Part 10

He was gone too quickly for her to answer. She did not see him again for a week, and when she did she invited him to tea. In an hour he was as much at his ease as though he had known her forever, and stayed so long he expressed the fear of having bored her. Soon after that she was seeing him two or three times a week.

He came because she listened to his monologues. Moira found that this was the man’s characteristic. Shy to the point of morbidness in company, she no sooner began to encourage him alone than he talked without end. His ideas were neither very well thought out nor very clearly expressed, but they stimulated her. He poured forth the most curious tag-ends of experience, made extraordinary confessions with few traces of shame, chattered cynically, humorously, passionately and autocratically by turns about writing and all the arts, and then stopped suddenly in the midst of things, frightened to silence by the realization of her presence and the boldness of his own tongue. Only one thing could have enabled him to indulge this luxury and keep coming--a knowledge of her interest, and she gave it honestly. She saw that the inner life of this young man and her own had been similar. He soon passed from Miss Smith to Mary, and from Mary to Madonna, and finding that the last was to his taste, he held to it. Before long he was giving full rein to a natural streak of fantastic high spirits and messing about her place like a privileged person.

She was, for some reason, wholly delighted by all this. The crushed spirit he had shown at their first meeting had seemed tragically inappropriate and she was glad to be drawing anybody out who needed it. The man, set beside most of the people she had known, was a freak, certainly, but he was not an impossible freak. And he differed from such people as Selden Van Nostrand in depth, breadth and sensitive contact with life. With a perfectly conventional background, he had simply, she thought, allowed his spiritual life to express itself in his physical life from an early age. His courtesy was innate and usually unfailing, on some occasions oppressive--but it was a quality she would not have liked to find lacking. His flattery she had to accept as simply as she could; he exhausted his vocabulary in finding terms for her beauty. It seemed an ever-renewed miracle to him, which he had to talk about to enjoy.

“Madonna,” he said one day, “you should be some queen like Margaret of Navarre. I should like to be one of the story tellers of your court. It is a commentary on our beastly times that such a one as you is a stenographer.”

“If I had the courage--as you have--I wouldn’t be,” she laughed, “but it scares me to think of going my own way.”

“Ah, that is one thing I came to ask you about. I must have told you that I intend going into business.”

“But why?” she asked, “why should you, after all?”

“Well, when we are young we expect all things to come to us. We don’t want them just to-day, but to-morrow?--we’ll whistle and down they will come from the sky. That’s what we think. In my case, however, they haven’t come. Ergo, I have lived disgracefully. Now I must begin to die gracefully by turning to work. Yet isn’t it possible to look upon the grotesque preoccupation of the American male as a trade, a form of artisan-ship, a deed of the left hand? I know a man who sells advertising, and who has more confidence in me than I should dare to have in myself. He is decent enough to think that I can supply what he wants. Why not try it?”

“Aren’t you writing anything nowadays, Miles?”

“Nothing,” he said, with a shrug. “Book reviews! What are book reviews? Every time I have to go to see an editor and ask for a book, it makes me feel as though selling hairpins from house to house is more respectable. Besides, the literary world has forgotten me. I only fill up space.”

“Nonsense,” said she vehemently. “And you’re wrong about business. Business is pretty awful. I suppose you’ll have to find that out for yourself.”

“There _are_ more delightful occupations, true. I have always had an ambition to be a cab-driver. It is the sole profession in which one becomes a licensed eavesdropper. Excellent for the literary man. You know people mind the cabby no more than if he were the horse. I mean a horse-cab, of course ... only in such leisurely vehicles do people expose their souls, their most intimate secrets. But I haven’t the cabby’s training. From things you have said, I fancied you knew horses.”

“A little. When I was a young girl I had some playmates who owned them.”

“Noble beasts. I’m sure they would break the neck of any poor fool who had condescended to Pegasus.”

“The trouble with you, Miles, is that you don’t condescend often enough, nor persistently enough. You ought to be writing poems at this moment. You should have been doing it these last five years.”

