took it. Back of the glamour of the girl’s lovely face; back of the pull
of her, standing there in the slackening rain holding her wet skirts
about her, her neck bare; back of the wonder of her, there rose a bank
of his sane self--that self indifferent to all else. There towered a
steeple of his future as he had planned it; of his ambitions; of his
wealth and fame which were just beginning and for which he had worked
hard. They grew--these steeples--and pushed closer. The girl watched
him.
“She had not spoken to him since her father had gone away; she had stood
aside while Eric got the car out upon the road; she had followed him to
it and stood there clasping her bare elbows--lips parted like the
Raphael girl-child, he said. She was oblivious to watchers behind drawn
curtains.
“‘Now what shall you do?’ he asked her. ‘Does he mean it?”
“‘Yes, he means it. I shall walk to the next town. There will be
something for me to do there.’
“‘I’m sorry----’ he began, all the steeples crowding around him.
“‘Don’t be. I’m glad. It gives me a chance to be brave as she was.’
“She put up one hand to her mouth and pressed her lips tight with it.
“‘It’s odd, isn’t it?’ she asked.
“He says he did not need to ask what was odd. He knew. It was the sudden
new thing which was his--and hers. But the steeples were nearer. And a
free life was what he had planned; it alone could bring him what he
wanted. But he asked:
“‘Will you come with me, as he said?’
“She shook her head.
“‘Oh, no. I am not your kind.’
“‘But I love you,’ he told her then. You should have heard him speak
those three words, the day he told me the story. Another man surely--not
the Eric we know. He said it twice: ‘I love you.’
“‘And I you,’ the girl replied.
“‘Then come with me,’ he pleaded.
“‘No. It will pass. It cannot be the real thing. It was too quick for
that.’
“She smiled, and he tried to laugh and say, without too much
earnestness:
“‘Shall I come back some day?’
“She shook her head again.
“‘Please don’t.’
“He climbed slowly into the car, legs weighted, he said. He looked back
as he gathered speed on the hard road. She was walking too slowly it
seemed to him--her head too low----
“But everywhere were the steeples of fame and fortune to come if he were
unhampered; if he could be always indifferent. The west had red
streaks---- He drove away.”
“Oh, I hate the man!” cried Janet, indignantly. “It’s just like him!
What became of her?”
“There she is now, at the end of the room,” said Kent, smiling at the
evident astonishment of the group around him.
Eric Hall’s wife was lifting her coffee cup and laughing. Her filmy
sleeves fell away from perfect arms; a jewel flashed from a tiny silver
band in her hair. She was clearly the loveliest, the most distinguished
woman there.
They stared at her.
“But you just said that he drove away!” some one exclaimed in amazement.
“That was the drama of your story!”
“He drove back and got her,” finished Kent sententiously.
PHANTOM ADVENTURE
BY FLOYD DELL
From _Century_
_I. A Secret._ He was not a banker by temperament. But nobody in New
York, nobody east of the Rockies, knew that. It was his secret.
When he graduated from college, instead of preparing himself seriously
for life by cleaning the inkwells in some Wall Street institution, as an
ambitious young man should, he got a job on a Western ranch. He did this
for no better reason than that he had been fond of reading about
cowboys. He learned many things about horses and cattle, and made
friends with every cowboy within a hundred miles. Nevertheless, he was
not satisfied; for cowboy life, while interesting enough in fact, is
less romantically adventurous than in fiction. Yet he stayed there for
five years, dreaming now of the sea and reading stories of sailor
adventures.
Then an uncle died, leaving him a legacy of a little more than five
thousand dollars. With five thousand dollars a young man could get
started in business, and it was high time for him to do so. He went to
San Francisco and looked about for an opening.
In a café he met a man who had just come back from incredible adventures
in the South Seas. To this man’s tales he listened all evening, and then
went back to his lodging, where he could not sleep, but walked back and
forth for hours in a little garden, dreaming, awake, of strange birds
and strange trees and slim, brown, laughing girls with flowers in their
hair.
Next morning he went down to the waterfront, and looked out thoughtfully
in the direction of the South Seas. With his five thousand dollars he
could buy or build a little boat and, with some congenial companion,
set sail for those islands of incredible adventure. But he knew that
this was mere romantic folly, more worthy of a boy than of a man. He
must begin to take life seriously. He shook his head and frowned, and
went on to the café.
