"Hold tight!"
She caught his shoulder at a sudden grinding stop, a breakneck turn into
a side street, and the released forward leap.
"Look out! Don't touch my arm!" he cried warningly.
The next moment they had leaped an intersecting avenue, skirting the
impending rush of a trolley car by inches. He laughed uproariously.
"Afraid?"
"No!"
Another turn, and they were on Riverside, the broad Hudson with its
firefly lights below, the Palisades rising darkly, like gathering
thunder-clouds. There was no moon, but above their heads were the
swarming stars, brilliant as a myriad sword-points. Once a policeman
rushed with a peremptory club in their path, springing aside with an
oath as Lindaberry set the machine at him--an oath that was lost like a
whirling leaf. She no longer sought to distinguish the giddy passage at
her sides, straining her eyes on the white consuming path of the
lanterns, feeling all at once the hungry soul of the monster waking in
the machine, strident, throbbing, crying out at the unshaken hand of man
which dominated it. Then the Viaduct slipped underneath them, and
below, in a swirling dip, the sunken city, hungry as a torrent, awaiting
a single mishap.
She had a sudden remembrance of her dream--of Nebbins pulling her over a
brink, and the thread of a river grave miles below. Only now she
remembered coldly, as if the speed at which they were flying gave her no
time to associate two ideas. Suddenly, by an instinct not of fear but of
disdainful certainty, her eyes closed before the impossibility of
surviving a looming obstacle. When she opened them again they were among
trees and fields, while the goaded machine hurled itself forward in
tugging leaps. Now, as they seemed to fling themselves irrevocably on
the destruction of wall or upstarting tree, she no longer winced or
closed her eyes, but breathlessly waited the sudden liberating touch of
the hand, which snatched them miraculously aside in the last fraction of
time. She felt something that she had never felt before--an appetite and
an intoxication in thus defrauding destruction; even her flesh responded
with a tingling electric glow. All at once she perceived that he was
trying her purposely--steering from right to left, seemingly bent on a
plunging end, trying to draw a cry of fear. She laughed again
disdainfully, and all at once the runaway came back into control,
gliding into a smooth easy flight, slower and slower, until it came to a
stop.
"By George! you have nerve!" he said, turning toward her.
"Go on! Go on!" she said feverishly.
He extended to her his hand, which was trembling.
"God! that's excitement that's worth while!" he said. "A fight every
minute. Ugly old brute! Wouldn't it like to throw me just once?" He put
on the brakes, drawing his sleeve across his forehead, which was wet
with perspiration, taking a long breath. "Each century has its vice. By
George, this is ours--speed! And it's got everything in it--gamble,
danger, intoxication, all! Like it?"
"Yes!"
He remained silent a moment, as if struggling to clear his heavy head of
befogging weights. Then he said slowly, a little thickly, curiosity
growing:
"Why the devil did you do it?"
"Do what?"
"Risk your neck with a fool like me?"
"Oh, don't let's talk!" she said nervously. "Go on! Fast!"
"All right!"
They were off again, a wild liberating rush, and then a calmer motion, a
gliding ease. She felt in him a different mood, a mood that sought an
opportunity to put questions and weigh answers, and as she felt a desire
to escape personalities, she said complainingly:
"But it's so slow--so tame! Let's go on running away!"
"This is different," he said, with a wave of his hand overhead at the
myriad-eyed night. "You can't run away from this! The rest--houses,
people, rotten brutality, useless things, yes; that's what I like to go
plunging from--to get to this. I like the feeling--solitude. George! if
you could only go steering your way out of all the old into something
new!" He repeated the phrase moodily, as if to himself: "If one only
could--if it were only possible!" Then he broke off abruptly, laughing
to himself: "You're too young. You can't understand. Everything is new
to you. By George, marry me and start for Australia, or Timbuctoo,
to-morrow! What do you say?"
"Look out! I might accept!" she said, laughing, and yet understanding.
"Every one thinks I'm a wild ass," he said grimly. "Wish I could do
something really wild--make over the world! Look here; are you going to
answer my question?"
"What question?"
"Why in the name of the impossible are we here to-night?"
"I wonder?" she said, half to herself.
The reply seemed to satisfy him; he continued a moment, absorbed in
their smooth progress. Insensibly she felt her mood yielding to his, no
longer impatient, vaguely content, lulled into reverie, giving herself
over to a new strange companionable inclination toward the man who had
revealed himself, half boy, half savage, in his first unconscious
longings.
