affection without money, but one shouldn't marry for either money or
affection without a little romance thrown in."
Saying which, this whimsical little lady laughed, rose, and put an arm
lovingly around her favorite.
"Come back to the States with me, Janet," she continued. "You'll see
what we women can do when we put on steam. You shall make an independent
place for yourself in New York, besides helping other women to do the
same. And by and by some suitable countryman of ours will come along,
and we'll have you nicely married off."
*V*
_We'll have you nicely married off_. Left alone, Janet had to pull
herself together after the shock of these words. Everybody seemed
determined to get her married. Claude, Pryor, Cornelia, Robert. And
now Mrs. Jerome, too!
Clearly, even people who were extremely well disposed towards her, had
it at the back of their minds that she had lost credit with her
fellow-men. And that nothing short of marriage could restore her to
full public esteem! This was a situation she would have to reckon with.
But how comical it was to have marriage urged upon her as though it were
a kind of penance she must do in order to regain her standing!
Penance! She was driven to admit that it really would be something like
an act of penance to marry M. St. Hilaire. Still, would she feel this
way if she hadn't met Robert again? Would she? Scarcely. It was
Robert's turning up that had caused M. St. Hilaire to appear in the
light of a penitential infliction.
There were two courses open to her, and staying with Cornelia was not
one of them. No, she recoiled from fashionable dressmaking and all its
shows, and the atmosphere of the Maison Paulette with its lurking vapors
of parasitism and prostitution grew more oppressively sickening every
day.
True, the big establishment was an amusing novelty at first, when you
saw only the surface glamor. Nor was it half bad to help Harry Kelly to
train the manikins, so long as you supposed that this training merely
equipped them to wear expensive frocks in the salon or at the races or
at the opera. But when you found out that every one of these dainty
girl models expected confidently to become the mistress of some rich
merchant or politician, your zest for the work oozed away.
Not that you saw much difference between the kept mistresses who
exhibited the Paulette garments and the kept wives who purchased them.
But you began to look upon the whole traffic in dresses as a symbol of
woman's enslavement to man and of man's enslavement to the dollar sign.
And you observed how this traffic changed everybody connected with it
for the worse. (Everybody except poor Mazie, who had experienced a
revulsion of feeling against the ghost of her Ziegfeld "Follies"
self--unluckily too late to do her any good.) You watched the crude
boyish cynicism of Harry Kelly turn into a morose pessimism, and in
Cornelia you felt the growth or stiffening of all that was grasping and
cruel.
As Janet saw these metamorphoses, she realized that the house of
Paulette was a house of bondage. It was not an institution with which a
free-spirited woman would wish permanently to throw in her lot.
For practical purposes, then, her choice lay between the managership
under Mrs. Jerome and a "marriage of convenience" with M. St. Hilaire.
Instinct, to be sure, pointed to another alternative in which the name
of Robert figured in capital letters. But this was a romantic dream, a
dream which her fancy might embroider but which her courage and common
sense had to dispel. Thus, when instinct urged, "A little feminine
beguilement will bring him swiftly to your feet," common sense rejoined,
"You may elect life-long poverty for yourself; dare you inflict it on
Robert?" Instinct could rear and curvet, it could champ the bit; but it
was not in the saddle.
As between the two available courses, she had vastly preferred the
managership. She would have jumped at it when Mrs. Jerome first offered
it, but for a tacit understanding with Henriette. What a pull on her
affections the little girl exercised! In a moment of weakness, or
rather of passionate disgust with Paulette's, Janet had given her former
pupil all but an outright promise to become her second mother. Yet,
though the father's proposal was a handsome one, full of concessions to
Janet's conception of a modern woman's sphere, it was difficult to
ignore the likelihood of a bitter conflict after the wedding. A
conflict on the issue of these very concessions. For between the feudal
traditions of a man like M. St. Hilaire and the equalitarian assumptions
of a woman like herself, there was a great gulf fixed. Could it ever be
bridged?
Anyhow, Mrs. Jerome's offer had blazed out the real path of independence
for her, and no mistake. Or so she had thought. A dozen times of late
she had been on the point of imparting her final decision to Henriette
and facing Cornelia and M. St. Hilaire with it. Lack of courage had not
restrained her. A very different consideration had given her pause.
Might net her "past" prove a source of serious embarrassment to Mrs.
Jerome's work? The last two years had taught her something of the
"chemical" methods of warfare, the "poison gas" attacks which the foes
of progress did not scruple to adopt. Was it likely that the enemies of
the women's movement would lose the chance of wrecking Mrs. Jerome's
scheme by raising against her young manager the hue and cry of
_immorality_, that cry with which a handful of knaves had so often
brought a whole nation of fools and cowards to heel?
None the less, good sense had suggested that if Mrs. Jerome could risk
it, so could she. And she had at last nerved herself to a conclusive
interview with M. St. Hilaire. It was no more than fair that after so
much shilly-shallying, she should explain at first hand her definitive
refusal.
She was awaiting him now. Had everything gone smoothly, she could have
shown him that her career was already booked for passage by a different
route. Booked! But at this critical moment she had struck a snag in the
shape of Mrs. Jerome's intimation that the shortest way with an awkward
past was to "marry it down," so to speak. Had she been mistaken in Mrs.
Jerome? Was the good lady so bravely taking a risk only with the quiet
resolve to insure this risk at the earliest opportunity? Well, if she
had to get married for her sins, one thing was certain. The St. Hilaire
she did know was better than the St. Hilaire she didn't.
These reflections were brought to an abrupt close by the return of
Cornelia.
"Monsieur St. Hilaire is below," she announced, stormily. "It seems to
me that you owe an explanation to me as well as to him."
"If you don't mind," returned Janet in a voice that was strangely calm,
"let me accept him first. I'll explain to you afterwards."
Cornelia stared at her. For some time she had believed that, despite
the disturbing influence of Mrs. Jerome and Robert, there was a fairly
good chance of putting the St. Hilaire marriage through. She had
cherished this belief until today. Then she suddenly learned that Janet
had all along been carrying on an intrigue with Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome,
the upshot of which was that the benevolent Cornelia's plans were to be
set wholly at naught. And as if this humiliation were not enough, Janet
had entertained the disloyal scheme of deserting the Maison Paulette at
barely a day's notice.
These distressing facts had transpired scarcely half an hour ago. And
now Janet was again serenely proposing to marry M. St. Hilaire! She had
been acting in this erratic fashion ever since Robert came on the scene.
Had he had anything to do with this latest change of heart?
"I'll tell M. St. Hilaire to come up," she said tonelessly, paralyzed by
the instability of her friend's decisions. "The coast is quite clear.
Mazie is upstairs with Harry, and Robert has just gone to Fontainebleau
for the day."
She omitted to say that she had packed him off on a factitious errand.
"Yes," she continued, her cadenced speech picking up as she went on. "I
told him to make the most of his glorious freedom. You know, he's as
good as betrothed to Charlotte Beecher."
"How lucky for them both!" said Janet hypocritically.
Cornelia went out, having thus drawn the long bow at a venture. And
not, she trusted, in vain.
*VI*
M. St. Hilaire came in. Janet had never been tempted to rave over him
as Cornelia lately did. She thought him a little too short, but she
admitted that his well-poised figure, ruddy complexion, and auburn beard
were a delight to the eye. And she liked his courtly and somewhat
superior demeanor.
Yet, at the first intimate touch of his hand, she recoiled almost with
violence.
Her sudden start robbed him of every shred of confidence. And it
astonished Janet herself. The fascination of Claude and the voltaic
attraction of Robert had put these two, for her, in a class by
themselves. But she had met men who were not half so agreeable to talk
to or to look upon as M. St. Hilaire--men whose company was dull or
whose personalities she disapproved of and yet whose caresses she would
not have wished to repel.
It had been this way ever since their first meeting in Brussels. M. St.
Hilaire had befriended her in a time of need, he possessed many mental
and material advantages, he was the father of Henriette. But he lacked
some one thing needful. When she dreamed her day dreams, she never
pictured him; and when he touched her, she never thrilled.
True, in his absence, she thought of him (if she thought of him at all)
as precisely the sort of man a girl ought to be able to love. But in
his presence she was overwhelmed with the single conviction that to live
with him would be more than she could bear. The conviction was absurd,
unjust, incomprehensible; yet it was not to be gainsaid.
Sensing her thoughts, M. St. Hilaire was disheartened.
"I hoped I had made amends," he said, in sorrowful allusion to the cause
of their rupture in Brussels. "But I see you've never forgiven me."
"Oh, no, no," she cried, with a pang of remorse. "I've forgotten all
about that. Please believe me. It isn't that at all. It's--I don't
quite know--something tells me that I simply can't live with you as your
wife."
He rose, by main force suppressing caustic and resentful comments that
leapt to the tip of his tongue. He had one more card to play.
"And you mean to--to go back on Henriette?" he asked, in measured tones.
She came to his side and, affectionately taking his hand, began:
"I'm terribly fond of Henriette--"
The door flew open and in walked Robert! But stopped on the instant!
He saw Janet caressing the arm of M. St. Hilaire, heard the tender
words, and felt the whole universe reel.
In the flash of an eye, he pulled himself together.
"Pardon," he said between his teeth. And, turning sharply round, flung
headlong out.
Janet gazed after him in stupefaction.
She never knew how she finished the interview with M. St. Hilaire, nor
how, with a hardening of her voice, she made it clear to him that, in a
straight conflict between Henriette's self-interest and her own, it was
not the former that she was bound to consult.
M. St. Hilaire took his dismissal with a good deal of dignity and
self-control, albeit Janet's display of firmness had excited a deeper
emotion than any woman had ever aroused in him before. An unconsidered
trifle, snatched away, may become the heart's desire. And Janet had
ranked far higher than a trifle in M. St. Hilaire's European scale of
values, at least since her departure from Brussels. Yet, throughout his
courtship of this strange, incalculable American girl, he had never been
quite free from an uneasy fear that the marriage might prove a social
indiscretion. He now felt certain that his choice had been in keeping
with the very best taste. And this certainty, while adding poignancy to
his loss, afforded some consolation to his pride.
*VII*
As for Janet, she fairly bolted upstairs and threw a bombshell into the
gymnasium by the summary announcement of her intention to leave for
England with Mrs. Jerome next day. An unalterable intention. She was
determined to establish her independence not by marriage but by hard
work.
Mazie listened to her with very mixed feelings; Harry Kelly looked like
one who heard the rumble of an approaching earthquake; Cornelia stood
petrified.
She came to life again with a sinister, arpeggiative laugh.
"So you'll go trapesing to America on Robert's heels, after all?" she
said. "To dish his whole career!"
"Cornelia, you're a devil!" cried Janet, incandescent with anger. "I'd
like to know the reason, the real reason for your anxiety to get me
married to M. St. Hilaire. Not to do me a good turn, that's one sure
thing."
Mazie advanced between them.
"Say, Janet," she called out, pacifico-satirically, "even the devil
sometimes does a pal a good turn--just for a change."
Cornelia extinguished her with a gesture.
"Why did you ever run away with Claude," she said, turning to Janet
again, "if you were so gone on Robert?"
"How was I to tell the difference between an infatuation that was bound
to perish and a love that had scarcely been born?" replied Janet, once
more her cool, keen self. "How was I to tell, until I had tried them
out?"
"Tried them out! Words fail to describe your morals, Janet. But go on
your own way rejoicing, my dear. Hang yourself around Robert's neck, if
you like. You'll make a charming picture there, I'm sure. Of course,
clinging vines have gone out of fashion. But clinging leeches are
always with us."
Janet went out ignoring these insults and mutely denying Harry Kelly's
passionate appeal to her not to mind what Cornelia was saying in a
vertigo of rage.
