Closing time never found Jerome napping. His legs had been wrapped all
the afternoon about the rungs of his stool with the cheerful yet sluggish
permanence one encounters commonly in the plant kingdom; but now he
unwound them, took down his hat, and went out into a thick winter fog.
His legs really belonged somewhat in the category of beanpoles, but they
carried him over the ground. His gait, indeed, possessed a slightly
headlong quality, without being quite eager. All his movements seemed
a little automatic, even his head being held at a more or less fixed
angle—a habit indubitably acquired through prolonged association with
the ledger, and encouraging a suspicion that to change its focus a lever
somewhere would have to be touched, or a spring pressed.
Some blocks along he caught sight, through the fog, of a familiar back,
a little in advance, and the automatic walk accelerated to an automatic
dog-trot.
“Stella!” He was grinning all over with welcome.
She raised her head abruptly and returned his greeting, with just that
degree of impatience which is likely to accompany a rebound from startled
solitude.
“What are you doing ’way down here at such a time of night?”
She told him, a bit curtly, of her visit to Elsa. Ordinarily she would
have taken a car uptown from the ferry terminus, but today it had
occurred to her that exercise might tend a little to relieve her sense
of depressing futility. So far as he was concerned, it had been a most
happy decision.
They walked on together, talking of immediate things, or not talking at
all; and he kept sliding his admiring eyes round for brief surveys of
the fair face he could never seem to keep vividly in his mind. It rather
exasperated Stella to be looked at this way. She might, she thought,
almost as well be an article in any one of the shop windows they were
passing. At length she demanded:
“Is something the matter with my hat?”
“No, indeed! I like it very much, Stella.”
She sighed sharply.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“You seem rather mad. Anything up?”
She shook her head, and there followed a space of silence, during which
she was conscious, as never hitherto, of her companion’s imperfections.
It couldn’t be denied—the engagement was dragging. There wasn’t even a
ring. They had decided for the present to call themselves engaged and
save the money a ring would cost. Today, however, she eyed her vacant
finger scornfully, and remembered with a turbulent pang how Elsa had
whispered her own forthcoming engagement; what a romantic, exciting
engagement it promised to be; such a propitious beginning!
“Well,” she sighed at length, rebelling against so wooden a silence,
“anything new at the store today?”
“No,” Jerome laughed shortly.
“Doesn’t anything ever happen there?”
“No.” He laughed again. And she was thinking: “What a stupid
conversation!” Stella sometimes had sparkling enough conversations with
persons her mind conjured to flashes of fragmentary tête-à-tête, though
they might not, it is perhaps true, stand up under a test of modern
psychology. “Don’t you ever think of getting into something else?” she
demanded.
“Oh, I’ve thought of plenty of things I’d like to do, but”—he drew a fine
distinction—“this seems to be about the only thing I really know _how_ to
do.”
“Because you’ve never tried.”
“Well, what would you like to have me try?”
“Isn’t there anything you’d like to try yourself?” She lifted her head
impetuously. “If I were a man I think I’d discover something besides
being a clerk in a ship supply store!”
She was really scolding him now, though she hadn’t meant to speak with
quite such driving scorn. It was a day when everything grated, nothing
went well; a day when blouse strings knotted and buttons flew off; a day
aggravated by everything and everybody. By this time her mood of revolt
was poignant indeed. Jerome looked at her in mild, inquisitive amazement.
Stella was groping. She saw herself deep in a mire of eventlessness
and humdrum, and longed to reach out after the dazzling things in
life—romance, excitement, the luxury of gay, brilliant contacts. In her
heart rose a blind little cry of opaque desire.
Abruptly, right at her elbow, a door slammed. She started quite violently
and turned, in time to behold an arrestingly handsome man emerging from
a railroad and steamship travel bureau, his hand full of bright-coloured
tourist pamphlets.
Her glance was hurried and thrilled. But a tiny miracle was to happen.
A moment later the handsome man came running up behind her, with quick
chivalrous steps.
“Pardon me,” he requested, raising his hat in an almost lavish way; and
she saw that he was handing her a pattern page from her fashion magazine,
which she had detached on the ferry boat and thrust in loosely. It had
fallen to the sidewalk just as she was passing the travel bureau.
“Oh—thank you so much!” she fluttered, flushing with vague excitement.
