Читать книгу The Dust Flower - Basil King - Страница 6

26

The girl, who had paused when he did, leaned on the pusher of her go-cart, studying him calmly. Chewing something with a slow, rotary movement of the lips and chin, she broke the action with a snap before quite completing the circle, to begin all over again. “Oh, you do, do you?” was her quiet response.

“If you please.”

She studied him again, with the same semi-circular motion of the jaw. She might have been weighing his proposal.

“Say, is this one of them club initiation stunts, or have you just got a noive?”

“Am I to take that as a yes or a no?”

“And am I to take you as one of them smart-Alecks, or a coily-headed nut?”

He saw a way out. “I’m generally considered a curly-headed nut.”

“Then it’s me for the exit-in-case-of-fire, so ta-ta.” She laughed back at him over her shoulder. “Wish you luck with your next.”

But fate was already on him in another form. A lady of fifty or thereabouts was coming up the path, refined, sedate, mistress of herself, the one type of all others most difficult to accost. All the same he must do it. He must keep on doing it till some one yielded to his suit. The rebuffs to which he had been subjected did no more than inflame his will.

Approaching the new sibyl with the same ceremoniousness, he repeated the same words in the same precise tone. The lady stood off, eyed him majestically through a lorgnette, and spoke with a force which came from quietude.

27

“I know who you are. You’re Rashleigh Allerton. You ought to be ashamed with a shame that would strike you to the ground. I’m a friend of Miss Marion Walbrook’s. I’m on my way to see her and shall not mention this encounter. We work on the same committee of the League for the Suppression of Men’s Clubs. The lamentable state in which I see you convinces me once more of the need of our work, if our men are to become as we hope to see them. I bid you a good afternoon.”

With the dignity of a queen she passed on and out of sight, leaving him with the sting of a whiplash on his face.

But the name of Miss Walbrook, connected with that of the League which was her pet enthusiasm for the public weal, only served as an incitement. He would go through with it now at any cost. By nightfall he would be at police-headquarters for insulting women, or he would have found a bride.

Walking on again, the path was clear before him as far as he could see. Having thus a few minutes to reflect, he came to the conclusion that his attacks had been too precipitate. He should feel the ground before him, leading the sibyl a little at a time, so as to have her mentally prepared. There were methods of “getting acquainted” to which he should apply himself first of all.

But getting acquainted with the old Italian peasant woman, bowed beneath a bundle, who was the next he would have to confront, being out of the question, he resolved to side-step destiny by slipping out of the main path and following a branch one. Doing so, he 28 came into less frequented regions, while his steps took him up a low hill burnished with the tints of mid-October. Trees and shrubs were flame-colored, copper-colored, wine-colored, differing only in their diffuseness of hue from the concentrated gorgeousness of amaranth, canna, and gladiolus. The sounds of the city were deadened here to a dull rumble, while the vibrancy of the autumn afternoon excited his taut nerves.

At the top of the hill he paused. There was no one in sight who could possibly respond to his quest. He wondered for a second if this were not a hint to him to abandon it. But doing that he would abandon his revenge, and by abandoning his revenge he would concede everything to this girl who had so bitterly wronged him. Ever since he could remember they had been pals, and for at least ten years he had vaguely thought of asking her to marry him when it came to his seeking a wife. It was true, the hint she had thrown out, that he had felt himself in no great need of a wife till his mother had died some eighteen months previously, and he had found himself with a cumbrous old establishment on his hands. That had given the decisive turn to his suit. He had asked her. She had taken him. And since then, in the course of less than ten weeks, if they had had three quarrels they had had thirty. He had taken them all more or less good-naturedly—till to-day. To-day was too much. He could hardly say why it was too much, unless it was as the last straw, but he felt it essential to his honor to show her by actual demonstration the ruin she had made of him.

29

Looking about him for another possibility, he noticed that at the spot where the path, having serpentined down the little hillside, rejoined the main footway there was a bench so placed that its occupant would have a view along several avenues at once. Since it was obviously a vantage point for such strategy as his, he had taken the first steps down toward it when a little gray figure emerged from behind a group of blue Norway spruces. She went dejectedly to the bench, sitting down at an extreme end of it.

