Part 25

The state of Armstrong's mind so preyed upon him that it affected even his giant strength and health, and his friends urged him to take a vacation. He worked only the harder, because in work alone could he get any relief whatever from the torments of his remorse and his baffled love. He became morose, given to bursts of unreasonable anger. "Success is turning his head," was the general opinion. "He's getting to be a tyrant, like the others." In some moods, he saw the lessons of gentleness and forbearance in the fate his selfish arrogance had brought upon him; but it is not in the nature of men of strong individuality and unbroken will to practice such lessons. The keener his sufferings, the bitterer, the harder he became. And soon he began to feel that there was nearly if not quite a quittance of the balance between him and the man he had wronged. He convinced himself that, if Neva's father were dead, he could speedily win her. "Meanwhile," he reflected, "I must take my punishment"; and with the stolid, unwhimpering endurance of those whose ancestors have through countless generations been schooled in the fields, the forests, and the camps, he waited for the news that would mean the end of his expiation.

Raphael, taking his walk in Fifth Avenue late one afternoon instead of in Central Park, saw him in a closed motor in the halted mass of vehicles at the Forty-second Street crossing. Boris happened to be in his happiest mood. Always the philosopher, he was too catholic in his interests and tastes to permit disappointment in any one direction or even in many directions to close the other avenues to the joy of life. There were times when he could not quite banish the shadows which the thought of death cast over him--death, so exasperating to men of pride and imagination because, of all their adversaries, it alone cannot be challenged or compromised. But on that day, Boris had only the sense of life, life at its best, with the sun bright and not too warm, with the new garb of nature and of womankind radiantly fresh, and the whole world laughing because the winter had been vanquished once more. As his all-observing eyes noted Armstrong's profile, his face darkened. There was for him, in that profile, rugged, stern, inflexible, a challenge of the basis of his happiness.

In all his willful life Boris had never wanted anything so intensely, so exclusively as he wanted Neva. Every man who falls in love with a woman feels that he is her discoverer, that he has a property right securely based upon discovery. Raphael's sense of his right to Neva was far stronger; it was the creator's sense. Had he not said, "Let there be beauty and light and capacity to give and receive love"? And had not these wonders sprung into existence before his magic? True, the beauty and the light and the power to give and to receive were different both in kind and in degree from what he had commanded. But that did not alter his right. And this Armstrong, this coarse savage who would take away his Galatea to serve in a vulgar, sooty tent of barbaric commerce-- The very sight of Armstrong set all his senses on edge, as if each were being assailed by its own particular abhorrence.

That day the stern, inflexible profile somehow struck into him the same chill that always came at the thought of death with its undebatable "must." Yet there was in his pocket, at the very moment, warming his heart like a flagon of old port, a long letter from Neva, a confidential letter, full of friendly, intimate things about herself, her anxieties, her hopes, and fears; and she asked him to stop off on his way to or from his lectures before the Chicago art students. "Narcisse is here," she wrote. "She will be leaving about that time, she says, and if you stop on your way, she and you can go back together. How I wish I could go, too! Not until I settled down here did I appreciate what you--and New York--had done for me. Yet I had thought I did. Do stop off here. It will be so good to see you, Boris."

As he looked at Armstrong's profile, he laid his hand on his coat over the letter and remembered that sentence--"It will be so good to see you." But the shadow would not depart. That profile persisted; he could not banish it.

When he descended from the train at the Battle Field station and saw Neva, with Narcisse beside her in a touring car, he saw that ominous profile, plain as if Armstrong were there, too. This, though Neva's welcome was radiantly bright. "What's the matter, Boris?" cried Narcisse, climbing to the seat beside the chauffeur before Neva could prevent. "Get in beside your hostess and cheer up. You ought to look like a clear sunrise. The lecture was a triumph. I read two whole columns of it aloud to Neva and her father this morning. No cant. No hypocrisy. They agreed with me that your art ideas are like an island in the boundless ocean of flap-doodle."

