The Luck of the Irish/Chapter 22
CHAPTER XXII
ONE afternoon, toward dusk the fifth day of her captivity—Retrospection seized her and whirled her away in his purple chariot.
Retrospection, who is one of the unmentioned gods of tragedy, is never very particular about his backgrounds; Persian, Axminster or rag carpet, palace or hovel, little he cares; to him the play's the thing. Upon this occasion he set the disembodied spirit of Ruth in a furnished room, neat and comfortable, one flight up, in a genteel boarding-house in Washington Square. The scene would not have impressed the adventurous, consisting as it did of a lone young woman (who Ruth recognized as herself) feverishly packing a suit-case. When she had locked and strapped it she sat down upon a trunk near by, panting and disheveled. Her figure was slender yet shapely, the contours ripe; there was nothing out of the ordinary about it; indeed, the mold was common to nine-tenths of American women. It was by her face, perhaps, that one might distinguish her from the ruck of millions, the commonplace. It was not beautiful, but it was singularly attractive.
She drew her sleeve across her damp forehead, flushed by her exertions, for it was the evening of a long, hot summer day. The pavements were throwing off the heat they had absorbed; and what little breeze came in through the open windows was tainted by the smell of water and dust and asphalt, and burdened with the thousand changeable, indescribable sounds of mechanisms, the voices of a great city.
From somewhere came the whining, discordant music of a hand-organ; and the young woman knew that near it happy, barelegged children were dancing. Children! There are some words which, when called into being, seem instantly to clothe themselves with bristling, stabbing points. The young woman winced. She who loved children, who was peculiarly familiar with the bewildering facets of their budding characters, she had forgotten them. What a horror she was to herself!
She flung up her head, slid from the trunk, snatched her hat from the bed, and put it on without so much as a glance into the mirror, which, in a young and comely woman, registers the sign that she is under some great emotional strain. She had made her calculations in cold blood; there was not even the shadow of love in her heart. Ah, if only love had swayed her, human and beautiful love, which gives everything and asks for nothing!
She crossed over to the bureau drawers, which were all out, and once again looked through them. Then she sought one of the windows and leaned against the casement. Each time she heard the ring of horse-shoes upon the asphalt she peered out eagerly, only to withdraw her head in disappointment.
"Why does he not hurry?"
It was twenty minutes past seven. If she was not out of the house before eight she was as good as lost. She shut her hands tightly and her teeth clicked. There was something in the tenseness of her expression that suggested she was throwing out her will, taking up invisibly a whip and beating the flanks of a jaded horse. A dray rumbled by; a taxicab sputtered noisily under the shadowy arch; a huckster's cart rattled eastward; and still the man did not come. Everything seemed to be fighting against her.
A tap sounded upon the panel of the door. She wheeled quickly, but remained where she was, undecided. The tap came again, with a little more emphasis. The girl cleared her throat.
"Come in."
The door opened.
"Oh, it is you, Mrs. Oliver!"
"Why, what's all this?" demanded the landlady, indicating the trunk and suit-case and the denuded walls.
"I am leaving in a few minutes. The rent of the piano has been paid to date. They will come for it to-morrow."
"Leaving? What in the world has happened?"
"I wish I could tell you, but I can't. I have lived three years in this room, and you have all been very good to me."
"But I don't understand! Child, you are all alone, and I couldn't love you more if you were my own. Tell me what has happened and maybe I can help."
"Dear Mrs. Oliver, the only help is what I must give myself."
"You are running away to get married?"
"Do I look like it? No. I am running away from … myself! Please don't ask me questions. I should only lie to you. My determination is irrevocable. Some day I'll come back and tell you."
"You leave me with grave and terrible doubts," said the landlady in a troubled voice.
"Mrs. Oliver!"
"Well, this is life; this is a big and wicked city; I am old, and I know. You are young and pretty and alone." The landlady's motherhood, which was as comprehending as it was deep, yearned toward this girl, who had always remained aloof. The brood she gathered under her wing was composed of struggling artists and writers, but yonder chick had been hatched from a strange egg. "You can't tell me what the trouble is?"
