Held to Answer/Chapter 12
One whole month passed before John sat again at midnight in the Roman chair with Marien vis-à-vis upon her heaped-up cushions. Many things may happen in a month. Many did in this. For John it was a month of progress in his art. Though the People's Stock Company had passed out of existence within two weeks after Marien Dounay's departure from it, John had done so well that he found no difficulty in securing an engagement as heavy man across the bay in Oakland with the Sampson Stock, the grade of which was higher and its permanency well established.
It was also a month of progress in his passion for Marien Dounay, although during all those thirty days he did not see her once. In the meantime imagination fed him. Every memory of that night and every deduction from those memories fanned the flame of his infatuation. Each in itself was slight, but they were like a thousand gossamer webs. Once spun, their combined holding power was as the strength of many cables.
Take, for instance, the environment in which he found her. It spoke gratifyingly to him of a genuinely good, modest nature to see that she shrank away from the garish theatrical hotels to this quiet nest with Julie. It revealed a true woman's instinct for domesticity not only surviving but flourishing in this vagabond life to which her profession compelled her.
And yet how unlike the life of the fine women he had known in the old First Church. It would have so shocked them,—this roving, Bohemian life that turned the night into day, the deep-sleep time from twelve to three into the leisure, happy, carefree hours that were like the sun at noon instead of the dark of midnight. How unbecoming it would have been in those coddled home-keeping women of the First Church, this reversal of life,—how immoral even! Yet to her it was natural. In her it was moral. It did pay a proper respect to those conventions which protect the character and happiness of woman. It was not prudish. It was better than prudish, it was good. Her virtue was not forced. It was hardy, indigenous, self-enveloping. Yes, this whole mode of life became her in her profession.
And the thought that he was of her profession threw him into raptures. Hers was a life into which he could enter,—had entered already, by reason of the favor she had shown him. What could that favor mean? Nothing else but love. She had given him too much, forgiven him too much in that one evening for him to question that at all.
And he loved her! Doubt on that score had vanished so many days ago that he could not remember he had ever doubted it.
That the partnership could not at first be equal, he was humiliatingly aware; but the development of his own powers would soon balance the inequality. However, it was something else that for the moment wiped out of mind the enormity of his presumption, and this was that memory of unpleasant experiences at which she had hinted. The thought of this beautiful, ambitious, devoted creature battling her way alone among selfish, brutal, designing men was maddening to him. The chivalrous impulse to be with her, to protect her, to battle for her, made him forget entirely considerations of inequality, and he prepared to offer himself boldly. If she did not invite him again soon, he meant to seek her out; but the invitation came before his processes had reached that stage.
John was impatiently prompt. His eyes leaped upon her eagerly as if to make sure she was still real, still the flesh and blood confirmation of his passion. She was,—not a doubt of it. Her eye was bright; the clasp of her hand was warm. Her personal power was never more evident, its whimsical manifestations never more varied, interesting, or captivating than now.
To John, no longer quite so hungry, for his salary was larger now, that supper was not so much a meal as a series of delightful additions to his impressions of the finer side of the character of Marien. But with the supper despatched, and his beautiful hostess again lolling in luxurious relaxation, it was her personality once more rather than her character which began to play upon him like an instrument with strings. Lazily she brooded and mused, talked and was silent, drifting from momentary vivacities to periods of depressed abstraction. Again and again John felt her eyes upon him scrutinizingly, estimatingly almost, it seemed to him. Because it was a supremely blissful experience to submit himself thus to the play of her moods, John postponed the declaration he felt impelled to make until it burst from him irresistibly, like a geyser.
"Listen!" he broke out excitedly, and began to pour out impetuously the tale of his swiftly ripened infatuation.
Marien did listen at first as if surprised, and then with a flush of pleasure that steadily deepened on her cheeks. Even when he had concluded she sat for a moment with lips half parted, eyes half closed, and an expression of enchantment upon her face as if listening to music that she wished might flow on forever.
"Do not speak!" John protested suddenly, as her expression appeared to change. "The picture is too beautiful to spoil. Let me take from your lips in silence the kiss that seals our betrothal."
But Marien held him off with sudden strength.
"Marien, I love you. I love you," he protested vehemently.
"No," Marien replied, lifting herself higher amid the pillows and speaking alertly as if she had just been given words to answer. "You do not love me. You love the thing you think I am."
John's blond brows were lifted in mute protest.
"Listen!" she exclaimed. "You compelled me to listen. Now I must compel you to listen—mad, impetuous man!" and she seemed almost resentful. "In what you have just been saying, you have written a part for me. You have given me a character. If I could play that part always, I should be what you are in love with, and you would love me always; but I cannot play it always; I can play it seldom. I play it now for an hour and then perhaps never again."
