A Financier Bewitched
It was interesting to note how, able though he was, and bound up with
this vast street-railway enterprise which was beginning to affect
several thousand men, his mind could find intense relief and
satisfaction in the presence and actions of Stephanie Platow. It is not
too much to say that in her, perhaps, he found revivified the spirit
and personality of Rita Sohlberg. Rita, however, had not contemplated
disloyalty--it had never occurred to her to be faithless to Cowperwood
so long as he was fond of her any more than for a long time it had been
possible for her, even after all his philanderings, to be faithless to
Sohlberg. Stephanie, on the other hand, had the strange feeling that
affection was not necessarily identified with physical loyalty, and
that she could be fond of Cowperwood and still deceive him--a fact
which was based on her lack as yet of a true enthusiasm for him. She
loved him and she didn't. Her attitude was not necessarily identified
with her heavy, lizardish animality, though that had something to do
with it; but rather with a vague, kindly generosity which permitted her
to feel that it was hard to break with Gardner Knowles and Lane Cross
after they had been so nice to her. Gardner Knowles had sung her
praises here, there, and everywhere, and was attempting to spread her
fame among the legitimate theatrical enterprises which came to the city
in order that she might be taken up and made into a significant figure.
Lane Cross was wildly fond of her in an inadequate way which made it
hard to break with him, and yet certain that she would eventually.
There was still another man--a young playwright and poet by the name of
Forbes Gurney--tall, fair, passionate--who had newly arrived on the
scene and was courting her, or, rather, being courted by her at odd
moments, for her time was her own. In her artistically errant way she
had refused to go to school like her sister, and was idling about,
developing, as she phrased it, her artistic possibilities.
Cowperwood, as was natural, heard much of her stage life. At first he
took all this palaver with a grain of salt, the babbling of an ardent
nature interested in the flighty romance of the studio world. By
degrees, however, he became curious as to the freedom of her actions,
the ease with which she drifted from place to place--Lane Cross's
studio; Bliss Bridge's bachelor rooms, where he appeared always to be
receiving his theatrical friends of the Garrick Players; Mr. Gardner
Knowles's home on the near North Side, where he was frequently
entertaining a party after the theater. It seemed to Cowperwood, to say
the least, that Stephanie was leading a rather free and inconsequential
existence, and yet it reflected her exactly--the color of her soul.
But he began to doubt and wonder.
"Where were you, Stephanie, yesterday?" he would ask, when they met for
lunch, or in the evenings early, or when she called at his new offices
on the North Side, as she sometimes did to walk or drive with him.
"Oh, yesterday morning I was at Lane Cross's studio trying on some of
his Indian shawls and veils. He has such a lot of those things--some
of the loveliest oranges and blues. You just ought to see me in them.
I wish you might."
"Alone?"
"For a while. I thought Ethel Tuckerman and Bliss Bridge would be
there, but they didn't come until later. Lane Cross is such a dear.
He's sort of silly at times, but I like him. His portraits are so
bizarre."
She went off into a description of his pretentious but insignificant
art.
Cowperwood marveled, not at Lane Cross's art nor his shawls, but at
this world in which Stephanie moved. He could not quite make her out.
He had never been able to make her explain satisfactorily that first
single relationship with Gardner Knowles, which she declared had ended
so abruptly. Since then he had doubted, as was his nature; but this
girl was so sweet, childish, irreconcilable with herself, like a
wandering breath of air, or a pale-colored flower, that he scarcely
knew what to think. The artistically inclined are not prone to quarrel
with an enticing sheaf of flowers. She was heavenly to him, coming in,
as she did at times when he was alone, with bland eyes and yielding
herself in a kind of summery ecstasy. She had always something
artistic to tell of storms, winds, dust, clouds, smoke forms, the
outline of buildings, the lake, the stage. She would cuddle in his
arms and quote long sections from "Romeo and Juliet," "Paolo and
Francesca," "The Ring and the Book," Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes." He
hated to quarrel with her, because she was like a wild rose or some art
form in nature. Her sketch-book was always full of new things. Her
muff, or the light silk shawl she wore in summer, sometimes concealed a
modeled figure of some kind which she would produce with a look like
that of a doubting child, and if he wanted it, if he liked it, he could
have it. Cowperwood meditated deeply. He scarcely knew what to think.
