Part 6

Surprise made him exclaim:

“My aunt? How do you know I have an aunt?”

The girl laughed again.

“You would,” was all she said. “Have a cigaret?”

“Thank you, I never smoke.”

“I do,” she said, and taking a box of matches from her hand-bag she lit a long Russian cigaret.

“Then you did have matches all the time!” cried Edwin.

She looked at the box in her hand, and said, as if she were the most astonished person in the world:

“Why, so I did.” Then she added, “My name is Valerie Keat.”

Edwin had it drawn forcibly to his attention that this woman was outrageously pretty in a bold, obvious way. She had adventurous green eyes and an insinuating mouth; her lips were a vivid carmine. Red, thought Edwin, the sign of danger; a person to be eschewed.

With a brief prayer that his tapioca pudding would be brought soon, he took up his book and sought safety in the prose of Bishop Groody. But the book had changed to some foreign tongue; its pages seemed blurred and its words hieroglyphics; had the Bishop lapsed into Czech? His table companion laughed.

“Do you always read upside down?” she inquired.

He turned his book right side up and looked at her with what for Edwin was a glare.

“No,” said he, stiffly.

“You’re from the country?”

He nodded. Why didn’t that wretch of a waiter hurry with the pudding?

“You’ve just come to New York?”

Again Edwin nodded.

“Ever been kissed?”

He straightened up in his chair as if a pin had been abruptly inserted in him.

“Really, now——” he began.

“Call me Val,” she said. “What shall I call you?”

His mind was too beside itself to be on the defensive.

“My name,” he said, “is Edwin Tillotson Dell.”

“I’ll call you ‘Ned!’” she said. “I’m an artist. How do you cheat the wolf, Ned?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What field of endeavor do you decorate?”

“Me? Oh, I’m an—author.”

“How interesting your work must be!” Was she sincere, or was she putting it all on? “What do you author?”

It occurred to him as an inspiration that he might be able to swamp and daze her with technical theological terms till his pudding came, so he began to quote his book, beginning on page one. He did not, however, get far.

“You can tell me all that when you come to see me,” the girl interrupted.

“When I come to see you?”

“Certainly. You’ll come, won’t you? Or shall I come to see you?”

He thought of the eyes of Emerson—wise, kind, understanding. His resolute teeth closed on a bit of chicken liver.

“Neither,” he said.

This, he thought, should abash her, but it did nothing of the sort. Instead, she gave him a playful wink.

“Ned,” she said, “I used to belong to the Northwestern Mounted Police and you know their motto.”

“I do not.”

“Get your man,” said Miss Keat.

He buried embarrassed eyes in the tapioca pudding which that moment providentially arrived.

“I hope,” he said, his eyes still on his plate, “that nothing in my manner has encouraged you to venture on such familiarity.”

It was impossible to rebuff this woman with the adventurous eyes and the carmine lips. Rebuffs rebounded from her.

“What are you doing this evening, Ned?” she asked.

Intuitively he sensed his peril.

“I am going to my room,” he said, “to think.”

He picked up book, coat, hat.

“You’re not mad, Ned?” she called after him.

“No, not mad,” he said, simply. “Only hurt, terribly hurt.”

He did go to his room as swiftly as if he had been tapped for Skull and Bones. He locked the door. He tried not to think of her, of those eyes, those lips. He looked hard at the picture of Emerson, and tried to think of him.

* * * * *

Valerie Keat lived in a reformed haymow over a converted stable in a redeemed alley in Greenwich Village. She had nineteen pairs of jade earrings, black, georgette underwear, and the following books: the Droll Tales, Jurgen, Mlle. de Maupin, The Rainbow, the collected writings of Havelock Ellis, the Decameron, the works of Rabelais, Ulysses, The Genius, Many Marriages, The Memoirs of Casanova, Sappho, Leaves of Grass, and an array of books in French, beginning with Volupte by Sainte-Beuve and Fleurs de Mal by Baudelaire and ending with La Garconne by Victor Margueritte. She had divorced one husband, had been divorced by a second, and kept a little red leather note-book full of names and telephone numbers. She was not a good girl.

