Don-A-Dreams/Part 4/Chapter 4
IV
He came to the evening's performance of "The Rajah's Ruby" full of blissful and quiet thoughts; and he replied to Miss Morris's silent scrutiny with the bare announcement that Miss Richardson was to join the company on Monday night. He was unmoved by her stubborn insistence that he was "making a mistake." He asked cheerfully: "How? Why am I?"
She answered by asking whether he had done any writing on his play; and he had to explain that his quarrel with Conroy had upset him, but that now—in his own room, alone with his manuscript—he would be able to give all his time to his ambitions. The explanation did not seem to satisfy her, though she did not voice any criticism of it. She asked: "Does her mother know what she's doing?"
"No," he said. "She's not doing it as a permanent thing. She's only coming here until she finds an opening for her music."
"You know, as well as I do, that she'll never find an opening for her music in New York."
He replied calmly: "I know that she can do this extra work until she has time to find something better. That's all she expects."
Miss Morris said nothing more, and he left her to accept the situation as best she could. But at the matinée of the following day—which was Saturday—he made another appeal to her to be kind to Miss Richardson. "She hasn't a friend in town but me—and you, if you'll be her friend. You know how it is to come to strange work like this, without anyone to tell you anything. A word or two from you would mean so much to her. . . . She can't go back home—any more than you or I. She hasn't a penny but what she'll earn. They've lost everything. . . . I'm sure you'll like her. She"
"If I do anything for her," she broke out, "it'll not be for her sake. But I think you're making a mistake. You're doing wrong. You should have sent her home where she belongs. She's out of her place here, and neither you nor anyone else can make her succeed in it."
"That may be true," he said diplomatically, "but it can't hurt her to try—and it can't hurt us to give her what little help we can. Can it?"
She answered "No," but with an evident reservation; and what the reservation was he was to understand after a conversation which they had in the lawn-party scene, that evening.
She said: "I've had an offer of a good part in a new play by Mr. Polk. And I'm going to take it. I want you to wait until you hear from me."
"'Wait'? I don't under"
"I have some influence with him." She did not look at him. "He is taking a theatre of his own, to produce his own plays, independently. There may be something for you. I think I can get something for you—better than this at least."
"Oh say, you're—you're awfully kind," he stammered. "You don't know how I appreciate—I"
"Don't" She caught herself up. "Don't thank me, I mean—not until you see whether I can do it or not. I want you to—to trust me; that's all. I want you to believe that I'll do anything to help you, except what I don't think is wise for you. I mean about her. And I want you—if you hear anything—if anyone says anything against me—not to believe it until you ask me."
He was reminded of a sentence in a letter from Walter Pittsey received several days before: "I have heard a weird story, here, about your friend Miss M. and a playwright. How is she?" But his curiosity had not risen to the bait; he had felt himself too indebted to Miss Morris to listen to gossip about her; and he had so replied to Pittsey.
He replied, now, to her: "I wouldn't believe anything against you, if you told me yourself."
She did not speak. The stage dialogue was rapidly nearing the conclusion of their scene together. He asked her if he might walk with her to her door, after the play. "Thank you," she said. "No." And the strain of emotion on her voice warned him not to make her talk.
They parted in silence, not to meet again that night.
He was sorry that he could not overcome her hostility to Margaret; but since that hostility was insuperable, he was glad that she was leaving the company. In spite of his gratitude to her, he felt that there was something not quite open and natural about her; the very violence of those emotional outbursts which he had unwittingly provoked in her, in the past, had made him uneasy concerning the unknown depths from which they came. It was as if she were continually striking matches in the darkness with a disconcerting suddenness—as she had on the evening of their first meeting—and as suddenly dropping the match and withdrawing into the darkness again. She had known him for years, and yet in all those years she had kept herself hidden from him. She had never told him anything of her past with Polk; and she had spoken guardedly, now, of her "influence" with the playwright. In short, she had repelled Don by her lack of frankness in all matters concerning herself, though she had attracted him and bound him to her by the sincerity of her kindly interest in his welfare.
