THE TEST
"I knew something was wrong," he said, emerging, big and efficient, from
the firelight, "and I was just coming up." Before she could answer she
felt his warm grasp on her hands, and it seemed to her suddenly that it
was not only her hands he enfolded, but her agonized and suffering mind.
"There's a man up there--" she faltered helplessly. "I was once married
to him long ago--oh, long ago. Just now I found him in the street and he
seems to be out of his mind. We are frightened."
But he seemed not to hear her, not to demand an explanation, not even to
wait to discover what she wanted. Already his long stride was
outstripping her on the staircase, and while she followed more slowly,
pausing now and then to take breath, she realized thankfully that the
situation had passed completely away from her power of command. As Miss
Polly's strength to hers, so was her strength to O'Hara's.
Faint, despairing moans issued from Archibald's room as she reached the
landing; and going inside, she saw George wrestling feebly with O'Hara,
who held him with one hand while with the other he waved authoritative
directions to Miss Polly.
"Get the bed ready for him, with plenty of hot blankets. He's about at
the end of his rope now. It's a jag, but it's more than a jag, too. If
I'm not mistaken he's in for a case of pneumonia."
Miss Polly, hovering timidly at a safe distance, held out the blankets
and the hot water bottles, while O'Hara carried George across the room
to the bed, and then covered him warmly. When he turned to glance about
his gaze fell on Gabriella, and he remarked bluntly: "You'd better get
out. You aren't wanted."
"But I am obliged to be here. It is my business, not yours," she
replied, while a sensation of sickness passed over her.
For a moment he regarded her stubbornly, "Well, I don't know whose
business it was a minute ago," he rejoined, "but it's mine now. I am
boss of this particular hell, and you're going to keep out of it. I
guess I know more about D.T. than you and Miss Polly put together would
know in a thousand years."
She was very humble. In the sweetness of her relief, of her security,
she would have submitted cheerfully not only to slang, but to downright
profanity. It was one of those unforgettable instants when character,
she understood, was more effective than culture. Even Arthur would have
appeared at a disadvantage beside O'Hara at that moment.
"I think I ought to help you," she insisted.
"Well, I think you oughtn't. Out you go! I guess I know what I'm up
against."
Before she could protest, before she could even resist, he had pushed
her out into the hail, and while she still hesitated there at the head
of the staircase, the door opened far enough to allow the huddled figure
of Miss Polly to creep through the crack. Then the key turned in the
lock; and O'Hara's voice was heard pacifying George as he might have
pacified a child or a lunatic. After a few minutes the shrieks stopped
suddenly; the door was unlocked again for a minute, and there floated
out the reassuring words:
"Don't stand out there any longer. It's as right as right. I've got him
buffaloed!"
"What does he mean?" inquired Gabriella helplessly of the seamstress.
"I don't know, but I reckon it's all right," responded Miss Polly. "He
seems to know just what to do, and anyhow the doctor'll be here in a
minute. It seems funny to give him whiskey, don't it, but that was the
first thing Mr. O'Hara thought of."
"I suppose his heart was weak. He looked as if he were dying," answered
Gabriella. "He asked for more whiskey, didn't he?"
"Yes; I'm goin' right straight to get it. Oh, Gabriella, ain't a man a
real solid comfort sometimes?"
Without replying to this ejaculation, Gabriella went after the whiskey,
and when she came back with the bottle in her hand, she found the doctor
on the landing outside the locked door. He was a stranger to her, and
she had scarcely begun her explanation when O'Hara called him into the
room.
"The sooner you take a look at him the better." Everything was taken out
of her hands--everything, even her explanation of George's presence in
her apartment.
As there was nothing more for her to do, she went back to the
sitting-room, where a fire burned brightly, and began to talk to Miss
Polly.
"I don't know what I should have done if he hadn't been here," she
said.
"Who? Mr. O'Hara? Well, it certainly was providential, honey, when you
come to think of it."
The door of Archibald's room opened and shut, and the doctor came down
the hall to the telephone. They heard him order medicines from a chemist
near-by; and then, after a minute, he took up the receiver, and spoke to
a nurse at the hospital. At first he gave merely the ordinary
directions, but at the end of the conversation he said sharply in answer
to a question: "No, there's no need of a restraining sheet. He's too far
gone to be violent. It is only a matter of hours."
His voice stopped, and Gabriella went out to him. "Will you tell me what
you think, Doctor?" she asked.
"Is he your husband?" He had a blank, secretive face, with light eyes,
and a hard mouth--so different, she thought from the poetic face of Dr.
French.
"I divorced him ten years ago."
He looked at her searchingly. "Well, he may last until morning, but it
is doubtful. His heart has given out."
"Is there anything I can do?"
"No. Morphine is the only thing. We are going to try camphorated oil,
but there is hardly a chance--not a chance." He turned to go back into
the room, then stopped, and added in the same tone of professional
stoicism: "The nurse will be here in half an hour, and I shall wait till
she comes."
When Gabriella went back to the sitting-room, Miss Polly was weeping. "I
followed you and heard what he said. Oh, Gabriella, ain't life too
awful!"
"I'll be glad when the nurse comes," answered Gabriella with impatience.
