Howard was now thirty years old. Park Row had long ceased talking of him as a “coming man.” While his style of writing was steadily improving, he wrote with no fixed aim, wrote simply for the day, for the newspaper which dies with the day of its date. Some of his acquaintances wondered why a man of such ability should thus stand still. The less observant spoke of him as an impressive example of the “journalistic blight.” Those who looked deeper saw the truth—a dangerous facility, a perilous inertia, a fatal entanglement. Facility enabled him to earn a good living with ease, working as he chose. Inertia prevented him from seeking opportunities for advancement. Entanglement shut him off from the men and women of his own kind who would have thrust opportunities upon him and compelled him.
Howard himself saw this clearly in his occasional moods of self-criticism. But as he saw no remedy, he raged intermittently and briefly, and straightway relapsed. Vanity supplied him with many excuses and consolations. Was he not one of the best reporters in the profession? Where was there another, where indeed in any profession were there many of his age, making five thousand a year? Was he not always improving his mind? Was he not more and more careful in his personal habits? Was he not respected by all who knew him; looked upon as a successful man; regarded by those with whom he came in daily contact as a leader in the profession, a model for style, a marvel for facility and versatility and for the quantity of good “copy” he could turn out in a brief time? But with all the soothings of vanity he never could quite hide from himself that his life was a failure up to that moment.
“Why try to lie to myself?” he thought. “It’s never a question of what one has done but always of what one could have and should have done. I am thirty and I have been marking time for at least four years. Preparing by study and reading? Yes, but not preparing for anything.”
On the whole he was glad that Alice had refused to marry him. Her reason was valid. But there was another which he thought she did not see. He was deceived as to the depth of her insight because he did not watch her closely. He had no suspicion how many, many times, in their moments of demonstrativeness, she listened for those words which never came, listened and turned away to hide from him the disappointment in her eyes.
He did not love her—and she knew it. She did not inspire ambition in him—and she knew it. She simply kept him comfortable and contented. She simply prevented his amatory instincts from gathering strength vigorously to renew that search which men and women keep up incessantly until they find what they seek. She knew this also but never permitted herself to see it clearly.
He was pleased with her but not proud of her. He was not exactly ashamed of his relation with her but—well, he never relaxed his precautions for keeping it conventionally concealed. He still had a room at his club and occupied it occasionally. He laughed at himself, despised himself in a—gentle, soothing way. But he excused himself to himself with earnestness despite his sarcasms at his own expense. And for the most of the time he was content—so well, so comfortably content that if his mind had not been so nervously active he would have taken on the form and look of settled middle-life.
There was just the one saving quality—his mental alertness. All his life he had had insatiable intellectual curiosity. It had kept him from wasting his time at play when he was a boy. It had kept him from plunging deeply into dissipation when youth was hot in his veins. It was now keeping him from the sluggard’s fate.
On the last day of January—six weeks after his thirtieth birthday—he came home earlier than usual, as they were going to the theatre and were to dine at seven. He found Alice in bed and the doctor sitting beside her.
“You’ll have to get some one else to go with you, I’m afraid,” she said with good-humoured resignation, a trifle over-acted. “My cold is worse and the doctor says I must stay in bed.”
“Nothing serious?” Howard asked anxiously, for her cheeks were flaming.
“Oh, no. Just the cold. And I am taking care of myself.”
He accompanied the doctor to the door of the apartment. At the threshold the doctor whispered: “Make some excuse and come to my office. I wish to see you particularly.”
He grew pale. “Don’t let her see,” urged the doctor. He went back to Alice, sick at heart. “I must go out and arrange for some one else to do the play for me,” he said. “I shall spend the evening with you.”
She protested, but faintly. He went to the doctor’s office.
“She must go south at once,” he began, after looking at Howard steadily and keenly. “Nothing can save her life. That may prolong it.”
Howard seemed not to understand.
“She must go to-morrow or she’ll be gone forever in ten days.”
“Impossible,” Howard said in a dull, dazed tone.
“At once, I tell you—at once.”
“Impossible,” Howard repeated. He was saying to himself, “And only this afternoon I wished I were free and wondered how I could free myself.” He laughed strangely.
“Impossible,” he said again. And again he laughed. The room swam around. He stood up. “Impossible!” he said a fourth time, almost shouting it. And he struck the doctor full in the face, reeled and fell headlong to the floor. When he recovered consciousness he was lying on a lounge, the doctor’s assistant standing beside him.
“I must go to her,” he exclaimed and sat up. He saw the doctor a few feet away, holding a cloth odorous of arnica to his cheek. Howard remembered and began, “I beg your pardon,”—The doctor interrupted with: “Not at all. I’ve had many queer experiences but never one like that.” But Howard had ceased to hear. He was staring vacantly at the floor, repeating to himself, “And I wished to be free. And I am to be free.”
“You must go back to her. Take her south tomorrow. Asheville is the best place.”
Howard was on his way to the door. “We shall go by the first train,” he said.
“Pardon me for telling you so abruptly,” said the doctor, following him. “But I saw that you weren’t—that is I couldn’t help noticing that you and she were—And usually the man in such cases—well, my sympathy is for the woman.”
“Do you think a man voluntarily lives with a woman because he hates her?” Howard asked, with an angry sneer. He bowed coldly and was gone.