The stranger, smiling with an ample bewitchment, restored her property,
lifted his fashionable hat again, and strolled into oblivion. Her last
searching glance discovered a single fresh violet in his buttonhole.
“That was a stroke of luck!” Jerome observed in his calm, automatic
manner. “You don’t often get back things you lose in a crowd.”
Stella, though she beheld in what had just occurred a sly stroke of irony
in that the chivalrous act should have fallen to another than Jerome,
made no immediate reply. Indeed, for the moment her mind surged richly
with excited imaginings. It was like the beginning of a romance! “I was
just wishing,” she mused, still flushed. “Then a door slammed—as though
fate had been listening all the time, and then....” Yes, she liked to
view life in terms of indefinite grandiloquence. Still, it had all ended
there. The handsome stranger, who might be a prince setting out on some
fabulous tour of the universe, had quickly disappeared. She would never
see him again.
Once more the fog settled about her. Life slumped. She felt more dismally
hemmed in than ever.
Jerome cheerfully broke the silence with easy commonplaces, to which she
responded moodily if at all. Each time a space of stillness came between
them, Stella was reminded in a curious, haunting way, of the silence of
that long wait in the Utterbourne drawing room, where there had seemed
something ominous or impending, invisible yet more palpable, too, than
mere fancy.
At length Jerome fell taciturn also; and it was then that the girl
reëstablished the theme which the episode of the fashion page had broken.
“Don’t you ever have a feeling,” she wearily insisted, “you ought to be
getting more out of life?”
This time his laugh was slightly constrained. “I’ve thought of cutting
quite a figure in the world some day. How do I know but I still may? You
never can tell.”
“You certainly won’t unless you make up your mind to!”
“Oh say!” he protested, his masculine dignity beginning to feel menaced.
“Why do you want to jump on me all of a sudden? I guess I’m no worse off,
at least, than I was a year ago.”
But his defensive nonchalance infuriated her. “A year ago!”
“Well,” he replied easily and a trifle coolly, “I lay a whole lot of
plans I don’t always discuss, because I prefer to wait till I’m ready to
spring something definite.”
Their voices were taking on a sharper quality as they carried their
lovers’ quarrel through the home-rush of the ignoring fog-choked city.
“Anything’s better than submitting! I must say _I’d_ admire you more if
you didn’t just take what’s handed out.”
“You would?”
“Oh,” she cried, with a hot fling of her voice, “if you could only
_plunge_!”
His reply was indeed provoking. “Where to?”
“Almost any place would be better than where we are!”
It was beginning to get under his skin. He smarted, looking straight
before him as he walked. “Oh, I think I might be a little worse off.
Oaks-Ferguson is a good old house.”
She gestured blindly with the fashion magazine. “It isn’t so much just
money. It’s settling down right here in one spot for the rest of our
lives!” And at length, since he made no reply, she sighed angrily and
stopped. “I’m tired. I guess I’ll wait at this corner for a car.”
He paused moodily beside her, and she turned on him with a heavy look in
which there seemed no glint now of affection. “Don’t bother to wait. I
know you always walk.”
“You mean you’d rather go the rest of the way without me?” She stood with
pressed lips, staring gloomily down the street. Finally he continued: “If
so, all you’ve got to do is say the word.”
She was witheringly thinking: “It oughtn’t to be necessary.” As a matter
of fact, she hadn’t really intended bringing about such a situation; yet
even now, as she had it in her heart to speak more gently, words of
greater harshness rose perversely.
“We don’t seem to be getting anywhere with each other, Jerome.”
He addressed the ground: “You mean you’re tired of me for good?”
His very directness irritated her. “I’m certainly tired of the way we
just drag along.”
“Well,” he said at last, speaking with an emotion which, while genuine
enough, also seemed to him rather pleasurably smacking of the heroic, “if
you can do better without me, all I can say is you better try. Nothing I
do seems to suit you.” And, in his aroused mood of masculine ire, Jerome
found it expedient to add: “It’s my private opinion you don’t exactly
know what you do want.”
The thrust was so palpably true, in a sense, that the girl abandoned her
last scruple of lingering reserve. “I guess it’s high time we broke off
our engagement!”
Her car arrived and she stepped aboard, while Jerome turned and marched
off without a word.