Light-Fingered Gentry

by David Graham Phillips

Armstrong sent Neva a prompt telegram of sympathy and inquiry. He got a telegraphed reply—her thanks and the statement that her father was desperately ill, but apparently not in immediate danger. He wrote her about the highly satisfactory turn in his affairs; to help him to ease, he tried to dismiss herself and himself, but at every sentence he had to stem again the feeling that this letter would be read where he was remembered as the sort of person it made him hot with shame to think he had ever been. He waited two weeks; no answer. Again he wrote—a lover's appeal for news of her. Ten days, and she answered, ignoring the personal side of his letter, simply telling how ill her father was, what a long struggle at best it would be to save him. Armstrong saw that nursing and anxiety were absorbing all her time and thought and strength. He wrote a humble apology for having annoyed her, asked her to write him whenever she could, if it was only a line or so.

Two more increasingly restless weeks, and he telegraphed that he was coming. She telegraphed an absolute veto, and in the first mail came a letter that was the more crushing because it was calm and free from bitterness. "In this quiet town," wrote she, "where so little happens, you know how they remember and brood and become bitter. What is past and forgotten for us is still very vivid to him and magnified out of all proportion. Please do not write again, until you hear from me."

Thus, he learned that his worst fears were justified. If she had shown that, in the home atmosphere again, she was seeing him as formerly, he could have protested, argued, appealed. But how strive against her duty to her sick, her dying father whose generous friendship he had ruthlessly betrayed and whose life he had embittered? He debated going to Battle Field and seeing Mr. Carlin and asking forgiveness. But such an agitating interview would probably hasten death, even if he could get admittance; besides, he remembered that Frederic Carlin, slow to condemn, never forgave once he had condemned. "He feels toward me as I'd feel in the same circumstances. I have got only what I deserve." No judgments are so terrible as those that are just.

The state of Armstrong's mind so preyed upon him that it affected even his giant strength and health, and his friends urged him to take a vacation. He worked only the harder, because in work alone could he get any relief whatever from the torments of his remorse and his baffled love. He became morose, given to bursts of unreasonable anger. "Success is turning his head," was the general opinion. "He's getting to be a tyrant, like the others." In some moods, he saw the lessons of gentleness and forbearance in the fate his selfish arrogance had brought upon him; but it is not in the nature of men of strong individuality and unbroken will to practice such lessons. The keener his sufferings, the bitterer, the harder he became. And soon he began to feel that there was nearly if not quite a quittance of the balance between him and the man he had wronged. He convinced himself that, if Neva's father were dead, he could speedily win her. "Meanwhile," he reflected, "I must take my punishment"; and with the stolid, unwhimpering endurance of those whose ancestors have through countless generations been schooled in the fields, the forests, and the camps, he waited for the news that would mean the end of his expiation.

Raphael, taking his walk in Fifth Avenue late one afternoon instead of in Central Park, saw him in a closed motor in the halted mass of vehicles at the Forty-second Street crossing. Boris happened to be in his happiest mood. Always the philosopher, he was too catholic in his interests and tastes to permit disappointment in any one direction or even in many directions to close the other avenues to the joy of life. There were times when he could not quite banish the shadows which the thought of death cast over him—death, so exasperating to men of pride and imagination because, of all their adversaries, it alone cannot be challenged or compromised. But on that day, Boris had only the sense of life, life at its best, with the sun bright and not too warm, with the new garb of nature and of womankind radiantly fresh, and the whole world laughing because the winter had been vanquished once more. As his all-observing eyes noted Armstrong's profile, his face darkened. There was for him, in that profile, rugged, stern, inflexible, a challenge of the basis of his happiness.

In all his willful life Boris had never wanted anything so intensely, so exclusively as he wanted Neva. Every man who falls in love with a woman feels that he is her discoverer, that he has a property right securely based upon discovery. Raphael's sense of his right to Neva was far stronger; it was the creator's sense. Had he not said, "Let there be beauty and light and capacity to give and receive love"? And had not these wonders sprung into existence before his magic? True, the beauty and the light and the power to give and to receive were different both in kind and in degree from what he had commanded. But that did not alter his right. And this Armstrong, this coarse savage who would take away his Galatea to serve in a vulgar, sooty tent of barbaric commerce— The very sight of Armstrong set all his senses on edge, as if each were being assailed by its own particular abhorrence.

That day the stern, inflexible profile somehow struck into him the same chill that always came at the thought of death with its undebatable "must." Yet there was in his pocket, at the very moment, warming his heart like a flagon of old port, a long letter from Neva, a confidential letter, full of friendly, intimate things about herself, her anxieties, her hopes, and fears; and she asked him to stop off on his way to or from his lectures before the Chicago art students. "Narcisse is here," she wrote. "She will be leaving about that time, she says, and if you stop on your way, she and you can go back together. How I wish I could go, too! Not until I settled down here did I appreciate what you—and New York—had done for me. Yet I had thought I did. Do stop off here. It will be so good to see you, Boris."

As he looked at Armstrong's profile, he laid his hand on his coat over the letter and remembered that sentence—"It will be so good to see you." But the shadow would not depart. That profile persisted; he could not banish it.

When he descended from the train at the Battle Field station and saw Neva, with Narcisse beside her in a touring car, he saw that ominous profile, plain as if Armstrong were there, too. This, though Neva's welcome was radiantly bright. "What's the matter, Boris?" cried Narcisse, climbing to the seat beside the chauffeur before Neva could prevent. "Get in beside your hostess and cheer up. You ought to look like a clear sunrise. The lecture was a triumph. I read two whole columns of it aloud to Neva and her father this morning. No cant. No hypocrisy. They agreed with me that your art ideas are like an island in the boundless ocean of flap-doodle."

"My father used to sell bananas from a cart in Chicago," said Boris, "and we lived in the cellar where he ripened them."