Part 7

Charles had expected to walk home with Fanny, continuing the sad but interesting talk, but he was frustrated in that intention by the arrival of an escort of Fanny's own. This proved to be none other than Mr. Tilletts.

It developed that the seeking widower, who was known as a sort of public Former Suitor, had called on Fanny this evening, and, finding her about to go out, had begged the privilege of squiring her to and fro. Had Angela understood this in advance, how willingly would she have raised Three-Hand to a Table! But at least she could do her best now to remove from Mr. Tilletts's mind the idea that she was rude,--derived at the Redmantle Club, where she had made her unfortunate mistake,--and apparently she was successful, for Charles heard the plump seeker say, "May I call?" quite distinctly, as they moved into the hall.

The door shut on a chorus of good-nights.

The bridge-party was over; and it was only quarter of eleven. Charles turned toward the hat-rack and the Studio. And in turning, he surprised a look in his hostess's dark eyes, which seemed to say, in the most ingenuous way: "At last, a few minutes to ourselves!"

All evening, he had been aware of a subtly more personal note in Miss Angela's manner; a coyer and engagingly proprietary note, which he, with his known dispassionateness toward this sex, considered as intended for Fanny Warder's benefit. Charles had not been annoyed by this: few men repel the adoration of a pretty girl. And now this soft simple expectancy of hers, this girlish lingering over her somewhat pathetic party, seemed beyond his kind heart (as he would have put it) to disappoint. "You're not going!--it's so early!" she exclaimed, and coquetted prettily enough: "I'd think you were displeased with me--promising to have Cousin Mary for you, and then not doing it!... But you don't mind _very_ much, do you?"

Kindly Charles capitulated at once. "Pay my party-call right now--?" he threw out, gallant and yet thrifty withal. "If you're sure I'm not keeping you up...."

So these two reëntered Miss Angela's little parlor, with its sleeping-car shape and too prominent Latrobe heater: a room poor enough in itself, but having an institutional significance when considered as the Waiting Room of the Womanly Woman. Here they sat down, side by side, upon a dented sofa. And here, before a great while, there took place a somewhat strange occurrence.

There began an animated flow of girlish chatter.

"I haven't seen you on Washington Street for three days now, Mr. Garrott. I believe you're avoiding me! I met Mr. Manford this afternoon, and what do you think he said? That he couldn't play bridge as well as he could build them, and was afraid he'd be mobbed at a party! I don't think he _could_ play any worse than Fanny, do you? But Mr. Garrott, why does he want to go to _Wyoming_? I'd _lots_ rather go to New York, if I were a man! I asked him if that river out there he was going to dam was pretty, and he said he'd send me a picture post-card of it, when he went. But I suppose he'll forget all about it...."

Mr. Garrott, pleasantly relaxed, made suitable replies as need arose. In his scientific way, he was noting how fine and clear Miss Angela's skin was, what shining soft eyes she had, how soothing and sweet was her voice. Certainly this girl did not try to create the air that she was your manly superior, or address you like a Self-Made Man reproving his wife.

"Fanny's broken so dreadfully, hasn't she? She was so lovely and attractive as a girl. Tommy was crazy about her when she visited us in Mitchellton, a long time ago. He gave her the loveliest presents! But Tommy was always the most generous boy. They were getting up a drinking-fountain as a memorial to Major Beesom--he was postmaster for years and years, you know--and Tommy headed the list with twenty-five dollars, and he was only making forty a month! I just wish you could have known Major Beesom! I know you'd want to put him in a book. Mr. Garrott, I'm _so_ anxious to read some of your stories! What are your heroines like, generally?"

Out of which, she said presently, laughing and whisking her hand behind her back:--

"You were looking at my ring!"

"Why not?" said Mr. Garrott, starting a little. "A cat may look at a ring."

That was reasonable surely. Angela, after a few teasing pretenses, held up her modest gimcrack for him to see. And Charles, naturally, accepted the hand so presented.

As to what subsequently occurred, there was always a divided house within the many-sided Charles. But all his sides insisted that, at this point, he had no interest in the matter whatever; some held that he had not even seen the ring till she called attention to it. Now, bending over the hand, he examined it, and said:--

"Well! This is news to me, you know!"

