Part 19

“If you told me your reason--I would.”

“Myrtle, you did right to come to me,” he said decisively. “This is my answer: Placed as you are, with what’s ahead, there’s no two ways about it--it’s too big, too wonderful. Marry him!”

She did not move. The words seemed to have left so little impression on her that he was wondering if she had understood them, when, all at once, she looked up and said:

“You mean that?”

“I do.”

She rose, nodded to him to follow, and went out of the restaurant. They walked home in silence, and she did not take his arm. In the Arcade, by the brass entrance of the Gloria Theater, he turned to her abruptly, conscience-stricken, and yet fortified by the thought that he had been square enough not to stand in her way.

“What are you going to say to him?” he said anxiously, taking the hand which she gave him heavily. She turned and he saw that her eyes were filled with tears.

“Look here,” he said miserably; “I’ve been honest with you, Myrtle.”

“Yes; you’ve been that,” she said, and, with a nod, she hurried away.

XXVIII

King O’Leary had made no mistake. Dangerfield was far from being tamed, and no one understood it better than Inga Sonderson. The day after their return to the Arcade had come the revulsion she had feared. When she had entered, he had looked up without sign of recognition and turned moodily to the solitaire which lay spread before him. She remained half an hour without a word passing between them. She went out and presently returned with a mass of yellow roses, which she distributed about the room, and resumed her waiting attitude. Finally he said:

“Seen the papers?”

“Yes,” she answered, though she knew only of the sensational details of the Garford history through Belle Shaler. But she did not wish to have him discuss them, for she comprehended how keenly the man must be suffering in his vanity.

He laughed his short, bitter laugh, the laugh which sounded like the bark of some wild animal, which was characteristic of his rebellious moods. To her, it was always a danger-signal. She rose and, moving easily, stood before him, young, awake, and smiling. He considered her thus with set glance, plainly resentful.

“Wonder if you know what I’m thinking,” he said, at last.

“I think I do. To-day you must hate me,” she said solemnly. “I’m sorry.”

His face showed too much surprise.

“No; I don’t hate you,” he said shortly, “not you--all the rest.”

“Yes; me, too,” she insisted. “I don’t mind. I understand it.”

He rose without notice of the flowers she had brought in timid offering, and, going to the desk, took up a newspaper, stared at it, and handed it to her. She glanced at it long enough to get the full significance of the photograph and the head-lines:

DAN GARFORD IN THE LIMELIGHT AGAIN

Then she deliberately tore it into pieces and threw it into the waste-basket.

“It’s time for lunch; let’s go out.” He shook his head. The suggestion irritated him. “The walk will do you good.”

“Are you going to order me around?” he said, frowning.

“To-day, yes, because you can’t make up your mind,” she said, coming to him with his coat. It was rarely that she took a determined stand. He turned, resenting it.

“We must come to an understanding,” he said irritatedly. “I don’t intend to be told to do this and do that. If I want to cut loose, go wild, I’m going to do it!”

She faced him resolutely.

“Don’t worry; I’m not asking you to do anything--no promises.” She considered a moment, and corrected herself with a smile. “Only one promise.”

He drew back, prepared for an issue, frowning.

“What one?”

“Whatever you do, wherever you go, I am to go with you.”

He glanced at her sharply--the blurred look on his face that she dreaded.

“What! Even nights like night before last!” he said cunningly. That inward struggle which he had been fighting all morning completely transformed the usual kindly look in his eyes, bringing back the glare of a caged animal.

“Especially nights when it’s hard,” she said, in her low, musical voice.

He laughed.

“There’ll be a lot of those!”

“I know there must be,” she said, laying her hand on his arm as though to calm him. “Perhaps it’s best that you should let go sometimes--at first.”

“What!” he said loudly. Then he laughed again; but already under the controlling pressure of her hand, the laugh had a softer note. “So you’re not going to reform me?”

She shook her head.

“No, no!” She thought a moment, “I’m just here to help--when you need me.”

He was so surprised at this unexpected attitude that he walked up and down, deliberating. Finally, he turned and stared at her.

