The Kiss (Woodrow)

by Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

 

The Kiss

By Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

WHEN Shannon O’Keefe brought “Bluet” Marshall into that small, select, sophisticated and famous group gathered in Kate Raeburn’s studio up under the roof, the effect was immediate and electric.

They were all lounging and having tea. It was five o’clock in the afternoon, but when Bluet entered, you suddenly thought of the day’s early hours. She hadn’t much but youth and the best things that go with it to cast in the scales, and the hands of every other woman there were heavy with the gifts the gods had bestowed and the years had lavished; and yet—for the moment, anyway—they would all have let their hard-won prizes in life’s gamble go without a pang, for just that mere shimmering evanescence—the untroubled morning that shone in Bluet’s eyes, her boyishly confident assurance that every minute was a good time, that intangible atmosphere of spring that encompassed her, that fragrance of apple-blossoms—or was it clove-pinks?—which seemed to waft about her.

Agra Wyndham—you’ve seen her in a dozen successful plays, richly lovely, the eternal romance in her eyes and voice—was sitting under the dormer window on a seat piled with cushions, her hands loosely clasped about her knees, a cigarette between her lips. When she saw Bluet, she hastily pulled a thin rose-silk curtain across the window. The last rays of the setting sun are so revealing. She was just remarking to Heywood Halleck, the illustrator, who was sitting on the edge of the table eating gingerbread:

“For film-work my skin wont stand the Number 8. I take yellow Number 3. Good Lord!”—as she saw Bluet and her chaperon. “What is Shannon O’Keefe up to now?”

Kate Raeburn went forward with her grand air to meet her two latest guests. She was a big, handsome woman with brown eyes and quantities of untidy, light hair—one of the few women painters who are really worth while. She had been painting with a profound absorption until the light failed her a few moments before, and had quite ignored her guests, who, used to this, had gone ahead and made themselves tea and much conversation.

Shannon O’Keefe, as delightfully Irish as her name implies, and at present the last word on interior decorations, presented Bluet to Kate and to Marcia Foster Randall,—just enjoying the royalties from her last best-seller,—who crossed the room to join the great Wyndham and Heywood Halleck.

“I hope,” Halleck said severely to Shannon, “that you’ve simply got that dream”—he waved his hand toward Bluet—“on a brief New York sightseeing trip, and are merely showing us off as a little group of earnest thinkers, so that she can go back to Higginsville and tell the six-handed euchre-club all about meeting us.”

“Yes,” put in Kate Raeburn, who had joined them, “I’m glad I’ve got on my fiercest painting-apron and these blue and yellow smudges on my cheek. They'll mean real local color to her. Look here!”—to Shannon—“what are you doing with her?”

“The very tones of you two are an insult,” returned Mrs. O’Keefe. “I’ll hasten to say that she’s my favorite sister’s only daughter, and I didn’t just bring her here to look at you stuffed lions, I can tell you. I’m in a quandary.”

“As I was telling you, Heywood,”—the Wyndham spoke in those mellifluous tones which have enchained thousands, and turned her shoulder pointedly on Mrs. O’Keefe,—“the first pictures were taken in a cave. Why cave, or what I was doing there, heaven alone knows.

“‘Now it’s ten years later, and you come back,’ said the director.

“‘Come back from where?’ I asked.

“‘Never mind,’ he said.

“‘In the same frock?’ I screamed.

“‘I’ve no time to bother with details.’

“‘Am I laughing or crying?’ I begged.

“‘I don’t know,’ he answered, scratching his head. ‘What do you think? Your husband’s just died.’”

SHANNON composedly poured herself a cup of tea and chose some small cakes with care. Then she jostled Agra Wyndham’s feet off the window-seat and sat down.

“Better listen,” she said. “It’s a romance. She’s just what she looks—the sweetest thing in the world: An only daughter with everything she wants, not in Higginsville, Heywood, but Centervale. Has had a lifelong admirer in a charming young fellow, and is practically engaged to him. He’ll be here presently. He’s going on to dinner with Bluet and myself. The parents on both sides are wild for the match, but these children are complicating the situation absurdly. That girl—adorable idiot!—is just going through that trying period when she is crying for that foolishest of moons, a career.”

The painter and the illustrator and the actress all gave simultaneous and hollow groans.

“They all think”—Halleck helped himself to another piece of gingerbread—“that by some process of levitation they can bound right up and pluck it from the sky. The mind of youth is incapable of grasping the fact that there are a thousand million steps on that unending stairway, each step steeper and harder to climb than the one before.”