"Not at all!" laughed the owner of the ring. "Why, what do you mean?"

"I've seen an engagement ring once before, you see."

"You're very clever! But--does it have to follow that I'm engaged?"

"That was the rule, in my day."

"You don't seem at all curious!"

"I'm very curious."

"Well, I'm not, of course!"

"I'm glad to hear it."

He made, as it were, a sort of sketch of a move to release the small hand at this point. However, nothing seemed to come of it.

"Are you?... Why?"

"Oh, because--it's rather sad for an old bystander like me to see all the nice young people going off two by two, for happiness and the great adventure."

To that, the girl made no reply. She merely gave a little laugh, and withdrew her hand. The house seemed very still. And Charles was at once aware that he had been found somehow deficient at the simple game of parlor conversation. In a scarcely definable way, he felt himself rebuked for timidity, wariness.

Nevertheless, in her simple, natural way, the girl made known that the ring was properly the possession of a man in Mitchellton--Charles recalled Mr. Jenney--and was now worn only by courtesy, reminiscently, as it were, with no obligations attached.

"You see, his brothers all went off, like all the other men, and his sister married and went away, and so he said he would stay in Mitchellton with his mother. And it's truly the most hopeless place! He doesn't seem to have any ambition at all--it provoked me so! I think all men ought to have ambition, don't you?"

"I do, indeed. And he owns that pretty ring, you say?"

"Yes. You see," she said, laughing and coloring, "when I felt I must break it off,--well, he wouldn't let it stay off exactly! I--I'm telling you all my secrets! He said he'd still consider himself--oh--you know!"

"Naturally. He had enough ambition for that."

And, as if to show Miss Angela that, in point of fact, none knew better than he how to talk to a girl on a sofa, Charles carelessly took up that betrothal hand again, saying: "So he made you keep the ring all the same?"

"The day we left Mitchellton. And I said I'd wear it--oh, just till I met somebody I liked better! It was really more of a joke!..."

"Ah! And you haven't met such a person yet, I gather?"

"Oh--I'm not to send it back till I know--"

"How long," said the young authority, at once completely conscious of the supreme inanity of the proceedings, and finding them enjoyable enough, "how long do you allow yourself to find out?"

"That isn't easy to tell.... Do you know you're the strangest man!"

"Am I? How do I seem so strange to you?"

The little hand was warm, not unpleasant to retain. The eyes, gazing up at him, were liquid and bright; they were woman's eyes. "Consider me," they seemed to say. "Am I not sweet, desirable? Am I not worthy to be held dear? Was I not made to delight? See, I am Woman, beside you...."

"Oh," said the soft voice, "the way you do. Cousin Mary says you're the new sort of man, that isn't interested in girls at all. You're too clever to care anything about them. Are you?"

"Clever? I'd call that the stupidest thing in the world."

"Then you do like them! I'm so glad. I've wondered, you see...."

The feminine speeches, the appeal of these eyes, seemed all at once to create an enveloping pressure, softer than nothing, yet extraordinary. Or possibly the trouble was that Dionysius, after all, had freed his eyes of the magic more brilliantly than his creator.

"What sort of girls do you like? Tell me?" said the voice of Woman, nearer.

And then in the suddenest way conceivable there took place the Strange Occurrence referred to. Without the smallest premeditation, Charles bent and touched his lips to that smooth invitational cheek.

On that central point there is not the slightest room for doubt. Let there be no wriggling or evasion here. Charles Garrott, who scorned La Femme and viewed Woman exclusively as a Movement, did bend his neck and kiss the Mitchellton Home-Maker upon a sofa.

He meant the salute, he was afterward certain, as but a fatherly tribute to youth and beauty, or (considered in another way) but the expected, and in a sense purely conventional, move in the ancient parlor-game. But on such a move as this homes have been broken, families set to mutual slaughter, thrones shaken, history changed. Charles, to put it in a word, found it easier to begin paying his tributes than gracefully to desist from them.

