MRS. LAITHE IS IN
On the ultimate night of defeat Ewing walked as usual into Ninth Street
for his vigil before Teevan's house. He had come to a wall that must be
scaled. He could no longer believe in any chance way round it or
gracious opening through it. Teevan would have to be told, and he was
sorry for Teevan. The little man had believed so.
He scanned the starred strip of sky above him as if for words to renew
the faith of his friend. His eye ran along the house fronts opposite,
but they were blunt, uninspiring masses with shut doors and curtained
windows, houses turned away from him. He wished for another friend, less
exacting than Teevan, who would take defeat lightly. Then one of the
houses stood out familiarly, the Bartell house, with its generous width
and its hospitable white door. He had not cared to go there in his time
of suspense, but now he was overwhelmed with a sudden longing to see
Mrs. Laithe, to feel her friendliness and confide to her, perhaps, a
hint of his plight. At least he could look at her a little while, even
if he told her nothing.
He crossed the street quickly, walked toward the avenue until he reached
the marble steps, and rang the bell. It occurred to him dismally while
he waited that she might not be in; still worse, that there might be
people about who would keep him from her. It had been so most of the
few times he had called. There was always friendliness in the look she
gave him across those shoreless seas of talk, but too often there had
been little beside this look.
The man admitted him and was not sure if Mrs. Laithe was in; he would
see. Ewing strolled back to the soothing snugness of the library and
dropped on the couch. Even to be there alone was something: the room was
alive with her, and the restful quietness of it made him conscious all
at once of the long strain he had been under. Leaning his head back, he
shut his eyes in a sort of desperate surrender, letting the tragedy of
his failure swirl about him. But something from the woman he awaited
seemed to have flowed in upon him, healing his hurt with gracious little
reminders of her. He breathed a long sigh of relief, and for a moment
almost lost himself in unconscious rest. It was good to stop thinking.
It was thus she saw him as she came softly in, with scarce a silken
rustle. Her face, as she gazed, lost its look of welcome and ready
speech, for she saw all his anguish uncovered there before her. It was
in his young face, gaunt and jaded and bleached to the city pallor; in
the closed eyes, the folded lips; and in the body wearily relaxed. So
little life he showed, it seemed to her he might be sleeping, and again,
as at the other time, she was shaken by a rush of tenderness for
him--tenderness and fear, alike terrible.
She could not speak. She hovered a half step toward him, with a hand
instinctively up to shelter and cherish, her eyes wide with pity and a
great gladness. Poised so, she waited, breathless.
Though she had made no sound, he thrilled suddenly to the knowledge of
her presence, and his eyes opened to hers. They stared dully an instant,
then shone with a quick light that held her exposed and defenseless,
while he came to himself--for the first time in her presence--as a man.
Helpless to stay it, she watched this consciousness unfolding within
him, traced it lucidly from its birth to the very leaping of it from his
lips in a smothered cry of want unutterable.
So he held her with his look. Though every nerve warned her to flight,
she was powerless even when he started toward her, raising himself
slowly from the couch with his hands; her own hand even groped a little
toward him, blindly fighting its way into both his own. It turned and
nestled there, unreasoningly, warming itself, clasping and unclasping.
He towered above her--she had never felt herself so small, so frail as
now. His two hands fiercely smothered her own, and his eyes were on her
with a look she had never seen there, a look she could not face. It was
then that her tenderness was lost in fear of him, and she forced herself
to laugh. She laughed in the desperate knowledge that his rising arm
threatened her with some crushing, blinding enfoldment where no striving
would avail her--laughed with a little easy, formal grace.
He fell back dazed, scanning her in uncomprehending dismay as they stood
apart. Then he seemed to recover himself and smiled foolishly as she
moved to a chair.
"I'm so glad you came," she began with nervous quickness. He dropped
back on the couch, his eyes still on her--the man's eyes.
She endured the look, but she could not suppress the color she felt
rising in her face. It seemed to her that her strength must go if the
moment lasted a little longer. She knew now that in the weeks of his
absence she had longed for this look--for the fearful joy of it--and the
realization left her overpowered.
At last, to her relief, he muttered some conventional phrase of his own
pleasure in seeing her. But the look of the man still held her, an
implacable look. She felt that the shy, embarrassed boy in him was gone
forever. She had aged him all in a moment. There was something
splendidly ruthless in his gaze, and in place of the confusion she was
wont to wreak on him he showed a strange, dogged coolness.
"You've changed," he continued. "You're not well." The wondrous deep
alarm of his tone warmed her through and through. She murmured a
careless disavowal, and her low laugh, like the little comprehending
chuckle of a pleased child, banished from her face for a moment its
almost haggard set. But the face was flatly white again under the dark
of her hair, and the white gown defined her frailness and drooping, as
of some pale, long-stemmed flower fainting of languor in the still heat
of late summer.