“But that isn’t all,” said Shannon O’Keefe, thoughtfully sipping her tea and glancing sidewise at Agra Wyndham. “The boy—his name’s Paul Welles has some fool notion of being a playwright, instead of turning the wheels that mint Papa’s millions. He’s been taking the Baker course at Harvard, and is here to spill his plays all over Broadway. So, you see,”—ignoring a heavy sigh from Agra,—“it’s a case for immediate intervention.

“I’ve thought it all out,” Mrs. O’Keefe added. She was a woman not only of farsighted diplomacy, but of immediate action. “All I want is a little coöperation. What both those children need to make them wake up is several hard jolts. Just simply to have Bluet meet you all in a casual way would only harden her determination. But I want her to grasp what our lives really are—work, work, work, eternal drudgery, unceasing discipline.”

“She’s trying to make us think well of ourselves, Agra,” said Kate in consternation. “She always does that when she means us to burn our paws pulling her chestnuts out of the fire.”

Shannon ignored her.

“I’ve got a sterner task for you, Agra, than powdering your nose.”

Miss Wyndham dropped her vanity-box in dismay.

“You’ve got to turn that boy’s head temporarily,” continued Shannon. “He’s overwhelmed at the very possibility of meeting you. Just take possession of him sufficiently to rouse Bluet’s jealousy, you know, while Kate and Marcia Foster Randall and myself show her the seamy side of success.”

Agra opened her lovely mouth once or twice, to gasp.

“Are you asking even Agra to compete with all that radiance?” Kate questioned teasingly.

Agra shriveled her with ineffable disdain.

“It’s a chestnutty plot,” she said coldly, “and you fail to consider the possibility of his falling in love with me. Men have been known to do so from time to time.”

“You can manage all that,” returned Shannon with easy confidence. “As for the radiance, at his age—twenty-three—he’ll prefer the sophistication of the lip-stick and eyebrow-pencil to any color that comes and goes.”

“I hate women,” said the Wyndham deeply. “I’ve neither the time nor the conscience to turn a cub’s head, and yet you'll nag the life out of me until I do. I see why you're such a successful business woman, Shannon. You hang onto a person’s buttonhole until he’ll give you anything to be able to shake you off.”

THE door opened, and a young man came in.

“Hush—here he is. Isn’t he a dear? Get on your siren expression, Agra.”

He was a dear,—a nice, big boy, with a square, determined face, clean-cut features and something shy and yet eager in both his eves and his smile. As he came forward, a flicker of light and interest went over the face of every one of those world-worn, perennially fresh women.

Immediately, imperceptibly, Agra Wyndham dropped her slouch. She lifted her classic head with the hair wound close about it, shining bronze with copper lights. Even Halleck, who had done innumerable sketches of her, paid tribute again to the exquisite modeling of her chin, the long line of her smooth throat. Her soft, dull draperies, the color of mignonette, fell faultlessly about her sinuous grace. The thin smoke from the cigarette in her fingers wavered upward and cast the shadow of illusive mystery over her black-fringed, topaz eyes.

Paul Welles grew a shade paler as he stood before her. His face became serious; his lip trembled the least bit.

Agra made way for him on the window-seat beside her and bent toward him.

“I’ve just been hearing,” she said,—and her voice was like strained honey with just the least husky tang in it,—“that you’ve been taking a course with Professor Baker. How interesting! What is your play about? And when are you going to write one for me?”

“Agra’s all right.” Shannon nodded contentedly to Kate Raeburn. “She grouches and growls, but she’s a good sport. She’s got on her best Cleopatra expression; and just look at that darling boy. He’s evidently met the Sphinx for the first time; and gaze at Bluet taking them in, eyes stretched! She’s Red Riding Hood getting her first glimpse of the wolf.”

“I think you’re playing a particularly meddlesome and dangerous game—considering Agra,” said Kate Raeburn dubiously.

“What do you expect of a born gambler?” asked Shannon with her customary blitheness. “I always win on the long chance.”

Indeed, Shannon O’Keefe was not, as she frequently remarked, an Irishwoman for nothing. A consummate politician, she was also a profound manipulator and a great executive. When she pulled the strings, she expected her puppets to dance; and to her credit, be it said, they rarely failed to do so. She had given herself a fortnight on the job of disillusioning Bluet Marshall with a career, and she had confident anticipations of bringing the matter to a satisfactory conclusion in that time. “Man proposes; God disposes” had no place in her bright lexicon.

