THEN SLOWLY, SLOWLY LETTY SANK ON HER KNEES, BOWING HER HEAD ON THE HANDS WHICH DREW HER CLOSER. [[See p. 350]]

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE DUST FLOWER

3

THE DUST FLOWER

Chapter I

It is not often that you see a man tear his hair, but this is exactly what Rashleigh Allerton did. He tore it, first, because of being under the stress of great agitation, and second, because he had it to tear—a thick, black shock with a tendency to part in the middle, but brushed carefully to one side. Seated on the extreme edge of one of Miss Walbrook’s strong, slender armchairs, his elbows on his knees, he dug his fingers into the dark mass with every fresh taunt from his fiancée.

She was standing over him, high-tempered, imperious. “So it’s come to this,” she said, with decision; “you’ve got to choose between a stupid, vulgar lot of men, and me.”

He gritted his teeth. “Do you expect me to give up all my friends?”

“All your friends! That’s another matter. I’m speaking of half a dozen profligates, of whom you seem determined—I must say it, Rash; you force me to it—of whom you seem determined to be one.”

He jumped to his feet, a slim, good-looking, well-dressed figure in spite of the tumbled effect imparted by excitement. “But, good heavens, Barbara, what have I been doing?”

4

“I don’t pretend to follow you there. I only know the condition in which you came here from the club last night.”

He was honestly bewildered. “Came here from the club last night? Why—why, I wasn’t so bad.”

Standing away from him, she twirled the engagement solitaire as if resisting the impulse to snatch it off. “That would be a question of point of view, wouldn’t it? If Aunt Marion hadn’t been here––”

“I’d only had––”

“Please, Rash! I don’t want to know the details.”

“But I want you to know them. I’ve told you a dozen times that if I take so much as a cocktail or a glass of sherry I’m all in, when another fellow can take ten times as much and not––”

“Rash, dear, I haven’t known you all my life without being quite aware that you’re excitable. ‘Crazy Rash’ we used to call you when we were children, and Crazy Rash you are still. But that’s not my point.”

“Your point is that that infernal old Aunt Marion of yours doesn’t like me.”

“She’s not infernal, and she’s not old, but it’s true that she doesn’t like you. All the more reason, then, that when she gave her consent to our engagement on condition that you’d give up your disgusting habits––”

He raced away from her to the other side of the room, turning to face her like an exasperated animal at bay.

The room was noteworthy, and of curiously feminine refinement. Expressing Miss Marion Walbrook as it did, it made no provision for the coarse and 5 lounging habits of men, Miss Walbrook’s world being a woman’s world. All was straight, slender, erect, and hard in the way that women like for occasions of formality. It was evident, too, that Miss Walbrook’s women friends were serious, if civilized. There was no place here for the slapdash, smoking girl of the present day.

The tone which caught your eye was that of dusky gold, thrown out first from the Chinese rug in imperial yellow, but reflected from a score of surfaces in rich old satinwood, discreetly mounted in ormolu. On the French-paneled walls there was but one picture, Sargent’s portrait of Miss Walbrook herself, an exquisite creature, with the straight, thin lines of her own table legs and the grace which makes no appeal to men. Not that she was of the type colloquially known as a “back number,” or a person to be ignored. On the contrary, she was a pioneer of the day after to-morrow, the herald of an epoch when the blundering of men would be replaced by superior intelligence.

You must know these facts with regard to Miss Walbrook, the aunt, in order to understand Miss Walbrook, the niece. The latter was not the pupil of the former, since she was too intense and high-handed to be the pupil of anyone. Nevertheless she had caught from her wealthy and public-spirited relative certain prepossessions which guided her points of view.

Without having beauty, Miss Barbara Walbrook impressed you as Someone, and as Someone dressed by the most expensive houses in New York. For beauty her lips were too full, her eyes too slanting, 6 and her delicate profile too much like that of an ancient Egyptian princess. The princess was perhaps what was most underscored in her character, the being who by some indefinable divine right is entitled to her own way. She didn’t specially claim her way; she only couldn’t bear not getting it.

Rashleigh Allerton, being of the easy-going type, had no objection to her getting her own way, but he sometimes rebelled against her manner of taking it. So rebelling now, he tried to give her to understand that he was master.

“If you marry me, Barbe, you’ll have to take me as I am—disgusting habits and all.”

It was the wrong tone, the whip to the filly that should have been steered gently.

“But I suppose there’s no law to compel me to marry you.”

“Only the law of honor.”

Her whole personality was aflame. “You talk of honor!”

“Yes I talk of it. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Do you know anything about it?”

“Would you marry a man who didn’t?”

“I haven’t married any one—as yet.”

“But you’re going to marry me, I presume.”

“Considering the facts, that’s a good deal in the way of presumption, isn’t it?”

They reached the place to which they came once in every few weeks, where each had the impulse to hurt the other cruelly.

“If it’s so much presumption as all that,” he demanded, “what’s the meaning of that ring?”

7

“Oh, I don’t have to go on wearing it.” Crossing the room she pulled it off and held it out toward him “Do you want it back?”

He shrank away from her. “Don’t be a fool Barbe. You may go too far.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of—that I’ve gone too far already.”

“In what way?”

“In the way that’s brought us face to face like this. If I’d never promised to marry you I shouldn’t now have to—to reconsider.”

“Oh, so that’s it. You’re reconsidering.”

“Don’t you see that I have to? If you make me as unhappy as you can before marriage, what’ll it be afterward?”

“And how happy are you making me?”

Holding the ring between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand, she played at putting it back, without doing it. “So there you are! Isn’t that another reason for reconsidering—for both of us?”

“Don’t you care anything about me?”

“You make it difficult—after such an exhibition as that of last night, right before Aunt Marion. Can’t you imagine that there are situations in which I feel ashamed?”

It was then that he spoke the words which changed the current of his life. “And can’t you imagine that there are situations in which I resent being badgered by a bitter-tongued old maid, to say nothing of a girl––” He knew how “crazy” he was, but the habit of getting beyond his own control was one of long standing—“to say nothing of a girl who’s 8 more like an old maid than a woman going to be married.”

With a renewed attempt at being master he pointed at the ring which she was still holding within an inch of its finger. “Put that back.”

“I think not.”

“Then if you don’t––”

“Well—what?”

Plunging his hands into the pockets of his coat, he began tearing up and down the room. “Look here, Barbe. This kind of thing can’t possibly go on.”

“Which is what I’m trying to tell you, isn’t it?”

“Very well, then; we can stop it.”

“Certainly—in one way.”

“The way of getting married, with no more shilly-shallying about it.”

“On the principle that if you’re hanging over a precipice the best thing you can do is to fall.”

He continued to race up and down the room, all nerves and frenzy. “Don’t we care about each other?”

She answered carefully. “I think you care about me to the extent that you believe I’d make a good mistress of the house your mother left you, and which, you say, is like an empty sepulcher. If you didn’t have it on your hands, I don’t imagine it would have occurred to you to ask me.”

“Well, that’s all right. Now what about you?”

“You’ve already answered that question for yourself.” She stiffened haughtily. “I’m an old maid. I haven’t been brought up by Aunt Marion for nothing. I’ve an old maid’s ways and outlooks and habits. I resented your saying it a minute ago, and yet it’s 9 true. I’ve known for years that it was true. It wouldn’t be fair for me to marry any man. So here it is, Rash.” Crossing the floor-space she held out the ring again. “You might as well take it first as last.”

He drew back from her, his features screwed up like those of a tragic mask. “Do you mean it?”

“Do I seem to be making a joke?”

Averting his face, he swept the mere sight of the ring away from him. “I won’t touch the thing.”

“And I can’t keep it. So there!”

It fell with a little shivery sound to a bare spot on the floor, rolling to the edge of a rug, where it stopped. Each looked down at it.

“So you mean to send me to the devil! All right! Just watch and you’ll see me go.”

She was walking away from him, but turned again. “If you mean by that that you put the responsibility for your abominable life on me––”

“Abominable life! Me! Just because I’m not one of the white-blooded Nancies which your aunt thinks the only ones fit to be called men––”

But he couldn’t go on. He was choking. The sole relief to his indignation was in once more tearing round the room, while Miss Walbrook moved to the fluted white mantelpiece, where, with her foot resting on the attenuated Hunt Diedrich andirons she bowed her head against an attenuated Hunt Diedrich antelope in bronze.

She was not softened or repentant. She knew she would become so later; but she knew too that her tempers had to work themselves off by degrees. Their 10 quarrels having hitherto been rendered worth while by their reconciliations, she took it for granted that the same thing would happen once more though, as she expressed it to herself, she would have died before taking the first step. The obvious thing was for him to pick up the ring from off the floor, bring it to her humbly while her back was turned on him, and beseech her to allow him to slip it on where it belonged; whereupon she would consider as to whether she would do so or not. In her present frame of mind, so she told herself, she would not. Nothing would induce her to do anything of the kind. He had betrayed the fact that he knew something as to which she was desperately sensitive, which other people knew, but which she had always supposed to have escaped his observation—that she was like an old maid.

She was. She was only twenty-five, but she had been like an old maid at fifteen. It had been a joke till she was twenty, after which it had continued as a joke to her friends, but a grief to herself. She was distinguished, aristocratic, intellectual, accomplished, and Aunt Marion would probably see to it that she was left tolerably well off; nevertheless she had picked up from her aunt, or perhaps had inherited from the same source, the peculiar quality of the woman who would probably not marry. Because she knew it and bewailed it, it had come like a staggering blow to learn that Rash knew it, and perhaps bewailed it too. The least he could do to atone for that offense would be to beg her, to implore her on his bended knees, to wear his ring again; and she might not do it even then.

The dramatic experience was worth waiting for, 11 however, and so with spirit churning she leaned her hot brow against the thin, cool flank of Hunt Diedrich’s antelope. She knew by the fierce grinding of his steps on the far side of the room that he hadn’t yet picked up the ring; but there was no hurry as to that. Since she would never, never forgive him for knowing what she thought he didn’t know—forgive him in her heart, that was to say—not if she married him ten times over, or to the longest day he lived, there was plenty of time for reaching friendly terms again. Her anger had not yet blown off, nor had she stabbed him hard enough. As with most people subject to storms of hot temper, stabs, given and received, were all in her day’s work. They relieved for the moment the pressure of emotion, leaving no permanent ill-will behind them.

She heard him come to a halt, but did not turn to look at him.

“So it’s all over!”

As a peg on which to hang a retort the words would serve as well as any others. “It seems so, doesn’t it?”

“And you don’t care whether I go to the devil or not?”

“What’s the good of my caring when you seem determined to do it anyhow?”

He allowed a good minute to pass before saying, “Well, if you don’t marry me some other woman will.”

“Very likely; and if you make her a promise to reform I hope you’ll keep your word.”

“She won’t be likely to exact any such condition.”

“Then you’ll probably be happier with her than you could have been with me.”

12

Having opened up the way for him to make some protest to which she could have remained obdurate, she waited for it to come. But nothing did come. Had she turned, she would have seen that he had grown white, that his hands were clenched and his lips compressed after a way he had and that his wild, harum-scarum soul was worked up to an extraordinary intensity; but she didn’t turn. She was waiting for him to pick up the ring, creep along behind her, and seize the hand resting on the mantelpiece, according to the ritual she had mentally foreordained. But without stooping or taking a step he spoke again.

“I picked up a book at the club the other day.”

Not being interested, she made no response.

“It was the life of an English writing-guy.”

Though wondering what he was working up to, she still held her peace.

“Gissing, the fellow’s name was. Ever hear of him?”

The question being direct, she murmured: “Yes; of course. What of it?”

“Ever hear how he got married?”

“Not that I remember.”

“When something went wrong—I’ve forgotten what—he went out into the street with a vow. It was a vow to marry the first woman he met who’d marry him.”

A shiver went through her. It was just such a foolhardy thing as Rashleigh himself was likely to attempt. She was afraid. She was afraid, and yet reangered just when her wrath was beginning to die down.

13

“And he did it!” he cried, with a force in which it was impossible for her not to catch a note of personal implication.

It was unlikely that he could be trying to trap her by any such cheap melodramatic threat as this; and yet––

When several minutes had gone by in a silence which struck her soon as awesome, she turned slowly round, only to find herself alone.

She ran into the hall, but there was no one there. He must have gone downstairs. Leaning over the baluster, she called to him.

“Rash! Rash!”

But only Wildgoose, the manservant, answered from below. “Mr. Allerton had just left the ’ouse, miss.”

14

Chapter II

While Allerton and Miss Walbrook had been conducting this debate a dissimilar yet parallel scene was enacted in a mean house in a mean street on the other side of the Park. Viewed from the outside, the house was one of those survivals of more primitive times which you will still run across in the richest as well as in the poorest districts of New York. A tiny wooden structure of two low stories, it connected with the sidewalk by a flight of steps of a third of the height of the whole façade. Flat-roofed and clap-boarded, it had once been painted gray with white facings, but time, weather, and soot had defaced these neat colors to a hideous pepper-and-salt.

Within, a toy entry led directly to a toy stairway, and by a door on the left into a toy living-room. In the toy living-room a man of forty-odd was saying to a girl of perhaps twenty-three,

“So you’ll not give it up, won’t you?”

The girl cringed as the man stood over her, but pressing her hand over something she had slipped within the opening at the neck of her cheap shirtwaist, she maintained her ground. The face she raised to him was at once terrified and determined, tremulous with tears and yet defiant with some new exercise of will power.

“No, I’ll not give it up.”

“We’ll see.”

15

He said it quietly enough, the menace being less in his tone than in himself. He was so plainly the cheap sport bully that there could have been nothing but a menace in his personality. Flashy male good looks got a kind of brilliancy from a set of big, strong teeth the whiter for their contrast with a black, brigand-like mustache. He was so well dressed in his cheap sport way as to be out of keeping with the dilapidation of the room, in which there was hardly a table or a chair which stood firmly on its legs, or a curtain or a covering which didn’t reek with dust and germs. A worn, thin carpet gaped in holes; what had once been a sofa stood against a wall, shockingly disemboweled. Through a door ajar one glimpsed a toy kitchen where the stove had lost a leg and was now supported by a brick. It was plain that the master of the house was one of those for whom any lair is sufficient as a home as long as he can cut a dash outside.

Quiveringly, as if in terror of a blow, the girl explained herself breathlessly: “The castin’ director sent for me just as I was makin’ tracks for home. He ast me if this was the on’y suit I had. When I ’lowed it was, he just said he couldn’t use me any more till I got a new one.”

The man took the tone of superior masculine knowledge. “That wasn’t nothin’ but bull. What if he does chuck you? I know every movin’ picture studio round N’York. I’ll get you in somewheres else. Come now, Letty. Fork out. I need the berries. I owe some one. I was only waitin’ for you to come home.”

She clutched her breast more tightly. “I gotta have a new suit anyhow.”

16

“Well, I’ll buy you a new suit when I get the bones. Didn’t I give you this one?”

She continued, still breathlessly: “Two years ago—a marked-down misses’ it was even then—all right if I was on’y sixteen—but now when I’m near twenty-three—and it’s in rags anyhow—and all out of style—and in pitchers you’ve gotta be––”

“They’se plenty pitchers where they want that character—to pass in a crowd, and all that.”

“To pass in a crowd once or twice, yes; but when all you can do is to pass in a crowd, and wear the same old rig every time you pass in it––”

He cut her protests short by saying, with an air of finality: “Well, anyhow I’ve got to have the bucks. Can’t go out till I get ’em. So hand!”

With lips compressed and eyes swimming, she shook her head.

“Better do it. You’ll be sorry if you don’t. I can pass you that tip straight now.”

“If you was laughed at every time you stepped onto the lot––”

“There’s worse things than bein’ laughed at. I can tell you that straight now.”

“Nothin’s worse than bein’ laughed at, not for a girl of my age there ain’t.”

Watching his opportunity he caught her off her guard. Her eyes having wandered to the coat she had just taken off, a worn gray thing with edgings of worn gray squirrel fur, he wrenched back with an unexpected movement the hand that clutched something to her breast, thrust two fingers of his other hand within her corsage, and extracted her pay-envelope.

17

It took her by such surprise that she was like a mad thing, throwing herself upon him and battling for her treasure, though any possibility of her getting it back from him was hopeless. It was so easy for him to catch her by the wrists and twist them that he laughed while he was doing it.

“You little cat! You see what you bring on yourself. And you’re goin’ to get worse. I can tell you that straight now.”

Still twisting her arms till she writhed, though without a moan or a cry, he backed her toward the disemboweled sofa, on whose harsh, exposed springs she fell. Then he sprang on her a new surprise.

“How dare you wear them rings? They was your mother’s rings. I bought and paid for ’em. They’re mine.”

“Oh, don’t take them off,” she begged. “You can keep the money––”

“Sure I can keep the money,” he grinned, wrenching from her fingers the plain gold band he had given her mother as a wedding ring, as well as another, bigger, broader, showier, and set with two infinitesimal white points claiming to be diamonds.

Though he had released her hands, she now stretched them out toward him pleadingly. “Aw, give ’em back to me. They’se all I’ve got in the world to care about—just because she wore ’em. You can take anything else I’ve got––”

“All right, then. I’ll take this.”

With a deftness which would have done credit to a professor of legerdemain he unbuckled the strap of her little wrist-watch, putting the thing into his pocket.

18

“I give that to your mother too. You don’t need it, and it may be useful to me. What else have you got?”

She struggled to her feet. He was growing more dangerous than she had ever known him to be even when he had beaten her.

“I ain’t got nothin’ else.”

“Oh, yes, you have. You gotta purse. I seen you with it. Where is it?”

The fear in her eyes sent his toward her jacket, thrown on the chair when she had come in. With an “Ah!” of satisfaction he pounced on it. As he held it upside down and shook it, a little leather wallet clattered to the floor. She sprang for it, but again he was too quick for her.

“So!” he snarled, with his glittering grin. “You thought you’d get it, did you?” He rattled the few coins, copper and silver, into the palm of his hand, and unfolded a one-dollar bill. “You must owe me this money. Who’s give you bed and board for the last ten year, I’d like to know? How much have you ever paid me?”

“Only all I ever earned—which you stole from me.”

“Stole from you, did I? Well, you won’t fling that in my face any more.” He handed her her coat. “Put that on,” he commanded.

“What for?” She held it without obeying the order. “What’s the good o’ goin’ out and me without a cent?”

“Put it on.”

Her lip quivered; she began to suspect his intention. “I do’ wanta.”

“Oh, very well! Please yourself. You got your 19 hat on already.” Seizing her by the shoulders he steered her toward the door. “Now march.”

Though she refused to march, it was not difficult for him to force her.

“This’ll teach you to valyer a good home when you got one. You’ll deserve to find the next one different.”

She almost shrieked: “You’re not going to turn me out?”

“Well, what does it look as if I was doin’?”

“I won’t go! I won’t go! Where can I go?”

“What I’m doin’ ’ll help you to find out.”

He had her now in the entry, where in spite of her struggles he had no difficulty in unlocking the door, pushing her out, and relocking the door behind her.

“Lemme in! Lemme in! Oh, please, lemme in!”

He stood in the middle of the living-room, listening with pleasure and smiling his brigand’s smile. He was not as bad as you might think. He did mean to let her in eventually. His smile and his pleasure sprang purely from the fact that his lesson was so successful. With this in her mind, she wouldn’t withstand him a second time.

She rattled the door by the handle. She beat upon the panels. She implored.

Still smiling, he filled his pipe. Let her keep it up. It would do her good. He remembered that once when he had turned her mother out at night, she had sat on the steps till he let her in at dawn before the police looked round that way. History would repeat itself. The daughter would do the same. He was only giving her the lesson she deserved.

Meanwhile she was experiencing a new sensation, 20 that of outrage. For the first time in her life she was swept by pride in revolt. She hadn’t known that any such emotion could get hold of her. As a matter of fact she hadn’t known that so strong a support to the inner man lay within the depths of human nature. Accustomed to being cowed, she had hardly understood that there was any other way to feel. Only within a day or two had something which you or I would have called spirit, but for which she had no name, disturbed her with unexpected flashes, like those of summer lightning.

While waiting for the camera, for instance, in the street scene in “The Man with the Emerald Eye,” a “fresh thing” had said, with a wink at her companions, “Say, did you copy that suit from a pattern in Chic?”

Letty had so carefully minded her own business and tried to be nice to every one that the titter which went round at her expense hurt her with a wound impelling her to reply, “No; I ordered it at Margot’s. You look as if you got your things there too, don’t you?” Nevertheless, she was so stung by the sarcasm that the commendation she overheard later, that the Gravely kid had a tongue, didn’t bring any consolation.

