A MAN AND A “PAST.”
HAD Emily and Stilson been idlers or of those workers who look upon
work as a curse, they would have taken one of two courses. Either
Stilson would have repudiated his obligations and they would have
rushed together to hurry on to what would have been for them a moral
catastrophe, or they would have remained apart to sink separately into
mental and physical ruin. As it was, they worked--steadily, earnestly,
using their daily routine of labour to give them strength for the fight
against depression and despair.
Stilson, with the tenacity of purpose that made life for him one long
battle, fought hopelessly. To him hope seemed always only the delusive
foreshadow of oncoming disappointment, a lying messenger sent ahead by
fate in cynical mockery of its human prey. And whenever his routine
relaxed its compulsion, he laid himself on the rack and tortured
himself with memories and with dreams.
Emily was aided by her temperament. She loved life and passionately
believed in it. She was mentally incapable of long accepting an adverse
decree of destiny as final. But at best it was a wintry light that
hope shed--between storms--upon her heart. Her chief source of courage
was her ideal of him--the strong, the brave, the inflexible. “Forgive
me!” she would say, humbling herself before his image in her mind after
her outbursts of protest or her attacks of despondency. “I am not
worthy of you. But oh,--I want you--need you--_so_!”
Within a short time it was apparent that from the professional
standpoint she had done well in going to the _World of Women_. After
the newspaper, the magazine seemed play. In the _Democrat_ office she
had not been looked upon as extraordinary. Here they regarded her as a
person of amazing talent--for a woman. They marvelled at her energy,
at her quickness, at her flow of plans for articles and illustrations.
And without a hint from her they raised her salary to what she had been
getting, besides accepting proposals she made for several articles to
be written by herself.
They were especially delighted with her management of “the old
lady”--the only name ever given Mrs. Parrott when she was out of
hearing. She patronised Emily in a motherly way, and Emily submitted
like a dutiful daughter. She accepted Emily’s suggestions as her own.
“My dear,” she said one day, “I’m so glad I’ve got you here to help me
put my ideas through. I’ve been suggesting and suggesting in vain for
years.” And Emily looked grateful and refused to respond to the sly
smile from Mr. Burnham who had overheard.
Emily did not under-estimate Mrs. Parrott’s usefulness to her. In
thirty years of experience as a writer and an editor, “the old lady”
had accumulated much that was of permanent value, as well as a mass of
antiquated or antiquating trash. Emily belonged to the advance guard
of a generation that had small reverence for the “prim ideals of the
past.” Mrs. Parrott knew the “provincial mind,” the magazine-reading
mind, better than did Emily--or at least was more respectful of its
ideas, more cautious of offending its notions of what it believed or
thought it ought to believe. And often when Emily through ignorance
or intolerance would have “gone too far” for any but a New York
constituency, Mrs. Parrott interposed with a remonstrance or a
suggestion which Emily was acute enough to appreciate. She laughed at
these “hypocrisies” but--she always had circulation in mind. She liked
to startle, but she knew that she must startle in ways that would
attract, not frighten away.
But conscientious though she was in her work, and careful to have her
evenings occupied, she was still forlorn. Life was purposeless to her.
She was working for self alone, and she who had never cared to excess
for self, now cared nothing at all. In her own eyes her one value was
her value to Stilson. She reproached herself for what seemed to her
a low, a degrading view, traversing all she had theretofore preached
and tried to practice. But she had only to pause to have her heart
aching for him and her thoughts wandering in speculations about him or
memories of him.
Her friends--Joan, Evelyn, Theresa--wondered at the radical changes in
her, at her abstraction, her nervousness, her outbursts of bitterness.
She shocked Joan and Evelyn, both now married, with mockeries at
marriage, at love, at every sentiment of which they took a serious
view. One day--at Joan’s, after a tirade against the cruelty,
selfishness, and folly of bringing children into the world--she
startled her by snatching up the baby and burying her face in its
voluminous skirts and bursting into a storm of sobs and tears.
“What is it, Emmy?” asked Joan, taking away the baby as he, recovering
from his amazement, set up a lusty-lunged protest against such conduct
and his enforced participation therein.
Emily dried her eyes and fell to laughing as hysterically as she had
wept. “Poor baby,” she said. “Let me take him again, Joan.” And she
soon had him quiet, and staring at a large heart-shaped locket which
she slowly swung to and fro just beyond the point, or rather, the cap,
of his little lump of a nose. “I’m in a bad way, Joan,” she went on. “I
can’t tell you. Telling would do no good. But my life is in a wretched
tangle, and I don’t see anything ahead but--but--tangles. And as I
can’t get what I want, I won’t take anything at all.”
