XI
When in the course of time, Frances Mary’s door was opened to Wilfred, he experienced a disagreeable let-down. She was quite unchanged; just as good-looking; just as comradely. It was an offense in his eyes now. It might as well have been Stanny or Jasper; there was no thrill in it. What a fool he had been to let himself imagine things! . . . Why was he unable to fall in love with Frances Mary? It was because there was no trace of sex-consciousness in her to arouse a like feeling in him. In other words it was her finest quality which put him off. Same old vicious circle!
He was a little discomposed to find Jessie Dartrey sitting demurely in the warm-colored living-room. But her manner had undergone a metamorphosis. This afternoon the downright creature was almost anxiously friendly. Wilfred grinned at her mockingly; but even so, could not rouse her to battle. He interpreted her changed attitude as a plea to allow the little scene between them to be forgotten and buried—and especially not to let Frances Mary know about it. He was quite willing. He liked Jessie fine. Very soon she went.
Frances Mary brought out the tea-things; moving about the room in her large, graceful fashion. She was telling Wilfred about her summer in the Vermont hills. She had found a tiny shack, where she had lived alone, doing her own housekeeping. There were three delightful children who brought her supplies from the farmer’s nearby. Jean Ambrose and Aurora Page had had a house in the neighborhood. Frances Mary had made a new friend in a painter who had come to board at the farmer’s; a diffident girl, who had come out wonderfully in the end. Other girls had visited Jean and Aurora, who possessed a spare room.
An Adamless Eden thought Wilfred, with a tinge of scorn.
Frances Mary told Wilfred briefly, of the completed novel she had brought back with her. It was the story of a woman who had married too late. She did not suggest on this occasion that Wilfred might help her with criticism. He felt a little jealous and sore. Will I ever have the constancy to write a whole book? he asked himself with a sinking heart.
In return he told her about the genteel boarding-house; and about his long walks over the Ramapo Mountains, which had reduced his mind to a state of comfortable vacuity.
“How is your work?” she asked. “Hasn’t it been coming well?”
“It’s been going well,” he answered with a laugh. “I sold four stories in the Spring. That is how I was able to go to the country. I’ve got rid of three more since. I’ve been reeling them off.”
Frances Mary glanced at him, to see how this was to be taken.
“Oh, I know they’re putrid,” said Wilfred. “I’ve discovered the combination. You take a thoroughly nice fellow, and a thoroughly nice girl, and you invent difficulties to separate them; then you remove the difficulties. There are three old fables that you can work ad lib; the Cinderella motive; the Ugly Duckling Motive; and the Prince in Disguise. Work in a bit of novelty into the setting, and your story is hailed as Original; a sure go! That’s the sort of thing they fill the backs of the magazines with; they’ve got to have a lot of it.”
Frances Mary said nothing.
“Well, I had to be writing something,” he said; “or I’d have gone clean off my chump. That was the best I could fish up out of myself. The old keenness has gone.”
“How about the mountains?”
“The mountains did things to me,” he said flippantly; “but I couldn’t throw them!”
“Isn’t there good material in your social experiences last winter?”
“No,” said Wilfred quickly. Fearful of betraying his inward shiver, he added: “It’s been done too often. . . . There’s no lack of material. The lack is in me.”
She said no more on the subject.
Wilfred was sitting beside a little table covered with a scarf of coffee-colored Italian silk in alternate stripes, shiny and dull. On the table were some of Frances Mary’s precious gim-cracks. She loved little objects of all sorts, if they had beauty. On this table, a row of books still in their paper wrappers; a white Chinese bowl, decorated with red fish, and filled with apples; a small censer of pierced silver; an enamelled snuffbox; some miniature ivory grotesques; a bit of cloisonné. Wilfred knew every object in the room.
