Angela's Business Part 13

"Clever? I'd call that the stupidest thing in the world."

"Then you do like them! I'm so glad. I've wondered, you see...."

The feminine speeches, the appeal of these eyes, seemed all at once to create an enveloping pressure, softer than nothing, yet extraordinary.

Or possibly the trouble was that Dionysius, after all, had freed his eyes of the magic more brilliantly than his creator.

"What sort of girls do you like? Tell me?" said the voice of Woman, nearer.

And then in the suddenest way conceivable there took place the Strange Occurrence referred to. Without the smallest premeditation, Charles bent and touched his lips to that smooth invitational cheek.

On that central point there is not the slightest room for doubt. Let there be no wriggling or evasion here. Charles Garrott, who scorned La Femme and viewed Woman exclusively as a Movement, did bend his neck and kiss the Mitch.e.l.lton Home-Maker upon a sofa.

He meant the salute, he was afterward certain, as but a fatherly tribute to youth and beauty, or (considered in another way) but the expected, and in a sense purely conventional, move in the ancient parlor-game. But on such a move as this homes have been broken, families set to mutual slaughter, thrones shaken, history changed. Charles, to put it in a word, found it easier to begin paying his tributes than gracefully to desist from them.

Prompted by a not unnatural curiosity, the lady (who had not proved more than maidenly surprised or rebuking) said:--

"Oh!... Why do you do this?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "OH!... WHY DO YOU DO THIS?"]

Who knows what trusting heart first voiced that immemorial question?

Charles Garrott, at least, was not the first gentleman on earth to fail to utter promptly the one satisfactory commentary on his behavior. Miss Angela made that little, gentle note of interrogation which cannot be written, and then she said again:--

"Tell me--why do you?"

Then it was as if the intrinsic pointedness of that query penetrated the man, suddenly and sharply. It was the mere force of iteration, no doubt; but all at once the soft voice seemed possessed of a certain insistence, tinctured with a certain definite expectation, you might say. Now that Charles stopped to think of it, why was he doing this?

The young man's arms fell, as if something had burned them. He rose abruptly and strode away to the mantelpiece, where, however, the Latrobe heater spoiled any hope of an effective pose.

If he meant thus to signify that the little episode was closed and done with, life, unluckily, was not quite so simple as that. The pretty Home-Maker, having gazed at his back- or side-view a moment, as if bewildered, said in an uncertain voice:--

"I--I don't understand you at all. Why did you do that?"

Putting down the impulse to bolt, and the even more astonishing impulse to return to that fatal sofa, Charles Garrott braced himself to reply.

In this effort he was handicapped by emotions altogether unknown to most young men who sit upon sofas. For example: What would the lady in Sweden have to say to this little affair?

He confronted a fact which he had temporarily lost sight of: that he who pays these tributes must pay for them to the full. Half of him might feel resentful and furious, but it was clear that the whole of him, the net Charles, must cut a sorry figure for a while. Half of him might be crying out, stern as science itself: "Come, girl, be honest! Don't go about dropping matches into gunpowder, and then pretend to be surprised at the explosion." But the net Charles, brightly flushed, was speaking lamely as a schoolboy:--

"Well! Do you think I could be _blamed_--exactly? It--it seemed such an awfully natural thing to do. You--ah--it seemed I--I couldn't do anything _else_!..."

"I see," said the girl slowly.

"Ah--you--you're a very kissable person, you must know--"

"And do you always go about kissing people you think are kissable?"

The young man shrank as from a blow. Not looking once in her direction, he did not note that she had spoken with a quivering lip. With a great effort at lightness, he stammered:--

"Well, hardly! It must be that I don't often meet people who--who are as k-k-kissable as you--"

"I suppose I ought to feel flattered."

There was a miserable silence.

"I was mistaken in you," continued the Nice Girl's stricken voice. "I--I trusted you. I supposed you were too honorable--I didn't think--"

That word seemed to touch him to the quick. He spoke with desperate stiffness.

"I _am_ honorable, I hope. Miss Flower--aren't you taking this too--too seriously, perhaps? After all, you--"

She astonished him by bursting into tears.

And all modernity became as nothing then, and Charles was a simple man, horrified by the sight of woman's grief. Now his abas.e.m.e.nt became complete; now he groveled most properly; never, he vowed, would he cease to censure himself most severely for this Occurrence. He wheedled, he implored, he cajoled. But, of course, all this but made the matter worse, threw his wary, inexcusable omissions into sharper and sharper relief. And presently Miss Angela referred to him as _brutal_ (did she not pause even after that, in a sort of expectant way?) and then ended the tragedy by begging him to leave her, her fatally ringed hands held fast before her eyes.