As he looked at Alice he saw that it was of no use to try to deceive her. “We must go South in the morning,” he almost whispered, taking her hand and kissing it again and again, slowly and gently.
The next day but one they were at Asheville and two weeks later Howard could not hide from himself that she would soon be gone.
Her bed was drawn up to the open window and she Was propped with pillows. A mild breeze was flooding the room with the odours of the pine forests and the gardens. She looked out, dilated her nostrils and her eyes.
“Beautiful!” she murmured. “It is so easy to die here.”
She put out her hand and laid it in his.
“I want you, my Alice.” He was looking into her eyes and she into his. “I need you. I can’t do without you.”
She smiled with an expression of happiness. “Is it wrong,” she asked, “to take pleasure in another’s pain? I see that you are in pain, that you suffer. And, oh, it makes me happy, so happy.”
“Don’t,” he begged. “Please don’t.”
“But listen,” she went on. “Don’t you see why? Because I—because I love you. There,” she was smiling again. “I promised myself I never, never would say it first. And I’ve broken my word.”
“What do you mean?”
“For nearly four years—all the years I’ve really lived—I have had only one thought—my love for you. But I never would say it, never would say ‘I love you,’ because I knew that you did not love me.”
He was beginning to speak but she lifted her hand to his lips. Then she put it back in his and pushed her fingers up his coat-sleeve until they were hidden, resting upon his bare arm.
“No, you did not.” Her voice was low and the words came slowly. “But since we came here, you have loved me. If I were to get well, were to go back, you would not. Ah, if you knew, if you only knew how I have wanted your love, how I have lain awake night after night, hour after hour, whispering under my breath ‘I love you. I love you. Why do you not love me?’”
Howard put his head down so that his face was hid from her in her lap.
“After the doctor had talked to me a few minutes, had asked me a few questions,” she went on, “I knew. And I was not sorry. It was nearly over, anyhow, dear. Did you know it? I often wondered if you did. Yes, I saw many little signs. I wouldn’t admit it to myself until this illness came. Then I confessed it to myself. And I was not sorry we were to part this way. But I did not expect”—and she drew a long breath—“happiness!”
“No, no,” he protested, lifting his face and looking at her. She drank in the expression of his eyes—the love, the longing, the misery—as if it had been a draught of life.
“Ah, you make me so happy, so happy. How much I owe to you. Four long, long, beautiful years. How much! How much! And at last—love!”
There was silence for several minutes. Then he spoke: “I loved you from the first, I believe. Only I never appreciated you. I was so self-absorbed. And you—you fed my vanity, never insisted upon yourself.”
“But we have had happiness. And no one, no one, no one will ever be to you what I have been.”
“I love you.” Howard’s voice had a passionate earnestness in it that carried conviction. “The light goes out with you.”
“With this little candle? No, no, dear—my dear. You will be a great man. You will not forget; but you will go on and do the things that I’m afraid I didn’t help, maybe hindered, you in trying to do. And you will keep a little room in your heart, a very little room. And I shall be in there. And you’ll open the door every once in a while and come in and take me in your arms and kiss me. And I think—yes, I feel that—that I shall know and thrill.”
Her voice sank lower and lower and then her eyes closed, and presently he called the nurse.
The next day he rose from his bed, just at the connecting door between his room and hers, and looked in at her. The shades were drawn and only a faint light crept into the room. He thought he saw her stir and went nearer.
“Why, they’ve made you very gay this morning,” he laughed, “with the red ribbons at your neck.”
There was no answer. He came still nearer. The red ribbons were long streamers of blood. She was dead.
He left her at Asheville as she wished—“where I have been happiest and where I wish you to think of me.” On the train coming north he reviewed his past and made his plans for the future.
As to the past he had only one regret—that he had not learned to appreciate Alice until too late. He felt that his failure to advance had been due entirely to himself—to his inertia, his willingness to seize any pretext for refraining from action. As to the future—work, work with a purpose. His mind must be fully and actively occupied. There must be no leisure, for leisure meant paralysis.
At the Twenty-third Street ferry-house he got into a hansom and gave the address of “the flat.” He did not note where he was until the hansom drew up at the curb. He leaned forward and looked at the house—at their windows with the curtains which she had draped so gracefully, which she and he had selected at Vantine’s one morning. How often he had seen her standing between those curtains, looking out for him, her blue-black hair waving back from her forehead so beautifully and her face ready to smile so soon as ever she should catch sight of him.
He leaned back and closed his eyes. The blood was pounding through his temples and his eyeballs seemed to be scalding under the lids.
“Never again,” he moaned. “How lonely it is.”
The cabman lifted the trap. “Here we are, sir.”
“Yes—in a moment.” Where should he go? But what did it matter? “To a hotel,” he said. “The nearest.”
“The Imperial?”
“That will do—yes—go there.”
He resolved never to return to “the flat.” On the following day he sent for the maid and arranged the breaking up. He gave her everything except his personal belongings and a few of Alice’s few possessions—those he could keep, and those which he must destroy because he could not endure the thought of any one having them.
