The Fighting Edge (Smith's Magazine 1907)/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X.
Stoneman found his silk hat and his gloves.
“Don’t be so stupid,” she coaxed, with a hint of sweet tenderness.
“I think there is nothing more to be said,” he stiffly answered.
“You won’t have me for a friend, then?”
“My friends must be worthy of me.” He bowed deep, with an air that implied she had been weighed and sorrowfully found wanting.
She was between laughter and tears. It was ridiculously depressing that he insisted on the pedestal when he did not fit one at all.
“I must have whole-hearted trust or nothing. I accept no compromise in friendship,” he continued fatuously.
Then she let him have it. “You mean you don’t want friends, but sycophants. The king can do no wrong. That is the attitude you want them to take. I must regretfully decline. I’m only an American, you know, and I’m embarrassed with the surplusage of humor and common sense. The trouble with you is that you exaggerate yourself so extraordinarily. You need not look so savagely pained at my indecorum, Mr. Stoneman. I’m telling you this for your good.”
He achieved a smile of forgiveness as he backed toward the door.
“Yes, sir, for your good. You should tender me a unanimous vote of thanks for telling you. Your toadies dare not, and nobody else would take the trouble. Oh, I know it hurts; but after you have had time to digest it, there is no doubt it will do you good. Come in.” This last in answer to a knock at the door.
[Illustration: He folded his arms and looked at her, frowning like a hanging judge. “Choose.” ]
If Devereux Blake was embarrassed at meeting the man whose ambition he had just defeated, that fact was apparent only for the flicker of an eyelid. His hand fell from Maisie’s to offer itself promptly to his fellow guest. But Stoneman, his face frozen in hostility, deliberately put his hands behind him. So swiftly did Blake catch the other man’s refusal, that the rejected hand in a continuation of the movement of offering itself went up to brush back a lock of waving hair from his forehead.
Stoneman bowed again coldly to Miss Marriott, and passed at the same time out of the door and out of her life.
“He has given me up, Devvie,” she told Blake swiftly.
“Given you up?”
“For my unworthiness,” she explained, with a choked little laugh.
“He must have been having an aggravated attack of Stonemanitis.”
“I thought I was being rather nice to him under the circumstances, but I made the mistake of venturing on a criticism. That made it immediately apparent to him that I was not worthy of his friendship.”
Blake laughed. “It is really impossible to exaggerate Jefferson B. Stoneman. He exaggerates himself so.”
“That is one of the pleasant little personalities I ended up by disclosing to him,” she admitted, joining in his laugh.
“I shall not have to save you, after all—and I had the rescue all planned,” he deplored.
She smiled in appreciation of the joke on herself. “No, Mr. Stoneman rescued me from the danger of marrying him by saying, ‘No, thank you.’ In a manner of speaking, I suppose I have been jilted.”
“If one can be said to be jilted by a man one never intended to marry.”
“But to be told that one does not measure up to the necessary specifications, to be dismissed as not strong enough to play the part. It certainly is not flattering to one’s vanity.”
“He can’t be expected to flatter both his and yours.”
“And what was your plan of rescue, sir?”
“Elimination by substitution. You were to have found a refuge in marriage.”
“And had you found a man willing to encumber himself with Maisie Marriott and her career?”
“He jumped at the chance when I suggested it to him.”
“Is he a nice man? Can you recommend him?” she asked, with innocent daring.
“As I could myself.”
“Old or young?”
“Just the right age.” Then—“Same age as myself,” he added complacently.
“Well, it will not be necessary for him to sacrifice himself now.”
“I don’t think he looked at it at all in the light of a sacrifice,” he assured her, after consideration. “I’m quite sure he would esteem it a privilege to oblige you in any way he could.”
“Even to the half of his name,” she said, with a soft little laugh. “No, Devvie, we'll let him keep it for some other girl—some nice, dear girl, that could make him a home more endurable than the dressing-room of a stuffy theater.”
