Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905
She was crying when I left her. “Percy, my dear,” she said; then she began to laugh – that after dinner benedictine laugh of hers. “If there weren’t Jack, that speech of yours just now might make me want to kiss you.”
On the sidewalk I tried to figure out if there had been knockout drops in the coffee Natica had brewed for me. In any one of the forty-eight hours ensuing, I might have rung up the Draytons’ on the telephone, and told her that I had come to my senses. But I didn’t do anything of the sort. Instead, I hunted up a newspaper chap I knew, and he put me next to “Boiler-plate” Hartopp at the Metropole.
The bruiser wasn’t as bad sort as I had fancied him. He was an Englishman all right – a cut below middle class; you could tell that by the way he clipped his initial h’s off and on. I tried the ice at first – it’s always best when you don’t know the exact thickness of your frozen water. The way I tried it was to toss a flower or two at Maisie Hartopp and her “Jo-Jo” song.
He rose sure enough, and it didn’t take me a quarter hour to see that the pug was really bowled out by the parcel of stage skirts who wore his name on the Gaiety bills. This made it a warmer game than it might have been otherwise, but I was in for it now, and I made the date.
No, I didn’t mention Natica. Even a broken-to-harness shawl carrier has a shred of cautious decency about him. But I gabbled lightly about a certain feminine party who was keen on exemplars of the genuine thing in the line of the manly art. Whereupon “Boilerplate” acquired a pouter-pigeon chest, which fairly bulged over the bar railing, and gave me his word of honor he’d be waiting at Forty-fourth Street about eleven on Friday. He intimated, ere I left, that he’d bring his festive accouterments with him. And he did.
We were a bit late – Natica and I. It must have been a quarter past the hour when we drove up to Cherry’s. I felt reasonably certain that if Jack Drayton were guarding a champagne bucket by the corner table that night, he was located then. In the offing, miserably self-conscious, a crush hat on the back of his really fine head, and two or three small locomotive headlights glinting from his broad expanse of evening shirt, was “Boiler-plate” Hartopp. The flunkeys were regarding him curiously, and once a waiter-captain came out and gave him what seemed to be an unsatisfactory report.
I think the man was just about to take the count from sheer nerves, when he made me out in the doorway. Natica winked – actually winked at me – as he floundered over his share of the introduction. Looking at her, and faintly divining her mood that night, I felt sorry for Jack, for “Boiler-plate” and for myself. I left them for a moment and went in to see about my table. Two minutes later I emerged, to face Drayton and the Hartopp unloading from an electric hansom. The under-toned remark of one of the footman came to me: “A bit behind schedule time to-night, eh, Charley?”
There wasn’t anything to do then, for they were fair inside. “Boiler-plate” was finishing some elephantine pleasantry to Natica, when he saw what I saw. A foolish grin rippled across his wide face. “Hullo!” he said to the Hartopp, who looked properly peevish, and then waspish, as she let her glance travel to Natica, who stood perfectly poised and, I fancied, a trifle expectant. Drayton eyed them together and in particular. The color streaked his forehead and faded out. Then he saw me, and, although he never may have murder in his eyes again, it was there at that choice moment. We weren’t at all spectacular, you mustn’t think that. It was all very quick, and there were a lot of people coming and going.
She was in instant command of the situation. Why shouldn’t she have been, having created it? And unexpectedly, suddenly as she had encountered her quarry, equally suddenly she shifted her position, without the time to take me into her confidence.
“Don’t bother about our table, Percy,” she said. “Now that we’ve met friends, it will be jollier to dine en famille. It will be ever so much nicer than eating in a stuffy restaurant, and the butler won’t have gone to bed yet. Run out and get us a theater wagon.”
I went out to the carriage man in a trance. The gods, of a deed, were fighting furiously on Natica’s side – for she could not have foreseen this vantage, readily as she swung her attack by its aid. Exquisite torture, truly, to flaunt a husband’s folly in his own face, over his own mahogany, with the source of that folly looking on. Drayton’s bounden civility to his wife, and to the other woman, must make him present himself as a target. He knew it, his wife knew it; as yet the other woman but dimly suspected it – not being over subtle – and it smote me in the face continuously. The puppet always feels the most cut up at times like these. In a way, it is because his vanity is being seared. Mine fairly crackled.
