'I love you!'
'Oh--h!' she breathed. 'Please!'
Words came from him, a jumble of words. About his hopes, the few
thousand dollars that would be his on the seventh of November, when he
would be twenty-one, the wonderful stories he would write, with her for
inspiration.
Inwardly he was in a panic. He hadn't dreamed of saying such a thing.
Never before, in all his little philanderings had he let go like this,
never had he felt the glow of mad catastrophe that now seemed to be
consuming him. Oh, once perhaps--something of it--years back--when he
had believed he was in love with Ernestine Lambert. But that had been in
another era. And it hadn't gone so deep as this.
'Anyway'--he heard her saying, in a rather tired voice--'anyway--it
makes it hard, of course--you shouldn't have said that--'
'Oh, I _am_ making it hard! And I meant to----'
'--anyway, I think you'd better come. Unless it would be too hard for
you.'
There was a long silence. Then Henry, his forehead wet with sweat, his
feet braced apart, his hands gripping the rail as if he were holding
for his life, said, with a sudden quiet that she found a little
disconcerting:--
'All right. I'll come.... Your aunt said a quarter past six, didn't
she?'
'No, six.'
5
Madame Watt appropriated Henry the moment he entered her door
on Saturday evening. She was, despite her talk of offhand summer
informality, clad in an impressive costume with a great deal of lace and
the shimmer of flowered silk.
At her elbow, Henry moved through the crowd in the front hall. He felt
cool eyes on him. He stood very straight and stiff. He was pale. He
bowed to the various girls and fellows--Mary, Martha, Herb, Elbow, and
the rest, with reserve. It was, from moment to moment, a battle.
Nobody but Madame Watt would have thought of giving such a party. It
was so expensive--the dinner for twenty-two, to begin with; then all
the railway fares; a bus from the station in Chicago to the theatre and
back. The theatre tickets alone came to thirty-three dollars (these were
the less expensive days of the dollar and a half seat). Sunbury still,
at the time, was inclined to look doubtfully on ostentation.
You felt, too, in the case of Madame, that she was likely to speak, at
any moment rather--well, broadly. All that Paris experience, whatever
it was, seemed to be hovering about the snapping black eyes and the
indomitable mouth. You sensed in her none of the reserve of movement, of
speech, of mind, that were implied in the feminine standards of Sunbury.
Yet she was unquestionably a person. If she laughed louder than the
ladies of Sunbury, she had more to say.
To-night she was a dominantly entertaining hostess. She talked of the
theatre, in Paris, London and New York--of the Coquelins, Gallipaux,
Bernhardt, of Irving and Terry and Willard and Grossmith. Some of these
she had met. She knew Sothem, it appeared. Even the extremely worldly
Elbow and Herb were impressed.
She had Henry at her right. Boldly placed him there. At his right was a
girl from Omaha who was visiting the Smiths and who made several efforts
to be pleasant to the pale gloomy youth with the little moustache and
the distinctly interesting gray-blue eyes.
By the time they were settled on the train Henry found himself grateful
to the certainly strong, however coarse-fibred woman.
Efforts to identify her as she seemed now, with the woman of that
hideous scene with the Senator brought only bewilderment. He had to give
it up.
This woman was rapidly winning his confidence; even, in a curious sense,
his sympathy.
At the farther end of the table the little Senator, all dignity and calm
stilted sentences, made himself remotely agreeable to several girls at
once.
At one side of the table sat Cicely, in lacy white with a wonderful
little gauzy scarf about her shoulders. She looked at him only now and
then, and just as she looked at the others. He wondered how she could
smile so brightly.
Herb and Elbow made a great joke of fighting over her. Elbow had her at
dinner; Herb on the train; Elbow again at the theatre.
Henry was fairly clinging to Madame by that time.
I think, among the confused thoughts and feelings that whirled
ceaselessly around and around in his brain, the one that came up
oftenest and stayed longest was a sense of stoical heroism. For Cicely's
sake he must bear his anguish. For her he must be humble, kindly,
patient. He had read, somewhere in his scattered acquaintance with
books, that Abraham Lincoln had once been brought to the point of
suicide through a disappointment in love. And to-night he thought much
and deeply of Lincoln. He had already decided, during an emotionally
turbulent two days, not to shoot himself.
During the first intermission the Senator stayed quietly in his seat.
When the curtain went down for the second time, he stroked his beard
with a small, none-too-steady hand, coughed in the suppressed way he
had, and glanced once or twice at Madame.
The young men were, apparently all of them, moving out for a smoke in
the lobby.
Henry, with a tingling sense of defiance, a little selfconscious about
staying alone with the girls, followed them.
And after him, walking up the aisle with his odd strutting air of
importance, came the Senator.
