THE MYSTERY PAUSES, AND OTHER THINGS GO FORWARD
The doctor drew back from examining a badly bruised, cut, and skinned youth and smiled.
"Well, young man," said he, "if I were you, the next time I saw an automobile making right for me, I'd get out of its way."
"I guess I'm all right," Herrick grinned. The grin was rather sketchy. He was not very secure yet in which world he was.
On first recovering consciousness he had found himself lying with his head in Christina's lap, and had supposed he was in heaven. But it hadn't been heaven; it had still been the middle of Ninety-third Street and Christina was sitting in the dust thereof. And then he had another glimmer; he was on a couch, and, facing him, Christina was huddled on her heels on the floor with large tears running down her nose and plumping off the end of it into a bowl, full of funny red water, that she held; a cloth in her hand was even redder, and her mouth had such a piteous droop that if only he could have sat up it would have been the natural thing to kiss it. "Darling!" he had said, to comfort her; and she had said, eagerly, "Yes!" just as if that were her name; then another blackness. And now the couch was in her drawing-room and everywhere was the scent and the sheen of her country flowers—larkspur and sweet alyssum and mignonette, the white of wild cucumber vine, the lavender of horsemint, and everywhere the breath of clover—the house was filled with them! Wherever did she get them?
"What's that?" he asked sharply. It was a policeman's helmet.
The policeman was merely left there,—the automobile having escaped without leaving its number behind it,—to take his evidence of the accident. Herrick rather dreaded being laughed at for his surety that it was no accident; but a man who had seen it from a window and the passing lady who had saved his life by shrieking had already testified to the same effect. They had both declared the offending car to be a gray touring-car; a very dark gray, Herrick thought. The policeman, who had read his Sunday special, stooped to be communicative. "Do you remember the young feller," he asked, "that was a witness to the Ingham inquest? Do you remember he got there late through bein' knocked over by 'n automobile?"
Herrick stared.
"Well, the young lady called him on the 'phone with me listenin', an' I guess you're on a'ready to what kind of a car it was that hit him—'twas a gray tourin'-car."
By-and-by, when the policeman and the doctor were gone, and Mrs. Hope and Mrs. Deutch, without whom no crisis in the life of the Hope family seemed to be complete, had swathed him tastefully in one of Mrs. Hope's kimonos they began to tell him that he must send for his things, because he would have to convalesce as Christina's guest. The idea was distressing to him, but he was a little surprised by the soft bitterness with which Christina opposed it. "Do you want him murdered outright?" she said. "What has he done that he should be mixed up with my house and my life? I was wrong ever to let him be my friend." She was spreading a cloth over a little table which Stanley Ingham had brought close to the couch. She lifted a lighted lamp out of Herrick's eyes and set it on the mantel shelf behind his head. Looking down as the light touched his bandaged forehead and the unusual pallor of his bronzed face she said, so gently that Herrick's heart melted with a painful sweetness, "I warned you!"
"It does look awfully funny," young Ingham exclaimed, "about this touring-car. Wonder what the police will say to that! Wouldn't open their mouths about the letters, and warned me not to open mine. Wouldn't even let me tell you, Chris!"
"Fortunately," said Christina, "Mr. Herrick had told me before any one could possibly interfere.—The police think they're genuine, then?"
"You bet they do! At least, I s'pose they do. They didn't say. But they grabbed them, fast enough."
Christina asked no more, and thereafter, if she kept the talk around Herrick quiet, she kept it almost gay. She and the boy ate their dinner with him in order to wait on him and watch his comfort; and before long she seemed scarcely the older of the two. It was all wonderfully simple and kind; there could be no embarrassment in that light, genial atmosphere; when the dishes had been cleared away the girl went to the piano and sang softly—tender negro melodies, little folk lullabies, snatches of German love-songs. Just as Herrick, greatly soothed and at peace, was beginning to feel tired, Deutch arrived and he and Stanley Ingham took the patient home in a taxi and put him to bed.
To Herrick's indignant astonishment, it was four or five days before he could get about again, and at the end of that period the Deutches had become almost as large a part of his life as of the Hopes. It was in vain he protested. Mrs. Deutch came twice a day and looked after his comfort with a devotion as arbitrary as a mother's; she inspected all his garments, and, with clucks of consternation, took them away with her and returned them, perfected; between her and Mrs. Grubey a deep distrust as to each other's cookery arose. She cooked him three meals a day, beside all sorts of elaborate "foreign" trifles, Mr. Deutch bringing them over in a basket, piping hot; and Mrs. Grubey, entering with her own dainty contribution of pork chops and canned lobster, professed herself unable to understand how he could eat such messes. He finished his memorial of Ingham amid the perpetual bloom and fragrance of Christina's garden flowers; once Mr. Ingham came, with Stanley, to inquire; Mrs. Hope came twice. On her second visit, when he was almost ready to re-enter the world, she brought Christina with her.
