THE PURSUER IS CAPTURED
SHE was late to a late dinner. She found herself last, but felt herself
more looked at than mere lateness warranted. Some of the women looked
first at her, and then at each other.
Among the glances given she noted but two—Longacre’s and Julia Budd’s;
though theirs were the eyes least evidently on her.
The girl was in great spirits, rather readier with her rich laugh than
usual. Florence was almost betrayed into a straight stare of admiration,
of wonder, at all she meant—the arrogance of youth in great beauty that
repudiated the need of enhancement, either from the rosy cloud of
chiffon in which she had clothed herself, or the mind, hardly awake,
under the splendid aura of her hair. How she was sailing on the surface
of life! But it occurred to Florence that when she _should_ plunge into
its depths—!
Longacre leaned across the table with a question to Florence, and she
fancied that Julia listened to it. Her eyes and ears were unwontedly
keen and sensitive for tones and expressions. The atmosphere was charged
with diverse elements. The sense of cross-purposes around the table was
as vivid to her mind as, to her eyes, the general disintegration upon
the rising, and the confused crystallizations of people.
Cissy Fitz Hugh was already complaisantly established in the back seat
of Thair’s automobile when Florence came out on the veranda. Groups of
men and women stood irresolutely about, as if uncertain what disposition
fate was about to make of them. Julia, thrusting on a half-coat of lace,
came rushing through the hall with her air of knowing exactly where she
was going.
“Why, pettie!” Her mother detained her by one sleeve. “You _must_ put on
a thicker wrap if you are going in an open vehicle!”
“But I’m not,” said Julia, with a gleam. “I’m going in the carryall.”
Mrs. Budd’s helpless “Oh!” was clearly audible.
At this, Cissy, whose mind had evidently contained one doubt as to who
would be the other occupant of the back seat, looked contentedly at
Longacre handing Julia into her chosen conveyance. He held open the door
on the last glimmer of her slippers—then followed her into the carryall.
Cissy’s rapid change of expression amounted to a grimace. She shot
Florence a look of incredulity, craned hastily around at the carryall
windows, started to speak; then she stared rather blankly at the
blooming Bess who swung into the seat beside her with the confidence of
belonging nowhere else.
Florence looked at Thair, and he gave her almost a grin.
“Place aux dames!” he lilted as the “red devil” slid past the carryall.
They headed the procession down the steep drive, the sea wind in their
faces, plunging through black and white shadows of moonlight and oaks,
catching the flicker of the Monterey lights, finally rolling through the
Del Monte gates with the electric stars overhead drawing huge, sprawling
silhouettes of banana and palm on the drive in front, and a
string-orchestra sounding somewhere beyond the open French windows.
Florence had never felt more alone in her life than on that swarming
hotel veranda. She saw Cissy Fitz Hugh with a hand out to a dozen the
minute she was out of the automobile—full-necked, close-cropped men;
liquid-eyed women with cheeks like peaches and voices like ringing
glass; how Cissy seemed to belong among them, to be one of them with an
identity eloquent of a dozen summers of common pursuits, gossips, and
scandals.
Florence’s steel and lace sheared through their softer fabrics like a
blade through flowers.
The great rooms were filled, jammed. To the hotel inmates had been added
by degrees the parties from the cottages along the shore. The assemblage
showed its “mixedness” by the sharp lines of its cliques, made up like a
Chinese toy—ring within ring; the outer, whoever could manage a night at
the hotel for the sake of a show; the inner, by their sharper
individuality of manner and gown and their air of belonging exactly
where they happened to be, undoubtedly the show, and supremely
regardless of it.
Of them, a woman in heliotrope, with passementerie dragons running up
her arms, waved to Florence, and drew her into her shouting group,
crying, “You here!” and “Who next where!”
“And where,” she wanted to know at the top of her voice, “is the sweet
musician—the American with the short hair, who was at your elbow in
London?”
“In much the same position,” came Longacre’s soft drawl over Florence’s
shoulder.
“The dear impertinence,” the lady-dragoness appealed, “of taking that
description to yourself!”
“Oh, it was too perfect,” he insisted. “The American with the short
hair!”
“_And_ the sweet musician!” Florence teased. A note in her voice took
him back to Vienna and their fresher days. He looked at her. She seemed
a reawakened memory—flushed cheeks, and a stinging light in her eyes.
