OLGA TCHERNY
As the guests gathered in the drawing-room and on the terrace before
dinner it was apparent to Markham that, unless he obeyed the
injunctions of his small preceptor, he would be quite forgotten amid
this gay company. On Thimble Island, as in New York, he had not found
them necessary to his own existence, and it was quite clear that her
at "Wake-Robin" they returned his indifference. After the first nod
and appraising glance in his direction, Crosby Downs and Carol
Gouverneur had completely ignored him. Archie Westcott had unbent to
the point of offering him a cigarette, and Trevvy Morehouse, who had
joined them over the cocktails, and injected polite bromidics into the
conversation which Reggie Armistead, who knew nothing of Markham's art
and cared less, only saved by some wholesome enthusiasm, in which all
joined, over the "sand" and all-around good fellowship of their
hostess.
But it required little assurance to make one's self at home here where
informality seemed to be the rule, and before Hermia and the Countess
came down Markham found himself on easy terms with the group he had
joined. Mrs. Renshaw's appraisal and patronizing air dismayed him
less than the china blue eyes of Phyllis Van Vorst which she had
raised with a pretty effectiveness to his; Hilda Ashhurst hadn't even
taken the trouble to notice him. When Carol Gouverneur was in her
neighborhood there were no other men in the world.
But Hermia took pains to make her guests aware of the status of Mr.
Markham in her house by seating him on her right at dinner and paying
him an assiduous attention which detracted something from Reggie
Armistead's interest, as well as Olga's, in that repast.
With a carelessness which put him off his guard Hermia drew him into
the general conversation, aroused his sense of humor, until with a
story of an experience in France, which he told with a dry wit that
well suited him, he found himself the center of interest at the head of
the table.
Out on the terrace over the coffee and tobacco, the compound slowly
resolved itself into its elements, social and sentimental. Markham,
scarcely aware of the precise moment when she had appropriated him,
found himself in the garden below the terrace with Olga Tcherny. The
heavy odor of the roses was about them, unstirred by the land breeze
which faintly sighed in the treetops. A warm moon hung over Thimble
Island, its soft lights catching in the ornaments Markham's companion
wore, caressing her white shoulders and dusky hair, and softening the
shadows in her eyes which peered like those of a seer down the path of
light where the moonbeams played upon the water.
He had always thought her handsome, but to-night she was a fragment of
the night itself, with all its tenderness and its melancholy mystery.
He watched her slender figure as she reached forward, plucked a rose
and raised its petals to her lips--a full flown rose, wasting its last
hours of loveliness. She fastened it in her corsage and led the way to
a stone bench beneath an arbor at the end of the wall where she sat and
motioned to the place beside her.
The accord which existed between these two was unusual because of the
total difference in their points of view on life and the habits of
thought which made each the negative pole of the other. However
unusual Markham may have appeared to a person of Olga Tcherny's
training, he was not an unusual young man in the ordinary sense. He
had always taken life seriously, from the hour when as a clerk in a
broker's office he had started to work at night at the League in New
York, with the intention of becoming a painter. He was no more
serious than thousands of other young men who plan their lives early
and live them up to specifications; but Olga Tcherny, who had flitted
a zig-zag butterfly course among the exotics, now found in the meadows
she had scorned a shrub quite to her liking. Markham was the most
refreshingly original person she had ever met. He always said exactly
what he thought and refused to speak at all unless he had something to
say. Those hours in the studio when he had painted her portrait had
been hours to remember, sound, sane hours in which they had discussed
many things not comprehended in her philosophy, when he had led her by
easy stages up the steep path he had climbed until she had gained,
from the pinnacle of his successes, a vista of what had lain beneath.
Unconsciously he had drawn upon her mentality until, surprised at its
own existence, it had awakened to life and responded to his. To make
her mental subjection the more complete, he had in his simplicity
peered like a child through all her disguises and painted her soul as
he saw it--as it was. The flattery was the more effectual because of
its subtlety and because she knew, as he did, that in it there was no
guile, no self-interest or sentimentality. And in return she could
have paid him no higher compliment than when coolly, almost coldly,
she told him of her life and what she had made of it.
She was very winning to-night--very gentle and womanly--more English
than French or Russian, more American than either. Neither of them
spoke for a long while. Such words as they could speak would have
taken something from the perfection of their background. But Markham
thought of her as he had frequently done, thankful again for the
benefits of her regard, the genuineness of which she had brought home
to him in many material ways.
To Olga alone there was a peril in the silence, a peril for the sanity
he had taught her, for the pact which she had made with herself. She
had eaten the bread and salt of his friendship and had given him hers.
