V
After having resisted the temptation for many days, Wilfred pushed a button at the door of one of the little flats in the Manhanset Building on Fifty-Ninth street. He was ashamed to drag his dead and alive self there for succor; nevertheless a feeling of thankfulness sprang up in his breast like water in dusty earth. What a blessing it was to have a place where you could drop in without an appointment, and be sure of your welcome. Perhaps he could conceal from Frances Mary how far gone he was.
She opened the door. His eyes were gratified by the sight of her bland and dusky fairness; her calm. Frances Mary was always the same. “Hello!” she said with her ironical smile, while her eyes beamed with friendliness. She had a quality of voice that worked magic with refractory nerves. “Come in!”
She walked away from the door, leaving Wilfred to close it and follow. If she had read anything in his face she gave no sign of it.
“Hope I’m not interrupting your work,” he said, trying not to sound perfunctory. He knew he was interrupting.
“I was ripe for an interruption.”
At the end of a tiny hall was her general room, a mellow retreat highly characteristic of its owner. It had two windows looking northward over the flat roofs of dwellings below. The effect was of green and brown and gold. Wilfred looked around him thirstily; it provided just what he needed then.
“This room is as right as a natural thing,” he said grinning. “Nothing sticks out. It doesn’t ask to be admired, but to be flopped in. Demoralizing I call it. Makes me feel tearful.”
Frances Mary looked most ironical when she was flattered. “Want a hanky?” she asked.
There was a hard coal fire burning in the grate. She put a plump brass kettle on the trivet and swung it in.
“Don’t bother about tea,” said Wilfred; “at least not for me.”
“I want it,” she said. They always carried through this little fiction.
She moved about the room, bringing out the tea things. She had the gift of getting things done without any fuss. A tall woman, of an essentially feminine tenderness of flesh, her glance was not tender but level. The leaf-colored room was a fit setting for her. Wilfred’s frantic feeling passed away. How restful! How blessedly restful! Her unexpressed sympathy was like sleep stealing on.
He could always count on her sympathy, he reflected, though she rarely agreed with him. There was a wholesome astringent quality in her nature. She was not generally popular he had observed with surprise. People complained that she seemed to mock at everything. They would not see that her mockery was only a thin shield for her heavenly kindness of heart. He felt that he alone understood Frances Mary. She had a slightly invidious smile; and her gentle glance was generally veiled. In particular, stupid women hated her for her smile. Yet she was what is known as a woman’s woman; she had devoted friends amongst the best sort of women. On the other hand she seemed to know but few men, and they not the best sort of men; women’s men.
Frances Mary was predestined to die single, Wilfred supposed, watching her. And she so splendidly made; what a pity! Loved babies, too. But she lacked any disturbing quality for men. Well, she was one of the rare women who could do without a man. There would be no souring here. Not with that serene mind. The happiest person he knew. Noble. If one had only had the luck to fall in love with a woman like that instead of . . . well, it would be just the difference between life and death! But you couldn’t fall in love with Frances Mary. She was too intelligent. A hollow laugh sounded inside Wilfred. What would be said of a man who uttered such a sentiment in a story?—But it was true just the same. Nature disregarded intelligence in the business of mating. Perhaps intelligence was too modern for Nature. It was a truism that a man’s man and a woman’s woman were the best types of each sex. What a ghastly joke anyhow, the whole damned business of sex! The peach-like Frances Mary doomed to shrivel, ungathered; and he to his Hell of base jealousy!
She did not look at him while she moved about, nevertheless Wilfred felt that he was being explored with a faculty other than sight—that withdrawn glance of hers; that hint of a smile. In haste he said, still in the tone of one determined not to be perfunctory—he could hear it!
“How is your work going?”
At the tone, her smile deepened; but she answered simply: “I’ve been working at the ‘Æolian Harp.’ I’d like you to read part of it later.”
“I expect I shan’t like it,” he said. “A little bird tells me you have been niggling at it. I warned you to leave it alone. It was all right as it was.”
An adorable look of anxiety came into Frances Mary’s face. It gave Wilfred a pleasant sense of power. She came to a stop; looking at him; biting her lip. “I . . . I thought I had improved it,” she faltered.
“Your vice is, never knowing when to leave a thing alone,” he said severely. “You lose sight of the whole in the parts.”
