The Great God Success Part 7

"I escaped from that none too soon," he congratulated himself. "It wasn't nearly so one-sided as I thought."

He had never been gregarious. Thus far he had not had a single intimate friend, man or woman. He knew many people and knew them well. They liked him and some of them sought his friendship. These were often puzzled because it was easy to get acquainted with him, impossible to know him intimately.

The explanation of this combination of openness and reserve, friendliness and unapproachableness, was that his boyhood and youth had been spent wholly among books. That life had trained him not to look to others for amus.e.m.e.nt, sympathy or counsel, but to depend upon himself.

As his temperament was open and good-natured and sympathetic, he was as free from enemies and enmities as he was from friends and friendships.

Women there had been--several women, a succession of idealizations which had dispersed in the strong light of his common sense. He had never disturbed himself about morals in what he regarded as the limited sense.

He always insisted that he was free; and he was careful only of his personal pride and of taking no advantage of another. What he had said to Alice about marriage was true--as to his intentions, at least. A poor woman, he felt, he could not marry; a rich woman, he felt, he would not marry. And he cared nothing about marriage because he was never lonely, never leaned or wished to lean upon another, abhorred the idea of any one leaning upon him; because he regarded freedom as the very corner-stone of his scheme of life.

The nearest he had come to companionship was with Alice. With the other women whom he had known in various degrees from warmth to white-heat, there had been interruptions, no such constant freedom of access, no such intermingling of daily life. Her he had seen at all hours and in all circ.u.mstances. She never disturbed him but was ready to talk when he wished to listen, listened eagerly when he talked, and was silent and beautiful and restful to look at when he wished to indulge in the dissipation of mental laziness.

As she loved him, she showed him only the best that there was in her and showed it in the most attractive of all lights.

While he was still wavering or fancying that he was wavering, the Managing Editor sent him to "do" a great strike-riot in the coal regions of Pennsylvania. He was there for three weeks, active day and night, interested in the new phases of life--the mines and the miners, the display of fierce pa.s.sions, the excitement, the peril.

When he returned to New York, Alice had ceased to tempt him.

One midnight in the early spring he was in his sitting room, reading and a little bored. There came a knock at the door. He hoped that it was some one bringing something interesting or coming to propose a search for something interesting. "Come in," he said with welcome in his voice.

The door opened. It was Alice.

She was dressed much as she had been the first time he talked with her--a loose, clinging wrapper open at the throat. There was a change in her face--a change for the better but also for the worse. She looked more intelligent, more of a woman. There was more sparkle in her eyes and in her smile. But--Howard saw instantly the price she had paid. As the German had suggested, she had "got on up town."

She was pulling at the long broad blue ribbons of her negligee. Her hands were whiter and her pink finger nails had had careful attention.

She smiled, enjoying his astonishment. "I have come back," she said.

Howard came forward and took her hand. "I'm glad, very glad to see you.

For a minute I thought I was dreaming."

"Yes," she went on, "I'm in my old room. I came this afternoon. I must have been asleep, for I didn't hear you come in."

"I hope it isn't bad luck that has flung you back here."

"Oh, no. I've been doing very well. I've been saving up to come. And when I had enough to last me through the summer, I--I came."

"You've been at work?"

She dropped her eyes and flushed. And her fingers played more nervously with her ribbons.

"You needn't treat me as a child any longer," she said at last in a low voice; "I'm eighteen now and--well, I'm not a child."

Again there was a long pause. Howard, watching her downcast face, saw her steadying her expression to meet his eyes. When she looked, it was straight at him--appeal but also defiance.

"I don't ask anything of you," she said, "we are both free. And I wanted to see you. I was sick of all those others--up there. I've never had--had--this out of my mind. And I've come. And I can see you sometimes. I won't be in the way."

Howard went over to the window and stared out into the lights and shadows of the leafy Square. When he turned again she had lighted and was smoking one of his cigarettes.

"Well," he said smiling down at her, "Why not? Put on a street gown and we'll go out and get supper and talk it over."

She sprang up, her face alight. She was almost running toward the door.

Midway she stopped, turned and came slowly back. She put one of her arms upon his shoulder--a slender, cool, smooth, white arm with the lace of the wide sleeve slipping away from it. She turned her face up until her mouth, like a rosebud, was very near his lips. There was appeal in her eyes.

