FATE GOES A-FISHING
Roger told me afterward that he literally could not say if it were
five seconds or five minutes that he looked into the girl's eyes. He
has since leaned to the opinion that it was nearer five minutes,
because even the news-woman stared at him and the passing street boys
had already begun to collect. Some subconscious realisation of this
finally enabled him to drag his eyes away, very much as one drags
himself awake when he must, and to realise the picture he presented--a
dazed man confronting an extraordinarily lovely girl with her fist
full of banknotes on a Broadway kerbstone. An interested cabby caught
his eye, wagged his whip masterfully, wheeled up to them and with an
apparently complete grasp of the situation whirled them off through a
side street with never so much as a "Where to, sir?"
And so he found himself alone with an unknown beauty in a hansom cab,
for all the world like a mysterious hero of melodrama, and Roger hated
melodrama and was never mysterious in all his life, to say nothing of
disliking mystery in anyone connected with him. He says he was
extremely angry at this juncture and I believe him.
"What is your name?" he asked shortly. "Have you no parents or friends
to protect you from the consequences of this crazy performance? Where
do you live?"
"My name is Margarita," she replied directly and pleasantly, "I never
had but one parent and he died a few days ago. I live by the sea."
An ugly thrill shot down his spine. No healthy person likes to be
alone with a mad woman, and under a brilliant fleeting light he
studied her curiously only to receive the certain conviction that
whatever his companion might be, she was not mad. Her slate-blue eyes
were calm and bright, her lips rather noticeably firm for all their
curves--and the mad woman's mouth bewrayeth her inevitably under
scrutiny. Nor was she drugged into some passing vacancy of mind: her
whole atmosphere breathed a perfectly conscious control of her
movements, however misguided the event might prove them. Before this
conviction he hesitated slightly.
"You have another name, however," he said gently, "and what do you
mean by the sea? What sea?"
For it occurred to him that although her English was perfect, she
might be an utter stranger to the country, unthinkably abandoned, with
sufficient means to salve her betrayer's conscience.
"Is there more than one sea, then?" she inquired of him with interest.
"I thought there was only mine. It is a very large one with high
waves--and cold," she added as an after-thought.
Roger gasped. "You did not tell me your other name," he said.
"Josephine," she replied readily, pronouncing the name in the French
manner.
"But you have another still?"
"Yes. Dolores," she said, with an evidently accustomed Spanish accent.
"And the last name?" he persisted in despair, noting with some busy
corner of his mind that they were drifting down Fifth Avenue.
"That is all there are," she assured him, "surely three different
names are sufficient for one person? I do not use the last two--only
Margarita."
Roger squared his shoulders, took the banknotes from her unresisting
hand and gravely folded them into her bag before he spoke again.
"Listen to me, Miss Margarita," he said slowly and with exaggerated
articulation, as one speaks to a child, "what was your father's name?
What did the people in the town you live in call him?"
"I told you we lived by the sea--did you forget?" she answered, a
shade reprovingly. "There is no town at all. And there are no people.
We live alone."
"But your servants must have called him something?" he persisted.
"Hester called my father 'sir' and the boy cannot talk, of course,"
she said.
"Why not?"
"Because he is dumb. His name is Caliban," she added hastily, "and he
has no other, only that one."
"What is Hester's name?" Roger demanded doggedly.
"Hester Prynne," said Margarita Josephine Dolores, "and I have had
nothing to eat since the man with the shining buttons gave me meat
between bread a great many hours ago. I wish I might see another such
man. He might be willing to give me more. Will you look out and tell
me if you see one?"
"For heaven's sake," Roger cried, "you are hungry! You should have
said so before--why didn't you?"
He called out a name to the cabman who took them quickly to a place
now called "the old one," because the new one is filled with people
who endeavour consistently to look newer than they are, I suppose. The
wine is newer certainly, and the manners. At this place, then, in a
quaint old corner, they found themselves, and Roger bespoke a meal
calculated to please a young woman far more exigent than this lonely
dweller by the sea was likely to be. The clearest of soups, the driest
of sherry in a tiny glass, something called by the respectful and
understanding waiter "_sole frite_," which was at any rate, quite as
good as if it had been that, a hot and savoury _poulet roti_--and
Roger, who had been too busy to take luncheon, looked about him,
contentedly well fed, rested his eyes with the clean, coarse linen,
the red wine in its straw basket that had come with the _poulet_, the
quiet, worn fittings of the little old-world place, and realised with
a shock of surprise that his companion had not spoken a word since the
meal began.