The girl had lost her air of tragic greatness; there was more color in her face, the pupils of her eyes were less expanded and her nostrils less inflated. She seemed, too, to have been rather put back into her place as a young lady, for she smiled sweetly but a little shyly about Herrick's room, and left the talking to her mother; when her eyes encountered the photograph which had been replaced over the desk a faint flush suffused her face.
"My daughter has at last allowed herself to be persuaded," said Mrs. Hope, "that Miss Cornish is hiding voluntarily; and that, if there is a blackmailing society trying to slander us and to injure any one who is apt to defend us, the police are quite as capable of dealing with it as she is. Therefore she is now able to give a little attention to her own affairs."
Herrick was sorry for the poor lady; he knew that she was devoted to Christina and that she must have had a great deal to endure. He had learned by this time that she had been a Miss Fairfax, and that her family, however desperately poor, considered her to have made a misalliance with a mere wealthy manufacturer of wall-papers, like Hope. It had been, indeed, a runaway match and relations with her family were never really resumed. Now Deutch reported that of late conciliatory relatives, making advances to the rising star, had been routed with great slaughter. But both men guessed that this had not been the real wish of a person so socially inclined as Mrs. Hope; she was too plainly dragged at the chariot-wheels of a freer spirit, and in this light even her occasional asperities, her method of communicating with her daughter mainly by protesting exclamations, became only pathetic attempts at an authority she did not possess. "You know, Mr. Herrick," she now went on, "that the opening of 'The Victors' three weeks from next Thursday night is the great occasion of my daughter's life. I can't begin to tell you what it means to us; it's everything. At such a time I think we—we ought to have our friends about us. The Inghams are so kind; they are taking me in their box. But Christina had already ordered me two of the best seats in the house, and I'm sure I'm speaking for her, too, when I say what a pleasure it would be if you would accept them. Indeed it would be a favor.—My dear, can't you persuade him?"
"It's only—" said Christina, slowly, "that I'm afraid."
"Christina! I do wish you would drop that ridiculous pose. No horrible fate has overtaken me!"
"Ah, mother," said the girl, touching her mother's shoulder, "perhaps because we were both born, you and I, under the same ban!"
"My dear!" cried Mrs. Hope, as if Christina had mentioned something indecent. "I hope you won't pay any attention to her, Mr. Herrick."
"I certainly shan't. I shall be too glad to get those seats."
"Ah, now you're a dear! You'll see Christina at her best, and I'm going to say that that's something to see. It's a magnificent part and Mr. Wheeler has been so wonderful in rehearsing her in it. Christina doesn't find him at all intimidating or brutal, as people say. Though, of course, he's a very profane man."
"I love every bone in his body," Christina said.
"My child! I wish you wouldn't speak so immoderately!"
"I'm an immoderate person," the girl replied. She rose, and pointing out of the window she said to Herrick—"You sat here? It was there, on that shade?"
"Yes."
Christina shuddered; just then Mr. Deutch arrived with the luncheon basket. The ladies passed him in taking their leave and Christina slipped her hand through his arm. "Mr. Herrick," she said, "Herr Hermy does not look wise—no, Herr Hermy, you don't,—but if ever I puzzle you, ask him. Do not ask Tante Deutch, she will tell you something noble and solid, for she herself is wise, and so she can never understand me. But Herr Hermy is a little foolish, just as I am. He is flighty; he has the artistic temperament and understands us; he knows me to the core.—Herr Hermy, he is coming to see me act; tell him I am really Sal, not Evadne; tell him that I am a hardworking girl."
As he came to know her better, Herrick did not need to be told that. He had never seen any one work so hard nor take their work quite so seriously. But her advice remained with him and he began to listen more respectfully to Hermann Deutch on his favorite subject. "Wait till you see her, Mr. Herrick! She's like Patti, and the others were the chorus; you'll say so, too. And it don't seem but yesterday, hardly, she didn't know how she should go to faint, even! Drop herself, she would, about the house, and black and blue herself in bumps! We used to go in the family circle, when I had a half-a-dollar or two, and watch great actresses and when one did something she had a fancy for, she'd pinch me like a pair o' scissors! And she'd be up practising it all night, over and over, and the gas going! She'd wear herself out, and there's those that would expect she shouldn't wear them out, too!"
"She takes things too hard," said the lover fondly.