Her haymow studio was large, with several square yards of north-light sky-light and a balcony from which were draped bright Spanish shawls. On the walls hung a dozen of her own paintings, most of them guilty of grand or petty nudity. Her gold bed stood on a platform reached by four purple steps and it was snowed under by twenty-four fat, odd-shaped cushions, each a different color, vermilion, heliotrope, claret, taupe, wisteria, tan, orchid, bisque, chrome yellow, bice, russet, carnation, cream, periwinkle, cherry, azure, citrine, jet, bister, salmon, maize, cinnabar, flame and flesh. She had invested some of her alimony in Chinese screens, Japanese prints, Russian brasses, Czecho-Slovakian china, East Indian hand-printed curtains, French futuristic furniture, a brocaded Bengal howdah to house her telephone, tall, white, wicked-eyed Copenhagen porcelain cats, Viennese statuettes, Florentine candle-sticks, carved ivory cigarette boxes from Egypt, and a profusion of thick, soft, Oriental rugs—Cabistans, Hamadan Mosouls, Namazis-Kanepas, Zaronims, Dozar-Namazis, Noborans, Ispahans, and a priceless Anatolian prayer-rug. But this last she never used; Valerie Keat was the sort of woman who never prays. Soft lights with strange shades by Bakst, Urban and Alice O’Neill filled the room with a sensuous glow. In one corner a green bronze cobra made by Javanese natives emitted subtle chypre incense from its eyes. At the end of the room stood the model stand, covered with black velvet. Beside it was a crimson baize screen behind which the models undressed. Before the fireplace lay a tiger-skin rug. Such was the place to which Valerie Keat had sought to lure Edwin Dell.

At the very moment that night when Valerie Keat in écru satin pajamas, sank down on her twenty-four cushions, lit a Persian narghil, and opened a French novel by Gyp, Edwin Dell, in his unpretentious white muslin nightshirt, was lying on his plain iron cot; was rereading a sentence from a letter he had just received from his aunt. Half aloud he read the words in Aunt Charity’s precise, virginal script:

“Some people New York ennobles; others, it drags straight down to H——.”

With his eyes resting on the picture of Emerson, Edwin Dell said the word “Fortitude.” He repeated the word—“Fortitude, fortitude, fortitude, fortitude, fortitude,” until the gentle, dreamless sleep of innocence wrapped him in its platonic embrace. Valerie Keat dreamed of wild horses, rushing water, satyrs. . . .

For his frugal dinner next evening Edwin Dell avoided the Scarlet Hyena and went instead to the Esoteric Pussy-Cat, in a damp, artistic basement on Washington Square, South. It was so full of young men and older women eating the dollar dinner and discussing intimate problems that only one seat was left and that was in the window, where Edwin, perforce, had to eat his dinner in the most distressingly public fashion, while rude passers-by stopped to stare at him, presumably under the impression that he was advertising a dyspepsia cure. One passerby stopped much longer than the rest and pressed a retroussé nose against the window-pane. Edwin Dell’s heart began to knock like a poor motor taking a high hill.

Valerie Keat, for she it was, came bounding into the restaurant and greeted him like an old friend. She conjured up a chair and drew it to his table, uninvited. He looked appealingly at the other diners, seeking in all that throng one wise, kind, understanding face. He sought in vain. The faces of New Yorkers are hard, hard.

“Still damnationing the infants?” asked Valerie Keat, breezily.

“Levity on that subject is most unbecoming,” he said.

Unexpectedly her face grew sober under its film of cosmetics.

“You are right, Edwin,” said Valerie Keat. “I am too facetious. Perhaps you think I take nothing in life seriously. But I do, I assure you I do.”

“Ah, do you?” he said, hoping to convey the idea that it didn’t in the least matter to him. Then, to his surprise, he found himself adding the word “What?”

Her green eyes bored into his light blue eyes.

“Love,” she said, in a low, poignant voice.

Edwin beckoned the Japanese waiter.

“My bill, please, at once,” he directed.

“Vellygoo,” said the waiter, and brought it, discreetly folded, as all restaurant bills are, as if they were illicit billet doux. Edwin put his hand inside his coat pocket. Alarm and dismay congealed him. He had no money. Caring naught, as he did, for worldly goods, he had entirely forgotten that he had given away his allowance to the poor, and Aunt Charity had forgotten to send him a fresh supply of money. Doubtless she had sent it to the missionaries; so much of her income went there. He looked up, and there stood the waiter, suspicion in his oblique Nipponese eyes. Valerie Keat was quick to sense the situation.

“Broke?” she asked.

He nodded.

She bent over and from somewhere took a five dollar bill, which she tossed to the waiter. He came back with four dollars in change. Nonchalantly, Valerie Keat waved the money away.

“Keep the change, Ito,” she said. The waiter bowed himself back to the kitchen and fainted.

“I seldom tip more than two dollars,” the woman explained, “but Ito has a wife and nine kiddies. Don’t you just love kiddies, Ned?”

Had he misjudged the woman, Edwin Dell wondered?

