THE TRUTH ABOUT A ROMANCE.
ONE half of that mystery had been betrayed by little Mary. The other
half she might have known long before had she not held aloof from her
fellow workers, except the few who did not gossip.
* * * * *
He was a Virginian. He had been brought up on a farm--an only son,
carefully sheltered, tutored by his father and mother. He had gone
up to Princeton, religious and reverential of the most rigid code
of personal morals. His studies in science and philosophy had taken
away his creed. But he the more firmly anchored himself to his moral
code--not because he was prim or feeble or timid, but because to him
his morality was his self-respect.
He graduated from Princeton at twenty and became a reporter on _The
World_. He was released to New York--young, hot-blooded, romantic,
daring. He rose rapidly and was not laughed at for his idealism and
his Puritanism, partly because he was able, chiefly because he had
that arrogant temperament which enforces respect from the irresolute,
submissive majority.
One night, a few weeks before he was twenty-one, he went with Harry
Penrose of the _Herald_ to the opening of the season at the Gold and
Glory. It was then in the beginning of its fame as the best music-hall
in the country if not in the world. As they entered, the orchestra
was playing one of those dashing melodies that seem to make the blood
flow in their rhythm. The stage was thronged with a typical Gold and
Glory chorus--tall, handsome young women with long, slender arms and
legs. They were dancing madly, their eyes sparkling, their hair waving,
the straps slipping from their young shoulders, their slim legs in
heliotrope silk marking the time of the music with sinuous strokes
from the stage to high above their heads and down again. Against this
background of youth and joy and colour two girls were leading the
dance. One of them was round and sensuous; the other thin with the
pleasing angularity of a girl not yet a woman grown.
Instantly Stilson’s eyes were for her. He felt that he had never even
imagined such grace. The others were smiling gaily, boldly, into the
audience in teasing mock-invitation. Her lips were closed. Her smile
was dreamy, her soul apparently wrapped in the delirium of the dance.
Her whole body was in constant motion. It seemed to Stilson that at
every movement of shoulders or hips, of small round arms or tapering
legs, at every swing of that little head crowned with glittering waves
of golden light, a mysterious, thrilling energy was flung out from
her like an electric current. He who had not cared for women of the
stage watched this girl as a child at its first circus watches the lady
in tights and tarlatan. When the curtain went down, he felt that the
lights were being turned off instead of on.
“Who is she?” he asked Penrose.
“Who?” said Penrose, looking at the women near by in the orchestra
chairs. “Which one?”
“The girl at the end--the right end--on the stage, I mean.”
“Oh--Marguerite Feronia. Isn’t she a wonder? I don’t see how any one
can compare her with Jennie Jessop, who danced opposite her.”
“Do you know--Miss Feronia?” asked Stilson.
“Marguerite? Yes. I’ve seen her a few times in the cork-room. Ever been
there?”
“No.” Stilson had neither time nor inclination for dissipation.
“Would you like to go? It’s an odd sort of place.”
They went downstairs, through the public bar and lounge and into a long
passage. At the end Penrose knocked on a door with a small shutter in
it. Up went the shutter and in its stead there was a fierce face--low
forehead, stubby, close cropped hair, huge, sweeping moustache shading
a bull-dog jaw. The eyes were wicked yet not unkindly.
“Hello, John. This is a friend of mine from the _World_--Mr. Stilson.”
“Oh, it’s you, Mr. Penrose.” The shutter replaced the face and the door
opened. They were under the stage, in a room walled and ceilinged
with champagne corks, and broken into many alcoves and compartments.
They sat at a table in one of the alcoves and Penrose ordered a bottle
of champagne. When the waiter brought it he invited “John” to have a
glass. “John” took it standing--“Your health, gents--best regards”--a
gulp, the glass was empty and the moustache had a deep, damp fringe.
“I have orders not to let nobody in till the end of the performance,”
said “John.” “But you gents of the press is different.” He winked as if
his remark were a witticism.
“May I see Marguerite for a minute?”
“She’s got to change,” said “John” doubtfully, “and she comes on about
five minutes after the curtain goes up. But I’ll see.”
He went through a door at the far end of the “cork-room” and soon
reappeared with Marguerite close behind him. She was in a yellow and
red costume--the skirt not to her knees, the waist barely to the top of
her low corset. She put out a small hand white of itself, and smeared
with rice-powder. Her hair was natural golden and Stilson thought her
as beautiful and as spiritual as she had seemed beyond the footlights.
“Perhaps not quite so young,” he said to himself, “possibly twenty.”
