Ainslee's Magazine/The Woman With a Past/The Edge of the Wilderness
II.—THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS
What shall I please to-day?
My morn, noon, eve, and night—
how spend my day?
To-morrow I must be Pippa.—Pippa Passes.
MONTY CREWE swung himself across the Place Vendôme in big strides that somehow seemed out of place in town—above all in Paris. He was exceedingly large, strikingly brown and muscular, and sensationally good looking. He was fresh from the Southwest of America, and he was, at twenty-five, having his first taste of the Continent. Once upon a time he had been a spoiled baby in New York, but when he had left college at twenty-two he had gone West and roughed it for nearly four years. The effect upon him had been admirable; he had emerged very much a man, with a boy's high spirits. And now, having come into his money on the death of his uncle and guardian, he was reëntering upon the life to which he had been born. It had taken a year or two to make him a first-class cowboy. It was probable that the task of forgetting that he had been one would be a less lengthy process.
He felt distinctly in his element in this world of good-looking men and gentle-mannered women and high power motor cars. He had enjoyed Arizona, but he found himself quite capable of enjoying smart Paris—not the painted city of the Latin Quarter and Montmartre. He was not overkeen on the so-called bohemianism of which he had heard so much. He classified it under a vague general heading of “off color.” At present he had yearnings toward his own kind and class. He wanted to talk with men who belonged to decent clubs and played polo. He wanted to go to the races, and dine at the Ritz.
It was very absurd of him, of course, but just a little pathetic perhaps. You see, one has chances for a great many adventures and interests in the Far West from time to time, but one doesn't get much afternoon tea. And the women one sees don't wear dark, inconspicuous street gowns, with drooping hats and odorous violets, or speak softly, or ask one to dinner “just to meet a few nice people that you'll like awfully.” In fact, Monty Crewe wanted to “get back”; and here in Paris, in the delicious May season, he was proceeding to do it. His people had always “belonged,” and he had already run across two or three men whom he had known in his earliest salad days, and had received half a dozen invitations. Paris was teeming with Americans, and he felt, with a ridiculous, boyish sense of elation, that he was going to have a very good time indeed.
Some pretty women smiled at him with that suggestion of romance which the French contrive to infuse into that which the Anglo-Saxon races make wholly ignoble; but though Monty smiled back he was not beguiled. He had turned into the Rue St. Honoré, and was striding along at a pace that indicated a pressing date, though, as a matter of fact, he hadn't a thing to do in the world. As he passed Rumpelmayer's tea rooms, a lady came out and descended the steps. They found themselves standing stock-still, looking at each other with that curious sense of recognition occasionally felt by perfect strangers. This time, however, though Monty had no specific recollection of having ever seen the lady before, she appeared to know him.
After a moment of hesitation, she bowed prettily, and said: “How do you do? You're quite a deliverer. Do you think you could find me a fiacre or a taximetre or something?”
A taxi marked libre was passing at the moment, and he put her into it, wishing that she would vouchsafe her name. She seemed to read his mind, for from the open machine she smiled at him, and said: “I met you in New York at somebody or other's wedding a thousand years ago. You were quite a child. You don't know my present name, I think. It's Carpenter.”
He bowed gratefully, thinking that he had never in his life seen such lovely, persuasive, pathetic eyes. He felt, indeed, so oddly moved by her that he was actually tongue-tied and ill at ease—Monty!
“Can't I give you a lift?” she inquired, in her rather plaintive voice. And he regained the power of speech:
“Indeed, you can!”
“Where?” she asked, smiling faintly at him.
“Anywhere,” he returned promptly, and sprang in beside her.
She laughed deliciously, and said: “Well, tell him—anywhere!”
“To the Bois,” he said to the man.
Mrs. Carpenter was slender and tall, and made up of long, lovely, melting lines. Her skin was very white and smooth; her lips very red, and drooping at the corners. Monty was then new to the type, and it thrilled him. She had glittering, dark-red hair, brushed smoothly down over her ears and fastened in a great heavy knot in the back. And she had enchanting eyes—purplish-gray, with huge pupils, and lids that were most of the time half closed. Her clothes were marvelous, very severe in outline, and very elaborate in detail, of a violet tone that matched her eyes and harmonized uncannily with certain shades in her hair. She wore a great black hat, and one perfect orchid on her breast. She was very exquisite, very soignée, very dangerous, and she exhaled a new and demoralizing perfume. She seemed to Monty Crewe quite the most perfect creature he had ever met in his life, and altogether grande dame. I repeat, the type was new to him.
