MARGARITA'S SOUL

PART ONE

MARGARITA'S SOUL

CHAPTER I

At the second slanting of the great, tawdry lane he bent with it and encountered suddenly a little knot of flustered women just descended from the elevated way that doubled the din and blare of the shrieking city. They were bundle-filled, voluble, dressed by any standards save those of their native city, far beyond their probable means and undoubted station. As they stopped unexpectedly and hesitated, damming the flood of hurrying citizens, Roger halted of necessity and stepped backward, but in avoiding them he bumped heavily against the person behind him. A startled gasp, something soft against his shoulder, the sharp edge of a projecting hat, told him that this person was a woman, and stepping sidewise into the shelter of a neighbouring news-stall, he raised his hat with a courtesy alien to the place and hour.

"I beg your pardon, madam," he said, "I trust I have not hurt you?"

"No," said the woman, who wore a heavy grey veil, and as that is literally all she said and as her method of saying it was as convincing as it was simple, one would suppose the incident closed and look to see Roger complete his journey to his club without further adventure.

Do I wish he had? God knows. It was undoubtedly the turning-point in his life and he was forty. Had he gone on to the club where I was waiting for him; had we dined, played out our rubber, dropped in at the occasional chamber concert that was our usual and almost our only dissipation in those days, I should not now be ransacking old letters and diaries from which to make this book, nor would Margarita's picture—her loveliest, as Juliet—lean toward me from the wall. She is smiling; not as one smiles in photographs, but as a flesh-and-blood woman droops over the man she loves and smiles her heart into his lips, reaching over his shoulder. Everything slips behind but you two, herself and you, when you look at it. Sarony, who took it, told me he had never posed such a subject, and I believe him.

Well, well, it's done now. It was twenty years ago that Roger bumped into his fate in that eddy of Broadway and I was as powerless as you are now to disentangle him and keep him for myself, which, selfishly enough, of course, I wanted terribly to do. You see, he was all I had, Roger, and I was hoping we would play the game out together. But—not to have known Margarita? Never to have watched that bending droop of her neck, that extraordinary colouring of her skin—a real Henner skin! I remember Maurice Grau's telling me that he had always thought Henner colour blind till he saw Margarita's neck in her name-part in Faust.

The things that girl used to tell me, before she had any soul, of course, and in the days when I was the third man to whom she had ever spoken more than ten words in her life, were almost enough to pay for all the pain she taught me. Such talks! I can close my eyes and actually smell the sea-weed and the damp sand and hear the inrush of the big combers. She used to sit in the lee of the rocks, all huddled in that heavy, supple army-blue officer's cloak of hers with its tarnished silver clasps, and talk as Miranda must have talked to Ferdinand's old bachelor friend, who probably appreciated the chance—too well, the poor old dog!

I had reached, I think, when I left off my plain unvarnished tale and took to maundering, that precise point in it which exhibits Roger in the act of replacing his hat upon his even then slightly greyish head and striding on. It seems to me that he would not have checked in his stride if the woman had replied after the usual tautological fashion of her sex (we blame them for it, not thinking how wholly in nature it is that they should be so, like the repeated notes of birds, the persistence of the raindrops, the continual flicker of the sun through the always fluttering leaves,) with some such phrase as, "No, indeed, not in the least, I assure you!" or "Not at all, really—don't mention it!" or even, "No, indeed," with a shy bow or a composed one, as the case might be. But this woman uttered merely the syllable, "No," with no modification nor variation, no inclination of the head, no movement forward or back. Her utterance was grave, moreover, and precise; her tone noticeably full and deep. Roger, pausing a moment in the shelter of the news-stall, spoke again at the spur of some unexplainable impulse.

"I was afraid I had stepped directly on your foot—it felt so," he said.

Again she answered simply, "No," and that was his second chance. Now in the face of these facts it is folly to contend that the woman "accosted" him, as his cousin, who was one of the Boston Thayers, put it to me. She did nothing of the kind; she replied twice, to his distinct questions, in the coldest of monosyllables and he could not even have told if she looked at him, her veil was so thick. Let that be definitely understood, once and for all. The chances were even in favour of her being violently pitted from the small-pox, since even twenty years ago, when the city was less cosmopolitan (and from my point of view more interesting) the women of New York of the class that travels unaccompanied and on foot at dusk were not accustomed to go heavily veiled if they had any fair excuse for the contrary course.