Opposite him, sat Frances Mary by the tea-table, watching the kettle, which at this season did its work suspended over an alcohol flame. With her bright hair banded round her head in a style of her own; and wearing a soft draped dress the same color as her hair, what a grateful sight to the eye! Purely feminine; ladylike—horrible word for a lovely quality. What was the color of her hair? Wilfred had always termed it sorrel, but was dissatisfied with the word. Now the right word leaped into his mind; fallow! Of course! the color of the fallow deer! Fallow! a delicious word!—But Frances Mary’s veiled level glance and reticent lips rejected passion. She seemed less sympathetic to him than usual.
In the silence Wilfred saw the abyss yawning at his feet, and shutting his eyes, leaped. His limbs were palsied; his tongue clave to the roof of his mouth. He said stammeringly:
“Frances Mary, how about you and I getting married?”
She looked at him quickly, her face dimpling with laughter. “Why, Wilfred! Just like that! . . . You’re not in love with me!”
“I’m fed up with love!” cried Wilfred, bitterly, before he thought of the implications of his speech. Panic seized him. “With the idea of love,” he hastily added, becoming aware at the same moment, that he was only making matters worse.
Frances Mary’s lashes were lowered. Her face showed no other change. There was a silence. Having taken the leap, and not having met with annihilation, Wilfred began to discover resources in himself. After all, the whole truth had to come out; and it didn’t so much matter if it came wrong end first.
“I don’t expect you to give me an answer out of hand,” he went on. “We must talk it out. I know that this must appear to you like just another of my artificial, self-conscious flights, but if you will only have a little patience with me, I will convince you.”
“Could one marry from conviction?” she asked lightly.
“Yes!” he cried. “That’s the very point! The notion that passion must decide is fatal. I know it! I know it!”
“You may be right,” she said with a half smile that he could not interpret. “By all means let us talk it out!” Her serene glance was raised again; but it did not rest on Wilfred. She was looking at the kettle, meditatively. “If you do not love me, why do you want to marry me?”
“I do love you,” said Wilfred. “But not. . . .”
“Not passionately,” she quickly interposed, smiling and looking at him full; an extraordinary look of remote kindness.
Wilfred was silent. He was being put in the wrong, though he knew he was right.
“Well, your reasons?” she asked.
“You are the finest woman I know,” he said quickly. This was one of the questions he had imagined her asking. “I respect and admire you. My instinct tells me you will grow in my respect and admiration as long as I live. That’s the only thing that could hold me.”
She smiled again. He felt resentfully, that she was reading him through and through. It wasn’t fair, because he was all at sea respecting her. Still, everything had to come out!
“You feel that it is essential you should be held,” said Frances Mary, dryly.
“Oh Fanny, you make me feel so young!”
Again that smile from a distance. The kettle boiled; but instead of making tea, she put out the light. She looked about her. Fetching a little raffia basket, she commenced to sew a lace edging to a scrap of white stuff.
“To live with somebody you trusted!” said Wilfred, moved by his own words. “Somebody you could be yourself with; to whom you could reveal your innermost thoughts! To share the same tastes and pleasures! Somebody who could help you, and whom you might help a little—you have said it of me. Wouldn’t that be happiness?”
“You have pictured it all out!” she said smiling.
“Yes, I have!” he returned, goaded. “I have thought about it, and dreamed about it! I know you laugh at my mixed mental processes, at the way I deceive myself; well, I laugh too! Just the same you can build on dreams as well as thoughts. The soft stuff fades; but something collects little by little, just from one’s having been deceived so often.”
She disregarded this. “You do not know me,” she said quietly. “Nobody knows me. I have made a business of concealing myself. Even in my stories. Everything I write is just . . . bravura! . . . You only imagine those fine things about me. Nobody is any better than anybody else—in some ways. If you thought you were getting a paragon you’d be frightfully sold . . . so would I!”
“Not a paragon,” said Wilfred, smiling in his turn. “I know your faults.”
“What are they?” she challenged.
“You are afraid of life. You hate your own emotions. You dissect them while they are alive. You are much too refined. Occasionally you ought to be beaten. You have lived too long in your mind; you ought to give your blood a chance!”
