V. V.'s Eyes Part 35

"Well, but don't you think of happiness as a frame of mind, a--a sort of habit of the spirit? Don't you think it comes usually as a--a by-product of other things?"

"Oh, but I'm asking you, you see.... What sort of things do you mean?"

He hesitated perceptibly, seeming to take her light derisive remarks with a strange seriousness.

"Well, I think a--a good rule is to ... to cultivate the sympathies all the time, and keep doing something useful."

Carlisle continued to look at his downcast face, with the translucent eyes, and as she looked, the strangest thought shimmered through her, with a turning of the heart new in her experience. She thought: "This man is a good friend...."

And then she said aloud, suddenly: "I am not happy--very."

She could not well have regarded that as a Parthian shot, a demolishing rebuke. Nevertheless, she turned upon it, precipitately, and went away down the steps.

These events took place, in the course of ten minutes upon a doorstep, on the 31st of January. On the 27th of February, Carlisle departed, from the face of her mother's displeasure and all the horridness of home, for her Lenten visit to the Willings. Through the interval the dreariness of life continued; Canning was reported in Cuba; she had abandoned all thought of a little note. The nephew she saw no more; but it chanced that she came to hear his name on many lips. For on the cold morning of the birthday of the Father of his Country, old Armistead Beirne, whom three doctors had p.r.o.nounced all but a well man, was found dead in his bed: and a few days later, by the probation of his will, it became known that of his fortune of some two hundred thousand dollars, he had left one-fifth to his eccentric nephew in the Dabney House.

XV

In which she goes to New York, and is very Happy indeed.

Mrs. Willing was twenty-four, handsome, expensive, lively, and intensely fond of what she thought was pleasure. Willing was thirty-two, and had a close-clipped mustache: there were ten thousand men in New York whom you might have mistaken for him at twenty paces. He was a.s.sistant something on a nineteenth story downtown, and his scale of living continually crowded his income to the wall. The Willings--there were, of course, but two of them--had the kind of home which farmers' daughters so envy the heroines of "society" novels. They lived in a showy apartment hotel in the West Fifties, kept a motor-car, and went out for dinner. In fact "out" was the favorite word in the establishment: the Willings did everything but sleep "out."

"I can't bear to stick at home," said Mrs. Willing to Carlisle. "I've always _loved_ to go places."

And places they went from one end of Carlisle's visit to the other. The shops in the morning, downtown on a rush to lunch with Willing, back to Broadway for a matinee, back home at the double-quick to dress for dinner, to the theatre after dinner, to supper after the theatre. There was always hurry; there was never quite time to reach any of the places at the hour agreed.

"That's the fun!" said Florrie Willing. "Rush, rush, rush from morning to night. That's little old New York in a nutsh.e.l.l."

Carlisle had expected to be thoroughly diverted by the rattle, bang, and glitter in which the Willings lived, but in this she was only partially gratified. Pure restlessness, it seemed, had entered her blood: she was no sooner fairly settled in the Wrexham than she began to wish herself back home again. The vague thought pursued her, even at the places, that she was missing something; that she had stepped aside from, not into, the real current of her life. Dazzling indeed were some of the dining-places to which the experienced Willings took their guest, but somehow none of them seemed so really interesting, after all, as home.

What was happening away off there on Washington Street? Suppose Mr.

Canning should return ahead of time for his farewell visit--return and find her not there?...

"You're changed somehow, Cally," cried Florrie Willing, on the third or fourth day--"I can't just put my little patty on it, but I can see it all the same."

They had just rushed up from breakfast, which the Willings took in the apartment cafe, and were now dressing furiously to go shopping. Cally, surprised with her mouth full of hatpins, said of course she had; she was getting frightfully old.

"You never used to rest a cheek on a pensive hand, and stare five minutes at a time into eternity. Out with it!" said Florrie. "You're disappointed in love."

"That's it, too. I loved a tall pretty soldier, and he rode away."

"_We'll_ never ride away, at this rate. Get a _move_ on, Cally! We've slews and slews of places to go to."

Cally, who considered that she already had a move on, did her best to get on another one.

Young Mrs. Willing added: "Whatever became of the gay young thing with the eyelashes you flirted so outrageously with, the time we were up at Island Inn? What was his name--oh--Mr. Dalhousie?"

Carlisle winced a little in spite of herself.... Banquo could not have been more impossible to forget than this.

"Oh--why, he and I had the worst kind of smash-up--and he went away somewhere. I never like to think of him any more.... Let's fly!"

Fly they did, that morning and many others. It was all very different from life at home. Born and bred in a town where social life is large, constant, and gay, Carlisle could not help being struck by the fact that the Willings, roughly speaking, had no friends. One other young couple in the same hotel, the Jennisons, appeared to be about the limit of their intimate circle: a phenomenon, no doubt at least partly explained by the fact that the Willings moved every year, or sometimes twice a year, "to get a change." Thus, in the huge rabbit-warren, they were constantly cutting themselves off from their past.

