Light-Fingered Gentry

by David Graham Phillips

He had been fancying he was leading her along the flower-walled path he had trod so often with some passing embodiment of his passing fancy, was luring her to the bower where he had so often taught what he called and thought "the great lesson." Instead, he was himself being whirled through space—whither? "I love her!" he said to himself, tears in his eyes and tears and fears in his heart. "This is not like the others—not at all—not at all. I love her, and I am afraid." And then there came to him a memory—a vision—a girl whom he had taught "the great lesson" years before; she had disappeared when he grew tired—or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, when he had exhausted for the time the capacity of his nerves; for how can a man grow tired of what he never had?—and the rake kills the bird for the one feather in its crest. At any rate, he sent her away; he was seeing now the look in her eyes, as she went without a murmur or a sigh. And he was understanding at last what that look meant. In the anguish of an emotion like remorse, yet too selfish, perhaps, too self-pitying for remorse, he muttered, "Forgive me. I didn't know what I was doing."

The vision faded back to the oblivion from which it had so curiously emerged. He glanced at Neva again, with critical eyes, like a surgeon diagnosing stolidly his own desperate wound. She was, or seemed to be, busy at her easel. He could study her, without interruption. He made slow, lingering inventory of her physical charms—beauties of hair and skin and contour, beauties of bosom's swell and curve of arm and slant of hip and leg. No, it was not in any of these, this supreme charm of her for him. Where then?

For the first time he saw it. He had been assuming he was regarding her as he had regarded every other woman in the long chain his memory was weaving from his experiences and was coiling away to beguile his days of the almond tree and the bated sound of the grinding. And he had esteemed these women at their own valuation. It was the fashion for women to profess to esteem themselves, and to expect to be esteemed, for reasons other than their physical charms. But Boris, searcher into realities, held that only those women who by achievement earn independence as a man earns it, have title to count as personalities, to be taken seriously in their professions. He saw that the women he knew made only the feeblest pretense to real personal value other than physical; they based themselves upon their bodies alone. So, women had been to him what they were to themselves—mere animate flesh.

He attached no more importance—beyond polite fiction—than did they themselves to what they thought and felt; it was what men thought of their persons, what feelings their persons roused in men—that is, in him. And he meted out to them the fate they expected, respected him the more for giving them; when they ceased to serve their sole purpose of ornament or plaything he flung them away, with more ceremony, perhaps, but with no less indifference than the emptied bottles of the scent he imported in quantity and drenched himself with.

But he saw the truth about Neva now—saw why, after the few first weeks of their acquaintance, he had not even been made impatient by her bad days—the days when her skin clouded, her eyes dimmed, her hair lost its luster, and the color, leaving her lips, seemed to take with it the dazzling charm of her blue-white teeth. Why? Because her appeal to his senses was not so strong as her appeal to— He could not tell what it was in him this inner self of hers appealed to. Heart? Hardly; that meant her physical beauty. Intellect? Certainly not that; intellect rather wearied him than otherwise, and the sincerest permanent longing of his life was to cease from thinking, to feel, only to feel—birds, flowers, perfumed airs, the thrill of winds among grasses and leaves, sunshine, the play of light upon women's hair, the ecstasy of touch drifting over their smooth, magnetic bodies. No, it was neither her intellect nor her heart, any more than it was her loveliness. Or, rather, it was all three, and that something more which makes a man happy he knows not why and cares not to know why.

"I would leave anyone else to come to her," he said to himself. "And if anyone else lured me away from her, it would be only for the moment; I would know I should have to return to her, as a dog to its master." He repeated bitterly, mockingly, "As a dog to its master. That's what it means to be artist—more woman than man, and more feminine than any woman ever was."

He stood behind her, looking at her work. "You'd better stop for to-day," he said presently. "You're only spoiling what you did yesterday."

"So I am," said she.

She put down palette and brushes with a sigh and a shrug. When she turned, he stood his ground and looked into her eyes. "I've been letting outside things come between me and my work," she went on, pretending to ignore his gaze.

"You guessed my secret a few minutes ago?" he asked.