"Yes," said Mr. Deutch, after a pause, "she takes 'em hard, but she can drop 'em quick!" Herrick felt a little knife go through his heart; and then Deutch added, "Not that she's the way people talk—insincere. Oh, that's foolish talk! She's only quick-like; she sees all things and she feels all things, and not one of 'em will she keep quiet about! Those glass pieces, you know, hang from chandeliers?—when they flash first in the one light and then the way another strikes 'em, they ain't insincere. An' that's the way Miss Christina is—she's young, an' she's got curiosity, an' she wants she should know all things an' feel all things, so she can put 'em in her parts; she wants all the lights to go clean through her. And there's so many of 'em! So many to take in and so many to give out! There ain't one of 'em, Mr. Herrick, but what she'll reflect it right into your face."
Although, in this elaborate fancy, Herrick suspected an echo of Christina's own eloquence, he did not listen to it less eagerly on that account. "After all," he translated, "it's only that she's willingly and extraordinarily impressionable, and then willingly and extraordinarily expressive! In that case, instead of being less sincere than other people, she's more so!"
"You got it!" cried Mr. Deutch with satisfaction. "That's what these outsiders, they can't ever understand. The best friend she ever had says to me once, 'If ever Miss Hope gets enough really good parts to keep her interested, she'll take things more quietly around the house!' That's been a great comfort to me, Mr. Herrick.—She's got these emotions in her, I'll say to myself, and what harm is it she should let 'em off?"
"The best friend she ever had?"
"Well, now, Mr. Herrick, he was an old hand when she first came into the business. He taught her a lot; she'd be the first to say so. Often I've thought if she hadn't been so young then, what a match they might ha' made of it! But she never thought of it, nor, I shouldn't wonder, he neither, and now it's too late. But don't you worry because she takes all things hard; she's got a kind of a spring in her. When she's laid down to die of one thing, comes along another and she gets up again."
If Herrick did not complete this analysis, it was not for lack of opportunity. As soon as he was about again he found himself as merged in the life of the Hopes as were the Deutches themselves. "You interest Christina," Mrs. Hope told him. "You take her mind off these dreadful things. It's a very critical week with us. I hope you won't leave her alone."
Herrick did all that in him lay to justify this hope, and if Christina never urged nor invited, never made herself "responsible" for his presence, she accepted it unquestioningly. His first outing was a Sunday dinner at their house, and again Christina kept herself in the background, and only drew her mother's affectionate wrath upon herself by one remark; saying, as Herrick helped himself from the dish the maid was passing him, "I hope it's not poisoned!"
She seemed rather tired, and he hoped this was not because she had made him come at an outrageously early hour and read her the beginning of his novel. He knew she was recasting it into scenes as he read; she got him to tell her all that he meant to do with it and, as they all, save Mrs. Hope, lighted their cigarettes over the coffee in the sitting-room, she began telling Wheeler about it.—Wheeler had dined there, too.
Christina's star was a big, stalwart man of about fifty, who had not quite ceased to be a matinée idol in becoming one of the foremost of producers. He listened with a good deal of interest and indeed the story lost nothing on Christina's tongue; Herrick began to see that her mind was a highly sensitized plate which could catch reflections even of disembodied things. Then Wheeler exclaimed what an actor's approval has to say first, whatever he may bring himself to deal with afterward. "Why, but there's a play in that!"
"Yes," said Christina, promptly. "For me!"
Humor shone out of the good sense and good feeling of Wheeler's heavy, handsome face. "Give me more coffee, my cormorant! Do you think I want to play the young lady myself? Nay, 'I know the hour when it strikes!'—heavy fathers for mine! Stouter than I used to be—Tut-tut, no sugar!—There will be too much of me—Did you get your idea of moral responsibility out of New England, Mr. Herrick?"
"Well, this form of it I got from such a different source as a very suave, amiable Italian, Emile Gabrielli, an intending author, too,—a lawyer who had exiled himself to Switzerland. Do you know a line of Howell's?—'The wages of sin is more sinning.' And it's seemed to me that the more-sinning doesn't stop with ourselves; it draws the most innocent and indifferent people into our net. Well, I always wanted to find a vehicle for that notion."
"And your Italian told you this story?"
"Something like it. Set the tone for it, too, in a way. He was a highly respectable sentimental person, and used to carry about an old miniature of a lovely girl to whom, I believe, he had once been betrothed. The bans had been forbid by cruel parents but he used to brag to me, at fifty, that they could never force him to part from her idolized face! Yet he knew so many shady stories I've often wondered if he hadn't left home in order to avoid a circle of too embarrassing clients. At any rate he had known a woman whose husband had got into trouble with the police in Italy—for swindling, I think he said. She had to clear out and disappeared. Years afterward he found that she had run into the arms of a respectable, God-fearing family; the natural prey of cheats because years before their little daughter had been kidnapped or lost and never found. They cry out at this young woman's resemblance to the child; the young woman puts two and two together into a story which deceives those who wish to be deceived, and settles down to be taken care of for the rest of her life. It must have been any port in a storm, for I didn't gather her adopted family had money. Spent all they had in looking for her when she was a baby, as I understood. To Signor Gabrielli the cream of the jest was that this girl was being petted and cherished and labored for by industrious people who would have perished of horror if they had known who she was, and who had not one drop of their blood in her veins.—I may not have got the incidents at all straight, but that's the idea."