So we rattled off up the avenue. The only comfortable ones among us were Natica and Hartopp. He seemed to think the occurrence a pleasant bit of chance, and he wasn’t in the least jealous, not he. I suppose the wife had him schooled to her stage ways of doing things.
Once he turned to Jack with a chuckle and said: “This is a jossy bit of luck, ain’t it, each of us out with the other man’s better?”
Natica laughed shamelessly. “You’ve such a keen appreciation of the ridiculous, Mr. Hartopp,” she said. And when “Boiler-plate” tried to deny the insinuation, his wife nudged him on the arm and whispered: “Shut up, Jim.”
There isn’t any use in stringing out the amateur theatricals the five of us indulged in that night. The Drayton servants were too well chosen to show any surprise at being told to put on a champagne supper at midnight, and then go to bed before it was served. We sat at that mahogany table until the candelabra were guttering, and each of us had toyed more than he ought to have done with his glass. Natica acted as if she were entertaining in earnest, and for the time being I actually think she felt that she was. She got the Hartopp to sing her “Jo-Jo” song, and the Hartopp actually did it as if she enjoyed it. Afterward Natica induced “Boiler-plate” to tell about the time he mixed it up with Fitzsimmons for ten rounds.
“It was a lucky punch that put me out,” he kept repeating, almost pathetically. “You know Fitz’s lucky punch.”
I might have seen what was in the wind if I hadn’t been thick-headed, what with the champagne and the rattles. “Boiler-plate” once started on the ring, it was an easy transition.
“You’ve boxing gloves, haven’t you, Jack?” asked Natica. “Get them for Mr. Hartopp. Let’s see him demonstrate Mr. Fitzsimmons’ lucky punch.”
Drayton turned without a word, and made as if to go upstairs. At the door he turned. “Come on, Hartopp,” he said. “I’ll lend you a rowing jersey.”
“You clear a place in the drawing room, Percy,” said Natica, briskly. “Be sure that the shades are drawn. It would be awful to be raided by the police.” And I obediently piled the gilt parlor furniture in corners.
The Hartopp fluttered anxiously around Natica the while. She was a woman, and she was beginning to half understand. “Please,” she said, touching Natica’s arm. “Jim’s been drinking, and he’s very rough when he’s been drinking. We’ve all been foolish, but only foolish, remember. Jim and I sail for London next week. Just let us slip away now, and forget all about it.”
Natica laughed. Her eyes were on the door. “Remember, we’ve only been foolish,” repeated the Hartopp. “Only foolish, that’s all.” She went to Natica and shook her arm roughly; there were feet upon the stairs. “You silly,” she snapped. “You ought to be glad you’re married to a gentleman. He’s different from all the others. I can tell you that, and I know. And I tell you that Jim’s been drinking. Jack will – ”
Natica’s pose stiffened, but she did not look around. “Yes, Jack will what?” she said, coldly.
The Hartopp flushed. “He’ll be hurt,” she finished, weakly. Then, as the two from upstairs entered, she whispered: “He’ll be hurt worse than you are now.”
The “Boiler-plate” looked very foolish in an old Yale rowing shirt, with the “Y” stretched taut across his ponderous chest. He had a pair of arms like a blacksmith. Jack Drayton had taken off his coat and was in his shirt sleeves. He never looked at Natica, nor at the Hartopp; but he tossed me a stopwatch and told me to keep time.
“We’ll box five rounds, Percy,” he said.
Natica clapped her hands. “What fun!” she cried. “Jack, you’re boxing against my champion.”
The “Boiler-plate,” who had been regarding the work at hand with much gravity, again allowed his countenance to be relaxed by the old, foolish grin. “Oh, I say,” he interposed. “That’s all right, but so long as Maisie is in the room I’m fighting for her – she’s my wife, you know.”
The Hartopp went to Natica with a softened gleam in her eyes; “I saw a telephone in the hall,” she said. “I’m going out to call a cab.” I heard her at the lever as they began to spar.
I don’t believe I could get a job at timekeeping in a real mill. My rounds must have been wonderfully and fearfully made. For I forgot all about the stop-watch now and then, while I learned the truth of the Hartopp’s caution that “Boiler-plate” grew rough after he’d been drinking a bit.
