OLIVER, THE ROMANTIC
An hour later Oliver stood before the book-shelves in his room, wrapping
each separate volume in newspapers. Downstairs in the basement, he knew,
the family were at supper, but he had vowed, in his splendid scorn of
material things, that he would never eat another morsel under Cyrus's
roof. Even when his aunt, trembling in every limb, had brought him
secretly from the kitchen a cup of coffee and a plate of waffles, he had
refused to unlock his door and permit her to enter. "I'll come out when
I am ready to leave," he had replied to her whispered entreaties.
It was a small room, furnished chiefly by book-shelves, which were still
unfinished, and with a depressing view from a single window of red tin
roofs and blackened chimneys. Above the chimneys a narrow band of sky,
spangled with a few stars, was visible from where Oliver stood, and now
and then he stopped in his work and gazed up at it with an exalted and
resolute look. Sometimes a thin shred of smoke floated in from the
kitchen chimney, and hung, as if drawn and held there by some magnetic
attraction, around the kerosene lamp on a corner of the washstand. The
sultriness of the night, which was oppressive even in the street, was
almost stifling in the little room with its scant western exposure.
But the flame burning in Oliver's breast had purged away such petty
considerations as those for material comforts. He had risen above the
heat, above the emptiness of his pockets, above the demands of his
stomach. It was a matter of complete indifference to him whether he
slept in a house or out of doors, whether he ate or went hungry. His
exaltation was so magnificent that while it lasted he felt that he had
conquered the physical universe. He was strong! He was free! And it was
characteristic of his sanguine intellect that the future should appear
to him at the instant as something which existed not beyond him, but
actually within his grasp. Anger had liberated his spirit as even art
had not done; and he felt that all the blood in his body had rushed to
his brain and given him the mastery over circumstances. He forgot
yesterday as easily as he evaded to-day and subjugated to-morrow. The
past, with its starved ambitions, its tragic failures, its blighting
despondencies, melted away from him into obscurity; and he remembered
only the brief alternating hours of ecstasy and of accomplishment. With
his wind-blown, flame-like temperament, oscillating in the heat of youth
between the inclinations he miscalled convictions, he was still, though
Cyrus had disowned him, only a romantic variation from the Treadwell
stock. Somewhere, in the depths of his being, the essential Treadwell
persisted. He hated Cyrus as a man hates his own weakness; he revolted
from materialism as only a materialist in youth revolts.
A knock came at his door, and pausing, with a volume of Heine still
unwrapped in his hand, he waited in silence until his visitor should
retire down the stairs. But instead of Mrs. Treadwell's trembling
tones, he heard, after a moment, the firm and energetic voice of Susan.
"Oliver, I must speak to you. If you won't unlock your door, I'll sit
down on the steps and wait until you come out."
"I'm packing my books. I wish you'd go away, Susan."
"I haven't the slightest intention of going away until I've talked with
you----" and, then, being one of those persons who are born with the
natural gift of their own way, she laid her hand on the door-knob while
Oliver impatiently turned the key in the lock.
"Since you are here, you might as well come in and help," he remarked
none too graciously, as he made way for her to enter.
"Of course I'll help you--but, oh, Oliver, what in the world are you
going to do?"
"I haven't thought. I'm too busy, but I'll manage somehow."
"Father was terrible. I heard him all the way upstairs in my room. But,"
she looked at him a little doubtfully, "don't you think he will get over
it?"
"He may, but I shan't. I'd rather starve than live under a petty tyranny
like that?"
"I know," she nodded, and he saw that she understood him. It was
wonderful how perfectly, from the very first instant, she had understood
him. She grasped things, too, by intelligence, not by intuition, and he
found this refreshing in an age when the purely feminine was in fashion.
