The firm for which Wayne worked was young and small--Benson & Honaton.
They made a specialty of circularization in connection with the bond
issues in which they were interested, and Wayne had charge of their
“literature,” as they described it. He often felt, after he had finished
a report, that his work deserved the title. A certain number of people in
Wall Street disapproved of the firm’s methods. Sometimes Pete thought
this was because, for a young firm, they had succeeded too quickly to
please the more deliberate; but sometimes in darker moments he thought
there might be some justice in the idea.
During the weeks that Farron was in the hospital Pete, despite his
constant availability to Mathilde, had been at work on his report on a
coal property in Pennsylvania. He was extremely pleased with the
thoroughness with which he had done the job. His report was not
favorable. The day after it was finished, a little after three, he
received word that the firm wanted to see him. He was always annoyed with
himself that these messages caused his heart to beat a trifle faster. He
couldn’t help associating them with former hours with his head-master or
in the dean’s office. Only he had respected his head-master and even the
dean, whereas he was not at all sure he respected Mr. Benson and he was
quite sure he did not respect Mr. Honaton.
He rose slowly from his desk, exchanging with the office boy who brought
the message a long, severe look, under which something very comic lurked,
though neither knew what.
“And don’t miss J.B.’s socks,” said the boy.
Mr. Honaton--J.B.--was considered in his office a very beautiful dresser,
as indeed in some ways he was. He was a tall young man, built like a
greyhound, with a small, pointed head, a long waist, and a very long
throat, from which, however, the strongest, loudest voice could issue
when he so desired. This was his priceless asset. He was the board
member, and generally admitted to be an excellent broker. It always
seemed to Pete that he was a broker exactly as a beaver is a
dam-builder, because nature had adapted him to that task. But outside of
this one instinctive capacity he had no sense whatsoever. He rarely
appeared in the office. He was met at the Broad Street entrance of the
exchange at one minute to ten by a boy with the morning’s orders, and
sometimes he came in for a few minutes after the closing; but usually by
three-fifteen he had disappeared from financial circles, and was
understood to be relaxing in the higher social spheres to which he
belonged. So when Pete, entering Mr. Benson’s private office, saw Honaton
leaning against the window-frame, with his hat-brim held against his
thigh exactly like a fashion-plate, he knew that something of importance
must be pending.
Benson, the senior member, was a very different person. He looked like a
fat, white, pugnacious cat. His hair, which had turned white early, had a
tendency to grow in a bang; his arms were short--so short that when he
put his hands on the arms of his swing-chair he hardly bent his elbows.
He had them there now as Pete entered, and was swinging through short
arcs in rather a nervous rhythm. He was of Irish parentage, and was
understood to have political influence.
“Wayne,” said Benson, “how would you like to go to China?”
And Honaton repeated portentously, “China,” as if Benson might have made
a mistake in the name of the country if he had not been at his elbow to
correct him.
Wayne laughed.
“Well,” he said, “I have nothing against China.”
Benson outlined the situation quickly. The firm had acquired property in
China not entirely through their own choice, and they wanted a thorough,
clear report on it; they knew of no one--_no one_, Benson emphasized--who
could do that as impartially and as well as Wayne. They would pay him a
good sum and his expenses. It would take him a year, perhaps a year and a
half. They named the figure. It was one that made marriage possible. They
talked of the situation and the property and the demand for copper until
Honaton began to look at his watch, a flat platinum watch, perfectly
plain, you might have thought, until you caught a glimpse of a narrow
line of brilliants along its almost imperceptible rim. His usual working
day was over in half an hour.
“And when I come back, Mr. Benson?” said Wayne.
“Your place will be open for you here.”
There was a pause.
“Well, what do you say?” said Honaton.
“I feel very grateful for the offer,” said Pete, “but of course I can’t
give you an answer now.”
“Why not, why not?” returned Honaton, who felt that he had given up half
an hour for nothing if the thing couldn’t be settled on the spot; and
even Benson, Wayne noticed, began to glower.
“You could probably give us as good an answer to-day as to-morrow,”
he said.
Nothing roused Pete’s spirit like feeling a tremor in his own soul, and
so he now answered with great firmness:
“I cannot give you an answer to-day _or_ to-morrow.”
“It’s all off, then, all off,” said Honaton, moving to the door.
“When do the Chinese boats sail, Mr. Honaton?” said Pete, with the
innocence of manner that an employee should use when putting his superior
in a hole.
