Infatuation

by Lloyd Osbourne

Of all human gifts surely that of loving has received the least general recognition. A genius for music, a genius for mathematics or natural history, or sculpture, or mechanics, is at once admitted and acclaimed. But what of a genius for loving, which of all is infinitely the rarest? The trouble is that every one is conceited enough to think that he (or she) is a wonder at it. But frankly, do we really indeed see so many love-geniuses about us? Are we not rather struck instead by an almost universal love-poverty? If the husband stays drearily at home every night of his life, and if the wife is entirely absorbed in the baby, are we not asked enthusiastically to applaud a happy home? This is the national ideal, and tens of thousands are yawning heroically through it. But where's love in any but half-pint sizes? Everybody insists it is there in barrelfuls, much as they insisted in the fairy tale in the case of the man with the invisible clothes.--We are not defending hubby when he gets tangled up with the blonde lady, but emotionally speaking (only emotionally, be it understood), it may be an upward step. If you have a ten per cent. capacity to love, it is hard to be fobbed off with a four per cent. partner.

Phyllis was one of the chosen few in whom the capacity to love was inordinate. Her one thought was to make herself indispensable to the man to whom she had given herself. Adair was the last thing in her head at night, the first at dawn. Hardly was there an act of hers in which his personality was not a contributing factor. Her insatiable ambition was to please and delight him, and her brain was ever busy to find fresh ways, and improve on the old. Her finesse, her humor, her ardent and tender imagination--all were enlisted to a single end. Passion she had in plenty, for she was of a voluptuous nature, and the blood coursed hotly in her veins--but she had more than that to give him, and was possessed of a thousand captivating arts to ensnare this love that was said to be so elusive, and bind it tight with a myriad silken threads.

It will be asked was Adair worthy of so supreme a devotion? Is it not enough to answer that he was not altogether unworthy? There was a lot of human clay in the creature, and while Phyllis was exerting all her blithe young ardor to keep the altar-fires aflame, he was content to look on lazily, and man-like, take many things for granted. Had she been no better, their love would have run the ordinary course, and perished fast enough on the rocks of habit and satiety. Adair's spiritual side was all but dormant. He was encased in materialism as stoutly as some of us in fat; whatever gropings he had toward higher things were all in the direction of the stage. Feelings he could not initiate himself he took here ready made, and showed almost a genius in their comprehension. He presented a paradox of one who could admirably "get into" any written character, and yet who was wholly unable to "get into" his own.

Phyllis knew much more what laid beneath than he. To her the yearning, troubled, inarticulate soul of the man appealed as pathetically as the sight of some great, ashamed, bearded fellow who had never been taught to read. In the finer sense Adair had never been taught anything. His instincts alone had saved him from being a clod. In his fight up from the bottom he had arrived a good deal splashed with mud; and Phyllis, figuratively speaking, rolled back her sleeves, and set herself to tubbing him.

He was extraordinarily submissive in this respect, extraordinarily grateful and responsive. He made no pretense of hiding his ignorance, but questioned her like a child, and often as artlessly. At thirty-four he was having the universe reconstructed for him, and the process filled him with astonishment. Phyllis read aloud to him from such unheard-of authors as Thackeray, Carlyle, Hardy, Stevenson, and Meredith until these strange names became quite familiar. She could read French, too, translating as she went, while he sat back, profoundly respectful and impressed, his humility tinged with the zest of ownership. Yes, her youth, her beauty, her intelligence, her love, all were his; and as he gazed at her through the haze of his cigar, the words often fell heedlessly on his ear as he felt the mantling of a divine contentment.

Yet he could be very masterful on some matters. Phyllis was not allowed to receive the advances of the company, or to associate with any of its members, a prohibition not a little difficult to obey in the course of their constant traveling together. But if Phyllis shrank from being rude, Adair suffered from no similar delicacy, and was brutally direct in making his wishes plain to his stage companions. It was not only that he feared Lydia de Vere, whose yellowish eyes were full of enmity, and whose powers for mischief he well knew; but in contrast to his dainty wife these theater-people somehow began to strike him as tarnished and common, and he was jealously reluctant to expose her to their familiarities. Intercourse with Phyllis was sharpening his critical faculty; his view-point was insensibly changing; there were even times when he realized his own deficiencies.--Tommy Merguelis was the one exception he made. The lanky young man, when weighed in the new scales, was found to be less wanting than the others. There was something sensitive and refined about Tommy. Ill-health, pins, and years of furniture-polish had been as cleansing fires. He was a humble person who would accept his humble inch and grin gratefully, and not reach out for an ell. Yes, Phyllis might be friends with Tommy.

With them on their travels from town to town went a punching-bag, which Adair inflated and set up as soon as their trunks were unpacked. Every morning, stripped to the waist, Phyllis had to double up her little fists, and start a-pummelling for ten furious minutes. There could be no begging off from this daily rite; it was one of the iron rules of married life; pleadings, caresses, protests all were in vain. An icy bath had to follow, and if she hesitated too long on the brink, or showed too mutinous a row of toes, Adair would jump up, and tumble her in as mercilessly as a boy with a puppy. At night, too, he was no less rigid in regard to her prayers. His own religion was very nebulous. He never prayed himself nor went to church; but apparently that was no reason why Phyllis should be similarly backward. It gave him a peculiar pleasure to see her kneeling beside the bed, her night dress flowing about her slender, girlish body, and her hair drawn back, and held by a circlet of red ribbon. He knew no prettier picture, nor was it without a tender and uplifting value. For it was his name that moved on her lips, and who would not have been proud to send so enchanting a little deputy to plead for one before the Throne of Grace? Then it was that he seemed to love her best; and though all unaware of it, he, too, was praying in the deeper, unspoken language of the heart.

"You've forgotten your prayers!"

"Oh, it was so cold--I thought I wouldn't to-night."

"Jump up!"