Chapter V (2)

What if Stanley Baird should lose interest? What if, after he lost interest, she should find herself without money, worse of than she had been when she sold herself into slavery--highly moral and conventionally correct slavery, but still slavery--to the little general with the peaked pink-silk nightcap hiding the absence of the removed toupee--and with the wonderful pink-silk pajamas, gorgeously monogramed in violet--and the tiny feet and ugly hands--and those loathsome needle-pointed mustaches and the hideous habit of mumbling his tongue and smacking his lips? What if, moneyless, she should not be able to find another Stanley or a man of the class gentleman willing to help her generously even on ANY terms? What then?

She was looking out over the sea, her bank-book and statements and canceled checks in her lap. Their cottage was at the very edge of the strand; its veranda was often damp from spray after a storm. It was not storming as she sat there, "taking stock"; under a blue sky an almost tranquil sea was crooning softly in the sunlight, innocent and happy and playful as a child. She, dressed in a charming negligee and looking forward to a merry day in the auto, with lunch and dinner at attractive, luxurious places farther down the coast--she was stricken with a horrible sadness, with a terror that made her heart beat wildly.

"I must be crazy!" she said, half aloud. "I've never earned a dollar with my voice. And for two months it has been unreliable. I'm acting like a crazy person. What WILL become of me?"

Just then Stanley Baird came through the pretty little house, seeking her. "There you are!" he cried. "Do go get dressed."

Hastily she flung a scarf over the book and papers in her lap. She had intended to speak to him about that fresh deposit of five thousand dollars--to refuse it, to rebuke him. Now she did not dare.

"What's the matter?" he went on. "Headache?"

"It was the wine at dinner last night," explained she. "I ought never to touch red wine. It disagrees with me horribly."

"That was filthy stuff," said he. "You must take some champagne at lunch. That'll set you right."

She stealthily wound the scarf about the papers. When she felt that all were secure she rose. She was looking sweet and sad and peculiarly beautiful. There was an exquisite sheen on her skin. She had washed her hair that morning, and it was straying fascinatingly about her brow and ears and neck. Baird looked at her, lowered his eyes and colored.

"I'll not be long," she said hurriedly.

She had to pass him in the rather narrow doorway. From her garments shook a delicious perfume. He caught her in his arms. The blood had flushed into his face in a torrent, swelling out the veins, giving him a distorted and wild expression.

"Mildred!" he cried. "Say that you love me a little! I'm so lonely for you--so hungry for you!"

She grew cold with fear and with repulsion. She neither yielded to his embrace nor shook it off. She simply stood, her round smooth body hard though corsetless. He kissed her on the throat, kissed the lace over her bosom, crying out inarticulately. In the frenzy of his passion he did not for a while realize her lack of response. As he felt it, his arms relaxed, dropped away from her, fell at his side. He hung his head. He was breathing so heavily that she glanced into the house apprehensively, fearing someone else might hear.

"I beg pardon," he muttered. "You were too much for me this morning. It was your fault. You are maddening!"

She moved on into the house.

"Wait a minute!" he called after her.

She halted, hesitating.

"Come back," he said. "I've got something to say to you."

She turned and went back to the veranda, he retreating before her and his eyes sinking before the cold, clear blue of hers.

"You're going up, not to come down again," he said. "You think I've insulted you--think I've acted outrageously."

How glad she was that he had so misread her thoughts--had not discovered the fear, the weakness, the sudden collapse of all her boasted confidence in her strength of character.

"You'll never feel the same toward me again," he went fatuously on. "You think I'm a fraud. Well, I'll admit that I am in love with you--have been ever since the steamer--always was crazy about that mouth of yours--and your figure, and the sound of your voice. I'll admit I'm an utter fool about you--respect you and trust you as I never used to think any woman deserved to be respected and trusted. I'll even admit that I've been hoping--all sorts of things. I knew a woman like you wouldn't let a man help her unless she loved him."

At this her heart beat wildly and a blush of shame poured over her face and neck. He did not see. He had not the courage to look at her--to face that expression of the violated goddess he felt confident her face was wearing. In love, he reasoned and felt about her like an inexperienced boy, all his experience going for nothing. He went on:

"I understand we can never be anything to each other until you're on the stage and arrived. I'd not have it otherwise, if I could. For I want YOU, and I'd never believe I had you unless you were free."

The color was fading from her cheeks. At this it flushed deeper than before. She must speak. Not to speak was to lie, was to play the hypocrite. Yet speak she dared not. At least Stanley Baird was better than Siddall. Anyhow, who was she, that had been the wife of Siddall, to be so finicky?

"You don't believe me?" he said miserably. "You think I'll forget myself sometime again?"

"I hope not," she said gently. "I believe not. I trust you, Stanley."

