“Well, Mel,” Dan declared as he returned to the drawing room after
seeing Maisie to her car, “I am prepared for the worst. Fly to it, old
philosopher. I observe you are fairly bristling with bellicose veins.”
“That is only additional proof that you are purblind.” Mellenger helped
himself to a cigar, rang for Sooey Wan, ordered a Scotch and soda and
removed his dinner coat. The major portion of his existence was spent
working in his shirt-sleeves, and tonight he had work to do. So he
cleared for action.
“Now, then,” he began, “are you or are you not engaged to be married to
Maisie Morrison?”
“I am not.”
“I thought so. Going to be?”
“I—don’t know, Mel.”
“I’ll make up your mind for you. You are.”
“Why?”
“For any number of incontestable reasons. However, the principal reason
is that she is very much in love with you, and she is not particularly
happy about it. You’re such a dull dog.”
“Granting that, why should I engage myself to Maisie?”
“Because it would be good for you. It would be protection from the
world. You’re going to marry Maisie sooner or later. Why not do it now
and get the worry of it off your mind?”
“But, you double-dyed idiot, I’m not at all certain I’d be perfectly
happy with Maisie.”
“I’ll dissipate your doubts. You wouldn’t be. No man ever is perfectly
happy in the married state.”
“How do you know?”
“Observation and philosophical meditation. You would be perfectly happy
with Maisie about eighty-five per cent of the time, and all you have to
have in order to win is a controlling interest, or fifty-one per cent.
All married life is a continuous adjustment of conflicting
personalities. What you are seeking, we all seek—the wild, abandoned
thrill of a love that will never grow old or stale or commonplace—a
love that will punctuate your life with wonderful, breathless
moments—moments that you would not miss, even though in claiming them
you realized that sorrow and heartbreak might be the inevitable outcome
of your yielding. My dear old friend, you paint pictures in water colors
and see them turn to crude charcoal smudges. Dan, you seek the
unattainable; when you have found her, she will have been married ten
years to a barber!”
There fell between them a long and pregnant silence. Then:
“You spoke just now of—breathless moments, moments one would not miss,
even though in claiming them one realizes that sorrow and heartbreak may
be the inevitable outcome. Have you ever known such a breathless
moment?”
“Yes—in France, during the war. She was a little dancer, about twenty,
I should say. I found her weeping and half conscious in the Place
Vendôme at four o’clock of a winter morning. There had been an air raid
and a great deal of anti-aircraft firing; she had been struck in the
foot by a shrapnel falling five thousand meters. I carried her to my
billet. . . two months. . . she will never dance again. . . fortunately
I was ordered home. . . send her a few francs every month. . . not very
much, because I can’t afford much, but she writes. . . breathless
moments when I get her letters. . . brains, imagination. . . I think she
loves me—always will, perhaps, but it’s no good thinking too much about
it. I have gotten over it.” Mellenger blew a succession of smoke rings
and watched them float upward to frame a face he would never see again,
except in his dreams. And dreams fade as men grow older and the fires of
youth burn out.
“And was it worth the price, Mel?”
“No, I knew that in the beginning. No joy that leaves a pain is quite
worth having.”
“Yet we will never have done with our longing for the adventure. I
suppose that is why men who have never worn a uniform feel their hearts
beat high at the sight of homecoming troops.”
“Yes, I think so. But remember, those civilians see only the avenue with
the flags flying; they have never seen the wreckage or heard the wail of
a funeral march. They’ve only dreamed of that and painted a vision they
call the Field of Honor, with a trail across it labeled the Path of
Glory. They know it leads to Hell, but they know also that some men
escape. You know, Dan, we can always visualize ourselves escaping,
because the wish is father to the thought.”
“Well, at any rate, Mel, I have lived to know—one breathless moment.”
“Do not know another, my friend.”
“Believe me, I did not desire to know this one. I—I——”
Mellenger waved his cigar in absolution. “You didn’t have any help at
the critical moment. I observed the event. I was sitting in the
semi-twilight of this room, thinking—I had asked Julia not to turn on
the light except in the hall. And then you and Tamea came in. . . I saw
your face, I saw hers. . . . And I had seen the face of the other girl
this afternoon. Tamea has told me in so many words, in French, that she
is going to land you; that she doesn’t consider Maisie a foeman worthy
of her steel. Says Maisie hasn’t got the courage to take that which she
desires. Tamea has. I’ll swear to that.”