BUT the moment of destiny shaved her calculations by a day. Instead of being the fourteenth instant after she had enlisted her friends, it was the thirteenth. Unperturbed, she sat in her private office giving an interview to the bright young college woman who conducted the “Shannon O’Keefe” departments in the various woman’s magazines, when, without even a warning knock, Agra Wyndham came in.

She was a very artistic and at the same time realistic impersonation of storm. Gray chiffons falling over velvet darkly blue, almost black, suggested the mist of rain against a threatening cloud-bank. Her brows were drawn, her eyes sultry. She threw herself into a long chair and tapped the floor impatiently with her slipper until Mrs. O’Keefe murmured a few smiling but definite words of dismissal to the college girl and turned to the actress.

“What on earth’s the matter?” she asked in pleasant, indifferent tones, picking up an ivory paper-knife and preparing to attack a pile of unopened letters.

“I hate women. Oh, how I loathe them!” Miss Wyndham cast a small pillow passionately to the floor. “Never, never again! When I first knew you, Shannon O’Keefe, you had green satin wall-paper on your living-room, and red plush chairs. Now you've progressed to black and white, with touches of orange, but you’ve got a green satin wallpaper and red plush soul.”

Said Mrs. O’Keefe, unmoved:

“You're getting into a tantrum, and you know what it does to the lines about your mouth and eyes. No woman can afford either tears or temper after she’s—”

Agra gave a bound forward as rapid and graceful as that of a black panther.

“Don’t say it, don’t say it,” she warned. Then she sank back in her chair, her hand at her heart, drew a deep breath and went on.

“You are exactly like The Duchess in ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ always tucking some poor flamingo under your arm and playing croquet with it, and I’m your present flamingo. I’m so easily imposed on, always ready to spend myself and be spent for my friends. I’m all feeling, heart.

“Good heavens!” She took out her handkerchief and holding a small mirror close to her eyes, touched first one and then the other with practiced deftness.

“There! You almost made me cry,” she said as if a national calamity had been averted.

“I suppose,” said her friend, knitting her brows abstractedly over a letter she held in her hand, “that this means that Paul Welles has lost his head about you. Cheer up. It’s only temporary. He’ll revert to habit again. Habit’s the strongest thing in the world. It’s the habit of a lifetime for him to be in love with Bluet.”

Agra fairly seemed to draw regal if imaginary robes about her and cast down scorn from illimitable heights.

“A man lose his head! What is that to me? I, who have seen them abandon themselves to their grotesque agonies a thousand times, crawl about the floor after me and water my rugs with their tears!

“Shannon O’Keefe,”—her voice sank to the deep emotional tone which had caused shivers in the spines of her audiences for the last twenty years,—“it is a black, a damnable, thing you’ve done. It isn’t only that he’s mad about me—that serves you right; it’s that I—I, who have never really loved before—”

“Oh, that!” Shannon penciled a note on the margin of the letter she had been frowning over and looked relieved. “You’ve told me that so often.”

Agra laughed harshly.

“I have had my fancies,” she admitted, “but when the real thing comes, it’s different. And it’s all so hopeless, so hopeless. You know the management wont hear of their stars marrying.” She let her clasped hands fall between her knees; her chin sank on her chest, while she looked at Shannon tragically from under her black lashes.

“Ah—h! He’s so different from anything that ever came into my life before. So unspoiled, so true! Fine to the core! And we understood each other so perfectly from the first. We met in a companionship that both of us had always dreamed about but never hoped to realize. Neither of us looked forward. We were just two children happy in the perfect present; and then—last night—”

SHE had risen as she talked, and was moving about the room apparently seeking something.

“Shannon, isn’t there a match in this place? Thanks. Well,”—with a long sigh,—“you know that last night they released ‘Her Heart’s Story.’ He and I had dinner on the Astor roof and then went over to the theater to see it.

“Even at dinner I was conscious of something in the air—you know. There was one of those soft, sweet breezes, and there was a little crescent moon swinging through the clouds, and the colored lanterns were like globes of fairy-fire. You may know how it affected me when I tell you that I didn’t care a straw whether what I ate was fattening or not.

“And afterward we went to see the pictures. Shannon, they’re all to the good. You must see them. That boy! How he watched them, leaning forward in his seat, tense. Every once in a while he’d draw a deep breath; and at last he turned and said:

“‘Think of seeing you there on the screen and having you here beside me!’ Wasn’t it sweet of him? Did you ever notice his eyes? Positively luminous! Shannon dear, would you mind ordering me a seltzer lemonade—no sugar. I shall have to starve for a week now, after the things I ate and drank last night.