"For God's sake, Cornelia," said Harry, making a frantic demonstration,
"don't let her leave us like that."
"Hold your tongue, you imbecile!" called out his wife, turning on him
fiercely. "When I want to play the fool. I'll ask for your advice."
Her exit, a tempestuous one, left Mazie and Kelly alone and forlorn.
Poor Harry Kelly collapsed in his swivel chair, while Mazie hovered
around the desk like a gadfly.
"Unless you give her what for," she warned him, "_you'll_ never travel
on asphalt."
He looked up and feebly waved her away.
"What can I do?" he said plaintively. "Just jawing back won't help
matters."
"No," said Mazie scornfully. "Jawing back won't. But how about
knocking her down and jumping on her with both feet? Gee, if I had your
strength for five minutes! I tell you what, my frazzled Gorilla, if you
don't mop up the floor with her this very minute, she'll make a doormat
of you for the rest of your life."
Her tone was slighting, and there was bark in the dose she administered.
For a second, he straightened up. Then he shook his head at her,
slumped again, and buckled down to the papers on the desk. Poor Harry!
His muscle was willing, but his nerve was weak.
*CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE*
*I*
The blow which Robert got between the eyes when he saw Janet and St.
Hilaire together had left him shunned. And he was on the train speeding
to Fontainebleau before he began coming to, a painful process of
returning sensibility, beside which the pins and needles of a limb that
had been asleep would have seemed the merest child's play.
The wild nomadic images that chased one another across the field of his
consciousness! They racked his brain, his world-reforming brain, and
limited his feverish introspection to one discovery, the startling
discovery of how very much he was in love.
Rather an awkward plight, he told himself, for a young man who had
purposed the moral regeneration of mankind and in pursuit of this
purpose had sworn to spurn fate, scorn death, and set his hopes above
happiness and love. Especially love! Didn't all the Dick Dudgeons and
Devil's Disciples begin by renouncing love? Indeed, didn't they make
this renunciation a cardinal point of honor?
To think that even Cornelia had cautioned him against making an utter
ass of himself about Janet! Cautioned him in vain. And Janet, too, had
tried her hardest to warn him off by jibing at his poverty. This cruel
kindness had almost worked; almost, but not quite. The poet, the
lunatic, the lover--they were the embodiments of diseases (Shakespeare
had said it!), diseases that resisted the most desperate remedies.
Of course she preferred St. Hilaire to himself. Why not? According to
his own theories, he should be the first to dub her an imbecile if she
didn't. When she needed sex to gratify desire, she had taken Claude by
preference. Now that she needed a position, she would take St. Hilaire.
And rightly so.
He had nothing to offer her but his brains.
Brains and no money! And that in the twentieth century, the triumphant
mechanical century, in which any fool with a little low cunning and a
good thick skin could make money by the bushel.
What on earth had possessed Mark Pryor to start him on this trail?
Confound it! It had all grown out of a chance encounter with Pryor in
Charlotte Beecher's studio one fatal afternoon. The fellow had taken
him aside and poured out a harrowing story of Janet's miseries coupled
with a picture of her dependence on Cornelia! But for that _rencontre_,
he wouldn't have gone on this wild-goose chase from Geneva to Paris to
rescue Janet from a gilded cage.
A gilded cage! No, by heaven! He might be living in a gilded cage
himself (the gilt being drawn from Charlotte Beecher's gilt-edged
securities), instead of in one-third of a model tenement flat in Kips
Bay. To think that Pryor, the transcendently practical Pryor, should
have been the instigator of this fatuous proceeding! Hang the fellow
for his unwarranted meddling and plausible tongue!
He reached Fontainebleau in a drizzling rain and voted it a sleek and
stupid place. In the chilly Hotel de Londres he had ample leisure to
reflect on his folly. Sightseeing! His business in the world was to
create new sights not to see old ones. A fat lot he cared for chateaux
in which the greasy Bourbons had entertained their mistresses and in
which streams of tourists would be sure to blink in awe at vulgarly
showy decorations or childishly ornamented bric-a-brac, not to mention
the celebrated, idiotic insipidities painted by Boucher and David.
Merely to read about these "sights" in the guidebook made him sick. Why
hadn't he followed his own nose instead of letting Cornelia map, or
rather, Baedeker, his course for him?
"What dire offence from trivial causes springs," he silently quoted.
His present plight was the result of putting Cornelia into a bad temper
at the breakfast table that morning. Afterwards, he had gone to pacify
her, a feat he had so often accomplished before. So often, in fact,
that it seemed to him rather a joke to watch Cornelia's stony heart melt
into abject sentimentality. A double-edged joke, now he came to think
it over, in his present plight.
Well, on this occasion she had _not_ been as wax in his hands. Nor had
she been sentimental. True, she had apparently let herself be mollified
as of old. But he was so absorbed in Janet that he failed to be struck
by her unusual manner. In retrospect it stood out. Cornelia had become
playful: it was the playfulness of the panther.
She had begged him to go to Fontainebleau, pointing out that everybody
went at least once in a lifetime, and that he could oblige her by doing
his duty to himself and performing a service for her at one and the same
time. The service (it would save Harry a journey!) was to give a
commission for a special Paulette design to an artist who had an
open-air studio in the famous Fontainebleau forest.
On his way from Paulette's to the Gare de Lyon he had wondered whether
Janet wouldn't be mightily piqued by his unannounced absence of two
days. Two days cut clean out of a visit that was not scheduled to be a
long one! Well, if she was piqued, so much the better.
Yes, but mightn't she suppose him deeply wounded by her wantonly
taunting shot at his impecunious, ineligible pretentions? Possibly.
But, as a matter of fact, he had been deeply wounded. A taunt from her
lips, at such a moment, and in such a style! It was horribly unlike the
Janet he had known in Kips Bay. Had she really become calculating to
her finger tips in accordance with the law of the evolution of the
Lorillardian female? Did her rapturous return of his kisses mean
nothing to her?
Oh, well, after a tremendous love affair like hers with Claude, a young
lady was probably as much thrilled by a kiss of rapture now and then, as
by an extra slice of toast at breakfast.
So he had reasoned as he was about to jump on a bus running to the Lyon
station. He had stopped and retraced his steps to the Maison Paulette,
telling himself that as a sane and sensible citizen of the world it
would be much better to bid her a brief good-bye.
Here in Fontainebleau his memory retraced these steps for the fiftieth
time. Cornelia had been in the exhibition room, thank heaven. So he
had hurried upstairs to the gymnasium, stopping to glance in at the
private office on his way. That was how he had come to swing open the
door and burst incontinently upon Janet and St. Hilaire.
Certainly, there was nothing like a smasher in the face for making you
feel things you had been innocent of feeling before.
"Let the pain do the work!" said Robert, quoting to himself the oldest
and most respected maxim known to the medical profession. Then he went
to bed.
A sleepless night followed.
*II*
The weather next morning was brisk and clear. Under its inspiration
Robert began to recover from the depression of the night before and, for
a time at least, to drive away the misgivings that had tormented him.
He yielded to the beauty of the forest of Fontainebleau, a fact which
made the discharge of his mission for Cornelia much less tedious than he
had dreaded.
During his return through wooded walks to the town, he so far regained
his self-confidence that he was able to laugh at yesterday's morbid
speculations and nightmarish fancies. What a bother he had made about a
crisis that ought to have been foreseen, and a sequel that ought to have
been taken for granted!
And, as a pure point of information, could he be absolutely sure that
Janet really did mean to marry St. Hilaire?
This startling query, coming like a whisper from the void, crystallized
a decision towards which he had unconsciously been groping. He would
return posthaste to Paris and level the invisible wall that had sprung
up between Janet and himself. "An invisible wall!" To suppose that a
figment like that could separate two people endowed with good will,
quick wit, and flexible tongues, was to insult his intelligence.
Parks, palaces, gardens, and all the other sights of Fontainebleau could
go hang!
He tingled with shame as he reflected that now, more than at any other
moment since the dissolution of the firm of Barr and Lloyd, Janet might
need the friendly counsel or the sympathetic ear that he had pressed
upon her with unlimited enthusiasm in their Kips Bay workshop. Yet this
was the moment he had chosen in which to act like the screen hero who
advances his money or his time to the heroine in amounts arithmetically
proportioned to the exact quantity of amorous response from the lady's
side. True, this sordid barter was the popular American conception of
the course of true love. But did he propose to fall in with this
conception? Was he ready to prostitute his gifts to the worship of the
great Atlantic bitch-goddess, _Success_?
If only he had been in a position to make Janet a tolerably acceptable
offer of marriage!
Still, no need to blink the fact that he was now better circumstanced
than at any time since leaving the _Evening Chronicle_. Hadn't the
Confederated Press given him this assignment at Geneva, the most
responsible assignment in its province? He flattered himself that he
had reported the proceedings of the Labor Congress with a color,
vividness, trenchancy, and fire none too common in American journalism.
It ought to make people at home sit up and take notice; it might lead to
a much more profitable commission. Look where Hutchins Burley's
articles on the Colorado mine strike had carried him, chock-full of
rhetorical clap-trap and maudlin pathos though the beggar's work had
been!
A pity that the Confederated Press served chiefly radical newspapers
with a limited circulation! It kept your tenure on quicksand. He might
have to yield to temptation and falsify his better self by sinking into
one of the fat jobs that the plutocratic press would now be sure to
offer him.
For the sake of marrying Janet? No, no, it wouldn't do at all. Not
even if she were insane enough to be willing to take the plunge. He
pictured himself and her together in the marital state, saw the cramped
Harlem flat in which they'd be boxed up. Both working of course! No
conveniences, no facilities for either sociability or solitude, no
children (on less than ten thousand a year birth control would be
imperative), no health. And the economies they'd have to practice!
They'd have to deny themselves freedom of movement, shun social and
professional contacts, and take refuge in an isolation paralyzing to
their talents.
Until death did them part--
Thousands of childless couples in every big city existed thus. And the
lives they led were hell.
In spite of which solemn conclusion Robert had no sooner reached his
hotel than he prepared to desert the spacious freedom of Fontainebleau.
And he actually took the first afternoon train back to Paris with the
express purpose of seeking Janet out for a heart-to-heart talk.
The perfection of French "system," so extensively advertised on paper,
is also realized on paper, and there only. This truth was once more
brought home to Robert when, grimy with soot, he reached the capital
long after his train was due. He decided to skip the supper at
Paulette's, partly from a desire to avoid Cornelia, partly from a hope
that he might find Janet alone after Harry Kelly and his wife had left,
as they often did, for an evening's entertainment.
A bus to the American Express Company enabled him to get his mail just
before the office closed. He kept the dozen-odd letters in his pocket,
intending to read them whilst taking a snack in a quaint, spotless
little dairy restaurant (the _a toute heure_ shop, as he and Janet
called it, in allusion to its boast of never closing) in the Boulevard
Montmartre.
The waitress having taken his order, he rapidly sorted out his letters,
seven or eight of which had official or commercial headings that at once
betrayed the enclosures as mere announcements or bills. These he
stuffed back unread into his pocket. Of the remaining few, the first
one proved to be from the London agent of the Confederated Press. This
was the man under whose orders he worked while in Europe. A grudging,
carping cuss! Robert hoped that the fellow had at last seen the light
(of Robert's merit), and that handsome amends were forthcoming.
The message ordered him home to New York at once!
So much for the recognition and advancement which his gorgeous accounts
of the Labor Congress were to bring him. Had the ironical shafts, tipped
with caustic wit and aimed at the rancor and obstructiveness of some of
the labor leaders, given mortal offence to his own side?
With a horrible sense of the insecurity of life, and with a nameless
dread more invasive and powerful than any he had ever known before, he
reached the Maison Paulette about an hour later. He met one of the
principal manikins at the door.
