IV. — IN THE EDGE OF BOHEMIA.
Howard lived in Washington Square, South. He had gone to a “furnished-room house” there because it was cheap. He staid because he was comfortable and was without a motive for moving.
It was the centre of the most varied life in New York. To the north lay fashion and wealth, to the east and west, respectability and moderate means; to the south, poverty and squalor, vice and crime. All could be seen and heard from the windows of his sitting room. In the evenings toward spring he looked out upon a panorama of the human race such as is presented by no other city in the world and by no other part of that city. Within view were Americans of all kinds, French and Germans, Italians and Austrians, Spaniards and Moors, Scandinavians and negroes, born New Yorkers and born citizens of most of the capitals of civilisation and semi-barbarism. There were actresses, dancers, shop girls, cocottes; touts, thieves, confidence-men, mission workers; artists and students from the musty University building, tramps and drunkards from the “barrel-houses” and “stale-beer shops;” and, across the square to the north, representatives of New York’s oldest and most noted families. To the west were apartment houses whence stiff, prim bookkeepers, floor-walkers, clerks and small shop-keepers issued with their families on Sundays, bound for church. There were other apartment houses—the most of them to the south—whence in the midnight hours came slattern servants and reckless looking girls in loose wrappers and high-heeled slippers, pitcher in hand, bound for the nearest saloon.
After dusk from early spring until late fall a multitude of interesting sounds mingled with the roar of the elevated trains to the west and south and the rumble of carriages in “the Avenue” to the north. Howard, reading or writing at his window on his leisure days, heard the young men and young women laughing and shouting and making love under the trees where the Washington Arch glistened in the twilight. Later came the songs—“I want you, my honey, yes I do,” or “Lu, Lu, how I love my Lu!”, or some other of the current concert-hall jingles. Many figures could be seen flitting about in the shadows. Usually these figures were in pairs; usually one was in white; usually at her waist-line there was a black belt that continued on until it was lost in the other and darker figure.
Scraps of a score of languages—curses, jests, terms of endearment—would float up to him. Then came the hours of comparative silence, with the city breathing softly and regularly, with the moon hanging low and the pale arch rising above the dark trees like a giant ghost. There would be an occasional drunken shout or shriek; a riotous roar of song from some staggering reveller making company for himself on the journey home; the heavy step of the policeman. Or perhaps the only sound to disturb the city’s sleep would be that soft tread, timid as a mouse’s, stealthy as a jackal’s—the tread of a lonely woman with draggled silk skirt and painted cheeks and eyes burning into the darkness, and a heart as bitter and as sad as no money, no home, no friends, no hope can make it.
Once he threw a silver dollar from his window to the sidewalk well in front of her. She did not see it flash downward but she heard it ring upon the walk. She rushed forward and twice kicked it away from her in her frenzy to get it. When her bare hand—or was it a claw?—at last closed upon it, she gave a low scream, looked slyly and fearfully about, then ran as if death were at her heels.
Soon after Howard was put “on space” he took the best suite of rooms in the house. It was a strange company which Mrs. Sands had gathered under her roof. Except Howard there was no one, not even Mrs. Sands herself, who did not have so much past that there was little left for future. Indeed, perhaps none of these storm-tossed or wrecked human craft had had more of a past than Mrs. Sands. There was no mistaking the significance of those deep furrows filled with powder and plastered with paint, those few hairs tinted and frizzed. But like all persons with real pasts Mrs. Sands and her lodgers kept the veil tightly drawn. They confessed to no yesterdays and they did not dare think of to-morrow. They were incuriously awaiting the impulse which was sure to come, sure to thrust them on downward.
A new lodger at Mrs. Sand’s usually took the best rooms that were to be had. Then, sometimes slowly, sometimes swiftly, came the retreat upward until a cubby-hole under the eaves was reached. Finally came precipitate and baggageless departure, often with a week or two of lodging unpaid. The next pause, if pause there was, would be still nearer the river-bed or the Morgue.
One morning when he had been living in Washington Square, South, about—three years, Howard was dressing hurriedly, the door of his sitting-room accidentally ajar. Through the crack he saw some one stooping over the serving tray which he had himself put outside his door when he had finished breakfast. He looked more closely. It was “the clergyman” from up under the eaves—an unfrocked priest, thin to emaciation, misery written upon his face even more deeply than weakness. He hastily bundled the bones of two chops and a bit of bread into a stained and torn handkerchief, and sprang away up the stairs toward his little hole at the roof.
Howard was in a hurry and so put off for the time action upon the natural impulse. When he came back at midnight, there was soon a knock at his door. He opened it and invited in the man at the threshold—a tall, strongly built, erect German, with a dissipated handsome face, heavily scarred from university duels.