“I expect I do,” she said with a disarming humility. “Your criticism is awfully good for me. . . . What are you doing?”
Wilfred relapsed into the depths. “Nothing,” he said. The blackness was real enough; but he equivocated respecting its cause. For days past he had not even tried to write. “I’m still stuck in the middle of my restaurant story.”
“What’s the matter with it?”
“Too damn sentimental!”
Frances Mary was silent.
Wilfred found he was not so deadened, but that he could still feel the pin-pricks of wounded self-love. “You don’t say anything,” he said bitterly. “You think it’s tripe, too.”
“Oh, not as bad as that!” she said. “The sentimentality was implicit in the original design. . . .”
“Why didn’t you tell me so then?”
“I tried to, but you wouldn’t have it so. . . . Why not finish it now, frankly in a sentimental vein; and go on to something else.”
“Why not advise me to tear it up?”
“But it has charm. It will sell readily.”
“You think that’s all I’m good for!”
She shook her head. “You can be as brutal as you like, next time. Your Rivington street story wasn’t sentimental.”
“Ah! don’t throw that up to me! I’ve never been able to equal it!”
“Every artist knows that feeling!”
“You manage to maintain the level of your stuff. It makes me sore, you write so much better than I do!”
Frances Mary smiled somewhat dryly. “I’ve been at it longer than you.”
“That hasn’t got anything to do with it. You have an instinct for perfection, while I’m all over the place!”
“Perfect stories of perfect ladies to adorn the chaste pages of our leading family magazine!” she said, smiling still.
“It doesn’t matter what they’re about, they’re well done!” said Wilfred.
“I suppose I do write better than you do now,” she said, ceasing to smile. “But my work is much the same as it was ten years ago when I began. There is more hope in your unevenness than in my dead level.”
“I truckle to the editors,” said Wilfred glooming.
“So you do,” admitted Frances Mary—and laughed when he looked up resentfully. “But as long as you know it, the case is not hopeless.”
“I’m no good!” said Wilfred, touching bottom.
“Have it your own way,” she said. “You are in one of your self-accusatory moods to-day, and to argue with you only strengthens your obstinacy. I’ll wait until you come out of it.”
“It’s not only to-day!” Wilfred burst out. “I shall never write again! I’ve utterly lost the knack. I can’t put together an intelligible sentence! I have gone dead inside!”
Frances Mary looked at him levelly before answering. Wilfred knew that look. It was to enable her to decide if this was the mere froth that he sometimes gave off, or if there was really something in it. He couldn’t tell which she decided. She said:
“Why not drop work for a while? Take a day or two off to walk in the country. There is snow on the Connecticut roads.”
He shook his head. “Can’t leave town just now,” he said, looking down.
She made no comment. The tea was made. Extending a cup she said: “Try hot tea.”
Wilfred forgot his guard for a moment. Raising his eyes to hers, he broke out laughing. “What a fool you must think me!” he said.
For an instant, the veil was lifted from her glance too. By his laughter she knew that he was in real pain. She laughed too. “Perfect!” she said.
Her laughter; her warm glance made Wilfred feel that existence was a little less like a vacuum.
He allowed himself to be persuaded to stay for dinner. Dinner in Frances Mary’s flat had the effect of a miracle. Without any heat or fuss or noise, a little table appeared in the center of the room, and was dressed in snow and silver. She wafted in and out of the room, keeping up the conversation from the kitchenette. An enticing odor gradually got itself recognized, and in a surprisingly short space of time, behold! there was the dinner on the table, an exactly right meal, never quite the same as anybody else’s dinner. Like her room, and like her stories, it revealed the Frances Mary touch. There was even a little bottle of wine to grace the board. At the last moment she had made an opportunity to go change her dress. Wilfred, who knew something about housekeeping, always marvelled how it was done.
He suddenly discovered a renewed zest for food. “Oh, this is good!” he said continually; and Frances Mary trying in vain to look ironical, smiled all over like a little girl. A tinge of color had come into her magnolia-petal cheeks and her eyes were bright. Feeding herself abstractedly, she eagerly watched every mouthful he took, and filled his glass before it was half emptied. They talked shop, and Wilfred experienced a precarious happiness. Outside of that enchanted haven the beast might be waiting to rend him—let it wait!
