Don-A-Dreams/Part 4/Chapter 2
II
She had been to the studio of a Mr. Barber, a teacher of singing whom she had known in Canada; and when Don called on her, in the afternoon, she had the worried look of discouragement which he understood so well. She had been told that there was nothing for her in her singing or her music—nothing. The church choirs were out of the question, for they paid no salaries worth speaking of, except to the soloists, and she had not voice enough for solo parts. The grand opera chorus—and all other such—had been filled up since the trying out in August. There was no possibility of getting piano pupils unless she could find a position as music teacher in some girls' school; and even for that she would need influence, "pull." In short, she must recognise that in New York the competition was so keen, musicians were so numerous, and the average of ability was so high, that it was impossible for her to support herself as so many young women supported themselves in smaller cities. It would be easier for her among friends and relatives, in the circle of family acquaintances. "In fact," she said, "he told me to go home!"
"That's all right," Don replied doggedly. "That's what they always tell you."
"But what am I to do?"
"Stay here. Something will turn up. It's bound to."
She cried impatiently: "But something has to 'turn up' or I can't stay!"
"I know. That's the fix I was in. That's why I took what I'm doing now. So did Miss Morris. She had her singing and her music, like you."
"On the stage, you mean? You know mother wouldn't let me!"
"Well," he said wearily, "I don't see what your mother has to do with it—if she won't help you. It was the same way with my father. He tried to stop me."
She stared, fascinated, at this daring suggestion of revolt.
In the pause of silence he found himself tired of the whole discussion. The morning's walk had fatigued his body, and the strain of the morning's expectation had fatigued his mind. He felt the difference between those morning fancies and this talk of the merely sordid problems of life. He said: "Well, when shall I see you again?"
"You're not going?" she cried, as he stood up.
"I ought—to go back. I have things to do."
"Oh please don't leave me like this! What am I to do? You haven't told me what to do!"
"I wish I knew. I don't seem to be able"
"But you must," she insisted, giving way to her panic. "What am I to do? I must get something. I can't go You don't want me to go home, do you?"
He shook his head, looking dully at the carpet. "I don't seem to be able"
"You had plans enough once," she cried. "The day you got me into trouble with Mrs. Kimball"
The memory of that afternoon under the pine returned to him with bitterness. "Yes," he said. "But it was different then."
"How was it different?"
"You were different."
"Thank you!" There were indignant tears in her eyes. "I might have expected You Oh!" She turned with a gesture that recalled to him their parting at the gate—on the day she had told him of her quarrel with Mrs. Kimball—and she was out of the room before he could speak. He followed her to the hall in time to see her reach the landing of the floor above. He put on his hat and went out to the street.
There he found a loneliness of soul so calm and so self-centred that the whole city seemed to hush to let him pass. It was not that she had quarrelled with him, for in the mood that had overtaken him he was indifferent to her anger; and it was not that he did not love her as passionately as ever, though there was a despair of love in his thought. It was merely that he had found her separated from him by that space of mental isolation which seems to divide every one person from every other, the cold interplanetary space which surrounds what we call souls and separates them as eternally as the worlds of the solar system. He had found her a centred identity following an orbit of thoughts and interests within which she saw him revolving, drawn by a superior attraction. Love might bring them a little nearer together; he felt, now, that it could never really merge them in an absolute unity of interest and outlook. And this old tragedy of affection had come on him with a deadening chill of banishment and desertion.
He told himself that he must find her something to do. He assured himself that he would do so. But he knew that whether he succeeded in that endeavour or failed in it, whether she remained in New York or went away, whether he won her or lost her for life, she would be, always, as she was now, a fellow-human looking out at him from the closed chamber of her identity as he looked out at her. He was alone in the world—alone even with her. He might help her and love her, as he might love and help anybody; but he could not share with her his imprisonment in being. The walls were up between them. They spoke through grated windows—which Death, at last, would close.
With this mood of pessimism still heavy on him, he returned to the apartment, feeling himself strangely alien in those familiar surroundings. He threw his overcoat and his hat on the cot in the dining-room, reminding himself, as if with an effort, that it was the cot which he had brought out for Walter Pittsey and had never taken back to the room in which the other two boys slept; and it seemed that the incidents of that night had occurred a long time ago. Conroy was sitting with his head and arms on the table, apparently dozing. Bert Pittsey was busy in the little kitchen, from which there came an odour of scorched fat.
"Hello, you noble Thespian," he greeted Don. "Give us an impersonation of a man setting a table, will you? My hands are full."
"What's the matter with him?"
Pittsey laughed. "He's tired. He has had a hard day."
"What do you mean?"
"His money came this morning."
Don's isolation had raised him above fellow-sympathy, like a judge. He walked deliberately around the table, and putting a hand on Conroy's head he rolled it over on the arm to look at the boy's face. It was the flushed and bloated face of semi-drunkenness. "Ach!" he said, with a shudder of disgust.
Conroy roused himself, blinking. "What's the"
"Get up out of that!"
He glared, his eyes inflamed and still befogged with sleep. "What's chewing you?"
Don turned his back, without replying, and went to the pantry for the dishes. "We want to set the table," Pittsey explained pacifically. "Your dinner's ready."
Conroy mumbled that he did not need any dinner, and went grumbling to the bedroom. Don, as he laid the table, heard him splashing water in the wash-basin. They sat down to their meal without him; and Pittsey was carving the burned steak, in the gloom of Don's silence, when Conroy came out of the bedroom and confronted his cousin across the table.