The constant atmosphere of suspicion and doubt in which he was
compelled to remain, came by degrees to distress and anger him. While
she was with him she was clinging enough, but when she was away she was
ardently cheerful and happy. Unlike the station he had occupied in so
many previous affairs, he found himself, after the first little while,
asking her whether she loved him instead of submitting to the same
question from her.
He thought that with his means, his position, his future possibilities
he had the power to bind almost any woman once drawn to his
personality; but Stephanie was too young and too poetic to be greatly
impaired by wealth and fame, and she was not yet sufficiently gripped
by the lure of him. She loved him in her strange way; but she was
interested also by the latest arrival, Forbes Gurney. This tall,
melancholy youth, with brown eyes and pale-brown hair, was very poor.
He hailed from southern Minnesota, and what between a penchant for
journalism, verse-writing, and some dramatic work, was somewhat
undecided as to his future. His present occupation was that of an
instalment collector for a furniture company, which set him free, as a
rule, at three o'clock in the afternoon. He was trying, in a mooning
way, to identify himself with the Chicago newspaper world, and was a
discovery of Gardner Knowles.
Stephanie had seen him about the rooms of the Garrick Players. She had
looked at his longish face with its aureole of soft, crinkly hair, his
fine wide mouth, deep-set eyes, and good nose, and had been touched by
an atmosphere of wistfulness, or, let us say, life-hunger. Gardner
Knowles brought a poem of his once, which he had borrowed from him, and
read it to the company, Stephanie, Ethel Tuckerman, Lane Cross, and
Irma Ottley assembled.
"Listen to this," Knowles had suddenly exclaimed, taking it out of his
pocket.
It concerned a garden of the moon with the fragrance of pale blossoms,
a mystic pool, some ancient figures of joy, a quavered Lucidian tune.
"With eerie flute and rhythmic thrum Of muted strings and beaten drum."
Stephanie Platow had sat silent, caught by a quality that was akin to
her own. She asked to see it, and read it in silence.
"I think it's charming," she said.
Thereafter she hovered in the vicinity of Forbes Gurney. Why, she
could scarcely say. It was not coquetry. She just drew near, talked
to him of stage work and her plays and her ambitions. She sketched him
as she had Cowperwood and others, and one day Cowperwood found three
studies of Forbes Gurney in her note-book idyllicly done, a note of
romantic feeling about them.
"Who is this?" he asked.
"Oh, he's a young poet who comes up to the Players--Forbes Gurney. He's
so charming; he's so pale and dreamy."
Cowperwood contemplated the sketches curiously. His eyes clouded.
"Another one of Stephanie's adherents," he commented, teasingly. "It's
a long procession I've joined. Gardner Knowles, Lane Cross, Bliss
Bridge, Forbes Gurney."
Stephanie merely pouted moodily.
"How you talk! Bliss Bridge, Gardner Knowles! I admit I like them all,
but that's all I do do. They're just sweet and dear. You'd like Lane
Cross yourself; he's such a foolish old Polly. As for Forbes Gurney,
he just drifts up there once in a while as one of the crowd. I
scarcely know him."
"Exactly," said Cowperwood, dolefully; "but you sketch him." For some
reason Cowperwood did not believe this. Back in his brain he did not
believe Stephanie at all, he did not trust her. Yet he was intensely
fond of her--the more so, perhaps, because of this.
"Tell me truly, Stephanie," he said to her one day, urgently, and yet
very diplomatically. "I don't care at all, so far as your past is
concerned. You and I are close enough to reach a perfect
understanding. But you didn't tell me the whole truth about you and
Knowles, did you? Tell me truly now. I sha'n't mind. I can understand
well enough how it could have happened. It doesn't make the least bit
of difference to me, really."
Stephanie was off her guard for once, in no truly fencing mood. She was
troubled at times about her various relations, anxious to put herself
straight with Cowperwood or with any one whom she truly liked.
Compared to Cowperwood and his affairs, Cross and Knowles were trivial,
and yet Knowles was interesting to her. Compared to Cowperwood, Forbes
Gurney was a stripling beggar, and yet Gurney had what Cowperwood did
not have--a sad, poetic lure. He awakened her sympathies. He was such
a lonely boy. Cowperwood was so strong, brilliant, magnetic.
