As we neared the upper end of the park, I told my chauffeur, through the
tube, to enter and go slowly. Whenever a lamp flashed in at us, I had a
glimpse of her progress toward composure--now she was drying her eyes with
the bit of lace she called a handkerchief; now her bare arms were up, and
with graceful fingers she was arranging her hair; now she was straight and
still, the soft, fluffy material with which her wrap was edged drawn close
about her throat. I shifted to the opposite seat, for my nerves warned me
that I could not long control myself, if I stayed on where her garments
were touching me.
I looked away from her for the pleasure of looking at her again, of
realizing that my overwrought senses were not cheating me. Yes, there she
was, in all the luster of that magnetic beauty I can not think of even now
without an upblazing of the fire which is to the heart what the sun is to a
blind man dreaming of sight. There she was on my side of the chasm that had
separated us--alone with me--mine--mine! And my heart dilated with pride.
But a moment later came a sense of humility. Her beauty intoxicated me, but
her youth, her fineness, so fragile for such rough hands as mine, awed and
humbled me.
“I must be very gentle,” said I to myself. “I have promised that she shall
never regret. God help me to keep my promise! She is mine, but only to
preserve and protect.”
And that idea of _responsibility in possession_ was new to me--was
to have far-reaching consequences. Now that I think of it, I believe it
changed the whole course of my life.
She was leaning forward, her elbow on the casement of the open window of
the brougham, her cheek against her hand; the moonlight was glistening
on her round, firm forearm and on her serious face. “How far, far away
from--everything it seems here!” she said, her voice tuned to that soft,
clear light, “and how beautiful it is!” Then, addressing the moon and the
shadows of the trees rather than me: “I wish I could go on and on--and
never return to--to the world.”
“I wish we could,” said I.
My tone was low, but she started, drew back into the brougham, became an
outline in the deep shadow. In another mood that might have angered me.
Just then it hurt me so deeply that to remember it to-day is to feel a
faint ache in the scar of the long-healed wound. My face was not hidden as
was hers; so, perhaps, she saw. At any rate, her voice tried to be friendly
as she said: “Well--I have crossed the Rubicon. And I don't regret. It was
silly of me to cry. I thought I had been through so much that I was beyond
such weakness. But you will find me calm from now on, and reasonable.”
“Not too reasonable, please,” said I, with an attempt at her lightness. “A
reasonable woman is as trying as an unreasonable man.”
“But we are going to be sensible with each other,” she urged, “like two
friends. Aren't we?”
“We are going to be what we are going to be,” said I. “We'll have to take
life as it comes.”
That clumsy reminder set her to thinking, stirred her vague uneasiness in
those strange circumstances to active alarm. For presently she said, in a
tone that was not so matter-of-course as she had tried to make it: “We'll
go now to my Uncle Frank's. He's a brother of my father's. I always used to
like him best--and still do. But he married a woman mama thought--queer.
They hadn't much, so he lives away up on the West Side--One Hundred and
Twenty-seventh Street.”
“The wise plan, the only wise plan,” said I, not so calm as she must have
thought me, “is to go to my partner's house and send for a minister.”
“Not to-night,” she replied nervously. “Take me to Uncle Frank's, and
to-morrow we can discuss what to do and how to do it.”
“To-night,” I persisted. “We must be married to-night. No more uncertainty
and indecision and weakness. Let us begin bravely, Anita!”
“To-morrow,” she said. “But not to-night. I must think it over.”
“To-night,” I repeated. “To-morrow will be full of its own problems. This
is to-night's.”
She shook her head, and I saw that the struggle between us had begun--the
struggle against her timidity and conventionality. “No, not tonight.” This
in her tone for finality.
To argue with any woman in such circumstances would be dangerous; to argue
with her would have been fatal. To reason with a woman is to flatter
her into suspecting you of weakness and herself of strength. I told the
chauffeur to turn about and go slowly up town. She settled back into her
corner of the brougham. Neither of us spoke until we were passing Grant's
Tomb. Then she started out of her secure confidence in my obedience, and
exclaimed: “This is not the way!” And her voice had in it the hasty
call-to-arms.
“No,” I replied, determined to push the panic into a rout. “As I told you,
our future shall be settled to-night.” That in _my_ tone for finality.
