The Flirt

by Booth Tarkington

  Cora turned up the lights at the sides of the cheval-glass, looked at herself earnestly, then absently, and began to loosen her hair. Her lifted hands hesitated; she re-arranged the slight displacement of her hair already effected; set two chairs before the mirror, seated herself in one; pulled up her dress, where it was slipping from her shoulder, rested an arm upon the back of the other chair as, earlier in the evening, she had rested it upon the iron railing of the porch, and, leaning forward, assumed as exactly as possible the attitude in which she had sat so long beside Valentine Corliss. She leaned very slowly closer and yet closer to the mirror; a rich colour spread over her; her eyes, gazing into themselves, became dreamy, inexpressibly wistful, cloudily sweet; her breath was tumultuous. “`Even as you and I’?” she whispered.

  Then, in the final moment of this after-the-fact rehearsal, as her face almost touched the glass, she forgot how and what she had looked to Corliss; she forgot him; she forgot him utterly: she leaped to her feet and kissed the mirrored lips with a sort of passion.

  “You DARLING!” she cried. Cora’s christening had been unimaginative, for the name means only, “maiden.” She should have been called Narcissa.

  The rhapsody was over instantly, leaving an emotional vacuum like a silence at the dentist’s. Cora yawned, and resumed the loosening of her hair.

  When she had put on her nightgown, she went from one window to another, closing the shutters against the coming of the morning light to wake her. As she reached the last window, a sudden high wind rushed among the trees outside; a white flare leaped at her face, startling her; there was a boom and rattle as of the brasses, cymbals, and kettle-drums of some fatal orchestra; and almost at once it began to rain.

  And with that, from the distance came a voice, singing; and at the first sound of it, though it was far away and almost indistinguishable, Cora started more violently than at the lightning; she sprang to the mirror lights, put them out; threw herself upon the bed, and huddled there in the darkness.

  The wind passed; the heart of the storm was miles away; this was only its fringe; but the rain pattered sharply upon the thick foliage outside her windows; and the singing voice came slowly up the street.

  It was a strange voice: high-pitched and hoarse—and not quite human, so utter was the animal abandon of it.

  “I love a lassie, a bonnie, bonnie lassie,” it wailed and piped, coming nearer; and the gay little air—wrought to a grotesque of itself by this wild, high voice in the rain—might have been a banshee’s love-song.

  “I love a lassie, a bonnie, bonnie lassie.

  She’s as pure as the lily in the dell–-“

  The voice grew louder; came in front of the house; came into the yard; came and sang just under Cora’s window. There it fell silent a moment; then was lifted in a long peal of imbecile laughter, and sang again:

  “Then slowly, slowly rase she up

  And slowly she came nigh him,

  And when she drew the curtain by—

  `Young man I think you’re dyin’.’”

  Cora’s door opened and closed softly, and Laura, barefooted, stole to the bed and put an arm about the shaking form of her sister.

  “The drunken beast!” sobbed Cora. “It’s to disgrace me! That’s what he wants. He’d like nothing better than headlines in the papers: `Ray Vilas arrested at the Madison residence’!” She choked with anger and mortification. “The neighbours–-“

  “They’re nearly all away,” whispered Laura. “You needn’t fear–-“

  “Hark!”

  The voice stopped singing, and began to mumble incoherently; then it rose again in a lamentable outcry:

  “Oh, God of the fallen, be Thou merciful to me! Be Thou merciful—merciful—MERCIFUL” …

  “MERCIFUL, MERCIFUL, MERCIFUL!” it shrieked, over and over, with increasing loudness, and to such nerve-racking effect that Cora, gasping, beat the bedclothes frantically with her hands at each iteration.

  The transom over the door became luminous; some one had lighted the gas in the upper hall. Both girls jumped from the bed, ran to the door, and opened it. Their mother, wearing a red wrapper, was standing at the head of the stairs, which Mr. Madison, in his night-shirt and slippers, was slowly and heavily descending.