Without knowing that what she felt now was an intensified form of the same rebellion against scorn, she knew it was not consistent with some inborn sense of human dignity to stand there pleading to be let into a house from which she was locked out, even though it was the only spot on earth she could call home. Still less was it possible when, round the foot of the steps, a crowd began to gather, jeering at her passionate beseechings. For the most part they were children, 21 Slavic, Semitic, Italian. Amid their cries of, “Go it, Sis!” now in English and now in strange equivalents of Latin, or Polish, or even Hebraic origin, she was suddenly arrested by the consciousness of personal humiliation.

She turned from the door to face the street. It was one of those streets not rare in New York which the civic authorities abandon in despair. A gash of children and refuse cut straight from river to Park, it got its chief movement from push-carts of fruit and other foods, while the “wash” of five hundred families blew its banners overhead. Vendors of all kinds uttered their nasal or raucous cries, in counterpoint to the treble screams of little boys and girls.

Letty had always hated it, but it was something more than hatred which she felt for it now. Beyond the children adults were taking a rest from the hawking profession to comment with grins on the sight of a girl locked out of her own home. She was probably a very bad girl to call for that kind of treatment, and therefore one on whom they should spend some derision.

They were spending it as she turned. It was an experience on a large scale of what the girl in the studio had inflicted. She was a thing to be scorned, and of all the hardships in the world scorn, now that she was aware of it, was the one she could least submit to.

So pride came to her rescue. Throwing her coat across her arm she went down the steps, passed through the hooting children, one or two of whom pulled her by the skirt, passed through the bearded 22 Jews, and the bronzed Italians, and the flat-nosed Slavs, passed through the women who had come out on the sidewalk at this accentuation of the daily din, passed through the barrows and handcarts and piles of cabbages and fruit, and went her way.

23

Chapter III

Exactly at this minute Rashleigh Allerton was standing outside Miss Walbrook’s door, glancing up and down Fifth Avenue and over at the Park. It was the hour after luncheon when pedestrians become numerous. For his purpose they could not be very numerous; they must be reasonably spaced apart.

And already a veritable stream of women had begun to flow down the long, gentle slope, while a few, like fish, were stemming the current by making progress against it. None of them was his “affair.” Young, old, short, tall, blond, brunette, they were without exception of the class indiscriminately lumped as ladies. Since you couldn’t go to the devil because you had married a lady, even on the wild hypothesis that one of these sophisticated beings would without introduction or formality marry him, it would be better not to let himself in for the absurdity of the proposal. When there was a break in the procession, he darted across the street and made his way into the Park.

Here there was no one in sight as far as the path continued without a bend. He was going altogether at a venture. Round the curve of the woodland way there might swing at any second the sibyl who would point his life downward.

He was aware, however, that in sibyls he had a preference. If she was to send him to the devil, she must be of the type which he qualified as a “drab.” 24 Without knowing the dictionary meaning of the word, he felt that it implied whatever would contrast most revoltingly with Barbara Walbrook. Seeing with her own eyes to what she had driven him, her heart would be wrung. That was all he asked for, the wringing of her heart. It might be a mad thing for him to punish himself so terribly just to punish her, but he was mad anyhow. Madness gave him the satisfaction which some men got from thrift, and others from cleverness. He would keep the vow with which he had slipped out of Miss Walbrook’s drawing room. It was all that life had left for him.

That was, he wouldn’t pick and choose. He would take them as they came. He had not stipulated with himself that she must be a “drab.” It was only what he hoped. She must be the first woman he met who would marry him. Age, appearance, refinement, vulgarity were not to be considered. Picking and choosing on his part would only take his destiny out of the hands of Fate, where he preferred that it should lie.

Had any one passed him, he would have seemed the more perturbed because of his being so well-dressed. He was one of the few New Yorkers as careful of appearances as many Londoners. With the finish that comes of studied selection in hat, stick, and gloves, as well as all small accessories of the costliest, he might have been going to or coming from a wedding.

He was imposing, therefore, to a short, stout, elderly woman with whom he suddenly found himself face to face as the path took a sharp sweep to the south. The shrubs which had kept them hidden from each other gave place here to open stretches of lawn. When 25 Allerton paused and lifted his hat, the woman naturally paused, too.

She was a red-faced woman crowned with a bonnet of the style introduced by Mrs. Langtry in 1878, but worn on this occasion some degrees off center. On her arm she carried a flat basket of which the contents, decently covered with a towel, might have been freshly laundered shirts. Being stopped by a gentleman of Allerton’s impressiveness and plainly suffering expression, her face grew motherly and sympathetic.

“Madam, I wish to ask if you’ll marry me?”

Even a dull brain couldn’t fail to catch words hammered out with this force of precision. The woman didn’t wait to have them repeated. Dropping her basket as it was, she took to flight. Flight was the word. A modern Atalanta of Wellesley or Bryn Mawr might have envied the chamois leaps which took the good creature across the grass to the protection of a man with a lawn-mower.

Allerton couldn’t pause to watch her, for a new sibyl was advancing. To his disgust rather than not, she was young and pretty, a nursemaid pushing a baby-cart into which a young man of two was strapped. While far more likely to take him than the stout old party still skipping the greensward like a mountain roe, she would be much less plausible as a reason for going to the evil one. But a vow was a vow, and he was in for it.

His approach was the same as on the previous occasion. Lifting his hat ceremoniously, he said with the same distinctness of utterance, “Madam, I wish to ask if you’ll marry me?”

26

The girl, who had paused when he did, leaned on the pusher of her go-cart, studying him calmly. Chewing something with a slow, rotary movement of the lips and chin, she broke the action with a snap before quite completing the circle, to begin all over again. “Oh, you do, do you?” was her quiet response.

“If you please.”

She studied him again, with the same semi-circular motion of the jaw. She might have been weighing his proposal.

“Say, is this one of them club initiation stunts, or have you just got a noive?”

“Am I to take that as a yes or a no?”

“And am I to take you as one of them smart-Alecks, or a coily-headed nut?”

He saw a way out. “I’m generally considered a curly-headed nut.”

“Then it’s me for the exit-in-case-of-fire, so ta-ta.” She laughed back at him over her shoulder. “Wish you luck with your next.”

But fate was already on him in another form. A lady of fifty or thereabouts was coming up the path, refined, sedate, mistress of herself, the one type of all others most difficult to accost. All the same he must do it. He must keep on doing it till some one yielded to his suit. The rebuffs to which he had been subjected did no more than inflame his will.

Approaching the new sibyl with the same ceremoniousness, he repeated the same words in the same precise tone. The lady stood off, eyed him majestically through a lorgnette, and spoke with a force which came from quietude.

27

“I know who you are. You’re Rashleigh Allerton. You ought to be ashamed with a shame that would strike you to the ground. I’m a friend of Miss Marion Walbrook’s. I’m on my way to see her and shall not mention this encounter. We work on the same committee of the League for the Suppression of Men’s Clubs. The lamentable state in which I see you convinces me once more of the need of our work, if our men are to become as we hope to see them. I bid you a good afternoon.”

With the dignity of a queen she passed on and out of sight, leaving him with the sting of a whiplash on his face.

But the name of Miss Walbrook, connected with that of the League which was her pet enthusiasm for the public weal, only served as an incitement. He would go through with it now at any cost. By nightfall he would be at police-headquarters for insulting women, or he would have found a bride.

Walking on again, the path was clear before him as far as he could see. Having thus a few minutes to reflect, he came to the conclusion that his attacks had been too precipitate. He should feel the ground before him, leading the sibyl a little at a time, so as to have her mentally prepared. There were methods of “getting acquainted” to which he should apply himself first of all.

But getting acquainted with the old Italian peasant woman, bowed beneath a bundle, who was the next he would have to confront, being out of the question, he resolved to side-step destiny by slipping out of the main path and following a branch one. Doing so, he 28 came into less frequented regions, while his steps took him up a low hill burnished with the tints of mid-October. Trees and shrubs were flame-colored, copper-colored, wine-colored, differing only in their diffuseness of hue from the concentrated gorgeousness of amaranth, canna, and gladiolus. The sounds of the city were deadened here to a dull rumble, while the vibrancy of the autumn afternoon excited his taut nerves.

At the top of the hill he paused. There was no one in sight who could possibly respond to his quest. He wondered for a second if this were not a hint to him to abandon it. But doing that he would abandon his revenge, and by abandoning his revenge he would concede everything to this girl who had so bitterly wronged him. Ever since he could remember they had been pals, and for at least ten years he had vaguely thought of asking her to marry him when it came to his seeking a wife. It was true, the hint she had thrown out, that he had felt himself in no great need of a wife till his mother had died some eighteen months previously, and he had found himself with a cumbrous old establishment on his hands. That had given the decisive turn to his suit. He had asked her. She had taken him. And since then, in the course of less than ten weeks, if they had had three quarrels they had had thirty. He had taken them all more or less good-naturedly—till to-day. To-day was too much. He could hardly say why it was too much, unless it was as the last straw, but he felt it essential to his honor to show her by actual demonstration the ruin she had made of him.

29

Looking about him for another possibility, he noticed that at the spot where the path, having serpentined down the little hillside, rejoined the main footway there was a bench so placed that its occupant would have a view along several avenues at once. Since it was obviously a vantage point for such strategy as his, he had taken the first steps down toward it when a little gray figure emerged from behind a group of blue Norway spruces. She went dejectedly to the bench, sitting down at an extreme end of it.

Wrought up to a fit of tension far from rare with him, Allerton stood with his nails digging into his clenched palms and his thin lips pressed together. He was sure he was looking at a “drab.” All the shoddy, outcast meanings he had read into the word were under the bedraggled feathers of this battered black hat or compressed within the forlorn squirrel-trimmed gray suit. The dragging movement, the hint of dropping on the seat not from fatigue but from desperation, completed the picture his imagination had already painted of some world-worn, knocked-about creature who had come to the point at which, in his own phrase, she was “all in.”

As far as this described Letty Gravely, he was wrong. She was not “all in.” She was never more mentally alert than at that very minute. If she moved slowly, if she sank on the seat as if too beaten down by events to do more, it was because her mind was so intensely centered on her immediate problems.

She had, in fact, just formed a great resolution. Whatever became of her, she would never go back to Judson Flack, her stepfather. This had not been 30 clearly in her mind when she had gone down his steps and walked away, but the occasion presented itself now as one to be seized. In seizing it, however, the alternatives were difficult. She was without a cent, a shelter, a job, a friend, or the prospect of a meal. It was probable that there was not at that minute in New York a human being so destitute. Before nightfall she would have to find some nominal motive for living or be arrested as a vagrant.

She was not appalled. For the first time in her life she was relatively free from fear. Even with nothing but her person as she stood, she was her own mistress. No big dread hung over her—that is, no big dread of the kind represented by Judson Flack. She might jump into the river or go to the bad, but in either case she would do it of her own free will. Merely to have the exercise of her own free will gave her the kind of physical relief which a human being gets from stretching limbs cramped and crippled by chains.

Besides, there was in her situation an underlying possibility of adventure. This she didn’t phrase, since she didn’t understand it. She only had the intuition in her heart that where “the world is all before you, where to choose your place of rest, and Providence your guide,” Providence becomes your guide. Verbally she put it merely in the words, “Things happen,” though as to what could happen between half-past three in the afternoon and midnight, when she would possibly be in jail, she could not begin to imagine.

So absorbed was she in this momentous uncertainty that she scarcely noticed that some one had seated himself at the other end of the bench. It was a public 31 place; it was likely that some one would. She felt neither curiosity nor resentment. A lack of certain of the feminine instincts, or their retarded development, left her without interest in the fact that the newcomer was a man. From the slight glance she had given him when she heard his step, she judged him to be what she estimated as an elderly man, quite far into the thirties.

She went back to her own thoughts which were practical. There were certain measures which she could take at once, after which there would be no return. Once more she was not appalled. She had lived too near the taking of these steps to be shocked by them. Everything in life is a question of relativity, and in the world which her mother had entered on marrying Judson Flack the men were all so near the edge of the line which separates the criminal from the non-criminal that it seemed a natural thing when they crossed it, while the women....

But as her thoughts were dealing with this social problem in its bearing on herself, her neighbor spoke.

“Funny to watch those kids playing with the pup, isn’t it?”

She admitted that it was, that watching children and young animals was a favorite sport with her. She answered simply, because being addressed by strange men with whom she found herself in proximity was sanctioned by the etiquette of her society. To resent it would be putting on airs, besides which it would cut off social intercourse between the sexes. It had happened to her many a time to have engaging conversations with chance young men beside 32 her in the subway, never seeing them before or afterward.

So Allerton found getting acquainted easier than he had expected. The etiquette of his society not sanctioning this directness of response on her part, he drew the conclusion that she was accustomed to “meeting fellows halfway.” As this was the sort of person he was looking for, he found in the freedom nothing to complain of.

With the openness of her social type she gave details of her biography without needing to be pressed.

“You’re a New York girl?”

“I am now. I didn’t use to be.”

“What were you to begin with?”

“Momma brought me from Canada after my father died. That’s why I ain’t got no friends here.”

At this appeal for sympathy his glance stole suspiciously toward her, finding his first conjectures somewhat but not altogether verified. She was young apparently, and possibly pretty, though as to neither point did he care. He would have preferred more “past,” more “mystery,” more “drama,” but since you couldn’t have everything, a young person utterly unfit to be his wife would have to be enough. He continued to draw out her story, not because he cared anything about hearing it, but in order to spring his question finally without making her think him more unbalanced than he was.

“Your father was a Canadian?”

“Yes; a farmer. Momma used to say she was about as good to work a farm as a cat to run a fire-engine. 33 When he died, she sold out for four thousand dollars and come to New York.”

“To work?”

“No, to have a good time. She’d never had a good time, momma hadn’t, and she was awful pretty. So she said she’d just blow herself to it while she had the berries in her basket. That was how she met Judson Flack. I suppose you know who he is. Everybody does.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t the pleasure.”

“Oh, I don’t know as you’d find it any big pleasure. Momma didn’t, not after she’d give him a try.”

“Who and what is he?”

“He calls hisself a man about town. I call him a bum. Poor momma married him.”

“And wasn’t happy, I suppose.”

“Not after he’d spent her wad, she wasn’t. She was crazy about him, and when she found out that all he’d cared about was her four thousand plunks—well, it was her finish.”

“How long ago was that?”

“About four years now.”

“And what have you been doing in the meanwhile?”

“Keepin’ house for Judson Flack most of the time—till I quit.”

“Oh, you’ve quit?”

“Sure I’ve quit.” She was putting her better foot forward. “Now I’m in pitchers.”

He glanced at her again, having noticed already that she scarcely glanced at him. Her profile was toward him as at first, an irregular little profile of lifts and tilts, which might be appealing, but was not beautiful. 34 The boast of being in pictures, so incongruous with her woefully dilapidated air, did not amuse him. He knew how large a place a nominal connection with the stage took in the lives of certain ladies. Even this poor little tramp didn’t hesitate to make the claim.

“And you’re doing well?”

She wouldn’t show the white feather. “Oh, so so! I—I get along.”

“You live by yourself?”

“I—I do now.”

“Don’t you find it lonely?”

“Not so lonely as livin’ with Judson Flack.”

“You’re—you’re happy?”

A faint implication that she might look to him for help stirred her fierce independence. “Gee, yes! I’m—I’m doin’ swell.”

“But you wouldn’t mind a change, I suppose?”

For the first time her eyes stole toward him, not in suspicion, and still less in alarm, but in one of the intenser shades of curiosity. It was almost as if he was going to suggest to her something “off the level” but which would nevertheless be worth her while. She was used to these procedures, not in actual experience but from hearing them talked about. They made up a large part of what Judson Flack understood as “business.” She felt it prudent to be as non-committal as possible.

“I ain’t so sure.”

She meant him to understand that being tolerably satisfied with her own way of life, she was not enthusiastic over new experiments.

35

His next observation was no surprise to her. “I’m a lawyer.”

She was sure of that. There were always lawyers in these subterranean affairs—“shyster” was a word she had heard applied to them—and this man looked the part. His thin face, clear-cut profile, and skin which showed dark where he shaved, were all, in her judgment, signs of the sinister. Even his clothes, from his patent leather shoes with spats to his dark blue necktie with a pearl in it, were those which an actor would wear in pictures to represent a “shark.”

She was turning these thoughts over in her mind when he spoke again.

“I’ve an office, but I don’t practise much. It takes all my time to manage my own estate.”

She didn’t know what this meant. It sounded like farming, but you didn’t farm in New York, or do it from an office anyhow. “I guess he’s one of them gold-brick nuts,” she commented to herself, “but he won’t put nothin’ over on me.”

In return for her biography he continued to give his, bringing out his facts in short, hard statements which seemed to hurt him. It was this hurting him which she found most difficult to reconcile with her gold brick theory and the suspicion that he was a “shark.”

“My father was a lawyer, too. Rather well known in his day. One time ambassador to Vienna.”

Ambassador to Vienna! She didn’t know where Vienna was or the nature of an ambassador, but she did know that it sounded grand, so she looked 36 at him attentively. It was either more gold brick or else....

Then something struck her—“smote her” would be perhaps the more accurately descriptive word, since the effect was on her heart. This man was sick. He was suffering. She had often seen women suffer, but men rarely, and this was one of the rare instances. Something in her was touched. She couldn’t imagine why he talked to her or what he wanted of her, but a pity which had never yet been called upon was astir among her emotions.

As for the minute he said no more, her next words came out only because she supposed them to betray the kindly interest of which he was in need.

“Then I suppose he left you a big fat wad.”

“Yes; but it doesn’t do me any good. I mean, it doesn’t make me happy—when I’m not.”

“I guess it’d make you a good deal less happy if you didn’t have it.”

“Perhaps so; I don’t think about it either way.” He added, after tense compression of the lips; “I’m all alone in the world—like you.”

She was sure now that something was coming, though of what nature lay beyond her speculative power. She wondered if he could have fallen in love with her at first sight, realizing a favorite dream she often had in the subway. Hundreds of times she had beguiled the minutes by selecting one or another of the wealthy lawyers and bankers, whom she supposed to be her fellow-travelers there, seeing him smitten by a glance at her, following her when she got out, and laying his heart and coronet at her feet before she had 37 run up the steps. If this man were not a shyster lawyer or a gold brick nut, he might possibly be doing that.

“It’s about a girl,” he burst out suddenly. “Half an hour ago she kicked me out.”

“Did she know you had all that dough?”

“Yes, she knew I had all that dough. But she said that since I was going to the devil, I had better go.” He drew a long breath. “Well, I’m going—perhaps quicker than she thinks.”

“Will you do yourself any good by that?”

“No, but I’ll do her harm.”

“How?”

“I’ll show her what she’s made of me.”

“She can’t make anything of you in half an hour or in half a year—not so long as you’ve got your wad back of you. If you was to be kicked out with your pay-envelope stole, and your mother’s rings pulled off your fingers, and her wrist-watch from your wrist, and even your carfare––”

“Is that what’s happened to you?”

“Sure! Half an hour ago, too. Judson Flack! But why should I worry? Something’ll happen before night.”

He became emphatic. “Yes, and I’ll tell you what it will be. You put your finger on it just now when you said she couldn’t make anything out of men in half an hour. Well, it’s got to be something that would take just that time—an hour at the most—and fatal. Now do you see?”

She shook her head.

He swung fully round on her from his end of the bench. “Think,” he commanded.

38

As if with a premonitory notion of what he meant, she answered coldly: “What’s the good o’ me thinkin’? I’ve got nothin’ to do with it.”

“You might have.”

“I can’t imagine what, unless it’d be––” Realizing what she had been about to say, she broke off in confusion, coloring to the eyes.

He nodded. “I see you understand. I want you to come off somewhere and marry me.”

She took it more calmly than if she hadn’t thought him mad. “But—but you said you’d be—be goin’ to the devil.”

“Well?”

His look, his tone, conveyed the idea, which penetrated to her mind but slowly. When it did, the surging color became a flush, hot and painful.

So here it was again, the thing she had been running away from. It had outwitted and outrun her, meeting her again just at the instant when she thought she was shaking it off. She was so indignant with the thing that she almost overlooked the man. She too swung round from her end of the bench, so that they confronted each other, with the length of the seat between them. It was her habit to put things plainly, though now she did it with a burning heart.

“This is the way you mean it, isn’t it?—you’d go to the devil because you’d married me.”