“I understand you less than ever.”

She smiled and shook her head.

“I’m not so difficult.”

“Well, what do you want me to do now?”

“I want to get you away from here.”

He took up his things and followed her moodily. He was thinking of the head-lines which had startled him, of the mockery of the truth which had been published. Whenever they passed a news-stand, his glance went furtively to the papers displayed, dreading to see his name in the black, leaded spreads. She guessed this shrinking within him, and changed her position to shield him. Curiously enough, his mood led him toward the river-front, over the route past the gas-towers, where they had gone in the silences of the night. If he remembered anything of that fantastic journey, he gave no sign.

They wandered by the docks amid a confusion of trucks, greeted by strong, pungent smells, lingering lazily on a packing-case to watch the cranes, sweeping up their cargoes for foreign ports. Late in the afternoon they stopped in a sanded-floored restaurant for a bite of luncheon. A few loitering groups were at the tables, sailors in jerseys, with down-turned pipes and ruddy faces worked by sea and wind, queer types of briny adventurers.

Inga drew his attention to the men.

“Sometime you must paint a group like that. Wish I could,” she said, her eyes dwelling on the strong masses and deep colors. “There’s so much in New York--isn’t there?--if you’ll only look.”

He looked up, and, being in a momentary mood of tolerant amusement, smiled at her artifice.

“Want me to be a painter of the slums?”

“Why not?” she said defiantly. “Isn’t it realer than painting pretty pictures--simpering, sugary women--the same old thing again and again? Oh, if I were a man who could--who really could do what I wanted--I’d love it--to get down into the people themselves, to reflect what’s going on below, the color and the soul of the people! It’s only in places like this, where life is natural, that you feel one thing is different from another!”

“What a long speech!” he said, with an amused look. Then he turned serious and thoughtful. “Good sense--you don’t talk much, but when you do----”

He nodded to himself, put out his hand, patted hers, and, though he said no more, he began whistling to himself, his head aslant, his eyes narrowing as he studied the group across the sanded floor.

Then there were the dark moments, feverish days of aimlessness and regret, of heavy forgetfulness, long periods of taciturnity, with sudden, irrelevant speech--speech that came without warning, which seemed rather the man in the mists of his groping, taking counsel with himself. Sometimes what he said was only querulous, thrown out in anger or bitter self-hatred. At other times he seemed to be standing off and looking at himself, viewing his past dispassionately, analyzing his career without prejudice. Once he said to her, as they sat waiting for the dusk to enter the studio:

“Some people like life, like it for the sake of living--at least, I suppose it’s that--to find your rut and run on it smoothly, the same thing to-day as yesterday--routine.”

“Most are like that,” she said, not yet seeing where he wished to come.

“Most--yes. But if you’re not satisfied with that--if you want something--want to create something, to get somewhere--to some fixed object, then you’ve got to face the thing in the end.”

“What thing?”

“The fact that you’ve got to recognize to yourself, whatever you’re hoping for, that you’ve gone as far as you can go.” He thought a moment. “If you could only fool yourself! Some do--that’s where conceit comes in--a mighty saving quality that, to be wrapped up in vanity, not to know when you’ve stopped.”

She was so puzzled by this and the tense introspection which she felt in him that she ventured a question.

“What _are_ you talking about, Mr. Dan?”

He turned and said:

“Remember once I told you how I used to climb up Montmartre and look down on Paris, and believe the day would come when I’d set them all talking about me--when I _believed_ I was going to be a great man?”

She came and settled on the ground beside him as he sat in the great armchair, looking gravely into his face.

“Remember?”

She nodded.

“Well, it’s great to believe that, even for a year, to be working passionately, hungrily, sure of where you’re going,” he said, smiling back into the past. “It’s worth--even what comes after. But you pay for it--Lord, but you pay for it!--when you look at yourself in the end, and know the time’s to come when you’ve got to stand still and watch others go on.”

“But you are going on--you are!”

