They moved again, the landlord uptown having raised the rent at the
expiration of their lease. The new place was in two large, bare rooms
four stories up, lighted by gas, and without any kitchen except a
small gas stove in a corner and some shelves concealed by a wall-board
screen. There was a dilapidated bathroom, and a roof above where she
could take the children in good weather. The place was in the Italian
quarter and was cheap. The move seemed a logical one to Moira, for it
brought them down in the social scale. If they were to be poor, it was
better to live with the poor than with the pretentious. And the Italian
section was in the Village, of which they had both become incurably
fond, and where for many reasons they felt most comfortable.
The house was managed by an Italian woman named Respetti, who had
once done odd jobs of sewing for Moira and for whom she felt a strong
liking. Mrs. Respetti had appeared to be quite overjoyed to see her
again, delighted to hear of her marriage and her children, and had
offered to help her look after them when she could. Her willingness in
this regard was the deciding factor in Moira’s choice of the house.
She had not been installed there more than a few weeks when Miles
finally lost his job outright, an event she had anticipated almost
any day since before the birth of her little girl. He made efforts to
obtain work of the same kind, but unsuccessfully. He got books for
review. He did whatever came along. One day he brought her a check
signed by his father. He began shortly afterwards to be somewhat
worse than idle, and sought forgetfulness of his troubles in a way to
increase them....
Moira had lived to see three men in him: the skylarking poet, the
dogged misfit in business, and finally the self-drugged and nearly
self-convinced failure. And still the vision of the first one haunted
her and she hoped to bring it back to life.
Left to herself, she made friendships in the Village and built up
her own income to fairly respectable proportions. She was, at least,
preserved from downright anxiety about the children. In her youth at
Thornhill, had she witnessed the privations and makeshifts which now
made up her life she would have thought them a chapter out of some
incredible tale of human misfortune.
One night when she had waited late for Miles and he had not come, she
went to Sophie’s Kitchen.
This was a dimly lighted little restaurant, with two rows of board
tables down each wall, and an exotically foreign air, where the food
was well-flavoured and not so expensive as in most of the show
places of the section. She was very fond of Sophie, the proprietress,
a whole-souled woman, discriminating in her intimates, with a soft,
pleasing voice, and remarkably long, narrow hazel eyes.
As Moira seated herself at one of the tables she was conscious of a
fashionable party across the room. Such people were not unusual in
Sophie’s and she paid little attention to them. She saw the handsome
proprietress in the open pantry at the back of the room and waved
to her with a cry of greeting. Sophie replied by calling her name.
Immediately afterward, Moira looked up to see a man coming toward her
from the group she had spotted upon entering. He reached her table and
thrust out his hand.
“Well, Rob Blaydon!” she cried.
“Moira.”
She had recognized him at once, but she looked him over more carefully
as he sat down opposite her. He was stouter. She found herself
experiencing a sensation she had never known before, that of meeting a
youthful companion grown mature in her absence, one she was fond of. It
wasn’t such an extraordinary sensation. It might have been only a few
days ago when she was seeing Rob constantly. Nothing happened to people
at all. Perhaps his face had changed a little, but whatever change
there was she would have expected. Yes, she felt he was an even more
wicked and human Rob than before.
“I’ll tell you what, Moira,” he went on at once. “I don’t care what
you’ve got on hand to-night, you’ve got to spend the evening with me.
If you will wait just a minute I’ll get away from these people on some
pretext. I’ve simply got to talk to you, Moira. What do you say?”
“Go ahead, Rob, if you want to. I’d love it,” she replied with
unaffected pleasure.
He came back in a few moments.
“Evidently they are used to your whims,” she said. “They don’t seem to
mind.”
“Forget ’em,” he replied, with a clipped ruthlessness she remembered
well.
The two women had in fact glanced at her curiously and critically,
but she did not care. They were certainly a very smart party. She
wondered what they would think if they knew that she, too, not so
many years ago, had worn the clothes they were wearing and cultivated
their dry, sophisticated smiles. It appeared to her now a diluted and
uninteresting sophistication....
“Moira,” he was saying, “I’ve got to know all about you. I’m hungry for
information. You don’t look any younger. But you don’t look any the
worse, either. What wouldn’t they give back home to be with me now!”
“Rob, it’s good to see you!”
“Honest? Well, I’m certainly glad you feel that way. Still, I always
knew you’d be just the same. Why did you do it, Moira? Why in the devil
did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Oh, all that--rot. It was silly, Moira. You’re one of us, to this day.
Always will be, you know. Who cared?”
She laughed a few notes of warm laughter that was still a clear stream
free from the sediment of bitterness.