Well, she, too, was leaving him now, he thought; and that secession would eliminate another of his problems. His life was becoming more simple; it was narrowing down to his relations with Margaret; it was beginning to flow quietly in a still, deep stream. As he walked home after the play, under a moon that looked down, untroubled, on the fretful street-lights, he felt himself walking towards peace, guided by that placid hermit of the night, that mild philosopher of the white silences. Its influence possessed him with an unquestioning contentment. He felt, rather than argued, the presence in the world of an unseen Power for good that had led mankind from barbarity to civilization along a progress of which simple faith had been the blind compass. He felt at peace with the world, at peace with the heavens, at peace with himself. He felt at peace even with his love—content to give all and expect nothing, satisfied to be near her so that he might help her, willing to wait without a word of encouragement, so certain of his goal that he did not even raise his eyes to see how far it was away.
His little room received him like a home. He kindled a fire of small wooden blocks which he had bought for two cents a bundle, from "Tony," the Italian vendor down the street; and he warmed the dregs of his breakfast's pot of coffee, to drink it sitting on the side of his bed, holding his cup on his knee, smiling, like a camper in the wilderness who looks back, from the rise of a hill, over the difficult and tangled valleys he has crossed.
He went to church with her in the morning—to a house of fashionable worship on Fifth Avenue—unconscious of the fact that he was no longer in revolt against the "police of organized religion"' and he listened, like a child at the theatre, to the music and the singing and the literary eloquence of a minister who flattered and smiled on his congregation. But when Margaret asked him what he had thought of the sermon, he had to confess that he had not heard it. "I was thinking of the little church at home," he said. "I'm glad I went, aren't you?"
"I'll not go to that church again!"
"Why not?"
"They judge you by your clothes. That was some sort of servants' gallery the usher put us in."
He looked down at himself guiltily. "I suppose I do need a new pair of shoes."
"Yes, and a new hat, and a new overcoat, and a new suit of clothes, and a new necktie and a pair of gloves."
"I can get the hat anyway," he said; and he said it with such a disproportionate accent of hopefulness that she had to laugh at him.
"You are certainly an optimist!"
But when he wished her to take her midday meal with him at his French café, she said: "No. I'd feel as if I were eating your new hat. You call for me again at half-past two." And she escaped into her boarding-house while he was still laughing at her little joke.
He thought that he had never been happier. It was so calm and so assured a happiness, derived from such heart-easing friendliness, such practical and smiling friendliness, and so dear. If it were to continue all his life long, it would be enough.
She was even more practical in the afternoon. On their way to the Park, she made him tell her about his quarrel with Conroy, about his father and his mother, about his play-writing and his future plans. And when he led her to the bench on which Miss Morris and he had sat, beside the water—explaining, "The last time I sat here I didn't think I'd ever" she interrupted him to ask: "What shall I tell mother?"
He did not know. He suggested that she tell as little as possible. "Just write that there's a prospect of doing better with your music here than at home. Something may turn up any day now. And it's just possible, you know," he hinted reluctantly, "that your mother may be—that she'll not object to having you—to letting you make your own plans."
"That she'll be glad to have me off her hands? I shouldn't be surprised."
"It would settle all the trouble as far as she's concerned."
"I hadn't thought of that."
"Then you could take your own time about finding something better."
"Well," she agreed, accepting this easy method of postponing her worries. "Now tell me what I'll have to do, meanwhile, in 'The Rajah's Ruby.' "
"Miss Morris has left the company," he said. "She played with me. And I'm going to get the stage manager to put you in her place, if I can. You'll have really nothing to do." He described what there was to describe in her part. "We're just to make up the background. It will be all right. Don't worry. You'll see to-morrow night."
She nodded, sunken back in the arm of the rustic bench, looking down at the muddy lip of the lake, where the fallen leaves were black in the water. She was not beautiful in the way that Miss Morris would have been in such a pose; but she was so tenderly fragile, with her small shoulders and the frail lines of her girlish figure—so innocent in the large meditation of her eyes, so appealingly unprotected and so sweet—that Don turned away from the sight of her, trembling with a new sense of the fearful and delicious privilege of being the only barrier between her and adversity.
