Held to Answer/Chapter 11
The next night Miss Dounay gave John her forehead instead of her lips to kiss, but she heckled him no more, and it was perfectly obvious to him, as to Parks, that she helped him deliberately and had been helping him all along by her stage direction.
"If you've got her interested in you, you're fixed for life," grumbled Parks wistfully. "That girl's going up the line, and she's got stuff enough to take somebody else with her."
There was a suggestion in this which John resented.
"I'm going up, too," he rejoined with the defiant exuberance of youth, "but on my own steam."
Parks looked at John up and down, and laughed,—just that and nothing more. The old man's frankness was comforting at times; at others disagreeable. John moved away irritated, and his head went up into the clouds of his dreams. But there was something in what Parks had suggested that kept coming back to his mind. True, Miss Dounay never exchanged more than the merest words of courtesy with John off the stage. But on the stage and at rehearsal it really did seem as if there was a very nice little understanding growing up between them.
Off stage John dreamed of going to call upon her. In his little room he thought of her much and hungrily. That he should think hungrily was not strange, since he was hungry. His salary was twenty dollars a week. To send half to Rose, and save money to meet his wardrobe bills, he lived on two meals a day. The morning meal, taken at half-past nine, consisted of coffee and cakes, and cost ten cents. The evening meal was taken at half-past five. It was a grand course dinner that went from soup to pie, and its cost was fifteen cents. The tip to the waitress was a smile.
When one goes supperless to bed, dreams come lightly and are fantastic. John's dreams were of banqueting after the play with Marien Dounay. Greenroom gossip had it that Marien lived royally but in modest thrift; that her French maid, Julie, was also cook and housekeeper; that Marien's disposition was domestic and yet convivial. That instead of a supper down town in one of the brilliant cafés, she preferred the seclusion of her small but cozy apartment, and the triumphs of Julie at a tiny gas grill, supplemented and glorified by her own skill with the chafing dish. That there were nights when she supped alone, but others when a lady or two, or much more likely a gentleman, or mayhap two gentlemen were honored with invitations to this feast of goddesses; for tiny, efficient, ambidextrous Julie was in her way as much of an aristocrat as her mistress, and as skillful in imparting the suggestion that she was herself of some superior clay. Subject to the whims of her mistress, she, too, had whims, and made men—and women—not only respect but admire them. Rumor said that if an invitation to one of these midnight revels with toothsome food under the personal direction of this flashing beauty ever came, it was on no account to be despised, especially if a man were hungry either for beauty or for food.
John Hampstead was hungry for food, and now he began to feel hungry also for beauty. This last was really a new appetite. John, through all his struggling years, had of course his thoughts of woman as all men have, but vaguely, as something a long way off, indefinitely postponed. Yet ever since he carried Lygia in his arms, these thoughts of woman had been recurring as something nearer, more tangible, and more necessary even. As for that kiss in the garden scene of East Lynne! Well, there was something wonderfully awakening in that kiss. It was worlds different from that brotherly, sympathetic little kiss he had given Bessie yonder upon the rocks.
By the way,—why did Bessie cry? He used to wonder sometimes why she did! And why did Marien Dounay taunt him till he was angry enough to beat her,—and then kiss him?
Women were hard to understand. They seemed to do things that had no meaning; to use words not to convey but to conceal thought; and they spoke half their speeches in riddles. However, John reflected that when he had been with women more, he would know them better. And in the meantime he supplemented his professional contacts with Marien by thinking of her constantly, even to the point where his absorbing interest led him to follow her home at night after the play,—keeping always at a safe distance behind,—and to stand across the street and watch till the light went on in that third-story bay-window on Turk Street near Mason; and then still to stand, trying to interpret the meaning of shadows moving across the window for uncounted hours, till the light went out, sometimes at two and sometimes later, or until a policeman bade him move on. If any one had told John that he was falling in love with Marien Dounay, he would have indignantly rejected the idea. She held a fascinating interest for him,—that was all. Something basic in him was attracted by something basic in her, and he yielded to it wonderingly, experimentally almost, and that was all it amounted to.
But on the night that Miss Dounay completed her engagement at the People's, for her tiff with Mowrey was over in just four weeks, the opportunity came to John to submit his feelings to more searching experimentation.
It had been his custom to wait in the shadowy wings each night to see the object of his solicitous interest depart, supposing himself always to be unobserved. But on this last night Marien surprised him into nervous thrills by walking over into the shadow with the cool assurance of an autocrat, and saying:
"Come home to supper with me, John."
