Affinities, and Other Stories

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

III

On Tuesday night I was going to a dance. Mother and father were dining out and were to meet me later, so I was free until ten o'clock. That night Henry brought Russell Hill.

I kept them waiting a few minutes, and came down ready for the car. At the last minute I pulled my hair a bit loose over my face, and the effect was exactly right.

Henry was horribly uncomfortable, and left in a few minutes. He was going with some people to the dance, and would see us later. About all he said was with his usual tact.

"You two ought to get together," he said. "There's a lot too much being whispered these days, and not enough talking out loud."

With that he went, and we two were left facing each other.

"This is one of Henry's inspirations, Miss Katherine," Russell said. "I—I don't usually have to wait until the family is out before I make a call."

"Families are queer," I said non-committally. There was a window open and I stood near it, under a pink lamp, and let my hair blow about.

"Are we going to sit down, or am I to be banished as soon as I've explained that I am a safe companion for a débutante?"

He was plainly laughing at me, although he was uncomfortable too. And I have some spirit left.

"I am afraid you are giving me credit for too much interest," I said. "This is Henry's idea, you know. You needn't defend yourself to me. You look—entirely safe."

He hated that. No man likes to look entirely safe. He put his hands in his pockets and half closed his eyes.

"Humph!" he said. "Then I gather that this whole meeting is a mistake. I'm respectable enough to be uninteresting, and the ban your people have placed on me doesn't particularly concern you!"

"That's not quite true," I said slowly. "I—if I ever got a chance to know you really well, I'm sure we'd be—but I'll never get a chance, you know."

"Upon my word," he broke out, "I'd like to know just what your people have heard! But that doesn't matter. What really matters"—he had hardly taken his eyes off me—"what really matters is that I am going to see you again. Often!"

"It's impossible."

"Rot! We're always going to the same places. Am I absolutely warned off?"

"You're not. But I am."

He began to walk up and down the room. Half an hour before he had never given me a thought. Henry, I knew, had lugged him there by sheer force and a misplaced sense of justice. And now he was pacing about in a rage!

He stopped rather near me.

"If it's Mrs. Warrington all the fuss is about, it's imbecile," he said. "In the first place, there never was anything to it. In the second place, it's all over anyhow."

"I don't know what the fuss is about."

"You know the whole thing. Don't pretend you don't. You've got the face of a little saint, with all that fluffy hair, but your eyes don't belong to the rest, young lady. Are you going to dance with me to-night?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Well, you'll give me a little time, won't you? I suppose we can sit in a closet and talk, or hide on a veranda."

"It's—it's rather sneaking, isn't it?"

"That doesn't hurt it any for me."

So I promised, and, the car being announced, he put my wrap round my shoulders.

"Stunning hair you've got," he said from behind me. "Thank heaven for hair that isn't marceled and glued up in a net!"

I held out my hand in the hall, and he took it.

"I'm not such a bad lot after all, am I?" he demanded.

With my best spontaneous gesture I put my free hand over his as it held mine.

"I'm so sorry, so terribly sorry, if I've misunderstood," I said earnestly.

Wallace had gone to the outer door. Russell Hill stooped over and kissed my hand.

Well, it was working. An hour before I was one of what I'd heard he had called "the dolly dozen." Now, by merely letting him understand that he couldn't have what he'd never wanted, he was eager.

We sat out one dance under the stairs, and an intermission in a pantry while the musicians who had been stationed there were getting their supper. He tried to hold my hand and I drew it away—not too fast, but so he could understand the struggle I was having between duty and inclination. And we talked about love.

I said I liked to play round with men and have a good time and all that sort of thing, but that I thought I was naturally cold.

"You cold?" he said. "It's only that the right man has not come along."

"I've known a good many. A good many have—have——"

"Cared for you? Of course. They're not fools or blind. Look here, I'm going to ring you up now and then."

"I think you'd better not."

"If I'm not to see you and not to telephone, how's this friendship of ours to get on?"

"People who are real friends don't need to see each other."

"That's the first real débutante speech you've made to-night. Now, see here, I'm going to see you again, and often. And I'm going to ring you up. What's your tailor's name?"

I told him, and he put it down on his dance card.

"All right," he said. "Herschenrother is now my middle name, and if it's not convenient to talk, you can give me the high sign."

Toots Warrington came along just then with an army officer she'd taken on. They got clear round the palms and into the pantry before they saw us, and her face was funny.

Mother and I had another heart-to-heart talk that night on the way home. Father had gone a couple of hours earlier and we had the car to ourselves. Mother was tired and irritable.

"It seemed to me, Kit," she observed, "that you danced with every hopeless ineligible there. You danced three times with Henry."

"For heaven's sake, mother," I snapped, "let poor Henry alone. Henry is the most useful person I know."