"But you've changed the relationship—?"
"Oh, yes. I've cut down the family to a daughter and, as you see, I've reversed the parts—in my story it is the daughter who is deceived; it is the supposed mother who settles down upon the devoted innocence and labor of a generous girl."
"Oh, of course!" exclaimed Mrs. Hope. "Put it all on the mother! Nowadays, everything's sure to be her fault!"
Christina gave her mother her hand, much as she might have given her a cup of tea and said, "Well, but that is only where your novel begins?"
"Yes. I thought the interesting part was all to come. I thought I should be justified in supposing my reformed lady to go back to her old habits, perhaps through the mere claim of genuine ties,—old friendships, real relationships—to be caught in some serious crime, involve those friends and, finally, without in the least intending it, draw her daughter and her daughter's lover into her quicksand—of course, by means of their efforts to pull her out! And then to see what happened!"
"When the daughter finds out," Wheeler cogitated, "that should be a strong scene, a very strong scene.—What made you think of reversing the characters?—less trite?"
"Simply, I could handle it this way and not the other. When I had the cheat a young woman, she was very strenuous—I couldn't keep her from being the most lurid of common adventuresses. And I had a theory that people are never like that to themselves. Well, as soon as I substituted a rather passée woman she became much quieter—just a feeble, worthless, selfish person a good deal battered by life, and wanting nothing but comfort—trying to get it in the easiest way. I wanted so much to give the commonplace quality of crime, of what a simple, sensible, ordinary piece of business it seems to the person engaged in it—at any rate until it's found out, and he begins to be reacted on by fear and other people's minds. Ah, if I can only give these people their own point of view, and make one thing after another seem quite ordinary and human, just the necessary thing to do! Until they begin to lose their heads when one gate and then another closes and, finding themselves cornered, they fight like rats in a trap! The good as well as the bad, in one panic degradation of despair! I heard a figure of crime the other day which I should like to carry out. I should like to start with the smallest blemish on the outside of the clean, rosy apple of respectable society, 'the little, pitted speck in garnered fruit, which, rotting inward' lets you, by following it, down and down, from one layer of human living to another, at last hold a whole sphere of crime, collapsed, crumbling and wide open, in your hand. Then I've got to save Evadne in the end, without the effect of dragging her through a trap-door!"
"Well, if you made it into a play," Wheeler persisted, "would the mother or the daughter be the star-part?"
"I could play both!" Christina cried.
Wheeler laughed aloud. "You are too good to be true!"
"Well, but why not? Why not a dual rôle? Even if the relationship were false, the resemblance would have to be real—it's the backbone of the story! Mother and I look a good deal alike, but I've seen chance resemblances incomparably stronger!"
She went on eagerly and Herrick was surprised to see that it was not she alone but Wheeler who took the idea of dramatization seriously. It was his first real gage of what was expected of Christina as an actress—that in a year or two she would be starring on her own account. She was not only Wheeler's leading-woman, she was his find, his speculation; he meant to be her manager and Christina meant that he should, too. Again Ingham's death seemed to be dragging Herrick into the path of success.
Then his attention was caught by Wheeler's saying, "Well, we must all be as criminal as we can, while we can. Once P. L. B. C. Ten Euyck gets to be a police inspector there will be no more crime. The word will be blotted from the vocabulary of New York."
"That man!" Mrs. Hope cried.
"Well, all these recent scandals in the Department are making them remove Simmonds; they want somebody beyond the reach of graft; and Ten Euyck has resigned his coronership. What does that look like to you?
"It will be nuts to watch," Wheeler went on. "The force, down in his district, will be shaken up till its teeth rattle. Ten Euyck won't rest contented till he has stopped mice from stealing scraps of cheese! But my leading-woman must be civil to him, now, or he's the sort of fellow to get my license revoked. Nobody's ever run up against his self-righteousness and got away with it, yet. Poor chap, he'd be mighty able if he weren't crazy! I believe I could do a Valjean if I could engage him as Javert!"
"Don't let us speak forever of that bilious person! Why do you distract a poor girl from her work? Come," cried she to Wheeler, "are we going to do our scene?"
