The Business of Life

She looked up at him out of her hands, a little pale, then down at his arm, resting loosely around her waist.

"Don't hold me so, please," she said, in a low voice.

"Of course not." But instead he merely took her slender hands between his own, which were not very steady, and looked her straight in the eyes. Such men can do it, somehow. Besides, he really meant to control himself and cast anchor in a moment or two.

"Will you trust me with your friendship?" he said.

"I – seem to be doing it. I don't exactly understand what I am doing. Would you answer me one question?"

"If I can, Jacqueline."

"Then, friendship is possible between a man and a woman, isn't it?" she insisted wistfully.

"I don't know."

"What! Why don't you know? It's merely a matter of mutual interest and respect, isn't it?"

"I've heard so."

"Then isn't a friendship between us possible without anything threatening to spoil it? Isn't it to be just a matter of enjoying together what interests each? Isn't it? Because I don't mind waiving social conditions that can't be helped, and conventions that we simply can't observe."

"Yes, you wonderful girl," he said under his breath, meaning to anchor at once. But he drifted on.

"You know," she said, forcing a little laugh, "I am rather wonderful, to be so honest with a man like you. There's so much about you that I don't care for."

He laughed, enchanted, still retaining her hands between his own, the palms joined together, flat.

"You're so wonderful," he said, "that you make the most wonderful masterpiece in the Desboro collection look like a forgery."

She strove to speak lightly again: "Even the gilding on my hair is real. You didn't think so once, did you?"

"You're all real. You are the most real thing I've ever seen in the world!"

She tried to laugh: "You mustn't believe that I've never before been real when I've been with you. And I may not be real again, for a long time. Make the most of this moment of expansive honesty, Mr. Desboro. I'll remember presently that you are an hereditary enemy."

"Have I ever acted that part?"

"Not toward me."

He reddened: "Toward whom?"

"Oh," she said, with sudden impatience, "do you suppose I have any illusions concerning the sort of man you are? But what do I care, as long as you are nice to me?" she laughed, more confidently. "Men!" she repeated. "I know something about them! And, knowing them, also, I nevertheless mean to make a friend of one of them. Do you think I'll succeed?"

He smiled, then bent lightly and kissed her joined hands.

"Luncheon is served," came the emotionless voice of Farris from the doorway. Their hands fell apart; Jacqueline blushed to her hair and gave Desboro a lovely, abashed look.

She need not have been disturbed. Farris had seen such things before.

That evening, Desboro went back to New York with her and took her to her own door in a taxicab.

"Are you quite sure you can't dine with me?" he asked again, as they lingered on her doorstep.

"I could – but – "

"But you won't!"

One of her hands lay lightly on the knob of the partly open door, and she stood so, resting and looking down the dark street toward the distant glare of electricity where Broadway crossed at right angles.

"We have been together all day, Mr. Desboro. I'd rather not dine with you – yet."

"Are you going to dine all alone up there?" glancing aloft at the lighted windows above the dusky old shop.

"Yes. Besides, you and I have wasted so much time to-day that I shall go down stairs to the office and do a little work after dinner. You see a girl always has to pay for her transgressions."

"I'm terribly sorry," he said contritely. "Don't work to-night!"

"Don't be sorry. I've really enjoyed to-day's laziness. Only it mustn't be like this to-morrow. And anyway, I knew I'd have to make it up to-night."

"I'm terribly sorry," he said again, almost tenderly.

"But you mustn't be, Mr. Desboro. It was worth it – "

He looked up, surprised, flushing with emotion; and the quick colour in her cheeks responded. They remained very still, and confused, and silent, as fire answered fire; suddenly aware how fast they had been drifting.

She turned, nervously, pushed open the door, and entered the vestibule; he held the door ajar for her while she fitted her key with unsteady fingers.

"So – thank you," she said, half turning around, "but I won't dine with you – to-night."

"Then, perhaps, to-morrow – "

"Don't come into town with me to-morrow, Mr. Desboro."

"I'm coming in anyway."

"Why?"

"There's an affair – a kind of a dance. There are always plenty of things to take me into town in the evenings."

"Is that why you came in to-night?" She knew she should not have said it.

He hesitated, then, with a laugh: "I came in to town because it gave me an hour longer with you. Are you going to send me away now?" And her folly was answered in kind.

