Light-Fingered Gentry

by David Graham Phillips

A week, almost to the minute, and he came again. She received him exactly as before—like an old acquaintance. She had to do the talking; he could only look and listen and marvel. "I certainly wasn't so stupid," he said to himself, "that I wouldn't have noticed her if she had had eyes like these, or such teeth, or that form, or that beautiful hair." He would have suspected that she had been at work with the beauty specialists who, he had heard, were doing a smashing business among the women, had he not seen that her manners, her speech, the use of her voice, everything about her was in keeping with her new physical appearance; she had expanded as symmetrically as a well-placed sapling. The change had clearly come from within. There was a new tenant who had made over the whole house, within and without.

What seemed to him miracle was, like all the miracles, mysterious only because the long chain of causes and effects between beginning and end was not visible. There probably never lived a human being to whom fate permitted a full development of all his possibilities—there never was a perfect season from seed-time to harvest. The world is one vast exhibit of imperfect developments, physical, mental, moral; and to get the standard, the perfection that might be, we have to take from a thousand specimens their best qualities and put them together into an impossible ideal—impossible as yet. For one fairly well-rounded human being, satisfying to eye and mind and heart, we find ten thousand stunted, blighted, blasted. Each of us knows that, in other, in more favorable, in less unfavorable circumstances, he would have been far more than he is or ever can be. But for Boris, Neva might have gone through life, not indeed as stunted a development as she had been under the blight of her unfortunate marriage, but far from the rounded personality, presenting all sides to the influences that make for growth and responding to them eagerly. Heart, and his younger brother, Mind, are two newcomers in a universe of force. They fare better than formerly; they will fare better hereafter; but they are still like infants exposed in the wilderness. Some fine natures have enough of the tough fiber successfully to make the fight; others, though they lack it, persist and prevail by chance—for the brute pressure of force is not malign; it crushes or spares at haphazard. Again, there are fine natures—who knows? perhaps the finest of all, the best minds, the best hearts—that either cannot or will not conform to the conditions. They wither and die—not of weakness, since in this world of the survival of the fittest, the fit are often the weak, the unfit the strong. All around us they are withering, dying, like the good seed cast on stony ground—the good minds, the good hearts, the men and women needing only love and appreciation and encouragement, to shine forth in mental, moral, and physical beauty. Of these had been Neva.

Boris, with eyes that penetrated all kinds of human surfaces and revealed to him the realities, had seen at first glance what she was, what she could be, what she was longing and striving to be against the wellnigh hopeless handicaps of shyness and inexperience and solitude. For his own sybarite purposes, material and selfish, from mere wanton appetite, he set his noble genius to helping her; and the creative genius finds nothing comparable in interest to the development of the human plant, to watching it sprout and put forth leaves, blossoms, flowers, perfume, spread into an individuality.

Every day there was some progress; and now and then, as in all nature, there were days when overnight a marvelous beautiful change had occurred. In scores on scores of daily conversations, between suggestions or instructions as to painting, much of the time consciously, most effectively and most often unconsciously, never with patronage or pedantry, he encouraged and trained her to learn herself, the world, the inner meaning of character and action—all that distinguishes fine senses from coarse, the living from the numb, all that most of us pass by as we pass a bank of wild flowers—with no notion of the enchanting history each petal spreads for whoever will read. Boris cleared away the weeds; he softened the soil; he gave the light and the air access. And she grew.

But Armstrong had no suspicion of this. Indeed, if he had been told that Boris Raphael, cynic and rake, had been about such an apparently innocent enterprise, he would have refused to believe it; for the Raphael temperament, the temperament that is soft and savage, sympathetic to the uttermost refinement of delicacy and appreciation, and hard and cruel as death, was quite beyond his comprehension. Armstrong, looking at Neva, saw only the results, not the processes; and he could scarcely speak for marvel, as he sat, watching and listening. "May I come again?" he asked, when he felt he must stay no longer.

"I'm usually at home after five."

Her tone was conventional—alarmingly so. With a pleading gesture of both hands outstretched and a youthful flush and frank blue eyes entreating, he burst out, "I have no friends—only people who want to get something out of me—or whom I want to get something out of. Can't you and I be friends?"

She turned abruptly away to the window. It was so long before she answered that he nerved himself for an overwhelming refusal of his complete, even abject surrender with its apology for the past, the stronger and sincerer that it was implied and did not dare narrow itself to words. When she answered with a hesitating, "We might try," he felt as happy as if she had granted all he was concealing behind that request to be tolerated. He continued in the same tone of humility, "But your life is very different from mine. I feared— And you yourself— I can't believe we were ever—anything to each other."

There was her opportunity; she did not let it slip. She looked straight into his eyes. "We never were," she said, and her eyes piercing him from their long, narrow lids and deep shadowing lashes forbade him ever to forget it again.

He returned her gaze as if mesmerized. Finally, "No, we never were," he slowly repeated after her. And again, "We never were," as if he were learning a magic password to treasures beyond those of the Forty Thieves.