“When will you be able to afford it?”
Neither were embarrassed; he looked thoughtfully into the fire; and for a while she watched him in his brown study.
“Will it be soon?” she asked, under her breath.
“No, dear.”
That time a full minute intervened before either realised how he had answered. And both remained exceedingly still until she said calmly:
“I thought you were the very ideal embodiment of personal liberty. And now I find that wretched and petty and ignoble circumstances fetter even such a man as you are. It — it is — is heartbreaking.”
“It won’t last forever,” he said, controlling his voice.
“But the years are going — the best years, Mr. Jones. And your life’s work beckons you. And you are equipped for it, and you can not take it!”
“Some day — —” But he could say no more then, with her hand tightening in his.
“To — to rise superior to circumstances — that is god-like, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yes.” He laughed. “But on six hundred dollars a year a man can’t rise very high above circumstances.”
The shock left her silent. Any gown of hers cost more than that. Then the awfulness of it all rose before her in its true and hideous proportions. And there was nothing for her to do about it, nothing, absolutely nothing, except to endure the degradation of her wealth and remember that the merest tithe of it could have made this man beside her immortally famous — if, perhaps, no more wonderful than he already was in her eyes.
Was there no way to aid him? She could look for ichneumon flies in the morning. And on the morning after that. And the next morning she would say good-bye and go away forever — out of this enchanted forest, out of his life, back to the Chihuahua, and to her guests who ate often and digested all day long — back to her father, her mother — back to Stirrups ——
He felt her hand close on his convulsively, and turned to encounter her flushed and determined face.
“You like me, don’t you?” she said.
“Yes.” After a moment he said: “Yes — absolutely.”
“Do you like me enough to — to let me help you in your research work — to be patient enough to teach me a little until I catch up with you?... So we can go on together?... I know I am presumptuous — perhaps importunate — but I thought — somehow — if you did like me well enough — it would be — very agreeable — —”
“It would be!... And I — like you enough for — anything. But you could not remain here — —”
“I don’t mean here.”
“Where, then?”
“Where?” She looked vaguely about her in the firelight. “Why, everywhere. Wherever you go to make your researches.”
“Dear, I would go to Ceylon if I could.”
“I also,” she said.
He turned a little pale, looking at her in silence. She said calmly: “What would you do in Ceylon?”
“Study the unknown life-histories of the rarer Ornithoptera.”
She knew no more than a kitten what he meant. But she wanted to know, and, moreover, was perfectly capable of comprehending.
“Whatever you desire to study,” she said, “would prove delightful to me.... If you want me. Do you?”
“Want you!” Then he bit his lip.
“Don’t you? Tell me frankly if you don’t. But I think, somehow, you would not make a mistake if you did want me. I really am intelligent. I didn’t know it until I talked with you. Now, I know it. But I have never been able to give expression to it or cultivate it.... And, somehow, I know I would not be a drag on you — if you would teach me a little in the beginning.”
He said: “What can I teach you, Cecil? Not the heavenly frankness that you already use so sweetly. Not the smiling and serene nobility which carries your head so daintily and so fearlessly. Not the calm purity of thought, nor the serene goodness of mind that has graciously included a poor devil like me in your broad and generous sympathies — —”
“Please!” she faltered, flushing. “I am not what you say — though to hear you say such things is a great happiness — a pleasure — very intense — and wonderful — and new. But I am nothing, nothing — unless I should become useful to you. I could amount to something — with — you — —” She checked herself; looked at him as though a trifle frightened. “Unless,” she added with an effort, “you are in love with somebody else. I didn’t think of that. Are you?”
“No,” he said. “Are you?”
“No.... I have never been in love.... This is the nearest I have come to it.”
“And I.”
She smiled faintly.
“If we — —”
“Oh, yes,” he said, calmly, “if we are to pass the balance of our existence in combined research, it would be rather necessary for us to marry.”
“Do you mind?”
“On the contrary. Do you?”
“Not in the least. Do you really mean it? It wouldn’t be disagreeable, would it? You are above marrying for mere sentiment, aren’t you? Because, somehow, I seem to know you like me.... And it would be death for me — a mental death — to go back now to — to Stirrups — —”
“Where?”
“To — why do you ask? Couldn’t you take me on faith?”
He said, unsteadily: “If you rose up out of the silvery lagoon, just born from the starlight and the mist, I would take you.”
“You — you are a poet, too,” she faltered. “You seem to be about everything desirable.”
“I’m only a man very, very deep in — love.”
“In love!... I thought — —”
“Ah, but you need think no more. You know now, Cecil.”
She remained silent, thinking for a long while. Then, very quietly:
“Yes, I know.... It is that way with me also. For I no sooner find my liberty than I lose it — in the same moment — to you. We must never again be separated.... Do you feel as I do?”
“Absolutely.... But it must be so.”
“Why?” she asked, troubled.
“For one thing, I shall have to work harder now.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you know we can not marry on what I have?”
