Book Six

Wilson Avenue

LV. The Consolations of Philosophy

1

COMING out on the street, swinging his stick, Felix was vividly conscious of the outer world—it was as if the curtain had just risen upon a stage scene. The shapes of the trees in the distance had all the interest of a beautifully painted set—artificial, as scenery should be, not aping nature, but symbolizing it. The houses that stood beside the road were cardboard shapes that suggested great masses of brick and stone. And the way the night sky bent down at the street-end to touch the earth—that was marvelous.

The whole scene was refreshing. It had the beauty of something made to be looked at. It was as if the outer-world were no longer the unnoted background of a drama in which he was a baffled participant: he had stepped out of the play now, he was a spectator—he could look on and enjoy the spectacle.

There was a sense of vast release in his mind. The burden of emotion, of pain, of grief, of anger, the intolerable burden of human illusion, was lifted. His shoulders felt lighter, and he carried himself with a jaunty air.

A man passed him—no spectator like himself of this play, but a participant in it, a man to whom things really seemed to matter. With a tired droop of the head and shoulders, putting one foot mechanically before another, he was going home. Two girls passed, eagerly talking to each other. None of them saw him, or the world through which they moved—they were busy acting their parts, too busy thinking about yesterday and tomorrow.

How good it was no longer to have a part to play—to be able to look on, full of curiosity! He was like a disembodied spirit that wanders freely upon the earth without a care. The world was beautiful. All the time that he had been worrying about other things, it had been beautiful—and he had been too passionately entangled in the coil of personal emotions to notice.... The crooked branch of an elm, from which all but a few leaves had fallen, drooping black against the luminous sky—the world had been full of such things all along, and he had never paused to look before.

It was pleasant to have a mind able to notice little things—like the fantastic shadow that danced along the sidewalk, growing shorter and longer and dodging about in front and behind—a mind that could dwell upon light things, instead of revolving eternally in some cycle of hope and fear. A leisurely, disinterested, curious mind!

As he walked, his thoughts touched lightly upon Rose-Ann—he had a fleeting memory-picture, uncoloured by any painful emotion, of her standing on the balcony of that house in Woods Point, about to jump off into the snow-bank; he sensed her as a creature possessed by some wish which she did not understand, driven on by it to delightful and absurd actions.... And Clive, ironically officiating as host to a bridal pair in the house which he had built to shelter his own happiness.... And Phyllis, holding Clive perpetually at arm’s length, because he was not utterly a god.... And himself, strangest shape of all, taking the emotions of all these other characters seriously and trying to adjust his life to them! They were like people in a play, strange and foolish, beautiful and pitiful. He saw them all, he saw his own past self, with a delicate and appreciating exactitude.

But they did not matter—he could stop thinking of them, and look at the nimbus of light around the arc lamp on the corner. That was strange and beautiful, too.

To be a spectator of the spectacle of existence! At first that was enough. But presently he was aware of a vague desire for a fellow-spectator. The desire was faint, but faint as it was it moved his steps to the Illinois Central platform, and presently he emerged upon Michigan Avenue.

2

That evening in the Artists’ Theatre there was a rehearsal of several episodes from Schnitzler’s “Anatol,” which was to be the second bill of the season. At midnight Elva Macklin saw Felix Fay stroll in and listen to the jaded end of the rehearsal from the theatre’s one tiny and inconvenient box.

Felix saw her, too, and realized by what instinctive wish he had been led, without conscious thought, to the Artists’ Theatre. He wanted her for his fellow-spectator of the spectacle of existence.

He saw her as if for the first time. He had never talked with her much; and he had been drunk, on dreams if not on whiskey, the time he had danced with her at the ball. She had been a sort of dream-figure to him, an out-of-the-world creature. He saw her now clearly enough—an intense young egotist in her every word and gesture; no dryad, but soulless enough for all her human nature—a girl who still kept the hardness of a child about her. She would never make a good actress, he reflected; she was too much herself; she was acting abominably her part in this Schnitzler play, but with her own special charm, the charm that made her what she was. But she was not a person to pity. He liked her for that. He would talk to her.

A few moments later, as Elva Macklin was putting on her coat to go home, Felix Fay appeared at the door of the tiny women’s dressing room.

The others had gone, she was there alone.

“May I come in?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, “whoever you are ... and you may button my spats if you want to, Felix Fay. I’m too tired, and I was going off without them.”

She continued, as he knelt at her feet and twisted the reluctant buttons one by one into place, “I’ve done the circus girl for hours, over and over again. Gregory doesn’t like the way I do it—and I don’t like the way Jimmy Taylor does Anatol. Neither does Gregory, for that matter. Everything’s gone wrong tonight.... Gregory gets more and more Napoleonic. He says, ‘Stop! we’ll do that scene all over again!’ Nothing about what’s the matter, or how it should be done—we just know that it doesn’t suit him, and so we do it differently. And usually worse. Then he frowns; he bites his lip; he even stamps his foot: but even that doesn’t do much good!”

She put out her other foot. “Jimmie’s really impossible as Anatol. He looks all right—but he hasn’t any spirit. You just can’t imagine Jimmie’s having six mistresses. He treats me as though I were his aunt.... Gregory wants me to do the circus girl ‘simply’—whatever that means. I wish he would condescend to explain, instead of just looking haughty.... I’m awfully tired.... Thanks. I don’t feel quite clothed without my spats.”

Felix stood up. “Let’s go somewhere and get something to eat,” he said.

“I’d like to,” she said. “I don’t want to go home. I’m too tired to sleep.” She buttoned her coat about her.

It was a boyish coat, and she wore it with a boyish air. There was something Puck-like in her face, something impish, mischievous.

“Have you a nickname?” he asked curiously.

“Yes,” she said, startled. “Why?”

“What is it?”

“Bobby. Again, why?”

He laughed.

“Because I was going to give you one if you hadn’t. I was going to name you Till Eulenspiegel. But Bobby will do very well. I shall call you that, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind. But you may regret it.—Who was Till Eulenspiegel?” she asked.

“A celebrated scamp.—Why should I regret it?”

“We’ll have to number our questions and answers—we’re getting all mixed up. Bobby is a celebrated scamp, too. You haven’t heard of her? When I’m Elva I’m on my very best behaviour.”

“Then come as Bobby, by all means!” he said.

“It’s only fair to warn you that you may not like her at all. Some people don’t.”

“I’m sure _I_ shall. Come along!” he laughed.

“Wait a moment. How much money have you got? When I’m Bobby, I insist on paying my own way. But I’ve only carfare home tonight. So you’ll have to lend me some.”

He took out a roll of bills from his pocket, all that was left of the two weeks’ salary after paying for his apartment, and solemnly divided it.

She accepted the money, and then handed it back. “No, I feel like being recklessly dependent tonight. I’ll let you buy my dinner.... One moment—I have to turn the lights out. Go ahead, I can find my way out in the dark.”

She joined him in the hall a moment later. “The elevator’s stopped running,” she said, “we’ll have to walk down.”

Half way down she stopped. “Let’s rest and smoke a cigarette.”

She lighted her cigarette at his match, and then asked, “What brings you here tonight?”

“Idle curiosity,” he said.

She puffed on her cigarette and scrutinized his face by the glow it made in the dark.

“Something’s happened to you,” she said.

“Right,” he answered cheerfully.

“Want to tell me your troubles?” she asked indifferently.

“No,” he said. “I haven’t any troubles. I’ve ceased to have them. That’s what’s happened to me.”

She laughed lightly. “So that’s it. Well, I’m glad you don’t want sympathy. I was afraid you might.”

“You misjudged me,” he said. “Besides, if I had wanted sympathy, would I have come to you?”

“No, I guess you do know me better than that.... Well, what _do_ you want of me?”

“Nothing in particular of you,” he said. “I just want somebody to bum around with tonight.”

She puffed on her cigarette again. “You don’t look at all broken-hearted,” she said.

“Why should I look broken-hearted?”

“I hear all the theatre-gossip. I suppose it’s true?”

“Well, I don’t hear the theatre-gossip, so I don’t know whether it’s true or not. Why should you care?”

“I don’t care. I’m just curious. You know, you’ve been looking worried and unhappy ever since I first saw you—until now. At first I thought you were worried about the play; but when it was a success you looked more unhappy than ever. And now—well, the transformation is astonishing!”

“I can explain that.... You probably have in your rooms—”

“My room,” she corrected him. “A quite singular room, in every sense.”

“In your room, then, you probably have five or six copies of the Rubaiyat, presented you by different youths....”

“Yes, all with a pencil mark beside the ‘Book of Verses’ verse. Go on.”

“Well, in that poem Omar boasts of ‘striking from the Calendar Unborn Tomorrow and Dead Yesterday.’ I’ve just performed that same astronomical feat.”

“I know just what you mean,” she said. “It’s—it’s like getting over a headache, isn’t it?... I’m glad.... Well, let’s go on.”

She jumped up.

Out in the street he asked her, “How do you come to know so much about it? When did you perform Omar’s astronomical feat?”

She laughed.

“I? Oh, fully twenty years ago—at the age of five!... You see, up to that time I had been the only child—the reigning princess, in fact. And then a little brother came along. People laugh about these things—but I don’t think anything in later life can hurt worse than a childish tragedy like that. To be considered the most wonderful being in all the world, and then—pushed out of the way.... Well, I saw that my reign was ended, that human beings were fickle, and that my heart would be broken if I kept on caring. So I stopped—and I’ve never cared since. Not for a single other living thing in all the world.”

“I see you are a person of great experience in—not caring. Twenty years of it! Tell me, how does it work out?”

She stopped suddenly, pulling at his sleeve. “Look!” she said with apparent irrelevance.

He looked in the direction of her upward glance, and saw outlined against the sky a curious accidental roof-line made by the juxtaposition of two buildings. It was nothing—and it had the pure beauty of a design by Hiroshige.

“Yes,” he said, gazing at it. An accidental scrap of beauty, unseen by millions of passing eyes, and only revealed, it seemed, to such people as themselves! He gazed, and the knowledge that she too saw it, that her world was full of such moments, and that they could share them together, satisfied his need of companionship. He pressed her arm closer to his side.

They resumed their walk. “You can’t see things like that if you care about people,” she said. “And that’s how it works out.... But it’s nice to know some one else like that. Only—I don’t think this will last, with you....”

“Why?” he demanded.

“I don’t know.”

“So you believe I’ll go back to caring—to being human, as they call it—to having remorse about the past and worries about the future, to being all tangled up in unhappiness again!” he said incredulously.

