Ida Summers insisted on departing on her own ways, laughingly
proclaiming that if she couldn't be provided with an adorer she wasn't
going to sit by for a second time and spoil the fun. Dore let her go
without protest. She did not care now. Her head ached. She could not
collect her thoughts--could not place before her what had happened. That
everything had suddenly ceased, that in the cataclysm her youth, her
dreams, her joy in being, were swallowed up, she knew. Something had
happened, and yet she could not distinctly perceive it.
They went rushing up the crowded driveway, and on along the open Hudson,
hour after hour. The man at her side, leaning forward eagerly, facing
her, talked incessantly--talked to her as a man does only when he seeks
to unfold all that he has to impress a woman. She answered correctly;
she even heard phrases and repeated them mechanically, seeking to
comprehend them.
"You are more than life--you are youth itself. I don't know why--every
reason--you attract me, but I know I'm groping for you!
"Yes, it's youth, youth, a man like myself needs--the feeling of youth
again, the daring of youth, impetuous, magnificent. That's what you can
give me!
"I'll give everything--not by half measures; I want you to know all I'm
holding back. You'll know the greatest joy in the world, of sharing
everything!"
Once he took her hand. Then she turned, and without withdrawing the
fingers, which felt no sensation, said:
"Don't do that!"
And he obeyed.
She listened, seeking only the sadness in the sky, the melancholy of
isolated and distant things. She knew her heart was broken, that nothing
could ever exist for her again. No, never could she feel a palpitating
joy; it would all be gray and brown--brown and gray as the worn hills
about her, nature, which had forgot its May! And at the same time she
listened, smiling and provocative, to this other man who passionately
courted her, laying open his inner-most soul for her inspection--a man
who proclaimed again and again that she drew him to her by the glow of
her youth and the joy of life.
That afternoon was like a phantasmagoria. Even he, at the end, noticed
her mental numbness.
"What's the matter with you?" he asked.
She looked at him, smiling negation.
"You seem crushed, as if I could stick a pin in you! What's wrong? Has
that beast Sassoon insulted--?"
She shook her head. Even this incongruity did not penetrate.
"Listen!" he went on, retaining her hand as she started to descend.
"I'm not a fool! I won't throw myself away on any woman! I'll play fair,
too, and open. I don't want backing and pulling--I want things to be
big, direct, honest! You know what I feel; you know what I'm capable of
feeling! Don't you?"
She smiled and nodded, without comprehending in the least. She was
thinking, with a desperate longing, of the shelter of her room, still so
far away.
"Very well. I'm going to see you once more," he said abruptly. "Then
it's for you to decide. If you want me to come,"--he hesitated to give
full emphasis,--"it's for you to send for me!"
She remembered the ultimatum afterward. Now she murmured something
commonplace.
He caught her hand.
"Can't you tell me now?"
"What?" she said, striving to recall his meaning.
"Do you want me to come? Is it your wish?"
"Why--yes, why not?" she answered mechanically--nor did she see what
leaped into his eyes.
She went hurriedly up the stoop and in. Suddenly she had the feeling
that she used to have when she had left the tense concentrated glare of
the footlights and passed into the relief of the shadowy wings. The
smiles fled from her lips, the nervous provocative mask dropped away.
She felt a mortal heaviness of accomplishment. She had lasted through
the afternoon; she had not betrayed herself. Half-way up the second
flight, she sat down abruptly, exhausted; then, straining every nerve
in her body, she reached the haven of her room, as a spent swimmer
battling for the shore.
Then a new trial. From behind her door came the sound of voices. Again
she took up her mask. The next moment Winona had sprung to her,
embracing her feverishly, crying:
"I've got it! I've got it, you darling!"
"Ah--Blainey," she said, suffering her embrace.
But Winona, not to be prevented, continued hugging her frantically,
babbling everything, all in a breath, frantic with joy and
relief--Winona, whom the night before she had held sobbing in her arms,
who to-day was the deliriously happy one!
Then she saw Snyder standing apart, and at her skirts a little girl,
half child, half baby, clinging, shyly revolted. As soon as Dore saw
her, she went forward impulsively, kneeling and holding out her arms.
The child, with the divining instinct of childhood toward suffering, to
the amazement of the others, ran swiftly into her embrace. Dore carried
her to a chair, holding her head from her, looking into the starry eyes.
"What's your name?"
"Betty."