“Pardon me for disturbing you,” said the German. His speech, his tone, his manner, left no doubt as to his breeding though they raised the gravest doubts as to his being willing to give a true account of why he had become a tenant in that lodging house.
“Will you have a cigarette and some whiskey?” inquired Howard.
The German’s glance lit and lingered upon the bottle of Scotch on the table. “Concentrated, double-distilled friendship,” said he as he poured out his drink.
“But a friend that drives all others away,” smiled Howard.
“I have found it of a very jealous disposition,” replied the German with a careless shrug of the shoulders and a lifting of the eyebrows. “But at least this friend has the grace to stay after it has driven the others away.”
“To stay until the last piece of silver is gone.”
“But what more does one expect of a friend? Besides, we are overlooking one friend—the one who helped our clerical fellow-lodger of the attic out of his troubles to-day.”
“His luck has turned?”
“Permanently. He shot himself this afternoon.”
“And only this morning I made up my mind to try to help him,” said Howard regretfully.
“You could not have hoped to succeed so well. His case needed something more than temporary expedient. But, to come to the point, I had a slight acquaintance with him. He left a note for me—mailed it just before he shot himself. In it he asked that I insert a personal in the Herald. Unfortunately I have not the money. I thought that you as a journalist might be able to suggest something.”
The German held out a slip of cheap writing paper on which was written: “Helen—when you see this it will be over—L.”
“A good story,” was Howard’s first thought, his news-instinct alert. And then he remembered that it was not for him to tell. “I will attend to this for you to-morrow.”
“Thank you,” said the German, helping himself to the whiskey. “Have you seen the new lodgers?”
“Those in the room behind me? Yes. I saw them at the front door as I came in.”
“They’re a queer pair—the youngest I’ve seen in this house. I’ve been wondering what tempest wrecked them on this forlorn coast so early in the voyage.”
“Why wrecked?”
“My dear sir, we are all—except you—wrecks here, all unseaworthy at least.”
“One of them was quite pretty, I thought,” said Howard, “the slender one with the black hair.”
“They are not mates. The other girl is of a different sort. She’s more used to this kind of life, at least to poverty. I fancy Miss Black-Hair looks on it as a lark. But she’ll find out the truth by the time she has mounted another story.”
“Here, to go up means to go down,” Howard said, weary of the conversation and wishing that the German would leave.
“They say that they’re sisters,” the German went on, again helping himself to the whiskey; “They say they have run away from home because of a stepmother and that they are going to earn their own living. But they won’t. They spend the nights racing about with a gang of the young wretches of this neighbourhood. They won’t be able to stand getting up early for work. And then——”
The German blew out a huge cloud of cigarette smoke, shrugged his shoulders and added: “Miss Black-Hair may get on up town presently. But I doubt it. The Tenderloin rarely recruits from down here.”
The bottle was empty and the German bowed himself out. As the night was hot, Howard opened the door a few moments afterward. At the other end of the short hall light was streaming through the open door of the room the two girls had taken. Before he could turn, there was a shadow and “Miss Black-Hair” was standing in her doorway:
“Oh,” she began, “I thought——”
Howard paused, looking at her. She was above the medium height—tall for a woman—and slender. Her loose wrapper, a little open at her round throat, clung to her, attracting attention to all the lines of her form. Her hair was indeed black, jet black, waving back from her forehead in a line of curving and beautiful irregularity. Her skin was clear and dark. There were deep circles under her eyes, making them look unnaturally large, pathetically weary. In repose her face was childish and sadly serious. When she smiled she looked older and pert, but no happier.
“I thought,” she continued with the pert, self-confident smile, “that you were my sister Nellie. I’m waiting for her.”
“You’re in early tonight,” said Howard, the circles under her eyes reminding him of what the German had told him.
“I haven’t slept much for a week,” the girl replied, “I’m nearly dead. But I won’t go to bed till Nellie comes.”
Howard was about to turn when she went on: “We agreed always to stay together. She broke it tonight. My fellow got too fresh, so I came home. She said she’d come too. That was an hour ago and she isn’t here yet.”
“Isn’t she rather young to be out alone at this time?”
Howard could hardly have told why he continued the conversation. He certainly would not, had she been less beautiful or less lonely and childish. At his remark about her sister’s youth she laughed with an expression of cunning at once amusing and pitiful.
“She’s a year older than me,” she said, “and I guess I can take care of myself. Still she hasn’t much sense. She’ll get into trouble yet. She doesn’t understand how to manage the boys when they’re too fresh.”
“But you do, I suppose?” suggested Howard.
“Indeed I do,” with a quick nod of her small graceful head, “I know what I’m about. My mother taught me a few things.”
“Didn’t she teach your sister also?”
“Miss Black-Hair” dropped her eyes and flushed a little, looking like a child caught in a lie. “Of course,” she said after a pause.
