The Chivalry of David Henley

by Anne O'Hagan

The Chivalry of David Henley

By ANNE O’HAGAN

I

EVEN before she looked at the superscription, Jessica knew what the package contained. It was Henley's book; Henley's own hand had directed it to her. She smiled at the superscription, its vowels a matter of mere conjecture.

With shaking fingers she cut the cord in half a dozen places, though her meaningless pet economy was cord. There it lay—“The Lobbyists, by David Brewster Henley.” She turned to the fly-leaf, and there again was the scrawl she had come to know so well.

“To Jessica Stewart, the creator of this book, from David Henley, her penman, in gratitude and friendship.”

She laughed happily, and then she read the note that lay between the leaves.

“Dear Jessica,” it ran; “This is the first volume I could get my hands on. I did it up myself, you'll observe, instead of putting you on the complimentary list. It's out—your book. It would never have existed but for you—you know that, don't you? I'm not sure I congratulate you, but I do thank you, dearest and kindest of girls. The two years we have worked on it have been the best in my life.

“I shall come in this evening in the hope of finding you. ⁠ D.B.H.”

There was not one of the group of stories which she did not know by heart. She had heard them as anecdotes of Henley's sessions of legislative reporting; she had seen them outlined in half a dozen sentences on random scraps of paper. She had criticised, ridiculed, encouraged boundlessly; she had suggested, pruned, planned, stimulated his flagging interest by her own unfeigned zeal. She had correct typewritten copies and proofs, and she had fought against the first cover-design. She knew the tales word by word. But she sat down and read them through all the afternoon, missing not a syllable.

“It won't create a literary revolution.” she said, smiling as she closed the book and began to dress for dinner. “But it's a beginning, and they're good—the clear, strong, unsentimental, masculine things.”

Already his novel, “John Blount, Assemblyman,” was under way. But more than his plans or any possible material reward from them was the realization of the changed attitude of the man himself, vigorous where he had been mentally indolent, permanently interested where the fatal habit of boredom had sat blighting him. And that was her accomplishment, whatever the book was. .

She recalled her first talk with him. She had come into the glaring, overheated, busy office of the Chronicle, unnerved after a day of hideous reporting on Long Island. She had been hungry, tired, mentally and physically exhausted. And Henley, lounging somewhere in the big room, had marked her lassitude, had carried her, half reluctant, off to supper, had lectured her on the care of her health, had expended upon her kindness from a store not frequently drawn upon in his solitary, irresponsible life. She had not meant that the supper should prelude any deep friendship. She had brought ideals of chaperonage into the busy world and they had cut her off from companionships. She had had no intention of making an exception in favor of Henley; but she found that he too was alone, bored, drifting away from all his early ambitions for the mere lack of incentive and encouragement. Then she had fervently thrown away her theories and had paid him for the half-patronizing kindliness of that first evening with a generosity of interest and inspiration which was very feminine.

When he came that night he looked at her with mock lugubriousness.

“Not a single convulsion of nature,” he announced, “and the book out twelve hours!”

She laughed, and tossed a cushion toward his favorite chair.

“Lie back and be comfortable for once,” she commanded. “But don't quote the occasion as a precedent.”

“May I smoke?”

“When haven't you? There's an ash-tray on the desk; I merely mention it. The room was swept to-day.”

“How do you like your book?” he inquired after he had lit his cigar.

“Print becomes it very well. There are two or three small proof-readers' errors. How did we manage to overlook them in the countless readings we gave the thing? You must have them corrected before the next edition.”

Henley broke into deep, mirthful laughter.

“What,” he inquired anxiously, “would you suggest as an appropriate get-up for the tenth edition? Ought it to be a de luxe?”

“But a second edition is quite likely—almost sure.”

“O Jessica, for a practical woman you're the greatest believer in fairy stories! Do you often set out to find the pot of gold at the rainbow's end nowadays?”

He sent her a glance of intimate affection. She, singularly free from the coquetries of self-consciousness with him, scarcely noticed the look. All their intercourse, familiar and mutually dependent as it had grown to be, had been utterly without expressed sentiment, or even that conscious, unexpressed sentiment which creates the most inflammable of atmospheres.

