He stared across the street at the Olympian Club. He was expected there.
“If she only wasn’t so — so expressionless and — silent about it. It’s like killing something that lets you do it. That’s a crazy thing to think of!”
Suddenly he found he had a fight on his hands. He had never had one like it; didn’t know exactly what to do, except to repeat over and over:
“It isn’t square — it isn’t square. She knows it, too. She’s frightened. She knows it isn’t square. There’s nothing ahead but hell to pay! She knows it. And she doesn’t defend herself. There are only two kinds of women. It is up to them, too. But it’s like killing something that lets you kill it. Good God! What a damn fool I am!”
Later he repeated it. Later still he found himself leaning over his desk, groping blindly about for a pen, and cursing breathlessly as though he had not a moment to lose.
He wrote:
“Dear Little Jacqueline: I’m not going to see you again. Where the fool courage to write this comes from I don’t know. But you will now learn that there is nothing to me after all — not even enough of positive and negative to make me worth forgiveness. And so I let it go at that. Good-bye.
“Desboro.”
In the same half blind, half dazed way, cursing something all the while, he managed to seal, stamp, and direct the letter, and get himself out of the house with it.
A club servant at the Olympian mailed it; he continued on his way to the dining room, and stumbled into a chair between Cairns and Reggie Ledyard, who were feasting noisily and unwisely with Stuyvesant Van Alstyne; and the racket and confusion seemed to help him. He was conscious of laughing and talking and drinking a great deal — conscious, too, of the annoyance of other men at other tables. Finally, one of the governors came over and very pleasantly told him to shut up or go elsewhere.
They all went, with cheerfulness unimpaired by gubernatorial admonition. There was a large dinner dance for debutantes at the Barkley’s. This function they deigned to decorate with their presence for a while, Cairns and Van Alstyne behaving well enough, considering the manners of the times; Desboro, a dull fire smouldering in his veins, wandered about, haunted by a ghost whose soft breath touched his cheek.
His manners were good when he chose; they were always faultless when he was drunk. Perfectly steady on his legs, very pale, and a trifle over polite, the drunker he was the more courtly he invariably became, measuredly graceful, in speech reticent. Only his pallor and the lines about his mouth betrayed the tension.
Later, one or two men familiar with the house strolled into the distant billiard room and discovered him standing there looking blankly into space.
Ledyard, bad tempered when he had dined too well, announced that he had had enough of that debutante party:
“Look at ‘em,” he said to Desboro. “Horrible little fluffs just out of the incubator — with their silly brains and rotten manners, and their ‘Bunny Hugs’ and ‘Turkey Trots’ and ‘Dying Chickens,’ and the champagne flaming in their baby cheeks! Why, their mothers are letting ’em dance like filles de Brasserie! Men used to know where to go for that sort of thing — —”
Cairns, balancing gravely on heels and toes, waved one hand comprehensively.
“Problem was,” he said, “how to keep the young at home. Bunny Hug solves it. See? All the comforts of the Tenderloin at home. Tha’s ‘splaination.”
“Come on to supper,” said Ledyard. “Your Blue Girl will be there, Jim.”
“By all means,” said Desboro courteously. “My car is entirely at your disposal.” But he made no movement.
“Come to supper,” insisted Ledyard.
“Commer supper,” echoed Cairns gravely. “Whazzer mazzer? Commer supper!”
“Nothing,” said Desboro, “could give me greater pleasure.” He rose, bowed courteously to Ledyard, included Cairns in a graceful salute, and reseated himself.
Ledyard lost his temper and began to shout at him.
“I beg your pardon for my inexcusable absent-mindedness,” said Desboro, getting slowly onto his feet once more. With graceful precision, he made his way to his hostess and took faultless leave of her, Cairns and Ledyard attempting vainly to imitate his poise, urbanity and self-possession.
The icy air of the street did Cairns good and aided Ledyard. So they got themselves out across the sidewalk and ultimately into Desboro’s town car, which was waiting, as usual.
