One gray and penetrating afternoon laid its depressing fingers on Paul
Burton's heart with a heavier touch than usual. Even Hamilton was
wearing a frowning and unsympathetic brow these days, and when the
musician saw Mary, despite the inflexible courage of her eyes, there was
something in them that hurt him to the quick. He knew and shared his
mother's grief, but could not bear the trace of unshed tears in her
voice. So, seeking asylum from the anxious ghosts that stalked between
the walls of his house, he made his way down-town and rang the bell on
Marcia Terroll's door. There are women men go to in triumph and women
they go to when hurt. Often they are not the same women. It was a raw,
bleak afternoon of disheartening drizzle and a reek of fog which veiled
the tops of the taller buildings. As he waited for an answer to his
ring, he could hear the fog-horn voice groaning over river and bay as
though some huge monster were troubled in its sleep.
Then Marcia opened the door and as he made his way along the four-foot
hall to the small living-room he discovered that she, too, was pale and
distraite.
"What is it?" he demanded with that sympathy which always lay close to
the surface of his nature. To his astonishment, the girl whose courage
and composure had become the reliance of his own weakness dropped on the
disguised cot and buried her face in her hands while her slim figure
shook to her sobbing, among the cushions.
Paul stood embarrassed and perplexed. Then, moved by impulse, he crossed
to the lounge and his hand fell with a gently caressing touch upon her
arm. "Why, little girl," he remonstrated softly, "where is your gay
bravery--what has happened?"
She sat up then and almost impatiently shook his hand away. After that
she rose to her feet.
"That's just it," she declared, and for the first time in their
acquaintanceship her eyes shone with an angry gleam, which quickly faded
again into distress. Her tear-stained face confronted him accusingly
"Everybody talks about my intelligence--and my courage. That's not what
I want. I'm just human and I want a human chance."
"What sort of chance?" he asked in that vague distress which confuses a
man and makes him stupid, at sight of a woman's tears.
She lifted her head defiantly. "A chance to work and live and be
happy," she told him vehemently. "A chance to support my child and
myself. They all praise me, but no one will hire me. I'm tired of
fighting--unspeakably tired." Once more her face went into the support
of the two small hands and her body shook.
"But your part in the new piece--don't you get it?" he questioned.
"They gave it to another woman," she told him faintly between her
fingers. "A woman who--who is the friend of the author."
Heretofore Paul had always felt a half-submerged diffidence with Marcia,
such a partially acknowledged deference as one accords to another who
has drunk deeper of life and more extensively built wisdom from
experience. With her his easy pose of acknowledged genius that passed
current in the drawing-rooms lost its assurance, and with her he was at
his best because most natural. But this was a new Marcia, a Marcia whose
delicate, childlike face was stamped with grief; a child in distress and
a child who needed comforting. Just as once before, when there was no
escape, Paul had fought the Marquess kid and had been astonished at the
ease of battle, so now an impulse seized him and he found himself acting
without premeditation. He was the man looking on at the tears of a
woman, and a woman whose laughter had often been his comfort.
Instinctively he folded her in his arms and kissed the soft hair which
was all that showed itself of the bowed head and hidden face.
Now when for the first time he held her close to him he felt a tremor of
sobs run through the slender figure. His pulses heightened their tempo
as he became conscious of the soft palpitation of her shoulders and
bosom.
Sympathy, he thought, actuated him. He took the averted face between his
hands and raised it gently, but with a strong pressure until the
tear-stained eyes were looking into his own.
Her lips were very petal-like and her eyes were very dewy and on each
cheek bloomed a spot of color heightened by the pallor of the moment.
Paul Burton at the instant forgot Loraine Haswell, the prize of his
brother's grand larceny for his pleasure, forgot that this woman was no
more than his Platonic friend and remembered only that her chin rested
in his hand and that his arm encircled her, as he bent his head and
pressed his lips against the mouth that trembled.
He did not think of the demonstration as necessarily loverlike. His
nature was instinctive, not analytical, but suddenly there swept into
the utterly lonely and battle-weary eyes of the woman, who was _not_ a
child, a smile of happiness and comfort which parted her lips, so that
her face reminded him of sudden sunshine flashing into rainbow hope
through an April shower. He could feel the heart fluttering wildly in
her breast, and at once he knew that to her his kiss had meant an avowal
of love--that in her code there was no place for light or unmeaning
caresses.
He rose and his face paled. The indecisiveness which never dared to
grasp the thistle firmly was troubling him with a new dilemma. Yet
something in Marcia Terroll made a call upon him which no other woman
had yet made--the call to be honest at all cost.