Never had he seen a finer example of young, buoyant, conquering
womanhood--of womanhood freed from the consciousness and the
disabilities of sex. "She's not the sort of girl a man would lose his
head over," he reflected; "there's too little of the female about
her--she's as free from coquetry as she is from the folderol of
sentimentality. She's a free spirit, and God knows how she ever came out
of the Treadwells." Her beauty even wasn't of the kind that usually goes
by the name. He didn't suppose there were ten men in Dinwiddie who would
turn to look back at her--but, by Jove, if she hadn't beauty, she had
the character that lends an even greater distinction. She looked as if
she could ride Life like a horse--could master it and tame it and break
it to the bridle.
"It's amazing how you know things, Susan," he said, "and you've never
been outside of Dinwiddie."
"But I've wanted to, and I sometimes think the wanting teaches one more
than the going."
He thought over this for an instant, and then, as if the inner flame
which consumed him had leaped suddenly to the surface, he burst out
joyously: "I've come to the greatest decision of my life in this last
hour, Susan."
Her eyes shone. "You mean you've decided not to do what father asks no
matter what happens?"
"I've decided not to accept his conditions--no matter what happens," he
answered.
"He was in earnest, then, about wanting you to give up writing?"
"So much in earnest that he would give me a job only on those terms."
"And you declined absolutely?"
"Of course I declined absolutely."
"But how will you live, Oliver?"
"Oh, I can easily make thirty dollars a month by reviewing German books
for New York papers, and I dare say I can manage to pull through on
that. I'll have to stay in Dinwiddie, of course, because I couldn't live
anywhere else on nearly so little, and, besides, I shouldn't be able to
buy a ticket away."
"That will be twenty dollars for your board," said the practical Susan,
"and you will have to make ten dollars a month cover all your other
expenses. Do you think you can do it?"
"I've got to. Better men have done worse things, haven't they? Better
men have done worse things and written great plays while they were about
them."
"I believe Mrs. Peachey would let you have a back room and board for
that," pursued Susan. "But it will cost you something to get your books
moved and the shelves put up there."
"As soon as I get through this I'll go over and see her. Oh, I'm free,
Susan, I'm happy! Did you ever see an absolutely happy man before? I
feel as if a weight had rolled off my shoulders. I'm tired--dog-tired of
compromise and commercialism and all the rest of it. I've got something
to say to the world, and I'll go out and make my bed in the gutter
before I'll forfeit the opportunity of saying it. Do you know what that
means, Susan? Do you know what it is to be willing to give your life if
only you can speak out the thing that is inside of you?" The colour in
his face mounted to his forehead, while his eyes grew black with
emotion. In the smoky little room, Youth, with its fierce revolts, its
impassioned egoism, its inextinguishable faith in itself, delivered its
ultimatum to Life. "I've got to be true to myself, Susan! A man who
won't starve for his ambition isn't worth his salt, is he? And, besides,
the best work is all done not in plenty, but in poverty--the most
perfect art has grown from the poorest soil. If I were to accept Uncle
Cyrus's offer, I'd grow soft to the core in a month and be of no more
use than a rotten apple."
His conviction lent a golden ring to his voice, and so winning to Susan
was the impetuous flow of his words, that she felt herself swept away
from all the basic common sense of her character. She saw his ambition
as clearly as he saw it; she weighed his purpose, as he weighed it, in
the imaginary scales of his judgment; she accepted his estimate of his
powers as passionately as he accepted it.
"Of course you mustn't give up, Oliver; you couldn't," she said.
"You're right, I couldn't."
"If you can get steady reviewing, I believe you can manage," she
resumed. "Living in Dinwiddie costs really so very little." Her voice
thrilled suddenly. "It must be beautiful to have something that you feel
about like this. Oh, I wish I were you, Oliver! I wish a thousand times
I were you!"
Withdrawing his eyes from the sky at which he had been gazing, he turned
to look at her as if her words had arrested him. "You're a dear girl,"
he answered kindly, "and I think all the world of you." As he spoke he
thought again what a fine thing it would be for the man who could fall
in love with her. "It would be the best thing that could happen to any
man to marry a woman like that," he reflected; "she'd keep him up to the
mark and never let him grow soft. Yes, it would be all right if only
one could manage to fall in love with her--but I couldn't. She might as
well be a rose-bush for all the passion she'd ever arouse in me." Then
his charming egoism asserted itself, and he said caressingly: "I don't
believe I could stand Dinwiddie but for you, Susan."