“Besides,” went on Valerie Keat, and her voice broke a little, “he reminds me of my father.”

Clouds seemed to lift from Edwin Dell. Surely it was not possible to suspect the honorableness of the intentions of a woman who spoke like that about her father.

“Will you stop at my studio?” he heard Valerie Keat saying. “I want to give you a book I think you should read.”

“I only read books on ecclesiastical and theological subjects,” he said.

“That’s just what this book is,” she assured him.

But when they reached the door of her studio, something (was it his guardian angel?) made Edwin hesitate.

“Come on up,” she said, urgently.

“It’s rather late,” objected Edwin.

“Nonsense! It’s only nine. Come on.”

Mystery was in her smile; or was it mystery?

For one second, two seconds, possibly three seconds he wavered. Then on the wall of the building opposite he seemed to see written in fiery letters the warning words of his aunt.

SOME PEOPLE NEW YORK ENNOBLES; OTHERS IT DRAGS STRAIGHT DOWN TO H——.

His soul was a battle-field of conflicting emotions. What, he asked himself, would Emerson have done in a case like this? That thought steadied him.

“No,” he said. “A thousand nevers. I’ll wait here.”

Pain showed in the green eyes of Valerie Keat.

“Don’t you trust me?” she asked.

“I trust everyone,” said Edwin Dell, gently. “But then I am so very young.”

“It was your youth that attracted me,” she said; then added hastily, “Don’t misunderstand me. I am speaking purely in a professional sense. I am an artist, you know. I want you for a model.”

Edwin Dell shrank from her.

“Me?” he said. “A model?”

“Yes, why not?” Her manner was most reassuring. “I want to paint a Galahad or maybe a Parsifal. You’d be perfect. I suppose you know”—here she lowered her voice and her eyes were full of meaning—“that you are very handsome.”

“You must not say such things to me,” said Edwin Dell.

“Forgive me,” she murmured, “but I forgot myself.” Then, very businesslike, “But you will pose for me, won’t you?”

Edwin Dell drew back.

“You’ve been kind to me, Miss Keat,” he said, “but please don’t ask this thing of me. Ask anything, but not that.”

Her tone was hurt as she said:

“I only want to help you. I know you’re hard up. I pay some of my models ten dollars an hour.”

Remembering how she had spoken of her father, Edwin felt that he had been a brute, and he said:

“I’m very sorry. I don’t wish to seem ungrateful. Perhaps it is foolish of me to care about . . . some things; but I do. I think you’d better not stand out here any longer; it’s beginning to snow; you’ll catch your death of cold.”

Her eyes lingered on his.

“Would you care?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “After all, you are a human being.”

He thought there was hardness in her laugh.

“Thanks,” she said. “Then you won’t come?”

“I cannot,” he said.

“Very well. Another time, perhaps. I’ll get that book.”

She brought down to him a thick, much-thumbed volume.

“Are you sure it is theological?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, indeed,” she said. “It’s by the Rev. Mr. Rabelais. Well, bring it back when you’re finished and I’ll lend you Leaves of Grass. Good night, Ned.”

She held out a small hand; he found it warm.

“Remember,” she said, pressing his hand, “about my offer. Ten dollars an hour. I usually paint at night.”

Her eyes were like emeralds held before lighted candles.

Miss Venable met Edwin in the hall of his house. She was a lady whose face appeared to have been pickled, and she was pessimistic by nature and experience. Her faith in human nature had been erased by a life of running a rooming house; her roomers were always using her gas to terminate their lives. Briefly she informed Edwin that his rent was overdue. She would trouble him, etc. Always the soul of frankness, Edwin told her he had no money, but that he would be in funds in a day or two. He even tried to laugh a little to show her how unwarranted her fears about his solvency were. Under her freezing eyes and skeptic nose the laugh was hollow on both ends and cracked in the middle.

“I want ten dollars,” she said, “not promises. I must have my money by midnight or . . .”

“Or?”

In pantomime she indicated an exit.

“But, Miss Venable, you can’t mean . . .”

“What can’t I mean, young man?”

Edwin blanched.

“The streets,” he said.

One look at her stony countenance told him that the streets were precisely what she did mean.

He stumbled up to his room, dropped into a chair, and tried to collect his thoughts. In the rural calm of his sheltered life he had never felt the raw edge of existence before. This was stark life. He would read a bit to compose his mind, he decided. He opened the book Valerie Keat had given him.

Some words he knew, some he did not know, some he suspected. A hot flush of shame began to mantle his brow. At Chapter Four, he threw the book from him. He dare not lift his eyes to Emerson’s. Hardly knowing what he was doing, he marched down-stairs, holding the book at arm’s length before him. One idea was uppermost in his mind: he must take back the book to its owner.

