"Yes, indeed," said she. "This is the best time to catch them. They'll
be dressing for dinner."
And he hurried away.
*XXVI*
*TRAFFORD AS DOVE OF PEACE*
As Trafford sprang from his cab at Armstrong's hotel, Armstrong was just
entering the door. "Mr. Armstrong! Mr. Armstrong!" he cried, hastening
after him.
The big, easy-going-looking Westerner--still the Westerner, though his
surface was thoroughly Easternized--turned and glanced quizzically down
at the small, prim-looking Trafford. "Hello! What do you want?"
"To see you for a few minutes, if it is quite convenient," replied
Trafford, still more nervous before Armstrong's good-natured contempt.
"A very few minutes," conceded the big man. "I've a pressing
engagement."
They went up to his apartment. As he opened the door, he saw a note on
the threshold. "Excuse me," he said, picking it up, and so precipitate
that he did not stand aside to let Trafford enter first. In the sitting
room he turned on the light, tore open the note and read; and Trafford
noted with dismay that, as he read, his face darkened. It was a note
from Neva, saying that she had just got a telegram from home, that her
father was ill; she had scrawled the note as she and Molly were rushing
away to catch the train. He glanced up, saw Trafford. "Oh--beg
pardon--sit down." And he read the note again; and again his mind
wandered away into the gloom. Once more, after a moment or two, his
eyes reminded him of Trafford. "Beg pardon--a most annoying message--
Do sit down. Have a cigar?"
"Not at present, thank you," said Trafford in his precise way,
reminiscent of the far days when he had taught school.
"Well--what can I do for you?" inquired Armstrong, adding to himself,
"This is Atwater's first move." But he was not interested; his mind was
on Neva, on the note that had chilled him--"unreasonably," he muttered,
"yet, she might have put in just the one word--or something."
Trafford saw that he had no part of Armstrong's attention. He coughed.
"If you can give me--" he began.
"Yes, yes," said Armstrong impatiently. "What is it? You can't expect
me to be enthusiastic, exactly, about you, you know. I didn't expect
anything of the others; but I was idiot enough to think you weren't
altogether shameless--you, the principal owner of the Hearth and Home!"
Armstrong's sarcasm was savage.
"You are evidently laboring under some misapprehension, Mr. Armstrong,"
cried Trafford, pulling at his neat little beard, while one of his neat
little feet tapped the carpet agitatedly.
"Bosh!" said Armstrong. "I know all about you. Don't lie to me. What
do you want? Come to the point!"
There was a pink spot in each of Trafford's cheeks. "I have been much
distressed," said he, "at the confusion downtown, at the strained
relations between interests that ought to be working together in harmony
for the general good." Armstrong's frown hastened him. "I have come to
see if it isn't possible to bring about good feeling and peace."
"You come from Atwater?"
"No--that is--Frankly, no."
Armstrong rose with a gesture of dismissal. "We're wasting time.
Atwater is the man. Unless you have some authority from him, I'll not
detain you."
"But, my dear sir," cried Trafford, in a ferment to the very depths now,
because convinced by Armstrong's manner that he was not dealing with a
beaten man but with one champing for the fray. "You do not seem to hear
me," he implored. "I tell you I can make terms. In this matter Atwater
is dependent upon me."
"You've come about the attack he's going to make on the O.A.D.?"
"Precisely. I've come to arrange to stop it, to say I wish to make no
attack."
"You mean, you don't wish to be attacked," rejoined Armstrong with a
cold laugh that made Trafford's flesh creep. "By the time Morris gets
through with you, I don't see how you can possibly be kept out of the
penitentiary. He has all the necessary facts. I think he can compel
you to disgorge at least two thirds of what you've stolen and salted
away. I don't see where you got the courage to go into a fight, when
you're such an easy target. The wonder is you weren't caught and sent
up years ago."
"This is strange language, very strange language," said Trafford in an
injured tone, and not daring to pretend or to feel insulted. "I am
surprised, Mr. Armstrong, that you should use it in your own house."
"I didn't ask you here. You thrust yourself in," Armstrong reminded
him, but his manner was less savage.
"True, I did come of my own accord. And I still venture to hope that
you will see the advantages of a peaceful solution."
"What do you propose?--in as few words as possible," said Armstrong,
still believing Trafford was trying to trifle with him, for some hidden
purpose.
"To call off our attack," Trafford answered, "provided you will agree to
call off yours. To give you a liberal representation in our board of
directors, including a member of the executive committee."
Armstrong was astounded. He could not believe that Trafford's humble,
eager manner was simulated. Yet, these terms, this humiliating surrender
of assured victory--it was incredible. "You will have to explain just
how you happened to come here," said he, "or I shall be unable to
believe you."
The pink spots which had faded from Trafford's cheeks reappeared. "It
was my wife," he replied. "She heard there was to be a scandal. She has
a horror of notoriety--you know how refined and sensitive she is. She
would not let me rest until I had promised to do what I could to bring
about peace."
Armstrong was secretly scorning his own stupidity. He had spent days,
weeks on just this problem of breaking up the combination against him,
of separating Trafford or Langdon from Atwater; and the simple, easy,
obvious way to do it had never occurred to him, who dealt only with the
men and disregarded the women as negligible factors in affairs. To
Trafford he said, "You've not seen Atwater?"
"No, but I shall go to him as soon as I have some assurance from you."
Atwater--there was the rub. Armstrong felt that the time to hope had
not yet come. Still he would not discourage Trafford. He simply said,
"I can't give any assurance until I consult Morris."
"But, as I understand it--at least, his original motive was simply a
political ambition. We can easily gratify that."
"He wants fireworks--something that'll make the popular heart warm up to
him. He has a long head. He wants some basis, at least, in popularity,
so that he won't be quite at the mercy of you gentlemen, should you turn
against him."
"I see--I see," said Trafford. "He was counting on the reputation he
would make as an inquisitor. Yes, that would give him quite a push.
But--there ought to be plenty of other matters he might safely and even,
perhaps, beneficially, inquire into. For instance, there is the Bee
Hive Mutual--a really infamous swindle. I've had dealings with many
unattractive characters in the course of my long business career, Mr.
Armstrong, but with none so repellent in every way as Dillworthy. He
has made that huge institution a private graft for himself and his
family. He is shocking, even in this day of loose conceptions of
honesty and responsibility."
"Have you any facts?"
"Some, and they are at Mr. Morris's disposal. But all he needs to do is
to send for the books of the Bee Hive. I am credibly informed--you can
rely on it--that the Dillworthys have got so bold that they do not even
look to the books. The grafting in that company is quite as extensive
and as open as in our large industrial and railway corporations--and,
you know, they haven't profited by the lesson we in the insurance
companies had in the great investigation."
"Your proposal will content Morris, I think," Armstrong now said. "As
the Dillworthys aren't entangled with any of the other large interests,
showing them up will not cause a spreading agitation." He laughed.
"There's a sermon against selfishness! If old Dillworthy hadn't been so
greedy, so determined to keep it all in the family, he wouldn't be in
this position."
"There will be general satisfaction over his exposure," replied
Trafford. "And it will greatly benefit, tone up, the whole business
world."
"Really, it's our Christian duty to concentrate on the Busy Bee, isn't
it?" said Armstrong sardonically. "Well-- Can you see Atwater
to-night?"
"I'm going direct to his house. But where shall I find you? You said
you had an engagement."
Armstrong winced as if a wound had been roughly set to aching. "I'll be
here," he said gruffly.
"We might dine together, perhaps? Atwater may be able to come, too."
"No--can't do it," was Armstrong's reply. "But I'll be here from half
past eight on."
Trafford, so much encouraged that he was almost serene again, sped away
to Atwater's palace in Madison Avenue. The palace was a concession to
Mrs. Atwater and the daughters. They loved display and had the tastes
that always accompany that passion; they, therefore, lived in the
unimaginative and uncomfortable splendor of the upper class heaven that
is provided by the makers of houses and furniture, whose one thought,
naturally, is to pile on the cost and thus multiply the profits.
