"You've turned _Red_, Susan? How long since? Overnight?"
"Not red," answered Susan, with bravely forced gayety; "pinkish, say! I
haven't fixed on my special shade till I'm sure it becomes me."
"It's certain to do that, dear."
She bobbed me a little bow across the cloth, much in the old happy
style--alas, not quite. "But I never did like washed-out colors," she
threw in for good measure.
"You _are_ irresponsible, then! Suppose Phil could hear you--or Jimmy.
Jimmy'd say your Greenwich Village friends were corrupting you. Perhaps
they are?"
"Perhaps they are," echoed Susan, "but I think not. I'm afraid it goes
farther back, Ambo. It's left-over Birch Street; that's what it is. So
much of me's that. All of me, I sometimes believe."
"Not quite. You'll never escape Hillhouse, either, Susan. You've had
both."
"Yes, I've had both," she echoed again, almost on a sigh, pushing her
untasted _demi-tasse_ from her.
Suddenly her elbows were planted on the cloth before her, her
face--shadowed and too finely drawn--dropped between her hands, her eyes
sought and held mine. They dizzied me, her eyes....
"Ambo," she said earnestly, "I suppose I'm a dreadful egotist, but more
and more I'm feeling the real me isn't a true child of this world! I
love this world--and I hate it. I don't know whether I love it most or
hate it most. I bless it and damn it every day of my life--in the same
breath often. But sometimes I feel I hate it most--hate it for its cold
dullness of head and heart! Why can't we care more to make it worth
living in, this beautiful, frightful world! What's the matter with us?
Why are we what we are? Half angels--and half pigs or goats or
saber-toothed tigers or snakes! Each and every one of us, by and large!
And oh, how we do distrust our three-quarters angels--while they're
living, anyway! Dreamers--mad visionaries--social rebels--outcasts!
Crucify them, crucify them! Time enough to worship them--ages of
to-be-wasted time enough--when they're dead!" She paused, still holding
my eyes, and drawing in a slow breath, a breath that caught midway and
was almost a sob; then her eyes left mine.
"There--that's over. Saying things like that doesn't help us a bit;
it's--silly.... And half the idealists _are_ mad, no doubt, and have
plenty of pig and snake in them, too. I've simply coils and coils of
unregenerate serpent in me--and worse. Oh, Ambo dear--but I've a dream
in me beyond all that, and a great longing to help it come true! But it
doesn't--it won't. I'm afraid it never will--here. Will it _there_,
Ambo? Is there a _there_?... Have we got all of Sister that clean fire
couldn't take, shut up in that tiny vase?"
"We can hope not, at least," I replied.
"Hope isn't enough," said Susan. "Why don't you say you know we
haven't! I know we haven't. I do know it. It's the only thing
I--_know_!"
A nervous waiter sidled up to us and softly slipped a small metal tray
before me; it held my bill, carefully turned face downward.
"Anything more, sir?" he murmured.
"A liqueur?" I suggested to Susan. She sat upright in her chair again,
with a slight impatient shake of the head.
I ordered a cigar and a _fine champagne_. The waiter, still nervously
fearful of having approached us at a moment when he suspected some
intimate question of the heart had grown critically tense, faded from us
with the slightest, discreetest cough of reassurance. He was not one, he
would have us know, to obtrude material considerations when they were
out of place.
"No; I can't go with Mr. Sampson," Susan was saying; "and he'll be
hurt--he won't be able to see why. But I'm not made to be an editor--of
anything. Editors have to weigh other people's words. I can't even weigh
my own. And I talk of nothing but myself. Ugh!"
"You're tired out, overwrought," I stupidly began.
"Don't tell me so!" cried Susan. "If I should believe you, I'd be lost."
"But," I blundered on, "it's only common sense to let down a little, at
such a time. If you'd only take a real rest----"
"There is no such thing," said Susan. "We just struggle on and on. It's
rather awful, isn't it?" And presently, very quietly, as if to herself,
she said over those words, surely among the saddest and loveliest ever
written by mortal man:
_From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be_
_That no life lives forever,
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea._
"To sea," she repeated; "to sea.... As if the sea itself knew rest!--Now
please pay your big fat bill from your nice fat pocketbook, Ambo; and
take me home."
"If I only could!" was my despairing thought; and I astounded the
coat-room boy, as I tipped him, by muttering aloud, "Oh, damn Jimmy
Kane!"
"Yes, sir--thank you, sir--I will, sir," grinned the coat-room boy.
On our way downtown in the taxi Susan withdrew until we reached her West
Tenth Street door. "Good-night, Ambo," she then said; "don't come with
me; and thank you for everything--always." I crossed the pavement with
her to the loutish brownstone front-stoop of the boarding house; there
she turned to dismiss me.
"You didn't ask my second reason for not going on the review, Ambo. You
must know it though, sooner or later. I can't _write_ any more--not
well, I mean. Even my Dax paragraphs are falling off; Hadow Bury
mentioned it yesterday. But nothing comes. I'm sterile, Ambo. I'm
written out at twenty. Bless you. Good-night."
"Susan," I cried, "come back here at once!" But she just turned in the
doorway to smile back at me, waved her hand, and was gone.
I was of two minds whether to follow her or stay. Then, "A whim," I
thought; "the whim of a tired child. And I've often felt that way
myself--all writers do. But she must take a vacation of some kind--she
must!"
She did.