THE MOTH AND THE FLAME
Several weeks after this, on the day that Trent's first play was
accepted, he dropped in to Adams' office, where the editor was busily
giving directions about the coming _Review_.
"I know you aren't in a mood for interruptions," began the younger man,
in a voice which, in spite of his effort at control, still quivered with
a boyish excitement, "but I couldn't resist coming to tell you that
Benson has at last held out his hand. I'm to be put on in the autumn."
Adams laid down the manuscript upon which he was engaged, and turned
with the winning smile which Trent had grown to look for and to love.
"Well, that is jolly news," he said heartily, "you know without my
saying so that there is no one in New York who is more interested in
your success than I am. We'll make a fine first night of it."
"That's why I dropped in to tell you," responded Trent, while his
youthful enthusiasm made Adams feel suddenly as old as failure. "I came
about a week ago, by the way, but that shock-headed chap at the door
told me you were out of town."
Adams nodded as he picked up the manuscript again.
"I took Mrs. Adams south," he replied. "Her health had given way."
"So I heard, but I hope she's well again by now?"
"Oh, she's very much better, but one never knows, of course, how long
one can manage to keep one's health in this climate. I hate to make you
hurry off," he added, as the other rose from his chair.
"I want to carry my good news to Miss Wilde," rejoined Treat. "Do you
know, she was asking about you only the other day."
"Is that so? I've hardly had time for a word with her for three weeks.
Mrs. Adams has not been well and I've kept very closely at home ever
since I got back. Will you tell her this from me? It's a nuisance, isn't
it, that life is so short one never has time, somehow, for one's real
pleasures? Now, Laura Wilde is one of my real pleasures," he pursued,
with his quiet humour, "so when there's a sacrifice to be made, its
always the pleasure instead of the business that goes overboard. Oh,
it's a tremendous pity, of course, but then so many things are that, you
know, and its confoundedly difficult, after all, to edit a magazine and
still keep human."
The winning smile shone out again, and Treat noticed how it transfigured
the worn, sallow face under the thin brown hair.
"Well, you may comfort yourself with the reflection that it's easy to be
human but hard to edit a magazine," laughed the younger man, adding, as
he went toward the door and paused near the threshold, "I haven't seen
you, by the way, since Miss Wilde's last poems are out. Don't you agree
with me that her 'Prelude' is the biggest thing she's done as yet?"
"The biggest--yes, but there's no end to my belief in her, you know,"
said Adams. "She'll live to go far beyond this, and I'm glad to see that
her work is winning slowly. Every now and then one runs across a rare
admirer."
"And she is as kind as she is gifted," remarked Trent fervently. Then he
made his way through the assistant editors in the outer office, and
hastened with his prodigious news to Gramercy Park.
Laura was alone, and after sending up his name he followed the servant
to her study on the floor above, where he found her working with a
pencil, as she sat before a brightly burning wood fire, over a
manuscript which he saw to his surprise was not in verse. At his glance
of enquiry she smiled and laid the typewritten pages carelessly aside.
"No, it's not mine," she said. "They're several short stories which Mr.
Kemper did many years ago, and he's asked me to look over them. I find,
by the way, that they need a great deal of recasting."
"Is it possible," he exclaimed in amazement, "that you allow people to
bore you with stuff like that?"
The smile which flickered almost imperceptibly across her lips mystified
him completely, and he drew his chair a little nearer that he might
bring himself directly beneath her eyes.
"Oh, well, I don't mind it once in a while," she returned, "though he
hasn't in the very least the literary sense."
"But I wasn't aware that you even knew him," he persisted, puzzled.
"It doesn't take long to know some people," she retorted gayly; then as
her eyes rested upon his face, she spoke with one of her sympathetic
flashes of insight: "You've come to bring me good news about the play,"
she said. "Benson has accepted it--am I not right?"
"I'm jolly glad to say you are!" he assented with enthusiasm. "It will
be put on in the autumn and Benson has suggested Katie Hanska for the
leading rôle."
His voice died out in a joyous tremor, and he sat looking at her with
all the sparkles in his young blue eyes.
"I am glad," said Laura, and she stretched out her hand, which closed
warmly upon his. "I can't tell you--it's useless to try--how overjoyed I
am."
