For a moment, startled out of a confused succession of restless
dreams, Inga could not realize where she was. Then the squalor of
the room, the haggard, tortured face of Dangerfield looking down in
remorse, the memory of the long night of struggle came back in a
flash. She sprang up hastily.
“I went off to sleep--heavens, how late is it?”
“It’s after three--I’ve been waiting for you,” he said, in a low
voice.
“Oh, why didn’t you call me?” she said hastily, struck by the new
note of pain and contrition.
He brushed her question aside, staring at her.
“How was it possible--Good God, how could I have brought you here?”
He stopped, shuddered, and glanced around at the room.
“You didn’t. I brought you,” she said quickly. “You had--had
collapsed.”
“Sit down,” he said.
He drew a chair opposite her, took both her hands in his, and
looked at her so long that she began to be embarrassed. Then, all
at once, his lips twisted, his eyes filled with tears, and he
buried his head in his hands.
“Don’t mind me, Mr. Dan!” she cried in her distress, bending over
him. “Don’t think of me!” And, as he continued to dig his hands
into his cheeks against the long pent-up emotion, she added: “I’m
only happy to have helped you. Really I am.”
He rose suddenly, fighting down a sob, overcome by remorse.
“Good God, where have I dragged you?”
She came to him swiftly and seized his hands with an imperious
gesture.
“What do you think I care about that?” she said, with such anger
that it shocked him into attention. “To make a man out of you, I’d
go through anything--anything, do you hear!”
He searched in his pockets at a sudden remembrance, found the
bottle he had bought at the druggist’s the night before, and looked
up at her.
“Then why didn’t you take this?” he said curtly.
“What good would that have done?” she said impatiently.
He stared at her a moment and, with a gesture of contempt, flung
the bottle against the floor, where it crashed to pieces.
She swayed with a cry of joy and clung to him, her head pressed
against his shoulder, as though a sea of perils had returned him
safely.
“Why the devil should you care what happens to an old derelict, you
queer little creature?” he said slowly, surprised at the trembling
in her body.
“Care! Why, if anything had happened--” She broke off, caught her
breath just at the moment when she could no longer control herself,
and dug her nails into the palms of her hands in an effort to
regain her self-control.
“Don’t move--stay where you are--near me,” he said gently, and he
drew one arm about her shoulder.
Through the leaden, racking burdens of the night, a flood of
cleansing light entered his soul, a passionate thirst for life
once more. The world outside was good, full of vibrant, joyful
sounds--children’s voices, laughing as they danced to the music of
a hurdy-gurdy, the long chatter of scolding sparrows, tiny sounds
and yet teeming with life, its curiosity, its health, its response
to sensations, pleasant, intense, and intoxicating. The arm he had
drawn about her tightened as though clinging to its salvage in the
storm of his mind. Warned by some subtle intuition of the heart,
she did not attempt to move away. Instead, one hand crept up until
it lay against the rough cheek.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Dan,” she said, in a whisper. “Why, you never
could have harmed any one--I know it! I know it isn’t your
fault--it couldn’t be!”
“No; it isn’t my fault,” he said mechanically, but his thoughts
were of the outer world with its insistent call back to life,
to the life which rose in him from the perfumed contact of her
straight, young body, the scent of her hair, the softness of her
protecting arms, and the warm notes of her whispering voice. All at
once he held her from him so that he could look into her flushed
face and said solemnly, sadly:
“Inga, have you the right to do this? Don’t you know it’s a grave
responsibility you have taken--to force me to go on living, hating
everything, hoping nothing--for that’s what you’re doing?”
“You must--you must!” she said tremulously.
His eyes were on her every expression now, and in them was a
longing to question and to be answered.
“Why did you come to me--why do you stick to me now?” he said
eagerly.
“It’s just so,” she said nervously. “I can’t help it. I couldn’t
have let you go out alone--Why, if you saw a child drowning you’d
have to save it, wouldn’t you?” He nodded gravely. “Well, that’s
the way with me. I just couldn’t be otherwise.”
“I have taken heavily from you,” he said slowly, “long, long,
racking hours, and you’ve never complained. You have given me so
much and I have had no right.”
She smiled.
“Those were the happiest moments.”
“And after all that,” he said, “you still want to go on--giving to
me?”
Her hands came together eagerly as she raised her eyes in
supplication.
“Please--oh, you wouldn’t take this from me now!”
“You don’t know, child; you don’t know what you are undertaking,”
he said bitterly.
“I want it!”
“And you do all this because----”
“I believe in you.”
He turned away, not quite satisfied, and yet the feeling of what he
had contemplated the day before was so coldly insistent that the
revulsion urged him to cling to what she offered.
“It’s too much to ask,” he said, hesitating.
“You say that because you do not understand!” she cried, coming to
him eagerly, her hand on his shoulder, standing behind him. “You
don’t know all it means in my life to have the feeling of really
counting.” She stopped as he turned, wondering if, at last, she
was going to speak of herself. She wavered and then continued
resolutely, “It’s all so useless--being alone--so starved! If you
knew what it meant to me, to count, to give to some one, to fight
for something, you wouldn’t talk of its being hard on me.”
