IV
He went back the next night.
Bernice received him in a pale-blue smock, her hair twisted up in slovenly fashion at the back of her neck, a black band about her head. The smock looked greasy. Bernie was smoking a cigarette as she admitted him herself.
“It’s Hashi’s night out,” she explained. “We’ll be alone and can talk. Come in!” And she led him into a spacious studio room behind, where the evening before the music had been playing. Nathan was clothed again in his Tuxedo. Bernie surveyed him and smiled quietly, aggravatingly.
She shoved a chair across for him and reclined on a chaise-longue. She did not offer to apologize for not including him among her guests of the prior night, although Nathan soon learned why she had not done so, and not because the woman was ashamed of her guests, either.
“Now,” declared Bernie, “tell me all about that damned hick town of Paris!”
Nathan honestly tried to do so. It was sketchy.
“But when did your wife die?” the woman demanded.
“May I smoke?” the man asked.
“Smoke? Of course you can smoke! Don’t be such a disgusting rube. I’m smoking, am I not?”
He lit a cigar.
“I had some trouble with my wife, Bernie. She was untrue to me while I was away on the road. I came back one night and caught her in another man’s arms. She left Paris next day. You read about the Russellville explosion last week? She was either blown to atoms or burned to death—in it!”
For a moment Bernie forgot her pose and looked frankly incredulous. Then she tapped her cigarette and sniffed.
“I don’t know that I blame her, Nat. You always were rather impossible from a woman’s standpoint, you know.”
Nathan let it pass.
“I’ve brought you something, Bernie, that you might like to keep,” he said. And upon the table at her elbow he laid the little packet of childhood love letters.
“For God’s sake, what’re those?”
“The letters we wrote, Bernie, while we were boy-and-girl sweethearts in the graded school together.”
Bernie dropped her cigarette. She had a bad time recovering it and the fire burned a small hole in the smock before she had done so. She swore.
“But what the devil do you suppose I want of them now?”
“I don’t know, Bernie. I thought perhaps they might mean something to you—little relics from the past, as I’ve always regarded them.”
“You always were a sickly, sentimental fool, Nat. As for the past, the less we discuss it or think about it, the better I’ll be pleased. I’ve had trouble enough weaning myself ‘from the past.’ The present and future gives me bother enough, God knows. As for Paris, I hate it as I hate copperheads in a mangrove swamp. I’m done with it forever and never want to be dragged back into it again—not even to be buried.”
“It’s your old home town, Bernie. You can’t get back of that.”
“I don’t want any ‘old home town.’ I’ve risen above it. I was simply unlucky enough to be born in the little tank-burg, and that’s plenty. And as soon as possible I shook clear from it and all it stood for! I got over being a hick quite a while ago, Nathan. And I hate everything that reminds me of it as the devil hates holy water. I don’t want to have to think of the disgusting depths I’ve come up from.”
“I’m sorry, Bernie.”
“You’re not half so sorry as I am! Paris nearly did for me. Father and mother—especially mother!—ugh!”
“What about your mother? You thought she was pretty classy once——”
“Nathan Forge! Don’t say ‘classy’ or I’ll scream. More provincialism! ‘Classy’ was one of mother’s favorite words. The other was ‘blood.’ Blood! And for all her grand airs, she was cheap as dirt! But how could I know it until I got out in the world and had to suffer for it? And God, what a Golgotha it’s been! When I first married Wallace and was taken into his family, life was one long nightmare of ‘break’ after ‘break’ before his people. They were Real Blood. And they looked down on me—righteously—from the day he brought me home until the day I divorced him. I’ve had enough of vulgarians and lowbrows. I’ll have you know I’m a lady!” And in proof that she was a lady, Bernice lit another cigarette and inhaled the smoke.
“I apologize, Bernice,” the man offered.
“Oh, you needn’t apologize. Don’t depreciate yourself. That’s ‘hick’ too! And don’t sit sprawled out so, as though you didn’t know what to do with your hands and your feet. Paris is stamped all over you, from the cravat in your collar to the cut of your shoes. And yet Ted Thorne is sending you to the Orient to represent him! Oh, well, after all, he’s ‘hick’ too. Probably doesn’t know any better. It’s none of my business!”
Nathan’s face burned. She was the same old Bernie. He might have known. He tried to appear at ease—although nothing the woman could have done would have made him more self-conscious—and he smoked for a moment in perturbed silence. She broke that silence by exclaiming angrily:
“And I wish, as a favor to me, that you’d stop eating that cigar! And I’ll bet it cost five cents and came from Tom Edwards’ cigar store next to the newspaper office——”
“It cost twenty cents,” defended Nat, with foolish ire.
