People Like That Part 6

"You don't know what you mean."

It was silly, childish, unreasonable, that I should speak sharply to Bettina, and equally unreasonable that fear and horror and sickening suspicion should possess me, but possessed I was by sensations. .h.i.therto unexperienced, and for a moment the gaslight from the lamp on the opposite street corner wavered and circled in a confusing, bewildering way. Sudden revelations, sudden realizations, were unsteadying me. Was Selwyn really some one I did not know? Was his life less single than I believed it? Hateful, ugly, disloyal questions surged tumultuously for a half-minute; then reason returned, and shame that I should insult him with doubt, cooled the flame in my face.

"It's too late to go to the Binkers. We'd better go home. We'll go there some other afternoon."

I turned from Bettina's amazed eyes. My tone of voice a moment before was still perplexing her, and unblinkingly she was searching my face. Hitherto her directness, her frankness of speech and use of words, had amused me, and I had permitted, perhaps, too great an exercise of her gift of comment; but applied personally it was a different matter.

"We'll go to the corner and turn there," I said. "That will be the nearest way home."

"But don't you want to see who she is?" Scarborough Square customs were those most familiar to Bettina, and they exacted understanding of doubtful situations. "Don't you want to see what--what she looks like?"

"Why should I? Mr. Thorne knows many people I do not know." I moved toward the corner. "Come on. It's getting late."

"Gentlemen like him don't know girls like her. She lives down here somewhere, and he lives where you used to live. He couldn't be sweet on her, because--because he couldn't." She caught up with me. "He's yours, ain't he, Miss Danny? You'd better tell him--"

I hated myself for looking across the street, but as I hurried on my eyes were following Selwyn and the girl, and when I saw the latter stop and bury her face in her hands, saw Selwyn say something to her, saw him turn in one direction and she in another, I, too, stopped; for a moment was unable to move.

We had reached the corner as Selwyn left the opposite one and came toward us. Head down, as if deeply thinking, he did not look up until close to us. Under the gaslight I waited, not knowing why, and Bettina being behind me, he thought I was alone when presently he saw me.

"Dandridge!" He stared as if stupefied with amazement. Lifting his hat mechanically, he came closer. "What in the name of Heaven are you doing here alone this time of night? Are you losing your mind?"

His entire absence of embarra.s.sment, his usual disapproval of my behavior, his impatient anger, had an unlooked-for effect, and sudden relief and hot joy so surged over me that I laughed, a queer, nervous, choking little laugh.

"I am not alone. It is not yet six, and I have been to see a boy who is what you are not--the head of a house. I mean a house with a family in it. Have you, too, been visiting?"

His face flushed, and frowningly he turned away. "I had business down here. I had to come to it as it could not be brought to me.

Where are you going?"

"Home."

Bettina, who in some unaccountable way had managed to stay behind me, came forward and bowed as if to an audience. "I've been taking her to where she goes, Mr. Thorne, and grannie knows all the places.

There ain't one that's got a disease in it, and Mr. Crimm would tell us if it wasn't right to go to them. She don't ever go anywhere by herself. She's too new yet."

Selwyn smiled grudgingly. Bettina's fat and short little body made effort to stretch to protective requirements, and her keen eyes raised to his held them for a moment. Then she turned to me.

"Maybe he'd like to go to some of the homes we go to and see--"

"No. He doesn't want to see." I caught her hand and slipped it through my arm. "It's much more comfortable not to see. One can sleep so much better. Are you going our way?" I turned to Selwyn.

"If you are, we'd better start."

For a full block we said nothing. Selwyn, biting the ends of his close-cut mustache, walked beside me, hands in his pockets and eyes straight ahead, and not until Bettina had twice asked him if he knew where Rowland Street was did he answer her.

"Rowland Street?" He turned abruptly, as if brought back to something far removed in thought. "What on earth do you know of Rowland Street?"

"Nothing--I never knew there was a street by that name until last week when I heard a girl talking to grannie, who said she lived on it. She did her hands, when she talked, just like the girl with you did." Bettina twisted hers in imitative movements. "She didn't keep her hands still a minute."

"Few girls do when they talk. They apparently prefer to use their hands to their brains." Selwyn's shoulders shrugged impatiently, then his teeth came together on his lip. Again he stared ahead and, save for Bettina's chatter, we walked in silence to Scarborough Square.

There had been few times in my life in which speech was impossible, but during the quarter of an hour it took us to reach home words would not come, and numbness possessed my body. A world of possibilities, a world I did not know, seemed suddenly revealing itself, and at its dark depths and sinister shadows I was frightened, and more than frightened. Conflicting and confusing emotions, a sense of outrage and revolt, were making me first hot and then cold, and distrust and suspicion and baffling helplessness were enveloping me beyond resistance. The happy ignorance and unconcern and indifference of my girlhood, my young womanhood, were vanis.h.i.+ng before cruel and compelling verities, and that which, because of its ugliness, its offensiveness, its repulsiveness, I had wanted to know nothing about, I knew I would now be forced to face.

It was true what Mrs. Mundy and Aunt Matilda and Selwyn and even Kitty, four years younger than myself, had often told me, that in knowledge of certain phases of life I was unwarrantably lacking.