“Home is where the heart is,” suggested Devvie.
“My heart is in my work.”
“So is his.”
Her soft loveliness was warmed by the tenderest smile imaginable. “I think I know that young man, Devvie. Tell him for me that I have no dearer friend than he is; that I do love him in a way.”
He smiled a little wistfully. “I’ll tell him, and I know what he will say.”
“After he has had time to think it over he will say it is best.”
“Not he. If I know him, he will hang onto his chance, no matter how small it seems to him. He will probably misquote old Geoff Chaucer to me when I let him know your present decision:
“And good it is so far it goeth,
But goeth not far enough, God knoweth.”
She felt herself flush an answer to the eyes that went questing for the divine fire in hers, and she turned away to give herself a chance to get a better hold on her emotions while she carelessly waved him to a chair. He watched her graceful, supple body as she moved aimlessly about the room, apparently intent on adjusting photographs and magazines to better order. The mobile play of her face, the long, lissom curves he exulted in, the fragrance of sweetness she diffused—surely she was the one woman on earth for him.
Back she came to him presently, her face aglow. “It was splendid, Devvie; the finest thing I ever saw.”
“I’m sure it must have been,” he laughed gaily. “Are you referring to last night’s performance, when Miss Marriott appeared as Jeanne D’ Arc?”
“No, sir. I am referring to this morning’s performance in which Mr. Devereux Blake starred as The Patriot.”
He looked at her in swift surprise. “You don’t mean that you were in the gallery this morning?”
“I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. You were superb. I didn’t know you had it in you. Oh, Devvie, I did want to run down and stand beside you when they were acting so outrageously.”
“That would have been melodrama worth while. Jeers of the populace, in the midst of which the heroine to the rescue. Mob at bay, quailing before her scathing glance of scorn. Curtain.”
“It did not look so much like farce when it was in the doing. Oh, you needn’t say a word. I saw it all, and for a minute I was dreadfully afraid for fear they would harm you.”
“I could have told you they were quite harmless. That was merely the politician’s method of expressing disapproval of my action.”
“They weren't politicians just then. They were trapped wild beasts—some of them. I never saw more malignant fury, more eloquent despair. And the way you faced them—Devvie, if you had seen me in the gallery and asked me to marry you then, I should have scrambled over the seats to get to you before you changed your mind.”
“I expect I have missed the only chance I shall ever have,” he smiled. “But I’m glad you approve of my stage bearing, because I shall expect to get a place in your company as a super if I find I can’t live away from you.”
“I’m supposed to have just a touch of temper. It’s conceivable that you couldn’t live with me, either.”
“There is usually a breeze in your neighborhood, but that is merely the artistic temperament in action,” he explained.
“You're trying to drift the conversation, sir. That is not permitted. We are always to talk about what I find interesting. Just now, strange as it may appear, I want to discuss you rather than myself. You remember last night I said that Mr. Stoneman was a bigger man than you. I’m taking it back, sir, with humblest apologies. I think that what you did was a bigger thing than he can ever do.”
He found himself blushing. “Oh, come, Maisie. I’m not unduly modest, you know. But I don’t want to exaggerate myself as much as Stoneman does. He is full of possibilities, and will go a long way yet. As for me” He shrugged and waved himself aside as a candidate for greatness. “I don’t seem to be particularly ambitious. It takes a good many kinds to make a world. My kind does not care much for the lime-light.”
“I don’t care anything about that. You can’t persuade me, sir, that it was not a man’s work to expose the dishonor that was spreading so disastrously over the State-house.” She gave way to an impulsive flame of admiration. “It was a fine thing. I’m proud to know any man that could do what you did, and I’m all the prouder of you because I know how a man of your temperament must have shrunk from it. You like to get along easily with people, Devvie. You’re my idea of a sublimated popularity. It isn’t that you seek for popular approval; rather that you inevitably like most decent people, and are liked by them. You’re not naturally a crusader, but I’d go a good way to meet a better fighter when you get started. We were speaking of Mr. Stoneman. He is going to be wofully hampered, because he can’t get away from himself long enough to do an unselfish thing like this. I don’t say he will never do anything big, but I do say”—she broke into a gay little laugh—“that the ego in his cosmos will make him do it primarily for Jefferson B. Stoneman.”
