“How it happened was like this: A long, long time later, I worked through a part of one winter in a popular-priced upstairs clothing concern, posing in the window as a wax figure wearing the latest thing in business suits. All I had to do,” he explained with another of his gentle, bubbling laughs, “was put on a heavy makeup, that I learned how to do once from an actor I roomed with. Then I dressed up and walked out into the window. I would strike a pose and hold it fifteen or twenty minutes, standing without moving. When I broke the pose, half the people out in the street would be standing there with their mouths open.” He smiled, a look of great happiness and light in his wasted face. “They paid me ten dollars a week. I lived on stew and doughnuts, and slept a part of the time in a sort of dormitory where the beds were twenty-five cents a night, with special inducements if taken by the week.”
The man seemed all aglow and under the sway of eternal forces. Indeed, as the excitement of narrative grew upon him he began to show even a tiny flush across his sunken cheeks, which had become at length so grey and sere. His eyes were bright and a little wild, as with fever.
King seemed eager that she should know what his life had been—just as at first he had bowed to her silent mandate that only what was fine and romantic in it need matter. He kept exclaiming: “Isn’t it beautiful?” And she could do nothing but sit there and listen, while, on his serene and breathless heights he tore the veil from a heart which had so long been shut away in a realm of glamorous mystery.
II
“It lasted nearly all one winter,” he went on. “Then I lost this good place because the daughter of the managing director got crazy about me. She was a pretty little doll,” he laughed, musingly, “and I guess I might have done a whole lot worse than marry her. But you see I was nobody, with a salary of only ten dollars a week, and anyhow, I wasn’t in love with the girl. But she made such a commotion that they decided it would be good thing to get me out of the way.”
His look was eager, yet always serene, and he kept rocking gently. To Stella there seemed in him a horrid new fascination as he hurled forth at her, though so softly and from so cloud-kissed an elevation, this startling avalanche of words. She listened to him with hot flushes. And she could not bid him stop till he had poured out all his heart to her; she could not deprive herself of a single bitter drop.
“After that,” he continued, “I decided to go to Rochester, because I’d found some items in the help wanted columns that looked pretty good. Moving,” he smiled in lambent appreciation, “was no great matter. I didn’t even have a trunk. I just put my things in a paper suitcase and got on the train. In Rochester I found work in a shoe store. It didn’t take me long to catch on, and it turned out to be a very good thing.”
Indeed, it turned out, in quite short order, that fitting shoes was King’s genuine calling. Business actually increased—especially on the feminine side of the establishment. “Ladies came,” he said, with an effect of quiet drollness, “who needed shoes no more than they needed elephants.” There seemed to be a peculiar and overwhelming thrill about the mere way he knelt before them in his superbly fitting clothes. But the odd part of it all was that this enormous fascination was just as natural and spontaneous in him as eating or walking. He became, in a short time, a kind of shoe-fitting matinée idol.
Stella made a vague gesture, but it did not amount to an interruption. She had merely come to a last little climax in her immense disillusion. Almost without realizing it during the past months, with everything else torn asunder in her life, Stella had faintly clung to the thought that there was an aura of martyrdom playing out from her position. Other women before her had married men who, like Ferdinand, had fallen victims to drug. A man might be very brilliant, even an actual prince, for that matter, and still destroy himself with opium. But now the last ounce of sentimental comfort was drowned in her soul by this sudden outburst of confession—which yet was no confession surely, so far as the radiant being before her was concerned. (“It’s all beautiful—isn’t it!” he murmured.) And she saw with an eye of entire disenchantment at last that the man she had married had once been a wax figure in a clothing window, and then a shoe clerk. How could she think of herself as a martyr after that?
“I liked to hang around hotel lobbies and bars,” he said. “I would drift around with swells and imagine I was one of them. In the back of my head somewhere I was always figuring—I even had some sort of idea that I might meet somebody some day who would give me a boost.”