He took her head in his hands, as she sat there close to him, and said:

“If you could only make me believe that, child--if you could even _fool_ me into believing that--you might get hold of me. You see, that’s what you’re up against. There’s nothing to get to. Oh, the rest doesn’t count! I’ve had notoriety, what some people call fame. Do you think it means anything to me to paint what I have been painting, do it over again and again?” He shook his head. “It’s not the knocks that’s the trouble. No; I’ll be honest. If this--this thing that’s ended had come ten years--five years ago, it might have done me good.”

She nodded her head eagerly.

“It will now--I know it!”

“No; not now. It wasn’t what others did to me; it was what I did to myself. Five years ago, I should have run away; I should have been cruel. I didn’t. I was a sentimentalist. I didn’t want to do another harm. I stayed and sacrificed the other thing--the thing that can’t be shared. I made my choice then; now it is too late.”

“But why? You can work now as you want.”

“Yes; but the power to dream isn’t there, and that’s the whole of it. And that doesn’t come--it just doesn’t seem to come,” he said nervously, his hands twisting, and a blank look coming across his eyes.

She understood now the depth of the task before her, as she understood, too, how much he wanted to disbelieve the things he announced. And there rose before her clearly that the only way to reclaim him was to put a purpose into his aimless life.

“Mr. Dan,” she said softly.

His eyes came back to hers.

“Pretty hard task you’ve got, Inga.”

“Please be patient--just a while longer. I know it’ll all come back.”

“Wish you were right.”

“It will; it will. I’ve even seen it in your eyes, the way you look at things, that group in the restaurant, the old woman with the newspapers.”

“Seeing is one thing; doing is another.”

“But why don’t you try?” she said hesitatingly. At this, he turned and glanced longingly at the easel in the corner.

“Oh, if you only would! I’d pose for you all day long!” she cried eagerly.

But at this he shrank back, a tortured, doubting look passed over his face, and he sprang up angrily, crying,

“No, no, no!”

At other times, he would fix his dull glance on her and say, without kindness:

“See what you’ve dragged me back to!”

These were the secret black hours, when he lay in stupor after periods of heavy, obstinate drinking. For something had come which frightened him. He had boasted, in the wild days when he was new to the Arcade, that he did what he did because he wanted to do it, proclaiming scornfully that he could stop it whenever he chose. And, in his pride, he believed this. Now he came to the frightened realization that this was no longer true, and that there lay before him a struggle against a dark and shapeless enemy which filled the day with its crushing shadow.

At first, he deluded himself with the thought that he was seeking relief, a numbed forgetfulness out of the vacant world--that it was his right to escape the depression in his soul, and that this seeking was deliberate. This delusion was the stronger in that he believed he was testing the girl, challenging her right to reclaim him by a last obstinate rebellion. But Inga, neither by word nor expression, made the slightest criticism. This patient acquiescence, this mute devotion that followed where he went and watched the inevitable moment when he called her in his weakness, at first surprised him and then awoke his latent chivalry.

The day came when, in remorse, he turned to take up the fight himself. Then he found that the dark companion that he had called upon so often to shut out the aching reality could no longer be thrown aside, that, instead of a servant, he had found a master. He found himself gripped in with a hunger he had not realized. At times, frightened, he recoiled and sought to struggle, as though his body were sinking into a lurking quicksand that drew him down, down, and ever down.

There was yet a darker thing which hung shapelessly in this gradually settling obscurity, a thing of dread that waited beside the other shadowy comforter. For, at times, he came struggling back to life with a feeling of blurred, vacant spaces behind, where something had slipped from him, when he had been but a shell inhabited by muddled desires and gropings.

These were days of rough going, of tense straining on every nerve of the girl who watched him. Strange, opposite flashes, the sublime and the ridiculous of the man’s soul, shifted and whirled before her. At times, from long periods of inner torment, there came a sudden pitch of exaltation, wild, colorful moments of eloquence, when he discoursed on life and art, justice and morality, when he analyzed mercilessly established prejudices and beat through to a clearer verity--when she listened breathlessly, enthralled at his dramatic tossings. Then, when the prophetic rage had passed in its fine fury, the reaction would come, and for hours he would lie clinging to her hand, shuddering in the dark at terrors he did not dare to phrase. These moments of groping weakness, of intermingled bombast, wisdom, and cringing brought her always to the same _impasse_--either she must instil some object into this denial of life, or see him slowly crumble, morally and physically, before her eyes.