“He is as God made him, I suppose,” said Devereux good-naturedly.
“That is a most immoral excuse. On that reasoning you might have shirked your unpleasant duty this morning. Mr. Stoneman must stand responsibility for the finished product he is, just as you and I must.”
“Oh, are you responsible for yourself?”
She looked at him suspiciously. “Certainly I am.”
“Then that makes you responsible for me, since it is because you are what you. are that I am where I am.”
She declined responsibility with an adorable smile. It was unfortunate that she could not keep the challenge out of it, that provocation most alluring wooed him unconsciously in the sparkle of limpid eye, in the warm, soft curve of cheek and chin, in the slim reach of lines perfect in their flow and sweep.
He divined more than she herself knew, and attacked with the courage of his intuition. He walked across to her, his hands in the pockets of his sack coat in characteristic fashion. Gravely he looked down at her, with a searching insistency that made her fear for her secret.
“Pray, sir, would you have aught of me?” she asked lightly enough, and made him a little mock curtsy.
But presently her eyes fell, and he took one hand from his pocket, and tilted her chin so that his gaze held her again.
“You’re very masterful, sir.”
“I wish I were. But that is the question in my mind. How far am I master?”
“I did not say master. I said masterful. It’s a synonym for impertinent.”
“You school your eyes, dear, to make them say anything—to sweetly mock, to pity divinely, to run the gamut of all emotions. It is part of your charm that you are so pulsingly alive, that you see ‘naught common on Thy earth.’ But back of those lovely windows, what passes in your heart, I wonder.”
“Sir, when you are through with my chin, may I borrow it again?” she asked humbly.
“In a minute. Just now I want it. I can’t read what passes behind your eyes. If they are windows of the soul, they are stained glass.”
She was conscious of a sudden clamor of the blood, a pounding of the pulses. “Please let me go.”
“Never again, for on my soul I believe I am master of the citadel within you. Maisie Marriott, do you love me?”
The sweetness of his demand flowed through and through her. She shut her eyes and swayed dizzily, scarce knowing that his arm stayed her in close embrace. It was his kiss, the touch of his warm, passionate lips, that brought her quivering back to happy earth. A tiny electric battery seemed to be shocking her with bliss at every meeting of the lips.
She heard him murmur lowly to himself: “My love! My love!” And then, summoning all her strength of slipping will, she pressed back her supple body from his eager embrace.
“No—no—no,” she cried. “What are we doing? This is madness.”
“If this be madness, then sanity is well lost, my sweet.”
“But it is impossible. You don’t understand. I have to go my way and you yours.”
“My way is yours.” The lilt of his buoyancy sang in his voice.
“Tt can’t be. Oh, Devvie, why do you make it so hard for us?”
“You love me?”
“What does that matter? Love is not all of life.”
“But you love me,” triumphantly he insisted.
“And if I do”
“No ifs, my sweetheart. You do.”
“Oh, my boy, I do,” her voice sang back, and she gave herself again in impetuous surrender of the lips and heart.
The fragrance of her, the intoxicating perfume of her sweetness, went to his head. His pulses hammered, his racing blood was champagne.
She was the first to recover herself. “It won’t do, Devvie. Let us be sane, boy. Let us take facts as they are.”
“I shall take you as you are.”
“No, I should spoil your life. I can’t give up the stage. It is a part of me, bred and born in my being. Perhaps I am selfish, but even for love I can’t give up my destiny.”
“And why should you? I accept you with your career, recognize it as inevitable, rejoice in your triumphs more than you can.”