“Little bunny-hugging, bread-and-butter beasts,” muttered Ledyard to himself. “Lord! Don’t they want us to draw the line between them and the sort we’re to meet at supper?”
“They’re jus’ fools,” said Cairns. “No harm in ‘em! And I’m not going to supper. I’ll take you there an’ go’me!”
“What’s the matter with you?” demanded Ledyard.
“No — I’m through, that’s all. You ‘sult nice li’l debutantes. Rotten bad taste. Nice li’l debbys.”
“Come on, you jinx!”
“That girl in blue. Will she be there — the one who does the lute solo in ‘The Maid of Shiraz’?”
“Yes, but she’s crazy about Desboro.”
“I waive all pretension to the charming condescension of that very lovely young lady, and cheerfully concede your claims,” said Desboro, raising his hat and wrecking it against the roof of the automobile.
“As you wish, dear friend. But why so suddenly the solitary recluse?”
“A personal reason, I assure you.”
“I see,” remarked Ledyard. “And what may be the name and quality of this personal reason? And is she a blonde?”
Desboro shrugged his polite impatience. But when the others got out at the Santa Regina he followed. Cairns was inclined to shed a few tears over Ledyard’s insults to the “debbys.”
“Sure,” said the latter, soothingly. “The brimming beaker for you, dear friend, and it will pass away. Hark! I hear the fairy feetsteps of a houri!” as they landed from the elevator and encountered a group of laughing, bright-eyed young girls in the hallway, seeking the private supper room.
One of them was certainly the girl in blue. The others appeared to Desboro as merely numerous and, later, exceedingly noisy. But noise and movement seemed to make endurable the dull pain thudding ceaselessly in his heart. Music and roses, flushed faces, the ringing harmony of crystal and silver, and the gaiety à diable of the girl beside him would ease it — must ease it, somehow. For it had to be first eased, then killed. There was no sense, no reason, no excuse for going on this way — enduring such a hurt. And just at present the remedy seemed to lie in a gay uproar and many brilliant lights, and in the tinted lips of the girl beside him, babbling nonsense while her dark eyes laughed, promising all they laughed at — if he cared to ask an answer to the riddle.
But he never asked it.
Later somebody offered a toast to Desboro, but when they looked around for him in the uproar, glasses aloft, he had disappeared.
CHAPTER VII
There was no acknowledgment of his note to Jacqueline the day following; none the next day, or the next. It was only when telephoning to Silverwood he learned by chance from Mrs. Quant that Jacqueline had been at the house every day as usual, busy in the armoury with the work that took her there.
He had fully expected that she would send a substitute; had assumed that she would not wish to return and take the chance of his being there.
What she had thought of his note to her, what she might be thinking of him, had made him so miserable that even the unwisdom of excess could not dull the pain of it or subdue the restless passion ever menacing him with a shameful repudiation of the words he had written her. He had fought one weakness with another, and there was no strength in him now. He knew it, but stood on guard.
For he knew, too, in his heart that he had nothing to offer her except a sentiment which, in the history of man, has never been anything except temporary. With it, of course, and part of it, was a gentler inclination — love, probably, of one sort or
another — with it went also genuine admiration and intellectual interest, and sympathy, and tenderness of some unanalysed kind.
But he knew that he had no intention of marrying anybody — never, at least, of marrying out of his own social environment. That he understood fully; had wit and honesty enough to admit to himself. And so there was no way — nothing, now, anyway. He had settled that definitely — settled it for her and for himself, unrequested; settled, in fact, everything except how to escape the aftermath of restless pain for which there seemed to be no remedy so far — not even the professional services of old Doctor Time. However, it had been only three days — three sedative pills from the old gentleman’s inexhaustible supply. It is the regularity of taking it, more than the medicine itself which cures.