Emotionally she felt as if she had turned to stone, and she had little
inclination to explore the trite and tangled paths of Miss Polly's
philosophy.
The nurse, a stout, blond woman in spectacles, arrived on the stroke of
the half-hour, and after talking with her a few minutes, the doctor took
up his bag and came to tell Gabriella that he would return about
daybreak. "I've given instructions to the nurse, and Mr. O'Hara will sit
up in case he is needed, but there is nothing to do except keep the
patient perfectly quiet and give the hypodermics. It is too late to try
anything else."
"May I go in there?"
"Well, you can't do any good, but you may go in if you'd rather."
Then he went, as if glad of his release, and after Gabriella had
prevailed upon Miss Folly to go to bed, she changed her street dress for
a tea-gown, and threw herself on a couch before the fire in the
sitting-room. An overpowering fatigue weighed her down; the yellow
firelight had become an anodyne to her nerves; and after a few minutes
in which she thought confusedly of O'Hara and Cousin Jimmy, she let
herself fall asleep.
When she awoke a man was replenishing the fire, and as she struggled
drowsily back into consciousness, she realized that he was not Cousin
Jimmy, but O'Hara, and that he was placing the lumps of coal very softly
in the fear of awaking her.
"Hallo, there!" he exclaimed when he turned with the scuttle still in
his hand; "so you're awake, are you?"
She started up. "I've been asleep!" she exclaimed in surprise.
"You looked like a kid when I came in," he responded cheerfully, and she
reflected that even the presence of death could not shadow his jubilant
spirit. "I went back to the kitchen to make some coffee for the nurse
and myself, and I thought you might like a cup. It's first-rate coffee,
if I do say it. Two lumps and a little cream, I guess that's the way. I
rummaged in the icebox, and found a bottle of cream hidden away at the
back. That was right, wasn't it?"
A strange, an almost uncanny feeling of reminiscence, of vague yet
profound familiarity, was stealing over her. It all seemed to have
happened before, somewhere, somehow--the slow awakening to the large
dark form in the yellow firelight, O'Hara's sudden turning to look at
her, his exuberance, his sanguine magnetism, and even the cup of coffee
he made and brought to her side. She felt that it was the most natural
thing in the world to awake and find him there and to drink his coffee.
"It's good," she answered; "I had no dinner, and I am very hungry."
"I thought you'd be. That's why I brought a snack with it." He was
cutting a chicken sandwich on the tray he had placed under the green
shaded light, and after a minute he brought it to her and held the cup
while she ate. A nurse could not have been gentler about the little
things she needed; yet she knew that he was rough, off-hand,
careless--she could imagine that he might become almost brutal if he
were crossed in his purpose. She had believed him to be so simple; but
he was in reality, she saw, a mass of complexities, of actions and
reactions, of intricacies and involutions of character.
"I don't know what I should have done if you hadn't been here," she said
gratefully while she ate the sandwich and he sat beside her holding her
cup. "But I'm so unused to being taken care of," she added with a
trembling little laugh, "that I don't quite know how to behave."
"Oh, you would have got on all right," he rejoined carelessly; "but I'm
glad all the same that I was here."
She motioned toward the hall. "Has there been any change?"
"No, there won't be until morning. He'll last that long, I think. We're
giving him a hypodermic every four hours, but it really ain't any good,
you know. It is merely professional." For a minute he was silent,
watching her gravely; then recovering his casual manner, he added: "I
shouldn't let it upset me if I were you. Things happen that way, and
we've got to take them standing."
She shook her head. "I'm not upset. I'm not feeling it in the least.
Somehow, I can't even realize that I ever knew him. If you told me it
was all a dream, I should believe you."
"Well, you're a plucky sort. I could tell that the first minute I saw
you."
"It's not pluck. I don't feel things, that's all. I suppose I'm hard,
but I can't help it."
"Hard things come useful sometimes; they don't break."
"Yes, I suppose if I'd been soft, I should have broken long ago," she
replied almost bitterly.
After putting the plate and cup aside, he sat down by the table, and
gazed at her attentively for a long moment. "Well, you look as soft as a
white rose anyhow," he remarked with a curiously impersonal air of
criticism.
A rosy glow flooded her face. It was so long since any man had commented
upon her appearance that she felt painfully shy and displeased.
"All the same I've had a hard life," she returned with passionate
earnestness. "I married when I was twenty, and seven years later my
husband left me for another woman."
"The one in there?"
She shuddered, "Yes, the one in there."
"The darn fool!" he exclaimed briefly.
"There was a divorce, and then I had my two children to support and
educate. Because I had a natural talent for dressmaking, I turned to
that, and in the end I succeeded. But for ten years I never heard a word
of the man I married--until--I met him downstairs--in the street."
"And you brought him in?"
"What else could I do? He was dying."
"Do you know what he was doing out there?"
"He was looking for me, I think. He thought. I would take him in."
"Well, it's strange how things work out," was his comment after a pause.
"There's something in it somewhere that we can't see. It's impossible to
reason it out or explain it, but life has a way of jerking you up at
times and making you stand still and think. I know I'm putting it badly,
but I can't talk--I never could. Words, don't mean much to me, and yet I
know--I know--" He hesitated, and she watched his thought struggle
obscurely for expression. "I know you can't slip away from things and be
a quitter, no matter how hard you try. Life pulls you back again and
again till you've learned to play the game squarely."
