"An artist ought never to marry. I will always say that."
I began to wonder if that were true, if Cecelia Brune were not after all the wiser. We beat back and forth on the subject for the time that I kept Jerry with me. The evening of the second day came a telegram. Jealousy tearing at the heart of poor little Mrs. McDermott had torn away the young life that nestled there.
Jerry wrote me later that the baby had breathed and died and that his wife was likely to be ill a long time. In view of the extra expense incurred, I didn't feel that I ought to ask him for the loan I was now so desperately in need of.
It was about this time that Griffin and I began to avoid one another about meal time. I have read how wild animals in sickness turn their backs on one another; one must in unrelievable misery ... we dodged in and out of our hall rooms like rabbits in a warren. And then suddenly we would meet and walk along the streets together, mostly at night when the alternate flare of the lamps and the darkness and the hurrying half-seen forms, numb the sense like the flicker of light on a hypnotist's screen, and we moved in a strange, incommunicable world out of which no help reached us. We saw women go by with the price of our redemption flashing at their breasts or in their hair. We saw men hurried, overburdened with work, and there was no work for us. In our own land we were exiled from the community of labour and we sighed for it more than the meanest Siberian prisoner for home. And then suddenly communication seemed to be reëstablished. Effie for no reason sent me half of the rent money. "I don't need it here, and I think maybe I shall get more out of it by investing it in you," she wrote. She had always such a way of making the thing she did seem the choice of her soul. I bought meat and vegetables and invited Griff to dinner. He took me that night to that sort of dreary entertainment known as musical comedy. He could often get tickets and it was a way of spending the evening that saved fuel. As we tramped back through the chill, trying for an effect of jocularity in his voice, so that he might seem to have made a joke in case I shouldn't like, Griff said to me.
"I suppose you wouldn't go with a musical comedy?"
"My dear Griff," I answered him in the same tone, "I'd go with a flying trapeze if only it paid enough."
"I'm acquainted with Lowe, the tenor. I've been thinking I'd ask him——" We were as shy of speaking of an engagement as though it were wild game to be scared away by the mere mention of it.
There was no reason why Griffin shouldn't have succeeded in musical comedy, he had a fairish voice and had turned his gift as many times as the minister's wife in Higgleston used to turn her black silk. It was not more than two days or three after that, as I was coming back to my cold room in the twilight—I had spent the day in the public library on account of the heat—and as I was fumbling at the lock as I had been that first evening he had spoken to me, I heard Leon Griffin come up the stair three steps at a time, and I knew before I heard it in his voice, that the times had turned for him. I struck out fiercely against a sudden blankness that seemed to swim up to the eyes and throat of me.
He was trembling too as he came into the room.
"Olive," he cried, "Olive, I've turned the trick. I'm going with the 'Flim-Flams.'" That was the wretched piece we had seen together. He had never called me by my name before, and I had no mind to correct him. In the dusk he ran on about his engagement; they would go on the road presently and settle for the summer in some city. I heard him speak far from me. I was down, down in the pit of the cold room with the shabby furniture and the bleak light that disdained it from the one high window.