"Is it of the nature of what is generally called trouble?"
"It's of the nature of what is generally called misfortune."
"And I suppose I mustn't say so much as that I'm sorry."
"You could say that much," I smiled, "if you didn't say any more."
She repeated the weary gesture of a few minutes earlier, a slight
tossing outward of both hands, with a heavy drop against the sides.
"What a life!"
As she began to move on once more I spoke as I walked beside her.
"What's the matter with life?"
Again she paused to confront me. In her eyes gold lights gleamed in the
brown depths of the irises.
"What sense is there in a civilization that cuts us all off from each
other? We're like prisoners in solitary confinement--you in one cell
and Boyd in another and Lulu in another and I in another, and everybody
else in his own or her own and no communication or exchange of help
between us. It's--it's monstrous."
The half-choked passion of her words took me the more by surprise for
the reason that she treated me as if the defects of our civilization
were my fault. Joining Lydia Blair and taking her by the arm, she led
the way back to the motor, while I was left to pilot Drinkwater, who
carried the tea-basket. During the drive back to town our hostess
scarcely spoke, and not once to me directly.
*CHAPTER XI*
But I was troubled by all this, and puzzled. That I couldn't afford the
complication of a love-affair will be evident to any one; but that a
love-affair threatened was by no means clear. As far as that went it was
as fatuous on my part to think of it as it would have been for
Drinkwater, except in so far as it involved danger to myself.
For a few hours that danger did not suggest itself. That is, I was so
busy speculating as to Mildred Averill's meaning that I had no time to
analyze the way I was taking it. Weighing her words, her impulses, her
impatiences, I saw no more than that she might be offering her treasures
at the feet of a wooden man, a carved and painted figment, without
history or soul.
That is, unless I mistook her meanings as Malvolio mistook Viola's!
There was that side to it, too. It was the aspect of the case on which
I dwelt all through my lonely dinner. I had not forgotten Boyd
Averill's reception of me on the Sunday of the luncheon; I never should
forget it. There is something in being in the house of a man who is
anxious to get you out of it unlike any other form of humiliation. The
very fact that he refrains from pointedly showing you the door only
gives time for the ignominy to sink in. Nothing but the habit of doing
certain things in a certain way carried me through those two hours and
enabled me to take my departure without incivility. On going down the
steps the sense that I had been kicked out was far more keen than if
Averill had given way to the actual physical grossness.
Some of this feeling, I admit, was fanciful. It was due to the
disturbed imagination natural to a man whose mental equipment has been
put awry. Averill had been courteous throughout my visit. More than
that, he was by nature kindly. Anywhere but in his own house his
attitude to me would have been cordial, and for anything I needed he
would have backed me with more than his good-will.
Nevertheless, that Sunday rankled as a poisoned memory, and one from
which I found it impossible wholly to dissociate any member of his
family. Though I could blame Mrs. Averill a little, I could blame Miss
Averill not at all; and yet she belonged to the household in which I had
been made to feel an unwelcome guest. That in itself might give me a
clue to her sentiment toward me.
As I went on with my dinner I came to the conclusion that it did give me
such a clue. I was the idiot Malvolio thinking himself beloved of
Viola. Where there was nothing but a balked philanthropy I was looking
for the tender heart. The dictionary teemed with terms that applied to
such a situation, and I began to heap them on myself.
I heaped them on myself with a sense not of relief, but of
disappointment. That was the odd discovery I made, as much to my
surprise as my chagrin. Falling in love with anybody was no part of my
program. It was out of the question for obvious reasons. In addition
to these I was in love with some one else.
That is to say, I knew I had been in love; I knew that in the portion of
my life that had become obscured there had been an emotional drama of
which the consciousness remained. It remained as a dream remains when
we remember the vividness and forget the facts--but it remained. I
could view my personality somewhat as you view a countryside after a
storm has passed over it. Without having witnessed the storm you can
tell what it was from the havoc left behind. There was some such havoc
in myself.