"My father used to sell bananas from a cart in Chicago," said Boris, "and we lived in the cellar where he ripened them."

Neva glanced at him with quick sympathetic interest. It was the first time he had happened to speak of his origin. "I always thought you were born abroad," said she.

"I think not," replied he. "I really don't know at exactly what point I broke into the world. Those things matter so little. Countries, governments, races--they mean nothing to me. I meet my fellow beings as individuals."

There he caught Neva studying him with an expression so curious that he paused. She forestalled his question by plunging into an animated talk about his lecture. He was well content to listen, enjoying now the surroundings and now the beauty of the woman beside him. Both were wonderfully soothing to him, filled him with innocent, virtuous thoughts, made him envy, and half delude himself into fancying he wished for himself, the joys of somnolescent, corpulent, middle-class life--the life obviously led by the people dwelling in these flower-embedded houses on either side of these shady streets. He sighed; Neva laughed. And he saw that she was laughing at him.

"Well, why not?" he demanded, knowing she understood his sigh. But before she could answer he was laughing at himself. "Still, I like it, for a change," said he. "And--" he was speaking now in an undertone--"with you I could be happy in such a place--always. Just with you; not if we let these stupid burghers in to fret me."

She laughed outright. "I understand you better than you understand yourself," said she. "Change and contrast are as necessary to you as air. If you had to live here, you would commit suicide or become commonplace.... And so should I."

"Not with a husband you loved and children you adored and a home you had created yourself. As the world expands, it contracts; as it contracts, it expands. From end to end the universe is not so vast as such a love."

Neva, coloring deeply and profoundly moved, leaned forward. "I'm sorry you're missing this," said she, lightly to Narcisse. "Boris is sentimentalizing about the vine-clad cottage with children clambering."

"It's about time you quit and came in to settle down," called Narcisse. "A few years more and you'll cease to be romantic. An old beau is ridiculous."

Boris gave Neva a triumphant look. "Narcisse votes yes," said he.

But they were arriving at the house. As the motor ran up the drive under the elms toward the gorgeous masses of forsythia about the entrance steps, Boris's eyes were so busy that he scarcely heard, while Neva explained that her father was too weak to withstand the excitement of visitors--"especially anyone distinguished. We're not telling him you're here. He would feel it his duty to exert himself."

"Distinguished!" he exclaimed. "In presence of these elms and this house built for all time, and these eternal colors, how could mere mortal be distinguished?"

It was not until the next morning that he had a chance to talk with her alone. He rose early and went out before breakfast. He strolled through the woods back of the house until he came to a pavilion with a creek rushing steeply down past it toward Otter Lake. In the pavilion he found Neva with a great heap of roses in her lap, another on the table, another on the bench. On her bright hair was a huge garden hat, its broad streamers of pink ribbon flowing upon her shoulders.

She dropped her shears and watched him with the expression in her eyes that he had surprised there, as they were coming from the station in the motor. "May I ask," said he, "what is the meaning of that look?"

"Did you sleep well?" parried she.

"Without a dream."

"I don't know," replied she--"Let us have breakfast here--you and I.... Washington!" she called.

There rose from a copse below, near the brim of the creek, a small colored boy, barefooted, bareheaded, with no garments but a blue shirt and a pair of blue cotton jean trousers. She sent him off to the house to tell them to bring breakfast. And soon a maid appeared with a tray whose chief burden was a heating apparatus for coffee and milk.

"I've heard you say you detested cold coffee," said Neva. "Your frown when I suggested breakfast out here was premature."

She scattered and heaped the roses into an odorous, dew-sprinkled mat of green and pink and white, in the center of the rustic table. Then she served the coffee. It was real coffee, and the milk was what is called cream in many parts of the world. "Brother Tom has a model farm," she explained. "These eggs were laid this morning."