And she went into the house. He looked after her, in admiration of the sweet and pure calm of this quiet rebuke. She tried to take the same exalted view of it herself, but she could not fool herself just then with the familiar "good woman" fake. She knew that she had struck the flag of self-respect. She knew what she would really have done had he been less delicate, less in love, and more "practical." And she found a small and poor consolation in reflecting, "I wonder how many women there are who take high ground because it costs nothing." We are prone to suspect everybody of any weakness we find in ourselves--and perhaps we are not so far wrong as are those who accept without question the noisy protestations of a world of self-deceivers.

Thenceforth she and Stanley got on better than ever--apparently. But though she ignored it, she knew the truth--knew her new and deep content was due to her not having challenged his assertion that she loved him. He, believing her honest and high minded, assumed that the failure to challenge was a good woman's way of admitting. But with the day of reckoning--not only with him but also with her own self-respect--put off until that vague and remote time when she should be a successful prima donna, she gave herself up to enjoyment. That was a summer of rarely fine weather, particularly fine along the Jersey coast. They--always in gay parties--motored up and down the coast and inland. Several of the "musical" men--notably Richardson of Elberon--had plenty of money; Stanley, stopping with his cousins, the Frasers, on the Rumson Road, brought several of his friends, all rich and more or less free. As every moment of Mildred's day was full and as it was impossible not to sleep and sleep well in that ocean air, with the surf soothing the nerves as the lullaby of a nurse soothes a baby, she was able to put everything unpleasant out of mind. She was resting her voice, was building up her health; therefore the career was being steadily advanced and no time was being wasted. She felt sorry for those who had to do unpleasant or disagreeable things in making their careers. She told herself that she did not deserve her good fortune in being able to advance to a brilliant career not through hardship but over the most delightful road imaginable--amusing herself, wearing charming and satisfactory clothes, swimming and dancing, motoring and feasting. Without realizing it, she was strongly under the delusion that she was herself already rich--the inevitable delusion with a woman when she moves easily and freely and luxuriously about, never bothered for money, always in the company of rich people. The rich are fated to demoralize those around them. The stingy rich fill their satellites with envy and hatred. The generous rich fill them with the feeling that the light by which they shine and the heat with which they are warm are not reflected light and heat but their own.

Never had she been so happy. She even did not especially mind Donald Keith, a friend of Stanley's and of Mrs. Brindley's, who, much too often to suit her, made one of the party. She had tried in vain to discover what there was in Keith that inspired such intense liking in two people so widely different as expansive and emotional Stanley Baird and reserved and distinctly cold Cyrilla Brindley. Keith talked little, not only seemed not to listen well, but showed plainly, even in tete-a-tete conversations, that his thoughts had been elsewhere. He made no pretense of being other than he was--an indifferent man who came because it did not especially matter to him where he was. Sometimes his silence and his indifference annoyed Mildred; again--thanks to her profound and reckless contentment--she was able to forget that he was along. He seemed to be and probably was about forty years old. His head was beautifully shaped, the line of its profile--front, top, and back--being perfect in intellectuality, strength and symmetry. He was rather under the medium height, about the same height as Mildred herself. He was extremely thin and loosely built, and his clothes seemed to hang awry, giving him an air of slovenliness which became surprising when one noted how scrupulously neat and clean he was. His brown hair, considerably tinged with rusty gray, grew thinly upon that beautiful head. His skin was dry and smooth and dead white. This, taken with the classic regularity of his features, gave him an air of lifelessness, of one burnt out by the fire of too much living; but whether the living had been done by Keith himself or by his immediate ancestors appearances did not disclose. This look of passionless, motionless repose, like classic sculpture, was sharply and startlingly belied by a pair of really wonderful eyes--deeply and intensely blue, brilliant, all seeing, all comprehending, eyes that seemed never to sleep, seemed the ceaselessly industrious servants of a brain that busied itself without pause. The contrast between the dead white calm of his face, the listlessness of his relaxed figure, and these vivid eyes, so intensely alive, gave to Donald Keith's personality an uncanniness that was most disagreeable to Mildred.

"That's what fascinates me," said Cyrilla, when they were discussing him one day.

"Fascinates!" exclaimed Mildred. "He's tiresome--when he isn't rude."

"Rude?"

"Not actively rude but, worse still, passively rude."

"He is the only man I've ever seen with whom I could imagine myself falling in love," said Mrs. Brindley.

Mildred laughed in derision. "Why, he's a dead man!" cried she.

"You don't understand," said Cyrilla. "You've never lived with a man." She forgot completely, as did Mildred herself, so completely had Mrs. Siddall returned to the modes and thoughts of a girl. "At home--to live with--you want only reposeful things. That is why the Greeks, whose instincts were unerring, had so much reposeful statuary. One grows weary of agitating objects. They soon seem hysterical and shallow. The same thing's true of persons. For permanent love and friendship you want reposeful men--calm, strong, silent. The other kind either wear you out or wear themselves out with you."

"You forget his eyes," put in Stanley. "Did you ever see such eyes!"

"Yes, those eyes of his!" cried Mildred. "You certainly can't call them reposeful, Mrs. Brindley."