She laughed, and sang, in a low voice, close to his ear, the lines of a song that went to an old ballad measure:

“_Oh, the briary-bush, That pricks my heart so sore! If I ever get out of the briary-bush I’ll never get in any more!_”

“You think you won’t, Felix, but you will! People do go back to the briary-bush. You have to learn early, to stay out.... But I’m glad you came to see me while you’re in this mood. You know, you may get over it in an hour or two!”

“Wait and see!”

LVI. Eulenspiegel

1

“ALL right—I’ll wait....”

“Shall we sup in luxury at one of these gilded hotels?”

“Yes, let’s,” she said.

They went to the grill-room. It was gay with its midnight crowd, an orchestra was playing, and in the cleared space couples were dancing. The waiter found them a little table in the corner.

“I’m really hungry,” she said. “I forgot to eat dinner.”

“Silly child!” he said. “So did I.”

“Who’s a silly child?”

“I was waiting for my playmate.”

They laughed.

With her cloak thrown back carelessly on the chair, leaning forward with bare elbows on the table, her black hair tousled about her curiously slanting temples, her blouse askew over one shoulder, she was indeed very much a child. And he felt like a child too, and rejoiced in her as a careless and happy playfellow.

“Let’s start,” she said, ignoring the menu, “with all the different kinds of little fishes.”

“Good. And—” he consulted the menu—“a filet mignon?”

She nodded. “And petit pois?... And then what? Some kind of salad, I suppose.”

“One of the things you keep pulling apart all evening.”

“Yes—what are they called? Artichoke. With Hollandaise sauce. And what kind of cocktail?” he asked.

“The one that has a dash of electricity in it.”

“A Daiquerai!” he affirmed.

“Right.”

“Well, that will do to begin with.—Oh, yes, wine.”

“Nothing sweet,” she warned him.

“A Sauterne, then?”

“That will be nice,” she said.

He gave the order, and when he had finished turned to her. “You know,” he said, “it always makes me feel reckless to order wine. I’m always sure that I’m not going to have enough left to tip the waiter.”

“I’m glad you feel that way,” she said. “It’s no fun to dine with people who are blasé about ordering wine—unless you can feel wickedly extravagant about it, you might just as well drink water. The thrill is all in the idea, anyway. I think wine is a much overrated institution—so far as its effects go.... I ordered a liqueur once, a beautiful purple thing I had just discovered—I forget the name of it; I ordered it, not to drink, but just to look at—and when the man I was dining with called my attention to my neglect, and I explained, he was outraged!... But I wish they would bring the little fishes—I shan’t neglect _them_.”

“It’s nice,” he said, “to be able to think and talk about things that don’t matter.”

“Such as what?”

“Such as little fishes, and poetry. I’ve been so dreadfully serious-minded for a long time.—Is Gregory going to put on ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire’?”

“He hasn’t decided. If he does—”

“If he does, you must play Mary. It won’t be Yeats’s Mary, but it will be something very exciting, if you play it.”

“I hope he’ll let me.”

“Do you know ‘On Baile’s Strand’?”

“He’s thinking of doing that, too. I haven’t read it. But I hear there’s nothing in it for me.”

“Oh, yes, there is! There’s the part of the young prince. It wouldn’t be a half bad idea. You’re quite as much a boy as a girl. You’d be a very striking young prince.”

“Thank you!”

“However, I was thinking of another part for you—the part of the warrior-queen that the two kings talk about. You remember?”

“No.”

“She doesn’t actually appear in the play. But she ought to. I’d like to write you a play about her.”

“Tell me about her!”

“She fights like a man, and bears a love-child to a soldier-king—and then makes war on him. He is speaking about her afterward, in Yeats’s play, and he says to the older king:

“_You have never seen her—ah! Conchobar, had you seen her With that high, laughing, turbulent head of hers Thrown backward, and the bowstring at her ear, Or sitting at the fire with these grave eyes Full of good counsel as it were with wine, Or when love ran through all the lineaments Of her wild body...._”

She drank in the lines eagerly, and when he paused she looked at him gratefully. “I’d like to do a part like that,” she said.

The cocktails came, but she pushed hers aside. “Tell me some more about her. She loves and hates the same man? Does he understand that—her lover, I mean.”

“Perhaps not at first—in my play, he wouldn’t. But in Yeats’s play, years later, he does understand. When the older king complains that even his former sweetheart makes war on him, he says:

“_No wonder in that, no wonder at all in that. I never have known love but as a kiss In the mid battle, and a difficult truce Of oil and water, candles and dark night, Hillside and hollow, the hot-footed sun And the cold, sliding, slippery-footed moon— A brief forgiveness between opposites That have been hatreds for three times the age Of this long ’stablished ground._”

“A kiss in the mid-battle!” she repeated. “That is lovely.”

She raised her cocktail. “Here’s to our play!”

They drank.

“Now,” he said, a little embarrassedly, “I feel that I shall have to write that play!”

She put her hand on his for a moment. “Don’t feel that,” she said. “I know—people dream of things and ... don’t do them. I shan’t hold you to account. But it’s a lovely dream—and that’s what I’m drinking to.”

“But wouldn’t you rather have the play than the dream?” he asked.

“I don’t know.... By the time you wrote it—I would be interested in something else, and you would want another girl to do it. Why should we bother with promises? We’re not that kind.... If I said I loved you—and I could say that right now—I always love people who think of lovely things, and that play was a lovely thing to think of—why, I wouldn’t expect you to hold me to account for it ... later.”

“Do you love me?” he asked, in a casual tone.

“Yes.... Here are the fishes!... Of course I do. You are a terribly nice person. You love me, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Felix.

The waiter went away, and she laughed. “That was a test,” she said. “A man who can talk about love in the presence of the waiter without looking awkward—! But I meant it, too.... These _are_ good, aren’t they?”

“Delicious! Especially these sprats. I don’t know what a sprat is, but I’m sure this is one.”

“That’s another thing—people ought to be able to talk about love, and food, and art, and money, in the same tone of voice. Some men would be shocked to hear me discuss love and little fishes all in the same breath.”

“I seem to be passing all your tests.”

“Yes—it doesn’t even make you nervous to be compared with other men.”

“Oh, I suppose there _are_ other men in the world,” said Felix. “They don’t interest me, but I don’t mind your alluding to them.”

“So long as it’s to their disadvantage!”

“Or any other way. I simply can’t take them seriously. Men seem ridiculous creatures to me.”

“I’ve known some very interesting ones!”

“You thought so at the time. A pardonable mistake. The truth is, Bobbie Eulenspiegel, you and I are the only truly interesting people alive in the world at this moment.”

She laughed up into his eyes. “I think so too,” she said.

She had suddenly become very much a girl, with the light of a feminine magic gleaming in her mischievous eyes.

“Are you flirting with me?” he demanded.

“How did you guess?” she asked.

The orchestra struck up again.

“Shall we dance?” she said, jumping up from the table.

“Yes,” he said. “Do you know, the last time I danced with you, I had been drinking, and thought I was dancing with a childhood playmate.”

“Aren’t I your childhood playmate?” she asked pausing at the edge of the dancing space.

“No, Serpent of the Nile,” he said, taking her in his arms. “And you aren’t a dryad, either,” he went on, as they mingled with the dancers. “You are a water-witch, that’s what you are. You dance like water in the sunlight. You are an exhalation from the salt sea wave. You have no body—which is even worse than having no soul; if I knew the proper magic words to pronounce, this which seems to be your body would dissolve, and I would hold in my arms only a handful of shining mist. You are really not here at all—there is no one here but me, talking to myself. In fact, now I think you must be somebody that I invented in a fanciful mood—a quite imaginary person.”

“You seem to have a number of contradictory theories about me,” she said.

“Yes—the only thing I am quite sure of is that you don’t really exist.”

“Are you sure that _you_ exist?” she mocked.

“No, now that I think of it, I’m not sure.”

“Perhaps you are an imaginary person that _I_ invented,” she insisted.

“If any one could invent me, I think you might.”

“Oh, easily!”

“That shows how little you know me,” he said. “I don’t think you invented me, after all. You would be prouder of me if you had. Masterpieces like that are not thrown off every day.”

“Masterpiece? A mere jeu d’esprit!”

“I renounce you utterly,” he said. “You are a base pretender. Besides, you are too young to have thought of such things. I believe you said you were twenty-five.”

“I lied, to impress you. I am twenty-four. How old are you?”

“I am twenty-four, too,” he said. “Remarkable coincidence!”

“Not at all. I am really twenty-seven.”

“Devil! How old are you?”

“Older than you, anyway.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I _am_ an awful liar,” she said, with an air of telling him a secret.

“I shall distrust every word you say henceforth.”

“Good—then I shall always tell the truth, and you’ll be no wiser. You can’t hold me.”

“Who wants to hold you? Not I!” he said.

“Oh, don’t you?”

“What would I do with you? What are you good for? No, I don’t want you. Go home,” he told her.

“Now I sha’n’t.”

“All right, stay then.”

“I’ve a rehearsal at ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” she remarked.

“What’s that to me?”

“I ought to go home and get some sleep.”

“Then you probably won’t.”

“No. I probably won’t.... There’s the waiter bringing our food.”

“It can wait,” he said.

“You’re in no hurry to get home, I take it?”

“No.”

The music ended. He led her back to their table.

“Besides—” he said. “I didn’t tell you about my new home, did I? It’s on the north side.”

“Where? I live on the north side too. Think of us two living in the midst of Wilson Avenue respectability. It’s very amusing.... Is it the dancing or the cocktail that gives us such an appetite?”

“Or the fact that we had no dinner, perhaps? Just off Wilson Avenue, near the L station. A dingy bachelor apartment.”

“It can’t be worse than mine. I fear I have no talent for home-making.”

“There’s a dance hall just across the street,” he said. “That’s why I left home tonight.”

“Why let that annoy you? Why not dance there?”

“Yes, why not? Will you go and dance with me?”

Her eyes lit up. “When?”

“Any time. I imagine it’s always in full blast. Tonight?”

“Yes!” She clapped her hands. “Now!”

“Our supper....”

“What of it? There are other places to eat, a dog-wagon will do. Come!” She rose, her eyes dancing.

He rose too, throwing his napkin on the table. “Never put off till tomorrow—”

He helped her on with her coat, and when the surprised waiter came with the wine, he demanded his check.

“Yes, sir. And the wine, sir?”

“Give it to me!” said the girl.

He handed it over with a dignified gesture.

“You should have borrowed a corkscrew, too!” said Felix, as they left the room.

“I didn’t want the wine,” she said. “I just wanted to walk out with it under my arm. I thought you might object.”

