"No; I've never sold anything like that."
"But what's the use," Mrs. Averill asked, "of caring about things when
you can't have them? I should hate it."
"Only that there's nothing you can't have."
"Do you hear that, Boyd?" I caught the impulse of the purring, velvety
thing to vary the monotony of life by scratching. "Mr. Soames says
there's nothing I can't have. Much he knows, doesn't he?"
"There's nothing you can't have--within reason, dear."
"Ah, but I don't want things within reason. I want them out of reason.
I want to be like Mr. Soames--free--free--"
"You can't be free and be a married woman."
"You can when you have a vocation, can't you, Mr. Soames? I suppose Mr.
Soames is a married man--and look at him." She hurried beyond this
point, to add: "And look at Sydna, whom we heard the other afternoon!
She's a married woman and her husband lives in London. He lets her sing.
He lets her travel. He leads his life and lets her ... Mr. Soames, what
do you think?"
I said, tactfully, "I shall be able to judge better when you've sung to
me."
Miss Averill, taking up the thread of the conversation here, we got
through the rest of the luncheon without treading in difficult places,
and presently I was alone with Averill, who was passing the cigars.
The constraint which had partially lifted during the conversation at
luncheon fell again with the departure of the ladies. I had mystified
them more than ever; and mystery does not make for easy give and take in
hospitality. To Averill himself his hospitality was sacred. To
entertain at his own board a man with no credentials but those which an
adventurer might present was the source of a discomfort that amounted to
unhappiness. He couldn't conceal it; he didn't care to conceal it.
While fulfilling all that courtesy required of a host, he was willing to
let me see it. I saw it, and could say nothing, since he might easily
be right; and an adventurer I might be.
As, with his back to the open doorway into the hall, he sat down with
his own cigar, I felt that he was saying to himself, "I wish to God you
were not in this house!" I myself was responding silently by wishing
the same thing.
It was the obvious minute at which to tell him everything. I saw that
as plainly as you do. Had I made a clean breast of it I should have
become one of the most interesting cases of his experience. Such
instances of shell-shock were just beginning to be talked about. The
term was finding its way into the newspapers and garnishing common
speech. Though I knew of no connection between my misfortunes and the
Great War, I could have made shift to furnish an illustration of this
new phase among its tragedies.
During a pause in our stilted speech I screwed myself up to the point.
"There's something--" But his attention was distracted for the moment,
and when it came back to me I couldn't begin again. No! I could fight
the thing through on my own; but that would be my utmost. A confession
of breakdown was impossible.
Then, all at once, I got a glimpse of what was in the back of his mind,
though something else happened simultaneously, of which I must tell you
first. Into the open space between the portieres behind him there
glided a little figure clad in amber-colored linen, the monochrome with
the sun-spots beneath it. She didn't speak, for the reason that Averill
spoke first.
"You're--" He struck a match nervously to relight his cigar--"you're
a--a married man?"
Once more negation had to be my refuge. If I admitted that I was he
might ask me whom I had married, and when, and where. I spoke with an
emphasis that sprang not from eagerness of denial, but from anxiety that
the topic shouldn't be discussed.
"No."
The question and answer followed so swiftly on Mildred Averill's arrival
on the threshold that she caught them both. Little sparks of gold shone
in the brown pools of her eyes, and her smile took on a new shade of
vitality.
"Boyd, Lulu wants you to bring your cigars up-stairs. The coffee is
there, and she'd like to talk to Mr. Soames about the old Chinese things
before she begins to sing."
He jumped to his feet. He was not less constrained, but some of his
uneasiness had passed. I could read what was in his mind. If the worst
came to the worst I was at least a single man; and the worst might not
come to the worst. There might be ways of getting rid of me before his
sister...
He led the way up-stairs. I followed with Miss Averill, saying I have
forgotten what. I have forgotten it because, as we crossed the
low-ceiled hall with its monumental bits of furniture, two gleaming eyes
stood over me like sentinels in the air.
*CHAPTER X*
Within a fortnight my nearly two hundred dollars had come down to nearly
one, and this in spite of my self-denials.
Self-denials were new to me. I knew that by my difficulties in
beginning to practise them. Such economics as staying at the Barcelona
instead of a more luxurious hotel, or as buying ready-made clothes
instead of waiting for the custom-made, I do not speak of as
self-denials, since they were no more than concessions to a temporary
lack of cash. But the first time I made my breakfast on one egg instead
of two; the first time I suppressed the eggs altogether; the first time
I lunched on a cup of chocolate taken at a counter; the first time I
went without a midday meal of any kind--these were occasions when the
saving of pennies struck me as akin to humiliation. I had formed no
habits to prepare me for it. The possibility that it might continue
began at last to frighten me.