“You are old enough to know better. Your good sense teaches you that if
you did get what you want, you’d probably wish you hadn’t.”
“That’s the trouble,” said Emily, shaking her head sadly at the baby.
“My good sense in this case teaches me just the reverse. I’ve seen a
man--a real man this time--_my_ man morally, mentally, physically. He’s
a man with a mind, and a heart, and what I call a conscience. He’s been
through--oh, everything. And error and suffering have made him what he
is--a man. He’s a man to look up to, a man to lean upon, a man to--to
care for.” Her expression impressed Joan’s skepticism. “Do you wonder?”
she said.
“No.” Joan looked away. “But--forget--put him out of your life. You are
trying to--aren’t you?”
“To forget? No--I can’t even try. It would be useless. Besides, who
wants to forget? And there’s always a _chance_.”
“At least”--Joan spoke with conviction--“you’re not likely to _do_
anything--absurd.”
“That’s true--unfortunately. _I_ couldn’t be trusted. I’m afraid.
But--” Emily’s laugh was short and cynical--“my man can.”
“He must be a--a sort of prig.” Joan felt suspicious of a masculine
that could stand out against the temptation of such a feminine as her
adored Emily.
“See! Even you couldn’t be trusted. But no, he’s not a prig--just plain
honourable and decent, in an old-fashioned way that exasperates me--and
thrills me. That’s why I say he’s a man to lean upon and believe in.”
Emily felt better for having talked with some one about him and went
away almost cheerful. But she was soon down again, and time seemed
only to aggravate her unhappiness. “I must be brave,” she said. “But
why? Why should I go on? He has Mary--I have nothing.” And the great
dread formed in her mind--the dread that he was forgetting her. If
not, why did he not seek her out, at least reassure himself with his
own eyes that she was still alive? And she had to look steadily at her
memory-pictures, at his eyes, and the set of his jaw, to feel at all
hopeful that he was remembering, was living his real life for her.
* * * * *
Three weeks after Emily’s departure, on a Thursday night, Stilson
left his assistant in charge and went home at eleven. As he entered
his house--in West Seventy-third street near the river--he saw
strange wraps on the table in the entrance-hall, heard voices in the
drawing-room. He went on upstairs. As he was hurrying into evening
dress he suddenly paused, put on a dressing-gown, and went along the
hall. He gently turned the knob of a door at the end and entered. There
was a dim light, as in the hall, and he could at once make out all the
objects in the room.
He crossed to the little bed, and stood looking down at Mary--her
yellow hair in a coil on top of her head, one small hand clinched and
thrust between the pillow and her cheek, the other lying white and limp
upon the coverlid. He stood there several minutes without motion. When
he reappeared in the bright light of his dressing-room, his face was
calm, a complete change from its dark and drawn expression of a few
minutes before.
He was soon dressed, and descended to the drawing-room. Like the hall,
like the whole house, like its mistress, this room was rather gaudy,
but not offensive or tasteless. The most conspicuous objects in its
decoration were two pictures. One was a big photograph of a slim,
ethereal-looking girl--the dancer he had loved and married. She was
dressed to reveal all those charms of youth apparently just emerging
from childhood--a bouquet of budding flowers fresh from the garden in
the early morning. The other was a portrait of her by a distinguished
artist--the face and form of the famous dancer of the day. The face
was older and bolder, with the sleepy sensuousness and sadness that
characterised her now. The neck and arms were bare; and the translucent
and clinging gown, aided by the pose, offered, yet refused, a view of
every line of her figure.
Marguerite was sitting almost under the portrait; on the same sofa was
Victoria Fenton, looking much as when Stilson first met her--on her
trip to America in the autumn in which Emily returned from Paris. She
still had to the unobservant that charm of “the unawakened”--as if
there were behind her surface-beauty not good-natured animalism, but a
soul awaiting the right conjurer to rouse it to conscious life.
Marlowe was seated on the arm of a chair, smoking a cigarette. He was
dressed carefully as always, and in the latest English fashion. He had
an air of prosperity and contented indifference. His once keen face
was somewhat fat and, taken with his eyes and mouth, suggested that
his wife’s cardinal weakness had infected him. Stilson was late and
they went at once to supper--Marlowe and Miss Fenton had been invited
for supper because that was the only time convenient for all these
night-workers.
“You are having a great success?” said Stilson to Victoria. She was
exhibiting at the Lyceum in one of Joan’s plays which had been partly
rewritten by Marlowe.