  Before he reached the front door, the voice outside ceased its dreadful plaint with the abrupt anticlimax of a phonograph stopped in the middle of a record. There was the sound of a struggle and wrestling, a turmoil in the wet shrubberies, branches cracking.

  “Let me go, da–-” cried the voice, drowned again at half a word, as by a powerful hand upon a screaming mouth.

  The old man opened the front door, stepped out, closing it behind him; and the three women looked at each other wanly during a hushed interval like that in a sleeping-car at night when the train stops. Presently he came in again, and started up the stairs, heavily and slowly, as he had gone down.

  “Richard Lindley stopped him,” he said, sighing with the ascent, and not looking up. “He heard him as he came along the street, and dressed as quick as he could, and ran up and got him. Richard’s taken him away.”

  He went to his own room, panting, mopping his damp gray hair with his fat wrist, and looking at no one.

  Cora began to cry again. It was an hour before any of this family had recovered sufficient poise to realize, with the shuddering gratitude of adventurers spared from the abyss, that, under Providence, Hedrick had not wakened!

  CHAPTER SIX

  Much light shatters much loveliness; but a pretty girl who looks pretty outdoors on a dazzling hot summer morning is prettier then than ever. Cora knew it; of course she knew it; she knew exactly how she looked, as she left the concrete bridge behind her at the upper end of Corliss Street and turned into a shrub-bordered bypath of the river park. In imagination she stood at the turn of the path just ahead, watching her own approach: she saw herself as a picture—the white-domed parasol, with its cheerful pale-green lining, a background for her white hat, her corn-silk hair, and her delicately flushed face. She saw her pale, live arms through their thin sleeves, and the light grasp of her gloved fingers upon the glistening stick of the parasol; she saw the long, simple lines of her close white dress and their graceful interchanging movements with the alternate advance of her white shoes over the fine gravel path; she saw the dazzling splashes of sunshine playing upon her through the changeful branches overhead. Cora never lacked a gallery: she sat there herself.

  She refreshed the eyes of a respectable burgess of sixty, a person so colourless that no one, after passing him, could have remembered anything about him except that he wore glasses and some sort of moustache; and to Cora’s vision he was as near transparent as any man could be, yet she did not miss the almost imperceptible signs of his approval, as they met and continued on their opposite ways. She did not glance round, nor did he pause in his slow walk; neither was she clairvoyant; none the less, she knew that he turned his head and looked back at her.

  The path led away from the drives and more public walks of the park, to a low hill, thoughtfully untouched by the gardener and left to the shadowy thickets and good-smelling underbrush of its rich native woodland. And here, by a brown bench, waited a tall gentleman in white.

  They touched hands and sat without speaking. For several moments they continued the silence, then turned slowly and looked at each other; then looked slowly and gravely away, as if to an audience in front of them. They knew how to do it; but probably a critic in the first row would have concluded that Cora felt it even more than Valentine Corliss enjoyed it.

  “I suppose this is very clandestine,” she said, after a deep breath. “I don’t think I care, though.”

  “I hope you do,” he smiled, “so that I could think your coming means more.”

  “Then I’ll care,” she said, and looked at him again.

  “You dear!” he exclaimed deliberately.

  She bit her lip and looked down, but not before he had seen the quick dilation of her ardent ey
es. “I wanted to be out of doors,” she said. “I’m afraid there’s one thing of yours I don’t like, Mr. Corliss.”

  “I’ll throw it away, then. Tell me.”

  “Your house. I don’t like living in it, very much. I’m sorry you CAN’T throw it away.”

  “I’m thinking of doing that very thing,” he laughed. “But I’m glad I found the rose in that queer old waste-basket first.”

  “Not too much like a rose, sometimes,” she said. “I think this morning I’m a little like some of the old doors up on the third floor: I feel rather unhinged, Mr. Corliss.”

  “You don’t look it, Miss Madison!”

  “I didn’t sleep very well.” She bestowed upon him a glance which transmuted her actual explanation into, “I couldn’t sleep for thinking of you.” It was perfectly definite; but the acute gentleman laughed genially.

  “Go on with you!” he said.