But Atwater had part of the house set aside for and dedicated to his own
personal satisfaction. With the same sense of surprise that one has at
the abrupt transition of a dream from one phantasy to another resembling
it in no way except as there is a resemblance in flat contradictions,
one passed out of the great, garish, price-encrusted entrance hall,
through a door to the left into a series of really beautiful
rooms--spacious, simple, solidly furnished; with quiet harmonies of
color, with no suggestions of mere ornamentation anywhere. The
Siersdorfs had built and furnished the whole house, and its double
triumph was their first success. With the palace part they had pleased
the Atwater women and the crowd of rich eager to display; with the part
sacred to Atwater, they had delighted him and such people as formed
their ideas of beauty upon beauty itself and not upon fashion or
tradition or outlay. Trafford was shown into a music room where Atwater
was playing on the piano, as he did almost every evening for an hour
before dinner. It was a vast room, walls and ceilings paneled in
rosewood; there were no hangings, except at the windows valances of
velvet of a rosewood tint, relieved by a broad, dull gold stripe; a few
simple articles of furniture; Boris Raphael's famous "Music" on the wall
opposite the piano, and no other picture; a huge vase of red and gold
chrysanthemums at the opposite side of the room to balance the painting;
Atwater at the piano, in a dark red, velvet house suit, over it a silk
robe of a somewhat lighter shade of red, as the room was not heated.
"Business?" he said, pausing in his playing, with a careless, unfriendly
glance at Trafford.
"I'll only trouble you a moment," apologized the intruder. His prim,
strait-laced appearance gave those surroundings, made sensuous by
Boris's intoxicatingly sensuous picture, an air of impropriety, of
immorality--like a woman in Quaker dress among the bare shoulders,
backs, and bosoms of a ballroom.
"Business!" exclaimed Atwater, rising. "Not in this room, if you
please."
He led the way to a smaller room with a billiard table in the center and
great leather seats and benches round the walls. "Do you play,
Trafford? Music, I mean."
"I regret to say, I do not," replied Trafford.
"Then you ought to get a mechanical piano. Music in the evening is like
a bath after a day in the trenches. Try it. It'll soothe you, put you
into a better condition for the next day's bout. What can I do for
you?"
"I've come about the O.A.D. matter. Atwater, don't you think we might
lose more than we stand to gain?"
Atwater concealed his satisfaction. Since his talk with Armstrong, he
had been remeasuring with more care that young man's character, and had
come to the conclusion that he was entering upon a much stiffer campaign
than he had anticipated. Atwater's dealings were, and for years had
been, with men of large fortune--industrial "kings," great bankers, huge
investors. Such men are as timid as a hen with a brood. They will fight
fiercely--if they must--for their brood of millions. But they would
rather run than fight, and much rather go clucking and strutting along
peacefully with their brood securely about them. To manage such men,
after one has shown he knows where the worms are and how they may be
got, all that is necessary is inflexible, tyrannical firmness. Their
minds, their hearts, their all, is centered in the brood; personal
emotions, they have none--that is, none that need be taken into account.
Atwater ruled, autocratic, undisputed. Who would dare quarrel with such
a liberal provider of the best worms?
But Armstrong's personality presented another proposition. Here was a
man with no fortune, not even enough to have roused into a fierce
passion the universal craving for wealth. He had a will, a brain,
courage--and nothing to lose. And he, still comparatively poor, had
succeeded in lifting himself to a position of not merely nominal but
actual power. The misgivings of Atwater had been growing steadily. The
price of pulling down this man might too easily be far, far beyond its
profits. "We shall have to come together for a finish fight sooner or
later--if I live," reasoned Atwater. "But this is not the best time I
could have chosen. He isn't deeply enough involved. He isn't helpless
enough. I'm breaking my rule never to fight until I'm ready and the
other fellow isn't."
Instead of answering Trafford's pointed and anxious question, Atwater
was humming softly. "I can't get that movement out of my head," he
broke off to explain. "I'm very fond of Grieg--aren't you?"
"I know about music only in the most general way. My wife----"
"You let your women attend to the family culture, eh?" interrupted
Atwater. "You originally suggested this war on Fosdick and Armstrong.
By the way, you heard the news this afternoon? Armstrong has thrown out
the whole executive staff of the O.A.D.--at one swoop--and has put in
his own crowd."
Trafford leaped in the great leather chair in which his small body was
all but swallowed up. "Impossible!" he cried. "Why, such a thing would
be illegal."
"Undoubtedly. But--how many years would it be before a court can pass
on it--pass on it finally? Meanwhile, Armstrong is in possession."
"That completely alters the situation," said Trafford, in dismay.
"Atwater, it would be folly--madness!--for us to go on, if we could make
a treaty with Armstrong."
"I don't agree with you," said Atwater, with perfect assurance now that
he saw that Trafford would not call his bluff by acquiescing.
"Trafford, I'm surprised; you're losing your nerve."
"Using sound business judgment is not cowardice," retorted Trafford. "I
owe it to my family, to the stability of business, not to encourage a
senseless, a calamitous war."
Atwater shrugged his shoulders. "As you please. I feel that, in this
affair, your wishes are paramount. But, at the same time, Trafford, I
tell you frankly, I don't like to be trifled with. Nor does Langdon."
"Perhaps Morris and Armstrong might be induced to turn their attention
elsewhere--say, to the Busy Bee. Would you not feel compensated by
getting control there?"
"Not a bad idea," mused Atwater aloud. "Not by any means a bad idea."
He reflected in silence. "If you could arrange that, it would be even
better than the plan you ask me to abandon at the eleventh hour."
"Then you agree?" said Trafford, quivering with eagerness.
"If we can get the Busy Bee. I've had an eye on that chap Dillworthy,
for some time."
"I am much relieved," said Trafford, rising. His face was beaming;
there was once more harmony between his expression and the aggressive,
unbending cut of his hair and whiskers.
Atwater looked at him sharply. "You've seen Armstrong," he jerked out.
Trafford hesitated. "I thought," he said apologetically, "it would be
best to have a general talk with Armstrong first--just to sound him."
"I understand." Atwater laughed sarcastically. "And may I ask, if it
wasn't the news of the upset in the O.A.D., what was it that set you to
running about so excitedly?"
Trafford gave a nervous cough. "My wife--you know how refined and
sensitive she is-- She got wind of the impending scandal, and, being
very tender-hearted and also having a horror of notoriety, she urged me
to try to find a peaceful way out."
"Petticoats!" said Atwater, with derision, but tolerant.
"Not that I would have--" Trafford began to protest.
"No apology necessary. I comprehend. I've got them in the house."
Trafford laughed, relieved. "The ladies are difficult at times," said
he, "but, how would we do without them?"
"I don't know, I'm sure," said Atwater dryly. "I never had the good
fortune of the opportunity to try it. What did Armstrong say, when you
sounded him? I believe you called it 'sounding,' though I suspect-- No
matter. What did he say?"
"I think you may safely assume the matter is settled. In fact,
Armstrong has shown a willingness to make peace."
"Rather!" said Atwater, edging his visitor toward the door. "Good
night," he added in the same breath; and he was rid of Trafford. He
went slowly back to the piano, and resumed the interrupted symphony
softly, saying every now and then, in a half sympathetic, half cynical
undertone, "Poor Dillworthy! Poor devil!"
*XXVII*
*BREAKFAST AL FRESCO*
Armstrong sent Neva a prompt telegram of sympathy and inquiry. He got a
telegraphed reply--her thanks and the statement that her father was
desperately ill, but apparently not in immediate danger. He wrote her
about the highly satisfactory turn in his affairs; to help him to ease,
he tried to dismiss herself and himself, but at every sentence he had to
stem again the feeling that this letter would be read where he was
remembered as the sort of person it made him hot with shame to think he
had ever been. He waited two weeks; no answer. Again he wrote--a
lover's appeal for news of her. Ten days, and she answered, ignoring
the personal side of his letter, simply telling how ill her father was,
what a long struggle at best it would be to save him. Armstrong saw
that nursing and anxiety were absorbing all her time and thought and
strength. He wrote a humble apology for having annoyed her, asked her
to write him whenever she could, if it was only a line or so.
