Don-A-Dreams/Part 4/Chapter 1
I
HE looked around him at the boarding-house parlour, his hat in his hand—with an appearance of having suddenly dashed in there, at the end of a long run, and stopped dead, in the midst of empty chairs—standing before the yellowed keyboard of an old "grand" piano, and facing the double doors that were closed like a partition at the end of the room. Her letter—Margaret's letter—received on the previous evening, had given him the address; and every thought of every minute, since, had been rushing toward this moment of his arrival breathlessly. The maid who had answered the door-bell had gone upstairs to tell her that he had come. He heard his heart beating in his ears, and the stuffy silence of the room seemed to be listening, with a ghostly attention, to the pulse of his emotion. He turned away, to face the machine-made lace curtains that hung like a faded and simpering coquetry before two over-dressed old windows—old windows that had once been the smiling eyes of a home and still made a pathetic pretence of welcoming the homeless boarder.
He heard the maid coming down the stairs. He waited for the step that should thrill him. "Well?" Margaret said, from the doorway.
She was smiling, with an air of having taken advantage of him, of having studied him while he was unaware of her; and he caught, at once, in that smile, a new expression of friendly criticism, of amused tolerance, that marked some unexpected change in her. She came to him to give him her hand. His voice clung to his throat, in a lump. "Why didn't you come last night?"
"I—I had to work," he said.
She withdrew her hand, still smiling. "Oh, I forgot that you were a working man now!"
Her somewhat formal affectation of parlour gaiety had the effect, on him, of an insincerity; he could not find a reply.
She reached a cushion that stood uncompromisingly in the angle of a sofa arm, shook it and sat down against it, "Won't you take a chair?"
The nearest was a little spindle-shanked pretence of elegance that had been gilded with a brush. "I'm afraid that will break with you," she warned him. He had to cross the room to a bow-legged parlour chair that was all curves and discomfort; and the distance that lay between them, then, was chilling.
"We arrived Wednesday," she said, as if he had asked her for that information. "Mother left at six o'clock last night. So, you see, I didn't waste any time, did I?"
He shook his head, unable to get his eyes past the worn seam of the carpet that divided them. She had changed. She was older, more self-possessed, with an air of having come back from travel to see him from a new point of view. Even her clothes were strange; for, in his expectation, he had thought of her as dressed in the summer gown and be-ribboned hat in which he had last seen her; and she wore heavy English walking shoes, a plain black skirt, a cloth waist with bands of ruching at her wrists and collar He dropped his eyes quickly when, from that collar, he reached her smile again.
"Tell me about yourself," she said. . . . "How is Conroy?"
"He's . . . well."
"Are you together still?"
"Yes. We live together."
"What is he doing?"
"Nothing, I think. His father sends him money."
"But you're at work?"
"Yes," he answered dumbly.
"Well. . . . Now," she said, with a determined brightness, "have you made a plan for me?"
He shook his head. "I"
"Oh, but you must have," she cried, in another voice. "I've depended on you. I left everything until I should see you."
"Didn't you . . . think of anything yourself?"
"How could I? I didn't know of anything to think of. I thought you"
He found her staring at him in an angry dismay. He gulped miserably. "I haven't found anything for myself—except suping—and trying to write plays."
"What is 'suping'?"
"In the theatre—like the chorus—only you don't have to sing."
"And that's all you've thought of!" she cried.
He did not reply.
She rose stiffly. She said: "Then I suppose I'll have to find something myself. Thank you. I'm glad"
"Wait." He sprang up, dropping his hat. "Don't go. I'll—I'll think of something. I couldn't think of anything but seeing you. I forgot. I didn't have time. There's something. I'll find something. I know a girl here—Miss Morris. She'll know. She's from Coulton. I asked her. She I only suggested the stage because I thought, with your singing and that, you'd be able to I didn't know of anything else. I thought when we met we'd be able to talk it over. I thought you'd know, yourself."
"Well! Why didn't you say so?"
"I" He looked around the room, as if vaguely accusing it of being the cause of his discomfiture. "I thought you would come out—where we could talk."
