TRAPPED
ELLEN West tossed for an hour in her luxurious bed unable to sleep. The
luxury of this bed was a personal fad which contradicted apparently
the austerity of her views of life and yet was strictly a development
of her fundamental trait. Self-development was the keynote of her new
philosophy of life--the development of the individual character to the
furthermost reach of every power.
Ellen possessed a voluptuous body. Its beauty was beyond question. Her
capacity to see, hear, feel, taste and sniff the daintiest perfumes of
the Garden of Life was a power of which she was both proud and jealous.
Life was a big serious problem.
But in the meantime she must _live_ in order to know life’s
meaning--live to her finger-tips. She was doing it and she meant to
continue. There were personal luxuries which added a hundred-fold to
her capacity to feel and realize life. Perfect rest for her body was
one of these personal luxuries.
The bed on which she slept had cost more than any three pieces of
furniture in the room. The rails and stanchions were so heavy they
felt like lead. The lacquered gold on the surface was wrought by the
hand of an artist into quaint, dim pictures of a dreamland mythology.
This bedstead had been imported from Europe by a dealer in artistic
furnishings. He claimed that it had been made by hand for an exiled
king, whose love-affairs had caused an international scandal.
In half-dreaming, half-waking moments her vivid imagination had
pictured the beauty of the woman for whom it had been built and
wondered at the tragedy of her fate since her royal lover’s exile.
To-night the magic of this bed had failed to work its spell. Its
caressing touch, instead of soothing to sleep, fired her imagination to
new flights of fancy and brighter visions of life.
She reviewed each article of her new creed and renewed her oath of
allegiance only to come up smiling against the vital, appealing young
person who had chatted to her for an hour about his unimportant self
and completely upset her for the night.
What an absurd thing real life was after all! This boy was real--the
real human bundle of hopes and dreams and fear and contradictions. To
him the modern feminist movement meant little or nothing. It was merely
a current theme about which he could write a keen satire, perhaps, and
advance himself in his chosen career. It was easy to see that he was
studying her more as a specimen of the new female than as an individual
girl whom he might love or hate. With his provincial education it was
certain that he held the oldest old-fashioned ideas about the girl of
his dreams and the home he would build--a gilded cage, no doubt, he
pictured it--but still a cage.
The certainty of this old-fashioned ideal wrought into the inner fiber
of his being angered her for a moment.
“Bah! what do I care what the young snip thinks!” she exclaimed.
She laughed at the earnestness of her anger, tossed the eiderdown
coverlet and snowy sheets aside and sprang to her feet.
“It’s no use trying to sleep, anyhow!”
She slipped her toes into a dainty pair of slippers, drew a heavy
fleece-lined robe about her form, threw on the electric light and sank
into an armchair beside her desk.
She had a writing-desk in every room of her studio apartment. When the
spirit moved she sat down and wrote. She wrote so many hours a day,
spirit or no spirit, and usually enticed the spirit to come. But it
came unbidden at times and she always answered the call.
She seized a pencil and pad and wrote the heading of an essay which
she had planned on the “Significance to Man of the New Woman’s Demand
for a Single Standard of Morals.” The spirit refused to come. Her mind
refused point-blank to work.
She lit a cigarette and smoked in silence. Always back to the new
obsession--the dark, serious face and straight, slender figure of Ralph
Manning!
She rose in rage, flecked the ashes from her cigarette and paced the
floor. The cigarette burned out and scorched her finger. With a gesture
of annoyance she threw it into the lacquered ash-tray.
“Of course, he’ll disapprove cigarettes!”
She laughed indignantly.
“Of course--of course!”
She smoked furiously for half an hour, lighting one cigarette after
another, in sheer defiance of the opinion of any man on earth.
How well she knew his moth-eaten line of argument.
“Somehow I don’t think it nice for a girl to smoke.”
She could hear him saying it in the old, half-apologetic way--ten times
more insulting and infuriating than a straightforward denunciation. And
how she hated that little word “nice”! Thank God, she had outgrown the
infantile ambition for such an extinction of character!