"So they were," exclaimed Boris, as he broke one. His eyes were sparkling; all that was best in his looks and in his nature was irradiating from him. Her sweet, lovely face, her delicate fresh costume, the sight and odor of the roses, of the forest all round them, the melody of the descending waters, and the superb coffee, crisp rolls, and freshest of fresh eggs-- "You criticise me for my appreciation of the sensuous side of life, my dear friend," said he. "But, tell me, is there anywhere anything more delicious, more inspiring than this breakfast?"

"I never criticised you for loving the joys of the senses," cried she. "Never! We are too much alike there."

"What happiness we could have!" exclaimed he. "For do we not know how to make life smooth and comfortable and beautiful, you and I?"

"Only too well," confessed she. "I often think of it. But----"

He waited for her to continue. When he saw that she would not, but was lost in a reverie, he said, "You promised you would think about our going abroad. Have you thought?"

She nodded.

"You will go?"

She slowly shook her head.

"Why not?"

"I want to, but--I can't."

"Why?"

He had paused in buttering a bit of roll. Anyone coming up just then would have thought he was looking at her, awaiting an answer to an inquiry after salt or something like that. She said: "Because I do not love you."

He waved his knife in airy dismissal. "A trifle! And so easily overcome."

"Because I cannot love you, my dear." She looked at him affectionately.

He balanced the bit of bread before his lips. "Not that brotherly look, please," said he. "It--it hurts!" He put the bread in his mouth.

She leaned forward and laid her hand on his. "We are too much alike. You are too subtle, too nervous, too appreciative, too changeable. You would soon cease to fancy you loved me. I--it so happens--have never begun to fancy I loved you. That is fortunate for us both."

"Armstrong!" he exclaimed. And suddenly, despite his ruddy coloring, he suggested a dark Sicilian hate peering from an ambush, stiletto in impatient hand.

"Don't show me that side of you, Boris," she entreated. "Whether it is Armstrong or not, did I not say the fact that I don't fancy I love you is fortunate for us both?"

"You love Armstrong," he insisted sullenly.

"How can you know that, when I don't know it myself?" replied she. "As I told you once before, the only matter that concerns you is that I do not love you." She spoke sharply. Knowing him so well, she had small patience with his childish, barbaric moods; she could not bear pettiness in a man really and almost entirely great. "Will you be yourself?" she demanded, earnest beneath her smiling manner. "How can I talk to you seriously if you act like a spoiled, bad boy? If you'll only think about the matter, as I've been compelled to think about it, you'll see that you don't really love me--that I'm not the woman for you at all. We'd aggravate each other's worst. What you need is a woman like Narcisse."

"You are most kind," he said sarcastically.

"As she told you yesterday, you've got to settle down within a few years or become absurd. And she----"

"It is because of the women I have known that you will not give me yourself," he said. "Oh, Neva, I have never loved but you." And in his agitation he clasped her hands and, dropping into French, cried with flaming eyes, "I adore you. You are my life, the light on my path--my star shining through the storm. You make me tremble with passion and with fear. Neva, my love, my soul----"

She snatched her hands away. She tried to look at him mockingly, but could not.

"Neva, my girl," he said in English again. "Do not wither my heart!"

"Boris," she answered gently, "I've tried to care for you as you wish me to care. I sent for you because I thought I had begun to succeed. But when I saw you again-- I liked you, admired you, more than ever, more than anyone. But my dear, dear friend, I cannot give you what you ask. It simply will not yield."

He became calm as abruptly as he had burst into passion. Taking his heavily jeweled and engraved gold cigarette case from his pocket, he slowly extracted a cigarette, lighted it with great deliberation, blew out the match, blew out the lamp of the portable stove. "Why?" he said in a tone of pleasant bantering inquiry. "Please tell me why you do not and cannot love me."

She colored in confusion.

"Do not fear lest you will offend," urged he. "I ask impersonally. Feminine psychology is interesting."

"I'd rather not talk about it."

"Let me help you," he persisted amiably, so amiably that she had to remind herself of the sort of nature she knew he had, to quell a suspicion of treachery under his smoothness. "Because I am too--feminine?" he went on.