“I’m not going by the cost. I’m going by the smell! Just goes to show how much bringing up you’ve had. If you didn’t come from a small town, you’d know more than to drag out a heavy, offensive cigar in front of a lady; you’d smoke a delicate, gentlemanly cigarette.”
“I don’t smoke cigarettes,” the other replied dully.
“Well, you would if you weren’t a rube. Thank God I didn’t introduce you to those people I had in here last evening! I suppose you’d have pulled out one of those sickening cabbages and lighted up right in my drawing-room.”
Unconsciously Nat’s eyes swept the apartment. It didn’t look like a drawing-room.
Bernie’s tone suddenly softened. Perhaps it was the sudden misery and pain of self-consciousness in the man’s eyes. She leaned over with her elbows on her knees and the cigarette fumes bathing her colorless face.
“Natie, tell me something. Hasn’t anybody ever broken the news to you what an awful hick you are—and have always been?”
“N-N-No!” choked the young man.
The woman regarded him gravely for a quarter moment. Then as though to herself she remarked:
“Honestly, I almost think it’s my Christian duty, as a woman and a one-time friend of yours, to hold up a mirror in front of you and let you look at yourself properly.”
Nathan arose, walked to the window and threw out the offensive cigar.
“What did you do then?” cried Bernie hysterically.
“Threw out my cigar, of course. You said you didn’t like it.”
“Yes. But where did you throw it? Out of one of my windows—like a Polack at a drink-fest down by the railroad yards on a Sunday afternoon. Suppose there’s somebody down in the court that happens to know my window! What will they think of me, when my window opens and rains down nasty cigar butts? Oh, Nathan, in God’s name, where is your bringing up?”
“I guess I haven’t had very—much,” the poor man choked.
“You never said a truer thing in your life! And stop walking the floor! As though we were married and having a quarrel! Come and sit down quietly and poised—as a gentleman should—and let me show you how very impossible you are to a well-bred lady!”
Nathan obediently returned to his chair.
“In the first place, why did you come up here to-night in dinner clothes!—just for a social call when you knew I’d be in careless négligée myself?”
“I didn’t know it. Anyhow, to wear a business suit——”
“I shouldn’t have minded you in a business suit! Just goes to show how little you Forges understand women! But we’ll let the dinner clothes pass. Oh, Nathan! Nathan! Nathan!” The last word was almost a hysterical shriek.
“Now what am I doing?” cried the thoroughly unnerved fellow.
“Picking at your thumb nail!” cried Bernie. From the cold horror in her voice one might imagine Nathan had drawn the decapitated head of a child from his clothes and juggled it to amuse himself while she talked.
“Excuse me,” he muttered. And he dropped his hands in his lap and looked the picture of misery. What could he do but sit quietly like a tailor’s dummy and take the hot-shot she poured into him, broadside? And she poured it. There was no doubt about it. She poured it.
“Look at you!” she cried witheringly, her neurasthenia getting the upper hand. “Feet clad in rakish patent leather shoes! Dinner clothes, when you know you’re from a little tank-town anyhow and never wore dinner clothes there in your life! Necktie drawn too tight! Shirt bosom hard and smooth instead of soft and pleated! Collar two seasons out of style! Hair parted on one side instead of deftly and sophisticatedly in the middle! Ears—look at your ears!—especially your left one! Ugh! It gives me the creeps to look at it——”
“It’s an injury, Bernie. I can’t help that, can I?”
“Certainly you can help it! You got into the fight that made it that way, didn’t you? And if I remember aright, it was over some of your asinine poetry! But aside from getting into the fight in the first place, surely you could have submitted to a surgical operation and had it removed and put on right! And your hands! Look at your hands! Knotted and gnarled in the knuckles——”
“If you’d had to do as much manual labor with your hands as I’ve had to do with mine, your hands would be knotted and gnarled in the knuckles!”
“There you go! Hick again! Trying to defend yourself! Insulting a lady!”
“But aren’t you insulting me a trifle, Bernie, by calling attention to the condition of my hands, which I can’t help?”
“No!” Bernie’s hysteria was growing a trifle wilder. “If a man is a perfect gentleman—and perfectly bred—never mind what a lady says to him, he concedes her the privilege of insulting him as her right—because she is a lady! But what can you know about that, of course—coming from Paris!”
“I don’t think a perfect lady would be cruel enough to remind a fellow of things about his appearance he can’t help.”
“What do you know about perfect ladies? Where have you met any perfect ladies? Who are you, that you presume to sit there and question my knowledge of etiquette and what’s right and polite?”
Nathan gave a tired laugh. He drew a long breath,—that sigh of infinite patience when called upon to hold his temper and indulge irascible, inconsistent, spoiled womanhood.