Every morning--sometimes it was noon--for a whole year he went down to
the waterfront and looked out over the bay. And every afternoon and
evening he sat in some café. At the end of the year he had made many
friends and heard many curious tales, and his money was all gone.
He began to look for a job. He had an extensive convivial acquaintance
among the business men of the town; but they did not seem to have any
job for him, though they were willing to lend him a few dollars.
So he borrowed a little money and came to New York, where no one knew,
as he expressed it, what a damn fool he was.
He took care that no one should know. He got a job in a Fifth Avenue
bank, and when he was barely forty he was one of its vice-presidents. He
had an apartment in town and a house in the country and a car and a wife
and four lovely children, and he was proud of them all.
He was proud of being a sober and responsible citizen--proud of having
conquered his romantic propensities. Perhaps his children knew, from the
wild, half-true and half-imagined tales he told them at their bedtime
hours, that he was still at heart a romantic adventurer. But nobody
else, and least of all his sweet and sensible wife, suspected his
secret.
_II. A Conversation._ In the summer of his fortieth year the town
apartment had been closed, and his wife and children were in the
country. He himself was going to the country in a day or two, as soon as
he had cleared up those matters, whatever they are, that keep bankers in
town in August. He stayed at his club until one evening on an impulse he
went down to an out-of-the-way little street near Washington Square, in
the hope of hearing some talk from a man who lived there, and whom he
had been thinking of at intervals all day.
He was thinking of this man because he had read the night before, at the
club, a story of his in a magazine. This man was a writer of stories
and lived in what was called Greenwich Village; and this particular
story was one of romantic adventure in the South Seas. The
story-writer’s wife and the banker’s wife had been friends from
girlhood, and the story-writer and the banker were acquaintances of a
sort. The banker was always a little aware in the other’s presence of
his own secret and foolish past. He was embarrassed when he talked of
financial conditions by a fear and perhaps also a hope that the other
would somehow see through him. Also he kept wondering if a writer
imagined all his romantic adventures or if some of them had really
happened. He particularly wondered this about the story he had read the
night before at the club, for it gave such a vivid description of a
South Sea island that it seemed as though it could only have been
written by one who had lived there.
The story-writer was at home. His wife, he explained, was at the
seashore with the children, and he was staying in town to do a story or
two to pay their summer bills. He sat down again in his study, cocking
up his feet on the typewriter desk and lighting a fresh cigarette.
“No, you’re not interrupting me,” he said. “Don’t worry about that. I
never get started to work till after midnight, and I want somebody to
talk to while this new South Sea yarn ferments in my head. Have a
cigarette.” He started to talk. Again the banker had the feeling of
guarding a secret.
It was nearly midnight when the conversation took a turn that promised
to satisfy the banker’s curiosities.
“It’s odd,” said the story-writer, and paused. “It’s very odd. I’m
supposed to be a respectable citizen. But consider these stories of
mine. The hero, who is me, meets a beautiful girl and falls in love with
her. Sometimes she is a princess, sometimes a chorus girl; just now she
is usually a dusky maiden with flowers in her hair. I suppose I’ve met
and made love to more than a hundred girls in the course of my literary
career. To be sure, I always ask them to marry me; but I never tell them
of all the other beautiful heroines I have loved and left behind me. And
yet nobody thinks I’m a scoundrel. Not even my wife!”
“Of course not,” said the banker. “That would be absurd.”
“Yes, it would be unthinkable,” said the story-writer. “For when I have
finished one of my adventures, I mail it to an editor and get a check
for it. And that’s exactly why my wife doesn’t object. It pays the rent;
and so it’s perfectly all right for me to spend my life in
extra-matrimonial love scenes. But why do I get paid for these
adventures?” he went on meditatively. “Because people want adventures.
When a man reads one of my romantic yarns, _he_ becomes the hero, _he_
makes love to beautiful, strange girls. And yet no one has thought of
proposing laws to forbid married men to read love stories.”
“After all,” said the banker, ironically, “there is a slight difference
between reading a love adventure and going out and having one.”