On the fourth day, he emerged from the unhappy seclusion of his rooms and ventured into the Olympian Club, where he deliberately attempted to anæsthetise his badly battered senses. But he couldn’t. Cairns found him there, sitting alone in the library — it was not an intellectual club — and saw what Desboro had been doing to himself by the white tensity of his features.
“Look here,” he said. “If there’s really anything the matter with you, why don’t you go into business and forget it? You can’t fool real trouble with what you buy in bottles!”
“What business shall I go into?” asked Desboro, unoffended.
“Stocks or literature. All the ginks who can’t do anything else go into stocks or literature.”
Desboro waved away the alternatives with amiable urbanity.
“Then run for your farms and grow things for market. You could do that, couldn’t you? Even a Dutchess County millionaire can run a milk-route.”
“I don’t desire to grow milk,” explained Desboro pleasantly.
Cairns regarded him with a grin of anxiety.
“You’re jingled,” he concluded. “That is, you are as jingled as you ever get. Why?”
“No reason, thanks.”
“It isn’t some girl, is it? You never take them seriously. All the same, is it?”
Desboro smiled: “Do you think it’s likely, dear friend?”
“No, I don’t. But whatever you’re worrying about isn’t improving your personal beauty. Since you hit this hamlet you’ve been on one continuous tootlebat. Why don’t you go back to Westchester and hoe potatoes?”
“One doesn’t hoe them in January, you know,” said Desboro, always deprecatingly polite. “Please cease to trouble yourself about me. I’m quite all right, thanks.”
“You’ve resigned from a lot of clubs and things, I hear.”
“Admirably reported, dear friend, and perfectly true.”
“Why?”
“Motives of economy; nothing more serious, John.”
“You’re not in any financial trouble, are you?”
“I — ah — possibly have been a trifle indiscreet in my expenditures — a little unfortunate in my investments, perhaps. You are very kind to ask me. It may afford you some gratification to learn that eventually I anticipate an agreeable return to affluence.”
Cairns laughed: “You are jingled all right,” he said. “I recognise the urbane symptoms of your Desboro ancestors.”
“You flatter them and me,” said Desboro, bowing. “They were the limit, and I’m nearing it.”
“Pardon! You have arrived, sir,” said Cairns, returning the salute with exaggerated gravity.
They parted with pomp and circumstance, Desboro to saunter back to his rooms and lie limply in his arm chair beside an empty fireplace until sleep overcame him where he sat. And he looked very young, and white, and somewhat battered as he lay there in the fading winter daylight.
The ringing racket of his telephone bell aroused him in total darkness. Still confused by sleep, he groped for the electric light switch, could not find it; but presently his unsteady hand encountered the telephone, and he unhooked the receiver and set it to his ear.
At first his imagination lied to him, and he thought it was Jacqueline’s distant voice, though he knew in his heart it could not be.
“Jim,” repeated the voice, “what are you doing this evening?”
“Nothing. I was asleep. It’s you, Elena, isn’t it?”
“Of course. To whom are you in the habit of talking every evening at seven by special request?”
“I didn’t know it was seven.”
“That’s flattering to me. Listen, Jim, I’m coming to see you.”
“I’ve told you a thousand times it can’t be done — —”
“Do you mean that no woman has ever been in your apartments?”
“You can’t come,” he repeated obstinately. “If you do, it ends my interest in your various sorrows. I mean it, Elena.”
She laughed: “I only wanted to be sure that you are still afraid of caring too much for me. Somebody told me a very horrid thing about you. It was probably a lie — as long as you are still afraid of me.”
He closed his eyes patiently and leaned his elbow on the desk, waiting for her to go on or to ring off.
“Was it a lie, Jim?”
“Was what a lie?”
“That you are entertaining a very pretty girl at Silverwood House — unchaperoned?”
“Do you think it likely?”
“Why not? They say you’ve done it before.”