"I'm very, very glad to see you," Howard said as he kissed her.

And so Howard's life was determined for the next four years.

He worked well at his profession. He read a great deal. He wrote fiction and essays in desultory fashion and got a few things printed in the magazines. He led a life that was a model of regularity. But he knew the truth--that Alice had ended his career.

He was content. Ambition had always been vague with him and now his habit of following the line of least resistance had drifted him into this mill-pond. Sometimes, he would give himself up to bitter self-reproach, disgusted that he should be so satisfied, so non-resisting in a lot in every way the reverse of that which he had marked out for himself. If he had been chained he might, probably would, have broken away. But Alice never attempted to control him. His will was her law. She was especially shrewd about money matters, so often the source of disputes and estrangements. Two months after she reappeared, she proposed that they take an apartment together.

"I saw one to-day in West Twelfth Street at seventy dollars a month,"

she said, "and I'm sure I could manage it so that you would be much better off than you are now."

He viewed this plan with suspicion. It definitely committed him to a mode of life which he had always regarded as degrading both to the man and the woman and as certain of a calamitous ending. So he made excuses for delay, fully intending never to yield. But although Alice did not speak of her plan again, he found himself more and more attracted by it, caught himself speculating about various apartments he happened to see as he went about the streets. She must have been conscious of what was going on in his mind; for when, a month after she had spoken, he said abruptly: "Where was that apartment you saw?" she went straight on discussing the details as if there had been no interval. She was ready to act.

The apartment was taken in her name--Mrs. Cammack, the "Mrs." being necessary to account for him. They selected the furniture together, he as interested as she and very pleased to find that she had the same good taste in those matters that she had in dress. She took all the troubles and annoyances upon herself. When she invited him to a.s.sist in the arrangement, it was in matters that amused him and at times when she was sure he had nothing else to do. It is not strange that he got a wholly false idea of the difficulties of setting up an establishment.

After a month of selecting and discussing, of pleasure in the new experience, pleasure in Alice's enthusiasm and excitement and happiness, he found himself master of five attractive and comfortable rooms, his clothing, his books, all his belongings properly arranged. The door was opened for him by a cleanlooking coloured maid, with a tiny white cap on her head.

As he looked around and then at the beautiful face with the wistful, gold-brown eyes so anxiously following his wandering glance, he was very near to loving her. Indeed, he was like a husband who has left out that period of pa.s.sionate love which extends into married life until it gives place to boredom, or to dislike, or to some such sympathetic affection as he felt for Alice. "It is just this that holds me," he thought, in his infrequent moods of dissatisfaction. "If we quarrelled or if there were any deep feeling on my side, I should not be in this mess. I should be"--Well, where would he be? "Probably worse off," he usually added.

Certainly he could not have been freer, for she never questioned him; and, if she was ever uneasy or jealous when he came in late--for him--without telling her where he had been, she never showed it. She had no friends, and he often wondered how she pa.s.sed the time when he was not with her. Whenever he inquired he got the same answer: She had been busying herself with their home; she had been planning to save money or to make him more comfortable; she had been reading to improve her mind and to enable herself to start him talking on subjects that interested him.

No matter how unexpectedly he looked in upon her life or her mind, he found--himself.

One day she said to him--it was after two years of this life: "Something is worrying you. Is it about me? You look at me so queerly at times."

"Yes," he answered. "It is about you. Tell me, Miss Black-Hair, do you never think of getting old?"

"No," she smiled. "I shall wait until I am twenty-five before I begin to think of that."

"But don't you see that this sort of thing must stop sometime? It is unjust to you. When I think of it, I reproach myself for permitting us to get into it."

"I am happy," she said, looking straight at him, terror in her eyes.

"But you have no friends?"

"Who has? And what do I want with friends?"

"But don't you see, I can't introduce you to anybody. I can't talk about you to the people I know. I am always having to explain you away, always having to act as if I were ashamed of this, my real life. At times I am Anglo-Saxon enough to be really ashamed of it. And I ought to be and am ashamed of myself."

"Don't let's talk about it. You and I understand. Why should we bother about the rest of the world?"

"No, we _must_ talk about it. I have been going over it carefully. We must--must be married."