The Salamander Part 45

"But you will!" she exclaimed, forgetting all her resolves to enlighten him on the subject of her affections.

"There'll be some bad b.u.mps," he said grimly. "I've got into this night habit pretty deep--insomnia, and then anything to eat up the night.

Lampson's got some new system to try out on me. Later, perhaps, I'll beat it for the woods; but just at present, a few weeks, I guess you can do me more good than anything else!"

"Can I?" she said gratefully.

"Yes. Time for lunch now. Are you starved?" he said evasively. "I'll talk over things and ways later."

As they came back, he went into detail about the fight ahead. Much that he said was technical, and she did not comprehend all. Only that his body had been fed too long on the consuming alcohol to be too suddenly deprived.

"Which means," he added, with a smile, "that you mustn't get discouraged if I break over the traces once or twice."

"Send for me!"

"Perhaps," he said doubtfully. "If I do, you need never be afraid, Dodo, no matter how much others are. I would always do what you ask!"

"I could never be afraid of you!" she answered truthfully.

The impulse that brought her closer to him was so strong that, though she said to herself that there was nothing of the sentimental in it, it seemed to her that it might be something n.o.bler, more unselfish, more satisfying than that which she had conceived of as love between woman and man. She even went so far as to wish to herself that it might have been different, that she could have given him all without a lie, that she could have gone bravely, casting the die, into life with Lindaberry.

If only she had not known Ma.s.singale! To give, to be loved, was one thing, if she had not known the blinding intoxication of being taken, of loving!

Three days later, after a half confidence to Estelle Monks, she went with her to a society bazaar where Mrs. Ma.s.singale was in charge of a booth. It was in one of the ballrooms of a new hotel, more overlaid with gilt and ornaments than the rest, specially and artfully advertised as quite the most expensive in the city. As a consequence, the rooms were packed with a struggling gazing crowd, swirling about the counters where the social patronesses looked on with the disdain of lap-dogs of high degree.

"This one--lady in baby pink, sharp face," said Estelle Monks.

In that brief terrifying instant, before she was able to raise her eyes, Dodo was shaken from head to foot. Never before had so much penetrating despair crowded upon her in such a fraction of time!

She was at a counter of fragrant hand-bags, staring up into the face of a bored, hostile, sharp-eyed woman, struggling for youth and attention--a brown little wanderer from nowhere confronting a great lady.

"What can I sell you?" said Mrs. Ma.s.singale with an instantaneous social smile.

She found herself answering, breathlessly:

"No--nothing!"

The smile faded. The lady turned indifferently. It was close, she had been on her feet almost two hours, she was pardonably annoyed at this staring girl--and she showed it.

Suddenly, her face lit up, the surface smile on duty again. A group of men advanced effusively, taking her hand delicately, like a fragile ornament. She turned, and perceiving Dodo leaning vacantly, said:

"Excuse me!"

Without too much insistence she extended her fingers and moved her from the path of possible purchasers.

Dodo went, hurt, crushed and revolting. There had been nothing which the other had not had a right to do, yet in those seconds she had experienced the deepest humiliation a woman can receive from another, the disdain of caste.

She had come penitent and full of compa.s.sion. She went in a dangerous mood; this woman, perfectly correct, perfectly emotionless, perfectly cold and brilliant, might be Mrs. Ma.s.singale; she could never be his wife!

"No, that is not a marriage!" she said indignantly to herself.

The thing she dreaded, and hoped for, had come to pa.s.s. She forgave him, and she understood!

Yet she hesitated day after day, until ten had pa.s.sed in a whirl, alternately resolved, alternately recoiling. She had no defined morality. She was one of a thousand young girls of to-day, adrift, neither good nor bad, quite unmoral--the good and the bad equally responsive and the ultimate victory waiting on the first great influence from without, which would master her. She had no home; she was alone, a social mongrel. She could only hurt herself. What her parents had left her was only a heritage of lawlessness. Yet she hesitated, frightened by some fear conjured up from an unconscious self, like thin remembered notes of village bells, across the tumult of worldly clamors. At last, when she could see before her no other face, when the sound of his voice was mingled with every sound that came to her ear, when nothing else diverted her a moment from the insistent drumming ache of the present, she yielded. She went in the afternoon, just before four, to the court in Jefferson Market where she knew he was, pushing her way through the miserable, the venal, the vermin of all nations, cl.u.s.tered and ill smelling.

He saw her instantly as she came into the aisle.