"Mademoiselle Janet? Hadn't he heard the tragic news? _C'est si
triste_. The whole Maison was in mourning. Mademoiselle had departed
that very noon with Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome, the great rich lady without a
heart. _Ah, comme c'est triste_!"
*III*
The "Touraine" had been two days out from Havre in weather decidedly
rough, before Robert got his sea-legs back again. Others on board were
doubtless still deploring the pit of instability that lurks beneath the
surface of things. But as a rule their reflections had an origin that
was strictly physical. Robert, on his first brisk walk around the
second-class deck, reasoned from premises of a very different nature.
For he had reached a point where he felt constrained to take a sort of
inventory of himself, a mental stock-listing of his reverses, his
prospects, and his altered outlook on affairs.
Not that his theories had changed in substance.
From first to last, his mind had been filled with a fierce impatience of
the stupidity of man today and an unquenchable faith in a sanity to
come. Evil; as he conceived it, was a by-product of human growth, and
not, as Shelley conceived it, something imposed on man by a malignant
external power on the fall of which the race would at once become
perfect. In short, he believed that the incessant conflict of life was
largely a struggle between high and low desires, with money and numbers
on the side of Satan, and high-spirited intelligence on the side of the
angels.
In America, to be sure, where achievements not open to a flat cash
interpretation are passed by with a shrug or a vulgar joke, Robert's
view of life had excited as much interest as a whisper in the wind. The
few who gave his philosophy a brief attention had hastily dismissed it
as a matter for milksops or imbeciles; on the fool who preached this
philosophy they had bestowed a cynical pity, and on the failure who
practised it, an amused contempt.
The failure who practised it! Robert knew that, judged by every
standard save his own, he was a failure, a complete, incurable failure.
He did not try to dodge this unanimous judgment. He despised it as much
as he exulted in his own faith. To be exact, as much as he _had_
exulted in his own faith.
For the blow that had knocked him galley-west in the office of the
Maison Paulette had seriously shaken his self-confidence.
A review of his recent conduct led him straight to a very unpalatable
verdict. He had behaved as stupidly towards Janet as any average man of
stone-age instincts. Because she had made one risky experiment in the
field of sex and had almost been tempted to make an even riskier
experiment in the field of subsistence, he had displayed in turn his
pique, jealousy, anger and scorn. The childish resentment that had
mastered him! And this when he owed Janet unbounded gratitude for her
wisdom in frightening him off from a suicidal offer of marriage. In his
varied exhibition of neolithic folly, where was the high-spirited
intelligence he boasted of possessing?
Look how Janet had stuck to _her_ guns! As he might have foreseen (if
he hadn't been a perfect donkey!), she was going to make a glorious
fight of it, on her own. She had given to Caesar the things that were
Caesar's; and for the rest, she had kept her integrity intact.
Incidentally, there was a grain of comfort in the fact that she hadn't
accepted M. St. Hilaire after all. A grain! Say rather, several tons.
Suspending this train of thought, Robert turned to his other great
problem, his work in the labor movement. He asked himself whether he,
like Janet, had kept _his_ integrity intact. Two weeks ago he would
have shouted out a triumphant yes. But now the thin edge of doubt had
entered his soul. This incorruptible, critical gift--the gift above all
others that he prized--was he justified in pushing its exercise to the
furthest limit? He had always rejoiced in the uncompromising candor
with which he had exposed and flayed the special weaknesses of the
radical leaders, the general deficiencies of his own side. But when
candor compelled you to smite people in the fifth rib in order to save
their souls, weren't you carrying virtue a little too far?
Well, his employers on the Confederated Press thought so. And that they
were not alone in their opinion was evident from his several failures.
He counted them up: the _Evening Chronicle_, the Guild movement, the
attempt to unionize the mercantile workers, the Labor Party publicity,
and now this latest debacle. Not to mention his friendships!
He retained the hearty confidence of nobody.
Ought a successful honest man, then, to show as much discretion in the
practice of candor as a successful knave shows in the practice of
deceit? It would seem so. Plainly, he who would change the moral
standards of his kind could not afford to be one thing to all men. Not
a specialist or an extremist, in short.
How to be an aggressive revolutionist and at the same time a progressive
evolutionist--this was the paradox that every effective radical had to
embody in his own life.
It was clear that he would have to begin again at the bottom of the
ladder.
This being so, the first thing to do was to ascertain his liabilities,
material no less than spiritual.
Here Robert was reminded abruptly of the half dozen letters--bills,
circulars, and the like, as he surmised--which he had rammed into his
coat pocket at the _a toute heure_ restaurant. The coat in question was
in his stateroom and he would look for the letters when he went below.
Half an hour later he found them. One of the first envelopes bore the
heading: Simons and Hunt, Attorneys-at-Law, 150 Broadway. It had two
enclosures. The first one he opened read:
..vspace:: 2
My Dear Nephew:
About a year ago you wrote to me suggesting that I do something handsome
by you. In your own delicate words you asked me to subsidize your
imagination, a quality you believed of sufficient value to your fellow
men to be worth preserving. As a proof that you possessed this quality,
you provided me with an outline of your career in all its ups and downs,
chiefly downs. You were also good enough to favor me with copies of
your several articles on social and industrial reform.
As I am in receipt of some ten thousand requests for money every year,
it is obviously impossible for me to comply with them all. And I am
bound to say that I saw no reason for complying with your request, the
more so in that its tone of mockery and sly derision led me to doubt
whether it was made in entire good faith. The claim of kinship which
you advanced (somewhat belatedly I thought) had little weight with me.
You know what family ties are amongst the Lloyds! I was but a youngster
of fourteen when my father and my elder brother (_your_ father) ripped
up my gilded dreams of a future as an artist and hashed my romantic
plans by a single practical act. They pitched me out of the house into
the street. There I remained to live on my own wits, and this fate I
have had little occasion to complain of.
But to return to your letter. It did not win me to your way of
thinking. Nor, to be candid, did your articles on "the collapse of
modern society." I will admit that your attacks on land speculators
(like myself) were witty, if not wise. And when you sailed into the
monopoly on land values, you wrote with astonishing authority; indeed
the only flaw I could find in your otherwise perfect qualifications for
solving the economic problem of land was the trifling fact that you had
never owned a foot of it.
This might have passed. Not so your observations on the distribution of
the country's wealth and other related iniquities. Here you repeated
the usual flub-dub with the usual fine flourish of the man who imagines
he has made a startling discovery. Thus, you solemnly pointed out that
there are only two kinds of people on earth: those who prey and those
who are preyed upon. You announced that you had never seen the
profiteer forsaken, nor the preying man begging his bread. And you
informed the world that the [Transcriber's note: some text appears to be
missing from the source book] intensified every year, the sheep being
now more securely muzzled and more efficiently fleeced than ever before.
Now, my dear nephew, there is nothing new in your "discovery." Since
the days of Plato all prudent men have been of one opinion respecting
the class war, but no prudent man has ever admitted it. Conscious of
this, I was unmoved by your ringing call to the sheep that they had
nothing to lose but their muzzles; and your desire to see them organize
for the purpose of destroying the wolves by mass action, left me cold.
A world of sheep--and nothing but sheep--would not be to my taste. For
the wolves, whatever else we may say of them, at least vary the drab
monotony here below. Besides, I suspect that your indignation in the
matter of the muzzles is largely shandygaff. It is not necessary to
muzzle sheep!
In fine, your credentials did not greatly impress me. Your writings, it
is true, were clever, witty, imaginative.
But what is imagination without matter or money to work upon? Like a
spark without tinder on a wet day in the woods. At all events, I could
scarcely overlook the fact that, whereas _I_ had made a fortune by my
real estate speculation, _you_ were unable to make so much as a bare
living by your real estate denunciation.
Have patience a little longer with the garrulity of a dying man. A few
weeks ago, I was taken ill with a fatal dilatation of the aorta, and the
end may come in a day, a month, a year. What to do with my investments
became an immediately pressing problem. The charities I had named in my
last will were administered, as I well knew, by a host of
charity-mongers even more distasteful to me than kith and kin.
In this painful dilemma I read your letter again, thinking that my
reaction to it, a year ago, had been hasty or unfair. Perhaps the wish
was father to the thought; perhaps my infirmity has softened my brain.
Whatever the cause, one passage in your letter struck me. My eyes were
opened and I saw, or believed I saw, that you were a chosen vessel to
bear my name and fortune before the American people. Accordingly I
revoked all charitable bequests and appointed you as my principal heir
and assign.
The passage that took my fancy was the one in which you declared that it
is nobler to spend a fortune than to make one. Unhappily, I have never
been able to practice this sentiment in full. Not that I have failed to
try. I have spent millions in my time. Indeed I feel justified in
saying that I have been a constant and deliberate spendthrift in the
most literal sense of the word. But, like you, I have an imagination
(although, unlike you, I have always prudently given my imagination the
wherewithal to work upon). Thus, in the teeth of a free and incessant
expenditure, my mind has always produced far more than my body could
possibly consume or my hands give away. And so I come at last to the
most tragic moment in a rich man's life: that in which he arranges for
others to spend what he himself has earned.
But spent it must be. And when I consider your Lloyd heredity, your
childlike ignorance of the ease with which money is made, and your
crushing innocence of the difficulty with which it is spent, I feel I
can hardly put my future in better hands than yours. God bless you, my
dear nephew, and may your efforts at noble disbursement be attended by
success.
Your affectionate uncle,
Allan D. Lloyd.
Robert's feelings beggared expression.
Half dazed, he took out the second enclosure, a brief communication from
Messrs. Simons and Hunt, his uncle's attorneys. This notified him of
Mr. Lloyd's death, and confirmed the fact of his designation as the
residuary legatee. After putting an estimate of two million dollars on
the minimum value of the estate, Messrs. Simons and Hunt placed their
services at the disposal of the heir and announced their readiness to
receive his instructions.
Followed a blank in Robert's consciousness. Slowly, very slowly, this
was replaced by the sound of the steamer throbbing its way across the
Atlantic.
*IV*
The day after landing, Robert paid Messrs. Simons and Hunt a visit, with
the result that, on leaving their offices in lower Broadway, he was a
little less haunted by the suspicion that the reality was a dream. A
most reassuring item was tucked away in his pocket in the shape of an
advance of cold cash amounting to two thousand dollars, a sum far larger
than any he had ever been in possession of before.
On the theory that excess of joy, like excess of sorrow, had better be
skimmed off by a long, brisk walk, Robert trusted to his two legs to get
him back to Kips Bay. He had planned no change in his habits as yet;
hence he still shared part of a model flat with the sporting editor of
one of the evening newspapers.
He had just turned from the open court of the Lorillard tenement block
into the rather dark entrance, when what appeared to be a shadow on the
wall assumed solidity and life, stepped alertly forward, and tapped him
on the shoulder.
"The one man in New York I particularly want to see," cried Mark Pryor,
in his cool, staccato tones.
"The one man in New York I particularly want to avoid," retorted Robert,
not ill-naturedly, but with a lively remembrance of Pryor as the
engineer of his Parisian misadventures. "How in thunder did you know I
was back?"
"I didn't. Luck simply drifted my way."
His cordial handshake accelerated Robert's returning sense of the
reality of earthly affairs. Pryor might be slim and wiry enough to slip
in or out of the most impossible places. He might be as elusive as a
ghost. But there was nothing weak or spirituelle about his grasp of
one's hand or his grip on life. As for his voice, which had a ring of
decency and good intent always attractive to Robert, it dispelled
fanciful grudges and installed common sense.
They went to lunch together in a favorite restaurant of Pryor's, a
little Austrian place in one of the side streets east of the Pershing
Square district.