"You are whiter than ever," he insisted, "whiter and finer. You are like
a white rose that is beginning to let its petals fall. You--you are
beyond anything now." She laughed helplessly, as people laugh at
something insupportable.
"You're going to tell me that people don't talk that way here," he went
on, with his old fling of the head, like that of a horse about to gallop
off, "but you understand me." He sighed, remembering his trouble for the
first time. "But you understand me," he repeated, with a wistful
attenuation of the words.
"Yes, I understand--everything," she said, seeing again the amazing
sadness in him. Her look seized all the dejection of his attitude, the
listless lean of his head, once upheld so gayly on the strong neck. She
had to exert her will not to go nearer to him. She turned away and
closed her eyes for a moment to shut him out, then opened them quickly
and began to berate him charmingly for having neglected her. "I've
thought of you so much oftener than I've seen you," she concluded.
He floundered in the old shyness. It had come suddenly on him when he
thought of himself.
"I've been--at work."
"Your face shows it," she said, with a swift, unsteady look. "You have
changed, too. You actually look ill."
He reddened slowly under her scrutiny, stammering protestations, but her
eyes were open to him. She shrugged herself together and assumed a
brisk, motherly air.
"Is it as bad as _that_--truly? And you told me nothing of it! Come--I
want to know." There was a ring of authority in her voice as she leaned
toward him, her great eyes full of pity and succor. "Is the world
different from what you thought? Let me know--where does it hurt? That's
what they say to children."
Challenged thus directly, he felt shame at the thought of confession
equally direct. He would come to it only by winding ways, asserting at
first that there was no trouble; then that the trouble was but a little
one; and insisting at last that, though the trouble was great, it might
have been greater.
Her eyes beat upon him insistently while she drove him to these
admissions. Then she was eager with attention while he compelled himself
to details. He told of his two weeks' humiliation at the school, not
sparing himself, confessing his lack of power, and the pain this
discovery had cost him. When he had finished, with a self-belittling
shrug, she sat silent, bending forward, her hands loosely clasped, her
eyes fixed away from him.
Now that it was over he felt a sudden lightening of his mood, a swift
consciousness of reliance on the woman, a foreknowledge that her words
would profit him. At last she brought her eyes upon him and cut to the
heart of his woe with a single stroke.
"The thing is nothing in itself." He drew a long breath of relief. "It's
in the way you take it. If it weakens you, it's bad. If it strengthens
you, it's good. Call the thing 'failure' if you like--but what has it
done to you?"
"Why, of course"--he broke off to laugh under her waiting look--"of
course I'm still in the race. I see now that I haven't really doubted
myself at all." He looked at her with sudden sharpness. "I'd be ashamed
to doubt myself before you." He sprang to his feet in the excitement of
this discovery and stood alertly before her.
"It doesn't mean anything, does it?" he went on quickly. "You believe in
me?"
She laughed defensively. "I believe in you now. You look so much less
like a whipped schoolboy."
"I won't forget again. That school isn't for me. I can do things those
poor charcoal dusters won't do for years yet. I know that. Baldwin said
they'd spoil me if I wasn't stubborn, and I _was_ stubborn--I am. You
believe I'm stubborn, don't you?"
She smiled assurance. "You have it--can you use it?"
"You'll see!" He sat down, continuing almost apologetically, "I worried
more about the effect on others than on myself. It was that threw me
down, a fear that other people might think I was some pretentious fool
who had come here to get over big things and stumbled at the first
little one. I was deathly afraid of hurting other people."
His eyes had been steadily upon hers with an under-current of
consciousness for what he would have called the "queerness" of her look,
a baffling look that hinted of many things--of sympathy, consternation,
rejoicing, even of embarrassment, and yet it had not distinctly been any
one of these, so quick had been the play of light in her eyes to the
moment they fell before his.
She released her breath with a sound like a sigh, as if she had been
holding it, and there was another look in her eyes when she at last
raised them to his, one that he could not read, save that it was wholly
serious and, he felt, peculiarly a woman's look.
"I am sure," she began, "that no one--no one you consider in this way,
could think less of you for a failure. You ought to know that. I want
you to know it." She rose from her chair and stepped to the table with a
little shrug, turning over the leaves of a magazine, her back toward
him. At last she turned her head only, looking at him over one shoulder
and speaking with a laughing, reckless impatience.
"Oh, fail--fail--fail as often as you like--fail a hundred times and
then--fail." He felt his cheeks burning under her vehemence. She turned
about, facing him squarely.
