The Beauty and the Bolshevist Part 9

"I can't understand your allowing yourself to be dragged there against your will. You say you despise this life, but you seem to take it pretty seriously if you can't break any engagement that you may make."

"How absurd you are! Of course I often break engagements."

"I see. You do when the inducement is sufficient. Well, that makes it all perfectly clear."

She felt both angry and inclined to cry. She knew that to yield to either impulse would instantly solve the problem and bring a very unreasonable young man to reason. She ran over both scenes in her imagination. Registering anger, she would rise and say that, really, Mr. Moreton, if he would not listen to her explanation there was no use in prolonging the discussion. That would be the critical moment.

He would take her in his arms then and there, or else he would let her go, and they would drive in silence, and part at the little park, where of course she might say, "Aren't you silly to leave me like this?"--only her experience was that it was never very practical to make up with an angry man in public.

To burst into tears was a safer method, but she had a natural repugnance to crying, and perhaps she was subconsciously aware that she might be left, after the quarrel was apparently made up by this method, with a slight resentment against the man who had forced her to adopt so illogical a line of conduct.

A middle course appealed to her. She laid her hand on Ben's. A few minutes before it would have seemed unbelievable to Ben that his own hand would have remained cold and lifeless under that touch, but such was now the case.

"Ben," she said, "if you go on being disagreeable a second longer you must make up your mind how you will behave when I burst into tears."

"How I should behave?"

She nodded.

His hands clasped hers. He told her how he should behave. He even offered to show her, without putting her to the trouble of tears.

"You mean," she said, "that you would forgive me? Well, forgive me, anyhow. I'm doing what I think is right about this old dinner. Perhaps I'm wrong about it; perhaps you're mistaken and I'm not absolutely perfect, but if I were, think what a lot of fun you would miss in changing me. And you know I never meant to abandon you for the whole evening. I'll get away at half past nine and we'll take a little turn."

So that was settled.

CHAPTER III

As they drove back she revealed another plan to him--she was taking him for a moment to see a friend of hers. He protested. He did not want to see anyone but herself, but Crystal was firm. He must see this woman; she was their celebrated parlor Bolshevist. Ben hated parlor Bolshevists. Did he know any? No. Well, then. Anyhow, Sophia would never forgive her if she did not bring him. Sophia adored celebrities.

Sophia who? Sophia Dawson. The name seemed dimly familiar to Ben, and then he remembered. It was the name on the thousand-dollar check for the strike sufferers that had come in the day before.

They drove up an avenue of little oaks to a formidable palace built of gray stone, so smoothly faced that there was not a crevice in the immense pale facade. Two men in knee-breeches opened the double doors and they went in between golden grilles and rows of tall white lilies.

They were led through a soundless hall, and up stairs so thickly carpeted that the feet sank in as in new-fallen snow, and finally they were ushered through a small painted door into a small painted room, which had been brought all the way from Sienna, and there they found Mrs. Dawson--a beautiful, worn, world-weary Mrs. Dawson, with one streak of gray in the front of her dark hair, her tragic eyes, and her long violet and black draperies--a perfect Sibyl.

Crystal did not treat her as a Sibyl, however. "Hullo, Sophie!" she said. "This is my brother-in-law's brother, Ben Moreton. He's crazy to meet you. You'll like him. I can't stay because I'm dining somewhere or other, but he's not."

"Will he dine with me?" said Mrs. Dawson in a wonderful deep, slow voice--"just stay on and dine with me alone?"

Ben began to say that he couldn't, but Crystal said yes, that he would be delighted to, and that she would stop for him again about half past nine, and that it was a wonderful plan, and then she went away.

Mrs. Dawson seemed to take it all as a matter of course. "Sit down, Mr. Moreton," she said. "I have a quarrel with you."

Ben could not help feeling a little disturbed by the way he had been injected into Mrs. Dawson's evening without her volition. He did not sit down.

"You know," he said, "there isn't any reason why you should have me to dine just because Crystal says so. I do want to thank you for the check you sent in to us for the strike fund. It will do a lot of good."

"Oh, that," replied Mrs. Dawson. "They are fighting all our battles for us."

