CHAPTER V

SHOWING THAT SACRIFICES ARE NOT ALWAYS APPRECIATED

To cast a glance backward,--it was with a mixture of surprise, chagrin and growing indignation, that Emil St. Ives took his way from the Maine coast to tumultuous, brain-inspiring New York. In the hotel at Old Harbour he lingered over his packing, confident until the last moment, that some word would arrive from Rachel. She surely would not allow him to go without seeking to effect a reconciliation. No word came and, once seated in the train, he stared out at the landscape with sullen fierceness. But there, in scraggy rocks, stumps of trees, water, meadows, salt marshes, wind with a tang in it, gold beams poured from rifted clouds, mist, storm, rolling fog--there was Rachel, the girl herself. She was dancing, scudding on ahead of the train, wrapped in a veil. Now he saw the gleam of her eyes; now her serious mouth! now the curve of a wrist; now a fleeing ankle! Remaining behind, she yet went with him! Deuce take it, he felt her breath on his face!

He was conscious of an immense weight of sadness in his breast, but it lessened neither his pique nor his astonishment. Full of mastership, his ideas of womankind were based chiefly on the devotion accorded him by his mother, by Annie Lawless, and, until then, by Rachel herself. Such whole-souled devotion he accepted as his rightful due. Therefore Rachel's downright and uncompromising attitude astounded him. Her anger, when she learned that another young lady was interested in his affairs, was justified, he admitted. He had not been open with her. What he could not overlook, however, was her allusion to his mother's disappointment if his plans with the lithographers failed to materialize. If she had cared for him, she would have spared him that barbed thrust which even in memory caused his nerves to tingle. If she had cared for him she would have prevented his going. But she had allowed him to go without a hope of ever seeing him again.

He began to laugh bitterly; presently lifting his long frame out of the car seat, he went for a drink of water. He stood with the cup in his hand, forgetting to drink. He could not endure that a woman should scorn and repudiate him. The quarrel with Rachel shook him all the more violently, as, with his habits of mind, he was unaccustomed to such tempests. He returned to his seat and fixed his eyes once more on the flying landscape.

She had shone upon him like sunlight, and passion had awakened--passion and interest and something besides. She had stormed at him like a tempest and finally had mystified him with a fog, best proof of all that hers was the womanhood for his manhood. But did he understand? The pebble rolling down a hill has as much comprehension of the force that summons it--indeed it has more, for the pebble obeys the force and Emil St. Ives did not obey. Instead he set himself squarely about and took his way back to New York with a smouldering eye; but a fierce, surprised bird whose pinions had been clipped might have worn just such a look, and he kept ruffling the feathers of his vanity, for the wings of his egotism drooped.

Presently he produced paper and pencil, but still boiling, it was sometime before he could control his thoughts. Finally, he began to sketch roughly a plan for an instrument; the next day his humiliation had so far abated as to permit of his working steadily on the scheme; and when he reached New York his complacency was practically restored. On alighting from the train he found awaiting him a little eager, flushing, paling being in the shape of a woman.

When Emil saw Annie Lawless peering at him from the midst of the crowd on the platform, a certain new sensation, strong, sweet, but somehow malign, sprang to life within him. At least Annie was not indifferent to him. His chagrin disappeared and a desperate hardihood took its place. It is soothing, as most people will agree, when a golden apple has been denied us, to have offered for our acceptance a little rosy plum. Is it amazing then, that Emil stood ready hand and mouth for the plum, all the more as he reckoned its flavour, on the whole, rather pleasant? With his worn suit-case in one hand and his precious _depth-indicator_ in the other, he swung down the platform, and Annie, followed by the ungainly figure of Ding Dong, advanced to meet him. Then Emil set down the suit-case and the _depth-indicator_ and received Annie's timid anxious glance in his own dark orbs. In it plunged, that little maiden look, and the earth for Annie rocked, though for Emil it merely oscillated very slightly,--no more than when one has taken a sip of wine, piquant and a little heady.