“Don’t you see, dear, that would be the trouble? You would have to give so much, and I could give so little. Always you would be sacrificing for my career. A woman’s life should be merged in her husband’s, but it would come that yours would lose itself in mine. What I have seen to-day makes it more impossible. You are strong and brave, a man out of a thousand. Oh, my darling, I was proud of you, standing up alone before them all to denounce the wrong you hated. I looked into the future, and saw how far you might go, what a service you might do your country. But if we married—we should have to find the same interests, come closer together, or we should drift apart. I can’t give up my career for you, Devvie, and you are too big to be a tail to my kite, no matter how high it soars. I could not permit you to do that. In time you would chafe, and, though you would say nothing, I should know it.”
“Wrong premises, my dear. You have assumed that my career—and that’s a big word for my kite-flights—is to be political. I’m done with politics except so far as every public-spirited citizen must be interested in them. After this, I stick to my last, which is writing. Now, the trouble with most writers is that they do not mix enough with the world. They live by themselves, and write out of their inner consciousness. So they miss life. You are going to rescue me from that, dear. If I am going to write plays, I must know my medium and its technique more intimately. If I am going to write novels, I must touch realities more nearly than I can do from the easy chair in my club. Marriage with you offers me the very chance I need.”
She shook her head, a sweet, clouded smile in her eyes. “I think you might have a career as a lawyer, too, you versatile boy. You make a very pretty argument out of nothing. I'd just love to have been convinced. But I’m not. This happiness is not meant for us, dear. We must look at it wisely. We shall always be friends, but you must find your ‘superlative joy’ with another woman, one that would ask no more than to make you a happy home. You'll find her some day. Almost any woman would love you. How could she help it?” She smiled again wanly.
“And do you think that ‘almost any woman’ would satisfy me—or, indeed, any other woman under heaven—after I have known and loved you, the one woman?”
Swiftly she leaned forward and kissed him. “I love to hear you say that. All my longing is tugging me one way. I want you dreadfully—to have you always near; to feel your love about me. But, dear, it isn’t best—not best for you. I know it is not. You must help me to do what I think best. You are so much braver than I. Don’t take advantage of my weakness—of my love for you.”
Her hands went out and met his. He looked at her for a long breath of surrender to her will, his face working with emotion.
“Very well, dear. For the present it shall be as you say.”
“That’s like you, my chivalrous lover.”
“But I’m not your lover now, you know. Isn’t that the decree?”
She followed him to the lower ground of the lighter mood he had summoned to help her resolution. “That’s the supreme court decision, sir. And now you must go. I have a rehearsal this afternoon.”
“You can have a rehearsal any day, but you can’t every day do the impossible thing that you have just accomplished,” he smiled.
“Convert a lover to a friend? You’re right. It’s a feat not accomplished once in a lifetime. Most men fall out of love into a secret hostility.”
“Half a loaf is better than no bread.”
“But the lover’s wounded vanity. It takes a rare man to forget that.”
He shook hands with her smilingly. “Mine has been fed to-day above all days in my life. There is no room for wounds.”
“I’m glad to hear you say so.”
“Besides, I'll tell you a secret. There’s a certain luxury in final renunciation when one has a conviction that it is not final, after all.”
“Devvie, do you mean”
“Only that our relapse to friendship is a merely temporary concession.”
She looked at him reproachfully. “Oh, Devvie!”
“Don’t look at me like that, or I’ll kiss you,” he warned.
Maisie’s laugh wimpled out. “You’re not half so chivalrous as I thought you were.”
“Certainly I’m not. I take what I can get, and I hold what I have won.”
“Then you’re nothing but a buccaneer of love?”
“Yes, for I sail under only one flag, and carry papers of clearance open to all.”
She found a difficulty in letting go his hand. “You'll come again soon?”
“As soon as you'll let me. May I eat supper with you after the play?”
“For this once only. Good-by, friend.”
“Good-by, temporary friend.”