“Again you misjudge me,” said Felix. “You can do all the foolish things you want to—but don’t waste your time doing them to see whether I care. I don’t care. You can stand on your head here on Michigan Avenue if you like. I sha’n’t mind.”

“Shouldn’t you?” she said. “Well, then, if I may do as I please, then I sha’n’t do anything very outrageous. Would it be very outrageous to visit your apartment in the dead of night with this wine, before we go to the dance across the street? Will you be put out?”

“Probably,” said Felix. “But there are other places to live. There is always the park bench, when you have had me turned out of all my apartments.”

“Oh, my enthusiasm for you won’t last that long. Never fear!... Have we enough money to taxi up there?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s take the L. It’s quicker. Do you like me, Felix?”

“I sha’n’t tell you!”

They climbed the elevated steps, and waited for a train. A weary policeman waited there, the only other person on the platform.

“How do you suppose this adventure is going to end?” she asked, as they walked.

“Who knows?” he answered. “That’s the fun of an adventure—one never does know.”

She sighed. “If I thought you thought you knew—! But you don’t, do you?”

“And I don’t care.”

“Amazing youth! I can’t tease you, can I? So I won’t try any more.... Don’t you think I ought to go home and go to bed?”

“I’m sure you ought.”

“If we danced all night—”

“I think I will kiss you, right now. The idea has just occurred to me.”

Standing on the platform in the glare of the electric lights, under the amused eye of the policeman, they kissed each other.

“I _must_ go to that rehearsal at ten o’clock!” she said.

“You shall have three cups of the best coffee the Wilson Avenue Tea and Coffee Store affords,” he said smiling, “made by the most expert hands.”

She looked frightened. “Let’s _walk_ up to Wilson Avenue,” she said suddenly.

“Good. We can make it by breakfast time. I’d like a nice long walk!”

“No,” she said. “There’s our train coming! Besides, I can change my mind several times more on the way up....”

2

“You do make good coffee, Felix!” she said, the next morning. “One more cup, and I think I’ll be equal to the rehearsal. No, you mustn’t come with me.”

“I wasn’t going to go with you, foolish child. I’m merely going to escort you to the front door.”

At the street door she kissed him. “Don’t expect me!” she said. “If you wait for me, I shan’t come back.”

“And if I don’t?”

“You’ll probably find me curled up on your doorstep when you come home. Good-bye.”

He watched her disappear around the corner, then went out and looked on the sidewalk, and in the street. He was looking for a little book which he had tossed out of the window the night before.

He did not find it. Somebody had picked it up and carried it away.... But that was better than finding it crumpled and muddy in the gutter. It was the last thing binding him to his old life, and it was just as well that it should be utterly gone.

LVII. Three Days

1

“THERE are,” writes the learned Winckler in his History of Love, “erotic adventures, or misadventures, which do not arise from any real emotion between the two people immediately concerned, but are a banal reaction from the recent—or even remote—hurts of some other, authentic relationship. Made much of in modern fiction, these misadventures scarcely deserve such attention. It is unprofitable, even for the philosophic moralist, to inquire closely into the details of such baffling relationships; if mere flirtations, they are adulteries none the less; and if adulteries, they still remain mere flirtations. Lacking as they do any personal significance, these misadventures are as devoid of lasting interest to others as to the misadventures themselves.”

With all due deference to the learned Winckler, it may perhaps be suggested that the lack of any personal significance in such relationships, and the discovery of it by the persons involved, is worthy of record.... There is a charm, real if evanescent, in impersonality; and at times the weary mind finds in this charm a blessed anodyne. It seems, at such times, as though the very nothingness at the heart of such a relationship were the most beautiful thing in the world. A wanderer shipwrecked in a tumultuous tropic sea might well yearn to be cast up on some arctic shore. Deeper than the demands of the senses is the yearning for the Snow Princess, whose kisses are as cool as snowflakes. There is no fever of love in those kisses; their sweet hard chill is like the sight of marble contours; they have the calm of eternity in them.

During his first hours with Elva Macklin, it had seemed to Felix that he knew the profoundest secret of human wisdom—the vanity of desire. He desired nothing in the world, least of all any gift from his light-hearted companion in Nirvana. She had nothing to give; and whatever she might give and he might take, it was still nothing. It was strange, how like fire ice could be; but fire burns, and leaves nothing the same as before—it transmutes, or destroys; and this crystal flame left them both as they had been. They felt no need of each other; and they could not be disappointed. They were satisfied with themselves; and they could be content to remain strangers for all their nearness. No kiss could bridge the gulf between them; they did not want it bridged; and if they kissed, it was as though to prove that no intimacy, none whatever, could shatter their splendid and perfect isolation, no mere happy human closeness merge their triumphant individual identities. There was a defiance in their kisses—they were proving that they could be to each other everything and yet nothing.

It was quite true that Felix did not care, when Elva Macklin went off to her rehearsal, whether he ever saw her again; he knew she would return; but it made no difference. It never would make any difference. They were strangers; they would remain strangers for ever. There was no danger of love.

And as long as there was no danger, they would enjoy the happy charm of each other’s strangeness....

Felix did not go to his office; he stayed in the apartment, writing—writing a play. It was the same play he had been writing ever since his marriage; a new version, and different from all the others. Before, he had written fantastically of people as he wished them to be; now he wrote of them as they were. He knew, now, what human beings were like; himself outside the boundaries of their hopes and fears, he understood them, pitied them, loved them. He wrote of himself as he had been—caught hopelessly in the briary-bush of human passions.... Yes, this was a play at last. One must, it seemed, be outside things to understand them.

He was beginning to weary of this warm human nature in which his imagination was immersed, when Elva Macklin came, suddenly....

“Writing?” she said indifferently.

“Yes—a play.”

“Is there a part for me in it?”

“No—not in this one.”

She talked of the rehearsal. He put his manuscript aside.... She did not care, aside from the question of a part for her, whether he wrote plays or not; thank heaven! She did not care whether he ever became a playwright. She did not care if he ever did anything. She did not, the gods be praised, believe in him!

He went over and kissed her.

2

The second day he wrote again on his play, all day, while again she went to rehearsals. He had not gone to the office at all. He mentioned the fact. It was evident that she did not care. Whether or not the Evening Chronicle had a dramatic editor made no difference to her.

She talked of herself. She was doing her part in “Anatol” magnificently, she said.

He pressed her hand, glad that she was so pleased with herself. She did not need his reassurance. He could not have given it. He did not believe that she would ever do that part well.

He remarked that he was writing a great play. She smiled, and patted his hand. Probably she did not believe it. Anyway, she didn’t care, so long as he didn’t need sympathy and encouragement....

They were very happy....

3

The end came suddenly, on the morning of the fourth day. They were having coffee.

She yawned, and asked for another cup. “I don’t think I’ll come back today,” she said casually.

He laughed. He couldn’t help it.

“You, too?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said frankly. “I’m getting interested in my play.... I suppose I’ve been rather a nuisance, talking about that play!”

“And you’re bored hearing what a great actress I am!” she said.

They smiled at each other.

“It’s been very nice!” she said.

“You are a darling!” he told her.

“I’ll pay you a real compliment,” she said. “You are as much of an egotist as I am. I like you. I can go off now and think about my part and never give you another thought.... And you won’t mind.”

“No. But I, on the contrary, shall think about you often—and put you in a play sometime.”

They chatted until it was time for her to go to the rehearsal.

“Will you button my spats?” she asked.

He knelt and pried the buttons into their eyelets.

“Good-bye,” she said, and lifted her face to be kissed.

For the first time, in this good-bye kiss, there was expressed a real affection. At least, they were friends now. They wished each other well. They cared—a little—about each other. Doubtless that was why they had begun wanting each other’s praise, begun to be annoyed at each other’s indifference. They were friends already—they might perhaps become more than friends. That was why they were not going to see each other any more.

It had been perfect. It must not be spoiled.

“Good-bye, Felix dear.”

He put his arms about her.

“Good-bye, Bobbie Eulenspiegel.”

“I do like you.”

“I like you, too.”

They kissed again, and she went.

He turned back to his play.

4

Late that evening he finished the rough draft of his second act. That was as far as he could go. He had put into his characters all he knew of them. The rest of the play would wait. He put his manuscript away.

And as he put it away, the thoughts that it had shut out by its dream-like presentment of them began painfully to crowd in upon him.... Elva had been right; not caring was only a mood with him—and it was already over. She had predicted that it would last three hours. It had lasted three days.

All the emotions that he had forgotten and escaped rushed in to hurt and confuse him. His little moment of careless freedom was over.... Tomorrow he would go back to the office and see if he still had a job.

And what had been his marriage ... it could not be ended like this. He could not simply run away. They would have to meet and talk. Make arrangements.... The obsequies of marriage....

The past and the present were back again on his calendar.

LVIII. Rendezvous

1.

GOING back to the office the next morning, Felix had the sense of his absence—so momentous to himself—not having been particularly remarked.... True, there had been no new plays opening that week; and the editorial page could get along without his assistance. But it was strange to go back to the real world and find that it does not know you have been away!... He worked all morning, distractedly, on a column for the Saturday page, and arranged a layout of photographs of actors and actresses.

He had glanced that morning into the busy editorial writers’ room, and Clive had not been there. He had been assailed by a vague feeling of self-reproach, as his imagination presented to him the possible meaning of that absence. He had quite amazingly—it now seemed to him—left Clive out of his considerations altogether. How all this might affect Clive had simply not occurred to him.... They all of them had had a way of treating each other as super-people. They had disdained the notion of sparing each other’s feelings; they had not even been willing to admit that they had feelings which might require to be spared!... But there was no reason to believe that Clive, any more than himself, should come out of this emotional earthquake unscathed.

At noon he went in to ask about his friend. But as soon as he entered, Willie Smith looked up and said,

“Oh, here you are! Well, tell us what it’s all about!”

“What what’s about?” Felix asked, confused.

“Clive’s getting married. You know about it, don’t you? You don’t? Well, I thought you’d know all about it!”

“Is he married?”

“Where’s that card, Hosmer? Well, I’m surprised. I thought you’d be in on it.—Can’t you find that card? He’s married all right. To some girl named—I forget her name. And you didn’t know anything about it! Well, he had us guessing all week. He didn’t show up, and we thought he must be sick. And then Hosmer saw in the morning papers that a license had been issued to John C. Bangs and some girl. Hosmer’s entitled to all the credit for deducing that John C. Bangs was our old friend Clive—I wouldn’t believe it. And then the announcement came.—Oh, here it is, right here. Have you got any idea who the girl is?”

