“It lasted nearly all one winter,” he went on. “Then I lost this good
place because the daughter of the managing director got crazy about me.
She was a pretty little doll,” he laughed, musingly, “and I guess I might
have done a whole lot worse than marry her. But you see I was nobody,
with a salary of only ten dollars a week, and anyhow, I wasn’t in love
with the girl. But she made such a commotion that they decided it would
be good thing to get me out of the way.”
His look was eager, yet always serene, and he kept rocking gently. To
Stella there seemed in him a horrid new fascination as he hurled forth
at her, though so softly and from so cloud-kissed an elevation, this
startling avalanche of words. She listened to him with hot flushes. And
she could not bid him stop till he had poured out all his heart to her;
she could not deprive herself of a single bitter drop.
“After that,” he continued, “I decided to go to Rochester, because I’d
found some items in the help wanted columns that looked pretty good.
Moving,” he smiled in lambent appreciation, “was no great matter. I
didn’t even have a trunk. I just put my things in a paper suitcase and
got on the train. In Rochester I found work in a shoe store. It didn’t
take me long to catch on, and it turned out to be a very good thing.”
Indeed, it turned out, in quite short order, that fitting shoes was
King’s genuine calling. Business actually increased—especially on the
feminine side of the establishment. “Ladies came,” he said, with an
effect of quiet drollness, “who needed shoes no more than they needed
elephants.” There seemed to be a peculiar and overwhelming thrill about
the mere way he knelt before them in his superbly fitting clothes. But
the odd part of it all was that this enormous fascination was just as
natural and spontaneous in him as eating or walking. He became, in a
short time, a kind of shoe-fitting matinée idol.
Stella made a vague gesture, but it did not amount to an interruption.
She had merely come to a last little climax in her immense disillusion.
Almost without realizing it during the past months, with everything else
torn asunder in her life, Stella had faintly clung to the thought that
there was an aura of martyrdom playing out from her position. Other
women before her had married men who, like Ferdinand, had fallen victims
to drug. A man might be very brilliant, even an actual prince, for that
matter, and still destroy himself with opium. But now the last ounce of
sentimental comfort was drowned in her soul by this sudden outburst of
confession—which yet was no confession surely, so far as the radiant
being before her was concerned. (“It’s all beautiful—isn’t it!” he
murmured.) And she saw with an eye of entire disenchantment at last that
the man she had married had once been a wax figure in a clothing window,
and then a shoe clerk. How could she think of herself as a martyr after
that?
“I liked to hang around hotel lobbies and bars,” he said. “I would drift
around with swells and imagine I was one of them. In the back of my head
somewhere I was always figuring—I even had some sort of idea that I might
meet somebody some day who would give me a boost.”
He dressed like a dandy and lived in a hall bedroom. He wore a pearl
stick pin and gaiters and believed in “hunches” and went on fitting
shoes. Naturally, all this time, he admitted, with one of his soft little
laughs, there were affairs of the heart. He withheld nothing, but poured
it out upon Stella in a warm, confounding torrent. Of course a man so
magnetic could not very well escape the toils into which his sheer
perfection of face and form attracted poor dazzled idolaters.
“I was always getting mash notes,” he said, “from women I didn’t know
from Eve. They were sometimes on monogram stationery, and scented....
Women were always wanting to meet me, and inviting me to tea, and begging
me to send them my photograph. I used to get so tired of it sometimes,”
he sighed, yet quite happily. “You can’t imagine how tired I’d get. I
used to want something else, but I never seemed to know just what....”
Serenely and without a blush, in this curious exaltation wherein all was
tuned to the “master key,” King told his story to the girl he had finally
married. Stella, breathing rapidly, her hands clasping and unclasping in
her lap, saw again with singular vividness her husband coming out of the
hut where Cha-cha-kamui’s Small Wife lived.