I knew that Jack had been a pretty fair boxer at the university, but, after I had called time for the first round, the thing was to all intents and purposes a genuine fight, and he was all in several times over. The “Boiler-plate’s” fists made a noise like a woodchopper. Natica stood watching it with a queer, queer smile. But I saw – and I saw it with a sinking at the heart, for I realized that I’d cherished the guilty hope that things were not really going to be straightened out – that with every mark of the “Boiler-plate’s” glove, her husband was coming back into his own.
She half sprang toward them when Jack went down with a crash, after I had got them started on the last go. Drayton arose warily, the blood spurting from a nasty cut over the eye, where the heel of the other’s glove had scraped. The “Boiler-plate” lumbered dangerously near just then, and Natica, despite her, uttered a cry of warning.
I saw Jack turn away from the mountain in the Yale rowing shirt, and his eyes met Natica’s squarely for the first time since Cherry’s. Something he read in them made him laugh. This was only for the fraction of a second, however, for a glove, with the nth power behind it, lifted him a clear three feet into a stack of gilt chairs near his own corner.
He didn’t move, and the “Boilerplate” stared at him stupidly.
“Say, you made him look at you,” he said to Natica. “I didn’t mean to land on him blind.”
But she did not heed him. She was among the gilt chairs, with Jack Drayton’s head upon her lap. The wheels of a cab stopped outside, and the Hartopp was seizing her dazed lord and master. She had his coat and bediamonded linen in her hands, and she clutched the “Boiler-plate” firmly, leading him to the door.
“Say, Maisie, wait a minute,” he protested. “I’ve got the swell’s college shirt on, and I didn’t mean to land on him blind.”
I opened the door, for she signaled with her eyes. “Come on, Jim, there’s a dear,” she said. Between us we cajoled him into the coupe. As I shut the door, she leaned to me and whispered: “Tell her for me she’s a cat – a cruel cat.”
I handed the driver a bill. “You’ve a very bad memory, cabby, haven’t you?” I asked.
“Extremely bad, sir,” said he, touching his hat.
“But, Maisie, I’ve got the swell’s college shirt on,” I heard “Boiler-plate” insist. Then the wheels moved.
The Draytons were both upon their feet when I stole back into the hall. I needed my hat and coat, or I shouldn’t have set foot within the house again that night. Jack, a bit staggery and holding to the back of a chair, mopped the cut on his temple with a handkerchief, his wife’s handkerchief, in his free hand. Natica, a smear of red on the front of her frock, stood beside him, with a strangely happy expression in her face and pose. A great many things had been pushed over the precipice which leads to forgetfulness, in the time I had been out on the sidewalk busy with the cabby.
“Good-night, Percy,” Jack called out.
“Good-night,” said I, going to him to take his hand, for he was too wobbly to have met me halfway.
“It’s been a nightmare,” said he. “We’ll wake up to-morrow morning and know that we’ve only been asleep.”
“Yes,” I agreed, but looking at the puffiness in his face, I thought this was coming it a bit strong.
“Good-night, Percy,” said Natica. And gently as she spoke the words, it came to me with a sudden rush of conviction that I had ceased fagging for the Drayton establishment for good – now.
“It was coming to me,” said Jack. I was fiddling on the threshold uncertainly.
“Hush, you foolish boy,” whispered Natica, touching the cut on his forehead, just once, with a very tender finger.
“Yes, it was coming to you,” said I. I was glad that they perceived the conviction in my speech.
And that is how I had my last supper with Natica.
BY THE FOUNTAIN
By Margaret HoustonThere was nothing in the aspect of the white brick mansion to indicate that a tragedy was going on inside. A woman quietly dressed, her face showing delicately above her dark furs, came lightly down the steps. She paused a half second at the gateway and looked back, but there was no hesitation in the glance.
“Jules,” she said to the coachman, “you may drive to the park.”
She did not look back as they drove away.
There should be no gossiping among the servants. Everything should be done decently. From the park she could take the suburban and go quietly into town. From there – the world was wide. There was a note on his dresser, he would read it to-night and understand – no, not understand, she had ceased to expect that of him – but he would know – in some dull, stern way he would see – he would see. She caught sight of her face in the little mirror of the brougham and lowered her veil. Ah, it was a bitter, barren thing, this striving, striving, endlessly striving to be understood. She had endured it for four years and she was worn heartsick with the strain. Her soul cried out for warmth, for life, for breathing room; was not one’s first duty to one’s self after all? She turned suddenly – Jules stood by the open door.
