Clark's Field Part 14

Archie winced at this truthful statement and nervously dropped a palette with which he had been fussing. It clattered to the floor and broke, setting the nerves of all three on edge.

"Such a man," Mr. Smith proceeded in his most acid tones, glaring at Archie, "is properly called an adventurer, and rarely if ever proves to have character enough to retain the respect of the woman he has wheedled into sacrificing herself."

This was a bit unfair, for Archie had been wheedled rather than wheedled Adelle. Moreover, the world is full, as Mr. Smith must surely know, of young men who have committed matrimony with girls financially to their advantage and who have retained not only their own self-respect, but won the admiration of their acquaintances into the bargain for their skill and good luck.

And Adelle resented the slur for Archie even more than the young man did. She felt vaguely that Archie ought to do something to demonstrate that he was not a worthless character, possibly kick Mr. Smith out of the studio, at least protest at being called a "cad" and "adventurer."

But Archie took it all meekly and busied himself with recovering the pieces of the broken palette from the floor. Mr. Smith did not press his dialectic advantage; in other words, did not specifically hit Archie again. Perhaps a human compunction, for the sake of the young girl who had just rashly hazarded her life's happiness with the young man, restrained him. He turned instead again to Adelle in a gentler tone.

"I feel sincerely sorry for you, Mrs. Davis. A young woman in your position, without family or near friends to shield her, is exposed to all the evil selfishness of the world. You have succ.u.mbed, I am afraid, to a delusion, although the trust company did its best to supply your lack of natural protectors, to shield you."

He reflected, perhaps, that the trust company had been, even from the easy American standard, a rather negligent parent, chiefly concerned with its ward's fortune, and hastened to say defensively,--"We placed you with an excellent woman,"--Adelle had placed herself, but it made no difference,--"one in whom we have every confidence not only as a teacher, but also as a friend and guide." Even Adelle smiled broadly at this description of p.u.s.s.y. "But all our care has been in vain: you have put us now where we cannot help you further!"

Adelle lowered her eyes, but felt happier--the sermon was coming to an end.

"It is useless for me to continue, however. It rests with you alone, with you and your husband,"--he p.r.o.nounced the term with infinite scorn,--"to prove that your rash choice is not what it seems,--the end of your career, the end of your happiness. And it rests with you, sir,"

he added severely, looking over at Archie, "to prove that you are man enough to be a kind husband to the girl who has married you under such circ.u.mstances. I sincerely hope that your future will be better than your act promises!"

Here was another opening for the kick, but Archie failed to grasp it. He took his cue from Adelle and maintained a sulky silence.

"There remains but one more thing for me to speak of, Mrs. Davis, and that is your property, of which the trust company must continue guardian for nearly two years more until you become of age and the company is released from its guardianship by the court."

The couple p.r.i.c.ked up their ears with relief at the mention of property.

"You have shown yourself to be prodigal in expenditure," Mr. Smith remarked, pulling from his pocket a card with a list of figures. "This past year you drew very nearly if not quite thirty-eight thousand dollars,--altogether too much money, I should say, for a young woman to spend safely."

"It was the cars and the Nile trip," Adelle murmured.

"Fortunately it happens to be well within the income of your estate, and so I suppose I cannot raise objections except upon moral grounds. It is too much money for any woman to spend wisely!"

Mr. Smith apparently had positive convictions on this subject. Adelle did not seem to care what he thought a woman could spend wisely.

"And so I propose that for the remainder of the time while you are nominally under our guardianship the trust company shall allow you--" He paused as if debating the figure with himself, and Archie unconsciously walked a couple of steps nearer the others. Alas! It drew Mr. Smith's attention from Adelle, for whom he was sorry, to the cause, as he thought, of her misfortune. Whatever had been in his mind he said curtly, looking at Archie, "Five thousand dollars a year, to be paid in quarterly installments on your personal order, Mrs. Davis."

The young people looked at him aghast. As a matter of fact, five thousand dollars a year was not penury, at least to Archie, who had rarely seen a clear twelve hundred from January to January. Even Adelle, after her training in the Church Street house, might at a pinch hold herself in for eighteen months, all the more as after that period of probation she could not be prevented by the trust company from indulging herself to the full extent of her income. Adelle, indeed, who was still somewhat vague about the limitations and possibilities of money, was not as much annoyed as Archie. But she knew that she was being punished for her conduct in running away with Archie by this disagreeable old man, and she resented punishment as a child might resent it. Mr. Smith, observing the signs of discontent with his announcement, remarked with increased decision and satisfaction:--

"I am sure that will be best for both of you. Especially for you, Mrs.

Davis! It will give you an opportunity to find out how much you care for each other, without the luxuries that wealth brings. And it will protect you, my dear, from--er--the indiscretions of a young husband, who has not been accustomed to the use of much money, I gather."