“It’s true I haven’t had many social advantages, Bernie,” he conceded. “But that’s never been because I didn’t hanker for them——”
“There you go! Hanker! That’s a nice word to use before a lady. Hanker! I can see old man Fodder using it, while he spits foully on the floor and wipes his dirty whiskers with the back of his hand. Hanker! Nathan, you’ll leave me a nervous wreck!”
“What should I say?”
“Hunger is bad enough. Because you ‘never desired them’ would be better and more refined.”
“Well, then, it’s never been because I’ve never desired them. But what can a fellow do when his father——”
“That’s right! Blame your father! Blame your mother, blame your sister, blame your town, blame every one and everything but yourself! In a moment you’ll be blaming me! Do you remember the day after the Sunday-school picnic when your father flogged you for going off alone with me in the woods? Do you remember what I told you to do?”
“Yes!”
“What?”
“Get a gun and shoot him!”
“Precisely! Why didn’t you? Don’t you suppose that if you’d found a shotgun and peppered his hide with holes, the big, hypocritical, child-mauling bully wouldn’t have had a new respect for you and left you alone?”
“But suppose I’d killed him?”
“Well, suppose you had? Wouldn’t it have been what he deserved?”
“But, Bernie! Be reasonable! You’re not advising a boy to get a gun and commit murder? Where would I have ended? In the electric chair or on the gallows.”
“They don’t hang children!”
“But do you think it would be pleasant to go through the rest of life with the realization that I’d shot my own father?”
“If you were justified—as you were!—there would have been no remorse. Besides, if you had been hounded by remorse, it just goes to show you’ve got a clinging, messy, sentimental mind!”
Nathan had a feeling that he was talking to some one who was not quite rational. Still, he was accustomed to dealing with irrational people—especially, The Sex.
“I preferred not to do it,” he returned dully.
“Just so! And your father walked all over you, and took your earnings, and imposed on you, and ground you down so that at twenty-one you flew into the arms of that little Richards slut. And now you come yowling around me for sympathy——”
“I haven’t—I’m not—‘yowling around you for sympathy.’”
“You needn’t think I haven’t any brains! You needn’t add that to your boorish insults! You came here to-night, with your cheap peasant wife dead and those silly love notes, thinking to stir up something of our kid romance—ask me to marry you, perhaps. As if I would marry you—you! Oh, my God, what an insult! I could call the police and have you ejected for it, right this minute!”
“Oh, Bernie, please be reasonable! I haven’t asked you to marry me! I——”
“You don’t need to add falsehood to it all. If I’d marry you to-morrow, you’d feel highly complimented, because there’s nothing in Paris to equal me. Isn’t that so?”
Nathan hesitated to say “No,” and felt that “Yes” was falsehood.
“Answer me!”
“I hardly know, Bernie. I——”
But Bernie was obsessed with her own assumption.
“Well, I’ll have you know I’m done with men, do you understand? There’s never been one yet that shot straight with me! Look in my eyes, Nathan Forge! Do you see that stabbed look there?”
Nathan looked in her eyes. He saw no stabbed look. But he did see the wild forked light and iris dilations of a rampant neurasthenic. And moreover, if no males had ever shot straight with Bernie, Nathan had a quiet hunch he knew the reason. But Bernie, of course, would have exploded in one grand cataclysm of atomic energy if he had not agreed that he did see a stabbed look in her eyes.
“Men have put that stabbed look there, Nathan Forge! Your sex! Even you have had your part in doing it!”
“Me?” cried the amazed young man.
“You! You, you, you! That day off in the woods—remember it? You bet you remember it! You tempted me to degrade my girlish modesty! You taught me what fascination a woman’s body has upon——”
“Bernice! I——”
“Stop! Not a word! I guess I know! I’ve suffered enough for it! You and your sex are rotten! Rotten! Rotten! And I’m done with it! And yet here you come, sniveling around in your small-town boorishness and dinner clothes, bringing me old love letters, thinking I’d marry you! And what have you done that I should marry you? What are you in the world, anyway—among real men, I mean? What goals have you won? What have you to offer a woman——?”
“I hope I’ve got a reasonable amount of decency——”
The effect on Bernice was a shriek.
“Decency! Oh, my God, what conceit! You’re worse than some of those Los Angeles picture actors I met last summer! ‘A reasonable amount of decency!’ You! Who lived for six years in foul propinquity with a woman you didn’t love——”
“I believed that sticking by my wife—when I’d given her a child—was the right and proper thing to do. Men usually are sports that way.”