The half-minute before he answered was occupied not merely in thinking what to say but in noticing, now that he had her in full-face, that her large, brown irises seemed to be sprinkled with gold dust. Otherwise her appearance struck him simply as blurred, as if 39 it had been brightly enough drawn as to color and line, only rubbed over and defaced by the hand of misery.

“I don’t want you to get me wrong,” he explained. “It’s not a question of my marrying you in particular. I’ve said I’d marry the first girl I met who’d marry me.”

The gold-brown eyes scintillated with a thousand tiny stars. “Say, and am I the first?”

“No; you’re the fourth.” He added, so that she should be under no misconception as to what he was about: “You can take me or leave me. That’s up to you. But if you take me, I want you to understand that it’ll be on a purely business basis.”

She repeated, as if to memorize the words, “A purely business basis.”

“Exactly. I’m not looking for a wife. I only want a woman to marry—a woman to whom I can point and say, See there! I’ve married—that.”

“And that’d be me.”

“If you undertook the job.”

“The job of—of bein’ laughed at—jeered at––”

“I’d be the one who’d be laughed at and jeered at. Nobody would think anything about you. They wouldn’t remember how you looked or know your name. If you got sick of it after a bit, and decided to cut and run, you could do it. I’d see that you were well treated—for the rest of your life.”

She studied him long and earnestly. “Say, are you crazy?”

“I’m all on edge, if that’s what you mean. But there’s nothing for you to be afraid of. I shan’t do you any harm at any time.”

40

“You only want to do harm to yourself. I’d be like the awful kind o’ pill which a fellow’ll swaller to commit suicide.” She rose, not without a dignity of her own. “Well, mister, if I’m your fourth, I guess you’ll have to look about you for a fifth.”

“Where are you going?”

He asked the question without rising. She answered as if her choice of objectives was large.

“Oh, anywheres.”

“Which means nowhere, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, not exactly. It means—it means—the first place I fetch up.”

“The first place you fetch up may be the police-station, if the things you said just now are true.”

“The police-station is safe, anyways.”

“And you think the place I’d take you to wouldn’t be. Well, you’re wrong. It’ll be as safe as a church for as long as you like to stay; and when you want to go—lots of money to go with.”

Facing away from him toward the city, she said over her shoulder: “There’s things money couldn’t pay you for. Bein’ looked down on is one.”

She was about to walk on, but he sprang after her, catching her by the sleeve.

“Look here! Be a sport. You’ve got the chance of your lifetime. It’ll mean no more to you than a part they’d give you in pictures—just a rôle—and pay you a lot better.”

She was not blind to the advantages he laid before her. True, it might be what she qualified as “bull” to get her into a trap; only she didn’t believe it. This man with the sick mind and anguished face was none 41 of the soft-spoken fiends whose business it is to ensnare young girls. She knew all about them from living with Judson Flack, and couldn’t be mistaken. This fellow might be crazy, but he was what he said. If he said he wouldn’t do her any harm, he wouldn’t. If he said he would pay her well, he would. The main question was as to whether or not, just for the sake of getting something to eat and a place to sleep, she could deliberately put herself in a position in which the man who had married her would have gone to the devil because he had married her.

As he held her by the sleeve looking down at her, and she, half turned, was looking up at him, this was the battle she was fighting. Hitherto her impulse had been to run away from the scorn of her inferiority; now she was asking herself what would happen if she took up its challenge and fought it on its own ground. What if I do? was the way the question framed itself, but aloud she made it.

“If I said I would, what would happen first?”

“We’d go and get a license. Then we’d find a minister. After that I should give you something to eat, and then I’d take you home.”

“Where would that be?”

He gave her his address in East Sixty-seventh Street, only a few doors from Fifth Avenue, but her social sophistication was not up to the point of seeing the significance of this. Neither did her imagination try to picture the home or to see it otherwise than as an alternative to the police-station, or worse, as a lodging for the night.

42

“And what would happen to me when I got to your home?”

“You’d have your own room. I shouldn’t interfere with you. You’d hardly ever see me. You could stay as long as you liked or as short as you liked, after the first week or two.”

There was that about him which carried conviction. She believed him. As an alternative to having nowhere to go, what he offered her was something, and something with that spice of adventure of which she had been dreaming only a few minutes earlier. She couldn’t be worse off than she was now, and if it gave her the chance of a hand-to-hand tussle with the world-pride which had never done anything but look down on her, she would be fighting what she held as her worst enemy. She braced herself to say,

“All right; I’ll do it.”

He, too, braced himself. “Very well! Let’s start.”

The impetuosity of his motion almost took her breath away as she tried to keep pace with him.

“By the way, what’s your name?” he asked, before they reached Fifth Avenue.

She told him, but was too overwhelmed with what she had undertaken to dare to ask him his.

43

Chapter IV

“Nao!”

The strong cockney negative was also an exclamation. It came from Mrs. Courage, the cook-housekeeper, who stood near the kitchen range making the coffee for breakfast. She was a woman who looked her name, born not merely to do battle, but to enjoy being in the midst of it.

Jane, the waitress, was the next to speak. “Nettie Duckett, you ought to be ashymed to sye them words, you that’s been taught to ’ope the best of everyone.”

Jane had fluttered in from the pantry with the covered dish for the toast. Jane still fluttered at her work, as she had done for the past thirty years. The late Mrs. Allerton had liked her about the table because she was swift, deft, and moved lightly. A thin little woman, with a profile resembling that of Punch’s Judy, and a smile of cheerful piety, she yielded to time only by a process of drying up.

Nettie Duckett was quick in her own defense, but breathless, too, from girlish laughter. “I can’t ’elp syin’ what I see, now can I? There she was ’arf dressed in the little back spare-room. Oh, the commonest thing! You wouldn’t ’a wanted to sweep ’er out with a broom.”

“Pretty goin’s on I must sye,” Jane commented. “’Ope the best of everyone I will, but when you think that we was all on the top floor––”

44

“Pretty goin’s off there’ll be, I can tell you that,” Mrs. Courage declared in her rich, decided bass. “Just let me ’ave a word with Master Rashleigh. I’ll tell ’im what ’is ma would ’ave said. She left ’im to me, she did. ‘Courage,’ she’s told me many a time, ‘that boy’ll be your boy after I’m gone.’ As good as mykin’ a will, I call it. And now to think that with us right ’ere in the ’ouse.... Where’s Steptoe? Do ’e know anything about it?”

“Do ’e know anything about what?” The question came from Steptoe himself, who appeared on the threshold.

The three women maintained a dramatic silence, while the old butler-valet looked from one to another.

“Seems as if there was news,” he observed dryly.

“Tell ’im, Nettie,” Mrs. Courage commanded.

Nettie was the young thing of the establishment, Mrs. Courage’s own niece, brought from England when the housemaid’s place fell vacant on Bessie’s unexpected marriage to Walter Wildgoose, Miss Walbrook’s indoor man. Indeed she had been brought from England before Bessie’s marriage, of which Mrs. Courage had had advance information, so that as soon as Bessie left, Nettie was on the spot to be smuggled into the Allerton household. Steptoe had not forgiven this underhand movement on Mrs. Courage’s part, seeing that in the long-ago both she and Jane had been his own nominees, and that he considered the household posts as gifts at his disposal. “I’ll ’ave to make a clean sweep o’ the lot o’ them,” he had more than once declared at those gatherings at which the English butlers and valets of upper Fifth 45 Avenue discuss their complex of interests. Forty years in the Allerton family had made him not merely its major-domo but in certain respects its head. His tone toward Nettie was that of authority with a note of disapprobation.

“Speak, girl, and do it without giggling. What ’ave you to tell?”

Though she couldn’t do it without giggling Nettie repeated the story she had given to her aunt and Jane. She had gone into the small single back bedroom on the floor below Mr. Allerton’s, and there was a half-dressed girl ‘a-puttin’ up of ’er ’air.’ According to her own statement Nettie had passed away on the spot, being able, however, to articulate the question, “What are you a’doin’ of ’ere?” To this the young woman had replied that Mr. Allerton had brought her in on the previous evening, telling her to sleep there, and there she had slept. Nettie’s information could go no further, but it was considered to go far enough.

“So what do you sye to that?” Mrs. Courage demanded of Steptoe; “you that’s always so ready to defend my young lord?”

Steptoe was prepared to stand back to back with his employer. “I don’t defend ’im. I’m not called on to defend ’im. It’s Mr. Rashleigh’s ’ouse. Any guest of ’is must be your guest and mine.”

“And what about Miss Walbrook, ’er that’s to be missus ’ere in the course of a few weeks?”

Steptoe colored, frostily. “She’s not missus ’ere yet; and if she ever comes, there’ll be stormy weather for all of us. New missuses don’t generally get on with old servants like us—that’s been in the family 46 for so many years—but when they don’t, it ain’t them as gets notice.”

A bell rang sharply. Steptoe sprang to attention.

“There’s Mr. Rashleigh now. Don’t you women go to mykin’ a to-do. There’s lots o’ troubles that ’ud never ’ave ’appened if women ’ad been able to ’old their tongues.”

“But I suppose, Steptoe, you don’t deny that there’s such a thing as right.”

“I don’t deny that there’s such a thing as right, Mrs. Courage, but I only wonder if you knows more about it than the rest of us.”

In Allerton’s room Steptoe found the young master of the house half dressed. Standing before a mirror, he was brushing his hair. His face and eyes, the reflection of which Steptoe caught in the glass, were like those of a man on the edge of going insane.

The old valet entered according to his daily habit and without betraying the knowledge of anything unusual. All the same his heart was sinking, as old hearts sink when beloved young ones are in trouble. The boy was his darling. He had been with his father for ten years before the lad was born, and had watched his growth with a more than paternal devotion. “’E’s all I ’ave,” he often said to himself, and had been known to let out the fact in the afore-mentioned group of English upper servants, a small but exclusive circle in the multiplex life of New York.

In Steptoe’s opinion Master Rash had never had a chance. Born many years after his parents had lived together childlessly, he had come into the world constitutionally neurasthenic. Steptoe had never known 47 a boy who needed more to be nursed along and coaxed along by affection, and now and then by indulgence. Instead, the system of severity had been applied with results little short of calamitous. He had been sent to schools famous for religion and discipline, from which he reacted in the first weeks of freedom in college, getting into dire academic scrapes. Further severity had led to further scrapes, and further scrapes to something like disgrace, when the war broke out and a Red Cross job had kept him from going to the bad. The mother had been a self-willed and selfish woman, claiming more from her son than she ever gave him, and never perceiving that his was a nature requiring a peculiar kind of care. After her death Steptoe had prayed for a kind, sweet wife to come to the boy’s rescue, and the answer had been Miss Barbara Walbrook.

When the engagement was announced, Steptoe had given up hope. Of Miss Walbrook as a woman he had nothing to complain. Walter Wildgoose reported her a noble creature, splendid, generous, magnificent, only needing a strong hand. She was of the type not to be served but to be mastered. Rashleigh Allerton would goad her to frenzy, and she would do the same by him. She was already doing it. For weeks past Steptoe could see it plainly enough, and what would happen after they were married God alone knew. For himself he saw no future but to hang on after the wedding as long as the new mistress of the house would allow him, take his dismissal as an inevitable thing, and sneak away and die.

It was part of Steptoe’s training not to notice anything 48 till his attention was called to it. So having said his “Good-morning, sir,” he went to the closet, took down the hanger with the coat and waistcoat belonging to the suit of which he saw that Allerton had put on the trousers, and waited till the young man was ready for his ministrations.

Allerton was still brushing his hair, as he said over his shoulder: “There’s a young woman in the house, Steptoe. Been here all night.”

“Yes, sir; I know—in the little back spare-room.”

“Who told you?”

“Nettie went in for a pincushion, Mr. Rash, and the young woman was a-doin’ of ’er ’air.”

“What did Nettie say?”

“It ain’t what Nettie says, sir, if I may myke so bold. It’s what Mrs. Courage and Jane says.”

“Tell Mrs. Courage and Jane they needn’t be alarmed. The young woman is—” Steptoe caught the spasm which contracted the boy’s face—“the young woman is—my wife.”

“Quite so, sir.”

If Allerton went no further, Steptoe could go no further; but inwardly he was like a man reprieved at the last minute, and against all hope, from sentence of death. “Then it won’t be ’er,” was all he could say to himself, “’er” being Barbara Walbrook. Whatever calamity had happened, that calamity at least would be escaped, which was so much to the good.

His arms trembled so that he could hardly hold up the waistcoat for Allerton to slip it on. But he didn’t slip it on. Instead he wheeled round from the mirror, threw the brushes with a crash to the toilet table, and 49 cried with a rage all the more raging for being impotent:

“Steptoe, I’ve been every kind of fool.”

“Yes, sir, I expect so.”

“You’ve got to get me out of it, Steptoe. You must find a way to save me.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.” The joy of cooperation with the lad almost made up for the anguish at his anguish. “What ’ud it be—you must excuse me, Mr. Rash—but what ’ud it be that you’d like me to save you from?”

Allerton threw out his arms. “From this crazy marriage. This frightful mix-up. I went right off the handle yesterday. I was an infernal idiot. And now I’m in for it. Something’s got to be done, Steptoe, and I can’t think of any one but you to do it.”

“Quite so, sir. Will you ’ave your wystcoat on now, sir? You’re ready for it, I see. I’ll think it over, Mr. Rash, and let you know.”

While first the waistcoat and then the coat were extended and slipped over the shoulders, Allerton did his best to put Steptoe in possession of the mad facts of the previous day. Though the account he gave was incoherent, the old man understood enough.

“It wasn’t her fault, you must understand,” Allerton explained further, as Steptoe brushed his hat. “She didn’t want to. I persuaded her. I wanted to do something that would wring Miss Walbrook’s heart—and I’ve done it! Wrung my own, too! What’s to become of me, Steptoe? Is the best thing I can do to shoot myself? Think it over. I’m ready to. I’m not sure that it wouldn’t be a relief to get out of this 50 rotten life. I’m all on edge. I could jump out of that window as easily as not. But it wasn’t the girl’s fault. She’s a poor little waif of a thing. You must look after her and keep me from seeing her again, but she’s not bad—only—only—Oh, my God! my God!”

He covered his face with his hands and rocked himself about, so that Steptoe was obliged to go on brushing till his master calmed himself.

“Do you think, sir,” he said then, “that this is the ’at to go with this ’ere suit? I think as the brown one would be a lot chicker—tone in with the sort of fawn stripe in the blue like, and ketch the note in your tie.” He added, while diving into the closet in search of the brown hat and bringing it out, “There’s one thing I could say right now, Mr. Rash, and I think it might ’elp.”

“What is it?”

“Do you remember the time when you ’urt your leg ’unting down in Long Island?”

“Yes; what about it?”

“You was all for not payin’ it no attention and for ’oppin’ about as if you ’adn’t ’urt it at all. A terr’ble fuss you myde when the doctor said as you was to keep still. Anybody ’ud ’ave thought ’e’d bordered a hamputation. And yet it was keepin’ still what got you out o’ the trouble, now wasn’t it?”

“Well?”

“Well, now you’re in a worse trouble still it might do the syme again. I’m a great believer in keepin’ still, I am.”

Allerton was off again. “How in thunder am I to keep still when––?”

51

“I’ll tell you one wye, sir. Don’t talk. Don’t do nothink. Don’t beat your ’ead against the wall. Be quiet. Tyke it natural. You’ve done this thing. Well, you ’aven’t committed a murder. You ’aven’t even done a wrong to the young lydy to whom you was engyged. By what I understand she’d jilted you, and you was free to marry any one you took a mind to.”

“Nominally, perhaps, but––”

“If you’re nominally free, sir, you’re free, by what I can understand; and if you’ve gone and done a foolish thing it ain’t no one’s business but your own.”

“Yes, but I can’t stand it!”

“O’ course you can’t stand it, sir, but it’s because you can’t stand it that I’m arskin’ of you to keep just as quiet as you can. Mistykes in our life is often like the twists we’ll give to our bodies. They’ll ache most awful, but let nyture alone and she’ll tyke care of ’em. It’s jest so with our mistykes. Let life alone and she’ll put ’em stryght for us, nine times out o’ ten, better than we can do it by workin’ up into a wax.”

Calmed to some extent Allerton went off to the club for breakfast, being unable to face this meal at home. Steptoe tidied up the room. He was troubled and yet relieved. It was a desperate case, but he had always found that in desperate cases desperate remedies were close at hand.

52

Chapter V

“See that the poor thing gets some breakfast,” had been Allerton’s parting command, and having finished the room, Steptoe went down the flight of stairs to carry out this injunction.

He was on the third step from the landing when the door of the back room opened, and a little, gray figure, hatted and jacketed, crept out stealthily. She was plainly ready for the street, an intention understood by Beppo, the late Mrs. Allerton’s red cocker spaniel, who was capering about her in the hope of sharing the promenade.

As Steptoe came to a halt, the girl ran toward him.

“Oh, mister, I gotta get out of this swell dump. Show me the way, for God’s sake!”

To say that Steptoe was thinking rapidly would be to describe his mental processes incorrectly. He never thought; he received illuminations. Some such enlightenment came to him now, inducing him to say, ceremoniously, “Madam can’t go without ’er breakfast.”

“I don’t want any breakfast,” she protested, breathlessly. “All I want is to get away. I’m frightened.”

“I assure madam that there’s nothink to be afryde of in this ’ouse. Mr. Allerton is the most honorable—” he pronounced the initial h—“young man that hever was born. I valeted ’is father before ’im and know that ’e wouldn’t ’urt a fly. If madam’ll trust 53 me—Besides, Mr. Allerton left word with me as you was to be sure to ’ave your breakfast, and I shouldn’t know how to fyce ’im if ’e was to know that you’d gone awye without so much as a hegg.”

She wrung her hands. “I don’t want to see him. I couldn’t.”

“Madam won’t see ’im. ’E’s gone for the dye. ’E don’t so often heat at ’ome—’ardly never.”

Of the courses before her Letty saw that yielding was the easiest. Besides, it would give her her breakfast, which was a consideration. Though she had nominally dined on the previous evening, she had not been able to eat; she had been too terrified. Never would she forget the things that had happened after she had given her consent in the Park.

Not that outwardly they had been otherwise than commonplace. It was going through them at all! The man was as nearly “off his chump”—the expression was hers—as a human being could be without laying himself open to arrest. After calling the taxi in Fifth Avenue he had walked up and down, compelling her to walk by his side, for a good fifteen minutes before making her get in and springing in beside her. At the house opposite he had stared and stared, as if hoping that some one would look out. During the drive to the place where they got the license, and later to the minister’s house, he spoke not a word. In the restaurant to which he took her afterward, the most glorious place she had ever been in, he ordered a feast suited to a queen, but she could hardly do more than taste it. She felt that the waiter was looking at them strangely, and she didn’t know the uses of the knives and forks. 54 The man she had married offered her no help, neither speaking to her nor giving her a glance. He himself ate but little, lost in some mental maze to which she had no clue.

After dinner he had proposed the theatre, but she had refused. She couldn’t go anywhere else with him. Wherever they moved, a thousand eyes were turned in amazement at the extraordinary pair. He saw nothing, but she was alive to it all—more conscious of her hat and suit than even in the street scene in “The Man with the Emerald Eye.” Once and for all she became aware that the first standard for human valuation is in clothes.

In the end they had got into another taxi, to be driven round and round the Park and out along the river bank, till he decided that they might go home. During all this time he hardly noticed her. Once he asked her if she was warm enough, and once if she would like to get out and take a walk along the parapet above the river, but otherwise he was withdrawn into a world which he kept shut and locked against her. That left her alone. She had never felt so much alone in her life, not even in the days which followed her mother’s death. It was as if she had been snatched away from everything with which she was familiar, to find herself stranded in a country of fantastic dreams.

Then there was the house and the little back room. By the use of his latchkey they had entered a palace huge and dark. Letty didn’t know that people lived with so much space around them. Only a hall light burned in a many-colored oriental lamp, and in the 55 half-gloom the rooms on each side of the entry were cavernous. There was not a servant, not a sound. The only living thing was a little dog which pattered out of the obscurity and, raising his paws against her skirt, adopted her instantaneously.

“He was my mother’s dog,” Allerton explained briefly. “He likes women, but not men, though he’s never taken to the women in the house. He’ll probably like you. His name is Beppo. I’ll show you up at once.”

The grandeur of the staircase was overpowering, and the little back spare-room of a magnificence beyond all her experience outside of movie-sets. The flowers on the chintz coverings were prettier than real ones, and there was a private bath. Letty had heard of private baths, but no picture she had ever painted equaled this dainty apartment in which everything was of spotless white except where a flight of blue-gray gulls skimmed over a blue summer sea.