“Why worry over nothing,” she muttered. “I can bend him to my will if I
wish----.” She paused and puffed a ring of cigarette smoke toward the
ceiling.
“Could I bend him?” she breathed.
Something of the ring of steel she had caught once in the fiber of his
character when she had said something that squarely conflicted with his
ideals.
“Would I care anything for him,” she whispered, “if I could bend him as
I willed?”
She tried to face the question squarely in her woman’s soul and deep
down found the old ideal of the glorification of strength at the
basis of her consciousness of life. She could not imagine herself
in love with a weather-vane. She could not imagine herself in love
with a weakling, physical or mental. She shuddered at the thought of
surrendering herself to a weakling.
“There!” she cried, “I’ve caught myself redhanded mumbling the old
creed. Surrender, indeed! I’ll not ‘surrender’ to any man on this
earth, strong or weak, genius or fool.”
She closed her fine, strong jaw with a snap that meant business.
It angered her to think that for an instant she had even breathed the
word “surrender.” For modern woman the word no longer existed. It had
been stricken from human speech.
From her self-analysis one fact emerged clearly--she did not propose to
surrender herself to any man and yet she was positive that she would
have no respect for the man who would surrender to her.
She faced the situation from every point of view and the longer she
looked at it, the more acute became the sense of possible tragedy in
her love for this boy.
The trouble was that he was no mere boy.
He was exactly twenty-seven years old. There were but five days
difference in their ages. They were born in the same month, in the
same year, under the same star. She had recognized the fine quality of
his mind and the conquering, enthusiastic yet modest quality of his
personality. She knew that he would never go backward. She knew that
he would not stay long in the little room on the square. Such men were
born to rise. It was written in the book of life.
The one thought that haunted her imagination and became a sickening
fear was that she had been stricken with a foolish, unreasonable love
for a man who would not care for her. In nothing that he had said,
in nothing that he had done, in neither gesture nor tones of speech
nor quiver of eyelid or lip had he revealed the slightest personal
interest. And yet she had somehow leaped to the absurd conclusion that
his drawing toward her had been equally as strong as hers toward him.
She made up her mind to one thing quickly. She would set herself right
on the marriage question when he called in the evening. She would
express herself plainly. She would not mince words. She meant to shock
him and send him about his business at once if he began to show signs
of the usual masculine domineering love-making. It would be best for
all concerned that she strangle the impulse to love in the moment of
its birth rather than face the tragedy of quarrel and disagreement when
too late.
The decision soothed her mind. She went to bed and slept five hours.
She woke with a sense of freedom and elation in startling contrast to
the foreboding of the hours before sleep. Her mind was fresh and every
nerve a quiver with the joy of living. All sense of fear had vanished
and only the prospect of an early meeting with the tall young person
seemed to count.
She dressed with a langorous indifference to the call of work.
“I’ll rest a day anyhow,” she murmured before her mirror.
She was sorry she had worn the splendid gown at their first meeting. It
would be bad form to repeat that effective costume this evening. She
had intended to buy a new dress weeks ago, but neglected it in the rush
of work. She would take the day off and get it.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon before she awakened to the
ridiculous fact that she had wasted a day in an idiotic search for a
dress which she didn’t need.
“What a return to primitive woman!” she exclaimed in disgust.
She left the store with a quick, firm decision and walked down Fifth
Avenue to her apartment. In spite of her serious arraignment of her
feminine weakness she was foolishly happy. She could not help wondering
how many of the pretty girls she saw looking in the shop windows were
in love.
To think that she, Ellen West, orator, author and leader of modern
woman should fall in love with a callow country youth at first sight!
As a matter of fact, however, he was not “callow.”
The word didn’t fit him. He was serious. He had brains. He had a
trained mind in a trained body and he was master of both.
Yesterday she would have ridiculed the idea of love at first sight
as a physical and psychological impossibility. She would never have
acknowledged that such a thing could really happen to her if she were
not so unreasonably elated over the disturbing and idiotic fact.
She mounted the four flights of stairs in a state of ecstasy, which
gave wings to her feet.
She called her maid in tones of gaiety.