When the table was cleared they gave themselves up to talk. Frances Mary had an insatiable curiosity concerning Wilfred’s friends, whom she had never seen, and his daily doings. He enjoyed feeding it of course; but was sometimes troubled by the feeling that he was inflicting himself unduly on his friend. When he remembered to try to draw her out, she was generally too many for him.
“What have you been doing lately, Frances Mary?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me about your friends.”
“I can’t make them sound as interesting as you do yours.”
“What do you do with yourself? You can’t write all the time.”
“I ruminate,” said Frances Mary flippantly.
Wilfred laughed. “I can see you!” he said unguardedly. “I know you so well!”
She looked at him quickly, started to speak, and thinking better of it, pulled down the corners of her mouth mockingly.
“Oh, sure, that was a fatuous thing to say,” muttered Wilfred, blushing.
“It’s what everybody says to everybody,” she said.
“But I ought to have known better. Nobody knows anybody, really.”
“I don’t know,” said Frances Mary, “when two people live together they may. Because then they have a chance to watch each other in the company of others. But you and I travel in entirely separate orbits. The only point of intersection is your coming here to see me. And you don’t come very often. And if you find anybody else here you clear out immediately.”
“But surely we get more out of it. . . .”
“Surely! The point I was making is that all you see is your own facet of me.”
“Do you mean you show a different facet to everybody?”
“Oh, nothing so exciting. Alas! I am not different from other girls. I am always the same—at least I think I am. What I mean is, that you only see in me what you wish to see, and there is never anybody else around to upset your self-pleasing notions.”
“Oh, come!” said Wilfred.
“It’s just as well,” said Frances Mary with her mocking smile—she was mocking herself now. “Who wants the truth to be known about oneself? Especially a woman. Mystery is her existence. No matter how clever she is, she cannot escape the common fate of woman. Her own concerns are so unreal to her! . . . Mercy, what nonsense I am talking!”
A note of real bitterness had crept into Frances Mary’s voice, and Wilfred felt that he was on the brink of a disclosure. But while he was still trying to puzzle out her meaning in his mind, he discovered that he had been hurried on to something else. It was a trick of hers. She was now asking him about his experiences in society.
“Oh, I couldn’t keep that up,” said Wilfred with his glib, surface mind. “It was useful to see a few interiors, and get a line on the way those people talk; but it’s deadly, really. You can’t let yourself go. It was cruel hard on a child of nature like me! And Mrs. Gore’s dinners weren’t as good as yours. Not by a damn sight.”
“I thought perhaps you might make a friend or two.”
“Hardly, in that milieu.”
“That brilliant girl you told me about; Elaine Sturges; she sounded promising.”
This name had the effect of a cave-in under Wilfred’s feet. He dropped sickeningly; the waters of wretchedness closed over his head. Just when he had succeeded in forgetting it, too. He carefully made his face a blank. The skin of it grew tight in the effort. “Oh, yes, she has character,” he said carelessly.
“Don’t you see her any more?”
“She leads a crowded life,” said Wilfred. “Occasionally she vouchsafes me an hour.”
“How picturesque, such a life!” murmured Frances Mary. “Has she got the imagination to conceive its picturesqueness?”
Wilfred attended closely to his pipe. His heart swelled and seemed to squeeze his lungs. He cautiously drew a long breath. He wondered if Frances Mary was doing this on purpose, but dared not look at her, for he suspected that she was looking at him. Her eyes were sharp.
“Hardly imaginative,” he said, after a pause, as if for consideration.
“If she isn’t imaginative, what on earth do you find to talk about?” asked Frances Mary.
Wilfred thought of venturing a laugh; decided against it. He shot a glance at Frances Mary through his lashes. She was no longer looking at him. The line of her averted face suggested the same agonized self-consciousness that he felt. Of course, he thought, I am giving everything away, and she feels for me. She has guessed everything. Why not be open with her? He trembled with a horrible internal weakness. No! he thought desperately. If I let a single word out, I should go completely to pieces. Make a disgusting exhibition of myself; this thing’s got to be clamped down. . . .
“Oh, she likes me to explain her to herself,” he said lightly.
Frances Mary let the subject drop.