Felix took the card, on which was written in Clive’s small, precise handwriting:

_Phyllis Nelson and Clive Bangs announce their marriage at the City Hall in Chicago Friday, November twenty-eighth_

“Today!” he said. “Yes.... I know the girl. Will you give me the card? I suppose there’s one waiting for me at home, but I’d like to have this now.”

2

California!... Rose-Ann went about her work that same morning with the thought always in her mind. Going away would simplify everything. In California one could start one’s life anew.

There was no need to make a fuss about anything. She had her work. Life would go on. She would make new friends.... Yes, going away made it easy. She wouldn’t even have to plan for a new place to live, if she were going away soon; she could just take a room anywhere, and not tell any one where it was. Or she might even stay on in the studio. It was only for a little longer.

Yes, she would stay there; she wouldn’t hide herself. Nobody need pity her. After all, she and Felix had been drifting apart for a long time; they had been seeing less and less of each other; the break had come gradually; this was merely the end. There were some things about it that she did not understand—but no matter. She accepted the situation as it stood.

In that spirit of bravado, she went that noon to the little Hungarian restaurant where she and Felix and Clive and Phyllis had lunched so often. She went to her accustomed table, and sat there, remembering what Clive had once said and they had all laughingly agreed to, in the days when they believed themselves wonderful young people who could talk about anything—that if anything ever happened to them of the sort that “couldn’t be discussed,” they would come here and discuss it “in the teeth of God and Nature.”

Well, she was here and they were not.

She wondered at little at Clive’s absence. Was he off breaking his heart somewhere? Or had he, as they had all boasted of themselves, no heart to break? At all events, she had stood her ground.

Some one entered, and she looked up, as of old habit when she arrived first.

It was Felix.

3

She sat quietly and waited for him. He came over, seeming glad to see her, and slouched into a chair. “I wondered if I’d find you here,” he said.

“I wondered if you’d come!” she said. She was astonished to find in herself no emotion except that of being glad that he had come—simply that.

“Last night,” he said, “I wanted to come to see you. And I was afraid to, I guess. Because of things I didn’t want to tell you about—that I thought you wouldn’t understand.”

The table, that place dedicated to the telling of impossible truths, still had for them its old magic. “Last night,” she said, smiling ruefully, “I set the alarm clock to go off at midnight.... If you didn’t come by then, I was going to forget you.”

“And I didn’t come,” he said.

“No.... I waited till the clock went off. I said that if you came before that I would forgive you everything—anything.”

“How could I come?” he asked. “Before one can be forgiven, one must be ashamed. And I wasn’t ashamed. I’m not now.”

“Why should you be?” she asked.

“But you don’t know,” he said. “Or do you? Have you seen Phyllis?”

“Phyllis? No!”

“Neither have I—for three days.”

“But I thought—”

“No you didn’t.” He leaned forward. “Tell me—did you ever _believe_—not your mind, but with your emotions!—that I was in love with Phyllis? Were you ever really jealous of her? Did you ever take her seriously, as your rival?”

“No—not the real Phyllis—no. The real Phyllis I liked, and was sorry for and ... perhaps a little afraid of—but not as a rival. I _was_ jealous of the Phyllis who—who existed only in your mind.”

“My illusion of her, yes. But why?”

“Felix, you robbed me to give to that illusion. You loved in her what you refused to see in me to love. I might have been all that she was to you—and you wouldn’t let me! When you spoke of her, I kept thinking, ‘He might say those things of me!’—and you might, much more truly.”

“Then why did you push me into her arms—into the arms of the real Phyllis ... the one you were afraid of! Because you knew she’d hurt me? Was that it?”

They were talking in the eager low tones of their accustomed discussion, cut off by the influences of this spot from any disturbing sense of outer things—alone in an enchanted solitude, a magic circle into which none but the waiter could intrude.

“Hurt you?” A look of tenderness shone fleetingly in Rose-Ann’s eyes, half-contradicted by a triumphant smile. “Did she hurt you? I’m sorry, Felix.”

“Are you?”

“No—I’m glad! I wanted you to be hurt! I wanted to punish you—for dreaming of her—punish you by making you find out....”

“It would serve you right if the illusion had turned out to be true after all, wouldn’t it?”

“I thought it had, Felix. What happened?”

“I don’t know exactly. But look at this!”

He took the card from his pocket and put it before her.

At that moment the waiter came up, bowing them welcome. “You haf’ not been here for many days now,” he said. “I begin to think you desert us! Haf’ you your order ready?”

“You know what we want,” said Felix absently.

“Yes, sir. Everything shall be as always!” He beamed and ceased to exist.

Felix turned again to Rose-Ann, who sat staring quietly at the card.

“You aren’t surprised?” he asked.

“I feel that I knew it all along, somehow!” she said.

“Yes, so did I.... That’s the queer thing. All this other—”

“Was just Phyllis’s game with Clive. I don’t mean she did it on purpose. She couldn’t help it!”

“It was Clive’s game too,” he insisted.

“In a sense, yes.... She tormented him, ran away from him—and played up to you—all for Clive’s sake.... I’m sorry, Felix!”

“For me? You needn’t be. You were victimized too. By your pride—just as I by my vanity.”

“Yes,” she said, “and now—at last—they can have their happiness!”

They were silent for a moment, contemplating the tragic farce in which they had acted their tragi-comic parts.

“So,” he said ironically, “it was to make their marriage possible that we were so busy destroying our own!”

“No—I won’t have that. If she’s hurt you, I’m sorry, Felix; I really am. But I can’t think of us just as helpless victims. Why did we do it? We have our own quarrel, Felix.”

“Yes—a quarrel in which no one else counts. I know. But first let me explain. She did hurt me. But I found consolation.”

“In whom?” she asked sharply.

“Elva Macklin.”

“That queer egotistic little theatre-waif! Felix!”

“Say what you like—I’m not ashamed of it.”

“You _couldn’t_ love her!”

“No—I never pretended to. Nor she.”

“I’m ashamed for you, Felix, if you’re not!”

“Be ashamed, then. I can’t be. I’ve tried.”

“Why try?”

“People that are ashamed—can be forgiven.”

“But I can’t understand it....”

“Neither can I.”

“If it had been some one you loved—”

“You might have lost me.”

“I’ve lost you now,” she said sadly.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll tell you one thing I _am_ ashamed of. No—I don’t know whether I can or not. It’s too silly.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ll tell it backwards.... This morning I found a bottle of wine in my apartment—the relic of that orgy of which you are so scornful. It was unopened. I decided to make a present of it to my landlady. She thanked me and rummaged on a shelf and gave me in return a book—a book with my name in it that she had found in her area-way. She had been saving it for me.... That’s the end of the story. Here’s the book.”

He took from his pocket a soiled copy of the Bab Ballads. She gazed at it.

“Oh! you took it with you?”

“To my new home, yes—to remember you by. But wait. It did make me remember you—too well—and so I flung it out the window. That’s what I am ashamed of, Rose-Ann. I know it’s absurd. But we’re telling each other the truth.... And it’s not Elva, nor anything else—but just what I did to that book, that I want to ask your forgiveness for....”

“Was _she_ there?”

“Yes. That was why.”

“I’m glad you did it!”

“You don’t understand. That book—it’s more than just you, Rose-Ann: it’s all you stand for to me.... I wanted to get rid of it all.”

“What _do_ I stand for, to you?”

He thought a moment, and then answered, as if the word had pushed itself up out of the deeps of his mind.

“Reality.”

“Merely that?” Her voice was disdainful and challenging.

He took up its challenge.

“No—more than that. Pain. You stand for that.”

“I?”

“And heartbreak.”

“I?”

“And yesterday and tomorrow.”

“And am I,” she demanded quietly, “never to stand for any of the beautiful things?—Must you find them—or think you find them—in Phyllis ... and Elva?...”

He felt as though they had reached the crux of their discussion at last. And he felt, too, that it was a perilous moment. He could sense the forces of an intense resistance gathering in her mind.

“Yes, that’s our quarrel,” he said.

“What?”

He spoke with a sudden anger, only half repressed.

“You won’t help me. You never have. You tell me lies....”

“Felix!”

“Yes, you do. And I—I believe you, because it is you who tell them. Lies about life.”

“What have I told you?”

“That I could be free. I _was_ free, Rose-Ann. With Elva. For three days. That was quite enough. And that’s why I am not ashamed or sorry. I learned something from her that you refused to tell me.”

“What did you learn—from her?”

“That I don’t want freedom.”

“Don’t you?” she mocked gently. “The truth, Felix!”

“Oh, it’s beautiful enough! As death is more beautiful than life. As for me, after a little cupful of death, I prefer pain and heartbreak. I prefer you.”

“But—it’s as if you wanted me to make you unhappy, Felix.... That’s what you are saying!”

“Isn’t it true? You _have_ made me unhappy. And happy, too, Rose-Ann. The two things go together. I want them both. Not this mad, mystical peace that is like death.”

“The mad mystical peace of death,” she repeated. “You make it very alluring, Felix. One gets tired of life.... Just as you got tired of me. But perhaps—perhaps I am not what you think I am. Perhaps I can understand the joys of a little cupful of death—I, too.”

The waiter arrived with a savoury stew. He uncovered the dish with a flourish. It reeked of nutritiousness. They stared at it helplessly. The waiter went away.

“I can’t eat,” Rose-Ann said appealingly.

Sympathetically he passed her a cigarette.

“Felix,” she said, “I know what you think you want. It’s like that stew. You ought to want it; but you don’t. You want coffee and cigarettes and talk and poetry—not the solid food of life.... You try to fool yourself. And you try to fool me.”

She paused and then went on with sudden passion, “You’ve accused me of lying to you. It’s you who have lied! Whose fault is it if I didn’t mean what I said—that time? You’ve never been honest with me. You were never willing to face the future. I tried to talk with you, but you wouldn’t. You made me feel that I was wrong. And so I tried to believe differently about our marriage. And when the real truth came out—yes, the truth!—I wasn’t prepared to meet it. I was a coward.—Perhaps I’m a coward still. I don’t know. But I know this—I’m not willing to do what you say you want me to do—bind you, tame you, keep you. No! I won’t be ... _a wife_.”

LIX. Unanswered Questions

1

FELIX smiled at her. “Nor even a woman, Rose-Ann?”

“If that’s what being a woman is, no. But you’re mistaken. A woman can be something else besides that.”

“So it seems. I always had the notion that they understood life better than I did. But I’m mistaken, I guess.”

“Would you like to be _my_ keeper?” she flashed out. “Would _you_ want to guard and watch after me, and keep me in the paths I should go in?”

He looked at her intently. “So that—that is what you want?” he hazarded.

For a moment that seemed to him the truth hidden behind all Rose-Ann’s evasions. But before he had time to read confirmation in her startled eyes, the waiter came up.