At the office all understood his mourning; but no one, not even Kittredge, knew him well enough to intrude beyond gentler looks and tones. Kittredge had written a successful novel and was going abroad for two years of travel and writing. Howard took his rooms in the Royalton. They dined together a few nights before he sailed.
“And now,” said Kittredge, “I’m my own master. Why, I can’t begin to fill the request for ‘stuff.’ I can go where I please, do as I please. At last I shall work. For I don’t call the drudgery done under compulsion work.”
“Work!” Howard repeated the word several times absently. Then he leaned forward and said with what was for him an approach to the confidential: “What a mess I have been making of my life! What waste! What folly! I’ve behaved like a child, an impulsive, irresponsible child. And now I must get to work, really to work.”
“With your talents a year or so of work would free you.”
“Oh, I’m free.” Howard hesitated and flushed. “Yes, I’m free,” he repeated bitterly. “We are all free except for the shackles we fasten upon ourselves and can unlock for ourselves. I don’t agree with you that earning one’s daily bread is drudgery.”
“Well, let’s see you work—work for something definite. Why don’t you try for some higher place on the paper—correspondent at Washington or London—no, not London, for that is a lounging job which would ruin even an energetic man. Why not try for the editorial staff? They ought to have somebody upstairs who takes an interest in something besides politics.”
“But doesn’t a man have to write what he doesn’t believe? You know how Segur is always laughing at the protection editorials he writes, although he is a free-trader.”
“Oh, there must be many directions in which the paper is free to express honest opinions.”
Howard began that very night. As soon as he reached his club where he was living for a few days he sat down to the file of the News-Record and began to study its editorial style and method. He had learned a great deal before three o’clock in the morning and had written a short editorial on a subject he took from the news. In the morning he read his article again and decided that with a few changes—adjectives cut out, long sentences cut up, short sentences made shorter and the introduction and the conclusion omitted—it would be worth handing in. With the corrected article in his hand he knocked at the door of the editor’s room.
It was a small, plainly furnished office—no carpet, three severe chairs, a revolving book case with a battered and dusty bust of Lincoln on it, a table strewn with newspaper cuttings. Newspapers from all parts of the world were scattered about the floor. At the table sat the editor, Mr. Malcolm, whom Howard had never before seen.
He was short and slender, with thin white hair and a smooth, satirical face, deeply wrinkled and unhealthily pale. He was dressed in black but wore a string tie of a peculiarly lively shade of red. His most conspicuous feature was his nose—long, narrow, pointed, sarcastic.
“My name is Howard,” began the candidate, all but stammering before Mr. Malcolm’s politely uninterested glance, “and I come from downstairs.”
“Oh—so you are Mr. Howard. I’ve heard of you often. Will you be seated?”
“Thank you—no. I’ve only brought in a little article I thought I’d submit for your page. I’d like to write for it and, if you don’t mind, I’ll bring in an article occasionally.”
“Glad to have it. We like new ideas; and a new pen, a new mind, ought to produce them. If you don’t see your articles in the paper, you’ll know what has happened to them. If you do, paste them on space slips and send them up by the boy on Thursdays.” Mr. Malcolm nodded and smiled and dipped his pen in the ink-well.
The editorial appeared just as Howard wrote it. He read and reread it, admiring the large, handsome editorial type in which it was printed, and deciding that it was worthy of the excellent place in the column which Mr. Malcolm had given it. He wrote another that very day and sent it up by the boy. He found it in his desk the next noon with “Too abstract—never forget that you are writing for a newspaper” scrawled across the last page in blue pencil.
In the two following months Howard submitted thirty-five articles. Three were published in the main as he wrote them, six were “cut” to paragraphs, one appeared as a letter to the editor with “H” signed to it. The others disappeared. It was not encouraging, but Howard kept on. He knew that if he stopped marching steadily, even though hopelessly, toward a definite goal, a heavy hand would be laid upon his shoulder to drag him away and fling him down upon a grave.
As it was, desperately though he fought to refrain from backward glances, he was now and again taken off his guard. A few of her pencil marks on the margin of a leaf in one of his books; a gesture, a little mannerism of some woman passing him in the street—and he would be ready to sink down with weariness and loneliness, like a tired traveller in a vast desert.
He completely lost self-control only once. It was a cold, wet May night and everything had gone against him that day. He looked drearily round his rooms as he came in. How stiff, how forbidding, how desert they seemed! He threw himself into a big chair.
“No friends,” he thought, “no one that cares a rap whether I live or die, suffer or am happy. Nothing to care for. Why do I go on? What’s the use if one has not an object—a human object?”
And their life together came flooding back—her eyes, her kisses, her attentions, her passionate love for him, so pervasive yet so unobtrusive; the feeling of her smooth, round arm about his neck; her way of pressing close up to him and locking her fingers in his; the music of her voice, singing her heartsong to him yet never putting it into words——
He stumbled over to the divan and stretched himself out and buried his face in the cushions. “Come back!” he sobbed. “Come back to me, dear.” And then he cried, as a man cries—without tears, with sobs choking up into his throat and issuing in moans.
“Curious,” he said aloud when the storm was over and he was sitting up, ashamed before himself for his weakness, “who would have suspected me of this?”
Howard was now thirty-two. He was still trying for the editorial staff; but in the last month only five of his articles had been printed to twenty-three thrown away. A national campaign was coming on and the News-Record was taking a political stand that seemed to him sound and right. For the first time he tried political editorials.
