5
Madame Watt appropriated Henry the moment he entered her door on Saturday evening. She was, despite her talk of offhand summer informality, clad in an impressive costume with a great deal of lace and the shimmer of flowered silk.
At her elbow, Henry moved through the crowd in the front hall. He felt cool eyes on him. He stood very straight and stiff. He was pale. He bowed to the various girls and fellows—Mary, Martha, Herb, Elbow, and the rest, with reserve. It was, from moment to moment, a battle.
Nobody but Madame Watt would have thought of giving such a party. It was so expensive—the dinner for twenty-two, to begin with; then all the railway fares; a bus from the station in Chicago to the theatre and back. The theatre tickets alone came to thirty-three dollars (these were the less expensive days of the dollar and a half seat). Sunbury still, at the time, was inclined to look doubtfully on ostentation.
You felt, too, in the case of Madame, that she was likely to speak, at any moment rather—well, broadly. All that Paris experience, whatever it was, seemed to be hovering about the snapping black eyes and the indomitable mouth. You sensed in her none of the reserve of movement, of speech, of mind, that were implied in the feminine standards of Sunbury. Yet she was unquestionably a person. If she laughed louder than the ladies of Sunbury, she had more to say.
To-night she was a dominantly entertaining hostess. She talked of the theatre, in Paris, London and New York—of the Coquelins, Gallipaux, Bernhardt, of Irving and Terry and Willard and Grossmith. Some of these she had met. She knew Sothem, it appeared. Even the extremely worldly Elbow and Herb were impressed.
She had Henry at her right. Boldly placed him there. At his right was a girl from Omaha who was visiting the Smiths and who made several efforts to be pleasant to the pale gloomy youth with the little moustache and the distinctly interesting gray-blue eyes.
By the time they were settled on the train Henry found himself grateful to the certainly strong, however coarse-fibred woman.
Efforts to identify her as she seemed now, with the woman of that hideous scene with the Senator brought only bewilderment. He had to give it up.
This woman was rapidly winning his confidence; even, in a curious sense, his sympathy.
At the farther end of the table the little Senator, all dignity and calm stilted sentences, made himself remotely agreeable to several girls at once.
At one side of the table sat Cicely, in lacy white with a wonderful little gauzy scarf about her shoulders. She looked at him only now and then, and just as she looked at the others. He wondered how she could smile so brightly.
Herb and Elbow made a great joke of fighting over her. Elbow had her at dinner; Herb on the train; Elbow again at the theatre.
Henry was fairly clinging to Madame by that time.
I think, among the confused thoughts and feelings that whirled ceaselessly around and around in his brain, the one that came up oftenest and stayed longest was a sense of stoical heroism. For Cicely's sake he must bear his anguish. For her he must be humble, kindly, patient. He had read, somewhere in his scattered acquaintance with books, that Abraham Lincoln had once been brought to the point of suicide through a disappointment in love. And to-night he thought much and deeply of Lincoln. He had already decided, during an emotionally turbulent two days, not to shoot himself.
During the first intermission the Senator stayed quietly in his seat.
When the curtain went down for the second time, he stroked his beard with a small, none-too-steady hand, coughed in the suppressed way he had, and glanced once or twice at Madame.
The young men were, apparently all of them, moving out for a smoke in the lobby.
Henry, with a tingling sense of defiance, a little selfconscious about staying alone with the girls, followed them.
And after him, walking up the aisle with his odd strutting air of importance, came the Senator.
He gathered the young men together in the lobby; pulled at his twisted beard; said, 'It will give me pleasure to offer you young gentlemen a little refreshment;' and led the way out to a convenient bar. It was a large, high-panelled room. There were great mirrors; rows and rows of bottles and shiny glasses; alcoves with tables; and enormous oil paintings in still more enormous gilt frames and lighted by special fixtures built out from the wall. The one over the bar exhibited an undraped female figure reclining on a couch.
They stood, a jolly group, naming their drinks.
Henry, who had no taste for liquor, stood apart, pale, sober, struggling to exhibit a savoir faire that had no existence in his mercurial nature.
'I'll take ginger ale,' he said, in painful self-consciousness.
The Senator, his somewhat jaunty straw hat thrust back a little way off his forehead, took Scotch; drank it neat. It seemed to Henry incongruous when the prim little man tossed the liquor back against his palate with a long-practised flourish.
Back in his seat, between Madame and the girl from Omaha, Henry noted that the Senator had not returned with the others.
Madame turned and looked up the aisle.
The lights were dimmed. The curtain rose.
Cicely was in the row ahead, Herb on one side, Elbow on the other.
