Part 6

"A man--like you, for instance--can be so free; but a woman has to live within exact limitations. The only way she can get any liberty at all is within her own home. Not that my brother and sister aren't angelic to me. They are, of course; but you know what I mean." The glance that stole under her lashes was half daring and half apologetic. "It must be wonderful to do as one likes--to experiment with different sorts of life--and get to know things at first hand."

So that was her summing up concerning me. I was one of those moderns with so keen a thirst for life that I was testing it at all its springs. She didn't know my ultimate intention, but she could sympathize with my methods and admire my courage and thoroughness. Almost in so many words she said if she had not been timid and hedged in by conventions it was what she would have liked herself.

Before any one came to disturb us there seeped through her conversation, too, the reason of Averill's coldness. They had discussed me a good deal, and while he had nothing to accuse me of, he considered that the burden of the proof of my innocence lay with me. I might be all right--and then I might not be. So long as there was any question as to my probity I was a person to watch with readiness to help, but not one to ask to luncheon. He would not have invited me to tea a few days before, and had allowed me to pass and repass before ceding to his wife's persistence. He had consequently been the more annoyed when she carried her curiosity to the point of bringing me there that day.

Miss Averill did not, of course, say these things; she would have been amazed to know that I inferred them. I shouldn't have inferred them had I not seen her brother and partially read his mind.

But my hostess came trailing in--the verb is the only one I can find to express her gracefully lymphatic movements--and I was obliged to submit to a welcome which was overemphasized for the benefit of the husband who entered behind her.

"We're really not equipped for having any one come to us," she apologized. "We're scarcely unpacked. We're going to move from this house anyhow when we can find another. It's so poky. If we're to entertain again--" She turned to her sister: "Mildred dear, _couldn't_ some one have cleared these things away?" Waving her hand toward the array of potteries and porcelains, she continued to me: "One buys such a lot during two or three years abroad, doesn't one? I'm sure Mrs. Soames must feel the way I do, that she doesn't know where to put the things when she's got them home."

I knew the reason for the reference which others were as quick to catch as I, and, in the idiom of the moment, tried to "side-step" it by saying:

"That's a good thing--that Rouen _saladier_. You don't often pick up one of that shape nowadays."

"I saw it in an old shop at Dreux," Mrs. Averill informed me, in her melting tone. "I got this pair of Ming vases there, too. At least, they said they were Ming; but I don't suppose they are. One is so taken in. But I liked them, whatever they are, and so--"

She lifted one up and brought it to me--a dead-white jar, decorated with green foliage, violet-blue flowers, and tiny specks of red fruit.

Something in me leaped. I took the vase in my hand as if it had been a child of my flesh and blood. I was far from thinking of my hearers as I said:

"It's not Ming; but it's very good K'ang-hsi.'"

I had thrown another little bomb into their camp, but it surprised them no more than it did me. A trance medium who hears himself speaking in a hitherto unknown tongue could not have been more amazed at his own utterance. I went on talking, not to give them information, but to listen for what I should say next.

They had all three drawn near me. "How can you tell?" Miss Averill asked, partly in awe at my knowledge, and partly to give me the chance to display it.

"Oh, very much as you can tell the difference between a hat you wear this year and one you wore five years ago. The styles are quite different. Ming corresponds roughly to the Tudor period in English history, and K'ang-hsi to the earlier Stuarts--with much the same distinction as we get between the output of those two epochs. Ming is older, bolder, stronger, rougher, with a kind of primitive force in it; K'ang-hsi is the product of a more refined civilization. It has less of the instinctive and more deliberate selection. It is more finished--more self-conscious." I picked up the Rouen salad-dish and a Sevres cup and saucer, putting them side by side. "It's something like the difference between these--strength and color and dash in the one, and in the other a more elaborately perfected art. You couldn't be in any doubt, once you'd been in the habit of seeing them."

Mrs. Averill's question was as natural and spontaneous as laughter.

