Part 27

“Why do you stay?” she asked him, one evening, when they had sat silently, looking across at Catamount, blue and luminous under the scattering sunset clouds which swam like radiant goldfish above its sharp outline.

“I wonder.” After a moment he said, a certain gentleness in his voice which seemed attuned to the gentleness in the skies, “I think it’s because it’s the ending of a phase. I want the other--the big things--and yet I want to hold on to this, to what this has been to us, a little longer and still a little longer. Do you understand?”

She nodded, and her fingers turned gently in his fingers.

“This is personal,” he said slowly, “the other will be different. It will be a sort of renunciation of many things. This is the romance, the great romance of my life, and, well, I want it to go on a little longer.”

Her head went slowly down to his shoulder; he drew his arm about her.

“It is unbelievable, providential--and it is all you,” he said reverentially. “You are as strange to me, Inga, as the first day. I do not know you--no, not at all. Yet, in what you have made me feel and in what you have made me suffer too, you have done everything.”

A certain charm of the twilight, of the quiet spot, and of the youthful ecstasy he had known momentarily swept aside the man that had been built up victoriously and logically. For the instant he was in love with love without reason or reserve with the memory of other moments felt in the passionate moods of the fading day and the poignant floods of moonlight.

“Shall we never go back, Inga?” he said breathlessly. “Shall we stay here all winter, just you and I?”

In his arms he felt her tremble and then fill with a great sigh.

“Oh, I’m so glad you said that!” she cried abruptly, and for a moment something shook in her voice.

“Shall we stay?” he said eagerly, confused by thronging sensations, even as the earth and the sky grew confused in the fall of the night.

She laughed, lightly and happily from the heart, and though she was not deceived by the intoxication of the moment, she yielded with every sense.

The next morning she was an inconscient child, without a brooding thought, romping about the bungalow, doing a dozen crazy things, singing and laughing until her mood caught him in its playfulness. For the day they were as foolishly happy as a pair of growing puppies, playing a dozen tricks on each other, laughing for the pure joy of being together, pursuing or pursued.

“Upon my soul, Inga, I believe you are actually flirting with me!” he cried, from across the table.

She eluded his sudden grasp and went scurrying out of doors and up into the sheltering branches of a broken pine. He stood at the foot laughing, one hand on her ankle which he had caught just as she was hurrying out of reach. Thus arrested, she turned and settled herself on the swaying branch.

“Actually flirting with me,” he said sternly.

She shook her head indignantly, her eyes sparkling.

“What is the meaning of this, I’d like to know?” he continued, scowling.

“Would you, Mr. Dan?” she said, with her head on one side, her lips tantalizingly set.

“I certainly do! Why are you so happy, all at once?”

“Because,” she cried, “because I want to crowd a whole lifetime into a day! Look out!”

Before he could reply, she had sprung down into his arms, almost upsetting him with the shock of her descent. She lay her face close to his, panting and flushed.

“Because I want to be happy for a whole lifetime!” she said and flung her arms about him. The next moment, she had slipped from him and taken refuge along the shore, leaping lightly from rock to rock.

A little later, as he waited her return, she came back quite sober and demure.

“When you make up your mind to go,” she said, looking at him intently, “do it quite suddenly, and don’t--don’t tell me until just before--just a few hours before.”

His mood, too, had turned to seriousness. He drew her to a seat beside him.

“It’s queer how your mind changes,” he said earnestly. “I thought, once, I wanted to shake the dust of the city forever--run off, be a hermit up in the top of a mountain, on an island. I hated men and their ways, their jealousies, and their estimates--and, now, I feel as though I’d like to go back, astound them just for once, and then come back here forever.” He stopped, looked at her, and saw the smile on her lips. “What’s that mean--you don’t believe me?”

“I believe all but the last.”

“Well, that’s the way I feel now,” he admitted. “I suppose I should stay away. It’s only vanity.”

“No; you want to feel your strength,” she said slowly. “What you get from others will give you confidence.”

