The Business of Life

He stared across the street at the Olympian Club. He was expected there.

"If she only wasn't so – so expressionless and – silent about it. It's like killing something that lets you do it. That's a crazy thing to think of!"

Suddenly he found he had a fight on his hands. He had never had one like it; didn't know exactly what to do, except to repeat over and over:

"It isn't square – it isn't square. She knows it, too. She's frightened. She knows it isn't square. There's nothing ahead but hell to pay! She knows it. And she doesn't defend herself. There are only two kinds of women. It is up to them, too. But it's like killing something that lets you kill it. Good God! What a damn fool I am!"

Later he repeated it. Later still he found himself leaning over his desk, groping blindly about for a pen, and cursing breathlessly as though he had not a moment to lose.

He wrote:

"Dear Little Jacqueline: I'm not going to see you again. Where the fool courage to write this comes from I don't know. But you will now learn that there is nothing to me after all – not even enough of positive and negative to make me worth forgiveness. And so I let it go at that. Good-bye.

    "Desboro."

In the same half blind, half dazed way, cursing something all the while, he managed to seal, stamp, and direct the letter, and get himself out of the house with it.

A club servant at the Olympian mailed it; he continued on his way to the dining room, and stumbled into a chair between Cairns and Reggie Ledyard, who were feasting noisily and unwisely with Stuyvesant Van Alstyne; and the racket and confusion seemed to help him. He was conscious of laughing and talking and drinking a great deal – conscious, too, of the annoyance of other men at other tables. Finally, one of the governors came over and very pleasantly told him to shut up or go elsewhere.

They all went, with cheerfulness unimpaired by gubernatorial admonition. There was a large dinner dance for debutantes at the Barkley's. This function they deigned to decorate with their presence for a while, Cairns and Van Alstyne behaving well enough, considering the manners of the times; Desboro, a dull fire smouldering in his veins, wandered about, haunted by a ghost whose soft breath touched his cheek.

His manners were good when he chose; they were always faultless when he was drunk. Perfectly steady on his legs, very pale, and a trifle over polite, the drunker he was the more courtly he invariably became, measuredly graceful, in speech reticent. Only his pallor and the lines about his mouth betrayed the tension.

Later, one or two men familiar with the house strolled into the distant billiard room and discovered him standing there looking blankly into space.

Ledyard, bad tempered when he had dined too well, announced that he had had enough of that debutante party:

"Look at 'em," he said to Desboro. "Horrible little fluffs just out of the incubator – with their silly brains and rotten manners, and their 'Bunny Hugs' and 'Turkey Trots' and 'Dying Chickens,' and the champagne flaming in their baby cheeks! Why, their mothers are letting 'em dance like filles de Brasserie! Men used to know where to go for that sort of thing – "

Cairns, balancing gravely on heels and toes, waved one hand comprehensively.

"Problem was," he said, "how to keep the young at home. Bunny Hug solves it. See? All the comforts of the Tenderloin at home. Tha's 'splaination."

"Come on to supper," said Ledyard. "Your Blue Girl will be there, Jim."

"By all means," said Desboro courteously. "My car is entirely at your disposal." But he made no movement.

"Come to supper," insisted Ledyard.

"Commer supper," echoed Cairns gravely. "Whazzer mazzer? Commer supper!"

"Nothing," said Desboro, "could give me greater pleasure." He rose, bowed courteously to Ledyard, included Cairns in a graceful salute, and reseated himself.

Ledyard lost his temper and began to shout at him.

"I beg your pardon for my inexcusable absent-mindedness," said Desboro, getting slowly onto his feet once more. With graceful precision, he made his way to his hostess and took faultless leave of her, Cairns and Ledyard attempting vainly to imitate his poise, urbanity and self-possession.

The icy air of the street did Cairns good and aided Ledyard. So they got themselves out across the sidewalk and ultimately into Desboro's town car, which was waiting, as usual.

"Little bunny-hugging, bread-and-butter beasts," muttered Ledyard to himself. "Lord! Don't they want us to draw the line between them and the sort we're to meet at supper?"