“After the pictures he insisted on going to Claremont. It was such a perfect night. The moon followed us all the way up, and the river was so still and black and mysterious, all gleaming with light. And the linden-trees were in bloom, and you know what Riverside Drive is when the lindens bloom. And we got a table in one of those little kiosk things, and he said that my eyes were the color of the champagne, and that he didn’t want any wine while he could watch them sparkle. They all say that, but it was different, so different when he said it. And I recited:

“Before our lives divide forever,
While time is with us, and hands are free—

“SHANNON, the quality of my voice! There was something in it, a tone that was never there before. I wish my manager might have heard it. And what it did to that boy! He listened as if he were hearing the music of the spheres, or something like that. And when I finished, he leaned across the table and caught my hands and put his head down on them without a word. It was the sweetest, the most perfect; tribute I’ve ever received.”

Mrs. O’Keefe tapped her teeth with the paper-knife. Her brows were slightly drawn; she looked worried for the first time.

“You haven’t gotten to the kisses yet,” she said dryly as Agra paused.

“Oh, they were on the way home, of course.” The Wyndham’s voice was dreamily sweet. “I suppose I should not have let him, and yet—Shannon,”—she clasped her jeweled hands together,—“I felt just sixteen.”

THERE was a sharp knock upon the door, the rat-tat-tat of strong, eager, masculine knuckles; and then, without waiting for an answer, Paul Welles came in. His face was wan and a bit haggard.

“Mrs. O’Keefe,” he begged huskily, “would you understand if I asked to see Miss Wyndham one moment alone?”

Shannon went a bit white. She glanced from one to the other of them in an undecided sort of way. Then with a faint bow she left the room.

Paul turned a miserable and distraught face upon Agra.

“Miss Wyndham—Agra,” he burst out, “she’s given me back my ring. She believes that I’m—I’m in love with you. I’ve tried to make her understand, but she wont. I’ve told her what a wonderful opportunity it was for a young playwright to have the privilege of knowing a great actress. I’ve pointed out to her the difference in our—our ages;. but it was no good. At last she,”—here he hung his head,—“she asked me if I kissed you. She said if I’d swear to her that I’d never kissed you, she might listen to me.”

“Well!” Agra’s tones were those of a deep, astonished, shocked, indignant bell.

He flushed darkly red.

“Oh, of course!” His tones were as shocked as hers, at the unspoken intimation that he was either ignorant of the code or had hesitated to comply with its requirements.

“Of course!”—in confused, rapid explanation. “But I didn’t dare to try that on her. She knows me too well. She can spot me in a minute when I lie. So I got huffy, told her that if she was going to take that attitude—and all that; but”—he shook his head and twisted his hat forlornly—“it’s no good. She’s like a rock.

“She said: ‘I’ve seen the whole thing from the first. You can’t deceive me, Paddy.’ She called me ‘Paddy’ before she could talk plain enough to say Paul.” His voice broke there.

“She said: ‘I’ve given you your choice. Either you kissed her or you didn’t; and if you did, everything’s over between us.’

“You see she’s too young to understand how—how,” he stammered, flushing again and shifting uncomfortably from one foot to another, “—a man can love a girl with all his heart and yet—yet—admire an older woman. All that I tried to be a playwright for was for her sake. I don’t want to be one. I hate writing pages of silly dialogue. I can’t get those other things that Baker harps on into my head—motivation and unities of time and place, and coördination, and—

“I want to go back to Centervale and go into the mills; but she’s got this craze about ‘people who do things,’ and I tried to please her. Oh, Miss Wyndham,”—he crumpled his handkerchief into a ball and mopped his eyes,—“I’ve loved Bluet all my life. I can’t give her up, and I don’t know what to do. What must I do?”

IF he had not been so completely absorbed in himself, he might have seen the Wyndham run the entire gamut of facial expression, depicting all the more unlovely passions. Beginning mildly with astonishment and stunned vanity, she achieved a crescendo of rage, fury, resentment, and so forth as she realized that she, past mistress of the art of fascination, had at last met her Waterloo at the hands of Youth.

But fortunately, before these emotions could find vocal expression, he burbled on; and by the time he had finished, Agra Wyndham was herself again—the real Agra Wyndham who had grappled big-brained, big-souled men and women to her with hooks of steel in enduring friendships.