“Is there anything else?—You don’t like the stew today?”

He stood there, a statue of injured pride, looking at the neglected dish.

“It’s a noble stew,” said Felix. “Nothing wrong with the stew. Bring our coffee.”

“Yes, sir. Shall I take away the stew?”

“Please.”

He bore it away with a mournful air.

2

Rose-Ann was sitting back in her chair with the air of the discussion having become too absurd to go on with.

Felix looked inquiry.

“How little we know each other after all,” she said.

“Meaning?”

“Have you forgotten what you said? I hope so.... Felix, if I wanted those things from my lover ... to be kept and guarded ... would I have chosen _you_?”

She dealt the blow lightly, looking away from him. He paled a little. “Perhaps not,” he said sullenly. And then—“Forgive me for being ridiculous.”

“I only meant,” she said, still looking away, “that I don’t want to spoil you. I like you as you are.... And if you insist upon being taught the cave-man virtues, why you will have to get some other woman to teach them to you. I decline the office.”

“Very well,” he said, “I sha’n’t ask you again.”

3

“It’s just as well the way it has turned out,” she said. “We might have made ourselves miserable trying to please each other. Now we can be ourselves.”

“And what is your notion of that?”

“For me—freedom.”

He smiled incredulously, scornfully.

“I’ve been trying,” she said, “against all my principles, to be a wife—for nearly two years. We both agree that I was a failure at it. I shall never try to be a wife again, Felix.... As for freedom—You speak as one who knows what it is. I have still to find out. Do you think you can forbid me my little cupfuls of mad, mystical peace?”

“Your coffee,” said the waiter.

“If I choose to have adventures, who are you to say No to me?” she said mockingly.

Felix did not answer.

4

“My paper is moving to Los Angeles this winter,” Rose-Ann said presently, in a casual tone.

“And I suppose,” he replied, in an equally casual way, “that you are going along....”

“I hope so,” she said. “The details aren’t settled yet, but I expect to go.... Perhaps very soon.”

“I forgot to tell you,” he remarked, “that I am writing another play.”

“I should like to see it before I go. Won’t you come in to see me occasionally? I’m going to stay in the studio until I leave. There’s no reason why we can’t be friends.”

“None whatever,” he said.

“I’m glad we’ve had this talk, Felix. Talk does straighten things out, doesn’t it? And now I must hurry back to the office. You _will_ come and see me?”

“Yes. I’ll stay and finish my coffee if you don’t mind.”

She went away, and he sat there for a long time, smoking cigarettes.

LX. A Leave-taking

1

ROSE-ANN left for Los Angeles during the Christmas holidays. During the month that had elapsed before her departure, Felix had been to see her several times a week.... There is something disconcerting in finding oneself treated by one’s wife as a new acquaintance—in a politely friendly manner, quite as she treats any other guest. He had gone away more than once secretly enraged, swearing that he would not go again; at other times it seemed to him a prodigious joke.

To knock at the door of his own studio; to sit as a guest upon a chair he had painted with his own hands; that was sufficiently strange. To invite formally to dinner—in order not to be merely one of several of her friends and admirers, in order to have a word with her alone—the girl with whom one has talked all night more nights than one could remember: that was stranger still. But to be met at the door, when you came to your studio a little early to escort her to that dinner, by a rather shy startled figure in a scarlet dressing gown well-known to you, but now clasped with firm fingers at her bosom, and asked to wait before the fire while she finished dressing behind the screen at the back, in a tone which cancelled utterly the countless intimacies that you have shared—that was the strangest of all.... Was it any wonder that, having thus achieved the opportunity for a word or two alone with her he should have found it impossible to say any words whatever except such as would be appropriate addressed to a young woman with whom one stood on such a footing? One might talk to her seriously about ideas, or lightly about friends; one might be argumentative or witty; one might pay her compliments, even equivocal and daring compliments, of whose double meaning she would seem unconscious; one might, in short, pay court to her as one might to a hundred others.

But as for anything more—

Try it and see.... Treat a young woman to whom you are a perfect stranger, with an air of familiar lang syne; show up her airs of reserve as an absurd affectation; stand for no nonsense from her! Do not let her pretend; break down that silly barrier of proud virginal constraint. Remind her that in some previous existence, millions of years ago, she was the docile companion of your pillow. What right has she to that look of a defiant vestal?... Yes, tell her so!

Did you think she was yours, that she belonged to you now and henceforth? Well you are mistaken. She belongs to herself.

You remember a time when—? Well, she doesn’t remember. Pay your court! Perhaps in another thousand years or so you may get to be fairly well acquainted with her. Not so well acquainted as Tom, who jests with her familiarly, or Billy, whom she pets, or that young painter, of whom she seems quite fond; but she likes you, after a fashion—yes, she even encourages you to persevere.

“_Had we but world enough, and time This coyness, lady, were no crime!_”

But day after day, in this preposterous fashion, is slipping past; and she says she is going to Los Angeles: and who are you to prevent her?

To Felix it bore very much the aspect of ironic comedy. One can often see a joke when one cannot laugh at it. But what, after all, was the point of this particular joke?

If it was a demonstration that a married couple who have parted may continue to remain good friends, it was eminently successful. That appeared to be the way everybody took it. After the first shock, people seemed pleased. He and Rose-Ann had illustrated the virtues of modernistic marriage; now they were illustrating the virtues of modernistic divorce—something even more exciting!

_Was_ this a divorce?—the human fact which the law in its laborious way confirmed after due and hypocritic consideration! They were apart; Rose-Ann was going away; what did that mean except a complete separation of their lives? It might be unthinkable, and yet happen just the same. Everything that had happened was unthinkable: divorce was no more so than any of the rest.

He loved her? Well, she knew that. And she loved him—there was no need of questioning that. But she was going away nevertheless: and he was going to let her go away.

How the devil could he stop her?

Plead with her, make promises, threaten, weep? That was child’s play. Rose-Ann was not going away because he had omitted to make a scene.

They were past the day of scenes; they had had scenes enough. It wasn’t that she wanted. Her going wasn’t an idle gesture to evoke his tears. She meant it.

He had never understood her; he realized it now. He had had her in his arms and let her slip out of them; and he didn’t know how to win her back.

It was precisely as if they had never been married at all. He was wooing her under difficulties. He wasn’t succeeding....

On the evening before she took her train for Los Angeles—she had been very sweet to him in a touch-me-not way all that week—he said to her:

“Must you go, Rose-Ann? I wish you wouldn’t.”

It was hard to say even so much. He said it quietly enough: there was no need to dramatize the situation. She knew what she was doing to him in going away. He couldn’t ask for her pity.

She looked hastily around. She was making fudge in her dismantled studio for a party of friends, and Felix was assisting her. But nobody had overheard his—as it seemed—improper proposal.

She bent close to him, touching his shoulder with hers. “Don’t spoil my good-bye party!” she whispered reproachfully; and then stealthily patted his knee with her hand, as if to make amends for her scolding.

He did not ask, after that, to see her off; it was she who commanded his presence. He went sullenly.

She talked about everything which least concerned them, and he wished himself away. He hated her at that moment.

They were in the Pullman, with one more minute by Felix’s watch before the train started. He was wishing it were over, when she smiled reminiscently and said “Do you remember seeing me off to Springfield two years ago?”

“I remember,” he said doggedly. Why did she want to torment him?

“Only two years—and a whole lifetime to forget them in,” she mused. “We ought to be able to manage that.”

He looked up, but did not reply.

“Aren’t you going to kiss me good-bye?” she said.

He put his arms about her—and once more, as a long time ago, they were swept together in a passionate embrace, that sought by its very pain to impress this moment on their souls, to annihilate time and space for them, and make them remember it always....

And then Felix was outside on the platform, and she was waving him a cheerful good-bye.

2

Back in his apartment, where he had not been since morning, he found a note from Clive, asking him to come out and spend the week-end in Woods Point. Clive had thrown up his job on the Chronicle to write his long postponed novel. As he had told it, he and Phyllis had tossed up a penny to decide which should come first—his novel or her baby ... and he had lost.

The invitation annoyed Felix. He didn’t want to go to Woods Point to hear about Clive’s novel.

He sat down at his desk and took out the manuscript of his unfinished play.

LXI. Two Men Discuss a Girl

1

THERE was one thing about writing which Felix felt had never been done justice to by those who had praised the art of literature—it could quite astonishingly fill up the hollow emptiness of one’s idle hours. This quality, to be sure, it shared with drinking, opium-smoking, mathematics, pure science, pre-pragmatic philosophy, chess and the collecting of first editions, Japanese prints and postage stamps. But it was less debilitating than drink and philosophy; a surer refuge than chess; and there were no auctions to attend. Moreover one could work out the third act of a play with a triumphant certitude and power such as is denied to people who are engaged in trying to work out conclusions in their personal lives.

When he finished his play, late in January, he was appalled to find that he had nothing with which to occupy his spare time.... Of course, he might write his play over again. But he was angry at that play, now he had finished it. It had ended happily. Couldn’t one end anything happily except on paper?

On a sudden impulse, he went to the railway station one evening and inquired what time a train left for Springfield. He had got to thinking of Rose-Ann’s father. For some reason he wanted to see him.... He found that there was a train leaving in half an hour which would reach Springfield in the middle of the night....

He wanted to see Rose-Ann’s father: if he waited to make sensible arrangements and pack a bag, something would happen to keep him from going.... He bought a ticket, feeling of his unshaven cheek with ink-stained fingers and reflecting that he looked like a tramp—and went aboard the train.

2

The streets of Springfield were covered with new fallen snow. There were apparently no street cars running at that hour. Felix started to walk toward the Prentiss residence.

He walked for an hour. It was still dark when he reached the big house on the corner. As he approached from a side-street he could see a light burning in the Rev. Mr. Prentiss’s study, at the back of the house.

The ground slanted upward from the street, and Felix climbed the stone coping and scrambled up into the back yard. Going up a terrace at the back end of the lot, he could see into the window of the study upstairs. Rose-Ann’s father was sitting at his desk, with an unlighted cigar in his mouth, not reading or writing, but just sitting there, looking at the lamp. Felix watched him. Once he moved abruptly, and shifted his unlighted cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other, and then sat quietly as before, looking at the lamp.

Felix moved incautiously, and stumbled off the terrace, covering himself with snow. He stood up and brushed it off, and then went down by the back porch underneath the studio window. A memory of Eddie Silver, throwing dollars at the window of his Canal street home, came into his mind, and he felt in his pocket for a coin and rather cautiously threw it up at the window.