“Oh! Is that the reason?” She laughed, sprang lightly to her feet, stood looking down at him. He got up, slowly.
“I bring you,” she said, “six hundred dollars a year. And a little more. Which sweeps away that obstacle. Doesn’t it?”
“I could not ask you to live on that — —”
“I can live on what you live on! I should wish to. It would make me utterly and supremely happy.”
Her flushed, young face confronted his as she took a short, eager step toward him.
“I am not making love to you,” she said, “ — at least, I don’t think I am. All I desire is to help — to give you myself — my youth, energy, ambition, intelligence — and what I have — which is of no use to me unless it is useful to you. Won’t you take these things from me?”
“Do you give me your heart, too, Cecil?”
She smiled faintly, knowing now that she had already given it. She did not answer, but her under lip trembled, and she caught it between her teeth as he took her hands and kissed them in silence.
VI
“Miami is not very far, is it?” she asked, as she sprang aboard the Orange Puppy.
“Not very, dear.”
“We could get a license immediately, couldn’t we?”
“I think so.”
“And then it will not take us very long to get married, will it?”
“Not very.”
“What a wonderful night!” she murmured, looking up at the stars. She turned toward the shore. “What a wonderful place for a honeymoon!... And we can continue business, too, and watch our caterpillars all day long! Oh, it is all too wonderful, wonderful!” She kissed her hand to the unseen camp. “We will be back to-morrow!” she called softly. Then a sudden thought struck
her. “You never can get the Orange Puppy through that narrow lead, can you?”
“Oh, there is an easier way out,” he said, taking the tiller as the sail filled.
Her head dropped back against his knees. Now and then her lips moved, murmuring in sheerest happiness the thoughts that drifted through her enchanted mind.
“I wonder when it began,” she whispered, “ — at the ball-game — or on Fifth Avenue — or when I saw you here? It seems to me as if I always had been in love with you.”
Outside in the ocean, the breeze stiffened and the perfume was tinged with salt.
Lying back against his knees, her eyes fixed dreamily on the stars, she murmured:
“Stirrups will be surprised.”
“What are you talking about down there all by yourself?” he whispered, bending over her.
She looked up into his eyes. Suddenly her own filled; and she put up both arms, linking them around his neck.
And so the Orange Puppy sailed away into the viewless, formless, starry mystery of all romance.
After a silence the young novelist, who had been poking the goldfish, said slowly: “That’s pretty poor fiction, Athalie, but, as a matter of simple fact and inartistic truth, recording sentimental celerity, it stands unequalled.”
“Straight facts make poor fiction,” remarked Duane.
“It all depends on who makes the fiction out of them,” I ventured.
“Not always,” said Athalie. “There are facts which when straightly told are far stranger than fiction. I noticed a case of that sort in my crystal last winter.” And to the youthful novelist she said: “Don’t try to guess who the people were if I tell it, will you?”
“No,” he promised.
“Please fix my cushions,” she said to nobody in particular. And after the stampede was over she selected another cigarette, thoughtfully, but did not light it.
VII
“You are queer folk, you writers of fiction,” she mused aloud. “No monarch ordained of God takes himself more seriously; no actor lives more absolutely in a world made out of his imagination.”
She lighted her cigarette: “You often speak of your most ‘important’ book, — as though any fiction ever written were important. Painters speak of their most important pictures; sculptors, composers, creative creatures of every species employ the adjective. And it is all very silly. Facts only can be characterised as important; figments of the creative imagination are as unimportant — —” she blew a dainty ring of smoke toward the crystal globe— “as that! ‘Tout ce qu’ont fait les hommes, les hommes peuvent le détruire. Il n’y a de caractères inéffaçables que ceux qu’ imprime la nature.’ There has never been but one important author.”
I said smilingly: “To quote the gentleman you think important enough to quote, Athalie, ‘Tout est bien sortant des mains de l’Auteur des choses: tout dégénere entre les mains de l’homme.’”
Said the novelist simply: “Imagination alone makes facts important. ‘Cette superbe puissance, ennemie de la raison!’”
“O Athalie,” whispered Duane, “night-blooming, exquisite blossom of the arid municipal desert, recount for us these facts which you possess and which, in your delightful opinion, are stranger than fiction, and more important.”
And Athalie, choosing another sweetmeat, looked at us until it had dissolved in her fragrant mouth. Then she spoke very gravely, while her dark eyes laughed at us:
When young Lord Willowmere’s fiancée ran away from him and married Delancy Jones, that bereaved nobleman experienced a certain portion of the universal shock which this social seismic disturbance spread far and wide over two hemispheres.
That such a girl should marry beneath her naturally disgusted everybody. So both Jones and his wife were properly damned.
England read its morning paper, shrugged its derision, and remarked that nobody ought to be surprised at anything that happened in the States. “The States” swallowed the rebuke and squirmed.