As she watched this picture of boyish wretchedness before her with a softening heart, there was pain, a passionate pain, for one moment in her eyes. Then she blew a kiss backward across the years to her own radiant youth and threw herself into her new rôle.

Again she was the consummate actress, the unsurpassed Wyndham.

“But, my dear boy,”—her voice was delicately reproachful,—“how you have misunderstood me! That hurts a little, you know. Last night the beauty of the moon and the river, the poetry of ‘Her Heart’s Story,’ affected me deeply. My nature is responsive, impressionable. I live so entirely in my art that I forget that the world misinterprets, and that you men, yes, even you, dear Paul, are apt to be a little coarse, a little uncomprehending.”

She paused, leaning her chin upon her hand.

“But it seems too absurd that that sweet young girl should have imagined—”

Paul had been following her with a strained and puzzled expression, but now his eyes became suddenly alert.

“And yet, if I remember, I did touch your brow with my lips; but it was all all so impersonal.”

Paul had opened his mouth as if to speak; he quickly closed it.

Miss Wyndham seemed to grow every moment more remote, genius enthroned in its niche.

“I think,” she said, “that what actually occurred was so very far in spirit from what she imagines, that that kiss as I intended it, as I meant it—could hardly be called a kiss, but a sort of a—a—benediction—art’s—er—chrism. Therefore that kiss, as she, as the world, would regard it, never existed. So”—she looked at him with sweet, sincere candor—“aren’t you really justified in insisting, in swearing to her, if necessary, that it never did occur? I think so. My intuitions are usually very correct about those things. I know so.”

Paul drew a deep breath; his face was irradiated.

“Women are so wonderful!” He seized her hands in so strong a grip that her rings cut into the flesh, but she never winced. “Thank you, thank you! I’ll never forget.”

JUST at the door Mrs. O’Keefe, who was about to enter, passed him.

“Talk about tangles!” She threw herself gloomily into a chair. “I suppose you’re going to elope with that snippet. I ask my friends to help me, and this muddle is the result! Heavens! What I’ve gone through, hearing that girl rave! Never intends to marry! Devote herself to a career, and all that rot!”

Shannon picked up the letters on her desk and tossed them recklessly into the wastebasket.

“Kate Raeburn and Marcia Foster Randall have overdone the thing,” she said bitterly. “She began some long harangue about Marcia Foster Randall’s beginning by writing in a freezing, skylight room on pads made from wrapping paper that she begged from the other lodgers; and about Kate Raeburn’s having nothing but summer clothes all winter, her only outside wrap being an old raincoat of her brother’s; and about you, Agra, cooking in old tomato-cans over the gas-jet and living on an egg and an onion a day. When she got that far, I couldn’t stand it any farther. I told her a few plain truths.” Shannon spoke viciously; her flashing eyes and the two scarlet spots in her cheeks showed that she was indeed not Irish for nothing.

“I said very calmly: ‘My dear Bluet, you might just as well realize that it takes something more than a little freezing and starving and somebody’s old raincoats to win success. Marcia and Kate had, in addition to the patience to stick it out, genuine ability. As for Agra Wyndham—do you imagine that just because you’ve got the beauty of youth, you can compete with her? It takes something besides even beauty and brains and hard work to win the sort of success she’s got.

“‘Why, you insignificant piece of pink-and-white prettiness, you couldn’t get across a row of candles on the drawing-room floor; but Agra Wyndham’s got the magnetism to pull a wooden Indian out of his chair in the back seat of the top gallery.’

“Well, for some unexplained reason, that little idiot began to have hysterics right there in one of my big showrooms, ‘the blue-and-gray correct office for the modern business woman,’ you know, ‘—open to the public from ten to four.’”

“Some one certainly has blundered,” moaned Agra Wyndham and leaned back faintly.

AT this moment Heywood Halleck opened the door and peeped in.

“Office hours over,” he announced. “Luncheon-time.”

Miss Wyndham rose.

“Heywood,” she said earnestly, “have you any moral scruples about peeping through a keyhole?”

“None whatever,” he assured her without a moment’s hesitation.

“Then would you mind—it would be such a favor to Shannon and myself—peeping through the keyhole of ‘the correct office for the business woman, in subdued blue and gray’?”

“None at all.” He hastened to obey her.

“What are they doing?” Agra and Shannon asked anxiously and in chorus, as he returned.

“He’s kissing her to beat the band,” he said.

The two women drew a long sigh of relief.

“Let’s all go to luncheon and celebrate,” cried Shannon jubilantly.

“Beefsteak and stout!” said Agra.