"The next time you put your hands on me," he threatened, "you'll get into trouble."
Don did not look at him. "Go away," he said. "I don't want to talk to you."
"No! Don't you? Oh? Well, I want to talk to you!"
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself. What would Aunt Jane say if she—or Uncle John"
"You mind your"
"Making a drunken brute of yourself. You're a disgrace. It makes me sick to see you." The blood went to his head, in a blinding passion. "You ought to be locked up somewhere! Drinking! You haven't done a thing but drink since you came back here—getting worse every day—brutalizing yourself. Where—where do you think this is going to end? In the gutter! On the streets! The town drunkard! In gaol! You're growing worse every day—worse! You're"
"Here!" Pittsey thrust a plate into Don's hands. "What's the use of starting a row? Sit down and eat your dinner. Have some sense about you."
Conroy took a long breath, his anger checked by Don's unexpected attack on him. "What do you think of that?" he appealed to Pittsey. "Isn't that—isn't it? G! If you'd heard your father talking about you, going home on the train! You!" He pointed, his hand shaking. "The supe! Gee! If your father"
Pittsey took him by the arm. "For Heaven's sake cut it out. Sit down and eat your dinner."
"I'm not saying anything," he protested, as Pittsey forced him into his chair. "It's that suping sneak. Shut him up."
"Go on and eat your dinners, both of you—before it turns cold. Here! Get busy with this."
But peace was not to be so easily restored. Conroy alternately worried his steak and attacked his cousin, who ate in a silence of evident contempt and disgust. Pittsey spread a newspaper beside his plate and read it, satisfied that the quarrel would subside now that Don was quiet. Conroy continued intermittently to point the moral that if he had disappointed his father, Don had done as much and more. "You ought to hear what they say about you at home! With your mother sick in bed from worrying about you, and your father ashamed to hear you mentioned! You're a great one to talk, you are! . . . Suping, on the stage with a lot of chorus girls. I haven't fallen as low as that, any way. . . . If you had left me alone before, there'd have been no trouble. Sneaking home letters about me. I told them what you were—borrowing money, and playing the cad to get rid of me."
"Oh, drop it," Pittsey said, turning his paper.
"I won't drop it! He started it. The snivelling codfish."
He went on, in the same strain, endlessly. Don did not speak until he had finished his meal. Then as he rose to get his pipe, he said: "I want you to understand that I'm not going to be a party to any more of this. If you intend to live like a beast, your father shall know of it. I'll not help conceal it any longer. . . . And what's more," he broke out, "I won't live with it myself. I'd as soon live in a bar-room. I can't and I won't! You'll behave yourself or I'll write to Uncle John and get out of here altogether."
"Well, say," Conroy sneered, "we'll miss you, won't we? You can get out of here just as quick as you please. If you don't, I will!"
Don waved his hand excitedly. "That's all right. I'll go. You may roll in the gutter if you like it. You'll not splash me with your mud any more."
Pittsey rose to check him. Don reached his hat and coat. "That's enough now, Bert," he said. "I—I'll move out my things to-morrow morning, I've had enough. It's been impossible for me to live here, ever since he came back. I can't live this way, and I won't."
He went out to the street again, like a poet to solitude. Everyone misjudged him, quarrelled with him, or was disappointed in him. He admitted that the cause, no doubt, was in himself; but he could not change himself. He could not, for example, continue to be a silent spectator of Conroy's downfall and make a joke of it, as Pittsey could. He would write his uncle so, and be done with the whole worry. He would take a room where he might live alone, as he had lived at college. He saw himself in a garret that was lamp-lit and peaceful, with the frost on the windows and nothing but the sloping roof between him and the stars. He would have his plays to work on—his books to read—Margaret to think of. He would have her, there, as she had been before this change in her. She could not rob him of that past, of the memory of her and the old ideal; he could live with that, as he had been living. It was enough. It was the better part. He was alone in the world; they were all strangers to him; he would escape them and be happy.
He did not call on Margaret in the morning. He wrote his letter to his uncle, and went out to look for a room. And he found one in an old red-brick house that had been built in the days when this part of the city was Greenwich village.
The landlady, who was the wife of a police sergeant, lived on the first floor and rented the rest of her house. The back room on the top story had the sloping roof and the dormer window for which Don had been longing; it had also a little iron bed with a mattress that was still dented from the weight of its former occupants, and a "Franklin" grate-stove that had warmed a long procession of young art students, writers and poor Bohemians through the first bitter winters of their struggles in New York. "There never was a finer stove to broil a chop into," the woman said, "er a slice o' toast. An' yuh can get a good meal any time aroun' the corner to the rest'runt."
She asked four dollars a week rent, but when she found that Don could not take the room at such a price, she let him have it for $2.50, on condition that he supplied his own towels and bedding.
"I'm givin' 't to yuh fer less than I w'u'd to any other livin' soul alive," she said. And Don thanked her with all the gratitude of innocence.
In an "express" waggon drawn by a broken-kneed white horse, he moved his trunk, his share of the bedding, a kitchen chair and some cooking utensils. He settled his accounts with Pittsey, who said nothing either in blame or regret. Then he went in peace to eat his luncheon in the "rest'runt" which Mrs. McGahn had recommended.
It was that little French resort of unsuccessful Bohemians which used to be known to New York by the significant name, "The Café of Failures," because of its clientele.