"No." The girl turned quickly toward the window. Once more came the beat of iron shoes. A baggage-cart stopped at the curb. "The man for my things. I thought he never would come." She walked toward the door. The landlady stepped aside. The girl whirled unexpectedly and flung her arms around the surprised landlady and kissed her. "You have been so good to me! Good-by!" She flew out into the hall and down the stairs. "You will find a trunk and suit-case up-stairs. Please hurry," she said to the cart-man, whom she met coming up the steps.
"All right, miss."
"I'll ride with you and give you the directions."
The man nodded. Five minutes later he got up beside his passenger and flicked the horse with a broken whip.
The girl looked up at the window. She saw the bulky figure of the landlady in silhouette, and a hard lump came into her throat. She had never been happy in that room, but sometimes she had known content.
Beautiful old square, so brave in history, once so brilliant in fashion, shunted to one side like a plaything which no longer amused the grown-up child called New York. It was only now, when she was going to leave it, that she realized how much she loved every stone of it. The electric lamps were blurred and the blue lances, grotesquely broken, danced absurdly. She knew that she was gazing through tears.
She focused her gaze upon the drooping head of the horse, and for a long time refused to look right or left. Shiffle-shuffle, shiffle-shuffle went the iron shoes. One was loose. She could hear the clink of it each time the animal lifted the hoof.
"Muggy weather," volunteered the cartman. "Th' ol' nag 'ain't got much gumption t'night."
She did not reply. She heard the sound of his voice, but the words fell meaningless against the stone wall around her thoughts. She was a weak and contemptible thing, no better than the painted woman in the street. Did one inherit moral as well as physical characteristics? Were there such things as sixteenths, thirty-seconds, sixty-fourths handed down from generation to generation? Was she merely a fractional reincarnation of her mother, who had run away from her father upon the plea of loneliness and neglect? She had been nine then; five years later, beaten, broken, dying, the mother had returned. And this wasn't lesson enough!
Her father! She thought of him with a tender smile. The poor benign dreamer, forever delving into scientific research, in the world but not of it, scarcely realizing that his wife had forsaken him, that he had a child to bring up! He had taken back the mother without a word of reproach, and an hour later the doctor had found him puttering among his retorts. Loneliness and neglect that had been her mother's excuse, and with some justice. But what excuse had she, her mother's daughter?
"It 'll take half an hour, miss."
"Don't hurry the poor horse," she replied, mechanically.
The cartman shifted his quid and spat surreptitiously, concluding that his customer had been turned out for not paying her rent. It was no new story to him. Somebody was always moving, because it was cheaper to move than whack down the rent. Well, it was all grist to his mill; he had no preference. She was pretty; and generally it was the pretty ones who moved.
Two blocks farther on, before a house in one of the numbered streets, he drew up.
"Is this the place?"
"Yes."
She climbed down, ran up the steps, and rang the bell. The door opened shortly and she vanished into the hall. When the cartman laid the suit-case on top of the trunk he suggested that he wouldn't mind an extra ten cents for beer. It took "all th' water out o' yer hide, this weather."
He pocketed the tip and shuffled out of the house, out of her life, one of those shadow shapes which come and go without leaving the slightest impression on the memory.
The girl stood stock-still in the middle of the room until she heard the shiffle-shuffle of the poor old bag of bones that had once been a lively colt in the green fields. Into her tragic thoughts came strangely the thought of this horse. She had already forgotten the master, but she would always remember the horse. It was symbolical. Twenty years hence she would be like that, a bag of bones, all her spirit crushed, gray-haired, weak of eye, trembling. How distinct the dull portrait was!
All her life she had been poor; always she had grubbed. She had been denied the right of butterflies—to fly. Always they had been in debt. She had grown to dread the door-bell, for nine-tenths of the callers had been irascible bill-collectors, and the brunt of "shooing" them off had always fallen upon her young shoulders. Her father had no idea where his salary went. She had cooked the meals, washed the dishes, kept the house in order. The social life of the college town had been closed doors to her. The boys had naturally sought, with the careless cruelty of their kind, those girls who had pretty dresses, leisure, and who knew how to dance. What was it to them that she could play the Second Symphony if, on the other hand, she did not know the latest ragtime? She was pretty; but her hands were always red from housework and her dresses made-overs. Only two things had she plucked from this dreary life—education and music—and these haphazardly, due primarily to the kindness of the German professor of music, who loved the father and understood the child.