“How long have you been without your mother?”
“I’ve been away from home four months. But I saw her in the street yesterday. She didn’t see me though.”
“Then you’ve got a step-father?”
“No, I haven’t. Nellie told that to Mrs. Sands. But it’s not so. You know Nellie’s not my sister?”
“I fancied not from what you said a moment ago.”
“No, she used to be nurse girl in our family. We just say we’re sisters. I wish she’d come. I’m tired of standing. Won’t you come in?”
She went into her room, her manner a frank and simple invitation. Howard hesitated, then went just inside the door and half sat, half leaned upon the high roll of the lounge. The room was cheaply furnished, the lounge and a closed folding bed almost filling it. Upon the mantel, the bureau and the little table were a few odds and ends that stamped it a woman’s room. A street gown of thin pale-blue cloth was thrown over a rocking chair. As the girl leaned back in this chair with her face framed in the pale-blue of the gown, she looked tired and sad and beautiful and very young.
“If Nellie doesn’t look out, I’ll go away and live alone,” she said, and the accompanying unconscious look of loneliness touched Howard.
“You might go back home.”
“You don’t know my home or you wouldn’t say that. You don’t know my father.” She had got upon the subject of herself, and, once in that road she kept it with no thought of turning out. “He can’t treat me as he treats mother. Why, he goes away and stays for days. Then he comes home and quarrels with her all the time. They never both sit through a meal. One or the other flares up and leaves. He generally whipped me when he got very mad—just for spite.”
“But there’s your mother.”
“Yes. She doesn’t like my going away. But I can’t stand it. Papa wouldn’t let me go anywhere or let anybody come to see me. He says everybody’s bad. I guess he’s about right. Only he doesn’t include himself.”
“You seem to have a poor opinion of people.”
“Well, you can’t blame me.” She put on her wise look of experience and craft. “I’ve been away, living with Nellie for four months and I’ve seen no good to speak of. A girl doesn’t get a fair chance.”
“But you’ve got work?”
“Oh, yes. We both stayed down in a restaurant, Nellie’s got a place as waiter. That’s the best she could do. The man said I was good-looking and would catch trade. So he made me cashier. I get six dollars a week to Nellie’s three. But it’s a bad place. The men are always slipping notes in my hand when they give me their checks. Then the boss, he’s always bothering around.”
“But you don’t have to work hard?”
“From nine till four. We get our lunch free. I pay three dollars on the room and Nellie pays one.”
If Howard had not seen many such problems in economics before, he would have been astonished at any one even hoping to be able to get two meals a day, clothing and carfare out of two or three dollars a week. As it was, he only wondered how long a girl who had been used at least to comfort would endure this. “It’s easy for the other girl,” he thought, “because she’s used to it. But this one—” and he decided that the “trouble” would begin as soon as her clothing was worn out.
He noticed that she was pulling at the third finger of her right hand where she would have worn rings if she had had any. “You’ve had to pawn your rings?” he ventured.
She looked at him startled. “Did Nellie tell you?” she asked.
“No,” he replied, “I saw that you were missing your rings and suspected the rest.”
“Yes; that’s so. I’ve pawned all my jewelry except a bracelet. Nellie can’t get along on her three dollars. She eats too much.”
“I should think you’d rather be at home.”
“As I told you before,” she said impatiently, “anything’s better than home. Besides, I’m pretty well off. I go where I please, stay out as late as I please and have all the company I want. At home I’d have to be in bed at ten o’clock.”
There was a sound at the front door down in the darkness. The girl started from the chair, listened, then exclaimed: “There she comes now. And it’s two o’clock!”
Howard took the hint, smiled and said: “Well, good-night. I’ll see you again.”
“Good-night,” the girl answered absently.
From his room Howard heard Nellie coming up the stairs. “You’re a nice one!” came in “Miss Black-Hair’s” indignant voice, “Where have you been? Where did you and Jack go?”
The answer came in a sob—“Oh, Alice, you’ll never forgive me!”
Their door closed upon the two girls but Howard could still hear Nellie’s voice tearful, pleading. There was the sound of some one falling heavily upon the lounge, then sobs and cries of “Oh! Oh!” As Howard went into his bedroom, he could hear the voices still more plainly through the thin wall. He caught the words only once. “Miss Black-Hair,” her voice shaking with anger, exclaimed: “Nellie Baker, you are a wicked girl, I shall go away.”
V. — ALICE.
Several nights later Howard came upon Alice at the front door, where a young man was detaining her in a lingering good-bye. Another night as he was passing her room he saw her stretched upon the floor, her head supported by her elbows and an open book in front of her. She looked so childlike that Howard paused and said: “What is it—a fairy story?”