A pause, then: “It _has_ been settled,” she said, like a child that
feels, yet denies, its impotence as it struggles in the compelling arms of
its father. “I thought until a few minutes ago that I really intended to
marry you. Now I see that I didn't.”
“Another reason why we're not going to your uncle's,” said I.
She leaned forward so that I could see her face. “I can not marry you,” she
said. “I feel humble toward you, for having misled you. But it is better
that you--and I--should have found out now than too late.”
“It is too late--too late to go back.”
“Would you wish to marry a woman who does not love you, who loves some one
else, and who tells you so and refuses to marry you?” She had tried to
concentrate enough scorn into her voice to hide her fear.
“I would,” said I. “And I shall. I'll not desert you, Anita, when your
courage and strength shall fail. I will carry you on to safety.”
“I tell you I can not marry you,” she cried, between appeal and command.
“There are reasons--I may not tell you. But if I might, you would--would
take me to my uncle's. I can not marry you!”
“That is what conventionality bids you say now,” I replied. And then I
gathered myself together and in a tone that made me hate myself as I
heard it, I added slowly, each word sharp and distinct: “But what will
conventionality bid you say to-morrow morning, as we drive down crowded
Fifth Avenue, after a night in this brougham?”
I could not see her, for she fell back into the darkness as sharply as if
I had struck her with all my force full in the face. But I could feel the
effect of my words upon her. I paused, not because I expected or wished
an answer, but because I had to steady myself--myself, not my purpose; my
purpose was inflexible. I would put through what we had begun, just as I
would have held her and cut off her arm with my pocket-knife if we had
been cast away alone, and I had had to do it to save her life. She was
not competent to decide for herself. Every problem that had ever faced
her had been decided by others for her. Who but me could decide for her
now? I longed to plead with her, longed to let her see that I was not
hard-hearted, was thinking of her, was acting for her sake as much as for
my own. But I dared not. “She would misunderstand,” said I to myself. “She
would think you were weakening.”
Full fifteen minutes of that frightful silence before she said: “I will go
where you wish.” And she said it in a tone that makes me wince as I recall
it.
I called my partner's address up through the tube. Again that frightful
silence, then she was trying to choke back the sobs. A few words I caught:
“They have broken my will--they have broken my will.”
* * * * *
My partner lived in a big, gray-stone house that stood apart and commanded
a noble view of the Hudson and the Palisades. It was, in the main, a
reproduction of a French château, and such changes as the architect had
made in his model were not positively disfiguring, though amusing. There
should have been trees and shrubbery about it, but--“As Mrs. B. says,” Joe
had explained to me, “what's the use of sinking a lot of cash in a house
people can't see?” So there was not a bush, not a flower. Inside--One day
Ball took me on a tour of the art shops. “I've got a dozen corners and
other big bare spots to fill,” said he. “Mrs. B. hates to give up money,
haggles over every article. I'm going to put the job through in business
style.” I soon discovered that I had been brought along to admire his
“business style,” not to suggest. After two hours, in which he bought in
small lots several tons of statuary, paintings, vases and rugs, he said,
“This is too slow.” He pointed his stick at a crowded corner of the shop.
“How much for that bunch of stuff?” he demanded. The proprietor gave him a
figure. “I'll close,” said Joe, “if you'll give fifteen off for cash.” The
proprietor agreed. “Now we're done,” said Joe to me. “Let's go down town,
and maybe I can pick up what I've dropped.”
You can imagine that interior. But don't picture it as notably worse than
the interior of the average New York palace. It was, if anything, better
than those houses, where people who deceive themselves about their lack of
taste have taken great pains to prevent any one else from being deceived.
One could hardly move in Joe's big rooms for the litter of gilded and
tapestried furniture, and their crowded walls made the eyes ache.
The appearance of the man who opened the door for Anita and me suggested
that our ring had roused him from a bed where he had deposited himself
without bothering to take off his clothes. At the sound of my voice, Ball
peered out of his private smoking-room, at the far end of the hall. He
started forward; then, seeing how I was accompanied, stopped with mouth
ajar. He had on a ragged smoking-jacket, a pair of shapeless old Romeo
slippers, his ordinary business waistcoat and trousers. He was wearing
neither tie nor collar, and a short, black pipe was between his fingers.
