if I could. I don't lie myself, you know--as it happens; and it could
represent to him then about the only thing, the only bad one, I don't
do. I _did_--'lovely as I am'!--have my regular time; I wasn't so
hideous that I couldn't! Besides, do you imagine he'd come and ask
me?"
"Gad, I wish he would, Julia!" said Mr. Pitman, with his kind eyes on
her.
"Well then, I'd tell him!" And she held her head again high. "But he
won't."
It fairly distressed her companion. "Doesn't he want, then, to
know--?"
"He wants _not_ to know. He wants to be told without asking--told,
I mean, that each of the stories, those that have come to him, is a
fraud and a libel. _Qui s'excuse s'accuse_, don't they say?--so that
do you see me breaking out to him, unprovoked, with four or five
what-do-you-call-'ems, the things mother used to have to prove in
court, a set of neat little 'alibis' in a row? How can I get hold of
so _many_ precious gentlemen, to turn them on? How can _they_ want
everything fished up?"
She paused for her climax, in the intensity of these considerations;
which gave Mr. Pitman a chance to express his honest faith. "Why, my
sweet child, they'd be just glad--!"
It determined in her loveliness almost a sudden glare. "Glad to swear
they never had anything to do with such a creature? Then _I'd_ be glad
to swear they had lots!"
His persuasive smile, though confessing to bewilderment, insisted.
"Why, my love, they've got to swear either one thing or the other."
"They've got to keep out of the way--that's _their_ view of it, I
guess," said Julia. "Where _are_ they, please--now that they _may_ be
wanted? If you'd like to hunt them up for me you're very welcome."
With which, for the moment, over the difficult case, they faced each
other helplessly enough. And she added to it now the sharpest ache of
her despair. "He knows about Murray Brush. The others"--and her pretty
white-gloved hands and charming pink shoulders gave them up--"may go
hang!"
"Murray Brush--?" It had opened Mr. Pitman's eyes.
"Yes--yes; I do mind _him_."
"Then what's the matter with his at least rallying--?"
"The matter is that, being ashamed of himself, as he well might, he
left the country as soon as he could and has stayed away. The matter
is that he's in Paris or somewhere, and that if you expect him to come
home for me--!" She had already dropped, however, as at Mr. Pitman's
look.
"Why, you foolish thing, Murray Brush is in New York!" It had quite
brightened him up.
"He has come back--?"
"Why, sure! I saw him--when was it? Tuesday!--on the Jersey boat." Mr.
Pitman rejoiced in his news. "_He's_ your man!"
Julia too had been affected by it; it had brought, in a rich wave, her
hot color back. But she gave the strangest dim smile. "He _was_!"
"Then get hold of him, and--if he's a gentleman--he'll prove for you,
to the hilt, that he wasn't."
It lighted in her face, the kindled train of this particular sudden
suggestion, a glow, a sharpness of interest, that had deepened the
next moment, while she gave a slow and sad head-shake, to a greater
strangeness yet. "He isn't a gentleman."
"Ah, lordy, lordy!" Mr. Pitman again sighed. He struggled out of it
but only into the vague. "Oh, then, if he's a pig--!"
"You see there are only a few gentlemen--not enough to go round--and
that makes them count so!" It had thrust the girl herself, for that
matter, into depths; but whether most of memory or of roused purpose
he had no time to judge--aware as he suddenly was of a shadow (since
he mightn't perhaps too quickly call it a light) across the heaving
surface of their question. It fell upon Julia's face, fell with the
sound of the voice he so well knew, but which could only be odd to her
for all it immediately assumed.
"There are indeed very few--and one mustn't try _them_ too much!"
Mrs. Drack, who had supervened while they talked, stood, in monstrous
magnitude--at least to Julia's reimpressed eyes--between them: she was
the lady our young woman had descried across the room, and she had
drawn near while the interest of their issue so held them. We have
seen the act of observation and that of reflection alike swift in
Julia--once her subject was within range--and she had now, with all
her perceptions at the acutest, taken in, by a single stare, the
strange presence to a happy connection with which Mr. Pitman aspired
and which had thus sailed, with placid majesty, into their troubled
waters. She was clearly not shy, Mrs. David E. Drack, yet neither was
she ominously bold; she was bland and "good," Julia made sure at a
glance, and of a large complacency, as the good and the bland are apt
to be--a large complacency, a large sentimentality, a large innocent,
elephantine archness: she fairly rioted in that dimension of size.