“Yes; I suppose I’m like the rest,” he said frankly. “There is something cruel about it. I want to go back and feel how I’ve gone ahead of the others--even my friends, my best friends. It’s something savage, almost as though you flung them down bodily and climbed over them. And they’ll feel that, too, no matter how much they praise what I’ve done--at the bottom in their secret hearts it’ll hurt. Wonder why it must be so!”

“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully; “if you feel that way, it’s because you need just that feeling, I suppose.”

He hesitated, rather surprised at her understanding before he went on.

“I know it’s trivial, guess the big ones are beyond that--if they are; and yet--” He brought his hands together in an eager clasp over his knee, and his face lit up. “And yet it would be something to go back and feel how you’ve astonished them all, to make good, to have everyone talking about you again--the feeling of the footlights. If you’ve once known that, it’s hard to get away from it.” He smiled at himself. “What an ass I am! Do you think I’m hopelessly ridiculous?” She was standing, her back to a tree. As he looked up guiltily, she was smiling down at him, with a proprietary, maternal pride. “Inga,” he said grinning, “sometimes you remind me of a mother cat, purring away contentedly and watching her favorite kitten tumbling about the rug.”

She burst out laughing.

“Perhaps!”

He took her hand and said abruptly:

“And you--do you want to go back?”

“I want what you need, Mr. Dan,” she said, looking at him steadily.

“Will you be proud of me, Inga, when we have an exhibition all our own?”

“I’m proud now----”

“But won’t you be prouder when the crowds come and you feel what you’ve done?”

She shook her head.

“No; not more than I am now.”

“I don’t see why you say that,” he said, perplexed and frowning.

“I shan’t like to share you with crowds,” she said abruptly, and then, as though she were afraid to have shown too much feeling, she said hastily, “Mr. Dan, don’t think of exhibiting too soon.”

“Why, Inga?”

She studied him carefully, as though calculating in him all his capacity of suffering and all his need of praise.

“You’re too sensitive--you’ll be changed too easily by what people tell you.”

“You mean, criticism will hurt me?”

“No, no; their praise.”

“Flattery.”

“Yes.”

“So you think I’ll give in to flattery, do you?” he said, with the exaggerated gruffness he used when he pretended to be angry.

She nodded without yielding an inch.

“Yes; it means so much to you--oh, I’m serious. There are so many things, new ideas in you. Work them out yourself; don’t let any one else know what you’re thinking--not even me--until you get where you want.”

“What a wise head!” he said, smiling.

“I’m right; I know I’m right.”

“Yes, you are,” he said solemnly. “I don’t know how you guess my failings, but you guess them remarkably well. All right; I’ll appoint you my guardian, and I’ll promise to obey.”

“Then don’t show your sketches to any one--oh, Tootles and King, if you want, but not to the others--the ones you want to--to throw down and climb over.”

“Why, I believe you’re just as savage as I am!” he said, laughing at her conclusion.

“I am; I am!” she cried, in high excitement, and the point lay settled. She was back in her mood of riotous gaiety.

For the rest of the day he watched her, puzzled and fascinated, drawn to her by all his senses, finding her a hundred times more tantalizing, perplexing, and desirable than ever before, astounded at the whirl of spirits into which she drove without a pause. The next day, while he was still waiting what mood would dominate her, she announced abruptly that the time had come to depart. Then he understood.

* * * * *

It was far into November when they returned to the Arcade, and the city was the city of the approaching winter, vibrant, stirring, and electric. He felt a new eagerness of the imagination, a confidence buoyed up on waves of energy that seemed to urge him joyfully back into the arena of conflict.

When they had taken a taxi and were caught in the full crush of thronged avenues, he drew forward on his seat, leaning eagerly toward the window. The city was there, waiting for him, with its variegated flashes of life, its movements of skyscrapers and clouds, its streaming multitudes and, in the shifting current, faces, fragments of human light and shade. These scattered details, which once had been meaningless and confusion on confusion, had a new significance, brought together and made comprehensible by deep, underlying impulses, moving and massed according to the same immutable laws, that flung giant rocks, inscrutable and calm amid the shifting seasons that overran them only to die away. In this opposition of fashioned cliffs and drifting tides of men he felt a kinship with the sea-swept reaches he had known, a unity in significance which surprised him, where he had expected disillusionment, and, drinking in greedily thus the richness of the thronged world which called to him, he realized, with a sudden joy, that his true work lay ahead of him.