She nodded hesitatingly. Then, encouraged by his cynical, good-humored laugh, "Though feminine doesn't quite express it. There isn't enough of the primitive man left in you for a woman of my temperament. You have been superrefined, Boris. You are too understanding, too sympathetic for a feminine woman like me. There are two persons to you--one that feels, one that reasons--criticises--analyzes--laughs. I couldn't for a moment forget the one that laughs--at yourself, at any who respond to the you that feels. I suppose you don't understand. I'm sure I don't."

"Vaguely," said he, somewhat absently. "Who'd suspect it?"

"Suspect what?"

"That there was this--this coarse streak in _you_--this craving for the ultramasculine, the rude, rough, aggressive male, inconsiderate, brutal, masterful?"

"A coarse streak," she repeated, half in assent, half in mere reflection.

He surveyed impersonally her delicately feminine charms, suggesting fragility even. "And yet," he mused aloud, "I should have seen it. What else could be the meaning of those sharp, even teeth--of the long slits through which your green-gray-brown-blue eyes look. And your long, slim, sensitive lines----"

The impersonal faded into the personal, the Boris that analyzed into the Boris that felt. The appeal of her beauty to his senses swept over and submerged his pose of philosopher. His eyes shone and swam, like lights seen afar through a mist; the fingers that held the cigarette trembled. But, as he realized long afterwards, he showed then and there how right she was as to his masculinity. For, his was the passive intensity of the feminine, not the aggressive intensity of the male; instead of forgetting her in the fury of his own baffled desire and seizing her, to crush her until he had wrung some sensation, no matter what, from those unmoved nerves of hers, he restrained himself, hid his emotion as swiftly as he could, turned it off with a jest--"And I've let my coffee grow cold!" He was once more Boris of the boyish vanity that feared, more than ridicule, the triumph of a woman over him. He would rather have risked losing her than have given her the opportunity to see and perhaps enjoy her power.

Presently Narcisse came into view. The lamp was relighted; the three talked together; he was not alone with Neva again, made no attempt to be.

That afternoon, just before the time for him and Narcisse to depart, Neva took her in to say good-by to her father--a mere shadow of a wreck of a man, whose remnant of vitality was ebbing almost breath by breath. As they came from his room, it suddenly struck Narcisse how profoundly Neva was being affected by her father's life, now that his mortal illness was bringing it vividly before her. A truly noble character moves so tranquilly and unobtrusively that it is often unobserved, perhaps, rather, taken for granted, unless some startling event compels attention to it. Neva was appreciating her father at last; and Narcisse saw what there was to appreciate. No human being can live in one place for half a century without indelibly impressing himself upon his surroundings; Narcisse felt in the very atmosphere of the rooms he had frequented a personality that revealed itself altogether by example, not at all by precept; a human being that loved nature and his fellow beings, lived in justice and mercy.

"How much it means to have a father like yours!" she exclaimed.

Neva did not reply for some time. When she did, the expression of her eyes, of her mouth, made Narcisse realize that her words had some deeper, some hidden meaning: "If ever I have children," she said, "they shall have that same inheritance from their father." And presently she went on, "I often, nowadays, contrast my father with the leading men there in New York. What dreadful faces they have! What tyranny and meanness and trickery! And, how wretched! It is hard to know whether most to pity or to despise them."

Narcisse knew instinctively that she meant Armstrong, and perhaps, to a certain extent, Boris also. "We've no right to condemn them," said she. "They are the victims of circumstances too strong for them."

"_You_ have the right," insisted Neva. "You have been tempted; yet, you are not like them. You have not let New York enslave you, but have made it your servant."

"The temptations that would have reached my weaknesses didn't happen to offer," replied she. And there she sighed, for she felt the ache of her wound--Alois.