“What makes you say that?” she demanded, startled and affronted.
Wilfred shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking,” he said. “It just came out.”
She quickly regained her equanimity. “Not bad as far as it goes,” she said. “But you haven’t touched on the worst things.”
Her quiet bitterness struck a little fear into Wilfred’s breast. Was there an unsuspected worst in Frances Mary? Oh, well, he was committed now; no choice but to struggle on. “You have one quality that I hold to through all,” he said; “your disinterestedness. The finest quality of all!”
Her smile became still more remote. “Oh, it’s easy to be disinterested about things that don’t touch you too closely,” she said.
This was a facer for Wilfred. He strove not to show it. “I’ll take my chance of your soundness,” he said.
She shook her head. “Passion, preposterous as it is, is the only justification.”
“I could love you—if you gave me a chance,” he said sullenly.
Frances Mary laughed suddenly and merrily.
“I know I’m ridiculous,” he said blushing crimson; “but I mean to see it through. It’s all got to come out, absurdities and all.”
“Why marry at all?” she asked.
“I want you.”
She looked at him.
“Well . . . need you.”
“As a sort of antidote to passion, I take it,” said Frances Mary softly. All the kindness had suddenly gone out, leaving her soft face pinched and awry.
Wilfred was stung beyond endurance. “Yes!” he cried, jumping up. “An antidote to passion! I’ve seen it and what it ends in. Am I criminal or foolish to dream of something better? I looked on you as a woman above prejudice. It’s easy enough to make a joke of me because I’m not playing the old false game with you. You’ve got everything on your side, the whole weight of the ages! But I won’t be so easily shut up now; my foolishness has taught me something. There’s something to be said for my way, though I’m alone in it. It’s my real self I’m offering you; though I sound like a fool.”
She had risen too, and walked away to a table between the windows where she stood with her back turned. “I’m sorry, Wilfred,” she said in a muffled voice. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
When she apologized, it took all the fire out of him. “It doesn’t matter,” he said flatly.
Presently, she turned around; but, the light being behind her, he could not see her face clearly. “Your position is sound,” she said, “and you have stated it better than you think. . . . Still, what you ask is impossible. For two reasons; first, I am not the woman you think I am; second, I must think of myself a little.”
The cold voice completed Wilfred’s demoralization. “I only admit the second reason,” he said gloomily. “Of course you must think of yourself. I am seeking my good.”
“Why should I marry you?”
“If you put it to me, the Lord knows!”
“I do not think you are the finest man I ever knew. In fact I have no illusions about you.”
“So much the better,” he mumbled.
“Then why? why?”
“Well, I thought. . . .”
“You thought I loved you?” she asked quickly.
“Not so far as that. I thought perhaps you might come to. There was sympathy. . . .”
She came away from the front table. Her hands were pressed against her breast; her face tormented. To Wilfred, who was wrought up too, that seemed natural. “Wilfred, tell me plainly what you have been doing these last months,” she said breathlessly.
“I’ll tell you,” he said quickly, “I . . .”
A cry escaped her. “No! Don’t tell me. . . . !”
But he was already under way. “I fell in love, as they put it, with a woman who preferred Joe Kaplan to me,” he said bitterly. “You know all about Joe Kaplan. She married him. Well, that cured that. Afterwards I slid into an affair with a woman whom I despised. That soon ran its course. Then I went to the country and tried to haul myself up by my own boot-straps without succeeding. That’s all.”
Frances Mary had returned to her chair. She was sitting forward in an attitude unnatural to her, her head lowered. “You experienced passion . . . for a woman you despised?” she murmured.
“Yes,” said Wilfred. “That’s the point I was trying to make. That’s how easy it is. . . .”
There was a silence. Then Frances Mary said in an uncertain voice: “You had better go.”
Wilfred stared. “I won’t go for any such reason as that!” he said hotly. “Are you raising the banner of conventional morality! You . . . !”