Prompted by a not unnatural curiosity, the lady (who had not proved more than maidenly surprised or rebuking) said:--

"Oh!... Why do you do this?"

Who knows what trusting heart first voiced that immemorial question? Charles Garrott, at least, was not the first gentleman on earth to fail to utter promptly the one satisfactory commentary on his behavior. Miss Angela made that little, gentle note of interrogation which cannot be written, and then she said again:--

"Tell me--why do you?"

Then it was as if the intrinsic pointedness of that query penetrated the man, suddenly and sharply. It was the mere force of iteration, no doubt; but all at once the soft voice seemed possessed of a certain insistence, tinctured with a certain definite expectation, you might say. Now that Charles stopped to think of it, why was he doing this?

The young man's arms fell, as if something had burned them. He rose abruptly and strode away to the mantelpiece, where, however, the Latrobe heater spoiled any hope of an effective pose.

If he meant thus to signify that the little episode was closed and done with, life, unluckily, was not quite so simple as that. The pretty Home-Maker, having gazed at his back- or side-view a moment, as if bewildered, said in an uncertain voice:--

"I--I don't understand you at all. Why did you do that?"

Putting down the impulse to bolt, and the even more astonishing impulse to return to that fatal sofa, Charles Garrott braced himself to reply. In this effort he was handicapped by emotions altogether unknown to most young men who sit upon sofas. For example: What would the lady in Sweden have to say to this little affair?

He confronted a fact which he had temporarily lost sight of: that he who pays these tributes must pay for them to the full. Half of him might feel resentful and furious, but it was clear that the whole of him, the net Charles, must cut a sorry figure for a while. Half of him might be crying out, stern as science itself: "Come, girl, be honest! Don't go about dropping matches into gunpowder, and then pretend to be surprised at the explosion." But the net Charles, brightly flushed, was speaking lamely as a schoolboy:--

"Well! Do you think I could be _blamed_--exactly? It--it seemed such an awfully natural thing to do. You--ah--it seemed I--I couldn't do anything _else_!..."

"I see," said the girl slowly.

"Ah--you--you're a very kissable person, you must know--"

"And do you always go about kissing people you think are kissable?"

The young man shrank as from a blow. Not looking once in her direction, he did not note that she had spoken with a quivering lip. With a great effort at lightness, he stammered:--

"Well, hardly! It must be that I don't often meet people who--who are as k-k-kissable as you--"

"I suppose I ought to feel flattered."

There was a miserable silence.

"I was mistaken in you," continued the Nice Girl's stricken voice. "I--I trusted you. I supposed you were too honorable--I didn't think--"

That word seemed to touch him to the quick. He spoke with desperate stiffness.

"I _am_ honorable, I hope. Miss Flower--aren't you taking this too--too seriously, perhaps? After all, you--"

She astonished him by bursting into tears.

And all modernity became as nothing then, and Charles was a simple man, horrified by the sight of woman's grief. Now his abasement became complete; now he groveled most properly; never, he vowed, would he cease to censure himself most severely for this Occurrence. He wheedled, he implored, he cajoled. But, of course, all this but made the matter worse, threw his wary, inexcusable omissions into sharper and sharper relief. And presently Miss Angela referred to him as _brutal_ (did she not pause even after that, in a sort of expectant way?) and then ended the tragedy by begging him to leave her, her fatally ringed hands held fast before her eyes.

No such conclusion to the evening of wholesome pleasure could have been devised by the wit of fiction-writers. Charles gathered up his hat and coat like a thief, and let himself gently out into the night.

VIII

He turned in at the Green Park, in the still night, and stood gazing with bitterness at a dim gigantic Citizen, who rose in bronze at the intersection of two walkways. The Citizen gazed back with no bitterness at all; but then, he was dead.

Charles Garrott, being very much alive, was thinking cadlike thoughts with clarity and vigor. In the romances, men who won a maiden's sweet kiss instantly besought her to name the day; failing that, they were cads. But Charles was resolved to fail that, and he was struggling determinedly not to feel a cad. He simply did not consider that Miss Angela's kiss had such a pricelessness, entailing cosmic responsibilities. Why was her kiss any sweeter than his own, to come right down to it?

