The Vehement Flame Part 17

"You can't deny it! You're tired of me because I'm older than you!"

And he said, between his teeth, "If you were old enough to have any sense, I wouldn't be tired of you."

She gave a cry; then stood, the back of her hand against her lips, her eyes wide with terror.

Maurice threw down a book he had been trying to read, got up, plunged into his overcoat, pulled his hat down over his eyes, and, without a word, walked out of the room. A moment later the front door banged behind him. Eleanor, alone, stood perfectly still; she had said foolish things like that many times; she rather liked to say them! But she had not believed them; now, her own words were a boomerang,--they seemed to strike her in the face! _He was tired of her._ Instantly she was alert!

What must she do? She sat down, tense with thought; first of all, she must be sweet to him; she mustn't be cross; then she must try (Mrs.

Newbolt had told her so!) to "entertain" him. "I'll read things, and talk to him the way Mrs. Davis does!" She must sew on his b.u.t.tons, and scold poor old O'Brien.... With just this same silent determination she had hurried to act that night on the mountain!

But while she was sitting there in their cheerless room, planning and planning!--Maurice was out, wandering about in the gray afternoon. It had begun to snow, in a fitful, irritating way--little gritty pellets that blew into his face. He had nowhere to go--four o'clock is a dead time to drop in on people! He had nothing to do, and nothing to think of--except the foolish, middle-aged woman, stating, in their dreary third-floor front, an undeniable fact--he was tired of her! Walking aimlessly about in the cold, he said to himself, dully, "Why _was_ I such an idiot as to marry her?" He was old enough to curse himself for his folly, but he was young enough to suffer, agonies of mortification, and to pity himself, too; pity himself for the mere physical discomfort of his life: the boarding-house table, with its uninteresting food; the worn shirt cuff which was scratching his wrist; and he pitied himself for his spiritual discomfort--when Eleanor called him "darling" at the dinner table, or exhibited her jealousy before people! "They're sorry for me--confound 'em!" he thought.... Yet how trivial the cuff was, or even--yes, even the impertinence which was "sorry" for him!--how unimportant, when compared to a ring of braided gra.s.s, and the smell of locust blossoms, and a lovely voice, rising and falling:

"O Spring!"

"Oh, _d.a.m.n_!" he said to himself, feeling the sc.r.a.pe of worn linen on the back of his hand. Then he fell into certain moody imaginings with which that winter he frequently and harmlessly amused himself. He used to call these flights of fancy "fool thoughts"; but they were at least an outlet to his smoldering irritation, "Suppose I should kick over the traces some day?" his thoughts would run; and again, "Suppose I should be in a theater fire, and 'disappear,' and never come back, and she'd think I was dead," "Suppose there should be a war, and I should enlist," ... and so forth, and so forth. "Fool thoughts," of course!--but Maurice is not the only man upon whom a jealous woman has thrust such thoughts, or who has found solace in the impossible! So, now, wandering about in the cold, he amused himself by imagining various ways of "kicking over the traces"; then, suddenly, it occurred to him that he wanted something to eat. "By George!" he thought, "I'll get that girl, Lily, and we'll go and have a good dinner!"

Even in the rococo vestibule of the yellow-brick apartment house, while he pressed the bell below Miss Lily Dale's letter box, he began to feel a glow of comfort; and when Lily let him into her little parlor, all clean and vulgar and warm, and fragrant with blossoming bulbs, and gave him a greeting that was almost childlike in its laughing pleasure, his sense of physical well-being was a sort of hitting back at Eleanor.

"Oh," said little Lily, "my! Ain't you cold! Why, your hand's just like ice!"

He let her help him off with his coat, and push him into what had been the vanished Batty's chair; then she saw that his feet were wet, and insisted (to his horror) on unlacing his boots and making him put on a pair of slippers.

"But I was going to take you out to dinner," he remonstrated.

She said: "Oh no! It's cold. I'll cook something for you, and we'll have our dinner right by that fire."

"Can you cook?" he said, with admiring astonishment.

"You bet I can!" she said; "I'll give you a _good_ supper: you just wait!" In her pretty, laughing face was very honest friendliness. "I 'ain't forgot that time you handed it out to Batty! He had a bruise on his chin for a week!"

"A steak!" he exclaimed, watching her preparations in the tiny closet of a kitchen that opened into her parlor.