She said, confused and trying to smile: "You say things that you don't mean. Evening, for us, must always mean 'good-night.'"

"Why, Jacqueline?"

"Because. Also, it is my hour of freedom. You wouldn't take that away from me, would you?"

"What do you do in the evenings?"

"Sew, read, study, attend to the thousand wretched little details which concern my small household. And, sometimes, when I have wasted the day, I make it up at night. Because, whether I have enjoyed it or not, this day has been wasted."

"But sometimes you dine out and go to the theatre and to dances and things?"

"Yes," she said gravely. "But you know there is no meeting ground there for us, don't you?"

"Couldn't you ask me to something?"

"Yes – I could. But you wouldn't care for the people. You know it. They are not like the people to whom you are accustomed. They would only bore you."

"So do many people I know."

"Not in the same way. Why do you ask me? You know it is better not." She added smilingly: "There is neither wealth nor fashion nor intellectual nor social distinction to be expected among my friends – "

She hesitated, and added quietly: "You understand that I am not criticising them. I am merely explaining them to you. Otherwise, I'd ask you to dinner with a few people – I can only have four at a time, my dining room is so small – "

"Ask me, Jacqueline!" he insisted.

She shook her head; but he continued to coax and argue until she had half promised. And now she stood, facing him irresolutely, conscious of the steady drift that was forcing her into uncharted channels with this persuasive pilot who seemed to know no more of what lay ahead of them than did she.

But there was to be no common destination; she understood that. Sooner or later she must turn back toward the harbour they had left so irresponsibly together, her brief voyage over, her last adventure with this man ended for all time.

And now, as the burden of decision still seemed to rest upon her, she offered him her hand, saying good-night; and he took it once more and held it between both of his. Instantly the impending constraint closed in upon them; his face became grave, hers serious, almost apprehensive.

"You have – have made me very happy," he said. "Do you know it, Jacqueline?"

"Yes."

A curious lassitude was invading her; she leaned sideways against the door frame, as though tired, and stood so, one hand abandoned to him, gazing into the lamp-lit street.

"Good-night, dear," he whispered.

"Good-night."

She still gazed into the lamp-lit darkness beyond him, her hand limp in his; and he saw her blue eyes, heavy lidded and dreamy, and the strand of hair curling gold against her cheek.

When he kissed her, she dropped her head, covering her face with her forearm, not otherwise stirring – as though the magic pageant of her fate which had been gathering for two weeks had begun to move at last, passing vision-like through her mind with a muffled uproar – sweeping on, on, brilliant, disarrayed, timed by the deafening beating of her heart.

Dully she realised that it was here at last – all that she had dreaded – if dread be partly made of hope!

"Are you crying?" he said, unsteadily.

She lifted her face from her arm, like a dazed child awaking.

"You darling," he whispered.

Eyes remote, she stood watching unseen things in the darkness beyond him.

"Must I go, Jacqueline?"

"Yes."

"You are very tired, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"You won't sit up and work, will you?"

"No."

"Will you go straight to bed?"

She nodded slowly, yielding to him as he drew her into his arms.

"To-morrow, then?" he asked under his breath.

"Yes."

"And the next day, and the next, and next, and – always, Jacqueline?" he demanded, almost fiercely.

After a moment she slowly turned her head and looked at him. There was no answer, and no question in her gaze, only the still, expressionless clairvoyance of a soul that sees but does not heed.

There was no misunderstanding in her eyes, nothing wistful, nothing afraid or hurt – nothing of doubt. What had happened to others in the world was happening now to her. She understood it; that was all – as though the millions of her sisters who had passed that way had left to her the dread legacy of familiarity with the smooth, wide path they had trodden since time began on earth. And here it was, at last! Her own calmness surprised her.

He detained her for another moment in a swift embrace; inert, unresponsive, she stood looking down at the crushed gardenia in his buttonhole, dully conscious of being bruised. Then he let her go; her hand fell from his arm; she turned and faced the familiar stairs and mounted them.

Dinner waited for her; whether she ate or not, she could not afterward remember. About eleven o'clock, she rose wearily from the bed where she had been lying, and began to undress.

As for Desboro, he had gone straight to his rooms very much excited and unbalanced by the emotions of the moment.