At the same time Miss Dounay took the big man's arm as comfortably as if the matter had been arranged the week before last, and John walked out as if on air, but hurriedly. That soft touch upon his arm made him hungry with indescribable anticipations. Moreover, he was stirred by an itching curiosity concerning the whole of the intimate personal life of Marien Dounay. Who was she? What was she? How was she?
Yet on the very threshold of the little apartment, his sense of what was conventional in the world out of which he had come halted him.
"Should I?" he asked huskily, as the door stood open. "Would it be—proper?"
"Most particularly proper, innocent!" laughed Marien. "At the theater Julie is my maid; at home she is my housekeeper, my social secretary, my companion, and chaperone."
While the light of reassurance kindled on John's face, Marien gently drew him inside.
"Behold!" she exclaimed with a stage gesture, when the door was closed behind him. "My temporary home; my balcony window overlooking the street, my alcove wherein I sleep, the kitchenette in which we cook; behind that the bath, and back of that Julie's own room. Isn't it dear?"
"Dear!" That was a woman's word. Bessie said that about her invitation paper for the Phrosos.
"Dear?" he breathed, comparing it in one swift estimating glance to his own barren cell. "It's a paradise!"
"So much more seclusion than in hotels," declared Marien, and then went on to say in that sort of tone which belongs to an air of frank and simple comradeship: "So much less expensive, too. Do you know what saves a girl in this business? Money! Ready money. And do you know what ruins her? Extravagance—debt. We are very economical, Julie and I. We have what crooks call 'fall money', laid by for any emergency. That's what you'll need to do. Save half your salary every week. There'll be weeks you don't play, weeks when you have to go to expense. You may be ill or have an accident, or your company will close unexpectedly. Save. Save your money!"
Marien uttered these bits of practical wisdom, which were to John the revelation of an unthought-of side of this exquisite young woman's character while she was conducting him toward the window.
"Sit here," she commanded. "Look straight down Turk. See the lights battling with the fog. Listen to the waning music of the night in this noisy, cobbly, clangy city. Don't turn your head till I say!"
The lights were indeed beautiful, each with its halo of mist. The clanging bells of cars, and even the horrible squeak of the wheels as they turned a curve, with the low singing of the cables that drew them, did rise up like the orchestration of some strange new motif of the night that lulled him till he was only faintly conscious of the opening and closing of doors and a rustling at the other end of the room.
"Now!" called the voice of Marien cheerily, awakening him with a sudden thrill to the realization of her presence.
She stood at the far end of the room, surveying herself in a long mirror. Her figure was draped rather than dressed in a silken, shimmering texture of black, splashed with great red conventional flowers. The garment flowed loosely at neck, sleeves, and waist, and the fabric was corrugated by a succession of narrow, vertical, unstitched pleats, which gave an illusory effect of yielding to every movement of the sinuous body and yet clinging the closer while it yielded. As John gazed, Marien belted this flowing drapery at the waist with a knot of tiny crimson cord, and then released her coils of rich dark hair so that they fell to her hips in a fluttering cascade as silky as the texture of her robe.
When she advanced to him, the shimmering, billowy movements of the gown matched the rhythmic sway of her limbs as completely as the red splashes upon it matched the color of her cheeks. She came laughing softly, and bearing in her hand a pair of tiny red and gold slippers.
A low divan ran along one side of the room, piled high with gay cushions. Near the foot of it was a Roman chair.
"Sit here," said Marien, indicating the chair; and John, as if obeying stage directions, complied, while his hostess sank back luxuriously amid the cushions and by the same movement presented a slim, neatly booted foot upon the edge of the divan, so very near to the big man's hand as to embarrass him. At the same time she held up the slippers to his notice and observed with a nod toward the boot:
"As a mark of special favor."
For a moment John's face reddened, and he looked the awkwardness of his state of mind, his eyes shifting from the boot to Marien's face and back again.
Her face took on an amused smile, and the boot wiggled suggestively.
"Oh," exclaimed John, blushing with fresh confusion at his own dullness as he bent forward and began to struggle with the buttons of the boot.
"You see," he explained presently, still worrying with the combination of the first button, "you see—well, I guess I don't know women very well."
Marien laughed happily.
"Stage women!" John added, as if by an afterthought.
"Stage women," affirmed Marien loyally, "are no different from other women—only wiser." Then she tagged her speech sententiously with, "They have to be. Careful! You will tear the buttons off. And you—you are pinching me!"
"I beg your pardon," stammered John. "But there are so very many of these buttons."