“Lay out my black jet evening gown, Dora!”
“You gwine out agin dis evenin’, Miss Ellen?”
“No, silly,” she laughed; “I’m going to stay in----”
She paused, leaned near the good-natured ebony face and whispered:
“Ma beau’s comin’ ter see me, chile!”
“Ah, g’long, Miss Ellen,” the maid giggled; “you done scared ’em all
ter death! I done lose heart. I don’t believe you’s ever gwine ter get
married nohow.”
“I’ve told you I wouldn’t.”
“Den what yer mean by a beau? Beau means business down South.”
“So do I, chile!” Ellen cried in mocking tones. “He’s a real sho’ nuff,
honest-ter-God beau, I tell ye!”
Dora laughed heartily at her mistress’s fine imitation of her dialect.
“Den de Lawd hab mercy on his po’ soul when you gets froo playin’ wid
him.”
“Maybe it’ll be my po’ soul this time,” she broke in seriously.
“Well, I recken not!” Dora protested.
“You never can tell, Dora; you never can tell.”
She dressed with unusual care and lazy deliberation. For the first time
in her life the art of dressing her beautiful body became a curiously
sacred thing. She felt the strange elation which swept her heart in
her first emotional experiences in the religion of her childhood. She
wondered what subtle connection there could be between the impulse of
love and the religious instinct.
She surveyed her superb figure before the mirror at last with a
sense of triumph. The black, clinging, filmy material had completely
transformed her from the shimmering silver vision of the night before.
As she studied the effects of the gleaming ivory of her perfect arms
against the somber background of the dress she knew instinctively that
he would like her better in it.
She was not surprised at his open-eyed admiration when he entered half
an hour later.
“You’ll pardon me one perfectly silly boyish speech, won’t you?” he
asked, smiling.
“Certainly, as many as you like.”
“I hardly knew you. The effect of that wonderful black dress is really
magic.”
“You like it?” she asked with the pride of a school-girl.
“It’s enchanting. It transforms your whole being. Its tragic, somber
note awes me. I’m afraid to speak to you, unless you reassure me.”
She lifted her finger in warning and studied him intently.
Was he in earnest? Or was he simply clever in his study of her
character that his analysis might be more searching in his article. She
wondered. At least she would be on her guard.
But something about his manner and his frank, engaging ways disarmed
her. In five minutes she was chattering like a school-girl on her first
vacation and he was delivering an endless string of confessions as if
his life depended on her knowing it all at one sitting.
Only once did she remember her determination to make a complete
declaration of her independence of man. It seemed too absurd to attempt
to shock this charming, fresh young fellow with her propaganda to-night.
Besides, the more she thought of it, the more foolish such a proceeding
would be. He might not really have the slightest personal interest
in her. He, too, was bent on self-development. His ambitions were
boundless. His career was the one big thing in the world. All this
chatter of his might be sheer egotism. Come to think of it, could there
be any other rational explanation of his eager attentions? She was a
notable figure in New York life. To call on her was an honor for an
unknown youth. She was taking it all too seriously.
She pulled herself up with a sharp jolt and told him it was time to go.
In fact, it was time to go. It was ten minutes past twelve o’clock!
Incredible! She looked at the clock a second time, unable to believe
her eyes. She had thought to call the time to go as a rebuke to his
presumption. It was, in fact, a confession of her complete surrender to
his charm.
He rose, blushed and looked hurt. He, too, glanced at the clock.
“I beg your pardon,” he apologized, “for keeping you so late with my
chatter. I had no idea what time it was. I forgot that you have serious
work to do to-morrow.”
She held his hand unconsciously for a moment at the door and caught
herself with a start. Again the utterly silly impulse came to kiss him
good-night. She closed the door suddenly, shocked with the fear that
she might do the fool thing on a resistless impulse.
She closed the door so quickly the young man’s heart sank with the sure
conviction that he had bored her beyond the hope of forgiveness.
She turned back into the room, shocked by the clear recognition of the
fact that she was firmly caught in the trap--the old, old trap which
nature sets for all the mothers of men!
It gripped her with a sense of strange foreboding.