Dore had not been mistaken in her swift perception on entering the court
room, heavy with weakness and discouragement. Judge Massingale saw her
with a feeling of profound relief. Whatever came now, the responsibility
lay on her head, not on his. Just how completely one memory had filled
his days he did not realize until he experienced a sudden excited calm
at the thought that she was there by his side, and that the long weeks
of struggle had been in vain.
For, he, too, had struggled against every instinct in him, warned by his
clear and analytical brain that his hands were on the curtains of a
perilous and forbidden adventure. At first he had been immensely
surprised that in his forty-second year it should suddenly flash across
him, from the depths of eyes of cloudy blue, that he was as human as his
brother. The memory of the soft white arms against his cheek, the
ecstasy of the girl who, in a twinkling, had surrendered to his
domination, withholding nothing, eager and unafraid, enveloped in the
blinding halo of complete renunciation and faith, her look when her eyes
sought his, her lips, the sound of her voice, the naturalness of it all,
the human directness, all returned again and again to demolish and
scatter the careful intellectual theory of conduct which he had raised
for his defense in life.
At the time when Judge Massingale, by a trick of fate, had blundered
upon the acquaintance of Dore Baxter, he had arrived at that
satisfactory station in life when he could look upon himself as a
perfectly disciplined being. He had passed through a period of
embittered emotional revolt which had threatened to carry him publicly
into the divorce courts, and through a deeper period of moral revolt
which came near sacrificing him on the altar of the social reformer. Now
he had come to an attitude of tolerant and amused contemplation of
things as they are, without fretting his spirit as to things as they
should be.
His marriage had been a purely conventional one, contracted in the weak
and vulnerable period of the early twenties at the instigation of his
mother, who had become suddenly alarmed at a college infatuation for the
daughter of one of his professors. Within a year the thoroughly unsuited
couple had come to an amicable understanding of the duties involved in
their covenant before the church.
Mrs. Massingale was incapable of an original mental operation, but she
was clever enough to combine the opinions of those who seemed to know.
She thoroughly disapproved of her husband's soiling political ventures,
as beneath the dignity of a gentleman. Each week she devoted one
afternoon and one evening to the encouragement of the arts; the rest was
given over to the punctilious performance of the proper social duties
to those whom she disliked and who disliked her. Absolutely cold and
absolutely prudish, she had not hesitated, in that hazardous period of
maidenhood, to effect the successful capture of such a matrimonial prize
by subtle appeals to his senses; but as though bitterly resenting the
means to which an unjust society reduces a modest woman to secure her
future, she revenged herself on her amazed husband by a sort of
vindictive antagonism.
He had fiercely combated this marriage, vowing he would marry the love
of his college days, if he had to carry her off in the good old way. But
his mother, being quite determined and unprincipled, paid the girl a
visit, and contrived to make the interview so completely insulting that
the rupture resulted immediately.
In the third year of his marriage Massingale had again become
infatuated, this time with the young wife of an elderly friend. As the
married relations on either side were identical, and each was chafing
against the irritating and galling yoke, longing for life and liberty,
the infatuation soon assumed tragic proportions. She wished to break
through everything, ready to go openly with him until, their respective
divorces secured, they could be married. He passed eight days feverishly
inclined, debating the issue. But in the end, for the stigma that would
lay across his shoulders, for the reputation of the family, the customs
of a man of the world, and what not, he resisted.
He had thought then that he had sacrificed the world and the heavens
for a hollow recompense; but, as the years sent the drifting sands of
their oblivion over the memory, he had come to look upon this emotional
adventure as a great peril avoided. He had believed then in the union of
man and woman as something like a divine rage, all-absorbing,
obliterating everything else--this in the bitter revolt against the
deception which had come in his marriage. Ten years later he had arrived
at the point of looking back with tolerant humor, and confessing to
himself that for his purposes he was perhaps fortunate in a union which
brought no compulsion into his life, obtruded itself in no way, and gave
him complete liberty to pursue his intellectual curiosity in
unrestricted intercourse with men of varied stations.