The cause aroused his passion for justice, for democratic equality and the abolition of privilege. He had something to say and he succeeded in saying it vigorously, effectively, with clearness and moderation of statement. How to avoid hysteria; how to set others on fire instead of only making of himself a fiery spectacle; how to be earnest, yet calm; how to be satirical yet sincere; how to be interesting, yet direct—these were his objects, pursued with incessant toiling, rewriting again and again, recasting of sentences, careful balancing of words for exact shades of meaning.
“I shall never learn to write,” had been his complaint of himself to himself for years. And in these days it seemed to him that he was farther from a good style than ever. His standards had risen, were rising; he feared that his power of accomplishment was failing. Therefore his heart sank and his face paled when an office boy told him that Mr. Malcolm wished to see him.
“I suppose it’s to tell me not to annoy him with any more of my attempts,” he thought. “Well, anyway, I’ve had the benefit of the work. I’ll try a novel next.”
“Take a seat,” said Mr. Malcolm with an absent nod. “Just a moment, if you please.”
On a chair beside him was the remnant of what had been a huge up-piling of newspapers—the exchanges that had come in during the past twenty-four hours. The Exchange Editor had been through them and Mr. Malcolm was reading “to feel the pulse of the country” and also to make sure that nothing of importance had been overlooked.
On the floor were newspapers by the score, thrown about tumultuously. Mr. Malcolm would seize a paper from the unread heap, whirl it open and send his glance and his long pointed nose tearing down one column and up another, and so from page to page. It took less than a minute for him to finish and filing away great sixteen page dailies. A few seconds sufficed for the smaller papers. Occasionally he took his long shears and with a skilful twist cut out a piece from the middle of a page and laid it and the shears upon the table with a single motion.
“Now, Mr. Howard.” Malcolm sent the last paper to increase the chaos on the floor and faced about in his revolving chair. “How would you like to come up here?”
Howard looked at him in amazement. “You mean——”
“We want you to join the editorial staff. Mr. Walker has married him a rich wife and is going abroad to do literary work, which means that he is going to do nothing. Will you come?”
“It is what I have been working for.”
“And very hard you have worked.” Mr. Malcolm’s cold face relaxed into a half-friendly, half-satirical smile. “After you’d been sending up articles for a fortnight, I knew you’d make it. You went about it systematically. An intelligent plan, persisted in, is hard to beat in this world of laggards and hap-hazard strugglers.”
“And I was on the point of giving up—that is, giving up this particular ambition,” Howard confessed.
“Yes, I saw it in your articles—a certain pessimism and despondency. You show your feelings plainly, young man. It is an excellent quality—but dangerous. A man ought to make his mind a machine working evenly without regard to his feelings or physical condition. The night my oldest child died—I was editor of a country newspaper—I wrote my leaders as usual. I never had written better. You can be absolute master inside, if you will. You can learn to use your feelings when they’re helpful and to shut them off when they hinder.”
“But don’t you think that temperament——”
“Temperament—that’s one of the subtlest forms of self-excuse. However, the place is yours. The salary is a hundred and twenty-five a week—an advance of about twelve hundred a year, I believe, on your average downstairs. Can you begin soon?”
“Immediately,” said Howard, “if the City Editor is satisfied.”
An office boy showed him to his room—a mere hole-in-the-wall with just space for a table-desk, a small table, a case of shelves for books of reference, and two chairs. The one window overlooked the lower end of Manhattan Island—the forest of business buildings peaked with the Titan-tenements of financial New York. Their big, white plumes of smoke and steam were waving in the wind and reflecting in pale pink the crimson of the setting sun.
Howard had his first taste of the intoxication of triumph, his first deep inspiration of ambition. He recalled his arrival in New York, his timidity, his dread lest he should be unable to make a living—“Poor boy,” they used to say at home, “he will have to be supported. He is too much of a dreamer.” He remembered his explorations of those now familiar streets—how acutely conscious he had been that they were paved with stone, walled with stone, roofed with a stony sky, peopled with faces and hearts of stone. How miserably insignificant he had felt!
And all these years he had been almost content to be one of the crowd, like them exerting himself barely enough to provide himself with the essentials of existence. Like them, he had given no real thought to the morrow. And now, with comparatively little labour, he had put himself in the way to become a master, a director of the enormous concentrated energies summed up in the magic word New York.
The key to the situation was—work, incessant, self-improving, self-developing. “And it is the key to happiness also,” he thought. “Work and sleep—the two periods of unconsciousness of self—are the two periods of happiness.”
His aloofness freed him from the temptations of distraction. He knew no women. He did not put himself in the way of meeting them. He kept away from theatres. He sunk himself in a routine of labour which, viewed from the outside, seemed dull and monotonous. Viewed from his stand-point of acquisition, of achievement, it was just the reverse.
The mind soon adapts itself to and enjoys any mental routine which exercises it. The only difficulty is in forming the habit of the routine.
Howard was greatly helped by his natural bent toward editorial writing. The idea of discussing important questions each day with a vast multitude as an audience stirred his imagination and aroused his instincts for helping on the great world-task of elevating the race. This enthusiasm pleased and also amused his cynical chief.