For none of my artful methods had been successful. I frequented the
hotels; I hung about the entrances to theaters; I tramped the streets
till a new pair of boots became a necessity; but no one ever hailed me
as an old acquaintance. Once only, standing in the doorway of a great
restaurant, did I recognize a face; but it was that of Lydia Blair,
dining with a man. He was a big, round-backed, silver-haired man, with
an air of opulence which suggested that Miss Blair might be taking the
career of adventuress more seriously than I had supposed. Whether or
not she saw me I couldn't tell, for, to avoid embarrassment both for
herself and me, I withdrew to another stamping-ground. What the young
lady chose to do with herself was no affair of mine. Since a pretty
girl of facile temperament would have evident opportunities, it was not
for me to interfere with her. Had she belonged to my own rank in life I
might have been shocked or sorry; but every one knew that a beautiful
working-girl...
As to my own rank in life a sense of going under false pretenses added
to my anxieties, though it was through no fault of my own. Miss Averill
persisted in giving me the role of romantic seeker for the hard facts of
existence. She did it only by assumption; but she did it.
"There's nothing like seeing for oneself, is there? It's feeling for
oneself, too, which is more important. I'm so terribly cut off from it
all. I'm like a bird in a cage trying to help those whose nests are
being robbed."
This was said during the second of the excursions for which Miss Blair
captured me from the lobby of the Barcelona. Her procedure was exactly
the same as on the first occasion, except that she came about the middle
of the afternoon. Nothing but an unusual chance found me sitting there,
idle but preoccupied, as I meditated on my situation while smoking a
cigar. My first impulse to refuse Miss Averill's invitation point-blank
was counteracted by the thought of escape from that daily promenade up
and down the halls of hotels which had begun to be disheartening and
irksome.
Of this the novelty had passed. The expectations that during the first
week or two had made each minute a living thing had simmered away in a
sense of futility. No old friend having recognized me yet, I was
working round to the conviction that no old friend ever would. If I
kept up the tramp it was because I could see nothing else to do.
But on this particular afternoon for the first time I revolted. The
effect was physical, in that my feet seemed to be too heavy to be
dragged along. They were refusing their job, while my mind was planning
it.
Thus in the end I found myself sharing the outing given nominally for
the blind boy, but really planned from a complication of motives which
to Miss Averill were obscure. It did not help to make them clearer that
her wistful, unuttered appeals to me to solve the mystery surrounding my
personality passed by without result.
The high bank of an autumn wood, the Hudson with a steamer headed
southward, more autumn woods covering the hills beyond, a tea-basket,
tea--this was the decoration. We had alighted from the motor somewhere
in the neighborhood of Tarrytown. Tea being over, Miss Blair and
Drinkwater, with chaff and laughter, were clearing up the things and
fitting them back into the basket.
"She's very clever with him," Miss Averill explained, as she led the way
to a fallen log, on which she seated herself, indicating that I might
sit beside her. "She seizes on anything that will teach him the use of
his fingers, and makes a game of it. He's very quick, too. The next
time he'll be able to take the things out of the tea-basket and put them
back all by himself."
So we had dropped into her favorite theme, the duty of helping the
helpless.
She was in brown, as usual, a brown-green, that might have been a Scotch
or Irish homespun, which blended with the wine shades and russets all
about us with the effect of protective coloration. The day was as still
as death, so breathless that the leaves had scarcely the energy to fall.
In the heavy, too-sweet scents there was suggestion and
incitement--suggestion that chances were passing and incitement to seize
them before they were gone.
I wish there were words in which to convey the peculiar overtones in
Miss Averill's comparison of herself with a bird in a cage. There was
goodness in them, and amusement, as well as something baffled and
enraged. She had been so subdued when I had seen her hitherto that I
was hardly prepared for this half-smothered outburst of fierceness.
"If you're like a bird in a cage," I said, "you're like the one that
sings to the worker and cheers him up."
Her pleasure was expressed not in a change of color or a drooping of the
lids, but in a quiet suffusion that might most easily be described as
atmospheric.
"Oh, as for cheering people up--I don't know. I've tried such a lot of
it, only to find that they got along well enough without me. A woman
wants more than anything else in the world to feel that she's needed;
and when she discovers she isn't--"
The sense of my own apparent superfluity in life prompted me to say:
"Oh, it isn't only women who discover that."
Her glance traveled down the steep wooded bank and over the river, to
rest on the wine-colored hills on the other side.
"Did you--did you ever?"--she corrected herself quickly--"I mean--do
men?"
"Some men do. It's--it's possible."
"Isn't it," she asked, tackling the subject in her sensible way,
"primarily a question of money? If you have enough of it not to have to
earn a living--and no particular duties--don't you find yourself edged
out of the current of life? After all, what the world wants is
producers; and the minute one doesn't produce--"
"What do you mean by producers?"
She reflected. "I suppose I mean all who contribute, either directly or
indirectly, either mentally or physically, to the sum total of our needs
in living. Wouldn't that cover it?"