Emotion had not flourished in the soil of so much labor.

But to-night Henley looked at her with a deepened admiration and pride, because in the successful outcome of his undertakings all his tenderer feelings were intensified. For once they were idly enjoying the fruits of toil; there was in the air, if not a languor, at least a relaxation.

“There's one queer thing about your stories, David,” said Jessica at last, breaking the half-dreamy quiet into which they had fallen.

“What's that?”

“There isn't a sentimental one in the dozen.”

David reflected.

“That's so. Well, sentiment doesn't flourish about the capital.”

“I'm not sure it's that,” she argued. “I think sentiment doesn't flourish about you, David. You're a most unromantic person.”

She had uttered the words in a spirit of idle teasing. But when she heard them strike the air, they filled her with a sudden embarrassment. She sought to clear it away with explanation.

“I mean,” she elaborated, “that I don't believe you know, either by experience or intuition, anything about love.”

The words hung poised, and mischievous sprites tossed them about, refusing to let them sink to silence. They vibrated against her ears; the little room was full of them as a bar of sunlight is full of golden motes. The syllables crowded back upon her, smothering her. Now they were rose-petals, blinding her eyes, sealing her lips—love, love, love. What had she said, what spell had been wrought, what was this sudden wonder that held her blind, breathless, waiting?

The full silence that had fallen with her words quivered from her to him. He, too, was caught in the whirl of the magic she had evoked. He looked at her swiftly. Her head still leaned back upon the cushion of her chair, her eyes were still away from him. But the tilted chin and the throat below it and all the face, clear to where the pale hair met the broad, honest forehead, was incarnadined. Suddenly she was beautiful and desirable in his sight. Her words beat against her ears, his heart——

He found himself standing by her chair. On her lips was the soft fire of hers.

“Don't you think that I do?” he asked unsteadily. “O dearest, dearest, don't you think that I know anything about love?”

II

The square, its bare trees mere sketches in the delicate purple mists of the early evening, became a sudden garden fruited with great globules of gold. Jessica had been looking across it with unseeing eyes; now the sharpness of the transformation commanded her attention. She played with the notion of her life as a dim, nebular region, upon which in a dazzling moment the light of love had burst. Then she sighed, turning away. The parallel was a poor one.

“There's a measure of stability about electricity,” she said, turning from the window. But she shook her head impatiently at the expression. She had always had a healthy scorn of the callow cynicism of half-experience, and she liked it in herself as little as in others.

Her engagement was six months old. Her dissatisfaction was almost co-extensive with it. To-night she would have said that from the very beginning, after the first dizzy rapture, the first unquestioning ecstasy of emotion, her doubts had begun and she had known but half-hearted joy. It seemed to her that the very first of Henley's farewells as a lover had left her aching with the sense of need.

On the table, when she had lighted the lamp, she saw a note from him. She opened it with the slight constriction of the throat she always had nowadays at sight of his writing, her eager hope always dashed by the expectation of some hurt to it.

“Dearest:” the note ran; “A foolish gentleman in Boston has desecrated the water side of Beacon Street by shooting down a highly respected citizen, and everyone is busily engaged in explaining that it was a misktake. You'll see the afternoon despatches. Ferguson insists upon sending me off to unravel the mystery—the murderer is expected to become emotionally garrulous at sight of me.

“I have looked everywhere for you to tell you about it, and have finally discovered that you are interviewing the Mormon lady at the Holland, and that you're to send the story down. I wanted to say good-bye to you for a day or two, but after all, it's as well that I can't. Office good-byes—do you like them as little as I do?

“Here are the tickets for the show to-night. Take some man; I hate to have you out without adequate protection. Maybe Martyn can go.

“And remember that you are not to have that cold when I come back. Miss me—at least half as much as I shall you. ⁠ D.B.H.”

“I knew it,” said Jessica drearily to herself. “I knew it. I was sure that something would happen to spoil to-night.”