Habited in an extraordinary quantity of stiff and lustrous black
brocade, with enhancements, of every description, that twinkled
and tinkled, that rustled and rumbled with her least movement, she
presented a huge, hideous, pleasant face, a featureless desert in a
remote quarter of which the disproportionately small eyes might have
figured a pair of rash adventurers all but buried in the sand. They
reduced themselves when she smiled to barely discernible points--a
couple of mere tiny emergent heads--though the foreground of the
scene, as if to make up for it, gaped with a vast benevolence. In
a word Julia saw--and as if she had needed nothing more; saw Mr.
Pitman's opportunity, saw her own, saw the exact nature both of Mrs.
Drack's circumspection and of Mrs. Drack's sensibility, saw even,
glittering there in letters of gold and as a part of the whole
metallic coruscation, the large figure of her income, largest of all
her attributes, and (though perhaps a little more as a luminous blur
beside all this) the mingled ecstasy and agony of Mr. Pitman's hope
and Mr. Pitman's fear.
He was introducing them, with his pathetic belief in the virtue for
every occasion, in the solvent for every trouble, of an extravagant,
genial, professional humor; he was naming her to Mrs. Drack as the
charming young friend he had told her so much about and who had been
as an angel to him in a weary time; he was saying that the loveliest
chance in the world, this accident of a meeting in those promiscuous
halls, had placed within his reach the pleasure of bringing them
together. It didn't indeed matter, Julia felt, what he was saying: he
conveyed everything, as far as she was concerned, by a moral pressure
as unmistakable as if, for a symbol of it, he had thrown himself
on her neck. Above all, meanwhile, this high consciousness
prevailed--that the good lady herself, however huge she loomed, had
entered, by the end of a minute, into a condition as of suspended
weight and arrested mass, stilled to artless awe by the fact of her
vision. Julia had practised almost to lassitude the art of tracing in
the people who looked at her the impression promptly sequent; but it
was a striking point that if, in irritation, in depression, she felt
that the lightest eyes of men, stupid at their clearest, had given her
pretty well all she should ever care for, she could still gather a
freshness from the tribute of her own sex, still care to see her
reflection in the faces of women. Never, probably, never would that
sweet be tasteless--with such a straight grim spoon was it mostly
administered, and so flavored and strengthened by the competence of
their eyes. Women knew so much best _how_ a woman surpassed--how and
where and why, with no touch or torment of it lost on them; so that as
it produced mainly and primarily the instinct of aversion, the sense
of extracting the recognition, of gouging out the homage, was on the
whole the highest crown one's felicity could wear. Once in a way,
however, the grimness beautifully dropped, the jealousy failed: the
admiration was all there and the poor plain sister handsomely paid it.
It had never been so paid, she was presently certain, as by this great
generous object of Mr., Pitman's flame, who without optical aid, it
well might have seemed, nevertheless entirely grasped her--might in
fact, all benevolently, have been groping her over as by some huge
mild proboscis. She gave Mrs. Brack pleasure in short; and who could
say of what other pleasures the poor lady hadn't been cheated?