  Her eyes sparkled, and she joined laughter with him. “But it’s true: you did keep me awake. Besides, I had a serenade.”

  “Serenade? I had an idea they didn’t do that any more over here. I remember the young men going about at night with an orchestra sometimes when I was a boy, but I supposed–-“

  “Oh, it wasn’t much like that,” she interrupted, carelessly. “I don’t think that sort of thing has been done for years and years. It wasn’t an orchestra—just a man singing under my window.”

  “With a guitar?”

  “No.” She laughed a little. “Just singing.”

  “But it rained last night,” said Corliss, puzzled.

  “Oh, HE wouldn’t mind that!”

  “How stupid of me! Of course, he wouldn’t.

  Was it Richard Lindley?”

  “Never!”

  “I see. Yes, that was a bad guess: I’m sure Lindley’s just the same steady-going, sober, plodding old horse he was as a boy. His picture doesn’t fit a romantic frame—singing under a lady’s window in a thunderstorm! Your serenader must have been very young.’

  “He is,” said Cora. “I suppose he’s about twenty-three; just a boy—and a very annoying one, too!”

  Her companion looked at her narrowly. “By any chance, is he the person your little brother seemed so fond of mentioning—Mr. Vilas?”

  Cora gave a genuine start. “Good heavens! What makes you think that?” she cried, but she was sufficiently disconcerted to confirm his amused suspicion.

  “So it was Mr. Vilas,” he said. “He’s one of the jilted, of course.”

  “Oh, `jilted’!” she exclaimed. “All the wild boys that a girl can’t make herself like aren’t `jilted,’ are they?”

  “I believe I should say—yes,” he returned. “Yes, in this instance, just about all of them.”

  “Is every woman a target for you, Mr. Corliss? I suppose you know that you have a most uncomfortable way of shooting up the landscape.” She stirred uneasily, and moved away from him to the other end of the bench.

  “I didn’t miss that time,” he laughed. “Don’t you ever miss?”

  He leaned quickly toward her and answered in a low voice: “You can be sure I’m not going to miss anything about YOU.”

  It was as if his bending near her had been to rouge her. But it cannot be said that she disliked his effect upon her; for the deep breath she drew in audibly, through her shut teeth, was a signal of delight; and then followed one of those fraught silences not uncharacteristic of dialogues with Cora.

  Presently, she gracefully and uselessly smoothed her hair from the left temple with the backs of her fingers, of course finishing the gesture prettily by tucking in a hairpin tighter above the nape of her neck. Then, with recovered coolness, she asked:

  “Did you come all the way from Italy just to sell our old house, Mr. Corliss?”

  “Perhaps that was part of why I came,” he said, gayly. “I need a great deal of money, Miss Cora Madison.”

  “For your villa and your yacht?”

  “No; I’m a magician, dear lady–-“

  “Yes,” she said, almost angrily. “Of course you know it!”

  “You mock me! No; I’m going to make everybody rich who will trust me. I have a secret, and it’s worth a mountain of gold. I’ve put all I have into it, and will put in everything else I can get for myself, but it’s going to take a great deal more than that. And everybody who goes into it will come out on Monte Cristo’s island.”

  “Then I’m sorry papa hasn’t anything to put in,” she said.

  “But he has: his experience in business and his integrity. I want him to be secretary of my company. Will you help me to get him?” he laughed.

  “Do you want me to?” she asked with a quick, serious glance straight in his eyes, one which he met admirably.

  “I have an extremely definite impression,” he said lightly, “that you can make anybody you know do just what you want him to.”

  “And I have another that you have still another `extremely definite impression’ that takes rank over that,” she said, but not with his lightness, for her tone was faintly rueful. “It is that you can make ME do just what you want me to.”

  Mr. Valentine Corliss threw himself back on the bench and laughed aloud. “What a girl!” he cried. Then for a fraction of a second he set his hand over hers, an evanescent touch at which her whole body started and visibly thrilled.

  She lifted her gloved hand and looked at it with an odd wonder; her alert emotions, always too ready, flinging their banners to her cheeks again.

