INTRIGUE
Osborn passed that first night at the best hotel in Liverpool. The
term "expenses" provided for the best, in reason, of everything; and a
good man at his job need not be afraid of making claims. Osborn was
going to be a very good man at his job and, somehow, without any undue
swelling of the head, he knew it. His chance had come, the big chance
which had laid poor Woodall low, and sent him up, up, rejoicing. When
they carried his rather goodlooking luggage--which he had bought new
for his honeymoon--into a palatial bedroom of the Liverpool hotel, he
experienced, only with a thousand degrees more conviction, that sense
of freedom from care which his wife was even then timidly grasping,
far away in London. He was provided for handsomely and agreeably for
three hundred and sixty-five days.
All his liabilities were provided for, too. No unexpected call could
come to him, no fingers delve into the purse that he might now keep
privately to himself. He was going out into a big world where life had
never taken him before, and he was going untrammeled; strong, young.
Osborn dressed for dinner that evening; he wore the links his
mother-in-law had given him as a wedding present, and a shirt
whose laundering had been paid for out of that omnipresent
thirty-two-and-sixpence, and the jacket cut by the tailor whom he had
never been able to afford since. He looked a very nice young man,
fresh, broad and spruce, but not too spruce; open-browed, clear-eyed
and keen. He was now at the zenith of his physical strength, in his
thirty-second year, untired and still eager. As he dressed, he looked
at himself in the glass as a man regards himself upon his wedding day.
He had remembered to find out about mails from Cook's and, before
going in to dinner, sat down in a great lounge and scribbled a note to
his wife; just this information, love, and a further injunction to
take care of herself; and no more. Like other husbands who had been
similarly placed domestically, he had no idea how this process of
taking care was to be accomplished by a harassed and busy woman, but
it was some satisfaction to express a verdant hope that it should be
done.
He went in, duty done, to an aldermanic dinner. He passed a very
successful evening. Actually, only on the eve of his mission, he sold
a Runaway car to a fat merchant prince who dined opposite to him; or
at least he went as near to the actual selling as it was possible to
go in the circumstances. He recommended him to their Liverpool agent,
wrote a personal letter, gave his card and received one in return, and
parted from his probable client with a feeling that the transaction
was going through.
He was off at daybreak next morning.
A stupendous piece of luck befell him on board. They were only two
days out when he found that a well-known theatrical management was
taking a play, with the entire London cast, to New York. It was only
on the second day, when, looking across the dining saloon, he saw a
raven head on the top of a rather full neck and high shoulders, and
met the gay and luring glance which he had met once before, to his
secret thrill, across the Royal Red, on the night when he dined there
with his wife to celebrate her birthday.
Osborn was a free man; he had broken routine and was out adventuring;
and he was goodlooking, he looked worth while. She was a rather stupid
actress, with no magnetism but her looks, and no possible chance of
ever in this world obtaining a bigger part than the minor one she at
present had inveigled from the manager; and she liked well-set-up
smart men, men who appeared as if they had money to burn. There were
no obstacles placed in Osborn's way.
He was highly elated when the end of a week found him calling her
familiarly "Roselle," when he could walk the deck with her after
breakfast, and join her party for bridge in the afternoons, and
withdraw to a warm corner of the saloon with her after dinner, there
to become better acquainted. He was at last, he said to himself,
loosening those domestic chains which had hobbled him, and was doing
more as other men did.
She gulled him into thinking her clever; all she said and did and
looked excited him; she was so different from the women whom men of
his class married and with whom only they became intimate; a fellow on
two hundred a year with a wife and family could not afford the society
of the stage. But a fellow with three hundred a year and any
commission his smartness could make, all just for mere pocket-money,
was in a different boat altogether. The sums he staked at bridge with
Roselle and her party on those winter afternoons in mid-Atlantic used
to keep the household at No. 30, Welham Mansions for a week. Sometimes
he won and sometimes he lost; but either seemed to him immaterial in
this new lightness of his heart.
He was to be in New York two months, and she was to be there three
months.
She used to say reckless things to him which stirred the blood. Thus:
"You and I, Osborn"--he knew, of course, that familiarity with
Christian names was a trait of the stage--"have met, and presently we
shall part; and what was the good of meeting if this dear little
friendship is just to be packed up with our luggage?"
"You can pack up mine, and I'll pack up yours," he said softly.
"That's a sweet way of putting it; you're one of those light-hearted
people who don't mind saying goodbyes."
"I say, Roselle, do you?"