From law school he had gone as an assistant into the district attorney's
office, and the three years spent in those catacombs of humanity had
removed the veneer of generations of inherited snobbery. The first view
of the vermin-populated halls of justice had appalled him, and aroused
in him a religious fury. The spectacle of the strong riding the weak,
judges gravely listening to lying hypocrisies, criminals in gold buttons
and uniform, the insolence of power, the cynicism of brains, and, below
all, raw humanity gasping under staggering burdens, mocked, farmed out,
betrayed--all this sank so profoundly into his young enthusiasm that he
swore to himself that the day would come when he would lift up his voice
against iniquity, no matter how intrenched it might rest.
If at this time he had had the courage to break with social prejudices
and seek reality and inspiration in the love of a woman ready to
sacrifice everything for him, it is probable that he would have one day
stirred the sophisticated forces of the city to furious invective, and
accomplished little or great good, according to the sport of chance. But
the impossibility of assuming responsibility before social conventions
had its effect on the thinker, too. He gradually reconciled himself,
lulled into tolerance by the good fellowship o f those whom he would have
to attack. He still disapproved, but he added to the first fierce
protestation, "Things must be changed," the saving clause, "but I can
not change them!"
Later, when, in a sudden burst of reform, a mayor, revolting against the
machine, appointed him a municipal magistrate, he had progressed
further, even to the point of saying that things had always been the
same, here as elsewhere, that what was needed was to be practical, to
accomplish quietly as much good as possible, instead of shrieking into
unbelieving ears. His religious fury had subsided into a great
compassion. He sought to save rather than to punish. He became known as
a judge who could not be approached. He had had one or two conflicts
with the machine of the shadows, and had come out victorious and
respected. He was known as a very courageous man.
Life lay agreeably ahead. As the emotional and spiritual cravings
departed, his curiosity increased. Life on the surface, life as a
spectator, life as the confidant of others, watching developments,
explosions, consequences, was very satisfying, without danger. He knew
from experience the sting of great emotions, and he said to himself that
that man was securest in his happiness who depended on no indispensable
friendship, who cherished in his imagination no ambition linked with the
stars, who took the laughter and the smiles of women, and avoided the
heat, the pain and the soul-bruising of a great passion. Such love was
to him yoked with tragedy, conflict, disillusionment, subjection, or
crowned with final emptiness.
He had indeed become the judicial observer, watching with unsated
amusement, through his thousand points of vantage, the complex panorama
of human beings groping, struggling, crawling, running, bacchanalian
with sudden hysteric joys, or crying against little tragedies. His
intimate acquaintance with men of every calling, open or suspect, was
immense. His knowledge of the city, its big and little secrets, its whys
and wherefores, its entangled virtue and vice, its secret ways from
respectability to shame, its strange bedfellows, the standards of honor
among the corrupt and the mental sophistries of the strong, was
profound. For him the baffling brownstone mask of New York did not
exist. People instinctively trusted him. Criminals told him true stories
in restaurants where few could venture; women of all sorts and
conditions, passing before him for grave or minor offenses, often
returned for advice or relief from blackmailing conditions. The police
swore by him, politicians admitted his fairness. He played the game
according to their standards of honor strictly on the evidence
presented, never taking advantage of what was told him privately.
He was not insensible to the attraction of women. He sought their
confidence, but returned none; amused at their comedies, as it amused
him intellectually to reduce a lying officer to terrified confession.
Twice bruised, he never attempted more than a light and agreeable
comradeship. He had that curious but rather high standard of morality
which one often encounters among men of his opportunity in life. He
prided himself that no woman had suffered harm by him, which,
translated, meant that he had never been responsible. In fact, he shrank
from the thought of incurring responsibility. This was the horror that
had sent him from Dore, for he was honest in his intellectual
perceptions, and he saw at once that what he had blundered into was more
immoral than the flesh hunter's seeking of the body, for this was
trafficking with a soul.
When he had first paused to study Dore, he had perceived in her an
unusual specimen of a type which he knew and enjoyed immensely. The
interesting woman, to him, was the one who was destined to arouse
passions and leave disaster behind her. The antagonism which had flared
up between Harrigan Blood and Sassoon over her favors, the resulting
quarrel as she had escaped, amused him immensely. He was not ignorant of
the defensive alliance that existed between the Sassoon interests and
Harrigan Blood's chain of papers, and though he judged too clearly not
to doubt that a rupture was but delayed, it struck him as the very
essence of human drama that forces of such magnitude could be shaken by
the impertinent turn of a head or a luring smile.