He gathered the young men together in the lobby; pulled at his twisted
beard; said, 'It will give me pleasure to offer you young gentlemen a
little refreshment;' and led the way out to a convenient bar. It was a
large, high-panelled room. There were great mirrors; rows and rows
of bottles and shiny glasses; alcoves with tables; and enormous oil
paintings in still more enormous gilt frames and lighted by special
fixtures built out from the wall. The one over the bar exhibited an
undraped female figure reclining on a couch.
They stood, a jolly group, naming their drinks.
Henry, who had no taste for liquor, stood apart, pale, sober, struggling
to exhibit a _savoir faire_ that had no existence in his mercurial
nature.
'I'll take ginger ale,' he said, in painful self-consciousness.
The Senator, his somewhat jaunty straw hat thrust back a little way off
his forehead, took Scotch; drank it neat. It seemed to Henry incongruous
when the prim little man tossed the liquor back against his palate with
a long-practised flourish.
Back in his seat, between Madame and the girl from Omaha, Henry noted
that the Senator had not returned with the others.
Madame turned and looked up the aisle.
The lights were dimmed. The curtain rose.
Cicely was in the row ahead, Herb on one side, Elbow on the other.
Elbow was calm, casual, humorous in a way, whispering phrases that had
been found amusing by many girls.
Herb, the only man in what Henry still thought of as a 'full dress
suit,' had a way of turning his head and studying Cicely's hair and
profile whenever she turned toward Elbow, that stirred Henry to anguish.
'He's rich,' thought Henry, twisting in his chair, clasping and
unclasping his hands. 'He's rich. He can do everything for her. And he
loves her. He couldn't look that way if he didn't.'
A comedian was singing and dancing on the stage. Cicely watched him, her
eyes alight, her lips parted in a smile of sheer enjoyment.
'How can she!' he thought. 'How _can_ she!' Then: 'I could do that. If
I'd kept it up. If she'd seen me in _Iolanthe_ maybe she'd care.'
The curtain fell on a glittering finale.
With a great chattering the party moved up the aisle. Cicely told her
two escorts that she didn't know when she had enjoyed anything so much.
She was merry about it. Care free as a child.
Henry stopped short in the foyer; standing aside, half behind a framed
advertisement on an easel; his hands clenched in his coat pockets; white
of face; biting his lip.
'I can't go with them!' he was thinking. 'It's too much. I can't! I
can't trust myself. I'd say something. But what'll they think?
'She won't know. She won't care. She's happy--my suffering is nothing to
her.' This was youthful bitterness, of course. But it met an immediate
counter in the following thought, which, to any one who knew the often
selfcentred Henry would have been interesting. 'But that's the way it
ought to be. She mustn't know how I suffer. It isn't her fault. A great
love just comes to you. Nobody can help it. It's tragedy, of course.
Even if I have to--to'--his lip was quivering now--'to shoot myself, I
must leave a note telling her she wasn't to blame. Just that I loved her
too much to live without her. But I haven't any money. I couldn't make
her happy.'
His eyes, narrow points of fire, glanced this way and that. Almost
furtively. Passion--a grown man's passion--was or seemed to him to be
tearing him to pieces. And he hadn't a grown man's experience of life,
the background of discipline and self-control, that might have helped
him weather the storm. All he could do was to wonder if he had spoken
aloud or only thought these words. He didn't know. Somebody might have
heard. The crowd was still pouring slowly out past him. It seemed to him
incredible that all the world shouldn't know about it.
The others of the party were somewhere out on the street now. They were
going to a restaurant; then, in their bus, to the twelve-fourteen, the
last train for Sunbury until daylight.
What could he do if he didn't take that train? He might hide up forward,
in the smoker. But there were a hundred chances that he would be seen.
No, that wouldn't do. He must hurry after them.
But he flatly couldn't. Why, the tears were coming to his eyes. A little
weakness, whenever he was deeply moved, for which he despised himself.
There was no telling what he might do--cry like a girl, break out into
an impossible torrent of words. A scene. Anywhere; on the street, in the
restaurant.
No, however awkward, whatever the cost, he couldn't rejoin them, he
couldn't look at Cicely and Elbow and Herb and the others.
He felt in his pocket. Not enough money, of course. He never had enough.
He couldn't ever plan intelligently. Yet he was earning twelve dollars a
week!... He had a dollar, and a little change. Perhaps it was enough.
He could go to a cheap hotel. He had seen them advertised--fifty or
seventy-five cents for the night. And then an early morning train for
Sunbury.
He would be worse off then than ever, of course. The people who had
talked, would have fresh material. Running away from the party! They
might say that he had got drunk. Though in a way he would welcome that.
It was a sort of way out.
The crowd was nearly gone. They would be closing the doors soon. Then he
would have to go--somewhere.
A big woman was making her way inward against the human current. But
Henry, though he saw her and knew in a dreamy way that it was Madame
Watt, still couldn't, for the moment, find place for her in his madly
surging thoughts.
She passed him; looked into the darkened theatre; came back; stood
before him.