“No, it’s a love story,” she replied, just glancing at him with a faint smile and showing that she did not wish to be interrupted. The same night as he was going to bed he heard the angry voices of the two girls. A week later, toward the end of July, he found Alice sitting on the front stoop, when he came from dinner. She was obviously in the depths of the “blues.” Her eyes, the droop of the corners of her mouth, even the colour of her skin indicated anxiety and depression. She looked so forlorn that he said gently: “Wouldn’t you like to walk in the Square?”
She rose at once. “Yes, I guess so.” They crossed to the green. She was wearing the pale-blue gown and it fitted her well. Neither in the gown nor in the big hat with its coquettish flowers nodding over the brim was there much of fashion. But there was a certain distinction in her walk and her manner of wearing her clothes; and to a pretty face and a graceful form was added the charm of youth, magnetic youth.
“Do you want to walk?” she asked, lassitude in her voice.
“No, let us sit,” he said, and they went to a bench near the arch. It was twilight. The children were still romping and shouting. Many fat elderly women—mothers and grandmothers—were solemnly marching about, talking in fat, elderly voices.
“You have the blues?” asked Howard, thinking it might make her feel better to talk of her troubles. “If I were your doctor, I should prescribe a series of good cries.”
“I don’t cry,” said the girl. “Sometimes I wish I could. Nellie cries and gets over things. I feel awful inside and sick and my eyes burn. But I can’t cry.”
“You’re too young for that.”
“Oh, in some ways I’m young; again, I’m not. I hate everybody this evening.”
“What’s the matter? Has Nellie deserted you?”
“She? Not much. I had to tell her to go”—this with a joyless little laugh—“she quit work and wouldn’t behave herself. So now I’m going on alone.”
“And you won’t go home?”
“Never in the world,” she said with almost fierce energy; then some thought made her laugh in the same way as before. Howard decided that she had not told him everything about her home life, even though she had rattled on as if there were nothing to conceal. He sat watching her, she looking straight before her, her small bare hands clasped in her lap. He was pitying her keenly—this child, at once stunted and abnormally developed, this stray from one of the classes that keeps their women sheltered; and here she was adrift, without any of those resources of experience which assist the girls of the tenements.
Her features were small, sensitive, regular. Her eyes were brown with lines of reddish gold raying from the pupils. Her chin and mouth were firm enough, yet suggested weakness through the passions. Her clear skin had the glow of youth and health upon its smooth surface. She was certainly beautiful and she certainly had magnetism.
“What do you think is going to become of you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, after a deep sigh. “A girl doesn’t have a fair chance. I don’t seem to be able to have any fun without getting into trouble. I don’t know what to think. It’s all so black. I wish I was dead.”
Her dreary tone put the deepest pathos into her words. Howard had seen despondency in youth before—had felt it himself. But there had always been a certain lightness in it. Here was a mere child who evidently thought, and thought with reason, that there was no hope for her; and her despair was not a passing cloud or storm, but a settled conviction.
“There doesn’t seem to be any chance for a young girl,” she repeated as if that phrase summed up all that was weighing upon her. And Howard feared that she, was right. Even the readiest of all commodities, advice, failed him. “What can she do?” he thought. “If she has no home, worth speaking of”—then he went on aloud:
“Haven’t you friends?”
She laughed again with that slight moving of the lips and with eyes mirthless. “Who wants me for a friend? Nobody’d think I was respectable. And I guess I’m not so very. There’s Nellie and her—friends. Oh, the girls join in with the men to drag other girls down. But I won’t do that. I don’t care what becomes of me—except that.”
“Why?” he asked, curious for her explanation of this aversion.
“I don’t know why,” she replied. “There doesn’t seem to be any good reason. I’ve thought I would several times. And then—well, I just couldn’t.”
Howard turned the subject and tried to draw her out of this mood. They sat there for several hours and became well acquainted. He found that she had an intelligent way of looking at things, that she observed closely, and that she appreciated and understood far more than he had expected.
It was the beginning of a series of evenings spent together. He took her with him on many of his assignments and they often dined together at “Le Chat Noir” or the “Restaurant de Paris,” or “The Manhattan” over in Second Avenue. Late in June she bought a new gown—a pale-grey with ribbons and hat to match. Howard was amused at the anxious expression in her gold-brown eyes as she waited for his opinion. And when he said: “Well, well, I never saw you look so pretty,” she looked much prettier with a slight colour rising to tint the usual pallor of her cheeks.
One Sunday he came home in the afternoon and found her helping the maid at straightening his rooms. As he lay on the lounge smoking he watched her lazily. She handled his books with a great deal of awe. She opened one of them and sat on the floor in the childlike way she often had. She read several sentences aloud. It was a tangle of technical words on the subject of political economy.