But after a minute's brooding she took herself to task for an unreasonable idiot, telephoned to the Van Rensselaer office for a connection with Mr. Martyn's studio on the top floor, and gaily inquired if his engagements would permit his taking her to the theater. Mr. Martyn's delight, as he explained, was fourfold. He wanted to see “Cousin Kate”; he adored first nights; he did not wish to finish the drawing which he had pledged to the confiding art manager of an advertising concern for the next morning; and finally and chiefly, he always desired to be with her. Young Martyn suspected the unannounced engagement of his friends, and gave rein to his admiration for Jessica with a sense of delightful security.

Jessica laid the little note, the kind, inherently indifferent, conscientiously affectionate, little note away along with various other specimens of the same epistolary style. She supposed that no reasonable woman would cavil at it! But she wanted a love which would fulfil every desire of an irrational woman; she wanted ardor, despair, passion, which would disdain trivial cleverness. She did not want to be sent to the theater with young Martyn. She wanted to be forbidden young Martyn's cheerful, harmless society.

“Novels,” Jessica told herself for at least the thousandth time since her engagement, “have been my undoing. They have given me false notions of love, false expectations of men, false views of everything. David does love me. He comes to me every free moment that he has; he works with me—I don't think he would pass a sentence without my seeing it; he is tolerant of my moods, admires my character and my attainments—” She struggled to fasten a waist in the back and the current of her thoughts varied. “In short, I have sketched a very delightful cousin or an ideal brother-in-law!”

Over the thought of their more distinctly lover-like relations she sighed again. David was not without ardor, not without his outbursts of demand for tenderness; but even they, though she tried to persuade herself that they meant love and the passion of love, left her dissatisfied. In those infrequent moments it was primeval man that looked through his eyes toward primeval woman, not the soul of David Henley yearning for annihilation and life everlasting in the soul of Jessica Stewart.

“I'm a romantic fool,” she told herself angrily. “He does love me; he needs me; with habit he needs me, and with his mind he needs me, and with the great longing of human loneliness he needs me.”

“But oh, you poor thing, you poor thing!” cried the voice that had never been stifled in her since first David had tilted her head back and had looked down upon her transfigured face with eyes half passionate, half scrutinizing, “when has he whispered your name to the rose? When has he lain awake to watch the white stars coursing, because somewhere in their revolving they shone upon the place where you slept? When has he been willing to forego everything for the sound of your voice, the look of your blown hair?”

“At any rate,” for the thousandth time Jessica answered the questioning, tormenting voice, “he gives me all that he has to give. And, O my dear, my dear and kind and true, that is all the wealth of love I want.”

So with loyalty she put down her longings, and with the glorified common-sense which is demanded by the stern code of her generation she banished disappointment. The somewhat inadequate reward for her heroism was that she derived a measure of enjoyment from the youthful irresponsibilities of Martyn, except in those moments when her heart ached poignantly for another figure in the chair next to her at the theater, and another pair of eyes, less eager, less sympathetic perhaps, than Martyn's, but dearer than all the world, to meet her own after each sally of stage wit.

Henley was in Boston a week. His brief notes, affectionate, amusing, referred Jessica to the Chronicle's account of the cause célèbre for the history of his life. She read them with a mixture of loathing for the subject and of unwilling admiration for his journalistic style—that combination of penetration, shallow superiority, and vivid English, of which he mysteriously retained only the good in his more lasting work. There was the customary woman in the case, and for a day or two Henley dwelt upon her with avidity. Suddenly his references to her became perfunctory. The other papers, Jessica observed, continued to make much of her and to draw effective contrasts between her and the daughter of the distinguished victim. Henley barely mentioned the latter, accorded her no more description than could be gathered from the vital statistics of her native city, and refused to make her into pathetic copy. Jessica wrinkled her forehead over this anomaly. Then she smiled with sudden understanding.

“Dearest!” she cried in her heart. “You are keeping her out of all this as far as you can. How kind you are, how kind!”

She remember with a rush of gratitude his goodness to a bedraggled young reporter one night long past. Still, it was not like Henley to be swayed by personal feelings in the discharge of his unpleasant duties—indeed, to have personal feelings.