“Oh, the sweet musician”—Longacre was very easy about him—“is
pigeonholed in New York.”
“What, that dear thing you were playing us catches of last spring?” The
dragoness was all vociferous sympathy, but through it he remained aware
of Florence Essington’s pure profile averted from him, looking across
the room toward a gorgeous, rose-like Julia, blooming, the center of a
circle of black coats.
But for Longacre, at that moment, the other side of the room might well
have been the other side of the world. As the orchestra slid into a
waltz of Strauss, and the lady of dragons was drawn away into the
measure, he laid an eager hand on Florence’s arm, with an “Oh, I say,
dance this with _me_!” hard to be denied.
But she nodded across the room toward Thair approaching with long stride
and confident smile. “It is promised, but—”
“Well,” he frowned, “the next, then.”
“Well—” she acceded.
“And the next.”
As she hesitated he muttered, “Do you know what I want?” He leaned
nearer. “I want the whole evening, as we used—all of ’em!”
“Oh, only that!” she fairly laughed at him.
“This isn’t Vienna,” she said as she turned away with Thair, but her
negation sounded like a promise. She left him—Longacre, who habitually
loafed out a ball,—with a desire to dance—to dance wildly, madly, with
any one!
Safely and slowly steered around the room in Thair’s practised arm,
Florence saw him whirling recklessly through the crowd, dancing double
time in fine Viennese fashion, twice as fast as the rhythmic swing of
the room, with Julia Budd a half-alarmed, half-angry, wholly excited
partner. She seemed holding back, objecting; he was urging her on,
domineering. He swept her along against her will.
“Oh, no, no; you _don’t_ want to stop!” Florence heard him laugh as he
dashed past. And, catching glimpses of Julia’s face as she was whirled
along, Florence thought it struggled with a desire, and an inability, to
be angry; a confused pleasure in a will stronger than her own.
Mrs. Budd was making covert attempts to attract her daughter’s
attention. Her expression said that Longacre was proving himself all and
more than “queer” included. “Conspicuousness” was her abomination, and
there was no doubt that Fox Longacre was making Julia conspicuous.
To Florence it was equally plain that he did not know it. The situation
opened before her like a tableau, the climax of the play. She saw Fox
and Julia in their excited gyration, not as she had seen them that
morning in the garden, but in discord, in different planets of feeling,
the girl supremely agitated, Longacre elated. What was the origin of
that elation? Florence asked herself. A look of hers—a waft of memory!
If she missed the significance of the girl’s face, the danger it
threatened, it was that she lost it in the tumult of her own feeling.
A word, and she would have been whirling in Julia’s place. Still looking
at Julia, she blamed herself for holding him off so long. The girl’s
mere proximity was peril. That was enough to keep any man beside her all
the evening. She had more than beauty. She was magnetic. She sunk the
women around her to nonentities.
Florence watched Longacre shouldering Julia a passage through the press
in the direction of Mrs. Budd’s disapproval. He stood a moment talking
with the mother and daughter; and as the girl turned her long throat,
and bent her black brows upon him, the woman thought, “Of course he will
stay. At least he will stay out the interval.” He seemed to hesitate,
but turned presently and walked on to another group, said a word there,
started across the room.
Unconsciously Florence straightened herself. What irrelevant thing she
said to Thair she didn’t know. She heard him laugh. She was thinking:
“It is only the beginning. I don’t know—”
She answered Thair, but all the while was watching Longacre coming
across the floor, with a word here and there, and bright, absent eyes.
His look found concentration as he paused in front of her. His eyes were
more eager than she had seen them for longer than she cared to remember.
He was less at ease, too. His looks at Thair were hints. When the
returning violins urged that gentleman in the direction of his hostess
and his hostess’s daughter, Longacre, as if at last released, burst out:
“Now let’s get out of this before any more come along!”
“Any more?” She was composed about it.
“That two hundred pounds of commercialism looking in this direction.” He
indicated Holden with a sliding eye.
“Why, Tony, what has happened to you?”
“Don’t you know?” He was smiling, but well in earnest. “I haven’t said a
word to you,” he pronounced impressively, “for twenty-four hours.”
“But why?” She seemed to challenge him with: “Whose fault is that?”
“Because you dodged,” he replied coolly. “And unless I look out, you’ll
do it again.”
“And your suggestion is that we dodge together?”
He rose, and stood in front of her while Holden passed slowly in the
crowd, turning his penetrating eye from side to side, but missing them
completely.