“What do you have such stupid things around for?” she said, smiling and rising. She began to arrange the books and papers on the table. He was looking at her but thinking of something else when he became conscious that she had got suddenly white to the lips. He jumped to his feet.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, “are you going to faint?”
Her eyes were shining as with fever out of a ghostly face. Her lips trembled as she answered: “Oh it’s nothing. I do this often.” She went slowly into the back room where the maid was. In a few minutes she returned, apparently as usual. She flitted about uneasily, taking up now one thing, now another in a purposeless, nervous way.
“I never was in here before,” she said. “You’ve got lots of pretty things. Whose picture is this?”
“That? Oh, my sister-in-law out in Chicago.”
Howard did not then understand why she became so gay, why her eyes danced with happiness, why as soon as she went into the hall she began to sing and kept it up in her own room, quieting down only to burst forth again. He did not even especially note the swift change, the, for her, extraordinary mood of high spirits. It was about this time that their relations began to change.
Howard had thought of her, or had thought that he thought of her, only as a lonely and desolate child, to be taught so far as he was capable of teaching and she of learning. He was conscious of her extreme youth and of the impassable gulf of thought and taste between them. He did not take her feelings into account at all. It never occurred to him that this part of friend and patron which he was playing was not safe for him, not just and right toward her.
One night he took her to a ball at the Terrace Garden—a respectable, amusing affair “under the auspices of the Young-German-American-Shooting-Society.” The next day a reporter for the Sun whom he knew slightly said to him with a grin he did not like: “Mighty pretty little girl you’re taking about with you, Howard. Where’d you pick her up?”
Howard reddened, angry with himself for reddening, angry with the Sun man for his impudence, ashamed that he had put himself and Alice in such a position. But the incident brought the matter of his relation with her sharply and clearly before his mind and conscience.
“This must stop,” he said to himself; “it must stop at once. It is unjust to her. And it is dragging me into an entanglement.”
But the mischief had been done. She loved him. And with the confidence of youth and inexperience, she was disregarding all the obstacles, was giving herself up to the dream that he would presently love her in return, with the end as in the story books. Indeed love stories became her constant companions. Where she once read them for amusement, she now read them as a Christian reads his Bible—for instruction, inspiration, faith, hope and courage.
One evening in July—it was in the week of Independence Day—Howard’s windows and door were thrown wide to get the full benefit of whatever stir there might be in the air. He was sprawled upon the lounge, the table drawn close and upon it a lamp shedding a dim light through the room but enough near by to let him read. He had dropped his book and was thinking whether a stroll in the Square in the moonlight would repay the trouble of moving. There were steps in the hall and then, peeping round the door-frame was the face of his young neighbour.
“Hello,” he said, “I thought you were out somewhere. Come in.”
“No, I’m going to bed,” she answered, nevertheless gradually edging into the room. She was wearing a loose wrapper of flowered silk, somewhat worn and never very fine. Her black hair hung in a long thick braid to her waist and she looked even younger than usual.
“Where have you been all evening?” asked Howard.
“Oh, I’ve been up to see a friend. She lives in Harlem, and she wants me to come and live with her.”
“Are you going?” Howard inquired, noting that he was interested and not pleased. “The house wouldn’t seem natural without you.”
She gave him a quick, gratified glance and, advancing further into the room, sat upon the arm of the big rocking-chair. “She gave me a good talking to,” she went on with a smile. “She told me I ought not to live alone at my age. She said I ought to live with her and meet some friends of hers. She said maybe I’d find a nice fellow to marry.”
Howard thought over this as he smoked and at last said in an ostentatiously judicial tone: “Well, I think she’s right. I don’t see what else there is to do. You can’t live on down here alone always. What’s become of Nellie?”
“Nellie’s got to be a bad girl,” said Alice with a blush and a dropping of the eyes. “She’s in Fourteenth Street every night. She says she doesn’t care what happens to her. I saw her last night and she wanted me to come with her. She says it’s of no use for me to put on airs. She says I’ve got no friends and I might as well join her sooner as later.”
“Well?” Howard was keeping his eyes carefully away from hers.
“Oh, I sha’n’t go with her. As long as a girl has got anything at all to live for, she doesn’t want that. Besides I’d rather go to the East River.”
“Drowning’s a serious matter,” said Howard with a smile and with banter in his tone.
“Yes, it is,” said the girl seriously, “I’ve thought of it. And I don’t believe I could.”
“Then you’d better go with your friend and get married.”
“I don’t want to get married,” she replied, shaking her head slowly from side to side.
“That’s what all the girls say,” laughed Howard. “But of course you will. It’s the only thing to do.”
“Then why don’t you get married?” asked Alice, tracing one of the flowers in her wrapper with her slim, brown forefinger.
“I couldn’t if I would and I wouldn’t if I could.”