Ding Dong gathered up the traps and fell submissively behind the young couple, and Annie pressed against Emil and clung to him. What more natural than that, finding himself unencumbered, he should bend down and encircle her little figure with his arm? A rosy plum, a sip of wine, a little bit of a woman with no wits at all and her heart in her face, such was Annie.

As for that puzzling mid-region between mind and heart, which was the region affected in Emil, one might as well attempt to mark out paths in a wilderness as to set up guideposts there. Every thought is tinged with feeling, every feeling is sullied with thought, and the ways are hopelessly mixed. But it is a region which stands in no need of description, for in the range of emotional experience, few people ken anything beyond this vast temperate zone. And yet they declare, at the last, that they have lived! Pathetic misapprehension! Nothing is more uncommon, more unspeakably rare, than a life actually lived. Only a person who is at once an intrepid explorer and an inexhaustible artist, appreciating ever the value of extremes and of contrasts, in short a genius on every side, is capable of life.

Though Emil had a measure of this capacity, he was hopelessly adrift in a maze of stupidity; for men, save at exceptional moments, are such a very small part of themselves. So he encircled Annie with his arm and, bringing his face close to hers, kissed her. And Annie did not utter a reproach. She forgot the words that would have formed it. She forgot every word in her vocabulary, except one little word that all but escaped from the hot panting region of her heart.

But she had formed a plan which she remembered. Dragging Emil into the waiting room, she indicated two chairs in a quiet corner. When they were seated, she put one little gloved hand for a moment over his and pressed it down hard in order to hold his attention, though this manoeuvre was not in the least necessary, for she was far from unpleasing to look upon. The colour kept chasing the white on her cheek, for she was frightened by what she had to say and at a loss how to say it; the sweet peas, pinned in a bunch on the breast of her jacket, threatened to fly away like a bevy of butterflies with her tumultuous breathing, and a fascinating little pulse fluttered in her neck just above the lace of her collar, and Emil, watching it, knew that it indicated the wild movements of her heart.

What wonder that he almost recovered his wonted spirits in the air of adoration that breathed from these two humble people? For Ding Dong, with his ears like huge excrescences and his legs that seemed to bend under the weight of his squat body so that he resembled nothing so much as a grotesque from a cathedral niche,--Ding Dong hung on his look with exactly as much attention as Annie. Despite the feeling of sadness that lurked far down in the depths of his being, Emil perceived afresh that it was a very good sort of world and that New York was a marvellous city. And his egotism began to spread its wings and his eyes to flash good humouredly. Being now well beyond the larva stage, admiration was necessary to him,--it was an air without which he was unable to exist.

"But how did you know that I would come on this train?" he asked gently; and, clasping his hands about his knees, he stared at Annie with a peculiar concentrated interest.

She looked up at him with a faint suggestion of reproach. "I didn't know; though I was prepared to wait until you did come," she said. "The fact is, Alexander," she continued, "what Father has done is shameful. It isn't right, and as he's my father, it's only just--well, I hope you won't take it wrong--but I have a little money which was left me by an aunt to do with just as I choose. I've got it all here, see, in this bag," and she opened the drawstrings. "It isn't much, only a thousand dollars, but I thought perhaps--perhaps you would take it until you could invent something."

To save his life Emil could not prevent the joy that flashed in his eyes. To be free to invent, even for a brief space! It was an unexpected glimpse straight into Paradise. He peeped in--just one peep; then greatly to his credit, considering how little of an ordinary man he was and how much of a genius,--who resembles a bird of heaven in his freedom from a sense of obligations,--he shut the door on the Paradise forcibly.

He bent forward and took both of Annie's hands in his. Slowly, very slowly, he shook his head.

"Oh, please!" she supplicated, and her face puckered. As she looked straight into his eyes with her own, he saw them suffuse with tears. The sight of these tears perturbed him so that he was no longer master of himself.

"But see here, I can't!" he said, and the blood darkened his cheek, "I can't take money from you; you're mad!"