The objects in the bedroom were too lovely to live with. On the toilet table were boxes and trays which Letty supposed must be priceless, and a set of brushes with silver backs. She couldn’t brush her hair with a brush with a silver back, because it would be journeying too far beyond real life into that of fairy princesses. On opening the closet to hang up her jacket the very hangers were puffed and covered with the “sweetest flowered silks,” so she hung her jacket on a peg.

But she wasn’t comfortable, she wasn’t happy. Alice had traveled too far into Wonderland, and too suddenly. Unwillingly she lay down in a bed too clean 56 and soft for the human form, but she couldn’t sleep in it. She could only tremble and toss and lie awake and wish for the morning. With the dawn she would be up and off, before any one caught sight of her.

For Allerton had used words which had terrified her more than anything that had yet happened or been said—“the other women in the house!” Not till then had she sufficiently visualized the life into which he was taking her to understand that there would be other women there. Now that she knew it, she couldn’t face them. She could have faced men. Men, after all, were simple creatures with only a rudimentary power of judgment. But women! God! She pulled the eiderdown about her head so as not to cry out so loudly that she would be heard. What mad thing had she done? What had she let herself in for? She didn’t ask what kind of women they would be—members of his family or servants. She didn’t care. All women were alike. The woman was not born who wouldn’t view a girl in her unconventional situation, “and especially in that rig”—once more the expression was her own—without a condemnation which Letty could not and would not submit herself to. So she would get up and steal away with the first gleam of light.

She got up with the first gleam of light, but she couldn’t steal away. Once more she was afraid. Unlocking the door, she dared not venture out. Who knew where, in that palace of cavernous apartments, she might meet a woman, or what the woman would say to her? When Nettie walked in later, humming a street air, Letty almost died from shame. For one 57 thing, she hadn’t yet put on her shirtwaist, which in itself was poor enough, and as she stood exposed without it, any other of her sex could see.... She had once been on the studio lot when a girl of about her own age, a “supe” like herself, was arrested for thieving in the women’s dressing-rooms. Letty had never forgotten the look in that girl’s face as she passed out through the crowd of her colleagues. In Nettie’s presence she felt like that girl’s look.

She had no means of telling the time, but when she could no longer endure the imprisonment she decided to make a bolt for it. She hadn’t been thieving, and so they couldn’t do anything to her—and there was a chance at least that she might get away. Opening the door cautiously, she stole out on the landing, and there was, not a woman, but a man!

Joy! A man would listen to her appeal. He would see that she was poor, common, unequal to a dump so swell, and would be human and tender. He was a nice looking old man too—she was able to notice that—with a long, kindly face on which there were two spots of bloom as if he had been rouged. So she capitulated to his plea, making only the condition that if she took the hegg—she pronounced the word as he did, not being sure as to what it meant—she should be free to go.

“Certainly, if madam wishes it. I’m sure the last thing Mr. Allerton would desire would be to detain madam against ’er will.”

She allowed herself to be ushered down the monumental stairs and into the dining-room, which awed her with the solemnity of a church. She knew at once 58 that she wouldn’t be able to eat amid this stateliness any more than in the glitter of last evening’s restaurant. She had yielded, however, and there was nothing for it but to sit down at the head of the table in the chair which Steptoe drew out for her. Guessing at her most immediate embarrassment, he showed her what to do by unfolding the napkin and laying it in her lap.

“Now, if madam will excuse me, I’ll slip awye and tell Jyne.”

But telling Jyne was not so simple a matter as it looked. The council in the kitchen, which at first had been a council and no more, was now a council of war. As Steptoe entered, Mrs. Courage was saying:

“I shall go to Mr. Rashleigh ’imself and tell ’im that hunder the syme roof with a baggage none of us will stye.”

“You can syve yourself the trouble, Mrs. Courage,” Steptoe informed her. “Mr. Rash ’as just gone out. Besides, I’ve good news for all of you.” He waited for each to take an appropriate expression, Mrs. Courage determined, Jane with face eager and alight, Nettie tittering behind her hand. “Miss Walbrook, which all of us ’as dreaded, is not a-comin’ to our midst. The young lydy Nettie see in the back spare-room is Mr. Rashleigh’s wife.”

“Wife!” Mrs. Courage threw up her hands and staggered backward. “’Im that ’is mother left to me! ‘Courage,’ says she, ‘when I’m gone––’”

Jane crept forward, horrified, stunned. “Them things can’t be, Steptoe.”

“Mr. Rash told me so ’imself. I don’t know what 59 more we want than that.” Steptoe was not without his diplomacy. “It’s a fine thing for us, girls. This sweet young lydy is not goin’ to myke us no trouble like what the other one would, and belongs right in our own class.”

“’Enery Steptoe, speak for yourself,” Mrs. Courage said, severely. “There’s no baggages in my class, nor never was, nor never will be.”

Jane began to cry. “I’m sure I try to think the best of everyone, but when such awful things ’appens and ’omes is broken up––”

“Jynie,” Steptoe said with authority, “the young missus is wytin’ for ’er breakfast. ’Ave the goodness to tyke ’er in ’er grypefruit.”

“Jyne Cakebread,” Mrs. Courage declared, with an authority even greater than Steptoe’s, “the first as tykes a grypefruit into that dinin’-room, to set before them as I shouldn’t demean myself to nyme, comes hunder my displeasure.”

“I couldn’t, Steptoe,” Jane pleaded helplessly. “All my life I’ve wyted on lydies. ’Ow can you expect me to turn over a new leaf at my time o’ life?”

“Nettie?” Steptoe made the appeal magisterially.

“Oh, I’ll do it,” Nettie giggled. “’Appy to get another look at ’er. I sye, she’s a sight!”

But Mrs. Courage barred the way. “My niece will wyte on people of doubtful conduck over my dead corpse.”

“Very well, then, Mrs. Courage,” Steptoe reasoned. “If you won’t serve the new missus, Mr. Rashleigh, will ’ave to get some one else who will.”

“Mr. Rashleigh will ’ave to do that very selfsame 60 thing. Not another night will none of us sleep hunder this paternal roof with them that their very presence is a houtrage. ’Enery Steptoe was always a time-server, and a time-server ’e will be, but as for us women, we shall see the new missus in goin’ in to give ’er notice. Not a month’s notice, it won’t be. This range as I’ve cooked at for nearly thirty years I shall cook at no more, not so much as for lunch. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! What’s the world comin’ to?”

In spite of her strength of character Mrs. Courage threw her apron over her head and burst into tears. Jane was weeping already.

“There, there, aunt,” Nettie begged, patting her relative between the shoulders. “What’s the good o’ goin’ on like that just because a silly ass ’as married beneath ’im?”

Mrs. Courage pulled her apron from her face to cry out with passion:

“If ’e was goin’ to disgryce ’imself like that, why couldn’t ’e ’a taken you?”

So Steptoe waited on Letty himself, bringing in the grapefruit, the coffee, the egg, and the toast, and seeing that she knew how to deal with each in the proper forms. He was so brooding, so yearning, so tactful, as he bent over her, that she was never at a loss as to the fork or spoon she ought to use, or the minute at which to use it. Under his protection Letty ate. She ate, first because she was young and hungry, and then because she felt him standing between her and all vague terrors. By the time she had finished, he moved in front of her, where he could speak as one human being to another.

61

Taking an empty plate from the table to put it on the sideboard, he said: “I ’ope madam is chyngin’ ’er mind about leavin’ us.”

Letty glanced up shyly in spite of being somewhat reassured. “What’ud be the good of my changin’ my mind when—when I’m not fit to stay?”

“Madam means not fit in the sense that––”

“I’m not a lady.”

Resting one hand on the table, he looked down into her eyes with an expression such as Letty had never before seen in a human face.

“I could myke a lydy of madam.”

At the sound of these quiet words, so confidently spoken, something passed through Letty’s frame to be described only by the hard-worked word, a thrill. It was a double current of vibration, partly of upleaping hope, partly of the desperate sense of her own limitations. A hundred points of gold dust were aflame in her irises as she said:

“You mean that you’d put me wise? Oh, but I’d never learn!”

“On the contrary, I think madam would pick up very quick.”

“And I’d never be able to talk the right––”

“I could learn madam to talk just as good as me.”

It seemed too much. She clasped her hands. It was the nearest point she had ever reached to ecstasy. “Oh, do you think you could? You talk somethin’ beautiful, you do!”

He smiled modestly. “I’ve always lived with the best people, and I suppose I ketch their wyes. I know 62 what a gentleman is—and a lydy. I know all a lydy’s little ’abits, and before two or three months was over madam ’ud ’ave them as natural as natural, if she wouldn’t think me overbold.”

“When ’ud you begin?”

The bright spot deepened in each cheek. “I’ve begun already, if madam won’t think me steppin’ out o’ my plyce to sye so, in showin’ madam the spoons and forks for the different––”

Letty colored, too. “Yes, I saw that. I take it as very kind. But—” she looked at him with a puzzled knitting of the brows—“but what makes you take all this trouble for me?”

“I’ve two reasons, madam, but I’ll only tell you one of ’em just now. The other’ll keep. I’ll myke it known to you if—if all goes as I ’ope.” He straightened himself up. “I don’t often speak o’ this,” he continued, “because among us butlers and valets it wouldn’t be understood. Most of us is what’s known as conservative, all for the big families and the old wyes. Well, so am I—to a point. But––”

He moved a number of objects on the table before he could go on. “I wasn’t born to the plyce I ’old now,” he explained after getting his material at command. “I wasn’t born to nothink. I was what they calls in England a foundlin’—a byby what’s found—what ’is parents ’ave thrown awye. I don’t know who my father and mother was, or what was my real nyme. ’Enery Steptoe is just a nyme they give me at the Horphanage. But I won’t go into that. I’m just tryin’ to tell madam that my life was a ’ard one, quite a ’ard one, till I come to New York as footman for 63 Mr. Allerton’s father, and afterward worked up to be ’is valet and butler.”

He cleared his throat. Expressing ideals was not easy. “I ’ope madam will forgive me if I sye that what it learned me was a fellow-feelin’ with my own sort—with the poor. I’ve often wished as I could go out among the poor and ryse them up. I ain’t a socialist—a little bit of a anarchist perhaps, but nothink extreme—and yet—Well, if Mr. Rashleigh had married a rich girl, I would ’a tyken it as natural and done my best for ’im, but since ’e ’asn’t—Oh, can’t madam see? It’s—it’s a kind o’ pride with me to find some one like—like what I was when I was ’er age—out in the cold like—and bring ’er in—and ’elp ’er to tryne ’erself—so—so as—some day—to beat the best—them as ’as ’ad all the chances––”

He was interrupted by the tinkle of the telephone. It was a relief. He had said all he needed to say, all he knew how to say. Whether madam understood it or not he couldn’t tell, since she didn’t seize ideas quickly.

“If madam will excuse me now, I’ll go and answer that call.”

But Letty sprang up in alarm. “Oh, don’t leave me. Some of them women will blow in––”

“None of them women will come—” he threw a delicate emphasis on the word—“if madam’ll just sit down. They don’t mean to come. I’ll explyne that to madam when I come back, if she’ll only not leave this room.”

64

Chapter VI

“Good morning, Steptoe. Will you ask Mr. Allerton if he’ll speak to Miss Walbrook?”

“Mr. Allerton ’as gone to the New Netherlands club for ’is breakfast, miss.”

“Oh, thanks. I’ll call him up there.”

She didn’t want to call him up there, at a club, where a man must like to feel safe from feminine intrusion, but the matter was too pressing to permit of hesitation. Since the previous afternoon she had gone through much searching of heart. She was accustomed to strong reactions from tempestuousness to penitence, but not of the violence of this one.

Summoned to the telephone, Allerton felt as if summoned to the bar of judgment. He divined who it was, and he divined the reason for the call.

“Good morning, Rash!”

His voice was absolutely dead. “Good morning, Barbara!”

“I know you’re cross with me for calling you at the club.”

“Oh, no! Not at all!”

“But I couldn’t wait any longer. I wanted you to know—I’ve got it on again, Rash—never to come off any more.”

He was dumb. Thirty seconds at least went by, and he had made no response.

65

“Aren’t you glad?”

“I—I could have been glad—if—if I’d known you were going to do it.”

“And now you know that it’s done.”

He repeated in his lifeless voice, “Yes, now I know that it’s done.”

“Well?”

Again he was silent. Two or three times he tried to find words, producing nothing but a stammering of incoherent syllables. “I—I can’t talk about it here, Barbe,” he managed to articulate at last. “You must let me come round and see you.”

It was her voice now that was dead. “When will you come, Rash?”

“Now—at once—if you can see me.”

“Then come.”

She put up the receiver without saying more. He knew that she knew. She knew at least that something had happened which was fatal to them both.

She received him not in the drawing-room, but in a little den on the right of the front door which was also alive with Miss Walbrook’s modern personality. A gold-colored portière from Albert Herter’s looms screened them from the hall, and the chairs were covered with bits of Herter tapestry representing fruits. A cabinet of old white Bennington faience stood against a wall, which was further adorned with three or four etchings of Sears Gallagher’s. Barbara wore a lacy thing in hydrangea-colored crêpe de chine, loosely girt with a jade-green ribbon tasselled in gold, the whole bringing out the faintly Egyptian note in her personality.

66

They dispensed with a greeting, because she spoke the minute he crossed the threshold of the room.

“Rash, what is it? Why couldn’t you tell me on the telephone?”

He wished now that he had. It would have saved this explanation face to face. “Because I couldn’t. Because—because I’ve been too much of an idiot to—to tell you about it—either on the telephone or in any other way.”

“How?” He thought she must understand, but she seemed purposely dense. “Sit down. Tell me about it. It can’t be so terrible—all of a sudden like this.”

He couldn’t sit down. He could only turn away from her and gulp in his dry throat. “You remember what I said—what I said—yesterday—about—about the—the Gissing fellow?”

She nodded fiercely. “Yes. Go on. Get it out.”

“Well—well—I’ve—I’ve done that.”

She threw out her arms. She threw back her head till the little nut-brown throat was taut. The cry rent her. It rent him.

“You—fool!”

He stood with head hanging. He longed to run away, and yet he longed also to throw himself at her feet. If he could have done exactly as he felt impelled, he would have laid his head on her breast and wept like a child.

She swung away from him, pacing the small room like a frenzied animal. Her breath came in short, hard pantings that were nearly sobs. Suddenly she stopped in front of him with a sort of calm.

67

“What made you?”

He barely lifted his agonized black eyes. “You,”

She was in revolt again. “I? What did I do?”

“You—you threw away my ring. You said it was all—all over.”

“Well? Couldn’t I say that without driving you to act the madman? No one but a madman would have gone out of this house and—” She clasped her forehead in her hands with a dramatic lifting of the arms. “Oh! It’s too much! I don’t care about myself. But to have it on your conscience that a man has thrown his life away––”

He asked meekly, “What good was it to me when you wouldn’t have it?”

She stamped her foot. “Rash, you’ll drive me insane. Your life might be no good to you at all, and yet you might give it a chance for twenty-four hours—that isn’t much, is it?—before you—” She caught herself up. “Tell me. You don’t mean to say that you’re married?”

He nodded.

“To whom?”

“Her first name is Letty. I’ve forgotten the second name.”

“Where did you find her?”

“Over there in the Park.”

“And she went and married you—like that?”

“She was all alone—chucked out by a stepfather––”

She burst into a hard laugh. “Oh, you baby! You believed that? The kind of story that’s told by nine of the––”

BY THE TIME HE HAD FINISHED, HIS HEART WAS A LITTLE EASED AND SOME OF HER TENDERNESS BEGAN TO FLOW TOWARD HIM

68

He interrupted quickly. “Don’t call her anything, Barbe—I mean any kind of a bad name. She’s all right as far as that goes. There’s a kind that couldn’t take you in.”

“There’s no kind that couldn’t take you in!”

“Perhaps not, but it’s the one thing in—in this whole idiotic business that’s on the level—I mean she is. I’d give my right hand to put her back where I found her yesterday—just as she was—but she’s straight.”

She dropped into a chair. The first wild tumult of rage having more or less spent its force, she began, with a kind of heart-broken curiosity, to ask for the facts. She spoke nervously, beating a palm with a gold tassel of her girdle. “Begin at the beginning. Tell me all about it.”

He leaned on the mantelpiece, of which the only ornaments were a child’s head in white and blue terra cotta by Paul Manship, balanced by a pair of old American glass candlesticks, and told the tale as consecutively as he could. He recounted everything, even to the bringing her home, the putting her in the little, back spare-room, and her adoption by Beppo, the red cocker spaniel. By the time he had finished, his heart was a little eased, and some of her tenderness toward him was beginning to flow forth. She was like that, all wrath at one minute, all gentleness the next. Springing to her feet, she caught him by the arm, pressing herself against him.

“All right, Rash. You’ve done it. That’s settled. But it can be undone again.”

He pressed her head back from him, resting the 69 knot of her hair in the hollow of his palm and looking down into her eyes.

“How can it be undone?”

“Oh, there must be ways. A man can’t be allowed to ruin his life—to ruin two lives—for a prank. We’ll just have to think. If you made it worth while for her to take you, you can make it worth while for her to let you go. She’ll do it.”

“She’d do it, of course. She doesn’t care. I’m nothing to her, not any more than she to me. I shan’t see her any more than I can help. I suppose she must stay at the house till—I told Steptoe to look after her.”

She took a position at one end of the mantelpiece, while he faced her from the other. She gave him wise counsel. He was to see his lawyers at once and tell them the whole story. Lawyers always saw the way out of things. There was the Bellington boy who married a show-girl. She had been bought off, and the lawyers had managed it. Now the Bellington boy was happily married to one of the Plantagenet Jones girls and lived at Marillo Park. Then there was the Silliman boy who had married the notorious Kate Cookesley. The lawyers had found the way out of that, too, and now the Silliman boy was a secretary of the American Embassy in Rome. Accidents such as had happened to Rash were regrettable of course, but it would be folly to think that a perfectly good life must be done for just because it had got a crack in it.

“We’ll play the game, of course,” she wound up. “But it’s a game, and the stronger side must win. 70 What should you say of my going to see her—she needn’t know who I am further than that I’m a friend of yours—and finding out for myself?”

“Finding out what?”

“Finding out her price, silly. What do you suppose? A woman can often see things like that where a man would be blind.”

He didn’t know. He thought it might be worth while. He would leave it to her. “I’m not worth the trouble, Barbe,” he said humbly.

With this she agreed. “I know you’re not. I can’t think for a minute why I take it or why I should like you. But I do. That’s straight.”

“And I adore you, Barbe.”

She shrugged her shoulders with a little, comic grimace. “Oh, well! I suppose every one has his own way of showing adoration, but I must say that yours is original.”

“If it’s original to be desperate when the woman you worship drives you to despair––”

There was another little comic grimace, though less comic than the first time. “Oh, yes, I know. It’s always the woman whom a man worships that’s in the wrong. I’ve noticed that. Men are never impossible—all of their own accord.”

“I could be as tame as a cat if––”

“If it wasn’t for me. Thank you, Rash. I said just now I was fond of you, and I should have to be to—to stand for all the––”

“I’m not blaming you, Barbe. I’m only––”

“Thanks again. The day you’re not blaming me is certainly one to be marked with a white stone, as the 71 Romans used to say. But if it comes to blaming any one, Rash, after what happened yesterday––”

“What happened yesterday wasn’t begun by me. It would never have entered my mind to do the crazy thing I did, if you hadn’t positively and finally—as I thought—flung me down. I think you must do me that justice, Barbe—that justice, at the least.”

“Oh, I do you justice enough. I don’t see that you can complain of that. It seems to me too that I temper justice with mercy to a degree that—that most people find ridiculous.”

“By most people I suppose you mean your aunt.”

“Oh, do leave Aunt Marion out of it. You can’t forgive the poor thing for not liking you. Well, she doesn’t, and I can’t help it. She thinks you’re a––”

“A fool—as you were polite enough to say just now.”

She spread her hands apart in an attitude of protestation. “Well, if I did, Rash, surely you must admit that I had provocation.”

“Oh, of course. The wonder is that with the provocation you can––”

“Forgive you, and try to patch it up again after this frightful gash in the agreement. Well, it is a wonder. I don’t believe that many girls––”

“I only want you to understand, Barbe, that the gash in the agreement was made, not by what I did, but what you did. If you hadn’t sent me to the devil, I shouldn’t have been in such a hurry to go there.”