"I knew you'd be," he answered softly, while his grateful glance
caressed her. The triumph of the day--which seemed to him prophetic of
the triumph of the future--went suddenly to his head, and in some
strange presentiment he felt that his emotion for Laura was bound up and
made a part of his success in literature. He could not, try as he
would--disassociate her from her books, nor her books from his, and as
he sat there in ecstatic silence, with his eyes on her slender figure in
its soft black gown, he told himself that the morning's happy promise
united them in a close, an indissoluble bond of fellowship. He saw her
always under the literary glamour--he felt the full charm of the poetic
genius--the impassioned idealism which she expressed, and it became
almost impossible for him to detach the personality of the woman herself
from the personality of the writer whom he felt, after all, to be the
more intimately vivid of the two.
"I knew you'd be," he repeated, and this time he spoke with a passionate
assurance. "If you hadn't been I'd have found the whole thing
worthless."
She looked up still smiling, and he watched her large, beautiful
forehead, on which the firelight played as on a mirror. "Well, one's
friends do add zest to the pleasure," she returned.
For a moment he hesitated; then leaning forward he spoke with a
desperate resolve. "One's friends--yes--but you have been more than a
friend to me since the beginning--since the first day. You have been
everything. I could not have lived without you."
He saw her curved brows draw quickly together, and she bent upon him a
look in which he read pity, surprise and a slight tinge of amusement.
"Oh, you poor boy, is it possible that you imagine all this?" she asked.
"I imagine nothing," he answered with a wounded and despairing
indignation, "but I have loved you--I have dreamed of you--I have lived
for you since the first moment that I saw you."
"Then you have been behaving very foolishly," she commented, "for what
you are in love with is a shadow--a poem, a fancy that isn't myself at
all. The real truth is," she pursued, with a decision which cut him to
the heart, "that you are in love with a literary reputation and you
imagine that it's a woman. Why, I'm not only older than you in years,
I'm older in soul, older in a thousand lives. There is nothing foolish
about me, nothing pink and white and fleshly perfect--nothing that a
boy like you could hold to for a day--"
She broke off and sat staring into the fire with a troubled and brooding
look--a look which seemed to lose the fact of his presence in some more
absorbing vision at which she gazed. He noticed even in his misery that
she had suffered during the last few weeks an obscure, a mysterious
change--it was as if the flame-like suggestion, which had always
belonged to her personality, had of late gathered warmth, light,
effectiveness, consuming, as it strengthened, whatever had been passive
or without definite purpose in her nature. Her face seemed to him more
than ever to be without significance judged by a purely physical
standard--more than ever he felt it to be but a delicate and sympathetic
medium for the expression of some radiant quality of soul.
"I did not know--I would not have believed that you could be so cruel,"
he protested with bitterness.
"I can be anything," she answered slowly, drawing her gaze with an
effort from the fire. "Most women can."
The glory of the morning passed from him as suddenly as it had come, and
he told himself with the uncompromising desperation of youth that for
all he cared now his great play might remain forever in oblivion. Life
itself appeared as empty--as futile as his ambition--so empty, indeed,
that he began immediately in the elastic melancholy which comes easily
at twenty-five--to plan the consoling details of an early death. When he
remembered his buoyant happiness of a few hours ago it seemed to him
almost ridiculous, and he experienced a curious sensation of
detachment, of having drifted out of his proper and peculiar place in
life. "I shall never be happy again and I am no longer the same person
that I was yesterday--or even a half hour ago," he thought with a
determination to be completely miserable. Yet even while the words were
in his mind he found himself weighing almost instinctively the literary
value of his new emotion, and to his horror the situation in which he
now stood began slowly to take a dramatic form in his mental vision. The
very attitude into which he had unconsciously fallen--as he paused with
his face averted and his hand tightening with violence upon a book he
had picked up--showed to his imagination as a bit of restrained
emotional acting beyond the footlights.
"Then there's nothing I can do but go straight to the devil," he
declared with resolution, and at the same instant he found to his
supreme self-contempt that he was wondering how the speech would sound
in the mouth of an actor in his drama.
"Or write another play," suggested Laura, while he started quickly and
turned toward the door.
"I'll never write another," he said in a voice of gloom, which he tried
with all his soul to make an honest expression of his state of mind. "I
wish now I hadn't written this one. I wouldn't if I'd known."