"Where have you seen them so much, Mr. Soames?"

"Oh, a little everywhere," I managed to reply, just as we were summoned to luncheon.

At table we talked of the pleasures of making "finds" in old European cities. I had evidently done a lot of it, for I could deal with it in general quite fluently. When they pinned me down with a question as to details I was obliged to hedge. I could talk of The Hague and Florence and Strasbourg and Madrid as backgrounds, but I could never picture myself to myself as walking in their streets.

That, however, was not evident to my companions, and as Mrs. Averill's interests lay along the line of ceramic art I was able to bring out much in the way of connoisseurship which did not betray me. With Averill himself I scored a point; with Mildred Averill I scored many. With Mrs. Averill, beneath a seeming ennui that grew more languorous, I quickened curiosity to the fever-point.

"What a lot of things you must have, Mr. Soames."

My refuge being always in the negative, I said, casually: "Oh no! One doesn't have to own things just because one admires them."

"But you say yourself that you've picked them up--"

As she had nearly caught me here I was obliged to wriggle out. "Oh, to give away--and that kind of thing."

Averill's eyes were resting on me thoughtfully. "Sell?"

"No; I've never sold anything like that."

"But what's the use," Mrs. Averill asked, "of caring about things when you can't have them? I should hate it."

"Only that there's nothing you can't have."

"Do you hear that, Boyd?" I caught the impulse of the purring, velvety thing to vary the monotony of life by scratching. "Mr. Soames says there's nothing I can't have. Much he knows, doesn't he?"

"There's nothing you can't have--within reason, dear."

"Ah, but I don't want things within reason. I want them out of reason. I want to be like Mr. Soames--free--free--"

"You can't be free and be a married woman."

"You can when you have a vocation, can't you, Mr. Soames? I suppose Mr. Soames is a married man--and look at him." She hurried beyond this point, to add: "And look at Sydna, whom we heard the other afternoon! She's a married woman and her husband lives in London. He lets her sing. He lets her travel. He leads his life and lets her ... Mr. Soames, what do you think?"

I said, tactfully, "I shall be able to judge better when you've sung to me."

Miss Averill, taking up the thread of the conversation here, we got through the rest of the luncheon without treading in difficult places, and presently I was alone with Averill, who was passing the cigars.

The constraint which had partially lifted during the conversation at luncheon fell again with the departure of the ladies. I had mystified them more than ever; and mystery does not make for easy give and take in hospitality. To Averill himself his hospitality was sacred. To entertain at his own board a man with no credentials but those which an adventurer might present was the source of a discomfort that amounted to unhappiness. He couldn't conceal it; he didn't care to conceal it. While fulfilling all that courtesy required of a host, he was willing to let me see it. I saw it, and could say nothing, since he might easily be right; and an adventurer I might be.

As, with his back to the open doorway into the hall, he sat down with his own cigar, I felt that he was saying to himself, "I wish to God you were not in this house!" I myself was responding silently by wishing the same thing.

It was the obvious minute at which to tell him everything. I saw that as plainly as you do. Had I made a clean breast of it I should have become one of the most interesting cases of his experience. Such instances of shell-shock were just beginning to be talked about. The term was finding its way into the newspapers and garnishing common speech. Though I knew of no connection between my misfortunes and the Great War, I could have made shift to furnish an illustration of this new phase among its tragedies.

During a pause in our stilted speech I screwed myself up to the point. "There's something--" But his attention was distracted for the moment, and when it came back to me I couldn't begin again. No! I could fight the thing through on my own; but that would be my utmost. A confession of breakdown was impossible.

Then, all at once, I got a glimpse of what was in the back of his mind, though something else happened simultaneously, of which I must tell you first. Into the open space between the portieres behind him there glided a little figure clad in amber-colored linen, the monochrome with the sun-spots beneath it. She didn't speak, for the reason that Averill spoke first.