“You believe in things?” Malcolm said to him after they had become well acquainted. “Well, it is an admirable quality—but dangerous. You will need careful editing. Your best plan is to give yourself up to your belief while you are writing—then to edit yourself in cold blood. That is the secret of success, of great success in any line, business, politics, a profession—enthusiasm, carefully revised and edited.”
“It is difficult to be cold blooded when one is in earnest.”
“True,” Malcolm answered, “and there is the danger. My own enthusiasms are confined to the important things—food, clothing and shelter. It seems to me that the rest is largely a matter of taste, training and time of life. But don’t let me discourage you. I only suggest that you may have to guard against believing so intensely that you produce the impression of being an impracticable, a fanatic. Be cautious always; be especially cautious when you are cocksure you’re right. Unadulterated truth always arouses suspicion in the unaccustomed public. It has the alarming tastelessness of distilled water.”
Howard was acute enough to separate the wisdom from the cynicism of his chief. He saw the lesson of moderation. “You have failed, my very able chief,” he said to himself, “because you have never believed intensely enough to move you to act. You have attached too much importance to the adulteration—the folly and the humbug. And here you are, still only a critic, destructive but never constructive.”
At first his associates were much amused by his intensity. But as he learned to temper and train his enthusiasm they grew to respect both his ability and his character. Before a year had passed they were feeling the influence of his force—his trained, informed mind, made vigorous by principles and ideals.
Malcolm had the keen appreciation of a broad mind for this honest, intelligent energy. He used the editorial “blue-pencil” for alteration and condensation with the hand of a master. He cut away Howard’s crudities, toned down and so increased his intensity, and pointed it with the irony and satire necessary to make it carry far and penetrate easily.
Malcolm was at once giving Howard a reputation greater than he deserved and training him to deserve it.
In the office next to Howard’s sat Segur, a bachelor of forty-five who took life as a good-humoured jest and amused his leisure with the New Yorkers who devote a life of idleness to a nervous flight from boredom. Howard interested Segur who resolved to try to draw him out of his seclusion.
“I’m having some people to dinner at the Waldorf on Thursday,” he said, looking in at the door. “Won’t you join us?”
“I’d be glad to,” replied Howard, casting about for an excuse for declining. “But I’m afraid I’d ruin your dinner. I haven’t been out for years. I’ve been too busy to make friends or, rather, acquaintances.”
“A great mistake. You ought to see more of people.”
“Why? Can they tell me anything that I can’t learn from newspapers or books more accurately and without wasting so much time? I’d like to know the interesting people and to see them in their interesting moments. But I can’t afford to hunt for them through the wilderness of nonentities and wait for them to become interesting.”
“But you get amusement, relaxation. Then too, it’s first-hand study of life.”
“I’m not sure of that. Yawning is not a very attractive kind of relaxation, is it? And as for study of life, eight years of reporting gave me more of that than I could assimilate. And it was study of realities, not of pretenses. As I remember them, ‘respectable’ people are all about the same, whether in their vices or in their virtues. They are cut from a few familiar, ‘old reliable’ patterns. No, I don’t think there is much to be learned from respectability on dress parade.”
“You’ll be amused on Thursday. You must come. I’m counting on you.”
Howard accepted—cordially as he could not refuse decently. Yet he had a presentiment or a shyness or an impatience at the interruption of his routine which reproached him for accepting with insistence and persistence.
It was the first week in November, and in those days “everybody” did not stay in the country so late as now. There were many New Yorkers in the crowd of out-of-town people at the Waldorf. Howard was attracted, fascinated by the scene—carefully-groomed men and women, the air of gaiety and ease, the flowers, the music, the lights, the perfumes. At a glance it seemed a dream of life with evil and sorrow and pain banished.
“No place for a working man,” thought he, “at least not for my kind of a working man. It appeals too sharply to the instincts for laziness and luxury.”
He was late and stood in the entrance to the palm-garden, looking about for Segur. Soon he saw him waving from a table near the wall under the music-alcove.
“The oysters are just coming,” said Segur. “Sit over there between Mrs. Carnarvon and Miss Trevor. They are cousins, Howard, so be cautious what you say to one about the other. Oh, here is Mr. Berersford.”
The others knew each other well; Howard knew them only as he had seen their names in the “fashionable intelligence” columns of the newspapers. Mrs. Carnarvon was a small thin woman in a black velvet gown which made her thinness obtrusive and attractive or the reverse according as one’s taste is toward or away from attenuation. Her eyes were a dull, greenish grey, her skin brown and smooth and tough from much exposure in the hunting field. Her cheeks were beginning to hang slightly, so that one said: “She is pretty, but she will soon not be.” Her mouth proclaimed strong appetites—not unpleasantly since she was good-looking.
Miss Trevor was perhaps ten years younger than her cousin, not far from twenty-four. She had a critical, almost amused yet not unpleasant way of looking out of unusually clear blue-green eyes. Her hair was of an ordinary shade of dark brown, but fine and thick and admirably arranged to set off her long, sensitive, high bred features. Her chin and mouth expressed decision and strong emotions.