Now pure remorse had faded: self-interest, outraged self-respect, fought to have their say. Indeed, Miss Angela herself could not well feel more mortified over those unimagined salutes than he, the New Man, did. And it was as if his humiliation had destroyed all that restraining sense of a bond here, and the brutal Charles was free now for a frank facing of his new reactions.

"Well, I won't marry her! I won't," said he to the calm Citizen. "I'll call myself names for her, yes; I'll send her bonbons--flowers--that sort of thing. I'll land Donald for her--that's a thought! I'll get her invited to the Thursday German. But _marry her_!... No, the kindest thing would be never to see her again."

And, gazing up in the silent darkness of the park, the unheroic young man began to think how he could go to Berringer's by the Center Street cars, and take his walks henceforth in the manufacturing district, and in far countrysides.

Between Miss Flower's and the park, Charles had been briefly unnerved by a disruptive thought. This girl loved him. Recollections from his salad days rushed on him, memories of swift violent fancies women took to him. He was cursed, it seemed, with a fatal fascination. Women might be practically engaged to other men; they might be at the altar's hinges; but he could not stroll among them with his devilish gift without scattering ruin amid the troths. If he was not openly rude to them, they took it as direct encouragement; if he was civil, from him they viewed it as wooing; and when actually crowned with the deliberate kiss ...

But these bachelor terrors he had exploded with one "Piffle!" spoken so loudly that two young street-car conductors, passing to or from a car-barn, no doubt, nudged and jeered. Oh, no, Miss Angela was not in love with him. She had merely conceived that he, Charles, was in love with her. (A stinging thought this, even while it vastly reassured.) Yes, this rudimentary country cousin, whom he had felt sorry for because of her loneliness, whom he had been interested in purely as a Type (he maintained), with which to cudgel the hard utilitarian egoism of another sort of woman--this little creature must needs suppose that he, Charles Garrott, who knew the most attractive women there were, had fallen a victim to her village arts and bucolic wiles.

Great heavens!--Oh, the cheek! Oh, the naïve complacence of the naïvest sex the Lord ever made!...

Why, he had never paid the smallest attention to this girl; never taken dog's notice of her, you might say! Booting pebbles this way and that in the darkness, the angry young man reviewed the circumstances with scientific dispassionateness (as he considered). Compulsorily introduced by the firm Mary, he had spoken politely to the girl; kindly presented a suitable young friend or two; and therewith considered that the whole matter was closed. But no, on the contrary; one pleasant smile from him, and the Womanly Woman was up and doing.

She had pumped out of him the hour at which he took his walks (he knew nothing about the opera-glasses as yet); and straightway she began waylaying him on the street, nothing less. She had all but forced a book on him, which he would have to return with a "call"--she supposed; when he did not call, she did something which could only be described as inveigling him to her home (that was his word now), by the shallow ruse of a bridge-party; and then and there she had (you might say) flung both arms about his neck and kissed him. And by these proceedings, it appeared to her, in that queer world where Nice Girls lived, that she had affixed a claim upon him, fairly bagged his heart, in short. "Why do you do this?" said she, insistently. Oh, how simple life looked to such as these, her and her sisters of the Naïve Sex! Forever putting that stereotyped query, forever expecting to elicit the hoarse but extremely welcome reply, "Because I love you so!" No conquest too extraordinary to seem at all surprising to their quaint little self-approval!

There was humor now in his imagining of the Womanly Woman as quietly waiting at home to be wooed. It appeared that Miss Angela had done everything but that.

A church clock boomed suddenly: it was half-past eleven. The young man's eyes fell from the face of the Citizen. Through the stark stems of the winter trees a yellow light glowed strongly in a lower window. That was Olive Street there; this light shone in the Wings' house. He noted it absently, wondering why Mary worked so late to-night. On the heels of that came another wonder, more personal: What would Mary think of these proceedings upon a sofa?