This was obviously not because she was famished, though she had the
healthy hunger of the creature not yet done with growing, but because,
simply, she felt no necessity for speech. She was evidently thinking,
for her eyes had the fixed absorption of a child's who dreams over his
bread and milk, but conversation she had none. He studied her, amused
partly, partly lost in her beauty, for indeed she was beautiful. She
had a pure olive skin, running white into the neck--oh, the back of
Margarita's neck! That tender nape with its soft, nearly blonde locks
that curled short about it below the heavy waves of what she called
her "real hair." That was chestnut, dark brown at night. Nature had
given her long dark lashes with perfect verisimilitude, but had at the
last moment capriciously decided against man's peace and hidden behind
them, set deep behind them under flexible Italian brows, those curious
slate-blue eyes that fixed her face in your mind inalterably. You
could not forget her. I know, because I have been trying for twenty
years.
"You are not, I take it, accustomed to dining out, Miss Margarita?"
said Roger, amused, contented, ignorant of the cause of his sudden
sense of absolute _bien etre_, or attributing it, man like, to his
good dinner.
"Oh, yes," she answered, "I dine out very often. I like it better."
He bit his lip with quick displeasure; she was merely eccentric, then,
not naive. For like every other man Roger detested eccentric women. It
has always been a marvel to me that women of distinct brain capacity
so almost universally fail to realise that we like you better
fashionable, even, than eccentric. You do not understand why, dear
ladies: you think it must be that we prefer fashion to brains, but
indeed it is not so. It is because to be fashionable is for you to be
normal, at least, that we tolerate your sheeplike marches and
counter-marches across the plain of society.
"Where do you dine when you dine out?" he inquired coldly, to trap her
at last into some explanation.
"On the rocks," she answered serenely, "or under the trees. Sometimes
on the sand close to the water. I like it better than in the house."
Roger experienced a ridiculous sense of relief.
"Do you dine alone?" he asked and she answered quietly,
"Of course. My father always ate by himself, and Hester, too. Caliban
will never let anyone see him eat: I have often tried, but he hides
himself."
The waiter brought them at this point an ivory-white salad of _endive_
set with ruby points of beet, drenched in pure olive-oil, and of this
soothing luxury Margarita consumed two large plates in dreamy silence.
"I like this food," she remarked at last, "I like it better than
Hester's."
Roger grew literally warm with satisfaction. He was still smiling when
she spooned out a great mouthful of the delicate ice before her and
under his amazed eyes set her teeth in it.
The horror of that humiliating scene woke him, years afterward,
through more than one clammy midnight. In one second the peaceful
dining-room was a chattering, howling reign of terror. For Margarita,
with a choking cry of rage and anguish, threw the ice with terrible
precision into the bland face of the waiter who had brought it; threw
her glass of water with an equal accuracy into the wide-open eyes of
the head waiter, who appeared instantly; threw Roger's wine-glass full
into his own horrified face as he rose to catch her death-dealing
hand, and lifting with the magnificent single-armed sweep of a Greek
war-goddess her chair from behind her, stood facing them, glaring
silently, a slate-eyed Pallas gloriously at bay!
The red wine poured down Roger's face like blood; the force of the
blow nearly stunned him, but by a supreme effort he bit furiously at
his tongue and the pain steadied him. As he swept the table over with
a crash and wrenched the chair from her hand (and he took his strength
for it) he became aware that the angry excitement behind his back, the
threatening babel, had subsided to long-drawn sighs of pity, and
realised with a sort of disgusted relief that the blow he had himself
suffered from this panting, writhing maenad had somehow changed the
situation and that he was an object of horrified sympathy. Mercifully,
the room was scantily filled, for it was early, and his curt
explanation was accepted in respectful silence.