It went wide of the mark. He threw another and it tinkled sharply against the glass. He stepped back, and he could see a shadow on the window-pane where Rose-Ann’s father had moved between it and the lamp.

He waited a half-minute, and threw a third coin. It rapped squarely against the pane, and a moment later the window was raised and Rose-Ann’s father had leaned out. His unlighted cigar was still in his mouth, and a lock of his grey hair fell forward from the back of his head, waving like a plume. He saw Felix standing in the snow.

For a moment the two stared at each other, and then Rose-Ann’s father leaned out still further and pointed downward with an angular arm. Felix pointed toward the porch inquiringly, and Rose-Ann’s father nodded emphatically. Then, it being clear that they understood each other, he shut the window.

Felix went up on the porch, after stamping the snow from his shoes. A light was turned on in the kitchen, and the door opened. Mr. Prentiss came out, closed the door softly behind him, and pressed Felix’s hand.

“Come on up to my study,” he whispered, “but be quiet, so we won’t wake everybody up.”

With an air of two conspirators, they went softly through the kitchen and dining room, into the hall, and up the stairs. When he had closed his study door behind them, Mr. Prentiss spoke aloud:

“It’s all right now. Nobody can hear us up here.” And again he shook hands with Felix. “You look done up,” he said.

“I walked from the station,” said Felix, “and I fell down in your back yard.” He laughed. “I look like a disreputable character—I wonder what Rose-Ann’s brothers would say if they saw me now!”

“Sit down,” said Rose-Ann’s father, and pulled up a chair in front of his own. “Have a cigar? You’ll find it more restful than those cigarettes of yours. Try this one.”

“Thanks,” said Felix.

Rose-Ann’s father threw away his gnawed unlighted cigar and took another. They lighted up, and smoked for a moment in silence.

“So you came to see me...,” said Rose-Ann’s father. “I was thinking about coming up to Chicago to see you....”

“I suppose,” said Felix, “that you know what the situation is?”

“Mm—yes.... Rose-Ann never tells me anything. I have to be a mind-reader. But usually I can figure out what’s going on. When she was here this time it wasn’t hard to guess what the trouble was.”

“I suppose not,” said Felix. “It must seem simple enough to any one on the outside....”

“And then,” said Mr. Prentiss with a guilty look, “I’ve a habit of getting into correspondence with some of Rose-Ann’s friends. They drop a bit of news now and then.... I used to have quite a correspondence with Will Blake at the Community House. That is why I wasn’t so surprised when I heard you two were married.... And lately I’ve been writing to Clive Bangs—very interesting young man: He tells me about a novel he’s writing; and sometimes he puts in a word or two about Rose-Ann; not very much, but then I know Rose-Ann; so I can figure things out.... I had a letter from him today....”

“What does he say?” asked Felix.

“Nothing in particular; just that he hears that Rose-Ann is quite happy about her work in California.”

“You didn’t know she’d gone?”

“No—she never tells me anything. Not until a long time after it’s happened.”

“Well, were you surprised?”

Rose-Ann’s father puffed on his cigar. “No—I can’t say that I was surprised exactly. I’ve known her a long time.”

“And I’ve only known her a little more than two years,” said Felix.

“She always was a difficult child to manage,” said Mr. Prentiss. “Not that I was ever any good at managing her. I just let her have her own way.”

“I seem to be pursuing the same tactics,” said Felix grimly.

Rose-Ann’s father rose and walked across the room and back, his thumbs locked behind his back, the cigar still in his mouth.

He paused before Felix. “Well,” he demanded defensively, “what else can we do?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” said Felix. He laid down his cigar, looked at it with disapproval and lighted one of his own cigarettes.

“Is it—is it all over between you?” asked Rose-Ann’s father softly and rather timidly, looking down at Felix.

“It looks very much that way,” said Felix gloomily.

“I was afraid so,” said Rose-Ann’s father sadly, “I was afraid so.”

He walked away, puffing out fierce clouds of smoke.

“It’s my fault,” said Felix.

“Mm—yes—yes,” said Rose-Ann’s father from the other side of the room where he had halted with his back to Felix. “Yes, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“I was unfaithful to her,” said Felix doggedly.

“Yes, yes,” said Rose-Ann’s father hastily from his corner. “That can happen, too. Women are—they drive you to it.”

Felix looked at him in surprise.

Rose-Ann’s father turned around to face him. “I’m an old man,” he said apologetically, “and a priest. You can’t expect me to take things like that as seriously as you young folks do. I hear about the sins of the flesh too often to be very much impressed with them.”

“I just thought you ought to know,” murmured Felix.

“Well, now, to get to the point,” said Mr. Prentiss, “what are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” said Felix. “I’m trying to consider Rose-Ann’s happiness.... She seems to be able to get along without me....”

“Seems to be? seems to be? You don’t seem so certain of it yourself?”

“If she can be happy with some one else, why should I interfere?” Felix muttered.

“Who is this some one else?” asked Rose-Ann’s father, taking up his march across the room. “Some one in California?”

“Yes, a poet.... I’ve my own little system of espionage, too. I got very chummy with the art editor of the Motion Picture World before he left, and he writes me all the gossip.... Besides I’ve Rose-Ann’s description of him in her last letter to me—we’re still friends, you know. ‘Tall, awkward, black-haired, blazing black-eyed’—sounds quite romantic.”

“Another one of her young geniuses,” said Rose-Ann’s father with a sigh.

“Another?”

“Yes.... She’s always had an eye for young genius. Queer-looking specimens usually ... you should have seen the one she brought home from Chicago once. Name was—Dick, Dick something. A poet. Never heard what became of him, but I imagine that he died of drugs.”

“Was she in love with him?”

“It’s hard to say. I don’t know whether she’s ever been in love.”

“What!”

Rose-Ann’s father came to a halt again. “Oh, yes, she married you; but she ran away from you.... And the nearest I can come to telling you why, is that I suspect she ran away because she was afraid she _would_ love you.... If that sounds foolish, just put it down to the maunderings of an old man.”

“It doesn’t sound foolish to me,” said Felix. “It sounds—true.”

“Well, then, I’ll tell you something else. I imagine she’s nearer to being in love with you _now_ than she was when she married you! What do you think of that?”

“Perhaps it’s only because it’s what I wish to believe,” said Felix, “but it sounds like gospel.”

“There’s such a thing as being afraid of falling in love,” mused Rose-Ann’s father. “I think she married you because she thought she would be safe from that danger—I know it doesn’t sound very complimentary to you, but maybe you know what I mean—and she ran away from you because she found out she was mistaken.”

“I know,” said Felix, “she’s always been afraid of love.... So have I, for that matter.”

“That’s why she chose you.”

“Yes.”

“Well, there you are. I’m afraid this doesn’t help the situation any.” Mr. Prentiss moved away, puffing his cigar.

“So you think it’s no use?”

“The question is,” said Rose-Ann’s father, “can you tame her?”

Tame her! Felix remembered suddenly the conversation he had had with Rose-Ann at their restaurant rendezvous....

Rose-Ann’s father sighed. “I’ve never tried....”

“Neither have I,” said Felix. “It might be worth while!”

Rose-Ann’s father looked at him quizzically, and for the first time Felix felt in his kindly smile the cynical quality which Rose-Ann had referred to more than once.

Rose-Ann’s father shook his head. “You’re too much like me,” he said.

“I’m her husband, confound it,” said Felix, jumping up. “Where is my hat?”

Rose-Ann’s father regarded him sympathetically. “You won’t stay to breakfast?” he said. “Well—good luck, young man!”

LXII. Theory and Practice

1

AT the end of the second day out on the Santa Fe, Felix had begun to leave winter behind; the desert was blossoming with strange white and scarlet flowers; and the next morning he rode past orange-groves golden with fruit and white with bloom, and quaint little rose-gardens at the way-stations, toward that purple infinite depth along the horizon which began to lift itself into the white peaks of a mountain range. Felix had been vaguely aware that the climate of southern California was supposed to differ from that of the Great Lakes, but to be riding out of a world of ice and snow straight into the heart of spring, seemed to him at once miraculous and auspicious. The green and gold of this new world was significant to him not as a fact of geography, but as a magical response of nature to his heart’s impatience. It was a promise of happiness.

Felix was in need of some such happy auspice to hearten him. The determination with which he had started out had been undermined by two days and nights of solitary thought. Sometimes he felt like a martyr going to the stake; and sometimes like a fool. But he was upheld by a theory.

It was the latest of all his theories concerning life in general and himself and Rose-Ann in particular; and he had resolved to act upon that theory at all costs, no matter how absurd it might at any moment seem.

His theory was this: that he and Rose-Ann were married....

The question of _how_ married, whether by the authority of the State of Illinois, or by their own free will and consent, was not permitted to be raised; for if once one started in considering questions like that, one got nowhere! The _how_ of anything in the world was a question one might debate for ever. Plato and H. G. Wells—St. Paul and Bernard Shaw—Tolstoi and Nietzsche—Dante and Milton—and Edward Bok ... the sages had never agreed what marriage was. Some said it was a social arrangement, some an agreement between two individuals, some a mystical sacrament; others considered it a necessary evil; and still others a damned nuisance. Felix himself had inclined to the view that it was a relic of barbarism, connected in some way with those other barbaric institutions, Private Property and the State. Perhaps it was; but that was not the point. Whether as a survival of the barbaric idea of possession or by common understanding and consent, whether by the majestic force of law or by private agreement, whether by sensual habitude or as an outward and visible sign of some inward and spiritual grace—they were man and wife.

That seemed to simplify the situation immensely. The relations of two individuals, as such, were infinitely complex and incalculable; but the relations of man and wife were something that the mind could comprehend. Thus—what had happened, as an incident in the history of two human bundles of emotions and ideas, was a mystery profound and unfathomable; but as an incident in the history of a marriage, it was no mystery at all—it was just a quarrel.... Married people often quarreled. Why? Perhaps because they were married.... And—generally—they made up. Perhaps for the same reason.

It was a comfort to merge the uniqueness of one’s woes in the ocean of generality—to feel that in this very perturbation he was representative of a vast class; that even here he was simply a husband!

And the solution of his difficulties was—this being the conclusion to which his theory led—to try to behave like any other husband in the same circumstances. Not—he was quite certain of this—not like Felix Fay. Not like a young man who has read learned books on psychology. But like a husband....