Undoubtedly Mr. Smith thought he was acting wisely towards them,--"Just as I would if it had been my own daughter," according to his report to President West. As a matter of fact, he acted precisely as parents are only too p.r.o.ne to act, with one third desire for the best interests of the parties concerned and two thirds desire to have them punished for their folly. The punitive motive was large in Mr. Smith's decision to put the couple on short rations as long as he had the power to do so. He would have liked to tie up Adelle's fortune indefinitely, so that the young scamp who had married her for her money (as he was convinced) might get as little of it as possible. Unfortunately the trust company had no control after Adelle's twenty-first birthday, unless by that time experience should teach her the wisdom of voluntarily putting her fortune beyond her husband's reach; but, at any rate, for the next few months it could arbitrarily and tyrannically disappoint his hungry appet.i.te, and that is what Mr. Smith meant to do. His psychology, unfortunately, was faulty. It was perhaps the poorest way of securing Adelle's happiness in the end, as he might have foreseen if he had been less conscientious and more human....

Shortly after delivering his blow, Mr. Smith took his hat and left the studio without shaking hands with Archie, although he smiled frostily on the trust company's ward and "hoped all would go well with her in her new life." All the way back to his hotel he congratulated himself for his dispatch, finesse, eloquence, and wisdom in handling a deplorable and difficult situation. Yet it is hard to see just what he had accomplished by crossing the ocean. He washed his hands of "the Clark girl" before he left Paris for his return voyage, and, like so many persons with whom the young heiress had dealings, never again actively entered her life.

XXVI

When the studio door closed upon the emissary of the trust company, the young couple looked at each other a little ruefully. Archie kicked over a chair or two and expressed himself volubly, now that it was safe, upon the priggishness and meanness of such folks as Mr. Solomon Smith. Adelle might wish that he had expressed himself in these vigorous terms earlier, when there could have been discussion and a chance of modifying Mr. Smith's decision. But she realized how raw he was feeling from the old gentleman's contempt and sweetly put her arms around her husband's strong shoulders and kissed him tenderly.

"It won't be so bad, Archie," she said hopefully. "We'll get on somehow, I expect, and it isn't forever--not two years." She could recall much graver crises in life than being compelled to live for eighteen months with an adored companion on seventy-five hundred dollars, and people somehow survived them.

"It isn't just the money," Archie protested, a little shamed, but still grumpy. "It's his rotten talk. A feller doesn't like being called all sorts of names."

"Well, he's gone now and he won't come back," Adelle remarked soothingly, with another effort to caress her young lord into amiability and resignation to fate. That proved more difficult than usual: Archie felt the sting of the older man's taunts, especially the horrid word "adventurer" rankled in his subconsciousness. He saw himself reflected in the opinion of other men,--at least of stodgy, middle-aged men like Mr. Smith, who worked hard for what they got and had families,--and it ruffled him seriously. He was not in a happy temper otherwise. A fortnight of conjugal picnicking in the perpetual society of Adelle, whose conversational powers were limited, had chafed him. So Adelle had her first experience in that woman's pathetic task of endeavoring to soothe and harmonize the disturbed soul of her lord, who, she is aware, has only himself to blame for his state of spiritual discomfiture. But Adelle, like all her sisters who love, since the world began, rose n.o.bly to her part.

Finally, they sallied forth and with some money that Adelle had contrived to extract, probably from the sale of another piece of real jewelry, they consoled themselves with an elaborate dinner at a famous restaurant in the Champs elysees, and as it was a warm evening drove afterwards out to the Bois. The next day Adelle ventured forth to the bankers alone, and secured the first quarterly installment of the funds left there to her account by the prim Mr. Smith. With the notes and gold she hastened back to Archie, and the couple began to plan seriously for the future.

It is not my purpose to follow the pair in their erratic course during the next eighteen months, although it had its ludicrous as well as pathetic steps. That they were not ready for any sort of matrimonial partnership, is of course obvious, but as they shared their disability with a goodly proportion of young married people the world over, it does not count. Adelle, being the woman, learned her lesson more quickly than Archie, and under conceivable circ.u.mstances might have made as much of a success with her rash choice, in spite of Mr. Smith's prophecies, as many others make with their more prudently premeditated ones. She wanted to be married, and on the whole she was content when she got what she wanted,--at least, in the beginning,--which is the essential condition of marital comfort. But Archie had not by any means been as anxious to tie himself up for good as Adelle had been, and was more restive with what he found marriage to a rich--at least, expectantly rich--wife to be.