"You can't play with red-headed people and not get burned," mother said with unconscious humour. "He's very fond of you, Kit. I watched him to-night."

"The fonder the better," I said flippantly. Yes, that's what I said. When I look back on that evening and think how little Henry entered into my plans, and the rest of it, it makes me cold.

"I want you to do one thing—just one, mother: I want you to be very cool to Russell Hill."

"Cool!"

"And I want you to forbid me to see him."

"I'm not insane, Katherine."

"Listen, mother," I said desperately. "All his life Russell Hill has had everything he wanted. He's had so much that—that he's got a sort of social indigestion. The only things he wants now are the things he can't have. So he can't have me."

Mother's not very subtle. And she was alarmed. I can still see her trying to readjust her ideas, and getting tied up in them, and coming a mental cropper, so to speak.

"If he can't have me he'll want me."

"I'm not sure of it. He——"

"Mother," I said in despair, "you've been married for twenty years, and you know less about men in a month than I do in a minute. Please forbid him the house—not in so many words, but act it."

"Why?" she said feebly.

"Anything you can think of—Toots Warrington will do."

She got out her salts and held them to her nose.

"I feel as though I'm losing my mind," she said at last. "But if you're set on it——"

That was all until we got home. Then on the stairs I thought of something.

"Oh, yes," I said. "No matter what I am doing, mother, if Herschenrother the tailor calls up I want to go to the telephone."

I can still see her staring after me with her mouth open as I went up the stairs.

Herschenrother called me up the next morning, and asked me how I was, and how the dragons were, and if there was any chance of my walking in the park at five o'clock. I said there was, and called up Henry and asked him to walk with me.

"I should say so," he said. "You've only got to ask me, Kit. I'm always ready to hang round."

There was rather a bad half hour in the park, and for a time I felt that Henry had been a wrong move. But, as it turned out he hadn't, for Russell took advantage of somebody's signalling to Henry from a machine to say:

"Just a bit afraid of me still, aren't you?"

"Why?"

"You brought Henry. I know the signs. You asked him, and he's so set up about it that he's walking on clouds."

"I am afraid."

"Of me?"

"Of myself."

He caught my arm as he helped me across a puddle, and squeezed it.

"Good girl!" he said.

And later on, when Henry was called again—he's terribly popular, Henry is—he had another chance.

"I'm going to see you alone if I have to steal you," he said.

Herschenrother called up again the next day, and Madge, who had come home for the Christmas holidays, called me.

"Gee, Kit," she said, "you must be getting a trousseau. That tailor's always on the phone."

I went.

"Hello," said Russell's voice, "how about that fitting?"

"I don't know. I'm horribly busy to-day."

"It's very important. I—I can't go ahead without it."

"Oh, all right," I said. Madge was listening and I had to be careful. "I must have the suit."

"You can have anything I've got. How about the Art Gallery? Art is long and time is fleeting. Nobody goes there."

"Very well, four o'clock," I replied, and rang off.

"Rather a nice voice," Madge said, eying me. "Think I'll go along, Kit. I've been shut up in school until the mere thought of even a good-looking tailor makes me thrill."

She was so insistent that I had to go to mother finally, and mother told her she would have to practise. She was furious. Really, mother turned out to be a most understanding person. I got to be quite fond of her. We had a chat that afternoon that brought us closer together than ever.

"Things are doing pretty well, mother," I said when she'd finished Madge.

"He must be interested when he would take that absurd name."

"And the Art Gallery! I dare say he has never voluntarily been inside of one in his life."

"Kit," mother said, "what about your father?"

"Haven't you told him?"

"No; he wouldn't understand."

Of course not. I knew men well enough for that. They believe that life and marriage arrange themselves. That it's all a sort of combination of Providence and chance. Predestination plus opportunity!

"Can't you tell him you've heard something about Russell, and that he'd better be cool to him?"

"And have him turn the man down if it really comes to a proposal!"

"That won't matter," I told her. "We'll probably elope anyhow."

Mother opposed that vigorously. She said that no matter how good a match it was, there was always something queer about an elopement. And anyhow she'd been giving wedding gifts for years and it was time something came in instead of going out. It was the only point we differed on.

Well, father did his best to queer things that very day. All the way through I played in hard luck. Just when things were going right something happened.

I met Russell at the Art Gallery. It was a cold day, but I left my muff at home. It was about time for the coat-pocket business. I couldn't afford to wait, for one or two of the girls were wearing their hair like mine, and I'd heard that Toots Warrington had gone to Russell and asked him how he liked kindergartening. Bessie Willing, who told me, said that Russell's reply was:

"It's rather pleasant. I'm reversing things. Instead of going from the cradle to the grave, I'm going from the grave to the cradle."

