PEACE AT ANY PRICE
Miss Severance, stepping out of a Waldorf elevator at the main floor,
shrank back wide-eyed. "You?" she gasped.
Before her, serene and smiling and inflexible, was Craig. None of the
suits he had bought at seven that morning was quite right for immediate
use; so there he was in his old lounge suit, baggy at knees and elbows
and liberally bestrewn with lint. Her glance fell from his mussy collar
to his backwoodsman's hands, to his feet, so cheaply and shabbily shod;
the shoes looked the worse for the elaborate gloss the ferry bootblack
had put upon them. She advanced because she could not retreat; but never
had she been so repelled.
She had come to New York to get away from him. When she entered the
train she had flung him out of the window. "I WILL NOT think of him
again," she had said to herself. But--Joshua Craig's was not the sort of
personality that can be banished by an edict of will. She could think
angrily of him, or disdainfully, or coldly, or pityingly--but think she
must. And think she did. She told herself she despised him; and there
came no echoing protest or denial from anywhere within her. She said she
was done with him forever, and well done; her own answer to herself
there was, that while she was probably the better off for having got out
of the engagement, still it must be conceded that socially the manner of
her getting out meant scandal, gossip, laughter at her. Her cheeks
burned as her soul flamed.
"The vulgar boor!" she muttered.
Was ever woman so disgraced, and so unjustly? What had the gods against
her, that they had thus abased her? How Washington would jeer! How her
friends would sneer! What hope was there now of her ever getting a
husband? She would be an object of pity and of scorn. It would take more
courage than any of the men of her set had, to marry a woman rejected by
such a creature--and in such circumstances!
"He has made everybody think I sought him. Now, he'll tell everybody
that he had to break it off--that HE broke it off!"
She ground her teeth; she clenched her hands; she wept and moaned in the
loneliness of her bed. She hated Craig; she hated the whole world; she
loathed herself. And all the time she had to keep up appearances--for
she had not dared tell her grandmother--had to listen while the old lady
discussed the marriage as an event of the not remote future.
Why had she not told her grandmother? Lack of courage; hope that
something would happen to reveal the truth without her telling. HOPE
that something would happen? No, fear. She did not dare look at the
newspapers. But, whatever her reason, it was not any idea that possibly
the engagement might be resumed. No, not that. "Horrible as I feel,"
thought she, "I am better off than in those weeks when that man was
whirling me from one nightmare to another. The peace of desolation is
better than that torture of doubt and repulsion. Whatever was I thinking
of to engage myself to such a man? to think seriously of passing my life
with him? Poor fool that I was, to rail against monotony, to sigh for
sensations! Well, I have got them."
Day and night, almost without ceasing, her thoughts had boiled and
bubbled on and on, like a geyser ever struggling for outlet and ever
falling vainly back upon itself.
Now--here he was, greeting her at the elevator car, smiling and
confident, as if nothing had happened. She did not deign even to stare
at him, but, with eyes that seemed to be simply looking without seeing
any especial object, she walked straight on. "I'm in luck," cried he,
beside her. "I had only been walking up and down there by the elevators
about twenty minutes."
She made no reply. At the door she said to the carriage-caller:
"A cab, please--no, a hansom."
The hansom drove up; its doors opened. Craig pushed aside the carriage
man, lifted her in with a powerful upward swing of his arm against her
elbow and side--so powerful that she fell into the seat, knocking her
hat awry and loosening her veil from the brim so that it hung down
distressfully across her eyes and nose. "Drive up Fifth Avenue to the
Park," said Craig, seating himself beside her. "Now, please don't cry,"
he said to her.
"Cry?" she exclaimed. Her dry, burning eyes blazed at him.
"Your eyes were so bright," laughed he, "that I thought they were full
of tears."
"If you are a gentleman you will leave this hansom at once."
"Don't talk nonsense," said he. "You know perfectly well I'll not leave.
You know perfectly well I'll say what I've got to say to you, and that
no power on earth can prevent me. That's why you didn't give way to your
impulse to make a scene when I followed you into this trap."
She was busy with her hat and veil.