Two more increasingly restless weeks, and he telegraphed that he was
coming. She telegraphed an absolute veto, and in the first mail came a
letter that was the more crushing because it was calm and free from
bitterness. "In this quiet town," wrote she, "where so little happens,
you know how they remember and brood and become bitter. What is past
and forgotten for us is still very vivid to him and magnified out of all
proportion. Please do not write again, until you hear from me."
Thus, he learned that his worst fears were justified. If she had shown
that, in the home atmosphere again, she was seeing him as formerly, he
could have protested, argued, appealed. But how strive against her duty
to her sick, her dying father whose generous friendship he had
ruthlessly betrayed and whose life he had embittered? He debated going
to Battle Field and seeing Mr. Carlin and asking forgiveness. But such
an agitating interview would probably hasten death, even if he could get
admittance; besides, he remembered that Frederic Carlin, slow to
condemn, never forgave once he had condemned. "He feels toward me as
I'd feel in the same circumstances. I have got only what I deserve."
No judgments are so terrible as those that are just.
The state of Armstrong's mind so preyed upon him that it affected even
his giant strength and health, and his friends urged him to take a
vacation. He worked only the harder, because in work alone could he get
any relief whatever from the torments of his remorse and his baffled
love. He became morose, given to bursts of unreasonable anger.
"Success is turning his head," was the general opinion. "He's getting
to be a tyrant, like the others." In some moods, he saw the lessons of
gentleness and forbearance in the fate his selfish arrogance had brought
upon him; but it is not in the nature of men of strong individuality and
unbroken will to practice such lessons. The keener his sufferings, the
bitterer, the harder he became. And soon he began to feel that there
was nearly if not quite a quittance of the balance between him and the
man he had wronged. He convinced himself that, if Neva's father were
dead, he could speedily win her. "Meanwhile," he reflected, "I must take
my punishment"; and with the stolid, unwhimpering endurance of those
whose ancestors have through countless generations been schooled in the
fields, the forests, and the camps, he waited for the news that would
mean the end of his expiation.
Raphael, taking his walk in Fifth Avenue late one afternoon instead of
in Central Park, saw him in a closed motor in the halted mass of
vehicles at the Forty-second Street crossing. Boris happened to be in
his happiest mood. Always the philosopher, he was too catholic in his
interests and tastes to permit disappointment in any one direction or
even in many directions to close the other avenues to the joy of life.
There were times when he could not quite banish the shadows which the
thought of death cast over him--death, so exasperating to men of pride
and imagination because, of all their adversaries, it alone cannot be
challenged or compromised. But on that day, Boris had only the sense of
life, life at its best, with the sun bright and not too warm, with the
new garb of nature and of womankind radiantly fresh, and the whole world
laughing because the winter had been vanquished once more. As his
all-observing eyes noted Armstrong's profile, his face darkened. There
was for him, in that profile, rugged, stern, inflexible, a challenge of
the basis of his happiness.
In all his willful life Boris had never wanted anything so intensely, so
exclusively as he wanted Neva. Every man who falls in love with a woman
feels that he is her discoverer, that he has a property right securely
based upon discovery. Raphael's sense of his right to Neva was far
stronger; it was the creator's sense. Had he not said, "Let there be
beauty and light and capacity to give and receive love"? And had not
these wonders sprung into existence before his magic? True, the beauty
and the light and the power to give and to receive were different both
in kind and in degree from what he had commanded. But that did not
alter his right. And this Armstrong, this coarse savage who would take
away his Galatea to serve in a vulgar, sooty tent of barbaric commerce--
The very sight of Armstrong set all his senses on edge, as if each were
being assailed by its own particular abhorrence.
That day the stern, inflexible profile somehow struck into him the same
chill that always came at the thought of death with its undebatable
"must." Yet there was in his pocket, at the very moment, warming his
heart like a flagon of old port, a long letter from Neva, a confidential
letter, full of friendly, intimate things about herself, her anxieties,
her hopes, and fears; and she asked him to stop off on his way to or
from his lectures before the Chicago art students. "Narcisse is here,"
she wrote. "She will be leaving about that time, she says, and if you
stop on your way, she and you can go back together. How I wish I could
go, too! Not until I settled down here did I appreciate what you--and
New York--had done for me. Yet I had thought I did. Do stop off here.
It will be so good to see you, Boris."
As he looked at Armstrong's profile, he laid his hand on his coat over
the letter and remembered that sentence--"It will be so good to see
you." But the shadow would not depart. That profile persisted; he
could not banish it.
When he descended from the train at the Battle Field station and saw
Neva, with Narcisse beside her in a touring car, he saw that ominous
profile, plain as if Armstrong were there, too. This, though Neva's
welcome was radiantly bright. "What's the matter, Boris?" cried
Narcisse, climbing to the seat beside the chauffeur before Neva could
prevent. "Get in beside your hostess and cheer up. You ought to look
like a clear sunrise. The lecture was a triumph. I read two whole
columns of it aloud to Neva and her father this morning. No cant. No
hypocrisy. They agreed with me that your art ideas are like an island
in the boundless ocean of flap-doodle."
"My father used to sell bananas from a cart in Chicago," said Boris,
"and we lived in the cellar where he ripened them."
Neva glanced at him with quick sympathetic interest. It was the first
time he had happened to speak of his origin. "I always thought you were
born abroad," said she.
"I think not," replied he. "I really don't know at exactly what point I
broke into the world. Those things matter so little. Countries,
governments, races--they mean nothing to me. I meet my fellow beings as
individuals."
There he caught Neva studying him with an expression so curious that he
paused. She forestalled his question by plunging into an animated talk
about his lecture. He was well content to listen, enjoying now the
surroundings and now the beauty of the woman beside him. Both were
wonderfully soothing to him, filled him with innocent, virtuous
thoughts, made him envy, and half delude himself into fancying he wished
for himself, the joys of somnolescent, corpulent, middle-class life--the
life obviously led by the people dwelling in these flower-embedded
houses on either side of these shady streets. He sighed; Neva laughed.
And he saw that she was laughing at him.
"Well, why not?" he demanded, knowing she understood his sigh. But
before she could answer he was laughing at himself. "Still, I like it,
for a change," said he. "And--" he was speaking now in an
undertone--"with you I could be happy in such a place--always. Just
with you; not if we let these stupid burghers in to fret me."
She laughed outright. "I understand you better than you understand
yourself," said she. "Change and contrast are as necessary to you as
air. If you had to live here, you would commit suicide or become
commonplace.... And so should I."
"Not with a husband you loved and children you adored and a home you had
created yourself. As the world expands, it contracts; as it contracts,
it expands. From end to end the universe is not so vast as such a
love."
Neva, coloring deeply and profoundly moved, leaned forward. "I'm sorry
you're missing this," said she, lightly to Narcisse. "Boris is
sentimentalizing about the vine-clad cottage with children clambering."
"It's about time you quit and came in to settle down," called Narcisse.
"A few years more and you'll cease to be romantic. An old beau is
ridiculous."
Boris gave Neva a triumphant look. "Narcisse votes yes," said he.
But they were arriving at the house. As the motor ran up the drive
under the elms toward the gorgeous masses of forsythia about the
entrance steps, Boris's eyes were so busy that he scarcely heard, while
Neva explained that her father was too weak to withstand the excitement
of visitors--"especially anyone distinguished. We're not telling him
you're here. He would feel it his duty to exert himself."
"Distinguished!" he exclaimed. "In presence of these elms and this
house built for all time, and these eternal colors, how could mere
mortal be distinguished?"