I don't believe he said it. In the first place, he is too polite. In the second place, he is too stupid. But as Toots is not young he may have thought of it.

He was waiting near a heater, and we sat down together. I shivered.

"Cold, honey?" he asked.

"Hands are cold. Do you mind if I put one in your coat pocket?"

Did he mind? He did not. He was very polite at first and emptied the pocket of various things, including a letter which he mentioned casually was a bill. But after a moment he slid his hand in on top of mine.

"You're a wonderful young person," he said, "and you've got me going."

Then he squeezed the hand until it hurt. Suddenly he looked up.

"Great Scott!" he said. "There's Henry!"

Of course it was Henry. He had brought a catalogue and was going painstakingly from one picture to another. He did not see us at first, and we had time to stand up and be looking at a landscape when he got to us. He looked moderately surprised and waited to mark something in the catalogue before he joined us.

"Bully show, isn't it?" he said cheerfully. "Never saw so many good 'uns. Well, what are you children up to?"

"Dropped in to get warm," said Russell. And I was going to add something, but Henry's interest in us had passed evidently. He marked another cross in the catalogue and went on, with the light shining on his red hair and his soul clearly as uplifted as his chin.

"You needn't worry about Henry," I said. "He's a friend of the family, and I'll just call him up and tell him not to say anything."

"I used to think he was fond of you."

"That's all over," I said casually. "It was just one of the things that comes and goes. Like this little—acquaintance of ours."

"What do you mean, goes?" he demanded almost fiercely.

"They always do, don't they? Awfully pleasant things don't last. And we can't go on meeting indefinitely. Some one will tell father, and then where will I be?"

That was a wrong move about father.

"That reminds me," he said. "Are you sure your father dislikes me such a lot?"

"Don't let's talk about it," I said, and closed my eyes.

"Because I met him to-day, and he nearly fell on my neck and hugged me."

Can you beat that? I was stunned.

"The more he detests people," I managed finally, "the more polite he is."

Then I took off my gloves and fell to rubbing the fingers of my left hand. And he moved round and put it in the other coat pocket without a word, with his hand over it, and the danger was past, for the time anyhow.

Mother came round that evening about the elopement.

"Perhaps you are right, Katherine," she said. "A lot of people will send things when the announcement cards go out. And Russell can afford to buy you anything you want anyhow."

Madge was a nuisance all that week. She was always at the telephone first when it rang, and I did not like her tone when she said it was Herschenrother again. Once I could have sworn that I saw her following me, but she ducked into a shop when I turned round.

She had transferred her affections to Henry, and he took her to a cotillon or two for the school set, and played round with the youngsters generally, and showed her a sweet time, as she said.

But once when mother and I had been shut in my room, going over my clothes and making notes of what I would take with me, if the thing came to an elopement—I was pretty sure by that time, and we planned a sort of week-end outfit without riding things—I opened the door suddenly, and Madge was just outside.

Well, we got her back to school finally, and Henry took her to the train. I remember mother's watching them as they got into the car together.

"That wouldn't be so bad for Madge," she said reflectively. "She is bound to marry badly anyhow, she's so impulsive, and Henry would be a good counterweight. He is very dependable."

"She would make him most unhappy," I said. "Probably Henry would be all right for Madge, but how about Madge for Henry?"

Mother looked at me and said nothing.

Russell proposed at the end of the next week, and I refused. He proposed in a movie. We'd had to give up the Art Gallery because Henry was always taking people through it. He took Toots one afternoon, and that finished us.

There was a little talk that Henry and Toots were getting rather thick. The army man's leave was up, and she had to have somebody. There was probably something to it. We saw them in the park one afternoon sitting on a bench, and I could have sworn she had her hand in his coat pocket!

Well, I refused Russell.

"Why?" he said. "You're crazy about me, and you know it."

"I'm not going to marry a past," I said. "You'd make me horribly unhappy."

"I'd never bore you, that's one thing."

"No, but you might find me dull."

"Dull! Darling girl, I've never had as interesting a month in my life."

I said nothing. After a minute:

"Do you remember the first night we really met?"

"In the pantry. Yes."

"Do you remember what you said about being cold? And I told you it was a question of the right man?"

I remembered.

"Well, I'm the man," he said triumphantly. "Don't fool yourself—that little hand of yours slips into my coat pocket as if it belonged there. And it does."

He pulled it out and kissed it. Luckily the theatre was dark.

Two days later I consented to elope with him. Mother was quite delirious when I told her. She came over and kissed my cheek.

"You've never disappointed me, Kit, never," she said. "If only Madge would do as well."

She sighed.

"Madge will probably marry for love, and be happy," I snapped. It was a silly speech. I haven't an idea why I made it.