After an interval during which Marien had appeared to watch his labors with amused interest, she asked, with mocking humor:
"Are you hurrying or delaying? I can't quite make out."
But John was by this time enjoying the to him novel situation, and merely chuckled happily in reply to this thrust. When the shoes were off, by a mystifying movement Marien snuggled first one stockinged foot and then the other into the gold embroidered slippers and with a sigh of contentment appeared to float among her pillows, while she contemplated with smiling attention the face of Hampstead. Presently she asked smiling:
"Are you a man or a boy, I wonder?"
Feeling himself drifting farther and farther under the personal spell of this magnetic woman, and entirely willing to be enthralled, John answered her only with his eyes.
"That's the Ursus look," she laughed softly, as if it pleased her.
A silver cigarette case was on a tabaret within reach of her hand.
"Have a cigarette!" she proposed.
John declined, a trifle embarrassed by the proffer. Miss Dounay lighted one and puffed a small halo above her head before she looked across at him again and asked quizzically:
"You do not smoke?"
"And I do not think women should," Hampstead replied, with level eyes.
"It is a horrid habit," she confessed, "but this business will drive women to do horrid things. Listen, Hampstead. It's hard for a man; you've found that out, and you're only beginning. It's harder for a woman; the despairs, the disappointments, the bitter lonelinesses,—the beasts of men one meets! But—" With a shrug of her shoulders she suddenly broke off her train of thought, and turning an inquiring glance on Hampstead asked:
"You never smoked?"
"Oh, yes," confessed John, "but I quit it. I decided it would not be good for me."
She regarded him narrowly, and asked:
"You would not do a thing which did not appear good for you?"
There was just a little accent on the "good."
"I have tried to calculate my resources," John confessed, resenting that accent.
Again Miss Dounay contemplated him in silence.
"You are a singularly calculating young man, I should say," she decreed finally. "And how long, may I ask, have you been living this calculating life?"
Marien was making a play upon his word "calculate."
"Seven years, I should say," replied John, thinking back.
"Seven years?" she mused. "Seven! And you feel that it has paid?"
"Immensely," replied John aggressively.
"By the way, how old are you, Ursus?"
This was what the old actor had asked. People were always asking John how old he was.
"Twenty-five," John answered a trifle apologetically. "I got started late. And you?"
The question was put without hesitation, as if it were the next thing to say.
"A man does not ask a woman her age in polite conversation," suggested Marien tentatively.
"He does not," replied John quickly, "if he thinks the answer is likely to be embarrassing."
Marien's face flushed with pleasure.
"Oh, hear him!" she laughed. "This heavy man is not so heavy, after all; but," she added, with another insinuating inflection, "he is always calculating." Then she went on, "You are right. The confession to you at least is not embarrassing. I am twenty-four years old, and I, too, have been living a calculating life for seven years."
"For seven years. How odd!" remarked John, rather excited at discovering even a slight parallel between himself and this brilliant creature.
"Yes," Marien replied. "I ran away from home at sixteen. I have been on the stage eight years. The first year was a careless one. The other seven have been—calculating years."
John could think of no words in which to describe the sinister significance which Marien now managed to get into her drawling utterance of that word "calculating." She made it express somehow the plotting villainies of an Iago, of a Richard the Third and a Lady Macbeth, and then overlaid the sinister note with something else, an impression of lofty abandon, of immolation, as if, in calculating her life, she had laid upon the altar all there was of herself—everything—in order to attain some supreme end.
John, staring at her, got a sudden intuitive gleam of a woman who was not only ambitious as he was ambitious, but wildly, dangerously ambitious, with a danger that was not to herself alone, but to any who stood near enough to be trampled on as she climbed upward,—dangerous to one who might love her, for example!
He got the thought clearly in his mind, too; yet only for a moment, and to be crowded out immediately by another thought, or indeed, a succession of thoughts, all induced by the picture she made amid her cushions.
How beautiful she was! How very, very beautiful! And how magnetic! How she had made the blood run in his veins when she lay upon his breast as Lygia, their hearts beating, their souls stirring together!
And now she had resigned herself for an hour to his company, had given him her confidence, was awaiting, as it seemed, his pleasure,—while the color came and went in her cheeks, while subdued lights danced in the dark pools beneath lazily drooping lashes, and the filmy gown which sheathed her body stirred with every breath as if a part of her very self.
Lying there like this, her presence ceased soon to induce thoughts and began to stimulate impulses. Hampstead longed to reach out and lay a hand upon her. She was so alluring and so, so helpless.