There must have been a bracing quality in the thought of Mary Wing, for Charles's hot desire to justify himself chilled instantly. Mary had her faults, heaven knew; but she had nothing to do with sofas. In a wink, the young man became staggered at himself. For there was nothing he had been thinking just now that he had not seen clearly for many years past. What, then? Had his vision of late been blurred in the cheapest way conceivable? When he told himself that he was scientifically commending the supplying of Beauty and Charm, was it possible that he, Charles Garrott, had been subtly allured by La Femme?

From outraged and resentful, Charles became let down and depressed. Standing and gazing at Mary Wing's bright light, he found his whole point of view shifting. He, of course, was blameworthy, not this soft bit of unthinking femininity. Turned out without a lesson and with but one way of life--what could she do but signify, like her mothers, that she was ready to twine about her oak? So again, Charles saw the girl he had left in tears as a being mysteriously wistful and pathetic. And still she was a type to him, still a symbol of myriads of girls, waiting over the world: Girls brought up by simple parents who assumed that life was still as simple as they; girls made to stake their whole lives on the vague expectation that, because they are girls, some man or other will be sure to want them some day; a million girls waiting, day by day and year by year, while all they have to offer life fades away under their eyes....

The young authority trailed out of the park feeling much like the cads of Romance, after all. And yet it seemed to be settled now, definitely and positively, that he would not make a Womanly Woman the heroine of his new novel.

A light snow had begun to fall. Other people than Charles Garrott moved homeward from evenings of beauty, charm and pleasure. Motor-cars rolled on Washington Street. Emerging from the Green Park, Charles moodily saluted two young men who stood there on a corner; one was his good friend, Talbott Maxon, but the author passed him almost like a stranger. To all intercourse with his kind he felt utterly averse. Nevertheless, when he passed the door of the Bellevue Club, presently, he found his privacy ruthlessly invaded.

Down the wide steps between the two columnar lights--exactly as on that other evening when it had all begun--came shambling the loose figure of Uncle Oliver Wing. Only now Uncle Oliver's large face was faintly flushed, his large felt hat was pulled over his eyes, his very large cigar was rakishly uptilted toward the heavens. From which it was concluded that Mr. Wing was not less than five drinks and five dollars the better for _his_ little card-party at the Club.

"Let's see now, Charlie,--what was it you asked me?" said Mr. Wing, catching stride and slipping his arm through the silent young man's. "Did I believe in this Woman's Movement, wasn't that it?"

Resenting the intrusion, Charles replied coldly: "That was it, I believe."

Mr. Wing appeared no whit abashed. "Well, Charlie, fact is I believe in most any kind of a movement, as I reckon you know, and all I ask about any of 'em is, where's the harm of moving kind of slow, and taking a few good squints around as we go. That'd about give my view that you asked me for," said the money-lender, a known reactionary in theory and practice--"Move slow and squint."

Genially, he took a fresh grip on the arm Charles had almost detached, and therewith went off into an ill-timed long rigmarole. So convivially windy was Mr. Wing that he had talked steadily through two blocks before it came over Charles, with force, that Mary's uncle had had a sharp aim from the beginning.

"Now, you take, for instance, this privilege of work they're all clamoring for, Charlie. Women mustn't be parasites; give us the privilege of work, they say. And that's right, too; give 'em all they'll take's my view. But, Charlie, my observation is that when a woman clamors that way, it's ten to one she's thinking of work like being governor, or a great public speaker maybe, or Miss Jane Addams, out to Hull House there. But if you ask _me_, are they willing to work like men do, just so's not to have you call 'em parasites--well, that's where I say, let's stop and squint around. Of course, now, whenever you see a rich man's daughter refusing to touch her daddy's money, and jumping up mornings by an alarm-clock to catch the 7.42, and when you see her working nine hours a day, winter and summer, at a job it makes her sick to look at, for ten little dollars a week, and no brass band or fireworks anywhere--why, then you got a right to say, _that_ woman hates being a parasite. But, Charlie, you're so quiet, you don't say anything, I don't guess you're following while I try to answer that question you asked me."

"Oh, I follow you," replied Charles, with annoyance.

Mr. Wing shot one keen glance at the young man's face, and another ahead as if to measure the distance yet remaining to his domicile.