Now, among the sturdy yeomanry, gentry, and nobility of those same British and impressive Isles there was an earnest gentleman whose ample waist and means and scholarly tastes inclined him to a sedentary life of research. The study of human nature in its various native and exotic phases had for forty years obsessed his insular intellect. Philologist, anthropologist, calm philosopher, and benignant observer, this gentleman, who had never visited the United States, determined to do so now. For, he reasoned — and very properly — a country where such a thing could happen to a British nobleman and a Peer of the Realm must be worth exploring, and its curious inhabitants merited, perhaps, the impersonally judicial inspection of an F. R. B. A. whose gigantic work on the folk manners of the world had now reached its twentieth volume, without as yet including the United States. So he determined to devote several chapters in the forthcoming and twenty-first volume to the recent colonies of Great Britain.
Now, when the Duke of Pillchester concluded to do anything, that thing was invariably and thoroughly done. And so, before it entirely realised the honour in store for it, the United States was buttoning its collar, tying its white tie, and rushing down stairs to open its front door to the Duke of Pillchester, the Duchess of Pillchester, and the Lady Alene Innesly, their youthful and ornamental daughter.
For a number of months after its arrival, the Ducal party inspected the Yankee continent through a lens made for purposes of scientific investigation only. The massed wealth of the nation met their Graces in solid divisions of social worth. The shock was mutual.
Then the massed poverty of the continent was exhibited, leaving the poverty indifferent and slightly bored, and the Ducal party taking notes.
It was his Grace’s determination to study the folk-ways of Americans; and what the Duke wished the Duchess dutifully desired. The Lady Alene Innesly, however, was dragged most reluctantly from function to function, from palace to purlieu, from theatre to cathedral, from Coney Island to Newport. She was “havin’ a rotten time.”
All day long she had nothing to look at but an overdressed and alien race whose voices distressed her; day after day she had nothing to say except, “How d’y do,” and “Mother, shall we have tea?” Week after week she had nothing to think of except the bare, unkempt ugliness of the cities she saw; the raw waste and sordid uglification of what once had been matchless natural resources; dirty rivers, ruined woodlands, flimsy buildings, ignorant architecture. The ostentatious and wretched hotels depressed her; the poor railroads and bad manners disgusted her.
Listless, uninterested, Britishly enduring what she could not escape, the little Lady Alene had made not the slightest effort to mitigate the circumstances of her temporary fate. She was civilly incurious concerning the people she met; their social customs, amusements, pastimes, duties, various species of business or of leisure interested her not a whit. All the men looked alike to her; all the women were over-gowned, tiresomely pretty, and might learn one day how to behave themselves after they had found out how to make their voices behave.
Meanwhile, requiring summer clothing — tweeds and shooting boots being not what the climate seemed to require in July — she discovered with languid surprise that for the first time in her limited life she was well gowned. A few moments afterward another surprise faintly thrilled her, for, chancing to glance at herself after a Yankee hairdresser had finished her hair, she discovered to her astonishment that she was pretty.
For several days this fact preyed upon her mind, alternately troubling and fascinating her. There were several men at home who would certainly sit up; Willowmere among others.
As for considering her newly discovered beauty any advantage in America, the idea had not entered her mind. Why should it? All the men looked alike; all wore sleek hair, hats on the backs of their heads, clothing that fitted like a coster’s trousers. She had absolutely no use for them, and properly.
However, she continued to cultivate her beauty and to adorn it with Yankee clothing and headgear befitting; which filled up considerab
le time during the day, leaving her fewer empty hours to fill with tea and three-volumed novels from the British Isles.
Now, it had never occurred to the Lady Alene Innesly to read anything except British fact and fiction. She had never been sufficiently interested even to open an American book. Why should she, as long as the three props of her national literature endured intact — curates, tea, and thoroughbred horses?
But there came a time during the ensuing winter when the last of the three-volumed novels had been assimilated, the last serious tome digested; and there stretched out before her a bookless prospect which presently began to dismay her with the aridness of its perspective.
The catastrophe occurred while the Ducal party was investigating the strange folk-customs of those Americans who gathered during the winter in gigantic Florida hotels and lived there, uncomfortably lodged, vilely fed, and shamelessly robbed, while third-rate orchestras play cabaret music and enervating breezes stir the cabbage-palmettos till they rustle like bath-room rubber plants.
It was a bad place and a bad time of year for a young and British girl to be deprived of her native and soporific fiction; for the livelier and Frenchier of British novelists were self-denied her, because somebody had said they were not unlike Americans.
Now she was, in the uncouth vernacular of the country, up against it for fair! She didn’t know what it was called, but she realised how it felt to be against something.
Three days she endured it, dozing in her room, half awake when the sea-breeze rattled the Venetian blinds, or the niggers were noisy at baseball.
On the fourth day she arose, went to the window, gazed disgustedly out over the tawdry villas of Verbena Inlet, then rang for her maid.
“Bunn,” she said, “here are three sovereigns. You will please buy for me one specimen of every book on sale in the corridor of this hotel. And, Bunn! — —”
“Yes, my lady.”
“What was it you were eating the other day?”
“Chewing-gum, my lady.”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 674