"Can I help you?" said he with a great show of politeness that was
ridiculously out of harmony with him in every way. That, and the
absurdity of Josh Craig, of all men, helping a woman in the delicate
task of adjusting a hat and veil, struck her as so ludicrous that she
laughed hysterically; her effort to make the laughter appear an outburst
of derisive, withering scorn was not exactly a triumph.
"Well," she presently said, "what is it you wish to say? I have very
little time."
He eyed her sharply. "You think you dislike me, don't you?" said he.
"I do," replied she, her tone as cutting as her words were curt.
"How little that amounts to! All human beings--Grant, you, I, all of us,
everybody--are brimful of vanity. It slops over a little one way and we
call it like. It slops over the other way and we call it
dislike--hate--loathing--according to the size of the slop. Now, I'm not
here to deal with vanity, but with good sense. Has it occurred to you in
the last few days that you and I have got to get married, whether we
will or no?"
"It has not," she cried with frantic fury of human being cornered by an
ugly truth.
"Oh, yes, it has. For you are a sensible woman--entirely too sensible
for a woman, unless she marries an unusual man like me."
"Is that a jest?" she inquired in feeble attempt at sarcasm.
"Don't you know I have no sense of humor? Would I do the things I do and
carry them through if I had?"
In spite of herself she admired this penetration of self-analysis. In
spite of herself the personality beneath his surface, the personality
that had a certain uncanny charm for her, was subtly reasserting its
inexplicable fascination.
"Yes, we've got to marry," proceeded he. "I have to marry you because I
can't afford to let you say you jilted me. That would make me the
laughing-stock of my State; and I can't afford to tell the truth that I
jilted you because the people would despise me as no gentleman. And,
while I don't in the least mind being despised as no gentleman by
fashionable noddle-heads or by those I trample on to rise, I do mind it
when it would ruin me with the people."
Her eyes gleamed. So! She had him at her mercy!
"Not so fast, young lady," continued he in answer to that gleam. "It is
equally true that you've got to marry me."
"But I shall not!" she cried. "Besides, it isn't true."
"It IS true," replied he. "You may refuse to marry me, just as a man may
refuse to run when the dynamite blast is going off. Yes, you can refuse,
but--you'd not be your grandmother's granddaughter if you did."
"Really!" She was so surcharged with rage that she was shaking with it,
was tearing up her handkerchief in her lap.
"Yes, indeed," he assured her, tranquil as a lawyer arguing a commercial
case before a logic-machine of a judge. "If you do not marry me all your
friends will say I jilted you. I needn't tell you what it would mean in
your set, what it would mean as to your matrimonial prospects, for you
to have the reputation of having been turned down by me--need I?"
She was silent; her head down, her lips compressed, her fingers fiercely
interlaced with the ruins of her handkerchief.
"It is necessary that you marry," said he summing up. "It is wisest and
easiest to marry me, since I am willing. To refuse would be to inflict
an irreparable injury upon yourself in order to justify a paltry whim
for injuring me."
She laughed harshly. "You are frank," said she.
"I am paying you the compliment of frankness. I am appealing to your
intelligence, where a less intelligent man and one that knew you less
would try to gain his point by chicane, flattery, deception."
"Yes--it is a compliment," she answered. "It was stupid of me to sneer
at your frankness."
A long silence. He lighted a cigarette, smoked it with deliberation
foreign to his usual self but characteristic of him when he was closely
and intensely engaged; for he was like a thoroughbred that is all fret
and champ and pawing and caper until the race is on, when he at once
settles down into a calm, steady stride, with all the surplus nervous
energy applied directly and intelligently to the work in hand. She was
not looking at him, but she was feeling him in every atom of her body,
was feeling the power, the inevitableness of the man. He angered her,
made her feel weak, a helpless thing, at his mercy. True, it was his
logic that was convincing her, not his magnetic and masterful will; but
somehow the two seemed one. Never had he been so repellent, never had
she felt so hostile to him.
"I will marry you," she finally said. "But I must tell you that I do not
love you--or even like you. The reverse."
His face, of the large, hewn features, with their somehow pathetic
traces of the struggles and sorrows of his rise, grew strange, almost
terrible. "Do you mean that?" he said, turning slowly toward her.