“Yes--the Americans are good to me--so generous and friendly,” replied
Victoria. “Of course the play is poor. I couldn’t have done anything
with it if George hadn’t made it over so cleverly.”
Stilson smiled. Banning, the dramatic critic, had told him that her
part was beyond Miss Fenton, and that only her stage-presence and
magnetic voice saved her from failure. “You players must have a
mournful time of it with these stupid playwrights,” he said with safe
sarcasm.
“You can’t imagine!” Victoria flung out her long, narrow white hand in
a stage-gesture of despair. “And they are so ungrateful after we have
created their characters for them and have given them reputation and
fortune.”
Stilson noted that Marlowe was listening with a faint sneer. His
manner towards his wife was a surface-politeness that too carelessly
concealed his estimate of her mental limitations. Stilson’s manner
toward “Miss Feronia”--he called her that more often than he called
her Marguerite--was almost distant courtesy, the manner of one who
tenaciously maintains an impenetrable wall between himself and another
whose relations to him would naturally be of the closest intimacy. And
while Victoria was self-absorbed, obviously never questioning that her
husband was her admirer and devoted lover, Marguerite was nervously
attentive to Stilson’s words and looks, at once delighted and made
ill-at-ease by his presence.
Her eyes were by turns brilliant and stupidly dull. Either a stream
of words was issuing from between her shut teeth or her lids were
drooped and she seemed to be falling asleep. Marlowe recognised the
morphine-eater and thought he understood why Stilson was gloomy and
white. Victoria ate, Marguerite talked, and the two men listlessly
smoked. At the first opportunity they moved together and Marlowe began
asking about the _Democrat_ and his acquaintances there.
“And what has become of Miss Bromfield?” he asked, after many other
questions.
“She’s gone to a magazine,” replied Stilson, his voice straining to be
colourless. But Marlowe did not note the tone and instantly his wife
interrupted:
“Yes, what has become of Miss Bromfield--didn’t I hear George asking
after her? You know, Mr. Stilson, I took George away from her. Poor
thing, it must have broken her heart to lose him.” And she vented her
empty affected stage-laugh.
Colour flared in the faces of both the men, and Stilson went to the
open fire and began stirring it savagely.
“Pray don’t think I encouraged my wife to that idea,” Marlowe said,
apparently to Marguerite. “It’s one of her fixed delusions.”
Victoria laughed again. “Oh, Kilboggan told me all about you two--in
Paris and down at Monte Carlo. He hears everything. I forgot it until
you spoke her name. ‘Pasts’ don’t interest me.”
Marlowe flushed angrily and his voice was tense with convincing
indignation as he said, “I beg you, Victoria, not to put Miss Bromfield
in this false light. No one but a--a Kilboggan would have concocted and
spread such a story about such a woman.”
His tone forbade further discussion, and there was a brief, embarrassed
silence. Then Marguerite went rattling on again. Stilson came back
to the table and lit a cigarette with elaborate and deliberate care.
Marlowe continued to stare to the front, his face expressionless, but
his eyes taking in Stilson’s expression without seeming to do so.
They were talking again presently, but each was constrained toward
the other. Marlowe knew that Stilson was suspecting him, but, beyond
being flattered by the tribute to his former “gallantry,” he did not
especially care--had he not said all that he honourably could say?
Emily, not he, had insisted upon secrecy.
As for Stilson, his brain seemed to be submerged in a plunge of boiling
blood. Circumstances of Marlowe’s and Emily’s relations rose swiftly
one upon another, all linking into proof. “How can I have been so
blind?” he thought.
The Marlowes did not linger after supper. Marguerite went to bed and
Stilson shut himself in his own suite. He unlocked and opened a drawer
in the table in his study. He drew from under several bundles of
papers the sketch of Emily which the _Democrat_ had reproduced with
her despatch from the Furnaceville strike. He looked contempt and hate
at the dreamy, strong yet sweet, young face. “So you are Marlowe’s
cast-off?” he said with a sneer. “And I was absurd enough--to believe
in you--in any one.”
He flung the picture into the fire. Then he sat in the big chair, his
form gradually collapsing and his face taking on that expression of
misery which seemed natural to its deep lines and strong features.
“And when Mary grows up,” he said aloud, “no doubt she too--” But he
did not clearly finish the thought. He shrank ashamed from the stain
with which he in his unreasoning anguish had smirched that white
innocence.
After a while he reached into the fireplace and took from the dead
coals in the corner the cinder of the picture. Very carefully he drew
it out and dropped it into an envelope. That he sealed and put away in
the drawer.