Inga, by his side, sat like a statue of contemplation. In her, a profound transformation was taking place. From the moment when, far-off, she had divined the approach of the metropolis, by its far-flung, hideous stragglers, until the moment when they had burst into the sudden upleap of serried life, crowded windows, flight on flight in mute straining toward the freedom of the upper air, something had closed about her, a rigidity of the soul, and from her eyes something childlike and inconscient had fled away. She continued to stare ahead calmly and without flinching, but the look on her clear forehead was brooding and prophetic.

They had hardly drawn up at the Arcade amid a gathering of small urchins, when a great limousine came superbly up and a familiar voice cried in great excitement:

“Inga! Inga!”

The next moment, the Myrtle Popper, which had been, came flying rapturously toward them, in the figure of a stylishly dressed woman in half mourning. From the limousine, more slowly, King O’Leary descended, somewhat embarrassed at being thus surprised.

“Mr. Dangerfield, how well you look! Inga, how pretty you’ve grown!” cried Myrtle, embracing her. “My, what a surprise; we thought you never was coming! The boys’ll be tickled to death. You must all dine with me to-night--sure you must! It’d just break my heart if you didn’t. We’ll have some party!”

O’Leary shook hands, a little red under the sharp, amused look Inga gave them and, after a promise to allow themselves to be fêted by Myrtle, they went in to Sassafras, whose white eyes rolled so rapidly in astonishment that they threatened to fly loose. The elevator was as dusky as ever, jolting and balking on its resentful way up. The corridors were vast--ill lighted and creaking under their tread, but at the door where the studio of the Three Arts had been, they stopped aghast before a strange sign which announced,

MCTWEEDER AND FLAHERTY CANADIAN-AMERICAN BUSTER PIE CO. BUSINESS OFFICE.

Myrtle, laughing, explained that the ruse was for defensive purposes only around the first of the month, and at the noise they made, Tootles and Flick came bounding out. In another five minutes they were the center of an excited gathering--Miss Quirley all aquiver; Belle Shaler; Millie Brewster, a little drawn and nervous; “the baron,” who seemed strangely feeble and old, even to Schneibel, who came plunging in, crying volubly to see the masterpieces of the summer--at once--while a patient waited below in the torture-chair. One look at Dangerfield told them the story of the summer. O’Leary shook hands with Inga, blurting out:

“Well, you’ve done it--say, my hat’s off to you!”

And a little later, “the baron,” profiting by a moment’s isolation, leaned over and patted her arm, saying with his courtly smile:

“You wonderful child--when you are in heaven will you ask the _bon Dieu_ to squeeze me through--a little?”

XLIII

Months of even tenor succeeded, of unremitting industry, when nothing else seemed comprehensible to Dangerfield but the rage of work. So absorbed was he by the richness of the vision which opened before him in the exploration of the city, that even at nights in the hundred and one restaurants through which they flitted--beer garden, water-front quick lunch, oyster-parlor or café in upper Italy--his eyes were always eager and his pencil busy. Of that narrow carpet from Twenty-third Street to the Park which is called New York, they saw nothing. They had plunged back into the healing flood of humanity that swirls and eddies along its upward striving voyage beyond the social boundaries of the elevated, feeling the sincerity of its joy and sorrows, noting its sane and colorful vulgarity, relishing its vitality, its capacity for progress, and its God-given will to enjoy and to enthuse.

For these months of intimacy with the simple and direct life of the massed nations of the cosmopolis, Dangerfield lived and worked in unconscious fervor. No weakening pause at self-analysis, no intimidating calculation of what foreign criticism might declare ever entered his day. He experienced the greatest delight of which an artist is capable, a joy which is like first love and must be surrendered with the consciousness of success--the pure and unreasoning love of the work itself. He had followed Inga’s intuition and resisted the impulse in him to try the effect of what he had done on those whose admiration would have been precious to him. He renounced this temptation of the vanity the more easily in that he perceived, to his own surprise, that the summer had been but preparatory to the big things before him.