* * * * *

He knocked with the gargoyle knocker, and Valerie Keat came to her studio door in a Chinese mandarin coat, thrown hurriedly about her.

“Ah,” she said, “it’s Infant Damnation himself! So you have come.”

“Yes,” he said, “I have come.”

“Well, step in. Don’t stand in the hall and wake the neighbors.”

He found himself inside the studio; the incense, the mellow lights, the warmth, the magnificence of it all left him incapable of speech. Then he remembered why he had come and thrust the book out at her.

“I could not sleep in the same house with this thing,” he said. She shrugged her shoulders and carelessly dropped the book on the tiger-skin rug. A Swiss cuckoo clock proclaimed that it was ten. Edwin shuddered; two hours to midnight . . . and the streets.

“Well, let’s begin,” said Valerie Keat, picking up a palette.

“Begin to what?” he asked, tremulously.

“I to paint,” she answered; “you to pose.”

“But, merciful Heavens, Miss Keat, you don’t think I came here for . . . that?”

“Then what did you come for?” Her eyes narrowed.

“To bring back that dreadful book.”

Her sardonic laugh jarred on his ear-drums.

“A man doesn’t come to a woman’s studio late at night to bring back a book,” she said.

“I must go, really I must,” declared Edwin, wondering, as he spoke, where to.

He put his hand on the door-knob; the door seemed to be locked.

“Please reconsider your decision,” said Valerie Keat. She turned on her most pathetic look. “If I could paint you it would mean everything to me; everything, do you understand? You have my artistic career at your mercy. Won’t you help me?”

He hesitated. To one so good at heart as he, such an appeal could not go unanswered.

“I’d like to,” he began, “but Emerson says——”

“Besides,” she broke in, “think of the ten dollars.”

Had she read his inmost thoughts?

“What possible harm could it do?” she argued. “Can’t you see I respect you? Won’t you trust me?”

“Let me think,” begged Edwin Dell. “Give me five minutes for quiet thought.”

Valerie Keat went to the buhlwork cabinet and took out a square bottle and a glass.

“Here,” she said. “This will help you think.”

“I never drink.”

“This is only juniper-berry juice and water. It’s a soft drink,” she told him.

Her eyes were so friendly, and he remembered how she had spoken of her father, so he poured half a glass of the pellucid drink down his dry throat. An agreeable sensation of warmth and well-being filled him. He emptied the glass. How bright the lights were!

He stood up and said:

“I have arrived at a decision.”

“Yes? What?” she asked, eagerly.

“I will be your model,” said Edwin Dell.

He sank back into his chair; there was a singing in his ears, a dancing before his eyes.

“Go ahead, paint me,” he said, almost with _sang froid_.

She came close to him and fastened on him intense eyes.

“You say you’ll be my model?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You know what that means.”

“I think so.”

“You’ll pose for the head?”

He nodded.

“You’ll pose for the shoulders?”

He gulped, but nodded. He felt his breath coming in short, cold pants; his brow was icy damp. He heard her low voice say:

“You’ll pose for . . . the figure?”

The room swam before his eyes; his cheeks were conflagrations; he drew in his breath with an effort, and gulped again.

“I’ll do . . . whatever models do,” he said.

Her eyes ran over him like flies over a cake; beneath them he trembled. How his heart throbbed! In a nightmare, he heard her say.

“Good! Go behind that screen.”

To Edwin Dell the lights were blurred now; the singing in his ears was frenzied. His pallid face was set. Walking like an automaton, he went behind the crimson screen. Slowly his quivering fingers fumbled with his polka-dot tie; his shoe lace seared his finger-tips. . . .

“Come, get a wiggle on. Don’t take all night. I’m waiting,” he heard the woman say. Her voice sounded, somehow, tense.

His teeth bit his bloodless lips; his nails dug into the palms of his hands.

“Fortitude,” whispered Edwin Dell.

Then he stepped out on the tiger-skin rug.

* * * * *

Came morn to the bedroom of Edwin Dell. Dully he opened his eyes. Had it all been a terrible dream?

He went to the window and scooped up a handful of snow and held it to his fevered brow. No, it had not all been a terrible dream. He dressed with leaden fingers. A letter had been slipped under his door and he opened it without interest. What could letters mean to him . . . now?

It was a note from his aunt. She told him to come home for Christmas, and enclosed a ticket to Crosby Corners, and a check. The check fluttered to the floor; the crooked smile of irony twisted his lips.

