tender intercourse, the pre-eminent feature is the big host of questions
which you cannot answer, or not, at least, with certainty....
4
For instance: the night of the Allardyce dance, after seeing Elena home,
I stepped in for a moment to get warm and have her mix me a highball. We
sat for a considerable while on the long sofa in the dimly-lighted
dining room, talking in whispers so as not to disturb the rest of the
house: and Elena was unusually beautiful that night, and I was more than
usually in love, more thanks to three of the five drinks she mixed....
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she stated, sighing.
I did not say anything.
"Oh, well, then--! If you will just promise me," she stipulated, "that
you will never in any way refer to it afterwards--"
So I promised.... And the next day she met me, cool as the proverbial
cucumber, and never once did she "refer to it afterwards," nor did I
think it wise to do so either. But the incident, however delightful,
puzzled me. It puzzles me even now....
5
In any event, she was not only beautiful but exceedingly well-to-do
likewise, since her dead father and her husband also had provided for
her amply; and Lichfield sniggered in consequence, and as a matter of
course assumed my devotion to be of astute and mercenary origin. But I
had, in this period, a variety of reasons to know that Lichfield was for
once entirely in the wrong; and that what Lichfield mistook to be the
begetter of, was in reality--so we will phrase it--the almost
unnecessary augmenter of my infatuation. Of course I did not exactly
object to her having money....
Meantime Elena was profoundly various. I told her once that being
married to her would be the very next thing to owning a harem. And in
consequence of this same mutability, it was as late as March before
Elena Barry-Smith made up her mind to marry me; and I was so deliciously
perturbed that the same night I wrote to tell Bettie Hamlyn all about
it. I had accepted Rosalind more calmly somehow. Now I was dithyrambic;
and you would never have suspected I had lived within fifty miles of
Bettie for an entire two years without attempting to communicate with
her, for very certainly my letter did not touch upon the fact. I was, in
fine, supremely happy, and I wanted Bettie, first of all, to know of
this circumstance, because my happiness had always made her happy too.
The act was natural enough; only Elena telephoned, at nine the following
morning, that she had altered her intention.
"My regret is beyond expression," said I, politely, "I shall come for my
tea at five, however."
She entered upon a blurred protest. "You have already broken my heart,"
I said, with some severity, "and now it would appear you contemplate
swindling the remainder of my anatomy out of its deserts. You are a
curmudgeon." And I hung up the receiver.
And my first thought was, "Oh, how gladly I would give the gold of Ormus
and of Alaska just to have my letter back!" But I had mailed it,
shuffling to the corner in my slippers, and without any collar on, in
the hushed middle of the night, because my letter had seemed so
important then.
6
"Will you not have me, lady?" I began that afternoon.
"No, my lord," she demurely responded, "for I've decided it would be too
much like living in my Sunday-clothes."
And "I give it up. So what's the answer?" was my annotation.
"Oh, I'm not making jokes to-day. Why are you so--Oh, as we used to say
at school," she re-began, _"Que diable allais-tu faire dans
cette galere?"_
"I was born in a vale of tears, Elena, and must take the consequences of
being found in such a situation."
She came to me, and her finger-tips touched my hand ever so lightly.
"That is another quotation, I suppose. And it is one other reason why I
mean not to marry you. Frankly, you bore me to death with your
erudition; you are three-quarters in love with me, but you pay heaps
less attention to what I say about anything than to what Aristotle or
some other old fellow said about it. Oh, that I should have lived to be
jealous of Aristotle! Indeed I am, for I have the misfortune to be
hideously in love with you. You are so exactly the sort of infant I
would like to adopt."
"Love," I suggested, "while no longer an excuse for marriage, is at
least a palliation."
"Listen, dear. From the first I have liked you, but that was not very
strange, because I like almost everybody; but it was strange I should
have remembered you and have liked the idea of you ever since you went
away that first time."
"Oh, well, this once I will excuse you--"
"But it happened in this way: I had found everybody--very nice, you
know--particularly the men,--and the things which cannot be laughed at I
had always put aside as not worth thinking about. You like to laugh,
too, but I have always known--and sometimes it gets me real mad to think
about it, I can tell you--that you could be in earnest if you chose, and
I can't. And that makes me a little sorry and tremendously glad,
because, quite frankly, I _am_ head over heels in love with you. That is
why I don't intend to marry you."
