A BLACK FLAG.
UNTIL Wayland saw Emily at church he had no intention to seize the
opportunity which Mrs. Ainslie’s disinterested kindliness had made
for him. Ever since he left the restraint of the “prep.” school for
Harvard, with a liberal allowance and absolute freedom, women had been
an important factor in his life; and they were still second only to
money-making. But not such women as Emily Bromfield.
In theory he had the severest ideas of woman. Practically, his
conception of woman’s sphere was not companionship or love or the
family, not either mental or sentimental, but frankly physical. And
something in that element in Emily’s personality--perhaps the warmth
of her beauty of form in contrast to the coldness of her beauty of
face--made it impossible for this indulgent and self-indulgent young
man to refrain from seeking her out. He was close with his money
in every way except where his personal comfort or amusement was
concerned. There he was generous to prodigality. And when he learned
how poor the Bromfields were and how fiercely discontented Emily
was in her Stoughton prison-cell, he decided that the only factor in
the calculation was whether or not on better acquaintance his first
up-flaring would persist.
In one respect Washington society is unequalled. Nowhere else is a
girl able so quickly and at so early an age to get so complete an
equipment of worldly knowledge. Emily’s three years under the tutelage
of cynical Mrs. Ainslie had made her nearly as capable to see through
men as are acute married women. Following the Washington custom of her
day, she had gone about with men almost as freely as do the girls of a
Western town. And the men whom she had thus intimately known were not
innocent, idealising, deferential Western youths, but men of broad and
unscrupulous worldliness. Many of them were young diplomats, far from
home, without any sense of responsibility in respect of the women of
the country in which they were sojourners of a day. They played the
game of “man and woman” adroitly and boldly.
Emily understood Wayland only so far as the clean can from theoretical
experience understand the unclean. Thus far she quickly penetrated into
his intentions toward her and his ideas of her. He was the reverse of
complex. He had not found it necessary to employ in these affairs the
craft he was beginning to display in business, to the delight of his
father. His crude and candid method of conquest had been successful
hitherto. Failure in this instance seemed unlikely. And there were no
male relatives who might bring him to an uncomfortable accounting.
Two weeks after he met Emily--weeks in which he had seen her several
times--he went to her house for dinner. She had been advancing
gradually, in strict accordance with her plan of campaign. Wayland
had unwittingly disarmed himself and doubly armed her by giving undue
weight to her appearance of extreme youth and golden inexperience, and
by overestimating his own and his money’s fascinations. He had not a
suspicion that there was design or even elaborate preparation in the
vision which embarrassed and fired him as he entered the Bromfields’
parlour. She was in a simple black dinner gown, which displayed her
arms and her rosy white shoulders. And she had a small head and a way
of doing her hair that brought out the charm of every curve of her
delicate face. Instead of looking cold this evening, she put into her
look and smile a seeming of--well, more than mere liking, he thought.
It happened to be one of Mrs. Bromfield’s good days, so she rambled on,
covering Wayland’s silence. Occasionally--not too often--Emily lifted
her glance from her plate and gave the young man the full benefit of
her deep, dark, violet eyes. When Mrs. Bromfield spoke apologisingly of
the absence of wine, he was surprised to note that he had not missed it.
But after dinner, when he was alone in the sitting-room with Emily,
he regretted that he had had nothing to drink. He could explain his
timidity, his inability to get near the subject uppermost in his mind
only on the ground that he had had no stimulus to his courage and
his tongue. All that day he had been planning what he would say; yet
as he went home in his automobile, upon careful review of all that
had been said and done, he found that he had made no progress. The
conversation had been general and not for an instant personal to her.
The only personalities had been his own rather full account of himself,
past, present and future--a rambling recital, the joint result of his
nervousness and her encouragement.
“At least she understands that I don’t intend to marry,” he thought,
remembering one part of the conversation.
“There’s nothing in marriage for me,” he had said, after a clumsy
paving of the way.
“Of course not,” she had assented. “I never could understand how a
young man, situated as you are, could be foolish enough to chain
himself.”
And then, as he remembered with some satisfaction, she added the only
remark she had made which threw any light upon her own feelings and
ideas: “It would be as foolish for you to marry, as it would be for me
to refuse a chance to get out of this dreadful place.”
As he reflected on this he had no suspicion of subtlety. It did not
occur to him that she hardly deserved credit for frankly confessing
what could not be successfully denied or concealed, or that she might
have confessed in order to put him off his guard, to make him think her
guilelessly straightforward.