"Here is a little creature who is going to make a good deal of trouble!"
he thought to himself, and interested at once before the possibilities
at her clever finger-tips, he had said to himself: "I am seeing the
beginning of a career, and a career that will be extraordinary!"
With this keen curiosity in mind, not insensible to the fleeting
compelling lure of the girl, he had gone up to her room, and suddenly,
as, delighted, he had prepared to watch the net prepared for others, it
had closed over him. He had had his doubts about Dore, that doubt which
waits in the mind of every man before every woman; but all this left him
the moment when, conquered in his arms, she had clung to him blindly, in
ecstasy. He comprehended what had overwhelmed her--had overwhelmed her
by surprise.
It was only when he had a dozen times sought to compose a letter which
would be neither caddish, prudish, or brutal, that he perceived to what
extent the old departed famine in himself had fiercely awakened. He had
made up his mind instantly to master such a peril, but he had not
succeeded. His conscience rose up at every turn, accusing him of
cowardice. How deep had been the wound he had inflicted? Had he the
right, for his own security, thus violently to separate himself from the
girl who, without artifice, had suddenly revealed herself? And what
would become of her? This latter idea pursued him constantly,
tormenting him. Finally, oppressed by the doubts which her absence made
to surge about him, he had gone to her door. She had left that very
afternoon. He did not leave his name, but retreated hastily, affecting
to believe that Providence had thus interfered to save him from a great
calamity.
When she had flashed into his life again, that night in the noisy Jungle
Room at Healey's, as he knew she must sooner or later, he was stricken
with the sudden imperious claim she exerted over all his impulses. He
understood all she sought to show him in the bitterness of her mood,
but, beyond all the pain he saw he had inflicted, he was terrified by
the thought of the danger to himself. He felt the fatality that waited
in the intensity of her nature, the fatality that for a glance and a
word had made enemies of Sassoon and Blood. The sight of her in the arms
of other men was intolerable, and yet he could not avert his eyes. He
was afraid to speak to her, but at the thought of her risking herself
with Lindaberry, he had broken through all restraint. When she had gone,
he had a feeling of thankfulness. He had done all he could to prevent
it. After all, what did he know of her? If she could go thus with
Lindaberry, what had she done with Sassoon, Harrigan Blood, others? With
fifty desperate reasonings, he sought to excuse himself and find a
justified way out. But always the accusation in her eyes, as she turned
scornfully, disdainfully to him in all the shifting points of the dance,
remained.
"She will wreck my life!" he said to himself fifty times a day, to
prevent his going to her. "Why am I responsible? She knew what she was
doing, that night!"
But at the first glimpse of Dodo in the blue Russian blouse, open throat
and white toque turning into the aisle, he had felt a profound relief.
He had done all that he humanly could do: he had resisted to the last,
struggled against the impossible; and, now that she herself had resolved
it, he felt immensely thankful.
The last case before him was one of daily occurrence--domestic trouble.
A young mother, baby in arms, a child at her skirts, preternaturally
bent and worn, had summonsed her husband into court on grounds of
non-support, accusing him of intoxication. He looked at the couple,
seeing deeper--the man vigorous and young, the woman whose prettiness
had led him to vow eternal constancy, now lost in drudgery and unequal
burden. What could he say to the unscathed young male who stood staring
at him with awed glance--bid him to love what he had driven from her
face and figure? The mockery of futile charges!
"Why don't you support your wife and children?" he asked, for the
thousandth time. "Why don't you stop drinking?"
The husband, a young mechanic, promised volubly what each knew he would
not perform.
"Put you on probation for three months!" he said sharply. "She's your
wife; you married her because you wanted to. Now, stop drinking and be a
man, or I'll send you up to the island. Do you understand?"
The man bowed and went out, the woman at his heels, dragging her second
child, believing that a word from His Honor could change everything.
Massingale watched them go, staring a moment, glanced at the clock and
ended the session with a nod to his officer.
"Does it interest you?" he said to Dore, in a matter-of-fact tone.