It was somehow a muddled world in which one of her conceivable joys,
at this time of day, would be to marry Mr. Pitman--to say nothing of a
state of things in which this gentleman's own fancy could invest such
a union with rapture. That, however, was their own mystery, and Julia,
with each instant, was more and more clear about hers: so remarkably
primed in fact, at the end of three minutes, that though her friend,
and though _his_ friend, were both saying things, many things and
perhaps quite wonderful things, she had no free attention for them
and was only rising and soaring. She was rising to her value, she was
soaring _with_ it--the value Mr. Pitman almost convulsively imputed
to her, the value that consisted for her of being so unmistakably the
most dazzling image Mrs. Brack had ever beheld. These were the uses,
for Julia, in fine, of adversity; the range of Mrs. Brack's experience
might have been as small as the measure of her presence was large:
Julia was at any rate herself in face of the occasion of her life,
and, after all her late repudiations and reactions, had perhaps never
yet known the quality of this moment's success. She hadn't an idea of
what, on either side, had been uttered--beyond Mr. Pitman's allusion
to her having befriended him of old: she simply held his companion
with her radiance and knew she might be, for her effect, as irrelevant
as she chose. It was relevant to do what he wanted--it was relevant to
dish herself. She did it now with a kind of passion, to say nothing of
her knowing, with it, that every word of it added to her beauty. She
gave him away in short, up to the hilt, for any use of her own, and
should have nothing to clutch at now but the possibility of Murray
Brush.
"He says I was good to him, Mrs. Drack; and I'm sure I hope I was,
since I should be ashamed to be anything else. If I could be good to
him now I should be glad--that's just what, a while ago, I rushed up
to him here, after so long, to give myself the pleasure of saying. I
saw him years ago very particularly, very miserably tried--and I saw
the way he took it. I did see it, you dear man," she sublimely went
on--"I saw it for all you may protest, for all you may hate me to talk
about you! I saw you behave like a gentleman--since Mrs. Drack agrees
with me, so charmingly, that there are not many to be met. I don't
know whether you care, Mrs. Drack"--she abounded, she revelled in
the name--"but I've always remembered it of him: that under the most
extraordinary provocation he was decent and patient and brave. No
appearance of anything different matters, for I speak of what I
_know_. Of course I'm nothing and nobody; I'm only a poor frivolous
girl, but I was very close to him at the time. That's all my little
story--if it _should_ interest you at all." She measured every beat of
her wing, she knew how high she was going and paused only when it was
quite vertiginous. Here she hung a moment as in the glare of the upper
blue; which was but the glare--what else could it be?--of the vast and
magnificent attention of both her auditors, hushed, on their side, in
the splendor she emitted. She had at last to steady herself, and
she scarce knew afterward at what rate or in what way she had still
inimitably come down--her own eyes fixed all the while on the very
figure of her achievement. She had sacrificed her mother on the
altar--proclaimed her as false and cruel: and if that didn't "fix" Mr.
Pitman, as he would have said--well, it was all she could do. But the
cost of her action already somehow came back to her with increase; the
dear gaunt man fairly wavered, to her sight, in the glory of it, as if
signalling at her, with wild gleeful arms, from some mount of safety,
while the massive lady just spread and spread like a rich fluid a bit
helplessly spilt. It was really the outflow of the poor woman's
honest response, into which she seemed to melt, and Julia scarce
distinguished the two apart even for her taking gracious leave of
each. "Good-bye, Mrs. Drack; I'm awfully happy to have met you"--like
as not it was for this she had grasped Mr. Pitman's hand. And then
to him or to her, it didn't matter which, "Good-bye, dear good Mr.
Pitman--hasn't it been nice after so long?"