In a blind effort to find a congenial environment, they moved about over the map a good deal. First they went to Venice, of which Adelle especially had rosy memories a.s.sociated with the dawn of love. They took a furnished apartment in an old palace over the Ca.n.a.l, and set up four swarthy, muscled rowers in blue sashes. Venice has been for many generations the haven of love, especially of irregular or illicit love: but its attraction evaporates swiftly after the ceremony has taken place. No spot where the male cannot stretch himself and get away from domesticity for a few hours is safe except for the diviner, more ecstatic forms of pa.s.sion. In a few weeks the couple became deadly bored with Venice and its picture postcard replica of life. At Archie's suggestion they next sought Munich, where some of his artist acquaintance had settled.

This was an atmosphere of work, more or less, and Adelle amused herself by thinking that she and her husband were members of that glorious band of free lances of art. They took a studio apartment and set up their crafts jointly. If either had had the real stuff of the artist, it might have gone well; but two idle and rather uninformed persons in the same studio produce disaster. Munich soon became an affair of beer, skittles, and music in company with the more careless spirits that gathered there that winter. Among them happened to be Sadie Paul.

A good deal had happened to the California sisters, and as the "two Pols" will come into Adelle's life later on, their story can be briefly given here. Irene, the sister who had brutally betrayed Adelle in a spirit of careless mischief, had attracted with her ripe California charm a young Englishman of family. Mr. Hermann Paul, the "San Francisco railroad man" referred to by Miss Comstock, meantime had died, and Irene had gone home to join her mother and younger brothers and ultimately was married to her Englishman. She divided her time thereafter about equally between England and the new earthly paradise of the Pacific. Her sister Sadie had determined to remain in Europe, under other chaperonage than p.u.s.s.y Comstock. It was rumored that a young Hungarian n.o.bleman was hanging somewhere in the horizon, but for the present she played about with Adelle and Archie. Apparently Sadie Paul did not share her sister's prejudices about "the red-headed bounder," for she flirted unconcernedly with Archie as far as he would go, which to do Archie justice was not dangerously far. Adelle, good-natured and easy-going by disposition, welcomed the return of her old school friend and was not in the least disturbed by her flirtatious attempts with Archie. That sort of amorous pretense was more or less the habit of the world she had known, and besides, she was aware that Sadie was "having a desperate affair" with Count Zornec, the Hungarian referred to above, who was temporarily exiled to his remote estate. Indeed, she became the means of furthering this pa.s.sion and speeding it to its destined end in matrimony, which has to do with a subsequent part of our tale....

To return to the wanderings of Adelle and Archie, in the Easter holidays they left Munich for Switzerland for the winter sports, and in the spring Archie conceiving the idea that he wanted to do Dutch landscape, they went to Holland for a few weeks. That summer they rented a small villa along the Bay of Biscay and had Sadie Paul and her Count as their guests for a time. The second winter of their marriage they spent in Paris, and by this time were rather hard-pressed for ready money, as neither had relaxed in wanting things and Adelle especially still had the habit of buying whatever attracted her attention,--bright-colored stuffs, jewels, and useless odds and ends of bric-a-brac, with the idea that sometime they should want to establish themselves permanently somewhere and purchases would all come in usefully. It was much as a bird gathers sticks, straws, and bright-colored threads, but in Adelle it was an expensive instinct. Towards the end of their period of probation, they had to get aid from money-lenders, to whom Sadie Paul introduced them. Adelle did not find it difficult to raise money on her expectations, at a stiff rate of interest, and thus the object of the Puritan Mr. Smith was defeated. It would have pained his thrifty banker's soul had he known that the trust company's ward was gayly paying ten and fifteen percent for "temporary accommodation," while her own funds were barely earning five per cent in the careful investments of the trust company! When Adelle finally got hold of her fortune, a goodly sum had to be paid over to settle the claims of these obliging money-lenders....

Of the quarrels, big and little, that the young couple had these first months it is useless to speak. Thus far they were neither excessively severe nor dangerously frequent--no worse, perhaps, than the average idle couple must create in love's readjustment to prosaic fact. Adelle no longer believed that her Archie would be the great painter that she had once fondly dreamed of helping him to become. He was too lazy and fond of good things to eat and drink and other sensual rewards of life to become distinguished in anything, unless perchance he were well starved into discipline. His present life of comparative ease and expected wealth was the very worst thing for him as man and as artist.

Like an over-fertilized plant he went to leaf and bore little fruit. And thus again Clark's Field, with its delayed expectations, had a baleful influence upon a new generation of human beings. The Davises had just enough money to wander loose over Europe, disturbed, as Addie had once been disturbed, by the hope of a more golden future.

Adelle herself was content not to work hard at the manufacture of jewelry, although if she had been encouraged, she might have become almost second-rate in this minor art. She, too, was indolent, if not by disposition, by training, and Europe offers abundant distraction of a semi-intellectual sort to fill the days of people like Archie and Adelle. To loaf herself was not so fatal for Adelle as to acquiesce in Archie's loafing, to accept the parasitic notion for her man that obtained in the easy-going circles she knew. "Oh, well," she said to Sadie, "why should Archie work if he doesn't want to?"