In fact she was almost thirty. Her voice was sweet and childish, her
manner confiding, as became so young-looking a person.
Stilson was unable to speak. He could only look and long. And he
felt guilty for looking--she was very slightly clad. She and Penrose
talked commonplaces about the opening, Penrose flattering her
effectively--Stilson thought his compliments crude and insulting, felt
that she would resent them if she really understood them. She soon
rose, touched the champagne glass to her lips, nodded and was gone. The
curtain was up--they could hear the music and the scuffling of many
feet on the stage overhead.
“You don’t want to miss this, Mr. Penrose,” said “John.” “It’s out
o’sight.”
They took a second glass of the champagne and left the rest for “John.”
When they were a few feet down the passage, Stilson went back to the
door of the “cork-room.” The shutter lifted at his knock and he cast
his friendliest look into the wicked, good-humoured, bull-dog face. “My
name is Stilson,” he said. “You won’t forget me if I should come again
alone?”
“I never forget a face,” said “John.” “That’s why I keep my job.”
Stilson’s infatuation increased with each of Marguerite’s appearances.
The longer he looked, the stronger was the spell woven over his senses
by that innocent face, by those magnetic arms and legs. But he would
have knocked down any one who had suggested that it was a sensuous
spell.
He devoted his account of the performance for the _World_ to
Marguerite, the marvellous young interpreter of the innermost meaning
of music.
The copy-reader “toned down” some of the superlatives, but left his
picture in the main untouched. And the next day every one in the office
was talking about “Stilson’s story of that girl up at the Gold and
Glory.” It was the best possible advertisement for the hall and for
the girl. Penrose called him on the telephone and laughed at him. “You
_are_ a fox,” he said. “Old Barclay--he’s the manager down there, you
know--called me up a while ago and asked if I knew who wrote the puff
of Feronia in the _World_. I told him it was you. Follow it up, old
man.”
And Stilson did “follow it up.” That very night, toward the end of the
performance he reappeared at the door of the “cork-room,” nervous but
determined, and with all he had left of last week’s earnings in his
pocket. “John” was most gracious as he admitted him and escorted him
to a seat. The room was hazy with the smoke of cigars and cigarettes.
Many men and several young women sat at the tables. A silver bucket
containing ice and a bottle was a part of each group. There was a great
pounding of feet on the floor overhead, the shriek and crash of the
orchestra, the muffled roar of applause. All the young men were in
evening clothes except Stilson who had come direct from the office. The
young women were dressed for the street. Stilson guessed that they were
“extras” as at that time the full force of the company must be on the
stage.
The music ceased, the pounding of feet above became irregular instead
of regular, and into the room streamed a dozen of the chorus girls in
tights, with bare necks and arms and painted lips and cheeks. Their
eyes, surrounded by pigment, looked strangely large and lustrous.
“Just one glass, then we must go up and change.” And there was much
“opening of wine” and laughter and holding of hands and one covert
kiss in the shadow of an alcove where “John” could pretend not to see.
Then the chorus girls rushed away to remove part of the powder, paint,
and pigment and to put on street clothing. After a few minutes, during
which Stilson watched the scene with a deepening sense of how out of
place he was in it, the stage-door opened and Marguerite came in,
dressed for the street in a pretty gray summer-silk with a gray hat
to match. As she advanced through the smoke, several men stood, eager
to be recognised. She smiled sweetly at each and hesitated. Stilson,
his courage roused, sprang up and advanced boldly. “Good evening, Miss
Feronia,” he said, his eyes imploring yet commanding. She looked at him
vaguely, then remembered him.
“You are Mr. Penrose’s friend?” she said, polite but not at all cordial.
“Yes--my name’s Stilson,” he answered. “I was here last night.”
“Oh--Mr. Stilson of the _World_?”
Stilson bowed. She was radiant now. “I wrote you a note to-day,” she
said. “It was _so_ good of you.”
“Would you sit and let me order something for you?”
“Certainly. I want to thank you----”
“Please don’t,” he said, earnestly and with a hot blush. “I’d--I’d
rather you didn’t remember me for that.”
“Something” in the cork-room meant champagne or a wine equally
expensive--the management forbade frugality under pain of exclusion.
Miss Feronia was thirsty and Stilson thought he had never before seen
any one who knew how to raise a glass and drink.
“You were good to me in the paper this morning,” she said. “Why?”
“Because I love you.”