There was a vacant chair between Segur and Berersford and it was presently filled by a fat, middle-aged woman, neither blonde nor brunette, with a large, serene face. Upon it was written a frank confession that she had never in her life had an original thought capable of creating a ripple of interest. She was Mrs. Sidney, rich, of an “old” family—in the New York meaning of the word “old”—both by marriage and by birth, much courted because of her position and because she entertained a great deal both in town and at a large and hospitable country house.
The conversation was lively and amused, or seemed to amuse, all. It was purely personal—about Kittie and Nellie and Jim and Peggie and Amy and Bob; about the sayings and doings of a few dozen people who constituted the intimates of these five persons.
Mrs. Carnarvon turned to the silent Howard at last and began about the weather.
“Horrible in the city, isn’t it?”
“Well, perhaps it is,” replied Howard. “But I fancied it delightful. You see I have not lived anywhere but New York for so long that I am hardly capable to judge.”
“Why everybody says we have the worst climate in the world.”
“Far be it from me to contradict everybody. But for me New York has the ideal climate. Isn’t it the best of any great city in the world? You see, we have the air of the sea in our streets. And when the sun shines, which it does more days in the year than in any other great city, the effect is like champagne—or rather, like the effect champagne looks as if it ought to have.”
“I hate champagne,” said Mrs. Carnarvon. “Marian, you must not drink it; you know you mustn’t.” This to Miss Trevor who was lifting the glass to her lips. She drank a little of the champagne, then set the glass down slowly.
“What you said made me want to drink it,” she said to Howard. “I was glad to hear your lecture on the weather. I had never thought of it before, but New York really has a fine climate. And only this afternoon I let that stupid Englishman—Plymouth—you’ve met him? No?—Well, at any rate, he was denouncing our climate and for the moment I forgot about London.”
“Frightful there, isn’t it, after October and until May?”
“Yes, and the air is usually stale even in the late spring. When it’s warm, it’s sticky. And when it’s cold, it’s raw.”
“You are a New Yorker?”
“Yes,” said Miss Trevor faintly, and for an instant showing surprise at his ignorance. “That is, I spend part of the winter here—like all New Yorkers.”
“All?”
“Oh, all except those who don’t count, or rather, who merely count.”
“How do you mean?” Howard was taking advantage of her looking into her plate to smile with a suggestion of irony. She happened to glance up and so caught him.
“Oh,” she said, smiling with frank irony at him, “I mean all those people—the masses, I think they’re called—the people who have to be fussed over and reformed and who keep shops and—and all that.”
“The people who work, you mean?”
“No, I mean the people you never meet about anywhere, the people who read the newspapers and come to the basement door.”
“Oh, yes, I understand.” Howard was laughing. “Well, that’s one way of looking at life. Of course it’s not my way.”
“What is your way?”
“Why, being one of those who count only in the census, I naturally take a view rather different from yours. Now I should say that your people don’t count. You see, I am most deeply interested in people who read newspapers.”
“Oh, you write for the papers, like Jim Segur? What do you write?”
“What they call editorials.”
“You are an editor?”
“Yes and no. I am one of the editors who does not edit but is edited.”
“It must be interesting,” said Miss Trevor, vaguely.
“More interesting than you imagine. But then all work is that. In fact work is the only permanently interesting thing in life. The rest produces dissatisfaction and regret.”
“Oh, I’m not so very dissatisfied. Yet I don’t work.”
“Are you quite sure? Think how hard you work at being fitted for gowns, at going about to dinners and balls and the like, at chasing foxes and anise seed bags and golf balls.”
“But that is not work. It is amusing myself.”
“Yes, you think so. But you forget that you are doing it in order that all these people who don’t count may read about it in the papers and so get a little harmless relaxation.”
“But we don’t do it to get into the papers.”
“Probably not. Neither did this—what is it here in my plate, a lamb chop?—this lamb gambol about and keep itself in condition to form a course at Segur’s dinner. But after all, wasn’t that what it was really for? Then think how many people you support by your work.”
“You make me feel like a day-labourer.”
“Oh, you’re a much harder worker than any day labourer. And the saddest part of it to me is that you work altogether for others. You give, give and get in return nothing but a few flattering glances, a few careless pats on the back of your vanity. I should hate to work so hard for so little.”
“But what would you do?” Miss Trevor was looking at him, interested and amused.
“Well, I’d work for myself. I’d insist on a return, on getting back something equivalent or near it. I’d insist on having my mind improved, or having my power or my reputation advanced.”
“I was only jesting when I said that about people not counting.”
“Altogether?”
“No, not altogether. I don’t care much about the masses. They seem to me to be underbred, of a different sort. I hate doing things that are useful and I hate people that do useful things—in a general way, I mean.”
“That is doubtless due to defective education,” said Howard, with a smile that carried off the thrust as a jest.
“Is that the way you’d describe a horror of contact with—well, with unpleasant things?” Miss Trevor was serious.
“But is it that? Isn’t it just an unconscious affectation, taken up simply because all the people about you think that way—if one can call the process thinking? You don’t think, do you, that it is a sign of superiority to be narrow, to be ignorant, to be out of touch with the great masses of one’s fellow-beings, to play the part of a harlequin or a ballet-girl on the stage of life? I understand how a stupid ass can fritter away his one chance to live in saying and hearing and doing silly things. But ought not an intelligent person try to enjoy life, try to get something substantial out of it, try to possess himself of its ideas and emotions? Why should one play the fool simply because those about one are incapable of playing any other part?”