And I was not a little at sea. "Oh, very well!" I pleasantly announced,
"I shall become a prominent citizen at once, if that's all that is
necessary. I will join every one of the patriotic societies, and sit
perpetually on platforms with a perspiring water-pitcher, and unveil
things every week, with felicitous allusions to the glorious past of our
grand old State; and have columns of applause in brackets on the front
page of the _Courier-Herald_. I will even go into civic politics, if you
insist upon it, and leave round-cornered cards at all the drugstores, so
that everybody who buys a cigar will know I am subject to the Democratic
primary. I wonder, by the way, if people ever survive that malady? It
sounds to me a deal more dangerous that epilepsy, say, yet lots of
persons seem to have it--"
But Elena was not listening. "You know," she re-began, "I could get out
of it all very gracefully by telling you you drink too much. You
couldn't argue it, you know--particularly after your behavior
last Tuesday."
"Oh, now and then one must be sociable. You aren't a prude, Elena--"
"However, I am not really afraid of that, somehow. I even confess I
don't actually _mind_ your being rather good for nothing. No woman ever
really does, though she has her preference, and pretends, of course, to
mind a great deal. What I mean, then, is this: You don't marry just me.
I--I have very few relations, just two brothers and my mother; yet, in a
sense, you know, you marry them as well. But I don't believe you would
like being married to them. They are so different from you, dear. Your
whole view-point of life is different--"
I had begun to speak when she broke in: "No, don't say anything, please,
until I'm quite, quite through. My brothers are the most admirable men I
ever knew. I love them more than I can say. I trust them more than I do
you. But they are just _good_. They don't fail in the really important
things of life, but they are remiss in little ways, they--they don't
_care_ for the little elegantnesses, if that's a word. Even Arthur chews
tobacco when he feels inclined. And he thinks no _man_ would smoke a
cigarette. Oh, I can't explain just what I mean--"
"I think I understand, Elena. Suppose we let it pass as said."
"And Mamma is not--we'll say, particularly highly educated. Oh, you've
been very nice to her. She adores you. You won _her_ over completely
when you took so much trouble to get her the out-of-print paper
novels--about the village maidens and the wicked dukes--in that idiotic
Carnation Series she is always reading. The whole affair was just like
both of you, I think."
"But, oh, my dear--!" I laughed.
"No, not one man in a thousand would have remembered it after she had
said she did think the titles 'were real tasty'; and I don't believe any
other man in the world would have spent a week in rummaging the
second-hand bookstores, until he found them. Only I don't know, even
yet, whether it was really kindness, or just cleverness that put you up
to it--on account of me. And I do know that you are nice to her in
pretty much the same way you were nice to the negro cook yesterday. And
I have had more advantages than she's had. But at bottom I'm really just
like her. You'd find it out some day. And--and that is what I mean,
I think."
I spoke at some length. It was atrocious nonsense which I spoke; in any
event, it looked like atrocious nonsense when I wrote it down just now,
and so I tore it up. But I was quite sincere throughout that moment; it
is the Townsend handicap, I suspect, always to be perfectly sincere for
the moment.
"Oh, well!" she said; "I'll think about it."
7
That night Elena and I played bridge against Nannie Allsotts and Warwick
Risby. I was very much in love with Elena, but I hold it against her,
even now, that she insisted on discarding from strength. However, there
was to be a little supper afterward, and you may depend upon it that
Mrs. Vokins was seeing to its preparation.
She came into the room about eleven o'clock, beaming with kindliness and
flushed--I am sure,--by some slight previous commerce with the
kitchen-fire.
"Well, well!" said Mrs. Vokins, comfortably; "and who's a-beating?"
I looked up. I must protest, until my final day, I could not help it.
"Why, we is," I said.
And Nannie Allsotts giggled, ever so slightly, and Warwick Risby had
half risen, with a quite infuriate face, and I knew that by to-morrow
the affair would be public property, and promptly lost the game and
rubber. Afterward we had our supper.