“More conceit! So you’re a sport, are you—along with being eligible to an especial halo for decency? As if anything could offset sleeping—even for one night!—with a woman who was not your ideal and your princess! It just goes to show where your self-respect is! You haven’t any! You never had any self-respect! If you’d had any self-respect you never would have permitted your father to bamboozle you as he did! Oh, what a dirty little cad you are! And you talk of decency!”
Nathan was beginning to lose his sense of proportion; he was getting muddled trying to follow Bernie’s logic.
“All I’ve had to go by is experience, what I’ve been taught, what I’ve contacted,” he blurted out. “If I did wrong it was because I didn’t know any better!”
“And here I am, trying to show you wherein you’re wrong, like a sincere friend, or a woman who loves you—and you sit there in all your small-town boorishness and bigotry and conceit and try to defend yourself! Faugh!”
Nathan, ever supersensitive, began to wonder how far Bernie was right and how far wrong. And the woman’s continued tirade did nothing to enlighten him:
“Hasn’t it dawned on you,” she cried, her voice strained with hysteria, “why you’ve never gotten on in the world—why at twenty-seven you’re no further along than you were at seventeen? I’ll tell you! It’s because you’ve never been able to see yourself as others see you! You’re a boob! A hick! A sentimental little small-town vulgarian. And I bet at table you eat with your knife and blow your coffee in a saucer! No wonder you haven’t got ahead. Hasn’t there ever been a time when opportunity opened for you and then—when people you met saw you—that opportunity mysteriously closed? Answer me! Hasn’t there?”
At once into poor Nathan’s distraught brain came the experience of the New York knitting-mills management. His acknowledgment showed plainly on his bewildered face.
“Ah! I thought so!” cried Bernie exultantly. “And why did you lose that opportunity? Because you were a hick! Because you didn’t know how to act! Because you probably deported yourself before fine-grained, well-bred people the way you’ve been deporting yourself in my house to-night—like a savage who pads around naked before his family and tears his food apart with his fingers! That’s why you’ve never gotten ahead and you never will! You’re small-town, I say! You’re rube and hick! A vulgarian! And a rotter beside!”
Nathan stared blankly ahead of him. Was he? He almost began to think that he was.
Bernie drew a long jagged sigh for breath, stared at him in self-satisfaction, then arose abruptly and crossed the room to the steam radiator. Bending down, she rattled the valve to turn it off. She came back. Nathan was still in his daze. Hands on hips, a slurring sneer on her features, Bernie paused before him contemptuously.
“Look at you!” she snapped. “Just as I say! Sit there and let a woman turn off a steam radiator—never make a single move, or offer to do it for her!”
Again Nathan was taken aback.
“You didn’t ask me,” he defended thickly.
“Ask you! Ask you! And has a woman to ask a man every time she wants a thing done? I can see your father sticking out all over you! All her life your mother had to ask him to get things done. A gentleman would anticipate all a woman’s little whims and desires and please her before she had to ask for them! And you!—you—want to marry me!”
Nathan was sick and getting sicker. More than sick, he felt bruised and bleeding, somehow. Bernice had jabbed the lance of her spleen into his most sensitive feelings of self-consciousness and handicap.
Were all women like this, even the best of them?
Again he had the feeling of holding out his hands to a woman and having them slapped. Slapped? His hands? Bernie was cuffing his hands, his mouth, his ears, belaboring him with blows from which he had no defense, which he could not return because she was woman, The Sex.
“I guess I better go, Bernie,” he whispered huskily after a time.
“That’s right, you piker! Run! Just when you hear the naked truth about yourself, run! It’s like you! It’s just like every man. It’s especially like a Forge, and your father! I understand he didn’t stop running until he got out of the country with a valise of other people’s money! And you ask me to marry you—his son!”
“Bernie, I haven’t asked you to marry me! At least if I did, I wasn’t conscious of it!”
“Then why are you here to see me?”
“To—to—talk over—old times—in Paris!”
“Fiddlesticks! Why should I want to talk over old times in Paris, when I despise and detest the place—and all it stands for?”
“I didn’t know you despised and detested the place. How could I? The trouble with you seems to be, Bernie, you want a man to anticipate what’s in your mind, or think of what you’re thinking about, before you even begin to think about it yourself——”
“Well, a brainy man would! Not being able to do it is another phase of your provincialism—the deficiency and mediocrity that’s held you back so that right now, sitting in that chair, you’re not a millionaire, a great success in life, a big-leaguer socially——”
“I simply happened to be ’way off here, passing through Chicago——”
“‘Way off here! A long, long way from home, aren’t you? A long, long way from Vermont and the General Store and the Village School and Uncle Josh Weatherbee’s Farm? Faugh! Yes, I think you’d better go! And I’m going to bed—and call a doctor. And if I’m ill as a result of this, your firm will get my doctor’s bill, and don’t you forget it!”