Don-A-Dreams/Part 3/Chapter 7
VII
It was a part of his young intensity that he should regard this experience on the Bowery as a fall from honour of which he should always bear the mark. He had none of that priggish vanity of self-righteousness which so passionately regrets the soiling of his garment; and he had little of the sensitive virtue that continues to shudder with abhorrence at thought of the filth which it has touched. But it seemed to him—as he tried to explain to the elder Pittsey—that "there are laws of morality, like the laws of health, and if a man breaks them he—he has to pay for it in the same sort of way . . . by being sick morally . . . by weakening himself morally. And I believe that's what's wrong with all those unhappy wretches on the Bowery. They're breaking the laws of morality, and they're suffering for it just the same as they would if they broke the laws of healthy living."
"But are they?" the other queried, amused. "Are they suffering?"
"Well, they look as if they were. They kill themselves with carbolic acid, as if they were."
That's so."
"Of course it's so. They can say what they please about man being only a higher animal. If he is only a higher animal, at least he is a higher animal; and the law of development . . . that has raised him . . . is a real law, and he can't go against it without suffering for it. I believe that!"
"Well, that's something to believe."
The elder Pittsey had called upon the younger on the previous evening, having obtained the address—so he explained—from the "folks at home"; and he had been introduced to Don by his proud brother, who carried himself with a subdued and respectful admiration for Walter, and was impressed by the easy friendliness of manner which developed at once between Walter and Don. He even dropped the note of raillery in his relations with Don, when the succeeding days seemed to strengthen that friendliness; and if he was somewhat envious of the way in which Don was admitted to confidences from which he himself was excluded, he consoled himself by falling back on Conroy for company, and left his brother to his choice.
It followed that Don was free to walk and argue with his new friend as much as he wished; and Walter Pittsey was nothing if not a patient listener. The discussions were rather one-sided, and they were always of abstract questions—for Don was still incapable of talking of himself—but they were the aggressive arguments of an idealist who was beginning to find his voice; and they marked a stage in Don's development from his past to his future.
They were, of course, merely the attempts of a bewildered youth to find some working compromise, on which to live, between the barren scepticisms of his education and the instincts which that education could not kill. He was at that most violent period of a man's growth, when the crisis of all his fevers come on him together, when he is tormented by the passionate uncertainties of his love and the chilling uncertainties of his unsettled religious beliefs, and the groping uncertainties of his attempts to find a place in a mad world. He walked the streets, day and night, with Margaret's letters in his pocket, the struggle for existence raging visibly around him, and the immense void of the sky overhead dwarfing his loneliness or oppressing, by its indifference, his hope.
It was the mark of his impracticality that he first grew easy in his mind about his merely worldly prospects; for, having earned a few dollars on the Bowery, he accepted them as confirming Walter Pittsey's assurance that it was always easy to find "something" to do; and he resigned himself to waiting idly for the theatrical season to begin. He idled in Central Park, trying to make himself familiar with all the puzzling turns of the labyrinth of walks in the "Ramble," or sitting to smile at the happiness of the children playing in the "Mall," or watching the contented swans floating above their inverted images in the sunlit still waters of the Ponds. He idled in the reading-room of the Astor Library, turning the thumbed pages of the illustrated magazines or drowsing over the philosophical and scientific essays on Assyrian inscriptions and the disputed authorship of the gospels and the latest experiments in the transmission of electrical energy without the use of wires. He idled in his room of an evening reading and re-reading the gossip of the newspapers, or sitting with empty eyes before his memories of Margaret—memories that were cast up in pictures of her on the drift of smoke in which he brooded; for he had begun to use tobacco.
He was worried somewhat by Conroy, who borrowed money from him with the careless air of asking for what he knew was his own and spent it ostensibly on theatres and cigars. It was evident from Conroy's talk of "rushing the growler" and "hitting the can" that the men at the warehouse were jovial drinkers; and he himself, on more than one warm evening, came to his dinner with a sleepy lack of appetite that smelled sourly of beer. Don put the situation before Walter Pittsey, on one of their rounds of the theatrical agencies; and the older man made light of it. "A little beer won't hurt him, you know. It's harmless stuff. Besides, he's old enough to take care of himself."
"But I'm responsible for him, to his father," Don said. "He promised not to drink."
"Well, I shouldn't make trouble for him, if I were you. He'll probably go home at Christmas and stay there. Then he'll be off your hands. Come up to the house to-night, will you? There's somebody there I'd like you to meet."
He lived on one of the upper floors of a theatrical boarding-house off Sixth Avenue, but he had never before invited Don to his room, and Don had been left to gather, from what he heard of the house, that it was the rough Bohemian abode of vaudeville "ham-fatters"—as Pittsey called them. Pittsey professed to like the house because the boarders had reduced the mistress of it to a proper meekness of spirit. "The last time she tried to make trouble for them," he had explained, "they carried her saucepans and the covers of her kitchen range up to the roof and dropped them down the chimney. They wouldn't leave the place, and she hadn't the nerve to go to the police-court, so she has to get along with them. But I shouldn't advise you to call on me there. Generally, she doesn't answer the door-bell. And when she does, she isn't exactly polite."