Nevertheless to that veiled woman did Roger address himself—unnecessarily, mark you—for the third time. Why did he? He had his chance; two chances in fact. But this is folly, for of course he had no chance at all. Fate stood by that news-stall, with the blear-eyed, frousy woman that tended it looking vacantly on; Fate, veiled, too, and not even monosyllabic in his behalf. I should have known this, I think, even if I had not lived those curious, long eight months in Algeria and slept those dreamless nights under the Algerian stars that got into my blood and call me back now and then; imperiously and never in vain, though I feel older than the stars, and Alif and the rest are dead or exhibiting themselves at the great American memorial fairs that began to flourish about the time this tale begins. No, there was no help: it was written.

"I am glad I did not hurt you," he said, really moving forward now and again raising his hat, "these crowds are dangerous for women at this hour."

He took two steps and stopped suddenly, for a hand slipped under his arm. (You should have seen his cousin's face, the Boston one, when in that relentless way known only to women and eminent artists in cross-examination she got this fact out of me.)

"Will you tell me the quickest way to Broadway?" said the woman to whom he had just spoken.

"To Broadway?" he echoed stupidly, standing stock still, conscious of the grasp upon his arm, a curious sense of the importance of this apparently cheap experience surging over him, even while he resented its banality. "This is Broadway. What do you want of it?"

"I want to show myself on it," said the woman, a young woman, from the voice.

Roger stepped back against the news-stall, dragging her with him, since her hand did not leave his arm.

"To show yourself on it?" he repeated sternly, "and why do you want to do that?"

"To get myself some friends. I have none," said she serenely.

Now you must not think Roger a fool, for he was not. You see, you never heard the voice that spoke to him. If you had, and had possessed any experience or knowledge of the world, you would have realised that the owner of that voice possessed neither or else was a very great and convincing actress. Mere print cannot excuse him, perhaps, but I give you my word he was as a matter of fact excusable, since he was a bachelor. Most men are very susceptible to the human voice, especially to the female human voice, and it has always been a matter of the deepest wonder to me that the men who do not hear a lovely one once in the year are most under the dominion of their females. I mean, of course, the Americans. It is one of the greatest proofs of the power of these belles Americaines that they wield it in spite of the rustiness of this, their chief national weapon.

The bell notes, the grave, full richness of this veiled woman's voice touched Roger deeply and with a brusque motion he drew out from his pocket a banknote and pressed it into the hand under his arm.

"Take this and go home," he said severely. "If you will promise me to call at an address I will give you, I will guarantee you a decent means of livelihood. Will you promise me?"

She reached down without a word into a bag that hung en chatelaine at her waist and drew out something in her turn.

"I have a great many of those," she said placidly, "and more at home. See them!"

And under his face she thrust a double handful of stamped paper—all green.

"Each one of these is called twenty dollars," she informed him, "and some of them are called fifty dollars. They are in the bottom of the bag. I do not think that I need any more."

Roger stared at her.

"Put that away directly," he said, "and lift your veil so that I can see who you are. There is something wrong here."

They stood in the lee of the flaring stall, a pair so obvious in their relation to each other, one would say, as to require no comment beyond the cynical indifference of the red-eyed woman who tended it. No doubt she had long ceased to count the well-dressed, athletic men who drew indifferently clothed young women into the shelter of her stand. And yet no one of his Puritan ancestors could have been further in spirit from her dreary inferences than this Roger. Nor do I believe him to be so exceptional in this as to cause remark. We are not all birds of prey, dear ladies, believe me. Indeed, since you have undertaken the responsibilities of the literary dissecting-room so thoroughly and increasingly; since you have, as one might say, at last freed your minds to us in the amazing frankness of your multitudinous and unsparing pages, I am greatly tempted to wonder if you are not essentially less decent than we. One would never have ventured to suspect it, had you not opened the door....

The woman threw back her veil so that it framed her face like a cloud and Roger looked straight into her eyes. And so the curtain rolled up, the orchestra ceased its irrelevant pipings and the play was begun.

CHAPTER II

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.

"Joséphine," 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 Joséphine 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 "sôle frite," which was at any rate, quite as good as if it had been that, a hot and savoury poulet rôti—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 être, 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 naïve. 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 mænad 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 débris 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 Joséphine 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 Brünhilde, 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.