"You're--" He struck a match nervously to relight his cigar--"you're a--a married man?"

Once more negation had to be my refuge. If I admitted that I was he might ask me whom I had married, and when, and where. I spoke with an emphasis that sprang not from eagerness of denial, but from anxiety that the topic shouldn't be discussed.

"No."

The question and answer followed so swiftly on Mildred Averill's arrival on the threshold that she caught them both. Little sparks of gold shone in the brown pools of her eyes, and her smile took on a new shade of vitality.

"Boyd, Lulu wants you to bring your cigars up-stairs. The coffee is there, and she'd like to talk to Mr. Soames about the old Chinese things before she begins to sing."

He jumped to his feet. He was not less constrained, but some of his uneasiness had passed. I could read what was in his mind. If the worst came to the worst I was at least a single man; and the worst might not come to the worst. There might be ways of getting rid of me before his sister...

He led the way up-stairs. I followed with Miss Averill, saying I have forgotten what. I have forgotten it because, as we crossed the low-ceiled hall with its monumental bits of furniture, two gleaming eyes stood over me like sentinels in the air.

*CHAPTER X*

Within a fortnight my nearly two hundred dollars had come down to nearly one, and this in spite of my self-denials.

Self-denials were new to me. I knew that by my difficulties in beginning to practise them. Such economics as staying at the Barcelona instead of a more luxurious hotel, or as buying ready-made clothes instead of waiting for the custom-made, I do not speak of as self-denials, since they were no more than concessions to a temporary lack of cash. But the first time I made my breakfast on one egg instead of two; the first time I suppressed the eggs altogether; the first time I lunched on a cup of chocolate taken at a counter; the first time I went without a midday meal of any kind--these were occasions when the saving of pennies struck me as akin to humiliation. I had formed no habits to prepare me for it. The possibility that it might continue began at last to frighten me.

For none of my artful methods had been successful. I frequented the hotels; I hung about the entrances to theaters; I tramped the streets till a new pair of boots became a necessity; but no one ever hailed me as an old acquaintance. Once only, standing in the doorway of a great restaurant, did I recognize a face; but it was that of Lydia Blair, dining with a man. He was a big, round-backed, silver-haired man, with an air of opulence which suggested that Miss Blair might be taking the career of adventuress more seriously than I had supposed. Whether or not she saw me I couldn't tell, for, to avoid embarrassment both for herself and me, I withdrew to another stamping-ground. What the young lady chose to do with herself was no affair of mine. Since a pretty girl of facile temperament would have evident opportunities, it was not for me to interfere with her. Had she belonged to my own rank in life I might have been shocked or sorry; but every one knew that a beautiful working-girl...

As to my own rank in life a sense of going under false pretenses added to my anxieties, though it was through no fault of my own. Miss Averill persisted in giving me the role of romantic seeker for the hard facts of existence. She did it only by assumption; but she did it.

"There's nothing like seeing for oneself, is there? It's feeling for oneself, too, which is more important. I'm so terribly cut off from it all. I'm like a bird in a cage trying to help those whose nests are being robbed."

This was said during the second of the excursions for which Miss Blair captured me from the lobby of the Barcelona. Her procedure was exactly the same as on the first occasion, except that she came about the middle of the afternoon. Nothing but an unusual chance found me sitting there, idle but preoccupied, as I meditated on my situation while smoking a cigar. My first impulse to refuse Miss Averill's invitation point-blank was counteracted by the thought of escape from that daily promenade up and down the halls of hotels which had begun to be disheartening and irksome.

Of this the novelty had passed. The expectations that during the first week or two had made each minute a living thing had simmered away in a sense of futility. No old friend having recognized me yet, I was working round to the conviction that no old friend ever would. If I kept up the tramp it was because I could see nothing else to do.

But on this particular afternoon for the first time I revolted. The effect was physical, in that my feet seemed to be too heavy to be dragged along. They were refusing their job, while my mind was planning it.