"Yes!"
She had not seen a thing that had transpired.
They went to his private room, noisy and dark as the rest, the
window-panes rattling at every elevated train that went crashing through
the air. He gave his gown to an attendant, issued a few orders and they
were alone. Neither spoke, waiting silently the other's advance, afraid
to speak that first word; for in such moments it is the first who speaks
who must explain. He continued to look at her with his magisterial
stare, at bottom suddenly vindictive, resenting this girl who had dared
to return into his life, to reclaim him to uncertainty and perils
against his logic.
She extended her hands in a little helpless movement, shook her head and
said timidly:
"Well?"
A moment before, still counseled by his reason, he had been on the point
of a cold answer, resolved correctly to beg her pardon and make this
interview the last. At her surrendering gesture and the plaintive note
in her voice, a great pity brushed aside everything else, and he said
impulsively:
"I went once--you were away. I wanted to see you!"
"I did not know," she said hurriedly, rushing at the hardest to be
said,--"that night--that you were married!"
"I understood that."
The court officer returned, announcing his automobile, and they passed
out. They had said nothing, and yet everything had been said.
"Where do you want to go?" he said, smiling.
"Anywhere!"
He hesitated, and then gave her address.
"We've got to have a frank talk," he said lightly; "then we can run up
somewhere for dinner--to celebrate. Did you notice Riley, my special?
He's a great character!"
"Funny mouth; does it ever stop grinning?" she said, joyfully,
wonderfully, perfectly happy. She leaned to him, whispering in his ear:
"Was he shocked at my coming?"
He was about to answer indiscreetly, but caught himself.
"Riley? No; he's quite a man of the world!"
The sunlight and the frosty December air restored his clarity of
thought. He would have the plainest of conversations with her. If they
could go on as free comrades, well and good. Perhaps even a certain
intimacy were better; it might serve to readjust certain illusions that
lingered in the memory.
He glanced at her sidewise, physically comforted at the delicacy of her
profile, the light airy youth that hung about her, intangible as a
perfume. He had known ten, twenty women more beautiful than Dodo, more
stimulating mentally, with an elegance that she did not possess. It was
impossible that this child, enticing and gay as she was, could really
have stirred him to uncontrollable emotions! With these thoughts running
through his mind, his confidence returned; he even began to wonder at
his former fear, holding it ridiculous. If she were foolishly resolved
in the conviction of a great passion, he was clever enough subtly to
undeceive her, to regulate their relations and keep them within the safe
limits of a confidential flirtation.
Pursuing this idea, he said nonchalantly, as they entered her room:
"Do you know, young mischief, that you have a great deal to answer for?
Sassoon and Harrigan Blood are at each other's throats. Blood's been
caught in the market, and is hammering the Sassoon interests like a wild
one. What have you been doing with them all this time?"
"How false that all sounds!" she said abruptly.
Disconcerted, he changed his tactics, saying seriously:
"Dodo, you are a very combustible sort of person. Do you realize the
danger of what we are doing?"
She shrugged her shoulders impatiently, going directly to the issue:
"Tell me about yourself--about your real self: your home, your wife! I
must know!"
"I don't wish to talk about others," he said, irritated in his sense of
delicacy.
"But I do!" she said passionately. "I saw her. There can be nothing
between you--and her!"
He made an imperative gesture, checking himself immediately, saying with
more restraint:
"There is nothing between us. Dodo, there are some things I don't think
you quite understand. Whatever may exist, I can not discuss Mrs.
Massingale with others!"
"'Others'!" she said indignantly, turning from him, deeply hurt.
He took her by the wrist and led her to a seat, feeling the necessity of
asserting his supremacy. She allowed herself to be forced into it,
looking up at him with rebellious eyes, like a naughty child.
"Do you know the danger of what you are doing?" he repeated. And then he
corrected himself--"What _we_ are doing?"
Her face changed instantly, becoming very serious. Her eyes looked past
him out of the window, beginning to be blurred by the gathering tears.
He drew back hastily.
"Why do you talk to me like this? What is the use of it all?"
"Why?" he exclaimed fiercely. "Because you are a child; because you try
me beyond my patience; because I want to be fair and honorable with you;
because I could--"
She was on her feet instantly, clapping her hands together.