Subjects that had seemingly interested other girls and other women had never interested me, and I took no part in their discussion. And now the protection of the past that had prevented understanding of sordid situations and polluting possibilities was being roughly torn away, and I was seeing that which not only stung and shocked and sickened, but I was seeing myself as one who after selfish sleep had been rudely waked.

Head and heart hot, I pushed back upleaping questions, forced down surging suspicion and tormenting fears, but all the while I was conscious that in the friends.h.i.+p that was mine and Selwyn's, the something that was more than friends.h.i.+p, a great gap had opened that was separating us. If he gave no explanation of his acquaintance with the girl he had just left, it must be because he could not. He knew my hatred of mystery, my insistence upon frankness between friends. Would he come in and talk as freely as he had ever done of whatever concerned him? Would he tell me--

As I opened the door with my latch-key Bettina bounded inside, and the light falling on Selwyn's face showed it white and worn.

Something was greatly troubling him.

"Good night." He turned toward the steps without offering his hand.

"It is useless to ask you not to go in such neighborhoods as you were in this evening, but if you knew what you were doing you would stay away."

"I know very well what I am doing. I am hardly so stubborn or wilful as you think. But if it is unwise for me to be in the neighborhood referred to, is it any less wise--for you?"

"Me?" The inflection in his voice was the eternal difference in a man's and woman's privileges. "It was not a question of wisdom--my being where you saw me. It was one of necessity. Moreover, a man can go where he pleases. A woman can't. No purity of purpose can overcome the tyranny of convention."

"Convention!" My hands made impatient gesture. "It's the drag-net of human effort, the shelter within which cowards run to cover. In its place it has purpose, but its place, for convenience sake, has been immensely magnified. And why is convention limited to women?"

It was childish--my outburst--and, ashamed of it, I started to go in, then turned and again looked at Selwyn. Into his face had come something I could not understand, something that involved our future friends.h.i.+p, and, frightened, I leaned against the iron railing of the little porch and gripped it with hands behind my back.

"Selwyn!" The words came unsteadily. "Have you nothing to say to me, Selwyn? Don't you know that I know the girl with you to-night was the girl who--who we brought in here last night? If you knew her, why--"

Staring at me as if not understanding, Selwyn came closer. In his eyes was puzzled questioning, but as they held mine they filled with something of horror, and over his face, which had been white and worn, spread deep and crimson flush. "You don't mean-- G.o.d in heaven! Do you think the girl is anything to me?"

I did not answer, and, turning, he went down the steps and I into the house.

CHAPTER X

For the past ten days I have been a very restless person. Mrs. Mundy looks at me out of the corners of her kind and keen and cheery little eyes when she does not think I am noticing, but she asks me nothing.

Mrs. Mundy is the wisest woman I know.

If only I could sleep! During the days I am busy, but I dread the long nights when questions crowd that, fight as I may, I cannot keep from asking. Selwyn is my friend. I never doubt a friend. But why does he not come to me? Why does he not make clear that which he must know is inexplicable to me?

I may never marry Selwyn, but certainly I shall marry no one else.

How could we hope for happiness when we feel so differently toward much that is vital, when our att.i.tude to life is as apart as the poles? When each thinks the other wrong in points of view and manner of living? Selwyn was born in a house with high walls around it. He likes its walls. He does not care for many to come in, and cares still less to go outside to others. Few people interest him. All sorts interest me. We are both selfish and stubborn, but both hate that which is not clean and clear, and save from his own lips I would not believe that in his life is aught of which he could not tell me.

I have never told him I loved him, never promised to marry him. To live in his high-walled house with its conventional customs, its age-dimmed portraits, its stiff furnis.h.i.+ngs, and shut-out suns.h.i.+ne, would stifle every cell in brain and lungs, and to marry him would be to marry his house. I hate his house, hate the aloofness, the lack of sympathy it represents. Its proud past I can appreciate, but not its useless present. Save his brother Harrie, it is the one thing of his old life left Selwyn. At the death of his father he bought Harrie's interest and it is all his now. I would not ask him to live elsewhere, but I would choke and smother did I live in his house.

And yet--

Ten days have pa.s.sed and I have neither seen nor heard from Selwyn.

I have often wondered, on waking winter mornings in my very warm bed, how it would feel to go out in the gray dawn of a new day and hurry off to work. Now I know.

For more than a week I have been up at five forty-five, and at six-thirty have been hurrying with Lucy Hobbs, who lives around the corner, to the overalls-factory, where she is a forewoman. It is dark and cold and raw at half-past six on a winter morning, and the sunrise is very different from what it is in summer.

Each morning as I started out with Lucy, and hurried down street after street, I watched the opening doors of the shabby, dull-looking houses we pa.s.sed with keen interest. Ash-cans and garbage-pails were in front of many of them, and through unshuttered windows a child could occasionally be seen with its face pressed against the pane, waiting to wave good-by to some one who was leaving. Out of the doors of these houses came men and women and boys and girls, who hurried as we hurried, and with a word to some, a wave of her uplifted hand to others, a blank stare at others again, Lucy seemed leading a long procession. Around each corner and from every car that pa.s.sed came more "Hands," and each morning when the factory was reached a crowd that jammed its entrance and extended half a block up and down the street was waiting for the opening of the door, out of which it would not come until darkness fell again.