She was off. “Yes, there you are again. Always me! I’m the one! You may be the gunpowder, the perfectly harmless gunpowder, but it would never 72 blow up if I didn’t come as the match. I make all the explosions. I set you crazy. I send you to the devil. I make you go and marry a girl you never laid eyes on in your life before.”

So it was the same old scene all over again, till both were exhausted, and she had flung herself into a chair to cover her face with her hands and burst into tears. Instantly he was on his knees beside her.

“Barbe! Barbe! My beloved Barbe! Don’t cry. I’m a brute. I’m a fool. I’m not satisfied with breaking my own heart, but I must go to work and break yours. Oh, Barbe, forgive me. I’m all to pieces. Forgive me and let me go away and shoot myself. What’s the good of a poor, wrecked creature like me hanging on and making such a mess of things? Let me kill myself before I kill you––”

“Oh, hush!”

Seizing his head, she pressed it against her bosom convulsively. By the shaking of his shoulders, she felt him sob. He was a poor creature. She was saying so to herself. But just because he was, something in her yearned over him. He could be different; he could be stronger and of value in the world if there was only some one to handle him rightly. She could do it—if she could only learn to handle herself. She would learn to handle herself—for his sake. He was worth saving. He had fine qualities, and a good heart most of all. It was his very fineness which put him out of place in a world like that of New York. He was a delicate, brittle, highly-wrought thing which should be touched only with the greatest care, and all his life he had been pushed and hurtled about as if 73 he were a football player or a business man. With the soul of a poet or a painter or a seer, he had been treated like the typical rough-and-ready American lad, till the sensitive nature had been brutalized, maimed, and frenzied.

She knew that. It was why she cared for him. Even when they were children she had seen that he wasn’t getting fair treatment, either at home or in school or among the boys and girls with whom they both grew up. He was the exception, and American life allowed only for the rule. If you couldn’t conform to the rule, you were guyed and tormented and ejected. Among all his associates she alone knew what he suffered, and because she knew it a vast pity made her cling to him. He had forced himself into the life of clubs, into the life of society, into the life of other men as other men lived their lives, and the effect on him had been so nearly ruinous that it was no wonder if he was always on the edge of nervous explosion. His very wealth which might have been a protection was, under the uniform pressure of American social habit, an incitement to him to follow the wrong way. She knew it, and she alone. She could save him, and she alone. She could save him, if she could first of all save herself.

With his head pressed against her she made the vow as she had made it fifty times already. She would be gentle with him; she would be patient; she would let him work off on her the agony of his suffering nerves, and smile at him through it all. She would help him out of the idiotic situation in which he found himself. The other girl was only an incident, as the 74 show-girl had been to the Bellington boy, and could be disposed of. She attached to that only a secondary importance in comparison with the whole thing—her saving him. She would save him, even if it meant rooting out every instinct in her soul.

But as he made his way blindly back to the club, his own conclusions were different. He must go to the devil. He must go to the devil now, whatever else he did. Going to the devil would set her free from him. It was the only thing that would. It would set him free from the other woman, set him free from life itself. Life tortured him. He was a misfit in it. He should never have been born. He had always understood that his parents hadn’t wanted children and that his coming had been resented. You couldn’t be born like that and find it natural to be in the world. He had never found it natural. He couldn’t remember the time when he hadn’t been out of his element in life, and now he must recognize the fact courageously.

It would be easy enough. He had worked up an artificial appetite for all that went under the head of debauchery. It had meant difficult schooling at first, because his natural tastes were averse to that kind of thing, but he had been schooled. Schooled was the word, since his training had begun under the very roof where his father had sent him to get religion and discipline. There had been no let-up in this educational course, except when he himself had stolen away, generally in solitude, for a little holiday.

But as he put it to himself, he knew all the roads and by-paths and cross-country leaps that would take him to the gutter, and to the gutter he would go.

75

Chapter VII

And all this while Letty was in the dining-room, learning certain lessons from her new-found friend.

For some little time she had been alone. Steptoe finished his conversation with Miss Walbrook on the telephone, but did not come back. She sat at the table feeding Beppo with bread and milk, but wondering if, after all, she hadn’t better make a bolt for it. She had had her breakfast, which was an asset to the good, and nothing worse could happen to her out in the open world than she feared in this great dim, gloomy house. She had once crept in to look at the cathedral and, overwhelmed by its height, immensity, and mystery, had crept out again. Its emotional suggestions had been more than she could bear. She felt now as if her bed had been made and her food laid out in that cathedral—as if, as long as she remained, she must eat and sleep in this vast, pillared solemnity.

And that was only one thing. There were small practical considerations even more terrible to confront. If Nettie were to appear again ...

But it was as to this that Steptoe was making his appeal. “I sye, girls, don’t you go to mykin’ a fuss and spoilin’ your lives, when you’ve got a chanst as’ll never come again.”

Mrs. Courage answered for them all. To sacrifice 76 decency to self-interest wasn’t in them, nor never would be. Some there might be, like ’Enery Steptoe, who would sell their birthright for a mess of pottage, but Mary Ann Courage was not of that company, nor any other woman upon whom she could use her influence. If a hussy had been put to reign over them, reigned over by a hussy none of them would be. All they asked was to see her once, to deliver the ultimatum of giving notice.

“It’s a strynge thing to me,” Steptoe reasoned, “that when one poor person gets a lift, every other poor person comes down on ’em.”

“And might we arsk who you means by poor persons?”

“Who should I mean, Mrs. Courage, but people like us? If we don’t ’ang by each other, who will ’ang by us, I should like to know? ’Ere’s one of us plyced in a ’igh position, and instead o’ bein’ proud of it, and givin’ ’er a lift to carry ’er along, you’re all for mykin’ it as ’ard for ’er as you can. Do you call that sensible?”

“I call it sensible for everyone to stye in their proper spere.”

“So that if a man’s poor, you must keep ’im poor, no matter ’ow ’e tries to better ’imself. That’s what your proper speres would come to.”

But argument being of no use, Steptoe could only make up his mind to revolution in the house. “The poor’s very good to the poor when one of ’em’s in trouble,” was his summing up, “but let one of ’em ’ave an extry stroke of luck, and all the rest’ll jaw against ’im like so many magpies.” As a parting shot 77 he declared on leaving the kitchen, “The trouble with you girls is that you ain’t got no class spunk, and that’s why, in sperrit, you’ll never be nothink but menials.”

This lack of esprit de corps was something he couldn’t understand, but what he understood less was the need of the heart to touch occasionally the high points of experience. Mrs. Courage and Jane, to say nothing of Nettie, after thirty years of domestic routine had reached the place where something in the way of drama had become imperative. The range and the pantry produce inhibitions as surely as the desk or the drawing-room. On both natures inhibitions had been packed like feathers on a seabird, till the soul cried out to be released from some of them. It might mean going out from the home that had sheltered them for years, and breaking with all their traditions, but now that the chance was there, neither could refuse it. To a virtuous woman, starched and stiffened in her virtue, steeped in it, dyed in it, permeated by it through and through, nothing so stirs the dramatic, so quickens the imagination, so calls the spirit to the purple emotional heights, as contact with the sister she knows to be a hussy. For Jane Cakebread and Mary Ann Courage the opportunity was unique.

“Then I’ll go. I’ll go straight now.”

As Steptoe brought the information that the three women of the household were coming to announce the resignation of their posts, Letty sprang to her feet.

“May I arsk madam to sit down again and let me explyne?”

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Taking this as an order, she sank back into her chair again. He stood confronting her as before, one hand resting lightly on the table.

“Nothink so good won’t ’ave ’appened in this ’ouse since old Mrs. Allerton went to work and died.”

Letty’s eyes shone with their tiny fires, not in pleasure but in wonder.

“When old servants is good, they’re good, but even when they’re good, there’s times when you can’t ’elp wishin’ as ’ow the Lord ’ud be pleased to tyke them to ’Imself.”

He allowed this to sink in before going further.

“The men’s all right, for the most part. Indoor work comes natural to ’em, and they’ll swing it without no complynts. But with the women it’s kick, kick, kick, and when they’re worn theirselves out with kickin’, they’ll begin to kick again. What’s plye for a man, for them ain’t nothink but slyvery.”

Letty listened as one receiving revelations from another world.

“I ain’t what they call a woman-’ater. I believe as God made woman for a purpose. Only I can’t bring myself to think as the human race ’as rightly found out yet what that purpose is. God’s wyes is always dark, and when it comes to women, they’re darker nor they are elsewheres. One thing I do know, and we’ll be a lot more comfortable when more of us finds it out—that God never made women for the ’ome.”

In spite of her awe of him, Letty found this doctrine difficult to accept.

79

“If God didn’t make ’em for the home, mister, where on earth would you put ’em?”

The wintry color came out again on the old man’s cheeks. “If madam would call me Steptoe,” he said ceremoniously, “I think she’d find it easier. I mean,” he went on, reverting to the original theme, “that ’E didn’t make ’em to be cooks and ’ousemaids and parlormaids, and all that. That’s men’s work. Men’ll do it as easy as a bird’ll sing. I never see the woman yet as didn’t fret ’erself over it, like a wild animal’ll fret itself in a circus cage. It spiles women to put ’em to ’ousework, like it always spiles people to put ’em to jobs for which the Lord didn’t give ’em no haptitude.”

Letty was puzzled, but followed partially.

“I’ve watched ’em and watched ’em, and it’s always the syme tyle. They’ll go into service young and joyous like, but it won’t be two or three years before they’ll have growed cat-nasty like this ’ere Jyne Cykebread and Mary Ann Courage. Madam ’ud never believe what sweet young things they was when I first picked ’em out—Mrs. Courage a young widow, and Jynie as nice a girl as madam ’ud wish to see, only with the features what Mrs. Allerton used to call a little hover-haccentuated. And now—!” He allowed the conditions to speak for themselves without criticizing further.

“It’s keepin’ ’em in a ’ome what’s done it. They knows it theirselves—and yet they don’t. Inside they’ve got the sperrits of young colts that wants to kick up their ’eels in the pasture. They don’t mean no worse nor that, only when people comes to Jynie’s age 80 and Mrs. Courage’s they ’ave to kick up their ’eels in their own wye. If madam’ll remember that, and be pytient with them like–––”

Letty cried in alarm, “But it’s got nothin’ to do with me!”

“If madam’ll excuse me, it’s got everything to do with ’er. She’s the missus of this ’ouse.”

“Oh, no, I ain’t. Mr. Allerton just brung me here––”

Once more there was the delicate emphasis with which he had corrected other slips. “Mr. Allerton brought madam, and told me to see that she was put in ’er proper plyce. If madam’ll let me steer the thing, I’ll myke it as easy for ’er as easy.”

He reflected as to how to make the situation clear to her. “I’ve been readin’ about the time when our lyte Queen Victoria come to the throne as quite a young girl. She didn’t know nothin’ about politics or presidin’ at councils or nothin’. But she had a prime minister—a kind of hupper servant, you might sye—’er servant was what ’e always called ’imself—and whatever ’e told ’er to do, she done. Walked through it all, you might sye, till she got the ’ang of it, but once she did get the ’ang of it—well, there wasn’t no big-bug in the world that our most grycious sovereign lydy couldn’t put it all hover on.”

Once more he allowed her time to assimilate this parable.

“Now if madam would only think of ’erself as called in youth to reign hover this ’ouse––”

“Oh, but I couldn’t!”

81

“And yet it’s madam’s duty, now that she’s married to its ’ead––”

“Yes, but he didn’t marry me like that. He married me—all queer like. This was the way.”

She poured out the story, while Steptoe listened quietly. There being no elements in it of the kind he called “shydy,” he found it romantic. No one had ever suspected the longings for romance which had filled his heart and imagination when he was a poor little scullion boy; but the memory of them, with some of the reality, was still fresh in his hidden inner self. Now it seemed as if remotely and vicariously romance might be coming to him after all, through the boy he adored.

On her tale his only comment was to say: “I’ve been readin’—I’m a great reader,” he threw in parenthetically, “wonderful exercise for the mind, and learns you things which you wouldn’t be likely to ’ear tell of—but I’ve been readin’ about a king—I’ll show you ’is nyme in the book—what fell in love with a beggar myde––”

“Oh, but Mr. Allerton didn’t fall in love with me.”

“That remynes to be seen.”

She lifted her hands in awed amazement. “Mister—I mean, Steptoe—you—you don’t think––?”

The subway dream of love at first sight was as tenacious in her soul as the craving for romance in his.

He nodded. “I’ve known strynger things to ’appen.”

“But—but—he couldn’t—” it was beyond her power of expression, though Steptoe knew what she meant—“not him!”

He answered judicially. “’E may come to it. It’ll 82 be a tough job to bring ’im—but if madam’ll be guided by me–––”

Letty collapsed. Her spirit grew faint as the spirit of Christian when he descried far off the walls of the Celestial City, with the Dark River rolling between him and it. Letty knew the Dark River must be there, but if beyond it there lay the slightest chance of the Celestial City....

She came back to herself, as it were, on hearing Steptoe say that the procession from the kitchen would presently begin to form itself.

“Now if madam’ll be guided by me she’ll meet this situytion fyce to fyce.”

“Oh, but I’d never know what to say.”

“Madam won’t need to say nothink. She won’t ’ave to speak. ’Ere they’ll troop in—” a gesture described Mrs. Courage leading the advance through the doorway—“and ’ere they’ll stand. Madam’ll sit just where she’s sittin’—a little further back from the tyble—lookin’ over the mornin’ pyper like—” he placed the paper in her hand—“and as heach gives notice, madam’ll just bow ’er ’ead. See?”

Madam saw, but not exactly.

“Now if she’ll just move ’er chair––”

The chair was moved in such a way as to make it seem that the occupant, having finished her breakfast, was giving herself a little more space.

“And if madam would remove ’er ’at and jacket, she’d—she’d seem more like the lydy of the ’ouse at ’ome.”

Letty took off these articles of apparel, which Steptoe whisked out of sight.

83

“Now I’ll be Mrs. Courage comin’ to sye, ‘Madam, I wish to give notice.’ Madam’ll lower the pyper just enough to show ’er inclinin’ of ’er ’ead, assentin’ to Mrs. Courage leavin’ ’er. Mrs. Courage will be all for ’avin’ words—she’s a great ’and for words, Mrs. Courage is—but if madam won’t sye nothin’ at all, the wind’ll be out o’ Mrs. Courage’s syles like. Now, will madam be so good––?”

Having passed out into the hall, he entered with Mrs. Courage’s majestic gait, pausing some three feet from the table to say:

“Madam, things bein’ as they are, and me not wishin’ to stye no longer in the ’ouse where I’ve served so many years, I beg to give notice that I’m a givin’ of notice and mean to quit right off.”

Letty lowered the paper from before her eyes, jerking her head briskly.

“Ye-es,” Steptoe commended doubtfully, “a lettle too—well, too habrupt, as you might sye. Most lydies—real ’igh lydies, like the lyte Mrs. Allerton—inclines their ’ead slow and gryceful like. First, they throws it back a bit, so as to get a purchase on it, and then they brings it forward calm like, lowerin’ it stytely—Perhaps if madam’ud be me for a bit—that ’ud be Mrs. Courage—and let me sit there and be ’er, I could show ’er––”

The places were reversed. It was Letty who came in as Mrs. Courage, while Steptoe, seated in the chair, lowered the paper to the degree which he thought dignified. Letty mumbled something like the words the hypothetical Mrs. Courage was presumed to use, while Steptoe slowly threw back his head for 84 the purchase, bringing it forward in condescending grace. Language could not have given Mrs. Courage so effective a retort courteous.

Letty was enchanted. “Oh, Steptoe, let me have another try. I believe I could swing the cat.”

Again the places were reversed. Steptoe having repeated the rôle of Mrs. Courage, Letty imitated him as best she could in getting the purchase for her bow and catching his air of high-bred condescension.

“Better,” he approved, “if madam wouldn’t lower ’er ’ead quite so far back’ard. You see, madam, a lydy don’t know she’s throwin’ back ’er ’ead so as to get a grip on it. She does it unconscious like, because bein’ of a ’aughty sperrit she ’olds it ’igh natural. If madam’ll only stiffen ’er neck like, as if sperrit ’ad made ’er about two inches taller than she is––”

Having seized this idea, Letty tried again, with such success that Mrs. Courage was disposed of. Jane Cakebread followed next, with Nettie last of all. Unaware of his possession of histrionic ability, Steptoe gave to each character its outstanding traits, fluttering like Jane, and giggling like Nettie, not in zeal for a newly discovered interpretative art, but in order that Letty might be nowhere caught at a disadvantage. He was delighted with her quickness in imitation.

“Couldn’t ’ave done that better myself,” he declared after Nettie had been dismissed for the third or fourth time. “When it comes to the inclinin’ of the ’ead I should sye as madam was about letter-perfect, as they sye on the styge. If Mr. Rash was to see it, ’e’d swear as ’is ma ’ad come back again.”

A muffled sound proceeded from the back part of 85 the hallway, with some whispering and once or twice Nettie’s stifled cackle of a laugh.

“’Ere they are,” he warned her. “Madam must be firm and control ’erself. There’s nothink for ’er to be afryde of. Just let ’er think of the lyte Queen Victoria, called to the throne when younger even than madam is––”

A shuffling developed into one lone step, heavy, stately, and funereal. Doing her best to emulate the historic example held up to her, Letty lengthened her neck and stiffened it. A haughty spirit seemed to rise in her by the mere process of the elongation. She was so nervous that the paper shook in her hand, but she knew that if the Celestial City was to be won, she could shrink from no tests which might lead her on to victory.

Steptoe had relapsed into the major-domo’s office, announcing from the doorway, “Mrs. Courage to see madam, if madam will be pleased to receive ’er.”

Madam indicated that she was so pleased, scrambling after the standard of the maiden sovereign of Windsor Castle giving audience to princes and ambassadors.

86

Chapter VIII

“I’m ’ere.”

Letty couldn’t know, of course, that this announcement, made in a menacing female bass, was due to the fact that three swaying bodies had been endeavoring so to get round the deployed paper wings as to see what was hidden there, and had found their efforts vain. All she could recognize was the summons to the bar of social judgment. To the bar of social judgment she would have gone obediently, had it not been for that rebelliousness against being “looked down upon” which had lately mastered her. As it was, she lengthened her neck by another half inch, receiving from the exercise a new degree of self-strengthening.

“Mrs. Courage is ’ere, madam,” Steptoe seconded, “and begs to sye as she’s givin’ notice to quit madam’s service––”

The explosion came as if Mrs. Courage was strangling.

“When I wants words took out of my mouth by ’Enery Steptoe or anybody else I’ll sye so. If them as I’ve come into this room to speak to don’t feel theirselves aible to fyce me––”

“Madam’ll excuse an old servant who’s outlived ’er time,” Steptoe intervened, “and not tyke no notice. They always abuses the kindness that’s been showed ’em, and tykes liberties which––”

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But not for nothing had Mrs. Courage been born to the grand manner.

“When ’Enery Steptoe talks of old servants out-livin’ their time and tykin’ liberties ’e speaks of what ’e knows all about from personal experience. ’E was an old man when I was a little thing not so high.”

The appeal was to the curiosity of the girl behind the screen. To judge of how high Mrs. Courage had not been at a time when Steptoe was already an old man she might be enticed from her fortifications. But the pause only offered Steptoe a new opportunity.

“And so, if madam can dispense with ’er services, which I understand madam can, Mrs. Courage will be a-leavin’ of us this morning, with all our good wishes, I’m sure. Good-dye to you, Mary Ann, and God bless you after all the years you’ve been with us. Madam’s givin’ you your dismissal.”

Obedient to her cue Letty lowered her guard just enough to incline her head with the grace Steptoe had already pronounced “letter perfect.” The shock to Mrs. Courage can best be narrated in her own terms to Mrs. Walter Wildgoose later in the day.