“The impulse to creation begins with a peculiar tickling of the tummy that I haven’t felt for ages.”

Her eagerness to start him writing usually came to nothing in some such joke. At other times he would grow more serious.

“No, Madonna, I cannot. The blossom of life is gone--only the bare stalk is left. It may flower again, but it must be watered and fed. My affair with poetry has ended like so many marriages--in disillusion. That is rough, when one realizes that poetry demands the hardest labour for the smallest return of any occupation on earth. It takes all one’s youth, at the expense of practical things--and one is left with a handful of frail results that are hardly more substantial than memories. But the greater the early love, the more complete must be the separation, and one must recognize it when it comes. One must renounce; in that lies the only hope of renewal. People are mistaken about life being a steady progress from youth to age, anyway. It’s a constant shuttling from age to youth and back again. We all grow senile about every seven years, and then young again. I am in a senile period. Why should I do poetry the dishonour of pursuing her in such a state? Bah, it is better to do anything else. You mustn’t be impatient with me. I do not flower very often--but neither does the century plant. And it is counted among the world’s wonders.”

“Well,” she said consolingly, “perhaps you are right. Better a little that is good than a lot that is indifferent. All I know is that there are reputations built on no more talent than yours.”

“If I could believe that,” he said thoughtfully, “I should not surrender. But I can’t believe it. I shall have to squeeze business for a time, as one squeezes an orange--for the golden juice. I shall hoard it, as if every ounce meant a golden hour. Then we shall see. My God! Madonna,” he burst forth. “Fifty dollars a week--there in my hand, _every week_. Think of it. All my life fifty dollars has seemed like the other side of the moon.”

The next day he began the work of which he had talked so much. She had known him a month. Now for some time, she was to see little of him. He left early and returned late, and with the long summer evenings at hand, she began to paint.

It was very hard to drive herself to work. Her hands were stiff; her senses were clumsy, and her first efforts resulted in little more than a waste of valuable materials. She needed everything--models, encouragement, criticism. These even Elsie or Miles could have furnished after a fashion, but she dared not ask them--she was not ready for that. She contented herself with trials at still life, with experiments, with attempts at self-portraiture.

Then slowly the love of simply applying the brush, the fever of trying and trying again for the effects she wanted, the joy of feeling momentary hints of power, and of succeeding now and then with some little thing, quickened her interest, until the time came when she found herself standing up to her canvas until it had grown almost dark.

She went with Elsie one night to the theatre and when they returned to Elsie’s rooms, Moira confessed that she had begun to work. They talked until three in the morning. She came away elated, and still sleepless, not the least bit tired. The mere divulging of her modest ambitions had started her blood bounding, and she swung buoyantly down the street.

A block or two from her house she heard voices, and against the glow of a lamp she saw the figure of a policeman leaning over a man who lay on the pavement luxuriously supporting his head from the flagging with folded arms.

“Come on, now, get up,” said the officer. “I’ve fooled long enough. If you don’t get up I’ll take you where you’ll have a long rest.”

The voice that replied was unmistakably Miles Harlindew’s. “Preposterous,” he said, running his consonants together. “I am lying on m’own prop’ty. It was legally d’vised to me by God the Father. Six feet by three of solid earth. That’s my allotment. You’ve spoiled it by putting concrete on it, but I’ll be a good fellow. Won’t complain. It’s all right. Just go away.”

“Get up, I tell ya.”

“What! Can’t a man lie on his own pat-patrimony, you blamed ass? It’s goin’ to be mine f’r eternity, and I choose to use it now!”

“We’ll see who’s a blamed ass, young feller. Come on!”

Moira interrupted as the patrolman was about to grasp Harlindew’s shoulder.

“Officer,” she said hurriedly, “I know this man. He lives in the same house I am in. I think I can get him to go with me, if you won’t take him.”

“Sure. That’s all right. I don’t want him if he’ll get out of here. I’ve had this bird before, and it might go hard with him.”