"Mademoiselle is--is not responsible for her act, I beg you to
believe," he said grimly, white with humiliation and pain. "I beg you
will accept ..."
The two waiters pocketed a week's earnings in voluble deprecation, the
proprietor shrugged his excitement away into an admirable regret, the
diners wrenched their eyes from Margarita's face and affected to see
nothing as Roger buttoned her cheapish vague-coloured jacket around
her and ordered her sternly to straighten her hat. Her fingers
literally trembled with rage, her soft, round breasts, strangely
distinct in outline to his fingers as he strained the tight jacket
over them, rose and fell stormily; in a troubled flash of memory he
seemed to be handling some throbbing, shot bird. His own clumsiness
and strange, heady elation he attributed to the shock of the wine in
his face.
In an incredibly short time the table was upright, the debris removed,
the room, except for the indefinable, electric sense of recent tragedy
that hovers over such scenes, much as it had been. Roger had carried,
fortunately for him, a light overcoat on his arm, and this would hide
his white, stained triangle of vest with a little management.
Grasping Margarita by the arm he led her out of the room, and for the
first time questioned her.
"Are you mad?" he muttered. "What do you mean by such a performance?"
"That man," she answered, her voice vibrating like a swept
violoncello, "is a devil. Did you not see what he gave me? It was not
food at all, but freezing snow. Snow should not be in a glass, but on
the ground. It is plain that he wishes to kill me."
Her resonant voice filled every corner of the room; it was impossible
for anyone in it to miss the situation, and with a sudden inspiration
Roger spoke with a special distinctness to the proprietor, noticing
that the dozen persons at the tables were obviously French, and using
that language.
"Mademoiselle is but recently come out of the convent," said he. "She
has lived always in the provinces and has never had the honour of
tasting such admirable forms of dessert as Monsieur offers his
patrons."
The proprietor bowed; an extraordinary mixture of expressions played
over his countenance.
"That sees itself, Monsieur," he replied. "The affair is already
forgotten. I have summoned a closed carriage for Monsieur."
And thus it was that Roger found himself for the second time in a
carriage with Margarita Josephine Dolores, but with a great difference
in his attitude toward that young person. It is a fact possibly
curious but certainly undeniable, that when one receives a wine-glass
full in the face at the hands of an acquaintance, however recent, this
acquaintance is placed immediately upon terms of a certain intimacy
with one; the ice, at least, is broken. An unconscious conviction of
this coloured Roger's tone and shone in his eyes.
"You must never do such a thing as that, Margarita," he said, "that
was a terrible thing to do."
"It was a terrible thing that he did to me," replied Margarita
composedly.
"Nonsense," said Roger, "perfect nonsense! The man meant you no harm.
He brought you only what I had ordered for you."
"You! You told him to try to kill me?" cried this unbelievable
Margarita, and turning in her seat with the swiftness of a panther she
slapped him, a stinging, biting blow, flat across his cheek. A tornado
of answering rage whirled him out of himself and seizing her wrists,
he bent them behind her back.
If I seem to be unwarrantably acquainted with Roger's emotions at this
crisis, it is only because I understand them from experience, not
because he analysed them at length for me. I too have been in
conflict, real physical conflict, with Margarita. I too have felt that
old unpitying frenzy, that unreasonable delight in vanquishing her
furious strength. Something in Roger--I know how suddenly, how
amazingly--strained and snapped; the old bonds of civilisation (which
with the Anglo-Saxon has always been feminisation) burst and dropped
away, and the lust of physical ascendency caught him and swept the
pretty legends of moral control and chivalrous forbearing into the
dust bins and kitchen middens of nature's great domestic economy. What
was it in Margarita that drew that old, primitive passion, that
ancient world-stuff out of its decorous grave, all planted with
orchids and maiden-hair, that woke it with a rough shout in us and
offered us at the same time its natural gratification--a fierce fight
and a certain victory? God knows and knows better, perhaps, than the
Devil that Roger's ancestors would have been quick to credit with the
exclusive knowledge.