When the others had gone--for my footing in the house was such that I,
by ordinary, stayed a moment or two after the others had gone,--Elena
Barry-Smith came to me and soundly boxed my jaws.
"That," she said, "is one way to deal with you."
A minute ago I had been ashamed of myself. I had not room to be that
now; I was too full of anger. "I did make rather a mess of it," I
equably remarked, "but, you see, Nannie had shown strength in diamonds,
and I simply couldn't resist the finesse. So they made every one of
their clubs. And I hadn't any business to take the chance of course at
that stage, with the ace right in my hand--"
"Arthur would have said, before he'd thought of it, 'You damn fool--!'
And then he would have apologised for forgetting himself in the presence
of a lady," she said, in a sorry little voice. "Yes, you--you _have_
hurt me," she presently continued,--"just as you meant to do, if that's
a comfort to you. I feel as though I'd smacked a marble statue. You are
the sort that used to take snuff just before they had their heads cut
off, and when _they_ were in the wrong. And I'm not. That's always been
the trouble."
"Elena!" I began,--"wait, just a moment! I'm in anger now--!" It was not
much to stammer out, but for me, who have the Townsend temper, it was
very hard to say.
"You talk about loving me! and I believe you do love me, in at any rate
a sort of way. But you'll never forget, you never _have_ forgotten,
those ancestors of yours who were in the House of Burgesses when I
hadn't any ancestors at all. It isn't fair, because we haven't got the
chance to pick our parents, and it's absurd, and--it's true. The woman
is my mother, and I'll be like her some day, very probably. Yes, she
_is_ ignorant and tacky, and at times she is ridiculous. She hadn't even
the smartness to notice it when you made a fool of her; and if anybody
were to explain it to her she would just laugh and say, 'Law, I don't
mind, because young people always have to have their fun, I reckon.' And
she would forgive you! Why, she adores you! she's been telling me for
months that you're 'a heap the nicest young man that visits with me.'"
Afterward Elena paused for an instant. "I think that is all," she said.
"It's a difference that isn't curable. Yes, I simply wanted to tell you
that much, and then ask you to go, I believe--"
"So you don't wish me, Elena, in the venerable phrase, to make an honest
woman of you?"
She had half turned, standing, in pink and silver fripperies, with one
bared arm resting on the chair back, in one of her loveliest attitudes.
"What do you mean?"
"I was referring to what happened the other night, after the Allardyce
dance."
And Elena smiled rather strangely. "You baby! how much would it shock
you if I told you no woman really minds about that either? Any way, you
have broken your solemn promise," she said, with indignation.
"Ah, but perfidy seemed, somehow, in tone with an establishment wherein
one concludes the evening's entertainment by physical assault upon the
guests. Frankly, my dear"--I observed, with my most patronizing languor,
--"your breeding is not quite that to which I have been accustomed, and
I have had a rather startling glimpse of Lena Vokins, with all the
laboriously acquired veneering peeling off. Still, in view of
everything, I suppose I do owe it to you to marry you, if you insist--"
"Insist! I wouldn't wipe my feet on you!"
"That especial demonstration of affection was not, as I recall,
requested of you. So it is all off? along with the veneering, eh? Well,
perhaps I did attach too much importance to that diverting epilogue to
the Allardyce dance. And as you say, Elena--and I take your word for it,
gladly,--once one has become used to granting these little favors
indiscriminately--"
"Get out of my house!" Elena said, quite splendid in her fury, "or I
will have you horsewhipped. I was fond of you. You would not let me be
in peace. And I didn't know you until to-night for the sneering,
stuck-up dirty beast you are at heart--" She came nearer, and her
glittering eyes narrowed. "And you have no hold on me, no letters to
blackmail me with, and nobody anywhere would take your word for anything
against mine. You would only be whipped by some real man, and probably
shot. So do you remember to keep a watch upon that lying, sneering mouth
of yours! And do you get out of my house!"
"It is only rented," I submitted: "yet, after all, to boast
vaingloriously of their possessions is pardonable in those who have
risen in the world, and aren't quite accustomed to it...." There were a
pair of us when it came to tempers.