"A fine scrape you got me into with your tip about Paris!" began Robert,
as soon as they were served.
"I've never seen you in better spirits," returned Pryor, cool as a
cucumber. "Are you engaged to marry Janet?"
Robert stared at him.
"No," he said emphatically.
"Then you're not the man I took you for."
"I'm not," said Robert, chuckling.
So Pryor knew nothing of the inheritance! And if Pryor knew nothing,
who would know? He had rather supposed that the news would create
something of a stir. The Lorillard tenements and Kips Bay generally
should, in all conscience, have been agog with it. But so far not a
word had been said by anybody he had met.
Clearly, it took a good deal to ripple the pachydermatous surface of
this monster city of New York!
Well, he would volunteer nothing. It was just as well to keep one or
two cards up your sleeve, especially when you matched your wits against
a clever man like Pryor.
Meanwhile Pryor did the talking. Did Robert mean to sit there and tell
him that he had missed the opportunity of a lifetime? He'd be blessed
if he ever threw him a chance like that again.
"A chance!" interrupted Robert. "Are you sure it wasn't a noose?"
"Don't talk through your hat, Lloyd," said Pryor, affecting indignation.
"Janet's a girl in a million. Whoever marries her is a made man."
"You are a cool hand," said Robert, lost in admiration. "I don't know
what in thunder your game is. Let me say this, though. As a man of
mystery you may be as superb a demon as Mark Twain's _Mysterious
Stranger_. But as a matchmaker you're a hopeless old blunderbuss."
He briefly outlined his recent experiences in Paris, including the
tableau of himself in the act of stumbling upon Janet and M. St.
Hilaire; he also sketched the sequel to this climax.
Pryor's restless eyes remained singularly still during this recital. At
its close, he offered one enigmatic remark:
"If Janet's coming to New York, we may yet be able to pull the chestnuts
out of the fire."
In response to further questions, Robert gave a few intimate word
pictures of unpublishable incidents at the Geneva Labor Congress. He
also touched rather pepperily on his recall by the Confederated Press.
"Serve you right," said Pryor. "To a plain man like me reformers who
try to change moral standards, whether for better or for worse, are a
nuisance. Too many obstacles cannot be put in their path."
"All I did was to tell the truth about my own side," said Robert
indignantly.
"What! Peach on your own side? Why, even the yeggmen consider that bad
form."
Robert smiled in spite of himself.
"Nonsense," he said. "Facts are facts. The truth is, Americans
habitually act like feeble-minded weaklings in the way they receive
criticism. And we radicals share the national infirmity. Let the least
suggestion of disapproval be levelled at _Columbia, the gem of the
ocean_, and all America foams at the mouth. This is a joke to
foreigners; it's a tragedy to us. I tell you, Pryor, unless Americans
learn to stand up to criticism like men and to tolerate dissent as the
English, the Germans, and even the French do, they'll stand where they
are--at the tail end of the procession of nations. Don't you agree with
me?"
"Lord, yes! Have it your own way. Pull your fellow radicals to pieces
if necessary. Treat 'em rough. But don't slaughter 'em. Remember
they're the only leaven in the slimy dough."
"For an avowed conservative, Pryor, that's going pretty far."
"Oh, I'll go farther than that. I'll say that if the Confederated Press
were to come to grief--which Heaven forbid!--I should have no means of
getting at the real news of the world. None whatever. Unless I could
sneak into some private whispering gallery in Washington, D.C., or in
Wall Street, N.Y."
"You perverse standpatter, what do you mean by sticking up for _my_
side? It looks fishy to me. What's your little game now, I wonder?"
"Lloyd, the time has come to give you a straight answer to that
question. I'm an agent of the Secret Service; at present, I'm detailed
to help the Department of Justice."
"The deuce you are!"
"My game has been to watch the most dangerous radicals in New York--some
five hundred of them--whose names are listed in the department's books.
You are one of the five hundred."
"Really! I hope I've been a source of ample diversion? As a friend, I'm
always glad to oblige."
"_Dienst ist dienst_, as the Germans say. While on duty, I had no
friends; I merely had five hundred suspects to keep track of. In point
of fact, my men have been through your effects several times. We found
nothing treasonable, nothing seditious, nothing compromising, except a
copy of the Declaration of Independence with the first eight lines
underscored. I tried to have your name removed from the black list.
But the damaging evidence aforesaid was the ground on which my
recommendation was ignored."
"Is this a joke?"
"No, it's the gospel truth. But you needn't feel as though you had been
singled out for persecution. Not at all. I'm a marked man as much as
you. If the Intelligence Service of the Government detects an atom of
intelligence in one of its agents, it makes it a special point always to
ignore that agent's recommendations. Never mind. I wrote out my
resignation this morning. Here it is. It goes to Washington at once."
"Surely, Pryor, you have other reasons for resigning the job?"
"Ah, now you're coming to it. For weeks past, I've been saturating my
mind with radical literature. Tons of it. From professional motives
solely, of course. After a studious and impartial consideration of
facts and principles, I've come to a very curious pass."
"You don't mean to say that you've been converted!" said Robert, rising
excitedly from his chair.
"Yes, I've been converted. Not to radicalism, mind. Personally, I'm a
firm believer in the aristocratic state as championed by Plato, Ruskin,
and Carlyle, the state in which the Government is carried on by those
whose equipment best fits them to govern. We'll reach this state--in
about a thousand years. Meanwhile, I've been converted not to
radicalism, but to the view that the radicals are right in theory and
the Government wrong in practice; the former right in demanding a
complete restoration of civil liberty and an enormous grant of
industrial liberty, the latter wrong in thwarting these demands."
After a few moments spent in digesting Pryor's astonishing admissions,
Robert said:
"One good surprise deserves another."
"Fire away."
"I've just inherited two million dollars!"
Pryor was stupefied.
"Where the blue blazes did you get it from?" he cried, his long neck
rising telescopically out of his stand-up collar.
"That's one piece of information that hasn't drifted your way, at all
events," said Robert, taking a malicious pleasure in Pryor's
stupefaction.
A marked pause followed. Then Pryor, having congratulated Robert, said
abruptly:
"As far as I can see, nothing now stands in the way of your marriage to
Charlotte Beecher."
"What do you mean?"
Searching glances were exchanged. Each recognized in the other a man of
rare talent and unusual probity, and trusted him accordingly. Pryor
took the plunge.
He remarked quietly that, during Robert's absence abroad, he and
Charlotte had become very good friends. He was well aware of her intense
attachment to Robert. She had, in fact, talked about it freely and
frankly to him. Thus he knew that she had taken the initiative in
proposing marriage to Robert, a very natural step, inasmuch as she was
in the vastly superior position. He knew, however that Robert had
refused on the ground of the extreme inequality of their circumstances.
With the best will in the world, Robert found it difficult to reply.
Habit and custom were strong against a ventilation of his refusal and of
the real reasons underlying it.
"The truth is," he said, after a second's hesitation, "Charlotte and I
would be very poor partners on a long dull grind, and this is what
modern marriage has become. We're excellent friends. We put a fine edge
on each other's faculties. When we meet, the blue sparks fly. In fact,
they fly too much."
"Say what you like, she could at least take you to art galleries and
concerts, and count on you as a sympathetic companion. That's where I
failed her. I'm such a duffer in matters of art. And as for music!
Lord, I hardly know the difference between Beethoven and a beet."
"Don't let that worry you. For all that Charlotte and I pull so well
together, our points of agreement are mostly on the surface. True, we
both get recreation from looking at pictures or sculpture and listening
to music. But not from the same pictures or sculpture, nor from the
same music. She's all for chastity and restraint in art--Hellenism or
aristocracy, you'd call it. She resents Strauss's volcanic turbulence;
Epstein's rough-hewn symbolism merely disgusts her; the brutal abandon
of Augustus John drives her mad. Yet I swear by these artists as she
swears by the Donatellos, Brahmses, and Raphaels whose exhibitions of
technical mastery bore me to extinction. We really have nothing in
common except our recognition of honest craftsmanship and our joy in the
clash of temperaments, instincts and opinions."
"These differences that you speak of: how do you know that they matter?"
"Because they go so deep. Her hopes are not my hopes, her dreams are
not my dreams, her gods are not my gods. These things are of the essence
of comradeship, and comradeship is the soul of love."
"Well, I'm as much in love with Charlotte as any normally sane man can
be in love," said Pryor, quizzically. "But on the points you mention,
_I_ don't hit it off with her, either. Her Brahms and your Strauss are
equally Greek to me, and I'd give up their collective compositions in a
jiffy for half an hour of the "Mikado" or the "Gondoliers."
He supposed he'd have to work backwards and find out what the essence of
comradeship consisted in. He sincerely trusted that it was not bound
up, in his case, with Charlotte's money. As it was, she was terribly
suspicious on that score. She was quite unshakable in the conviction
that Robert was the only man she had ever known who was not a fortune
hunter.
"You see the devilish harm you've done," said Pryor, in conclusion,
"with your reputation for disinterestedness."
"Quite an undeserved one, too," replied Robert, smiling. "Like most
reputations it was founded on my deficiencies and not on my
accomplishments. If I had known as much about money two years ago as I
do now, Charlotte might have a very different opinion of my
disinterested motives, as well as of me."
He assured Pryor that he would do his level best to free Charlotte from
her delusion. In return, Pryor was to keep secret the fact of Robert's
accession to a fortune.
"I'd like to enjoy the luxury of being a poor man with plenty of money
in my pocket," he said.
Nobody was to be told and, in particular, the news was to be kept from
Janet. He didn't expect to indulge this rather childish whim for more
than a few days. All New York would be talking about his good luck by
that time, no doubt.
"My dear fellow! A paltry two millions?" said Pryor with a short laugh.
"A mere pebble on the beach. Why, the reigning plutocrats here hand out
millions to charity as I'd give pennies to a beggar."
They settled their bill.
On their way out, Robert said:
"Now tell me how you caught that blackguard Burley smuggling diamonds
for the Fontaines."
"Who told you I caught them? In the strict etiquette of the Secret
Service, the names of the agents in specific cases are never made
public."
"Oh, the information just drifted my way," said Robert, bantering him.
"Even without it, though, I should have put two and two together.
Nobody admires the richness and variety of your knowledge more than I
do, Pryor. Yet I'm bound to say that your disguises seem puerile to me.
Among the Outlaws, although we didn't guess the Secret Service, we
spotted you as a Pinkerton, or something of that sort, almost from the
first."
"Precisely what I wanted you to do, my friend. My game was to spread
the truth broadcast. People simply will not believe the truth. Ask any
detective worth his salt and he'll tell you that being himself is the
best of all possible disguises, one that saves no end of trouble in
'make-up' and character acting. It causes every suspect to feel that he
and the sleuth are in each other's confidence, as it were. And this
puts people so much at their ease that they positively can't help giving
themselves away."
"So that's how you double crossed Hutchins Burley?"
"It's a long, amusing story, Lloyd. I'll keep the details for another
day. The poor wretch is doing five years in a Federal prison. Mr. Rene
Fontaine, for whom he was a mere tool, paid a fine of three million
dollars (not your beggarly two million!) without turning a hair, and
then decamped to England, where he lives in a regal villa somewhere in
Essex.--Lord, it's nearly three! I must make a move. Where are you
bound for?"
"Home, now. California, the day after tomorrow."
"California!"
Robert explained that all his uncle's realty holdings were on the
Pacific Coast. His mother, too, was there. What with one thing and
another, his presence out West was imperative.
"I shall return in two months for a quest of quite another sort," he
added, significantly.
"Walk a few blocks towards the Subway with me," said Pryor, "and I'll
show you one of the high lights of our low life."