For weeks now he had allowed himself to dream of her as possibly the woman of his destiny,—not admitting it, but still dreaming it. Here in his presence, she suddenly ceased to be even a woman. She was just Woman; and the primal attraction of the elemental man is not for the woman. Fundamentally, it is just for woman. And here was Woman, the whole race of woman, beautiful, bewitching, compulsive.
An odor began to float in from the kitchenette, an odor that was not of coffee and cakes, nor of grease upon the top of a range in a dirty little restaurant. It was savory and fragrant, and it filled his nostrils. It reminded him of all the appetizing meals he had ever eaten. It made him hungry with all the hungers he had ever known; his brain was reeling; he was going to faint,—and with mere appetite. Yet the appetite was not for food.
With a kind of shock he recognized the nature of his appetite. The shock passed; but the hunger remained. John felt that he himself was somehow changed. He was not the Chairman of the Prayer Meeting Committee of the Christian Endeavor Society, not a Deacon of the grand old First Church. He was instead the man that the Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell feared for and prayed for. He was the man whose heavy ridged brows had indicated to the shrewd old actor a nature packed full of racial dynamite.
And Woman was fulminating the dynamite. Deliberately—or recklessly—or innocently; but none the less surely. Her lips were pliant. Her form was plastic. The smouldering light in the eyes, the lashes drooping lazily, the witchery of a dark tress which coiled upon the white soft shoulder, all combined in the appeal of physical charm. To this, Woman added the subtle, maddening witchery of silence,—breathing, watchful, waiting quiet.
This silence continued until it became oppressive, explosive even.
Would she not speak? He could not. Would she not move? He dared not.
As if in response to this frenzy of thought, the ripe lips parted in a smile that added one more lovely detail to the picture by revealing rows of pearly, even teeth, and her hand began to move toward him.
"Don't touch me—don't," he found himself pleading suddenly.
But already the hand was laid tenderly upon his own, and Hampstead returned the clasp like one who holds the poles of a battery and cannot let go.
Laughing softly, Woman drew Man gently to her, his eyes gazing fascinated into the depths of hers, his body bending weakly, nearer and nearer.
"John!" she breathed softly, "John!"
But at the first warmth of breath upon his cheek, the explosion came. He snatched her in his arms as if she had been a child, and pressed her to his heart rapturously, but violently. And then his lips found hers, vehemently, almost brutally, as if he would take revenge upon them for the passion their sight and touch had roused in him. She struggled, but he pressed her tighter and tighter, till at length she gave up, and he felt only the rhythmic pulsing of her body.
When at length he released the lips and held the face from him to gaze into it fondly, her eyes were closed, and the head fell limply over his arm with the long tresses sweeping to the floor.
In sudden compunction he placed her tenderly upon the divan.
"I have hurt you, Marien; I have hurt you. Forgive me; oh, forgive me!" he implored in tones of deep feeling.
When she remained quite motionless, he asked, foolishly, "Marien, have you fainted?"
Slowly her bosom rose with a respiration so deep and long that it seemed to stir every fold of her pleated gown and every cushion on the divan, while with the eyes still closed the face moved gently from side to side to convey the negative.
"Thank God!" he groaned, dropping to his knees beside her, where, seizing her hand, he began to press his kisses upon it.
Presently disengaging the hand, Marien lifted it, felt her way over his face and began to push back the towsled mop of hair from his brow, and to stroke it affectionately.
"I thought I had hurt you," he crooned.
"You did," she murmured.
"Oh, I am so, so sorry," he breathed, seizing her hand once more and pressing it against his heart.
"I do not think I am sorry," she sighed contentedly, and was still again, the lashes lying flat upon her cheeks, the long tresses in disarray about her head.
Lying there so white and motionless, she looked to John like a crushed flower. Her very beauty was broken. As he gazed, remorse and contrition overcoming him, her lips parted in a half smile while she whispered:
"The—the calculated life cannot always be depended upon, can it?"
Innocently spoken, the words came to John with the force of a reproach, which hurt all the more because he was sure no reproach had been meant. She had trusted him, and he had failed. His sense of guilt was already strong. At the words he leaped up and rushed toward the hat-tree upon which his hat and coat had been disposed. Yet before he could seize them and start for the door, Marien was before him, barring his way, looking pale but majestic, like a disheveled queen.
"Let me go," he said stubbornly. "I am unworthy to be here."
"Stay," she whispered, in a tone sweeter, tenderer, than he had ever heard her use before. "It is my wish. I do not," and she hesitated for a word, "I do not misunderstand you—poor, lonely, hungry man!"
"Supper, Madame!" piped the voice of Julie.