"Saying good-bye to fellow-souls is always sad."
On the windy deck she used to wear a dark purple velvet hat slouched
down and pinned close against her darker hair. It showed up the
whiteness of her face, which even the saltwinds could not whip into
colour, under the coating of white cosmetic almost imperceptibly laid
on. Osborn loved that hat, as he loved the graceful tilt of her skirt
and the fragility of her blouses; and sometimes it occurred to him to
question why men's wives couldn't wear things like that. One sunny
afternoon they had, when, instead of playing bridge, they sat in a
sheltered corner on deck and talked.
"Where are you putting up in New York?" she asked that afternoon.
"At the Waldorf Astoria."
"Are you really?" she said, and she thought in her shallow mind that
he must be very well off indeed.
Osborn did not tell her that his firm sent him to an expensive hotel
for their own ends; it was pleasant to have her thinking what she did.
He asked if he might call upon her in New York; if she'd have supper
with him sometimes; come for a run in his two-seater which he was
taking over with him. They made a dozen plans which, after all, could
not hurt Marie, and the prospects of which were charming to a degree.
They landed just before Christmas.
Osborn had written his Christmas letters to his wife and children on
board, and his first errand on landing was to mail hastily-chosen
gifts to them. A box of sweets for the kids, a bottle of scent for
Marie, these seemed to suit the occasion quite well. He even
remembered a picture-postcard view of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel to
bear seasonable wishes to Grannie Amber. Then Roselle claimed him.
Osborn had a good deal of odd time to put at her disposal, and she
disposed of it with no uncertain hand. His way was not so uphill as he
had expected; within a week he was touching big commission, bigger
than he had dreamed of, with the prospects of plenty to follow. And
driving his electric-blue, silver-fitted Runaway two-seater about New
York, or over to Brooklyn, he placed Roselle in her inevitable fur
coat and slouched down purple velvet hat, as a splendid business
asset, beside him. At least he told his conscience that a smart woman
in a car is unparalleled advertisement for it and perhaps he was
right; but that was not the reason for her presence there.
When they said good-bye, under the wintry trees of the remotest part
of a great park, it hurt him. He set his hands suddenly on her
shoulders, and looked into her eyes; and then, it being almost dusk,
and no one very near, he slid an arm round her, and held her to him
for one swift instant. When she let him kiss her, with a yielding as
passionate as response, he was surprised at his own stupidity in not
tasting such sweets before.
"I've got to go," he said. "You've been a darling, to me. I'm crazy
about you; I suppose you know that?"
Her slow smile drove deep dimples into her white cheeks; she looked at
him warmly; and yet, had he not been too excited to note it, with an
acute appraisement. "We're to be here another month," she said, not
answering his query, "leave me your address; you have mine."
"Will you write?"
"Reams. And who knows? We may meet again some day."
"That's what I feel; that we haven't met just to part. You're
wonderful. You're the most wonderful woman I've ever met."
"And you--you've never told me anything about yourself, Osborn."
"There's nothing to tell."
He had Marie's last letter in his breast-pocket at that moment, and as
Roselle stirred against him he heard the slight crackling of the
paper. It dropped like a trickle of cold water into his excitement and
desire. He took Roselle's arm lightly in his hand, and turned about.
"I must take you to tea somewhere," he said; "where shall we go?"
In a shaded tea room, full of screens, rose-lights and china tinkling,
he sat looking at her. She _was_ wonderful; with the rather high
set of her shoulders, her white, full neck, the depth of her hair and
eyes, her short and tenderly kept hands, she was romance. You couldn't
imagine such a woman sinking into the household drudge whatever her
circumstances; she stood for all that was easy and pleasant, scented
and soft, in woman. Osborn felt, as many a man has done and will do
again, all memories, all fidelity slipping from him, in the lure of
the hour. Leaning forward, he said imperatively:
"I'll have to write every day. You'll answer me, won't you?"
"Of course I will, you exacting boy."
In a very low voice he went on:
"I want to have you all to myself till to-morrow--till I've got to
leave you. It would be heaven; but--"
Roselle Dates was of that talented community of stupid women who
understand and manipulate life through their super-instinct of sex
merely; who know how to take all and give nothing; suckers of life and
never feeders. She looked at him and sighed and smiled, and shook her
head, and touching his hand, whispered:
"But that's impossible. It isn't often a woman makes a friend like
you. Let it last a little longer, there's a dear boy."
"I'm sorry," said Osborn. "I suppose we're all beasts."