XXIX

How did she manage to reclaim him? In part by the unquestioning service which she yielded him, without weariness or discouragement, until, out of pity for her, he began to fight with himself, and, in a minor degree, through unforeseen influences, trivial in themselves, yet working together to restore his interest in those who lived about him. Tootles and the difficulties of his masterpiece drew from him a wild outburst of laughter, but he stayed to criticize and suggest, until gradually he came to the moment when, in his amused enthusiasm, he took up the brush himself. He had come to the point now where he could not bear to be alone, never content unless Inga were at his side. She transported her easel into his studio for the morning’s work, with Belle Shaler serving as model for the magazine covers which she drew with a certain deftness and charm.

During the first mornings, Dangerfield paid them scant attention beyond an occasional glance. The third day, he criticized a pose of Belle Shaler’s, and rose to superintend the readjustment. Then he glanced at Inga’s work and nodded.

“Pretty and delicate.”

The second week, Belle being engaged elsewhere, Inga had recourse to a model she sometimes used, an Italian mother, heavy and a bit dowdy, but picturesque and vital. He noticed the substitution with surprise and a long, contemplative stare. All at once he sprang up, brought out his easel, took a canvas, and began to draw. Inga, afraid to notice this unhoped-for development even by a word, continued a simulation of work while watching him from the corners of her eyes. He worked rapidly, humming to himself, frowning occasionally and stepping back to study the result with dissatisfied glances. In the end, he stood back, his head on one side, scowling.

“Atrocious!” he said abruptly. Then he laughed, returned, replaced the canvas by a fresh one, and started again.

“Come and behold!” he said grimly, when he had completed the second study. “Let’s see how good an artist you are. Which?”

He placed the two sketches together and stood back as Inga came eagerly up. They were done in a manner so opposite that they might have been by different hands--the last graceful, charming, inclining to the sentimental; the first trenchant, direct, almost cruel in its reality.

“Which?” he said, watching her gloomily.

But almost before the words were on his lips, her answer had come. She went past the thing of grace and charm to the first drawing he had made.

“That’s wonderful!” she said, with outstretched finger.

“What! You prefer that?” he said savagely. She faced his look and nodded.

“Any one can do the other; but this, this shocks you--it’s so savage and yet so convincing!”

He came to her side and viewed the canvases, trying to see them with her eyes, to feel a glimmer of her enthusiasm. So pathetic was the effort she saw writ on his clouded face that she longed, in a rush of maternal pity, to take him in her arms and cry.

“But it is good; it is!”

At the end, he said curtly:

“You don’t know--if, indeed, you really meant it.”

“But, Mr. Dan, I do; I do,” she said, seizing his arm. “You’ve done something unusual--something different from the way others do.”

“My dear child,” he said impatiently, “they are both hopeless. One is a pretty fake, and the other is as hard as rocks! Don’t argue; I know.”

He lifted the canvases and set them down with a crash against the wall, while she watched him, with a sinking heart, go and stand by the window in a brooding revulsion. The test had come which she had striven for, prayed for, waited for, and it had failed. She had a moment of intense, hopeless despair.

That night, matters were even worse. Dangerfield relapsed into his wildest mood, as though he, too, had felt the finality of the test and knew that nothing was left to hope for. He managed to slip away without her noticing it, and when he staggered back, late in the night, he was in such a frenzy of remorse, depression, and weakness that she did not dare to leave his side an instant.

Yet, by noon of the next day, when he had recovered his poise, by one of the miracles of which his extraordinary constitution was capable, curiously enough he did a thing for which she would never have dared to hope. He went over to the canvases which he had discarded so fiercely, chose the one Inga had preferred, and placed it on the easel.

At this moment Mr. Cornelius, coming in, expecting to find Dangerfield prostrate after the night’s debauch and perceiving him actually standing before his easel, burst into an exclamation of delight.