“Airs! No one couldn’t imagine it, Bessie, what ’adn’t seen it for theirselves—what them baggages’ll do—smokin’—and wearin’ pearl necklaces—and ’avin’ their own limousines—all that I’ve seen and ’ad got used to—but not the President’s wife—not Mary Queen of England—could ’a myde you feel as if you was dirt hunder their feet like what this one—and ’er with one of them marked down sixty-nine cent blouses that ’adn’t seen the wash since—and as for 88 looks—why, she didn’t ’ave a look to bless ’erself—and a-’oldin’ of ’erself like what a empress might—and bowin’ ’er ’ead, and goin’ back to ’er pyper, as if I’d disturbed ’er at ’er readin’—and the dead and spitten image of ’Enery Steptoe ’imself she is—and you know ’ow many times we’ve all wondered as to why ’e didn’t marry—and ’im with syvings put by—Jynie thinks as ’e’s worth as much as—and you know what a ’and Jynie is for ferritin’ out what’s none of ’er business—why, if Jynie Cykebread could ’a myde ’erself Jynie Steptoe—but that’s somethink wild ’orses wouldn’t myke poor Jynie see—that no man wouldn’t look at ’er the second time if it wasn’t for to laugh—pitiful, I call it, at ’er aige—and me always givin’ the old rip to know as it was no use ’is ’angin’ round where I was—as if I’d marry agyne, and me a widda, as you might sye, from my crydle—and if I did, it wouldn’t ’a been a wicked old varlet what I always suspected ’e was leadin’ a double life—and now to see them two fyces together—why, I says, ’ere’s the explanytion as plyne as plyne can make it....”

All of which might have been true in rhetoric, but not in fact. For what had really given Mrs. Courage the coup de grace we must go back to the scene of the morning.

Ignoring both Letty’s inclination of the head and Steptoe’s benediction she had shown herself hurt where she was tenderest.

“Now that there’s no one to ryse their voice agynst the disgryce brought on this family but me––”

“Speak right up, Jynie. Don’t be afryde. Madam 89 won’t eat you. She knows that you’ve come to give notice––”

Mrs. Courage struggled on. “No one ain’t goin’ to bow me out of the ’ouse I’ve been cook-’ousekeeper in these twenty-seven year––”

“Sorry as madam’ll be to lose you, Jynie, she won’t stand in the wye of your gettin’ a better plyce––”

Mrs. Courage’s roar being that of the wounded lioness she was, the paper shook till it rattled in Letty’s hand.

“I will be listened to. I’ve a right to be ’eard. My ’eart’s been as much in this ’ouse and family as ’Enery Steptoe’s ’eart; and to see shyme and ruin come upon it––”

Steptoe’s interruption was in a tone of pleased surprise.

“Why, you still ’ere, Mary Ann? We thought you’d tyken leave of us. Madam didn’t know you was speakin’. She won’t detyne you, madam won’t. You and Jynie and Nettie’ll all find cheques for your wyges pyde up to a month a ’ead, as I know Mr. Rashleigh’d want me to do....”

Shame and ruin! Letty couldn’t follow the further unfoldings of Steptoe’s diplomacy because of these two words. They summed up what she brought—what she had been married to bring—to a house of which even she could see the traditions were of honor. Vaguely aware of voices which she attributed to Jane and Nettie, her spirit was in revolt against the rôle for which her rashness of yesterday had let her in, and which Steptoe was forcing upon her.

Jane was still whimpering and sniffling:

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“I’m sure I never dreamed that things would ’appen like what ’as ’appened—and us all one family, as you might sye—’opin’ the best of everyone––”

“Jynie, stop,” Mrs. Courage’s voice had become low and firm, with emotion in its tone, making Letty catch her breath. “My ’eart’s breakin’, and I ain’t a-goin’ to let it break without mykin’ them that’s broken it know what they’ve done to me.”

“Now, Mary Ann,” Steptoe tried to say, peaceably, “madam’s grytely pressed for time––”

“’Enery Steptoe, do you suppose that you’re the only one in the world as ’as loved that boy? Ain’t ’e my boy just as much as ever ’e was yours?”

“’E’s boy to them as stands by ’im, Mrs. Courage—and stands by them that belongs to ’im. The first thing you do is to quit––”

“I’m not quittin’; I’m druv out. I’m druv out at a hour’s notice from the ’ome I’ve slyved for all my best years, leavin’ dishonor and wickedness in my plyce––”

Letty could endure no more. Dashing to the floor the paper behind which she crouched she sprang to her feet.

“Is that me?” she demanded.

The surprise of the attack caught Mrs. Courage off her guard. She could only open her mouth, and close it again, soundlessly and helplessly. Jane stared, her curiosity gratified at last. Nettie turned to whisper to Jane, “There; what did I tell you? The commonest thing!” Steptoe nodded his head quietly. In this little creature with her sudden flame, eyes all fire 91 and cheeks of the wine-colored damask rose, he seemed to find a corroboration of his power of divining character.

It seemed long before Mrs. Courage had found the strength to live up to her convictions, by faintly murmuring: “Who else?”

“Then tell me what you accuse me of?”

Mrs. Courage saw her advantage. “We ain’t ’ere to accuse nobody of nothink. If it’s ’intin’ that I’d tyke awye anyone’s character it’s a thing I’ve ’ardly ever done, and no one can sye it of me. All we want is to give our notice––”

“Then why don’t you do it—and go?”

Once more Steptoe intervened, diplomatically. “That’s what Mrs. Courage is a-doin’ of, madam. She’s finished, ain’t you Mary Ann? Jynie and Nettie is finished too––”

But it was Letty now who refused this mediation.

“No, they ain’t finished. Let ’em go on.”

But no one did go on. Mrs. Courage was now dumb. She was dumb and frightened, falling back on her two supporters. All three together they huddled between the portières. If Steptoe could have calmed his protégée he would have done it; but she was beyond his control.

“Am I the ruin and shame to this house that you was talkin’ about just now? If I am, why don’t you speak out and put it to me plain?”

There was no response. The spectators looked on as if they were at the theater.

“What have you all got against me anyhow?” Letty insisted, passionately. “What did I ever do to you? 92 What’s women’s hearts made of, that they can’t let a poor girl be?”

Mrs. Courage had so far recovered as to be able to turn from one to another, to say in pantomime that she had been misunderstood. Jane began to cry; Nettie to laugh.

“Even if I was the bad girl you’re tryin’ to make me out I should think other women might show me a little pity. But I’m not a bad girl—not yet. I may be. I dunno but what I will. When I see the hateful thing bein’ good makes of women it drives me to do the other thing.”

This was the speech they needed to justify themselves. To be good made women hateful! Their dumb-crambo to each other showed that anyone who said so wild a thing stood already self-condemned.

But Letty flung up her head with a mettle which Steptoe hadn’t seen since the days of the late Mrs. Allerton.

“I’m not in this house to drive no one else out of it. Them that have lived here for years has a right to it which I ain’t got. You can go, and let me stay; or you can stay, and let me go. I’m the wife of the owner of this house, who married me straight and legal; but I don’t care anything about that. You don’t have to tell me I ain’t fit to be his wife, because I know it as well as you do. All I’m sayin’ is that you’ve got the choice to stay or go; and whichever you do, I’ll do different.”

Never in her life had she spoken so many words at one time. The effort drained her. With a torrent 93 of dry sobs that racked her body she dropped back into her chair.

The hush was that of people who find the tables turned on themselves in a way they consider unwarranted. Of the general surprise Steptoe was quick to take advantage.

“There you are, girls. Madam couldn’t speak no fairer, now could she?”

To this there was neither assent or dissent; but it was plain that no one was ready to pick up the glove so daringly thrown down.

“Now what I would suggest,” Steptoe went on, craftily, “is that we all go back to the kitchen and talk it over quiet like. What we decide to do we can tell madam lyter.”

For consent or refusal Jane and Nettie looked to Mary Ann, whose attitude was that of rejecting parley. She might, indeed, have rejected it, had not Letty, bowing her head on the arms she rested on the table, begun to cry bitterly.

It was then that you saw Mrs. Courage at her best. The gesture with which she swept her subordinates back into the hall was that of the supremacy of will.

“It shan’t be said as I crush,” she declared, nobly, directing Steptoe’s attention to the weeping girl. “Where there’s penitence I pity. God grant as them tears may gush out of an aichin’ ’eart.”

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Chapter IX

By the time Letty was drying her eyes, her heart somewhat eased, Steptoe had come back. He came back with a smile. Something had evidently pleased him.

“So that’s all over. Madam won’t be bothered with other people’s cat-nasty old servants after to-dye.”

She felt a new access of alarm. “But they’re not goin’ away on account o’ me? Don’t let ’em do it. Lemme go instead. Oh, mister, I can’t stay here, where everything’s so different from what I’m used to.”

He still smiled, his gentle old man’s smile which somehow gave her confidence.

“Madam won’t sye that after a dye or two. It’s new to ’er yet, of course; but if she’ll always remember that I’m ’ere, to myke everythink as easy as easy––”

“But what are you goin’ to do, with no cook, and no chambermaid––?”

Standing with the corner of the table between him and her, he was saying to himself, “If Mr. Rash could only see ’er lookin’ up like this—with ’er eyes all starry—and her cheeks with them dark-red roses—red roses like you’d rubbed with a little black....” But he suspended the romantic longing to say, aloud:

“If madam will permit me I’ll tyke my measures as I’ve wanted to tyke ’em this long spell back.”

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Madam was not to worry as to the three women who were leaving the house, inasmuch as they had long been intending to leave it. Both Mrs. Courage and Jane, having graduated to the stage of “accommodating,” were planning to earn more money by easier work. Nettie, since coming to America, had learned that housework was menial, and was going to be a milliner.

Madam’s remorse being thus allayed he told what he hoped to do for madam’s comfort. There would be no more women in the house, not till madam herself brought them back. An English chef who had lost an eye in the war, and an English waiter, ready to do chamberwork, who had left a foot on some battlefield, were prepared under Steptoe’s direction to man the house. No woman whose household cares had not been eased by men, in the European fashion, knew what it was to live. A woman waited on by women only was kept in a state of nerves. Nerves were infectious. When one woman in a household got them the rest were sooner or later their prey. Unless strongly preventative measures were adopted they spread at times to the men. America was a dreadful country for nerves and it mostly came of women working with women; whereas, according to Steptoe’s psychology, men should work with women and women with men. There were thousands of women who were bitter in heart at cooking and making beds who would be happy as linnets in offices and shops; and thousands of men who were dying of boredom in offices and shops who would be in their element cooking and making beds.

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“One of the things the American people ’as got back’ards, if madam’ll allow me to sye so, is that ’ouse’old work is not fit for a white man. When you come to that the American people ain’t got a sense of the dignity of their ’omes. They can’t see their ’omes as run by anything but slyves. All that’s outside the dinin’ room and the drorin’ room and the masters’ bedrooms the American sees as if it was a low-down thing, even when it’s hunder ’is own roof. Colored men, yellow men, may cook ’is meals and myke ’is bed; but a white man’d demean ’imself. A poor old white man like me when ’e’s no longer fit for ’ard outdoor work ain’t allowed to do nothink; when all the time there’s women workin’ their fingers to the bone that ’e could be a great ’elp to, and who ’e’d like to go to their ’elp.”

This was one reason, he argued, why the question of domestic aid in America was all at sixes and sevens. It was not considered humanly. It was more than a question of supply and demand; it was one of national prejudice. A rich man could have a French chef and an English butler, and as many strapping indoor men—some of them much better fitted for manual labor—as he liked, and find it a social glory; while a family of moderate means were obliged to pay high wages to crude incompetent women from the darkest backwaters of European life, just because they were women.

“And the women’s mostly to blyme,” he reasoned. “They suffers—nobody knows what they suffers better nor me—just because they ain’t got the spunk to do anything but suffer. They’ve got it all in their 97 own ’ands, and they never learn. Men is slow to learn; but women don’t ’ardly ever learn at all.”

Letty was thinking of herself, as she glanced up at this fount of wisdom with the question:

“Don’t none of ’em?”

Having apparently weighed this already he had his answer. “None that’s been drilled a little bit before ’and. Once let woman feel as so and so is the custom, and for ’er that custom, whether good or bad, is there to stye. They sye that chyngin’ ’er mind is a woman’s privilege; but the woman that chynged ’er mind about a custom is one I never met yet.”

She took him as seriously as he took himself.

“Don’t you like women, mister—I mean, Steptoe?”

He pondered before replying. “I don’t know as I could sye. I’ve never ’ad a chance to see much of women except in ’ousework, where they’re out of their element and tyken at a disadvantage. I don’t like none I’ve ever run into there, because none of ’em never was no sport.”

The inquiry in her golden eyes led him a little further.

“No one ain’t a sport what sighs and groans over their job, and don’t do it cheerful like. No one ain’t a sport what undertykes a job and ain’t proud of it. If a woman will go into ’ousework let ’er do it honorable. If she chooses to be a servant let ’er be a servant, and not be ashymed to sye she is one. So if madam arsks me if I like ’em I ’ave to confess I don’t, because as far as I see women I mostly ’ear ’em complyne.”

Her admiration was quite sincere as she said: “I 98 shouldn’t think they’d complain if they had you to put ’em wise.”

He corrected gently. “If they ’ad me to tell ’em.”

“If they ’ad you to tell ’em,” she imitated, meekly.

“Madam mustn’t pick up the bad ’abit of droppin’ ’er haitches,” he warned, parentally. “I’ll learn ’er a lot, but that’s one thing I mustn’t learn ’er. I don’t do it often—Oh, once in a wye, mybe—but that’s something madam speaks right already—just like all Americans.”

Delighted that there was one thing about her that was right already she reminded him of what he had said, that women never learned.

“I said women as ’ad been drilled a bit. But madam’s different. Madam comes into this ’ouse newborn, as you might sye; and that’ll myke it easier for ’er and me.”

“You mean that I’ll not be a kicker.”

Once more he smiled his gentle reproof. “Oh, madam wouldn’t be a kicker any’ow. Jynie or Nettie or Mary Ann Courage or even me—we might be kickers; but if madam was to hobject to anything she’d be—displeased.”

She knitted her brows. The distinction was difficult. He saw he had better explain more fully.

“It’s only the common crowd what kicks. It’s only the common crowd what uses the expression. A man might use it—I mean a real ’igh gentleman like Mr. Rashleigh—and get awye with it—now and then—if ’e didn’t myke a ’abit of it; but when a woman does it she rubberstamps ’erself. Now, does madam see? A lydy couldn’t be a lydy—and kick. The lyte Mrs. 99 Allerton would never demean ’erself to kick; she’d only show displeasure.”

With a thumb and two fingers Letty marked off on the table the three points as to which she had received information that morning. She must say brought, and not brung; she must say tell, and not put wise; she must not kick, but show displeasure. Neither must she drop her aitches, though to do so would have been an effort. The warning only raised a suspicion that in the matter of speech there might be a higher standard than Steptoe’s. If ever she heard Rashleigh Allerton speak again she resolved to listen to him attentively.

She came back from her reverie on hearing Steptoe say:

“With madam it’s a cyse of beginning from the ground up, more or less as you would with a byby; so I ’ope madam’ll forgive me if I drop a ’int as to what we must do before goin’ any farther.”

Once more he read her question in the starry little flames in her eyes.

“It’s—clothes.”

The damask red which had ebbed surged slowly back again. It surged back under the transparent white skin, as red wine fills a glass. Her lips parted to stammer the confession that she had no clothes except those she wore; but she couldn’t utter a syllable.

“I understand madam’s position, which is why I mention it. You might sye as clothes is the ABC of social life, and if we’re to work from the ground up we must begin there.”

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She forced it out at last, but the statement seemed to tear her.

“I can’t get clothes. I ain’t got no money.”

“Oh, money’s no hobject,” he smiled. “Mr. Rash ’as plenty of that, and I know what ’e’d like me to do. There never was ’is hequal for the ’open ’and. If madam’ll leave it to me....”

Allerton’s office was much what you would have expected it to be, bearing to other offices the same relation as he to other business men. He had it because not to have it wouldn’t have been respectable. A young American who didn’t go to an office every day would hardly have been a young American. An office, then, was a concession to public sentiment, as well as some faint justification of himself.

It was in the latter sense that he chiefly took it, making it a subject of frequent reference. In his conversation such expressions as “my office,” or “due at my office,” were introduced more often than there was occasion for. The implication that he had work to do gave him status, enabling him to sit down among his cronies and good-naturedly take their fun.

He took a good deal of fun, never having succeeded in making himself the standardized type who escapes the shafts of ridicule. It was kindly fun, which, while viewing him as a white swan in a flock of black ones, recognized him as a swan, and this was as much as he could expect. To pass in the crowd was all he asked for, even when he only passed on bluff. If he couldn’t wholly hide the bluff he could keep it from being 101 flagrantly obtrusive; and toward that end an office was a help.

It was an office situated just where you would have expected to find it—far enough downtown to be downtown, and yet not so far downtown as to make it a trouble to get there. Being on the eastern side of Washington Square, it had a picturesque outlook, and the merit of access from East Sixty-seventh Street through the long straight artery of Fifth Avenue.

It was furnished, too, just as you might have known he would furnish it, in the rich and sober Style Empire, and yet not so exclusively in the Style Empire as to make the plain American business man fear he had dropped into Napoleon’s library at Malmaison. That is what Rashleigh would have liked, but other men could do what in him would be thought finicky. To take the “cuss” off his refinement, as he put it to Barbara, he scattered modern American office bits among his luscious brown surfaces, adorned with wreaths and lictors’ sheaves in gold, though to himself the wrong note was offensive.

But wrong notes and right notes were the same to him as, on this particular morning, he dragged himself there because it was the hour. His office staff in the person of old Mr. Radbury was already on the spot, and had sorted the letters for the day. These were easily dealt with. Reinvestment, or new opportunities for investment, were their principal themes, and the only positive duty to attend to was in the endorsement of dividend checks for deposit. A few directions being given to Mr. Radbury as to such letters 102 as were to be answered, Allerton had nothing to do but stroll to the window and look out.

It was what he did perhaps fifty times in the course of the two or three hours daily, or approximately daily, which he spent there. He did so now. He did so because it put off for a few minutes longer the fierce, exasperating, acrid pleasure of doing worse. To do worse had been his avowed object in coming to the office that morning, and not the answering of letters or the raking in of checks.

Looking down from his window on the tenth floor he asked himself the fruitless question which millions of other men have asked when folly has got them into trouble. Among these thousands who, viewed from that height, had a curious resemblance to ants, was there such a fool as he was? From the Square they streamed into Fifth Avenue; from Fifth Avenue they streamed into the Square. In the Square and round the Square they squirmed and wriggled and dawdled their seemingly aimless ways. Great green lumbering omnibuses disgorged one pack of them merely to suck up another. Motors whirled them toward uptown, toward downtown, or east, or west, by twos and threes, or as individuals. Like ants their general effect was black, with here and there a moving spot of color, or of intermingling colors, as of flowers in the wind, or tropic birds.

He watched a figure detach itself from the mass swirling round a debouching omnibus. It was a little black figure, just clearly enough defined to show that it was a man. Because it was a man it had been a fool. Because it had been a fool it had dark chambers in its 103 life which it would never willingly open. But it had doubtless got something for its folly. It might have lost more than it had gained, but it could probably reckon up and say, “At least I had my fun.”

And he had had none. He had squandered his whole life on a single act of insanity which even in the action had produced nothing but disgust. He hadn’t merely swindled himself; he had committed a kind of suicide which made death silly and grotesque. The one thing that could save him a scrap of dignity—and such a sorry scrap!—would be going to the devil by the shortest way.

He had come to the office to begin. He would begin by the means that seemed obvious. Now that going to the devil was a task he saw, as he had not seen hitherto, how curiously few were the approaches that would take him there. Song being only an accompaniment, he was limited to the remaining two of the famous and familiar trio.

Very well! Limited as he was he would make the most of them. Knowing something of their merits he knew there was a bestial entertainment to be had from both. It was a kind of entertainment which his cursed fastidiousness had always loathed; but now his reckoning would be different. If he got anything he should not feel so wastefully thrown away. He would be selling himself first and making his bargain afterwards; but some meager balance would stand to his credit, if credit it could be called. When the devil had been reached the world he knew would pardon him because it was the devil, and not—what it was in truth—an idiotic state of nerves.

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At the minute when Letty was leaping to her feet to take her stand he swung away from the window. First going to Mr. Radbury’s door he closed it softly. Luckily the old man, an inheritance from his, Allerton’s, father, was deaf and incurious. Like most clerks who had clerked their way up to seventy he was buried in clerking’s little round. He wouldn’t come in till the letters were finished, certainly not for an hour, and by that time Allerton would be.... He almost smiled at the old man’s probable consternation on finding him so before the middle of the day. Any time would be bad enough; but in the high forenoon....

He went to a cabinet which was said to have found its way via Bordentown from the furnishings of Queen Caroline Murat. Having opened it he took out a bottle and a glass. On the label of the bottle was a kilted Highlander playing on the pipes. A siphon of soda was also in the cabinet, but he left it there. What he had to do would be done more quickly without its mitigation.

