Don-A-Dreams/Part 3/Chapter 12
XII
He had run away from home; that was evident at once from the sulky and defiant way in which he received their surprised greetings. "Why, what happened?" Don cried. He answered brutally: "I don't know that it's any of your business." He continued eating in a surly indifference to them, as if they were a pair of intruders. They stood awkwardly, staring at him, until Walter Pittsey, with a shrug of the shoulder, turned into the other room. Don heard him talking in low tones to his brother, who was already in bed. There were only three beds—three cots—so narrow that it was impossible for more than one person to sleep in any one of them.
"You might have let us known that you were coming," Don said.
"I don't have to report my movements to you. I'm done with you. You mind your own affairs and I'll mind mine."
Don sat down, sick at heart. Conroy finished his supper and shoved back his chair. He swayed and stumbled as he crossed to the bedroom door. He threw it open with his foot, and went in to his cot—the cot in which Walter Pittsey had been sleeping. He sat down on the side of it and began to take off his shoes.
Walter came out. "Well," he said, as he shut the door behind him, "this is no place for me."
"No," Don replied, "nor for me either. I might as well get out now. I can't live here—not with this sort of thing."
"Nonsense! He'll be all right in the morning. He'll sleep it off."
"No. . . . No. . . . He thinks I It's no use. You know what I did. I did it because I had to—but he'll never forgive it. I might as well get out now. It'll be a dog's life. Where are you going?"
"Don't be absurd." He put down his hat. "I'm not going any place. Lend me your mattress, and I'll sleep on the floor."
Don shook his head.
"But if he needed looking after—before," Pittsey coaxed, "he'll need it a hundred times more now. He won't have a sou to pay rent. You don't intend to leave it all to Bert, do you?"
"No, but"
"Well, then, don't be foolish. Lend me your mattress and a blanket, and I'll sleep here."
"It's no use," Don said. "I can't stay."
However, after a weakening argument, he compromised by sleeping on the floor himself, giving Walter the bare springs of the cot—which they had carried out into the dining-room. He heard Conroy snoring in a heavy stupor through the night; and in the morning he was willing to accept his cousin's enmity as freeing him from a responsibility which he did not feel himself able to discharge.
Their breakfast was a constrained and unhappy meal, in spite of Bert Pittsey's attempt to make a joke of the night's discomforts. "Your back must look like a waffle, Walt," he laughed, "with the pattern of those springs on it."
"Well," Walter replied, "I didn't notice you putting yourself out any."
Bert flushed at his brotherly dig. Conroy carried himself as if Walter had been justly punished for his impertinent intrusion on the apartment. Don refused to join in any attempts to achieve a more companionable mood. They finished the meal as they had begun it.
Don helped Walter to pack his trunk and accompanied him to Kidder's office; and when they had said good-bye at the railway-station, Don went to the library and sat down to his books with a sigh of relief. He felt that he had returned to solitude, and he was glad of it. He was ready, now, for his future, his salary assured and his work before him.
He spent the greater part of the day in the library, lunching at a ten-cent restaurant so as to avoid a mid-day meeting with Conroy. He did not think of Miss Morris, until he met her on the stage, that night; and then she was so smilingly oblivious to what had passed between them on the previous evening that he was unable to refer to it. They talked about his playwriting, about his new responsibilities in the dressing-room, about Conroy's return and about Walter Pittsey's departure; and he looked out on the world of his stage work and his petty worries from the charmed circle of her friendship, feeling himself solaced and protected in it.
When he received a letter from his uncle, asking him to take charge of $30 a month for Conroy's maintenance, on the old conditions, he talked this letter over with her; and they agreed that it would be better to have Conroy independent of him. "Get them to send it to the other Pittsey," she advised. "He'll only quarrel with you more than ever."
"That's so," he said. "Bert has his confidence still. And he may know how to handle him."
But Pittsey did not look on the proposal with any favour. "I don't exactly relish being keeper to a remittance man myself," he objected. "Why can't they send him the money, if they want him to have it?"