8
And I went homeward almost physically sick with rage. I knew, even then,
that, while Elena would forgive me in the outcome, if I set about the
matter properly, I could never bring myself to ask forgiveness. If only
she had been in the wrong, I could have eagerly gone back and have
submitted to the extremest and the most outrageous tyranny she
could devise.
But--although I would never have blackmailed her, I think,--she had been
mainly in the right. She had humiliated me, with a certain lack of
decorum, to be sure, but with some justice: and to pardon plain
retaliation is beyond the compass of humanity. At least, it ranks among
achievements which have always baffled me.
22.
_He Cleans the Slate_
It was within a month of this other disaster that Jasper Hardress came
to America, accompanied by his wife. They planned a tour of the States,
which they had not visited in seven years, and more particularly, as his
forerunning letter said, they meant to investigate certain mining
properties which Hardress had acquired in Montana. So, not unstirred by
trepidations, I met them at the pier.
For I was already in New York, in part to see a volume of my short
stories through the press--which you may or may not have read, in its
elaborate "gift-book" form, under the title of _The Aspirants_,--and in
part about less edifying employments. I was trying to forget Elena, and
in Lichfield it was not possible to induce such forgetfulness without
affording unmerited pleasure for gabbling busybodies.... It was not in
me to apologise, except in a letter, where the wording and interminable
tinkering with phraseology would enable me to forget it was I who was
apologising, until a bit of nearly perfect prose was safely mailed; and
I knew she would not read any letter from me, because Elena comprehended
that I always persuaded her to do what I prompted, if only she
listened to me.
As it was, I talked that morning for an hour or more with fat Jasper
Hardress.... Even now I find the two errands which brought him to
America of not unlaughable incongruity.
2
For, first, he came as an agent of the Philomatheans, who were
endeavouring to secure official recognition by the churches of America
and England of a revised translation of, in any event, the New
Testament.
He told me of a variety of buttressing reasons,--which I suppose are
well-founded, though I must confess I never investigated the matter. He
told me how the Authorised Version was a paraphrase, abounding in
confusions and in mistranslations from the Greek of Erasmus's New
Testament, which, as the author confessed, "was rather tumbled headlong
into the world than edited." And he told me how the edition of Erasmus
itself was hastily prepared from careless copies of inaccurate
transcriptions of yet further copies of divers manuscripts of which the
oldest dates no further back than the fourth century, and is in turn,
most probably, just a liberal paraphrase, as all the others are, of
still another manuscript.
So that the English version, as I gathered, may be very fine English,
but has scarcely a leg left, when you consider it as a safe foundation
for superiority, or pillorying, or as a guide in conduct.
I suspect, however, that Jasper Hardress somewhat overstated the case,
since on this subject he was a fanatic. To me it seemed rather quaint
that Hardress or anybody else should be bothering about such things.
And as he feelingly declaimed concerning the great Uncials, and
explained why in this particular verse the Ephraem manuscript was in the
right, whereas to probe the meaning of the following verse we clearly
must regard the Syriac version as of supreme authority, I could well
understand how at one period or another his young wife must inevitably
have considered him in the light of a rather tedious person.
And I told him that it hardly mattered, because the true test of a
church-member was the ability to believe that when the Bible said
anything inconvenient it really meant something else.
But actually I was not feeling over-cheerful, because Jasper's second
object in coming to America was to leave his wife in Sioux City, so that
she could secure a divorce from him, on quite un-Scriptural grounds.
Hardress told me of this at least without any excitement. He did not
blame her. He was too old for her, too stolid, too dissimilar in every
respect, he said. Their marriage had been a mistake, that was all,--a
mismating, as many marriages were. She wanted to marry someone else, he
rather thought.
And "Oh, Lord! yes!" I inwardly groaned. "She probably does."
Aloud I said: "But the Bible--Yes, I _am_ provincial at bottom. It's
because I always think in nigger-English and translate it when I talk.
It was my Mammy, you see, who taught me how to think,--and in our
nigger-English, what the Bible says is true. Why, Jasper, even this
Revised Version of yours says flatly that a man--"
"Child, child!" said Jasper Hardress, and he patted my hair, and I
really think it crinkled under his touch, "when you grow up--if indeed
you ever do,--you will find that a man's feeling for his wife and the
mother of his children, is not altogether limited by what he has read in
a book. He wants--well, just her happiness."