With his averted face toward the window, in a forced and level voice,
not daring to meet her eyes, he told her almost all there was to tell
about Loraine Haswell. The new spark of manhood she had awakened in him
made him silent on one point. He said nothing of his own doubts; his own
wonder whether after all he loved or wanted Loraine. Just now he fancied
he wanted Marcia Terroll.
When the recital reached its end he stood for a space gazing into the
fog which seemed an emblem of his own life. He was waiting for her to
speak, but the silence remained unbroken. At last he turned and saw her
sitting there no longer tearful, only a little stunned.
"I couldn't lie to you," he protested in a hurried utterance as he came
over and knelt on the floor at her side. "Not to you.... Of course, you
know that I love you very dearly as a man loves his rarest friends....
You know what our comradeship means to me--"
With an impulsive forward sweep of her hands she interrupted him and her
voice was burdened with deep pain and heart-ache.
"Don't!" she pleaded, and the monosyllable was like a cry. "Oh, don't!"
Then after a little while she went on slowly: "You are a romanticist,
Paul, and a dreamer. Some day you will wake up. We all do."
"It was better to tell you, dear, wasn't it? It would have been
unfair--"
She bowed her head wearily as though realizing the futility of expecting
him to understand. "Yes, I suppose so, only--"
He waited a moment, then prompted:
"Only what?"
"Only perhaps a stronger man would have told me before he--kissed me."
"Did that--make so much difference?"
The green-gray eyes grew soft and the lips smiled wanly. "Yes--all the
difference," she said. "It made me think for a moment that--that
everything was different.... Ordinarily people don't--I mean men
don't--" She broke off and then explained a little laboriously. "To me
that sort of kiss must mean a very great deal to excuse itself."
"But I did mean it," he fervently assured her. "Marcia, I have been
horribly unhappy and you have been lonely. We have seen so much of each
other because we wanted each other--needed each other."
The girl rose and went quietly over to the window. Outside the murk of
the fog was raw and choking. The stertorous snore of the ferry whistles
was uneasy, ominous: the spirit of the town's myriad anxieties. She
began to speak with measured syllables and an averted face.
"No, you don't need me, Paul. I hadn't understood before, but I do now.
I am this moment's whim, that's all. I don't need you either, I don't
need anyone." A trace of resolution and hurt pride tinged the voice, but
the resolution was predominant. "I've depended on myself for years and I
can go on. When you came today I wasn't myself. I was disappointed and
miserable and my misery made its appeal to your sympathy. You were
carried away because you're emotional, and it was all my fault. I'm
supposed to be practical and I let you do it. We must forget about it
now, that's all."
"Some things--" his voice mounted to a thrill of feeling--"can't be
forgotten."
"They must be."
"I have made you angry," he said with deep contrition, "and it's the
last thing in the world I wanted to do."
Marcia smiled again, as she might have smiled on a child who promises to
be good all its life, and who will in a forgetful half-hour be again
breaking all the laws and ordinances of the nursery.
"No, I'm not angry," she said thoughtfully. "One should not be angry
with a person of your exact sort, Paul. In another man the same thing
would have made me angry, but not in you. I am only sorry it happened.
Let's pretend it didn't."
"Why," he inquired, puzzled, as he gazed at the face still moist with
its recent tears and now rather cryptic in its expression, "are your
laws of judgment different for me than for other men?"
Marcia shook her head.
"Perhaps just because you are yourself different from other men. Maybe
in the artist there is something of the woman and something of the
child, as well as something of the man. One doesn't grow angry with a
child."
"Oh!" The monosyllable came with an undernote of chagrin. "I'm not
exactly responsible. That's what you mean?"
She did not answer in words, but her eyes as she looked off through the
drizzle with her fingers hanging limply motionless at her sides gave him
the affirmative reply, and he went on in a low voice.
"Of course, that would make you hate me. It must make anyone hate me if
it's true."
There was a moment's silence and he heard her laugh. It was a sound of a
single note and it was neither a laugh of amusement nor of ridicule. If
there was any betrayal of laughing at the expense of someone, the
someone was evidently herself, and Paul was not sure it was a laugh
after all. Possibly it was a single sob or half-sob and half-laugh. But
she went on in a voice flattened by weariness.
"Life deals in paradoxes. Possibly that very thing might make one love
you."
Paul stood in the small room, feeling himself very small and
contemptible. The face of Loraine rose before his memory, beautiful and
petulant, appealing and regal, features of ivory with poppy-like lips,
dominated by dusky eyes and night-black hair.
Suddenly she seemed responsible for all his uncertainties. He saw her
just then as a Circe. He was a man, swung to an ebb and flow of mood by
influences outwardly as nebulous as moon-mists. Just now the influence
of Loraine Haswell was at ebb-tide. Tomorrow it might run again to
flood, but Paul Burton obeyed the prompting of the present.