Mrs. Brindley did not seize the opportunity to convict her of inconsistency. Said she:

"I admit the eyes. They're the eyes of the kind of man a woman wants, or another man wants in his friend. When Keith looks at you, you feel that you are seeing the rarest being in the world--an absolutely reliable person. When I think of him I think of reliable, just as when you think of the sun you think of brightness."

"I had no idea it was so serious as this," teased Stanley.

"Nor had I," returned Cyrilla easily, "until I began to talk about him. Don't tell him, Mr. Baird, or he might take advantage of me."

The idea amused Stanley. "He doesn't care a rap about women," said he. "I hear he has let a few care about him from time to time, but he soon ceased to be good-natured. He hates to be bored."

As he came just then, they had to find another subject. Mildred observed him with more interest. She had learned to have respect for Mrs. Brindley's judgments. But she soon gave over watching him. That profound calm, those eyes concentrating all the life of the man like a burning glass-- She had a disagreeable sense of being seen through, even to her secretest thought, of being understood and measured and weighed--and found wanting. It occurred to her for the first time that part of the reason for her not liking him was the best of reasons--that he did not like her.

The first time she was left alone with him, after this discovery, she happened to be in an audacious and talkative mood, and his lack of response finally goaded her into saying: "WHY don't you like me?" She cared nothing about it; she simply wished to hear what he would say--if he could be roused into saying anything. He was sitting on the steps leading from the veranda to the sea--was smoking a cigarette and gazing out over the waves like a graven image, as if he had always been posed there and always would be there, the embodiment of repose gazing in ineffable indifference upon the embodiment of its opposite. He made no answer.

"I asked you why you do not like me," said she. "Did you hear?"

"Yes," replied he.

She waited; nothing further from him. Said she:

"Well, give me one of your cigarettes."

He rose, extended his case, then a light. He was never remiss in those kinds of politeness. When she was smoking, he seated himself again and dropped into the former attitude. She eyed him, wondering how it could be possible that he had endured the incredible fatigues and hardships Stanley Baird had related of him--hunting and exploring expeditions into tropics and into frozen regions, mountain climbs, wild sea voyages in small boats, all with no sign of being able to stand anything, yet also with no sign of being any more disturbed than now in this seaside laziness. Stanley had showed them a picture of him taken twenty years and more ago when he was in college; he had looked almost the same then--perhaps a little older.

"Well, I am waiting," persisted she.

She thought he was about to look at her--a thing he had never done, to her knowledge, since they had known each other. She nerved herself to receive the shock, with a certain flutter of expectancy, of excitement even. But instead of looking, he settled himself in a slightly different position and fixed his gaze upon another point in the horizon. She noted that he had splendid hands--ideal hands for a man, with the same suggestion of intense vitality and aliveness that flashed from his eyes. She had not noted this before. Next she saw that he had good feet, and that his boots were his only article of apparel that fitted him, or rather, that looked as if made for him.

She tossed her cigarette over the rail to the sand. He startled her by speaking, in his unemotional way. He said:

"Now, I like you better."

"I don't understand," said she.

No answer from him. The cigarette depending listlessly from his lips seemed--as usual--uncertain whether it would stay or fall. She watched this uncertainty with a curious, nervous interest. She was always thinking that cigarette would fall, but it never did. Said she:

"Why did you say you liked me less?"

"Better," corrected he.

"We used to have a pump in our back yard at home," laughed she. "One toiled away at the handle, but nothing ever came. And it was a promising-looking pump, too."

He smiled--a slow, reluctant smile, but undeniably attractive. Said he:

"Because you threw away your cigarette."

"You object to women smoking?"

"No," said he. His tone made her feel how absurd it was to suspect him of such provincialism.

"You object to MY smoking?" suggested she; laughing, "Pump! Pump!"

"No," said he.

"Then your remark meant nothing at all?"

He was silent.

"You are rude," said she coldly, rising to go into the house.

He said something, what she did not hear, in her agitation. She paused and inquired:

"What did you say?"

"I said, I am not rude but kind," replied he.

"That is detestable!" cried she. "I have not liked you, but I have been polite to you because of Stanley and Mrs. Brindley. Why should you be insulting to me?"

"What have I done?" inquired he, unmoved. He had risen as she rose, but instead of facing her he was leaning against the post of the veranda, bent upon his seaward vigil.

"You have insinuated that your reasons for not liking me were a reflection on me."

"You insisted," said he.

"You mean that they are?" demanded she furiously. She was amazed at her wild, unaccountable rage.

He slowly turned his head and looked at her--a glance without any emotion whatever, simply a look that, like the beam of a powerful searchlight, seemed to thrust through fog and darkness and to light up everything in its path. Said he:

"Do you wish me to tell you why I don't like you?"

"No!" she cried hysterically. "Never mind--I don't know what I'm saying." And she went hastily into the house. A moment later, in her own room upstairs, she was wondering at herself. Why had she become confused? What did he mean? What had she seen--or half seen--in the darkness and fog within herself when he looked at her? In a passion she cried:

"If he would only stay away!"