Broken Butterflies

by Henry W. Kinney

Then, Karsten came to his aid unexpectedly. They were smoking after dinner. Nothing much was being said. Karsten was wandering up and down the floor, chewing the stem of his pipe. Suddenly he blurted out, apropos of nothing whatever, pipe-stem waving in the direction of Kent:

"I say, Kent, mind you, I am not trying to intrude on your affairs, but, I just wonder, have you ever mentioned to Miss Elliott anything about your wife, anything about your being married?"

"What? What's that?" He was gaping at him surprised, fish-like. "I say, old man, what in the devil are you driving at, anyway?"

He had been thinking of Sylvia just then, forcing his mind to travel wearily over the same old ground, trying to discover some tangible foothold from which to gain his way out from the baffling intangibility, the vagueness of it all. Karsten's question was right in line with his thoughts, fitted in as a marvelously apposite thing, as if he had been trying to work out a fretwork puzzle and Karsten had, by some surprising intuition, dumped before him one of the pieces for which he had been looking to effect the solution. He shook himself together. It seemed as if he must know something, have some idea, anyway, some kind of factor which might aid in puzzling it all out.

He repeated, "And what are you driving at, anyway?" Absurdly, he felt his chest contracting, the pulses in his temples swelling. He had no business to be so excited.

"Well, I was wondering. I came across the fag end of a bit of gossip to-day at the Imperial. Old Mrs. Tinker, the chief lady cat, you know, called me over to her table, at tea. She doesn't usually so favor me, you know. She's had enough to say about my foibles, what she could find out and what she could imagine. But she simply couldn't contain herself. She had just gotten hold of something that was too good to keep, that she must get off her chest to some one, any one, I fancy, and then I was your friend. I must have been just like a find. Maybe the old lady has some kind of rudimentary, perverted sense of the dramatic—or she may have hoped to get something more in the way of detail out of me. Anyway, she was full with it right up to the neck. She couldn't even show a bit of finesse. She just blurted it at me. She knew, of course, that you were a great friend of mine, and of Sylvia Elliott's, and that you were a man of honor, a gentleman. She took pains to repeat that, several times. But she wondered, she said, 'You know I'm an old woman,' she said, and God knows, she spoke the truth for once in her life. She wondered, the dear old soul, whether you had realized that with a young, innocent girl like Sylvia—And then it came again, like a refrain; she kept saying it, she must have said it a dozen times, 'I am an old woman, you know,' but she wondered, the foul old beast, whether you could really perceive the seriousness of it, the woeful consequences of toying with the affections of an 'innocent girl.' You know how such an old woman can say it so it becomes almost an insult. Good God, even the worst of us have a pride in taking the innocence of such a girl for granted, but such an old cat can contrive to use the term with the most insidious innuendo. Why the devil do our absurd rules of conduct prevent one from kicking an old beast like that. I felt like doing it more than I've ever done it with respect to any man. But there I must stand, deferentially, with a teacup waving in my hand, with a show of courtesy, while she meandered on. You know, it strikes me that such an absolutely useless old woman, an encumbrance on earth, with no apparent purpose than that of making it a worse place to live in for all the rest of us, can, while employing apparently all the ordinary polite phraseology of courteous intercourse, produce more of an effect of the most vicious foulness than can the most common harlot or the roughest obscenity of a salt-water second mate. By the gods, it seems to me——"

"Yes, and when you get through cussing old lady Tinker, I'd be obliged to know what the deuce it was all about." Generally Kent enjoyed Karsten's vivid circumambience, but now it seemed to him almost irritatingly studied, as if the other were playing him, like a fish. "Get on with your tale." He felt that the elusive thing, the explanation which he had been ransacking heaven and earth for, was at last within hand's reach.

"Yes, of course, I beg your pardon. Well, the long and the short of it was that the old girl had been informed that you had not told—that you had taken pains not to tell, was the way she put it, with that sickly, kindly, leering smile which she affects—that you were married. Oh, yes, she had just heard of it. And I was a friend of yours, and didn't I think that we older people—the smile again—just like that, she and I in the same category, hand in hand—I'd given a thousand yen for the privilege of heaving my tea in her face, hot tea—but would it not be best if you were spoken to about it, given a hint, though—you could see the satisfaction she got from spitting forth the full load of venom she had been gathering from the start—she was happy to know that Miss Elliott had been informed, fully informed, from a reliable source, most reliable, in fact, from the very source from which she, herself, had her information.

"And then she let me go. It must have seemed a good day's work to her, letting loose that bit of trouble on the world. I can imagine her sitting at home now, with her cat, or her parrot or whatever she has got, and turning that bit of mischief over in her mind, cocking her head on one side and scheming how she may elaborate on it, add a few details, artistic touches, and where she may carry her tale to-morrow where it may have the most effect. And, by the way, I wondered at the time who her source of information might be, and it struck me—she had just been sitting with that red-headed Wilson girl from the American Auto Company, the two of them with their heads together thick as thieves—I was wondering whether she might not be the serpent. Do you know her?"

So that was it. For the moment Kent was confused by a clash of conglomerate emotions; relief that, petty as the whole thing was, he at least knew now the exact state of affairs, had gained a foothold whence he might find his way out of the wilderness of uncertainty—and then, on the other hand, the abominable, spiteful malignity of that girl, that Wilson individual. Flashed into his mind the incident at the dance on board the Tenyo Maru, and his intuitive premonition that from the incidentally aroused enmity of this woman would come eventually a venomous sting of malice.