The Business of Life

"Then I'll say, bluntly, that it meant a lot to me, and that the place is intolerable when you're not here. That is specific, isn't it?"

"Very. You mean that, being accustomed to having somebody to amuse you, your own resources are insufficient."

"Are you serious?"

"Perfectly. That is why you are kind enough to miss my coming and going – because I amuse you."

"Do you think that way about me?"

"I do when I think of you. You know sometimes I'm thinking of other things, too, Mr. Desboro."

He bit his lip, waited for a moment, then:

"If you feel that way, you'll scarcely care to come up to-morrow. Whatever arrangement you make about cataloguing the collection will be all right. If I am not here, communications addressed to the Olympian Club will be forwarded – "

"Mr. Desboro!"

"Yes?"

"Forgive me – won't you?"

There was a moment's interval, fraught heavily with the possibilities of Chance, then the silent currents of Fate flowed on toward her appointed destiny and his – whatever it was to be, wherever it lay, behind the unstirring, inviolable veil.

"Have you forgiven me?"

"And you me?" he asked.

"I have nothing to forgive; truly, I haven't. Why did you think I had? Because I have been talking flippantly? You have been so uniformly considerate and kind to me – you must know that it was nothing you said or did that made me think – wonder – whether – perhaps – "

"What?" he insisted. But she declined further explanation in a voice so different, so much gayer and happier than it had sounded before, that he was content to let matters rest – perhaps dimly surmising something approaching the truth.

She, too, noticed the difference in his voice as he said:

"Then may I have the car there as usual to-morrow morning?"

"Please."

He drew an unconscious sigh of relief. She said something more that he could scarcely hear, so low and distant sounded her voice, and he asked her to repeat it.

"I only said that I would be happy to go back," came the far voice.

Quick, unconsidered words trembled on his lips for utterance; perhaps fear of undoing what had been done restrained him.

"Not as happy as I will be to see you," he said, with an effort.

"Thank you. Good-bye, Mr. Desboro."

"Good-bye."

The sudden accession of high spirits filled him with delightful impatience. He ranged the house restlessly, traversing the hallway and silent rooms. A happy inclination for miscellaneous conversation impelled him to long-deferred interviews with people on the place. He talked business to Mrs. Quant, to Michael, the armourer; he put on snow-shoes and went cross lots to talk to his deaf head-farmer, Vail. Then he came back and set himself resolutely to his accounts; and after dinner he wrote letters, a yellow pup dozing on his lap, a cat purring on his desk, and occasionally patting with tentative paw the letter-paper when it rustled.

A mania for cleaning up matters which had accumulated took possession of him – and it all seemed to concern, in some occult fashion, the coming of Jacqueline on the morrow – as though he wished to begin again with a clean slate and a conscience undisturbed. But what he was to begin he did not specify to himself.

Bills – heavy ones – he paid lightly, drawing check after check to cover necessities or extravagances, going straight through the long list of liabilities incurred from top to bottom.

Later, the total troubled him, and he made himself do a thing to which he was averse – balance his check-book. The result dismayed him, and he sat for a while eyeing the sheets of carelessly scratched figures, and stroking the yellow pup on his knees.

"What do I want with all these clubs and things?" he said impatiently. "I never use 'em."

On the spur of impulse, he began to write resignations, wholesale, ridding himself of all kinds of incumbrances – shooting clubs in Virginia and Georgia and North Carolina, to which he had paid dues and assessments for years, and to which he had never been; fishing clubs in Maine and Canada and Nova Scotia and California; New York clubs, including the Cataract, the Old Fort, the Palisades, the Cap and Bells, keeping only the three clubs to which men of his sort are supposed to belong – the Patroons, the Olympian, and his college club. But everything else went – yacht clubs, riding clubs, golf clubs, country clubs of every sort – everything except his membership in those civic, educational, artistic, and charitable associations to which such New York families as his owed a moral and perpetual tribute.

It was nearly midnight when the last envelope was sealed and stamped, and he leaned back with a long, deep breath of relief. To-morrow he would apply the axe again and lop off such extravagances as saddle-horses in town, and the two cars he kept there. They should go to the auction rooms; he'd sell his Long Island bungalow, too, and the schooner and the power boats, and his hunters down at Cedar Valley; and with them would go groom and chauffeur, captain and mechanic, and the thousand maddening expenses that were adding daily to a total debt that had begun secretly to appal him.

In his desk he knew there was an accumulated mass of unpaid bills. He remembered them now and decided he didn't want to think about them. Besides, he'd clear them away pretty soon – settle accounts with tailor, bootmaker, haberdasher – with furrier, modiste and jeweler – and a dull red settled under his cheek bones as he remembered these latter bills, which he would scarcely care to exhibit to the world at large.

"Ass that I've been," he muttered, absently stroking the yellow pup. Which reflection started another train of thought, and he went to a desk, unlocked it, pulled out the large drawer, and carried it with its contents to the fireplace.