He looked at her and wondered. He had known women like her before,
women of the Northlands and the Old World who never complained,
whose joy lay in sacrifice and redeeming. He thought of Pepita, the
little Spanish model whose adoration he had not suspected until
too late, and, thinking of Pepita, he wondered about Inga. What
was the true feeling in her--as much as he would ever understand
her? Did the girl love him? He wanted to believe it so keenly, in
the weak reaction from the dread decision of the night, longing
for something to cling to, that he hesitated, afraid to dissipate
a fragile illusion by too brusque a question. Yet, if she did
love him? At the very possibility, a new belief in himself awoke,
bringing to him that sensation of life at its fullest in the power
of inspiring love.
She saw the thronging, tumultuous thoughts which came crowding to
his eyes, and nervously turned away. Her retreat frightened him,
as such trivial symptoms can instill terror in moments of intense
hope. He put his hands over his eyes to repress the too frank
questioning in them, and walked to the window to regain his calm.
When he came back to her, determined to discuss matters rationally,
he was conscious only of a longing to believe in her, to go forth
into life and the sun once more. Yet he strove to be honest.
“This is all very well for now,” he said hurriedly, hardly trusting
his voice, “but after--when we are calm, when we can see things as
they are, when I face what is ahead, when you realize what you have
bound your life to--a derelict--”
“And if I can make you what you were before,” she said, in simple
faith.
“You can’t--men like me don’t come back,” he said bitterly,
sinking into a chair. “It isn’t simply to live--that’s what you
must understand. It’s--it’s to have the power to do what I used to
do, and to do that, one must believe in oneself; only that is so
hard--once you’ve lost it!”
“That is what I want, Mr. Dan,” she said impulsively. “I feel what
there is in you. It comes to me just by your being in the room.
I felt it that first night, even before you opened your eyes. I
couldn’t help myself. I had to come to you to do what you wanted,
to serve you. Do you think I’d have done that if you weren’t
something big, something really worth while?”
He looked at her, only too impatient to be convinced, forgetting
all his mental whys and wherefores in the instincts toward faith
and joy which came to him in the spell of her intimacy.
“I wanted to end it,” he said wistfully, yet already the thing was
far away, incredible. “I’d made up my mind.”
“Won’t you let me try?” she cried passionately. “Mr. Dan, let me
try--it would be such a big--big thing in my life!”
“Try,” he said impulsively, with a glad leap of his senses, and,
even at this moment, it struck him how incongruous, in this sordid
interior, was this sudden release toward the beauty and the faith
of things.
“And now,” she said hurriedly, “let’s get out of here--out of this
awful place!”
He sprang up hastily, cursing himself for his obtuseness, and came
face to face with the worn image of himself in the murky mirror. A
sudden loathing seized him.
“Good Lord, do I look like that?” he cried.
“Come,” she said smilingly. She stood in the doorway, her hand on
the knob, opening the way to him until he came and stood beside
her, looking back in revulsion at the tawdry room. “That’s the
past--we’ll shut it out forever,” she said softly, and closed the
door. “Now give me your hand.”
The hallway was dark. She took his hand and guided him through the
musty, oppressive darkness down the creaking, uncertain stairs,
never releasing her hold until she had found the door and led him,
dazzled, into the mellowness of the day.
The lights were coming out on the avenue one by one when they
returned to the Arcade. He stopped, suddenly solicitous of her,
on the point of suggesting that she might prefer not to be seen
returning thus. But, when this return of the worldly instinct was
phrasing a question, she deliberately slipped her arm through his
in a closer intimacy. He laughed contentedly.
“Why do you laugh?” she said, waving her hand to Myrtle Popper, who
was on guard at Joey Shine’s window.
“It was an honest laugh,” he said evasively.
The naturalness and the directness of her nature, the simple force
of her emotions, unfettered by self-consciousness, in contrast with
the worldliness in which he had moved, overcame him, as the clear
breath of the open fields sometimes is too overpowering to those
who seek it in city weariness.
And so, arm in arm, defiant of the world, they returned to the
Arcade where, only a few hours before, he had come in despair and
surrender, seeing the end of all things. For a moment, the whole
pack of cringing doubts--of himself, of her, of the waking realism
of the morrow, of distrust for the enduring quality of dramatic
moments--doubts that often caused him to laugh aloud in bitterness,
came howling around him. Were the tingling sensations of awaking
curiosity, the delight in singing sounds and thronging life, the
overwhelming passion to be, to know himself still alive, but the
mirage of a fool’s paradise? She felt the inner trouble in him, and
drew her arm closer to his, saying, with already a beginning of
proprietorship:
“What are you mumbling to yourself like that?”
“Call it a prayer,” he said, half in earnest, half in jest.