Meanwhile, many things had happened in the Arcade. About six weeks after Dangerfield’s return, to the amazement of every one, Drinkwater and Pansy reappeared. That he had married her, contrary to the fears of Belle Shaler, was fortunately true, though, beyond that mere announcement, the girl had nothing to say, maintaining an obstinate silence to all questions. They took an apartment in the building next door which was reached by a bridge from the lower floor, though Drinkwater still maintained his old room in the form of an office. That he held a strong fascination over his wife was apparent, for though she was much changed and quite tamed, no word of complaint or criticism passed her lips. The only evidence of unhappiness, if any did exist, might perhaps have been noticed in the assiduity of her attendance on Mr. Cornelius and the thousand and one attentions with which she surrounded him. “The baron,” who had been broken in health for some time, seemed to cling to this affection, though he would never reconcile himself to receiving the husband.

Tootles, who was of a dramatic temperament, had braced himself heroically to withstand the tragedy of his life. For several days his appetite noticeably diminished, but the recovery was rapid and visibly abetted by the providential meeting with a blonde student at the art school, who engaged his affections instantly and tyrannized over him as successfully as the brunette of the past. The windfall which had come to him from “The Apotheosis of the Well-dressed Man” had departed in the fashion of all winds, in an attempt to rival the careers of sudden millionaires, who are believed to soar from such humble foundations. One-third had gone in gilt-edged mining stocks from a sleek and confidential promoter whom Flick had annexed down South; another slice had been sacrificed to acquire fifty-one per cent of the stock of a combination corkscrew and coat-hanger to be called the Corkaroo, which had been sacrificed to them by an inventor in distress, while the last hundred dollars had been placed in desperation on a ten-to-one shot, about which a friend of a friend of Flick’s had private information.

Meanwhile, the Arcade was watching with undiminishing interest the comedy which was transpiring daily and which had as its principal actors Mrs. Pomello, King O’Leary, and Millie Brewster. That Myrtle had come back determined to carry off King O’Leary was evident to all. In fact, in the frankness of her nature, she made no disguise of her intention. By one of the caprices of fortune, which the fickle goddess delights in showering over the metropolis, the dashing girl, whisked from a manicure-parlor to sudden opulence as though on some miraculous wishing-carpet of the “Arabian nights,” found herself a widow within a short three months and sole heiress to a property which developed beyond her expectations.

Mr. Pomello had died suddenly at Nice, where in an indulgent cosmopolitan society, appraising by the eyes, they had found easy acquaintance. Myrtle as a young widow, heiress to fifteen thousand a year, undeniably stunning if inclined to liberties with the King’s English, found a number of sufficiently titled adventurers ready to assist her upward progress into society. Before she left, she had the exquisite sensation of actually refusing to be a countess--an internal satisfaction which Providence accorded her as a reward for constancy.

But, in the directness of her nature, she cared little for these infirm personalities. She remembered the man who had stirred her from the first impudent kiss, and, after a certain period of retirement in memory of the strange, gentle old man who had transformed her horizon, she came back to America and established herself in a resplendent suite at a neighboring hotel. Prosperity had as yet worked no arrogance in the naturalness of her nature, and though her former friends instinctively drew back in defensive attitudes at the spectacle of the limousine, the liveried chauffeur, the exquisite costumes of half mourning and the large and brilliant jewelry, they soon relaxed their suspicions before the unaffected generosity and gay moods of the ex-manicure-girl. The one exception was, of course, Millie Brewster, whose weakness for King O’Leary had long been evident. The gorgeous arrival of Mrs. Pomello reduced Millie to a state of melancholic desperation, which even drove her to the extent of half confidence in Tootles, who, having had his heart exploded a number of times, felt qualified for the rôle of a sympathetic consoler.