Wrought up to a fit of tension far from rare with him, Allerton stood with his nails digging into his clenched palms and his thin lips pressed together. He was sure he was looking at a “drab.” All the shoddy, outcast meanings he had read into the word were under the bedraggled feathers of this battered black hat or compressed within the forlorn squirrel-trimmed gray suit. The dragging movement, the hint of dropping on the seat not from fatigue but from desperation, completed the picture his imagination had already painted of some world-worn, knocked-about creature who had come to the point at which, in his own phrase, she was “all in.”

As far as this described Letty Gravely, he was wrong. She was not “all in.” She was never more mentally alert than at that very minute. If she moved slowly, if she sank on the seat as if too beaten down by events to do more, it was because her mind was so intensely centered on her immediate problems.

She had, in fact, just formed a great resolution. Whatever became of her, she would never go back to Judson Flack, her stepfather. This had not been 30 clearly in her mind when she had gone down his steps and walked away, but the occasion presented itself now as one to be seized. In seizing it, however, the alternatives were difficult. She was without a cent, a shelter, a job, a friend, or the prospect of a meal. It was probable that there was not at that minute in New York a human being so destitute. Before nightfall she would have to find some nominal motive for living or be arrested as a vagrant.

She was not appalled. For the first time in her life she was relatively free from fear. Even with nothing but her person as she stood, she was her own mistress. No big dread hung over her—that is, no big dread of the kind represented by Judson Flack. She might jump into the river or go to the bad, but in either case she would do it of her own free will. Merely to have the exercise of her own free will gave her the kind of physical relief which a human being gets from stretching limbs cramped and crippled by chains.

Besides, there was in her situation an underlying possibility of adventure. This she didn’t phrase, since she didn’t understand it. She only had the intuition in her heart that where “the world is all before you, where to choose your place of rest, and Providence your guide,” Providence becomes your guide. Verbally she put it merely in the words, “Things happen,” though as to what could happen between half-past three in the afternoon and midnight, when she would possibly be in jail, she could not begin to imagine.

So absorbed was she in this momentous uncertainty that she scarcely noticed that some one had seated himself at the other end of the bench. It was a public 31 place; it was likely that some one would. She felt neither curiosity nor resentment. A lack of certain of the feminine instincts, or their retarded development, left her without interest in the fact that the newcomer was a man. From the slight glance she had given him when she heard his step, she judged him to be what she estimated as an elderly man, quite far into the thirties.

She went back to her own thoughts which were practical. There were certain measures which she could take at once, after which there would be no return. Once more she was not appalled. She had lived too near the taking of these steps to be shocked by them. Everything in life is a question of relativity, and in the world which her mother had entered on marrying Judson Flack the men were all so near the edge of the line which separates the criminal from the non-criminal that it seemed a natural thing when they crossed it, while the women. …

But as her thoughts were dealing with this social problem in its bearing on herself, her neighbor spoke.

“Funny to watch those kids playing with the pup, isn’t it?”

She admitted that it was, that watching children and young animals was a favorite sport with her. She answered simply, because being addressed by strange men with whom she found herself in proximity was sanctioned by the etiquette of her society. To resent it would be putting on airs, besides which it would cut off social intercourse between the sexes. It had happened to her many a time to have engaging conversations with chance young men beside 32 her in the subway, never seeing them before or afterward.

So Allerton found getting acquainted easier than he had expected. The etiquette of his society not sanctioning this directness of response on her part, he drew the conclusion that she was accustomed to “meeting fellows halfway.” As this was the sort of person he was looking for, he found in the freedom nothing to complain of.

With the openness of her social type she gave details of her biography without needing to be pressed.

“You’re a New York girl?”

“I am now. I didn’t use to be.”

“What were you to begin with?”

“Momma brought me from Canada after my father died. That’s why I ain’t got no friends here.”