Perhaps it was with some idea of clearing up her moral status generally
that she finally said: "Well, I didn't tell you the exact truth about
it, either. I was a little ashamed to."
At the close of her confession, which involved only Knowles, and was
incomplete at that, Cowperwood burned with a kind of angry resentment.
Why trifle with a lying prostitute? That she was an inconsequential
free lover at twenty-one was quite plain. And yet there was something
so strangely large about the girl, so magnetic, and she was so
beautiful after her kind, that he could not think of giving her up.
She reminded him of himself.
"Well, Stephanie," he said, trampling under foot an impulse to insult
or rebuke and dismiss her, "you are strange. Why didn't you tell me
this before? I have asked and asked. Do you really mean to say that
you care for me at all?"
"How can you ask that?" she demanded, reproachfully, feeling that she
had been rather foolish in confessing. Perhaps she would lose him now,
and she did not want to do that. Because his eyes blazed with a
jealous hardness she burst into tears. "Oh, I wish I had never told
you! There is nothing to tell, anyhow. I never wanted to."
Cowperwood was nonplussed. He knew human nature pretty well, and woman
nature; his common sense told him that this girl was not to be trusted,
and yet he was drawn to her. Perhaps she was not lying, and these
tears were real.
"And you positively assure me that this was all--that there wasn't any
one else before, and no one since?"
Stephanie dried her eyes. They were in his private rooms in Randolph
Street, the bachelor rooms he had fitted for himself as a changing
place for various affairs.
"I don't believe you care for me at all," she observed, dolefully,
reproachfully. "I don't believe you understand me. I don't think you
believe me. When I tell you how things are you don't understand. I
don't lie. I can't. If you are so doubting now, perhaps you had
better not see me any more. I want to be frank with you, but if you
won't let me--"
She paused heavily, gloomily, very sorrowfully, and Cowperwood surveyed
her with a kind of yearning. What an unreasoning pull she had for him!
He did not believe her, and yet he could not let her go.
"Oh, I don't know what to think," he commented, morosely. "I certainly
don't want to quarrel with you, Stephanie, for telling me the truth.
Please don't deceive me. You are a remarkable girl. I can do so much
for you if you will let me. You ought to see that."
"But I'm not deceiving you," she repeated, wearily. "I should think
you could see."
"I believe you," he went on, trying to deceive himself against his
better judgment. "But you lead such a free, unconventional life."
"Ah," thought Stephanie, "perhaps I talk too much."
"I am very fond of you. You appeal to me so much. I love you, really.
Don't deceive me. Don't run with all these silly simpletons. They are
really not worthy of you. I shall be able to get a divorce one of
these days, and then I would be glad to marry you."
"But I'm not running with them in the sense that you think. They're
not anything to me beyond mere entertainment. Oh, I like them, of
course. Lane Cross is a dear in his way, and so is Gardner Knowles.
They have all been nice to me."
Cowperwood's gorge rose at her calling Lane Cross dear. It incensed
him, and yet he held his peace.
"Do give me your word that there will never be anything between you and
any of these men so long as you are friendly with me?" he almost
pleaded--a strange role for him. "I don't care to share you with any
one else. I won't. I don't mind what you have done in the past, but I
don't want you to be unfaithful in the future."
"What a question! Of course I won't. But if you don't believe me--oh,
dear--"
Stephanie sighed painfully, and Cowperwood's face clouded with angry
though well-concealed suspicion and jealousy.
"Well, I'll tell you, Stephanie, I believe you now. I'm going to take
your word. But if you do deceive me, and I should find it out, I will
quit you the same day. I do not care to share you with any one else.
What I can't understand, if you care for me, is how you can take so
much interest in all these affairs? It certainly isn't devotion to your
art that's impelling you, is it?"
"Oh, are you going to go on quarreling with me?" asked Stephanie,
naively. "Won't you believe me when I say that I love you? Perhaps--"
But here her histrionic ability came to her aid, and she sobbed
violently.
Cowperwood took her in his arms. "Never mind," he soothed. "I do
believe you. I do think you care for me. Only I wish you weren't such
a butterfly temperament, Stephanie."
So this particular lesion for the time being was healed.