She drove her rather reluctant star to action.—"Young miss!" he said, "it is not every ageing favorite who would take a girl on the word of a mutual friend, give her a better part than his own, push her over his own head, and coach her in private into the bargain!" He put his big hand on Christina's shoulder. "But she's worth it!" he said. "A scene with her is a tonic to me—I did not know the old man had so much blood in him! Sally, the poor working-girl, what are you going to do to the critics, that still sleep unconscious? 'Ha—ha! Wait till Monday week!' or whenever we open!
"'They'll be all gangin' East an' West,
They'll be all gane a-glee!
They'll be all gangin' East an' West,
Courtin' Molly Lee!'
"Mr. Herrick, as you come up Broadway, you don't see her name on the bills! But they might as well be printing the paper!—for the younger generation is knocking at the door. Ah, Christina, my dear, thou art thy Wheeler's glass, and he in thee calls back the lovely April of his prime!" His indulgent sardonic glance caught Christina's and the flaming sword of hers drove him to work. They left behind them such a vivid sense of Herrick's having written his play and their having taken it, that he might have thought it a scene of his they were working on.
From the room where they were immured strange sounds occasionally escaped; sometimes Wheeler laughed and sometimes he swore furiously. "She'll get everything that he knows out of him!" said Mrs. Hope with great satisfaction.
Herrick discovered this, in no ignoble sense, to be the keynote of Christina's life. It was borne in upon him with every hour that her work in the theater was the essence of her; that no matter where nor how utterly she should consciously give her heart the unconscious course of her nature would still flow through the field of dramatic endeavor. He might admire or condemn this, like it or leave it; but the jealous humility of his love must recognize it.
She seemed largely to have recovered from the terrors that had enveloped her upon Ingham's death. If for Nancy Cornish she had lain down to die, for her opening night she had got up again. And she was ready to bend the whole world to that night's service. Herrick saw that she had always been so.
It became a thrilling amusement to him to watch her at work; to see how vividly she perceived, how unscrupulously she absorbed! In the vocabulary of her profession, everything was so much "experience." All her life long she had sucked out of every creature that came near her some sort of artistic sustenance; learning from the jests of her own heart and its despair; out of the shop windows and the night sky. At an age when other girls were being chaperoned to dancing-parties she had worked,—she with her soft cheek and slight strength and shy eye,—"like a miner buried in a landslide"; she was mistress of her body's every curve, of her voice's every note; she had read widely and with passionate intelligence; as soon as she had begun to make money, she had poured it into her accomplishments; she was a diligent student of passing manners and historic modes, and of each human specimen through which she did not hesitate to run her pin.
For instance, what use had she not made of the Deutches? From Henrietta Deutch she had learned German and a not inconsiderable amount of music; they had a venerated library of standard works that contained a few modern continentals in the original; she developed her school-girl French by reading the Parisians under Mrs. Deutch's supervision and in Italian she surpassed her; while all the time she learned just enough knitting to know how people feel when they knit, and just what the sensation is of stirring sugar into the preserves. She liked to go to their apartment of an evening and, once, when Mrs. Hope sent Herrick after her, he found her sitting on the floor with her hair down and her head against Mrs. Deutch's black silk knee while that lady crooned German lullabies to the baby she had never borne, and "Herr Hermy" played the pianola. As soon as she had twisted up her hair, she put on a long apron and got supper and waited on them all with the charming daughterly ways which lent her such a tender girlishness; and Herrick perceived that when a part required her to move about a kitchen she would be able to welcome the kitchen as an old friend. She could reproduce Deutch's accent, his whole personal equation, with inhuman exactness, even his tremors at the inquest, his inarticulate stammer—as of a mental dumbness, groping for words—that overtook him in moments of extreme excitement, she had caught in her net; she had learned from him some jokes and stories, some student songs, which would have astonished the many delicate tea-tables at which she shyly cast down her thieving eyes to observe exactly what service was in vogue; she did not hesitate to stir him up to dreadful stories of old racial hates and though Herrick saw her eyes darken and her nostrils expand he knew that she was drawing thoroughly into her system the dark passion of retaliation with which she would some day scorch an astonished audience. "If ever I get a queen to do—oh, one of the virtuous queens, of course," she said, "I shall have to fall back on Tante Deutch." And Herrick saw how right she was; how all along she had modeled her grand moments—and Christina, though so fond of describing herself as a poor working girl, had occasional moments of extreme grandeur—upon that simple, domestic stateliness which was really the stateliness of a great lady.