She found him waiting for her when she came in from the office one afternoon at the end of the week. Joy surged high in her. She could never see him now without this blinding rush of tenderness. She stood at the door of the Van Rensselaer gilt-and-tapestry reception-room, with the gas sparkling odorously and undeceptively in the red asbestos fireplace, and for a second she watched him as he stood staring unseeingly at the customary pale etching of a bayside port.

“David!” she called.

He turned, his face glowing with sudden pleasure.

“I thought you'd be in soon,” he said. “So I waited. May I come up now—this instant? It's so long since I've seen you!”

“I've aged sadly, haven't I?” She spoke with a jocularity intended for the elevator boy. “Come up, do.”

When the door of the sitting-room closed upon them, he held her close to him with an arm across her shoulder, while he looked at the familiar chairs, the familiar shelves with their books, their blue-and-white and brass. When he had looked his fill, he sighed and released her.

“I don't know what was the matter with me,” he explained. “But I felt that there was going to be a great change in—you or in the room before I could get back. I grew fairly panicky coming over on the train. But you're both the same.” Then he kissed her.

“Only when we are conscious of change in ourselves do we anticipate it in others,” replied Jessica didactically. She had merely meant to be sententious after the copybook fashion, but her words seemed suddenly of evil omen. She hurried on: “Have some tea?”.

“Yes, please. How's your cold?”

“Better,” she mumbled from the corner cupboard. “When did you get in?”

“At four—and came straight here.”

“O eager lover!”

Contentedly he watched her moving about the room. By and by she asked:

“Did you have a chance to do any work on the Book while you were away?”

“No. The story kept me pretty busy. What did you think of my stuff?”

“Oh, it was clever and I hated it! You didn't make much of the daughter.”

“No—I don't know when I have loathed the newspaper business as I did up there.” He spoke with unaccustomed heat. “Not since I saw you breaking down under your foolish devotion to it. It was disgraceful. A young girl she is, mind you, twenty-one or so, just out. She has been most delicately reared; was her invalid mother's companion and pupil until Mrs. Pyncheon died a year or so ago. And since then she's been in the seclusion of her mourning, until this winter. Think of her plunged all at once into unimaginable grief and horror, and, as if that were not enough, a tribe of us unclean birds circling about her! Jess, if the Book makes any kind of a hit, we'll get out of the business.”

Jessica heated the teapot carefully and measured the tea from the old-fashioned caddy. Her face was half turned from him, and her head bent as though in the profundity of her calculations.

“I think you are rather hard on us,” she said finally, when the measuring was over. “We do not create the ugliness in the world.”

“No. And the buzzards do not kill the travelers in the desert. But, Jessica, how inconsistent you are! You're always hating it, always looking forward to the time when I can give it up.”

“If I remember,” said Jessica, a little coldly, “you have always opposed my point of view. You're as inconsistent as I am. But it only means that I don't like to be called buzzards and things. It hurts my feelings. Is she as pretty as the Star said?”

“Miss Pyncheon? I don't know whether she'd ordinarily be called pretty or not. Of course, every woman in an affair of this kind is a raving beauty, if she only has the proper complement of limbs and features.”

“What does she look like? Have a wafer?”

“No, thank you. I'm no good at description. She's a white-birch sort of a girl, tall and slim and swaying. Her hair's a very dusky, loose-tendriled black, and her face a longish oval, very pale. I got in to see her through the Brookses, you know. You forgot to give me any sugar, dear. I suppose Martyn doesn't take sugar?”

“That is a very clumsy and vulgar witticism, David,” said Miss Stewart in disdain. But all the cry of her heart was about a girl, slender and virginal like the young birch, with dark hair, and eyes that shrank from horror and appealed for pity.

III

The manuscript slid from Jessica's fingers to her lap; she heard the sound of a sob and realized that it had issued from her own lips. She was cold, and shaken with emotion.

For a month after his visit to Boston Henley's book had lagged and dragged in a way maddening to her intense energy.