Sadie saw no reason and suggested,--"There isn't one of those painters who would stick at it if he didn't have to."

Like all poor people, they hadn't any luck; that was her idea. And Adelle cultivated another dangerous conception of marriage.

"It's enough for me if he's good to me and loves me--I have plenty of money for us both."

In other words, she thought that she should be satisfied to keep her lover always as an appanage of her magic lamp, to maintain a human being and a male human being as she might maintain a motor-car or an estate or a stable, as something desirable and pleasurable, contributing to her happiness,--the privilege of her fortunate position as a woman of means.

There were many rich women who had that idea or cultivated it as a solace to their defeated souls.

"Isn't he a dear?" she would say to Sadie Paul in these moments of proud consciousness of possession; and conversely she would say sternly when some case of masculine errancy was brought to her notice,--"If Archie treated me like that, he'd find his bag packed and sitting outside the door!"

So she was very fussy about her husband's appearance,--his dress and manners and appointments; and insisted upon giving him every accessory of luxury, everything that rich men supposably enjoy. As her nearest and dearest possession, she was more concerned with his brave appearance than she was with her own. She "dolled" him up, as Sadie Paul laughingly called it. "Isn't he cunning?" was one of her common expressions of marital happiness. Occasionally, in more serious moods, she might talk largely about Archie's "going into business" when they "got their money," but as time went on and Archie displayed little apt.i.tude for managing money, she talked less about this. Adelle would have been content to buy the Basque villa they had rented and establish herself and Archie there in complete idleness and luxury, provided he would always be "good" to her, by which she meant faithful to those unconsidered marriage vows made in the Paris consulate, and not too cross.

And thus Archie and Adelle drifted on towards that great date of their complete emanc.i.p.ation from control, when all the riches of Clark's Field, now acc.u.mulating in the trust company's pool, should be handed over to them. That would be, indeed, the ultimate crisis for the old Field, when, having been finally trans.m.u.ted into coin of the realm, it should cease to have an ent.i.ty or any personal relation with the Clark race!

Meantime Archie and Adelle were not vicious, though Archie drank too much for his digestion and was often peevish in consequence, and Adelle was almost aimless and lazy enough to be described as vicious. Yet they were no worse than many, many other well-to-do young persons with no deep roots, no permanent incentives, no profound pa.s.sions to give them significance. Likely enough they might have ended in some charming English country house, or Roman palace, or pink-and-white villa along the Mediterranean,--if their fate had not been still involved with Clark's Field. They would have become perfectly respectable, utterly negligible modern citizens of the world,--the infertile by-product of a rich civilization with its perfected machinery for the preservation of acc.u.mulated wealth. There are more Archies and Adelles about us than is commonly recognized: they are on all our calling-lists, in every European capital or congregation of expensive country homes. Their names stud the "blue books" and the "red books" of conventional "society."

They fill the great hotels and the mammoth steamships. They, in sum, make up a large part of that fine fruit of civilization for which the immense majority toil, and for whom serious people plan and legislate, for whom laws are interpreted and trust companies formed in order to handle the money they themselves are incapable of controlling usefully, even of safely preserving....

Archie and Adelle were hungry at this period for more money and felt themselves martyrized by the whim of an ill-natured old man who had arbitrarily made them wait to be wholly happy. They talked perpetually about what they should do with themselves "after" the great event,--the sort of touring-car they should buy, the kind of establishment they should keep, the best place to live in, etc. It must be somewhere in Europe, of course, for neither was eager to return to America "where everybody worked and there was nothing fit to eat," according to Archie.

Adelle's ideas of America, never extensive, were growing dimmer every season, and the occasional friends who returned from the other sh.o.r.e described their native land in unflattering terms. Adelle thought that every American who could lived as much of the time as possible somewhere in Europe, but she did not think much about it at this time.

They had no children. Adelle had no objections to child-bearing and expected "sometime" to have "two or three" children. Archie thought there would be plenty of time for that "later on" when they had their money. Adelle was still very young, and in the present wandering state of their life children would be a nuisance.

Finally they were neither happy nor unhappy. Restless was the adjective that described them most closely. Their bodies and stomachs and nerves and minds and souls were always in a state of disequilibrium, and they were feeling about for equilibrium like blind kittens without forming any successful plan of extricating themselves from their subconscious state of dissatisfaction. With another order of gray matter in their brains either one might have produced out of this disequilibrium some fine, rare flower of form or color or words. But Archie's gray matter, like Adelle's, was not expressive.

Their friends thought them happy as well as fortunate. Sadie Paul reported to her sister and Eveline Glynn,--"Dell is crazy about her Archie--she won't let him out of her sight. He's not such a bad sort, but fearfully stuck on himself, just because Dell pets him so."