"I must find a room at once," she said. "I can't pay ten dollars a week board."
He mastered a tone of commonplace to reply: "I think there's one vacant in the house that I'm in—on the floor below me. That would be better than going to a strange place. I could look after you a little there. It shouldn't be more than three dollars. I get mine for two-fifty."
"Heated?"
"No-o. I heat it."
"Then you're paying too much. I was asking one of the women at the boarding-house."
"Mrs. McGahn said she was giving it to me for less than she would to anyone else."
"The old blarney! And you believed her. I think it's I that had better come and look after you a little."
"Do!"
She laughed. "What is Mrs. McGahn like?"
He described the house and its mistress, explained the arrangements he had made for his meals, and estimated the cost of them; and while he talked his eyes were fixed on the rosy promise of having her under his roof, and he smiled and smiled. When she agreed to call on Mrs. McGahn with him that evening to look at the vacant room, he accepted the future as already a thing accomplished. "Then when you're all settled," he said, "we can get to work in real earnest and see what we can find for you. It's always better to wait—not to accept the first thing that offers. Make a choice and take the best."
"To hear you, one would think I'd been besieged with offers."
"Well, perhaps you will be."
"Yes! Per-haps !" She stood up, settling her jacket at the waist with spread hands, arms akimbo; and there was something so intimate in this little feminine attitude of the boudoir, that it came to him as a mark of the unconstraint of friendship at which they had arrived. "It's time we were having our suppers."
"Shan't we have supper together?"
"No. You must economize. Mine is paid for in advance. You may call for me at seven."
Mrs. McGahn received them in a parlour full of all the old furniture and all the accumulated bric-a-brac of thirty years of housekeeping. She received them with a suspicion which neither of them understood, and she listened to Don, staring, silent, and wrapped majestically in her black shawl. "I don't rent rooms t' any unmarried women," she said, "except I know who they is."
"Oh, I beg your pardon," Don apologized, "Mrs. McGahn, this is Miss Richardson."
Margaret shook hands with her in a manner that evidently had some effect. She wavered, looking from one to the other, but she seemed still unsatisfied.
"Miss Richardson is studying music here," Don explained. "She doesn't wish to board any longer. I suggested that there was a room empty here which you might let her have."
She asked Margaret: "Where're yer—yer folks?"
"My mother has gone back to Canada. We have been boarding. I thought this would be cheaper." She smiled, amused.
"Well," Mrs. McGahn defended herself, "I can see yuh're decent, but I've got to be careful, an' yer comin' in on me this way Are y' all alone in N' York?"
"Yes. Mr. Gregg is the only friend I have here. We used to know each other at home."
"How old are yuh?"
"Nearly twenty."
"Yes? Well, now! Canadyens! I thought they was all Injuns up there!"
"Oh no," the girl laughed. "Not all of us."
"Have yuh been long in N' York?"
"Just a few days."
"Aw?" She turned to Don, twinkling. "Yuh're engaged, are yuh?"
He said "Yes," and then corrected himself hastily: "Oh no, no!"—blushing scarlet.
She glanced from one to the other with an illumined smile. "Yuh're a pair o' kids. Come along, girl, I'll show yuh the room."
Don was so confused by his slip of the tongue that he did not follow them, and they kept him waiting an unconscionably long time for their return; but when they came, Mrs. McGahn was blarneying and mothering the girl in a garrulous kindness, and Margaret had engaged the room. She and Don had to refuse an invitation to sit in the parlour and "chat a while." "Some other night, then," Mrs. McGahn said, following them to the door. "It's open to yuh any time yuh'll be wantin' in. He smokes in the kitchen when he's home at all, an' I'll not butt in meself. Don't be backward about usin' it. It won't be the first lolly-gaggin' in there. Yuh needn't be a bit afeard o' that."
After a self-conscious silence that carried them to the street corner, they both suddenly laughed—an apologetic laugh that pretended to accept Mrs. McGahn's insinuations as absurd.