With a low exclamation that was wordless and a face tense and white, he
was at the girl's side and his arms were again about her. She shook her
head and tried to draw away, but he only held her the more closely until
she raised her face and said patiently, "I'm very tired, don't make me
fight both myself and you."
The musician shook his head and talked fast. "You said when I kissed you
that you thought it meant something very different. You could have meant
only that you thought I loved you. But that was not all. Thinking that I
loved you would have meant nothing to you if you hadn't loved me--if you
didn't love me now. You do. You have just said, 'Don't make me fight
myself.' There would be no fight with yourself--if you didn't love me."
He paused and his arms held her very close, as he saw her turn away her
face and make an effort to release herself, but in the eyes that she
averted he read the cost of the effort.
"Please let me go." The words came faintly.
"Not until you answer me. I love you, Marcia. This time it means all
that you thought it meant before. I love you."
Her eyes came around again and intently studied his own, then the voice
spoke in low tone:
"No. You think you do--but it's only impulse."
"I love you," he insisted, "and you love me. Your pupils confess it. Why
deny it with your lips? You love me."
She gently disengaged herself and sat again on the lounge.
"Very well," she told him as she looked at him with an honesty of
expression under which his own gaze fell discomforted, "suppose I do
confess it, what then? I hadn't ever meant to confess it, but perhaps
it's better that we understand things. We mustn't drift blindly. Just
now, Paul, when you declared your love you thought you meant it. For the
fleeting time it took to say it you did mean it. If you saw her tomorrow
you would tell her the same things, and you'd believe yourself honest.
If I loved you beyond all hope of forgetting you, it would only prove
that we had both made a mistake. We mustn't go on with it."
As a wind may veer without warning, the current of Paul Burton's
emotions shifted. While wishing to deny and argue, he knew that what she
told him was true. He had entered the house with no thought of
love-making. Had she accepted his protestations at their face value, he
would have left it shaken with an agony of doubt and misgiving. After
all he had sworn his love first to Loraine. He had permitted her to
separate from her husband on the assumption that his own allegiance
would hold. Could a man truly love two women at the same time, he
wondered. Whatever he did he must appear a weak fool. The fact that this
phase of the matter presented itself for consideration at this time
proved only that it was Paul Burton who found himself in the situation.
"I don't know what to say," he admitted brokenly. "I know only that I
would like to be happy, if it's humanly possible, and I'd give anything
on earth to see you happy. At least you believe that much, dear, don't
you?"
She nodded. "Yes," she said, "I believe--that much."
Then after a few moments she continued seriously:
"We have been trusting ourselves on quicksands, Paul, and between us
we've done one wise thing. We've discovered it in time. Maybe it would
be still wiser now to be really frank for once and then to be very
careful afterwards."
"What do you mean, exactly?"
"I divined your unhappiness, and I knew my own--for a long time I've
known my own. You have been petted and praised by women--women of that
world which was once mine. You say I love you. Do you know why--?" She
wheeled suddenly and spoke without disguise. "Not because you are a
great musician or a celebrity. It is because I realize how weak and
foolish and helpless you are." The man winced, but she went on steadily.
"In all woman-love there is a ruling element of mother-love. I wanted to
take you into my heart and make you happy, to ... to give you all a
woman can give a man."
He came forward and his words were unsteady.
"You can at least let me be your best and closest friend--"
"No. I doubt if men and women can really be friends. It comes to mean
too much--or too little."
"But, Marcia--"
Again she interrupted and again the voice was monotonous, almost
lifeless.
"No, dear. All our silly little jokes--things that have come to be dear
little traditions between us--would be mockeries now." She raised her
chin, and said suddenly, with a forced laugh: "I don't often have these
brain-storms. They make me very foolish. We must see less of each other,
Paul."
"And yet," he stubbornly argued, "it has been only an hour since the
basis of our comradeship was secure enough."
"In that hour we have come a long way, dear. It's going to be hard
enough to get back as it is."
She stood still and, after a brief silence, spoke once more.
"I must brush these cobwebs away from my brain ... only--" suddenly her
eyes flooded and there was a gasping sob in her voice--"only they aren't
cobwebs--they are cables and chains! I was a fool to expect to be happy.
I haven't been happy for years. I've never had what I've wanted.... I
haven't even been able to have my baby with me." Marcia went slowly to a
chair and sat staring, wide-eyed, at the wall. At last she looked up and
commanded in a whisper. "You must go now--don't say good-by--just go!"
Paul took up his hat and let himself out into the narrow hall.