“There is nothing wrong about that.”
“Certainly not. A convention of maidenly modesty has metamorphosed many
a fine woman into an embittered, disillusioned old maid. She could have
had her man for the asking—for the taking; and because she neither
asked nor took he thought her repression spelled indifference or
dislike.
“There are many shy, embarrassed men in this world, you know. They are
always unhappy because always married to terrible women.
“Big women, fat women, red-headed, dominating, coarse women, women with
thick ankles, sloppy women, dull women, over-dressed women, loud women,
but all women who flouted convention and who just naturally helped
themselves to the shy, embarrassed, gentle little men they coveted.”
“Praise be, Tamea doesn’t come within the scope of your female _index
expurgatorius_. Isn’t she a glorious creature?”
“Of course she is,” Mellenger agreed petulantly. “She’s more than
glorious. She’s devastating, and all the more ruinous to your peace of
mind because she is simple, natural, unspoiled, eager and amorous. But
you’ve got to put your bright day-dreams behind you and marry Maisie
Morrison.”
“But why, Mel?”
“Why, man, you cannot possibly contemplate the prospect of
miscegenation?”
“Does Tamea remotely resemble a mulatto, a quadroon or an octoroon?”
“She is half Polynesian.”
“But a pure-bred Polynesian is a Caucasian.”
“Very well, then, if you insist. But I insist that the Caucasian race
has many subdivisions. An Arab is a Caucasian; so is a Hindoo; but if
you marry a woman of Arabic or Hindoo blood and have children by her,
your offspring will be Eurasians. Tamea is a half-breed brown white. And
she’s not very brown, either—sort of old ivory. She’d pass for a white
girl anywhere. People who do not know her blood will say, ‘Isn’t she a
marvelous brunette type of beauty!’”
“Well?”
“If she bore you sons, how would you feel if they should grow up to be
great, hearty, brown fellows, unmistakably Polynesian, with prehensile
great toes, an aversion to work, a penchant for white vices? You cannot
dodge the Mendelian law, my boy. Like begets like, but in a union of
opposites we get throwbacks. Breed a black rabbit to a white one and you
will get piebald rabbits. Breed these latter to a white rabbit, and
continue to breed the offspring of succeeding unions to other white
rabbits until you have bred all the black out of them. About the time
you think you have beaten the Mendelian law, the pure white descendant
of a black and white union, a hundred generations removed, will present
you with a litter of pure black rabbits! You’re not going to run the
risk of mongrelizing the species, are you?”
“No, I do not think I am, Mel.”
“Do you know you are not?”
“No.”
“I thought so.” Mellenger rose, walked to Dan and thrust the ruddy end
of his cigar in the latter’s face. “You’re in love with Tamea already,
aren’t you?”
“I don’t know, Mel. Something has happened. It happened tonight. You saw
it happen. It never happened to me before. Good Lord, Mel, old man, my
head has been in a whirl ever since.”
“That isn’t love. It’s infatuation. I’ve been through it. I know. It’s a
wonderful madness. It’s what’s wrong with the world today. It’s at the
root of the divorce problem. Infatuation. And the fools think it is
love.
“Nothing divine about it, nothing spiritual; its victims take no thought
of the qualifications so essential to successful marriage—an even
temper, generosity, unselfishness, tenderness, physical fitness, the
absence of mental and physical repulsiveness.
“My dear man, love should be born in reverence, and if later it develops
into infatuation—well, I suppose that would be quite all right, since
in that case infatuation would be the natural, normal outgrowth of
love—the apotheosis of it. If you marry Maisie Morrison—look here,
Dan, you say you do not love her——”
“I’m not certain, Mel.”
“Then it is a fact that you think a very great deal of her. You have the
utmost respect for her, you are happy in her society, you feel reverent
toward her.”
“Of course I do.”
“Then, you star-gazing jackanapes, marry her and become infatuated with
her afterward. She can’t reach out and grab you and maul you and paw you
over and kiss you and whisper love words to you—like this child of
nature, Tamea. It’s up to you to do that, Dan. How are you going to
discover Maisie’s possibilities to compete with this passion-flower,
Tamea, unless you uncover them yourself? You’re a weak, cowardly sort of
man where women are concerned. I grow very weary of you, my friend. You
want to eat your cake and have it.”