Because of this state of things, Don and he had always met at appointed places on street corners or in public squares; and now Don replied to the invitation to call with a doubt of Mrs. Kahrle's reception of him. "Well," the actor said, "come at eight o'clock and I'll meet you at the door."
He went—to escape from the thought that he should be writing a letter, to his uncle, about Conroy.
It was an old-fashioned house with a balcony that crossed the sills of the lower windows and connected with the porch steps; and when Don arrived, that evening, two girls in summer gowns were sitting with Walter Pittsey on the balcony, fanning themselves with newspapers and chatting to him while he smoked. He rose to greet Don and to introduce him to "Miss Arden" and "Miss Morrison"; and because Don could see their faces only dimly—and knew that they could not see his—he was not embarrassed. He was all the more startled, in his security, when Miss Morrison, as he sat beside her, said in a calm aside: "I suppose you have forgotten me, Mr. Gregg?"
He stared at her in the half-light, trying to distinguish her features, of which she gave him only the indistinct profile. (Miss Arden was continuing her conversation with Pittsey: "Oh, she fell down in it. Terribly! Terribly! She wasn't in the part for a minute.") Don said: "Why, no Yes. I"
Miss Morrison waited for him to go on. When he did not she added, still fanning herself, and without turning to him: "Have you forgotten when you went to Miss Morris's school?"
"Miss Morris's school?" He could see no connection between that almost forgotten past and this meeting with an occupant of Mrs. Kahrle's boarding-house. He laughed nervously. "Perhaps, if I could see you, I"
Pittsey had struck a match to relight his cigar. She said to him: "Give me that one, Walter. You light another." And reaching the match from him, she turned with it held before her face, at the level of her chin, and looked, without a smile, at Don.
He did not notice the theatricality of the action. He saw only that she had the face of a beautiful mask, and that it was as self-possessed as marble itself, with living eyes that studied him as he stared at her. She said calmly: "He doesn't remember me."
He had a confused and vague recollection of having been in this same situation, of having heard her say these same words, before; but he could not remember where it had been, and he found nothing familiar in her face. The match burned out between them. She explained, as she dropped the glowing ember: "I'm Rose Morris—her little sister."
He recalled her as a small girl in short dresses, with a scarlet hair ribbon—a lonely figure in the playground of Miss Morris's school, where the other children had been suspicious of her as the sister of the tyrant. There had been something "queer" about her. They had accused her of spying on them and of carrying reports of their behaviour to Miss Morris; and he felt the shame now of having been a party to such an accusation.
She said: "I should have known you, I think."
"You've—you've changed," he apologized.
She fanned herself in a reflective silence. "Yes, I suppose I have."
Pittsey put in: "You've changed your name, at least."
"I've added a 'son,'" she said.
"Oh, my dear," Miss Arden laughed. "How shocking!"
She ignored the remark in a way which Don was to find characteristic; and she continued her conversation with him as if she were insensible of the presence of the others. He was surprised to discover from her questions that she knew he had gone to college with Conroy and had not completed his Freshman year; that she remembered Frankie and him at the High School, where she had looked up to him from a lower "form." It was evident that she had shared the curiosity of the elder Miss Morris in the progress through life of one of her first pupils. He exchanged smiling reminiscences of Coulton with her, and told her what had become of this one and that one of the companions of their school days, in return for similar gossip concerning others with whom she had remained in touch. And when he left her—at Miss Arden's announcement that it was time they were all in their beds—he carried away with him a pleased glow of surprise at having met a stranger who had been for years, and unknown to him, a friendly well-wisher.
He learned from Walter Pittsey that she was on the stage. "She used to be in comic opera, I think," he said, "probably in the chorus. She's aiming at the legitimate now, but I imagine she's not doing much. No temperament. She makes a good show-girl, I suppose. She ought to be singing in a church choir."
But it was not her lack of temperament that struck Don in the meetings that followed; it was a strange effect she gave him of being concealed in her own body—hidden behind her beauty that attracted an admiration which did not reach her real self—silent, or speaking as if from a distance of thought. She was younger than Miss Arden, who was a woman of thirty-five, at least, and already puffy under the eyes and hollow in the cheeks where she might have been, at some time, dimpled. And yet Miss Arden seemed younger in heart, chattered more spiritedly and laughed with less reserve. When they made an excursion in the street-car to Fort George, on a Sunday afternoon, she was gaily juvenile beside Miss Morris's staid sobriety; and, with Walter Pittsey, she made the life of the party, while Don and Miss Morris listened, watched and smiled.
They rode between the monotonous fronts of cheap apartment houses, that were rusty with the iron balconies of fire escapes and overflowing with tenants who hung out the windows panting, or crowded, for air, to the doors. They rode, behind the motorman's insistent gong, through the games of the street-children, and were deafened by competitive shrieks. They came to the hills of the suburbs, covered with patient cemeteries, orphan asylums, homes for the aged and the blind—all as quiet as prisons—the field-hospitals for that army of workers encamped in the city below. And they ended on the veranda of a café crowning a breezy hill-top above the river valley and facing a peacefully wooded horizon that was smoke-blue in the mist of a humid midsummer afternoon.