“Jules,” she said, summoning a little severity of manner to counterbalance the tremor in her voice, “you need not come back for me. Jules,” she added, turning again, “good-by – you have – you have been very faithful.”
The man touched his hat gravely and stood like a sentinel till she had passed from sight among the trees.
It was late in November, and the maple boughs were a riot of red and gold. The sky beyond them looked pale and far away, as though a white veil had been drawn across its tender southern blue. She rejoiced now that she had elected to spend this last hour in the frosty outdoor gladness. With a little impulse of relief, she flung back her veil and drew a deep breath. Then she locked her hands inside her muff and began to walk briskly.
At the park’s further end there was a bench, inside a sort of roofless summerhouse, where on warm days the fountain played in a rainbow. She knew the place well – she had sat there many times – with him and with another – she would go there now and think her own thoughts. It was hidden from the driveways, and the place was sweet with memories which need not goad and pain her. She remembered the last time she had sat there. It came back to her now with a sudden vividness. It was the day she had refused – the other one. She remembered the dress she wore – a thin little mull, cut low about the throat and strewn with pink rosebuds. And it was on that same bench. She had done it very gently. She had simply shown him her ring, and begged him with a little catch of the breath to be her friend – always. His was the sort of heart a woman might warm herself by all her life. He was tender and impulsive like herself, and he had always understood – always. How could she have forgotten for so long? Friends were rare – and he had promised to be her friend through everything. Her friend! Had he realized how much that meant?
Her step had grown very slow; she quickened it, lifting her head, and reached the little plaza near the fountain, her face flushed with the walk, the dark tendrils of her hair fallen from beneath her floating veil.
It was very sad here now, and very lonely. She had not thought that any place long familiar could look so strange. She paused, almost dreading to enter the old retreat, clothed as it was in the withered vine robes of dead springs. It was so like the rainbow fountain of her own years, checked and desolate and still. A whirlwind of red and yellow leaves swept about her feet. She started nervously, and, opening the little gate, went in.
But the place was not deserted. A man sat on the bench. He rose as she closed the gate, and when she would have withdrawn, he came toward her and held out a hand.
“Oh,” she said, feeling as if she were speaking in a dream, “is it – where did you come from?”
“It seems very natural to see you here,” he said.
His face was bronzed and he had more beard than formerly, but his eyes were the same when he smiled.
“I did not dream you were anywhere near us,” she went on, the wonder deepening in her eyes. “I was – you seem part of my thoughts – I was thinking of you only a moment ago.”
“You were always kind,” said the man. “Let me spread my overcoat on the bench – the stone is cold. You have been walking, haven’t you?”
“Yes. I don’t walk much – it tires me easily.” She sat down, loosening the furs at her throat, Breathing quickly; her eyes searched his face, half dazed, half questioning. “But where have you been?” she asked. “Were you not in Africa?”
“Yes. I have been home only a few days – I don’t wonder you are surprised finding me here; people don’t often sit in the park at this time – but I find it cozier than the station across the way. I came out on the hill early this noon to look up old friends, and I found I’d an hour to wait.”
“Am I not an old friend?” she asked. “Why have you not been to see – us?”
“I hope I may count you such,” said the man. “I knew your husband, too, many years ago; but he said that you were ill; I saw him this morning.”
“I have been ill,” she answered, quickly, and looked away, pushing back her hair with the little movement he knew so well.
“I am sorry for that,” he said. “I heard of your loss – I did not lose sight entirely of my friends. Your little boy,” he added, his voice softening – “your little boy – ”
“My baby died,” she said.
“I know – I heard of it – I knew how keenly you could suffer. But I knew, too, how brave you were – ”
“Oh!” she said, catching the lace at her throat. “If he – if my baby had lived – I might – I could – ”
She checked herself with a sudden biting of the lip, but the tears broke from her eyelids and she bowed her face.
“Ah,” said the man, “I know – this is very hard; but it is something, after all, to have felt – to have known. No loss can be so bitter as a lack – a need.”
There was a moment’s silence between them.
“Tell me of yourself,” she said, quietly, at length.
“There is little to tell. My life is very much the same. I have neither wife nor child. Until a man finds those, he’s a most indifferent topic.”
“You have never married?” she asked.