She quickly shifted her eyes, in which her dislike was showing, shifted
them before he could possibly have seen. And she tried in vain to force
past her lips the words which she believed to be the truth, the words
his pathetic, powerful face told her would end everything. Yes, she knew
he would not marry her if she told him the truth about her feelings.
"Do you mean that?" he repeated, stern and sharp, yet sad, wistfully
sad, too.
"I don't know what I mean," she cried, desperately afraid of him, afraid
of the visions the idea of not marrying him conjured. "I don't know what
I mean," she repeated. "You fill me with a kind of--of--horror. You draw
me into your grasp in spite of myself--like a whirlpool--and rouse all
my instinct to try and save myself. Sometimes that desire becomes a
positive frenzy."
He laughed complacently. "That is love," said he.
She did not resent his tone or dispute his verdict externally. "If it is
love," replied she evenly, "then never did love wear so strange, so
dreadful a disguise."
He laid his talon-hand, hardened and misshapen by manual labor, but if
ugly, then ugly with the majesty of the twisted, tempest-defying oak,
over hers. "Believe me, Margaret, you love me. You have loved me all
along.... And I you."
"Don't deceive yourself," she felt bound to say, "I certainly do not
love you if love has any of its generally accepted meanings."
"I am not the general sort of person," said he. "It is not strange that
I should arouse extraordinary feelings, is it? Driver"--he had the trap
in the roof up and was thrusting through it a slip of paper--"take us to
that street and number."
She gasped with a tightening at the heart. "I must return to the hotel
at once," she said hurriedly.
He fixed his gaze upon her. "We are going to the preacher's," said he.
"The preacher's?" she murmured, shrinking in terror.
"Grant is waiting for us there"--he glanced at his watch--"or, rather,
will be there in about ten minutes. We are a little earlier than I
anticipated."
She flushed crimson, paled, felt she would certainly suffocate with
rage.
"Before you speak," continued he, "listen to me. You don't want to go
back into that torment of doubt in which we've both been hopping about
for a month, like a pair of damned souls being used as tennis balls by
fiends. Let's settle the business now, and for good and all. Let us have
peace--for God's sake, peace! I know you've been miserable. I know I've
been on the rack. And it's got to stop. Am I not right?"
She leaned back in her corner of the cab, shut her eyes, said no
more--and all but ceased to think. What was there to say? What was there
to think? When Fate ceases to tolerate our pleasant delusion of free
will, when it openly and firmly seizes us and hurries us along, we do
not discuss or comment. We close our minds, relax and submit.
At the parsonage he sprang out, stood by to help her descend,
half-dragged her from the cab when she hesitated. He shouted at the
driver: "How much do I owe you, friend?"
"Six dollars, sir."
"Not on your life!" shouted Craig furiously. He turned to Margaret,
standing beside him in a daze. "What do you think of THAT! This fellow
imagines because I've got a well-dressed woman along I'll submit. But
I'm not that big a snob." He was looking up at the cabman again. "You
miserable thief!" he exclaimed. "I'll give you three dollars, and that's
too much by a dollar."
"Don't you call me names!" yelled the cabman, shaking his fist with the
whip in it.
"The man's drunk," cried Josh to the little crowd of people that had
assembled. Margaret, overwhelmed with mortification, tugged at his
sleeve. "The man's not overcharging much--if any," she said in an
undertone.
"You're saying that because you hate scenes," replied Josh loudly. "You
go on into the house. I'll take care of this hound."
Margaret retreated within the parsonage gate; her very soul was sick.
She longed for the ground to open and swallow her forever. It would be
bad enough for a man to make such an exhibition at any time; but to make
it when he was about to be married!--and in such circumstances!--to
squabble and scream over a paltry dollar or so!
"Here's a policeman!" cried Craig. "Now, you thief, we'll see!"
The cabman sprang down from his seat. "You damn jay!" he bellowed. "You
don't know New York cabfares. Was you ever to town before--eh?"
Craig beckoned the policeman with vast, excited gestures. Margaret fled
up the walk toward the parsonage door, but not before she heard Craig
say to the policeman:
"I am Joshua Craig, assistant to the Attorney-General of the United
States. This thief here--" And so on until he had told the whole story.