From that moment she forgot the others. The room seemed narrowed to
their embrace, each clinging to the other. These arms, so warm against
her neck, this soft weight against her breast, filled her with
immeasurable awakening sadness, but a sadness that deadened the
consciousness of self, as if this innocence were the only affection
that could understand, the only one that could minister to her pain!
This helplessness pressing against her breast recalled her poignant
childhood, unmothered yet often in passionate grief groping for maternal
arms. If only now she could go in weakness, somewhere to confide her
crushed body weakly as a wounded child! If only the others would go and
leave her thus--
How long she remained thus she did not know. Winona went, returned and
departed. All at once Snyder was standing above them, saying:
"Sorry--time's up! Young one must be getting home to roost!"
She took her convulsively to her breast. She did not know whether it
soothed or hurt her more; only that it started within her a passionate
hunger for this innocence that responded, this incomprehension that
understood! She rose abruptly.
"Bring her often--often!" she said, turning away her face.
A knock at the door, and the black hand of Josephus extending a letter.
She knew at once whose letter it was; no need to look! She clutched it,
hiding it against her dress. Betty, clinging to her skirts, indignant at
her change of mood, clamored for recognition. She bent over, kissed her
swiftly, laughed. Then she was alone.
She looked at the letter, but she did not open it. Instead, she placed
it on a table, locked the doors, and clutching her hands until the nails
cut in, began to pace the floor.
If he had dared--to seek another meeting!
She felt a hot indignant anger wrapping her whole body. She would show
him her scorn! At one moment she was on the point of tearing up the
letter unread, at the next of sending it back contemptuously. At the end
she opened it and read:
"_Dear Miss Baxter_:
"I was out of my head.... I should have known my limitations....
I didn't. I am very sorry, and I only am to blame. Some later day
I want to be your good friend.... Do you understand?
"With great respect,
"L. M."
When she had read this unexpected renunciation, she forgot all her
anger, all her resistance.
"He will never see me again!" she said, with a sob, pressing the letter
convulsively against her tears.
She needed no second reading to understand that. She put the crumpled
sheet into her waist, striking her temples with her little fists as she
had once struck him, repeating:
"Never!"
In this moment she no longer had any doubts. She loved him madly, with
an intensity that obliterated everything else. And now all this must be
strangled; for, in her strange self-formed morality, such a love was
unthinkable. The only man who had known how to take her, to see through
her acting, to reach out roughly, brutally, like a master--this man
belonged to another woman;--was barred to her forever!
"What have I done? Why--why should I be punished this way?"
Suddenly she seized a chair, and dragging it to the side window, sat
down, her chin in her hands, staring through the glass at the sheer
blankness of brick only a few feet away. It was beginning to be dusk.
She felt herself caught; she yielded everything. The thought of pain was
so abhorrent to her nature, she had always rushed so fearfully from the
contact of suffering, that, now when she was caught without escape,
everything crumbled. In this abject moment, as her body yielded to the
pervading process of the dusk, she turned back over the entangled
progress of her life, convinced that she was paying fearfully in
retribution for selfishness and wickedness.
Life, which rises out of the past in its naked proportions only when we
dumbly seek a reason for the calamity that overwhelms us, came thus to
her as a conviction. What had happened must be her punishment.
She saw her progress as though she were looking down at great revolving
spirals, complete in themselves, yet merging in an upward progress. How
many men--not by tens, but by scores--she had deliberately used in her
upward striving!
"Yes; this is my punishment!" she said breathlessly. She had a feeling
that they--the others--were now to be revenged.
* * * * *
She had only a faint impression of her home in a little village town of
Ohio. Home it had never been. Her father, brilliant, erratic, emigrant
from New England, half politician, half journalist, had suddenly
disappeared from her life when she was not yet in her teens. They had
told her many things at the time. Afterward she had divined what must
have happened--unhappiness, flight with another woman, divorce. Her
mother, perhaps the most to blame, had remarried immediately. She had
known nothing of her step-father, only that he was some one in power in
Cincinnati politics, and well-off. She had been left to the care of an
aunt, and very soon she had realized that her duty in life was to make
her own way.
And this way she had achieved, or rather had made others achieve for
her. She had been precocious, feeling herself a little mongrel who must
captivate by its tricks. How simple it had all been--this curious spiral
mounting from the pillared house at the corner of the village green,
through various strata, to this--to New York, and to the heart of New
York at the last! She could never remember the time when she had not had
the devotion of the opposite sex. No one had ever needed to teach her
the art of pleasing, yet she had known how to exercise it everywhere.