He was gazing into the fire with a look that was strangely spiritual on
his face, which was half in shadow, half in the transfiguring glow of
the flames. For the second time she became acutely aware of the hidden
subtleties beneath his apparent simplicity.
"I've felt that myself often enough," he resumed presently in a low
voice. "I've been pulled up by something inside of me when I was
plunging ahead with the bit in my teeth, and it's been just exactly as
if this something said: 'Go steady or you'll run amuck and bu'st up the
whole blooming show.' You can't talk about it. It sounds like plain
foolishness when you put it into words, but when it comes to you, no
matter where you are, you have to stand still and listen."
"And is it only when you are running amuck that you hear it?" she asked.
"No, there've been other times--a few of them. Once or twice I've had it
come to me up in the Rockies when there didn't seem more than a few feet
between me and the sky, and then there was a time out on the prairie
when I was lost and thought I'd never get to the end of those darned
miles of blankness. Well, I've had a funny road to travel when I look
back at it."
"Tell me about some of the women you knew in the West." An insatiable
curiosity to hear the truth about his marriage seized her; but no sooner
had she yielded to it than she felt an impulsive regret. What right had
she to pry into the hidden sanctities of his past?
A frown contracted his forehead, but he said merely: "Oh, there wasn't
much about that," and she felt curiously baffled and resentful. "I think
I'll go and take a look in there," he added, rising and walking softly
in the direction of the room at the end of the hall.
He was gone so long that Gabriella, crushing down the revolt of her
nerves, went to the door, and opening it very gently, looked cautiously
into the room. The window was wide open to the night, where the snow was
still falling, and beside the candlestand at the head of the bed the
nurse was filling a hypodermic syringe from a teaspoon. By the open
window O'Hara stood inhaling the frosty air; and Gabriella crossed the
floor so silently that he did not notice her presence until he turned to
watch the nurse give the injection.
Then he said in a whisper: "You'd better go out. You can't do any good."
But she made an impatient gesture of dissent, and stopping between the
bed and the wall, waited while the nurse bared George's arm and inserted
the point of the needle. He was lying so motionless that she thought at
first that he was already dead; but presently he stirred faintly, a
shiver ran through the thin arm on the sheet, and a low, half-strangled
moan escaped from his lips. Had she come upon him in a hospital ward,
she knew that she should not have recognized him. He was not the man she
had once loved; he was not the father of her children; he was only a
stranger who was dying in her house. She could feel nothing while she
looked down at him. When she tried to remember her young love she could
recall but a shadow. That, too, was dead; that, too, had not left even a
memory.
As she bent there above him she made an effort to remember what he had
once been, to recall his face as she had first seen it, to revive the
burning radiance of that summer when they had been lovers. But a gray
veil of forgetfulness wrapped the past; and her mind, when she tried to
bring back the emotions of seventeen years ago, became vacant. For so
long she had stoically put the thought of that past out of her life,
that when she returned to it now, she found that only ashes remained.
Then a swift stab of pity pierced her heart like a blade, and she saw
again, not George her lover, not George her husband, but the photograph
Mrs. Fowler had shown her of the boy in velvet clothes with the wealth
of curls over his lace collar. So it was that boy who lay dying like a
stranger in the bed of his son!
She turned hurriedly and went out without speaking, without looking back
when she opened the door.
"If one could only understand it," she said aloud as she entered the
sitting-room; and then, with a start of surprise, she realized that
O'Hara had followed her. "You walked so softly I didn't hear you," she
explained.
"The rugs are thick, and I have on slippers. My boots were soaking when
I came in, and I'd just taken them off when you called."
They sat down again in front of the fire; and while she stared silently
at the flames, with her chin on her hand and her elbow on the arm of the
chair, he burst out so unexpectedly that she caught her breath in a
gasp:
"You didn't know that I was married, too, did you?" His words, and even
more than his words, his voice, filled with suppressed emotion, awoke
her from her reverie in which she had been dreaming of Arthur.
She smiled evasively, remembering her promise to Mrs. Squires.
He hesitated again, and then spoke with an effort. "Well, it was hell!"
he said grimly.
"I know"--she was very gentle, full of understanding and sympathy--"but
you went through it bravely."
"I stuck to her." His hand clenched while he answered. Then, after a
pause in which she watched him struggle against some savage instinct for
secrecy, he added quietly: "If she were alive to-day, I'd be sticking to
her still."
"You must have loved her." It was all she could think of to say, and yet
the words sounded trite and canting as soon as she had uttered them.
Lifting his head quickly, he made a contemptuous gesture of dissent.
"No, it wasn't that. I never loved her, except, perhaps, just at the
first. But there's something that comes before love, I guess. I don't
know what it is, but there's something. It may be just plain doggedness,
but after I married her there wasn't anything on top this earth that
could have made me give up and let go. As soon as I found what I was up
against--it was morphine--I knew I'd either got to fight it out or be a
quitter, and I've never been a quitter. Until she got so bad she had to
be shut up I kept a home for her out there in Colorado, and I lived with
her in hell as long as she wasn't too bad to be out of a hospital. Then
I brought her on here and we found a private place down on Long Island
where she stayed till she died--"
"And you still saw her?"