We had evidently caught the household stripped of “lugs,” and sunk in the
down-at-the-heel slovenliness which it called “comfort.” Joe was crimson
with confusion, and was using his free hand to stroke, alternately, his
shiny bald head and his heavy brown mustache. He got himself together
sufficiently, after a few seconds, to disappear into his den. When he came
out again, pipe and ragged jacket were gone, and he rushed for us in a
gorgeous velvet jacket with dark red facings, and a showy pair of slippers.
“Glad to see you, Mr. Blacklock”--in his own home he always addressed every
man as Mister, just as “Mrs. B.” always called him “Mister Ball,” and he
called her “Missus Ball” before “company.” “Come right into the front
parlor. Billy, turn on the electric lights.”
Anita had been standing with her head down. She now looked round with
shame and terror in those expressive blue-gray eyes of hers; her delicate
nostrils were quivering. I hastened to introduce Ball to her. Her impulse
to fly passed; her lifelong training in doing the conventional thing
asserted itself. She lowered her head again, murmured an inaudible
acknowledgment of Joe's greeting.
“Your wife is at home?” said I. If one was at home in the evening, the
other was also, and both were always there, unless they were at some
theater--except on Sunday night, when they dined at Sherry's, because many
fashionable people did it. They had no friends and few acquaintances.
In their humbler and happy days they had had many friends, but had lost
them when they moved away from Brooklyn and went to live, like uneasy,
out-of-place visitors, in their grand house, pretending to be what they
longed to be, longing to be what they pretended to be, and as discontented
as they deserved.
“Oh, yes, Mrs. B.'s at home,” Joe answered. “I guess she and Alva
were--about to go to bed.” Alva was their one child. She had been
christened Malvina, after Joe's mother; but when the Balls “blossomed out”
they renamed her Alva, which they somehow had got the impression was
“smarter.”
At Joe's blundering confession that the females of the family were in no
condition to receive, Anita said to me in a low voice: “Let us go.”
I pretended not to hear. “Rout 'em out,” said I to Joe. “Then, take my
electric and bring the nearest parson. There's going to be a wedding--right
here.” And I looked round the long salon, with everything draped for the
summer departure. Joe whisked the cover off one chair, his man took off
another. “I'll have the women-folks down in two minutes,” he cried. Then to
the man: “Get a move on you, Billy. Stir 'em up in the kitchen. Do the best
you can about supper--and put a lot of champagne on the ice. That's the
main thing at a wedding.”
Anita had seated herself listlessly in one of the uncovered chairs. The
wrap slipped back from her shoulders and--how proud I was of her! Joe
gazed, took advantage of her not looking up to slap me on the back and to
jerk his head in enthusiastic approval. Then he, too, disappeared.
A wait followed, during which we could hear, through the silence, excited
undertones from the upper floors. The words were indistinct until Joe's
heavy voice sent down to us an angry “No damn nonsense, I tell you. Allie's
got to come, too. She's not such a fool as you think. Bad example--bosh!”
Anita started up. “Oh--please--please!” she cried. “Take me away--anywhere!
This is dreadful.”
It was, indeed, dreadful. If I could have had my way at just that moment,
it would have gone hard with “Mrs. B.” and “Allie”--and heavy-voiced Joe,
too. But I hid my feelings.
“There's nowhere else to go,” said I, “except the brougham.”
She sank into her chair.
A few minutes more of silence, and there was a rustling on the stairs.
She started up, trembling, looked round, as if seeking some way of escape
or some place to hide. Joe was in the doorway holding aside one of the
curtains. There entered in a beribboned and beflounced tea-gown, a pretty,
if rather ordinary, woman of forty, with a petulant baby face. She was
trying to look reserved and severe. She hardly glanced at me before
fastening sharp, suspicious eyes on Anita.
“Mrs. Ball,” said I, “this is Miss Ellersly.”
“Miss Ellersly!” she exclaimed, her face changing. And she advanced and
took both Anita's hands. “Mr. Ball is so stupid,” she went on, with that
amusingly affected accent which is the “Sunday clothes” of speech.
“I didn't catch the name, my dear,” Joe stammered.
“Be off,” said I, aside, to him. “Get the nearest preacher, and hustle him
here with his tools.”