On the other hand when she was out with her mother she modeled herself—except for a stray vagary of speech—upon Mrs. Hope's excellent idea of a-young-lady-out-with-her-mother-a-la-mode; and she was by no means insensible to the glories of the smart world, nor to the luxuries of the moneyed world. "I want them all," she confessed to Herrick as they walked up Fifth Avenue from rehearsal. "I covet them; I long to own them, and I dare swear I should never be owned by them. I'm infinitely more fit than those that have them, and thank heaven I've stood out here when I was cold and wet and oh! how hopeless, and felt in me the anarchist and his bomb. I was never made to smile on conquerors. One man, from these great houses, once taught me how to hate them! How I should like to do a Judith! How I should like to tame all this!" She looked, with a bitterer gaze than he had ever seen in her, down the incomparable pomp of the great street. Then more lightly, with a curving lip, "My Deutches, I believe," she said, "are supposed to belong to the moneyed camp. But it is borne in upon me, every now and then, that our own race has occasionally put by a dollar or two."
She moved in such an atmosphere of luxury that it was difficult to imagine her what she plainly called "hard up." But it will be seen that they were now continually together and there was something about her which made it possible to offer her the simplest and the cheapest pleasures. In her rare hours of freedom he had the fabulous happiness of taking her where he had often taken Evadne in that old empty time; to Coney Island, to strange Bowery haunts, to the wharves where the boys dive, and even to his table d'hôte in the back yard. She had a zest, a fresh-hearted pleasure in everything and her sense of characterization fed upon queer colors and odd flavors just as he had known it would. He was so sorry that the little Yankee woman was absent from his table d'hôte, particularly as he had recently had a specimen of her which he longed to hear Christina reproduce. She had a little sewing-table behind her desk at which she sat playing solitaire with a grim precision which made Herrick think of the French Revolution and the knitting women; but as she had then been absent from the restaurant for some time he ventured a "Buon giorno" as he passed.
She instantly replied, "You needn't talk that Dago talk to me. I just took my daughter's paul-parrot away from here, case 't 'ed get so it couldn't talk real talk."
"That's what I call a good firm prejudice!" Herrick laughed to himself, and he continued to hope for some such specimen, or at least for Mr. Gumama, when he should bring Christina again.
But as the opening drew near, she began to limit her interests and to exclude from her vision everything which could interfere with the part in hand. It sometimes seemed to him, indeed, as if even her new calm about Nancy were only because Nancy—yes, and the threatening Arm of Justice,—were among these conscious, these voluntary exclusions. It was almost as though, over the very body of Ingham's death, she had thrown her part's rosy skirts and shut it out of sight. Beneath her innumerable moods one seemed permanent, strangely compounded of languor and excitement. By-and-by, she seemed to dwell within it, veiled, and Herrick knew that only her part was there behind the veil with her.
It was Mrs. Hope who could least endure this sleepwalking abstraction. There came an evening when some people whom Mrs. Hope considered of importance were asked to dinner. Christina improved this occasion by having her own dinner served upstairs, so that she would not be too tired to rehearse that night with Wheeler. And to Herrick Mrs. Hope reported this behavior, biting her lips. "She's the most self-willed person living! I declare to you, Mr. Herrick, she has the cruelest tricks in the world. The best friend that any girl ever had said once that, if acting were in question, she would grind his bones to make its bread!"
Later, Herrick said jealously to the girl, "Who was the best friend you ever had?"
Her head happened to be turned from him and it seemed to him a long time before she spoke. Even then her indifference was so great she almost yawned as "Who has told you of him?" she asked.
"Both Deutch and your mother called some old actor that."
"They meant a dear fellow who put me in the moving-picture business, bless him, when I hadn't enough to eat!"
"And where's he now?"
"I dare say he's very well off. He taught me poise. He taught me independence, too. That's enough for one man. He had a singular way of turning his eyes, without turning his head. I learned that, too."
Was it true, then—what had been hinted to him often enough—that once she had plucked out the heart of your mystery, the heart of the human being she forgot all about? She might be of as various moods as she would, she was very single-minded, and was all she valued in her friends some personal mannerism?—any peculiar impression of which she might master the physical mechanism and reproduce it? A trait like this naturally made Herrick take anxious stock of his own position. What personal peculiarity of his was she studying? But it was nevertheless in such a trait that the staunchness of his love found its true food. He found his faith digested such things capitally; his passion at once nourished and clarified itself by every human failing, by all the little nerves and little ways of his darling divinity, until it ceased to be merely the bleeding heart of a valentine and found within itself the solid, articulated bones of mortal life. If, in return, there was the least thing she could learn of him, let her, in heaven's name, learn it! Only, how long before she would have finished with it?