I looked up without thinking; and the aspect of that gross and
unattractive man humiliated me. He had reached a height denied to such
as I; and inwardly I cursed and envied this fat Jasper Hardress.... I
would have told him everything, had not the waiter come just then.
3
And the same afternoon I was alone with Gillian Hardress, for the first
time in somewhat more than two years. We had never written each other; I
had been too cautious for that; and now when the lean, handsome woman
came toward me, murmuring "Jack--" very tenderly,--for she had always
called me Jack, you may remember,--I raised a hand in protest.
"No,--that is done with, Jill. That is dead and buried now, my dear."
She remained motionless; only her eyes, which were like chrysoberyls,
seemed to grow larger and yet more large. There was no anger in them,
only an augmenting wonder.
"Ah, yes," she said at last, and seemed again to breathe; "so that is
dead and buried--in two years." Gillian Hardress spoke with laborious
precision, like a person struggling with a foreign language, and
articulating each word to its least sound before laying tongue to its
successor.
"Yes! we have done with each other, once for all," said I, half angrily.
"I wash my hands of the affair, I clean the slate today. I am not polite
about it, and--I am sorry, dear. But I talked with your husband this
morning, and I will deceive Jasper Hardress no longer. The man loves you
as I never dreamed of loving any woman, as I am incapable of loving any
woman. He dwarfs us. Oh, go and tell him, so that he may kill us both! I
wish to God he would!"
Mrs. Hardress said: "You have planned to marry. It is time the prodigal
marry and settle down, is it not? So long as we were in England it did
not matter, except to that Faroy girl you seduced and flung out into the
streets--"
"I naturally let her go when I found out--"
"As if I cared about the creature! She's done with. But now we are in
America, and Mr. Townsend desires no entanglements just now that might
prevent an advantageous marriage. So he is smitten--very
conveniently--with remorse." Gillian began to laugh. "And he discovers
that Jasper Hardress is a better man than he. Have I not always known
that, Jack?"
Now came a silence. "I cannot argue with you as to my motives. Let us
have no scene, my dear--"
"God keep us respectable!" the woman said; and then: "No; I can afford
to make no scene. I can only long to be omnipotent for just one instant
that I might deal with you, Robert Townsend, as I desire--and even then,
heaven help me, I would not do it!" Mrs. Hardress sat down upon the
divan and laughed, but this time naturally. "So! it is done with? I have
had my dismissal, and, in common justice, you ought to admit that I have
received it not all ungracefully."
"From the first," I said, "you have been the most wonderful woman I have
ever known." And I knew that I was sincerely fond of Gillian Hardress.
"But please go now," she said, "and have a telegram this evening that
will call you home, or to Kamchatka, or to Ecuador, or anywhere, on
unavoidable business. No, it is not because I loathe the sight of you or
for any melodramatic reason of that sort. It is because, I think, I had
fancied you to be not completely self-centred, after all, and I cannot
bear to face my own idiocy. Why, don't you realize it was only yesterday
you borrowed money from Jasper Hardress--some more money!"
"Well, but he insisted on it: and I owed it to you to do nothing to
arouse his suspicions--"
"And I don't hate you even now! I wish God would explain to me why He
made women so."
"You accuse me of selfishness," I cried. "Ah, let us distinguish, for
there is at times a deal of virtue in this vice. A man who devotes
himself to any particular art or pursuit, for instance, becomes more and
more enamoured of it as time wears on, because he comes to identify it
with himself; and a husband is fonder of his wife than of any other
woman,--at least, he ought to be,--not because he considers her the most
beautiful and attractive person of his acquaintance, but because she is
the one in whom he is most interested and concerned. He has a
proprietary interest in her welfare, and she is in a manner part of
himself. Thus the arts flourish and the home-circle is maintained, and
all through selfishness."
I snapped my fingers airily; I was trying, of course, to disgust her by
my callousness. And it appeared I had almost succeeded.
"Please go!" she said.