“No,” said the story-writer; “the difference is not slight; it is
considerable. But just what is that difference? A love adventure in
story form is guaranteed to be complete in itself, to be over when it is
finished, and to leave behind it nothing but a pleasant memory in the
reader’s mind. In all these ways it differs from a love adventure in
reality concerning which no such safe guarantees can be offered. We try
to live orderly lives, and while the love adventures of reality may
upset the well considered plans of a lifetime, the other kind leave
everything exactly as it was. The heroine may swoon with ecstasy in your
arms to-night; but she will not call you up on the telephone in the
morning or write you passionate and compromising letters.”
“Poor girl--she can’t!” said the banker.
“She doesn’t want to. It is only women of the real world who want love
to be a part of life. She belongs to the world of romance, which has
laws of its own.”
“The world of fancy,” said the banker.
“Don’t pretend to despise the world of fancy,” said the story-writer.
“Fond as we are of the real world, it is far from satisfying all our
demands. It is too inexorable. The phantom world of fancy is in many
respects a more agreeable place. And everybody goes to it for solace.
The sober triumphs of reality are never able for long to satisfy us;
always we turn from those four-square actualities to live for a
delightful hour in that extravagant land where our most impossible
wishes can come true. It is a need of our human nature.”
“Oh, no doubt,” said the banker. “But nevertheless----”
The story-teller interrupted him.
“Have you thought of this? That the self which goes out adventuring in
the land of fancy is not a part of this real life of ours, at all? It is
a kind of phantom, existing joyously and irresponsibly in a phantom
world.”
“I hadn’t thought of it just like that,” said the banker, reflectively.
“But here is the real question. These adventurers in the phantom realm
of fancy, _why do they never meet_?”
The banker stared.
“I’m not sure that I understand you.”
“Suppose a man and a girl, unknown to each other, reading the same story
at the same time; their phantom selves are sharing the same adventure,
one that some writer has created for them. But suppose they dispense
with the writer’s assistance. Suppose these phantom selves should meet
and create their own adventure. Why not?”
The banker stirred uneasily in his chair.
The story-writer laughed.
“It might happen.”
“It might,” said the banker.
“I wonder,” said the story-writer, “what my wife would say if I told her
of such an adventure. It would be like all my other adventures, more
beautiful, perhaps, than any of the others. And yet----”
“I hope,” said the banker, frowning, “that you----”
“Go to bed,” said the story-writer, suddenly. “You’ll find the guest
room on the top floor. I’m going to get to work on my South Sea story.
I’ll call you up for coffee in the morning.”
He took his feet down from the typewriter desk and threw away his
cigarette. His hands hovered over the keyboard and already he had
forgotten the outer world, including his guest, who rose and wandered
uncertainly from the room.
_III. The Ivory Gate._ He found the guest room upstairs. But whether it
was the faint clicking of the typewriter below that disturbed him, or
his own thoughts, he was disinclined to sleep.
There was a pile of magazines on the table, and he began to read a
story. It was the kind of story he had been fond of all his life, an
adventure and a strange meeting with a beautiful girl.
But he let the magazine slip to the floor. He was thinking of old times
in San Francisco. He remembered that he had wanted to build a boat and
sail to the South Seas.
“But I didn’t!” he said to himself triumphantly.
No--a mocking thought came to remind him--he had stayed on shore and
listened to café yarns.
But since then he had been sensible. He had been sensible for twelve
years. Twelve years! In a sudden panic he wondered if his youth had
slipped by and vanished with those years. He went over and gazed at
himself in the mirror. He saw a man in the prime of life, strong and
clear-eyed.
He did not want to go to bed; but perhaps a walk to the club would make
him sleepy. He debated whether to disturb the man at work below to tell
him, and decided he would not. He went downstairs quietly.
On the second floor he looked out to reassure himself as to the weather.
The sky was a little cloudy, that was all. And then, as he stood there
looking out of the hall window, he saw below him a little garden in the
moonlight. He looked away quickly, but not in time, for he remembered a
moonlit garden perched on one of the hills of San Francisco, where as a
young man he had walked night after night dreaming impossible things.
