With a desire keener than the hunger of the famishing for respectability and the privilege of living open-eyed and honestly before all men, I was forced, from the night of that first visit to Agatha Geddis, to lead a wretched, fear-frozen, double existence. On my return to Cripple Creek after the interview which I have just detailed, I swore roundly that I would stop going to the Everton's; that, come what might, Polly should never be dragged into the horrible morass of degradation which I saw clearly, even at that bare beginning, was waiting to engulf me.
But at best, a man is only a man, human in his desires, human in his powers of resistance; and a man in love can rarely be a complete master of circumstances. Though I had been holding back, both for Barrett's sake and because of my own wretched handicap, it soon became apparent that I had gone too far to be able to retreat with honor; that Polly Everton's name had already been coupled with mine in the gossip of the great gold camp; and that—if what Barrett had said were true—Polly herself had to be considered.
So the double life began and continued. In Cripple Creek I was Mary Everton's lover; in Denver I was Agatha Geddis's bondman and slave. Oftener and oftener, as the winter progressed, the business of the mine took me to the capital; and Agatha never let me escape. One time it would be a theater party, at which I would be obliged to meet her friends; people who, as I soon learned, were of the ultra fast set. At another it would be a driving party to some out-of-town resort with the same, or a worse, crowd; midnight banquetings, with champagne in the finger-bowls, cocktails to go before and after, and quite likely some daring young woman to show us a new dance, with the cleared dinner-table for a stage. Many times I tried to dodge; to slip into Denver on the necessary business errand and out again before the newspapers could publish my arrival. It was no use. That woman's ingenuity, prescience, intuition—whatever it may be called, was simply devilish. Before I could turn around, my summons would find me, and I had to obey or take the consequences.
Now and again I rebelled, even as the poorest worm will turn if it be sufficiently trodden upon; but that, too, was useless. My tormentor held me in a grip of steel. Worse than all, the dog's life she was leading me caused me to lose all sense of proportion. As a choice between two evils, a return to prison would have been far more endurable than this indefinite sentence of degradation Agatha Geddis was making me serve. But I could not see this: all I could see was that this woman had the power to make a total wreck of all that I had builded. The larger fact that I was myself the principal contributor to the wreck, helping it on by the time-serving course I was pursuing, did not lay hold of me.
One night, or rather early one morning, when I had taken her home from a road-house revel so shameful that the keeper of the place had practically turned us out, I asked her where all this was to end.
"Perhaps it will end when I have taught you how to make love to me again," she returned flippantly.
"And if I refuse to learn?"
Her smile was no longer alluring; it was mockingly triumphant.
"You can't keep it up indefinitely—with the Cripple Creek girl, I mean, Bertie"—she still called me "Bertie" or "Herbert" when we were alone together. "Sooner or later, she is going to find out what you are doing to her; and after that, the fireworks."
I shook my head. "It is hard to decide, sometimes, Agatha, whether you are a woman or merely a she-devil in woman's shape."