At this appeal for sympathy his glance stole suspiciously toward her, finding his first conjectures somewhat but not altogether verified. She was young apparently, and possibly pretty, though as to neither point did he care. He would have preferred more “past,” more “mystery,” more “drama,” but since you couldn’t have everything, a young person utterly unfit to be his wife would have to be enough. He continued to draw out her story, not because he cared anything about hearing it, but in order to spring his question finally without making her think him more unbalanced than he was.

“Your father was a Canadian?”

“Yes; a farmer. Momma used to say she was about as good to work a farm as a cat to run a fire-engine. 33 When he died, she sold out for four thousand dollars and come to New York.”

“To work?”

“No, to have a good time. She’d never had a good time, momma hadn’t, and she was awful pretty. So she said she’d just blow herself to it while she had the berries in her basket. That was how she met Judson Flack. I suppose you know who he is. Everybody does.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t the pleasure.”

“Oh, I don’t know as you’d find it any big pleasure. Momma didn’t, not after she’d give him a try.”

“Who and what is he?”

“He calls hisself a man about town. I call him a bum. Poor momma married him.”

“And wasn’t happy, I suppose.”

“Not after he’d spent her wad, she wasn’t. She was crazy about him, and when she found out that all he’d cared about was her four thousand plunks—well, it was her finish.”

“How long ago was that?”

“About four years now.”

“And what have you been doing in the meanwhile?”

“Keepin’ house for Judson Flack most of the time—till I quit.”

“Oh, you’ve quit?”

“Sure I’ve quit.” She was putting her better foot forward. “Now I’m in pitchers.”

He glanced at her again, having noticed already that she scarcely glanced at him. Her profile was toward him as at first, an irregular little profile of lifts and tilts, which might be appealing, but was not beautiful. 34 The boast of being in pictures, so incongruous with her woefully dilapidated air, did not amuse him. He knew how large a place a nominal connection with the stage took in the lives of certain ladies. Even this poor little tramp didn’t hesitate to make the claim.

“And you’re doing well?”

She wouldn’t show the white feather. “Oh, so so! I—I get along.”

“You live by yourself?”

“I—I do now.”

“Don’t you find it lonely?”

“Not so lonely as livin’ with Judson Flack.”

“You’re—you’re happy?”

A faint implication that she might look to him for help stirred her fierce independence. “Gee, yes! I’m—I’m doin’ swell.”

“But you wouldn’t mind a change, I suppose?”

For the first time her eyes stole toward him, not in suspicion, and still less in alarm, but in one of the intenser shades of curiosity. It was almost as if he was going to suggest to her something “off the level” but which would nevertheless be worth her while. She was used to these procedures, not in actual experience but from hearing them talked about. They made up a large part of what Judson Flack understood as “business.” She felt it prudent to be as non-committal as possible.

“I ain’t so sure.”

She meant him to understand that being tolerably satisfied with her own way of life, she was not enthusiastic over new experiments.

35

His next observation was no surprise to her. “I’m a lawyer.”

She was sure of that. There were always lawyers in these subterranean affairs—“shyster” was a word she had heard applied to them—and this man looked the part. His thin face, clear-cut profile, and skin which showed dark where he shaved, were all, in her judgment, signs of the sinister. Even his clothes, from his patent leather shoes with spats to his dark blue necktie with a pearl in it, were those which an actor would wear in pictures to represent a “shark.”

She was turning these thoughts over in her mind when he spoke again.

“I’ve an office, but I don’t practise much. It takes all my time to manage my own estate.”

She didn’t know what this meant. It sounded like farming, but you didn’t farm in New York, or do it from an office anyhow. “I guess he’s one of them gold-brick nuts,” she commented to herself, “but he won’t put nothin’ over on me.”

In return for her biography he continued to give his, bringing out his facts in short, hard statements which seemed to hurt him. It was this hurting him which she found most difficult to reconcile with her gold brick theory and the suspicion that he was a “shark.”

“My father was a lawyer, too. Rather well known in his day. One time ambassador to Vienna.”

