“Yes. I lived twenty years without it,” said Valerie, demurely, yet in her smile Rita divined the hidden tragedy. And she leaned forward and kissed her impulsively.
“Let’s swear celibacy,” she said, “and live out our lives together in single blessedness! Will you? We can have a perfectly good time until the undertaker knocks.”
“I hope he won’t knock for a long while,” said Valerie, with a slight shiver. “There’s so much I want to see first.”
“You shall. We’ll see everything together. We’ll work hard, live frugally if you say so, cut out all frills and nonsense, and save and save until we have enough to retire on respectably. And then, like two nice old ladies, we’ll start out to see the world—”
“Oh, Rita! I don’t want to see it when I’m too old!”
“You’ll enjoy it more—”
“Rita! How ridiculous! You’ve seen more of the world than I have, anyway. It’s all very well for you to say wait till I’m an old maid; but you’ve been to Paris — haven’t you?”
“Yes,” said Rita. There was a slight colour in her face.
“Well, then! Why must I wait until I’m a dowdy old frump before I go? Why should you and I not be as happy as we can afford to be while we’re young and attractive and unspoiled?”
“I want you to be as happy as you can afford to be, Valerie…. But you can’t afford to fall in love.”
“Why?”
“Because it will make you miserable.”
“But it doesn’t.”
“It will if it is love.”
“It is, Rita,” said the girl, smiling out of her dark eyes — deep brown wells of truth that the other gazed into and saw a young soul there, fearless and doomed.
“Valerie,” she said, shivering, “you won’t do — that — will you?”
“Dear, I cannot marry him, and I love him. What else am I to do?”
“Well, then — then you’d better marry him!” stammered Rita, frightened.
“It’s better for you! It’s better—”
“For me? Yes, but how about him?”
“What do you care about him!” burst out Rita, almost incoherent in her fright and anger. “He’s a man; he can take care of himself. Don’t think of him. It isn’t your business to consider him. If he wants to marry you it’s his concern after all. Let him do it! Marry him and let him fight it out with his friends! After all what does a man give a girl that compares with what she gives him? Men — men—” she stammered— “they’re all alike in the depths of their own hearts. We are incidents to them — no matter how they say they love us. They can’t love as we do. They’re not made for it! We are part of the game to them; they are the whole game to us; we are, at best, an important episode in their careers; they are our whole careers. Oh, Valerie! Valerie! listen to me, child! That man could go on living and painting and eating and drinking and sleeping and getting up to dress and going to bed to sleep, if you lay dead in your grave. But if you loved him, and were his wife — or God forgive me! — his mistress, the day he died you would die, though your body might live on. I know — I know, Valerie. Death — whether it be his body or his love, ends all for the woman who really loves him. Woman’s loss is eternal. But man’s loss is only temporary — he is made that way, fashioned so. Now I tell you the exchange is not fair — it has never been fair — never will be, never can be. And I warn you not to give this man the freshness of your youth, the happy years of your life, your innocence, the devotion which he will transmute into passion with his accursed magic! I warn you not to forsake the tranquillity of ignorance, the blessed immunity from that devil’s paradise that you are already gazing into—”
“Rita! Rita! What are you saying?”
“I scarcely know, child. I am trying to save you from lifelong unhappiness — trying to tell you that — that men are not worth it—”
“How do you know?”
There was a silence, then Rita, very pale and quiet, leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and framing her face with her hands.
“I had my lesson,” she said.
“You! Oh, my darling — forgive me! I did not know—”
Rita suffered herself to be drawn into the younger girl’s impulsive embrace; they both cried a little, arms around each other, faltering out question and answer in unsteady whispers:
“Were you married, dearest?”
“No.”
“Oh — I am so sorry, dear—”
“So am I…. Do you blame me for thinking about men as I do think?”
“Didn’t you love — him?”
“I thought I did…. I was too young to know…. It doesn’t matter now—”
“No, no, of course not. You made a ghastly mistake, but it’s no more shame to you than it is to him. Besides, you thought you loved him.”
“He could have made me. I was young enough…. But he let me see how absolutely wicked he was…. And then it was too late to ever love him.”
“O Rita, Rita! — then you haven’t ever even had the happiness of loving?
Have you?”
Rita did not answer.
“Have you, darling?”
Then Rita broke down and laid her head on Valerie’s knees, crying as though her heart would break.
“That’s the terrible part of it,” she sobbed— “I really do love a man, now…. Not that first one … and there’s nothing to do about it — nothing, Valerie, nothing — because even if he asked me to marry him I can’t, now—”
“Because you—”
“Yes.”
“And if you had not—”
“God knows what I would do,” sobbed Rita, “I love him so, Valerie — I love him so!”
The younger girl looked down at the blond head lying on her knees — looked at the pretty tear-stained face gleaming through the fingers — looked and wondered over the philosophy broken down beside the bowed head and breaking heart.
Terrible her plight; with or without benefit of clergy she dared not give herself. Love was no happiness to her, no confidence, no sacrifice — only a dreadful mockery — a thing that fettered, paralysed, terrified.