She smiled back at him, but there was a limpid clearness in her look
which made him feel that she had seen through him while he was thinking.
This clearness, with its utter freedom from affectation or
sentimentality, embarrassed him by its unlikeness to all the attributes
he mentally classified as feminine. To look straight seemed to him
almost as unwomanly as to throw straight, and Susan would, doubtless, be
quite capable of performing either of these difficult feats. He liked
her fine brow under the short fringe, which he hated, and he liked the
arched bridge of her nose and the generous curve of her mouth. Yet had
he stopped to analyze her, he would probably have said that the woman
spirit in her was expressed through character rather than through
emotion--a manifestation disconcerting to one whose vision of her sex
was chiefly as the irresponsible creature of drama. The old
shackles--even the shackles of that drama whose mistress and slave woman
had been--were out of place on the spirit which was incarnated in Susan.
Amid the cramping customs of the period, she moved large, free, and
simple, as though she walked already in the purer and more bracing air
of the future.
"I wish I could help you," she said, stooping to pick up a newspaper
from a pile on the floor. "Here, let me wrap that Spinoza. I'm afraid
the back will come off if you aren't careful."
"Of course a man has to work out his own career," he replied, as he
handed over the volume. "I doubt, when it comes to that, if anybody can
be of much help to another where his life's work is concerned. The main
thing, after all, is not to get in one's way, not to cripple one's
energy. I've got to be free--that's all there is about it. I've got to
belong to myself every instant."
"And you know already just what you are going to do? About your writing,
I mean."
"Absolutely. I've ideas enough to fill fifty ordinary lifetimes. I'm
simply seething with them. Why, that box over there in the corner is
full of plays that would start a national drama if the fool public had
sense enough to see what they are about. The trouble is that they don't
want life on the stage; they want a kind of theatrical wedding-cake.
And, by Jove, they get it! Any dramatist who tries to force people to
eat bread and meat when they are crying for sugar plums may as well
prepare to starve until the public begins to suffer from acute
indigestion. Then, if he isn't dead--or, perhaps, if he is--his hour
will come, and he will get his reward either here or in heaven."
"So you'll go on just the same and wait until they're ready for you?"
asked Susan, laughing from sheer pride in him. "You'll never, never
cheapen yourself, Oliver?" For the first time in her life she was face
to face with an intellectual passion, and she felt almost as if she
herself were inspired.
"Never. I've made my choice. I'll wait half a century if need be, but
I'll wait. I know, too, what I am talking about, for I could do the
other thing as easily as I could eat my dinner. I've got the trick of
it. I could make a fortune to-morrow if I were to lose my intellectual
honesty and go in simply for the making of money. Why, I am a Treadwell,
after all, just as you are, my dear cousin, and I could commercialize
the stage, I haven't a doubt, as successfully as your father has
commercialized the railroad. It's in the blood--the instinct, you
know--and the only thing that has kept it down in me is that I
sincerely--yes, I sincerely and enthusiastically believe that I am a
genius. If I didn't, do you think I'd stick at this starvation business
another fortnight? That's the whole story, every blessed word of it, and
I'm telling you because I feel expansive to-night--I'm such a tremendous
egoist, you know, and because--well, because you are Susan."
"I think I understand a little bit how you feel," replied Susan. "Of
course, I'm not a genius, but I've thought sometimes that I should
almost be willing to starve if only I might go to college."
Checking the words on his lips, he looked at her with sympathy. "It's a
shame you can't, but I suppose Uncle Cyrus won't hear of it."
"I haven't asked him, but I am going to do it. I am so afraid of a
refusal--and, of course, he'll refuse--that I've lacked the courage to
speak of it."
"Good God! Why is one generation left so absolutely at the mercy of the
other?" he demanded, turning back to the strip of sky over the roof. "It
makes a man rage to think of the lives that are spoiled for a whim.