While Allerton was making these preparations Judson Flack, in pajamas and slippers, was standing in his toy kitchen, looking helplessly at a small gas stove. It was the hour in the middle of the morning at which he was accustomed to be waked with the information that his coffee and eggs were ready. The forenoon being what he called his slack time he found the earlier part of it most profitably used for sleep.

“Curse the girl!”

The adjuration was called forth by the fact that he didn’t know where anything was, or how anything 105 should be done. From the simple expedient of going for his breakfast to one of the cheap restaurants with which he was familiar he was cut off by the fact of an unlucky previous night. He simply didn’t have the bones. This was not to say that he was penniless, but that in view of more public expenses later in the day it would be well for him to economize where economy was so obvious. He never had an appetite in the morning anyway. With irregular eating and drinking all through the evening and far toward daylight, he found a cup of coffee and an egg....

It was easy, he knew, to make the one and boil the other, but he was out of practice. He couldn’t remember doing anything of the sort since the days before he married Letty’s mother. Even then he had never tried this new-fangled thing, the gas stove, so that besides being out of practice he was at a loss.

“Curse the girl!”

The resources of the kitchen being few exploration didn’t take him long. He found bread, butter, milk that had turned sour, the usual condiments, some coffee in a canister, and a single egg. If he could only light the confounded gas stove....

A small white handle offering itself for experiment, he turned it timidly, applying a match to a geometrical pattern of holes. He jumped back as from an exploding cannon.

“Curse the girl!”

Having found the way, however, the next attempt was more successful. Soon he had two geometrical patterns of holes burning in steady blue buttons of flame. On the one he placed the coffee-pot into which 106 he had turned a pint of water and a cupful of coffee; on the other a saucepan half full of water containing his egg. This being done he retired to the bathroom for the elements of a toilet.

“Curse the girl!”

Washing, shaving, turning up his mustache with the little curling tongs, he observed with self-pity his increasing haggardness. He observed it also with dismay. Looks were as important to him as to an actress. His rôle being youth, high spirits, and the devil-may-care, the least trace of the wearing out would do for him. He had noticed some time ago that he was beginning to show fatal signs, which had the more emphatically turned his thoughts to the provision Letty might prove for his old age.

“Curse the girl!”

It was cursing the girl which reminded him that he had allowed more than the necessary time for his breakfast to be ready for consumption. Hurrying back to the kitchen he found the egg gracefully dancing as the water boiled. He fished it out with a spoon and took it in his hand, but he didn’t keep it there. Dashing it to the table, whence it crashed upon the floor, he positively screamed.

“Curse the girl!”

He cursed her now licking and sucking the tips of his fingers and examining them to see if they were scalded. No such calamity having occurred he took up the coffee pot, leaving the mashed egg where it lay. Ladling a spoonful of sugar into a cup, and adding the usual milk, he poured in the coffee, which became a muddy dark brown mixture, with what appeared to 107 be a porridge of seeds floating on the top. One sip, which induced a diabolical grimace, and he threw the beverage at the opposite wall as if it was a man he meant to insult.

“Curse the girl!”

The appeal to the darker powers being accompanied now by a series of up-to-date terms of objurgation, the mere act of utterance, mental or articulate, churned him to a frenzy. Seizing the coffee pot which he had replaced on the gas stove he hurled it too against the wall. It struck, splathered the hideous liquor over a hideous calsomining which had once been blue, and fell to the floor like a living thing knocked insensible.

The resemblance maddened him still more. It might have been Letty, struck down after having provoked him beyond patience. He rushed at it. He hurled it again. He hurled it again. He hurled it again. The exercise gave relief not only to his lawful resentment against Letty, but to those angers over his luck of last night which as “a good loser” he hadn’t been at liberty to show. No one knew the repressions he was obliged to put upon himself; but now his inhibitions could come off in this solitary passion of destruction.

When the coffee pot was a mere shapeless mass he picked up the empty cup. It was a thick stone-china cup, with a bar meant to protect his mustache across the top, a birthday present from Letty’s mother. The association of memories acted as a further stimulus. Smash! After the cup went the stone-china sugar bowl. Smash! After the sugar bowl the plate with the yellow chunk of butter. Smash! After the butter 108 plate the milk jar, a clumsy, lumpy thing, which merely gurgled out a splash of milk and fell without breaking.

“Curse the girl! Curse the girl! Curse the girl! I’ll learn her to go away and leave me! I’ll find her and drag her back if she’s in....”

109

Chapter X

While Letty was beginning a new experience Judson Flack was doing his best to carry out his threat. That is to say, he was making the round of the studios in which his step-daughter had occasionally found work, discreetly asking if she had been there that day. It was all he could think of doing. To the best of his knowledge she had no friends with whom she could have taken refuge, though the suspicion crossed his mind that she might have drowned herself to spite him.

As a matter of fact Letty was asking the question if she wasn’t making a mistake in not doing so, either literally or morally. Never before in her life had she been up against this problem of insufficiency. Among the hard things she had known she had not known this; and now that she was involved in it, it seemed to her harder than everything else put together.

In her humble round, bitter as it was, she had always been considered competent. It was the sense of her competence that gave her the self-respect enabling her to bear up. According to her standards she could keep house cleverly, and could make a dollar go as far as other girls made two. When she got her first chance in a studio, through an acquaintance of Judson Flack’s, she didn’t shrink from it, and had more than once been chosen by a director to be that member 110 of a crowd who moves in the front and expresses the crowd psychologically. Had she only had the clothes....

And now she was to have them. As far as that went she was not merely glad; she was one sheer quiver of excitement. It was not the end she shrank from; it was the means. If she could only have had fifty dollars to go “poking round” where she knew that bargains could be found, she might have enjoyed the prospect; but Steptoe could only “take measures” on the grand scale to which he was accustomed.

The grand scale frightened her, chiefly because she was dressed as she was dressed. It was her first thought and her last one. When Steptoe told her the hour at which he had asked Eugene to bring round the car the mere vision of herself stepping into it made her want to sink into the ground. Eugene didn’t live in the house—she had discovered that—and so would bring the stare of another pair of eyes under whose scrutiny she would have to pass. Those of the three women having already scorched her to the bone, she would have to be scorched again.

She tried to say this to Steptoe, as they stood in the drawing-room window waiting for the car; but she didn’t know how to make him understand it. When she tried to put it into words, the right words wouldn’t come. Steptoe had taken as general what she was trying to explain to him in particular.

“It’ll be very important to madam to fyce what’s ’ard, and to do it bryve like. It’ll be the mykin’ of ’er if she can. ’Umble ’ill is pretty stiff to climb; but them as gets to the top of it is tough.”

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She thought this over silently. He meant that if she set herself to take humiliations as they came, dragging herself up over them, she would be the stronger for it in the end.

“It’d ’ave been better for Mr. Rashleigh,” he mused, “if ’e’d ’ad ’ad somethink of the kind to tackle in ’is life; it’d ’ave myde ’im more of a man. But because ’e adn’t—Did madam ever notice,” he broke off to ask, “’ow them as ’as everythink myde easy for ’em begins right off to myke things ’ard for theirselves. It’s a kind of law like. It’s just as if nyture didn’t mean to let no one escype. When a man’s got no troubles you can think of, ’e’ll go to work to create ’em.”

“Didn’t he”—she had never yet pronounced the name of the man who had married her—”didn’t he ever have any troubles?”

“’E was fretted terrible—crossed like—rubbed up the wrong wye, as you might sye,—but a real trouble like what you and me ’ave ’ad plenty of—never! It’s my opinion that trouble is to char-ac-ter what a peg’ll be to a creepin’ vine—something to which the vine’ll ’ook on and pull itself up by. Where there’s nothink to ketch on to the vine’ll grow; but it’ll grow in a ’eap of flop.” There was a tremor in his tone as he summed up. “That’s somethink like my poor boy.”

Letty found this interesting. That in these exalted circles there could be a need of refining chastisement came to her as a surprise.

“The wife as I’ve always ’oped for ’im,” Steptoe went on, “is one that’d know what trouble was, and ’ow to fyce it. ’E’d myke a grand ’usband to a woman 112 who was—strong. But she’d ’ave to be the wall what the creepin’ vine could cover all over and—and beautify.”

“That wouldn’t be me.”

“If I was madam I wouldn’t be so sure of that. It don’t do to undervalyer your own powers. If I’d ’a done that I wouldn’t ’a been where I am to-dye. Many’s the time, when I was no more than a poor little foundlin’ boy in a ’ome I’ve said to myself, I’m fit for somethink big. Somethink big I always meant to be. When it didn’t seem possible for me to aim so ’igh I’d myde up my mind to be a valet and a butler. It comes—your hambition does. What you’ve first got to do is to form it; and then you’ve got to stick to it through thick and thin.”

To say what she said next Letty had to break down barrier beyond barrier of inhibition and timidity. “And if I was to—to form the—the ambition—to be—to be the kind of wall you was talkin’ about just now––”

“That wouldn’t be hambition; it’d be—consecrytion.”

He allowed her time to get the meaning of this before going on.

“But madam mustn’t expect not to find it ’ard. Consecrytion is always ’ard, by what I can myke out. When Mr. Rash was a little ’un ’e used to get Miss Pye, ’is governess, to read to ’im a fairy tyle about a little mermaid what fell in love with a prince on land. Bein’ in love with ’im she wanted to be with ’im, natural like; but there she was in one element, as you might sye, and ’im in another.”

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“That’d be like me.”

“Which is why I’m tellin’ madam of the story. Well, off the little mermaid goes to the sea-witch to find out ’ow she could get rid of ’er fish’s tyle and ’ave two feet for to walk about in the prince’s palace. Well, the sea-witch she up and tells ’er what she’d ’ave to do. Only, says she, if you do that you’ll ’ave to pye for it with every step you tykes; for every step you tykes’ll be like walkin’ on sharp blydes. Now, says she, to the little mermaid, do you think it’d be worth while?”

In Letty’s eyes all the stars glittered with her eagerness for the dénouement. “And did she think it was worth while—the little mermaid?”

“She did; but I’ll give madam the tyle to read for ’erself. It’s in the syme little book what Miss Pye used to read out of—up in Mr. Rash’s old nursery.”

With the pride of a royal thing conscious of its royalty the car rolled to the door and stopped. It was the prince’s car, while she, Letty, was a mermaid born in an element different from his, and encumbered with a fish’s tail. She must have shown this in her face, for Steptoe said, with his fatherly smile:

“Madam may ’ave to walk on blydes—but it’ll be in the Prince’s palace.”

It’ll be in the Prince’s palace! Letty repeated this to herself as she followed him out to the car. Holding the door open for her, Eugene, who had been told of her romance, touched his cap respectfully. When she had taken her seat he tucked the robe round her, respectfully again. Steptoe marked the social difference between them by sitting beside Eugene.

114

Rolling down Fifth Avenue Letty was as much at a loss to account for herself as Elijah must have been in the chariot of fire. She didn’t know where she was going. She was not even able to ask. The succession of wonders within twenty-four hours blocked the working of her faculties. She thought of the girls who sneered at her in the studios—she thought of Judson Flack—and of what they would say if they were to catch a glimpse of her.

She was not so unsophisticated as to be without some appreciation of the quarter of New York in which she found herself. She knew it was the “swell” quarter. She knew that the world’s symbols of money and display were concentrated here, and that in some queer way she, poor waif, had been given a command of them. One day homeless, friendless, and penniless, and the next driving down Fifth Avenue in a limousine which might be called her own!

The motor was slowing down. It was drawing to the curb. They had reached the place to which Steptoe had directed Eugene. Letty didn’t have to look at the name-plate to know she was where the great stars got their gowns, and that she was being invited into Margot’s!

You know Margot’s, of course. A great international house, Margot—the secret is an open one—is but the incognita of a business-like English countess who finds it financially profitable to sign articles on costume written by someone else, and be sponsor for the newest fashions which someone else designs. As a way of turning an impoverished historic title to account it is as good as any other.

115

Without knowing who Margot was Letty knew what she was. She couldn’t have frequented studios without hearing that much, and once or twice in her wanderings about the city she had paused to admire the door. It was all there was to admire, since Margot, to Letty’s regret, didn’t display confections behind plate-glass.

It was a Flemish château which had been a residence before business had traveled above Forty-second Street. A man in livery would have barred them from passing the wrought-iron grille had it not been for the car from which they had emerged. Only people worthy of being customers of the house could afford such cars, and he saw that Steptoe was a servant. What Letty was he couldn’t see, for servants of great houses never looked so nondescript.

In the great hall a beautiful staircase swept to an upper floor, but apart from a Louis Seize mirror and console flanked by two Louis Seize chairs there was nothing and no one to be seen. Steptoe turned to the right into a vast saloon with a cinnamon-colored carpet and walls of cool French gray. A group of gilded chairs were the only furnishings, except for a gilded canapé between two French windows draped with cinnamon-colored hangings. A French fender with French andirons filled the fireplace, and on the white marble mantelpiece stood a garniture de cheminée, a clock and two vases, in biscuit de Sèvres.

At the end of the room opposite the windows a woman in black, with coiffure à la Marcel, sat at a white-enamelled desk working with a ledger. A second woman in black, also with coiffure à la Marcel, 116 stood holding open the doors of a white-enamelled wardrobe, gazing at its multi-colored contents. Two other women in black, still with coiffure à la Marcel, were bending over a white-enamelled drawer in a series of white-enamelled drawers, discussing in low tones. There were no customers. For such a house the season had not yet begun. Though in this saloon voices were pitched as low as for conversation in a church, the sharp catgut calls of Frenchwomen—and of French dressmakers especially—came from a room beyond.

Overawed by this vastness, simplicity, and solemnity, Steptoe and Letty stood barely within the door, waiting till someone noticed them. No one did so till the woman holding open the wardrobe doors closed them and turned round. She did not come forward at once; she only stared at them. Still keeping her eye on the newcomers she called the attention of the ladies occupied with the drawer, who lifted themselves up. They too stared. The lady at the desk stared also.

It was the lady of the wardrobe who advanced at last, slowly, with dignity, her hands genteelly clasped in front of her. She seemed to be saying, “No, we don’t want any,” or, “I’m sorry we’ve nothing to give you,” by her very walk. Letty, with her gift for dramatic interpretation, could see this, though Steptoe, familiar as he was with ladies whom he would have classed as “’igher,” was not daunted. He too went forward, meeting madam half way.

Of what was said between them Letty could hear nothing, but the expression on the lady’s face was 117 dissuasive. She was telling Steptoe that he had come to the wrong place, while Steptoe was saying no. From time to time the lady would send a glance toward Letty, not in disdain, but in perplexity. It was perplexity which reached its climax when Steptoe drew from an inside pocket an impressive roll of bills.

The lady looked at the bills, but she also looked at Letty. The honor of a house like Margot’s is not merely in making money; it is in its clientèle. To have a poor little waif step in from the street....

And yet it was because she was a poor little waif that she interested the ladies looking on. She was so striking an exception to their rule that her very coming in amazed them. One of the two who had remained near the open drawer came forward into conference with her colleague, adding her dissuasions to those which Steptoe had already refused to listen to.

“There are plenty of other places to which you could go,” Letty heard this second lady say, “and probably do better.”

Steptoe smiled, that old man’s smile which was rarely ineffective. “Madam don’t ’ave to tell me as there’s plenty of other plyces to which I could go; but there’s none where I could do as well.”

“What makes you think so?”

“I’m butler to a ’igh gentleman what ’e used to entertyne quite a bit when ’is mother was alive. I’ve listened to lydies talkin’ at tyble. No one can’t tell me. I know.”

Both madams smiled. Each shot another glance at Letty. It was plain that they were curious as to her identity. One of them made a venture.

118

“And is this your—your daughter?”

Steptoe explained, not without dignity, that the young lady was not his daughter, but that she had come into quite a good bit of money, and had done it sudden like. She needed a ’igh, grand outfit, though for the present she would be content with three or four of the dresses most commonly worn by a lydy of stytion. He preferred to nyme no nymes, but he was sure that even Margot would not regret her confidence—and he had the cash, as they saw, in his pocket.

Of this the result was an exchange between the madams of comprehending looks, while, in French, one said to the other that it might be well to consult Madame Simone.

Madame Simone, who bustled in from the back room, was not in black, but in frowzy gray; her coiffure was not à la Marcel, but as Letty described it, “all anyway.” A short, stout, practical Frenchwoman, she had progressed beyond the need to consider looks, and no longer considered them. The two shapely subordinates with whom Steptoe had been negotiating followed her at a distance like attendants.

She disposed of the whole matter quickly, addressing the attendants rather than the postulants for Margot’s favor.

“Mademoiselle she want an outfit—good!—bon! We don’t know her, but what difference does that make to me?—qu’est ce que c’est que cela me fait? Money is money, isn’t it?—de l’argent c’est de l’argent, n’est-ce pas?—at this time of year especially—à cette saison de l’année surtout.”

119

To Steptoe and Letty she said: “’Ave the goodness to sit yourselves ’ere. Me, I will show you what we ’ave. A street costume first for mademoiselle. If mademoiselle will allow me to look at her—Ah, oui! Ze taille—what you call in Eenglish the figure—is excellent. Très chic. With ze proper closes mademoiselle would have style—de l’élégance naturelle—that sees itself—cela se voit—oui—oui––”

Meditating to herself she studied Letty, indifferent apparently to the actual costume and atrocious hat, like a seeress not viewing what is at her feet but events of far away.

With a sudden start she sprang to her convictions. “I ’ave it. J’y suis.” A shrill piercing cry like that of a wounded cockatoo went down the long room. “Alphonsine! Alphonsine!”

Someone appeared at the door of the communicating rooms. Madame Simone gave her orders in a few sharp staccato French sentences. After that Letty and Steptoe found themselves sitting on two of the gilded chairs, unexpectedly alone. The other ladies had returned to their tasks. Madame Simone had gone back to the place whence they had summoned her. Nothing had happened. It seemed to be all over. They waited.

“Ain’t she goin’ to show us nothin’?” Letty whispered anxiously. “They always do.”

Steptoe was puzzled but recommended patience. He couldn’t think that Madame could have begun so kindly, only to go off and leave them in the lurch. It was not what he had looked for, any more than she; but he had always found patient waiting advantageous.

120

Perhaps ten minutes had gone by when a new figure wandered toward them. Strutted would perhaps be the better word, since she stepped like a person for whom stepping means a calculation. She was about Letty’s height, and about Letty’s figure. Moreover, she was pretty, with that haughtiness of mien which turns prettiness to beauty. What was most disconcerting was her coming straight toward Letty, and standing in front of her to stare.

Letty colored to the eyes—her deep, damask flush. The insult was worse than anything offered by Mrs. Courage; for Mrs. Courage after all was only a servant, and this a young lady of distinction. Letty had never seen anyone dressed with so much taste, not even the stars as they came on the studio lot in their everyday costumes. Indignant as she was she could appreciate this delicate seal-brown cloth, with its bits of gold braid, and darling glimpses of sage-green wherever the lining showed indiscreetly. The hat was a darling too, brown with a feather between brown and green, the one color or the other according as the wearer moved.

If it hadn’t been for this cool insolence.... And then the young lady deliberately swung on her heel, which was high, to move some five or six yards away, where she stood with her back to them. It was a darling back—with just enough gold braid to relieve the simplicity, and the tiniest revelation of sage-green. Letty admired it the more poignantly for its cold contempt of herself.

Steptoe was not often put out of countenance, but it seemed to have happened now. “I can’t think,” he 121 murmured, as one who contemplates the impossible, “that the French madam can ’ave been so civil to begin with, just to go and make a guy of us.”

“If all her customers is like this––” Letty began.

But the young lady of distinction turned again, stepping a few paces toward the back of the room, swinging on herself, stepping a few paces toward the front of the room, swinging on herself again, and all the while flinging at Letty glances which said: “If you want to see scorn, this is it.”

Fascination kept Letty paralyzed. Steptoe grew uneasy.

“I wish the French madam’d come back agyne,” he murmured, from half closed lips. “We ’aven’t come ’ere to be myde a spectacle of—not for no one.”

And just then the seal-brown figure strolled away, as serenely and impudently as she had come.

“Well, of all––!”

Letty’s exclamation was stifled by the fact that as the first young lady of distinction passed out a second crossed her coming in. They took no notice of each other, though the newcomer walked straight up to Letty, not to stare but to toss up her chin with a hint of laughter suppressed. Laughter, suppressed or unsuppressed, was her note. She was all fair-haired, blue-eyed vivacity. It was a relief to Letty that she didn’t stare. She twitched, she twisted, she pirouetted, striking dull gleams from an embroidery studded with turquoise and jade—but she hadn’t the hard unconscious arrogance of the other one.