"Never again?" Hampstead gasped, something in the finality of her tone thrilling him through with a hollow, sickening note.
Her eyelids narrowed as she replied: "You forget that I, too, live the calculating life."
There was again that mysteriously sinister meaning in her utterance of the word "calculating."
"The key to my life is not love; it cannot be love," she went on. "I am not the purring kitten you have described. It angers me to have you think so. I am not a thing to love and fondle. I am a tigress tearing at one object. I am," and in the vehement force of her utterance she seemed to grow tall and terrible, "I am an ambitious woman! An unscrupulous, designing, clambering, ambitious woman!"
"But I love you, Marien," John iterated weakly.
"There is no place for love in the calculating life," she rejoined unhesitatingly. "Love is a thing incalculable." Yet as she uttered this sentence, her tone softened, and her eyes had a look of awe and hunger oddly mixed in them; but immediately the expression of resolute ambition succeeded to her features.
"When I am at the top," she proposed loftily.
"But the better part of life may be gone then," John protested bitterly. "The top! When shall we reach the top?"
"I shall reach it in a bound when my opportunity comes," Marien answered with cool assurance. "Nobody, not even myself, knows how good I am. Any night some man may sit in front who has both the judgment to see and the money to command playwrights, theaters, New York appearances to order. When they come, I shall conquer. Oh," and her eyes sparkled while she shivered with a thrill of self-gratulation, "it is wonderful to feel the great potential thing inside of you, to know that your wings are strong enough to fly and you only wait the coming of the breeze. It is dazzling, intoxicating, to think that within three months I may be a Broadway star; that within a year the whole English-speaking world may recognize that a new queen of the emotional drama and of tragedy has been crowned. Until that hour," and she lowered her voice as she checked the exaltation of her mood, "until that hour a lover would be a millstone."
"But," exulted John, "you are not at the top yet. I may arrive first!"
Marien looked him up and down and laughed, just laughed,—about the look and laugh that Parks had given him.
Hampstead's eager face flushed.
"You do not think that possible," he challenged aggressively.
"No, dear boy," replied the woman, her tone and manner swiftly sympathetic, "I know it is not possible. You do not realize how far you have to go. If you have genius, you do not show it. You have talent, temperament, intelligence, application; these may win for you, but the way will be long and the compensation uncertain. If you persist for ten, fifteen, maybe twenty years, till some of your exuberance has died, till experience has rounded you off, till you have learned from that great big compelling teacher out there in front, the audience, what is art and what is not; while you may not be accounted a great star, yet the world will recognize your craftsmanship and concede you a place of eminence upon the stage, a position well worth occupying, but one for which you will pay long years before you get it."
"But our love," John protested helplessly.
"Who said 'our love,'" Marien declaimed almost petulantly. "I have not confessed to any love."
"But—but," and John's eyes opened widely, "you would not permit—"
"I did not permit," she flashed. "You took, and I forgave because I told you I could understand. Can you not, blind man, also understand? If man is sometimes man, will not woman also sometimes be woman?"
"Did it mean—no more than that?"
John's eyes searched hers accusingly.
Her answer was to scorn to answer. She made it seem that she was dismissing him, exactly as any heartless woman might dismiss a favorite who had amused her for an hour, but whose antics and cajoleries had now begun to pall.
Dazed and dumb, Hampstead seemed to feel his way backward toward the door, where Julie came mysteriously, unsummoned, to help him on with his coat and thrust his hat into his hand. When John turned for a last look, Marien's back was turned, and though the head was bowed and the side of the face half concealed, he thought he saw a look of agony upon it.
"Marien," he murmured hoarsely, with sudden emotion. "Marien!"
But on the instant she raised her face to him, and it was the old face, wonderful and witching, beaming with a happy, cordial smile as she laid her hand in his without a sign of restraint of any sort. The very heartlessness of it completed his bewilderment. Did the woman not know that she was breaking his heart? It killed his hope; it cowed him and threw him into a sullen mood.
"Good-by, Miss Dounay," he said huskily.
Her eloquent eyes shot him a look in which reproach and tenderness mingled, while her hand pulsed quickly like a heart beating in his palm. What mood of sullenness could withstand that look? Not his. He smiled, as if a ray of sunshine played upon his face, and amended with:
"Good night, Marien."
"Good-by, John," she answered sweetly.
The door was closed behind him before John realized that with all her sweetness, she had said good-by, and the emphasis was on the "by."
At the corner the bewildered man turned and looked up. He could see the lace curtain at the window, but he could not see the pillows on the divan quivering with sobs from a soft burden that had flung itself among them when the door was closed.