“Oh, you could get a nice girl to marry you, I’m sure,” she said, the colour rising faintly toward her long, downcast lashes.
“But who would get the money? It takes money to keep a nice girl.”
“Oh, not much,” said Alice earnestly, yet with a queer hesitation in her voice. “You oughtn’t to marry those extravagant girls. I’ve read about them and I think they don’t make very good wives, real wives to save money and—and care.”
“You seem to know a good deal about these things for your age,” said Howard, much amused and showing it.
“I don’t care,” she persisted, “you ought to get married.”
Howard felt that this was the time to clear the girl’s mind of any “notions” she might have got. He would be very clever, very adroit. He would not let her suspect that he had any idea of her thoughts. Indeed he was not perfectly certain that he had. But he would gently and frankly tell her the truth.
“I shall never get married,” he said, sitting up and talking as one who is discussing a case which he understands thoroughly yet has no personal interest in. “I haven’t the money and I haven’t the desire. I am what they would call a confirmed bachelor. I wouldn’t marry any girl who had not been brought up as I have been. We should be unhappy together unsuited each to the other. She would soon hate me. Besides, I wish to be free. I care more for freedom than I ever shall for any human being. As I am now, so I shall always be, a wandering fellow without ties. It is not a pleasant prospect for old age. But I have made up my mind to it and I shall never marry.”
The girl’s hands had dropped limp into her lap; her face was down so that he could barely see the burning blush which overspread it.
“You don’t mean that,” she said in a voice that was queer and choked.
“Oh yes, I do, little girl,” he answered, intending to smile when she should look up.
When she did lift her eyes, his smile could not come. For her face was grey and her lips bloodless and from her eyes looked despair. Howard glanced away instantly. With rude hand he had suddenly toppled into the dust this child’s dream-castle of love and happiness which he had himself helped her build. He felt like a criminal. But partly from a sense of duty, chiefly from the cowardice of self-preservation, he made no effort to lighten her suffering.
“I should only prolong it,” he thought, “only make matters worse. To-morrow—perhaps.”
If she had been worldly wise, even if she had not been so completely absorbed in her worship of him that her woman-instincts were dormant, she would herself have found hope. But she had not a suspicion that these strong words of apparent finality were spoken to give himself courage, to keep him from obeying the impulse to respond to the appeal of her youth to his, her aloneness to his, her passion to his. She believed him literally.
There was a long silence. He heard her move, heard a suppressed cry and glanced toward her again. She was darting from the room. A second later her door crashed. He started up and after her, hesitated, returned to his book—but not to his reading.
Toward noon the next day, he passed her room on his way out. The door was wide open; none of her belongings was in sight; the maid was sweeping energetically. She paused when she saw him.
“Miss Alice left this morning,” she said, “and the room’s been let to another party.”
VI. — IN A BOHEMIAN QUICKSAND.
Howard could have got her new address; and for many weeks habit, at first steadily, afterward intermittently, teased him to look her up. He was amazed at her hold upon him. At times the longing for her was so intense that he almost suspected himself of being in love with her.
“I escaped from that none too soon,” he congratulated himself. “It wasn’t nearly so one-sided as I thought.”
He had never been gregarious. Thus far he had not had a single intimate friend, man or woman. He knew many people and knew them well. They liked him and some of them sought his friendship. These were often puzzled because it was easy to get acquainted with him, impossible to know him intimately.
The explanation of this combination of openness and reserve, friendliness and unapproachableness, was that his boyhood and youth had been spent wholly among books. That life had trained him not to look to others for amusement, sympathy or counsel, but to depend upon himself. As his temperament was open and good-natured and sympathetic, he was as free from enemies and enmities as he was from friends and friendships.
Women there had been—several women, a succession of idealizations which had dispersed in the strong light of his common sense. He had never disturbed himself about morals in what he regarded as the limited sense. He always insisted that he was free; and he was careful only of his personal pride and of taking no advantage of another. What he had said to Alice about marriage was true—as to his intentions, at least. A poor woman, he felt, he could not marry; a rich woman, he felt, he would not marry. And he cared nothing about marriage because he was never lonely, never leaned or wished to lean upon another, abhorred the idea of any one leaning upon him; because he regarded freedom as the very corner-stone of his scheme of life.
The nearest he had come to companionship was with Alice. With the other women whom he had known in various degrees from warmth to white-heat, there had been interruptions, no such constant freedom of access, no such intermingling of daily life. Her he had seen at all hours and in all circumstances. She never disturbed him but was ready to talk when he wished to listen, listened eagerly when he talked, and was silent and beautiful and restful to look at when he wished to indulge in the dissipation of mental laziness.
As she loved him, she showed him only the best that there was in her and showed it in the most attractive of all lights.