I had one eye on Anita all the time, and I saw her gaze follow Joe as he
hurried out; and her expression made my heart ache. I heard him saying in
the hall, “Go in, Allie. It's O K”; heard the door slam, knew we should
soon have some sort of minister with us.
“Allie” entered the drawing-room. I had not seen her in six years. I
remembered her unpleasantly as a great, bony, florid child, unable to
stand still or to sit still, or to keep her tongue still, full of aimless
questions and giggles and silly remarks that she and her mother thought
funny. I saw her now, grown into a handsome young woman, with enough beauty
points for an honorable mention, if not for a prize--straight and strong
and rounded, with a brow and a keen look out of the eyes which it seemed
a pity should be wasted on a woman. Her mother's looks, her father's good
sense, a personality apparently got from neither, but all her own, and
unusual and interesting. No wonder the Balls felt toward her much as a pair
of barn-swallows would feel if they were to hatch out an eaglet. These
quiet, tame American parents that are always finding their suppressed
selves, the bold, fantastic, unadmitted dreams of their youth startlingly
confronting them in the flesh as their own children!
“From what Mr. Ball said,”--Mrs. Ball was gushing affectedly to Anita,--“I
got an idea that--well, really, I didn't know _what_ to think.”
Anita looked as if she were about to suffocate. Allie came to the rescue.
“Not very complimentary to Mr. Blacklock, mother,” said she good-humoredly.
Then to Anita, with a simple friendliness there was no resisting: “Wouldn't
you like to come up to my room for a few minutes?”
“Oh, thank you!” responded Anita, after a quick, but thorough inspection
of Alva's face, to make sure she was like her voice. I had not counted on
this; I had been assuming that Anita would not be out of my sight until we
were married. It was on the tip of my tongue to interfere when she looked
at me--for permission to go!
“Don't keep her too long,” said I to Alva, and they were gone.
“You can't blame me--really you can't, Mr. Blacklock,” Mrs. Ball began to
plead for herself, as soon as they were safely out of hearing. “After some
things--mere hints, you understand--for I'm careful what I permit Mr. Ball
to say before _me_. I think married people can not be too respectful of
each other. I _never_ tolerate _vulgarity_.”
“No doubt, Joe has made me out a very vulgar person,” said I, forgetting
her lack of humor.
“Oh, not at all, not at all, Mr. Blacklock,” she protested, in a panic lest
she had done her husband damage with me. “I understand, men will be men,
though as a pure-minded woman, I'm sure I can't imagine why they should
be.”
“How far off is the nearest church?” I cut in.
“Only two blocks--that is, the Methodist church,” she replied. “But I know
Mr. Ball will bring an Episcopalian.”
“Why, I thought you were a devoted Presbyterian,” said I, recalling how in
their Brooklyn days she used to insist on Joe's going twice every Sunday to
sleep through long sermons.
She looked uncomfortable. “I was reared Presbyterian,” she explained
confusedly, “but you know how it is in New York. And when we came to live
here, we got out of the habit of church-going. And all Alva's little
friends were Episcopalians. So I drifted toward that church. I find the
service so satisfying--so--elegant. And--one sees there the people one sees
socially.”
“How is your culture class?” I inquired, deliberately malicious, in my
impatience and nervousness. “And do you still take conversation lessons?”
She was furiously annoyed. “Oh, those old jokes of Joe's,” she said,
affecting disdainful amusement.
In fact, they were anything but jokes. On Mondays and Thursdays she used
to attend a class for women who, like herself, wished to be “up-to-date on
culture and all that sort of thing.” They hired a teacher to cram them with
odds and ends about art and politics and the “latest literature, heavy and
light.” On Tuesdays and Fridays she had an “indigent gentlewoman,” whatever
that may be, come to her to teach her how to converse and otherwise conduct
herself according to the “standards of polite society.”
Joe used to give imitations of those conversation lessons that raised roars
of laughter round the poker table, the louder because so many of the other
men had wives with the same ambitions and the same methods of attaining
them.
Mrs. Ball came back to the subject of Anita.
“I am glad you are going to settle with such a charming girl. She comes of
such a charming family. I have never happened to meet any of them. We are
in the West Side set, you know, while they move in the East Side set, and
New York is so large that one almost never meets any one outside one's own
set.” This smooth snobbishness, said in the affected “society” tone, was
as out of place in her as rouge and hair-dye in a wholesome, honest old
grandmother.