Civilisation and her mysterious daughter whom we call nowadays Culture
have tried to teach us that golf and lawn tennis and, for the
lustiest, fencing, or the control of a spirited horse, must best
translate in your house-broken citizen of forty the heat that surged
up in Roger then; but to most of us it becomes once or twice apparent
in our sidewalk career, our delicate journey from mahogany sideboards
to mahogany beds, that this teaching is idiotic to the last degree,
however strictly the police have enforced it; and we know that only
the man that forged with clenched teeth after Atalanta, tenderly
hungry for all her uncaptured whiteness, brutally driving the pace
till her heart burst in her side if need be, tasted the supremest
ecstasy of the fighting that lifts us that one tantalising step above
the savage--the fight for joy. I am convinced that it is after some
one of those red glimpses that a certain proportion of us every year
of the world's life throws his chest weights out of window, settles
his tailor's bill, and is off for Africa or Greenland with a hatchet
and a cartridge belt. We become thus inscrutable to our maiden aunts
and it may be to ourselves, a little, when we discover that it was not
quite exactly the struggle for food and shelter, the fight against the
cliffs and elements and animals that we went out into the wilderness
to seek. But we are in any event less unreasonable than those belated
and blindfolded ones among us who translate the implacable desire too
literally and lose its meaning utterly in the garbled text of the
midnight city streets.
Roger literally fell upon this vixenish, beautiful creature with the
perfectly definite intention of shaking her until her teeth chattered
in her head, but he did not achieve this result, for the reason that
Margarita fought like a demon; fought, her hands being pinioned, with
her supple back, her strong shoulders and her rigid knees. It was like
struggling with a malicious little girl of six and a stubborn boy of
sixteen rolled into one. She did not cry nor chatter but set her teeth
and directed all her superb energy to the actual business in hand. His
idea of grasping both her wrists with one hand was out of the
question; for two or three delicious, angry moments he essayed this,
enraged, amused, breathing hard, while she strained and bent with all
her magnificent youth against him, and the years and the rust of the
years fell off from him in the heartsome contest, with victory certain
but not easy, her submission sure--but not yet! Some subterranean
spring welled up in him, some trickle from the everlasting caves that
will only be completely levelled over when humanity, decadent,
crumbles into them and returns to the primal clay, and he knew that
for these few gleaming seconds, snatched from the rest of the greyish
hours and weeks, he had been made and destined.
You will, of course, perceive that all this is what I felt when my
little turn came; Roger never talked this sort of thing in his life.
But unless I am vastly mistaken, he lived it, in those galloping
quick-breathed minutes, before he pinioned Margarita, her hands behind
her back, with one arm, and held her fast about the knees with the
other. Crushed against him, dead weight, she lay, her unconquered eyes
sea black now, flat against his, her heart labouring heavily, under
his relentless, banding arm.
"Will you be good, you absurd little wildcat? Will you?" he demanded,
his voice shaking with laughter and triumph. (And you need not be too
ready, O exponent of tolerant hearthstone chivalry, to smile at the
triumph! V--l, whom Margarita detested, practically refused to sing
_Siegfried_ to her _Bruenhilde_, because, he said, she made him
ridiculous with her virginal strugglings and got him out of breath
besides! And he could lift and carry Lilli Lehmann.)
"Will you?" Roger repeated, not loosening his hold of her, for he felt
her muscles tense as wire under the soft flesh.
"No, I will not," said Margarita. "I hate you. I will die before I
will obey you."
And at this foolish and melodramatic remark, Roger Bradley, descendant
of all the Puritans (Whistler used to say that he was by Plymouth Rock
out of Mayflower--alas, dear Jimmie!), a respected bachelor, of
exemplary habits and no entanglements, deliberately, and with a
happy, heartfelt oath, kissed Margarita, at length and somewhat
brutally, I fear, in a hired four-wheeler at the junction of
Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue. And of his sensations at this
point I cannot speak, because I never had them. I never kissed
Margarita but once and then very quickly, because I was convinced that
upon my subsequent speed depended my ever seeing her alive again. And
she did not struggle at all, because, as a matter of fact, it was
perfectly immaterial to her whether I kissed her or not. But that was
not the case with Roger's kiss.