Thus in the end I found myself sharing the outing given nominally for the blind boy, but really planned from a complication of motives which to Miss Averill were obscure. It did not help to make them clearer that her wistful, unuttered appeals to me to solve the mystery surrounding my personality passed by without result.

The high bank of an autumn wood, the Hudson with a steamer headed southward, more autumn woods covering the hills beyond, a tea-basket, tea--this was the decoration. We had alighted from the motor somewhere in the neighborhood of Tarrytown. Tea being over, Miss Blair and Drinkwater, with chaff and laughter, were clearing up the things and fitting them back into the basket.

"She's very clever with him," Miss Averill explained, as she led the way to a fallen log, on which she seated herself, indicating that I might sit beside her. "She seizes on anything that will teach him the use of his fingers, and makes a game of it. He's very quick, too. The next time he'll be able to take the things out of the tea-basket and put them back all by himself."

So we had dropped into her favorite theme, the duty of helping the helpless.

She was in brown, as usual, a brown-green, that might have been a Scotch or Irish homespun, which blended with the wine shades and russets all about us with the effect of protective coloration. The day was as still as death, so breathless that the leaves had scarcely the energy to fall. In the heavy, too-sweet scents there was suggestion and incitement--suggestion that chances were passing and incitement to seize them before they were gone.

I wish there were words in which to convey the peculiar overtones in Miss Averill's comparison of herself with a bird in a cage. There was goodness in them, and amusement, as well as something baffled and enraged. She had been so subdued when I had seen her hitherto that I was hardly prepared for this half-smothered outburst of fierceness.

"If you're like a bird in a cage," I said, "you're like the one that sings to the worker and cheers him up."

Her pleasure was expressed not in a change of color or a drooping of the lids, but in a quiet suffusion that might most easily be described as atmospheric.

"Oh, as for cheering people up--I don't know. I've tried such a lot of it, only to find that they got along well enough without me. A woman wants more than anything else in the world to feel that she's needed; and when she discovers she isn't--"

The sense of my own apparent superfluity in life prompted me to say:

"Oh, it isn't only women who discover that."

Her glance traveled down the steep wooded bank and over the river, to rest on the wine-colored hills on the other side.

"Did you--did you ever?"--she corrected herself quickly--"I mean--do men?"

"Some men do. It's--it's possible."

"Isn't it," she asked, tackling the subject in her sensible way, "primarily a question of money? If you have enough of it not to have to earn a living--and no particular duties--don't you find yourself edged out of the current of life? After all, what the world wants is producers; and the minute one doesn't produce--"

"What do you mean by producers?"

She reflected. "I suppose I mean all who contribute, either directly or indirectly, either mentally or physically, to the sum total of our needs in living. Wouldn't that cover it?"

I admitted that it might.

"And those who don't do that, who merely live on what others produce, seem to be excluded from the privilege of helpfulness."

"I can't see that. They help with their money."

"Money can't help, except indirectly. It's the great mistake of our philanthropies to think it can. We make a great many mistakes; but we can make more in our philanthropies than anywhere else. We've never taken the pains to study the psychology of help. We think money the panacea for every kind of need, when as a matter of fact it's only the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. If you haven't got the grace the sign rings false, like an imitation coin."

"Well, what is the grace?"

"Oh, it's a good many things--a blend--of which, I suppose, the main ingredient is love." She gave me a wistful half-smile, as she added: "Love is a very queer thing--I mean this kind of big love for--just for people. You can always tell whether it's true or false; and the less sophisticated the people the more instinctively they know. If it's true they'll accept you; if it's only pumped up, they'll shut you out."

"I'm sure you ought to know."

"I do know. I've had a lot of experience--in being shut out."

"You?"

She nodded toward Drinkwater and Miss Blair. "They don't let me in. In spite of all I try to do for them, they're only polite to me. They'll accept this kind of thing; but I'm as far outside their confidence--outside their hearts--as a bird in a cage, as I've called myself, is outside a flock of nest-builders."