She remembered curious odd figures, girlhood admirers, whom she blushed
now to have cared even to attract. How her ideas had changed! How she
had been educated! And how many different types of men she had known! At
first it had been the grocery clerk, a ruddy Saxon, who had cut prices
and swollen measures, fatuously, for her sake; then a young engineer on
the railroad who had appealed to her imagination; little storekeepers,
a local reporter, the captain of the village nine--a giant in those
days: not singly, but a dozen at once at her feet.
Next she had gone to high school in Toledo, where for the first time she
had judged her local admirers by the standards of the city, a metropolis
to her. There it had been another upward circle--students in the
university, young lawyers, scrub doctors, embryo merchants, demigods by
comparison. This first taste of the life of the city had decided her.
She returned to her home but once--to leave it forever. She had sought a
little capital and had obtained a few hundred dollars. There she had
learned that her mother had been divorced, married again, and that it
was quite hopeless to apply to her. She had had an enormous success on
that return, with her city clothes and her imposing manners. The
grocer's clerk had given up in despair at first sight; the others had
hung back awed, realizing that she was not stuff for them. And here she
had taken her first confidence, her first belief in her star--in her
star, which was not stationary, but which should travel.
She had given, as excuse against the frantic objections of her aunt,
that she must prepare herself to earn her living by stenography. She
started zealously to equip herself, going to Cleveland and taking a
modest hall bedroom at four dollars a week, board included. She
continued firm in this resolve for exactly two weeks. But application
was against her volatile nature. Besides, her masculine acquaintance had
assumed such proportions that she could find no time for work. And
suddenly she had met Josh Nebbins, press-agent for a local theater.
She had been attracted to him immediately by his shoes--patent leather
with chamois tops, that looked like spats and distinguished him from the
common herd. He wore a colored handkerchief in his breast-pocket,
English style, red or green shirts, and coats with curious pointed
cuffs, which she felt only a New York tailor could have imagined. He had
had the greatest influence on her life. He had shown her the easy way to
things people coveted, analyzing the philosophy of her sex with his
shrewd philosophy of life, contemptuous, successful and witty.
"Play the game, kid--play the game," he would say to her. "The world's
full of soft suckers ready to fall for a pretty pair of lamps, and yours
are A1 flashers. Make 'em give you what you want! Follow my tips and
I'll show you how. And say, don't for one moment think you have to give
up anything for what you get. No, sir, not Anno Domini, U. S. Ameriky!"
She had taken his tips, followed his leads. She had soon learned how to
acquire whatever she needed. If it was a dress, there was always an
admirer in a wholesale store who frantically insisted on the privilege
of making a present. Another placed a carriage at her disposal, grateful
for the privilege of her company when it pleased her. Other presents
were easily convertible.
Nebbins had even changed her name. She had been called Flossie, a
contraction from Florence. He had disapproved and invented Dore, and
she had accepted enthusiastically. She had a strange intuition that what
he did would result for her good, and obeyed implicitly--yes, with even
an uneducated admiration. They had become engaged. She would have
married him, but he was too much in love not to be proud. He wanted
three thousand in the bank, and so they had waited.
Through his offices, she had begun as a super in the local stock
company, advancing to an occasional speaking part. She had been at home
at once on the stage; she felt born for this. The next season she had
entered another stock company playing a circuit, as a regular member.
She had wept desperately on leaving Nebbins, completely under his
ascendency. She had even offered at the last moment to throw up
everything and marry him. He had refused honestly. She had not seen him
since.
This memory tortured her. She had soon progressed to where she had seen
him in true perspective, or rather in his ridiculous lights. She quickly
grew ashamed of the romance. It was something she would have blotted
from her life, the more so because at the bottom she felt an obligation,
and it revolted her to think that what she was become had, at a critical
moment, depended on a Yankee press-agent named Josh Nebbins, who wore
ridiculous patent leather shoes with chamois tops!
She was ashamed, and at the same time she was afraid--afraid lest at
some time this persistent man, to whom her word had once indiscreetly
been given, should surge up out of the past and claim her! He had been
the only man from whom she had ever directly accepted money. It had not
been much,--a hundred dollars given as a reserve; they were engaged to
be married; he had silenced her objections,--but still the fact
remained. She had a thousand times resolved to pay it back--to rid
herself of this fetter of the past. She had never done so. This was her
greatest reproach.