  “Oh, I don’t think it’s soiled,” he said, a speech which she punished with a look of starry contempt. For an instant she made him afraid that something had gone wrong with his measuring tape; but with a slow movement she set her hand softly against her hot cheek; and he was reassured: it was not his touching her that had offended her, but the allusion to it.

  “Thanks,” he said, very softly.

  She dropped her hand to her parasol, and began, musingly, to dig little holes in the gravel of the path. “Richard Lindley is looking for investments,” she said.

  “I’m glad to hear he’s been so successful,” returned Corliss.

  “He might like a share in your gold-mine.”

  “Thank heaven it isn’t literally a gold-mine,” he exclaimed. “There have been so many crooked ones exploited I don’t believe you could get anybody nowadays to come in on a real one. But I think you’d make an excellent partner for an adventurer who had discovered hidden treasure; and I’m that particular kind of adventurer. I think I’ll take you in.”

  “Do you?”

  “How would you like to save a man from being ruined?”

  “Ruined? You don’t mean it literally?”

  “Literally!” He laughed gayly. “If I don’t `land’ this I’m gone, smashed, finished—quite ended! Don’t bother, I’m going to `land’ it. And it’s rather a serious compliment I’m paying you, thinking you can help me. I’d like to see a woman—just once in the world—who could manage a thing like this.” He became suddenly very grave. “Good God! wouldn’t I be at her feet!”

  Her eyes became even more eager. “You think I—I MIGHT be a woman who could?”

  “Who knows, Miss Madison? I believe–-” He stopped abruptly, then in a lowered, graver voice asked: “Doesn’t it somehow seem a little queer to you when we call each other, `Miss Madison’ and `Mr. Corliss’?”

  “Yes,” she answered slowly; “it does.”

  “Doesn’t it seem to you,” he went on, in the same tone, “that we only `Miss’ and `Mister’ each other in fun? That though you never saw me until yesterday, we’ve gone pretty far beyond mere surfaces? That we did in our talk, last night?”

  “Yes,” she repeated; “it does.”

  He let a pause follow, and then said huskily:

  “How far are we going?”

  “I don’t know.” She was barely audible; but she turned deliberately, and there took place an eager exchange of looks which continued a long while. At last, and without ending this
serious encounter, she whispered:

  “How far do YOU think?”

  Mr. Corliss did not answer, and a peculiar phenomenon became vaguely evident to the girl facing him: his eyes were still fixed full upon hers, but he was not actually looking at her; nevertheless, and with an extraordinarily acute attention, he was unquestionably looking at something. The direct front of pupil and iris did not waver from her; but for the time he was not aware of her; had not even heard her question. Something in the outer field of his vision had suddenly and completely engrossed him; something in that nebulous and hazy background which we see, as we say, with the white of the eye. Cora instinctively turned and looked behind her, down the path.

  There was no one in sight except a little girl and the elderly burgess who had glanced over his shoulder at Cora as she entered the park; and he was, in face, mien, and attire, so thoroughly the unnoticeable, average man-on-the-street that she did not even recall him as the looker-round of a little while ago. He was strolling benevolently, the little girl clinging to one of his hands, the other holding an apple; and a composite photograph of a thousand grandfathers might have resulted in this man’s picture.

  As the man and little girl came slowly up the walk toward the couple on the bench there was a faint tinkle at Cora’s feet: her companion’s scarfpin, which had fallen from his tie. He was maladroit about picking it up, trying with thumb and forefinger to seize the pin itself, instead of the more readily grasped design of small pearls at the top, so that he pushed it a little deeper into the gravel; and then occurred a tiny coincidence: the elderly man, passing, let fall the apple from his hand, and it rolled toward the pin just as Corliss managed to secure the latter. For an instant, though the situation was so absolutely commonplace, so casual, Cora had a wandering consciousness of some mysterious tensity; a feeling like the premonition of a crisis very near at hand. This sensation was the more curious because nothing whatever happened. The man got his apple, joined in the child’s laughter, and went on.