"I can't endure to poke about in the same little spot year after year,"

said Florrie Willing. "If I don't have something new, I simply froth at the mouth and die."

However, Mr. Willing of course had his connections downtown, and knowing his duty in the premises, he would frequently "bring up" men in the evening, brisk, lively, ambitious young fellows like himself. One of the men so brought up fell abruptly and deeply in love with Carlisle, which helped considerably to pa.s.s the time away.

"You'd better hold on to Pierce," said Florrie, talking seriously as a married woman: "He's one of the coming men--dead certain to make a pile of money some day."

Cally said she'd dearly love to hold on to Pierce, but to herself she smiled, thinking if Florrie only knew. By this time she had been a fortnight in New York, and had decided to leave at the end of another week. Whatever else the visit was or was not, it had more than justified itself by providing her with just the perspective she needed, to see things once again in their true proportions. Distance seemed wonderfully to soften away all the horridnesses. Nothing had really happened. On the contrary, against this stimulating background it was rea.s.suringly plain that everything was agreeably settled at last, or very soon to be so settled. More and more, as April drew steadily nearer, Mr. Canning towered shiningly in the foreground of her thought.

The days pa.s.sed quickly enough. She and Florrie spent many absorbing mornings in the shops, Carlisle for the most part "just looking," under the coldly disapproving eyes of the shop-ladies. But her intentions were serious at bottom, in view of three hundred dollars which papa had privately given her, at the last moment, companied by a defiant wink.

(The wink indicated collusion against mamma, whose design it had been to cut her daughter off penniless for the trip.) After a great deal of looking, for she was a thrifty buyer, Cally expended one hundred and twenty-five dollars for a perfectly lovely two-colored dress, bewitchingly draped, and seventy-five dollars for a little silk suit.

Both were dirt cheap, Florrie agreed. She looked four times at a dear of a hat going begging for seventy dollars, but with only three hundred you have to draw the line somewhere, so Cally simply purchased a plain gray motor-coat lined with gray corduroy, which she really needed, at sixty dollars. She also sought a gift for papa, in recognition of his liberality, and finally selected a silver penknife as just the thing.

The knife, luckily enough, could be got for only $2.50.

The young broker who had fallen in love with Carlisle came up four times with Willing, called five times in between, and became host at two of the "out" evenings for the party of four. Carlisle forbore to give him any encouragement, though she rather liked his eyes, and the way his mouth slanted up at the right corner.

"I'm wild about you," said he, on her last evening,--his name, if it is of the smallest interest, was Pierce Watkins, Jr.,--"I'll shoot myself on your doorstep to-morrow if it'll give you even a moment of pleasure."

Carlisle a.s.sured him that she desired no suicidal attentions.

"You're the loveliest thing I ever looked at," said he, huskily. "G.o.d bless you for that, anyway. And no matter what else happens to me, I'll love you till I die."

"Don't look so glum, Mr. Watkins dear," said Cally.

They did not go to any matinee on the last afternoon, the reason being that it was Monday and there weren't any, except the vaudevilles, which were voted tiresome. Florrie and Carlisle lunched quietly at "home"; had a rubber of bridge afterwards in the apartment of Edith Jennison (who produced for the necessary fourth an acquaintance she had made last week in the tea-room of the Waldorf-Astoria); and rushed from the table for hats, veils, and a drive on the Avenue.

Carlisle was to leave at ten o'clock. Her trunks were packed; her "reservations" lay in the heavy gold bag swinging from her side. Home, somehow, beckoned to her as it had never done before. Besides, New York, with its swarming population (mostly with palms up) and its ceaseless quadruple lines of motor-cars, began to oppress her.

"It's too full of people," she laughed to Mrs. Willing as they shot down in the lift. "It's too big. Some day it will swell up and burst."

"Why, that's the fun of it, rusticus! How I love the roar!"

"I like it, too," said Carlisle. "But I do think it's nice to live in a city where you can _some_times cross Main Street without asking four policemen, and then probably having your leg picked off, after all."

They dashed across the onyx lobby for the main entrance, as fast as they could go, Mrs. Willing remarking that they were almost too late to catch the crowds as it was. From the small blue-velvet parlor, across the corridor from the clerk's desk, a tall man rose at the sight of them, and came straight forward. For a moment Carlisle's heart stopped beating as she saw that it was Hugo Canning.

He advanced with his eyes upon her, brought her to a halt before him. If the imps of memory must have their little toll at this remeeting, the flicker pa.s.sed through her too quickly for her to take note of it. It woke no palest ghost of rebellion, to walk now. The girl's heart, having missed a beat, ran away in a wild flutter....

"Did my cards reach you?" said the remembered voice, without preface.

"They just went up, I believe. But I see you mean to go out."