It was not until the next morning that he had a chance to talk with her
alone. He rose early and went out before breakfast. He strolled
through the woods back of the house until he came to a pavilion with a
creek rushing steeply down past it toward Otter Lake. In the pavilion he
found Neva with a great heap of roses in her lap, another on the table,
another on the bench. On her bright hair was a huge garden hat, its
broad streamers of pink ribbon flowing upon her shoulders.
She dropped her shears and watched him with the expression in her eyes
that he had surprised there, as they were coming from the station in the
motor. "May I ask," said he, "what is the meaning of that look?"
"Did you sleep well?" parried she.
"Without a dream."
"I don't know," replied she--"Let us have breakfast here--you and I....
Washington!" she called.
There rose from a copse below, near the brim of the creek, a small
colored boy, barefooted, bareheaded, with no garments but a blue shirt
and a pair of blue cotton jean trousers. She sent him off to the house
to tell them to bring breakfast. And soon a maid appeared with a tray
whose chief burden was a heating apparatus for coffee and milk.
"I've heard you say you detested cold coffee," said Neva. "Your frown
when I suggested breakfast out here was premature."
She scattered and heaped the roses into an odorous, dew-sprinkled mat of
green and pink and white, in the center of the rustic table. Then she
served the coffee. It was real coffee, and the milk was what is called
cream in many parts of the world. "Brother Tom has a model farm," she
explained. "These eggs were laid this morning."
"So they were," exclaimed Boris, as he broke one. His eyes were
sparkling; all that was best in his looks and in his nature was
irradiating from him. Her sweet, lovely face, her delicate fresh
costume, the sight and odor of the roses, of the forest all round them,
the melody of the descending waters, and the superb coffee, crisp rolls,
and freshest of fresh eggs-- "You criticise me for my appreciation of
the sensuous side of life, my dear friend," said he. "But, tell me, is
there anywhere anything more delicious, more inspiring than this
breakfast?"
"I never criticised you for loving the joys of the senses," cried she.
"Never! We are too much alike there."
"What happiness we could have!" exclaimed he. "For do we not know how to
make life smooth and comfortable and beautiful, you and I?"
"Only too well," confessed she. "I often think of it. But----"
He waited for her to continue. When he saw that she would not, but was
lost in a reverie, he said, "You promised you would think about our
going abroad. Have you thought?"
She nodded.
"You will go?"
She slowly shook her head.
"Why not?"
"I want to, but--I can't."
"Why?"
He had paused in buttering a bit of roll. Anyone coming up just then
would have thought he was looking at her, awaiting an answer to an
inquiry after salt or something like that. She said: "Because I do not
love you."
He waved his knife in airy dismissal. "A trifle! And so easily
overcome."
"Because I cannot love you, my dear." She looked at him affectionately.
He balanced the bit of bread before his lips. "Not that brotherly look,
please," said he. "It--it hurts!" He put the bread in his mouth.
She leaned forward and laid her hand on his. "We are too much alike.
You are too subtle, too nervous, too appreciative, too changeable. You
would soon cease to fancy you loved me. I--it so happens--have never
begun to fancy I loved you. That is fortunate for us both."
"Armstrong!" he exclaimed. And suddenly, despite his ruddy coloring, he
suggested a dark Sicilian hate peering from an ambush, stiletto in
impatient hand.
"Don't show me that side of you, Boris," she entreated. "Whether it is
Armstrong or not, did I not say the fact that I don't fancy I love you
is fortunate for us both?"
"You love Armstrong," he insisted sullenly.
"How can you know that, when I don't know it myself?" replied she. "As
I told you once before, the only matter that concerns you is that I do
not love you." She spoke sharply. Knowing him so well, she had small
patience with his childish, barbaric moods; she could not bear pettiness
in a man really and almost entirely great. "Will you be yourself?" she
demanded, earnest beneath her smiling manner. "How can I talk to you
seriously if you act like a spoiled, bad boy? If you'll only think
about the matter, as I've been compelled to think about it, you'll see
that you don't really love me--that I'm not the woman for you at all.
We'd aggravate each other's worst. What you need is a woman like
Narcisse."
"You are most kind," he said sarcastically.
"As she told you yesterday, you've got to settle down within a few years
or become absurd. And she----"
"It is because of the women I have known that you will not give me
yourself," he said. "Oh, Neva, I have never loved but you." And in his
agitation he clasped her hands and, dropping into French, cried with
flaming eyes, "I adore you. You are my life, the light on my path--my
star shining through the storm. You make me tremble with passion and
with fear. Neva, my love, my soul----"
She snatched her hands away. She tried to look at him mockingly, but
could not.
"Neva, my girl," he said in English again. "Do not wither my heart!"
"Boris," she answered gently, "I've tried to care for you as you wish me
to care. I sent for you because I thought I had begun to succeed. But
when I saw you again-- I liked you, admired you, more than ever, more
than anyone. But my dear, dear friend, I cannot give you what you ask.
It simply will not yield."
He became calm as abruptly as he had burst into passion. Taking his
heavily jeweled and engraved gold cigarette case from his pocket, he
slowly extracted a cigarette, lighted it with great deliberation, blew
out the match, blew out the lamp of the portable stove. "Why?" he said
in a tone of pleasant bantering inquiry. "Please tell me why you do not
and cannot love me."
She colored in confusion.
"Do not fear lest you will offend," urged he. "I ask impersonally.
Feminine psychology is interesting."
"I'd rather not talk about it."
"Let me help you," he persisted amiably, so amiably that she had to
remind herself of the sort of nature she knew he had, to quell a
suspicion of treachery under his smoothness. "Because I am
too--feminine?" he went on.
She nodded hesitatingly. Then, encouraged by his cynical, good-humored
laugh, "Though feminine doesn't quite express it. There isn't enough of
the primitive man left in you for a woman of my temperament. You have
been superrefined, Boris. You are too understanding, too sympathetic
for a feminine woman like me. There are two persons to you--one that
feels, one that reasons--criticises--analyzes--laughs. I couldn't for a
moment forget the one that laughs--at yourself, at any who respond to
the you that feels. I suppose you don't understand. I'm sure I don't."
[Illustration: "'You are my life, the light on my path.'"]
"Vaguely," said he, somewhat absently. "Who'd suspect it?"
"Suspect what?"
"That there was this--this coarse streak in _you_--this craving for the
ultramasculine, the rude, rough, aggressive male, inconsiderate, brutal,
masterful?"
"A coarse streak," she repeated, half in assent, half in mere
reflection.
He surveyed impersonally her delicately feminine charms, suggesting
fragility even. "And yet," he mused aloud, "I should have seen it.
What else could be the meaning of those sharp, even teeth--of the long
slits through which your green-gray-brown-blue eyes look. And your
long, slim, sensitive lines----"
The impersonal faded into the personal, the Boris that analyzed into the
Boris that felt. The appeal of her beauty to his senses swept over and
submerged his pose of philosopher. His eyes shone and swam, like lights
seen afar through a mist; the fingers that held the cigarette trembled.
But, as he realized long afterwards, he showed then and there how right
she was as to his masculinity. For, his was the passive intensity of
the feminine, not the aggressive intensity of the male; instead of
forgetting her in the fury of his own baffled desire and seizing her, to
crush her until he had wrung some sensation, no matter what, from those
unmoved nerves of hers, he restrained himself, hid his emotion as
swiftly as he could, turned it off with a jest--"And I've let my coffee
grow cold!" He was once more Boris of the boyish vanity that feared,
more than ridicule, the triumph of a woman over him. He would rather
have risked losing her than have given her the opportunity to see and
perhaps enjoy her power.
Presently Narcisse came into view. The lamp was relighted; the three
talked together; he was not alone with Neva again, made no attempt to
be.