"Except when I was out West, and that's where I was most of the time,
you know. My work was out there, and there's nothing like hell behind
you to keep you running. I made piles of money those years. That's all
I ever cared for about money--just making it. I'd fight the devil to get
it, but after I've once got it, I'll give it to the first fool who comes
begging. But the getting of it is great."
"How long did it last?"
"My marriage? Going on eighteen years. She was down on Long Island for
the last ten of them."
"Then you lived with her eight. Was she always--always-"
"Took it before I ever married her, and I found it out in a month. She
wasn't so much to blame as you might think," he pursued thoughtfully.
"You see she had a tough time of it, and she was little and weak, and
everything was against her. She came out West first to teach school, and
then she got mixed up with some skunk of a man who pretended to marry
her when he had a wife living in Chicago, and after that I guess she
went on taking a dope just to keep up her spirits and ease the pain of
some spinal trouble she'd had since she was a child. There was nothing
bad in her--she was just weak--and I began to feel sorry for her, and so
I did it. If I had it to do over again, I'm not so sure I'd act
differently. She was a poor little creature that didn't have any man to
look after her, and I was just muddling along anyway, thinking about
money. Heaven knows what would have become of her if I hadn't happened
along when I did."
He had lifted his head toward the light, while he ran his hand through
his hair, and again she saw the look, so like spiritual exaltation,
transfigure his face. Before this man, who had sprung from poverty and
dirt, who had struggled up by his own force, overcoming and triumphing,
fighting and winning, fighting and holding, fighting and losing, but
always fighting--before this man, who had been born in a cellar, she
felt suddenly humbled. Without friends, without knowledge, except the
bitter knowledge of the streets, he had fought his fight, and had kept
untarnished a certain hardy standard of honour. Beside this tremendous
achievement she weighed his roughness, his ignorance of books and of the
superficial conventions, and she realized how little these things really
mattered--how little any outside things mattered in the final judgment
of life. She thought of George, dying a drunkard's death in the room at
the end of the hail--of George whose way had been smoothed for him from
birth, who had taken everything that he had wanted.
"I wish there was something I could do for you--something to help you,"
she said impetuously. "But I never saw any one who seemed to need help
so little."
His face brightened, and she saw that her words had brought a touching
wistfulness into his eyes.
"Well, if you'd let me come and talk to you sometimes" he answered
shyly. "There're a lot of things I'd like to talk to you about--things I
don't know, things I do know, and things I half know."
From the brilliant look she turned on him, he understood that he must
have given her pleasure, and she saw the smile return to his face.
"I'll tell you everything I know and welcome," she replied readily; "but
that isn't much. Better than that, I'll read to you."
"If you don't mind, I think I'd rather you'd just talk." Then he rose
with one of his abrupt movements, "I'd better look in again now. The
nurse might want something."
"I feel that you oughtn't to stay up," urged Gabriella, rising as he
turned away from her. "You have done all you can."
His only response was an impatient negative gesture, and without looking
at her, he crossed the room quickly and went out into the hall. Hardly a
minute had passed, and she was still standing where he had left her,
when he returned and said in a whisper:
"He is going now--very quietly. Will you come?"
She shook her head, crying out sharply: "No! no!" Then before something
in his face her opposition melted swiftly away, and she added: "Yes,
I'll come. He might like to have some one by him who knew him as he used
to be."
"After all, he got the worst of it, poor devil!" he answered gently as
he opened the door.
By a miracle of memory her resentment was swept out of her thoughts, and
she was conscious of an infinite pity. In George's face, while she
watched it, there flickered back for an instant the glory of that
enchanted spring when she had first loved him. Of his brilliant promise,
his ardent youth, there remained only this fading glimmer in the face of
a man who was dying. And it seemed to her suddenly that she saw embodied
in this wreck of youth and love all the inscrutable mystery not of
death, but of life. Her tears fell quickly, and while they fell O'Hara's
grasp enfolded her hand.
"It's over now. The best thing that could happen to him has happened,"
he said, and the touch of his hand was like the touch of life itself,
consoling, strengthening, restoring.
In the days that followed it was as if the helpful spirit of Cousin
Jimmy had returned to her in the unfamiliar character of O'Hara. The
ghastly details of George's burial were not only taken out of her hands,
she was hardly permitted to know even that they were necessary. All
explanations were made, not by her, but by O'Hara; and when they
returned together from the cemetery, Gabriella brought with her a
feeling that she had been watching something that belonged to O'Hara
laid in the earth. But when she tried to thank him, she found that he
was apparently unaware that he had done anything deserving of gratitude.
"Oh, that's nothing. Anybody would have done it," he remarked, and
dismissed the subject forever.
For a week after this she did not see him again; and then one Saturday
afternoon, when she was leaving Dinard's, they met by chance and walked
home together. It was the first time she had been in the street with
him, and she was conscious of feeling absurdly young and girlish--she,
the mother of a daughter old enough to have love affairs! A soft
flush--the flush of youth--tinted her pale cheek; her step, which so
often dragged wearily after the day's work, was as buoyant as Fanny's;
and her low, beautiful laugh was as gay as if she were not burdened by
innumerable anxieties. As they passed a shop window, her reflection
flashed back at her, and she thought happily: "Yes, it is true, you are
better looking at thirty-seven, Gabriella, than you were at twenty."
