When the studio door closed upon the emissary of the trust company, the
young couple looked at each other a little ruefully. Archie kicked over
a chair or two and expressed himself volubly, now that it was safe, upon
the priggishness and meanness of such folks as Mr. Solomon Smith. Adelle
might wish that he had expressed himself in these vigorous terms
earlier, when there could have been discussion and a chance of modifying
Mr. Smith's decision. But she realized how raw he was feeling from the
old gentleman's contempt and sweetly put her arms around her husband's
strong shoulders and kissed him tenderly.
"It won't be so bad, Archie," she said hopefully. "We'll get on somehow,
I expect, and it isn't forever--not two years." She could recall much
graver crises in life than being compelled to live for eighteen months
with an adored companion on seventy-five hundred dollars, and people
somehow survived them.
"It isn't just the money," Archie protested, a little shamed, but still
grumpy. "It's his rotten talk. A feller doesn't like being called all
sorts of names."
"Well, he's gone now and he won't come back," Adelle remarked
soothingly, with another effort to caress her young lord into amiability
and resignation to fate. That proved more difficult than usual: Archie
felt the sting of the older man's taunts, especially the horrid word
"adventurer" rankled in his subconsciousness. He saw himself reflected
in the opinion of other men,--at least of stodgy, middle-aged men like
Mr. Smith, who worked hard for what they got and had families,--and it
ruffled him seriously. He was not in a happy temper otherwise. A
fortnight of conjugal picnicking in the perpetual society of Adelle,
whose conversational powers were limited, had chafed him. So Adelle had
her first experience in that woman's pathetic task of endeavoring to
soothe and harmonize the disturbed soul of her lord, who, she is aware,
has only himself to blame for his state of spiritual discomfiture. But
Adelle, like all her sisters who love, since the world began, rose nobly
to her part.
Finally, they sallied forth and with some money that Adelle had
contrived to extract, probably from the sale of another piece of real
jewelry, they consoled themselves with an elaborate dinner at a famous
restaurant in the Champs Elysees, and as it was a warm evening drove
afterwards out to the Bois. The next day Adelle ventured forth to the
bankers alone, and secured the first quarterly installment of the funds
left there to her account by the prim Mr. Smith. With the notes and gold
she hastened back to Archie, and the couple began to plan seriously for
the future.
It is not my purpose to follow the pair in their erratic course during
the next eighteen months, although it had its ludicrous as well as
pathetic steps. That they were not ready for any sort of matrimonial
partnership, is of course obvious, but as they shared their disability
with a goodly proportion of young married people the world over, it does
not count. Adelle, being the woman, learned her lesson more quickly than
Archie, and under conceivable circumstances might have made as much of a
success with her rash choice, in spite of Mr. Smith's prophecies, as
many others make with their more prudently premeditated ones. She wanted
to be married, and on the whole she was content when she got what she
wanted,--at least, in the beginning,--which is the essential condition
of marital comfort. But Archie had not by any means been as anxious to
tie himself up for good as Adelle had been, and was more restive with
what he found marriage to a rich--at least, expectantly rich--wife to
be.
In a blind effort to find a congenial environment, they moved about over
the map a good deal. First they went to Venice, of which Adelle
especially had rosy memories associated with the dawn of love. They took
a furnished apartment in an old palace over the Canal, and set up four
swarthy, muscled rowers in blue sashes. Venice has been for many
generations the haven of love, especially of irregular or illicit love:
but its attraction evaporates swiftly after the ceremony has taken
place. No spot where the male cannot stretch himself and get away from
domesticity for a few hours is safe except for the diviner, more
ecstatic forms of passion. In a few weeks the couple became deadly bored
with Venice and its picture postcard replica of life. At Archie's
suggestion they next sought Munich, where some of his artist
acquaintance had settled.
This was an atmosphere of work, more or less, and Adelle amused herself
by thinking that she and her husband were members of that glorious band
of free lances of art. They took a studio apartment and set up their
crafts jointly. If either had had the real stuff of the artist, it might
have gone well; but two idle and rather uninformed persons in the same
studio produce disaster. Munich soon became an affair of beer, skittles,
and music in company with the more careless spirits that gathered there
that winter. Among them happened to be Sadie Paul.