“Monsieur Cornelius,” said Dangerfield (he, of all the floor, never called him “baron”), “tell me what you think of this?”

“The baron” went lightly across the floor, picking up his feet and glancing in wonder at Inga, until he reached the easel, and adjusted his glasses with nicety. Then he looked up suddenly.

“You did this--you, my friend?”

“Yes; yesterday. What do you think of it?”

Mr. Cornelius examined it with care, nodding, raising his eyebrows, pursing his lips.

“I did not think you so strong,” he said slowly, and the look of wonder with which he examined Dangerfield had more flattery in it than his words. “_C’est fort; c’est plus que fort--c’est du vrai!_”

“Yes; there is something in it--something odd,” said Dangerfield slowly, to Inga’s amazement.

“You did not see things like that in Paris,” said “the baron,” still nodding. “_Cristi_--but it’s astonishing what you make a line do; what modeling!”

“Yes, yes,” said Dangerfield breathlessly, “it’s bold; it has audacity; it is not trivial, at any rate. Curious thing--last night--I thought it insufferably bad. I even preferred this!”

He held up the other sketch with a guilty laugh. Mr. Cornelius did exactly the right thing. He put his foot through it.

“_Mon ami_, you are one colossal ass! Now, isn’t that a nice damn thing? A man who can do what you can to behave so badly. If I could do that, the whole damn family could go cut their throats; _je m’en ficherais complètement_! That means, _mademoiselle_, the rest of them too can go right to the devil!” He turned on Dangerfield and shook his fist in his face in Gallic enthusiasm.

“You stop being the _big_ fool; you get to work! You draw; you paint! Where is the model?”

The model, in truth, had been postponed as a result of the previous night’s dissipation. Inga started up, seeing the eager look in Dangerfield’s eyes.

“I’ll run out; I’ll get one right away.”

“Pooh!” said “the baron,” and, to the surprise of them both, he strode to the model-stand, his violet dressing-gown floating behind him, and installed himself in a chair. “Paint me--no compliments--just as I am--Don Juan in old age--Beau Brummel in poverty--_le vieux boulevardier_. Paint me, and I don’t see nothing till you be satisfied. Now, paint like ze devil!”

In truth, he made a striking figure in his black-felt slippers and white socks, his loose, yellowish trousers, a flash of white at the throat above the faded violet of the dressing-robe, which set forth strongly the aristocratic features; the eyes still alert and compelling above the crinkled sacks which had formed about the hollowed cheeks; the defiant rise of the Gallic mustache, as saucy, as obstinate, and as proud in adversity as in the halls of revelry. Dangerfield exchanged the chairs, giving him one of barer outline, arranged a cold gray background over the screen, and added a faded red footstool. In another ten minutes he was feverishly at work, while Inga, at her pad, strove in vain to catch the spirit of the pose--yet thoroughly content.

The incident sank deep into her understanding. Dangerfield had rejected her sure instinct, and yet, a day later, had been convinced at the first word from Mr. Cornelius. She comprehended, not without a pang, all that lay in the feeling of caste, what power Mr. Cornelius, of Dangerfield’s own world, might have over him where she might strive in vain. At once she began to reach out for his assistance, to study the reticent, kind old man, to flatter him subtly, to please him by a dozen little attentions, and draw him into the intimacy of the studio.

What pleased her most was that Mr. Cornelius had the power to make Dangerfield talk. Often now, in the dark, after the day’s work was done, the easel put away, and the rug rolled back, the two men would stretch back, puffing on their pipes, and discuss art and life and the thousand and one affairs of the world which may always be better regulated in conversation. Dangerfield was still far from being tamed, as O’Leary had put it, but something had come now to aid her in the struggle, a new curiosity still unsatisfied, a wonder whether the months of disappointment had not left a compensating gift in a clearer vision. There were bad moments, when he found that old habits had set their yoke over his will and aroused a thirst of the flesh that rose up at times and overwhelmed him in dazed nights of defeat. But the dawn had broken at last through the clouds, and, little by little, hoping, doubting, he had begun to believe in himself.