She sighed again. "Every inch of life is snared, for women. In a
profession like mine you watch each step. My goodness, you do! Or
you'd fall into one of the traps."
"Isn't it ever worth while falling in?"
She refused to answer. Becoming suddenly capricious with the caprice
that is the armour of her kind, she wished to be taken home. After he
had left her, he walked the streets moodily for an hour before going
in himself.
He had to pack for an early start next morning. In a bedroom where a
prince might have slept, he threw himself into an easychair and
brooded. Roselle became more than ever desirable, as he imagined her,
sitting in that shaded tea room, her fur coat opened and thrown back
to show the fragile corsage underneath. She was romance; the fairy
tale, which he had read and mislaid, found again. Putting his hand up,
he pulled out his wife's letter, and read it again cursorily before
casting it into the wastepaper basket.
How dull it was! What a lack of sparkle and spontaneity it showed!
Something seemed to happen to women after marriage, making them
prosaic; growing little nagging consciences in them; egging them on to
a perpetual striving with things that were damned tiresome. And the
letter that he would write back would be just as constrained; there
would be no joy in the writing of it as there would be writing the
letters that would be sent to Roselle.
* * * * *
"MY DEAR OSBORN" (Marie wrote), "Thank you for your letter. You are
very good to write so regularly every mail. We are so glad to know
what a successful trip you are having. We are all very well; and
mother gave the children a tree for Christmas, and we hung your box
of sweets and my scent on it. They couldn't think how you had
managed to put them there! Thank you so much for the scent. I am
having the dining-room carpet cleaned. The children send their love
and so do I.--Your affectionate wife,
"MARIE."
"P.S.--Baby has cut another tooth."
"My God!" said Osborn resignedly, as he tore the letter across.
"Marriage is a big mistake. To tie oneself up for life at
twenty-seven...!"
* * * * *
Osborn was in Chicago, prospering exceedingly, when Roselle's second
letter came.
She was in the same city!
He hurried to her without a moment's loss. She was staying at a
boarding-house full of noisy young business people, among whom she was
a sensation. She received Osborn in a great smudged parlour decorated
with much gilt and lace curtains.
"Aren't you surprised?"
"I was never so glad."
"I expect you were. I expect you've been as glad ever so many times."
She looked at him shrewdly. "I didn't tell you in New York," she said,
letting her hand remain in his. They were alone in the horrible room.
"But my contract was for the passage out and three months playing with
Sautree; not for the passage home. You see, I wanted to get out here
somehow and see what I could do. It does one good to have been in the
States."
"And now--"
"I'm at a loose end."
She saw the quick flush on his face and the light in his eyes, and
playfully put against his lips two fingers, which he kissed.
"Only temporarily of course. I'm going round the hotels to-day--I
shall get plenty of entertaining to do. When I'm tired of this, I
shall move on."
"Why not let our moving on coincide?"
It was what, vaguely, in her mind, Roselle meant to do. She wanted
experience; but to gain it comfortably would need a certain amount of
financing; and she thought she had tested the fairly satisfactory
depth of his pockets, although he had told her nothing.
"I don't know," she reserved. "What are your movements and dates?"
He told her eagerly.
"I've always longed to tour Canada," she cried.
"Then tour it on your own. Only can't we be travelling companions?
I'll see to your tickets and luggage and so on."
"And I shan't have any hotel expenses," she added, lighting a
cigarette; "I shall work them off and see a profit."
Osborn's year now took on for him the aspect of the most magnificent
adventure sated married man ever had.
"Fancy us two trotting about the good old earth together!"
"Don't tell your friends," she laughed.
"Trust me."
"But I don't. I don't trust any of you."
"You are a tease. Roselle, it's so tophole to see you again; let me
kiss you good morning."
She took the cigarette from her mouth to return his kiss; she was
bright-eyed and hilarious. She knew that he was a fool as men were,
unless they were brutes; and you had to make the fools whipping-boys
for the brutes. As he kissed her, she knew that she was going to use
him; to take all and give nothing.
"You're the dearest boy. And how's the car?"
"She's first-rate. Want her this morning?"
"You might run me around in her; job-hunting."
Into the spring sun they drove; she had the inevitable fur coat and
the hat he loved, and she looked beautiful. By the time he ranked the
car outside one of Chicago's best restaurants for lunch, she had what
she called a pocketful of contracts, to sing at this restaurant and
that; to dance for her supper and half a guinea at a ruinous night
club, for she could do everything a little. But her greatest asset was
her beauty.