She nodded: "Ain't it luck to have it in the house? A friend of mine gave it to me this afternoon; her father's a butcher; and he's got a dandy shop on the next block; an' Annie run in with it, an' she says"

(Lily was greasing her broiler), "'there,' she says, 'is a present for you!'"

Maurice insisted upon helping, and was told where to get the dishes and what to put on the table, and that if he opened that closet he'd see the beer. "I got just one bottle," she said, chuckling; "Batty stocked up.

When he lit out, that was all he left behind him."

"Seen him lately?" Maurice asked.

Lily's face changed. "I 'ain't seen--anyone, since November," she said; "I'm a saleslady at Marston's. But I'll have to get out of this flat when Batty's lease runs out. He took it by the year. He was going to 'settle down,' and 'have a home,'--you know the talk? So he took it for the year. Well, he said I could stay till June. So I'm staying. There!

It's done!" She put the sizzling steak on a platter and pressed b.u.t.ter and pepper and salt into it with an energetic knife and fork. "I bet,"

she said, "you wouldn't get a better steak than this at the Mercer House!"

"I bet I wouldn't get one as good," he a.s.sured her.

As he ate his extremely well-cooked steak, and drank a cup of extremely well-made coffee, and reflected that the pretty, amber-eyed woman who, after the manner of her kind, had already dropped into the friendliness of a nickname, and who waited on him with a sweet deftness, was a reformed character, owing, no doubt, to his own efforts, Maurice, comfortable in mind and body, felt the intense pleasure of punishing Eleanor by his mere presence in Lily's rooms. For, _if she could know where he was_!... "Gosh!" said Maurice. But of course she never would know. He wouldn't think of telling her where he had spent his evening; which shows how far they had drifted apart since that night when he had come home in his shirt sleeves, and been so eager to tell her how he had given his coat to the "poor thing"!

No; if he told Eleanor of Lily, now, there would be no sympathy for a girl who was really trying to keep straight; no impulse to do any "uplift" work! For that matter, Lily could do something in the way of uplift for Eleanor! ... Look at this tidy, gay little room, and the well-cooked steak, and the bulbs on the window sill! He strolled over and looked at the row of purple hyacinth gla.s.ses, full now of threadlike roots and topped with swelling buds. "You're quite a gardener," he said.

"Well, there!" said Lily; "if I hadn't but ten cents, I'd spend five for a flower!"

After they had washed the dishes together she made him comfortable in the big chair, and even put a blossoming hyacinth on the table beside him, so he could smell it now and then. Then she sat down on a ha.s.sock at his feet, with her back to the fire, and, flecking off the ashes of her cigarette over her shoulder, she talked a friendly trickle of funny stories; Maurice, smoking, too, thought how comfortable he was, and how pleasant it was to have a girl like Lily to talk to. Once or twice he laughed uproariously at some giggling joke. "She has lots of fun in her," he reflected; "and she's a bully cook; and her hair is mighty pretty.... Say, Lily, don't you want to trim my cuff? It's scratching me to death."

"You bet I do!" Lily said, and got her little shiny scissors and trimmed the broken edge of a worn-out cuff that Eleanor had never noticed.

He felt her small, warm fingers on his hand, and had a sense of comfort that made him almost forget Eleanor. "It would serve her right if I took Lily on," he thought. But he had not the remotest intention of taking Lily on! He only played with the idea, because the impossible reality would serve Eleanor right.

It was a month or two later, on the rebound of another dreariness with Eleanor, that the reality came, and he did "take Lily on." When he did so, no one could have been more astonished--under his dismay and horror--than Maurice.

Unless it was Lily? She had been so certain that he had no ulterior purpose, and so completely satisfied with her own way of living, that her rather snuggling friendliness with him was as honest as a boy's. Her surprise at her own mistake showed how genuine her intention of straightness really was. When he came, once or twice to see her, he called her Lily, and she called him "Curt," and they joked together like two playfellows,--except when he was too gloomy to joke. But it was his gloominess that made her feel sure there was nothing but friendliness in his calls. She was not curious about him; she knew he was married, but she never guessed that his preoccupation--during the spring Maurice was very preoccupied with his own wretchedness and given to those cynical fancies about "theater fires";--was due to the fact that he and his wife didn't get along. She merely supposed that, like most of her "gentlemen friends," "Curt" didn't talk about his wife. But, unlike the gentlemen of her world he was, apparently, a husband whose acquaintance with her had its limits. So they were both astonished....