“I don’t see what difference that makes to you, Wayne, if you’re not
taking them,” said Honaton, as if he were triumphantly concealing the
fact that he didn’t know.
“Don’t feel you have to wait, Jack, if you’re in a hurry,” said his
partner, and when the other had slid out of the office Benson turned to
Wayne and went on: “You wouldn’t have to go until a week from Saturday.
You would have to get off then, and we should have to know in time to
find some one else in case you don’t care for it.”
Pete asked for three days, and presently left the office.
He had a friend, one of his mother’s reformed drunkards, who as janitor
lived on the top floor of a tall building. He and his wife offered Wayne
the hospitality of their balcony, and now and then, in moments like this,
he availed himself of it. Not, indeed, that there had ever been a moment
quite like this; for he knew that he was facing the most important
decision he had ever been forced to make.
In the elevator he met the janitor’s cat Susan going home after an
afternoon visit to the restaurant on the sixteenth floor. The elevator
boy loved to tell how she never made a mistake in the floor.
“Do you think she’d get off at the fifteenth or the seventeenth? Not she.
Sometimes she puts her nose out and smells at the other floors, but she
won’t get off until I stop at the right one. Sometimes she has to ride up
and down three or four times before any one wants the sixteenth. Eh,
Susan?” he added in caressing tones; but Susan was watching the floors
flash past and paid no attention until, arrived at the top, she and Pete
stepped off together.
It was a cool, clear day, for the wind was from the north, but on the
southern balcony the sun was warm. Pete sat down in the kitchen-chair
set for him, tilted back, and looked out over the Statue of Liberty,
which stood like a stunted baby, to the blue Narrows. He saw one
thing clearly, and that was that he would not go if Mathilde would not
go with him.
He envied people who could make up their minds by thinking. At least
sometimes he envied them and sometimes he thought they lied. He could
only think _about_ a subject and wait for the unknown gods to bring him a
decision. And this is what he now did, with his eyes fixed on the towers
and tanks and tenements, on the pale winter sky, and, when he got up and
leaned his elbows on the parapet, on the crowds that looked like a flood
of purple insects in the streets.
He thought of Mathilde’s youth and his own untried capacities for
success, of poverty and children, of the probable opposition of
Mathilde’s family and of a strange, sinister, disintegrating power he
felt or suspected in Mrs. Farron. He felt that it was a terrible risk to
ask a young girl to take and that it was almost an insult to be afraid to
ask her to take it. That was what his mother had always said about these
cherished, protected creatures: they were not prepared to meet any strain
in life. He knew he would not have hesitated to ask a girl differently
brought up. Ought he to ask Mathilde or ought he not even to hesitate
about asking her? In his own future he had confidence. He had an unusual
power of getting his facts together so that they meant something. In a
small way his work was recognized. A report of his had some weight. He
felt certain that if on his return he wanted another position he could
get it unless he made a terrible fiasco in China. Should he consult any
one? He knew beforehand what they would all think about it. Mr. Lanley
would think that it was sheer impertinence to want to marry his
granddaughter on less than fifteen thousand dollars a year; Mrs. Farron
would think that there were lots of equally agreeable young men in the
world who would not take a girl to China; and his mother, whom he could
not help considering the wisest of the three, would think that Mathilde
lacked discipline and strength of will for such an adventure. And on this
he found he made up his mind. “After all,” he said to himself as he put
the chair back against the wall, “everything else would be failure, and
this may be success.”
It was the afternoon that Farron was brought back from the hospital, and
he and Mathilde were sure of having the drawing-room to themselves. He
told her the situation slowly and with a great deal of detail,
chronologically, introducing the Chinese trip at the very end. But she
did not at once understand.
“O Pete, you would not go away from me!” she said. “I could not
face that.”
“Couldn’t you? Remember that everything you say is going to be used
against you.”
“Would you be willing to go, Pete?”
“Only if you will go with me.”
“Oh!” she clasped her hands to her breast, shrinking back to look at
him. So that was what he had meant, this stranger whom she had known for
such a short time. As she looked she half expected that he would smile,
and say it was all a joke; but his eyes were steadily and seriously
fixed on hers. It was very queer, she thought. Their meeting, their
first kiss, their engagement, had all seemed so inevitable, so natural,
there had not been a hint of doubt or decision about it; but now all of
a sudden she found herself faced by a situation in which it was
impossible to say yes or no.