In the blessed meantime she scarcely stirred without him. With a freedom unthinkable in girls of his own world, she let him take her to lunch every day; unlike a proper heroine of romance, Christina required at this time a great deal of food and he waited for her after rehearsal and took her to tea. It was a mercy that he was now doing a series of Famous Crimes in Manhattan, for the Record, as he certainly did not wish to put her on a diet of Italian table d'hôtes! She accepted all this quite as a matter of course; and it had become a matter of course that he should go home with her for dinner. Sometimes they walked up through the Park, sometimes they took a taxi and drove to shops or dressmakers; she did not scruple, when she was tired or wanted air, to drive home with her hat off and her eyes shut. It seemed to the poor fellow that she had accepted him like the weather.
For she had become strangely quiet in his presence. Eventually she ceased to use upon him any conscious witchery whatever; something had spiked all her guns, and Herrick was too much in love to presume that this quiet meant anything except that he did not irritate her. Every now and again, it is true, he was breathlessly aware of something that brooded, touchingly humble and anxious and tender, in a tone, in a glance. He feared that this anxiety, this tenderness, was only that royal kindness with which, for instance, when Joe Patrick gave up his elevator, hating that haunted job, she at once got him taken on as usher at the theater. But Herrick dared not translate her expression, when, looking up suddenly, he would find her eyes swimming in a kind of happy light and fastened on his face. At such moments a flush would run through him; there would fall between them a painful, an exquisite consciousness. And, with the passing of the wave, she would seem to him extraordinarily young.
He considered it a bad sign that seldom or never did she introduce him to any of her mates. Public as was their companionship, she kept him wholly to herself. This was particularly noticeable in the restaurants where she would go to strange shifts to keep actors from dallying at her table; she would forestall their advances by paying visits to theirs, leaving Herrick to make what he liked of it; and, do what he would, the poor fellow could find no flattering reason for this. Already he knew Christina too well to have any hope that it was the actors who were not good enough.
They were to her, in the most drastic and least sentimental sense, her family. She quarreled with them; often enough she abused and mimicked them; at the memory of bad acting scorn and disdain rode sparkling in her eye, and if her vast friendliness was lighted by passionate enthusiasms, it was capable, too, of the very sickness of contempt. But this was in private and among themselves; there was not the least nor the worst of them whom she would not have championed against the world. Quite apart from goodness or badness of art, Christina conceived of but two classes of human beings, artists and not artists; as who should say "Brethren"; "Cattle." Herrick congratulated himself that he could be scooped in under at least the title of "Writer." It was not so good as "Actor," but 't was enough, 't would serve. All her sense of kin, of race, of patriotism, and—once you came to good acting—of religion, was centered in her country of the stage. Herrick had never seen any one so class conscious. With those whom she called "outsiders," she adopted the course most calculated, as a matter of fact, to make her the rage; she refused to know them. And when, for the sake of some day reproducing high life upon the boards, she brought herself to dine out, this little protégée of the Deutches had always said to herself, with Arnold Bennett's hero, "World, I condescend."
Such an affair took place on the Monday before Christina's opening. Some friends of the Inghams made a reception for her; and Herrick saw a dress arrive that was plainly meant for conquest. Now Herrick considered that this reception had played him a mean trick. He had a right to! He who had recently been a desperado with sixpence was soon to be an associate editor of Ingham's Weekly!—While he was still dizzy with this knowledge a friend on the Record had pointed out a suite in an old fashioned downtown mansion, which had been turned into bachelor lodgings: a friend of the friend wished to sub-let these rooms furnished, and Herrick had extravagantly taken them. A beautiful Colonial fireplace had decided him. He remembered a mahogany tea-table and some silver which Marion could be induced to part with, and it seemed to him that he could not too quickly bring about the hour when Christina, before that fireplace and at that tea-table, should pour tea for whatever Thespians she might think him worthy to entertain. But it had taken time for the things to arrive; to-morrow she was going on the road for the preliminary performances, and to-day was set for the reception! He had, of course, kept silence. But it was heartbreaking to see how perfect a day it was for tea and fires—one of those cool days of earliest September. He kindled the flame; alas, it didn't matter! Then, toward six he went uptown to hear about the party.
He found Mrs. Hope, but not Christina, and the elder lady received him almost with tears. "She is out driving, Mr. Herrick; she is out driving about all by herself and she won't come home. She is in one of her tantrums and all about Mr. Wheeler—a fine actor, of course, but why bother?"
Herrick had never seen the poor lady so ruffled. "It was such a beautiful reception," she told him, "all the best people. She got there late. She always does. You can't tell me, Mr. Herrick, that she doesn't do it on purpose to make an entrance. All the time I was brushing her up after the rehearsal she stood with her eyes shut, mumbling one line over and over from her part. Nobody could be more devoted to her success than I am, but it got on my nerves so I stuck her with a hairpin and I thought she would have torn her hair down. 'What are these people to me?' she said. 'Or I to them.' You know how she goes on, Mr. Herrick, as if she were actually disreputable, instead of being really the best of girls. Then, again, she's so exclusive it seems sometimes as if she really couldn't associate with anybody, except the Deutches! She likes well enough to fascinate people, all the same. She behaved beautifully after she got there; and oh, Mr. Herrick, you can't imagine how beautiful she looked! Surely, there never was anything so lovely as my daughter!"
