“You have been yourself, Luce, and since the world is always conspiring against such an arbitrary occurrence, you can give yourself a bewildered congratulation,” he told her, gayly.
Without understanding his words she had felt the presence of defiant sounds which had cheered her. During the next two weeks, as he remained with her each night, he reflected upon the possible melodrama that lurked just outside of his visits.
“If her husband suddenly returns and finds me with her he’ll want to kill me,” he said to himself once, as though he welcomed the idea. “He’ll feel that only my death could heal his injured vanity—vermilion medicine!—but, of course, instead of admitting that to himself he’ll find an accommodating phrase to hide the actual motive, such as ‘avenging his honor,’ ‘killing a treacherous hound,’ ‘defending the family,’ etc. The newspapers are full of such charming episodes, well fortified by words, for without words to obliterate his motives man would perish in a day. Melodrama is the only real sincerity that life holds—the one surprising directness in a world of false and prearranged contortions. Perhaps I could ravish my fears and welcome it. I don’t know, and no one can until it actually arrives.”
But the two weeks died without the blundering interruption of drama, and Lucy and Carl parted on the last morning with a chuckling stoicism—tears and the syllables of laughter are always similar—the madcap protest of a last kiss—lips and tongues intent upon a future compensation—and a final flitting of hands. They had slapped in the face a violent shadow known as life and now it would take a fancifully piercing revenge. They had attained a quality known as bravery—a quality that is only fear rising to a moment and effectively sneering at itself.
CHAPTER XII.
Carl returned to the minor, suavely gesturing groups of hypocrites in the city in which he lived, and in going back to this “art and literary world” he had the feeling of one who had deserted a strong valley of desire to enter a stilted room filled with imitation orchids, valiantly empty words, and malice dressed in clumsy, velvet costumes. This reaction was still dominating him as he sat, one afternoon, in the office of a magazine called “Art and Life,” perched upon a window-sill and looking down at the black and dwarfed confusion of a street.
This office was a gathering place for several young writers, each of whom fondled his pet rebellion against conservative standards, and they clustered around the anxiously seraphic face of Martha Apperson, the young editor, and seriously fought for the treason of her smiles. She was a tall, sturdily slender woman with a blithely symmetrical swerve to her body, and the natural pinkness of her face parted into the curves of a lightly distressed and virginal doll. Her blue-gray eyes were looking at life with a startled incredulity—the gaze of one who has been tempted to regard a sometimes merry, but more often vaguely sorrowful picture-puzzle. Life to her was a rapidly taunting mixture of glints, hints, undertones, surface blooms, fleeting tints, portentous shadows with little shape to them, broken images, and misty heights, and she was forever trying to lure them all into a cohesive whole by striding from one philosophy and creed to another, adding another stride every three or four months. At such times she would appear at her office and enthusiastically assure her audience that she had finally accomplished the almost obscene miracle of penetrating the depths of human existence. She had started her magazine as a strident protest against “the people who live conventionally, steeped in a vicious comfort that binds their imaginations and ruins their legs and arms,” and its pages made an awkwardly weird combination of sophomoric revolts, longings for “beauty and splendor”—those easily bought thrones for the importance of youth—and enraged yelps against traditions and conventions, with here and there a more satirically detached note from Carl and two other men. Carl knew that he wanted her body because it was the only mystery that she seemed to possess and because he wondered whether it might not be able to make her thoughts less obvious. Her mind was a stumbling jest to him and her jerkily volatile pretences of emotion failed to cleave him.
He began to turn his eyes impatiently toward the office door. Martha had left him in charge, promising to return in an hour, but he knew that her hours were frequently afternoons as she cavorted around the city, throwing out miniature whirlwinds of appeals for money and attention. In a corner of the office stood a huge photograph of her latest god—a middle-aged, hawk-faced lecturer from England—that fertile land from whence all lecturers flow—a man who had recently startled the city by speaking on Oscar Wilde, dressed in a black robe and standing in a chamber dimly disgraced by candles, incense, and muslin poppies. The theatrically savage features of this man rested beneath a framed letter from a prominent writer—one of those abortions in which the great man tells a small magazine that he earnestly hopes that it will amount to something and believes that it can accomplish a great purpose if it pursues the ideals which have illuminated his work. Carl’s eyes sought this framed joke for the hundredth time, since his mood needed such artificial humor to make it less aware of itself, and at this moment Martha came with the rapid gait of one who is returning to vast and uncompleted tasks, although her day’s labors were at an end. This was not a pose but merely a bouncing overabundance of energy. With her was Helen Wilber, a young disciple who scarcely ever left her side. Helen had fled from a wealthy family in another city and traded her debutante’s excuse for the more fanciful robe of an ecstatic pilgrim starting to ascend from the base of veiled mountains of expression. She darted about on errands and interviews and felt the humble fervors of a novice—a tall, heavy girl with a long, soberly undeveloped face and abruptly turned features that were garlanded with freckles. She had made a fine art of her determination to persuade herself that she was masculine, giving it the intense paraphernalia of stolen words and gestures, but beneath her dubiously mannish attire and desperately swinging limbs the desires of an average woman were feebly questioning the validity of her days. She greeted Carl with her usual ringing assumption of boyishness.
“Hello, old top! Been waiting long?”
“Not as long as I expected to wait, considering Martha’s superb indifference to the impudence of time. Well, Martha, how have you been insulting actualities—with your usual crescendoes of insanity?”