"Oh, if that's the way you consider me--just like a stranger!" And Annie turned sharply aside and buried her face in a scrap of a handkerchief from which ascended an odour of subtle feminine appeal.

In their excitement both had risen and Emil spread his massive bulk to screen her distress from the few people who were seated in the waiting-room. Never had he been driven into such a net by his own emotions.

"See here," he cried, bending over her and breathing the words into her ear, "I consider you my only friend"; and his ardour was augmented by his remembrance of Rachel.

This was devotion, this!

"Friend?" she repeated, lifting her head and gazing at him through her tears. "I'm more than that. There isn't anything I wouldn't do for you, and I thought--I thought--"

For an instant Emil saw her judicially. "So that's it?" he reflected, but the next instant the male in him was completely glamoured.

For the last time some positive seduction in Annie overcame him. Love will polish even a plain woman to something approaching brilliancy, and Annie was by no means plain. Her hair gave out a delicate odour; the pupils of her eyes, usually small, spilled their black over the blue of the irises; her little mouth emitted a whole troop of sighs; the stuff of her waist crackled, as if, though it fitted her body, it compressed her heart. In truth, that which was the heart in her, the soul in her, was striving mightily to come to him, and being a man he did not refuse it.

"Do--do you mean that you would marry me?" he hazarded unsteadily, "without prospects--nothing? You can see for yourself, everything I put my hand to turns out wrong," he added argumentatively.

She nodded. A look of ecstasy overspread her face.

What he experienced chiefly was a profound astonishment.

He moved back a step in order to study her. That she felt in this way toward him was no news, but that she was ready to take the decisive step now, when his whole outlook was altered.... In his gaze there grew a peculiar gentleness and simplicity.

"Yes, but what about your father, what will he say?" he inquired, dallying dreamily with the consideration.

"Father, oh, he'll bluster at first, but he'll forgive us. I know him. Besides, hasn't he stolen your invention?"

"So it's only fair I should steal his daughter; is that it?" This question, like the other, was an idle playing with the subject, as though, for the moment, his will went in leash to hers.

Annie lifted her face with a laugh which stirred him strangely. Her eyes rested questioningly upon him and he was conscious of an ambiguous emotion of pleasure and confusion. He had a desire to say tender words to her, to touch her hair; none the less he sighed heavily.

And Annie all at once took his attitude for granted. Timid, yet with that potency of appeal which belongs often to the weakest women, she clasped his hand, glancing up at him in such a way that he felt all resistance expiring within him.

"That poor fellow over there," she went on happily after a moment, during which she pressed his fingers once or twice, "every time I'd go to the factory, he'd make the strangest signs, and at first I couldn't understand what he wanted. But after a little, I made out that he was asking about you. And when Father got in that new man to work on your machine, Ding Dong, as they call him, just went wild and raged. He tried to stand guard over the machine and he locked the door of your shop. But finally they got in and he acted so, they had to get rid of him."

Emil, who had been admiring the vivacity of her face, caught only the last words of this speech.

"Ding Dong you say! Yes, a fine fellow," he agreed with a sparkling smile.

"Well, between us we've got everything planned," Annie continued. "We've found a little apartment--"

He started.

"Where you can work and invent," she added in a voice scarcely above a whisper.

"Invent," he murmured, for she sidled and slunk closer to him so that with difficulty he resisted an impulse to seize her to his breast.

Explain it who can: in one short hour all the judgments of this man were reversed. Though he was influenced by selfish motives, he did not recognize them. Annie was his friend, the one most necessary to him and to whom he was necessary. It was really downright amazing how much she cared for him, and seeing her through a mist of gratitude which he mistook for love, he compared her to the cold Rachel to the latter's disadvantage. In love consciously with neither the one nor the other of these two women and only obscurely aware that his feeling for Rachel was capable of assuming the character of a dominating passion, he was really concerned in but one object, his work. He therefore yielded himself readily to gratified vanity, egotism, enthralled senses, those potent agents for the smothering of the masculine will.