And then one day she had been thrown upon her own resources, unceremoniously, by death. When the little estate was settled up, the trifling insurance paid, the furniture sold, and the debts wiped out, there was for her a meager nine hundred dollars to begin the real battle of life with.
She hated the small city where she had known nothing but penury and humiliation, and so went to the metropolis.
For ten years she had studied under the loving care of the old Bavarian music-master, who, back in Munich, had ranked among the greatest instructors of his time. Finding himself too deeply involved in political intrigue, he had stolen away to America. He had discovered the soul in Ruth, and she became all his ambitions in one. His own peculiar genius had fired hers, even when she was a child, unconscious of what was stirring within. He drew wonderful pictures for her. At the end of the road were wealth and fame.
To possess genius and yet to fail in attainment because of a trifling physical defect called nerves! She could not play before an audience; she could not even accompany a singer with any success. Yet, in a manager's office, all the yearning, all the poetry and romance in her soul, flooded her finger-tips. To hear the applause of the multitudes, to walk and live among the great, to be indeed one of them, to taste the sweetest fruit in life, real success! In the manager's office, prior to her last and complete failure, she met Norton Colburton.
Meantime, during her trials, she had tried clerkship in the big shops, given music-lessons, and by qualification and the assistance of her fathers late confrères she had eventually obtained a post in a public school, hating the work, yet sticking to it doggedly, as it meant not only financial independence, but personal liberty.
All these broken pictures passed through her mind as the shiffle-shuffle of the horse died away—old, bent, gray, wrinkled, the political mother of an endless stream of noisy, restless children. All these years of drudgery for what? Food, clothes, roof—little else! But what were twenty or thirty years of drudgery if, among them, there were three or four into which all the luxuries of life might be crowded? The devil always uses this argument; it is the best he has.
The disembodied spirit of the girl crept back into the sordid bedroom. Then imagination took up the thread where retrospection had laid it down. She saw a limousine stop before the house in Washington Square, perhaps twenty minutes after she had left it. Out of the car jumped a man in evening clothes. A fine Panama gave a rakish touch to his dark, handsome head. There was eagerness in his step as he hurried up to the door and rang the bell. His pose as he waited reminded one of Romeo, or Lothario, or the devil in mufti; it all depended on whether one saw him through the eyes of a romantic young girl, a poor young man, or the shade of Virgil. Under his arm he carried a long, narrow box such as florists use. He smiled.
Presently she saw the landlady open the door.
"Miss Warren?"
"She is gone."
"Gone?"
"Yes."
"When will she return?"
"She will not return. She has left for good."
He laid the flowers on the stand. "Will you be so good as to tell me exactly what has happened?"
"I have not the least idea. She left twenty minutes ago, bag and baggage. If you will leave your address …"
"It would be useless," he interrupted, with unexpected curtness. "Good evening!" He opened the door himself and went out into the street. "Club!" he directed, entering the limousine and slamming the door.
All these pictures were dreadfully vivid to Ruth. It seemed as though she was living through every scene again, through all the pain and the shame of it. She put aside these recollections suddenly and energetically. Her life was in danger; she must waste no vitality in useless retrospection. She looked out of the rear window of her prison. Always there was a Chinaman in the door of the outhouse, always covertly watching her window. They? Who were they who were to come for her? At ten that night this riddle was solved.
Colburton came in quietly and stood with his back to the door.
"You?" she whispered across the bed behind which she had taken refuge at the sound of the turning key. For a space the walls of the room warped fantastically. As they steadied down and became normal again she slowly reached for one of her hatpins. She could die.
But Colburton did not approach her; he remained where he was.
"Weren't expecting me, then?"
"No. I hadn't thought you quite so base as this." The sight of this man stiffened her spine. But she determined to see if there was not some decency left in his soul. "Better let me go, Norton. No good can possibly come of this. You'll be sorry. There must be some good in you, just enough not to let you do such a horrible thing as this. To bring me to such a house! Oh! You had better let me go."
"I offered you marriage in Venice, and you declined it. I was a fool, I suppose, but I meant it that morning. Now you're going to come to me of your own free will."
"No. You forget one thing."
"And what's that?"