He was a man not easily moved to genuine expression. Having acquired certain sorts of worldly wisdom in a career more or less erratic, experience had left him unconvinced and even cynical – or he thought it had.

But now, for the moment, all that lay latent in him of that impetuous and heedless vigour which may become strength, if properly directed, was awakening. Every recurring memory of her had already begun to tamper with his self-control; for the emotions of the moments just ended had been confusingly real; and, whatever they were arousing in him, now clamoured for some sort of expression.

The very thought of her, now, began to act on him like some freshening perfume alternately stimulating and enervating. He made the effort again and again, and could not put her from his mind, could not forget the lowered head and the slender, yielding grace of her, and her fragrance, and her silence.

Dressing in his rooms, growing more restless every moment, he began to walk the floor like some tormented thing that seeks alleviation in purposeless activity.

He said, half aloud, to himself:

"I can't go on this way. This is damn foolish! I've got to find out where it's landing me. It will land her, too – somewhere. I'd better keep away from her, go off somewhere, get out, stop seeing her, stop remembering her! – if she's what I think she is."

Scowling, he went to the window and jerked aside the curtain. Across the street, the Olympian Club sparkled with electricity.

"Good Lord!" he muttered. "What a tempest in a teapot! What the devil's the matter with me? Can't I kiss a girl now and then and keep my senses?"

It seemed that he couldn't, in the present instance, for after he had bitten the amber stem of his pipe clean through, he threw the bowl into the fireplace. It had taken him two years to colour it.

"Idiot!" he said aloud. "What are you sorry about? You know damn well there are only two kinds of women, and it's up to them what sort they are – not up to any man who ever lived! What are you sorry for? For her?"

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.

"Stocks or literature. All the ginks who can't do anything else go into stocks or literature."

Desboro waved away the alternatives with amiable urbanity.

"Then run for your farms and grow things for market. You could do that, couldn't you? Even a Dutchess County millionaire can run a milk-route."

"I don't desire to grow milk," explained Desboro pleasantly.

Cairns regarded him with a grin of anxiety.

"You're jingled," he concluded. "That is, you are as jingled as you ever get. Why?"

"No reason, thanks."

"It isn't some girl, is it? You never take them seriously. All the same, is it?"

Desboro smiled: "Do you think it's likely, dear friend?"

"No, I don't. But whatever you're worrying about isn't improving your personal beauty. Since you hit this hamlet you've been on one continuous tootlebat. Why don't you go back to Westchester and hoe potatoes?"

"One doesn't hoe them in January, you know," said Desboro, always deprecatingly polite. "Please cease to trouble yourself about me. I'm quite all right, thanks."

"You've resigned from a lot of clubs and things, I hear."

"Admirably reported, dear friend, and perfectly true."

"Why?"

"Motives of economy; nothing more serious, John."

"You're not in any financial trouble, are you?"

"I – ah – possibly have been a trifle indiscreet in my expenditures – a little unfortunate in my investments, perhaps. You are very kind to ask me. It may afford you some gratification to learn that eventually I anticipate an agreeable return to affluence."

Cairns laughed: "You are jingled all right," he said. "I recognise the urbane symptoms of your Desboro ancestors."

"You flatter them and me," said Desboro, bowing. "They were the limit, and I'm nearing it."

"Pardon! You have arrived, sir," said Cairns, returning the salute with exaggerated gravity.

They parted with pomp and circumstance, Desboro to saunter back to his rooms and lie limply in his arm chair beside an empty fireplace until sleep overcame him where he sat. And he looked very young, and white, and somewhat battered as he lay there in the fading winter daylight.

The ringing racket of his telephone bell aroused him in total darkness. Still confused by sleep, he groped for the electric light switch, could not find it; but presently his unsteady hand encountered the telephone, and he unhooked the receiver and set it to his ear.

At first his imagination lied to him, and he thought it was Jacqueline's distant voice, though he knew in his heart it could not be.

"Jim," repeated the voice, "what are you doing this evening?"

"Nothing. I was asleep. It's you, Elena, isn't it?"

"Of course. To whom are you in the habit of talking every evening at seven by special request?"

"I didn't know it was seven."

"That's flattering to me. Listen, Jim, I'm coming to see you."