"And assuming that that is so--though I do not assume it--how do you account for it?

"Oh, easily enough! I'm not the real thing. I never was--not at the Settlement--not now--not anywhere or at any time."

"But how would you describe the real thing?"

"I can't describe it. All I know is that I'm not it. I'm not working for them, but for myself."

"For yourself--how?"

"To fill in an empty life. When you've no real life you seek an artificial one. As every one rejects the artificial, you get rejected. That's all."

"What would you call a real life--for yourself?"

The fierceness with which she had been speaking became intensified, even when tempered with her diffident half-smile.

"A life in which there was something I was absolutely obliged to do. I begin to wonder if parents know how much of the zest of living they're taking away from their children by leaving them, as we say, well provided for. When there's nothing within reason you can't have and nothing within reason you can't do--well, then, you're out of the running."

"Is that the way you look at yourself--as out of the running?"

"That's the way I _am_."

"And is there no means of getting into the running?"

"There might be if I wasn't such a coward."

"If you weren't such a coward what would you do?"

"Oh, there are things. You've--you've found them. I would do like you."

"And do you know what I'm doing?"

"I can guess."

"And you guess--what?"

"It's only a guess--of course."

"But what is it?"

She rose with a weary gesture. "What's the good of talking about it? A knight in disguise remains in disguise till he chooses to throw off his incognito."

"And when he has thrown it off--what does he become then?"

"He may become something else--but he's--he's none the less--a knight."

We stood looking at each other, in one of those impulses of mutual frankness that are not without danger.

"And if there was a knight who--who couldn't throw off his incognito?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "Then I suppose he'd always be a knight in disguise--something like Lohengrin."

"And what would Elsa think of that?"

Seeing the implication in this indiscreet question even before she did, I felt myself flush hotly.

I admired the more, therefore, the ease with which she carried the difficult moment off. Moving a few steps toward Drinkwater and Miss Blair, who were shutting up the tea-basket, she threw over her shoulder:

"If there was an Elsa I suppose she'd make up her mind when the time came."

She was still moving forward when I overtook her to say:

"I wish I could speak plainly."

She stopped to glance up at me. "And can't you?"

"Were you ever in a situation which you felt you had to swing alone? You know you could get help; you know you could count on sympathy; but whenever you're impelled to appeal for either something holds you back."

"I never was in such a situation, but I can imagine what it's like. May I ask one question?"

I felt obliged to grant the permission.

"Is it of the nature of what is generally called trouble?"

"It's of the nature of what is generally called misfortune."

"And I suppose I mustn't say so much as that I'm sorry."

"You could say that much," I smiled, "if you didn't say any more."

She repeated the weary gesture of a few minutes earlier, a slight tossing outward of both hands, with a heavy drop against the sides.

"What a life!"

As she began to move on once more I spoke as I walked beside her.

"What's the matter with life?"

Again she paused to confront me. In her eyes gold lights gleamed in the brown depths of the irises.

"What sense is there in a civilization that cuts us all off from each other? We're like prisoners in solitary confinement--you in one cell and Boyd in another and Lulu in another and I in another, and everybody else in his own or her own and no communication or exchange of help between us. It's--it's monstrous."

The half-choked passion of her words took me the more by surprise for the reason that she treated me as if the defects of our civilization were my fault. Joining Lydia Blair and taking her by the arm, she led the way back to the motor, while I was left to pilot Drinkwater, who carried the tea-basket. During the drive back to town our hostess scarcely spoke, and not once to me directly.

*CHAPTER XI*

But I was troubled by all this, and puzzled. That I couldn't afford the complication of a love-affair will be evident to any one; but that a love-affair threatened was by no means clear. As far as that went it was as fatuous on my part to think of it as it would have been for Drinkwater, except in so far as it involved danger to myself.