THE DRAMA IN NINTH STREET
Ewing knew that his lady had come back. She had sent him a note the
first day: "I am dining to-night with an old friend. But come to-morrow
night."
The next day, while he was saying, "To-night I shall see her--actually
see her...." there had come another note in her careless, scrawled
writing: "I find, after all, that I shall be engaged to-night. Can you
not come to-morrow night instead? I am eager for a talk with you."
"Could" he come! He laughed as he put the thing tenderly away. Could he
come, indeed! Could he stay away?
But early in the evening of that same forbidden day he walked to Ninth
Street, entering that thoroughfare furtively. He might not see her for
another day, but at least he could look fondly at the door by which she
had entered, and gaze on the stanch house that enfolded her, even on the
steps that must have felt her light, quick tread, perhaps within the
hour.
These things would help him to believe in her actuality--she had so come
to seem but a dream lady to him.
Thrice he passed the house on the opposite side of the street. A dim
light glowed through the curtained windows. Beyond them, he thought, she
would be talking; laughing, perhaps; perhaps even thinking of him at
that very moment as she gazed absently at some speaker who thought to
have her attention. If only she, too, could be counting the hours! But
that was too unlikely. He warned himself not to imagine that. He
recalled some of Teevan's speeches about women--"Shallow, pretty fools,
for man's amusing--the Oriental alone, my boy, has a sane theory of
women; creatures to be kept as choice cabinet bits--under lock and key."
Poor Teevan, not to have known the one woman who could have illumined
his darkness! Poor Teevan, indeed! He idly wondered if his affair--that
troublesome affair of which the little man had spoken so feelingly--had
been "broken off."
He slowly walked once more past the Bartell house, beholding a splendid
vision of himself as he would leap up those steps the next evening. Then
he continued on past Teevan's house, regarding that, also, with great
kindness. He stopped a little beyond this, meaning to return. As he did
so the door opened and a woman came out. He thought there was something
furtive in her glance up and down the street as she paused to gather up
her skirts. Then something familiar in the feminine grace of that
movement chained him. Surely, but one person had ever done the thing in
just that way. There could be no other. He stood staring while she came
down the steps and into the light of a street lamp. It was Mrs. Laithe,
walking briskly now, toward her own home. He could not mistake that
free-swinging, level, deliberate stride, with the head so finely up.
He almost cried out to her in his gladness. He felt as a lost child who
wildly claims its own again in some crowded street. He walked back
quickly, watching her until her own door swallowed her up.
He felt a lively rejoicing. The unpromising evening had done well by him
after all. Thinking but to look tenderly at a house front he had
veritably seen his lady--watched her with secret, unrestrained fondness.
He had an impulse to follow now and demand her at the door. But he
remembered in time; she would be engaged and he would see her soon. That
long look was adventure enough for one night.
But he could ring Teevan's bell. That would be a fine thing to do, for
Teevan had seen her. Teevan would speak of her, little knowing how his
words were hungered for. He was admitted and found the little man on the
hearth rug in the library, talking to himself with great animation. He
showed surprise, but his welcome was warmer than usual, Ewing thought.
He seated his guest and proffered him brandy, pouring a glass for
himself from a decanter almost empty. As he drank he beamed shrewdly on
Ewing--kindly but shrewdly. "He must have seen her--he must have seen
her ..." the little man was saying. Then a vagrant, elfish vanity smote
him. He smiled inscrutably on Ewing--Ewing, who had been waiting to say
lightly, "I happened to see Mrs. Laithe leaving...." But he did not say
this, for the little man's smile came to life in speech.
"Gad! my boy--I'm deuced glad you came. You can make me forget a most
distressing half hour I've just gone through."
The light in Ewing's eyes changed perceptibly.
"Oh, these women!" grumbled Teevan pleasantly, with the fine, humorous
resignation of a persecuted gallant.
"Women--women?" muttered Ewing, slightly aghast. Teevan's heart beat
blithely within his breast.
"Silly, romantic fools! What _do_ they see in a man of my years?" He
flourished a gesture of magnificent deprecation. "I think I once
mentioned a very irksome affair--" How he blessed, now, that bit of
boasting, vague and aimless at the time! "The lady, I blush to say it,
becomes exigent. But I'm rightly served. Heaven knows I've seen enough
of that sort of thing to know how it ends. But come"--he rose to a
livelier manner--"I shouldn't bore you with a matter I'm half ashamed
of, man of the world as I am. You'll sound the ennui of it, all in your
own good time, when you've lost a few of those precious illusions." He
broke off to ring, and directed the man to replenish the decanter.
Ewing gazed stupidly at him, failing of speech. The little man drank
again when the brandy came, and Ewing wondered if he could be drunk. He
feared not. The men he had known in the hills were noisy in drink--they
chiefly yelled. And Teevan was quiet. If his eyes stared vacantly at
intervals, if he clipped syllables from his words, and seemed to attack
his speech with extreme caution, those might be only the results of his
emotion. But what monstrous stuff was this he uttered! What unbelievable
stuff! In a fever of apprehension he wondered what Teevan would say
next.