A second and a third call, a drive and several long walks; still he had
done nothing to further his scheme. He put off his return to New York,
seeing her every day, each time in a fresh aspect of beauty, in a new
mood of fascination. One night, a month after he met her at church, he
found her alone on the wide piazza. She was in an evening dress, white,
clinging close to her, following her every movement. He soon reached
his limit of endurance.
“You are maddening,” he said abruptly, stretching out his arms to
seize her. He thrust her wraps violently away from her throat and
one shoulder. He was crushing her against his chest, was kissing her
savagely.
She wrenched herself away from him, panting with anger, with repulsion.
But he thought it was a return of his ardour, and she did not undeceive
him. “You mustn’t!” she said. “You know that it is impossible. You must
go. Good-night!”
She left him and he, after waiting uncertainly a few moments, went
slowly down the drive, in a rage, but a rage in which anger and longing
were curiously mingled. When he called the next day, she was “not at
home.” When he called again she could not come down, she must stay
beside her mother, who had had another attack, so the servant explained
in a stammering, unconvincing manner. He wrote that he wished to see
her to say good-bye as he was leaving the next day. Then he called
and she came into the parlour--“just for an instant.” She was wearing
a loose gown, open at the throat, with sleeves falling away from
her arms. Her small feet were thrust into a pair of high-heeled red
slippers and her stockings had openwork over the ankles. She seemed so
worried about her mother that it was impossible for him to re-open the
one subject and resume progress, as he had hoped to do. But it was not
impossible for him to think. And Emily, anxiously watching him from
behind her secure entrenchments, noted that he was thinking as she
wished and hoped. His looks, his voice encouraged her to play her game,
her only possible game, courageously to the last card.
“If he doesn’t come back,” she thought, “at least I’ve done my best.
And I think he _will_ come.”
She sent him away regretfully, but immediately, standing two steps up
the stairway in a final effective pose. He set his teeth together and
took the train for New York. There he outdid all his previous impulses
of extravagant generosity with himself, but he could not drive her from
his mind. Those who formerly amused him, now seemed vulgar, silly, and
stale. They made her live the more vividly in his imagination. Business
gave him no relief. At his office his mind wandered to her, and the
memory of that stolen kiss made his nerves quiver and hot flushes
course over and through him. At the end of three weeks, he returned to
Stoughton. “I’ve let myself go crazy,” he thought, “I’ll see her again
and convince myself that I’m a fool.”
As he neared her house, his mind became more at ease. When he rang the
bell he was laughing at himself for having got into such a frenzy over
“nothing but a woman like the rest of ’em.” But as soon as he saw her,
he was drunk again.
“I love you,” he stammered. “I can’t do without you. Will you--will you
marry me, Emily?”
There was no triumph either in her face or in her mind. She was hearing
the hammer smash in the thick walls of her prison, but she shrank from
the sound. As she looked at his commonplace, heavy-featured face; as
she listened to his monotonous voice, with its hint of tyranny and
temper; as she felt his greedy eyes and hot, trembling fingers;--a
revulsion swept over her and left her sick with disgust--disgust for
her despicable self, loathing for him and for his feeling for her--his
“love.”
“How can I?” she thought, turning away to hide her expression from him.
“How can I? And yet, how can I refuse?”
“I must have until--until this evening,” she said in a low voice and
with an effort. “I--I thought you had gone--for good and all--and I
tried to put you out of my thoughts.”
She was standing near him and he crushed her in his arms. “You must,
you must,” he exclaimed. “I must have you.”
She let him kiss her once, then pushed him away, hiding her face in no
mere pretence of modesty and maidenly repulsion. “This evening,” she
said, almost flying from him.
She paused at the door of her mother’s sitting-room. From it came
the odor of drugs, and in it were all the evidences of the tedious
companionship of her poverty-stricken prison life--the invalid chair
with its upholstery tattering; the worn carpet; the wall paper stained,
and in one corner giving way because of a leak which they had no
money to repair; the table with its litter of bottles, of drug-boxes,
of patent-medicine advertisements and trashy novels; in the bed the
hypochondriac herself, old, yellow, fat in an unhealthy way, with her
empty, childish, peevish face.
Emily did not enter, but went on to her own room--bare, cheerless,
proofs of poverty and impending rags and patches threatening to
obtrude. She looked out through the trees at the glimpses of the
town--every beat of the pulse of her youth was a sullen and hateful
protest against it. Beyond were the tall chimneys of the mills,
with the black clouds from them smutching the sky--there lived the
work-people, the boredom of the town driving them to brutal dissipation.
“I must! I must!” she said, between her set teeth, then sank down in
the window seat and buried her face in her arms.
That evening she accepted him, and the next morning her mother
announced the engagement to the first caller.