As they drew near the Grand Central Palace, the streets grew thick with
people. Traffic along Lexington Avenue was suspended and a cordon of
New York's "finest" was drawn up in front of the Palace, with night
sticks polished to a turn.
Robert and Mark Pryor had just reached the outskirts of the crowd, when
several imposing motor cars drew up in front of the exhibition building.
"What on earth's the matter now?" said Robert. "Has our Anglo-American
Prince of Wales returned?"
A very handsome young man with two richly dressed young ladies alighted
from the first car, whilst the moving picture brigade went into
immediate action and the crowds thundered out cheers.
"It's the first day of the great Allied Armies' Bazaar," said Pryor.
"The Duchess of Keswick and Mr. and Mrs. Claude Fontaine are to open the
affair at three o'clock. There they go now."
"What a match for him!" murmured Robert, setting eyes for the first time
on Marjorie Armstrong's proud beauty.
"More than a match," said Pryor, softly.
*CHAPTER THIRTY*
*I*
"You don't love me, Robert!"
"It's false," he said, retreating. "I do love you. I've loved you
madly ever since you fled to Paris."
"Then why do you run away? I don't want you to marry me. You're too
poor! But you might at least kiss me. Come back, Robert, please come
back!"
Following him, she put her arms around his neck and clasped him tight.
"Let me go, Janet. I won't marry you. I won't! I'll never, _never,
NEVER_ marry a woman who has had a free lover!"
Still he receded, and ever so gently tried to unclasp her hands.
"You needn't marry me, Robert. Only treat me just as you'd treat a man.
Don't you remember that you promised you would? You promised on the
pier in Kips Bay, when your heart was a free and a fetterless thing."
She concentrated all her magic upon him, upon his pale thoughtful face
and discerning hazel-brown eyes. But look! The eyes were not
hazel-brown--they were a flashing blue! And these were not the mobile
sensitive features of Robert, but the bold virile features (somewhat
distorted by angry passion) of Claude.
"What!" he cried. "Marry you here--here in Brussels--after all I've
suffered on your account? Serpent! Shall I never escape your sting?"
Hovering somewhere in the background, a thin-edged female with
horn-rimmed spectacles took a malignant joy in fanning the flames of his
rage.
Claude wrenched both her hands loose and flung them off, the violence of
the action sending her prone to the floor.
*II*
Janet sat up in bed and shook back the tangles of her nut-brown hair.
What a horrible nightmare!
All on account of the rumpus started last night by the thin-edged female
with the horn-rimmed spectacles.
Not in Brussels, but in New York. Not in the Grand Hotel, Boulevard
Anspach, but in the Susan B. Anthony House, Park Avenue, Mrs. R. H. L.
Jerome's new apartment house for self-supporting professional women with
children.
Well, this particular rumpus had been settled, and the attack of
officious Pharisaism upon Janet's reputation had received a black eye.
Janet wondered whether the blow was to be recorded as a knockout or
merely as the end of the first round.
Time would show. Meanwhile, she dressed and breakfasted; then, with all
the gravity of her twenty-seven years, she began to discharge the
responsible duties of manager of the House.
But the memory of the nightmare would not down. Not even the excitement
she still felt in making the rounds of her three departments sufficed to
dispel it. In the children's section, she applauded the new floor games
which the kindergartner had invented for her wards; she became a ready
listener to the woes of the matron in charge of the household division;
on her way through the cuisine, she devoted her faculties to the task of
adjudicating the claims of the cook against the dietitian in command.
And she sought distraction in the stupendous thought that these three
great departments of the Susan B. Anthony House were coordinated in the
person of Miss J. Barr, the business manager and personal representative
of Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome.
Yet, although these occupations drove away the haunting nightmare for
minutes at a time, they were impotent to banish it permanently.
The chief trouble was, of course, that her nerves were still shaken by
the emotional explosion in which the whole House had been involved the
day before. The explosion was the cause of the nightmare. And the
nightmare itself, its several metamorphoses and all, had marched in such
a logical, well arranged order, that she was greatly tempted to tell it
to Lydia Dyson, the novelist, who was a crank on the subject of Freud
and dreams.
Lydia, to be sure, would pronounce it a contemptible dream, lamentably
short of knives, pitchforks, corks, bottles and other shining symbolic
materials. Contemptible or not, she would none the less insist that it
must be submitted to a psychoanalyst.
Yes, Lydia Dyson would torment her to be psychoanalyzed. With a smile
she recalled the novelist's visit to the Susan B. Anthony House a week
ago. Lydia, in search of material for her new novel, _The Soul Pirates_
(expression derived from Cornelia Covert), had set the members of the
house to narrating their worst dreams. Then she had beguiled more than
half of them into having themselves psychoanalyzed by Aristide Cambeau,
an amazingly brilliant speaker whose lectures (at the Ritz--five dollars
a ticket!) were the latest social rage, and whose clinic was daily
besieged by a long queue of fashionable ladies impatient to have their
souls laid bare.
Janet believed she could interpret her dream fully as well as the
fascinating Mr. Cambeau.
Her attempt to do so led her to a review of her own recent history.
Seven weeks ago she had returned with Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome to the United
States. Mrs. Jerome had resumed training her as soon as the Statue of
Liberty was sighted. Thus, the good lady reminded her that they had come
from England (where plenty of explosive insurrectionary material was
lying around) to their own land with its "tendency to normalcy" as a
noted politician expressed it. That is, they had come back to the
America of the women's vote, the high cost of living, the housing
shortage, the unemployment menace, the deportation of radicals and
Japanese, the reception of hoards of unhealthy South-European
immigrants, the ouija board, the stock market slump and jazz. The same
old America! It was reading "Main Street" just then; and Mrs. Jerome
opined that all America was reading the book, _not_ because it gave a
memorable picture of the soul of a nation in all its drab, desolating
mediocrity, but because it gratified the furious national craving to be
paid attention to and talked about, it mattered nothing whether in terms
of praise, disparagement or abuse.
Mrs. Jerome's gloomy view rolled off Janet like water off a duck's back.
She had youth, enthusiasm, vigor; there was a great civilizing work to
be done. And though, as Mark Pryor took pains to assure her, it might
take a thousand years to do it, she threw herself into it heart and
soul, just as if the goal were attainable next year.
Two weeks after their arrival in New York, the Susan B. Anthony House
had been opened, undemonstratively but successfully. Mrs. R. H. L.
Jerome, an omnipresent deity at first, relinquished the reins of
government gradually; all the reins save one, for it was well understood
that she was to be the power behind the scenes. Within a week, every
suite in the house was occupied and hundreds of applicants were turned
away. The rents, though far from low, were not unreasonable; and, as
special provision had been made for the care of children, and competent
experts placed in control of each department ("quality not quantity" was
the specific motto throughout), the house was a godsend for precisely
the ones it was designed to serve, that is, for self-supporting
professional women with one or two children.
For a time, things had gone swimmingly. Almost too swimmingly. As the
news spread, social workers and social science students began to pay the
place a visit. Before long the unofficial busybodies followed and, with
the kindliest intentions in the world, did their level best to
disorganize the machinery of the house and subvert the discipline.
And the reporters took up the scent! All the magazine sections of the
Sunday newspapers had articles describing Mrs. Jerome's "latest hobby."
Interviews with Mrs. Jerome--some real, some alleged--appeared in
increasing numbers and with increasingly pungent specimens of this
lady's sprightly wit. Writers of special features in the evening sheets
praised or deplored the "communal upbringing" of the children. The
photogravure supplements took up the sport and favored their readers
with pictures of every conceivable corner of the house, and also with
tableaux in which the children, looking remarkably happy and well
dressed, were grouped about three adults (from left to right): the
Duchess of Keswick, Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome and Miss J. Barr.
Finally, the Infamous Players-Smartcraft Company offered a fabulous sum
for the use of the Susan B. Anthony House as the scene of an "action"
(with adagio "close-ups"), which it insisted on calling (doubtless in
irony) a "moving" picture.
But the marvel of marvels was that, throughout this period of unbought,
unsought advertising, nobody breathed the suspicion that Miss J. Barr,
the calm, collected young manageress in the neat blouse and trim skirt,
might be the notorious Janet Barr who had eloped two years before with
Claude Fontaine!
Then, one fine day, as she was leaving the Broadway side of Wanamaker's,
a man had leapt out of a magnificent limousine drawn up at the curb, and
had seized her hands.
It was Claude himself! Handsome and imposing as ever, with perhaps a
dash less of self-confidence.
He had implored her for a meeting later in the day. No, no, he wouldn't
make love to her, he solemnly swore he wouldn't! He wanted to get a
load off his conscience. His wife? Oh, he got along well enough with
Marjorie, only-- Well, surely Janet knew _why_ he had married her?
There had simply been no alternative! If Colonel Armstrong hadn't stood
back of Fontaine and Company at the time of the smuggling exposure, the
firm would have gone to smash. And so on--
Janet peremptorily refused to meet him. There was no sense in a
meeting, she urged. He was importunate. "What about my House?" said
she. "What about my state of mind?" said he. She had tried hard to be
firm.
"Come not between the lion and his wrath or the tigress and her work,"
she said, torn this way and that between the comedy and the tragedy of
the situation.
To get rid of him, she had at length made an appointment for the
afternoon.
The appointment was never kept!
The sequel proved that her encounter with Claude had been observed.
That night the bloodhounds of scandal were unleashed in the Susan
Anthony House. The ring-leader was the thin-edged woman with the
horn-rimmed spectacles.
This precious female was the mother of a whining little boy whose father
was authenticated by due process of law. The law had not sufficed,
however, to keep the gentleman faithful for long to the nuptial vows.
After his disappearance from New York, his wife was left to support
herself and to wreak vengeance where vengeance was not due.
The first that Janet knew about the coming storm was when the dietitian
took her aside and told her that the house had been divided into two
camps: for and against Janet; or, as the anti-Janet crowd put it: for
and against Morality.
Two days before the nightmare, things had come to a head. In the
absence of the manager, the anti-Janet faction had assembled under the
chairmanship of the thin-edged agitator.
This lady had opened the meeting with the bitter announcement that those
present were liberal and fairminded, but that they had their children to
think of. Their darling children! Mothers, _married_ mothers, mind you
(and she, for her part, had consented to join the Susan B. Anthony House
_only_ on the confident assumption that _all_ the mothers were as
_regularly_ married as herself)--mothers, as such, could afford to take
no chances! Unhappily, she was persuaded that in the other camp there
were ladies who had more than _one good reason_ for standing by the
manager. She surmised that some of these ladies were _unmarried
mothers_! Scarcely mothers at all (if morals counted for anything), and
certainly no better than they should be.
After much nursing of self-righteousness, suitable resolutions were
moved, and a deputation was appointed to present the facts to Mrs. R. H.
L. Jerome; also to demand the discharge of Janet and the vindication of
American morality.
The great impeachment had occurred last night. Mrs. Jerome had motored
into town, and both factions had turned out for the occasion in the
large reception room on the ground floor. Mrs. Jerome had refused to
start the proceedings until Janet was seated at her right hand. This
settled, the thin-edged spokesman had made the formal charges.
Then the fun had begun--
At this point, a telephone bell jangled across Janet's reflections.
"Who is it?" she asked the switchboard girl.
"Mr. Pryor."
"Let him come up," said Janet eagerly.
*III*
As usual, Mark Pryor's spare form was dressed from head to foot in
materials of one color. But even Janet noticed that, for once, the
inevitable stand-up collar, with its two prongs tilting its wearer's
chin upwards, had been replaced by a low-lying collar of creamiest silk.
"Circles under the eyes!" he began severely. "What's wrong?"
"Nightmares, witches, broomsticks," she replied laughing.
"Out with it!" he commanded.