“Thank you,” she said fervently. Miles was on his feet in a second, a little unsteady but effusively polite, repeating the words “divine Madonna” in a voice that must have carried to many windows.

“Officer,” he said, “meet Madonna--no, meet Ariadne. Ariadne, the night is a labyrinth--you bring me a thread.”

At his door he insisted upon going up with her--“just for a second”--and she could not refuse him. He sat on the couch, pursuing a strange, disjointed tale of the day’s adventures. He told twice about a steel-worker he had met in a bootlegger’s house, who once had worked on the Woolworth, forty stories up. “Said he never went up on the steel in the morning without three whiskies--if he had he’d a fallen off,” said Miles. “That’s good--if he had he’d a fallen off.” The idea seemed to fill him with extraordinary delight. But other things were on his mind also. Some one he called “the damn buzzard at the office” came in for a large share of abuse.

“If you want to see the damned buzzard to-morrow, you’d better go downstairs and sleep,” she suggested. “You won’t feel much like work.”

“Work? Never mind work.... Valuable man.... Know my own value.... Not at all sleepy, anyway....” A moment later while she was out of the room he stretched full length on the couch and fell asleep.

She did not have the heart to wake him in the morning. If her own racket, as she flew about preparing to leave, had no effect upon his deep unconsciousness, it would probably take too much effort anyway. At noon, however, she found him just beginning to stir about, making coffee in her little kitchen, for which he apologized, but with no sheepishness. He seemed, on the contrary, to find excessive enjoyment in having awakened in a strange place, invaded by a lovely hostess. She took the rôle of cook out of his hands.

“Well,” he said when they were seated, “I suppose I am in a pickle. Must say something to Jones. Wonder what it’ll be. All’s fair, I imagine, in war and business. Any old alibi goes.”

“But you’re a valuable man, Miles, you know,” she mocked, “as you said several times last night.”

His smile was a trifle wan. It was too soon by all means to bid good-bye to the other side of the moon--that regular fifty a week.

“You know, I’ve never had to be anywhere I didn’t want to be, in ... in God knows when,” he declared. “Not easy to get the habit. But I’m doing well down there. Honest, I’m sort of proud about it.”

Moira thought that he seemed to be worrying very little about his remissness, not even very actively at work on the problem of finding an excuse. And it was late, even for that. She almost hated to undeceive him, it concerned him so slightly. Finally she said:

“I telephoned your Jones. I told him you were too ill to come down. Was that right?”

But obviously this service was in his eyes incalculably great. The look he gave her made her want to laugh. She had not thought it possible for a man to be so pathetically helpless, so profoundly grateful for an act of friendly foresight.

“How did it happen, Miles?”

“Oh, I think the monotony got on my nerves. Then yesterday everything went wrong; and I thought five o’clock would never come. Eight hours! By Jove, it sometimes seems like eight years.”

“Yes, it does,” she replied, remembering her first months of it.

“Do you get used to it?” he asked anxiously.

“Oh, yes, it comes to be a good deal like breathing.”

XVIII

They started out without objective, left the train at a little station far down the southern part of Long Island and walked miles through a flat country of stunted woods and sandy, almost deserted roads.

It was toward the end of a coppery afternoon, the hazy air aflame with the sun taking on the colour of the burnished trees. To Moira, it had been an unreal day too, for her thoughts were running upon revolutionary impulses, plans that would have seemed impossibly romantic a few months before. Was it only because of this suddenly important comradeship with Miles Harlindew that she had quite painfully realized a sense of loss? She needed much more than life was giving her, much more than her mere comfort and independence, even than her painting. Their half year together had been full of a strangely wide sympathy. But it had also been casual, without purpose and without end. The first tang and odour of Autumn cold always brought a stirring of unreasonable energy in her, a sense of dissatisfaction ... a prophecy of change. But now it was like nothing she had ever known before, a stifling in the midst of limitless air to breathe.

