THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL
THE reaction from the strain of her fight with her best friend and
lover left Ellen West in a condition of collapse. The bitterness of the
first big defeat in her impulsive life was sickening.
“The fool--the conventional weakling,” she exclaimed in disgust.
Her sense of humiliation was keen. She had offered herself in abject
submission--to give herself freely without condition to a man who
had refused to take the gift. It was maddening! That her beauty had
fascinated him she knew by intuition keener than reason. And yet her
charms had fallen short of victory.
Her soul rose in rebellion against the shame of his rejection, of his
assumption of moral superiority.
“His ignorance and stupidity!” she hissed.
Waves of helpless anger swept her. And yet the more she considered his
stern refusal the more reasonable and honorable from the man’s point of
view it seemed. In spite of her creed a sneaking admiration persisted
in the back of her indignant mind.
At last this admiration dared to come into full consciousness. She
stamped on it with indignant fury. Her anger at her own inherited
weakness was even greater than her wrath against the man who had
rejected her generous offer.
“It’s true!” she muttered. “Woman has no soul--she’s merely a mass of
gelatine on which the will of man acts and reacts. I’ll die before I’ll
submit!”
A faint but distinct tap on her wall from Field’s library stopped the
train of her angry thought.
He had rapped many messages during the past month and had called
many times from the balcony rail in vain. She had forgotten his very
existence in the unfolding of her love for Manning.
She listened with an amused smile.
“This is old reliable, fair lady,” he was saying. “Every day I call in
vain. Have pity, pray! Your humble slave awaits you on the backyard
fence--your faithful Tomascat!”
She rose with a light laugh, walked to the rear window and looked out.
He had just leaped on the balcony rail. His imitation of a cat was
perfect.
“O-o--Maria--M-a-r-i-i-a!” he called.
“Come over, Tomascat,” she answered, “and cheer me up!”
“I come on the run!” he cried as he leaped from the rail and re-entered
his apartment.
In two minutes he was at her door.
“You needn’t apologize, Ellen,” he began.
“I’m not apologizing, sir!” she answered quickly.
“I say you _needn’t_ apologize for your shameful treatment of the
man who really loves you. I know all about your dreadful carrying-on
with that other fellow.”
She waved him to a seat and sat down facing him.
“And from the length of your face this morning I can guess the ending
of the sad story.”
“Indeed?”
“Oh, yes indeedy,” he continued glibly, “for the past month I’ve held
myself aloof.”
“Quite so; you’ve only rapped once a day.”
“Exactly. I used to rap twice. And, moreover, I used to come right up
and knock at your door with or without an invitation at times. Not once
have I done this in thirty days. I repeat, I have held myself aloof,
not because I feared the outcome of this interloper’s attentions, but
because I thought it best to let the affair run its course--as in
measles and all immature love.”
“I like that!” Ellen broke in.
“I’m glad you do. I hoped your mind was still sufficiently alert to get
it. Still, you never can tell. The kind of affair in which you have
been floundering has a most benumbing effect on the female mind.”
“Thank you!”
“Don’t mention it. No fee expected. My advice is purely friendly, not
legal. Would you mind telling me the exact stage at which you have
arrived with our young friend of bucolic aroma?”
She looked at him a moment defiantly.
“Not in the least. We have declared our love. He asked me to marry him.
I refused and offered myself without a marriage ceremony.”
“And he indignantly refused?”
“He did.”
“I knew he would--the poor rube. And I have come into the kingdom for
such a time as this! I alone can save you from folly. You are, after
all, dear Ellen, supremely feminine in your attempt to claim the
privileges of man----”
“You’re a liar, Randy----”
“I deny the allegation, but I will not spurn the ‘alligator’! On the
other hand I draw nearer. I make myself plain. You refuse my offer of a
free alliance?”
“Indignantly.”
“Just so; although I am your comrade in creative art, our tastes are
similar, the fiber of character the same----”
“I don’t love you----”
“You say that because you don’t know the meaning of love. There is
no true love save the love of comrade and workers. All else is blind
impulse. The impulse to be a father--the impulse to be a mother,----”
“Pish--tush!”
“Pish--tush yourself! I’m telling you the deepest secrets of human
life. You believe in a free alliance. I offer it. I am a philosopher of
artistic and creative calling. So are you. We are perfectly fitted for
happiness in each other’s society, in each other’s love. You reject me
like a silly school girl--why?”
“Because I don’t love you--fool!”
“Because you don’t love me in the idiotic way of the old romantic
poets--the way the boy loves, for example. He swears to make you a
goddess and will end by making you his slave.”
“I’ll never marry him!”
“Legally, no. You have worked out a logical creed of individual freedom
from purely legal restraints, but what you’re really trying to do is
to bind him and bind yourself with a new and more aggravated form of
matrimony.”
“What do you mean?”
“Simply what I say. That the tyranny into which you would lure this
poor simp is more ‘holy,’ more ‘sacred,’ more galling in its chains
than the old ceremony. In it you have raised the old ceremony to the
nth power.”
“Our love would be as free as the beat of the human heart.”
“But you propose to so smother the human heart in the intimacy of
this personal freedom that it can’t beat. You forswear the chains
of matrimony for a free alliance whose tyranny you intend to make
ten times more tyrannical than the old conventional marriage. Why
an ‘alliance’? An alliance is made of agreements and promises and
obligations. It’s just another kind of iron-clad marriage you’re trying
to impose on the world in the name of freedom. It’s a fake, child--a
rank fake. Come, have common sense. You and I are mates, in mind and
body.”
She shook her head.
“It’s true. I offer you the real free alliance without bonds, without
promises, without agreements. I offer the glory and beauty of love
without chains of any kind. We will work together. We will roam the
fields together. We will think high thoughts and do great deeds in
creative art as chums and comrades without fighting, hating, or
quarrelling or getting on one another’s nerves. Divest yourself of the
obsession of sex. Woman will never be free as man until she does this.
Use your magnificent sex endowment as an inspiration in life. You are
still making it the supreme end of life. You understand me?”
“Yes--go home, Randy--you tire me.”
“All right. I’ve told you the truth. Remember old reliable is your
neighbor. I’m your best bet in life. I recommend myself highly----”
“Go home!”
With a grin and a friendly nod he left her brooding.