Money, money--curse it!--it all comes to that in the end. Money makes us
and destroys us."
"Do you remember what father said to you the other night--that you would
come at last to what you called the property idea and be exactly like
James and himself?"
"If I thought that, I'd go out and hang myself. I can understand a man
selling his soul for drink, though I rarely touch a drop, or for women,
though I've never bothered about them, but never, not even in the last
extremity, for money."
A door creaked somewhere on the second floor and a minute afterwards the
slow and hesitating feet of Mrs. Treadwell were heard ascending the
stairs.
"Let her come in just a moment, Oliver," begged Susan, and her tone was
full of the impatient, slightly arrogant affection with which she
regarded her mother. There was little sympathy and less understanding
between them, but on Susan's side there was a feeling of protective
tenderness which was almost maternal. This tenderness was all her own,
while the touch of arrogance in her manner belonged to the universal
inability of youth to make allowances for age.
"Oh, well," said Oliver indifferently; and going to the door, he opened
it and stood waiting for Mrs. Treadwell to enter.
"I came up to ask if you wouldn't eat something, dear?" she asked. "But
I suppose Susan has brought you your supper?"
"He won't touch a morsel, mother; it is useless to ask him. He is going
away just as soon as we have finished packing."
"But where is he going? I didn't know that he had any place to go to."
"Oh, a man can always find a place somewhere."
"How can you take it so lightly, Susan," protested Mrs. Treadwell,
beginning to cry.
"That's the only sensible way to take it, isn't it, Oliver?" asked
Susan, gaily.
"Don't get into a fidget about me, Aunt Belinda," said Oliver, pushing
the pile of newspapers out of her way, while she sat down nervously on
the end of a packing-case and wiped her eyes on the fringe of her purple
shawl. The impulsive kindness with which he had spoken to her a few
hours before had vanished from his tone, and left in its place an accent
of irritation. His sympathy, which was never assumed, resulted so
entirely from his mood that it was practically independent of the person
or situation which appeared to inspire it. There were moments when,
because of a sensation of mental or physical well-being, he overflowed
with a feeling of tenderness for the beggar at the crossing; and there
were longer periods, following a sudden despondency, when the suffering
of his closest friend aroused in him merely a sense of personal outrage.
So complete, indeed, was his absorption in himself, that even his
philosophy was founded less upon an intellectual conception of the
universe than it was upon an intense preoccupation with his own
personality.
"But you don't mean that you are going for good?--that you'll never come
back to see Susan and me again?" whimpered his aunt, while her sagging
mouth trembled.
"You can't expect me to come back after the things Uncle Cyrus has said
to me."
A look so bitter that it was almost venomous crept into Mrs. Treadwell's
face. "He just did it to worry me, Oliver. He has done everything he
could think of to worry me ever since he persuaded me to marry him. I
sometimes believe," she added, gloating over the idea like a decayed
remnant of the aristocratic spirit, "that he has always been jealous of
me because I was born a Bolingbroke."
To Oliver, who had not like Susan grown accustomed through constant
repetition to Mrs. Treadwell's delusion, this appeared so fresh a view
of Cyrus's character, that it caught his interest even in the midst of
his own absorbing perplexities. Until he saw Susan's head shake
ominously over her mother's shoulder, it did not occur to him that his
aunt, whom he supposed to be without imagination, had created this
consoling belief out of her own mental vacancy.
"Oh, he wanted to worry me all right, there's no doubt about that," he
replied.
"He hasn't spoken to me when he could help it for twenty years," pursued
his aunt, who was so possessed by the idea of her own relation to her
husband that she was incapable of dwelling upon any other.
"I wouldn't talk about it, mother, if I were you," said Susan with
resolute cheerfulness.
"I don't know why I shouldn't talk about it. It's all I've got to talk
about," returned Mrs. Treadwell peevishly; and she added with smothered
resentment, "Even my children haven't been any comfort to me since they
were little. They've both turned against me because of the way their
father treats me. James hardly ever has so much as a word to say to me."