"Have I said enough? Do you know what I think of failures now?"
He rose and stood before her. "You don't know what you've done for me.
You don't know--" Again came that crude impulse to take her in his arms.
It left him feeling like a criminal. As if she had discerned this she
resumed her seat, speaking quickly.
"Go back to that studio and do things. Do them your own way. It's a
better way for you than any they can teach you, and the next time----"
"The next time I have a hell----"
"--a hell of doubt--don't wait--come to me." She rose from her chair.
"You don't know all this has meant to me," he said feelingly as she gave
him her hand.
"Good night!" And though the gray eyes were hidden from his, there was
the look in them of one who knows more than she is thought to know.
As Ewing went out the man was admitting the younger Teevan, who asked
for Mrs. Laithe. Ewing wished it had been the father. He had much of
good to tell the little man now.
Neither Mrs. Laithe nor Teevan spoke of Ewing after their greeting,
though each was so busy in thought of him that their talk was scant and
aimless for the first five minutes. Alden Teevan was brought back to her
at length by noticing the drawn, tired look of her face, for the sparkle
that Ewing had left there was gone.
"Nell, you look done up. I'm no alarmist, but you really need to be
frightened. What is it you're doing to take you down so--the same old
round? Is it a visiting guild now, or the Comforters of the Worthy Poor,
or just amateur nursing of sin, sickness, and death?"
She smiled wanly.
"The same old round, Alden. I can't keep away from it when I am here. I
know it so well. No one could keep away who knew it well."
"Futile, futile, futile! Are you equal to a revolution?"
"More's the pity, no. And I've no time for one. I've a whole family of
consumptives on my hands at this moment, father, mother, two girls and a
boy."
"And you wear yourself out over a few minor effects like that, instead
of going at the cause. You may save one or two of those people--none of
them of any value, individually; while the same energy put to the root
of the evil might save thousands--and they _are_ of value in the mass.
Think me calloused if you like, but that's mere common sense economy of
effort. You and I--our class--make them live as they do, and we grow
maudlin over it and take them a little soup and many tracts. But we
won't remit our tithes. We keep them down to breed more misery for the
exercise of our little philanthropic fads. I'm radical, you see."
She turned her head away with a hand wave that seemed to dismiss an
argument familiar and outworn.
"I know--but I must do what I can."
He faced her with a sudden insistent energy.
"Come away, Nell--come farther off. You're too close to the ugly things
now--you lose the perspective. Come away--and come with me, won't you,
Nell? Come away and live. I must say it--I must ask it--come!"
He read the inexorable in the lift of her head.
"I understand, Alden--and I thank you--but no." She glanced across at
him and continued more lightly, "I wasn't meant to go far off--to go
above timber line, as Mr. Ewing would say."
He felt bitterness rising in him at her mention of the name, but he
laughed it away.
"You'll always do the hardest thing, Nell. I know that. But I--well, one
of the old heathen--Heraclitus, wasn't it?--remarked that the ass, after
all, would have his thistles rather than much fine gold."
She laughed. "Dad would say, the more ass he, if he wouldn't."
"I know--we'd rather have our own particular thistles, each of us. But
to live a day or two before we die, Nell! Come with me--stop trying to
mount the whirlwind. You'll only be thrown."
Again she shook her head, and gently shaped "No!" with her lips. It was
too unemotionally decisive to warrant of any further urging, and he
became silent, with something of pain in his face that her eye caught.
"I'm sorry, Alden--I've never liked you better--but I'd rather you
didn't ask."
"You wouldn't have come before, would you, Nell--three months ago?" And
she answered "No" again, very quickly.
"I must play my little game out in my own way," she continued. "I must
stay beside some one--beside people--who still have heart for trying."
"Someone, Nell?"
She caught her lip.
"Everyone who has fresh hope and stubbornness in defeat."
"If you'd let me, Nell--" There was the note of real pleading in his
tone.
"No, Alden."
"Friends, though?" he queried, seeming at last convinced.
She thought there was a trace of bitterness in his voice, but she
answered, "Friends, surely, Alden."
"We've skirted this thing often, Nell, but you never seemed certain
before."
"I didn't--I think I never was _quite_ so certain before, Alden--but now
I'm driven all one way."
"I believe that." He rose and spoke in a livelier manner. "But if you
won't be wise for me, Nell, be wise for some one else. For God's sake
feel a little worry about your health. I say you look unpromising at
this moment."
"I've always been well," she insisted brightly.
"And, Nell, I've wanted to be so much more than a friend to you that my
feelings are a bit blurred just now--but I believe I'll always do what a
friend should."