She left him, to go upstairs for her hat; and he stood gazing at the empty doorway as if he saw there, still, the expression of her face when she had turned from him, as if he saw in that expression the visible failure of this meeting of which he had hoped so much. With a look of panic, he turned to pick up his hat, and crushing it down on his head he began to walk up and down the room, biting his lip, his whole face working in a desperate effort to think of something to do, something to say, by which to regain the ground that he had lost.
When she came downstairs again, she found him pale, but tremblingly cool. He said, at once, as soon as he had opened the door for her: "Your letter took me so by surprise—I was looking forward so to seeing you—that I didn't think how anxious you would be to find something at once. How long have you? When will your mother be back?"
She replied, still somewhat resentfully: "In a week, at most."
"That will give us plenty of time. There's your singing, now; you should be able to do something with that." (He had remembered Pittsey's criticism of Miss Morris: "She ought to be singing in a church choir.") "You could get something in some of the churches—or in some of the big concerts—in the choruses at least. And you could get singing pupils—or piano pupils—more easily here than at home, I should think. I'll ask Miss Morris about it. She should know."
"Yes, but I can't sing. I found that out in Germany. And my playing is—is elementary. None of the big men would even teach me, over there. They said, 'Come back in three years and we'll see!'"
"Well, even so." He was determinedly undiscouraged, "This isn't Germany. You could go on studying at the same time." He talked, with his eyes fixed before him, conscious that he was trying to deceive her, as well as himself; but he felt that he was compelled to play the part—compelled by her expectation of aid from him—and he felt, too, that all this matter of earning a livelihood was a thing of no importance so he had her with him.
She asked him what he had been doing, and he told her. He accepted meekly her criticism of his failure to get anything but his ridiculous stage work. "I have my mornings free to look for something better," he explained, "and I'm using my experience at the 'Classic' to do some play-writing."
"You shouldn't have left college," she said, in the manner of a challenge.
"No," he admitted humbly. "However, it can't be helped now." He had no thought of reproaching her for her part in that fiasco.
She asked, in a gentler voice: "Where shall we go?"
"Up the Avenue?" he suggested.
"Very well."
If, an hour earlier, he could have foreseen the perfunctory conversation of that walk, it would have depressed him like a disillusionment; but in the agonized moments of his panic in the boarding-house parlour, he had consented to the mutilation of his hope, he had himself used the knife on it, and he had met her, at the doorway again, aware that she—like Miss Morris, like his father, like all the other agents of opposing circumstance—was an enemy of his philosophy of life; that he must love her without the thought of any reward from her. And he saw this without any sentimental self-pity, without any false heroics, as a thing to be reckoned with in his attempts to realize the future which he had planned.
It gave his manner a tinge of melancholy, as if he were years older than she; and he listened and replied to her, without looking at her, his eyes on the humid-blue vista of the avenue that was so stone-bare in the autumn mist.
She detailed, at great length, the story of her quarrel with her mother; and he gathered from it that Mrs. Richardson, being frivolous and fond of travel, was tired of dragging her daughter about with her, wished her to get married and begrudged her the money spent on her tuition. It was Margaret's opinion that her study of music was to be the serious pursuit of her life; her mother considered a musical education merely an aid to matrimony, an alluring springtime accomplishment for young ladies who had not yet mated and built their nests. These opinions had clashed when Margaret had rejected the man who wore such detestable shoes. They were still at war. The financial crisis had made the struggle more desperate. Mrs. Richardson evidently looked for an immediate marriage to relieve her of the expense of a daughter. Margaret planned to make herself self-supporting so that she might be free to follow her ambitions. Don was to help her. He promised that he would.
He came to his evening's meeting with Miss Morris, resolved to appeal again to her for aid; but since their parting in the rain at Mrs. Kahrle's steps, she had had an unfrank manner that made confidences impossible. She had not met his eyes squarely when he confronted her with his usual friendliness. Her smile, in their stage promenades, had been merely formal. Several times, seated at the rustic table with her, he had looked up to find her watching him with a thoughtful intensity that startled him. She maintained an oblique reserve, a sort of sidelong watchful silence which let him know that she was thinking of him, and made him feel that she was disappointed in him, but left it impossible for him to defend himself.
