Don-A-Dreams/Part 4/Chapter 10

by Harvey J. O'Higgins

X

It is the triumph of the imaginative man that he makes the best lover in the world; and Don's love had been, for so long, the faith of his life that even the realities of married intercourse did not more than ritualize it into a religion. If Margaret had been unable to appreciate it in its silent devotions, she thrilled and glowed to it now that it had become voluble and formulary. And like so many women who marry young, her maiden sentiment was a pale and mild affection compared with the passionate surrender of the wife. Even the discomforts of their honeymoon days in Pittsey's flat were lost in the sunrise flush of happiness that made all beautiful. Even her mother's anger softened into a natural misunderstanding which the girl sympathized with and forgave.

As for Don, he had arrived at the promised land. His great dream had come true. He felt that no hope could be too extravagant since this impossibility had come to pass. He hurried home at night, from the long day's separation, eager to bill and coo, to plan new joys for their future and to recall the vicissitudes of their past. He had to discover when it was that she had really, first, begun to love him. He had to be assured endlessly that she was happy. He had to sit over their late supper, basking in the comforts of domesticity, contrasting these full days of their companionship with the hungry ones he had come through. If she smiled at the wildness of his castle-building, he replied: "Well, would you have believed, a month ago, that we'd be here? You leave this to me. I'll do it. First we'll move into a comfortable flat. Then I'll write the bulliest play ever—and get Miss Morris the lead in it. Then I'm going to get Conroy on his feet. Then, as soon as the theatre closes for the summer, we're going on our honeymoon to Coulton—to see mother. Then——"

Meanwhile Miss Morris had not returned to the theatre, and when he attempted to see her he was told that she was ill. When he learned from Walter Pittsey that she had left Polk's company, he endeavoured to find out what had happened; and Pittsey replied oracularly: "You know more about it than I do." Subsequently, Don heard that she had "gone on the road." Finally, he read in a dramatic paper that she was leading woman in a San Francisco stock company; and he wrote to her. But he did not understand her part much less her purpose—in bringing about the events that had led up to his hasty marriage; and he did not understand why she had fallen back into that strange silence of life from which she had so suddenly emerged upon him.

He moved to a little, uptown, top-floor flat which Margaret and he furnished "on the instalment plan," dignifying the tiny front room with a rented piano for her and a library writing-table for him. She was to practise her music while he wrote on his plays. They settled down to that dual programme of ambitious work, happy in their nest under the eaves. Walter Pittsey became a frequent visitor, and Margaret encouraged him to come, because he tried to aid and advise Don in his play-writing. He even endeavoured to interest Polk in one of Don's manuscripts, and was not surprised to find that Polk—though he pronounced the play itself "awful stuff, awful"—was puzzled and amused by Don as if by a new specimen of young human nature to be studied and perhaps reproduced. He drew Don out, at their odd meetings in the box office, professed to see possibilities in Don's "Winter" as a sort of spectacular extravaganza, asked him to write it out, and quizzed him, with the soberest countenance, about his views of life. Only to Pittsey, Polk confessed: "I don't believe he'll write a play, if he lives to be a thousand."

"Why not?"

"I'll tell you why." He gulped his glass of whisky and water at the bar. "For the same reason that no woman has ever written a big play. Did you ever think of it? Lots of women have written first-class novels. One or two have written great poetry. Almost none have written any music worth considering. And fewer still have written even passable plays. And I'll tell you why! Because women are sensitive and emotional and artistic, but they're not strong enough to subdue emotion to the ends of art, d' you see? And the more stiff the laws of your art, the more impossible it is for them to handle it. Music's bad enough! Pure emotion expressed in rules of harmony that are like mathematics! But a play, man! Why a play's the most d——d intricate piece of mechanism that was ever put together. And to make it live, you have to be the master of life as well as the slave of it." He laughed abruptly. "That's the truth I'm telling you. I just read it in a newspaper."

"And you think that's the trouble with Gregg?"

"That's the trouble with Gregg, He's as sensitive as a woman, but he lives like a woman, and he'll never write a d——d thing! He's too deep in his own emotions." He added: "Lucky beggar! Life's worth while when you can live it as much as he does."

"He's happy, certainly."

"Happy! Of course he's happy. He's too happy to write. And when he's miserable, he'll be too miserable to write."

"Well," Pittsey reflected, "I suppose it'll not hurt him to try."

"No. And he'll be happier trying than he would be if he had it in him to succeed."

