“If you want, I'll go to Anita.” Natural feminine tact would have saved her
from this rawness; but, convinced that she was a “great lady” by the
flattery of servants and shopkeepers and sensational newspapers and social
climbers, she had discarded tact as worthy only of the lowly and of the
aspiring before they “arrive.”
“You are too kind,” said I. “Mrs. Blacklock and I feel competent to take
care of our own affairs.”
“Please, Mr. Blacklock,” she said, realizing that she had blundered, “don't
take my directness the wrong way. Life is too short for pose and pretense
about the few things that really matter. Why shouldn't we be frank with
each other?”
“I trust you will excuse me,” said I, moving toward the door--I had not
seated myself when she did. “I think I have made it clear that we have
nothing to discuss.”
“You have the reputation of being generous and too big for hatred. That is
why I have come to you,” said she, her expression confirming my suspicion
of the real and only reason for her visit. “Mowbray and I are completely
reconciled--_completely_, you understand. And I want you to be
generous, and not keep on with this attack. I am involved even more than
he. He has used up his fortune in defending mine. Now, you are simply
trying to ruin me--not him, but _me_. The president is a friend of
Mowbray's, and he'll call off this horrid investigation, and everything'll
be all right, if you'll only stop.”
“Who sent you here?” I asked.
“I came of my own accord,” she protested. Then, realizing from the sound of
her voice that she could not have convinced me with a tone so unconvincing,
she hedged with: “It was my own suggestion, really it was.”
“Your husband permitted _you_ to come--and to _me_?”
She flushed.
“And you have accepted his overtures when you knew he made them only
because he needed your money?”
She hung her head. “I love him,” she said simply. Then she looked straight
at me and I liked her expression. “A woman has no false pride when love is
at stake,” she said. “We leave that to you men.”
“Love!” I retorted, rather satirically, I imagine. “How much had your own
imperiled fortune to do with your being so forgiving?”
“Something,” she admitted. “You must remember I have children. I must think
of their future. I don't want them to be poor. I want them to have the
station they were born to.” She went to one of the windows overlooking the
street. “Look here!” she said.
I stood beside her. The window was not far above the street level. Just
below us was a handsome victoria, coachman, harness, horses, all most
proper, a footman rigid at the step. A crowd had gathered round--in those
stirring days when I was the chief subject of conversation wherever men
were interested in money--and where are they not?--there was almost always
a crowd before my offices. In the carriage sat two children, a boy and a
girl, hardly more than babies. They were gorgeously overdressed, after
the vulgar fashion of aristocrats and apers of aristocracy. They sat
stiffly, like little scions of royalty, with that expression of complacent
superiority which one so often sees on the faces of the little children of
the very rich--and some not so little, too. The thronging loungers, most
of them either immigrant peasants from European caste countries or the
un-disinfected sons of peasants, were gaping in true New York “lower class”
awe; the children were literally swelling with delighted vanity. If they
had been pampered pet dogs, one would have laughed. As they were human
beings, it filled me with sadness and pity. What ignorance, what stupidity
to bring up children thus in democratic America--democratic to-day,
inevitably more democratic to-morrow! What a turning away from the light!
What a crime against the children!
“For their sake, Mr. Blacklock,” she pleaded, her mother love wholly hiding
from her the features of the spectacle that for me shrieked like scarlet
against a white background.
“Your husband has deceived you about your fortune, Mrs. Langdon,” I said
gently, for there is to me something pathetic in ignorance and I was not
blaming her for her folly and her crime against her children. “You can tell
him what I am about to say, or not, as you please. But my advice is that
you keep it to yourself. Even if the present situation develops as seems
probable, develops as Mr. Langdon fears, you will not be left without a
fortune--a very large fortune, most people would think. But Mr. Langdon
will have little or nothing--indeed, I think he is practically dependent
on you now.”
“What I have is his,” she said.
“That is generous,” replied I, not especially impressed by a sentiment, the
very uttering of which raised a strong doubt of its truth. “But is it
prudent? You wish to keep him--securely. Don't tempt him by a generosity he
would only abuse.”
She thought it over. “The idea of holding a man in that way is repellent to
me,” said she, now obviously posing.
“If the man happens to be one that can be held in no other way,” said I,
moving significantly toward the door, “one must overcome one's
repugnance--or be despoiled and abandoned.”
“Thank you,” she said, giving me her hand. “Thank you--more than I can
say.” She had forgotten entirely that she came to plead for her husband.
“And I hope you will soon be as happy as I am.” That last in New York's
funniest “great lady” style.
I bowed, and when there was the closed door between us, I laughed, not at
all pleasantly. “This New York!” I said aloud. “This New York that dabbles
its slime of sordidness and snobbishness on every flower in the garden of
human nature. New York that destroys pride and substitutes vanity for it.
New York with its petty, mischievous class-makers, the pattern for the
rich and the 'smarties' throughout the country. These 'cut-out' minds and
hearts, the best of them incapable of growth and calloused wherever the
scissors of conventionality have snipped.”
I took from my pocket the picture of Anita I always carried. “Are
_you_ like that?” I demanded of it. And it seemed to answer: “Yes,--I
am.” Did I tear the picture up? No. I kissed it as if it were the magnetic
reality. “I don't care what you are!” I cried. “I want you! I want you!”
“Fool!” you are saying. Precisely what I called myself. And you? Is it
the one you _ought_ to love that you give your heart to? Is it the
one that understands you and sympathizes with you? Or is it the one whose
presence gives you visions of paradise and whose absence blots out the
light?
I loved her. Yet I will say this much for myself: I still would not have
taken her on any terms that did not make her really mine.