“Does he love you?” whispered Valerie.
“No — I think not.”
“If he did he would forgive.”
“Do you think so?”
“Of course. Love pardons everything,” said the girl in surprise.
“Yes. But never forgets.”
* * * * *
That was the first confidence that ever had passed between Valerie West and Rita Tevis. And after it, Rita, apparently forgetting her own philosophical collapse, never ceased to urge upon Valerie the wisdom, the absolute necessity of self-preservation in considering her future relations with Louis Neville. But, like Neville’s logic, Rita’s failed before the innocent simplicity of the creed which Valerie had embraced. Valerie was willing that their relations should remain indefinitely as they were if the little gods of convention were to be considered; she had the courage to sever all relations with the man she loved if anybody could convince her that it was better for Neville. Marry him she would not, because she believed it meant inevitable unhappiness for him. But she was not afraid to lay her ringless hands in his for ever.
Querida called on them and was very agreeable and lively and fascinating; and when he went away Valerie asked him to come again. He did; and again after that. She and Rita dined with him once or twice; and things gradually slipped back to their old footing; and Querida remained on his best behaviour.
Neville had prolonged the visit to the parental roof. He did not explain to her why, but the reason was that he had made up his mind to tell his parents that he wished to marry and to find out once and for all what their attitudes would be toward such a girl as Valerie West. But he had not yet found courage to do it, and he was lingering on, trying to find it and the proper moment to employ it.
His father was a gentleman so utterly devoid of imagination that he had never even ventured into b
usiness, but had been emotionlessly content to marry and live upon an income sufficient to maintain the material and intellectual traditions of the house of Neville.
Tall, transparently pale, negative in character, he had made it a life object to get through life without increasing the number of his acquaintances — legacies in the second generation left him by his father, whose father before him had left the grandfathers of these friends as legacies to his son.
[Illustration: “She and Rita dined with him once or twice.”]
It was a pallid and limited society that Henry Neville and his wife frequented — a coterie of elderly, intellectual people, and their prematurely dried-out offspring. And intellectual in-breeding was thinning it to attenuation — to a bloodless meagreness in which they, who composed it, conceived a mournful pride.
Old New Yorkers all, knowing no other city, no other bourne north of Tenth Street or west of Chelsea — silent, serene, drab-toned people, whose drawing-rooms were musty with what had been fragrance once, whose science, religion, interests, desires were the beliefs, interests and emotions of a century ago, their colourless existence and passive snobbishness affronted nobody who did not come seeking affront.
To them Theodore Thomas had been the last conductor; his orchestra the last musical expression fit for a cultivated society; the Academy of Music remained their last symphonic temple, Wallack’s the last refuge of a drama now dead for ever.
Delmonico’s had been their northern limit, Stuyvesant Square their eastern, old Trinity their southern, and their western, Chelsea. Outside there was nothing. The blatancy and gilt of the million-voiced metropolis fell on closed eyes, and on ears attuned only to the murmurs of the past. They lived in their ancient houses and went abroad and summered in some simple old-time hamlet hallowed by the headstones of their grandsires, and existed as meaninglessly and blamelessly as the old catalpa trees spreading above their dooryards.
And into this narrow circle Louis Neville and his sister Lily had been born.
It had been a shock to her parents when Lily married Gordon Collis, a mining engineer from Denver. She came to see them with her husband every year; Collis loved her enough to endure it.
As for Louis’ career, his achievements, his work, they regarded it without approval. Their last great painters had been Bierstadt and Hart, their last great sculptor, Powers. Blankly they gazed upon the splendours of the mural symphonies achieved by the son and heir of all the Nevilles; they could not comprehend the art of the Uitlanders; their comment was silence and dignity.
To them all had become only shadowy tradition; even affection and human emotion, and the relationship of kin to kin, of friend to friend, had become only part of a negative existence which conformed to precedent, temporal and spiritual, as written in the archives of a worn-out civilisation.
So, under the circumstances, it was scarcely to be wondered that Neville hesitated to introduce the subject of Valerie West as he sat in the parlour at Spindrift House with his father and mother, reading the Tribune or the Evening Post or poring over some ancient tome of travels, or looking out across the cliffs at an icy sea splintering and glittering against a coast of frozen adamant.
At length he could remain no longer; commissions awaited him in town; hunger for Valerie gnawed ceaselessly, unsubdued by his letters or by hers to him.
“Mother,” he said, the evening before his departure, “would it surprise you very much if I told you that I wished to marry?”
“No,” she said, tranquilly; “you mean Stephanie Swift, I suppose.”
[Illustration: “Tall, transparently pale, negative in character.”]
His father glanced up over his spectacles, and he hesitated; then, as his father resumed his reading:
“I don’t mean Stephanie, mother.”
His father laid aside his book and removed, the thin gold-rimmed spectacles.
“I understand from Lily that we are to be prepared to receive Stephanie
Swift as your affianced wife,” he said. “I shall be gratified. Stephen
Swift was my oldest friend.”