He believed in her and she could not deceive him. She knew his nature
well. She had not been a student of men all her life for nothing. It
would have been so easy to lie to him, to befuddle and bewitch him, to
bring him to her feet by unfair means. But she had scorned to use
them. For her, John Markham had been taboo. But there was peril in
the silence. She sat looking into the wake of the moon in the water,
very quiet, tense and almost breathless.
"You're glad you came?" she asked at last in the tones of matter and
fact.
"Yes, I am. You've been too kind and patient with me, Olga."
He laid his hand over hers with a genuine impulse. It did not move
beneath his touch or return his pressure.
"Yes," she said coolly, "I think I have."
"Have I offended you?"
"No. Not at all--only disappointed me a little. I had such nice plans
for you."
He laughed.
"Olga, you're the most wonderful woman in the world. I don't deserve
your friendship. But I _did_ want to loaf--I worked pretty hard last
winter."
"Oh, you needn't evade me. I can't make you like my friends. But I
hoped you wouldn't disappoint them. Mrs. Berkley Hammond, the Gormeley
twins, and now Hermia--"
"Miss Challoner!" in surprise. "Her portrait! I thought she
disapproved of my method."
She smiled. "Oh, you don't know Hermia as I do. One is never more
certain in one's judgment of her than when one thinks one is wrong."
She gave a short laugh. "At any rate, she said she was going to speak
to you about it."
"That's curious," he muttered.
"Will you do it?" she asked.
He looked away toward the terrace.
"I hadn't planned to do any portraits until Fall."
"Doesn't she interest you?" she continued quickly.
"She's paintable--it would be profitable, of course--"
"You're evading again."
"Yes, she interests me," he said frankly. "She's clever, amiable,
hospitable--and quite irresponsible. But then she would want to be
'pretty.' I'm afraid I should only make her childish."
"Oh, she's prepared for the worst. You had better paint her. It will
do you a lot of good. Besides, you paint better when you're a little
contemptuous."
"I'm not sure that I could take that attitude toward Miss Challoner,"
he said slowly. "She's too good for the crowd she runs with, that's
sure, and--"
"Thanks," laughed Olga. "You always had a neat turn for flattery."
But he didn't laugh.
"I mean it," he went on warmly. "She's too good for them--and so are
you. Mrs. Renshaw, a woman notorious even in New York, who at the age
of thirty has already changed husbands three times, drained them and
thrown them aside as one would a rotten orange; Hilda Ashhurst who
plays cards for a living and knows how to win; Crosby Downs, a
merciless voluptuary who makes a god of his belly; Archie Westcott,
the man Friday of every Western millionaire with social ambitions who
comes to New York--a man who lives by his social connections, his wits
and his looks; Carol Gouverneur, _his_ history needn't be repeated--"
"Nor mine--" finished Olga quietly, "you needn't go on." The calmness
of her tone only brought its bitterness into higher relief. Markham
stopped, turned and caught both her hands in his.
"No, not yours, Olga. God knows I didn't mean _that_. You're not
their kind, soulless, cynical, selfish and narrow social parasite who
poison what they fee don and live in the idleness that better men and
women have bought for them. Call them your crowd if you like. I know
better. You've only taken people as you've found them--taken life as
it was planned for you--moved along the line of least resistance
because you'd never been taught that there was any other way to go.
In Europe you never had a chance to learn--"
"That's it," she broke in passionately, "I never had a chance--not a
chance."
Her fingers clutched his and then quickly released them.
"Oh, what's the use?" she went on in a stifled tone. "Why couldn't you
have let me live on, steeped in my folly? It's too late for me to
change. I can't. I'm pledged. If I gamble, keep late hours, and do
all the things that this set does it's because if I didn't I should die
of thinking. What does it matter to any one but me?"
She stopped and rose with a sudden gesture of anger.
"Don't preach, John. I'm not in the humor for it--not to-night--do you
hear?"
He looked up at her in surprise. One of her hands was clenched on the
balustrade and her dark eyes regarded him scornfully.
"I've made you angry? I'm sorry," he said.
The tense lines of her figure suddenly relaxed as she leaned against
the pergola and then laughed up at the sky.
"Would you preach to the stars, John Markham? They're a merry
congregation. They're laughing at you--as I am. A sermon by moonlight
with only the stars and a scoffer to listen!"
Her mockery astonished and bewildered him. His indictment of those
with whom she affiliated was no new thing in their conversations, and
he knew that what he had said was true.
"I'm sorry I spoke," he muttered.
She laughed at him again and threw out her arms toward the moonlit sea.
"What a night for the moralities--for the ashes of repentance! I ask a
man into the rose-garden to make love to me and he preaches to me
instead--_preaches to me_! of the world, the flesh and the devil, _par
exemple_! Was ever a pretty woman in a more humiliating position!"