Elbow was calm, casual, humorous in a way, whispering phrases that had been found amusing by many girls.
Herb, the only man in what Henry still thought of as a 'full dress suit,' had a way of turning his head and studying Cicely's hair and profile whenever she turned toward Elbow, that stirred Henry to anguish.
'He's rich,' thought Henry, twisting in his chair, clasping and unclasping his hands. 'He's rich. He can do everything for her. And he loves her. He couldn't look that way if he didn't.'
A comedian was singing and dancing on the stage. Cicely watched him, her eyes alight, her lips parted in a smile of sheer enjoyment.
'How can she!' he thought. 'How can she!' Then: 'I could do that. If I'd kept it up. If she'd seen me in Iolanthe maybe she'd care.'
The curtain fell on a glittering finale.
With a great chattering the party moved up the aisle. Cicely told her two escorts that she didn't know when she had enjoyed anything so much. She was merry about it. Care free as a child.
Henry stopped short in the foyer; standing aside, half behind a framed advertisement on an easel; his hands clenched in his coat pockets; white of face; biting his lip.
'I can't go with them!' he was thinking. 'It's too much. I can't! I can't trust myself. I'd say something. But what'll they think?
'She won't know. She won't care. She's happy—my suffering is nothing to her.' This was youthful bitterness, of course. But it met an immediate counter in the following thought, which, to any one who knew the often selfcentred Henry would have been interesting. 'But that's the way it ought to be. She mustn't know how I suffer. It isn't her fault. A great love just comes to you. Nobody can help it. It's tragedy, of course. Even if I have to—to'—his lip was quivering now—'to shoot myself, I must leave a note telling her she wasn't to blame. Just that I loved her too much to live without her. But I haven't any money. I couldn't make her happy.'
His eyes, narrow points of fire, glanced this way and that. Almost furtively. Passion—a grown man's passion—was or seemed to him to be tearing him to pieces. And he hadn't a grown man's experience of life, the background of discipline and self-control, that might have helped him weather the storm. All he could do was to wonder if he had spoken aloud or only thought these words. He didn't know. Somebody might have heard. The crowd was still pouring slowly out past him. It seemed to him incredible that all the world shouldn't know about it.
The others of the party were somewhere out on the street now. They were going to a restaurant; then, in their bus, to the twelve-fourteen, the last train for Sunbury until daylight.
What could he do if he didn't take that train? He might hide up forward, in the smoker. But there were a hundred chances that he would be seen. No, that wouldn't do. He must hurry after them.
But he flatly couldn't. Why, the tears were coming to his eyes. A little weakness, whenever he was deeply moved, for which he despised himself. There was no telling what he might do—cry like a girl, break out into an impossible torrent of words. A scene. Anywhere; on the street, in the restaurant.
No, however awkward, whatever the cost, he couldn't rejoin them, he couldn't look at Cicely and Elbow and Herb and the others.
He felt in his pocket. Not enough money, of course. He never had enough. He couldn't ever plan intelligently. Yet he was earning twelve dollars a week!... He had a dollar, and a little change. Perhaps it was enough. He could go to a cheap hotel. He had seen them advertised—fifty or seventy-five cents for the night. And then an early morning train for Sunbury.
He would be worse off then than ever, of course. The people who had talked, would have fresh material. Running away from the party! They might say that he had got drunk. Though in a way he would welcome that. It was a sort of way out.
The crowd was nearly gone. They would be closing the doors soon. Then he would have to go—somewhere.
A big woman was making her way inward against the human current. But Henry, though he saw her and knew in a dreamy way that it was Madame Watt, still couldn't, for the moment, find place for her in his madly surging thoughts.
She passed him; looked into the darkened theatre; came back; stood before him.
Then came this brief conversation:—
'You haven't seen him, Henry?'
'No, I haven't.'
'Hm! Awkward—he took the pledge—he swore it—I am counting on you to help me.'
'Of course. Anything!'
'Were you out with him between the acts?'
'Why—yes.'
'Did he drink anything then?'
'Yes. He took Scotch.'
'Oh, he did?'
'Yes'm.'
'It's all off, then. See here, Henry, will you look? The same place? Be very careful. People mustn't know. And I must count on you. There's nobody else. We'll manage it, somehow. We've got to keep him quiet and get him out home. I'll be at the restaurant. You can send word in to me—have a waiter say I'm wanted at the telephone. Do that. And...'
It is to be doubted if Henry heard more than half of this speech. She was still speaking when he shot out to the street, dodged back of the waiting groups by the kerb and disappeared among the night traffic of the street in the direction of a certain bar.