Just as I could look into the glass and see a face young, haggard,
handsome, if I may use the word without vanity, that seemed not to be
mine, so I could look into my heart and read the suffering of which I no
longer perceived the causes. It was like looking at the scar of a wound
received before you can remember. Your body must have bled from it,
your nerves must have ached; even now it is numb or sensitive; but its
history is lost to you. It was once the outstanding fact of your
childish existence; and now all of which you are aware is something
atrophied, lacking, or that shrinks at a touch.
In just that way I knew that passion had once flashed through my life,
but had left me nothing but the memory of a memory. I could trace its
path almost as easily as you can follow the track of a tornado through a
town--by the wreckage. I mean by the wreckage an emotional weariness, an
emotional distress, an emotional distaste for emotion; but above
everything else I mean a craving to begin the emotion all over again.
I often wondered if some passional experience hadn't caused the
shattering of the brain cells. I often wondered if the woman I had loved
was not dead. I wondered if I might not even have killed her. Was that
the crime from which I was running away? Were the Furies pursuing me?
Was it to be my punishment to fall in love with another woman and suffer
the second time because the first suffering had defeated its own ends in
making me insensible?
All through the evening thoughts of this kind, now and then with a
half-feverish turn, ran through my mind, till by the time I went to bed
love no longer seemed impossible. It was appalling; and yet it had a
fascination.
So for the next few days I walked with a vision pure, unobtrusive,
subdued, holy in its way, which nevertheless broke into light and
passion and flame that nobody but myself was probably aware of. I also
gleaned from Lydia Blair, who had a journalistic facility in gathering
personal facts, that Mildred Averill's place in New York life was not
equal to her opportunities.
"There are always girls like that," Miss Blair commented. "They've got
all the chances in the world, and don't know how to make use of them.
She's not a bad looker, not when you come to study her; and yet you
couldn't show her off with the dressiest models in New York."
I ventured to suggest that showing off might not be Miss Averill's
ambition.
"And a good thing too, poor dear. If it was it would be the limit. She
sure has the sense to know what she can't do. That's something. Look
here, Harry," she continued, sharply, "I told you before that if you're
going to take letters down from the dictaphone you've got to read them
through to the end before you begin to transcribe. Then you'll know
where the corrections come in. Now you've got to go back and begin all
over again. See here, my dear. If you think I'm going to waste my
perfectly good time giving you lessons that you don't listen to you've
got your nerve with you."
It was one of my rare visits to Miss Flowerdew's dark front parlor, of
which Drinkwater had the use, and I was making the call for a purpose. I
knew there were certain afternoons when Miss Blair "breezed in," as she
expressed it, to give some special lesson to her pupil; and I had heard
once or twice that on such occasions Miss Averill, too, had come to lend
him her encouragement. Nominally she brought a cylinder from which
Drinkwater was to copy the letters her brother had dictated; but really
her mission was one of sympathy. Seeing the boy in such good hands, and
happy in his lot, I had the less compunction in leaving him alone. I
left him alone, as I have said, in order not to be identified more than
I could help with two stenographers.
My visit of this day was notably successful in that I obtained from Miss
Blair her own summing up of the social position of the Averill family.
As far as they carried a fashionable tag it was musical. Mrs. Averill
had a box at the opera, and was seen at all the great concerts. She
entertained all the great singers and all wandering celebrities of the
piano and violin. Before she went to Europe she had begun to make a
place for herself with her Sunday afternoons, at which one heard the
most renowned artists of the world singing or playing for friendship's
sake. In her own special line she might by now have been one of the
most important hostesses in New York had it not been for her
constitutional weakness in "chucking things."