“Nobody has been there except on business. And, after all, you know, it doesn’t — —”
“Yes, it does concern me! Oh, Jim, are you being horrid — when I’m so unhappy and helpless — —”
“Be careful what you say over the wire!”
“I don’t care who hears me. If you mean anybody in your apartment house, they know my voice already. I want to see you, Jim — —”
“No!”
“You said you’d be friendly to me!”
“I am — by keeping away from you.”
“Do you mean that I am never to see you at all?”
“You know well enough that it isn’t best, under the circumstances.”
“You could come here if you only would. He is not in town to-night — —”
“Confound it, do you think I’m that sort?”
“I think you are very absurd and not very consistent, considering the things that they say you are not too fastidious to do — —”
“Will you please be a little more reticent over the telephone!”
“Then take me out to dinner somewhere, where we can talk!”
“I’m sorry, but it won’t do.”
“I thought you’d say that. Very well, then, listen: they are singing Ariane to-night; it’s an 8:15 curtain. I’ll be in the Barkley’s box very early; nobody else will arrive before nine. Will you come to me at eight?”
“Yes, I’ll do that for a moment.”
“Thank you, dear. I just want to be happy for a few minutes. You don’t mind, do you?”
“It will be very jolly,” he said vaguely.
The galleries were already filling, but there were very few people in the orchestra and nobody at all to be seen in the boxes when Desboro paused before a door marked with the Barkleys’ name. After a second’s hesitation, he turned the knob, stepped in, and found Mrs. Clydesdale already seated in the tiny foyer, under the hanging shadow of her ermine coat — a charming and youthful figure, eyes and cheeks bright with trepidation and excitement.
“What the dickens do you suppose prompted Mrs. Hammerton to arrive at such an hour?” she said, extending her hand to Desboro. “That very wicked old cat got out of somebody’s car just as I did, and I could feel her beady eyes boring into my back all the way up the staircase.”
“Do you mean Aunt Hannah?”
“Yes, I do! What does she mean by coming here at such an unearthly hour? Don’t go out into the box, Jim. She can see you from the orchestra. I’ll wager that her opera glasses have been sweeping the house every second since she saw me!”
“If she sees me she won’t talk,” he said, coolly. “I’m one of her exemp
ts — —”
“Wait, Jim! What are you going to do?”
“Let her see us both. I tell you she never talks about me, or anybody with whom I happen to be. It’s the best way to avoid gossip, Elena — —”
“I don’t want to risk it, Jim! Please don’t! I’m in abject terror of that woman — —”
But Desboro had already stepped out to the box, and his keen, amused eyes very soon discovered the levelled glasses of Mrs. Hammerton.
“Come here, Elena!”
“Had I better?”
“Certainly. I want her to see you. That’s it! That’s enough. She won’t say a word about you now.”
Mrs. Clydesdale shrank back into the dim, rosy half-light of the box; Desboro looked down at Mrs. Hammerton and smiled; then rejoined his flushed companion.
“Don’t worry; Aunt Hannah’s fangs are extracted for this evening. Elena, you are looking pretty enough to endanger the record of an aged saint! There goes that meaningless overture! What is it you have to say to me?”
“Why are you so brusque with me, Jim?”
“I’m not. But I don’t want the Barkleys and their guests to find us here together.”
“Betty knows I care for you — —”
“Oh, Lord!” he said impatiently. “You always did care for anything that is just out of reach when you stand on tip-toe. You always were that way, Elena. When we were free to see each other you would have none of me.”
She was looking down while he spoke, smoothing one silken knee with her white-gloved hand. After a moment, she lifted her head. To his surprise, her eyes were brilliant with unshed tears.
“You don’t love me any more, do you, Jim?”
“I — I have — it is about as it always will be with me. Circumstances have altered things.”
“Is that all?”
He thought for a moment, and his eyes grew sombre.
“Jim! Are you going to marry somebody?” she said suddenly.
He looked up with a startled laugh, not entirely agreeable.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 643