“No. Your life is, fuller, sweeter, better. Tell me of that. I used to know your husband – did you know?”
“No,” she said, “I did not know.”
“Yes, we were chaps together, he and I, the same age, though he seemed older – he was a plucky little fellow – you did not know him long, I believe, before you married.”
She was looking straight before her at the still fountain. “No,” she said, “I did not know him long.”
“Ah,” mused the man, “I know him well. He is a prince – one of God’s own. Somewhat quiet now, I find, but he was always rather reserved, his life made him so; he was such a kid when he began to support them all – the mother and the girls, you know. But he worked along, going to night school – always ready, always courageous. My father used to say he’d give all his four boys for that one. We never worked much, you know. I suppose those who don’t know him call him stern, but he has carried a pretty heavy load all his life, and that sobers a man and takes the spring out of him – of course you know, though.”
But the woman said nothing. The man paused, regarding her a moment, then he let his gaze follow hers.
“I was thinking of the fountain,” she said; “how it once flashed and sang and played – and now – ”
“And now,” said the man, “it is silent and cold – but the bright water is there still, and when the spring comes back it will leap forth again. It reminds me of my friend of whom we were just speaking – your husband. All the glow and life are still in his heart, and you will waken them. I said when you were married, that he needed just that – a union with a rich, sunny nature like your own, to teach him all that he had missed, and give back to him all that he had lost.”
Her, lashes fell slowly, and she stroked her muff with one white hand.
The man spoke on, musingly. “I suppose even you do not realize the good he does – the help he gives to others. He doesn’t talk of himself – he never did – even to you, I suppose? No? It is like him, he was always so. It was – it was in the cemetery I saw him this morning. I – when I come home – I always go there – my mother is there, you remember – I found him by – by your little boy. He was talking, with the sexton when I came up. It seems the grass didn’t grow about the little fellow’s – bed. The man admitted that his own little folks were accustomed to play there – the lot is shady and close to the house – they bring their toys and frolic there till the grass is quite worn away. You should have seen his face when the man told him that. ‘Let them come,’ he said; ‘don’t stop them; the grass doesn’t matter.’ ‘The boy won’t be so lonely,’ said he to me. ‘It seems so far away out here – and he all by himself – he was such a little chap – I sort of feel one of us ought to stay with him – at night.’”
The woman raised her eyes to his face. “Ah,” she said, softly, “did he – did he say that?”
“Yes – and it goes to show, what you doubtless know better than I, how deep and true and tender he is beneath it all. Shan’t I lay this coat more about you? I think the air has grown chillier.”
“No, thank you,” she said, rising. “Yes, it is chillier.”
The man rose also. She stood a moment – her hand on the little gate, her eyes grown dark and deep. He waited at her side.
Her fingers sought the latch absently.
“Let me open it for you,” he said. “Were you going into town, or did you come for the walk?”
“I?” she said. “Oh, I told Jules not to come back for me – it’s a short walk home.” She smiled up at him for the first time with her old-time brightness. “And you,” she said, “you haven’t completed the round of your ‘old friends’ yet – you will come with me.”
BAS BLEU
By Anna A. RogersAuthor of “PEACE AND THE VICES”That his wife was keeping something from him had been unpleasantly apparent to Robert Penn for over two months; but what really wore upon his easily disturbed nerves was the equally obvious fact that her secret was the source of an unusual, unnatural, unseemly happiness, which she took no pains to disguise.
Robert was the very much overworked junior partner in the prosperous law firm of Messrs. Flagg, Bentnor & Penn; and the question of his taking a much-needed rest had been gravely discussed by the other two partners more than once during the year; but the mere suggestion of it put him into such a tantrum that they let it drop, trusting to a redistribution of the work of the office to lighten somewhat Penn’s burden. So all the fashionable divorcées – hitherto Bentnor’s specialty – were turned over to the junior partner, as a slight means of professional diversion.
But he threw himself into the cases of his clients, male and female, with the same old unsparing fervor, and Flagg and Bentnor – the latter was Penn’s brother-in-law – raised their eyebrows and shook their heads behind his back.
What first drew Robert’s attention to his wife’s secret was the sudden inexplicable condoning of his own small negligences and ignorances, which had once been brought to book. So accustomed does the happily married husband of the day become to certain domestic requisitions that the withdrawal of them is apt to arouse his suspicions at once.