To escape from the old? No, she did not yet understand that; but she did
comprehend the all-pervading serenity of the night, warm still with the
touch of Indian summer. The grating strident sounds of the day were
gone; the whisper on the wind was soft as a lullaby--sharp angles and
brutally straight lines lost in the feathery suffusion that lay on the
fields. Ahead, the brave steadfast rays of their lamps pierced through
sudden pools of darkness, that closed gently above them, and gave way
again to clear visions of stars. Once or twice she saw across the
enchanted blackness a distant trolley, unheard, rolling its ball of fire
like the track of a shooting star. Again, the far-off leathery bark of a
watch-dog complaining. But of man no sound. Only the mysterious shadows
held a spirit of life; only a giant tree, silhouetted against the faint
sky, seemed to move as they moved, racing with them past the vanishing
road bushes. A rabbit, started from its security, horribly hypnotized by
this chugging, fiery-eyed monster, scurried foolishly before them. Once
a swerving bat zigzagged before her eyes like the cut of a black
whirling blade. Even these were intruders, out of place in the old
world, older than the pyramids, older than the first stirring of
life--this waiting dominion of time, which reclaimed each night the
futile centuries of men, secure of the hour when all must return in
loyalty to its first silence. She looked at the stars, and the world
beneath dwindled into nothingness, to the span of a hand before these
twinking immensities. Which was real? This night, where only the
infinite and the inevitable reigned, or the day, with its clamoring
intrusion of confusing and needless voices?
She put her hand on his arm.
"It's so strange. It's so long since I remembered. I had forgot!"
She had forgot, indeed, that world which lay beyond men's world; but
she remembered it now--the strange night, which formerly in the quiet of
a child's room came gently, like a friendly stream, across her white
counterpane, awaking troubled questionings, impossible, terrifying
confrontations of the beyond and the hereafter. She had feared these
strange whys and wherefores then; and now they laid upon her only a
great peace--perhaps because she sought no answer.
She wanted to talk to him as one could talk in the hidden night, away
from foolish conventions. What did it matter what they said or did here
in this engulfing quiet? Why should human beings be constantly at war
with one another, stopped by vanities? She had forgot her anguish, in an
impulse toward the weakness in the man.
He stopped the car and turned toward her.
"What's wrong? What's the trouble?"
"Mine's nothing!" she said. "Let me talk about you."
But they did not at once begin--a little at a loss.
"How old are you?" she said at last.
"Twenty-eight ages!"
"Is it true, what they tell me?"
"That I'm riding hellbent to the devil? Correct!"
He did not say it with braggadocio, and yet it seemed incongruous, after
the glimpse she had had of the man.
"Why?" she said, laying her two hands impulsively on his arm and with
every instinct of her feminine nature sending him a message of sympathy.
"It's such a long story!" he said slowly. Then, with a last return of
the Saxon's fear of sentimentality: "If I were sober I wouldn't tell
you!"
"You're not--"
"Drunk? Yes! For ten days," he said--"in my way! There's nothing to
fear; never gets the best of me! When it does--crack! It'll be over in a
second!"
"But why?" she asked helplessly.
"Why not?" he said fiercely. "All I care about is a good fight, and, by
George, it _is_ a fight, a real sensation. You can't understand, but
it's so! To have your temples beating like trip-hammers, to fight the
mists out of your eyes--a great brute like this whipping back and forth,
shaking you off. One slip, a hundredth of a second, and then to beat it
all, to master it. God! it's gorgeous!"
Suddenly, with an attempt at evasion, he drew back.
"You know, I had a mind once. I reason things out now--I see straight!
Do you know how I figure it out? This way! What earthly use am I in the
world? What earthly use is a cuss who is given forty thousand a year,
without earning it, and told to amuse himself? None! By George!
Sometimes I believe dissipation is nature's way of getting rid of us!
And she's right, too; the sooner it's over, the more chance for some one
real to come along!"
"Are you serious?"
He drew his hand across his forehead, pinching his temples.
"Curiously enough, I am! I'm quite hopeless, and I don't care in the
least! So don't let's waste time!"
He started to crank the machine; but she stopped him.
"There was a woman?" she said.
"Yes, but not in the first place." He turned to her, puzzled. "Why do
you want to make me talk?"
"I don't know; I do!"
"What's your name?"
She hesitated.
"Dodo."
