Part 14 (1/2)
”Won't you give us tea, mother?” said Anita, on her surface not a trace of the cyclone that must still have been raging hi her.
”Congratulate me, Mrs. Ellersly,” said I. ”Your daughter has consented to marry me.”
Instead of speaking, Mrs. Ellersly began to cry--real tears. And for a moment I thought there was a real heart inside of her somewhere. But when she spoke, that delusion vanished.
”You must forgive me, Mr. Blacklock,” she said in her hard, smooth, politic voice. ”It is the shock of realizing I'm about to lose my daughter.” And I knew that her tears were from joy and relief--Anita had ”come up to the scratch;” the hideous menace of ”genteel poverty” had been averted.
”Do give us tea, mama,” said Anita. Her cold, sarcastic tone cut my nerves and her mother's like a razor blade. I looked sharply at her, and wondered whether I was not making a bargain vastly different from that my pa.s.sion was picturing.
XV. SOME STRANGE LAPSES OF A LOVER
But before there was time for me to get a distinct impression, that ugly shape of cynicism had disappeared.
”It was a shadow I myself cast upon her,” I a.s.sured myself; and once more she seemed to me like a clear, calm lake of melted snow from the mountains.
”I can see to the pure white sand of the very bottom,” thought I. Mystery there was, but only the mystery of wonder at the apparition of such beauty and purity in such a world as mine. True, from time to time, there showed at the surface or vaguely outlined in the depths, forms strangely out of place in those unsullied waters. But I either refused to see or refused to trust my senses. I had a fixed ideal of what a woman should be; this girl embodied that ideal.
”If you'd only give up your cigarettes,” I remember saying to her when we were a little better acquainted, ”you'd be perfect.”
She made an impatient gesture. ”Don't!” she commanded almost angrily. ”You make me feel like a hypocrite. You tempt me to be a hypocrite. Why not be content with woman as she is--a human being? And--how could I--any woman not an idiot--be alive for twenty-five years without learning--a thing or two? Why should any man want it?”
”Because to know is to be spattered and stained,” said I. ”I get enough of people who know, down-town. Up-town--I want a change of air. Of course, you think you know the world, but you haven't the remotest conception of what it's really like. Sometimes when I'm with you, I begin to feel mean and--and unclean. And the feeling grows on me until it's all I can do to restrain myself from rus.h.i.+ng away.”
She looked at me critically.
”You've never had much to do with women, have you?” she finally said slowly in a musing tone.
”I wish that were true--almost,” replied I, on my mettle as a man, and resisting not without effort the impulse to make some vague ”confessions”--boastings disguised as penitential admissions--after the customary masculine fas.h.i.+on.
She smiled--and one of those disquieting shapes seemed to me to be floating lazily and repellently downward, out of sight. ”A man and a woman can be a great deal to each other, I believe,” said she; ”can be--married, and all that--and remain as strange to each other as if they had never met--more hopelessly strangers.”
”There's always a sort of mystery,” I conceded. ”I suppose that's one of the things that keep married people interested.”
She shrugged her shoulders--she was in evening dress, I recall, and there was on her white skin that intense, transparent, bluish tinge one sees on the new snow when the sun comes out.
”Mystery!” she said impatiently. ”There's no mystery except what we ourselves make. It's useless--perfectly useless,” she went on absently.
”You're the sort of man who, if a woman cared for him, or even showed friends.h.i.+p for him by being frank and human and natural with him, he'd punish her for it by--by despising her.”
I smiled, much as one smiles at the efforts of a precocious child to prove that it is a Methuselah in experience.
”If you weren't like an angel in comparison with the others I've known,”
said I, ”do you suppose I could care for you as I do?”
I saw my remark irritated her, and I fancied it was her vanity that was offended by my disbelief in her knowledge of life. I hadn't a suspicion that I had hurt and alienated her by slamming in her very face the door of friends.h.i.+p and frankness her honesty was forcing her to try to open for me.
In my stupidity of imagining her not human like the other women and the men I had known, but a creature apart and in a cla.s.s apart, I stood day after day gaping at that very door, and wondering how I could open it, how penetrate even to the courtyard of that vestal citadel. So long as my old-fas.h.i.+oned belief that good women were more than human and bad women less than human had influenced me only to a sharper lookout in dealing with the one species of woman I then came in contact with, no harm to me resulted, but on the contrary good--whoever got into trouble through walking the world with sword and sword arm free? But when, under the spell of Anita Ellersly, I dragged the ”superhuman goodness” part of my theory down out of the clouds and made it my guardian and guide--really, it's a miracle that I escaped from the pit into which that lunacy pitched me headlong. I was not content with idealizing only her; I went on to seeing good, and only good, in everybody! The millennium was at hand; all Wall Street was my friend; whatever I wanted would happen. And when Roebuck, with an air like a benediction from a bishop backed by a cathedral organ and full choir, gave me the tip to buy coal stocks, I canonized him on the spot. Never did a Jersey ”jay” in Sunday clothes and tallowed boots respond to a bunco steerer's greeting with a gladder smile than mine to that pious old past-master of craft.
I will say, in justice to myself, though it is also in excuse, that if I had known him intimately a few years earlier, I should have found it all but impossible to fool myself. For he had not long been in a position where he could keep wholly detached from the crimes committed for his benefit and by his order, and where he could disclaim responsibility and even knowledge. The great lawyers of the country have been most ingenious in developing corporate law in the direction of making the corporation a complete and secure s.h.i.+eld between the beneficiary of a crime and its consequences; but before a great financier can use this s.h.i.+eld perfectly, he must build up a system--he must find lieutenants with the necessary coolness, courage and cunning; he must teach them to understand his hints; he must educate them, not to point out to him the disagreeable things involved in his orders, but to execute unquestioningly, to efface completely the trail between him and them, whether or not they succeed in covering the roundabout and faint trail between themselves and the tools that nominally commit the crimes.