CHAPTER XIX

Dore had not been mistaken in her swift perception on entering the court room, heavy with weakness and discouragement. Judge Ma.s.singale saw her with a feeling of profound relief. Whatever came now, the responsibility lay on her head, not on his. Just how completely one memory had filled his days he did not realize until he experienced a sudden excited calm at the thought that she was there by his side, and that the long weeks of struggle had been in vain.

For, he, too, had struggled against every instinct in him, warned by his clear and a.n.a.lytical brain that his hands were on the curtains of a perilous and forbidden adventure. At first he had been immensely surprised that in his forty-second year it should suddenly flash across him, from the depths of eyes of cloudy blue, that he was as human as his brother. The memory of the soft white arms against his cheek, the ecstasy of the girl who, in a twinkling, had surrendered to his domination, withholding nothing, eager and unafraid, enveloped in the blinding halo of complete renunciation and faith, her look when her eyes sought his, her lips, the sound of her voice, the naturalness of it all, the human directness, all returned again and again to demolish and scatter the careful intellectual theory of conduct which he had raised for his defense in life.

At the time when Judge Ma.s.singale, by a trick of fate, had blundered upon the acquaintance of Dore Baxter, he had arrived at that satisfactory station in life when he could look upon himself as a perfectly disciplined being. He had pa.s.sed through a period of embittered emotional revolt which had threatened to carry him publicly into the divorce courts, and through a deeper period of moral revolt which came near sacrificing him on the altar of the social reformer. Now he had come to an att.i.tude of tolerant and amused contemplation of things as they are, without fretting his spirit as to things as they should be.

His marriage had been a purely conventional one, contracted in the weak and vulnerable period of the early twenties at the instigation of his mother, who had become suddenly alarmed at a college infatuation for the daughter of one of his professors. Within a year the thoroughly unsuited couple had come to an amicable understanding of the duties involved in their covenant before the church.

Mrs. Ma.s.singale was incapable of an original mental operation, but she was clever enough to combine the opinions of those who seemed to know.

She thoroughly disapproved of her husband's soiling political ventures, as beneath the dignity of a gentleman. Each week she devoted one afternoon and one evening to the encouragement of the arts; the rest was given over to the punctilious performance of the proper social duties to those whom she disliked and who disliked her. Absolutely cold and absolutely prudish, she had not hesitated, in that hazardous period of maidenhood, to effect the successful capture of such a matrimonial prize by subtle appeals to his senses; but as though bitterly resenting the means to which an unjust society reduces a modest woman to secure her future, she revenged herself on her amazed husband by a sort of vindictive antagonism.

He had fiercely combated this marriage, vowing he would marry the love of his college days, if he had to carry her off in the good old way. But his mother, being quite determined and unprincipled, paid the girl a visit, and contrived to make the interview so completely insulting that the rupture resulted immediately.

In the third year of his marriage Ma.s.singale had again become infatuated, this time with the young wife of an elderly friend. As the married relations on either side were identical, and each was chafing against the irritating and galling yoke, longing for life and liberty, the infatuation soon a.s.sumed tragic proportions. She wished to break through everything, ready to go openly with him until, their respective divorces secured, they could be married. He pa.s.sed eight days feverishly inclined, debating the issue. But in the end, for the stigma that would lay across his shoulders, for the reputation of the family, the customs of a man of the world, and what not, he resisted.

He had thought then that he had sacrificed the world and the heavens for a hollow recompense; but, as the years sent the drifting sands of their oblivion over the memory, he had come to look upon this emotional adventure as a great peril avoided. He had believed then in the union of man and woman as something like a divine rage, all-absorbing, obliterating everything else--this in the bitter revolt against the deception which had come in his marriage. Ten years later he had arrived at the point of looking back with tolerant humor, and confessing to himself that for his purposes he was perhaps fortunate in a union which brought no compulsion into his life, obtruded itself in no way, and gave him complete liberty to pursue his intellectual curiosity in unrestricted intercourse with men of varied stations.

From law school he had gone as an a.s.sistant into the district attorney's office, and the three years spent in those catacombs of humanity had removed the veneer of generations of inherited sn.o.bbery. The first view of the vermin-populated halls of justice had appalled him, and aroused in him a religious fury. The spectacle of the strong riding the weak, judges gravely listening to lying hypocrisies, criminals in gold b.u.t.tons and uniform, the insolence of power, the cynicism of brains, and, below all, raw humanity gasping under staggering burdens, mocked, farmed out, betrayed--all this sank so profoundly into his young enthusiasm that he swore to himself that the day would come when he would lift up his voice against iniquity, no matter how intrenched it might rest.