As a matter of fact, neither Flick nor Tootles were in the least doubt that Myrtle had made up her mind to carry off O’Leary with a high hand and marry him, after the easy matter of a divorce had been settled, nor for that matter had Millie Brewster, who daily grew more silent and more pathetic, flitting into the studio at all hours for a glimpse of her idol or at least the opportunity to converse about him. What O’Leary himself was thinking remained the mystery, nor could his comrades in the arts, either by sly traps or direct accusations, procure a clue. In truth, O’Leary himself was as thoroughly perplexed as the next man. He was human, and he deeply relished the public rôle he had suddenly found himself thrown into, by the battle for his possession between the two charmers, either of whom enchanted when the other was away.

Now, it happened that Tootles, though the sentimental adviser of Millie, was convinced of the hopelessness of the odds against which she struggled, while Flick insisted that Myrtle was riding to a disaster, and for this he had shrewd reasons of his own.

“She’s making mistakes,” he said wisely, on one of the many occasions when he discussed the absorbing subject with Tootles. “Some girl, some action, fine eyes and all that, but she’s on the wrong track! I could put her wise, but I won’t.”

“What mistakes?” said Tootles.

“Introducing society and King to each other. You can’t tame King--he’ll kick over the traces some day--then good-by.”

“Oh, I don’t know. He doesn’t show any signs yet. He’s driving out, lunching out, theaters and all that sort of stuff. I do believe she’s even gotten him worked up to taking tea. Do you mean to say that’s not serious?”

“Serious for her--she’s rushing the game,” said Flick obstinately. “Mark my words, she’ll go too far! She’ll start dressing him up.”

“He had on a new tie yesterday,” said Tootles suddenly.

“Sure he did. She’ll try to make a dude out of him--see if she don’t; and one thing O’Leary isn’t, and that’s a Charlie boy. I tell you he won’t stand for it. He’ll go cold all of a sudden.”

“My word,” said Tootles doubtfully, “it is a chance though! Remember the solid-cash basis. That does count for something, Literature.”

“With you or me, Art,” said Flick crushingly. “I am quite ready to console the lady and so would you be. I’m wild, but I’m not a wild Indian like O’Leary. If Myrtle was wise, instead of blowing in on a circus-wagon with diamond attachments, she’d hang around here in a sweater and a sunbonnet, and do the joy-riding on a surface-car. O’Leary will never stand for the fancy stuff, never in the world!”

Even as they were thus debating, King O’Leary came into the studio. Under one arm he carried a couple of packages, while in the other hand hung what was unmistakably a hat-box.

“Hello!” said O’Leary, with brazen effrontery, and, whistling, he moved over to the corner which had been specially allotted to him as his private dressing-room.

“Hello!” said Flick, who stared first at the hat-box and then at Tootles.

O’Leary continued to whistle loudly, removing his coat and vest while he undid the first of the packages. Tootles, in his amazement, reached out his hand and clung to Flick’s. From the package, O’Leary drew forth a pink-and-white shirt with cuffs attached, and slowly and deliberately, without abating his nonchalant whistling, struggled into it.

“If he puts on a collar, you lose,” said Tootles to Flick, who was too completely flabbergasted to retort. Even as the words were spoken, King O’Leary produced a standing collar and attached it to the shirt with the clumsiness of a first effort. Flick and Tootles went over backward still holding hands and, thus supinely on their back, their feet in the air, continued to stare at the apparition.

King O’Leary, having surveyed the effect of the white badge of servitude in the mirror, flung into his vest and coat and ripping off the cover of the box produced a derby which he adjusted with nicety on his head, giving it a rakish tilt. Then he produced a pair of gloves, shook them carefully in the air, raised his arms, yawned, and departed whistling. Tootles looked at Flick; Flick looked at Tootles.

“Poor Millie!” said Tootles, still on his back. “Are you convinced now?”

“I am,” said Flick. “I give up. I know nothing about human nature.”

For three days, King O’Leary vouchsafed no explanation. He rose, clamped into stiff shirt and stiff collar, crushed down over his free brow the unspeakable derby hat, and departed into society. Flick and Tootles arranged the old flannel shirt, flowing tie, and venerable sombrero upon a roughly constructed wooden cross in the corner and placed upon it the following inscription:

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF KING O’LEARY _Requiscat in Pace_