She had always chucked things just when beginning to make a success of
them. She had chucked her career as a girl in good society in order to
work for the concert stage. She had chucked the concert stage in order
to marry a rich man. She had chucked the advantages of being a rich
man's wife while in the full tide of social recognition. With immense
ambitions, she lacked steadiness of purpose, and so, according to Miss
Blair, she was always "getting left." Getting left implied that as far
as New York was concerned Lulu Averill was nowhere when she might easily
have been somewhere, with a consequent feeling on her part of boredom
and disappointment.
It reacted on her husband in compelling him to work in unsettled
conditions and without the leisure and continuity so essential to
research. Miss Blair's expression was that the poor man never knew where
he was at. Adoring his wife, he was the more helplessly at her beck and
call, for the reason that he had long ago come to the knowledge that his
wife didn't adore him. Holding her only by humoring her whims, he was
just now struggling with her caprice to go back to the concert stage
again.
To Mildred Averill all this made little difference because she had none
of the aims commonly grouped as social. Miss Blair understood that from
her childhood she had been studious, serious, living quietly with her
elderly parents at Mornstown, and acquiring their elderly tastes. "Its
fierce the way old people hamper a girl," Lydia commented. "Just
because they're your father or mother they think they've a right to suck
your life-blood like a leech. My mother died when I was sixteen," she
added, in a tone of commendation. "Of course you're lonely-like at
times--but then you're free." Freedom to Mildred Averill, however, was
all the same as being bound. She didn't know how to make use of liberty
or give herself a good time. When her father died she stayed on with
her mother at Morristown, and when the mother "punched the clock for the
next life"--the figure was Miss Blair's--she simply joined her brother
and sister-in-law in New York. After she went out of mourning she was
sometimes seen at a concert or the opera with Mrs. Averill. There was
no more to her social life than that and an occasional dinner.
"Gray-blooded, I call it," Miss Blair threw in again, "and a sinful
waste of good chances. My! if I had them!"
"Perhaps you can have them," I suggested, Harry Drinkwater having gone
for a minute to his room. "Miss Averill told me one day that she
thought of taking a house and asking you to live with her."
"Me? Do you see me playing second fiddle to a girl as sure bound to be
an old maid as I'm bound to be--"
"An adventuress."
"I'm bound to be an adventuress--if I like."
"Oh, then there's a modification to your program. The last time we
talked about it you were going to do it. Now it's only--if you like."
Her lovely blue eyes shot me a look of protest. "You wouldn't want me to
do it--if I didn't like. The worst of being an adventuress is the kind
of guys you must adventure with. You don't mean to thrust them down my
throat."
"Oh, I'm not urging you at all. I did happen to see you one evening at
the restaurant Blitz--"
She nodded. "I saw you. What were you doing there? You don't feed at
places like that."
"How do you know I don't?"
"Well, I don't know. That's just the trouble. Sometimes I think you're
a--"
"I'm a--what?"
"See here! You give me the creeps. Do you know it?"
"How?"
"Well, you saw that guy I was with at the Blitz."
"Looked like a rich fathead."
"Yes; but you know he's a rich fathead. He's as clear as a glass of
water. You're like"--she paused for a simile--"you're like something
that might be a cocktail--and might be a dose of poison." She turned on
me with a new flash in her blue eyes. "Look here! Tell me honest, now.
Are you a swell crook--or ain't you?"
[Illustration: She turned on me with a new flash in her blue eyes.
"Look here! Tell me honest, now. Are you a swell crook--or ain't you?"
"Suppose I say that--that I ain't." "Say, kid!" she responded, coldly,
"talk like yourself, will you? ... If you're not a swell crook I can't
make you out.]
"Suppose I say that--that I ain't."
"Say, kid!" she responded, coldly, "talk like yourself, will you?" She
threw her hands apart, palms outward. "Well, if you're not a swell
crook I can't make you out."
"But as a swell crook you could. Is that it?"
"Why do you keep hanging round Miss Averill?" she asked, bluntly. "What
do you expect to get by that?"
"What do you expect to get by asking me?"