There they ate tricoloured ices and drank cool drinks, while Pittsey and Miss Arden discussed the affairs of "the profesh," and Miss Morris turned to the breeze with a thoughtful languor that showed in the slow movements of her eyes as she looked from the river up the sides of the valley and across the hill-tops, peak after peak. When Pittsey proposed that they stroll down the slope through the inviting underwoods, she said: "I'll wait for you here."
It was Don who remained, by tacit consent of the others, to keep her company.
She watched a bird soaring and sailing over the valley; and she asked, without taking her eyes from it: "Won't you smoke?" He replied, in the same tone, that it would be "a crime" to soil such a breeze with the smell of tobacco. The bosom of her light gown rose and fell over a long sigh: she laid her arm along the veranda rail, and the drooping line from her round shoulder to her curved wrist and relaxed hand had the unstudied grace of all her unconscious poses. He smiled with an æsthetic satisfaction in her beauty that repeated the repose of the calm distance and held the colour of his mood; and he was the more irritated—by the intrusion of the world they had left behind them—when she asked abruptly: "Are you going on the stage?"
He replied: "I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm taking anything I can get. . . . Why?"
"Oh," she said, "it's all so hateful!" And with a suddenness that amazed him, he found himself behind the barriers of her silence and admitted to a confidence which—though at the time it moved him to a reciprocation in kind—he was to look back upon doubtfully, as if it had been an indelicacy. "If I were a man, I'd do anything—anything but that—dig ditches, anything—work on a farm, anything. You don't know what it is—the managers, the women— such vulgarity—and to be set up on a platform to be stared at, like a freak in a dime museum! . . . If I had learned something—something to make a living by!" But she had only her music and her singing; and her music was nothing, and her singing was scarcely fit for the chorus. She had gone into the "legitimate"—as they called their serious attempts to be dramatic—because the life of a chorus girl was a disgusting vanity to her. She had not succeeded. "I can't do the things they do to succeed," she said. "And neither can you."
"No," he replied, "perhaps I can't. . . . Though I've done one thing since I came here—a thing I didn't believe I could ever have done. And I never will again. Never!"
The emotion gave his face a life which she had not seen in it before. She raised her arm on the rail and leaned her cheek against her hand, watching him.
"Besides," he argued, "what difference does it make whether we succeed or not? What difference will it make in a hundred years from now—so long as we don't do anything wrong—anything to be ashamed of—anything" He made a gesture that expressed nothing at all.
"Yes," she said. "A hundred years from now!" She gazed out over the valley, thinking of the crowded cemeteries she had passed in the street-car. She sighed. "I wonder where we'll be in a hundred years from now."
It was after a musing silence that he replied: "I wish I knew."
"They were happier," she said, "those people in the graveyards. They had something to believe in." She came out of her reverie to find him leaning towards her across the table, saying excitedly: "So have we!"
She stared at him. "What?"
"Something to believe in."
She did not reply.
"I know," he said. "I've felt about it just as you do. But look here: if man was an ape, once, if he lived in caves, if he was the savage brute that the Fiji Islanders are now, he rose above it, didn't he? He grew, and he found out the laws that governed his growth, and he wrote them down, and enforced them, and made a religion of them—didn't he? Well, to me, those laws are as real as the laws of gravity—every bit! And there's something behind them just as sure as there's matter behind the law of gravity. Yes. They can deny that. Let them! They have to live in accordance with those laws, and they know it. And so do we. If we do what's wrong, we'll suffer for it—in ourselves—just the same as we'd suffer in our bodies if we didn't obey the laws of hygiene! We"
She had looked over his head at the unexpected return of the others. He had caught the warning in her expression, and glanced back, sitting up in his chair.
Miss Arden came smiling. "Well! You seemed interested."
Miss Morris asked defensively: "Where did you go?"
Pittsey said, with an amused eye on her: "He's been having one of his serious talks with you, has he?"
"It's a relief," she replied coolly, "to be talked to, sometimes, as if you had brains."
Miss Arden laughed, with all the sprightliness of stage comedy. "Ah, my dear, be careful! It's the most dangerous form of flirtation."
"Do we start back now?" Miss Morris asked, so oblivious to their banter that she saved even Don's shamefacedness.
They started back, but she remained thoughtfully indifferent to them—and to him—on the street car. It was not until they were parting at Mrs. Kahrle's door, that she said, in a low aside to him: "Thank you—for a delightful afternoon." And her tone of gratitude was so deep with suppressed intensity that it startled him.
It was the result of that tone—and of the qualms of conscience which it awakened in him—that when he returned to his room, he sat down to write to his uncle a full report of Conroy's condition and of his own part in it. He felt that he must clear his honour of this affair before he could meet her again. He resolved to tell her of what he had done on the Bowery; and he spent an hour, in the evening, imagining himself telling her and picturing her reception of his confession.
That was a measure of the difference between his thought of her and his thought of Margaret. He could not have imagined himself making such a confession to Margaret. With a lover's unconscious duplicity, even in his reveries, he concealed from her everything in himself that did not seem worthy of her.