"Shall we walk down?" asked O'Hara, and added: "So that was your shop? I
am glad that I saw it. But what do you do there all day?"
She laughed merrily. "Put in pins and take them out again. Design,
direct, scold, and flatter. We are getting in the spring models now,
and it's very exciting."
He glanced down at her figure, noting, as if for the first time, the
narrowness at the feet, the large loose waist, and the bunchiness around
the hips.
"Did you make that?" he inquired.
"This coat? Oh, no; it came from Paris. It was left on my hands," she
explained, "or I shouldn't be wearing it. I wear only what people won't
buy, you know."
"No, I didn't know," he returned abstractedly, and she observed
humorously after a minute that he was not thinking of her because he was
thinking so profoundly about her clothes. It was his way, she had
discovered, to concentrate his mind intensely upon the object before
him, no matter how trivial or insignificant it might appear. He seemed
never to have learned how to divide either his interest or his
attention.
"If you could make what you wanted," he remarked, "I should think you'd
make them more comfortable. Are you going to wear those hobble skirts
this spring?"
"They'll be narrow at the feet but very bunchy at the top--doesn't that
sound delightful? I am making a white taffeta for Fanny that has five or
six yards of perfectly good material puffed out in the most ridiculous
way at the back over a petticoat of silver lace."
Her spirits felt so light, so effervescent, that she wanted to jest, to
laugh, to talk nonsense interminably; and after his first moments of
bewilderment, when he appeared still unable to detach his mind from his
business, he entered gaily and heartily into her mood. His perplexities
once disposed of, he gave himself entirely to the enjoyment of the walk
with her, and she noticed for the first time his boyish delight in the
simplest details of life. With the simplicity of a man to whom large
pleasures are unknown, he threw himself whole-heartedly into the
momentary diversion of small ones. Every person in the crowd, she
discovered, excited his interest, and his humour bubbled over at the
most insignificant things--at the grimace of a newsboy who offered him a
paper, at the absurd hat worn by a woman in a motor car, at the
expression of disgusted solemnity on the face of a servant in livery, at
the giggles of an over-dressed girl who hung on the arm of an anemic and
exhausted admirer. Never before had she encountered such vitality, such
careless, pure, and uncalculating joy of life. There was a tonic quality
in his physical presence, and while she walked at his side down Fifth
Avenue she felt as if she were swept onward by one of the health-giving,
pine-scented winds of Colorado. And she told herself reassuringly that
only a man who had lived decently could have kept himself so
extraordinarily young and exuberant at forty-five.
The shop windows, particularly those displaying men's shirtings,
enchanted him; and he stopped a moment before each one, while she
yielded as obligingly as she might have yielded to a fancy of
Archibald's, though she was aware that her son would have scorned to
look into a window.
"It's so seldom I get out on the Avenue, that's why I like it, I
suppose," he remarked while they were surveying a festive arrangement of
pink madras.
She smiled up at him, and her smile, gay as it was, held a touch of
maternal solicitude. Notwithstanding his bigness and his success and his
forty-five years, there was something appealingly boyish about him.
"It would be so easy to get out, wouldn't it?" she asked as they walked
on again.
"Well, there ain't much fun when you are by yourself."
"But you know plenty of people."
"Oh, yes, I know people enough in a business way, but that don't mean
having friends, does it? Of course, I've men friends scattered
everywhere," he added. "The West is full of 'em, but it's funny when you
come to think of it--" He broke off, hesitated an instant, and then went
on again: "It's funny, but I don't believe. I ever had a woman friend in
my life--I mean a friend who wasn't just the wife of some man I knew in
business."
The confession touched her, and she answered impulsively: "Well, that's
just what I want to be to you--a good friend."
He laughed, but his eyes shone as he looked down on her. "If you'd only
take the trouble."
"It won't be any trouble--not a bit of it. After your goodness to me,
how could I help being your friend?"
Lifting her eyes she would have met his squarely while she spoke, but he
was not looking at her--he appeared, indeed, to be looking almost
obstinately away from her.
"There wasn't anything in what I did," he responded in a barely audible
voice, and she understood that he was embarrassed by her gratitude.
"But there was something in it--there was a great deal in it," she
insisted. It was so easy to be natural with a man, so easy to be candid
and sincere when there was no question of sentiment, and, she thought
almost gratefully of the elusive and mysterious Alice. The faintest
suggestion of romance would have spoiled things in the beginning; but
thanks to the hidden Alice, she might be as kind and frank as she
pleased. Besides, she was nearly thirty-eight, and a woman of
thirty-eight might certainly be trusted to make a friend of a man of
forty-five.
With this thought, over which the memory of Arthur brooded benevolently,
in her mind, she said warmly: "It will make so much difference to me,
too, having a real friend in New York."
He turned to her with a start. "Do you mean that I could make a
difference to you?"
"The greatest difference, of course," she rejoined brightly, eager to
convince him of his importance in her life. "I can't tell you--you would
never understand how lonely I get at times, and now with the children
away it is worse than ever--the loneliness, I mean, and the feeling that
there isn't anybody one could turn to in trouble."