A good deal had happened to the California sisters, and as the "two
Pols" will come into Adelle's life later on, their story can be briefly
given here. Irene, the sister who had brutally betrayed Adelle in a
spirit of careless mischief, had attracted with her ripe California
charm a young Englishman of family. Mr. Hermann Paul, the "San Francisco
railroad man" referred to by Miss Comstock, meantime had died, and Irene
had gone home to join her mother and younger brothers and ultimately was
married to her Englishman. She divided her time thereafter about equally
between England and the new earthly paradise of the Pacific. Her sister
Sadie had determined to remain in Europe, under other chaperonage than
Pussy Comstock. It was rumored that a young Hungarian nobleman was
hanging somewhere in the horizon, but for the present she played about
with Adelle and Archie. Apparently Sadie Paul did not share her sister's
prejudices about "the red-headed bounder," for she flirted unconcernedly
with Archie as far as he would go, which to do Archie justice was not
dangerously far. Adelle, good-natured and easy-going by disposition,
welcomed the return of her old school friend and was not in the least
disturbed by her flirtatious attempts with Archie. That sort of amorous
pretense was more or less the habit of the world she had known, and
besides, she was aware that Sadie was "having a desperate affair" with
Count Zornec, the Hungarian referred to above, who was temporarily
exiled to his remote estate. Indeed, she became the means of furthering
this passion and speeding it to its destined end in matrimony, which has
to do with a subsequent part of our tale....
To return to the wanderings of Adelle and Archie, in the Easter holidays
they left Munich for Switzerland for the winter sports, and in the
spring Archie conceiving the idea that he wanted to do Dutch landscape,
they went to Holland for a few weeks. That summer they rented a small
villa along the Bay of Biscay and had Sadie Paul and her Count as their
guests for a time. The second winter of their marriage they spent in
Paris, and by this time were rather hard-pressed for ready money, as
neither had relaxed in wanting things and Adelle especially still had
the habit of buying whatever attracted her attention,--bright-colored
stuffs, jewels, and useless odds and ends of bric-a-brac, with the idea
that sometime they should want to establish themselves permanently
somewhere and purchases would all come in usefully. It was much as a
bird gathers sticks, straws, and bright-colored threads, but in Adelle
it was an expensive instinct. Towards the end of their period of
probation, they had to get aid from money-lenders, to whom Sadie Paul
introduced them. Adelle did not find it difficult to raise money on her
expectations, at a stiff rate of interest, and thus the object of the
Puritan Mr. Smith was defeated. It would have pained his thrifty
banker's soul had he known that the trust company's ward was gayly
paying ten and fifteen percent for "temporary accommodation," while her
own funds were barely earning five per cent in the careful investments
of the trust company! When Adelle finally got hold of her fortune, a
goodly sum had to be paid over to settle the claims of these obliging
money-lenders....
Of the quarrels, big and little, that the young couple had these first
months it is useless to speak. Thus far they were neither excessively
severe nor dangerously frequent--no worse, perhaps, than the average
idle couple must create in love's readjustment to prosaic fact. Adelle
no longer believed that her Archie would be the great painter that she
had once fondly dreamed of helping him to become. He was too lazy and
fond of good things to eat and drink and other sensual rewards of life
to become distinguished in anything, unless perchance he were well
starved into discipline. His present life of comparative ease and
expected wealth was the very worst thing for him as man and as artist.
Like an over-fertilized plant he went to leaf and bore little fruit. And
thus again Clark's Field, with its delayed expectations, had a baleful
influence upon a new generation of human beings. The Davises had just
enough money to wander loose over Europe, disturbed, as Addie had once
been disturbed, by the hope of a more golden future.
Adelle herself was content not to work hard at the manufacture of
jewelry, although if she had been encouraged, she might have become
almost second-rate in this minor art. She, too, was indolent, if not by
disposition, by training, and Europe offers abundant distraction of a
semi-intellectual sort to fill the days of people like Archie and
Adelle. To loaf herself was not so fatal for Adelle as to acquiesce in
Archie's loafing, to accept the parasitic notion for her man that
obtained in the easy-going circles she knew. "Oh, well," she said to
Sadie, "why should Archie work if he doesn't want to?"
Sadie saw no reason and suggested,--"There isn't one of those painters
who would stick at it if he didn't have to."
Like all poor people, they hadn't any luck; that was her idea. And
Adelle cultivated another dangerous conception of marriage.
"It's enough for me if he's good to me and loves me--I have plenty of
money for us both."
In other words, she thought that she should be satisfied to keep her
lover always as an appanage of her magic lamp, to maintain a human being
and a male human being as she might maintain a motor-car or an estate or
a stable, as something desirable and pleasurable, contributing to her
happiness,--the privilege of her fortunate position as a woman of means.