"Well, for one thing, he'd not keep enough of it to pay his rent here."
"That's so," Pittsey reflected. "But I'd have to fix it up some way so that he won't turn sour on me, too."
"Fix it any way you please," Don said. "I can't do anything with him, and if we don't take the money for him, we'll either have to pay for him ourselves or turn him out on the street."
Don wrote his uncle and explained the situation; and Mr. McLean, in his reply, accepted the inevitable. "He must not return," he wrote. "I will not have his mother worried. I will send enough for his support. Perhaps if we let him go his own gait he will come out all right. Keep him out of trouble. If anything goes wrong, write me."
Don accepted these instructions as releasing him from all but the most casual supervision, and he returned eagerly to his books. From reading of how to write plays, he had begun to read plays themselves; and he haunted old book shops for the second-hand volumes of "plays for amateurs and professionals," and carried them about in his pockets and studied them on the benches of the public squares or under the falling leaves of Central Park. The only dramas which he could see performed were at the few theatres that gave matinées on other days than Wednesdays and Saturdays; for on those latter afternoons he was on the stage himself. But he found an extravaganza called "The Enchanted Castle" that had a matinée on Thursday; and this gorgeous spectacle appealed to him like a fairy tale.
The dramas that depicted life did not invite him to attempt any imitation of them, but he felt that it would be a pure joy to plan such a play as this "Enchanted Castle"; and he amused himself by picturing a ballet for it—not in the "wizard's cavern," but in the great hall of an ice palace, of which all the floors were shining ice, transparently blue; and the walls were blocks of snow, like a white marble, sparkling in raised designs of frost; and from the arched ceilings hung great chandeliers that were pendant icicles supporting a myriad of lights; and on a throne that looked as if it had been carved from a frozen waterfall, sat the goddess of Winter, in ermine and white velvets, holding her wand of silver tipped with a great pearl, and looking down on her Amazons with their icy breastplates and their frost-spangled skirts. He was returning, unconsciously, to all he had ever imagined of Santa Claus's palace that stood on the top of a mountainous iceberg and was peopled by fairies who arrived and departed on floating clouds. He imagined Winter as a neglected divinity who envied the praises which mankind, and especially the poets, gave to her sisters of the Spring, the Summer and the Autumn. He saw the Prince, her devoted lover, in a drifted forest (that was his ravine at Coulton on a larger scale) sitting on some broken fir branches with a dog crouched in the snow beside him—when suddenly the dog barked and he looked up to see that the side of the hill had opened just where there had stood a huge rock dripping with ice, and from this cave a band of nymphs rushed out and surrounded him with a circle of spears—and then Winter herself came into the sunlight and waved them back and said: "For this is he!"
She had come to reward him for his devotion!
He gathered up his books from the reading-table, returned them at the library desk, and hurried out to the street to be alone among the multitudes of the city with this new make-believe.
She led him into her underground palace—which proved to be an Aladdin's cave encrusted with precious stones set in ice—its floors covered with the skins of polar bears, its walls shining with theatrical stalactites like the wizard's cavern; and when they were alone in a wonderful secret chamber out of the "Arabian Nights," they sat down to a Homeric feast of nectar and ambrosia. She told him how she had watched over him in the woods, patting him on the cheeks with snowflakes and caressing him with the winds. She had longed to speak to him, but—but intercourse with mortals was forbidden by the gods; and now, having sworn her attendant nymphs to secrecy, she was daring all the angers of Olympus by making herself visible to him and receiving him here in this enchanted cave which she had made for him unknown to Jupiter.
He walked up Broadway, listening to her complaints of loneliness, of the disregard of men who had become afraid of her since they began to herd together in cities and avoid the bracing airs and healthful exercises of the winter; and he tried to console her with his own fervent admiration, reminding her of his life-long adoration and his love of the snow. She interrupted him with a melancholy smile, to say, "And you—even you—will forget me. The city will take you. You will build a home and sit by your fireside with your wife and children, and shudder when you hear me calling to you mournfully outside among the frozen drifts."