"Ah, that's what I want to hear again--again!"
He halted directly, with a helpless gesture.
"Dodo," he said firmly, "listen to me! I will not make another mistake!
If you don't realize things, I do. I want to be your friend; I do want
to see you; but, unless it can be so, I--"
"Oh!" she cried furiously, dangerously near the point of
self-dramatization. "Don't always reason; don't think of what is going
to happen! Let's be as we are! I can't help it--can you? You know you
can't!"
"And then?"
"Don't talk to me of _then_! Think of to-day! Do you think, when the
first great thing has come into my life, that I'm going to put it aside
for--_what_?" She flung her arm out toward the ugly brick side that
symbolized to her all that she hated: "A little ordinary life, like
every other ordinary little life? No! I told you I won't be like every
one else! It's true! I don't want to live, if that's what life means!"
He said to himself swiftly that he had made a great mistake in coming;
that he would end it as soon as he could; and that he would never
venture again, even if he had to run away. For every accent of her
voice, every flashing look, moved him perilously.
"What do you want? Do you know?" he asked roughly.
"I want to be near you; that's all I know now!" she said, folding her
hands over her breast and closing her eyes.
"And the end?"
She was at his side with a bound, clutching his arm.
"Do you know what is the difference between us? I am honest; I say what
I think! You are afraid to admit what you feel!"
"The situation is not the same," he said stubbornly. "The responsibility
is all on my side!"
"Oh, Your Honor!" she said sublimely. "Don't let's talk! Don't you know
it won't change anything? It will be such a great, great love. I know
it--I feel it! So beautiful! And what else matters? It's our life, and
you--you have never really lived!"
Her impetuosity sobered him. He made a turn of the room; when he came
back he was smiling, with the smile she hated. "Dodo, I suppose at this
moment you think you would go off with me anywhere."
"Anywhere!"
"But you wouldn't!" he said quietly. "Luckily, I understand you!" He
shook his head. "Acting--always acting!"
"No!"
"Yes--acting with yourself, dramatizing a situation. But that's all!
Just another precipice! Dangerous for you, but fatal to me if I were to
believe you!"
"Oh, I swear to you that isn't so!" she cried, with a gesture that he
appreciated, even at the moment, for its dramatic verity.
"Come!" he said quietly. "Let's be good comrades. Don't dabble with
fire!"
"You think, when you leave, you will never see me again!" she said
swiftly, surprising him by the penetration of her intuition. She went to
him, fastening her fingers about him like the tendrils of clinging ivy.
"Well, Your Honor, I will never let you go! Remember that! If you don't
come, I will go and get you! You have caught me, and you can never get
rid of me. I swear it!"
She sprang away quickly, affecting nonchalance. The door opened and
Snyder came in, stopping short at the sight of the two figures,
indistinct in the twilight.
"Come in, come in, Snyder!" Dore said hastily. "My friend, Judge
Massingale."
Snyder gave him her hand abruptly, with a quick antagonistic movement,
watching his embarrassed face keenly.
"Just came up to get my coat," said Dore glibly. "Going out for dinner!"
They left hurriedly, ill at ease. On the second stairway, in the dark,
she stopped him, and approaching her lips so close to his ear that they
almost brushed it, said:
"I am not acting; I mean everything. It is to be the great thing in my
life!"
He laughed, but did not reply.
"I understand her now," he said to himself, with a feeling of strength.
"She may deceive herself; she can not blind me!" Later he added
uneasily: "If I ever believe her, I am lost!"
But Dore believed implicitly what she had said. At the bottom, what was
working in her soul? That instinct, second only to the nesting instinct,
in woman, that great protective impulse which alone explains a thousand
incomprehensible attachments. He had taken her, caught her soul and her
imagination, lawlessly, unfairly perhaps; but there it remained, an
imperishable mark. Only one thing could atone to her self-respect--the
glorification of this accident. Only when into his acquiring soul had
come an immense overpowering love, could a renunciation be possible
which would live in her memory, not to recall blushes of anger and
shame, but to give the satisfaction of a heroic sacrifice. But the
danger lay in his incredulity and resistance!