“Too late,” he said “too late.”

* * * * *

More like a machine than a man, he began to pack his straw suit-case. The last thing he did before leaving the room was to take down the picture of Emerson; Edwin did not look into those wise, kind, understanding eyes; he tore the picture into small pieces. Then, with bowed head, a wan, worn caricature of what had been Edwin Dell went slowly out into the snow-garbed metropolis.

* * * * *

It was Christmas eve in Crosby Corners. Thick snow was falling heavily and the wind whistled like a drunken demon; it was cold, bitter cold. Edwin Dell rapped with mittened hand on the door of the cozy farm-house and Aunt Charity opened it.

“Well, aunt,” he said, “I’ve come back.”

“For pity’s sake, close the door,” she said. “Hang up your coat and put your goloshes in the golosh-box.”

He did so. He sat there, silent, ashen.

“Why, Edwin Dell, what ails you? What is the matter?” she asked, sharply.

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” he faltered.

“Then why do you sigh?”

“It was the wind,” he replied. “Only the wind in the pines.”

“Fiddlesticks! I know a sigh. Stop moping, Edwin. This is Christmas eve.”

“It’s Christmas eve for some folks,” he said; “but just night for me.”

“What do you mean?” his aunt asked, fixing on him needle-pointed eyes.

He poked the glowing logs and made no reply.

“Edwin!”

“Yes, aunt.”

“Has anything happened?”

He poked the logs.

“Speak to me, Edwin. Tell me all.”

He poked the logs.

Aunt Charity put down her knitting, strode to him, placed her hands on his shoulders and bent a face lined with foreboding toward his.

“Edwin Dell,” she questioned, hoarsely; “what has New York done to you?”

He tried to avoid her alarmed eyes.

“Edwin Dell,” she cried, “I conjure you to answer me one question.”

“What?” His parched lips framed the word.

“Tell me, Edwin Dell, are you a . . . good boy?”

He made no answer.

“It can’t be,” cried his aunt. “Look me in the eye and I’ll know it isn’t so. Can you look me in the eye, Edwin Dell?”

He couldn’t.

She pushed him fiercely from her.

“My God,” she screamed. “Not that, not that?”

“Yes, Aunt Charity,” he groaned, “that.”

“Heaven give me strength in this dark hour,” she prayed. “That this thing should happen—and you a Tillotson. Tell me everything, I command you.”

“I was young,” was all he could say. “Nobody told me; I didn’t know.”

“Faugh,” she sneered, towering above him, her face working with wrath. “You might have guessed.”

“But she spoke so respectfully of her father,” sobbed Edwin Dell. “It was . . . that . . . or . . . the streets.”

His aunt scorched him with her outraged eyes.

“Which would Emerson have chosen?” she demanded.

“I was drugged,” he wept.

“Faugh! A likely story! Edwin Dell, put on your goloshes and leave this house.”

He cowered in his chair.

“Tonight? In this blizzard?” he quavered. “Where could I go?”

“Go to her,” said his aunt, and held the front door open.

* * * * *

Edwin Dell reached the studio of Valerie Keat late Christmas night. Inside he could hear the sounds of revelry—unrestrained laughter, bursts of song, a jazzing phonograph, the bursting of toy balloons, the popping of corks. Valerie Keat was holding high carnival. His heart was no bigger than a pea as he knocked. The door opened and a wave of hot air laden with confetti, tobacco smoke, incense and the fumes of alcohol rushed out and engulfed him. Inside he saw a mad whirlpool of gala-dressed dancers. Valerie Keat herself had opened the door; she stood there in an artful evening gown of shimmering silver, with no back whatsoever.

“Well?” she snapped.

“It is I. Edwin. Ned,” he said.

“So I see. What of it.” Her voice was icy.

“Where shall I put my goloshes?” he asked.

She pointed down the stairs behind him.

“That way. One after another,” she said.

He staggered as if from a blow.

“But you don’t mean . . . you can’t mean . . . Auntie has turned me out.”

“So do I. That makes it unanimous,” she said, puffing mockingly her cigaret.

“But it was because of . . . you,” he stammered. “Have you forgotten . . . so soon.”

“I’ve a poor memory,” she said unconcernedly.

“But you don’t mean . . . you can’t mean . . . Oh, think of your promises. . . .”

“Bah,” said Valerie Keat.

“Have you no compassion?”

“Not a bit.”

“No honor?”

“Nope.”

“Valerie Keat, think of your father!”

She flushed beneath her painted mask.

“You keep his name out of this,” she flashed. “Run along now to your damnation infants.”