“It would be wonderful, of course,” she said, after a minute, but her
tone showed she was not considering it as a possibility.
Wayne’s heart sank; he saw that he had thought it possible that he would
not allow her to go, but that he had never seriously faced the chance of
her refusing.
“Mathilde,” he said, “it’s far and sudden, and we shall be poor, and I
can’t promise that I shall succeed more than other fellows; and yet
against all that--”
She looked at him.
“You don’t think I care for those things? I don’t care if you succeed or
fail, or live all your life in Siam.”
“What is it, then?”
“Pete, it’s my mother. She would never consent.”
Wayne was aware of this, but, then, as he pointed out to Mathilde with
great care, Mrs. Farron could not bear for her daughter the pain of
separation.
“Separation!” cried the girl, “But you just said you would not go if
I did not.”
“If you put your mother before me, mayn’t I put my profession
before you?”
“My dear, don’t speak in that tone.”
“Why, Mathilde,” he said, and he sprang up and stood looking down at her
from a little distance, “this is the real test. We have thought we loved
each other--”
“Thought!” she interrupted.
“But to get engaged with no immediate prospect of marriage, with all
our families and friends grouped about, that doesn’t mean such a
lot, does it?”
“It does to me,” she answered almost proudly.
“Now, one of us has to sacrifice something. I want to go on this
expedition. I want to succeed. That may be egotism or legitimate
ambition. I don’t know, but I want to go. I think I mean to go. Ought
I to give it up because you are afraid of your mother?”
“It’s love, not fear, Pete.”
“You love me, too, you say.”
“I feel an obligation to her.”
“And, good Heavens! do you feel none to me?”
“No, no. I love you too much to feel an obligation to you.”
“But you love your mother _and_ feel an obligation to her. Why, Mathilde,
that feeling of obligation _is_ love--love in its most serious form.
That’s what you don’t feel for me. That’s why you won’t go.”
“I haven’t said I wouldn’t go.”
“You never even thought of going.”
“I have, I do. But how can I help hesitating? You must know I want to
go.”
“I see very little sign of it,” he murmured. The interview had not gone
as he intended. He had not meant, he never imagined, that he would
attempt to urge and coerce her; but her very detachment seemed to set a
fire burning within him.
“I think,” he said with an effort to sound friendly, “that I had better
go and let you think this over by yourself.”
He was actually moving to the door when she sprang up and put her arms
about him.
“Weren’t you even going to kiss me, Pete?”
He stooped, and touched her cheek with his lips.
“Do you call that a kiss?”
“O Mathilde, do you think any kiss will change the facts?” he answered,
and was gone.
As soon as he had left her the desire for tears left her, too. She felt
calm and more herself, more an isolated, independent human being than
ever before in her life. She thought of all the things she ought to have
said to Pete. The reason why she felt no obligation to him was that she
was one with him. She was prepared to sacrifice him exactly as she was,
or ought to be, willing to sacrifice herself; whereas her mother--it
seemed as if her mother’s power surrounded her in every direction, as
solid as the ancients believed the dome of heaven.
Pringle appeared in the doorway in his eternal hunt for the tea-things.
“May I take the tray, miss?” he said.
She nodded, hardly glancing at the untouched tea-table. Pringle, as he
bent over it, observed that it was nice to have Mr. Farron back.
Mathilde remembered that she, too, had once been interested in her
stepfather’s return.
“Where’s my mother, Pringle?”
“Mrs. Farron’s in her room, I think, miss, and Mr. Lanley’s with her.”
Lanley had stopped as usual to ask after his son-in-law. He found his
daughter writing letters in her room. He thought her looking cross, but
in deference to her recent anxieties he called it, even in his own mind,
overstrained.
“Vincent is doing very well, I believe,” she answered in response to his
question. “He ought to be. He is in charge of two lovely young creatures
hardly Mathilde’s age who have already taken complete control of the
household.”
“You’ve seen him, of course.”
“For a few minutes; they allow me a few minutes. They communicate by
secret signals when they think I have stayed long enough.”
Mr. Lanley never knew how to treat this mood of his daughter’s, which
seemed to him as unreasonable as if it were emotional, and yet as cold as
if it were logic itself. He changed the subject and said boldly:
“Mrs. Baxter is coming to-morrow.”
Adelaide’s eyes faintly flashed.