There were many rich women who had that idea or cultivated it as a
solace to their defeated souls.
"Isn't he a dear?" she would say to Sadie Paul in these moments of proud
consciousness of possession; and conversely she would say sternly when
some case of masculine errancy was brought to her notice,--"If Archie
treated me like that, he'd find his bag packed and sitting outside the
door!"
So she was very fussy about her husband's appearance,--his dress and
manners and appointments; and insisted upon giving him every accessory
of luxury, everything that rich men supposably enjoy. As her nearest and
dearest possession, she was more concerned with his brave appearance
than she was with her own. She "dolled" him up, as Sadie Paul laughingly
called it. "Isn't he cunning?" was one of her common expressions of
marital happiness. Occasionally, in more serious moods, she might talk
largely about Archie's "going into business" when they "got their
money," but as time went on and Archie displayed little aptitude for
managing money, she talked less about this. Adelle would have been
content to buy the Basque villa they had rented and establish herself
and Archie there in complete idleness and luxury, provided he would
always be "good" to her, by which she meant faithful to those
unconsidered marriage vows made in the Paris consulate, and not too
cross.
And thus Archie and Adelle drifted on towards that great date of their
complete emancipation from control, when all the riches of Clark's
Field, now accumulating in the trust company's pool, should be handed
over to them. That would be, indeed, the ultimate crisis for the old
Field, when, having been finally transmuted into coin of the realm, it
should cease to have an entity or any personal relation with the Clark
race!
Meantime Archie and Adelle were not vicious, though Archie drank too
much for his digestion and was often peevish in consequence, and Adelle
was almost aimless and lazy enough to be described as vicious. Yet they
were no worse than many, many other well-to-do young persons with no
deep roots, no permanent incentives, no profound passions to give them
significance. Likely enough they might have ended in some charming
English country house, or Roman palace, or pink-and-white villa along
the Mediterranean,--if their fate had not been still involved with
Clark's Field. They would have become perfectly respectable, utterly
negligible modern citizens of the world,--the infertile by-product of a
rich civilization with its perfected machinery for the preservation of
accumulated wealth. There are more Archies and Adelles about us than is
commonly recognized: they are on all our calling-lists, in every
European capital or congregation of expensive country homes. Their names
stud the "blue books" and the "red books" of conventional "society."
They fill the great hotels and the mammoth steamships. They, in sum,
make up a large part of that fine fruit of civilization for which the
immense majority toil, and for whom serious people plan and legislate,
for whom laws are interpreted and trust companies formed in order to
handle the money they themselves are incapable of controlling usefully,
even of safely preserving....
Archie and Adelle were hungry at this period for more money and felt
themselves martyrized by the whim of an ill-natured old man who had
arbitrarily made them wait to be wholly happy. They talked perpetually
about what they should do with themselves "after" the great event,--the
sort of touring-car they should buy, the kind of establishment they
should keep, the best place to live in, etc. It must be somewhere in
Europe, of course, for neither was eager to return to America "where
everybody worked and there was nothing fit to eat," according to Archie.
Adelle's ideas of America, never extensive, were growing dimmer every
season, and the occasional friends who returned from the other shore
described their native land in unflattering terms. Adelle thought that
every American who could lived as much of the time as possible somewhere
in Europe, but she did not think much about it at this time.
They had no children. Adelle had no objections to child-bearing and
expected "sometime" to have "two or three" children. Archie thought
there would be plenty of time for that "later on" when they had their
money. Adelle was still very young, and in the present wandering state
of their life children would be a nuisance.
Finally they were neither happy nor unhappy. Restless was the adjective
that described them most closely. Their bodies and stomachs and nerves
and minds and souls were always in a state of disequilibrium, and they
were feeling about for equilibrium like blind kittens without forming
any successful plan of extricating themselves from their subconscious
state of dissatisfaction. With another order of gray matter in their
brains either one might have produced out of this disequilibrium some
fine, rare flower of form or color or words. But Archie's gray matter,
like Adelle's, was not expressive.
Their friends thought them happy as well as fortunate. Sadie Paul
reported to her sister and Eveline Glynn,--"Dell is crazy about her
Archie--she won't let him out of her sight. He's not such a bad sort,
but fearfully stuck on himself, just because Dell pets him so."
Adelle, as she frequently told Archie, infinitely preferred her choice
to Sadie's "Black-and-Tan," as she called the Count Zornec.
This was their state after eighteen months of married life.