Dan laughed long and pleasurably at his old friend’s outburst. “You’re
such a comfort to me, Mel,” he declared. “I dare say you are right. I’m
cowardly. But then, one shouldn’t take even the most remote chance when
he marries. Marriage is until death.”
“Death sometimes comes early to some married men, and it is welcome. If
you marry Tamea you will die spiritually long before the breath leaves
your carcass and the doctor signs a death certificate authorizing your
burial.”
“What a gloomy picture you paint!”
“Marrying an exotic woman like Tamea—a half aborigine—is like marrying
any other aborigine, because all aborigines are pigmented. And no matter
how transcendent the beauty of a pigmented aborigine—or half-breed
aborigine—that beauty fades early. They degenerate physically and
mentally. They are old at thirty, repulsive at forty, hags at fifty.”
“Nonsense! Educate Tamea, spread over her the veneer of civilization,
teach her how to play, cultivate her voice, dress her exquisitely, and
who shall say of her, ‘You—_you_—are half aborigine’?”
“You speak of a veneer of civilization. Sometimes I think the veneer is
very thin and that man today stands, basically, where he stood five
thousand years ago. Dan, it isn’t a question of a veneer of
civilization. It’s a question of the adaptability of species to its
environment. How long do you suppose it would take you, a white man, to
adapt yourself to the environment of such an island, say, as Riva, in
eastern Polynesia?”
“I couldn’t hazard a guess.”
“I could, and it would be a fairly accurate guess, since the history of
white occupation of the isles of the south Pacific will support my
contention. You would be an infinitesimal portion of the moral and
physical decay before you had lived there five years. After that you
wouldn’t care. It’s like mixing two acids that, combined, produce an
explosion. There is never any real adaptability of the human species,
you know. As long as you and Tamea lived you would have different
thoughts and different thought impulses, different moral values. This
difference would prove an attraction at first; then, gradually, you
would begin to find her ways inferior to yours, so you would have a
contempt for them, which means that presently you would grow to hate
Tamea.”
Mellenger sat down and rested his head in his hands. “I wish I could
remember my geology and paleontology,” he complained. “However, I never
cared for it, so I swept it out of my rag bag of a mind. At any rate,
you are much older than Tamea——”
“Oh, not so old as to make a vital difference. About eighteen years.”
“Shut up, you ass. You ditch my train of thought. You are millions of
years older than Tamea. She is a Neolithic maid and you’re Paleozoic or
Silurian or Cretaceous or something, and in order to reach common ground
she’ll have to climb up through a lot of queer strata or you’ll have to
dig down. You paint mighty fine pictures, but down in Riva they’re still
carving hideous gods out of limestone and making hieroglyphics with a
burned stick; they’re still chasing each other around stumps with knobby
clubs.”
“You’re the man who can paint pictures!”
Mellenger sighed. “No, I cannot. I used to think I could, but nobody
else agrees with me, and now I agree with them. Thought once I’d develop
into a great novelist, when all that God Almighty created me for was to
be a great newspaper man!. . . Well, I’m not embittered, because I can
still think clearly and without illusion. And I can see fairly clearly,
too. . . . You’ve got to get rid of this girl.”
“You’re quite bent on clearing the way for Maisie, aren’t you?”
“Yes. But you are my friend, faithful and just to me, and I’ve loved you
since our freshman days in college. The years and wealth and success
haven’t changed you. You’re still the same shy, helpless, gentle,
obstinate, wistful boy, and—and—I—I want to do something for you, old
son. The best thing I can do is to clear the decks for Maisie and marry
you off to her. She’s a fine woman.”
“But I do not know, really, how to get rid of Tamea. I can’t just chuck
her out, you know. Can’t send her to a hotel or an apartment house and
let her go on the loose. Maisie’s plan is ill-advised. You realized
that.”
“Maisie didn’t have any plan. She isn’t up to the job of collected
thinking now.”
“But she said she had a plan.”
“Yes, I know. She wanted an excuse to come over here this evening to
guard you from Tamea.”