The grande-dame hypothesis, by the bye, happened to be correct. Mrs. Carpenter, in the years gone by, when she was not Mrs. Carpenter, but Mrs. Somebody Else, and the wife of a New York broker, had been very much worth-while socially. She had never quite outgrown it, even in these latter years, when she was a dweller in the wilderness, and a wanderer on the edge of the green, civilized places, though bidden by Mrs. Grundy to keep off the grass. Once upon a time she had run away with a man whose only assets had been a Grecian profile and a genius for lying, and after he had left her she had led the life of others of her class. Was she respectable? Was she disreputable? Was she rich or poor? I certainly cannot answer those questions. She was a woman of caprices and violent impulses. She lived her life without need of accounting for it to man or woman. Yet she contrived to remain young and beautiful; she dressed perfectly; and, except to the connoisseur—and the Continental connoisseur, at that—she still looked like a lady.
Probably in all her strange life she had never come across quite such virgin soil as Monty Crewe. Not that the boy was in any sense a prig, or different from his very human fellows, but his life in the big solitudes had kept his soul singularly childlike and untouched.
When Monty tried to remember afterward just how it happened that he and Mrs. Carpenter got so wonderfully friendly all at once, he always felt vaguely confused and nonplused, as if he were trying to recollect something that had happened while he was drunk. Only he wasn't drunk—unless it were with emotion. It struck him as odd, later on, that at first he had not been at all conscious of the emotion. He had believed himself stirred only by warm comradeship and a lively appreciation of her beauty and graciousness—nothing more. And all the time the waves were creeping up to engulf him.
They went around the Bois for two hours, and he talked. Heavens, how much Monty talked! He told her about his loneliness out on the plains, and the longings he had had for civilization and for men and women who talked his language, the language he had learned as a baby. He unfolded to her, quite unconsciously, odd, touching vistas of boyish dreams and whimsicalities and ideals, and showed her little, unmodernized corners in a curiously chivalric soul. She felt abashed before his simplicity, and she yearned to him in diverse ways. He was new to her, and she expanded softly and imperceptibly in the glamour of the fresh emotion, just as a slightly faded rose expands in clear water.
It would take far too long to relate precisely how they finally progressed to a private room at the Café de Paris for dinner. But they did, in fact, find themselves there at seven o'clock, with a May wind blowing in and a sympathetic waiter in attendance.
“Oh, you order!” said Monty Crewe, with a grin. “I've lived on coffee and canned stuff so long that I don't believe I'd know oysters from sweetbreads. Order all the things that I ought to begin to learn to like over again. Order anything and everything except bacon and beans!”
Mrs. Carpenter had rather a pretty taste in dinners. It was one of her specialties, in fact, learned from a distinguished Bavarian gourmet whom she had known rather well. She started with fresh caviare and moules marinière, and ended with omelet soufflé and café brûlé; and in between came sundry delectable things with mysterious flavors oddly and propitiously combined. They had vintage champagne as dry as sunlight and as aromatic as the spring season.
Monty ate an extraordinary amount of everything. Mrs. Carpenter tasted everything daintily, idly, even languidly. It was plain that these were the sorts of things she usually ate, and no more amusing to her than mutton and mashed potatoes to ordinary people. She drank, in a dreamy and unnoticeable manner, a great deal of champagne, which did not affect her in the least.
The window was open, and the voice of Paris came to them. '“Jolie! Jolie!”' it sang to Charpentier's Louise, and she followed it. Monty did not quite know what it sang to him, but it was something delicious and rather confusing. We are extraordinary creatures of general and mixed impressions. We group numberless separate individual causes into one harmonious composite effect. Thus Monty Crewe massed together the magical spring night outside, the faint echo from the streets, the distant sound of a girl singing in an open-air café chantant, and the sometimes plaintive, sometimes provocative voice of Mrs. Carpenter into one chord of pulse-stirring music. Somehow, the highly sensational food went into the harmony, too, and the queer violet tints of her dress, and the startling red of her lips against her cool white cheeks. Paris was going to Monty Crewe's head, and he liked the sensation.
“You can't know,” he said unsteadily—he had had only three glasses of champagne, and he could drink whisky with any man in the Southwest—“you can't know what it means to me to see and talk to a woman like you—a woman of my own kind, of the class I've come back to. One—one doesn't talk of these things much. People usually make light of them, or run them down, or make fun of them, or say they don't count. But I reckon all that strikes pretty deep down—blood and race and traditions and—and—oh, you know! All the stuff they call noblesse oblige. At least, I guess that's what I mean,” floundered Monty, his brown face flushing duskily. “Anyway, you stand for—well—for pretty much everything. The nice things that every fellow hangs onto through thick and thin. I—I've been waiting a good while to find some one like—you,” he finished, in a low voice.
Monty was very good to look at. Mrs. Carpenter found him so, but the charm that he had for her was being conquered by a queer, disconcerting call that was sounding from somewhere in space—a call that she had not heard for many years.
“Did you ever read a thing of Kipling's called 'Griffith's Debt'?” she asked abruptly.
Monty shook his head. He had read stray volumes of the magician thirstily, but could not recall the labels.