“Oh, wouldn’t you know it!” she murmured. “Just at the most inconvenient
time--inconvenient for me, I mean. Really, lovers are the only people you
can depend on. I wish I had a lover.”
“Adelaide,” said her father with some sternness, “even in fun you should
not say such a thing. If Mathilde heard you--”
“Mathilde is the person who made me see it. Her boy is here all the
time, trying to think of something to please her. And who have I?
Vincent has his nurses; and you have your old upholstered lady. I can’t
help wishing I had a lover. They are the only people who, as the Wayne
boy would say, ‘stick around.’ But don’t worry, Papa, I have a loyal
nature.” She was interrupted by a knock at the door, and a nurse--the
same who had been too encouraging to please her at the hospital--put in
her head and said brightly:
“You may see Mr. Farron now, Mrs. Farron.”
Adelaide turned to her father and made a little bow.
“See how I am favored,” she said, and left him.
Nothing of this mood was apparent when she entered her husband’s room,
though she noticed that the arrangement of the furniture had been
changed, and, what she disliked even more, that they had brushed his hair
in a new way. This, with his pallor and thinness, made him look strange
to her. She bent over, and laid her cheek to his almost motionless lips.
“Well, dear,” she said, “have you seen the church-warden part they have
given your hair?”
He shook his head impatiently, and she saw she had made the mistake of
trying to give the tone to an interview in which she was not the leading
character.
“Who has the room above mine, Adelaide?” he asked.
“My maid.”
“Ask her not to practice the fox-trot, will you?”
“O Vincent, she is never there.”
“My mistake,” he answered, and shut his eyes.
She repented at once.
“Of course I’ll tell her. I’m sorry that you were disturbed.” But she
was thinking only of his tone. He was not an irritable man, and he had
never used such a tone to her before. All pleasure in the interview was
over. She was actually glad when one of the nurses came in and began to
move about the room in a manner that suggested dismissal.
“Of course I’m not angry,” she said to herself. “He’s so weak one must
humor him like a child.”
She derived some satisfaction, however, from the idea of sending for her
maid Lucie and making her uncomfortable; but on her way she met Mathilde
in the hall.
“May I speak to you, Mama?” she said.
Mrs. Farron laughed.
“May you speak to me?” she said. “Why, yes; you may have the unusual
privilege. What is it?”
Mathilde followed her mother into the bedroom and shut the door.
“Pete has just been here. He has been offered a position in China.”
“In China?” said Mrs. Farron. This was the first piece of luck that had
come to her in a long time, but she did not betray the least pleasure. “I
hope it is a good one.”
“Yes, he thinks it good. He sails in two weeks.”
“In two weeks?” And this time she could not prevent her eye lighting a
little. She thought how nicely that small complication had settled
itself, and how clever she had been to have the mother to dinner and
behave as if she were friendly. She did not notice that her daughter was
trembling; she couldn’t, of course, be expected to know that the girl’s
hands were like ice, and that she had waited several seconds to steady
her voice sufficiently to pronounce the fatal sentence:
“He wants me to go with him, Mama.”
She watched her mother in an agony for the effect of these words.
Mrs. Farron had suddenly detected a new burn in the hearth-rug. She
bent over it.
“This wood does snap so!” she murmured.
The rug was a beautiful old Persian carpet of roses and urns.
“Did you understand what I said, Mama?”
“Yes, dear; that Mr. Wayne was going to China in two weeks and wanted you
to go, too. Was it just a _politesse_, or does he actually imagine that
you could?”
“He thinks I can.”
Mrs. Farron laughed good-temperedly.
“Did you go and see about having your pink silk shortened?” she said.
Mathilde stared at her mother, and in the momentary silence Lucie came in
and asked what madame wanted for the evening, and Adelaide in her fluent
French began explaining that what she really desired most was that Lucie
should not make so much noise in her room that monsieur could not sleep.
In the midst of it she stopped and turned to her daughter.
“Won’t you be late for dinner, darling?” she said.
Mathilde thought it very possible, and went away to get dressed. She went
into her own room and shut the door sharply behind her.