That afternoon, just before the time for him and Narcisse to depart,
Neva took her in to say good-by to her father--a mere shadow of a wreck
of a man, whose remnant of vitality was ebbing almost breath by breath.
As they came from his room, it suddenly struck Narcisse how profoundly
Neva was being affected by her father's life, now that his mortal
illness was bringing it vividly before her. A truly noble character
moves so tranquilly and unobtrusively that it is often unobserved,
perhaps, rather, taken for granted, unless some startling event compels
attention to it. Neva was appreciating her father at last; and Narcisse
saw what there was to appreciate. No human being can live in one place
for half a century without indelibly impressing himself upon his
surroundings; Narcisse felt in the very atmosphere of the rooms he had
frequented a personality that revealed itself altogether by example, not
at all by precept; a human being that loved nature and his fellow
beings, lived in justice and mercy.
"How much it means to have a father like yours!" she exclaimed.
Neva did not reply for some time. When she did, the expression of her
eyes, of her mouth, made Narcisse realize that her words had some
deeper, some hidden meaning: "If ever I have children," she said, "they
shall have that same inheritance from their father." And presently she
went on, "I often, nowadays, contrast my father with the leading men
there in New York. What dreadful faces they have! What tyranny and
meanness and trickery! And, how wretched! It is hard to know whether
most to pity or to despise them."
Narcisse knew instinctively that she meant Armstrong, and perhaps, to a
certain extent, Boris also. "We've no right to condemn them," said she.
"They are the victims of circumstances too strong for them."
"_You_ have the right," insisted Neva. "You have been tempted; yet, you
are not like them. You have not let New York enslave you, but have made
it your servant."
"The temptations that would have reached my weaknesses didn't happen to
offer," replied she. And there she sighed, for she felt the ache of her
wound--Alois.
But it was time to go. Neva took them to the station; at the parting
Boris kissed her hand in foreign fashion, after his habit, with not a
hint of anything but self-control and ease at heart and mind, not even
such a hint as Neva alone would have understood. She bore up bravely
until they were gone; then solitude and melancholy suddenly enveloped
her in their black fog, and she went back home like a traveler in a
desert, alone and aimless. "He didn't really care," she thought
bitterly, indifferent to her own display of selfishness in having
secretly and furtively wished for a love that would only have brought
unhappiness to him, since, try however hard, she could not return it.
"Does anyone care about anyone but himself? ... If I could only have
loved him enough to deceive myself. He's so much more worth while
than--than any other man I ever knew or ever shall know."
*XXVIII*
*FORAGING FOR SON-IN-LAW*
Narcisse had gone to Neva at Battle Field to get as well as to give
sympathy and companionship; to get the strength to tread alone the path
in which she had always had her brother to help her--and he had helped
her most of all by getting help from her. She had assumed that her
brother would marry some day; she herself looked forward to marrying, as
she grew older and appreciated why children are something beside a
source of annoyance and anxiety. But she had also assumed that he would
marry a woman with whom she would be friends, a woman in real sympathy
with his career. Instead, he married Amy, stunted in mind and warped in
character and withered in heart by the environment of the idle rich.
She knew that the end of the old life had come; and it was to get away
from the melancholy spectacle of her new brother that, two months after
his return from the honeymoon, she went West for that visit with Neva.
"Amy has ruined him," she said, when she had been at Battle Field long
enough to feel free to open her heart wide. "It's only a question of
time; he will give up his career entirely."
And, like the beginning of the fulfillment of her prophecy, there soon
came a letter from him which she showed Neva. With much beating round
the bush, he hinted dissolution of partnership. It gave Neva the
heartache to read, and she hardly dared look at Narcisse. "I'm afraid
you were right in your suspicions," she had to admit.
"Certainly I was right," replied Narcisse. "But I'm not really so cut
up as you think. Nothing comes unannounced in this world, thank heaven.
I've been getting ready for this ever since he told me they were
engaged."
"How brave you are!" exclaimed Neva. "I know what you must feel, yet
you can hide it."
"I'm hiding nothing," Narcisse assured her. "I've lived a long
time--much longer than my birthdays show. I've been making my own
living since I was thirteen--and it wasn't easy until the last few
years. But I've learned to take life as I take weather. There are sunny
seasons, and stormy seasons, and middling seasons. When the sun shines,
I don't enjoy it less, but rather more, because I know foul weather is
certain to come. And when it does come, I know it won't last forever."
There were tears in her eyes, but through them she smiled dauntlessly.
"And the sun _will_ shine again--warm and bright and streaming
happiness."
Neva's own heart was suddenly buoyant. "It will--it surely will!" she
cried.
"And," proceeded Narcisse, "my troubles are trifles compared with
Alois's. I know him; I know he's unhappy. If ever there was a man
cheated in a marriage, that man is my poor brother. And he must realize
it by this time."
She had guessed close to the truth. Alois and his bride had not been
honeymooning many weeks before he confessed to himself that he had
overestimated--or, perhaps, misestimated--her intellect. Not that she
was stupid or ignorant; no, merely, that she lacked the originality he
had attributed to her. He had pictured himself doing great work under
her inspiration, his own skill supplemented by her taste and cleverness
in suggesting and designing. He found that she knew only what he or
some book had told her, that her enthusiasm for architecture was in
large part one of those amiable pretenses wherewith the female aids the
passions of the male to beguile him to her will.
But this discovery did not depress him. No man ever was depressed by
finding out that his wife was his mental inferior, though many a man has
been pitched headlong into permanent dejection by the discovery of the
reverse. She was more beautiful than he had thought, more loving and
more lovable--and those compensations more than made good the vanished
dream of companionship. Soon, however, her intense affection began to
wear upon him. Not that he liked it less or loved her less; but he saw
with the beginnings of alarm that he was on the way to being engulfed,
that he either must devote himself entirely to being Amy's husband or
must expect to lose her. It was fascinating, intoxicating, to be thus
encradled in love; but it was not exactly his notion of what was manly.
He talked of the work "they" would do, of the fame "they" would win; she
responded with rapidly decreasing enthusiasm, finally listened without
comment. Once, when he was expanding upon this subject, with some
projected public buildings at Washington as the text, she suddenly threw
herself into his arms, and cried, "Oh, let Narcisse take care of those
things. We--you and I, dearest--have got only a little while to live.
Let us be happy--happy--_happy_!"
"But you forget, you've married a poor man," he protested. "We've got
our living to make."
"Oh--of course," said she. "I'd hate for you to be anything but
independent."
"If I were, you'd soon lose respect for me, as I should for myself."
"Yes--you must work," she conceded. "But not too hard. You mustn't
crowd _me_ aside." She clasped her arms more tightly about his neck.
"I'd _hate_ you, if you made me second to anybody or anything. I'm
horribly jealous, and I know I'd end by hating you."
The way to reassure her, for the moment, was obvious and easy; and he
took it. They talked no more of "our" work until they got back to New
York. There, it was hard for him to find time to go to the office; for
she was always wanting him to do something with her, and as luck would
have it, the things he really couldn't get out of doing without
offending her always somehow came in office hours. Sometimes he had a
business appointment he dared not break; he would explain to her, and
she would try to be "sensible." But she felt irritated--was he not her
husband, and is not a husband's first duty to his wife?
"Why do you make so many appointments just when you know I'll need you?"
she demanded. "I believe you do it on purpose!"
He showed her how unreasonable this was, and she laughed at herself.
But her feeling at bottom was unchanged. After much casting about for
some one to blame for this, to her, obvious conspiracy to estrange her
husband from her, she fixed upon Narcisse. "She hates me because I took
him away from her," she thought; and when she had thought it often
enough, she was convinced. Yes, Narcisse was trying to drift them
apart. And she ought to be doubly ashamed of herself, because what
would the firm of A. & N. Siersdorf amount to but for Alois? Narcisse
was, no doubt, clever in a way--but almost anybody who had to work and
kept at it for years, could do as well. "Why, I, with no experience at
all, did wonders down at Overlook--better than Narcisse ever did
anywhere." Indeed, had Narcisse really ever done anything alone? "She
has been living off Alois's brains, and she's trying to get him back."