"I like that!" he said reflectively. "So you are really interested? And
you don't know our story? Lord! That's funny! I thought every one knew
the story of the Lindaberry boys! We certainly raised enough Cain! Do
you know, I really was a damned nice sort of kid--men adored me!" He
drew in his breath reflectively, conjuring up, with a tolerant smile, a
picture out of forgotten days. "Yes, a real decent cuss who'd have done
something if he'd had half a chance! There's only one thing I love in
this world--a fight; and they took it all away from me!
"Do you know, the finest days, the ripping ones, were those back in the
old school, when I used to be carried off the field on the shoulders of
a mob. That was something real! I loved it! We used to sing about
shedding our blood, and all that funny rot, for the glory of the red and
black--and I believed it, too. Lord bless that queer cuss. Good days! I
used to play the game like a raging little devil, ready to fling my life
away! The Lindaberry boys--they haven't forgot us yet! It was so at
college, only not quite the same. But at school, four hundred fellows,
and to be king! Ambition? I was chock-full of it then. But they took it
away from me! That's what knocked me out! And who did it? The one who
loved us best--the governor!
"Out of college, forty thousand a year, and told to have a good time!
Put that down for my epitaph! The dad, poor old fellow, didn't know any
better! He'd worked like a pirate; said he'd never been young; wanted us
to live! Forty thousand a year each, and let her go! I remember the day
we started, with a whoop! Wonder is, we lasted a year! Tom, the young
one, didn't!"
"Dead?"
"To the world, yes; asylum. Killed the governor. He tried to stop us,
but it was too late! Now the race is between Jock and me. My lord, if
they'd only packed us off--started us in a construction gang, anywhere,
temperature a hundred in the shade--might have owned a state to-day!
Remember what I said about the feeling you get out here alone--the
awaking into something new? If Jock would go, I'd cut to-morrow--ship
before the mast, and God take the rudder! He won't. But, by jove, to get
into a new life, a new chance! You'll understand--or, no. I hope you
never will!"
She could see but a faint blurred mass at her side. Under the goblin
shadows of autumn trees, a brook sunk in the field told its hidden story
to piping crickets and rovers of the night. She felt in her a great need
of compassion, a yearning emptiness in her arms, a desire to lay her
comforting touch across his eyes, as once she had put into slumberland
the tear-stained cheeks of Snyder's little child. No other sentiment
came to mingle with this pure stream of maternal longing; but all about
her and all within her so impelled her to follow the instinct of the
ages that she drew back with a sigh.
"Here! Don't do that for me!" he said, straightening up ashamed.
She could not tell him what in her had called forth that sigh, so she
said hurriedly:
"No, no. Then, of course, there was a woman?"
"Yes, of course!" he assented. He opened his match-case, lighted a
cigarette and then flung it away nervously. "Lord, but I was a child in
those days. I believed implicitly! Women? A religion to me. I was ready
to fall down and worship! We were engaged--secret until I had got hold
of myself. Easy? It was child's play! I could have won out in three
months. Then, quite by accident, I found she was playing the same game
with my best friend--how many others, God knows! Great God! talk about
smashing idols for poor old heathen Chinese! Whew--there was nothing
left! I didn't even see her. Went off, crazy as a loon. A wild letter,
and good-by for a year. Bang around the world to get the poison out of
my system. Little good it did, too!" He stopped, considered a moment,
and added: "Now that I look back, I think she did care for me--as much
as she could in her polygamous little soul--else she wouldn't have done
what she did! When I got back--fool that I was--I found her Mrs. Jock
Lindaberry, and the devil in the saddle!"
"What! your own brother?" she said incredulously. "How did she dare?"
"You don't know the lady!" he said, with a laugh. "There's nothing in
this world she's afraid of. And--God, how she can hate! Fine revenge,
eh?"
"But you didn't tell--"
"Jock? No! What's the use? We never talk much--and he knows! Then,
there's a child, a boy--a Lindaberry; and that holds him. She was clever
enough for that!"
"You see her?"
"Never have entered the house!"
"You were very much in love?" she asked.
"At twenty-three? Mad, crazy in love! Ready to take any man by the
throat who dared insinuate a word!"
"Aren't you over it yet?"
"I? Yes and no. It was Kismet! If I'd been lucky enough, even then, to
have found a woman who cared, whom I could worship--who knows? Well! the
other thing happened! Kismet!"
"But there are lots of women--"
"Yes, of course! But I--I've never trusted since."
"You are really a great coward, Mr. Lindaberry!"