"It cheered us up in the office. I wanted to tell you, and now I think I'll go. I dare say you are dining out, anyhow--"

Her eyes flashed at him. "Dining out!" she exclaimed, as if the suggestion insulted her. "You evidently don't know me. I never dine out. I have nothing in common with these people. I lead a very lonely life. You do me a favor by staying. You and I could exchange ideas.

There is no one in Newport whom I can talk to--reactionaries."

"Miss Cord is not exactly a reactionary," said Ben, sitting down.

Mrs. Dawson smiled. "Crystal is not a reactionary; Crystal is a child," she replied. "But what can you expect of William Cord's daughter? He is a dangerous and disintegrating force--cold--cynical--he feels not the slightest public responsibility for his possessions." Mrs. Dawson laid her hand on her heart as if it were weighted with all her jewels and footmen and palaces. "Most Bourbons are cynical about human life, but he goes farther; he is cynical about his own wealth. And that brings me to my quarrel with you, Mr. Moreton. How could you let your brother spend his beautiful vigorous youth as a parasite to Cord's vapid son? Was that consistent with your beliefs?"

This attack on his consistency from a lady whose consistency seemed even more flagrant amused Ben, but as he listened he was obliged to admit that there was a great deal of good sense in what she had to say about David, whom she had met once or twice at the Cords'. Ben was too candid and eager not to ask her before long the question that was in his mind--how it was possible for a woman holding her views to be leading a life so opposed to them.

She was not at all offended, and even less at a loss for an answer.

"I am not a free agent, Mr. Moreton," she said. "Unhappily, before I began to think at all, I had undertaken certain obligations. The law allows a woman to dispose of everything but her property while she is still a child. I married at eighteen."

It was a story not without interest and Mrs. Dawson told it well.

There does not live a man who would not have been interested.

They dined, not in the great dining room downstairs, nor even in the painted room from Sienna, but in a sort of loggia that opened from it, where, beyond the shaded lights, Ben could watch the moon rise out of the sea.

It was a perfect little meal, short, delicious, and quickly served by three servants. He enjoyed it thoroughly, although he found his hostess a strangely confusing companion. He would make up his mind that she was a sincere soul captured by her environment, when a freshly discovered jewel on her long fingers would shake his faith.

And he would just decide that she was a melodramatic fraud, when she would surprise him by her scholarly knowledge of social problems. She had read deeply, knew several languages, and had known many of the European leaders. Such phrases as "Jaures wrote me ten days before he died--" were frequent, but not too frequent, on her lips.

By the time Crystal stopped for him Ben had begun to feel like a child who has lost his mother in a museum, or as Dante might have felt if he had missed Virgil from his side. When he bade Mrs. Dawson good night, she asked him to come back.

"Come and spend September here," she said, as if it were a small thing. "You can work all day if you like. I sha'n't disturb you, and you need never see a soul. It will do you good."

He was touched by the invitation, but of course he refused it. He tried to explain tactfully, but clearly, why it was that he couldn't do that sort of thing--that the editor of _Liberty_ did not take his holiday at Newport.

She understood, and sighed. "Ah, yes," she said. "I'm like that man in mythology whom neither the sky nor the earth would receive. I'm very lonely, Mr. Moreton."

He found himself feeling sorry for her, as he followed a footman downstairs, his feet sinking into the carpets at each step. Crystal in the blue car was at the door. She was bareheaded and the wind had been blowing her hair about.

"Well," she said, as he got in, "did you have a good time? I'm sure you had a good dinner."

"Excellent, but confusing. I don't quite get your friend."

"You don't understand Sophia?" Crystal's tone expressed surprise. "You mean her jewels and her footmen? Why, Ben, it's just like the fathers of this country who talked about all men being equal and yet were themselves slaveholders. She sincerely believes those things in a way, and then it's such a splendid role to play, and she enjoys that; and then it teases Freddie Dawson. Freddie is rather sweet if he's thoroughly unhappy, and this keeps him unhappy almost all the time.

Did she ask you to stay? I meant her to."

"Yes, she did; but of course I couldn't."

"Oh, Ben, why not?"

This brought them once more to the discussion of the barrier. This time Ben felt he could make her see. He said that she must look at it this way--that in a war you could not go and stay in enemy country, however friendly your personal relations might be. Well, as far as he was concerned this was a war, a cla.s.s war.

They were headed for the Ocean Drive, and Crystal rounded a sharp turn before she answered seriously:

"But I thought you didn't believe in war."