That was all quite clear; also, a loving and watchful wife's duty in the
circumstances. She gave Alois no rest until he had agreed to break
partnership and take offices alone. "When you've got your own offices,"
she cried, "what work we shall do! You must go down early and stay
late, and I'll have an office there, too."
So weak is man before woman on her knees and worshipful, Alois began
dimly to believe that his wife was, in a measure, right; that Narcisse
had been something--not much, but something--of a handicap to his
genius; that her prudence and everyday practicality had chained down his
soaring imagination. He had no illusions as to the help Amy would give
him; there, she had not his vanity to aid her in deluding him. But he
felt he owed it to himself to free himself from the partnership.
Anyhow, something was wrong; something was preventing him from doing
good work--and it was just as well to see if that something was his
sister. "The sooner I discover just what I am, the better," he
reasoned. And he had no misgivings as to the event.
Narcisse made the break easy for him. When she came back from Neva's,
she met him in her usual friendly way, and herself opened the subject.
"I think we'd better each go it alone," said she, as if she had not
penetrated the meaning of his letter. "You've reached the point where
you don't want to be bothered with the kind of things I do best. What
do you say?"
"I had thought of that, too," confessed he. "But I-- Do you really
want it, Cis?"
"No sentiment in business," replied she in her most offhand manner. "If
each of us can do better alone, it'd be silly not to separate. Anyhow,
where's the harm in trying?"
"I was going to suggest that we take offices a little further uptown,"
he went on. "We might do that, and keep on as we are for a while."
"No. You move; let me keep these offices. I'm like a cat; I get
attached to places."
And so it was settled. "Narcisse Siersdorf, Builder," appeared where
"A. & N. Siersdorf, Builders," had been. "Alois Siersdorf, Architect,"
appeared upon the offices, spacious and most imposing, in a small but
extravagantly luxurious bank building in Fifth Avenue, within a few
blocks of home--"home" being Josiah Fosdick's house.
Amy insisted on their living "at home" because her father couldn't be
left quite alone; and Alois sat rent and food free; he had made a
vigorous fight for complete independence in financial matters, but
nothing had come of it--he felt that it was ridiculous solemnly to give
Amy each month a sum which would hardly pay for her dresses. "You are
too funny about money," she said. "Why attach so much importance to it?
We put it all in together, and no doubt some months you pay more than
our share, other months less--but what of that? You can't expect me to
bother my head with horrid accounts. And I simply won't have you
talking such matters with the housekeeper--and who else is there?"
Alois grumbled, but gradually yielded. He consoled himself with the
reflection that presently his business would pay hugely, and then the
equilibrium would be restored. And after a while--an extremely short
while--he thought no more about the matter. This, in face of the fact
that the business did not expand as he had dreamed. He was offered
plenty to do at first, for he had reputation and the rich were eager for
his services. But he simply could not find time to attend to business;
he had to leave everything, even the making of plans, to assistants.
There were all sorts of entertainments to which he must go with
Amy--rides, coaching expeditions, luncheons, afternoon bridge parties,
week-end visits. And often he was up until very late at balls; she
loved to dance, and he found balls amusing, too. Indeed, he was well
pleased with all the gayety. Everybody paid court to him; the husband
of an heiress, and a distinguished, a successful, a famous man, one
whose opinions in professional matters were quoted with respect. And as
everybody talked and acted as if he were doing well, were rising
steadily higher and higher, he could not but talk and act and feel so,
himself--most of the time. He knew, as a matter of theory, that success
of any kind, except in being rich, and that exception only for the
enormously rich, is harder to keep than to win, must be won all over
again each day. But in those surroundings he could not feel this; he
seemed secure, permanent.
It was not long before all their world, except only her and him, knew he
had practically given up the profession of architect for that of
husband. The outward forms of deference to the famous young architect
deceived him, enabled him to deceive himself; but his friends, in his
very presence, and just out of earshot, often in undertones at his
father-in-law's table, were sneering or, what is usually the same thing,
moralizing. "Poor Siersdorf! How he has fagged out. Well, was there
as much to him as some people said? And they tell me he is living off
his wife."
When matters reach this pass, and when the man is really a man, the
explosion is not far off. It came with the first bitter quarrel he and
Amy had. She wished him to go away with her for two months; he wished
to go, and it infuriated him against himself that he had so far lost his
pride that he could even consider leaving his business when it needed
him imperatively. He curtly refused to go; by degrees their discussion
became a wrangle, a quarrel, a pitched battle. She was the first
completely to lose control of temper. She cast about for some missile
that would hit hard.
"What does this business of yours amount to, anyhow?" she jeered.
"Sometimes, I can't help wondering what would have become of you if you
hadn't married me."
She didn't mean it; she was hardly conscious that she was saying it
until the words were out. She grew white and shrank before the damage
she knew she must have done. He did not, could not, answer immediately.
When he did, it was a release of all that had been poisoning him for
months.
"You think that, do you?" he cried. "I might have known! You dare to
think that, when you are responsible!"
"That's manly," she retorted, eager to extricate herself by putting him
in the wrong.
He strode to her; he was shaking with fury. "We'll not talk about what's
manly or womanly. Let's look at the facts. I loved you, and you took
advantage of it to ruin my career, to make it impossible for me to work,
to drive away my clients. You have taken my reputation, my brain, my
energy. And you dare to taunt me! Men have killed women for less."
"Alois!" she sobbed. "Don't frighten me. Don't look--speak--like that!
Oh, I'm not responsible for what I say. I know I've been selfish--it's
all my fault. But what does anything matter except our happiness?
Forgive me. You know why I'm so bad tempered now--so different from my
usual self." And the sobs merged into a flood of hysterical tears.
The reference to her condition, to their expectations, softened him,
caused his anger at once to begin to change into bitter shame, a shame
to be concealed, to eat, acidlike, in and in and make a wound that would
never heal, but would grow in venom until it would torture him without
ceasing.
"I don't want you to work," she wept. "I want you all to myself. Ah,
Alois, some time you'll appreciate my love; you'll realize that love is
better than a career. And for you"--sob--"to reproach me"--sob,
sob--"when I thought you were as happy as I!" A wild outburst of grief.
And he was consoling her, had her in his arms, was lulling her and
himself in the bright waves of the passion which she could always evoke
in him, as he in her. Never again did she speak of his dependent
position; it always made her flesh creep and chill to remember what she
had said. But from that time she was distinctly conscious that he was a
dependent--and she no longer respected him. From that time, he clearly
recognized his own position. He thought it out, decided to make a bold
stand; but he felt he could not begin at once. In her condition she
must not be crossed; he must go away with her, since go she must and go
alone she could not. He would make a new beginning as soon as the baby
was born.
Meanwhile, his office expenses were heavy, and the money he had saved
before he was married was gone. He went into debt fast, terrifyingly
fast. He borrowed two thousand dollars of Narcisse; he hoped it would
last, as usually Amy's bills were all paid by her father. But they were
away from Fosdick's house, and she, thinking and knowing nothing about
money, continued to spend as usual. He got everything on credit that
did not have to be paid for at once; but in spite of all his contriving,
when they reached New York again he was really penniless. He went to
Narcisse's office; she was out of town. In desperation he borrowed five
hundred dollars from his brother-in-law.
Hugo loaned the money as if the transaction were a trifle that was
making no impression on him. Like all those who think of nothing but
money, he affected to think nothing of it. He noted Alois's
nervousness, then his thin and harassed look. "How do Amy and Alois
live?" he asked his father.
"Live? What do you mean?" said Josiah. "Why, they're perfectly happy.
What put such nonsense in your head?"
"Oh, bother!" exclaimed Hugo. "Certainly they're happy. Amy'd be a
fool not to be happy with as decent a chap as he is. I mean, how do
they get along about money?"