She said it impulsively--yet, once said, resolved to stand by her guns,
feeling now threefold the anger and irritation he had awakened in her at
their first meeting.
He shifted in his seat, amazed.
"You give up at your first defeat--let a woman who isn't worth a candle
wreck your life!"
"By Jove!"
"Pride? You talk of pride and courage! You haven't a drop of either,"
she continued hotly. "So you'll give her just what she wants, the
satisfaction of seeing how you cared! Yes, what a delicious revenge you
give her! I'm a woman--I know! She hates you, and she sits back smiling,
waiting for the end, saying to herself: 'I did it!' No; I have no
patience with such weakness! You are nothing but a great coward!"
She stopped, surprised at a sob that arose, unbidden, in her throat. He
gazed ahead, without answering, a long while, his fingers playing on the
wheel.
"That's rather rough!" he said at last.
"You deserve every bit of it!"
"To call me a coward?" he said, with an uneasy laugh.
"A great coward! Oh, courage! Easy enough, when you know you've physical
strength, to go smashing into a weaker man--or a dozen! That's so
obvious, so easy. But when something difficult comes up--"
He swore impatiently to himself.
"Yes, something difficult. When the odds are all against you, you give
up--do just what a cold-blooded little vixen wants of you. Why? Because
you have no pride!" she cried heatedly. "Don't talk to me of courage! I
have a thousand times more than you, to come to-night!"
"By jove! You're right!" he said, folding his arms. "Hold up, now;
that's enough. You've reached me. Don't say any more!"
She began to feel sorry for the way she had attacked him, feeling his
utter loneliness. Finally he ceased humming to himself, and turned.
"You're an honest, brave little thing--a child!" he said slowly. "I
don't know you at all. Who are you? What are you? I've only met you at a
couple of rowdy parties, and yet you talk this way! Are you straight?"
"Mr. Lindaberry!"
"I mean no offense--I wouldn't care. You're genuine, that's the thing!
I'm your friend, proud to be! Tell me about yourself!"
She saw that social judgments meant nothing to him; in fact, she was
rather touched by the thought that, even if she had not been what he
called "straight," he would have given her a loyal respect.
"Me?" she said dreamily. "I don't know what to tell you! I come from
nothing--a little town way out in Ohio. Never had a home--sort of turned
over to an aunt and uncle. I've shifted for myself, but I've never lost
my nerve. I was bound to get into a bigger life, to do something--if
only to be free, to live! I've done a lot of foolish things, I suppose,
because I'm a little crazy myself--can't resist excitement!"
"You shouldn't have gone to that party at Sassoon's," he said. "You are
too innocent to understand what it meant!"
"I'm not living in a sheltered house!" she protested. "I'm hurting no
one. I face the world by myself, stand on my own feet, and I can take
care of myself. I'm not ignorant!"
"Yes, you are. You can't know. You think you can, but you can't know! No
girl can, until--until she's caught!" He looked at her steadily. "You
know, at bottom you _are_ a child. That's the danger! What the devil
sent you out here to-night?"
"A good angel, perhaps," she said evasively.
He laughed obstinately, but with less resistance.
"No, that isn't it!" she said impulsively. "I am in a reckless mood
myself. I am hurt--oh, so hurt! Disappointed in a man. You see, we _are_
comrades, in a way!"
"Good God! Who could have hurt you!" he said roughly.
"It was all a mistake; it wasn't meant, perhaps, but that doesn't help
much!"
He reached out his hand and laid it comfortingly over her shoulder,
surprising her with the tenderness in his touch and in his voice.
"Sorry! I know. Queer, isn't it? We are sort of in the same boat! Queer
world! Who'd have thought we'd ended up this way? Funny! You start up
some of the old thoughts in me. I could have done something once, if I'd
only had to! But I belong to a cursed second generation. We Americans
weren't meant to be loafers!"
"Why are you, then?" she said impulsively. "Listen! I was hard on you
when I went for you a moment ago! Mr. Lindaberry, we are in the same
boat. Let me help you--see what I can do! No, wait! I'm speaking what I
feel! I've been cruel myself, very cruel--"
"Don't believe it!"
"Yes, yes, I have; I've made others suffer!"
"Then it was their fault!" he said obstinately.
"It would mean, just now, a lot to me to count for something," she
rushed on. "I can't tell you all the reasons--I don't know all--but I
believe what I feel here to-night is the best in me. There is something
in all this; I know there's some reason, back of it all, why we have
been sent here. Oh, Mr. Lindaberry, do let me help!"