That memory was painful, and he hurried downstairs and took his hat to
leave the house. But the pain of that memory was strangely sweet and
afflicted him with a kind of nostalgia. He wanted to go out into this
garden and be again the young fool he had been. He walked up and down
the hall with his hat in his hand, wanting to go away and wanting to
stay and dream in this garden. It was a queer thing. He had stopped
drinking, and he had stopped dreaming, years ago; the desire for drink
had never come back, but the desire for dreaming was upon him again. He
felt that his whole life of triumphant common sense was at stake. But
no, it couldn’t be. An hour in a moonlit garden could not undo the solid
achievement of twelve years. He put his hat back on the stand. With a
guilty feeling of having yielded to a weakness, he went quietly out,
past the door from behind which came the inspired click of typewriter
keys fashioning some strange adventure.
In the garden he stood and looked about. There was a full moon above,
dimmed with clouds and casting that half-light which transforms the
accustomed world into the realm of fancy. _On such a night as this_--Odd
bits of poetry, remembered from his youth, came into his mind.
Across from where he stood was a high board fence, and in it a gate,
painted ivory-white. He had an impulse to go over and open it. But
instead he stood still, mockingly analysing that impulse. “In a story,”
he said to himself, “there would be an adventure waiting in the next
garden. But in real life, as I well know, there is only another garden,
like this, with no one there. People do not moon about in gardens.”
But then he reflected, “I am mooning about in a garden.” Realizing that
bankers do not do such things, it seemed to him that he was not a
banker, but, as his friend had said, a phantom in a phantom world where
impossible things come true.
He surrendered himself for a moment to this feeling, and began to think
foolish thoughts, such as he had not thought for twelve years.
“What if there should be an adventure waiting for me on the other side
of that gate? What if there were a girl in that garden, waiting?” These
thoughts were frightening, and nevertheless they made him happy.
Then his common sense reasserted itself. There was nothing in that other
garden, and he was being a damn fool. He reflected gratefully that no
one would ever know what a damn fool he was. The depositors at the bank
could never guess, nor could his wife. And since there was nothing on
the other side of the gate, he might as well go and open it and look
into the garden, and then go back to bed.
He walked over to the gate, and there he paused. Why trouble himself to
prove what he already knew? Why not keep intact the memory of this
absurd fancy and have the pleasure of thinking that perhaps, after all,
there had been an adventure waiting beyond that gate?
He realized that if he opened the gate and nothing happened, it would
hurt. He put his hand on the latch in a mood curiously like the mood of
prayer. If he had had a God to whom such a prayer could be addressed, he
might have prayed, that just this once---- But his was no pagan deity,
and so he did not pray. Lacking the courage that prayer sometimes gives,
he took his hand from the latch.
Then he remembered how he had gone down to the waterfront every morning
and looked out over the bay and never set sail for the islands of
romance; and he felt that this was a test. It didn’t make any difference
what happened: he couldn’t turn back.
He pushed open the gate softly.
Seated on a little wooden bench was a girl; her face was turned away
from him, but he could see the languid sweep of a slender arm, bare and
beautiful.
One last reminder of his ordinary self intruded into his mind, the
façade of the bank on Fifth Avenue, symbol of twelve years of sturdy
effort in the realm of common sense. But it seemed to have no relation
whatever to this moment, and it faded and was gone.
He stood looking at the girl for the space of a breath; then he walked
over to her through a tangle of moonlight that broke through the
branches of an elm.
_IV. Afterward._ The milk wagons were rattling over the streets when he
went back through the ivory gate, and he could hear the typewriter still
clattering within the house. He went silently to the guest room. The
adventure was over, and now he had to think about its relation to
actuality. But he did not think; he fell asleep.
At the bank there were other matters to occupy his mind. On the train to
the country that afternoon there was a neighbour who talked about
financial conditions. At the end of the ride there was his wife’s
welcome and the children climbing into his arms. It wasn’t until after
dinner that he had any time to think.
He was rather surprised at his thoughts. They were, first of all,
thoughts of relief at being back at home. It was as if he had strayed
for a few hours out of time and space, and was happy to find himself
again safely within the cosy contours of the familiar. He was glad to be
back in a world that had a meaning beyond the moment, a world that
reached back in memory and forward in hope, the world of reality.
As a happy citizen of this comfortable world, he was naturally
concerned with the inquiry whether his position in it had been
endangered by last night’s adventure. And it seemed to him that he need
have no fear. That adventure was a thing utterly apart from all the rest
of his life--a thing complete and perfect in itself, with no sequel to
be feared or hoped for; they did not even know each other’s names. She
herself had preferred that it should be so.