If at this time he had had the courage to break with social prejudices and seek reality and inspiration in the love of a woman ready to sacrifice everything for him, it is probable that he would have one day stirred the sophisticated forces of the city to furious invective, and accomplished little or great good, according to the sport of chance. But the impossibility of a.s.suming responsibility before social conventions had its effect on the thinker, too. He gradually reconciled himself, lulled into tolerance by the good fellowship o f those whom he would have to attack. He still disapproved, but he added to the first fierce protestation, "Things must be changed," the saving clause, "but I can not change them!"

Later, when, in a sudden burst of reform, a mayor, revolting against the machine, appointed him a munic.i.p.al magistrate, he had progressed further, even to the point of saying that things had always been the same, here as elsewhere, that what was needed was to be practical, to accomplish quietly as much good as possible, instead of shrieking into unbelieving ears. His religious fury had subsided into a great compa.s.sion. He sought to save rather than to punish. He became known as a judge who could not be approached. He had had one or two conflicts with the machine of the shadows, and had come out victorious and respected. He was known as a very courageous man.

Life lay agreeably ahead. As the emotional and spiritual cravings departed, his curiosity increased. Life on the surface, life as a spectator, life as the confidant of others, watching developments, explosions, consequences, was very satisfying, without danger. He knew from experience the sting of great emotions, and he said to himself that that man was securest in his happiness who depended on no indispensable friendship, who cherished in his imagination no ambition linked with the stars, who took the laughter and the smiles of women, and avoided the heat, the pain and the soul-bruising of a great pa.s.sion. Such love was to him yoked with tragedy, conflict, disillusionment, subjection, or crowned with final emptiness.

He had indeed become the judicial observer, watching with unsated amus.e.m.e.nt, through his thousand points of vantage, the complex panorama of human beings groping, struggling, crawling, running, baccha.n.a.lian with sudden hysteric joys, or crying against little tragedies. His intimate acquaintance with men of every calling, open or suspect, was immense. His knowledge of the city, its big and little secrets, its whys and wherefores, its entangled virtue and vice, its secret ways from respectability to shame, its strange bedfellows, the standards of honor among the corrupt and the mental sophistries of the strong, was profound. For him the baffling brownstone mask of New York did not exist. People instinctively trusted him. Criminals told him true stories in restaurants where few could venture; women of all sorts and conditions, pa.s.sing before him for grave or minor offenses, often returned for advice or relief from blackmailing conditions. The police swore by him, politicians admitted his fairness. He played the game according to their standards of honor strictly on the evidence presented, never taking advantage of what was told him privately.

He was not insensible to the attraction of women. He sought their confidence, but returned none; amused at their comedies, as it amused him intellectually to reduce a lying officer to terrified confession.

Twice bruised, he never attempted more than a light and agreeable comradeship. He had that curious but rather high standard of morality which one often encounters among men of his opportunity in life. He prided himself that no woman had suffered harm by him, which, translated, meant that he had never been responsible. In fact, he shrank from the thought of incurring responsibility. This was the horror that had sent him from Dore, for he was honest in his intellectual perceptions, and he saw at once that what he had blundered into was more immoral than the flesh hunter's seeking of the body, for this was trafficking with a soul.

When he had first paused to study Dore, he had perceived in her an unusual specimen of a type which he knew and enjoyed immensely. The interesting woman, to him, was the one who was destined to arouse pa.s.sions and leave disaster behind her. The antagonism which had flared up between Harrigan Blood and Sa.s.soon over her favors, the resulting quarrel as she had escaped, amused him immensely. He was not ignorant of the defensive alliance that existed between the Sa.s.soon interests and Harrigan Blood's chain of papers, and though he judged too clearly not to doubt that a rupture was but delayed, it struck him as the very essence of human drama that forces of such magnitude could be shaken by the impertinent turn of a head or a luring smile.

"Here is a little creature who is going to make a good deal of trouble!"

he thought to himself, and interested at once before the possibilities at her clever finger-tips, he had said to himself: "I am seeing the beginning of a career, and a career that will be extraordinary!"

With this keen curiosity in mind, not insensible to the fleeting compelling lure of the girl, he had gone up to her room, and suddenly, as, delighted, he had prepared to watch the net prepared for others, it had closed over him. He had had his doubts about Dore, that doubt which waits in the mind of every man before every woman; but all this left him the moment when, conquered in his arms, she had clung to him blindly, in ecstasy. He comprehended what had overwhelmed her--had overwhelmed her by surprise.