"He's got a good business," said Fosdick. "You know it as well as I
do."
"He used to have," replied Hugo. "But he's too busy with Amy to be
doing much else. He's always standing on her dress. And he has no
partner."
"I don't know anything about it," said Fosdick. "If Amy needed money,
she'd come to me." Fosdick recalled that he had been paying even
heavier bills for her since she was married; but he had no mind to speak
of it to Hugo, as he did not wish Hugo to misunderstand. "You attend to
your own affairs, boy," he continued. "Those two are all right." And
he beamed benevolently. He delighted in Amy's happiness, felt that he
was entirely responsible for it.
But Hugo was not to be put off. "Believe me, father, Alois is down to
bed-rock. He can't speak to Amy about it, or to you. He's a gentleman.
It's up to you to do something for him."
"I guess looking after Amy does keep his time pretty well filled up,"
chuckled the old man, much amused. "I'll fix him a place in the
O.A.D.--something that'll give him a good income and not take his mind
entirely off his job."
"Why not get Armstrong to make him supervising architect? A big public
institution like that ought to pay more attention to cultivating the
artistic side. He could think out and carry out some general plan
that'd harmonize to high standards all the buildings, especially the
dwelling and apartment houses they own in the provinces." Hugo spoke of
the O.A.D. as "they" nowadays, though he still thought of it as "we."
"That's a good idea, Hugo, as good as any other. I'll see Armstrong
to-day. I oughtn't to have neglected putting Alois on the pay rolls.
I'll give him something in the railway, too. We'll fix him up
handsomely. He's a fine young fellow, and he has made Amy happy. You
don't appreciate that, you young scoundrel, as we of the older
generation do." And Hugo had to listen patiently to a discourse on
decaying virtue and honor and family life; for, like all decaying men,
Fosdick mistook internal symptoms for an exterior and universal
phenomenon, just as a man who is going blind cries, "The light is
getting dim!"
Fosdick did not forget. Now that his attention was upon the matter, he
reproached himself severely for his oversight. "I've been taking care
of scores of people, and neglecting my own. But I'll make up for it."
He ordered the president of the railway to put Alois on the pay rolls at
once with a salary of twelve thousand a year. "You need somebody to
supervise the stations. Everybody's going in for art, nowadays, and we
want the best. Mail him his first check to-day, with the notice of his
appointment."
In the full glow of generosity, he went up to see Armstrong. They were
great friends nowadays. Since the peace, not a trace of cloud had come
between them; he was careful to keep his hands entirely off the O.A.D.;
Armstrong, on his side, gave the Fosdick railway and industrial
enterprises the same "courtesies" they had always enjoyed, except that
he charged them the current rate of interest, instead of the old special
rate.
"Horace," he began, "I suppose you'll soon be organizing the
construction department on broader lines. I've come to put in a good
word for my son-in-law. I don't need to say anything about his merits
as an architect. As you know, there's none better."
"None," said Armstrong heartily. "Anything we want in his line, he'll
get."
"Thanks. Thanks. My idea, though, was a little more definite. I was
thinking you might want a man to pass on all buildings, plans,
improvements. He could raise the value of the company's
property--particularly the dwelling and apartment houses."
"That's a valuable suggestion," said Armstrong. "And Siersdorf would be
just the man for the place. But will he take it?"
"I think so."
"But he'd have to be traveling about, most of the time. He'd be in the
West and South, where we're trying to get back the ground lost in those
big exposes. I shouldn't think he'd care for that sort of life."
Fosdick was disconcerted. "I suppose that could be arranged. You
wouldn't expect a man of Siersdorf's caliber to go chasing about the
country like a retail drummer. He'd have assistants for that, and
drawings and pictures and those sort of things could be forwarded to him
here."
"That would hardly do," replied Armstrong, like a man advancing
cautiously, but determined to advance. "Then, there's the matter of
pay. The work would take all of his time, and we couldn't afford much
of a salary. I should say the job was rather for some talented young
fellow, trying to get a start."
"You'd simply waste whatever money you paid such a man," Fosdick
objected with a restraint of tone and manner that astonished himself.
"No, what you want is a high-class, a first-class, man at a good
salary--a first-class man's salary."
"Say--how much?" inquired Armstrong.
"I was thinking twenty thousand a year--or, perhaps fifteen." The lower
figure was an amendment suggested by the tightening of Armstrong's lips.
Armstrong saw the point. What Fosdick was after was a sinecure; a soft
berth for his son-in-law to luxuriate idly in; another and a portly
addition to the O.A.D's vast family of "fixed charges." "I'd like to
oblige you, Mr. Fosdick," said he, with the reluctance of a man taking a
new road where the passage looks doubtful and may be dangerous. "And I
hate to deprive the O.A.D. of the chance to get Siersdorf's services at
what is undoubtedly a bargain. But, as you may perhaps have heard, I'm
directing all my efforts to lopping off expenses. I'm trying to get the
O.A.D. on a basis where we can pay the policy holders a larger share of
the profits we make on their money. Perhaps, later on, I can take the
matter up. But I hope you won't press it at present."
The words were careful, the tone was most courteously regretful. But
the refusal was none the less a slap in the face to a man like Fosdick.
"As you please, as you please," he said hurriedly, and with averted
eyes. "I just thought it was a good arrangement all around....
Everything going smoothly?"
"So-so."
"Well, good day."
And he went, with a friendly nod and handshake that did not deceive
Armstrong. He drove to the magnificent Hearth and Home Defender
building which Trafford and his pals had built for their own profit out
of their stealings from millions of working men and women and children
of the poorest, most ignorant class. Trafford received his fellow adept
in the art of exploiting as Fosdick loved to be received; he did not let
him finish his request before granting it. "An excellent idea,
Fosdick," he cried. "I understand perfectly. I'll see that we get
Siersdorf at once. Would fifteen thousand be too small?"
"About right, as a starter, I should say," was Fosdick's judicial
answer. "You see, the thing's more or less an experiment."
"But certain to succeed," said Trafford confidently. "And, of course,
we'll accept any arrangements Mr. Siersdorf may make about assistants.
We can't expect him to give us all his time. We'll be quite content
with his advice and judgment. You've put me under obligations to you."
Fosdick's eyes sparkled. As he went away, he said to himself, "Now,
there's a big man, a gentleman, one who knows how to do business, how to
treat another gentleman. I must put him in on something good."
And he did.
*XXIX*
*"IF I MARRIED YOU"*
When Armstrong saw the announcement of Frederic Carlin's death, he
assumed Neva would soon be in New York, to escape the loneliness of
Battle Field. He let three weeks pass, after her brief but gentle and
friendly answer to his telegram of condolence. Then, he wrote her he
was going to Chicago and wished to stop at Battle Field; she replied
that she would be glad to see him. He took the first Westbound
express--the through limited which, at his request, dropped him at the
little town it had always before rushed past at disdainful speed. The
respect with which he was treated, the deference of those who recognized
him at the station, the smallness and simplicity of the old town, all
combined to put the now triumphant and autocratic president of the
mighty O.A.D. in the mood to appreciate every inch of the dizzy depth
down from where he now blazed in glory to where he had begun, a barefoot
boy in jeans, delivering groceries at back doors and alley gates. It
was not in Armstrong to condescend; but it is in the sanest of us poor
mortals, with our dim sense of proportion and our feeble sense of humor
where we ourselves are the joke, to build up a grandiose mood upon less
foundation of vanity of achievement than had Armstrong. The mood gave
him a feeling of confidence, of conquest impending, as he strode in at
the gate beside the drive into the Carlin place a full hour before he
was expected. Memory was busy--not by any means altogether
unpleasantly--as he went more slowly up the narrow walk to the old
square stone house, with its walls all but hidden under the ivy, with
its verandas draped in honeysuckle, and its peaceful, dignified
foreground of primeval elms. The past was not quite forgotten; but he
felt that it was completely expiated. He had paid for his ingratitude,
his selfishness, his blindness, his folly--had paid in full, with
interest.