II
Julia floated even to her own sense swan-like away--she left in her
wake their fairly stupefied submission: it was as if she had, by an
exquisite authority, now _placed_ them, each for each, and they would
have nothing to do but be happy together. Never had she so exulted
as on this ridiculous occasion in the noted items of her beauty. _Le
compte y était_, as they used to say in Paris--every one of them, for
her immediate employment, was there; and there was something in it
after all. It didn't necessarily, this sum of thumping little figures,
imply charm--especially for "refined" people: nobody knew better than
Julia that inexpressible charm and quotable "charms" (quotable
like prices, rates, shares, or whatever, the things they dealt in
down-town) are two distinct categories; the safest thing for the
latter being, on the whole, that it might include the former, and the
great strength of the former being that it might perfectly dispense
with the latter. Mrs. Drack was not refined, not the least little bit;
but what would be the case with Murray Brush now--after his three
years of Europe? He had done so what he liked with her--which
had seemed so then just the meaning, hadn't it? of their being
"engaged"--that he had made her not see, while the absurdity lasted
(the absurdity of their pretending to believe they could marry without
a cent), how little he was of metal without alloy: this had come up
for her, remarkably, but afterward--come up for her as she looked
back. Then she had drawn her conclusion, which was one of the many
that Basil French had made her draw. It was a queer service Basil was
going to have rendered her, this having made everything she had ever
done impossible, if he wasn't going to give her a new chance. If he
was it was doubtless right enough. On the other hand, Murray might
have improved, if such a quantity of alloy, as she called it, _were_,
in any man, reducible, and if Paris were the place all happily to
reduce it. She had her doubts--anxious and aching on the spot, and had
expressed them to Mr. Pitman: certainly, of old, he had been more open
to the quotable than to the inexpressible, to charms than to charm. If
she could try the quotable, however, and with such a grand result, on
Mrs. Drack, she couldn't now on Murray--in respect to whom everything
had changed. So that if he hadn't a sense for the subtler appeal, the
appeal appreciable by people _not_ vulgar, on which alone she could
depend, what on earth would become of her? She could but yearningly
hope, at any rate, as she made up her mind to write to him immediately
at his club. It was a question of the right sensibility in him.
Perhaps he would have acquired it in Europe.
Two days later indeed--for he had promptly and charmingly replied,
keeping with alacrity the appointment she had judged best to propose
for a morning hour in a sequestered alley of the Park--two days later
she was to be struck well-nigh to alarm by everything he had acquired:
so much it seemed to make that it threatened somehow a complication,
and her plan, so far as she had arrived at one, dwelt in the desire
above all to simplify. She wanted no grain more of extravagance or
excess of anything--risking as she had done, none the less, a recall
of ancient license in proposing to Murray such a place of meeting. She
had her reasons--she wished intensely to discriminate: Basil French
had several times waited on her at her mother's habitation, their
horrible flat which was so much too far up and too near the East Side;
he had dined there and lunched there and gone with her thence to other
places, notably to see pictures, and had in particular adjourned
with her twice to the Metropolitan Museum, in which he took a great
interest, in which she professed a delight, and their second visit
to which had wound up in her encounter with Mr. Pitman, after her
companion had yielded, at her urgent instance, to an exceptional
need of keeping a business engagement. She mightn't, in delicacy,
in decency, entertain Murray Brush where she had entertained Mr.
French--she was given over now to these exquisite perceptions and
proprieties and bent on devoutly observing them; and Mr. French, by
good-luck, had never been with her in the Park: partly because he had
never pressed it, and partly because she would have held off if he
had, so haunted were those devious paths and favoring shades by the
general echo of her untrammelled past. If he had never suggested their
taking a turn there this was because, quite divinably, he held it
would commit him further than he had yet gone; and if she on her side
had practised a like reserve it was because the place reeked for her,
as she inwardly said, with old associations. It reeked with nothing
so much perhaps as with the memories evoked by the young man who now
awaited her in the nook she had been so competent to indicate; but
in what corner of the town, should she look for them, wouldn't those
footsteps creak back into muffled life, and to what expedient would
she be reduced should she attempt to avoid all such tracks? The Museum
was full of tracks, tracks by the hundred--the way really she had
knocked about!--but she had to see people somewhere, and she couldn't
pretend to dodge every ghost.
All she could do was not to make confusion, make mixtures, of the
living; though she asked herself enough what mixture she mightn't find
herself to have prepared if Mr. French should, not so very impossibly,
for a restless, roaming man--_her_ effect on him!--happen to pass
while she sat there with the mustachioed personage round whose name
Mrs. Maule would probably have caused detrimental anecdote most
thickly to cluster. There existed, she was sure, a mass of luxuriant
legend about the "lengths" her engagement with Murray Brush had gone;
she could herself fairly feel them in the air, these streamers of
evil, black flags flown as in warning, the vast redundancy of so cheap
and so dingy social bunting, in fine, that flapped over the stations
she had successively moved away from and which were empty now, for
such an ado, even to grotesqueness. The vivacity of that conviction
was what had at present determined her, while it was the way he
listened after she had quickly broken ground, while it was the special
character of the interested look in his handsome face, handsomer than
ever yet, that represented for her the civilization he had somehow
taken on. Just so it was the quantity of that gain, in its turn, that
had at the end of ten minutes begun to affect her as holding up a
light to the wide reach of her step. "There was never anything the
least serious between us, not a sign or a scrap, do you mind? of
anything beyond the merest pleasant friendly acquaintance; and if
you're not ready to go to the stake on it for me you may as well know
in time what it is you'll probably cost me."