“I’m surprised that you are here to-night. Still, I suppose you’ll give yourself absolution on the plea that one must dine somewhere.”
“But I’m not wasting my time. I’m learning. I’m observing a phase of life. And I’m seeing the latest styles in women’s gowns and—”
“Is that important—styles, I mean?”
“Do you suppose that my kind of people, the working classes, would spend so much time and thought in making anything that was not important? There is nothing more important.”
“Then you don’t think we women are wasting time when we talk about dress so much?”
“On the contrary, it is an evidence of your superior sagacity. Women talk trade, ‘shop,’ as soon as they get away from the men. They talk men and dress—fish and nets.”
Berersford heard the word fish and interrupted.
“Do you go South next month, Marian?”
“Yes—about the fifteenth.” Miss Trevor explained to Howard: “Bobby—Mr. Berersford here—always fishes in Florida in January.”
The conversation again became general and personal. Howard knew none of the people of whom they were talking and all that they said was of the nature of gossip. But they talked in a sparkling way, using good English, speaking in agreeable voices with a correct accent, and indulging in a great deal of malicious humour.
As they separated Mrs. Sidney, to whom Howard had not spoken during the evening, said to Segur: “You must bring Mr. Howard on Sunday afternoon.”
“Will you drop Marian at the house for me?” Mrs. Carnarvon asked her. “I want to go on to Edith’s.”
Segur went with Mrs. Sidney and Marian to their carriage. “Who is Mr. Howard?” Mrs. Sidney said, and Miss Trevor drew nearer to hear the answer.
“One of the editorial writers down on the paper and a very clever one—none better. He works hard and is desperately serious and a regular hermit.”
“I think he’s very handsome—don’t you, Marian?”
“I found him interesting,” said Miss Trevor.
Howard thought a great deal about Miss Trevor that night, and she was still in his head the next day. “This comes of never seeing women,” he said to himself. “The first girl I meet seems the most beautiful I ever saw, and the most intellectual. And, when I think it over, what did she say that was startling?”
Nevertheless he went with Segur the next Sunday to Mrs. Sidney’s great house in the upper Avenue overlooking the Park.
“Why do I come here?” he asked himself. “It is a sheer waste of time. Mrs. Sidney can do me no good, or I her. It must be the hope of seeing Miss Trevor.”
When the gaudy and be-powdered flunkey held back the heavy curtains of the salon to announce him and Segur, he saw Miss Trevor on a low chair absently staring into the fire. Yet when he had spoken to Mrs. Sidney and turned toward her she at once stretched out her hand with a slight smile. Some others came in and Howard was free to talk to her. He sat looking at her steadily, admiring her almost perfect profile, delicate yet strong.
“And what have you been doing since I saw you?” Miss Trevor asked.
“Writing little pieces about politics for the paper,” replied Howard.
“Politics? I detest it. It is all stealing and calling names, isn’t it? And something dreadful is always going to happen if somebody or other isn’t elected, or is elected, to something or other. And then, whether he is or not, nothing happens. I should think the men who have been so excited and angry and alarmed would feel very cheap. But they don’t. And the next time they carry on in just the same ridiculous way.”
“Politics is like everything else—interesting if you understand what it is all about. But like everything else, you can’t understand it without a little study at first. It’s a pity women don’t take an interest. If they did the men might become more reasonable and sane about it than they are now. But you—what have you been doing?”
“I—oh, industriously superintending the making of my new nets.” Marian laughed and Howard was flattered. “And also, well, riding in the Park every morning. But I never do anything interesting. I simply drift.”
“That’s so much simpler and more satisfactory than threshing and splashing about as I do. It seems so fussy and foolish and futile. I wish—that is, sometimes I wish—that I had learned to amuse myself in some less violent and exhausting way.”
“Marian—I say, Marian,” called Mrs. Sidney. “Has Teddy come down?”
Miss Trevor coloured slightly as she answered: “No, he comes a week Wednesday. He’s still hunting.”
“Hunting,” Howard repeated when Mrs. Sidney was again busy with the others. “Now there is a kind of work that never bothers a man’s brains or sets him to worrying. I wish I knew how to amuse myself in some such way.”
“You should go about more.”
“Go—where?”
“To see people.”
“But I do see a great many people. I’m always seeing them—all day long.”
“Yes—but that is in a serious way. I mean go where you will be amused—to dinners for instance.”
“I don’t dare. I can’t work at work and also work at play. I must work at one or the other all the time. I can do nothing without a definite object. I can’t be just a little interested in anything or anybody. With me it is no interest at all or else absorption until interest is exhausted.”
“Then if you were interested in a woman, let us say, you’d be absorbed until you found out all there was, and then you’d—take to your heels.”
“But she might always be new. She might interest me more and more. Anyhow I fancy that she would weary of me long before I wearied of her. I think women usually weary first. Men are very monotonous. We are as vain as women, if not vainer, without their capacity for concealing it. And vanity makes one think he does not need to exert himself to please.”
“But why do people usually say that it is the men that are difficult to hold?”