"Can't I?" Herrick exclaimed.
"Well, every one just lay down flat in front of her. Even Mr. Ten Euyck. Yes, he was there. I trembled when they should meet. You know, he has his inspectorship now. He wants to give her a lunch on board his yacht! It was a triumph. Christina was very demure. But by-and-by I began to feel a trifle uneasy. You know that soft, sad look she's got?—it's so angelic it just melts you—when she's really thinking how dull people are! Well, there, I saw it beginning to come! And about then they had got rid of all but the very smartest people, just the cream, you know, for a little intimacy! We were all getting quite cozy, when some one asked Christina how she could bear to play love-scenes with a man like Wheeler—of course, Mr. Herrick, it is annoying, but they will ask things like that; they can't help it."
"And Miss Hope?"
"She looked up at them with the sugariest expression I ever saw and asked them why, and they all began reminding her of the—well, you know! And I must say, when you come to think of his—ah—affairs—! And they talked about how dear Miss So-and-So had refused to act with him in amateur theatricals, he said such rough things! And how lovely Christina was, and how hard it was on her, and all the time I could see Christina clouding up."
Herrick, with his eyes on the rug, smilingly murmured, "Wave, Munich, all thy banners wave! And charge, with all thy chivalry!"
"Well, Mr. Herrick, she stood up and looked all round her with that awful stormy lower she has, and then, in a voice like one of those pursuing things in the Greek tragedies, 'I!' she said, 'I am not worthy to kiss his feet!' Oh, Mr. Herrick, why should she mention them? There are times when she certainly is not delicate!"
Herrick burst out laughing. He thought Christina might at least have exhibited some sense of humor. "And was the slaughter terrible?"
"Why, Mr. Herrick, what could any one say? She looked as if she might have hit them. She shook the crumbs off her skirt, as if they were the party, and then she said good-by very sweetly, but coldly and sadly, like Mary Queen of Scots going to execution, and left. Mr. Herrick, I don't know where to hide my head!"
Herrick stayed for some time to counsel and console, but Christina did not return and as Mrs. Hope did not ask him to dinner he was at length obliged to go. For all his amusement he felt a little snubbed and blue and lonely; his eyes hungered for Christina in her finery; he saw her at once as the darling and the executioner of society and he longed to reassure himself with the favor of the spoiled beauty; how was he to wait till to-morrow for the summons of his proud princess? As he opened his door he saw that the fire had been kept up; some one kneeling before it turned at his entrance and faced him. It was Christina.
The shock of her presence was cruelly sweet. The firelight played over her soft light gown; she had taken off her gloves and the ruddiness gleamed on her arms and her long throat and on the sheen of her hair. As she rose slowly to her feet that something at once ineffably luxurious and ineffably spiritual which hung about her like the emanation of a perfume stirred uneasily in him and his senses ached. Never had her fairness hurt him like that; his passion rose into his throat and held him dumb.
"The man looked at me, hard," she told him, "and let me in. I came here to rest. And because I didn't want to be scolded. Don't scold me. Perhaps I've thrown away a world this afternoon. But no; it will roll back to be picked up again. Listen, and tell me that I was right."
Without stirring, "I can never tell you but the one thing," he said. "I love you!"
It was no sooner said than he loathed himself for speaking. He had not dreamed that he should say such a thing. It was not yet a month since her engagement to Ingham had been broken; she was a young girl; she was here alone with him in his rooms, to which she had paid him the perfect honor of coming—she, who had accepted him so simply, so nobly, as a gentleman. Hot shame and black despair seized upon him.
The girl stood quiet as if controlling herself. Then, so gently that she was almost inaudible, she said, "I must go!"
He could not answer her; he was aware of the ripple and murmur of her dress as she fetched her wraps; she put on her hat and the lace of her sleeves foamed back from her arms in the ruddy light; he felt how soon she would be engulfed by that world which was already rolling back to be picked up. He stepped forward to help her with her thin chiffon coat and she suffered this, gently, passively; as it slipped over her shoulders he felt her turn; he felt her arms come around his neck, clinging to him, and the sweetness of her body on his breast. In that firelit room her lips were cold, as they stumbled on his throat with the low cry, "Oh, you love me!—You love me!" she repeated. "And you're a man! Save me!"