“Mel, you have the most extraordinary ideas. You newspaper men are
always so suspicious of motives.”
“Rats! Not suspicion. Absolute knowledge. When you asked her for her
plan she floundered. Got into deep water close to the shore and I had to
throw her a line. Immediately thereafter—but not until Tamea had
retired—Maisie went home.”
“Have you a plan?”
“You bet I have. The talk of a school is sheer nonsense. That girl is
beyond school, and if you put her in a school she’ll not remain put.”
“You’ve overlooked one important detail. If she may not remain here or
in school she may promptly go to the deuce, for lack of proper control.”
“That would be all right, Dan. The main point is that she must not take
you with her. If she sticks around this house she’ll get you into Town
Topics. She has designs on you, my boy. That’s why I suggest you queer
them by marrying Maisie Morrison immediately, if not sooner. Maisie has,
in effect, proposed to you, and you’ve been very cavalier in your
treatment of the proposal.”
“What do you suppose made her make that wild statement to Tamea, Mel?”
“The best excuse in life. Self-preservation. It’s the first law of human
nature.”
“Just starting a backfire, eh?”
Mellenger nodded and put on his dinner jacket. “I suppose you have
observed that women usually marry the men they make up their minds to
marry.”
“No, I have not observed it.”
“You’re a greater numbskull than I thought you were. Two women have made
up their minds to get you, and one of them is going to succeed.” He
glanced at his watch. “Well, I suppose Maisie Morrison is safe in her
bed by this time, crying herself to sleep, wondering how she is ever to
muster the courage to face you again after tonight. Better send her some
flowers in the morning and ask her to go for a drive with you. That will
put her at her ease. I managed to give Tamea some food for thought, and
with her sleep has been out of the question. She looked out of her
bedroom window and saw Maisie drive away. Then she crept downstairs, and
even now she is sitting out on the hall stairs listening to every word
we say. Tamea! Enter!”
Tamea appeared in the doorway.
“I am such a splendid clairvoyant. I can see around a corner,” Mellenger
remarked dryly. . . . “Well, if I had heard the stairs squeak a little
earlier in the evening I would not have talked so freely. Good night,
Tamea. Good night, Dan. Thanks for a wonderful dinner and a wonderful
evening. I’ll be back next Thursday night, as usual.”
He smiled patronizingly as, on his way to the door, he passed Tamea. She
turned slowly and her fiery glance followed him.
“No, Monsieur Mellengair, you have made the great mistake. I am not the
go-to-the-deuce kind. But if that is interesting, perhaps I shall make
the experiment, no? Well, when I do I shall make it alone, thank you.”
“Now I suppose you’re very angry with me, Tamea.”
“A little. Not so much as I think I shall be tomorrow. I forgive you
much tonight because you are not a fool. But—I shall remember some
things that you said—and those things that I remember I shall not
forgive. Good night.”
“Good night.”
Dan Pritchard roused from the dumb amazement into which he had been
thrown by Tamea’s sudden appearance on the scene. “Hey, wait a moment,
Mel! I’ll walk downtown with you,” he called. He had a sudden impulse to
flee from danger.
But the heavy oaken door had already closed behind his friend, and in
the entrance to the drawing room Tamea stood looking at him. “Come to
me,” she murmured. “Come, _chéri_!”
He went.
Tamea’s round, beautiful arms came up around his neck slowly,
caressingly, and his head was drawn gently down toward her glorious face
until her lips touched his ear.
“That man Mellengair—he is your friend. He is not mine. But if I had,
like you, such a friend—ah, I would be so rich! You must never lose
him, _chéri_! Oh, yes, I hate him, but that does not matter. He is very
wise, but he does not know your Tamea. Ah, no, dear one. I would have
you—ah, so happy—and I would be happy with you. But if to be with me
meant sorrow for you—oh, I could not be so cruel! First I would die.
And you will believe that? Yes?”
Dan’s heart swelled—with that ecstacy that was almost a pain. And then
Tamea kissed his ear lightly, patted his cheek and fled upstairs to her
room, leaving him standing there—breathless, with a feeling that, be
the price what it might be, he could not afford to miss such another
moment as this. . . . It did not occur to him that sorrow and heartbreak
might be the outcome of his yielding.