While he was still wavering or fancying that he was wavering, the Managing Editor sent him to “do” a great strike-riot in the coal regions of Pennsylvania. He was there for three weeks, active day and night, interested in the new phases of life—the mines and the miners, the display of fierce passions, the excitement, the peril.
When he returned to New York, Alice had ceased to tempt him.
One midnight in the early spring he was in his sitting room, reading and a little bored. There came a knock at the door. He hoped that it was some one bringing something interesting or coming to propose a search for something interesting. “Come in,” he said with welcome in his voice. The door opened. It was Alice.
She was dressed much as she had been the first time he talked with her—a loose, clinging wrapper open at the throat. There was a change in her face—a change for the better but also for the worse. She looked more intelligent, more of a woman. There was more sparkle in her eyes and in her smile. But—Howard saw instantly the price she had paid. As the German had suggested, she had “got on up town.”
She was pulling at the long broad blue ribbons of her negligee. Her hands were whiter and her pink finger nails had had careful attention. She smiled, enjoying his astonishment. “I have come back,” she said.
Howard came forward and took her hand. “I’m glad, very glad to see you. For a minute I thought I was dreaming.”
“Yes,” she went on, “I’m in my old room. I came this afternoon. I must have been asleep, for I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I hope it isn’t bad luck that has flung you back here.”
“Oh, no. I’ve been doing very well. I’ve been saving up to come. And when I had enough to last me through the summer, I—I came.”
“You’ve been at work?”
She dropped her eyes and flushed. And her fingers played more nervously with her ribbons.
“You needn’t treat me as a child any longer,” she said at last in a low voice; “I’m eighteen now and—well, I’m not a child.”
Again there was a long pause. Howard, watching her downcast face, saw her steadying her expression to meet his eyes. When she looked, it was straight at him—appeal but also defiance.
“I don’t ask anything of you,” she said, “we are both free. And I wanted to see you. I was sick of all those others—up there. I’ve never had—had—this out of my mind. And I’ve come. And I can see you sometimes. I won’t be in the way.”
Howard went over to the window and stared out into the lights and shadows of the leafy Square. When he turned again she had lighted and was smoking one of his cigarettes.
“Well,” he said smiling down at her, “Why not? Put on a street gown and we’ll go out and get supper and talk it over.”
She sprang up, her face alight. She was almost running toward the door. Midway she stopped, turned and came slowly back. She put one of her arms upon his shoulder—a slender, cool, smooth, white arm with the lace of the wide sleeve slipping away from it. She turned her face up until her mouth, like a rosebud, was very near his lips. There was appeal in her eyes.
“I’m very, very glad to see you,” Howard said as he kissed her.
And so Howard’s life was determined for the next four years.
He worked well at his profession. He read a great deal. He wrote fiction and essays in desultory fashion and got a few things printed in the magazines. He led a life that was a model of regularity. But he knew the truth—that Alice had ended his career.
He was content. Ambition had always been vague with him and now his habit of following the line of least resistance had drifted him into this mill-pond. Sometimes, he would give himself up to bitter self-reproach, disgusted that he should be so satisfied, so non-resisting in a lot in every way the reverse of that which he had marked out for himself. If he had been chained he might, probably would, have broken away. But Alice never attempted to control him. His will was her law. She was especially shrewd about money matters, so often the source of disputes and estrangements. Two months after she reappeared, she proposed that they take an apartment together.
“I saw one to-day in West Twelfth Street at seventy dollars a month,” she said, “and I’m sure I could manage it so that you would be much better off than you are now.”
He viewed this plan with suspicion. It definitely committed him to a mode of life which he had always regarded as degrading both to the man and the woman and as certain of a calamitous ending. So he made excuses for delay, fully intending never to yield. But although Alice did not speak of her plan again, he found himself more and more attracted by it, caught himself speculating about various apartments he happened to see as he went about the streets. She must have been conscious of what was going on in his mind; for when, a month after she had spoken, he said abruptly: “Where was that apartment you saw?” she went straight on discussing the details as if there had been no interval. She was ready to act.
The apartment was taken in her name—Mrs. Cammack, the “Mrs.” being necessary to account for him. They selected the furniture together, he as interested as she and very pleased to find that she had the same good taste in those matters that she had in dress. She took all the troubles and annoyances upon herself. When she invited him to assist in the arrangement, it was in matters that amused him and at times when she was sure he had nothing else to do. It is not strange that he got a wholly false idea of the difficulties of setting up an establishment.
After a month of selecting and discussing, of pleasure in the new experience, pleasure in Alice’s enthusiasm and excitement and happiness, he found himself master of five attractive and comfortable rooms, his clothing, his books, all his belongings properly arranged. The door was opened for him by a cleanlooking coloured maid, with a tiny white cap on her head.