The ashes were still alive and the first packet of letters presently caught fire. On them he laid a silken slipper of Mrs. Clydesdale's and watched it shrivel and burn. Next, he tossed handfuls of unassorted trifles, letters, fans, one or two other slippers, gloves of different sizes, dried remnants of flowers, programmes scribbled over; and when the rubbish burned hotly, he added photographs and more letters without even glancing at them, except where, amid the flames, he caught a momentary glimpse of some familiar signature, or saw some pretty, laughing phantom of the past glow, whiten to ashes, and evaporate.

Fire is a great purifier; he felt as though the flames had washed his hands. Much edified by the moral toilet, and not concerned that all such ablutions are entirely superficial, he watched with satisfaction the last bit of ribbon shrivel, the last envelope flash into flame. Then he replaced the desk drawer, leaving the key in it – because there was now no reason why all the world and its relatives should not rummage if they liked.

He remembered some letters and photographs and odds and ends scattered about his rooms in town, and made a mental note to clear them out of his life, too.

Mentally detached, he stood aloof in spirit and viewed with interest the spectacle of his own regeneration, and calmly admired it.

"I'll cut out all kinds of things," he said to himself. "A devout girl in Lent will have nothing on me. Nix for the bowl! Nix for the fat pat hand! Throw up the sponge! Drop the asbestos curtain!" He made pretence to open an imaginary door: "Ladies, pass out quietly, please; the show is over."

The cat woke up and regarded him gravely; he said to her:

"You don't even need a pocket-book, do you? And you are quite right; having things is a nuisance. The less one owns the happier one is. Do you think I'll have sense enough to remember this to-morrow, and not be ass enough to acquire more – a responsibility, for example? Do you think I can be trusted to mind my business when she comes to-morrow? And not say something that I'll be surely sorry for some day – or something she'll be sorry for? Because she's so pretty, pussy – so disturbingly pretty – and so sweet. And I ought to know by this time that intelligence and beauty are a deadly combination I had better let alone until I find them in the other sort of girl. That's the trouble, pussy." He lifted the sleepy cat and held it at arm's length, where it dangled, purring all the while. "That's the trouble, kitty. I haven't the slightest intentions; and as for friends, men prefer men. And that's the truth, between you and me. It's rather rotten, isn't it, pussy? But I'll be careful, and if I see that she is capable of caring for me, I'll go South before it hurts either of us. That will be the square thing to do, I suppose – and neither of us the worse for another week together."

He placed the cat on the floor, where it marched to and fro with tail erect, inviting further attentions. But Desboro walked about, turning out the electric lights, and presently took himself off to bed, fixed in a resolution that the coming week should be his last with this unusual girl. For, after all, he concluded she had not moved his facile imagination very much more than had other girls of various sorts, whose souvenirs lay now in cinders on his hearth, and long since had turned to ashes in his heart.

What was the use? Such affairs ended one way or another – but they always ended. All he wanted to find out, all he was curious about, was whether such an unusual girl could be moved to response – he merely wanted to know, and then he would let her alone, and no harm done – nothing to disturb the faint fragrance of a pretty souvenir that he and she might carry for a while – a week or two – perhaps a month – before they both forgot.

And, conscious of his good intentions, feeling tranquil, complacent, and slightly noble, he composed himself to slumber, thinking how much happier this world would be if men invariably behaved with the self-control that occasionally characterised himself.

In the city, Jacqueline lay awake on her pillow, unable to find a refuge in sleep from the doubts, questions, misgivings assailing her.

Wearied, impatient, vexed, by turns, that her impulse and decision should keep her sleepless – that the thought of going back to Silverwood should so excite her, she turned restlessly in her bed, unwilling to understand, humiliated in heart, ashamed, vaguely afraid.

Why should she have responded to an appeal from such a man as Desboro? Her own calm judgment had been that they had seen enough of each other – for the present, anyway. Because she knew, in her scared soul, that she had not meant it to be final – that some obscure idea remained of seeing him again, somewhere.

Yet, something in his voice over the wire – and something more disturbing still when he spoke so coolly about going South – had swayed her in her purpose to remain aloof for a while. But there was no reason, after all, for her to take it so absurdly. She would go once more, and then permit a long interval to elapse before she saw him again. If she actually had, as she began to believe, an inclination for his society, she would show herself that she could control that inclination perfectly.

Why should any man venture to summon her – for it was a virtual summons over the wire – and there had been arrogance in it, too. His curt acquiescence in her decision, and his own arbitrary decision to go South had startled her out of her calmly prepared rôle of business woman. She was trying to recall exactly what she had said to him afterward to make his voice change once more, and her own respond so happily.

Why should seeing him be any unusual happiness to her – knowing who and what he had been and was – a man of the out-world with which she had not one thing in common – a man who could mean nothing to her – could not even remain a friend because their two lives would never even run within sight of each other.