He ascended to the veranda before the big oak front doors. The only
life in view was a hummingbird flitting and balancing like a sprite
among the honeysuckle blooms. The doors, the windows on either side,
were open wide; he looked in with the future-focused eyes of the
practical man of affairs. His past did not advance from those familiar
rooms to abash him. On the contrary his eager gaze entered, searching
for his future.
"We must have, will have, a place like this near New York," thought he.
"Why not in New York? I can afford it."
He rang several times at long intervals; it was Neva herself who finally
came--Neva, all in black and, so it seemed to him, more beautiful than
ever. That she was glad, more than glad, at sight of him was plain to
be seen in the color which submerged her pallor, in the swift lighting
up of her eyes, like the first flash of stars in the night sky. But
there was in her manner, as well as in her garb, a denial of the impulse
of his impetuous passion; the doubts that had tormented him began to
bore into his mood of self-confidence. She took him to the west
veranda, with its luminous green curtains of morning-glory. She made
him seat himself in the largest and laziest chair there, all the while
covering the constraint with the neutral conversation which women
command the more freely, the more difficult the situation. When the
pause came he felt that she had permitted it, that she was ready to
hear--and to speak. The doubts had made such inroads upon his assurance
that his tone was less conclusive than he would have liked, as he began:
"Neva, I've come to take you back to New York."
Her expression, her manner brought vividly back to him that crucial talk
of theirs at the lake shore. Only, now the advantage was wholly with
her, where then it had been so distinctly on his side that he had pitied
her, had felt almost cowardly. He looked at her impassive face,
impossible to read, and there rose in him a feeling of fear--the fear
every man at times has of the woman into whose hands his love has given
his destiny.
"Everything is waiting on you," he went on. "The way lies smooth before
us. You have brought me good fortune, Neva. My future--our future--is
secure. With you to help me I shall go to the top. So--come, Neva!"
And his heart filled his eyes.
She waited a moment before answering. "If we should fail this time, it
would be the end, wouldn't it?" she said.
"But we can't fail!" he protested. He was strong in his assurance once
more; did not her question imply that she loved him?
"We failed before, and we were younger and more adaptable."
"But now we understand each other."
"Do we?" she said, her eyes gravely upon him.
"How can you ask that!"
"Because so much depends on our seeing the truth exactly. The rest of
our lives is at stake."
"Yes. I can't go on without you. Can _you_ go on without me?"
"Each of us," she replied, "can go on without the other. I can paint
pictures; you can make money. The question is, what will we mean to each
other if we go on together? We aren't children any more, Horace. We
are a man and a woman full grown, experienced, unable to blind ourselves
even in our follies. And we aren't simply rushing into an episode of
passion that will rage and die out. If it were merely that, I shouldn't
be asking you and myself questions. When the end came, we could resume
our separate lives; and, even if our experience had cost us dear instead
of helping us, still we could recover, would in time be stronger and
better for having had it. But you offer me your whole self, your whole
life, and you ask me to give you mine. You ask me to marry you."
He did not understand this; woman meant to him only sex, and the
difference between love and passion was a marriage ceremony. He felt
that in what she said there lurked traces of the immorality of the woman
who tries to think for herself instead of properly selecting a proper
man and letting him do the thinking for both. "I love you," said he,
"and there's the whole story. Love doesn't reason; it feels."
"Then it ought never to get married," she said. "We tried marriage once
on the basis of husband and wife being absolute strangers to each other,
and at cross purposes." She paused; he did not suspect it was to steady
her constantly endangered self-control. "And," she added, "I shall never
try that kind of marriage again. Passion is a better kindler than
worldliness, but it is just as poor fuel."
"Neva!" he exclaimed.
"I couldn't be merely your mistress, Horace. I'd want _you_, and I'd
want you to take me, all of me. I'd want it to be our life, and not
merely an episode in our life. Can't you see what would come
afterwards--when you had grown calm about me--and I about you? Can't
you see that you'd turn back to your business and prostitute yourself
for money, while I'd turn perhaps to luxury and show and prostitute
myself to you for the means to exhibit myself? Don't you see it on
every side, there in New York--the traffic in the souls of men and women
viler than any on the sidewalks at night--the brazen faces of the men,
flaunting their shame, the brazen faces of the women, the so-called
wives, flaunting _their_ shame?"
"But you could never be like them," he protested. "Never!"
"As strong women as I, stronger, have been dragged down. No human being
can resist the slow, steady, insidious seduction of his daily
surroundings."
"I don't understand this at all, Neva," he said, though his
ill-concealed anger showed that he did. Indeed, so angry was he that he
was almost forgetting his own warnings to himself of the injustice of
holding her responsible for anything she said in her obviously unstrung
condition. He asked, "What have you to do with that sort of woman?" He
hesitated, forced himself to go boldly on. "Why do you compare me to
those men? _I_ do not degrade myself."
She did not answer immediately, but looked away across the beds of
blooming flowers. When she began again, she seemed calmer, under better
control. "All the time I was in New York," she said, "the life
there--the real life of money getting and money spending--never touched
me personally until toward the last. Then--I saw what it really meant,
saw it so plainly that I can't ever again hide the truth from myself.
And since I came away--out here--where it's calm, and one thinks of
things as they are--where father and the other way of living and acting
toward one's fellow beings, took strong hold of me----"
"But, Neva--you----"
"_Please_, let me finish," she begged, all excitement once more. "It's
so hard to say--so much harder than you think. But I must--must--_must_
let you see what kind of woman I am, who it is you've asked to be your
wife. As I remember my acquaintances in New York, _our_ friends, do you
know what I always feel? I remember their palaces, their swarms of
servants, their jewels, their luxuries, the food they eat, the wine they
drink, all of it; and I wonder just whose dollar was stolen to help pay
for this or that luxury, just who is in want, how many are in want, that
that carriage might roll or the other automobile go darting about. You
_know_ the men steal it; they don't know from whom, and so they can
brazen it out to themselves."
"That is harsh--too harsh, Neva!"
She did not heed his interruption. "They can brazen it out," she went
on, "because no one can or will come forward and say, 'Take off that new
string of pearls. Your husband stole the money from me to-day to buy
it.' He did steal it, but not that day, not directly from one person,
but indirectly from many who hardly, if at all, knew they were being
robbed. That is what New York has come to mean to me these last few
weeks--my New York and yours--the people we know best."
"But we need not know _them_. Have what friends you please." He took
an air of gentleness, of forbearance with her. He reminded himself that
she was overwrought by her father's illness and death, that she was not
in condition to see things normally and practically; such hysterical
ideas as these of hers naturally bred and flourished in the miasmatic
soil and atmosphere of the fresh grave.
"Don't you see it?" she cried desperately. "I mean you--Horace--_you_,
that ask me to be your wife."
"Me!" His amazement was wholly genuine.
"Yes--you!" And she lost all control of herself, was seized and swept
away by the emotions that had grown stronger and stronger during her
father's illness, and since his death had dominated her day and night in
her loneliness. The scarlet of fever was in her cheeks, its flame in
her eyes.
"Yes, you, Horace," she repeated. "Can't you see I'd be worse than
uneasy about everything we bought, about every dollar we spent? When
you left me to go downtown in the morning, I'd be thinking, 'Who is the
man I love going to rob to-day?' And when you came back at night, when
your hands touched mine, I'd be shuddering--for there might be blood on
them!" She covered her face. "There _would_ be blood on them.
Happiness! Why, I should be in hell! And soon you'd hate me for what I
would be thinking of you, would despise me for living a life I thought
degrading."
If he had been self-analytic, he would have suspected the origin of the
furious anger that surged up in him. "I see!" said he, his voice hard.
"If these notions," he sneered, "were to prevail among the women, about
all the strongest men in the country would lose their wives."