"They're jus' fools," said Cairns. "No harm in 'em! And I'm not going to supper. I'll take you there an' go'me!"

"What's the matter with you?" demanded Ledyard.

"No – I'm through, that's all. You 'sult nice li'l debutantes. Rotten bad taste. Nice li'l debbys."

"Come on, you jinx!"

"That girl in blue. Will she be there – the one who does the lute solo in 'The Maid of Shiraz'?"

"Yes, but she's crazy about Desboro."

"I waive all pretension to the charming condescension of that very lovely young lady, and cheerfully concede your claims," said Desboro, raising his hat and wrecking it against the roof of the automobile.

"As you wish, dear friend. But why so suddenly the solitary recluse?"

"A personal reason, I assure you."

"I see," remarked Ledyard. "And what may be the name and quality of this personal reason? And is she a blonde?"

Desboro shrugged his polite impatience. But when the others got out at the Santa Regina he followed. Cairns was inclined to shed a few tears over Ledyard's insults to the "debbys."

"Sure," said the latter, soothingly. "The brimming beaker for you, dear friend, and it will pass away. Hark! I hear the fairy feetsteps of a houri!" as they landed from the elevator and encountered a group of laughing, bright-eyed young girls in the hallway, seeking the private supper room.

One of them was certainly the girl in blue. The others appeared to Desboro as merely numerous and, later, exceedingly noisy. But noise and movement seemed to make endurable the dull pain thudding ceaselessly in his heart. Music and roses, flushed faces, the ringing harmony of crystal and silver, and the gaiety à diable of the girl beside him would ease it —must ease it, somehow. For it had to be first eased, then killed. There was no sense, no reason, no excuse for going on this way – enduring such a hurt. And just at present the remedy seemed to lie in a gay uproar and many brilliant lights, and in the tinted lips of the girl beside him, babbling nonsense while her dark eyes laughed, promising all they laughed at – if he cared to ask an answer to the riddle.

But he never asked it.

Later somebody offered a toast to Desboro, but when they looked around for him in the uproar, glasses aloft, he had disappeared.

CHAPTER VII

There was no acknowledgment of his note to Jacqueline the day following; none the next day, or the next. It was only when telephoning to Silverwood he learned by chance from Mrs. Quant that Jacqueline had been at the house every day as usual, busy in the armoury with the work that took her there.

He had fully expected that she would send a substitute; had assumed that she would not wish to return and take the chance of his being there.

What she had thought of his note to her, what she might be thinking of him, had made him so miserable that even the unwisdom of excess could not dull the pain of it or subdue the restless passion ever menacing him with a shameful repudiation of the words he had written her. He had fought one weakness with another, and there was no strength in him now. He knew it, but stood on guard.

For he knew, too, in his heart that he had nothing to offer her except a sentiment which, in the history of man, has never been anything except temporary. With it, of course, and part of it, was a gentler inclination – love, probably, of one sort or another – with it went also genuine admiration and intellectual interest, and sympathy, and tenderness of some unanalysed kind.

But he knew that he had no intention of marrying anybody – never, at least, of marrying out of his own social environment. That he understood fully; had wit and honesty enough to admit to himself. And so there was no way – nothing, now, anyway. He had settled that definitely – settled it for her and for himself, unrequested; settled, in fact, everything except how to escape the aftermath of restless pain for which there seemed to be no remedy so far – not even the professional services of old Doctor Time. However, it had been only three days – three sedative pills from the old gentleman's inexhaustible supply. It is the regularity of taking it, more than the medicine itself which cures.

On the fourth day, he emerged from the unhappy seclusion of his rooms and ventured into the Olympian Club, where he deliberately attempted to anæsthetise his badly battered senses. But he couldn't. Cairns found him there, sitting alone in the library – it was not an intellectual club – and saw what Desboro had been doing to himself by the white tensity of his features.

"Look here," he said. "If there's really anything the matter with you, why don't you go into business and forget it? You can't fool real trouble with what you buy in bottles!"

"What business shall I go into?" asked Desboro, unoffended.