I began to pace the floor. “Can it be,” I fretted aloud, “that Joe's racing
round looking for an Episcopalian preacher, when there was a Methodist at
hand?”
“I'm sure he wouldn't bring anything but a Church of England priest,”
Mrs. Ball assured me loftily. “Why, Miss Ellersly wouldn't think she was
married, if she hadn't a priest of her own church.”
My temper got the bit in its teeth. I stopped before her, and fixed her
with an eye that must have had some fire in it. “I'm not marrying a fool,
Mrs. Ball,” said I. “You mustn't judge her by her bringing-up--by her
family. Children have a way of bringing themselves up, in spite of damn
fool parents.”
She weakened so promptly that I was ashamed of myself. My only apology for
getting out of patience with her is that I had seen her seldom in the last
few years, had forgotten how matter-of-surface her affectation and snobbery
were, and how little they interfered with her being a good mother and a
good wife, up to the limits of her brain capacity.
“I'm sure, Mr. Blacklock,” she said plaintively, “I only wished to say what
was pleasant and nice about your fiancée. I know she's a lovely girl. I've
often admired her at the opera. She goes a great deal in Mrs. Langdon's
box, and Mrs. Langdon and I are together on the board of managers of the
Magdalene Home, and also on the board of the Hospital for Unfortunate
Gentlefolk.” And so on, and on.
I walked up and down among those wrapped-up, ghostly chairs and tables and
cabinets and statues many times before Joe arrived with the minister--and
he was a Methodist, McCabe by name. You should have seen Mrs. Ball's look
as he advanced his portly form and round face with its shaven upper lip
into the drawing-room. She tried to be cordial, but she couldn't--her mind
was on Anita, and the horror that would fill her when she discovered that
she was to be married by a preacher of a sect unknown to fashionable
circles.
“All I ask of you,” said I to him, “is that you cut it as short as
possible. Miss Ellersly is tired and nervous.” This while we were shaking
hands after Joe's introduction.
“You can count on me, sir,” said McCabe, giving my hand an extra shake
before dropping it. “I've no doubt, from what my young neighbor here
tells me, that your marriage is already made in your hearts and with all
solemnity. The form is an incident--important, but only an incident.”
I liked that, and I liked his unaffected way of saying it. His voice had
more of the homely, homelike, rural twang in it than I had heard in New
York in many a day. I mentally doubled the fee I had intended to give him.
And now Alva and she were coming down the stairway. I was amazed at sight
of her. Her evening dress had given place to a pretty blue street suit
with a short skirt--white showing at her wrists, at her neck and through
slashings in the coat over her bosom; and on her head was a hat to match. I
looked at her feet--the slippers had been replaced by boots. “And they're
just right for her,” said Alva, who was following my glance, “though I'm
not so tall as she.”
But what amazed me most, and delighted me, was that she seemed to be almost
in good spirits. It was evident she had formed with Joe's daughter one of
those sudden friendships so great and so vivid that they rarely lived long
after the passing of the heat of the emergency that bred them. Mrs. Ball
saw it, also, and was straightway giddied into a sort of ecstasy. You can
imagine the visions it conjured. I've no doubt she talked house on the
east side of the park to Joe that very night, before she let him sleep.
However, Anita's face was serious enough when we took our places before
the minister, with his little, black-bound book open. And as he read in a
voice that was genuinely impressive those words that no voice could make
unimpressive, I saw her paleness blanch into pallor, saw the dusk creep
round her eyes until they were like stars waning somberly before the gray
face of dawn. When they closed and her head began to sway, I steadied her
with my arm. And so we stood, I with my arm round her, she leaning lightly
against my shoulder. Her answers were mere movements of the lips.
At the end, when I kissed her cheek, she said: “Is it over?”
“Yes,” McCabe answered--she was looking at him. “And I wish you all
happiness, Mrs. Blacklock.”
At that name, her new name, she stared at him with great wondering eyes;
then her form relaxed. I carried her to a chair. Joe came with a glass of
champagne; she drank some of it, and it brought life back to her face, and
some color. With a naturalness that deceived even me for the moment, she
smiled up at Joe as she handed him the glass. “Is it bad luck,” she asked,
“for me to be the first to drink my own health?” And she stood, looking
tranquilly at every one--except me.