For a minute he appeared to ponder this deeply. "Well, you could always
come to me if you needed anything," he answered at last, and she felt
intuitively that for some reason he was distrustful either of himself or
of her. "I am not here very much of my time, but whenever I am, I am
entirely at your service."
"But that's only half of it." She was determined to reassure him. "A
friendship can't be one-sided, can it? And it isn't fair when you give
everything, that I should give nothing."
His scruples surrendered immediately to her argument. "You give
everything--you give happiness," he said--a strange speech certainly
from the twilight lover of Alice. However, as she reasoned clearly
after her first perplexity, men were often strange when one least
expected or desired strangeness. At thirty-seven, whatever else life had
denied her, she felt that it had granted her a complete understanding of
men; and it was out of this complete understanding that she observed
brightly after a minute:
"Well, if you feel that way, we are obliged to be friends." At least she
would prove by her frankness that she was not one of those foolish women
who are always taking things seriously.
"Yes, you give happiness. You scatter it, all over the place," he went
on, groping an instant after the right words.
"Cousin Jimmy used to say," she laughed back, "that I had a sunny
temper."
"That's it--that's what I meant," he replied eagerly; and she was
impressed again by his utter inability to make light conversation. When
he was once started, when he had lost himself in his subject, she knew
that he could speak both fluently and convincingly; but she realized
that he simply couldn't talk unless he had something to say. In order to
put him at his ease again, she remarked with pleasant firmness: "Do you
know there is something about you that reminds me of my Cousin Jimmy. It
gives me almost a cousinly feeling for you."
She had the air of expecting him to be interested, but he met it with
the rather vague interrogation: "Cousin Jimmy?"
"The cousin who always came to our help when we were in trouble. We used
to say that if the bread didn't rise, mother sent for Cousin Jimmy."
Though he laughed readily enough, she could see that his attention was
still wandering. "I never had a cousin," he returned after a pause, "or
a relation of any sort, for that matter."
His voice was curiously distant, and she was conscious of a slight
shock, as if she had run against one of the hard places in his
character. "Well, I've done my best," she thought impatiently. "If he
doesn't want to be friends he needn't be." Then, with a change of
manner, she observed flippantly: "Sometimes one's relatives are useful
and sometimes they're not." Really, he was impossibly heavy except in a
crisis; and one could scarcely be expected to produce crises in order to
put him thoroughly at his ease.
As he made no response to her trite remark, she, also, fell silent,
while they turned into Twenty-third Street, and began the long walk to
Ninth Avenue. Once or twice, glancing inquiringly into his face, which
wore a preoccupied look, she wondered if he were thinking of Alice.
Then, as the silence became suddenly oppressive, she ventured warily in
the effort to dispel it: "I hope you are not disturbed about anything?"
"Disturbed?" He turned to her with a start. "No, I was only wondering if
you knew how much your friendship would mean to me."
It was out at last, and confirmed once more in her knowledge of men, she
retorted gaily: "How can I know if you won't take the trouble to tell
me?" After all, she reflected cheerfully, the education she had derived
from George and Judge Crowborough, though lacking in the higher
branches, was fundamentally sound. All men were alike in one thing at
least--they invariably disappointed one's expectations.
"I've been trying to tell you for a quarter of an hour," he answered,
"and I didn't know how to put it."
"But at last you didn't have to put it at all," she said laughingly; "it
simply put itself, didn't it?"
"I am still wondering," he persisted gravely.
"Wondering if I know?" She spoke in the sweetly practical tone of one
who is firmly resolved not to permit any nonsense. "Yes, I do know--that
is, I know there are ways in which I might be useful to you."
"For instance?"
"Well, there are some little--some very little things I might tell you
if we were friends--real friends," she made this plain, "just as two men
might be."
"But the very last things two men would tell each other," he was
laughing now, "are the little things--the things about slang and
walking-sticks and oak furniture."
So he hadn't forgotten! The recollection of her impertinence confused
her, and she hastened to make light of it by protesting gaily: "I was
only joking. Of course, you didn't take that seriously."
"I don't know how much more seriously," he replied emphatically, "I
could have taken it."
"But you haven't thought of it since?"
"What would you say if I told you I hadn't thought of anything else?"
"Then I wish I hadn't said it." She was obviously worried by his
admission. "It was horrid of me--perfectly horrid. I ought to have been
ashamed of myself. I had no right to criticise you, and you have been so
heavenly kind."
"After that"--he appeared to be hammering the idea into her mind--"I
was so grateful I'd have done almost anything. Do you know," he burst
out with evident emotion, "that was the first criticism--I mean
downright honest criticism--I've ever had in my life. Nobody--that is
nobody who knew--ever thought enough of me before to tell me where I was
wrong."
It was all a pathetic mistake, she saw, but she saw also that it was
impossible for her to explain it away. She could not tell him the ugly
truth that she had been merely laughing at him when he had believed, in
his beautiful simplicity, that she was speaking as a friend. Though she
felt ashamed, humbled, remorseful, there was nothing that she could say
now which would not hurt him more than the original misunderstanding had
done.
In her desire to atone as far as possible, she remarked recklessly: "I
only wish I could be of some real help to you."
"You can," he answered frankly. "You can let me come to see you
sometimes before I go West again."