She had immediately plunged, measuring her effect and having thought
it well over; and what corresponded to her question of his having
become a better person to appeal to was the appearance of interest she
had so easily created in him. She felt on the spot the difference that
made--it was indeed his form of being more civilized: it was the
sense in which Europe in general and Paris in particular had made him
develop. By every calculation--and her calculations, based on the
intimacy of her knowledge, had been many and deep--he would help her
the better the more intelligent he should have become; yet she was to
recognize later on that the first chill of foreseen disaster had been
caught by her as, at a given moment, this greater refinement of his
attention seemed to exhale it. It was just what she had wanted--"if
I can only get him interested--!" so that, this proving quite vividly
possible, why did the light it lifted strike her as lurid? Was it
partly by reason of his inordinate romantic good looks, those of a
gallant, genial conqueror, but which, involving so glossy a brownness
of eye, so manly a crispness of curl, so red-lipped a radiance of
smile, so natural a bravery of port, prescribed to any response
he might facially, might expressively, make a sort of florid,
disproportionate amplitude? The explanation, in any case, didn't
matter; he was going to mean well--that she could feel, and also that
he had meant better in the past, presumably, than he had managed to
convince her of his doing at the time: the oddity she hadn't now
reckoned with was this fact that from the moment he did advertise an
interest it should show almost as what she would have called weird. It
made a change in him that didn't go with the rest--as if he had broken
his nose or put on spectacles, lost his handsome hair or sacrificed
his splendid mustache: her conception, her necessity, as she saw, had
been that something should be added to him for her use, but nothing
for his own alteration.
He had affirmed himself, and his character, and his temper, and his
health, and his appetite, and his ignorance, and his obstinacy, and
his whole charming, coarse, heartless personality, during their
engagement, by twenty forms of natural emphasis, but never by emphasis
of interest. How in fact could you feel interest unless you should
know, within you, some dim stir of imagination? There was nothing in
the world of which Murray Brush was less capable than of such a dim
stir, because you only began to imagine when you felt some approach to
a need to understand. _He_ had never felt it; for hadn't he been born,
to his personal vision, with that perfect intuition of everything
which reduces all the suggested preliminaries of judgment to the
impertinence--when it's a question of your entering your house--of
a dumpage of bricks at your door? He had had, in short, neither to
imagine nor to perceive, because he had, from the first pulse of his
intelligence, simply and supremely known: so that, at this hour,
face to face with him, it came over her that she had, in their old
relation, dispensed with any such convenience of comprehension on his
part even to a degree she had not measured at the time. What therefore
must he not have seemed to her as a form of life, a form of avidity
and activity, blatantly successful in its own conceit, that he could
have dazzled her so against the interest of her very faculties and
functions? Strangely and richly historic all that backward mystery,
and only leaving for her mind the wonder of such a mixture of
possession and detachment as they would clearly to-day both know.
For each to be so little at last to the other when, during months
together, the idea of all abundance, all quantity, had been, for
each, drawn from the other and addressed to the other--what was it
monstrously like but some fantastic act of getting rid of a person by
going to lock yourself up in the _sanctum sanctorum_ of that person's
house, amid every evidence of that person's habits and nature? What
was going to happen, at any rate, was that Murray would show himself
as beautifully and consciously understanding--and it would be
prodigious that Europe should have inoculated him with that delicacy.
Yes, he wouldn't claim to know now till she had told him--an aid to
performance he had surely never before waited for, or been indebted
to, from any one; and then, so knowing, he would charmingly endeavor
to "meet," to oblige and to gratify. He would find it, her case, ever
so worthy of his benevolence, and would be literally inspired to
reflect that he must hear about it first.