She said: “Suppose I told you that I . . . !”
“Rubbish!” cried Wilfred. “It would be better for you if you had!”
“Your ideas are loathsome!” cried Frances Mary with unexpected loudness.
“This is what I get for trying to be honest!”
“Honest!”
Simultaneously it struck them what exhibitions they were making of themselves. They laughed in bitter vexation, and fell silent. They avoided each other’s eyes.
“I apologize for shouting at you,” mumbled Wilfred.
Frances Mary did not apologize, though she had shouted too.
Presently something changed in her. She looked at Wilfred queerly. Settling back in her chair, she raised her head. “Wilfred, kiss me,” she said in a colorless voice.
He looked at her sharply. Her face was drawn and ugly. His instinct bade him refuse; but she had told him to do it. He was absurdly under her influence. He went to her with a hangdog air, and printed a cold kiss on her lips.
A little groan of rage was forced from Frances Mary. She sprang up so suddenly that her chair was knocked over backwards. All in the one movement, she fetched Wilfred such a smack on the cheek that his sight was blotted out for a moment. He fell back, covering the place, staring at her open-mouthed, clownishly. Frances Mary burst into tears; a catastrophic breakdown; her face working as absurdly and uglily as a small child’s; the tears fairly spurting from her eyes. Wilfred quickly recovered himself. He had to repress a desire to laugh. A load was lifted from his breast. She could feel! Frances Mary put her hands over her face, and turned away from him.
“Go! Go!” she murmured.
Wilfred walked to the other end of the room, and sat down on the couch. “I won’t go till I get to the bottom of this,” he said.
“You see . . . you see . . .” she gasped out in her torn voice.
She loves me! thought Wilfred in a maze. She feels passion for me! What a fatuous brute I have been! . . . Still, the bars had to be smashed down one way or another!
“Now you see what kind of a woman I am! . . . You’d better go!”
“I don’t think any of the worse of you,” said Wilfred, smiling to himself.
Careless of her ugly, tear-stained face, she flung around, and stamped her foot. “Don’t sit there and sneer!” she cried. “It’s intolerable!”
“Sneer . . . !” he echoed indignantly.
“Disinterested!” cried Frances Mary. “Oh, Heavens! . . . I don’t think much of it! Your so-called disinterestedness is revolting to me! You talk by rote! Prating of love and passion! What do you know about either? You’re light! What is passion to you? An interesting experience! You have suffered, you say. You’re quite healed, aren’t you, and ready for fresh experiments? You know nothing of the agony of repression. For years! For years! Everything comes out of you like a child’s babbling. You know nothing of the wolves that tear. . . . Oh, why don’t you go?”
Wilfred recognized the element of truth in her portrait of him, but was not dismayed. He could no longer repress the delighted grin. “I’m not afraid of your wolves,” he said. “. . . I hail them!”
“Be quiet!” cried Frances Mary. But the new quality in his grin arrested her. She stared; her angry face all at a pause.
Wilfred stood up.
“Don’t come near me!” she cried sharply.
He laughed outright. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go. But this is not the end, of course.”
She drew the old veil over her face. But it was somewhat torn now. Picking up the fallen chair, she set it on its feet. “I’ll never marry you now!” she said with extreme bitterness. “However it might be for your good! Women can’t forget things as conveniently as men seem to do. This scene would always be present with me. Even when you began to love me—as no doubt you would! no doubt you would! having resolved upon it. I should always be remembering how you decided beforehand that it would be a fine thing for you if you could bring yourself to it!”
She doesn’t mean a word of it! he thought with infinite relief and delight. She’s no better than me! He said: “You’re talking pure romantic nonsense! You might have got it out of one of my stories! . . . You’ve got something to learn too!”
“From your experience?” she asked with bitter nostrils.
Wilfred walked along Fifty-Ninth street, bemused with wonder. How extraordinary! How extraordinary! . . . Well, after all I didn’t do so badly, considering . . . !
PART FIVE: HUSBANDS