“Seasons must be responsible for a great deal in life,” she said. “I wonder if anything would get itself done at all, if it were not for them, for the urging they give us to act.”

“I have thought that too,” replied Miles. “You could almost live, simply by letting the time of the year do what it will with you. I shouldn’t be shocked if some one told me I had lived that way myself, most of my life.”

He drew out a pipe, filled and lighted it, and the fragrant smell was pleasing to her nostrils. She liked his agreeable, easy ways. He needed little to be happy, his thoughts, his books, tobacco, clothes that seemed to have grown older with him. Since that diffused night he had spent in her rooms in June, his life had run along in a quiet groove, free from excitement or discontent--a period during which, as he told her, weeks seemed so much longer because they were filled with so many more and varied impressions, and these impressions were caught and relished and fixed as they passed. Excitement and sprees were monotonous, not varied, and one lost almost all of one’s impressions.... She had shared this slow magic with him, and she understood what he meant. Suddenly she found herself asking him to marry her.

“But, child,” he said, with amusement in his face and voice, “you couldn’t do that.”

“I’m not a child,” she replied, with unmistakable seriousness, “and I could. I love you.”

He stopped walking and faced her, holding his pipe halfway to his mouth and looking at her in blank amazement.

“My dear Mary!” he exclaimed.

“My name isn’t Mary,” she broke in. “It’s Moira. Do you like it?”

“Moira? Why haven’t you told me that?”

“There’s even more to tell, Miles.”

“But what do you mean?”

“I suppose you won’t answer my question, until you hear the rest?”

“I shall be glad to hear anything you want to tell,” he replied slowly. “But first, my dear girl, do you know you are the stars in the sky? Do you know you are a prize for sultans, for emperors, for decent people, for people infinitely better than I am? I’m a stopping place in your passage. Not that.... I’m as worthless as a man can very well be. I think, in short, something has made you a little mad.”

“You’re _not_ worthless,” she replied vehemently. “I’m tired of hearing you say you are.... If all this means you don’t love me and don’t want me, there’s nothing more to be said. If it means that you think you are not good enough for me, that’s foolish. And in that case--there _is_--more to be said.”

She trembled a little. Both were under the stress of a new and powerful feeling.... She wanted more than anything else in the world to take hold of him, to shake him, to keep on shaking him, because he had not been equal to asking of her what she had just now asked of him. She wanted to love him as nobody had ever loved him; to love him until he respected himself. It needed no more than a spur, something to make him so proud that he could scarcely believe in his happiness. She could do that for him, she was equal to it, because she did love him and she was beautiful and desirable. She thought of herself, in that instant, as Moira Seymour of Thornhill. But in the next she did not. It was so terribly hard to say what she had to tell him.

Moira’s persistence in her reckless proposal had given rise to a tempest of forces in Miles Harlindew. The notion of marrying her had never even formed in his dispirited brain. Now it swept through him like a cleansing and strengthening hope. He faced her with the uncertainty of a man who is still afraid to trust his own understanding.

“Wait, Miles!” she said, “I’ve something more to tell you.” She began hurriedly, like a guilty child, but as she went on her voice became firm. “I don’t know who my father was. I was told his name was Williams, but I don’t know whether he is alive or dead. I’m the child of a servant who was never married. You see if you married me, it might be said that I wanted the protection of your name. I’ve none of my own.”

It was his turn to be impatient, and he had an impulse now to laugh and take her in his arms. But he held back.

“Mary,” he said seriously, “in the first place what has all that to do with it?”

“But it’s true. And you’ve forgotten my name is Moira.”

“I don’t care. It’s all beside the point. I’ve never been strong for relatives, my own kin into the bargain. I might not enjoy yours. But do you suppose it makes any difference to any one who your father is? Your father and mother are your face, your beautiful, glorious face. Your birthright is yourself, your incredible perfection. Don’t you see, it isn’t your father or your mother you’re giving up, but yourself, all this miracle? You can’t give all that to me. I’m not worth it. I can’t count on myself. How can I ask you to count on me?”