The smoke, the room, the flaunting reminders of coarseness and
sensuality and merchandising in smiles and sentiment--all faded away
for him. He was worshipping at the shrine of his lady-love. And he
thought her as pure and poetical as the temple of her soul seemed to
his enchanted eyes. She looked at him over the top of her glass, with
cynical, tolerant amusement. The rioting bubbles were rushing upward
through the pale gold liquid to where her lips touched it. As she
studied him, the cynicism slowly gave place to that dreamy expression
which means much or little or nothing at all, according to what lies
behind. To him it was entrancing; it meant mind, and heart, and soul.
“What a nice, handsome boy you are,” she said, in a voice so gentle
that he was not offended by its hint that her experience was pitying
his child-like inexperience.
And thus it began. At the end of the week they were married--he would
have it so, and she, purified for the time by the fire of this boy’s
romantic love, thought it natural that the priest should be called in.
To him it was a dream of romance come true. His strength, direct,
insistent, inescapable, compelled her. It pleased her thus to be
whirled away by an impassioned boy, enveloping her in this tempestuous
yet respectful love wholly new to her. She found it toilsome to live up
to his ideal of her; but, with the aid of his blindness, she achieved
it for two months and deserved the title her former associates gave
her--“Sainte Marguerite.” Then----
He came home one morning about two. As he opened the door of their
flat, he heard heavy snoring from their little parlour. He struck a
match and held it high. As the light penetrated and his eyes grew
accustomed, he saw Marguerite--his wife--upon the lounge. Her only
covering was a nightgown and she was half out of it. Her hair was
tumbled and tangled. There were deep lines in her swollen, red face.
Her mouth had fallen open and her expression was gross, animal,
repulsive. She was sleeping a drunken sleep, in a room stuffy with the
fumes of whiskey and of the stale smoke and stale stumps of cigarettes.
The match burned his fingers before he dropped it. He stumbled through
the darkness to their bedroom, and, falling upon the bed, buried
his face in the pillow and sobbed like a child that has received a
blow struck in brutal injustice. Out of the corners came a hundred
suspicious little circumstances which no longer feared him or hid from
him. They leered and jeered and mocked, shooting poisoned darts into
that crushed and broken-hearted boy.
He rose and lit the gas. He went to a closet in a back room and took
down a bottle of whiskey and a tumbler. In pyjamas and slippers he
seated himself at the dining-room table. He poured out a brimming glass
of the whiskey and drank it down. A moment later he drank another,
then a third. His head reeled, his blood ran thick and hot through his
veins. He staggered into the parlour and stood over his snoring wife.
He shook her. “Come, wake up!” he shouted.
She groaned, murmured, tossed, suddenly sat up, catching her hair
together with one hand, her night-dress with the other. “My God!” she
exclaimed, in terror at his wild face, “Don’t kill me! I can’t help
it--my father was that way!”
“Yes--come on!” he shouted. “You don’t need to sneak away to drink.
We’ll drink together. We’ll go to hell together.”
And he kept his word. At the end of the year he was dismissed from the
_World_ for drunkenness. She went back to the stage and supported them
both--she was a periodic drunkard, while he kept steadily at it. She
left him, returned to him, loved him, fled from him, divorced him,
after an absence of nearly a year returned to make another effort to
undo the crime she felt she had committed. As she came into the squalid
room in a wretched furnished-room house in East Fifth Street where he
had found a momentary refuge, he glared at her with bleared, bloodshot
eyes and uttered a curse. She had a bundle in her arms.
“Look,” she said, in a low tone, stooping beside the bed on which he
lay in his rags.
He was staring stupidly into the face of a baby, copper-coloured,
homely, with puffy cheeks and watery, empty eyes. He fell back upon the
bed and covered his head.
Soon he started up in a fury. “It ought to have been strangled,” he
said.
“No! No!” she exclaimed, pressing the bundle tightly against her bosom.
He rose and went toward her. His expression was reassuring. He looked
long into the child’s face.
“Where are you living?” he asked at last. “Don’t be afraid to tell me.
I’ll not come until”--He paused, then went on: “The road ought to lead
upward from here.” His glance went round the squalid room with roaches
scuttling along its baseboard. He looked down at his grimed tatters,
his gaping shoes, his dirty hands and black and broken nails.
“It certainly can’t lead downward,” he muttered. For the first time in
months he felt ashamed. “Leave me alone,” he said.
That night he wrote his mother for the loan of a hundred dollars--the
first money from home since, at the end of his last long vacation,
he left for New York and a career. In a week he was a civilised man
again. Marlowe got him a place as reporter on the _Democrat_. It was
immediately apparent that the road did indeed lead upward.
In a month he was restored to his former appearance--except that his
hair was sprinkled with gray at the temples and he had several deep
lines in his young yet sombre face.