From Nebbins on, the way had not been difficult. She had never saved
much money, nor continued long in one opportunity; but she had learned
confidence, and how easy opportunities rise for a pretty girl with
audacity and wit. But always, in her progress from city to capital, from
capital to metropolis, she felt a shadowy crowd of men, reproachful and
embittered. She had never been affected by the pangs she had awakened,
nor paused to think that there could be any wrong in using whatever
presented itself to her--never before. But to-night, alone, facing her
first defeat, revolted and stricken, she felt guilty--horribly guilty;
and as her faith was simple, and God had always appeared to her as a
good friend, she sought His reasons in her past, and said to herself:
"Yes; that is why it has come--that is why I am punished! Oh, I must be
very wicked!"
In this conviction, her offending seemed to her enormous, unending. From
the day of her arrival in New York until now, she felt that she had
never been anything but selfish, cruel, mercenary and calculating. No!
Certainly she had not scrupled to use men ... and what men she had
known, had availed herself of, climbed above, and discarded. Now the
smoke wreaths of her progress swirled more rapidly, thickly revolving,
mounting more slowly. She had found her dinners in humble restaurants,
paid for in half-dollars by young men already pinched in the struggle of
salaries, young men in whom that spark of hope of which Harrigan Blood
had spoken burned heedlessly--dreaming a miraculous future and the
winning of another Helen. Next it was the coarse world of the theater
and the restaurants--heavy sated types of men, demanding their brutal
pay, men who disgusted her, with whom she could not share the same air,
dangerous antagonists. Another swirl, another chance opportunity, and
she was out of the contagion, unscotched, meeting at last men of good
manners, gentlemen in name and often in heart. What an incredible
progress it had been! She saw few faces distinctly, but in the covetous,
brutal, chivalrous, or adoring crowd she remembered here and there a
look, a word, something that had struck her by its ridicule, by its
cruelty, or inclined her to a sudden gentleness.
She, too--how she had changed through all this! How ridiculous had been
her early admirations, how childish her ambitions! What a change had
come within--an education of all her tastes, a desire for the beautiful,
a longing for refinement, a need of distinction to respond to her
abiding sense of delicacy.
Yes; to acquire all this she had done much harm, inflicted useless pain
on many. But now retribution had come, inexorable. That she had never
thought of--that she too could suffer. And she did suffer, abjectly,
hopelessly, sitting there pressed against the window-frame, staring at
the unseen wall across which the figures of the past went swirling down
in long revolving spirals, like the slow undulating swirls of smoke.
There was no way out. She would never see him again--he would never seek
her. She was accursed, punished for all past wickedness, singled out for
tragedy by fate.
What now could become of her. What could she fall back on? Who could
help her? She was horribly alone--and afraid.
* * * * *
That night she dreamed a terrible dream. She was dining at Tenafly's in
the midst of a great company. Massingale was there. By some strange
turn, Mrs. Massingale did not exist; instead, it seemed to her that he
was bending over her saying:
"It's all a mistake. I'm not married; I've never been married. That was
my brother's wife. You are to be Mrs. Massingale. Do you understand?
That's why every one is here!"
She had looked around and seen so many faces: Sassoon, with his mounting
mustache; Mrs. Sassoon, judging her through a lorgnette; Lindaberry, De
Joncy, Mr. Peavey, who was wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, Busby,
Stacey even.
All at once some one was standing at her side,--some one who wore patent
leathers with chamois tops,--and Josh Nebbins, in a purple shirt and
green and black check suit, derby on one side, was grinning at her,
saying:
"Hello, kid! Here I am. Made my wad. Come to get you!"
Next she was on the edge of a precipice. Some one had his arms about
her, holding her back, and some one else was trying to pull her over.
She was crying:
"Don't let him throw me over. Don't, please! I'll love you, only you,
Your Honor!"
But, to her surprise, it was not Massingale who was trying to save her;
it was Lindaberry.
And the man who had her by the arm, pulling her over, she could not see;
only she could see far down, hundreds of miles, to a little thread of a
stream. Stones were slipping under her feet; she was going over; and all
at once she looked up. A pair of patent leathers with chamois tops! It
was Josh Nebbins.
She awoke with a scream.