“You don’t know yourself. You never have.”

“Mary!” he cried, and she let him continue using the old name which came so naturally. She felt his intense desire to be honest, while it angered and annoyed her. Why should he decide these things for her? But he went on, “Don’t you see? This is just a--a sentiment, a ridiculous illusion about your birth.”

“It’s _true_,” she replied. “I must know that you believe it’s true--or nothing can go on.”

“If it were a thousand times true it wouldn’t make me good enough for you.”

She sat down beside the road. Tears were coming to her eyes, and she hated to have him see them.

“Miles,” she said, “I thought once I couldn’t love again, but you’ve seemed like something lost to me and come back. It’s the same thing in my heart, only older and more real. If you don’t mind my being what I am, if you want me, please come and take me. Only don’t argue.”

His close embrace was like the end of a journey she had been travelling all these last weeks quite unconsciously. His passion, the fierce, sudden, exacting eagerness of the luckless taken unaware by great good fortune, could not hurt her too much.

“You must forgive me if I am quite mad,” he stammered. “Look at me. Am I sane, Madonna beloved?”

She did look at him, but she saw, beyond the cadaverous face and humble eyes, a man who carried, she hoped, the power of change within him. She was completely happy to have that job for her own. Yesterday she had had loneliness, a heavy secret, futility. Now she had everything that she had ever lost; and more, the knowledge of her own strength. What if it did fail, it would be this while it lasted....

XIX

“Oh, when I was in love with you Then I was clean and brave, And miles around the wonder grew How well did I behave....”

“It’s old Housman all over again,” cried Harlindew, in high glee. “Since I married you, I’ve become a respected citizen. People stop me on the street and want to talk who haven’t deigned to give me a wink in years.”

“Don’t forget there is a second verse,” said Moira.

“But now the fancy passes by And nothing will remain And miles around they’ll say that I Am quite myself again.”

“Yes, but he had to add that to make it a well-rounded thought. The first is the only one that counts. Well-rounded thoughts are an abomination. Or else he had to live up to the well known Housman cynicism. But isn’t this enough for one sitting? I’m hungry.”

“Just five minutes more. There’s something I don’t want to miss about that light. I can’t ever get you into the same position twice. You’re changeable enough--physically!” she concluded.

He strolled over to the portrait when she had released him and criticized it outrageously. The face was all wrong, the colour of the hair absurd, the brow too handsome. It was a good picture perhaps, but a poor portrait. Her sketches of him were better. She had a nice loose line in sketching and didn’t flatter so much. Women ought never to paint men, at least never their sweethearts. They weren’t honest enough. They were too romantic. But this was all delivered in the utmost good nature and she did not resent it. She thought he was quite a good critic of painting. He liked things of very crude strength, directness. Her work, she herself was inclined to admit, indulged in glamour--it was the hardest thing to avoid. But she hoped that in ten or twenty years she would do something good; that was time enough.

As a matter of fact, Miles Harlindew thought his wife’s work remarkably fine and had often said so. Then, discovering she was so modest about it that praise was downright displeasing to her, he adopted the bantering tone. He catered to her modesty by giving her all the severe criticism he dared to. And on the whole it resulted in a better understanding.

Standing in the doorway, he watched her with some impatience, while she put on a hat, powdered her nose, dabbed at her nails and stood in front of the mirror gazing at herself in satisfied animation. She liked to make him wait. Then they slipped down the narrow carpeted stairs and into the brilliant afternoon, breathless and laughing. It was not surprising that people looked twice at the pair. She wondered if there were any two lovers who enjoyed their holidays together as much as they. There were so many things to do and it needed so little to make them memorable. A walk through Italian streets, flooded with little bodies and loud with cries, to some unknown restaurant; or up the Avenue in the dusk to the Park; or a long ride in front of the bus--whatever met their eyes on these jaunts was fresh and new though they had seen it a hundred times before. There was no place for a honeymoon like New York: it meant that the honeymoon never ended.