"You are going back in the spring?"
He laughed happily, drawing himself erect with a large, free movement as
if he needed to stretch his limbs. "I can't stand more than six months
of the East, and I've been here a year now, off and on. After a time I
begin to want air. I want to breathe."
"Yet you lived here once."
"A sort of life, yes, but that don't count."
"What does count with you, I wonder?" She was smiling up at him, and as
they passed under a street light her eyes shone with a misty brightness
through her veil of dotted net.
For a minute he thought over her question. "I guess fighting does," he
answered at last. "Getting on in spite of hard knocks, and smashing
things that stand in your way. I like the feeling that comes after
you've put through a big deal or got the better of the desert or the
mountains. I got joy in Arizona out of my first silver mine; but I
didn't get the joy exactly out of the silver. I don't suppose you
understand."
"Oh, yes, I do. I understand perfectly. It's the pure spirit of
adventure. Whenever we do a thing for the sake of the struggle, not for
the thing itself, it's pure adventure, isn't it?"
"Well, I like money," he said with the air of being entirely honest.
"I'm not a romantic chap, don't think that about me. I care a lot about
money, only after I've made it, somehow, I never know what to do with
it. All I want for myself is a place to sleep and a bite to eat--I'm not
over-particular what it is--and clothes to wear, good clothes, too--but
I don't give a hang for motor cars except to go long distances in when
there are no trains running."
It was the commonplace problem, worked out in intricate detail, of the
newly rich, of the uncultivated rich, of the rich whose strenuously
active processes of enrichment had permanently closed all other highways
to experience. Seventeen years ago the Gabriella of Hill Street would
have had only disdain for the newly rich and their problems; but life,
which had softened her judgment and modified her convictions, had
completely reversed her inherited opinion of such a case as O'Hara's.
Though he was as raw as unbaked brick, she was penetrating enough to
discern that he was also as genuine; and, so radically had events
altered her point of view, that at thirty-seven she found genuine
rawness more appealing than superficial refinement. George had wearied
her of the sham and the superficial, of gloss without depth, of manner
without substance, of charm without character.
"But there is so much that you might do to help," she said presently.
"After all, money is power, isn't it?"
"Misused power too often," he answered. "Of course, you can always build
lodging-houses and tenements and hospitals; but when you come squarely
down to facts, I've never in my life tried to help a man by giving him
money that I haven't regretted it. Why, I've ruined men by helping to
make their way too easy at the start."
"Perhaps you're right," she admitted; "I don't know much about it, I
confess; but I should have been spared a great deal of suffering if I
had had something to start with when I was obliged to make my living."
"That's different." His voice had grown gentle in an instant. "I can't
think of your ever having had a hard time. You seem so strong, so
successful, so happy."
If she had answered straight from her heart, Gabriella would have
retorted frankly: "A good deal of that is in the shape of my face and
the way I dress," but instead of speaking sincerely, she remarked with
impersonal cheerfulness: "Oh, well, happiness, like everything else, is
mainly a habit, isn't it? I cultivated the habit of happiness at the
most miserable time of my life, and I've never quite lost it."
"But I don't like to think of your ever having worried," he protested.
Of her ever having worried! Was he becoming dangerously sentimental or
was it merely a random spark of his unquenchable Western chivalry?
Though she told herself emphatically again that she was not falling in
love with O'Hara, though she was perfectly faithful in her heart to the
memory of Arthur, still she was vividly aware with every drop of her
blood, with every beat of her pulses, of the man at her side. And
through her magnetic sense of his nearness there flowed to her presently
a deeper and clearer perception of the multitudinous movements of life
which surrounded her--of the variable darkness out of which lights
flashed and gigantic spectacular outlines loomed against a dim
background of sky, of the vague shapes stirring, swarming, creating
there in the darkness, and always of the pitiless, insatiable hunger
from which the city had sprung. For the first time, flowing like a
current from the mind of the man beside her, there came to her an
understanding of her own share in the common progress of life--for the
first time she felt herself to be not merely a woman who lived in a
city, but an integral part of that city, one cell among closely packed
millions of cells. Something of the responsibility she felt for her own
children seemed to spread out and cover the city lying there in its
dimness and mystery.
"But I don't like to think of your ever having worried," he repeated.
"Oh, it's over now," she returned, severely matter-of-fact. "It took me
years to make my way, but I've made it at last, and I may settle down to
a comfortable middle-age without the dread of the poorhouse to spur me
into activity. My business is doing very well; our custom has doubled in
the last two or three years."
"But wasn't it a tough pull at one time?"
"It was hard; but what isn't? Of course, when I was obliged to work from
nine till six and then come home to cook the children's dinner and teach
them their lessons, I used to be tired out by the end of the day--but
that lasted only a few years: five or six at the most--and now I can
afford to let Fanny wear imported gowns when she goes out to parties."
Though she spoke gaily, making a jest of her struggle, she saw the
gravity of his face deepen until his features looked almost wooden.
"And through it all you kept something that so many other women seem to
lose when they work for a living," he said. "You've kept your--your
charm."
Again she found herself on the point of exclaiming frankly: "heaven
knows I've tried to!"--and again, checking herself, she proceeded
cautiously: "I've never understood why charm should be merely a hothouse
flower."