As he looked around and then at the beautiful face with the wistful, gold-brown eyes so anxiously following his wandering glance, he was very near to loving her. Indeed, he was like a husband who has left out that period of passionate love which extends into married life until it gives place to boredom, or to dislike, or to some such sympathetic affection as he felt for Alice. “It is just this that holds me,” he thought, in his infrequent moods of dissatisfaction. “If we quarrelled or if there were any deep feeling on my side, I should not be in this mess. I should be”—Well, where would he be? “Probably worse off,” he usually added.
Certainly he could not have been freer, for she never questioned him; and, if she was ever uneasy or jealous when he came in late—for him—without telling her where he had been, she never showed it. She had no friends, and he often wondered how she passed the time when he was not with her. Whenever he inquired he got the same answer: She had been busying herself with their home; she had been planning to save money or to make him more comfortable; she had been reading to improve her mind and to enable herself to start him talking on subjects that interested him.
No matter how unexpectedly he looked in upon her life or her mind, he found—himself.
One day she said to him—it was after two years of this life: “Something is worrying you. Is it about me? You look at me so queerly at times.”
“Yes,” he answered. “It is about you. Tell me, Miss Black-Hair, do you never think of getting old?”
“No,” she smiled. “I shall wait until I am twenty-five before I begin to think of that.”
“But don’t you see that this sort of thing must stop sometime? It is unjust to you. When I think of it, I reproach myself for permitting us to get into it.”
“I am happy,” she said, looking straight at him, terror in her eyes.
“But you have no friends?”
“Who has? And what do I want with friends?”
“But don’t you see, I can’t introduce you to anybody. I can’t talk about you to the people I know. I am always having to explain you away, always having to act as if I were ashamed of this, my real life. At times I am Anglo-Saxon enough to be really ashamed of it. And I ought to be and am ashamed of myself.”
“Don’t let’s talk about it. You and I understand. Why should we bother about the rest of the world?”
“No, we must talk about it. I have been going over it carefully. We must—must be married.”
He laid his hand upon hers. She blushed deeply and lowered her head. A tear dropped upon the front of her gown and hung glittering in the meshes of the white lace. She crept into his arms and buried her face upon his shoulder and sobbed. He had never seen her even look like tears before.
“We must be married,” he repeated, patting her on the shoulder.
She shook her head in negation.
“Yes,” he said firmly, mentally noting that this was the very first time he had ever caught her in a pretense.
“No.” Her tone was as firm as his. She lifted her head and put her cheek against his. “It makes me very proud that you ask it. But—I—I do not——”
“Do not—what?”
“I do not want—I will not—risk losing you.”
“But you won’t lose me. You will have me more than ever.”
“Some men—yes. But not you.”
“And why not I, O Wisdom?”
“Because—because—do you think I have watched you all this time, without learning something about you? The way to keep you is to leave you free. I do not want your name. I do not want your friends I do not want to be respectable. I want—just you.”
“But are we not as good as married now?”
“Yes—that’s it. And I want it to keep on. I never cared for anybody until I saw you. I shall never care for anybody else. I never shall try. I want you as long as I can have you. And then——”
“And then,” Howard laughed or rather, pretended to laugh, “and then, ‘Oh, dig me a grave both wide and deep, wide and deep.’ How like twenty-years-old that is.”
She seemed not to hear his jest and presently went on: “Do you remember the evening before I left, down there at Mrs. Sands’s?”
“The night you proposed to me?” Howard said, pulling her ear.
She smiled faintly and continued: “I thought it all out that night. I intended to come back just as I did. I went deliberately. I——”
Howard put his hand over her lips.
“O, I am not going to tell anything,”, said she, evading his fingers. “Only this—that I understood you then, understood just why you would never marry. Not so clearly as I understand it now, but still I—understood. And you have been teaching me ever since, teaching me manners, teaching me how to read and think and talk. And more than all, you’ve taught me your way of looking at life.”
Howard held her away from him and studied her face, surprise in his eyes. “Isn’t it strange?” he said.
“Here I’ve been seeing you day after day all this time, have had a chance to know you better than I ever knew any one in my life, have had you very near to me day and night. And just now, as I look at you, I see the real you for the first time in two years.”
“I have been wondering when you would look at me again,” said Alice with a small, sly smile.
“Why, you are a woman grown. Where is the little girl I knew, the little girl who used to look up to me?”
“Oh, she’s gone these two years. She proposed to you and, when you refused her, she—died.”
“Yes—we must be married,” Howard went on. “Why not? It is more convenient, let us say.”
Alice shook her head and put her cheek against his again and clasped his fingers in hers. “No, my instinct is against it. Some day—perhaps. But not now, not now. I want you. I want only you. We are together out here—out beyond the pale. Inside, others would come in and—and surely come between us. I want no others—none.”