"And shabby," said mother.

I turned on her sharply. The strain of the last month was over, and I dare say I went to pieces.

"It's all very well for you to be satisfied," I cried. "You're not going to marry Russell Hill, and have him call you 'girlie,' and see his hat move every time he raises his eyebrows. I am."

She went out very stiffly, and sent her maid in with hot tea.

I was out at a theatre party that night, and mother was in my room when I got back.

"I want to talk to you, Katherine," she said, "I've been uneasy all evening."

"If you mean about what I said this afternoon, please forget it, mother. I was tired and nervous. I didn't mean it."

"Not that. I don't want any mistake about this elopement. Now and then those things have a way of going wrong. Quite often there is trouble about a license or a minister."

"Send father ahead," I said flippantly.

"Not father. But some one really ought to look after things. Russell is not the sort to arrange anything in advance. I thought perhaps Henry—"

"Henry!"

"He is reliable," said mother. "And he has your well-being at heart. He is more like a brother than a good many brothers I know."

I could scream my head off when I think of it now. For we fixed on Henry, and I telephoned him to come round to dinner. He seemed rather surprised when he heard my voice.

"Honestly, Kit," he said, "do you want me?"

"I want you to do something for me."

"Then I'll come. That's all that's necessary."

But it wasn't as easy as it had promised after all. There's something so downright about Henry. He was standing in front of the library fire after dinner when I told him.

"Henry," I said, "I am going to be married."

He did not say anything at first. Then:

"Well?" he asked.

"Do you know to whom?"

"Yes."

"Aren't you going to say anything?"

"I don't know what I can say," he said very slowly and carefully. "If each of you cares a lot, that's all there is to it, isn't it? The point is, of course, why you are doing it. If it's to cut out somebody else, or to get money or anything like that, I'm not going to wish you happiness, because you won't deserve it. If you're in love with him, that's different."

Did you ever try to tell a lie to a red-headed young man with blue eyes? It's extremely difficult.

"I'm not in love with him, Henry," I said. I was astounded to hear myself saying it.

"Then you're giving him a crooked deal."

"He's not in love with me either. So that's even."

"Then why——"

"Because he thinks he can't have me," I said. "I'm marrying him because he's the most marriageable man I know, and I have to marry money. I've been raised for that. And he's marrying me because I'm the only girl whose people didn't fling her at him."

"Then I wish you joy of each other!" he said hoarsely, and slammed out of the room and out of the house.

I haven't the faintest idea what came over me that night. I went upstairs and cried my eyes out.

A few days later, after a round of luncheons, dinners and dances until I was half dead, I had a free evening. The elopement had been set for Friday, and it was Wednesday. Mother and father were out, and I went downstairs for a book. I had got it and was just going out when I saw Henry's red head over the back of the leather chair by the fire.

I went over. He was not reading. He was just sitting, his long legs stretched out in front of him.

"Hello, Kit," he said calmly. "I knew this was an off night. Sit down."

I sat down, rather suspicious of his manner. Henry can't dissemble.

"About the other night," he said, "I was taken by surprise. Just forget it, Kit. Now, when are you going to pull this thing off?"

I told him, and where.

"Russell made any arrangements?"

"I haven't asked."

"Probably not. He'll expect to get out of the train and find a license and a preacher on the platform. I'd better be best man, and go down there a day before to fix things."

Well, it wasn't flattering to see him so eager to get me married. There had been a time when I thought—However—

"Oh!" I said.

"Better do it right while you're about it," he said. "You might give me one of your rings, and I'll order a wedding ring. Platinum or gold?"

"Platinum," I said feebly.

"Anything inside?"

"The—the date, I suppose."

"No initials or anything like that?"

I roused from a sort of stupor of astonishment.

"I like a very narrow ring," I said. "There won't be room for much inside. The date will do. But I'm sure that Russell——"

"All right if he does. Perhaps I'd better not put in the date. Then, if he takes one along, I can return this and have it credited to him."

"You're very thoughtful."

"Not at all," he said with the first atom of feeling he'd shown. "I don't approve of anything about this business; but if it's going to happen, it's going to happen right!"

He got up and stood in front of the fire.

"The thing to be sure of, Kit," he said soberly, "is that you don't love any one else. It's bad enough as it is, but that would be worse."

"I wouldn't dare to be in love with any one who wasn't eligible," I said, not looking at him. "I've been raised for just what I'm doing. I'm fulfilling my destiny."

"There's nobody else, then?"

"Who could there be?"

"That's twice I've asked you a perfectly simple question, Kit, and you have evaded it. The plain truth, of course, is that you are in love, absolutely single-heartedly in love, but not with Russell."

"Then who?" I demanded sharply.

"With yourself," he said, and picked up his hat and went out.