Ambassador to Vienna! She didn’t know where Vienna was or the nature of an ambassador, but she did know that it sounded grand, so she looked 36 at him attentively. It was either more gold brick or else. …

Then something struck her—“smote her” would be perhaps the more accurately descriptive word, since the effect was on her heart. This man was sick. He was suffering. She had often seen women suffer, but men rarely, and this was one of the rare instances. Something in her was touched. She couldn’t imagine why he talked to her or what he wanted of her, but a pity which had never yet been called upon was astir among her emotions.

As for the minute he said no more, her next words came out only because she supposed them to betray the kindly interest of which he was in need.

“Then I suppose he left you a big fat wad.”

“Yes; but it doesn’t do me any good. I mean, it doesn’t make me happy—when I’m not.”

“I guess it’d make you a good deal less happy if you didn’t have it.”

“Perhaps so; I don’t think about it either way.” He added, after tense compression of the lips; “I’m all alone in the world—like you.”

She was sure now that something was coming, though of what nature lay beyond her speculative power. She wondered if he could have fallen in love with her at first sight, realizing a favorite dream she often had in the subway. Hundreds of times she had beguiled the minutes by selecting one or another of the wealthy lawyers and bankers, whom she supposed to be her fellow-travelers there, seeing him smitten by a glance at her, following her when she got out, and laying his heart and coronet at her feet before she had 37 run up the steps. If this man were not a shyster lawyer or a gold brick nut, he might possibly be doing that.

“It’s about a girl,” he burst out suddenly. “Half an hour ago she kicked me out.”

“Did she know you had all that dough?”

“Yes, she knew I had all that dough. But she said that since I was going to the devil, I had better go.” He drew a long breath. “Well, I’m going—perhaps quicker than she thinks.”

“Will you do yourself any good by that?”

“No, but I’ll do her harm.”

“How?”

“I’ll show her what she’s made of me.”

“She can’t make anything of you in half an hour or in half a year—not so long as you’ve got your wad back of you. If you was to be kicked out with your pay-envelope stole, and your mother’s rings pulled off your fingers, and her wrist-watch from your wrist, and even your carfare––”

“Is that what’s happened to you?”

“Sure! Half an hour ago, too. Judson Flack! But why should I worry? Something’ll happen before night.”

He became emphatic. “Yes, and I’ll tell you what it will be. You put your finger on it just now when you said she couldn’t make anything out of men in half an hour. Well, it’s got to be something that would take just that time—an hour at the most—and fatal. Now do you see?”

She shook her head.

He swung fully round on her from his end of the bench. “Think,” he commanded.

38

As if with a premonitory notion of what he meant, she answered coldly: “What’s the good o’ me thinkin’? I’ve got nothin’ to do with it.”

“You might have.”

“I can’t imagine what, unless it’d be––” Realizing what she had been about to say, she broke off in confusion, coloring to the eyes.

He nodded. “I see you understand. I want you to come off somewhere and marry me.”

She took it more calmly than if she hadn’t thought him mad. “But—but you said you’d be—be goin’ to the devil.”

“Well?”

His look, his tone, conveyed the idea, which penetrated to her mind but slowly. When it did, the surging color became a flush, hot and painful.

So here it was again, the thing she had been running away from. It had outwitted and outrun her, meeting her again just at the instant when she thought she was shaking it off. She was so indignant with the thing that she almost overlooked the man. She too swung round from her end of the bench, so that they confronted each other, with the length of the seat between them. It was her habit to put things plainly, though now she did it with a burning heart.

“This is the way you mean it, isn’t it?—you’d go to the devil because you’d married me.”

The half-minute before he answered was occupied not merely in thinking what to say but in noticing, now that he had her in full-face, that her large, brown irises seemed to be sprinkled with gold dust. Otherwise her appearance struck him simply as blurred, as if 39 it had been brightly enough drawn as to color and line, only rubbed over and defaced by the hand of misery.

“I don’t want you to get me wrong,” he explained. “It’s not a question of my marrying you in particular. I’ve said I’d marry the first girl I met who’d marry me.”

The gold-brown eyes scintillated with a thousand tiny stars. “Say, and am I the first?”

“No; you’re the fourth.” He added, so that she should be under no misconception as to what he was about: “You can take me or leave me. That’s up to you. But if you take me, I want you to understand that it’ll be on a purely business basis.”

