Part 9
“No, indeed! I mean you must have experience. Will you tell me, is it so dreadful not to have money? People say different things.”
“They do.” He felt elevated, borne along on a wave of ornamental expression. “It is their salvation. Their common proverbs contradict each other. A man looks after his pence and trusts one proverb that the pounds will look after themselves, till presently he is called penny wise and pound foolish, and brought up by another. And consider how less noticeable life would be without its jostle of opinion, its conflicting lines of wisdom, its following of one truth to meet with another going a different way. Give me for finest companionship some half truth, some ironic veracity.”
She shook her head. It came to him with a shock that it was not his ornamental expression which interested her, but only as it might bear on something in her own mind more simple, direct and serious, something not yet disclosed. “In fact,” he thought, “she is right. One must get on with the plot” It was a grievous literary fault to break continuity, to be led away from the issue by niceties of expression. The proper issue of a plot was simple, direct, serious, drawn from the motive which began it. Why did she sit here with her jewels, her white arms and black dress these weird, still hours of the night? Propriety hinted his withdrawal, but one must resist the commonplace.
“The answer to the question does not satisfy you. But do you not see that I only enlarged on your own answer? People say different things because they are different. The answer depends on temperaments, more narrowly on moods; on tenses, too, whether it is present poverty and houselessness or past or future. And so it has to be answered particularly, and you haven't made me able to answer it particularly to you. And then one wouldn't imagine it could be a question particular to you.”
“You are very clever,” she murmured, half smiling again. “Are you not too clever for the purpose? You say so many things.”
“That is true,” said Noel plaintively. “The story has come to a standstill. It has all run out into diction.”
At that moment there was a loud noise in the hall.
The smile, which began hopefully, grew old while he watched it, and withered away. The noise that echoed in the hall was of a banging door, then of laden, dragging steps. The hall door was thrown open, and two snowy hackmen entered, holding up between them a man wearing a tall hat.
“He's some loaded, ma'am,” said one of them cheerfully. “I ain't seen him so chucked in six months.”
They dropped him in a chair, from which, after looking about him with half-open, glassy eyes, and closing them again, he slid limply to the floor. The hackman regarded that choice of position with sympathy.
“Wants to rest his load, he does,” and backed out of the door with his companion.
“It goes on the bill. Ain't seen him so chucked in six months.”
The lady had not moved from her chair, but had sat white and still, looking down into her lap. She gave a hard little laugh.
“Isn't it nice he's so 'chucked'? He would have acted dreadfully.” She was leaning on the table now, her dark eyes reading him intently. The man on the floor snorted and gurgled in his sleep.
“I couldn't kill anybody,” she said. “Could you?”
Noel shook his head.
“It's so funny,” she went on in a soft, speculative way, “one can't do it. I'm afraid to go away and be alone and poor. I wish he would die.”
“It wouldn't work out that way,” said Noel, struggling with his wits. “He's too healthy.”
It seemed to him immediately that the comment was not the right one. It was not even an impersonal fact to himself, an advantage merely to the plot, that the sleeper was unable to object to him and discard him from it, as he had resolved to discard Mrs. Tibbett, but with such brutal energy as the sleeper's face indicated. For it repelled not so much by its present relaxed degradation as by its power, its solidity of flesh, its intolerant self-assertion, the physical vigor of the short bull neck, bulky shoulders, heavy mustache, heavy cheeks and jaw, bluish with the shaving of a thick growth. He was dressed, barring his damp dishevelment, like a well-groomed clubman.
But the lady was looking Noel in the eyes, and her own seemed strangely large, but as if covering a spiritual rather than a physical space, settled in melancholy, full of clouds, moving lights and dusky distances.
“I was waiting for him because he ordered me. I'm so afraid of him,” she said, shrinking with the words. “He likes me to be here and afraid of him.”
“Tell me what I am to do?” he said eagerly.
“I suppose you are not to do anything.”
Noel caught the thread of his fluency. He drew a ten-cent piece from his pocket, tossed it on the table, gestured toward it with one hand and swung the other over the back of his chair with an air of polished recklessness.
“But your case seems desperate to you. Is it more than mine? You have followed this thing about to 'the end of the passage,' and there is my last coin. My luck might change to-morrow. Who knows? Perhaps tonight. I would take it without question and full of hope. Will you experiment with fortune and--and me?”