“Lily was mistaken, father. Stephanie and I are merely very good friends. I have no idea of asking her to marry me.”
“I had been given to understand otherwise, Louis. I am disappointed.”
Louis Neville looked out of the window, considering, yet conscious of the hopelessness of it all.
“Who is this girl, Louis?” asked his mother, pulling the white-and-lilac wool shawl closer around her thin shoulders.
“Her name is Valerie West.”
“One of the Wests of West Eighth Street?” demanded his father.
The humour of it all twitched for a moment at his son’s grimly set jaws, then a slight flush mantled his face:
“No, father.”
“Do you mean the Chelsea Wests, Louis?”
“No.”
“Then we — don’t know them,” concluded his father with a shrug of his shoulders, which dismissed many, many things from any possibility of further discussion. But his mother’s face grew troubled.
“Who is this Miss West?” she asked in a colourless voice.
“She is a very good, very noble, very cultivated, very beautiful young girl — an orphan — who is supporting herself by her own endeavours.”
“What!” said his father, astonished.
“Mother, I know how it sounds to you, but you and father have only to meet her to recognise in her every quality that you could possibly wish for in my wife.”
“Who is she, Louis!” demanded his father, casting aside the evening newspaper and folding up his spectacles.
“I’ve told you, father.”
“I beg to differ with you. Who is this girl? In what description of business is she actually engaged?”
The young fellow’s face grew red:
“She was engaged in — the drama.”
“What!”
“She was an actress,” he said, realising now the utter absurdity of any hope from the beginning, yet now committed and determined to see it through to the bitter end.
“An actress! Louis!” faltered his mother.
There was a silence, cut like a knife by the thin edge of his father’s voice:
“If she was an actress, what is she now?”
“She has helped me with my painting.”
“Helped you? How?”
“By — posing.”
“Do you desire me to understand that the girl is an artist’s model!”
“Yes.”
His father stared at him a moment, then:
“And is this the woman you propose to have your mother meet?”
“Father,” he said, hopelessly, “there is no use in my saying anything more. Miss West is a sweet, good, generous young girl, fully my peer in education, my superior in many things…. You and mother can never believe that the ideas, standards — even the ideals of civilisation change — have changed since your youth — are changing every hour. In your youth the word actress had a dubious significance; to-day it signifies only what the character of her who wears the title signifies. In your youth it was immodest, unmaidenly, reprehensible, for a woman to be anything except timid, easily abashed, ignorant of vital truths, and submissive to every social convention; to-day women are neither ignorant nor timid; they are innocent because they choose to be; they are fearless, intelligent, ambitious, and self-reliant — and lose nothing in feminine charm by daring to be themselves instead of admitting their fitness only for the seraglio of some Occidental monogamist—”
“Louis! Your mother is present!”
“Good heavens, father, I know it! Isn’t it possible even for a man’s own mother to hear a little truth once in a while—”
His father rose in pallid wrath:
“Be silent!” he said, unsteadily; “the subject is definitely ended.”
* * * * *
It was ended. His father gave him a thin, chilly hand at parting. But his mother met him at the outer
door and laid her trembling lips to his forehead.
“You won’t bring this shame on us, Louis, I know. Nor on yourself, nor on the name you bear…. It is an honourable name in the land, Louis…. I pray God to bless you and counsel you, my son—” She turned away, adding in a whisper— “and — and comfort you.”
And so he went away from Spindrift House through a snow-storm, and arrived in New York late that evening; but not too late to call Valerie on the telephone and hear again the dear voice with its happy little cry of greeting — and the promise of to-morrow’s meeting before the day of duty should begin.
* * * * *
Love grew as the winter sped glittering toward the far primrose dawn of spring; work filled their days; evening brought the happiness of a reunion eternally charming in its surprises, its endless novelty. New, forever new, love seemed; and youth, too, seemed immortal.
On various occasions when Valerie chanced to be at his studio, pouring tea for him, friends of his sister came unannounced — agreeable women more or less fashionable, who pleaded his sister’s sanction of an unceremonious call to see the great painted frieze before it was sent to the Court House.
He was perfectly nice to them; and Valerie was perfectly at ease; and it was very plain that these people were interested and charmed with this lovely Miss West, whom they found pouring tea in the studio of an artist already celebrated; and every one of them expressed themselves and their curiosity to his sister, Mrs. Collis, who, never having heard of Valerie West, prudently conveyed the contrary in smiling but silent acquiescence, and finally wrote to her brother and told him what was being said.
Before he determined to reply, another friend — or rather acquaintance of the Collis family — came in to see the picture — the slim and pretty Countess d’Enver. And went quite mad over Valerie — so much so that she remained for an hour talking to her, almost oblivious of Neville and his picture and of Ogilvy and Annan, who consumed time and cocktails in the modest background.
When she finally went away, and Neville had returned from putting her into her over-elaborate carriage, Ogilvy said:
“Gee, Valerie, you sure did make a hit with the lady. What was she trying to make you do?”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 538