"Save me?" he asked, with an ugly laugh.
"Yes, save you!"
A long silence, in which she watched him breathlessly, hoping for an
answer.
"Fight it out!" she insisted.
He turned suddenly, wondering if she knew how felicitous had been her
appeal.
"Why, Dodo, I'm pretty far gone!" he said sadly.
"Coward!"
"No, by God!" he said fiercely.
"Let me see you fight, then!"
"What for?"
"For your own self-respect! See here, Mr. Lindaberry, fight it out for
the love of a good fight, and let me be in it. Let me help!"
"You mean it?" he said slowly; then he nodded toward all that surrounded
them. "This, you know, gets us--sentimental!"
"No; I want it!"
He laughed in his characteristic way as he did when he sought more
reflection.
"The bets at the club are two to one against my lasting the year, Dodo!"
"Then take up the bet!"
"Why, that's an idea!" he said, with a chuckle.
He considered more profoundly, his arm still on her shoulder; but there
was in it no acquiring touch, only a clinging--the clinging of a weak
hand groping for companionship.
"I suppose I'm a lonely cuss at bottom," he said slowly, nor did she
follow his thought.
"Anything I can do I'll do," she urged. "It'll be my fight too! Come to
me, call me night or day, when you need me--when things are getting too
much for you! I'll come any time!"
"You can't!"
"I can!" she cried defiantly. "What do I care what is said, if I know
and you know that all is right! Thank God, I'm alone! I have no one to
whom it matters what the world says. I'm only a waif, a drifter!"
"Drifters both!" he said solemnly.
She stopped a moment, struck by the idea, feeling their mutual clinging,
and the incomprehensible, unseen winds of the night sweeping about them
and carrying them--whither?
"Listen!" she added hurriedly. "This is my promise. Fight it out, and I
will help you by everything that's in me! No matter whom I'm with or
where I'm going, I'll turn over everything, when you need me, and come!"
"Even nights like this?" he said. "For that's when it'll be the
hardest!"
"Especially nights like this!" she cried, opening her arms with a
feeling of glorification.
"Tell me something," he said slowly; "and be honest with me!"
"I swear I always will," she said impulsively from her heart, devoutly
believing it.
"Are you in love now?"
"Yes!"
"Are you sure?"
His arm, as if suddenly aware of her body, removed itself. He bent
toward her, striving to see her face.
An instant before, she had sworn to herself, swiftly, in the exultation
of a new-born spiritual self, that to this man, at least, she would
never lie; and all at once, by the divining charity of her woman's soul,
bent on saving him, she began her first deception!
"No; I am not--sure!"
She had a quick fear that he would spoil everything by an overt
movement, and shrank from him, conscious of the male and of her sex. But
at the end he rose quietly, saying:
"All right, Dodo. The fight's begun!"
If there were a double meaning in his words, he gave no sign of it. He
went to the front and cranked the car, then drew the rug about her with
solicitous deference, that had in it a new attitude. He did not even
offer his hand to seal the compact, and for that, too, she was
profoundly thankful, watching him with slanted approving glances.
"Whatever he does he will do magnificently!" she thought.
"Comfy?" he asked in a matter-of-fact tone.
"Yes!"
They shot out into the white road. He did not ask her wish, but, as if
sure of her acquiescence, went flying into the country, at times with
magnificent ease, at others with wild bursts of speed, break-a-neck, the
monster obeying the fierce exultant moods of the master. She lay back in
the seat, her eyes on the jagged tree-line, where broken shadows spun
past her, and the stars swam overhead. She felt his mood in every glide,
in every resentful bound, knowing what was in his spirit, uplifted into
a new manifestation, resolved, whatever happened, that to this one, at
least, she would give the divine that was in her.
It was three o'clock by the paling of the dawn in the east, and the
slinking scavengers in the streets, when they returned.
She fell almost instantly to sleep, for the first time in long weeks.
And as she tucked her hand under her cheek contentedly, in perfect
peace, she had a satisfied feeling that God, her inscrutable friend, had
not been so angry with her as she had believed; that in the moment of
her failing He had shown her this way out. She did not question her
feelings toward this new man. Pity? Yes, a great compassion, a
tenderness and a sure belief in his protection, all were confusedly in
her mind; but above all a great fatigue, and a wonder how the night
would remain in the beating clarity of the day.