"I suppose it does depend a good deal upon a sunny temper," he rejoined
in his blindness.
They had reached the gate, and stopping him when he would have entered,
she said with the directness of a man: "So we're friends, and you're
coming to see me?"
"Yes, I'm coming," he replied gravely. Then, standing beside the gate,
he watched her while she went up the walk and opened the door with her
key.
Upstairs, with her knitting on her lap and her feet on the fender, Miss
Polly looked up to observe: "You're late, Gabriella. You must have
walked all the way."
"Yes, I walked all the way. Mr. O'Hara joined me."
"Where did you run across him?"
"Just as I left the shop. He was walking down Fifth Avenue."
"Do you reckon he was waitin' outside?"
"Oh, no, he said he had been up to Fifty-ninth Street on business."
"Well, the walk certainly did you good. You are bloomin' like a rose."
"The air was delicious, and I really like talking to Mr. O'Hara. He is
quite interesting after you get over the first impression, and he isn't
nearly so ignorant about things as I imagined. He has thought a great
deal even if he hasn't read very much. It's wonderful, isn't it, what
the West can do with a man? Now, if he'd stayed in New York he would
have been merely impossible, but because he has lived out of doors he
has achieved a certain distinction. I can understand a woman falling in
love with him just because of his force and his bigness. They are the
qualities a woman likes most, I think."
"He must have made a great deal of money."
"Yes, he's rich, and that's a good thing. I like money tremendously,
though I used to think that I didn't. I wonder if he had been poor if I
should have liked him quite so much?" she asked herself honestly.
"I don't 'spose you could ever--ever bring yourself to think of him,
honey? It would be a mighty good thing in some ways."
Gabriella, being in a candid mood, pondered the question without
subterfuge or evasion. "Of course I've passed the sentimental age," she
answered. "If Mr. O'Hara had been poor, I suppose I should never have
thought of him; but his money does make a difference. It stands for
success, achievement, and ability, and I like all those qualities. Then
he is rough in many ways, but he isn't a bit vulgar. He has genuine
character. There is absolutely no pretence about him."
"You could catch him in a minute," replied Miss Polly hopefully,
animated by the inveterate match-making instinct of her class.
Gabriella laughed merrily. "Oh, yes, I might capture him if I went
questing for him. I am not a child. But put that out of your head
forever, Miss Polly. I have given him clearly to understand that there
must be no nonsense, though, for the matter of that, I doubt if he
needed the warning. There is an Alice."
"I reckon it would take more than an Alice to stand in the way if you
wanted him," insisted the little seamstress, possessed by an obstinate
conviction that fate could provide no happiness apart from marriage.
"Perhaps. But you see I don't want him." Gabriella had become perfectly
serious, and to Miss Polly's amazement a hint of petulance showed in her
manner. "Everything of that kind was over for me long ago. I never think
of love now, and if I did there wouldn't be but one--but one--"
"I know, honey," agreed Miss Polly, suddenly softened, "and I'd give
anything on earth if you and Arthur could come together again."
"It wouldn't be any use. I made my choice, and I have had to abide by
it. He could never forgive me--". She stopped as if she were choking,
and Miss Polly said sympathetically:
"Well, I wish he had a chance to, that's all. Why don't you run down to
Richmond for a few days this spring to see your folks? Your ma and all
would be so glad to see you, and it ain't as if you had the children to
keep you back. The thing that worries me," she added with feeling, "is
the thought of your spendin' the summer here without the children. If
Archibald goes to camp from school and Fanny joins Jane at the White
Sulphur Springs as soon as her school is out, you won't have them at
all, will you?"
"No, but they will be happy; that is the only thing that matters."
"It seems all wrong to me. What do you get out of life, honey?"
"What do any of us get out of it, dear little Miss Polly, except the joy
of triumphing? It's overcoming that really matters, nothing else, and it
is the same thing to you and to me that it is to the man downstairs. I
am happy because in my little way I stood the test of struggle, and so
are you, and so is Mr. O'Hara."
"But you're young yet, and it ain't natural for you to live as you're
doin'. Lots of women marry when they're older than you are."
"Oh, yes, if they want to--"
For a minute the little seamstress rattled her newspaper while she
looked at her without replying. Then, after folding the paper, and
removing her spectacles, she asked grimly: "Can you look me in the eyes,
Gabriella, and tell me that you ain't still hankerin' after Arthur?"
The blush of a girl made the business-like Gabriella appear as young and
as piquantly feminine as her daughter.
"No, Miss Polly, I cannot," she answered with incomparable directness;
"I have loved Arthur all my life."
"That's just what I thought all along, and yet you went off and married
somebody else." Excited by the unexpected confession, Miss Polly was
quivering with sympathy.
In that supreme instant of self-revelation Gabriella answered this
accusation as if it had been uttered by her remorseful conscience. "But
that wasn't love," she said slowly; "it was my youth craving experience;
it was my youth reaching after the unknown, the untried, the
undiscovered. We all go questing for adventure one way or another, I
suppose, but it was not the reality."
"I wonder what is," said Miss Polly in a whisper; "I wonder what is,
Gabriella?"
"That," replied Gabriella softly, "is what I am still trying to
discover."