She approached him again and leaned over him, the strands of her hair
brushing his temples, her voice whispering mockingly just at his ear.
"Oh, la la! You make such a pretty lover, John. If I could only
paint you in your sackcloth and ashes, I should die in content. What
is it like, _mon ami_, to feel like moralizing in a rose-garden by
moonlight? What do they tell you--the roses? Of the dull earth from
which they come? Don't they whisper of the kisses of the night winds,
of the drinking of the dew--of the mad joy of living--the sweetness of
dying? Or don't they say anything to you at all--except that they are
merely roses, John?"
She brushed the blossom in her fingers lightly across his lips and
sprang away from him. But it was too late. She had gone too far and
she realized it in a moment; for thought she eluded him once, he
caught her in his arms and kissed her roughly on the lips.
"You'd mock at me, would you?" he cried.
She struggled in his arms and then lay inert. She deserved this
revenge she knew, but not the carelessness of these kisses of
retribution, each of them merciless with the burden of her awakening.
"Let me go, John," she said faintly. "You must not--"
"Not yet. I'm no man of stone. Can you scoff now?"
"No, no. Let me go. I've paid you well and you--O God! you've paid
me, too. Let me go."
"Not until you kiss me."
"No--not that."
"Why?" he whispered.
"No--never that! Oh, the damage you have done!"
"I'll repair it--"
"No. You can't bring the dead to life----our friendship----it was so
clean----Let me go, do you hear?"
But he only laughed at her.
"You'll kiss me--"
"Never!"
"You shall--"
"Never!"
He raised her face to his. She quivered under his touch, but her lips
were insensate, and upon his hand a drop of moisture fell--a tear
limpid, pure from the hidden springs of the spirit. He kissed its
piteous course upon her cheek.
"Olga!" he whispered softly. "What have I done?"
"Killed something in me--I think--something gentle and noble that was
trying so hard to live--"
"Forgive me," he stammered. "I didn't know you cared so much."
She started in his arms, then slowly released herself, and drew away
while with an anxious gaze he followed her.
"Our friendship--I cared for that more than anything else in the
world," she said simply.
"It shall be stronger," he began.
"No--friendship does not thrive on kisses."
"Love--" he began. But her quick gesture silenced him.
"Love, boy! What can you know of love!"
"Nothing. Teach me!"
She looked up into his face, her hands upon his shoulders holding him
at arm's length, flushed with her empty victory--ice-cold with self
contempt at the means she had used to accomplish it. Another man--a
man of her own world--would have played the game as she had played it,
mistrusting the tokens she had shown and taking her coquetry at its
worldly value; would have kissed and perhaps forgotten the next
morning. But as she looked in Markham's eyes she saw with dismay that
he still read her heart correctly and that the pact of truthfulness
which neither of them had broken was considered a pact between them
still. Her gaze fell before his and she turned away, sure now that
for the sake of her pride she must deceive him.
"No, I can teach you nothing, it seems, except, perhaps, that you
should not make the arms of your lady black and blue. Love is a
zephyr, _mon ami_, not a tornado."
He stared at her, bewildered by the sudden transformation.
"I--I kissed you," he said stupidly. "You wanted me to."
"Did I?" she taunted him. "Who knows? If I did"--examining her
wrist--"I have now every reason to regret it."
He stood peering down at her from his great height, his thoughts
tumbling into words.
"Don't lie to me, Olga. You were not content with friendship. No
woman ever is. You wanted me to do--what I have done."
"Perhaps," she admitted calmly, "but not the way you did it. Kissing
should be done upon the soft pedal _mon ami, adagio, con amore_. Your
technique is rusty. Is it a wonder that I am disappointed?"
She was mocking him again, but this time he was not deceived.
"Perhaps I will improve with practice," he muttered.
He would have seized her again but she eluded him, laughing.
"Thank you, no--" she cried.
He went toward her again, but she sprang behind the bench, Markham
following, both intent upon their game. He had seized her again when
suddenly over their very heads there was a sound of feminine laughter
among the vines from which there immediately emerged a white satin
slipper, a slender white ankle, followed quickly by
another--draperies, and at last Hermia Challoner, who, swinging for a
moment by her hands, dropped breathlessly upon the bench between them.
Markham, whose nose had been narrowly missed by the flying slippers,
drew back in astonishment.
"Hello!" panted Hermia, laughing. "Reggie was chasing me, so I
slipped over the balustrade onto the pergola--" She stopped and looked
with quick intuition from one to the other. "Sorry I blunder'd in
here, though, Olga--awfully sorry. Did I kick you in the nose,
Mr. Markham?"