Now, when he tried to make her meet him frankly with her blame—by telling her that Margaret had arrived and confessing the girl's unhappy —she listened without a word. And when he asked her for help, for advice at least, she replied: "I can't help her. I couldn't help myself."
"Will you let me bring her to call on you? If you were to meet her"
She shook her head. "What is the use? I can do nothing for her. She will be better in Canada."
"You are very unjust to her," he said, hurt.
She did not reply. He nursed his resentment until, in a later scene, he caught her regarding him with a tragic dumb gaze that overcame him, like a memory of his mother's grief, with a strickening remorse; and when they met again, he said: "You asked me, once, not to judge you—and you're doing that now, when you shouldn't, when you don't understand. You don't know how it hurts me."
She brought her hand up, as if to brush back a straying hair from her forehead, shutting her eyes for the instant that her hand covered them. "No," she said; "it's you."
"How is it?" he argued. "What have I done? I'm what I always have been. . . . I can't change. I can't be untrue—to myself. I'm—I'm not very happy, but I should despise myself if I did that."
He did not look at her in the long silence that followed. As she left him, she said: "I'm not accusing you. Only . . . I can't help you to do what you wish. Don't ask me—please."
When he had left Margaret, after that first meeting, he had been numb with a cold depression of spirits. He had been not merely discouraged; he had been too downcast to feel discouragement. And his revival had been due to one of those unreasonable operations of his temperament which he could not justify, which he could not explain, which were as much a mystery to him as they were to Miss Morris and to everyone else. It was as if his affection for Margaret were stronger when he was alone than when he was with her; as if his imagination made her a dearer figure in his absent thought than she was in her own person. And in the days that followed, no matter how worried and unhappy he was while he was with her, as soon as he had left her he was tormented by the same restless longings, the same ardours that had kept him true to his dreams of her in all the time they had been separated.
On the morning after his unsuccessful appeal to Miss Morris for aid, he awoke as eager to see the girl as ever. He brushed his shabby clothes microscopically; he polished his shoes with elaborate care; he gulped his breakfast; and it was not until he was on the street that he remembered he had no encouraging news to take to her and no new plan to suggest. He turned aside from the direct route to her door, and wandered about the pavements trying to think of some excuse for such an early call.
He loitered at the art-shop windows, seeing her as beautiful as a plaster "Clytie," as regal as "Queen Louise" descending palace steps, as tender as the drooping maiden of a "Lovers' Quarrel." He stood before the display of photographs at a theatre door, gazing at a vision of her as a prima donna in grand opera—in an opera of which he had written the libretto—with her photograph on a gilded easel, in the foyer, opposite his own. In a bookshop, he saw her buying a set of his collected plays. All the windows that he passed were filled with presents which the future held for her. A hansom cab was drawn up before a florist's door while he was ordering
He frowned in an attempt to concentrate his mind on some practical solution of her present difficulties; and he even bought a morning newspaper to read the "want" advertisements again. But there was no situation vacant that she could fill; and he could think of nothing except the possibility that she had thought of something herself. He went apologetically to consult her, with the paper in his pocket as an excuse.
The maid who came to the door told him that "Miss Richards" had just gone out.
He hurried back toward Broadway in the hope of overtaking her. He thought he saw her in the distance, but a nearer view showed that it was not she. He began to wander about from street to street in the idle hope of coming on her suddenly, his whole mind occupied by that absurd chance, in the insane longing of love that is a torture of impossible expectation, of a wish so strong that it seems a surety.
He spent the morning chasing this will-o'-the-wisp, alternating between a mood of pity—in which he saw her going from office to office in search of employment, alone and discouraged—and a glorious foresight of a future in which she should be as fortunate as he. Now the streets were crowded with the rich in spirit, who passed him by as a street beggar asking, for her, only the alms of a little happiness. And now, the houses and the people, and all the activities of the world, were the background and the unregarded chorus for a life that was to hold, with her, the glaring centre of the stage.
It was a brisk, chill morning. He wore a spring overcoat of which the collar was so soiled that he had turned it up to conceal its condition from anyone who might walk behind him. He had lost one of his gloves, and for that reason he carried his left hand in the pocket of his coat. His face was lean; his eyes had a wistful emptiness; his hair, untrimmed, came down in a ragged fringe on the upturned collar of his coat.