In her calm, clear tones she gave him a graphic account of the
unpleasantness of the last few days, from its inception in her chance
encounter with Claude Fontaine down to the demand made upon Mrs. Jerome
for her dismissal.
"And how did little Apple Dumpling meet this demand?" inquired Pryor.
"Like a trump! Said she'd stand by me to the limit--also that the Susan
B. Anthony House, being designed for busy people and not for
busy*bodies*, Mrs. Farrar (the one with the horn-rimmed spectacles)
would have to vacate at the end of the week. Further that, in the
future, it is to be a fixed rule of the house that any mother, married
or unmarried, may become a tenant, and no questions asked other than
those needed to satisfy Mrs. Jerome or her representative that the
applicant is both self-supporting and self-respecting--"
"Bravo!"
"And, furthermore, she then and there dictated a letter to be sent to
the liberal weeklies in New York, informing their readers of the
adoption of this new rule."
"Hurrah!" cried Pryor. "The next time anybody queries, in the words of
the immortal William:
"'What king so strong
Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?'
I'll answer: No king; but let me tip you the name of a _queen_--Mrs. R.
H. L. Jerome, the magnificent. _She_ can turn the trick."
"Yes, she's a perfect darling. Do you know, I didn't mind the
backbiting of those silly women a bit. But Mrs. Jerome's unhesitating
support made me want to cry."
She added that in a private conversation with the dear lady she had
urged her own resignation as a matter of practical wisdom. Wasn't the
cause greater than the individual?--"Rubbish!" Mrs. Jerome had replied
with a considerable show of heat. No cause was worth the cowardly
abandonment of a comrade! For two thousand years men had prated of the
holy duties of friend to friend, and had committed one crime against
friendship after another. And when these crimes were committed, what
did they do? They folded their hands, raised pious eyes to heaven, and
sang (through their noses), "Alas for the rarity of Christian charity!"
etc. Well, women would show them that the time to be loyal was not when
the pack curried favor with your friend but when it turned to rend him.
"What do you mean to do now?" asked Pryor.
"I shall stick it out. After all, I'm not looking for social or
official favors. All I ask is to be allowed to do the best work of
which I'm capable. Surely, I have that right."
"So you think," said Pryor drily. "But bear in mind that for every
_bona fide_ worker in New York, there are nine idlers or time wasters,
nine breeders of noise, disorder and disease. And don't forget that the
chief objection to the idler is not that he neglects his own work, but
that he insists on interrupting or damaging yours. The doer is the
waster's sworn enemy to all eternity. And the waster knows it!
Therefore, he spies out your vulnerable spot: social, economic, psychic,
whatever it be; and the first moment he catches you off guard, he sends
his poisoned arrow straight to your Achilles' heel."
"I suppose I must take my chance of that. What else can I do?"
"You might imitate me."
"Imitate you! What do you mean?"
"Why, get married! I'm going to marry Charlotte Beecher."
"But I thought that Charlotte--"
"Yes, she's very fond of Robert Lloyd. And I'm only her second string.
But bless your wayward curls, we're all second strings on somebody's
violin! What's the odds--especially after the first string has snapped?
I've been madly in love myself, twice before. Once, down south in
Colon, with a dusky Isthmian beauty. The second time, with you."
"Don't be silly, Mark, or I shall stop envying Charlotte her
extraordinary good luck."
"Hers _and_ mine! Charlotte was looking for a husband with enough
brains to manage a fortune, and yet with heart enough not to love her
for her fortune alone. I was looking for a wife with heart enough to
lay her fortune at my feet, and yet with enough brains to permit me to
enjoy her society. Are we well matched or not?"
"'Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment,'" quoted
Janet, laughing.
"Now you're talking sense as well as poetry, dear girl."
"I didn't say I'd follow your example, though."
"All in good time! It's human nature for young blood to rebel against
wedlock--and to come around to it in the long run. Marriage, as Lydia
Dyson says, is the easiest way!"
"Yes, for Lydia, who changes her lover once a season, while her husband
stays at home and keeps the household in smooth running order. But my
needs don't run in Lydia's line."
Pryor admitted this. But he pointed out that marriage was a human
institution. There it was, for every one of us to reckon with. Either
you made use of it, or it made use of you. Sensible people adopted the
former alternative.
"Why, look at me!" he said, waxing strangely eloquent. "I've knocked
about the world a good bit in the last twenty years. A born adventurer
if ever there was one. Do you see me settling down to matrimony like
any spirit-broken married man in the pinchbeck salaried class? No, by
Jupiter! I've waited for the right conditions to come to pass so that I
could take up marriage as one more great adventure."
"Your last one, Mark!" said Janet, bantering him.
More seriously, she asked him whether all his other adventures had been
in the Secret Service.
"Lord no! I've taken a shot at all sorts of jobs and been all sorts of
things from a West Point cadet to a buccaneer in the South Seas."
This quiet, self-contained man, spare of frame but tough as a hickory
stick, had he really been a gorgeous sea-rover? Looking into his
humorously inquisitive gray eyes, Janet could not doubt his words. And,
like Desdemona entranced by Othello, she listened whilst he dipped into
a store of reminiscences and, in his own inimitably laconic style, gave
her an outline of his picturesque career.
Pryor as a West Point cadet, as a lieutenant in the Engineer Corps, in
service against the Moros in the Philippines, on the sanitary staff in
the thick of the Panama Canal construction, again as a civilian on a
dare-devil voyage to Tahiti--these pictures took the romantic side of
Janet by storm. She made him tell the Tahitian story most minutely, and
hung on his lips with bated breath as he recounted the capture of his
tiny steamer by real pirates who gave him a Hobson's choice of joining
them in their marauding trips near the Society Islands, or of walking
the plank.
"But I never gave full satisfaction anywhere," he concluded ruefully.
"Secrets that I had better not have known were incessantly coming my way
and causing me no end of trouble. Once, when we unexpectedly sighted a
Dutch merchantman laden with coffee and spices, I ran up the red flag
instead of the black! My shipmates swore that I did it on purpose and
assured me that, as a pirate, I was a failure. It was true. I _was_ a
failure! Almost a dead failure, in fact, for they left me on what they
thought was a desert island."
When he got back to the United States, the Great War had begun, but the
officials in Washington were extremely slow to utilize his services.
His record was against him. He was one of those men with whom two and
two didn't inevitably make four, but sometimes footed up to a sum that
included human as well as mathematical factors. For an army man, this
was a fatal defect.
Impatient to be of use, he eventually joined the Secret Service.
"Why?" asked Janet.
"Nothing else was open to me," he replied, with a twinkle in his roving
eyes. "When a man is a pronounced failure, there are only three
professions that will take him into their ranks: those of detective,
writer and teacher. I chose the first as the least degrading of the
three. Also because it gave me a chance to use my gift as a telepath,
an elemental telepath."
"You can't pretend that you haven't made good at _that_!"
"Oh, I've done so-so."
"So-so!" cried Janet indignantly. "Look how you caught Hutchins Burley
red-handed!"
"True enough. I'm bound to confess, however, that I went to the pier to
arrest him for treason. When his boxes of Oriental books were opened,
it was the smuggled diamonds that we found and not (as I had predicted)
the evidence of his sale of United States military secrets to the
Japanese. Later on, we got that evidence too; but that was Smilo's
doing more than mine. Ah, wait till you hear Robert's opinion of my
sleuthing skill."
"Oh, Robert!" she said, with the faintest quiver of her lip. "He hasn't
been near me. I'm not even sure that he's in America."
"Well, he is! And I happen to know that urgent business is keeping him
out of New York."
"What can it be?"
"It's a peculiar business. In a sense, it's the reverse of what I was
engaged upon. I was in pursuit of rogues; but rogues are in pursuit of
him."
"I must say, you're as enigmatic as ever."
"Only till tomorrow, Janet. I pledge my word to have everything
explained to your satisfaction if you'll come tomorrow to Charlotte's
studio in Washington Mews. The party begins at four."
"The party!"
"Precisely. An engagement party for Charlotte; a surprise party for
you."
Saying which, and protesting that he had talked her deaf, dumb and
blind, and affirming that he had never felt so horribly out of character
in his life, Mark Pryor gravely took his leave.
*IV*
In fulfillment of her promise, Janet went the following afternoon to the
converted stable in Washington Mews where Charlotte Beecher cultivated
sculpture in an atmosphere of aristocratic Bohemianism. It was the same
studio in which, of old, Cornelia Covert had luxuriated whenever the
routine of Outlawry in Kips Bay got on her nerves.
Spring and hope in a young woman's breast usually add love to their
number. In Janet's case they added thoughts of Robert. All morning she
had been plagued with a feeling, amounting to a conviction, that he
would be at Charlotte's party. But when she reached the Mews, she found
that Pryor and Lydia Dyson were the only other guests at a gathering
which bade fair to be intimate and exclusive.
For a minute or two her spirits were considerably dashed. She waited for
Pryor's advertised surprise to eventuate; but she waited in the dark,
nobody offering so much as a ray of enlightenment.
While Lydia Dyson stretched herself supine upon the magnificent tiger
rug before the blazing fire, Pryor fetched wineglasses and poured out
champagne.
"Here's to those about to wed!" cried Lydia, raising her glass, and then
quoting:
"'Farewell, happy fields where Joy forever dwells,
Hail Horrors!'"
"You might give us a more cheerful toast, old girl," protested
Charlotte.
"An occasion like this conduces to high philosophy rather than to vulgar
good cheer," retorted Lydia, whose Egyptian beauty--ebony hair against a
pale olive skin--had never been more stunning. "However, since you wish
it, I'll take another shot: 'Here's to continued failure for all of
us!'"
"Lydia, you _are_ a merry soul today," exclaimed Janet, amidst the
general laughter.
"And why not?" inquired Lydia, with a provoking drawl. "Why not? When I
see my last blood curdler running well into the two hundred thousands!"
"Lydia is right," said Pryor. "In the present state of civilization,
all the best people are failures, glorious failures."
He contrasted the fortunes of Lydia's pornographic romances with the
fate of her one serious experiment in fiction. The romances sold like
hot cakes. But the serious work, a short novel in which, with pitiless
Hogarthian realism, she had developed an episode between a brother and a
sister, had been refused by her publisher on the ground that "it was too
terrible!" Then there was his own case! Had he not failed as a
detective because too much secret information was always breezing his
way?
"Don't forget our young feminist over there," cried Lydia, indicating
Janet. "Don't forget her, or her heroic gesture against wedlock!"
"A bark is not as good as a bite," retorted Janet. "But isn't it better
than a tame crawl into the yoke?"
By way of reply, Lydia half raised herself from the tiger skin and, in
measured tones, recited:
"O Dewdrop, thou hast fought the better fight--in vain! Some women are
born to be wedlocked, some achieve wedlock, and some have wedlock thrust
upon them. Janet belongs to the first group, Charlotte belongs to the
second, I belong to the third."
"You to the third!" cried Charlotte. "How do you make that out? From
all I see, though Charley Morrow is a perfect dragon of jealousy, you
cling to him pretty tightly."
"I have to, Charlotte! I have to keep him in countenance (and in pocket
money, too!), because I'm afflicted with what the doctors call 'a
floating stomach.' Now, Charley is not only the best housekeeper in New
York, he's the best cook, too. There's simply nobody else whom I can
depend on not to sneak lard instead of butter into my bread--"
"Or to mix cottonseed oil instead of olive oil with your salads?" thrust
in Pryor.
"Precisely. Sometimes, when I eat at home I say: How can I stand
Charley another twenty-four hours? Next day I eat at a restaurant, and
say: I can stand Charley forever!"
They all laughed, and Lydia buried herself in the rug again.
"All the same," she went on meditatively, "I've never really got used to
marriage. It's a well of never-ending surprises."