But when Maurice discovered that such acquaintance had also its risks, the shock was agonizing. He was overwhelmed with disgust and shame.

Once, at his desk, brooding over what had happened, his whipping instinct of truthfulness roused a sudden, frantic impulse in him to go home and confess to Eleanor, and ask her to forgive him. She never would, of course! No woman would; Eleanor least of all. But oh, if he only could tell her! As he couldn't, remorse, with no outlet of words, smoldered on his consciousness, as some hidden and infected wound might smolder in his flesh. Yet he knew there would be no further unfaithfulness. He would never, he told himself, see Lily again! _That_ was easy! He was done with all "Lilys." If he could only shed the self-knowledge which he was unable to share with Eleanor, as easily as he could shed Lily, how thankful he would be! If he could but forget Lily by keeping away from her! But of course he could not forget. And with memory, and its redeeming pain of shame, was also the stabbing mortification of knowing that he had made a fool of himself, _again_!

First Eleanor; then--Lily. Sometimes, with this realization of his idiocy, he would feel an almost physical nausea. It was so horrible to him, that when, a month later, the anniversary which marked his first folly came around again, he made an excuse of having to be away on business. It seemed to Maurice that to go out to their field, with this loathsome secrecy (which was, of course, an inarticulate lie) buried in his soul, would be like carrying actual corruption in his hands! So he went out of town on some trumped-up engagement, and Eleanor, left to herself, took little pining Bingo for a walk. In a lonely; place in the park, holding the dog on her knee, she looked into his pa.s.sionately loving liquid eyes and wiped her own; eyes on his silky ears....

Those were aging months for Maurice; and though, of course, the poignancy of shame lessened after a while, it left its imprint on his face, as well as on his mind. They speculated about it at the office: "'G. Washington's' got a grouch on," one clerk said; "probably told the truth and lost a transfer! Let's give him another hatchet."

And the friendly people at the boarding house noticed the change in him.

He had almost nothing to say, now, at dinner--no more jokes with the school-teacher, no more eager talks with the gray-haired woman....

"Has she forbidden conversation, do you suppose?" Miss Moore asked, giggling; but the widow said, soberly, that she was afraid Mr. Curtis was troubled about something. Mrs. Newbolt saw that there was something wrong with him, and talked of it to Eleanor, without a pause, for an hour. And of course Eleanor felt a difference in him; all day long, in the loneliness of their third-floor front, under the gaze of Daniel Webster, she brooded over it. Even while she was reading magazines and plodding through newspaper editorials on public questions she had never heard of, so that she could find things to talk about to him, she was thinking of the change, and asking herself what she had done--or left undone--to cause it? She also asked him:

"Maurice! Something bothers you! I'm not enough for you. What _is_ the matter?"

He said, shortly, "Nothing."

At which she retreated into the silence of hurt feelings. Once, she knelt down, her face hidden on the grimy bed-spread, and prayed: "G.o.d, _please_ give us a child--that will make him happy. And show me what to do to please him! Show me! Oh, _show_ me! I'll do anything!" And who can say that her prayer was not answered? For certainly an idea did spring into her mind: those tiresome people downstairs--he liked to talk to them;--to Miss Moore, who giggled, and tried, Eleanor thought, to seem learned; and to the elderly woman who told stories. How could he enjoy talking to them when he could talk to her? But he did. So, suppose she tried to be more sociable with them? "I might invite Mrs. Davis to come up to our room some evening--and I would sing for her? ... But not Miss Moore; she is _too_ silly, with her jokes!" Her mind strained to find ways to be friendly with these people he seemed to like. And circ.u.mstances helped her....

That was the month of the great eclipse. For a week Miss Ladd's boarders had talked about it, exchanging among themselves much newspaper astronomical misinformation--which the learned Miss Moore good-naturedly corrected. It was her suggestion that the household should make a night of it: "Let's all go up on the roof and see the show!" So the friendly gayety was planned--a supper in the bas.e.m.e.nt dining room at half past eleven--ginger ale! ice cream! chocolate! Then an adjournment _en ma.s.se_ to the top of the house. Of course Miss Moore, engineering the affair, invited the Curtises, confident of a refusal--and an acceptance;--both of which, indeed, she secured; but, to her astonishment, it was Mr.