He had elaborated his theory in the spare moments of twenty-four hours devoted to arranging his affairs at the office so that he could be gone for an indefinite period. His first impulse had been to take the train and let his job go hang; but a young man who has just discovered that he is a husband realizes the significance of a job in its relation to his marriage. If he failed in his errand, the job did not matter; but it mattered very much if he succeeded.... And yet—he could not explain his predicament to any one; his very dignity as a husband was bound up in his not admitting that anything had gone wrong with his marriage. He had to think up some plausible lie to tell the managing editor. His play—Los Angeles—the moving pictures—five thousand dollars—a chance to direct it personally ... a lie like that was the sort of thing people liked to believe. The mention of five thousand dollars ought to convince any managing editor.... And it did.

The afternoon before he took the train, Felix had gone to see old Mrs. Perk at the Community House Theatre. She was still there, sewing costumes. He threaded a needle for her. They gossiped for a while. Then he asked her suddenly,

“Granny Perk, did you ever run away from your husband?”

A delicious smile of reminiscence stole over her plump old face.

“Yes, bless your heart, I did!” she said. It was as if he had recalled to her some exquisite and delicious adventure.

She shook her head. “I was young,” she said, as if that explained much. “I was a girl as liked to have my own way. And so,” she said proudly, “one day, I took the bit in my teeth and ran away!”

She put her chin in her plump hand and contemplated her memories.

“It sounds very exciting,” said Felix.

“Exciting’s no name for it,” said Granny Perk. “It was just regular sinful!”

“What did you do, Granny Perk?” he asked curiously.

She straightened up, and looked at him severely.

“I wouldn’t be putting ideas into the heads of young folks that are well brought up and content with things as they find them,” she said. “Nowadays the boys and girls talk as they should not, but they behave proper enough. It was different in my time. I wouldn’t say Boo to a goose—but I was a wild one for all that. But I’m not one to corrupt the youth of the land. So ask me no questions!”

“Tell me one thing,” said Felix. “What did your husband do when you ran away?”

“Why, he came after me, to be sure, and brought me home.”

“And you lived happily ever after?” asked Felix, laughingly.

“Oh, well now, I guess we got along as well as most,” she said. “I’ve nothing to complain of....”

Did human life go to that pattern, Felix wondered. And if so, what was the use of all his speculations and emotions? He wished he could go after Rose-Ann in the mood of Granny Perk’s husband, to whom it had been the most inevitable thing in the world. As it was, he had to brace himself against intellectual doubts for two days and nights with an intellectual theory: the theory that he was Rose-Ann’s husband after all.

If he could just remember that—whatever happened!

How does a husband behave on such an occasion? With firmness? That seemed rather absurd. With a tactful brutality? Felix sighed. It would be hard to enact this difficult rôle....

But it was spring—miraculously spring in the dead of winter, and he was going to Rose-Ann! Yucca-blooms and cactus-blossoms, roses and oranges, warm sunlight and the green of riotous vegetation—spring!

It was noon on Saturday that he reached Los Angeles. He went to a hotel, and lunched. Then he took the Pacific Electric to Santa Monica.... Rose-Ann lived in Santa Monica.

2

When Rose-Ann reached her apartment in Santa Monica, after a leisurely lunch in Los Angeles, and turned her key in the lock, she heard some one inside spring up and come to the door. It was opened for her, and Felix stood there smiling.

“How did you get in?” she demanded in surprise.

“Never mind how I got in,” he said. “I’m here.”

“It’s a matter of some importance to me how you got in,” she retorted, edging around him into the room and putting her purse on the little table. “I am known here as Miss Prentiss. The people here suppose me to be unmarried....” she paused. “How _did_ you get in?”

“I walked in.... You had left your door unlocked.”

“Oh!”

“Aren’t you glad to see me?”

She relaxed her attitude of defence, and came over to give him her hand. “Forgive me, Felix, for being so sensitive. I _am_ glad to see you. As well as surprised.”

Her last remark was a demand for explanations.... Should he tell her why he had come? Or dissemble his intentions? Courage!

“You know why I came,” he said.

She was on guard again instantly at the challenge in his voice.

“No.... Why?”

“Guess!”

He had only his theory to uphold him. Never had she seemed more utterly alien than she became in that moment. There was a cool surprise in her manner, and he felt as though he had committed some stupid insolence.

She did not reply, but only looked at him. He was making up his mind.... Now was the time when any husband in the world would assert his mastery of the situation. A contemptuous phrase came into his mind: “cave-man stuff!”

As if she were reading the thoughts in his mind, her cheeks grew red and then white, and her eyes blazed dangerously. Every muscle was taut.

He took one step toward her; and in that instant a wild frightened look came into her eyes ... like that in an animal’s caught in a trap. He turned away, saw a chair before him, and sat down, sick at heart. No, he would rather fail, than succeed—that way.

When he looked up, she was standing, a little dizzily, beside the table, steadying herself with her hand.

His theory had been wrong.... It wasn’t husband and wife—it was himself and Rose-Ann.

And yet—was she despising him? Well, let her.

“How long have you been in town?” she asked, quite naturally.

“I arrived this noon,” he answered quietly.

“Then you haven’t seen anything yet.”

“No.”

“There are some lovely places.”

“I suppose so.”

“I’ll show you about, if I may. I’d like to.”

“I sha’n’t be here long,” he said. “Only a few days.” Since he had failed, he might as well go back quickly.

“I’m sorry you can’t stay longer,” she said—wistfully, it seemed.

That silly lie he had told to the managing editor to save his dignity, came into his mind. It would save his dignity here too.

“I came to see the moving picture people about my play,” he said.

“Oh, did Winters write you about it?”

“Winters? No.”

“I told him about it, and he was very much interested.”

How utterly absurd! His play a movie!... Still, under the circumstances, he could hardly say that to her....

“You haven’t settled anything finally, have you?” she went on. “Because you really ought to see Winters. I’ll introduce you, if you wish.”

“That will be fine,” he said mechanically. He wished he could tell her it was a lie; but that would be a confession of his purpose in coming—and his failure.

“What are you doing this afternoon?” she pursued.

“Nothing,” he said.

She laughed. “You might be sociable and invite me to tea!”

He pulled himself together. He must play this thing out somehow. It was only for a few days.

“Tea?” he repeated stupidly.

“Can’t you come? Then how about dinner?—No—” she bit her lip. “I forgot—I’ve an engagement for dinner. But—I suppose I can break it ... if you’d like me to.”

“No, don’t break your dinner engagement. I can come to tea,” he said.

She hesitated, and then said appealing, “I want to be good friends with you, Felix!”

“I see no reason why we shouldn’t be,” he said.... That wasn’t very well done—he ought to be able to do better than that.... “It will be very nice to have tea with you.”

“Have you seen the Palisades?” she asked.

“No.”

“No, of course not....”

“The Palisades?” He appeared inquiringly interested.

“Pergolas and palm-trees. You’ll like it. We’ll go there for a walk.”

He smiled. “That will be lovely!”

Rose-Ann put on her hat, and looked at it in the mirror. It did not satisfy her, and she went to a closet for another. She viewed herself with dissatisfaction, and then turned to him and said lightly,

“Wait for me downstairs, Felix, while I change into some fresh things—I get so tired of my work-clothes.”

He was swept with a sudden uncontrollable anger, so that he trembled as he stood up.... It was strange that this petty humiliation, and not the thought of losing her for ever, should destroy his self-possession! He was ashamed of himself. He went toward the door.... Once outside, he would go away and go home and never see her again....

She followed him to the door and put her hands on his shoulders; and then they were in one another’s arms.

3

Rose-Ann began to cry.

“We’ve spoiled it all,” she said.

“How have we spoiled it?” he asked tenderly but troubledly. “You love me....”

“I love you.... I think so. Or at least I was terribly lonely for you. But—”

“But what?”

“This only makes it so much harder. This—_this_ hasn’t changed my mind, Felix.” She sat up on the couch.

“I shall never let you leave me now.”

“I’m afraid—you’ll have to find some other way of keeping me.”

“I shall,” he said defiantly.

“I—hope so, Felix.... I wish I could feel that I was really and truly your wife. I don’t—yet.”

“Then,” he said slowly, “play at being my wife—for a while. Can you do that?”

“I’ve played at it for nearly two years. It was nice enough. I guess I can—a little longer. Do you suppose that is what it will come to?—just playing at being married, Felix?”

“No. Never. We’ll find the answer this time.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to talk everything out....”

“We’ve talked so often, Felix!”

“Once more!”

“Yes ... but not now. Let’s play at being happy first. Shall we go outdoors?”

“Yes.”

“And have our tea.... Felix, you will love the palm-trees! I’ll put on my prettiest frock—for you.”

LXIII. In Play

1

BY an unspoken agreement they postponed their discussion from hour to hour. They were too happy to want to question that happiness. For the moment all was well.

They were playing at being married; playing that everything was all right.... And the very fear which lurked in the back of their minds of that impending hour when they must reopen old wounds, heightened the beauty of the present moment.

They loitered on “the Palisades,” under palm-trees, in the hot sunshine, and drank in the cold breeze from the ocean—into whose waters, still winter-cold, only the seagulls dared to dive.

They walked, under the eaves of that low cliff-wall along the shore, among the few early holiday-makers, and the mothers who had brought their children down to play on the beach. They watched the children feeding the seagulls—throwing their remnants of sandwiches out into the water, for the friendly birds to swoop down and take; and the children would clap their hands and venture down closer to the water’s edge until some icy wave would sweep in and send them scampering barelegged back over the sand—a lovely game of children and birds and waves that one could watch for ever....

Further down the beach they came to an Inn, where they sat on a balcony and drank tea with rice-cakes, and watched the sun sink lingeringly through bank after bank of cloud into the very ocean, taking with it suddenly the day.

They went to one of the play-places on the beach, and danced and dined, and rode on childish and breath-taking roller-coasting journeys. And at midnight, still unwearied, still flooded with the joy of being alive and together, they wandered back up the shore, to its remoter haunts, past the piers gleaming with lights, into the darkness wanly illumined by a young moon that climbed up behind the ragged rocks to shoreward.

“Let’s come here tomorrow night and build a bonfire,” said Rose-Ann. “And bring our supper.”

They lay on the sand, still warm from the blaze of day, under the cool wind from the sea, glad to have put off the testing of their happiness another day.

They went back to her apartment.

“What about this alleged poet of yours, Rose-Ann?” he asked casually.

“Eugene?”

“I didn’t know his name....”

“Well ... he doesn’t count, if that’s what you mean.”

And she kissed him, as if anxious to prove herself all his. Tonight there should be no cloud on their happiness.

2

They breakfasted lazily Sunday noon at a tea-shop in Santa Monica, kept by three quaint little Englishwomen; they dawdled over their shirred eggs and toast and coffee until mid-afternoon, talking. Their table was on a porch under a stucco archway, half screened from the road by a trellis covered with roses.

“Everything is too beautiful,” said Rose-Ann. “What have we done to deserve this?”