"Here you! Look where yuh're goin', will yuh?" A policeman thrust him back from "Dead Man's Curve," as a cable car swung around it with a frantic clang of its gong. "D' yuh want to go home 'n an amb'lance!"
He picked up his hat, and brushing it with his coat sleeve as he went, he hurried to the safety of the benches in the centre of the square. There he sat down with his drama, still trembling from the fright, but still smiling excitedly. He saw himself pleading with her to take him away from the world which he despised, to keep him with her hidden. He saw that she would not be able to resist him. She would carry him—on a cloud—to her summer palace in the unexplored North. A jealous nymph would betray her. The ballet in the great hall would be interrupted by the arrival of Jupiter, with stage thunder. The gods would sentence her to lose her immortality and her throne; she would return with him to the world, where they would live together—through the last act—in a little cottage in the woods. And she—because she shared with him the common menace of death and was linked to him by a doom that made love a fearful and precarious joy—she would be more happy, now, than she had ever been in the splendid ennui of her divinity.
It was, to him, the plot of a great play. He was blind to the incongruity of his Santa Claus palace and his Homeric mythology; he saw nothing unworthy in his chorus-girl nymphs; he accepted it all as a thing so beautiful that it almost brought tears to his eyes. He hastened to his rooms to put the outlines of it on paper before he should forget them; and he noticed, then, for the first time, that it had begun to rain.
He found, in his box, a letter from Margaret. "Dear Don," it read, "we are coming home. I can't tell you. It's mother's fault. Mr. Berwick warned her against doing just what she did, and now the money's gone and I'm glad of it because the worry's over. I'm trying to be brave and not frightened, but I wish you were here to tell me what to do. I'll have to earn my own living, you know. If there's anything left it will not be more than enough for her. I want to see you as soon as we get to New York, I'm sure you'll be able to tell me. You must because I won't go back home and take music pupils and wear made-over dresses like Maud Browning, and the only thing is to find something in New York. I can sing, you know, and play a little, and there ought to be something.
"I must tell you, though, not to meet me at the boat because I quarrelled with mother about a man here. You never saw such shoes as he wore! He actually dared to ask mother if he could marry me without ever asking me what I thought about it, and I believe she wanted me to because he had money. I didn't dare to tell her so, but I told her I wouldn't look at him if he were the only man in the world. She behaved shamefully about it. I'm going to make her leave me in New York when she goes up to Canada to see if Mr. Berwick can't do anything for us, and I'll write to you when she's gone because you know ever since Mrs. Kimball wrote her about the time we were out together that day she has been saying things about you, and perhaps she wouldn't leave me if she knew you, awful you, were in the city. Have a plan ready for me. You were always good at plans, weren't you? I know this letter is frightfully mixed up, but I have to have it posted before she comes back from buying the tickets and I have no time to read it over. I hope you will be glad to see me. I shall."
There was a postscript to say that if he were out of town "or anything," he was to write her, "Poste Restante," at the New York General Post-Office.
He read the letter over to see what boat she was coming on, or when she had sailed. There was, of course, no word of it. The thought that she might have arrived already, on the same steamship as her letter, came on him in a warm tremble of weakness.
She was poor! She would have to earn her living—in New York—with him! They would be together, on the level of a common poverty! . . . He looked up from the letter with a stupefied expression of guilty joy; for he was as if only partly awakened from sleep, his brain was still befuddled with the imaginary scenes of his play, and he confused reality with the pictures of his dreams and accepted her letter as an announcement that his goddess had been deprived of her divinity and exiled to earth with him.
The music publisher's sign on the door before him stared at him insistently. He blinked at it—as one might rub the eyes. Then he laughed, somewhat shamefacedly, and ran up the stairs, taking two of the steps at a time.