All the same it pained Letty that great ladies should be so beautiful. Not that this one was beautiful of 122 face—she wasn’t—only piquant—but the general effect was beautiful. It showed what money and the dressmaker could do. If she, Letty could have had a dress and a hat like this!—a blue or a green, it was difficult to say which—with these strips of jade and turquoise on a ground of the purplish-greenish-blue she remembered as that of the monkshood in the old farm garden in Canada—and the darlingest hat, with one long feather beginning as green and graduating through every impossible shade of green and blue till it ended in a monkshood tip....

No wonder the girl’s blue eyes danced and quizzed and laughed. As a matter of fact, Letty commented, the eyes brought a little too much blue into the composition. It was her only criticism. As a whole it lacked contrast. If she herself had worn this costume—with her gold-stone eyes—and brown hair—and rich coloring, when she had any color—blue was always a favorite shade with her—when she could choose, which wasn’t often—she remembered as a child on the farm how she used to plaster herself with the flowers of the blue succory—the dust-flower they called it down there because it seemed to thrive like the disinherited on the dust of the wayside—not but what the seal-brown was adorable....

The spectacle grew dazzling, difficult for Steptoe to keep up with. He and Letty were plainly objects of interest to these grand folk, because there were now four or five of them. They advanced, receded, came up and studied them, wheeled away, smiled sometimes at each other with the high self-assurance of beauty and position, pranced, pawed, curveted, were 123 noble or coquettish as the inner self impelled, but always the embodiment of overweening pride. Among the “real gentry,” as he called them, there had unfailingly been for him and his colleagues a courtesy which might have been called only a distinction in equality, whereas these high-steppers....

It was a relief to see the French madam bustling in again from the room at the back. Steptoe rose. He meant to express himself. Letty hoped he would. For people who brought money in their hands this treatment was too much. When Steptoe advanced to meet madam, she went with him. As her champion she must bear him out.

But madam forestalled them. “I ’ope that mademoiselle has seen something what she like. Me, I thought the brown costume—cœur de le marguerite jaune we call it ziz season––”

Letty was quick. She had heard of mannequins, the living models, though so remotely as to give her no visualized impression. Suddenly knowing what they had been looking at she adapted herself before Steptoe could get his protest into words.

“I liked the seal-brown; but for me I thought the second one––”

Madame Simone nodded, sagely. “Why shouldn’t mademoiselle ’ave both?”

124

Chapter XI

While this question was being put, and Steptoe was rising to what he saw as the real occasion, Rashleigh Allerton too was having a new experience. He couldn’t understand it; he couldn’t understand himself. Not that that was strange, since he had hardly ever understood himself at any time; but now he was, as he expressed it, “absolutely stumped.”

He had put on the table the bottle on which the kilted Highlander was playing on the pipes; he had poured himself a glass. It was what he called a good stiff glass, meant, metaphorically, to kill or cure, and he hoped it would be to kill.

And that was all.

He had sat looking at it, or he had looked at it while walking about; but he had only looked at it. It was as far as he could go. Now that to go farther had become what he called a duty the perversity of his nerves was such that they refused. It was like him. He could always do the forbidden, the dare-devil, the crazily mad; but when it came to the reasonable and straightforward something in him balked. Here he was at what should have been the beginning of the end, and the demon which at another time would have driven him on was holding him back. Temptation had worked itself round the other way. It was temptation not to do, when saving grace lay in doing.

125

An hour or more had gone by when Mr. Radbury knocked at the door, timidly.

“Come in, Radbury,” Allerton cried, in a gayety he didn’t feel. “Have a drink.”

Mr. Radbury looked at the bottle and the glass. He looked at his young employer, who with his hands in his pockets, was again standing by the window. It was the first time in all the years of his service, first with the father and then with the son, that this invitation had been given him.

“Thanks, Mr. Rash,” he said, with a thick, shaky utterance. “Liquor and I are strangers. I wish I could feel––”

But the old man’s trembling anxiety forced on Allerton the fact that the foolish game was up. “All right, Radbury. Was only joking. No harm done. Had only taken the thing out to—to look at it.”

Before sitting down to read and sign the letters he put both glass and bottle back into the keeping of Queen Caroline Murat, saying to himself as he did so: “I must find some other way.”

He was thrown back thus on Barbara’s suggestion of a few hours earlier. He must get rid of the girl! He had scarcely as yet considered this proposal, though not because he deemed it unworthy of himself. Nothing could be unworthy of himself. A man who was so little of a man as he was entitled to do anything, however base, and feel no shame. It was simply that his mind hadn’t worked round to looking at the thing as feasible. And yet it was; plainly it was. The law allowed for it, if one only took advantage of the law’s allowances. It would be beastly, of 126 course; and more beastly for him than the average of men; but because it was beastly it were better done at once, before the girl got used to luxurious surroundings.

But even this resolution, speedy as it was, came a little late. By evening Letty was already growing used to luxurious surroundings, and finding herself at home in them.

First, there were no longer any women in the house, and with the three men—Steptoe’s friends being already installed—she found herself safe from the prying and criticizing feminine.

Secondly, some of the new clothes had already come home, and she was now wearing the tea-gown she had long dreamt of but had never aspired to possess. It was of a blue so dark as to be almost black, with a flame colored bar across the breast, harmonizing with her hair and eyes. Of her eyes she wasn’t thinking; but her hair....

That, however, was another part of the day’s fairy tale.

When the dresses had been bought and paid for madame presumed to Steptoe that mademoiselle was under some rich gentleman’s protection. Taking words at their face value, as she, Letty, did herself, Steptoe admitted that she was. Madam made it plain that she understood this honor, which often came to girls of the humblest classes, and the need there could be for supplementing wardrobes suddenly. After that it was confidence for confidence. Madame had seen that in the matter of lingerie mademoiselle “left to desire,” and though Margot made no specialty in 127 this line, they happened to have on an upper floor a consignment just arrived from Paris, and if monsieur would allow mademoiselle to come up and inspect it.... Then it was Madame Simone’s coiffeur. At least it was the coiffeur whom Madame Simone recommended, who came to the house, after Letty had donned a peignoir from the consignment just arrived from Paris.... And now, at half past nine in the evening, it was the memory of a day of mingled agony and enchantment.

Having looked her over as he summoned her to dinner, Steptoe had approved of her. He had approved of her with an inner emphasis stronger than he expressed. Letty didn’t know how she knew this; but she knew. She knew that her transformation was a surprise to him. She knew that though he had hoped much from her she was giving him more than he had hoped. Nothing that he said told her this, but something in his manner—in his yearning as he passed her the various dishes and tactfully showed her how to help herself, in the tenderness with which he repeated correctly her little slips in words—something in this betrayed it.

She knew it, too, when after dinner he begged her not to escape to the little back room, but to take her place in the drawing-room.

“Madam’ll find that it’ll pass the time for ’er. Maybe too Mr. Rashleigh’ll come in. ’E does sometimes—early like. I’ve known ’im to come ’ome by ’alf past nine, and if ’is ma wasn’t sittin’ in the drorin’ room ’e’d be quite put out. Lydies mostly wytes till their ’usbands comes in; and in cyse madam’d feel 128 lonely I’ll leave the door open to the back part of the ’ouse, and she’ll ’ear me talkin’ to the boys.”

The October evening being chilly he lit a fire. Drawing up in front of it a small armchair, suited for a lady’s use, he placed behind it a table with an electric lamp. Letty smiled up at him. He had never seen her smile before, and now that he did he made to himself another comment of approval.

“You’re awful good to me.”

He reflected as to how he could bring home to her the grammatical mistake.

“Madam finds me horfly good, does she? P’rhaps that’s because madam don’t know that ’er comin’ to this ’ouse gratifies a tyste o’ mine for which I ain’t never ’ad no gratificytion.”

As he put a footstool to her feet he caught the question she so easily transmitted by her eyes.

“P’raps madam can hunderstand that after doin’ things all my life for people as is used to ’em I’ve ’ad a kind o’ cryvin’ to do ’em for them as ’aven’t ’ad nothink, and who could enjoy them more. I told madam yesterday I was somethink of a anarchist, and that’s ’ow I am—wantin’ to give the poor a wee little bit of what the rich ’as to throw awye.”

Later he brought her an old red book, open at a page on which she read, The Little Mermaid.

Her heart leaped. It was from this volume that Miss Pye had read to the Prince when he was a child. She let her eyes run along the opening words.

“Far out in the sea the water is as blue as the petals of the cornflower, and clear as the purest glass.”

She liked this sentence. It took her into a blue 129 world. It was curious, she thought, how much meaning there was in colors. If you looked through red glass the world was angry; if through yellow, it was lit with an extraordinary sun; if through blue, you had the sensation of universal happiness. She supposed that that was why blue flowers always made you feel that there was a want in life which ought to be supplied—and wasn’t.

She remembered a woman who had a farm near them in Canada, who grew only blue flowers in her garden. The neighbors said she was crazy; but she, Letty, had liked that garden better than all the gardens she knew. She would go there and talk to that woman, and listen to what she had to say of Nature’s peculiar love of blue. The sea and sky were loveliest when they were blue, and so were the birds. There were blue stones, the woman said, precious stones, and other stones that were little more than rocks, which said something to the heart when pearls and diamonds spoke only to the eyes. In the fields, orchards, and gardens, white flowers, yellow flowers, red flowers were common; but blue flowers were rare and retiring, as if they guarded a secret which men should come and search out.

To this there was only one exception. Letty would notice as she trudged back to her father’s farm that along the August roadsides there was a blue flower—of a blue you would never see anywhere else, not even in the sky—which grew in the dust, and lived on dust, and out of the dust drew elements of beauty such as roses and lilies couldn’t boast of. “That means,” the crazy woman said, “that there’s nothing so dry, or 130 parched, or sterile, that God can’t take it and fashion from it the most priceless treasures of loveliness, if we only had the eyes to see them.”

Letty never forgot this, and during all the intervening years the dust flower, with its heavenly color, had been the wild growing thing she loved best. It spoke to her. It not only responded to the ache she felt within herself, but gave a promise of assuagement. She had never expected the fulfilment of that promise, but was it possible that now it was going to be kept?

With her eyes on the fire she saw the color of the dust flower close to the flaming wood. It was the closest of all the colors, the one the burning heart kept nearest to itself. It seemed to be, as the crazy woman said, dear to Nature itself, its own beloved secret, the secret which, even when written in the dust of the wayside, or in the fire on the hearth, hardly anyone read or found out.

And as she was dreaming of this and of her Prince, Rashleigh was walking up the avenue, saying to himself that he must make an end of it. He was walking home because, having dined at the Club, he found himself too restless to stay there. Walking relieved his nerves, and enabled him to think. He must have the thing over and done with. She would go decently, of course, since, as he had promised her, she would have plenty of money to go with—plenty of money for the rest of her life—and that was the sole consideration. She would doubtless be as glad to escape as he to have her disappear. After that, so his lawyer had assured him in the afternoon, the legal steps would be relatively easy.

131

Letting himself in with his latchkey he was surprised to see a light in the drawing-room. It had not been lighted up at night, as far as he could remember, since the days when his mother was accustomed to sit there. If he came home early he had always used the library, which was on the other side of the house and at the back.

He went into the front drawing-room, which was empty; but a fire burnt in the back one, and before it someone was seated. It was not the girl he had found in the park. It was a lady whom he didn’t recognize, but clearly a lady. She was reading a book, and had evidently not heard his entrance or his step.

With the shadows of the front drawing-room behind him he stood between the portieres, and looked. He had looked for some seconds before the lady raised her eyes. She raised them with a start. Slowly there stole into her cheek the dark red of confusion. She dropped the book. She rose.

It wasn’t till she rose that he knew her. It wasn’t till he knew her that he was seized by an astonishment which almost made him laugh. It wasn’t till he almost laughed that he went forward with the words, which insensibly bridged some of the gulf between them:

“Oh! So this is—you!”

132

Chapter XII

Letty had not heard Allerton’s entrance or approach because for the first time in her life she was lost in the magic of Hans Andersen.

“The sun had just gone down as the little mermaid lifted her head above the water. The clouds were brilliant in purple and gold, and through the pale, rose-tinged air the evening star shone clear and bright. The air was warm and mild; the sea at rest. A great ship with three masts lay close by, only one sail unfurled, for there was no breath of air, and the sailors sat aloft in the rigging or leaned lazily over the bulwarks. Music and singing filled the air, and as the sky darkened hundreds of Chinese lanterns were lighted. It seemed as if the flags of every nation were hung out. The little mermaid swam up to the cabin window, and every time she rose upon the waves she could see through the clear glass that the room was full of brilliantly dressed people. Handsomest of all was the young prince with the great dark eyes.”

Allerton’s eyes were dark, and though she did not consider him precisely young, the analogy between him and the hero of the tale was sufficient to take her eyes from the book and to set her to dreaming.

“He could not be more than sixteen years old, and this was his birthday. All this gaiety was in honor of him; the sailors danced upon the deck; and when the young prince came out a myriad of rockets flew 133 high in the air, with a glitter like the brightest noontide, and the little mermaid was so frightened that she dived deep down under the water. She soon rose up again, however, and it seemed as if all the stars of heaven were falling round her in golden showers. Never had she seen such fireworks; great, glittering suns wheeled by her, fiery fishes darted through the blue air, and all was reflected back from the quiet sea. The ship was lighted up so that one could see the smallest rope. How handsome the young prince looked! He shook hands with everybody, and smiled, as the music rang out into the glorious night. It grew late, but the little mermaid could not turn her eyes away from the ship and the handsome prince.”

Once more Letty’s thought wandered from the page. She too would have watched her handsome prince, no matter what the temptation to look elsewhere.

“The colored lanterns were put out, no rocket rose in the air, no cannon boomed from the portholes; but deep below there was a surging and a murmuring. The mermaid sat still, cradled by the waves, so that she could look in at the cabin window. But now the ship began to make more way. One sail after another was unfurled; the waves rose higher; clouds gathered in the sky; and there was a distant flash of lightning. The storm came nearer. All the sails were taken in, and the ship rocked giddily, as she flew over the foaming billows; the waves rose mountain-high, as if they would swallow up the very masts, but the good ship dived like a swan into the deep black trough, and rose bravely to the foaming crest. The little mermaid thought it was a merry journey, but the sailors were 134 of a different opinion. The ship strained and creaked; the timbers shivered as the thunder strokes of the waves fell fast; heavy seas swept the decks; the mainmast snapped like a reed; and the ship lurched heavily, while the water rushed into the hold. Then the young princess began to understand the danger, and she herself was often threatened by the falling masts, yards, and spars. One moment it was so dark that she could see nothing, but when the lightning flamed out the ship was as bright as day. She sought for the young prince, and saw him sinking down through the water as the ship parted. The sight pleased her, for she knew he must sink down to her home. But suddenly she remembered that men cannot live in the water, and that he would only reach her father’s palace a lifeless corpse. No; he must not die! She swam to and fro among the drifting spars, forgetting that they might crush her with their weight; she dived and rose again, and reached the prince just when he felt that he could swim no longer in the stormy sea. His arms were beginning to fail him, his beautiful eyes were closed; in another moment he must have sunk, had not the little mermaid come to his aid. She kept his head above water, and let the waves carry them whither they would.”

Letty didn’t want Allerton’s life to be in danger, but she would have loved saving it. She fell to pondering possible conditions in which she could perform this feat, while he ran no risk whatever.

“The next day the storm was over; not a spar of the ship was left in sight. The sun rose red and glowing upon the waves, and seemed to pour down 135 new life upon the prince, though his eyes remained closed. The little mermaid kissed his fair white forehead and stroked back his wet hair. He was like the marble statue in her little garden, she thought. She kissed him again, and prayed that he might live.”

Letty saw herself seated somewhere in a mead, Allerton lying unconscious with his head in her lap, though the circumstances that brought them so together remained vague.

“Suddenly the dry land came in sight before her, high blue mountains on whose peaks the snow lay white, as if a flock of swans had settled there. On the coast below were lovely green woods, and close on shore a building of some kind, the mermaid didn’t know whether it was church or cloister. Citrons and orange trees grew in the garden, and before the porch were stately palm trees. The sea ran in here and formed a quiet bay, unruffled, but very deep. The little mermaid swam with the prince to the white sandy shore, laid him on the warm sand, taking care that his head was left where the sun shone warmest. Bells began to chime and ring through all parts of the building, and several young girls entered the garden. The little mermaid swam farther out, behind a tiny cliff that rose above the waves. She showered sea-foam on her hair that no one might see its golden glory, and then waited patiently to see if anyone would come to the aid of the young prince.”

To Letty that was the heart-breaking part of the story, the leaving the beloved one to others. It was what she and the little mermaid had in common, unless she too could get rid of her fish’s tail at the cost of 136 walking on blades. But for the little mermaid there the necessity was, as she, Letty read on.

“Before long a young girl came by; she gave a start of terror and ran back to call for assistance. Several people came to her aid, and after a while the little mermaid saw the prince recover his consciousness, and smile upon the group around him. But he had no smile for her; he did not even know that she had saved him. Her heart sank, and when she had seen him carried into the large building, she dived sorrowfully down to her father’s palace.”

Lifting her eyes to meditate on this situation Letty saw Allerton standing between the portières. Her dream of being little mermaid to his prince went out like a pricked bubble. Though he neither smiled nor sneered she knew he was amused at her, with a bitterness in his amusement. In an instant she saw her transformation as it must appear to him. She had spent his money recklessly, and made herself look ridiculous. All the many kinds of shame she had ever known focused on her now, making her a glowing brand of humiliations. She stood helpless. Hans Andersen dropped to the floor with a soft thud. Nevertheless, it was she who spoke first.

“I suppose you—you think it funny to see me rigged up like this?”

He took time to pick up the book she had dropped and hand it back to her. “Won’t you sit down again?”

While she seated herself and he followed her example she continued to stammer on. “I—I thought I ought to—to look proper for the house as long as I was in it.”

137

Her phrasing gave him an opening. “You’re quite right. I should like you to get whatever would help you in—in your profession before you—before you leave us.”

Quick to seize the implications here she took them with the submission of those whose lots have always depended on other people’s wills.

“I’ll go whenever you want me to.”

Relieved as he was by this willingness he was anxious not to seem brutal. “I’d—I’d rather you consulted your own wishes about that.”

She put on a show of nonchalance. “Oh, I don’t care. It’ll be just—just as you say when.”

He would have liked to say when at that instant, but a pretense at courtesy had to be maintained. “There’s no hurry—for a day or two.”

“You said a week or two yesterday.”

“Oh, did I? Well, then, we’ll say a week or two now.”

“Oh, not for me,” she hastened to assure him. “I’d just as soon go to-night.”

“Have you hated it as much as that?”

“I’ve hated some of it.”

“Ah, well! You needn’t be bothered with it long.”

Her candor was of the kind which asks questions frankly. “Haven’t you got any more use for me?”

“I’m afraid—” it was not easy to put it into the right words—“I’m afraid I was mistaken yesterday. I put you in—in a false position with no necessity for doing so.”

It took her a few seconds to get the force of this. “Do you mean that you didn’t need me to be—to be a shame and a disgrace to you at all?”

138

“Did I put it in that way?”

“Well, didn’t you?”

The fact that she was now dressed as she was made it more embarrassing to him to be crude than it had been when addressing the homeless and shabby little “drab.”

“I don’t know what I said then. I was—I was upset.”

“And you’re upset very easy, ain’t you?” She corrected herself quickly: “aren’t you?”

“I suppose that’s true. What of it?”

“Oh, nothing. I—I just happen to know a way you can get over that—if you want to.”

He smiled. “I’m afraid my nervousness is too deeply seated—I may as well admit that I’m nervous—you saw it for yourself––”

“Oh, I saw you was—you were—sick up here—” she touched her forehead—“as soon as you begun to talk to me.”

Grateful for this comprehension he tried to use it to his advantage. “So that you understand how I could go off the hooks––”

“Sure! My mother’d go off ’em the least little thing, till—till she done—till she did—the way I told her.”

“Then some of these days I may ask you to—but just now perhaps we’d better talk about––”

“When I’m to get out.”

Her bluntness of expression hurt him. “That’s not the way I should have put it––”

“But it’s the way you’d ’a’ meant, isn’t it?”

He was the more disconcerted because she said this 139 gently, with the same longing in her face and eyes as in that of the little mermaid bending over the unconscious prince.

The unconscious prince of the moment merely said: “You mustn’t think me more brutal than I am––”