"But I do, mother. How can you say such an unkind thing to me?"
"You never do the things that I want you to. You know I'd like you to go
out and enjoy yourself and have attention as other girls do."
"You are disappointed because I'm not a belle like Abby Goode or Jinny
Pendleton," said Susan with the patience that is born of a basic sense
of humour. "But I couldn't help that, could I?"
"Any girl in my day would have felt badly if she wasn't admired,"
pursued Mrs. Treadwell with the venom of the embittered weak, "but I
don't believe you'd care a particle if a man never looked at you twice."
"If one never looked at me once, I don't see why you should want me to
be miserable about it," was Susan's smiling rejoinder; "and if the girls
in your day couldn't be happy without admiration, they must have been
silly creatures. I've a life of my own to live, and I'm not going to let
my happiness depend on how many times a man looks at me." In the clear
light of her ridicule, the spectre of spinsterhood, which was still an
object of dread in the Dinwiddie of the eighties, dissolved into a
shadow.
"Well, we've about finished, I believe," remarked Oliver, closing the
case over which he was stooping, and devoutly thanking whatever
beneficent Powers had not created him a woman. "I'll send for these
sometime to-morrow, Aunt Belinda."
"You'd just as well spend the night," urged Mrs. Treadwell stubbornly.
"He need never know of it."
"But I'd know of it--that's the great thing--and I'd never forget it."
Rising unsteadily from the box, she stood with the ends of her purple
shawl clutched tightly over her flat bosom. "Then you'll wait just a
minute. I've got something downstairs I'd like to give you," she said.
"Why, of course, but won't you let me fetch it?"
"You'd never find it," she answered mysteriously, and hurried out while
he held the door open to light her down the dark staircase.
When her tread was heard at last on the landing below, Susan glanced at
the books that were still left on the shelves. "I'll pack the rest for
you to-morrow, Oliver, and your clothes, too. Have you any money?"
"A little left from selling my watch in New York. My clothes don't
amount to much. I've got them all in that bag, but I'll leave my books
in your charge until I can find a place for them."
"I'll take good care of them. O Oliver!" her face grew disturbed. "I
forgot all about my promise to Virginia that I'd bring you to see her
to-night."
"Well, I've no time to meet girls now, of course, but that doesn't mean
that I'm not awfully knocked up about it."
"I hate so to disappoint her."
"She won't think of it twice, the beauty!"
"But she will. I'm sure she will. Hush! Mother is coming."
As he turned to the door, it opened slowly to admit the figure of his
aunt, who was panting heavily from her hurried ascent of the stairs. Her
ill-humour toward Susan had entirely disappeared, for the only
resentment she had ever harboured for more than a few minutes was the
life-long one which she had borne her husband.
"It was not in the place where I had put it, so I thought one of the
servants had taken it," she explained. "Mandy was alone in my room
to-day while I was at dinner."
In her hand she held a small pasteboard box bearing a jeweller's
imprint, and opening this, she took out a roll of money and counted out
fifty dollars on the top of a packing-case. "I've saved this up for six
months," she said. "It came from selling some silver forks that belonged
to the Bolingbrokes, and I always felt easier to think that I had a
little laid away that he had nothing to do with. From the very day that
I married him, he was always close about money," she added.
The sordid tragedy--not of poverty, but of meanness--was in the gesture
with which she gathered up the notes and pressed them into his shrinking
hands. And yet Cyrus Treadwell was a rich man--the richest man living in
Dinwiddie! Oliver understood now why she was crushed--why she had become
the hopeless victim of the little troubles of life. "From the very day
of our marriage, he was always close about money."
"I had three dozen forks and spoons in the beginning," she resumed as if
there were no piercing significance in the fact she stated so simply,
"but I've sold them all now, one or two at a time, when I needed a
little money of my own. He has always paid the bills, but he never gave
me a cent in my life to do as I pleased with."