"What about _my_ surprise?" asked Janet, for the fourth time.
The bell rang and Charlotte went to the door a few feet away.
"Here it comes!" announced Pryor, as a man entered.
"Janet!"
"Robert!"
Greetings all round cut their glances short.
*V*
Janet was struck with the fact that he had never looked better. Robert,
as dynamic as a battery giving out blue sparks, was familiar enough to
her. But Robert, with a deepening pink spreading over his pale cheeks,
and with a suit that showed the craftsmanship of a fashionable Fifth
Avenue tailor, was a sight to make one gasp and stare. Nor was this
all. In times past, she had often conjured up a picture of him poised
as on a springboard, preparing to leap upward to join the spirits of the
air. But there was nothing aerial about the way in which his feet now
gripped the solid ground.
She couldn't get over the change!
When he alluded briefly to a trip to California from which he had just
returned and on which he appeared to have done some work for the
Confederated Press, she had the sensation of not being in a secret that
all the rest shared. This was the sort of discourtesy that had hitherto
been taboo in Charlotte's crowd, and she resented being made a victim of
it.
"Then the Confederated Press knew better than to give you your walking
papers?" drawled Lydia.
"They knew nothing," replied Robert. "I simply paid them to keep me on
and to let me say exactly what I pleased."
This was more mystifying to Janet than ever.
Presently, Mark Pryor proposed a walk to the Lorillard model tenements
to inspect Number Fifteen, Cornelia's old flat. It turned out that
Robert had rented it and that Donald Kyrion, perhaps the youngest and
certainly the most talented interior designer in New York, had decorated
it for him as a labor of love. Pryor pronounced the result: "Art that
congealed art!"
"Donald Kyrion?" said Lydia. "If Robert got him to do anything for
nothing he ought to get the Nobel prize for wonder-working."
"Ahem!" said Pryor, and again he and Robert exchanged knowing glances.
Charlotte protested with all her soul against being dragged to Kips Bay.
Now that Robert could earn an honest living, why didn't he rent a
lodging in a decent locality instead of consorting with the Outlaws
who--what with their talk of wrongs, their love of dirt, and their smell
of tobacco--were tiresome enough to bore Mephistopheles himself.
"The Outlaws parted company with me long ago," replied Robert, putting
up a vigorous defence. "It is not they who lure me back."
He said that the Outlaws were, after all, not the whole of Kips Bay.
They were the most picturesque element in the population, but they were
only a tiny fraction of the total. True, they behaved in every respect
as though no other element besides their own existed. Wasn't this,
however, merely a proof that they were New Yorkers to the manner born?
It was, in fact, undeniable that there were plenty of simple,
self-respecting toilers in Kips Bay, plenty of them right in the very
citadel of Outlawry, the Lorillard model tenements themselves. Nay,
candor compelled the admission that there were even "rich but honest"
toilers in the Kipsian district--to be specific, in the new "art
colonies" planted around Sutton Terrace and Turtle Bay Gardens.
He had found this out after the dispersal of Cornelia's set. Force of
circumstances having obliged him to look out into the Kips Bay that
extended beyond the model flats, he had learned how parochial, in their
assumptions about the district, the Outlaws had been.
"The fact is," he added, "I often think it's a hankering after the paths
of rectitude and respectability that makes me enjoy a Lorillard
flat--for short stretches only, needless to say. Anyhow, the older I
get and the more I study the flibbertigibbet Bohemian in _his_ lair and
the heavy-footed Bourgeois in his, the more I'm struck with the bond
between them."
"The bond, Robert!" exclaimed Charlotte. "Call it a touching point,
common ground, but don't call it a bond."
"Well, it's a hidden bond. For the irregular doings of the strait-laced
people and the comparatively regular doings of the gypsies show me how
Bohemian the Bourgeois is, and how Bourgeois the Bohemian."
"What Robert says reminds me forcibly of a passage in _Gulliver's
Travels_," interposed Mark Pryor. "I mean the passage in which the
horses, the noble highborn creatures that govern, move about stark
naked, whilst the Yahoos, the loathsome human creatures that live like
beasts, yearn to cover their shame with rags and strings of beads."
"For the matter of that," continued Robert, "look at our little group
here. We've all lived and worked quite contentedly in the thick of Kips
Bay. Yet there's nothing in our daily behavior at which a Philistine of
the deepest dye would turn a hair. Where, in fact, could one find a
more incurably respectable lot of people--always counting out Lydia who,
I believe, is still a member in good standing among the Outlaws?"
"Look here, old boy!" Lydia called out. "Are you attacking or defending
me?"
"As the supreme ornament of Charlotte's studio, you can always count on
my homage, Lydia. But as an Outlaw, you must expect no quarter. I've
lived among the Outlaws and weighed them in the balance."
"Meaning what?" said Lydia, groaning for effect. "That their honor
rooted in dishonor stands?"
"Not a bad way of putting it, Lydia," replied Robert, smiling. "Shall I
give you the gist of Outlawry? Well, it is an excrescence of
Radicalism, often a decorative, sometimes a merely indecorous
excrescence. The purpose of Radicalism is to remove the obstacles that
lie athwart the course of life, of life aspiring to an estate infinitely
higher than that of man. What part in this mighty purpose is played by
the mummers of Greenwich Village, the camp-stool triflers of Washington
Square, the picarescos of Kips Bay, and the other Outlaw aggregations?"
"They stand for insurgency, don't they?" drawled Lydia.
"For insurgency, yes. But what sort of insurgency? Your typical Outlaw
'insurges' against perfectly harmless laws and conventions: obstacles of
no importance. And at the very same time, he conforms to ruthlessly
strangling laws and conventions: obstacles that really matter."
"Kips Bay or bust!" announced Lydia, reluctantly abandoning her tiger
skin as the only alternative to a pursuit of Robert's theme.
*VI*
On the walk uptown, Lydia attached herself to Pryor and Charlotte, while
Robert with Janet soon fell far behind.
What a first aid to free speech an independent income is! Dozens of
questions which, in Paris, had stuck on the tip of Robert's tongue now
rolled off as freely as down a buttered slide. He was the first to
break boldly into the vicious circle of topics of the day.
"You'd better return my pearls and diamonds!" he began with a grave
smile. "As for me, I'll send back all your letters and also the lock of
your hair that I've worn next my heart."
He said that there was only one conclusion to be drawn from the unbroken
silence she had maintained ever since the end of the partnership of Barr
and Lloyd; an end, he reminded her, not of _his_ making.
Well, she liked that! She had written long letters, addressed to
Cornelia, but expressly intended for the whole Lorillard circle; and,
seeing that several people had replied, it would seem that her intention
had been respected. In these letters she had more than once fished for a
crumb of sympathy from him. She might say that, on reaching the very
bottom of the ladder of luck, she had signalled to him almost as
abjectly as Dives had to Lazarus. But no Lazarus had responded.
This reproach led, on both sides, to a rapid fire of questions and
answers in the course of which one of their chief misunderstandings was
cleared up. Janet learned that Cornelia had never shown her letters to
Robert. What she had done was to give him subtly to understand that
Janet, in the hope of inducing Claude to legitimate their love affair,
was prudently burning her Kips Bay connections behind her.
"It was only one of a score of things that Cornelia did to queer the
pitch between us," was Robert's comment.
They were silent for a space, whilst they adjusted their thoughts to a
much clearer interpretation of the curious way that Cornelia had acted
out her part in the triangle of their relations.
Robert's mind reverted to a bit of news which Pryor had passed on to him
the night before, after the arrival of the San Francisco Limited at the
Pennsylvania Station. Pryor had picked up the information in the course
of an interview with Hutchins Burley in the Tombs, where the fallen
editor, garbed as a Federal convict (he had begun to serve his sentence
for smuggling), was being detained to testify against a former
confederate in the Japanese espionage case. Burley, raging like the bull
of Bashan, had lashed out against all the people who had ever given him
offence, and against some who hadn't. As a by-product of sheer,
overflowing hatred, he had let slip the item that it was to Cornelia
that he was really indebted for having been able to get on Janet's track
in Brussels. Cornelia had not known Janet's precise whereabouts, yet
she had shown Burley the letters, the very letters she had withheld from
Robert! This was a piquant bit of gossip, but Robert decided to suppress
it for the time being. Until he had finished with the delicate job he
had in hand!
Crossing Astor Place, they proceeded along Bookworm Lane to Union
Square. Janet stopped halfway and pointed out a quaint old shop where
she had bought at secondhand many of the text-books used in her Evening
Law School. "You are on the primrose path of dalliance!" exclaimed
Robert, who heard of these studies for the first time. "Do you keep
your mother posted regarding your wicked ways or has she closed the
front door to you forever, as she threatened?"
"No, the front door has been left on a crack," said Janet. And she
recounted a visit she had lately paid her home. The family atmosphere
was exactly as she had left it, the only change being that her father,
having retired from business as the result of a serious accident, had
ceased to be even the titular head of the house.
"The poor old man, a mere ghost of his former handsome self, was in a
state of coma, Robert. And I fear that, as his salary days are over,
his approaching dissolution is being firmly and not too gently
accelerated. He sat huddled up in an invalid's chair, from time to time
mumbling that he hoped I'd be a sensible girl, and stay with them in
Brooklyn now, and learn to appreciate my mother for the brave and
unselfish woman she has always been! He'll lick the whip to the very
last breath. The sight of him was heartrending!"
Otherwise, the atmosphere of the Barr household had not changed one
whit. The same musty, fusty ideas prevailed, and the same hollow,
stagnant, make-believe existence went on. Here, at least, was one spot
in America where pre-war conditions prevailed unchallenged!
"How could I ever have stood it as long as I did! Mother pecked at my
cheek and, without turning a hair, asked me was I coming home at last
(to be a young lady of the house I suppose!) or did I mean to go on
wasting the Lord's time? Wasting the Lord's time! I replied that if she
was alluding to my work and to my legal studies--which together occupied
me from ten to sixteen hours a day--wasting the Lord's time wasn't the
picnic it sounded like. She muttered something about the wages of sin
being death! 'Oh, no,' I said, 'I get a very fat salary from Mrs. R. H.
L. Jerome.' I mentioned the exact figure--the amount quite made Emily
sit up!--and I added that Mrs. Jerome, my friend as well as my employer,
had undertaken to advance my career.
"Well, it seemed to me that this piece of news stumped mother a bit,
although she closed her eyes in that trance-like, oblivious way of hers
and affected never to have heard of a Mrs. Jerome. Perhaps she really
hadn't. Nobody has ever fathomed the bottomless ignorance of the Barr
mind."
"Nobody _could_--not even God!" said Robert.
Janet nodded and went on:
"Don't forget that the Barrs are inordinately vain and aggressively
jealous of the things they don't know. This is the fact that makes
their ignorance sublime! Take Emily. I got her to talk about herself
for a while. She is now one of the head teachers in a public high
school. Her devotion to her business is pathetic. She teaches, eats,
sleeps--and teaches! Once in a while she shops or sews. These acts
complete the cycle of her life from day to day, from year to year. No
books, no concerts, no theatres, no travel, no meditation, no
self-training, no real companionship with equals or superiors--never one
piercing or shattering experience of novelty--nothing that might make
the pulse go fast or the heart beat high. 'But how can you teach them
anything real, anything about life?' I maliciously asked her."
"'Anything real!' she sneered. 'I suppose you mean romantic adventures!
Well, teaching is real enough for me. I study the science of pedagogy
every night of the week. And when I want to learn anything more about
life, I read the _Saturday Evening Post_!'
"Yes, Robert; it sounds like a line from _The Old Homestead_. But
that's exactly what she said."