"Then it's just as well that you didn't," she returned with a positive
motherly assurance. "My poor dear boy," she added soothingly, "you are
not the first man of twenty-five who has mistaken the literary mania for
the passion of love, and I fear that you will not be the last. There
seems, curiously enough, to be a strange resemblance between the two
emotions. If you'd only look at me plainly without any of your lovely
glamour you'll see in a minute what nonsense it all is. Why, you are all
the time in your heart of hearts in love with some little blonde thing
with pink cheeks who is still at school."
He turned away in a passion of wounded pride; then coming back again he
stood looking moodily down upon her.
"I'll prove to you if it kills me that I've spoken the truth," he
declared, and it seemed to him that the words were not really what he
meant to say--that they came from him against his will because he had
fitted them into the mouth of an imaginary character.
"Oh, please don't," she begged.
"I suppose I may still see you sometimes?" he enquired.
"Oh, dear, yes; whenever you like."
Then while he stood there, hesitating and indignant, the servant brought
her a card, and as she took it from the tray, he saw a flush that was
like a pale flame overspread her face.
"It's Mr. Kemper now," she said. "Why will you not stay and be good and
forget?"
"I'd rather meet the devil himself at this minute," he cried in a boyish
rage that brought tears to his eyes. "It seems to me that I spend half
my life getting out of his way."
"But don't you like him?" she enquired curiously. "Every one likes him,
I think."
"Well, I'm not every one," he blurted out angrily, "for I think him a
consummate, thickheaded ass."
"Good heavens!" she gayly ejaculated, "what a character you give him."
Then, as he was leaving the room, she reached out, and taking his hand,
drew him against his will, back to his chair. "You shall not go like
this--I'll not have it," she said. "Do you think I am a stone that I can
bear to spoil all your beautiful triumph. Here, sit down and I promise
to make you like both him and me."
As she finished, Kemper came in with his energetic step and his genial
greeting, and she introduced the two men with a little flattering smile
in Trent's direction. "You have the honour to meet our coming
playwright," she added with a gracious gesture, skilfully turning the
conversation upon the younger man's affairs, while she talked on with a
sweetness which at once distracted and enraged him. He listened to her
at first moodily and then with an attention which, in spite of his
resolution, was fixed upon the fine points of his play as she made now
and then friendly suggestions as to the interpretations of particular
lines or scenes. The charming deference in her voice soothed his ruffled
vanity and it seemed to him presently that the flattering intoxication
of her praise sent his imagination spinning among the stars.
Kemper listened to it all with an intelligent and animated interest, and
when he spoke, as he did from time to time, it was to put a sympathetic
question which dismissed Trent's darling prejudice into the region of
departed errors. To have held out against the singular attraction of the
man, would have been, Trent thought a little later, the part of a
perverse and stiffnecked fool. It was not only that he succumbed to
Kemper's magnetism, but that he recognised his sincerity--his utter lack
of the dissimulation he had once believed him to possess. Then, as
Kemper sat in the square of sunlight which fell through the bow window,
Trent noticed each plain, yet impressive detail of his appearance. He
saw the peculiar roughness of finish which lent weight, if not beauty,
to his remarkably expressive face, and he saw, too, with an eye trained
to attentive observation, that the dark brown hair, so thick upon the
forehead and at the back of the neck, had already worn thin upon the
crown of the large, well-turned head. "In a few years he will begin to
be bald," thought the younger man, "then he will put on glasses, and yet
these things will not keep him from appealing to the imaginary ideal of
romance which every woman must possess. Even when he is old he will
still have the power to attract, if he cannot keep the fancy." But the
bitterness had gone out of his thoughts, and a little later, when he
left the house and walked slowly homeward, he discovered that a hopeless
love might lend a considerable sweetness to a literary life. After all,
he concluded, one might warm oneself at the flame, and yet neither
possess it utterly nor be destroyed.
His mother sat knitting by the window when he entered the apartment, and
he saw that the table was already laid for dinner in the adjoining room.