No such conclusion to the evening of wholesome pleasure could have been devised by the wit of fiction-writers. Charles gathered up his hat and coat like a thief, and let himself gently out into the night.

VIII

He turned in at the Green Park, in the still night, and stood gazing with bitterness at a dim gigantic Citizen, who rose in bronze at the intersection of two walkways. The Citizen gazed back with no bitterness at all; but then, he was dead.

Charles Garrott, being very much alive, was thinking cadlike thoughts with clarity and vigor. In the romances, men who won a maiden's sweet kiss instantly besought her to name the day; failing that, they were cads. But Charles was resolved to fail that, and he was struggling determinedly not to feel a cad. He simply did not consider that Miss Angela's kiss had such a pricelessness, entailing cosmic responsibilities. Why was her kiss any sweeter than his own, to come right down to it?

Now pure remorse had faded: self-interest, outraged self-respect, fought to have their say. Indeed, Miss Angela herself could not well feel more mortified over those unimagined salutes than he, the New Man, did. And it was as if his humiliation had destroyed all that restraining sense of a bond here, and the brutal Charles was free now for a frank facing of his new reactions.

"Well, I won't marry her! I won't," said he to the calm Citizen. "I'll call myself names for her, yes; I'll send her bonbons--flowers--that sort of thing. I'll land Donald for her--that's a thought! I'll get her invited to the Thursday German. But _marry her_!... No, the kindest thing would be never to see her again."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "WELL, I WON'T MARRY HER! I WON'T!"]

And, gazing up in the silent darkness of the park, the unheroic young man began to think how he could go to Berringer's by the Center Street cars, and take his walks henceforth in the manufacturing district, and in far countrysides.

Between Miss Flower's and the park, Charles had been briefly unnerved by a disruptive thought. This girl loved him. Recollections from his salad days rushed on him, memories of swift violent fancies women took to him.

He was cursed, it seemed, with a fatal fascination. Women might be practically engaged to other men; they might be at the altar's hinges; but he could not stroll among them with his devilish gift without scattering ruin amid the troths. If he was not openly rude to them, they took it as direct encouragement; if he was civil, from him they viewed it as wooing; and when actually crowned with the deliberate kiss ...

But these bachelor terrors he had exploded with one "Piffle!" spoken so loudly that two young street-car conductors, pa.s.sing to or from a car-barn, no doubt, nudged and jeered. Oh, no, Miss Angela was not in love with him. She had merely conceived that he, Charles, was in love with her. (A stinging thought this, even while it vastly rea.s.sured.) Yes, this rudimentary country cousin, whom he had felt sorry for because of her loneliness, whom he had been interested in purely as a Type (he maintained), with which to cudgel the hard utilitarian egoism of another sort of woman--this little creature must needs suppose that he, Charles Garrott, who knew the most attractive women there were, had fallen a victim to her village arts and bucolic wiles.

Great heavens!--Oh, the cheek! Oh, the nave complacence of the navest s.e.x the Lord ever made!...

Why, he had never paid the smallest attention to this girl; never taken dog's notice of her, you might say! Booting pebbles this way and that in the darkness, the angry young man reviewed the circ.u.mstances with scientific dispa.s.sionateness (as he considered). Compulsorily introduced by the firm Mary, he had spoken politely to the girl; kindly presented a suitable young friend or two; and therewith considered that the whole matter was closed. But no, on the contrary; one pleasant smile from him, and the Womanly Woman was up and doing.

She had pumped out of him the hour at which he took his walks (he knew nothing about the opera-gla.s.ses as yet); and straightway she began waylaying him on the street, nothing less. She had all but forced a book on him, which he would have to return with a "call"--she supposed; when he did not call, she did something which could only be described as inveigling him to her home (that was his word now), by the shallow ruse of a bridge-party; and then and there she had (you might say) flung both arms about his neck and kissed him. And by these proceedings, it appeared to her, in that queer world where Nice Girls lived, that she had affixed a claim upon him, fairly bagged his heart, in short. "Why do you do this?" said she, insistently. Oh, how simple life looked to such as these, her and her sisters of the Nave s.e.x! Forever putting that stereotyped query, forever expecting to elicit the hoa.r.s.e but extremely welcome reply, "Because I love you so!" No conquest too extraordinary to seem at all surprising to their quaint little self-approval!

There was humor now in his imagining of the Womanly Woman as quietly waiting at home to be wooed. It appeared that Miss Angela had done everything but that.

A church clock boomed suddenly: it was half-past eleven. The young man's eyes fell from the face of the Citizen. Through the stark stems of the winter trees a yellow light glowed strongly in a lower window. That was Olive Street there; this light shone in the Wings' house. He noted it absently, wondering why Mary worked so late to-night. On the heels of that came another wonder, more personal: What would Mary think of these proceedings upon a sofa?