“And,” she had said, “you needn’t fear that it will ever be made
commonplace by our meeting at a tea somewhere; you will never see me
again.” And he had said, laughing:
“You speak as though you were going to die or going on a very long
journey!”
“Yes,” she said; “something like that. You mustn’t ask me about it, only
take my word for it.”
And he believed her. Why, he did not know. But to-day he was glad to be
so sure that their adventure was ended and that no one but themselves
could ever know about it.... He had asked his friend the story-writer
over their morning coffee:
“Who lives in that little white house next door, a writer?” and was
told, “A school-teacher, I believe.” Evidently his friend did not know
of the school-teacher’s guest. No; so far as all the world was
concerned, there had been no midnight adventure. It was as detached from
reality, as immaterial from any common-sense point of view, as if it had
been merely a story he had read in a magazine that night. He might, if
he wished, think of it as that.
He was a little startled, as by an odd coincidence, when his wife asked:
“Shall I read you a story? The new magazines have come.” But really it
was no coincidence at all, for she knew that he liked magazine stories
and enjoyed being read to in the evenings. The thing had happened many
times before; nevertheless, it was a little strange to be listening to
such a story, while in and out of his mind there flashed bright memories
of another story.
“Why always the South Seas, I wonder?” his wife paused to remark,
looking up from the big chair where she sat with the magazine in her
lap. “I suppose it _is_ a more romantic place.”
“Yes, perhaps,” he said.
He had talked to that girl last night about the South Seas; he had said
he would like to take her there to see the strange birds and flowers.
And she had told him about Venice. And while they talked of sailboats
and gondolas, they were sitting on a garden bench.
“He gets the romantic atmosphere rather well, doesn’t he?” said his
wife. “I think I can guess which one of the girls he is going to fall in
love with, the one with the red hibiscus flower in her hair. What do you
think?”
“Very likely,” he agreed.
Who was she, the girl of last night’s story? He couldn’t guess. She
wasn’t young, as girls in stories are; there were even tragic lines
marring the beauty of what had been a lovely face. But her eyes were
incredibly young--the eyes of a child, full of wild dreams. Perhaps, in
her ordinary life, she was some one quite different from what she had
been that night--as different as he had been from his ordinary self.
None of his friends would have recognized _him_ as the romantic wanderer
whom she had held for a moment in her arms. He had even quoted poetry to
her. _On such a night as this_--Well, he didn’t care; it had not been
sham. It was another part of himself. And she? It did not matter what
she was to her friends. Last night she had been his strange and lovely
playmate.
His wife looked up from the magazine.
“A little improbable, don’t you think?”
Many things were improbable, he reflected. That room last night, with
its flowers and tall candles.
“This isn’t my place, you know,” she had said. “Shall I tell you the
story? It belongs to a school-teacher, a queer little old-maidish person
one would have thought if one had seen her in her schoolroom, no doubt.
She invested all her savings in oil stock; and contrary to what you
might expect, she made a fortune,--oh, just a little fortune, but enough
to last _her_ for the rest of her life. And she bought this house in
Greenwich Village, and fitted up this room as a place for romantic
things to happen in. But nothing romantic happened. So yesterday, when
we met--she was going away on a visit, and I was in town for a day and a
night, on my way somewhere else--well, we became very quickly
acquainted, and she wanted me to stay here. I was thinking of her when
you walked into her garden to-night. Shall I tell you? I think that she
believed _I_ was the sort of person to whom romantic things do happen,
and that if I were here this room of hers would fulfil its destiny. Is
it shameless of me to tell you that?”
“It’s beautiful of you to tell me that,” and he took her in his arms, no
longer wondering how this adventure would end.
“I don’t like her.” It was his wife, speaking of the heroine of the
story she was reading.
“Why not?”
“She isn’t real.”
He looked at his wife. She was real. And that was better than being the
phantom creature of a lovely moment. Why should she begrudge the other
kind of girl her moment?
It was odd; he wasn’t in the least ashamed. Men, he remembered,
sometimes had bad consciences over things like this, they were driven to
confession by remorse. But he had nothing to be sorry for. Why should he
confess?
His wife laid the magazine aside a little petulantly.
“Oh, well,” she said, “it’s just a story.”
“Yes,” he said absently, “just a story.”