The dark eyes neither consented nor refused. They looked at him gravely.
“It is a black, cold night. The snow is thick in the air and deep on the street Put it so at the worst, but fortune and wit will go far.”
“Your wit goes farther than your fortune, doesn't it?” she said, smiling.
“I don't conceal.”
“You don't conceal either of them, do you? You spread them both out,” and she laughed a pleasant little ripple of sound.
Noel rose with distinction and bent toward her across the table.
“My fortune is this ten-cent piece. As you see, on the front of it is stamped a throned woman.”
“Oh, how clever.” She laughed, and Noel flushed with the applause.
“Shall we trust fortune and spin the coin? Heads, the throned woman, I shall presently worship you, an earthly divinity. Tails, a barren wreath and the denomination of a money value, meaning I take my fortunes away, and you,” pointing in turn to the sleeper and the jewels, “put up with yours as you can.”
She seemed to shiver as he pointed. “No,” she said, “I couldn't do that. A woman never likes to spin a coin seriously.”
“Will you go, then?”
The sleeper grunted and turned over. She turned pale, put her hand to her throat, said hurriedly, “Wait here,” and left the room, lifting and drawing her skirt aside as she passed the sleeper.
She opened the door at last and came again, wrapped in a fur mantle, carrying a travelling case, and stood looking down at the sleeper as if with some struggle of the soul, some reluctant surrender.
They went out, shutting the door behind them.
The snow was falling still on Tenth Street, out of the crowding night. He held her hand on his arm close to him. She glided beside him noiselessly.
The express office was at the corner, a little dingy, gas-lit room.
“Carriage? Get it in a minute,” said the sleepy clerk. “It's just round the corner.”
They stood together by a window, half opaque with dust. Her face was turned away, and he watched the slant of her white cheek.
“You will have so much to tell me,” he whispered at last.
“I am really very grateful. You helped me to resolve.”
“Your carriage, sir.”
The electric light sputtered over them standing on the curb.
“But,” she said, smiling up at him, “I have nothing to tell you. There is nothing more. It ends here. Forgive me. It is my plot and it wouldn't work out your way. There are too many conflicting lines of wisdom in your way. My life lately has been what you would call, perhaps, a study in realism, and you want me to be, perhaps, a symbolic romance. I am sure you would express it very cleverly. But I think one lives by taking resolutions rather than by spinning coins, which promise either a throned woman, or a wreath and the denomination of a money value. One turns up so much that is none of these things. Men don't treat women that way. I married to be rich, and was very wretched, and perhaps your fame, when it comes, will be as sad to you. Perhaps the trouble lies in what you called 'the third disposal.' But I did not like being a study in realism. I should not mind being something symbolic, if I might prove my gratitude”--she took her hand from his arm, put one foot on the step and laughed, a pleasant little ripple of sound--“by becoming literary material.” The door shut to, and the carriage moved away into the storm with a muffled roll of wheels.
Noel stared after it blankly, and then looked around him. It was half a block now to Mrs. Tibbett. He walked on mechanically, and mounted the steps by habit. The outer door was not locked. A touch of compunction had visited Mrs. Tibbett.
He crept into his bed, and lay noting the growing warmth and sense of sleep, and wondering whether that arched doorway was the third of the three or the second. Strictly speaking he seemed to have gone in at the middle one and come out at the third, or was it not the first rather than the middle entrance that he had sheltered in? The three arched entrances capered and contorted before him in the dark, piled themselves into the portal of a Moorish palace, twisted themselves in a kind of mystical trinity and seal of Solomon, floated apart and became thin, filmy, crescent moons over a frozen sea. He sat up in bed and smote the coverlet.
“I don't know her name! She never told me!” He clutched his hair, and then released it cautiously. “It's Musidora! I forgot that sonnet!”
'Twas Musidora, whom the mystic nine
Gave to my soul to be forever mine,
And, as through shadows manifold of Dis,
Showed in her eyes, through dusky distances
And clouds, the moving lights about their shrine;
Now ever on my soul her touch shall be
As on the cheek are touches of the snow,
Incessant, cool, and gone; so guiding me
From sorrow's house and triple portico.
And prone recumbrance of brute tyranny,
In a strict path shall teach my feet to go.
The clock in the invisible steeple struck three.