“Florence,” he said, “thaw me out. I’m frozen stiff. Come, I’m stale
with self-communications.”
He thrust his arm through hers as he drew her around the skirts of the
crowd. She felt its urge with a heightened pulse.
“Isn’t this rather conspicuously inconspicuous?” she wanted to know as
he seated her behind a palm in the crook of a side stair.
“Quite within the limits,” he assured her. “Or do you _want_ to be
interrupted?”
“Tony, you’re almost formal!”
“You make me feel so. You’re a stranger.”
Upon this, the curve of her smile was almost childlike.
“Why,” he laughed, surprised, “you’re younger than I!”
The glittering butterfly in her hair trembled with her laughter.
“Delicious!” she cried.
“I suppose that’s the youngest thing that’s been said to-night,” he
admitted, rueful as a boy, but wholly amused. He looked up at her, and
again he seemed to see her anew, alight with an intensity that flashed
in her large eyes, that seemed reflected in the glitter of her
slow-waving black fan.
“You are the oldest, youngest ever born,” she said, with a gentle caress
of voice that caused his smile to fade and held his eyes steady.
“What a way you have with words!” he said. “You make them really mean
things. You get hold of one—”
“With words,” she helped him.
“Oh, no, no; not only that! But the _way_ you do it,” he said, with his
oldest look on his young face. “You get nearer with them. Most only get
away.”
He alarmed her and reassured her in a breath. “Words?” she thought,
remembering Julia’s eyes. Yes, words were her weapons, and that which
was back of them: the power of mentality. But how much did that count
for now?
“You don’t like people, Tony,” she told him.
He nodded. “I know. They’re such everlasting discords. They deafen me. I
suppose it’s infernally selfish, but I can’t think of you as an
individual, Florence. You’re just myself.”
They were too intent now, both of them, for a change of color.
“You know, ever since we came here,” he went on, his long fingers
running through and through the steel fringes in her lap, “I’ve had the
oddest sensation of losing myself—of seeing myself escape. Oh, it’s been
wretched!” He shook his head.
She paled a little. The meaning under his words—a meaning of which he
was unconscious—pierced her.
“Did you, really?” he asked her.
“Did I?” Her voice trembled.
“Try to get away from me?”
Oh, to have been sure _she_ had been the reason of his wretchedness!
“Are you accusing me of taking back a gift, Tony?”
The look he gave her swallowed her fears, and the flippancies they
engendered.
“Florence,” he said, “you’ve been always giving to me. You never think
of getting. You won’t even take what belongs to you—myself, the opera,
and whatever I may do or be.”
“But, Tony, years ago you gave me all that.”
“I offered it, and you refused it—on my account, you said! What a
reason!” He repudiated it with a fierce head-shake. “When you are giving
your brain, your strength, your life, why won’t you take that much from
me?”
[Illustration: “‘_Oh, it’s been wretched!_’”]
“Suppose I should?” She looked at him as if she half feared a recoil of
his eagerness; but the blood, mounting to his face, only gave him a more
headlong impetuousness. His answer was as direct as Holden could have
made: “Is that yes?”
“Why not?” she faltered, her eyes full upon him.
“Good Lord!”—his voice was thick—“then there need be no end to
anything!” He stooped with that incalculable impulse of his. She swayed
away from him. Her black fan seemed to brush him back.
“’Sh!” her warning hand was on his.
Tall, slightly stooping, Charlie Thair stood between the potted palms,
blinking at them out of his narrow eyes. One could not know how much
they had seen. They seemed to have seen simply nothing.
“I have,” he murmured, “constituted myself a relief expedition. You did
very well,” he said to Longacre. “I have spent three quarters of a waltz
hunting.”
“I did the best I could.” Longacre’s cheerful impudence covered the
situation. “You ought to give up sooner, old man.”
Florence felt half shocked, half relieved, to hear them talking thus, as
they would have talked if there had been no situation. But she left the
responsibility with Longacre. She nodded casually enough to him as she
went away with Thair. But, for all her lightness, she could not conceal
the evidences of what had happened to her. She dared not give her eyes
all the light they knew, and still Thair wondered at their brightness.
She could not keep the caress out of her voice. Her laugh lay too near
her lips. Her breast heaved too high. She saw that Thair noticed it, but
she felt it no longer mattered. Whom she danced with, what she said, she
hardly knew. “Is that yes?” she heard Longacre saying, and then her
answer: “Why not?”