"I don't doubt it," said Robert. "I know the Barrs of Brooklyn. I've
met them in every part of the United States, and one runs across them
even in Europe. Age cannot wither nor custom stale their infinite
monotony. As on creation's day, so they'll remain till the trump of
doom."
"Of course, Mother isn't as stupid as Emily, not by half," said Janet.
"Her behavior at parting convinces me that she really does have an
inkling of who Mrs. Jerome is and of how my position near this
influential lady sends my stock up in the world of cash realities. When
I left, she didn't peck at my cheek as at first. No, she kissed me
almost affectionately and said, in a tone so relenting that I'm sure
Emily was greatly shocked: 'Now that you've found the way back, my
child, come and see us again soon.' And I had always believed that
Mother's moral and religious prejudices were incorruptible--absolutely
money-proof, if nothing else in this age was! It was quite a blow to
me."
"Never mind," rejoined Robert. "We're all easily taken in by other
people's moral counterfeit. Haven't you observed that it's usually a
Barr who circulates the Biblical saying that a man cannot serve both God
and Mammon? Yet, though too modest to acknowledge it, the Barrs
themselves accomplish this miracle daily. It's precisely the Barrs who,
in their heart of hearts, worship these two deities as one."
They had now reached the Lorillard tenements. In the dimly lit foyer of
the middle house they rested on the settee, quite as in the chummiest
days of Barr and Lloyd.
"Speaking of Mammon," he resumed, in the most offhand way imaginable,
"don't you think you ought to marry a rich man? Of course I mean your
own sort of rich man, not the St. Hilaire sort."
Janet gave him a puzzled look.
"I should hate a welter of trivial responsibilities," she said
decisively. "A great big house and a lot of servants to manage--to say
nothing of a husband!--the mere prospect terrifies me."
"Now I'm doubly sure that we're birds of a feather, Janet! Still,
aren't you rather difficult to please? In Paris you said you wouldn't
marry a man if he was poor? Here you say you won't marry a man if he's
rich."
"Does it matter, Robert? What rich man is likely to ask me?"
"You're quite wrong. One is asking you now."
"You!" Had he suddenly lost his senses?
"I've inherited a couple of millions, Janet!"
He briefly put her in possession of the facts. Then he made her a
formal offer of marriage, in tones so restrained that she could hardly
guess the immortal longing beneath them.
"I need a partner to share the rich man's burden!" he said, with a
quizzical smile. "And I know from experience that you are the one
partner in the world for me."
"No!" she said, her eyes half closed, her cheeks rather pale. "I--I'm
not sure that I'm ready for marriage."
"Oh, don't let that stop you! Nobody is ever ready for birth, marriage,
or death. We're just plunged in--doubts, hesitations, and all. You
don't suppose any sane man or woman _wants_ to take the plunge, do you?
I know _I_ don't. But since I've got to marry somebody, I've made up my
mind to marry no one but you."
"At least you're quite frank," she said, with a rather trembling lip.
"Are you angry? Heaven knows it would be easier for me to use the stock
phrases on which we were brought up and fed up. But you're a woman of
the new age! And I'm proposing partnership to an equal, to a fellow
worker--not to a goddess-drudge!"
They both rose from the settee.
"Surely," he said, wondering at her silence, "it isn't the Free Love
philosophy that's in the way?"
"No, no!" she said, emphatically. "I thought I'd told you that in
Paris."
She repeated that she was done with all that! She admitted that, for a
time, Cornelia had won her over to what Bernard Shaw called the
_Love-Is-All_ school of fanatics. And, so she feared, she had actually
believed in her own readiness to give up _All for Love_! But the hard
knocks of the last two years had opened her eyes to the inadequacy as
well as to the inexpediency of this philosophy. When the Hutchins
Burleys, the Cornelia Coverts, the women with horn-rimmed spectacles,
and their like--when these successively popped up to interfere with her
purposes, she had realized that love, far from being _all_ to her, was
simply one of her heart's desires. She still held to the view that the
love relation between two people should be subject to no other law than
that of their own consciences. And she still hoped that society would
be converted to this view, although she no longer had a mind to risk her
soul's welfare in its behalf.
"You see, Robert, how fully I've come round to your opinion! If I'm to
risk my salvation for anything, it must be for something bigger than the
love chase."
After a pause, she added, with a faintly ironical smile:
"For something bigger, too, than a mere husband, don't you think?"
"But you won't risk your salvation with me, Janet," said Robert, coming
close to her side. "You're in a position to make your own terms,
absolutely--for have you I must! Stick to your practical terms but not
to your abstract ideas. And be generous! Remember, a man who's obliged
to take care of a fortune, needs a wife to take care of him."
"Indeed! But why expect one able-bodied human being to 'take care of'
another human being, equally able-bodied? Or why ask a woman to become
what men gallantly call a ministering angel, but what ought bluntly to
be called a domestic drudge?"
"I admit it's a very stupid arrangement. Yet at present it's the only
tolerable arrangement I know of. Unquestionably, it's haphazard,
wasteful, anarchic! And no doubt a later generation of men and women,
fired with a collective purpose, will regulate domestic affairs much
better. But what am I to do? Wasn't I born and bred on the
understanding that some ministering angel would drudge my home to
rights? Well, I'm extremely uncomfortable without one!"
"Selfish wretch. Do you know what Mrs. Jerome says?"
"No."
"She says that women have been men's cat's-paws long enough. It's time
for them to abdicate the job. If we are to make any headway, the
unmarried girls will have to be strong enough and self-respecting enough
to refuse the empty honors offered as bribes for their servitude. They
must put a high price on their freedom!"
"Good! I offer you a million dollars, cash down, for yours. It's half
my fortune."
Janet turned away, chilled to the soul.
"You're mocking me," she said.
"Not a bit of it," he retorted, following her. "I don't propose to live
with an economic inferior. Such a course would wreck us at the start.
That there can be no genuine comradeship between people of unequal means
is a truth which every philosopher from Plato to William James has
pointed out."
"Did they point it out, in the midst of a proposal?"
He held both her hands in a firm grip.
"Darling, don't pretend to misunderstand me. Do you want me to sink to
my knees in this public place and overwhelm you with ardors and
protestations? It's easy enough, and I'm quite mad enough now. Mad
with the enchantment of your touch, that turns my heart to fire; with
the music of your voice, in which I hear all Elfland calling; with your
haunting mystery and lilac fragrance, at which my senses reel and swim!
I'm ninety-nine parts drenched with ecstasy! If you reproach me because
one thin gleam of sanity still remains at the helm I shall be--"
"Arithmetical!"
At the word, he seized her and kissed her and--Time being Love's
fool--they were imparadised in each other's arms.
*VII*
After a while, between endearments, she managed to say:
"So you _do_ want me to make a marriage of convenience?"
"No, I want you to make a convenience of marriage. That's what all
sensible people do."
"Splendid! Then you won't expect me to give up the Susan B. Anthony
House? I couldn't leave Mrs. Jerome in the lurch now, you know."
"Of course not!" he said.
She was to go on with her work, he with his. They should have living
places to be alone in, and living places to be together in, like the
Havelock Ellises. They'd have a house together in the mountains or the
seashore, remote from other people--a biggish house, this would perhaps
have to be. But she need manage it no better (or no worse, he trusted)
than she now managed the Susan B. Anthony House.
Janet laughed at his incorrigible, man-made outlook on the future.
Indulgent and happy, she rested her head on his shoulder.
"Why didn't you take your own advice," she asked, "and marry some
independently rich woman--Charlotte, for instance?"
"Because there are a good many women that I could work with, yet never
love. And some few that I could love, yet never work with. But there's
only one that I could work with _and_ love as well. At least, I've
never met another."
"That's a very pretty speech, Robert, for you. We _were_ good comrades,
weren't we? In the days of Barr and Lloyd!"
"From now on, Barr and Lloyd, Inc."
"But it isn't the same Barr nor the same Lloyd that are to be
incorporated again. Suppose we prove not to be good comrades, this
time?"
"In that case, we shall hie us to some genuinely civilized
country--Sweden or Cape Comorin--where breach of comradeship is the sole
ground for divorce--"
Indignant voices from the staircase penetrated their mutual absorption.
"Where in the world can they be!"
"So this is your _radical_ hospitality!"
"Robert--latest method?--proposing by telepathy--imperfect
communications--vast silences--heavenly harmony--"
"Pooh! Janet's no fool--nothing like a bee line--marriage license
bureau--bird in the bush, you know--"
Blushing and looking like culprits, they climbed the stairs and braved
the mock indignation meeting which their three friends were holding in
the hall between flats 13 and 15. (Robert had rented both flats, as a
surprise for Janet.)
Lydia went straight to Janet and enfolded her in a copious embrace,
whilst Charlotte stood by, ready for a cordial handshake. Mark Pryor,
stupefied at this exhibition of feminine perspicacity, could only stare
at Robert and mutter:
"What! Already?"
"Was ever woman in this humor won!" drawled Lydia, as she led the way
into Number Thirteen, Kelly's old flat. "I must say, Janet, I'm not much
impressed with Robert's 1921 revision of the Lord of Burleigh stunt.
Like all modern versions of fine old idylls, it's gingerbread without
the ginger. Give me the village painter who leads his sweetheart to a
palace! There's the thrill that comes but once in a lifetime. But
fancy a millionaire taking his bride to a Kips Bay model tenement--and
Number Thirteen at that!"
"You forget," said Robert, who, with Pryor, had followed the ladies in.
"You forget that '_leiser Nachhall laengst verklungner Lieder, zieht mit
Erinnenings-Schauer durch die Brust_."
"Which means, I take it," Pryor said:
"'I saw her then, as I see her yet,
With the rose she wore, when first we met.'"
"Pooh! Male parsimony disguised as Teuton sentiment," said Lydia.
"Don't be put upon, Janet, by this _love-in-a-tenement_ stuff. Let me
give you a tip. Laurence Twickenham, my publisher, has just put his
Long Island home on the market. He says that the ruinous royalties he's
compelled to pay me do not permit him to keep up an expensive
establishment. It's a perfectly gorgeous estate, right next to mine,
and not too far from New York. Do make Robert buy it and settle down to
a useful life as a country gentleman."
"What! Foster his mania for hearth and home?" cried Janet, laughing.
"Catch me! Nowadays men are almost incurably domestic, as it is."
"Well, what _are_ you children going to do?"
"Children!" said Robert, coming forward, and lecturing Lydia with gusto.
"None of your wiseacre airs, Lydia. Our program will show you that we
know our own minds. Hear ye! We shall be married as soon as Janet can
get a day off. After the ceremony Janet will return to her job of
running the Susan B. Anthony House; I shall return to my job of trying
to make America safe for those who don't happen to be grafters,
parasites, or profiteers. During the better part of the year, our
offices will be in the Kips Bay tenements here, Numbers Thirteen and
Fifteen, respectively--we shall toss up to see who gets which. No
attempt on the part of either to impose his or her friends, diet,
hygiene, or recreations upon the other without consent, will be
tolerated for a moment. Each is to be absolute master in what may
jointly be agreed upon to be his own domain, provided only that Janet is
to darn all my socks or buy new pairs as fast as the big toe protrudes.
At the end of nine months, we shall both be ready for a trip to--"
"To Sweden," Janet put in softly, going to his side and caressing his
arm.
"To Sweden!" exclaimed Lydia, while Charlotte and Pryor laughed at her
bewilderment. "To the psychopathic ward, if you ask _me_!"
* * * * * * * *
*BY FELIX GRENDON*
WILL HE COME BACK?
A Play
NIXOLA OF WALL STREET
A Novel
FREEDOM IN THE WORKSHOP
A Study
* * * * * * * *
[Transcriber's note: Inconsistent spelling and punctuation has been
preserved as printed.]