Curtis who declined, and his wife who accepted.

"It's a bore," Maurice told Eleanor, listlessly.

She looked worried: "Oh, I am so sorry! I told them at luncheon that we would come. I thought you'd enjoy it" (Her acceptance, which had been a real sacrifice to her, was a bomb to the other boarders. "What _has_ happened?" they said to each other, blankly. "She'll be an awful wet blanket," some one said, frowning; and some one else said, "She's accepted because she won't let him out at night, alone!")

When the heterogeneous household gathered in the dining room, and corks popped and jokes were made, Eleanor and Maurice were there; he, watching the other people eat and drink and saying almost nothing; she, talking nervously and trying hard to be slangy about astronomy. Once he looked at her with faint interest--for she was so evidently "trying"! At midnight they all toiled up four flights of stairs from the bas.e.m.e.nt to the garret, where, with proper squeamishness on the part of the ladies, and much gallantry of pushing and pulling on the part of the gentlemen, and all sorts of awkwardnesses and displaying of legs, they climbed a ladder and got out through the scuttle on to the flat roof. Then came the calculating of minutes, and facetiousness as to other people's watches and directions as to what one might expect to see. "It'll look like a bite out of a cookie, when it begins," the bond salesman said; and Miss Ladd t.i.ttered, and said what the ladies wanted to see was the man in the moon!

Maurice, intolerably irked, had moved across to the parapet and was staring out over the city. Below him spread the dim expanse of roofs and chimneys, with here and there the twinkle of light in an attic window.

Leaning on the coping and looking down, he thought of the humanity under the dark roofs: a horizontal humanity--everybody asleep! The ugly fancy came to him that if that sleeping layer of bodies could be stirred up, there would be instantly a squirming ma.s.s of loathsome thoughts--maggots of l.u.s.t, and shame, and jealousy, and fear. "My G.o.d! we're a nasty lot,"

he thought.

"Look!" a voice said at his shoulder. He sighed, impatiently--and looked. Above him soared the abyss of s.p.a.ce, velvet black, p.r.i.c.ked faintly here and there by stars; and, riding high--eternal and serene--the Moon.

He heard Miss Moore say, "_It's beginning._" ... And the solemn curve of the Shadow touched the great disk. No one spoke: they stood--a handful of little human creatures, staring up into immensity; specks of consciousness on a whirling ball that was rushing forever into the void, and, as it rushed, its shadow, sweeping soundless through the emptiness of s.p.a.ce, touched the watching Moon ... and the broad plaque, silver gilt, lessened--lessened. To half. To a quarter. To a glistening line.

Then coppery darkness.

No one spoke. The flow of universes seemed to sweep personality out upon eternal tides. Yet, strangely, Maurice felt a sudden uprush of personality! ... Little he was--oh, infinitely little; too little, of course, to be known by the Power that could do this--spread out the heavens, and rule the deeps of s.p.a.ce; and yet he felt, somehow, near to the Power. "It's what they call G.o.d, I suppose?" he said. It flashed into his mind that he had said almost exactly the same thing that day in the field (when he was a fool), of the fire of joy in his breast: he had said that Happiness was G.o.d! And some people thought this stupendous Energy could know--_us_? Absurd! "Might as well say a man could know an ant." Yet, just because Inconceivable Greatness was great, mightn't it know Inconceivable Littleness? "The smaller I am--the nastier, the meaner, the more contemptible--the greater It would have to be to know me? To say I was too little for It to know about, would be to set a limit to Its greatness." How foolish Reason looks, limping along behind such an intuition--Intuition, running and leaping, and praising G.o.d!

Maurice's reason strained to follow Intuition: "If It knows about me, It could help me, ... because It holds the stars. Why! _It_ could fix things--with Eleanor!" Looking up into the gulf, his tiny misery suddenly fell away. "It would just prove Its greatness, to help me!"

While he groped thus for G.o.d among the stars, the order of rushing worlds brought light, just as it had brought darkness: first a gleam; then a curving thread; then a silver sickle; then, magnificently! a shield of light--and the moon's unaltered face looked down at them.