But the little man dismissed woman, dismissed her with an exquisite
shrug, to speak of his young friend's work, and of painting at large.
"A suggestion of the true manner in that late thing of yours, my boy,
really, a hint of Dupre, and he was a colorist of the first rank. And
there are fewer colorists, genuine masters of tone, than you'd think.
Turner was one, to be sure, but Millet had a restricted sense of color.
Corot was great only within a narrow range. Rousseau was only a bit
broader, robuster. There's a wretchedly defective color sense in many of
the old masters, and in heaven knows how many of the young ones. France
must take the blame for that, I'm sure you'd agree with me. The academic
sentiment there runs to form and against color. They insist that
colorists do little work. It's not an unplausible sophism. One has only
to begin counting to see that--counting the host of little niggling,
mechanical stipplers it's responsible for. It's true, color has its
pitfalls and its gins. There's a temptation to shirk form. Many an
aspiring colorist has become at last a mushy mannerist, as vicious in
his influence as the chaps who never get beyond smart drawing and clever
grouping." The little man was "squeezing" his eyes now as if he judged a
row of paintings. He talked on and drank frequently.
But Ewing left as soon as he could do so. Teevan pressed his hand with
rare cordiality at parting, as if Ewing were one person in the world
still worthy of belief. He wandered blindly home, awkwardly trying to
mold this new chaos into an understandable scheme of things. He fell
instinctively back on his studies of the drama.
Many nights he had sat before the painted curtain to feast a questing
mind on the life it lifted to reveal. He had found its revelations more
intimate, more specific, than those of the life outside, and he had
seemed to learn many things. Lacking this study he would not have
divined that actual men and women might be leading lives of domestic
adventure, of romantic vicissitude, of sinister intrigue, lives crowded
with love and hate and fear and a thousand lawless complexities.
He had studied the street crowds in the light thus thrown on their inner
motives. It had been a fine thing to detect the plotting scoundrel under
the placid, dissembling mask of some fellow who bought an evening paper
and boarded a street car with elaborate airs of innocence; to probe the
secret of the unhappy wife whose white face stared blankly from a
passing brougham; to identify the handsome but never culpable hero,
unconscious of third-act toils tightening about him; to know the
persecuted heroine, or the manly but comic chap who loved her with
exquisite restraint, divining that she could never be his.
But, though he had stripped the masks from these mummers in the street
crowds, and read their secrets of guilt or innocence, he had not
supposed that the people he actually knew could be leading lives
complicated in that way. And if Teevan had talked, then Teevan must have
been drunk. He would see her to-morrow night, and she would speak
casually of her call at Teevan's upon some trifling errand.
Yet, when night came again and he stood in her presence, the first
devouring look at her shocked him momentarily out of all thought of
Teevan's maunderings. She was drooping and wasted and flatly pale. He
scarcely knew her face, with the eyes burning at him from black rings.
He took her hand, nursing it gently, standing helpless and hurt before
her.
"You are so changed," he said fearfully, "so changed! Oh, you are so
changed!"
But she laughed with her familiar gayety, tossing her head in denial. He
still scanned her face. Some resemblance there, some sinister memory of
her look on another face, was stirring him. He could almost remember
what it meant. At last her eyes fell before his and she drew her hand
quickly away.
"Really, I won't have any talk of myself. I hear too much of that. I'm a
bit run down, that's all. We found Florida enervating. Even dad was
affected by it and forgot his philosophy. So, an end to that. I must
hear of you, of your work."
She sat down, drawing a white scarf about her shoulders, and leaning
toward him in the old inviting way.
"Tell me what you have done--everything there is to tell about it."
All at once he remembered.
"Last night," he began uneasily--"I wanted to see you last night--"
"You couldn't have seen me last night." She smiled in a way that brought
out all the weak, wasted look of her face. "I was busy--I was trying to
adjust something that has troubled me more than I can tell you."
He stared at her, incredulous, believing he could not have heard.
"... an affair that has worried me," she repeated, noticing his blank
look.
Stupefied as he was, he felt a great pity rush over him, an instant
longing to be her knight and give battle for her--to be her squire, if
she herself must be knight. Yet, if Teevan had spoken truly must it not
be a thing in which he was powerless to help her ever so little? A
sudden sickness of rage came over him at thought of Teevan. He had
almost made a jest of her.
He could not talk of himself after that. She could get nothing from him
of his own worries, though she could see that he had these in abundance.
At last she tired of striving against him and let him go, out of sheer
longing for the touch of his hand at parting. He had regarded her with a
moody, almost savage tenderness that made her weak.
As he walked home he felt new to the streets again. They were strange
streets in a strange world. But one thing he was sure of; one thing
stood clearly out of the puzzle: he must not intrude, must not bother
her; must not see her often. In a drama so alien to him he could not act
without direction. He knew his own longing too well to trust himself. He
sat a long time with his arms clasped across his breast. The anguish in
it seemed physical; it was as if a beast were devouring his heart.