He was certainly happy, trying—though he was perhaps happier talking about how happy both Margaret and he were to be when he should succeed. He worked at his manuscript of "Winter" undiscouraged by the sudden abatement of Walter's enthusiasm; but he did nothing to force himself into the way of success. He had a faith in his future that made him almost court a present obscurity; and he looked out on the world from the grating of his ticket window, amused to see that the public mistook him for what he seemed to be. His letters to his mother were full of dark hints of this faith in himself, but to no one else did he write a word of it. He did not write to his aunt or his uncle at all; for he had learned the whole truth of Conroy's "lady in the case," and he preferred rather to be silent than to be a hypocrite.

That "lady" was the young woman whom Conroy had found to do the housework at the time Bert Pittsey took his staff position on the newspaper. He had found her in want, on the streets. And he was living with her, now—an idle remittance man"—no one knew quite where. When Bert Pittsey wished to see him, he looked either in the smoking-room of the Mills Hotel, south of Washington Square, or in a little Italian café and music-hall, near by, in Sullivan Street. Don, too, had gone to see him at this "charity house," but Conroy had refused to recognise him, beyond leaving the smoking-room when he saw his cousin come in; and Don had hurried away, ashamed of the appearance of having spied on his old friend's degradation.

It touched him, like a tragedy. He brooded over the thought of Conroy wandering about those foul streets of the tenements, alone, or befriended only by a woman more unfortunate and unhappy than he. By contrast with Don's own happiness the picture was to him appalling. He remembered their boyish companionship in Coulton and the day that Conroy had brought Margaret to the little ravine. He foresaw another meeting that would bring Margaret to Conroy and insensibly reclaim the outcast and make him, in time, a part of a new life in which they three would be united as they had been once. And Don foresaw that meeting and its issue so vividly that he believed he had only to arrange it in order to make his most impossible hopes come true. He spoke of it to Bert Pittsey, and Pittsey shook his head. "I don't believe you can do anything for him unless you put new nerves into his stomach. I talked to him after you left us, that time. He knows what he's doing, but he can't stop. The craving's too strong for him. You had better leave him alone."

"But if we were to get him away from it? If we were to get him into a sanitarium?"

"If! If! How are you to do it? As soon as you try to interfere with him, he flies off the handle. He knows he can't help himself but he just has bull-headedness enough not to allow anyone else to help him."

Don thought it over. "If I can arrange a plan, will you join me?"

Pittsey nodded. "Sure enough. I'm game."

But Don could think of no practical plan. He could foresee a hundred different successful conclusions for his efforts, but not the details of a single method of attaining these ends. It was not until the approach of Christmas that the vaguest idea of a possible procedure occurred to him. Then, arranging with Margaret a Christmas Eve dinner to which they were to invite the Pittseys, he said suddenly: "And Conroy! Why couldn't we get Conroy?"

"Do you think we could?" She had heard the whole story from Don, and it had not left her hopeful. "Do you think he'd come?"

"Yes. If we go the right way about it. I must get Bert to help. If we could once get him here——"

"I hope he won't spoil the dinner."

He did not sympathize with this consideration of the young hostess. "Nonsense!" he cried. "What does it matter about the dinner?" He hastened to explain, apologetically, when he saw her expression: "No, of course not! He'll not spoil it. He'll be the jolliest of the lot of us. You should have seen some of the dinners we had in our old rooms—one on the day he first found work here. He'll be all right, if we can only get him. I must ask Bert."

His mother, a few days before, had sent him a bundle of the Christmas numbers of the illustrated English papers, full of just such pictures as Frankie and he used to tack up on the walls of their playroom; and they had come to him with such an almost tearful memory of the life he had left, that he saw in them, now, a powerful agent to help him in his appeal to Conroy. "I'll go with Bert," he said, "and try to have a talk with him. I'll take those papers mother sent, as an excuse. And if he won't see me, I'll mail them to him, and write him a letter."

He imagined the letter—a Christmas letter of eloquent good-feeling and a manly offer to let bygones be and begin the future afresh. Remembering his Dickens, he had faith in the influence of the season of peace and goodwill to aid him in his miracle of regeneration.