"I ordered dinner a little earlier for you," she explained as she laid
aside the purple shawl while the ball of yarn slipped from her short,
plump knees and rolled under the chair in which she sat. Never in his
recollection had he seen her put aside her knitting that the ball did
not roll from her lap upon the floor, and now as he stooped to follow
the loosened skein, he wondered vaguely how she had been able to fill
her life with so trivial and monotonous an employment.
"I wish you could get out," he said, as he sat down on a footstool at
her feet and leaned his head affectionately against her knees. "I don't
believe you've had a breath of air for a month."
"Why, I never went out of doors in the snow in my life," she responded,
"at least not since I was a child--and it always snows here except when
it rains. Do you know," she pursued, with one of her mild glances of
curiosity through the window, "I can't imagine how the people in that
big apartment over there ever manage to get through the day. Why, the
woman stays in bed every morning until eleven o'clock and then the maid
brings her something like chocolate on a tray. She wears such beautiful
wrappers, too, I really don't see how she can be entirely proper, and
then she seems to fly in such rages with her husband. There are some
children, I believe," she went on with increasing animation, "but they
are never allowed to set foot in her room, and this afternoon when she
dressed to go out I saw her try on at least four different hats and
every single one of them green."
"Poor creature!" observed Trent, with a laugh, "it must be worse than
living under the omnipresent eye of Providence. By the way, I told the
man to come up and have a look at the radiator. Did he do it?"
She laid her large, plump hand upon his head with a touch that was as
soft as her ball of yarn.
"The manager came himself," she replied, "but we got to talking and
after I found out how much trouble he had had in life--he lost his wife
and two little boys all in one year--I didn't like to say anything about
the heating. I was afraid it would hurt his feelings to find I had a
complaint to make--he seemed so very nice and obliging. And, after all,"
she concluded amiably, "the rooms do get quite warm, you know, just
about the time we are ready to go to bed, so all I need to do is to wear
my cloak a little while when I first get up in the morning. It will be a
very good way to make some use of it, for I never expect to go out of
doors again in this climate."
"You'll have to go once," he said gayly, "to the first rehearsal of my
play. You can't afford to miss it."
"Oh, I'll muffle up well on that occasion," she answered. "Did you see
Mr. Benson this morning? and what did he say to you?"
"A great deal--he was quite enthusiastic--for _him_, you know."
"I wonder what he is like," she murmured with her large, sweet
seriousness. "Is he married, and has he any children?"
"I didn't investigate. You see I was more interested in my own affairs.
He wants Katie Hanska to take the leading part. You may have seen her
picture--it was in one of the magazines I brought you."
"Did you enquire anything about her?" she asked earnestly, "I mean about
her character and her bringing up. I couldn't bear to have the part
played by any but a pure woman, and they tell me that so many actresses
aren't--aren't quite that. Before you consent I hope you'll find out
very particularly about the life she has led."
"Oh, I dare say she's all right," he remarked, with the affectionate
patience which was one of his more amiable characteristics. "At any rate
she has the mettle for the rôle."
"I hope she's good," said his mother softly, and she added after a
moment, "do you remember that poor Christina Coles I was telling you
about not long ago?"
"Why, yes," replied Trent; "the pretty girl with the blue eyes and the
uncompromising manner? What's become of her, I wonder?"
"I fear," began his mother, while she lowered her voice and glanced
timidly around as if she were on the point of a shameful disclosure, "I
honestly fear that she is starving."
"Starving!" exclaimed St. George, in horror, and he sprang to his feet
as if he meant to plunge at once into a work of rescue. "Why, how long
has she been about it?"
"I know she has stopped coming to see me because her clothes are so
shabby," returned Mrs. Trent, with what seemed to him a calmness that
was almost cruel, "and the charwoman tells me that she lives on next to
nothing--a loaf of baker's bread and a bit of cheese for dinner. It
takes all the little money she can rake and scrape together to pay her
room rent--for it seems that the papers have stopped publishing her
stories."
"For God's sake, let's do something--let's do it quickly," exclaimed
Trent, in an agony of sympathy.
"I was just thinking that you might run up and see if she would come
down to dine with us," said the old lady; "it really makes me miserable
to feel that she doesn't get even enough to eat."
"Why, I'll go before I dress--I'll go this very minute," declared the
young man. "Shall I tell her that we dine in half an hour or do you
think, if she's so very hungry, you might hurry it up a bit?"