“You know that I can't help it, Jessica,” he had pleaded, when at meeting after meeting her despairing eyes had accused him of the old indifference and languor. “I can't, indeed. I've come to the love, and I'm a duffer at love-scenes. When the novelists are properly unionized, I sha'n't have to do them; there'll be a beautiful subdivision of labor; a love-scene man will no more attempt a Wall Street panic, or vice versa, than a carpenter would attempt a glazier's job now. Ah, then we'll have fine novels! Don't frown, Jess; it isn't pretty. Besides, don't you remember that you yourself once declared me an ignoramus in love?”

She tried to keep behind her lips the retort, “And I was right.” But it slipped out, and Henley looked at her with a scrutiny half keen, half pitiful, the spirit of badinage dying in him.

“Poor Jessica!” he said, touching her hair gently. “I'm afraid I'm a disappointing sort of a person.”

“Only when you won't write.” That time she had been resolute to ignore the opening he gave for personal tragedy.

“Well, I'll be disappointing no longer,” he had declared. “I'll write.”

For a month he had been abstracted, absorbed, and now here was the result, these chapters that left her sobbing, moved to the heart by their unexpected intensity. They breathed the awe, the mystery, the beauty of love, working in the heavy soul of John Blount, melting with sudden divine heat the icy pride of Frances. Henley's words to her, Jessica, never thrilled her as the words he put into the mouth of his hero; her own love for him had taught her all she knew of ecstasy and pain, of instinctive rapture and despair. With her, love had not been the response to demand in him, but was itself the torch of fire. And to read words of his that swayed her as his spoken words had never done, to learn through this paper creation of his all that he knew of the compelling force of the world—here was the beginning of agonies.

Yet she did not recognize this at first. When she had escaped from the domination of the written scenes and come out of the life of John Blount and into her own again, she was conscious only of jubilant pride.

“It wasn't real, you little fool!” she laughed to herself, drying her eyes. “It wasn't real. David did it with his little pen—a silly fountain-pen and David's steady, big, kind hand did that! They made you laugh and cry and catch your breath, and shut your eyes so as not to see the heavens open. David's work! This proves him. This proves him. He can do anything now—anything! And to think that it was you who made him begin, who kept him at it! Why, the man's almost a genius.”

Her joy grew soberer by degrees, and upon the heels of the quieter mood a question came. Whence had he that assured knowledge, that depth of feeling? How did he acquire them, he who had dealt almost clumsily with sentiment hitherto? If her own intercourse with him had shown him to her as a man of romance, of passion, she could now have attributed the sentimental awkwardness or triviality of his earlier work to a sort of self-consciousness in the handling of new tools, and this beauty and power to his final mastery of them. But she knew him as an affectionate, kindly, clever, moderately ardent man, against whose unemotionalism her own intensities were receiving constant hurt. And here was a writer who knew the glamour of young dreams and the full, resistless sweep of noonday love, and had somewhere learned the tragedy of renunciation.

Like a flash of jagged lightning cutting through the gloom came the jealous illumination—the white-birch sort of girl. Of course! In the spell the novel had cast upon her, she had not noticed that the supreme scene was at the edge of a winter grove—white birches shivering upon the bank of a brook thin-sheeted with ice, the duskiness of the forest beyond. Now she remembered! Always that image in his mind! And thence the knowledge of the holy depths of life that had suddenly brought him to the fulness of his power.

She called herself a reasonable woman and she battled against the destructive impulses of her jealousy. She subdued the desire to summon him to a scene of explanation, of probing and recrimination, as she subdued the desire to cry aloud, to beat her head against the wall, to choke back sobs with cruel fingers against her throat instead of with determined self-control. But she never for a second questioned the truth of her intuition.

“He loves her,” she kept saying to herself. “He loves her. He may not know it yet; he may know it and put it away as disloyal or as a vagary of his pity. But he loves her. And I thought I had done so much for him in putting his commas straight—and she inspires this!”