Why not? Had she thought herself old? Her pulse was a girl’s, her color
inconstant, her heart quick and irregular. She saw him across the
crowd—a look. It was like a hand laid in her own. Was she beginning to
live over again? Had he, for what she had given him, repaid her with
youth? She was splendid in the flower of her mood.
She saw Julia Budd amid the crowd, distinct from it, yet somehow less
vital—a colorful, restless-eyed ghost. Among the dispersing dancers—with
the carriages at the door, and the morning faint yellow through the
banana leaves—Julia passed her with the others, a dimly disturbing
spirit. There was something searching, seeking, baffled in the look she
gave Longacre as he helped her into the carryall. He was so vital, so
alive, that he seemed to have taken from Julia some of her gorgeous
magnetism. But Florence knew it was from another source the vitality had
sprung. She was flushed and warm and sparkling with the thought of it.
It kept her brilliant through the long ride back in the cold sea wind
toward the cold saffron east. She was a whirl of feeling. She rushed
along with her sensations as if she dared not think. The spin of the
automobile helped her.
But when the rapid motion in the sharp half-light had changed for the
long upward house-stair; when Longacre’s good night was but the memory
of a hand-clasp around her fingers,—then she hurried to escape what was
crowding on her elation. She shut the door of her room. She locked it;
but the shadow that threatened had been too quick for her. The four
walls closed it in. She turned up all the lights in the room. In their
glare the shadow was fainter. She drew the curtains over the windows.
She shut herself away from the growing light. She saw an image in her
glass, a woman who loved, and was loved again, bright-eyed, hectic. The
room was too small to hold her. The walls weighed down upon her. Her
heart was too small to hold her happiness. Was it for that reason it
ached, that it lay lead in her breast? And the fullness in her
throat—tears of joy? It was very near to anguish.
She tried to recall Longacre’s face when he questioned, “Is that yes?”
But she only saw the confused distraction with which he had answered
Julia’s seeking look. She knew he belonged to her as never before. But
she felt guilty, uneasy, criminal.
She was suffering. She pressed her hands on her smarting eyes, with her
old impulse for reason crying, “Why?” What had she done? Whom had she
robbed? She had only taken what was hers. Rather, it had been given
freely, freely, she told herself insistently. Surely they belonged to
each other, herself and the man she loved. What had the other people to
do with it? Whom had she wronged?
She flung herself on her bed. The tumult of brain and soul ran out in
tears. Triumph, strength, color, hope, were flowing from her; but the
figures of the dark spelled out words before her closed, unsleeping
eyes—motives that she had obscured, meanings that had been dim.
Whom had she wronged? One figure filled her inturned sight. The man she
loved stood there, accusing her. The wrong she had done was between the
two of them. To him she must answer.
“What had she done?” the poor ghost seemed to ask.
She had made him. For what? That question stared at her horribly. “For
himself,” she tried to answer. It had been true in past years, but now
it was inexplicably false. For herself, now. She would have hidden from
the truth, but it was too quick for her. She lay still, seeing it all,
flinching, but looking it in the face.
She had had much to give him; and she had given it. She had helped him
over his hard road—a road which, without her, he might have found too
steep and narrow. Now she had come to the end.
How did she know—she broke in passionately upon her reason—that if he
wanted her, he no longer needed her? But something deeper than reason,
deeper than passion, assured her of the dreary truth. The very years
sundered them, and each succeeding year would widen the breach. She, in
her prime, in the full power of her faculties and charm—ten years would
find her old, years that would leave him young. After—what was there
after that?
If she could do no more, if she loved him, must she let him go? That was
the bitterest! To step out of the way. To make herself forgotten!
When she rose the east shone palely bright through her windows. She
turned out the sickly lights, thrust back the curtains, and let the
sharp, merciless morning fill the room.
Seeing her reflection in the mirror, she seemed to face her actual self.
Her cheeks were white, the shadows under her eyes bluish; from nostril
to mouth the lines were long and hard. But it was easier to look this
self in the face than the other of the night before. Here there was
nothing hidden, no unknown horror at her back, no shadow to engulf her.
Everything was clearly defined. Now that she was in the midst of the
shadow, it was less black than gray; but she wondered whether fire would
not have been a relief from that interminably dreary hue that infinitely
surrounded her.
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