"I can always die. I'm not your kind."
"You are going to be," he said, quietly. "Die? They always talk of dying, but they don't. Oh, you need not tremble! I sha'n't lay a hand on you until you come to me. I might have put you on board the yacht, but I did not think it would pay. You had to be broken first."
"I can not be kept here forever."
"I can and will keep you here until you break. No woman ever played your game successfully with me."
She knew now from his tone that he was without mercy. "But how many games have you played with women? Let us speak the truth to each other. When I first met you I thought you might inspire me with love."
He interrupted. "And when you learned that I couldn't, you said good-by, didn't you? Yes, let us speak the truth. You thought it over carefully. I could feather your nest comfortably. You took my gifts and permitted an occasional caress to keep the fire in me. … Ah, I know all about you, Ruth. I sent back to your little college town. I know your pedigree. You're cut from the same pattern as your mother, only, she made a bargain and kept it. You let me go to the extent of purchasing a certain kind of trousseau. You made a bargain, and then you played the cheat. Yes, let us speak the truth while we're about it. And then that night at Juneau's you ran away from me without any explanation."
"Cheat? To a certain extent, yes. But do you want the real explanation? I will give it to you. When you put my coat on that night I saw you in the mirror. You smiled and winked at the head-waiter as if I'd been a woman you had just picked up in the street."
"So that was it!" Colburton sensed chagrin.
"Yes, that was it. I had up to that moment believed you really cared for me. I was very unhappy. I had failed in the great object of my life—I had failed utterly. I turned to you. I did not care what became of me. Up to the moment I looked into that mirror I was ready to go with you. I did not love you, but I might have. I would have kept to the letter of my bargain. Well, in the mirror I saw everything. I knew instantly the kind of man you were. You would not have kept to the letter of your bargain. And a little later I should have been no better than the the poor things who live in these houses until they go to the hospitals to die. But God did not intend that I should go that way—be your kind."
"You will be before you leave this house," he replied, moodily.
"I can always kill myself."
"How?"
She smiled. He did not like that smile. He was a little afraid of her.
"You have only to put your hand on me to test my earnestness."
"You kept the pearls," he said, a queer look in his eyes.
"So I did. I took them in payment for that smile of yours. Oh, I offer no excuses for what I have done. It was all cold-blooded. Twenty times I was on the point of sending back those pearls. Do you think my conscience never bothered me?"
"Did it ever occur to you that I could have had you arrested for theft? You took something of which, at that time, you had no right."
"Yes; it occurred to me that morning in Venice. You were trying to separate us. Perhaps that was your tale to the carabinieri."
"Ah! our red-headed friend? Where is he?"
"He'll find me; never doubt that."
"Will he? Will he want to find you? Men are not friendly for nothing."
"His kind are."
"I'll break you, Ruth. I haven't been called a hell-rake for nothing. I'll break you. I've all the time in the world. You'll come to me; wait and see. And I wouldn't put any stake on that Irish friend. By this time he believes you've eloped with Camden."
"Camden?"
"Why, yes. Camden's the cleverest man in his way I know. When you ran away I sent him after you. I gave him your photograph. And here you are!"
"Camden!" she repeated, dully.
"Yes. Can't you see that you've eloped with him?"
"With my luggage on board and all my money with Mr. Grogan? Nobody will believe that."
"Sometimes women run away without their hats. You were coming to me with little else. Your Irishman will prove a human being like the rest. I shouldn't wait too long for him. Good night."
Her hell now became a definite one. Some night he would come in wine, and then God help her!
On the tenth night he did come in wine. He walked toward her without parley, and she saw what lay in his eyes. She prayed silently and ran around behind the bed. He ran after her, laughing. She drew out a hatpin and struck at him blindly. It bit deeply into his arm, but he was too deep in wine to feel the pain. He caught her by the wrist and wrenched the pin from her grasp, and tossed it out of the window. The second hatpin was not long in following.
She fought him like a tigress. She buried her teeth in his hand, scratched and kicked him. She fought with all the weapons she had, as all women fight when their honor is at stake. And it was her honor. Finally he succeeded in getting her in his arms. He kissed her so roughly that her lips bled. He then jumped back beyond the bed, still laughing.
It was here that William came in, haggard but bright-eyed.