“Would you like to live here—always?” he asked.

“I’d like to have been a child here,” she said. “But the mid-western winter has got into my blood. I guess I want to see snow again!”

“It does seem immoral,” he laughed, “—flowers in February!”

“I may go away,” she said. “Soon.... But not back to Chicago.”

“Why?” he asked in surprise.

“This—this magazine adventure—is over.... I was working to become editor. And now they’ve offered me the position. And I don’t want it. Isn’t it funny? It just doesn’t mean anything to me.... I shall try something different....”

“So shall I,” he said unexpectedly. “I’m tired of my job, too.”

She smiled. “When you’ve made your fortune in the movies—”

“That was all a damned lie, Rose-Ann. I haven’t the slightest idea of selling anything to the movies.”

“You’ve no idea how easy it is,” she said.

“Then that’s another reason for my not being interested,” he said. “I’m tired of easy things.... I lied to the managing editor to get to come out here. It was too easy. It’s all too easy.... No, I’m in earnest about it.—I came to Chicago expecting to have to fight my way. Chicago was too damned nice to me. I’ve been living in a pasteboard world ever since. Look at my job—I come and go when I please; and I can say anything I like.”

“The Fortunate Youth!” she murmured.

“The Intellectual Playboy,” he said. “I can say what I like—because nobody cares. That’s the truth. There’s nothing heroic in differing with the crowd when the crowd pays you to do it.”

“Do you want to be heroic, Felix?”

“Yes. I’d like to live in a world where ideas counted for something—where people might put you in jail if you disagreed with them. Then it would be worth while to have opinions of one’s own. One could find out whether one really believed in one’s ideas!”

“Find out—how?”

“By suffering for them a little.”

“You _are_ a Puritan!”

“It’s not that.... I want the feeling of other minds resisting the impact of my own, as sword clashes with sword. How can I know whether my ideas are true unless they are put to that test? But I’m let think as I please. It’s not a battle, it’s a sleight-of-hand performance. It’s vaudeville.”

“I didn’t know you felt that way about your work, Felix.”

“You want to throw up your job, Rose-Ann. Why shouldn’t I?”

She could not quite tell whether he meant it or not.

“And write?” she asked.

“Oh, yes. But that’s not enough. I’m going to do something hard.—Oh, I could be what’s called a literary artist ... the _mot juste_ and all that; that’s easy, too. One has only to be sufficiently bored or unhappy.... No, I want to deal with something harder than words. I want to build something with my hands—a house, for instance. Why not?”

She leaned forward, smiling. It was sufficiently clear that he was not in earnest. “Where will you build your house?”

“Not in this golden land where it is always afternoon. And not too near Chicago, either. Do you remember the Dunes where we picnicked last summer? There, perhaps. Away from everything.”

“I know where you mean. Yes. What kind of house will you build?”

“I suppose that depends to some extent on how much money I have. Let me see, I had thrown up my job a moment ago! I take it back again. Now that I have a house to build, I shall need it. How much do houses cost?”

“It depends on how large they are.”

“This will be large, but not too large, I should say.”

“Then it will take a small, but not too small, sum of money.”

“Just as I thought. And if anybody should be so foolish as to want my play—”

“But do you really mean all this, Felix?”

“Why not? Why can’t I have a house like other people? I realize more and more as time goes on that I am not essentially different from other people. They want houses. Why shouldn’t I?”

“If you’re in earnest about it, then it isn’t a house you mean, Felix. It’s a studio. That wouldn’t cost very much.”

“No. A house!” he insisted.

“But why a house?” she asked.

“Why do people want houses?” he countered.

“But—” she said.

“Yes?”

“You want a place to write in, Felix.”

“I shall write in the barn,” he said.

“Oh, is there to be a barn?”

“Don’t you think a barn would be nice?”

“I think a barn would be lovely. But then what is the house for?”

“I don’t know, exactly. You see, I’ve never had a house. But people seem to have found uses for them. I would settle down in mine and await developments. In the meantime, I could live in it. People do, don’t they?”

She laughed. “Yes. People do.... But won’t you be lonely in such a big house?”

“No,” he said, “I sha’n’t be lonely. Not in this house! If I am I shall go talk to the cook.”

They looked at each other, smiling, and remembering the first morning of their marriage. And for a moment Felix felt that they had drawn nearer than they had ever been in their lives—as if in this foolish dream of house-building he had by some inspired accident touched upon the secret of happiness.... And then, in his doubting mind, there rose the fear that this was an emotion shared only in play. It was too trivial a thing to bear the burden of his need of reassurance. No, the hurts which they had inflicted upon each other could not be healed by a jest....

For another moment their gaze still met, suspiciously, as he sought to surprise in her eyes the thoughts, the wishes, that lay mockingly hidden behind that impenetrable curtain. And then they looked away.

The moment in which they had seemed to understand each other had vanished, leaving him with the certainty that it had never existed.

“Come,” Rose-Ann cried gaily, “we must go on our picnic.”

LXIV. In Earnest

1

SHE had never seemed more dazzling to him, and more remote, than in the hours that followed. They lay on the beach and watched the sunset, and wandered arm in arm through the brief twilight into the darkness. She was happy; and her happiness was a mockery to him. She was tender and passionate—and in that very excess of tenderness and passion seemed to confess to him that this was the end.

She was playing at marriage.

In the vast night the moon rose slowly behind the hills, unseen but palely tinging the sky. They went past stray bonfires far up the shore until they could see it, a slender crescent, cradled between two hills.

Its light faintly touched the edges of the waves with silver.

“What would it be like,” Rose-Ann wondered, “to bathe in icy moonlight? Shall we?”

He remembered the time at Woods Point, the first morning of their marriage when she had slipped from their warm bed while he slept, to plunge into the snow. He remembered the sudden loneliness with which he had awakened, and her naked footprints in the snow.... It seemed profoundly characteristic of all her strangeness.

What other woman in the world would have left, at dawn, the bed of happy love, to keep such an icy tryst! It was like their whole married life: the warmth of mere human happiness had not satisfied her; she must go out into the bleak strange arctic spaces of emotion; and he must go, too.... Well, let her keep her cold assignation with the moonlight alone, this time!

“No,” he said resentfully, and gathered driftwood for a fire, while she undressed in the darkness.... He saw her go in, crying out with delight at the water’s bitter coldness, and emerge, white and slender and dripping with silver moonlight, from the waves.... And this was the creature he had tried to make his wife! This seeker after strange and impossible beauty!

He remembered that he had offered her, in some playful madness that day, a house. A house in the environs of Chicago! Thank heaven, she would never know that he had been in earnest.

She had dried her body miraculously on the tiny tea-towel from their lunch-basket and resumed her clothes by the time his fire was alight, and she came up laughing and hungry, demanding food. He unpacked from the little basket the supper which their hosts of the tea-shop had prepared for them. She munched sandwiches while he broiled bacon on a stick over the blaze.

“We could do this every night on the Dunes,” she said—and his heart leaped.

“Rose-Ann,” he said. “Don’t torment me.”

She took his hand. “Do I torment you?” she asked. “I don’t mean to. I’m sorry!”

Was it surrender? he wondered—or some new evasion?

“Our marriage—” he said.

“Oh! Must we talk about it?” Her voice was wistful. “We’re so happy—as we are.”

“As we are.... But what are we?” he demanded painfully.

“Together....” she said.

And then, when he did not speak, she asked, a little coldly,

“What do you want me to say, Felix?”

“I don’t know.... There are so many things to say.... All the things we haven’t said....”

“Must we say them, Felix? Well, then—I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For everything.... Felix, if we had met each other for the first time _now_—”

“Yes....”

“We could be very happy, I think. Oh, I know we could!”

“Have we hurt each other so much, then?” he asked sadly.

“It’s not that.... All that was my fault.”

“No,” he said.

“Yes. I’ve thought everything out. And sometimes I think I’m not sorry that it happened. Because I’ve learned some things I didn’t know—about myself.”

“Tell me.”

“I’d rather not.... Felix, I’m not the same person I was. I’ve found things in myself I’m frightened of. Don’t make me tell them....”

“I wish you would.”

“They’re not nice things, Felix.... I woke up last night hating you....”

Her voice was shaken.

“I’m sorry, Rose-Ann,” he said contritely. “You have a right to hate me.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not what you think. It’s something else—something you’d never guess.”

Suddenly she threw herself face down on the sand and began to cry.

He put his hand on her shoulder. She drew herself away from his touch with a convulsive movement. He looked on, hurt and baffled and frightened.

She sat up, seized his hand and pressed it desperately. “Why can’t I trust you?” she asked.

He had lost all clue to her thoughts. “I wish I could help you,” he said.

“I don’t know—perhaps I’m trying to fool myself again.... What are you really like, Felix?”

She was looking away from him, gripping his hand, staring blindly into the darkness. She seemed not to be speaking to him. He did not answer.

Her hand relaxed its grip upon his, and she said, drying her tears,

“I despise myself....”

“For crying?” he asked.

“No—for what we’ve done.”

He thought he knew what she meant. “For—playing at marriage?”

“Yes,” she said strangely, “playing at marriage....”

He had a moment of clairvoyance, a moment in which his mind saw into the one same realm of memory with hers.... He saw them, beside another camp-fire, talking....

“_Not afraid_,” he repeated aloud the words she had said to him then, “_not afraid of life or of any of the beautiful things life may bring us...._”

“Felix!” she cried out. “Don’t!”

He was seeing another picture, of themselves walking in a park under great trees that lifted their shivering glooms to the sky. “Everything,” she had said, “is all right now.” What mockery! And he felt, again, forces that he did not understand hurling themselves on his heart crushing and stunning it....

“We were afraid of life,” he said. “We were cowards. Despise me, too.”

“Felix!” she cried, “you did care!... I never knew!”

2

They looked into the dying embers of the fire.

His mind, as by a shadowy wing, was touched with a faint regret ... for what?... for an old dream, beautiful in its way—a dream of freedom; but a dream only—and worthy only the farewell tribute of a faint and shadowy regret.

“What shall we do?” she whispered.

“Let’s build our house, Rose-Ann. Will you?”

“Yes.”

THE END

● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ In chapter XVII, the sections are numbered 1, 2, 4. There is no 3, and no obvious place to insert another section number. Section 4 on page 132 was renumbered to 3. ○ Page 235, the third and fourth lines were swapped. ○ Page 240, the section number 4 was corrected to 5. ○ Page 289, there is a page break after section 2 and the following section is also numbered 2. The page break was deleted and the following two sections renumbered. ○ Page 295, the section number 2 was corrected to 3. ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected. ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book. ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).