But it was time to go. Neva took them to the station; at the parting Boris kissed her hand in foreign fashion, after his habit, with not a hint of anything but self-control and ease at heart and mind, not even such a hint as Neva alone would have understood. She bore up bravely until they were gone; then solitude and melancholy suddenly enveloped her in their black fog, and she went back home like a traveler in a desert, alone and aimless. "He didn't really care," she thought bitterly, indifferent to her own display of selfishness in having secretly and furtively wished for a love that would only have brought unhappiness to him, since, try however hard, she could not return it. "Does anyone care about anyone but himself? ... If I could only have loved him enough to deceive myself. He's so much more worth while than--than any other man I ever knew or ever shall know."

*XXVIII*

*FORAGING FOR SON-IN-LAW*

Narcisse had gone to Neva at Battle Field to get as well as to give sympathy and companionship; to get the strength to tread alone the path in which she had always had her brother to help her--and he had helped her most of all by getting help from her. She had assumed that her brother would marry some day; she herself looked forward to marrying, as she grew older and appreciated why children are something beside a source of annoyance and anxiety. But she had also assumed that he would marry a woman with whom she would be friends, a woman in real sympathy with his career. Instead, he married Amy, stunted in mind and warped in character and withered in heart by the environment of the idle rich. She knew that the end of the old life had come; and it was to get away from the melancholy spectacle of her new brother that, two months after his return from the honeymoon, she went West for that visit with Neva.

"Amy has ruined him," she said, when she had been at Battle Field long enough to feel free to open her heart wide. "It's only a question of time; he will give up his career entirely."

And, like the beginning of the fulfillment of her prophecy, there soon came a letter from him which she showed Neva. With much beating round the bush, he hinted dissolution of partnership. It gave Neva the heartache to read, and she hardly dared look at Narcisse. "I'm afraid you were right in your suspicions," she had to admit.

"Certainly I was right," replied Narcisse. "But I'm not really so cut up as you think. Nothing comes unannounced in this world, thank heaven. I've been getting ready for this ever since he told me they were engaged."

"How brave you are!" exclaimed Neva. "I know what you must feel, yet you can hide it."

"I'm hiding nothing," Narcisse assured her. "I've lived a long time--much longer than my birthdays show. I've been making my own living since I was thirteen--and it wasn't easy until the last few years. But I've learned to take life as I take weather. There are sunny seasons, and stormy seasons, and middling seasons. When the sun shines, I don't enjoy it less, but rather more, because I know foul weather is certain to come. And when it does come, I know it won't last forever." There were tears in her eyes, but through them she smiled dauntlessly. "And the sun _will_ shine again--warm and bright and streaming happiness."

Neva's own heart was suddenly buoyant. "It will--it surely will!" she cried.

"And," proceeded Narcisse, "my troubles are trifles compared with Alois's. I know him; I know he's unhappy. If ever there was a man cheated in a marriage, that man is my poor brother. And he must realize it by this time."

She had guessed close to the truth. Alois and his bride had not been honeymooning many weeks before he confessed to himself that he had overestimated--or, perhaps, misestimated--her intellect. Not that she was stupid or ignorant; no, merely, that she lacked the originality he had attributed to her. He had pictured himself doing great work under her inspiration, his own skill supplemented by her taste and cleverness in suggesting and designing. He found that she knew only what he or some book had told her, that her enthusiasm for architecture was in large part one of those amiable pretenses wherewith the female aids the passions of the male to beguile him to her will.

But this discovery did not depress him. No man ever was depressed by finding out that his wife was his mental inferior, though many a man has been pitched headlong into permanent dejection by the discovery of the reverse. She was more beautiful than he had thought, more loving and more lovable--and those compensations more than made good the vanished dream of companionship. Soon, however, her intense affection began to wear upon him. Not that he liked it less or loved her less; but he saw with the beginnings of alarm that he was on the way to being engulfed, that he either must devote himself entirely to being Amy's husband or must expect to lose her. It was fascinating, intoxicating, to be thus encradled in love; but it was not exactly his notion of what was manly.