“Because the men hold the women, not through the kind of interest we are talking about, but through another kind—quite different. Women are so lazy and so dependent—dependent upon men for homes, for money, for escort even.”
Miss Trevor was flushing, as if the fire were too hot—at least she moved a little farther away from it. “Your ideal woman would be a shop-girl, I should say from what you’ve told me.”
“Perhaps—in the abstract. I really do think that if I were going to marry, I should look about for a working-girl, a girl that supported herself. How can a man be certain of the love of a woman who is dependent upon him? I should be afraid she was only tolerating me as a labour-saving device.”
Miss Trevor laughed. “There certainly is no vanity in that remark,” she said. “Now I can’t imagine most of the men I know thinking that.”
“It’s only theory with me. In practice doubtless I should be as self-complacent as any other man.”
They left Mrs. Sidney’s together and Howard walked down the Avenue with her. It seemed a wonderful afternoon—the air dazzling, intoxicating. He was filled with the joy of living and was glad this particular tall, slender, distinguished-looking girl was there to make his enjoyment perfect. They were gay with the delight of being young and in health and attractive physically and mentally each to the other. They looked each at the other a great deal, and more and more frankly.
“Am I never to see you again?” he asked as he rang the bell for her.
“I believe Mrs. Carnarvon is going to invite you to dine here Thursday night.”
“Thank you,” said Howard.
Miss Trevor coloured. But she met his glance boldly and laughed. Howard wondered why her laugh was defiant, almost reckless.
He saw Segur at the club after dinner that same night. “And how do you like Miss Trevor?” Segur began as the whiskey and carbonic were set before them.
“A very attractive girl,” said Howard.
“Yes—so a good many men have thought in the last five years. She’s marrying Teddy Danvers in the spring, I believe. At any rate it’s generally looked on as settled. Teddy’s a good deal of a ‘chump.’ But he’s a decent fellow—good-looking, good-natured, domestic in his tastes, and nothing but money.”
Howard was smiling to himself. He understood Miss Trevor’s sudden consciousness of the nearness of the fire, her flush when Mrs. Sidney asked about “Teddy,” and the recklessness in her parting laugh.
“Well, Teddy’s in luck,” he said aloud.
“Not so sure of that. She’s quite capable of leading him a dance if he bores her. And bore her he will. But that is nothing new. This town is full of it.”
“Full of what?”
“Of weary women—weary wives. The men are hobby-riders. They have just one interest and that usually small and dull—stocks or iron or real estate or hunting or automobiles. Our women are not like the English women—stupid, sodden. They are alive, acute. They wish to be interested. Their husbands bore them. So—well, what is the natural temptation to a lazy woman in search of an interest?”
“It’s like Paris—like France?”
“Yes, something. Except that perhaps our women are more sentimental, not fond of intrigue for its own sake—at least, not as a rule.”
“Doesn’t interest them deeply enough, I suppose. It’s the American blood coming out—the passion for achievement. They want a man of whom they can be proud, a man who is doing something interesting and doing it well.”
“I doubt that,” replied Segur shrugging his shoulders. “When a woman loves a man, she wants to absorb him.”
Howard soon went away to his rooms for a long evening of undisturbed thought about Teddy Danvers’s fiancée—the first temptation that had entered his loneliness since Alice died.
In the few weeks of her illness and the few months immediately following her death, he had been at his very best. He was able to see her as she was and to appreciate her. He was living in the clear pure air of the Valley of the Great Shadow where all things appear in their true relations and true proportions. But only there was it possible for the gap between him and Alice to close—that gap of which she was more acutely conscious than he, and which she made wider far than it really was by being too humble with him, too obviously on her knees before him. Such superiority as she thought he possessed is not in human nature; but neither is it in human nature to refuse worship, to refuse to pose upon a pedestal if the opportunity presses.
In the three years between her death and his meeting Marian, the eternal masculine had been secretly gaining strength to resume its pursuit of the eternal feminine. And the eternal feminine was certainly most alluringly personified in this beautiful, graceful girl, at once appreciative and worthy of appreciation.
Perhaps she appealed most strongly to Howard in her vivid suggestion of the open air—of health and strength and nature. He had been leading a cloistered existence and his blood had grown sluggish. She gave him the sensation that a prisoner gets when he catches a glimpse from his barred window of the fields and the streams radiating the joy of life and freedom. And Marian was of his own kind—like the women among whom he had been brought up. She satisfied his idea of what a “lady” should be, but at the same time she was none the less a woman to him—a woman to love and to be loved; to give him sympathy, companionship; to inspire him to overcome his weaknesses by striving to be worthy of her; to bring into his life that feminine charm without which a man’s life must be cold and cheerless.
He knew that he could not marry her, that he had no right to make love to her, that it was unwise to go near her again. But he had no power to resist the temptation. And even in those days he had small regard for the means when the end was one upon which he had fixed his mind. “Why not take what I can get?” he thought, as he dreamed of her. “She’s engaged—her future practically settled. Yes, I’ll be as happy as she’ll let me.” And he resumed his idealising.
At his time of life idealisation is still not a difficult or a long process. And in this case there was an ample physical basis for it—and far more of a mental basis than young imagination demands. He took the draught she so frankly offered him; he added a love potion of his own concocting, and drank it off.
He was in love.