They were on their way to the office of the Mayor when abruptly Emil ordered the driver of the cab to halt, while he questioned Annie anxiously. Did she think it wise--what they were doing? Had she sufficiently considered?

For answer she put her hands on his shoulders and drew his head to her breast so vehemently that he had difficulty in breathing.

After that he spoke no more until their destination was reached, but stared out intently at the people, who passed in carriages and on foot, with a smile in which there was an uneasy melancholy.

A week later any scales he might have had over his eyes had vanished. Memories of Rachel obtruded themselves and he turned from them with stifled sighs. He was ill at ease and his conscience troubled him. He was penitent before Annie and redoubled his caresses. But she was not essential to him, and as time went on he buried himself in his work.

In the choice of the apartment the young girl betrayed the fundamental practicality of her nature. The rooms were inexpensive and at the same time attractive and homelike; but at the end of a month, Emil discovered a sky-lighted loft in the lower part of the city into which he wished to move. The place would be a more convenient one for his work. Thither Ding Dong, in the capacity of assistant to the inventor, accompanied the pair. With him he brought the monkey Lulu.

Largely because of his affection for her, though partly because of his hatred of his former employers on whom he thought absurdly to revenge himself, Ding Dong had stolen the little creature from the factory. He made her a cage, which she seldom occupied, her favourite station being the sill of the window where Emil had his work-bench. There she crouched among the tools with her little, worried, half-human face turned to the inventor, and now and then she reached out a black hand and laid it questioningly on his sleeve. Seeing his pet thus safely cared for, Ding Dong was free to spend himself in the service of his new master. He ran errands, bustled about in a flurry of often useless activity, and even fitted up the tiny room set apart for Annie. At first the young wife agreed to everything.

Crushed by a stormy interview with her father in which he had forbidden her to cross his threshold, in the early days of her marriage Annie accepted the privations of her new mode of life without a word. She thought to endear herself to her husband. But Emil, far from sympathizing with her position, was honestly unconscious of it. Carried away by the interest of his work, he forgot her. When made aware of her, bitterness filled his soul. He felt himself guilty toward her. Never the less, her tears, her letters to her mother, which he was forced to read and approve, her constant efforts on his behalf with her father, above all, her insistence that he go back and accept the situation of expert examiner, which was finally grudgingly offered him,--all this irked him in the extreme.

"Go back there--after the way he's treated me?" he cried,--"you ask it?"

"I thought--I thought--" murmured Annie, "we are very miserable."

"Well?" His significant tone seemed to imply, "Who's to blame?"

He now perceived clearly that she hampered him, that he could have got on very much better without her.

"You are not interested in my work," he cried, blaming her; "a woman is always like that. No detachment with them is possible. I ought to have understood this."

Then Annie broke down, and contrition overcame him. He took her in his arms where she cuddled like a little kitten.

"I'm no one for you," he whispered, while a fierce sigh rent him.

But convinced that he suffered by the arrangement more than she did, he cherished a grudge against her because she interfered with him. Fearing to disquiet his mother, he allowed several months to pass before he wrote to her of his marriage. Viewing it coldly, he felt much cause for shame in the situation.

Quarrels were constant, and as the sight of Annie disquieted him, he shut himself off from her more and more. He worked, slept and ate in his shop, and Annie inhabited her lonely little room, weeping and staring out over the house-tops in acute disgust. As Emil had said, devotion to an abstract ideal was impossible to her and she was jealous now of his work as of a rival, so that they had no topic about which they could talk when together. Everything furnished a subject for dispute, even Ding Dong and his pet. Ding Dong disgusted her by his outlandish appearance, and the monkey, she declared, made her nervous.

The day following her meeting with Rachel, Annie spoke of the encounter.

"I met someone you know yesterday," she said; "a girl from Maine."

Wrinkling up his brow, Emil paused in his work.

Something in his expression excited and angered his wife.

"Well," she cried sharply, "do you remember her? What's her name?"

But Emil, despite his desire to know more, resumed his work without answering, and the eyes he cast down held the look of a child that dimly perceives in its suffering the result of its own act.