He made his attempt on one of those unseasonable wet nights that make Christmas week in New York a time of drizzling misery and bedraggledness. Down among the tenements the streets were brimful of muddy slush; the trestles of the elevated railroad dripped a fluid grime; the street lights struggled against the fog with the feebleness of guttered candles; the damp air freshened the evil odours of the quarter to a pungency that seemed to Don to reach his palate. He shivered, with his collar to his ears, hugging his bundle of Christmas papers under his arm, trying to convince himself that all this doubled ugliness of wet filth and poverty would aid him in his attack on Conroy. But he no longer tried to convince Pittsey, who was tired by his long day's work on scattered "assignments" and inclined to be sarcastic in his replies to Don's optimism. They went in silence, slipping on the uneven flagstones on which the fog had congealed in a film of ice. When they came to the many-windowed block of the Mills Hotel, as square and formal as a prison of cells, Pittsey said: "You wait outside for me here until I see him. He'll quarrel with me for bringing you if I take you in."

Don waited. After the first few minutes, he was encouraged to think that at least Bert had found Conroy where they had planned to find him—probably smoking and playing solitaire at one of the little tables in that room of homeless loafers with its cement floor and its vile smells of cheap tobacco. And if he was there, it was proof that he was sober, since the rules of the house admitted no drunkards to enjoy its steam heat and its comfortable chairs. As the interval of waiting lengthened dismally, he repented having allowed Bert to go in alone, for he had no faith in the adroitness of Pittsey's address, and he feared that the whole undertaking might be brought to failure by a false beginning. Several times he had made up his mind to follow in and try to save the situation, but each time the resolution exhausted itself in gazing through the swing-doors at the lighted hall where several of the better-dressed patrons of the house stood talking. After all, it would be wiser to wait until he heard what Pittsey had to say.

He was at the door again, standing irresolute, with his hand on it, unable to gather the impulse to push it open. He saw Pittsey coming hurriedly, with his head down. He threw back the door. "It's no go," Pittsey said. "Come away—come away."

Don came as far as the sidewalk, but stopped there. "What does he say?"

"Oh 'say'!" Pittsey answered angrily. "It's not a question of what he says! Leave him alone! He's enjoying the delights of his private inferno hot enough without us coming down here to poke it up for him."

"Wouldn't he come to the dinner?"

Pittsey was walking up the street, Don hanging back reluctantly. "No. He won't come to the dinner. He doesn't even want to hear that there's a dinner for him to come to. Say!" He rounded on Don suddenly. "He has the willies, if you know what that is. You'll only drive him into trouble—just as you've always done. And it's a dirty shame to be bothering him. We can't do anything for him, and he knows it. He can't do anything for himself—and he knows it. What he needs is chloroform to put him out of his misery. I don't believe in this particular form of vivisection, if you want to know!"

"It—it seems to me that if we're ever going to get him away, we—we ought to be able to do it now—while he's——"

"Yes! Well, if you could see his face when's he's trying not to talk about it, you wouldn't relish the job."

Don turned over the papers in his hand, looking down at them. "I wish you'd taken these in to him."

"Go and take them yourself. Do!"

"Isn't there any place I could leave them for him? I'd rather write."

Pittsey laughed harshly. "By all means, write!"

"Could I leave them at the hotel?"

"No. He's not known at the hotel any more than a hundred other tramps that come in there to get warm."

Don winced. "How about the place—the other place where you——"

They were standing under a corner light, and Don, for all his meekness, was stubbornly unmoved by Pittsey's impatience to be away and done with the whole matter.

"Look here," Pittsey said. "If I take you there and leave them for him, that's all. You can do what you like about it. I'll not wait another minute for you, you understand?"

"Yes."

"Come on, then."

He walked as rapidly as his uncertain footing permitted, and Don staggered along beside him, between the dull glow of little shop-front windows and the churned sludge of the gutters, seeing only these two features of the streets, for his eyes were busy picking out a foothold on the treacherous stones. Pittsey stopped before a basement saloon that was down three stone steps below the level of the sidewalk. "Give me your papers." He left Don gazing at an arch of frosted gas globes bearing the sign "Caffé Sociale." On a board beside the entrance there had once been painted: "Giuoco di Boccia." Through the dirty windows he saw a fat Italian serving drinks over the bar—Italians sitting at round tables with their feet in sawdust—more Italians playing a game of billiards that included five pins set up as if for a miniature game of bowls. Whenever the door opened he smelled a warm odour of damp sawdust and stale beer, and he heard the squeak of a violin and the punctuating loud note of a cornet. He saw Pittsey pass the papers over the bar and turn back to the door again. And with a sudden resolution, Don stumbled down the steps and met him. "I'm going to wait and see him," he said. "You needn't stay."

Pittsey passed him without replying, and disappeared up the steps into the fog. Don went in, shut the door behind him and faced a tragic adventure.