All the time she was dressing she tried to rehearse her case--that it
was her life, her love, her chance; but all the time she had a sickening
sense that a lifted eye-brow of her mother’s would make it sound childish
and absurd even in her own ears. She had counted on a long evening, but
when she went down-stairs she found three or four friends of her mother’s
were to dine and go to the theater. The dinner was amusing, the talk,
though avowedly hampered by the presence of Mathilde, was witty and
unexpected enough; but Mathilde was not amused by it, for she
particularly dreaded her mother in such a mood of ruthless gaiety. At the
theater they were extremely critical, and though they missed almost the
whole first act, appeared, in the entr’acte, to feel no hesitation in
condemning it. They spoke of French and Italian actors by name, laughed
heartily over the playwright’s conception of social usages, and made
Mathilde feel as if her own unacknowledged enjoyment of the play was the
guiltiest of secrets.
As they drove home, she was again alone with her mother, and she said at
once the sentence she had determined on:
“I don’t think you understood, Mama, how seriously I meant what I said
this afternoon.”
Mrs. Farron was bending her long-waisted figure forward to get a good
look at a picture which, small, lonely, and brightly lighted, hung in a
picture-dealer’s window. It was a picture of an empty room. Hot summer
sunlight filtered through the lowered Venetian blinds, and fell in bands
on the golden wood of the floor. Outside the air was burned and dusty,
but inside the room all was clear, cool, and pure.
“How perfect his things are,” murmured Mrs. Farron to herself, and then
added to her daughter: “Yes, my dear, I did take in what you said. You
really think you are in love with this Wayne boy, don’t you? It’s
immensely to your credit, darling,” she went on, her tone taking on a
flattering sweetness, “to care so much about any one who has such funny,
stubby little hands--most unattractive hands,” she added almost dreamily.
There was a long pause during which an extraordinary thing happened to
Mathilde. She found that it didn’t make the very slightest difference to
her what her mother thought of Pete or his hands, that it would never
make any difference to her again. It was as if her will had suddenly
been born, and the first act of that will was to decide to go with the
man she loved. How could she have doubted for an instant? It was so
simple, and no opposition would or could mean anything to her. She was
not in the least angry; on the contrary, she felt extremely pitiful, as
if she were saying good-by to some one who did not know she was going
away, as if in a sense she had now parted from her mother forever. Tears
came into her eyes.
“Ah, Mama!” she said like a sigh.
Mrs. Farron felt she had been cruel, but without regretting it; for that,
she thought, was often a parent’s duty.
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Mathilde. The boy is a nice enough
little person, but really I could not let you set off for China at a
minute’s notice with any broker’s clerk who happened to fall in love with
your golden hair. When you have a little more experience you will
discriminate between the men you like to have love you and the men there
is the smallest chance of your loving. I assure you, if little Wayne were
not in love with you, you would think him a perfectly commonplace boy. If
one of your friends were engaged to him, you would be the first to say
that you wondered what it was she saw in him. That isn’t the way one
wants people to feel about one’s husband, is it? And as to going to China
with him, you know that’s impossible, don’t you?”
“It would be impossible to let him go without me.”
“Really, Mathilde!” said Mrs. Farron, gently, as if she, so willing to
play fair, were being put off with fantasies. “I don’t understand you,”
she added.
“No, Mama; you don’t.”
The motor stopped at the door, and they went in silence to Mrs. Farron’s
room, where for a bitter hour they talked, neither yielding an inch. At
last Adelaide sent the girl to bed. Mathilde was aware of profound
physical exhaustion, and yet underneath there was a high knowledge of
something unbreakable within her.
Left alone, Adelaide turned instinctively toward her husband’s door.
There were her strength and vision. Then she remembered, and drew back;
but presently, hearing a stir there, she knocked very softly. A nurse
appeared on the instant.
“Oh, _please_, Mrs. Farron! Mr. Farron has just got to sleep.”
Adelaide stood alone in the middle of the floor. Once again, she thought,
in a crisis of her life she had no one to depend on but herself. She
lifted her shoulders. No one was to blame, but there the fact was. They
urged you to cling and be guided, but when the pinch came, you had to act
for yourself. She had learned her lesson now. Henceforward she took her
own life over into her own hands.
She reviewed her past dependences. Her youth, with its dependence on her
father, particularly in matters of dress. She recalled her early
photographs with a shudder. Had she really dressed so badly or was it
only the change of fashion? And then her dependence on Joe Severance.
What could be more ridiculous than for a woman of her intelligence to
allow herself to be guided in everything by a man like Joe, who had
nothing himself but a certain shrewd masculinity? And now Vincent. She
was still under the spell of his superiority, but perhaps she would come
to judge him too. She had learned much from him. Perhaps she had learned
all he had to teach her. Her face looked as if it were carved out of some
smooth white stone.