“I never think of that any more. Perhaps it was silly. But I’ve been
happier.”
“H’m.” She was conscious that his eyes searched her face, and rather
proud that what he found there would make it impossible to pity her.
“H’m,” he repeated, “well, maybe you have. I guess you know a lot.”
“How are they, Rob? I’d like to see them all. I really would. Goodness,
it’s been ten years! How’s Hal?”
There was no challenge in the tone--it was just a natural question.
“You haven’t heard about Hal? Well, Hal is in China. Been there for
six years and I reckon he won’t come home. You know he looked high
and low for you--thought he was going out of his mind. There were
difficulties, you understand, or perhaps you counted on them. Fear
of publicity--truth leaking out--abduction--shouting your name from
the house-tops. But he wore himself out. Then one night he came home,
and broke down. Well, he told me he guessed it was better the way it
turned out--that he admired you and knew you’d never be moved. Thought
after what happened you’d never feel right. My God, you high and mighty
idealists!”
“Is he happy?”
“I don’t know. Hal and I were always so confounded different, it’s
hard for me to get him. He wasn’t cut out to be happy or the opposite.
He’s turned out one of those quiet, square-jawed gumps, Moira. I met
him in Paris two years ago, and we had a rotten dull time of it. I
suppose he’ll mope around the Orient the rest of his life, working for
corporations, get richer and richer and marry somebody’s sister equally
rich. Now, I’m another breed of coyote. I’m always satisfied when I
have a clean shirt on. It’s the thoughtless life I like.”
“I’m sorry Hal isn’t happy,” said Moira ruefully.
“I wouldn’t be sorry about him!” snapped Rob. “Damn it, Moira, I don’t
say you weren’t clever as the devil. But if Hal had been me I’d have
found you.”
“You’re the same Rob!” she laughed. “You know, of course, you’re
the only one of them I could have run into this way and talked to
comfortably. And the others--how are they? Your father I”--she dropped
her voice--“read about in the papers.”
“Poor Dad. He must have felt he was buncoed sometime or other in his
life. He tried to overcrowd the last few years. I think Aunt Mathilda
felt he went off about in time.... Those two old women--I mean your
mother, Moira, and my aunt. It’s a curious friendship that’s grown up
between them. They keep that big house together and think mostly about
cows and flowers--and old times.”
She did not reply to that nor look at him directly. She was glad when
he burst out in a more immediate vein.
“Well, what do you say to a night of it? I find it’s a dull world,
Moira. You may have more money than I have, and it may bore you to do
the bright lights ... but that’s my form of entertainment. However, I’m
only going to do what you say. It’s your night. But I don’t imagine you
want me to take you to church!”
“I haven’t money,” she answered, smiling. “I never have a night of it,
Rob. I’d love one.”
“Good! Come on.”
“No. I want you to wait here while I change. These clothes won’t do.”
“Just as you say. But can’t I take you--wherever it is you go to change
your clothes?”
“What’s the use?” she queried, tentatively, as much to herself as to
him. “No, I’d rather you wouldn’t.”
“Just as you say.”
“Rob, you’re a dear. In fifteen minutes I’ll be back. Meantime you talk
to Sophie. Oh, Sophie,” she called, and while she waited for Sophie to
come, she added, “Sophie will like you fine. She might even put you on
the poor list.”
“What’s that?”
“Sophie has a sliding scale of prices. But that’s a secret.”
Moira’s one black evening gown was rather old, but she felt
extraordinarily happy as she stepped out of the restaurant a little
later on his arm. The sweet, leathery smell of the taxicab’s interior
held almost a new shiver for her. How long it had been since she had
smelled that with a good conscience and seen the lights of the little
squares and the upper Avenue slip by like a single glittering chain,
to the slinky whirr of wheels. She looked forward to the evening for
itself--its adventure in colours--and for Rob. She begged him not to
ask her questions, not until they had had a few dances and found a
quiet corner after the fun.
“I see,” he said. “You’re starved for a fling--even if you won’t let
on.”
“I am--with you.”
“No kidding? But I guess you always did like me pretty well. You
used to be my only champion. And I needed one often. Well, I’m an
unrepentant sinner.”
After dining they took in a part of the Follies and then went to dance.
It was the same, she found, here as it had been at home. Whenever
they stopped, at the Tom-Tom and La Fleur de Nuit, he was known and
served like the old-timers. She begged him to go on drinking while she
skipped, and he did so without apology, explaining that it was his
forte. She wondered at his power of absorbing continuously without the
trembling of an eyelash. It pleased her to meet admiring eyes, and be
asked to dance by his friends.