She repeated, as if to memorize the words, “A purely business basis.”

“Exactly. I’m not looking for a wife. I only want a woman to marry—a woman to whom I can point and say, See there! I’ve married—that.”

“And that’d be me.”

“If you undertook the job.”

“The job of—of bein’ laughed at—jeered at––”

“I’d be the one who’d be laughed at and jeered at. Nobody would think anything about you. They wouldn’t remember how you looked or know your name. If you got sick of it after a bit, and decided to cut and run, you could do it. I’d see that you were well treated—for the rest of your life.”

She studied him long and earnestly. “Say, are you crazy?”

“I’m all on edge, if that’s what you mean. But there’s nothing for you to be afraid of. I shan’t do you any harm at any time.”

40

“You only want to do harm to yourself. I’d be like the awful kind o’ pill which a fellow’ll swaller to commit suicide.” She rose, not without a dignity of her own. “Well, mister, if I’m your fourth, I guess you’ll have to look about you for a fifth.”

“Where are you going?”

He asked the question without rising. She answered as if her choice of objectives was large.

“Oh, anywheres.”

“Which means nowhere, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, not exactly. It means—it means—the first place I fetch up.”

“The first place you fetch up may be the police-station, if the things you said just now are true.”

“The police-station is safe, anyways.”

“And you think the place I’d take you to wouldn’t be. Well, you’re wrong. It’ll be as safe as a church for as long as you like to stay; and when you want to go—lots of money to go with.”

Facing away from him toward the city, she said over her shoulder: “There’s things money couldn’t pay you for. Bein’ looked down on is one.”

She was about to walk on, but he sprang after her, catching her by the sleeve.

“Look here! Be a sport. You’ve got the chance of your lifetime. It’ll mean no more to you than a part they’d give you in pictures—just a rôle—and pay you a lot better.”

She was not blind to the advantages he laid before her. True, it might be what she qualified as “bull” to get her into a trap; only she didn’t believe it. This man with the sick mind and anguished face was none 41 of the soft-spoken fiends whose business it is to ensnare young girls. She knew all about them from living with Judson Flack, and couldn’t be mistaken. This fellow might be crazy, but he was what he said. If he said he wouldn’t do her any harm, he wouldn’t. If he said he would pay her well, he would. The main question was as to whether or not, just for the sake of getting something to eat and a place to sleep, she could deliberately put herself in a position in which the man who had married her would have gone to the devil because he had married her.

As he held her by the sleeve looking down at her, and she, half turned, was looking up at him, this was the battle she was fighting. Hitherto her impulse had been to run away from the scorn of her inferiority; now she was asking herself what would happen if she took up its challenge and fought it on its own ground. What if I do? was the way the question framed itself, but aloud she made it.

“If I said I would, what would happen first?”

“We’d go and get a license. Then we’d find a minister. After that I should give you something to eat, and then I’d take you home.”

“Where would that be?”

He gave her his address in East Sixty-seventh Street, only a few doors from Fifth Avenue, but her social sophistication was not up to the point of seeing the significance of this. Neither did her imagination try to picture the home or to see it otherwise than as an alternative to the police-station, or worse, as a lodging for the night.

42

“And what would happen to me when I got to your home?”

“You’d have your own room. I shouldn’t interfere with you. You’d hardly ever see me. You could stay as long as you liked or as short as you liked, after the first week or two.”

There was that about him which carried conviction. She believed him. As an alternative to having nowhere to go, what he offered her was something, and something with that spice of adventure of which she had been dreaming only a few minutes earlier. She couldn’t be worse off than she was now, and if it gave her the chance of a hand-to-hand tussle with the world-pride which had never done anything but look down on her, she would be fighting what she held as her worst enemy. She braced herself to say,

“All right; I’ll do it.”

He, too, braced himself. “Very well! Let’s start.”

The impetuosity of his motion almost took her breath away as she tried to keep pace with him.

“By the way, what’s your name?” he asked, before they reached Fifth Avenue.

She told him, but was too overwhelmed with what she had undertaken to dare to ask him his.

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