“But even granting that,” soothed sophistry, “what does it matter? He is devoted to you, fond of you, dependent on you. If something in that young girl's position or personality set vibrating an untouched chord in him—still, here is his daily life with you. By and by the chord will vibrate less and less; only a faint memory of a sad, appealing measure will haunt him. And you——”

But the demand that each woman's virginal soul makes of one man in the world—the demand of all or nothing—swelled to anguish in Jessica. So long as she could persuade herself that she possessed all he had to give, she could force herself to a certain semblance of content. Now, sure with the irrefrangible surety of instinct, that another woman had caused the blossoming of the flower in his heart, that its perfume exhaled toward her, Jessica wanted nothing of him. All the arguments of reason, the prating about congeniality, need, fondness, were brushed aside. From another man these might have contented her; but in first love, the measure of its greatness is its infinite demand. Dimly she foresaw that the time might come when compromises and makeshifts might suffice her; but not here, where she cared supremely. Stronger than logic, stronger than trivial considerations of better and worse, of generosity and right, uprose the fierce demand of her undivided heart for the whole of his. She found herself suddenly calmed into thankfulness that their relation was so uncomplicated; she was filled with swift pity for the women to whom such knowledge comes after marriage, after motherhood. Thank God, thank God, she was free to refuse the degradation of half-love!

Across this decision, which left her gray and old, one hope shot. Perhaps she was wrong! Perhaps she was merely a jealous woman endowing the delusions of her jealousy with the authority of the inspired truth. Perhaps——

The telephone rang. Mr. Henley, a voice from the office downstairs announced, wished to see her. Her own voice shook as she bade him come up.

He looked pale and worried as he entered.

“It's late, I know,” he said, not noticing that she withdrew from his kiss of greeting. “But I'm off to Boston again—and I want to see you to explain.”

“What is it this time?”

“The same case. You know the trial is just on; the other was just the crime and the inquest and the grand jury business. I told Ferguson I wouldn't go”—there was a nervous, annoyed frown on his forehead—“I particularly did not want to go. I—I wanted to stay with you, sweetheart.”

Jessica's intent eyes never left his face; his wandered from object to object in the little room. Now he looked at her.

“Yes,” she said. “But Ferguson wouldn't let you off?”

“It wasn't that.” His eyes shifted again. “But—he was going to send Knowles instead. You know what a ghoul Knowles is, how he'll dwell on every detail. Frankly, dear”—he dragged his vague tones and looked back to her—“I can't bear to think of the copy he'd make of Charlotte Pyncheon. It's such a horrible position for the child anyway.”

“Yes, it is. I didn't know her name was Charlotte.”

“It is—Charlotte.” There was silence for a few seconds while the sound of the girl's name died upon the air. Then he said:

“Well, dear, am I a fool to go—when the book's to finish, too? And I can't stop the other papers from printing columns of ill-bred drivel about her. There'll be buzzing of flies anyway. I'll only be called down, perhaps called back, by the office for not knowing news when I see it.”

“Don't turn introspective, David,” said Jessica. “It isn't like you. You had better run on, hadn't you?”

“Yes, I'm going over on the midnight train, and I must go home first. By the way, the chief was talking of having a Sunday series on the immigrants before they immigrate, with you for the Chronicle's 'special commissioner.' Ferguson spoke of it at dinner to-night. I never regretted so much that our engagement wasn't out. I wanted to explain that it was quite impossible. For if the book sells fifty copies—why, Jessica, you would not think of going, would you?”

“Not to-night, at any rate,” she smiled. “But you must hurry. Poor little Miss Pyncheon!”

He stooped and kissed Jessica's unresponsive lips. He did not notice their chill. His restless mind was otherwhere, not here with Jessica, and her constraints and unannounced plans.

“Good-night, dearest,” he said.

“Good-by, good fortune.”

When the elevator had slammed its way down, she lowered the lights and drew up the curtains. Many, many nights had she watched him swing along the iron-fenced square. Never had he looked back toward her windows after the foolish habit of lovers.

“If he only would to-night—if he only would to-night!” she prayed, although she did not know what fortune she balanced on the chance.

It seemed to her that he must hear the call of her heart, must turn at its cry. And for the trembling fraction of a second, he seemed to hesitate. Then he squared his shoulders and set his face toward the goal whither love and pity led him.