"In half an hour--she'll want a little time," replied his mother, and
she added presently, "but she's so proud, poor thing, that I don't
believe she'll come."
The words were said softly, but had they been spoken in a louder tone,
Trent would not have heard them for he had already hastened from the
room.
In response to his knock, Christina opened her door almost immediately,
and when she recognised him a look of surprise appeared upon her face.
"Won't you come in?" she asked, drawing slightly aside with a politeness
which he felt to be an effort to her, "my room is not very orderly, but
perhaps you will not mind?"
She wore a simple cotton blouse, the sleeves of which were a little
rumpled as if they had been rolled up above her elbows, and her skirt of
some ugly brown stuff was shabby and partly frayed about the edges--but
when she looked at him with her sincere blue eyes, he forgot the
disorder of her dress in the touching pathos of her gallant little
figure. She was very pretty, he saw, in a fragile yet resolute way--like
a child that is possessed of a will of iron--and because of her
prettiness he found himself resenting her literary failures with an
acute personal resentment. The tenderness of his sympathy seemed to
increase rather than diminish his hopeless love for Laura, and while he
gazed at Christina's flower-like eyes and smooth brown hair, which shone
like satin, there stole over him a poetic melancholy that was altogether
pleasant. It was as if he had suddenly discovered a companion in his
unhappiness, and he thought all at once that it would be charming to
pour the sorrows of his love into the pretty ears hidden so quaintly
under the smooth brown hair. Love, at the moment, appeared to him
chiefly as something to be talked about--an emotion which one might turn
effectively into the spoken phrase.
She drew back into the room and he followed her while his sympathetic
glance dwelt upon the sleeping couch under its daytime covering of
cretonne, upon the small gas stove on which a kettle boiled, upon the
cupboard, the dressing table, the desk at which she wrote, and the torn
and mended curtains before the single window. Though she neither
apologised nor showed in her manner the faintest embarrassment, he felt
instinctively that her fierce maidenly pride was putting her to torture.
"I came with a message from my mother," he hastened to explain as he
stood beside her on the little strip of carpet before the gas stove,
"she sends me to beg that you will dine with us this evening as a
particular favour to her. She is so much alone, you know, that a young
visitor is just what she needs."
Christina continued to regard him, as she had done from the first, with
her sincere, unsmiling eyes, but he saw a flush rise slowly to her face
in a wave of colour, turning the faint pink in her cheeks to crimson.
"I am very much obliged to her," she said, in her fresh attractive
voice, "but I am just in the middle of a story and I cannot break off
just now. I write," she added positively, "every evening."
As she finished she picked up some closely written sheets from the desk
and held them loosely in her hand, enforcing by a gesture the
unalterableness of her decision. "I hope you will give her my love--my
dear love," she said presently, with girlish sweetness, "and tell her
how sorry I am that it is impossible."
"You are writing stories, then--still?" he asked, lingering in the face
of her evident desire to be rid of him.
"Oh, yes, I write all the time--every day."
"But do you find a market for so many?"
She shook her head: "The beginning is always hard--have you never read
the lives of the poets? But when one gives up everything else--when one
has devoted one's whole life--"
Knowing what he did of her mistaken ambition, her fruitless sacrifices,
the thing appeared to him as a terrible and useless tragedy. He saw the
thinness of her figure, the faint lines which her tireless purpose had
written upon her face--and he felt that it was on the tip of his tongue
to beg her to give it up--to reason with her in the tone of a
philosopher and with the experience of the author of an accepted play.
But presently when he spoke, he found that his uttered words were not of
the high and ethical character he had planned.
"She will be very much disappointed, I know," he said at last; and
though he told himself that a great deal of good might be done by a
little perfectly plain speaking, still he did not know how to speak it
nor exactly what it would be.
"Thank her for me--I--I should love to see her oftener if I had the
time--if it were possible," said Christina. And then he went to the door
because he could think of no excuse sufficient to keep him standing
another minute upon the hearthrug.
"I hope you will remember," he said from the threshold, "that we are
always down stairs--at least my mother is--and ready to serve you at any
moment in any way we can."
The assurance appeared to make little impression upon her, but she
smiled politely, and then closing the door after him, sat down to eat
her dinner of cold bread and corned meat.