“It was about a man who had dropped out of his own class,” went on the woman, clasping her slim hands on her knees and staring into space. “He came down to living with the natives—naturally it was in India—and he drank, and lived a beast's life generally. The people gave him gifts of coarse food to keep him alive, and even they, the lowest of the Indians, looked down upon him. He seemed to be practically dead except in his body. But one day there came a great flood, and suddenly he remembered that he was a white man of the sahib class, with responsibilities and obligations, and that he must protect these wretched, terrified native people. And he rose up and drove them up the valley to safety. Because he was a sahib, and a sahib must never forget what should be expected of his class in times of danger.”
She stopped. The brief story had been told without expression, simply as a colorless little recital into which one might read what individual interpretation or lesson one might.
“Well,” said Monty, “all that's natural enough. It just means blood will tell. You've got to hold up the—the things your class stands for. Isn't that the idea?”
“Yes. Oh, yes!” she said, still staring ahead at nothing. “Quite the idea. I wonder—would one live up to it?”
“Of course!” said Monty Crewe, with cheery, youthful confidence. “I've seen awful down-and-outers out West—regular rotters, you know—who'd come up to the scratch in the most amazing way if things got really serious. If a man had once been a gentleman, it came out in emergencies—under fire, so to speak,” ended Monty lamely, for he was not used to expressing delicate human psychology in words,
With a curious little shrug, the woman seemed to dismiss the matter, and the talk drifted back to the dangerous, delicious waters of personalities. She told him her name was Philippa, which happened to be the truth. People called her Pippa, she explained, and though Monty was not up in his Browning, he found the little name very quaint and appealing, “And like you, somehow, though I don't quite know why.”
She smiled the melancholy small smile that she affected. Others had felt the charm of the little name, as they had felt the charm of herself. Leaning forward, with her beautiful slim hands folded beneath her chin, she looked across the table into Monty Crewe's eyes.
“You don't know women awfully well, do you?” she said softly.
“Not—your sort,” he said, flushing with honest adoration. If a doubt as to his meaning shadowed her mind, it was dispelled by the worshipful look he gave her. “I mean—women who are lovely and well bred and sweet and—apart, somehow”
Just for a second she did not meet his eyes. Then she glanced at him again, and raised her brows very slightly. “You mustn't set us too far apart—from you, you know. We don't like it much. We feel neglected.”
“But surely,” protested the boy, “nice women like to be looked up to?”
“Of course,” she said softly; “as long as we are not—out of reach.”
She was certainly not out of reach now. The table was not a large one, and Monty found it very easy to stretch his hand across it. Hers came slowly to meet his, and he shook with the thrill of the contact. Her fingers were exquisitely cool and smooth, like lily petals, but there was something tense and nervous in the clasp of them that was the reverse of passivity.
“I'm most horribly impertinent,” said Monty huskily. “I don't know that you'll ever forgive me. But—but I've never cared so much for any one before in all my life.”
She did not take her hand or her eyes from his. Again, very faintly and wistfully, she smiled. With a pounding heart and a dizzy brain, Monty realized that she was not angry with him for his effrontery. Then she withdrew the cool, tense fingers, and, rising quickly, walked to the open window.
“Listen, you, boy,” she said. “You are a child, standing at the edge of the wilderness. There is Paris outside; that is the wilderness, for it stands for the world—the wild, mad world of joy and pain and life. It is not peaceful and happy and gentle; it is swept by storms and haunted by beasts of prey. But it is beautiful. And it is there for your taking. Do you choose it?”
Monty's throat felt dry. He did not understand her at all, but he answered instantly: “Yes, I want it—if I can have it with you.”
She walked slowly back to the table, and, stopping beside his chair, bent suddenly to him. Her hands were on his shoulders, and her face close to his. They were alone in the universe, with the wilderness calling outside.
“You are mine for the taking,” said Pippa, in a curious tone. He remembered it long afterward, and remembered it often. “The gods shall write it to my credit that in this hour you were mine for the taking, and that—I remembered.”
“Remembered what?” said Monty Crewe, and his arms went up to her.
“'Griffith's Debt,'” she said, smiling enigmatically.
For just a second she let her lips rest upon his hair; then she wrenched herself free suddenly, and covered her face with her hands.
“I—I think I am faint,” she murmured breathlessly. “Can't you get me some cognac or something? No, please don't call the waiter. I don't want him to come in. I'm shaking with—nervousness. Get it yourself, please.”
He bent to kiss her hand, and hurried from the room.
When he returned with the cognac, the place was empty. In the dim light, the disordered supper table mocked him with its sardonic suggestion of what was past. There was nothing left of Pippa except the orchid that she had worn on her breast. It lay on the chair where she had been sitting, as if, by some stroke of inscrutable alchemy, she had been changed into the flower. There was no other message.
And he never saw her again. She had gone back into the wilderness.