He steered her afterward to a place furnished like a very intimate
club, where they sat in deep armchairs under dim lights and had
scrambled eggs and bacon on little French stands. There she took a long
Scotch highball and told him something of herself.
“Moira,” he said. “It’s a weird sensation to listen to such a tale from
you. You belong in this sort of thing.” He indicated the too elegant
room.
She rose to go.
“It’s better fun to feel you belong in the whole crazy world. I wonder
if you do?”
She laughed and then added with a sudden burst of bravado: “Rob, I’d
like to take you home and let you see my kids. I’d like to to-night.
Could you come?”
“Yep. I get a train out of here at nine in the morning and there’s more
than six hours to make it.”
She felt it was an odd experience for him climbing up the dark, gas-lit
stairs. She led him back to the cribs with candelabra in her hand,
and he looked longest at the blond-haired little Joanna, seeing in
her broad, upturned, warm face some misty resemblance to his earliest
vision of her mother.
“They’re great kids, Moira. But I won’t bluff--I like ’em all best when
they’re asleep.”
They came out into the shadowy, haphazard studio, and she knew he felt
uneasy and shocked at her surroundings.
“Well,” he said coolly, “of course you’re going to let me help you.
I’ve got plenty--more than is good for me--and nobody has more right to
it than you. If you say so, I’ll ditch that train to-morrow and have
you out of here by noon with the children, into a comfortable place.”
“No, sir,” she laughed.
“But, my God!” he protested, and then added severely. “Moira, I told
you early in the evening you looked none the worse for everything....
But you do--you look peaked. You’re fagged.”
“Who wouldn’t be, after a night of it with you! No, no, you dear boy.
But we’ll have a night of it again.”
“Thanks for that.”
“And only with you, Rob,” she continued, with emphasis. He caught the
hint that he was to keep the secret of her whereabouts.
“Just as you say. I shan’t talk. But I’m going to get you out of this,
somehow, sometime. I can’t tell you where to reach me, to-night, except
that Thornhill does, in a roundabout way. I’m going to locate in the
East in a few days and you’ll hear from me. I’m going now. There’s no
use talking, Moira, this pulls me down”--he made a gesture with his
hand about the room and then added apologetically--“Don’t be offended.
It’s just because it happens to be you.”
As he stood awkwardly, with hat and stick under one arm, he took out a
long box of cigarettes and threw it on the table.
“At least let me give you those,” he said with a sheepish grin.
“Rob, please don’t worry about me,” she pleaded. She stepped toward
the table to take a cigarette from the box he had thrown down, but his
outstretched arm stopped her.
“Here,” he said, offering his opened case, “take one of these....
Moira, you’re the woman who makes all my conceptions about the sex go
blooey. Damn it, I wish I were Harold. I wish I had some prior rights
in the matter.”
“You’ve more rights this minute than Hal,” she said firmly.
After he had gone she sat puffing smoke into the dim upper reaches of
the room, and watching the petals of candlelight waver and dip. What
fun it had been! Life held strange meetings. Perhaps it held many more
for her. She was a little unhappy, dissatisfied ... the place did look
dismal, unclean, comfortless.
In the morning she found Miles pacing the studio waiting for her to
rise. He was nervous and evasive, but in better shape than she had
expected to see him. Obviously, he had done his recovering elsewhere,
and bathed while she slept. She kissed him, her quarrel with him lost
in pleasant afterthoughts of the night before, but he seemed troubled
and strange. At breakfast, he suddenly asked:
“What the devil is this?”
“What?”
He tossed a Pall Mall cigarette box across the table and she opened it.
The silver paper was folded carefully over the top. Between it and the
bottom layer of cigarettes lay five one hundred dollar bills.
“It’s a long story,” she said, recovering from her surprise. Then she
told him about Rob. He stood up to go after she had finished.
“Well,” he said, with some embarrassment, “I do hope you feel it’s a
perfectly natural thing for a fellow to open a box of cigarettes lying
around on a table. I mean to say--”
“Nonsense. I should have done it myself.”
Miles left her, to go to his accumulated work, bitterly, she knew, and
more completely convinced of his uselessness. She sat down to try to
think out what was to be done. The owner of the five hundred had taken
his train long ago. She did not know where to reach him, and if she
did, it would be downright mean to send the money back. She remembered
how he had prevented her from opening the box before he had left her.
The money was not there by accident. Rob was her schoolboy friend.
Perhaps she was only giving herself an excuse, but what good would her
self-righteousness do to temper the hurt she knew he would feel? She
would accept his gift simply and with thanks. Besides, she had a plan.
On the children’s account, on Miles’, on her own, she had long been
wanting to put it into execution. This money would enable her to do so,
beautifully and without a hitch.