"I can't take it from you, Aunt Belinda. It would burn my fingers."
"It's mine. I've got a right to do as I choose with it," she persisted
almost passionately, "and I'd rather give it to you than buy anything in
the world." Something in her face--the look of one who has risen to a
generous impulse and finds happiness in the sacrifice--checked the hand
with which he was thrusting the money away from him. He was deeply
touched by her act; it was useless for him to pretend either to her or
to himself that she had not touched him. The youth in him, unfettered,
strong, triumphant, pitied her because she was no longer young; the
artist in him pitied her because she was no longer beautiful. Without
these two things, or at least one of these two, what was life worth to a
woman?
"I'll take it on condition that you'll let me pay it back as soon as I
get out of debt to Uncle Cyrus," he said in obedience to Susan's
imploring nod.
To this she agreed after an ineffectual protest. "You needn't think
about paying it back to me," she insisted; "I haven't anything to spend
money on now, so it doesn't make much difference whether I have any or
not. I can help you a little more after a while," she finished with
enthusiasm. "I'm raising a few squabs out in the back yard, and Meadows
is going to buy them as soon as they are big enough to eat."
An embarrassment out of all proportion to the act which produced it held
him speechless while he gazed at her. He felt at first merely a sense of
physical revolt from the brutality of her self-revelation--from the
nakedness to which she had stripped the horror of her marriage under the
eyes of her daughter. Nothing, not even the natural impulse to screen
one's soul from the gaze of the people with whom one lived, had
prevented the appalling indignity of this exposure. The delusion that it
is possible for a woman by mere virtue of being a woman to suffer in
sweetness and silence, evaporated as he looked at her. He had believed
her to be a nonentity, and she was revealing an inner life as intense,
as real, as acutely personal as his own. A few words of casual kindness
and he had made a slave of her. He regretted it. He was embarrassed. He
was sorry. He wished to heaven she hadn't brought him the money--and yet
in spite of his regret and his embarrassment, he was profoundly moved.
It occurred to him as he took it from her how easy it would have been
for Cyrus to have subjugated and satisfied her in the beginning. All it
needed was a little kindness, the cheapest virtue, and the tragedy of
her ruined soul might have been averted. To make allowances! Ah, that
was the philosophy of human relations in a word! If men and women would
only stop judging each other and make allowances!
"Well, I shan't starve just yet, thanks to you, Aunt Belinda," he said
cheerfully enough as he thrust the notes into his pocket. It was a small
thing, after all, to make her happy by the sacrifice of his pride. Pride
was not, he remembered, included among the Christian virtues, and,
besides, as he told himself the next instant, trifling as the sum was,
it would at least tide him over financially until he received the next
payment for his reviewing. "I'd better go, it's getting late," he said
with a return of his old gaiety, while he bent over to kiss her. He was
half ashamed of the kiss--not because he was self-conscious about
kissing, since he had long since lost that mark of provincialism--but
because of the look of passionate gratitude which glowed in her face.
Gratitude always made him uncomfortable. It was one of the things he was
forever evading and yet forever receiving. He hated it, he had never in
his life done anything to deserve it, but he could never escape it.
"Good-bye, Susan." His lips touched hers, and though he was moving only
a few streets away, the caress contained all the solemnity of a last
parting. Words wouldn't come when he searched for them, and the bracing
sense of power he had felt half an hour ago was curiously mingled now
with an enervating tenderness. He was still confident of himself, but he
became suddenly conscious that these women were necessary to his
happiness and his success, that his nature demanded the constant daily
tonic of their love and service. He understood now the primal necessity
of woman, not as an individual, but as an incentive and an appendage to
the dominant personality of man.
"Send for me if you need me," said Susan, resting her loving eyes upon
him; "and, Oliver, please promise me to be very careful about money."
"I'll be careful, never fear!" he replied with a laugh, as he took up
his bag and opened the door. A few minutes later, when he was leaving
the house, he reflected that the fifty dollars in his pocket would keep
life in him for a considerable time in Dinwiddie.