Margaret kept her back to the street, but she could hear the two
fiercely-angry voices, the laughter of the crowd. At last Craig joined
her--panting, flushed, triumphant. "I knew he was a thief. Four dollars
was the right amount, but I gave him five, as the policeman said it was
best to quiet him."
He gave a jerk at the knob of parsonage street bell as if he were
determined to pull it out; the bell within rang loudly, angrily, like
the infuriate voice of a sleeper who has been roused with a thundering
kick. "This affair of ours," continued Craig, "is going to cost money.
And I've been spending it to-day like a drunken sailor. The more careful
I am, the less careful I will have to be, my dear."
The door opened--a maid, scowling, appeared.
"Come on," cried Joshua to Margaret. And he led the way, brushing the
maid aside as she stood her ground, attitude belligerent, but expression
perplexed. To her, as he passed, Craig said: "Tell Doctor Scones that
Mr. Craig and the lady are here. Has Mr. Arkwright come?"
By this time he was in the parlor; a glance around and he burst out:
"Late, by jiminy! And I told him to be here ahead of time."
He darted to the window. "Ah! There he comes!" He wheeled upon Margaret
just as she dropped, half-fainting, into a chair. "What's the matter,
dear?" He leaped to her side. "No false emotions, please. If you could
weather the real ones what's the use of getting up ladylike excitement
over--"
"For God's sake!" exclaimed Margaret, "sit down and shut up! If you
don't I shall scream--scream--SCREAM!"
The maid gaped first at one, then at the other, left them reluctantly to
admit Arkwright. As she opened the door she had to draw back a little.
There was Craig immediately behind her. He swept her aside, flung the
door wide. "Come on! Hurry!" he cried to Grant. "We're waiting." And he
seized him by the arm and thrust him into the parlor. At the same
instant the preacher entered by another door. Craig's excitement, far
from diminishing, grew wilder and wilder. The preacher thought him
insane or drunk. Grant and Margaret tried in vain to calm him. Nothing
would do but the ceremony instantly--and he had his way. Never was there
a more undignified wedding. When the responses were all said and the
marriage was a fact accomplished, so far as preacher could accomplish
it, Craig seemed suddenly to subside.
"I should like to go into the next room for a moment," said the pallid
and trembling Margaret.
"Certainly," said Doctor Scones sympathetically, and, with a fierce
scowl at the groom, he accompanied the bride from the room.
"What a mess you have made!" exclaimed Arkwright indignantly. "You've
been acting like a lunatic."
"It wasn't acting--altogether," laughed Josh, giving Grant one of those
tremendous slaps on the back. "You see, it was wise to give her
something else to think about so she couldn't possibly hesitate or bolt.
So I just gave way to my natural feelings. It's a way I have in
difficult situations."
Grant's expression as he looked at him was a mingling of admiration,
fear and scorn. "You are full of those petty tricks," said he.
"Why petty? Is it petty to meet the requirements of a situation? The
situation was petty--the trick had to be. Besides, I tell you, it wasn't
a trick. If I hadn't given my nerves an outlet I might have balked or
bolted myself. I didn't want to have to think any more than she."
"You mustn't say those things to me," objected his friend.
"Why not? What do I care what you or any one else thinks of ME? And what
could you do except simply think? Old pal, you ought to learn not to
judge me by the rules of your little puddle. It's a ridiculous habit."
He leaped at the door where Margaret had disappeared and rapped on it
fiercely.
"Yes--yes--I'm coming," responded a nervous, pleading, agitated voice;
and the door opened and Margaret appeared.
"What shall we do now?" she said to Craig. Grant saw, with an amazement
he could scarcely conceal, that for the time, at least, she was quite
subdued, would meekly submit to anything.
"Go to your grandmother," said Craig promptly. "You attend to the
preacher, Grant. Twenty-five's enough to give him."
Margaret's cheeks flamed, her head bowed. Grant flushed in sympathy with
her agony before this vulgarity. And a moment later he saw Margaret
standing, drooping and resigned, at the curb, while Craig excitedly
hailed a cab. "Poor girl!" he muttered, "living with that
nightmare-in-breeches will surely kill her--so delicate, so refined, so
sensitive!"