The Grain of Dust Part 26

He frowned and bit his lip--and felt uncomfortable, though he protested to himself that he was simply irritated at her slyness. Yes, it must be slyness.

"So," she went on, "there's no _reason_ for being on guard. Still, I feel that way." She looked at him with sweet gravity. "Perhaps I shouldn't if you didn't talk about love to me and kiss me in a way I feel you've no right to."

Again he laid his hands upon her shoulders. This time he gazed angrily into her eyes. "Are you a fool? Or are you making a fool of me?" he said. "I can't decide which."

"I certainly am very foolish," was her apologetic answer. "I don't know a lot of things, like you and father. I'm only a girl."

And he had the maddening sense of being baffled again--of having got nowhere, of having demonstrated afresh to himself and to her his own weakness where she was concerned. What unbelievable weakness! Had there ever been such another case? Yes, there must have been. How little he had known of the possibilities of the relations of men and women--he who had prided himself on knowing all!

She said, "You are going to marry?"

"I suppose so," replied he sourly.

"Are you worried about the expense? Is it costing you too much, this helping father? Are you sorry you went into it?"

He was silent.

"You are sorry?" she exclaimed. "You feel that you are wasting your money?"

His generosity forbade him to keep up the pretense that might aid him in his project. "No," he said hastily. "No, indeed. This expense--it's nothing." He flushed, hung his head in shame before his own weakness, as he added, in complete surrender, "I'm very glad to be helping your father."

"I knew you would be!" she cried triumphantly. "I knew it!" And she flung her arms round his neck and kissed him.

"That's better!" he said with a foolishly delighted laugh. "I believe we are beginning to get acquainted."

"Yes, indeed. I feel quite different already."

"I hoped so. You are coming to your senses?"

"Perhaps. Only--" She laid a beautiful white pleading hand upon his shoulder and gazed earnestly into his eyes--"please don't frighten me with that talk--and those other kisses."

He looked at her uncertainly. "Come round in your own way," he said at last. "I don't want to hurry you. I suppose every bird has its own way of dropping from a perch."

"You don't like my way?" she inquired.

It was said archly but also in the way that always made him vaguely uneasy, made him feel like one facing a mystery which should be explored cautiously. "It is graceful," he admitted, with a smile since he could not venture to frown. "Graceful--but slow."

She laughed--and he could not but feel that the greater laughter in her too innocent eyes was directed at him. She talked of other things--and he let her--charmed, yet cursing his folly, his slavery, the while.

X

Many a time he had pitied a woman for letting him get away from her, when she obviously wished to hold him and failed solely because she did not understand her business. Like every other man, he no sooner began to be attracted by a woman than he began to invest her with a mystery and awe which she either could dissipate by forcing him to see the truth of her commonplaceness or could increase into a power that would enslave him by keeping him agitated and interested and ever satisfied yet ever baffled. But no woman had shown this supreme skill in the art of love--until Dorothy Hallowell. She exasperated him. She fascinated him.

She kept him so restless that his professional work was all but neglected. Was it her skill? Was it her folly? Was she simply leading him on and on, guided blindly by woman's instinct to get as much as she could and to give as little as she dared? Or was she protected by a real indifference to him--the strongest, indeed the only invulnerable armor a woman can wear? Was she protecting herself? Or was it merely that he, weakened by his infatuation, was doing the protecting for her?

Beside these distracting questions, the once all-important matter of professional and worldly ambition seemed not worth troubling about. They even so vexed him that he had become profoundly indifferent as to Josephine. He saw her rarely. When they were alone he either talked neutral subjects or sat almost mute, hardly conscious of her presence.

He received her efforts at the customary caressings with such stolidity that she soon ceased to annoy him. They reduced their outward show of affection to a kiss when they met, another when they separated. He was tired--always tired--worn out--half sick--hara.s.sed by business concerns. He did not trouble himself about whether his listless excuses would be accepted or not. He did not care what she thought--or might think--or might do.

Josephine was typical of the women of the comfortable cla.s.s. For them the fundamentally vital matters of life--the profoundly hara.s.sing questions of food, clothing, and shelter--are arranged and settled. What is there left to occupy their minds? Little but the idle emotions they manufacture and spread foglike over their true natures to hide the barrenness, the monotony. They fool with phrases about art or love or religion or charity--for none of those things can be vivid realities to those who are swathed and stupefied in a luxury they have not to take the least thought to provide for themselves. Like all those women, Josephine fancied herself complex--fancied she was a person of variety and of depth because she repeated with a slight change of wording the things she read in clever books or heard from clever men. There seemed to Norman to be small enough originality, personality, to the ordinary man of the comfortable cla.s.s; but there was some, because his necessity of struggling with and against his fellow men in the several arenas of active life compelled him to be at least a little of a person. In the women there seemed nothing at all--not even in Josephine. When he listened to her, when he thought of her, now--he was calmly critical. He judged her as a human specimen--judged much as would have old Newton Hallowell to whom the whole world was mere laboratory.

She bored him now--and he made no effort beyond bare politeness to conceal the fact from her. The situation was saved from becoming intolerable by that universal saver of intolerable situations, vanity.

She had the ordinary human vanity. In addition, she had the peculiar vanity of woman, the creation of man's flatteries lavished upon the s.e.x he alternately serves and spurns. In further addition, she had the vanity of her cla.s.s--the comfortable cla.s.s that feels superior to the ma.s.s of mankind in fortune, in intellect, in taste, in everything desirable. Heaped upon all these vanities was her vanity of high social rank--and atop the whole her vanity of great wealth. None but the sweetest and simplest of human beings can stand up and remain human under such a weight as this. If we are at all fair in our judgments of our fellow men, we marvel that the triumphant cla.s.s--especially the women, whose point of view is never corrected by the experiences of practical life--are not more arrogant, more absurdly forgetful of the oneness and the feebleness of humanity.

Josephine was by nature one of the sweet and simple souls. And her love for Norman, after the habit of genuine love, had destroyed all the instinct of coquetry. The woman--or, the man--has to be indeed interesting, indeed an individuality, to remain interesting when sincerely in love, and so elevated above the petty but potent s.e.x trickeries. Josephine, deeply in love, was showing herself to Norman in her undisguised natural sweet simplicity--and monotony. But, while men admire and reverence a sweet and simple feminine soul--and love her in plays and between the covers of a book and when she is talking highfaluting abstractions of morality--and wax wroth with any other man who ignores or neglects her--they do not in their own persons become infatuated with her. Pa.s.sion is too much given to moods for that; it has a morbid craving for variety, for the mysterious and the baffling.

The only thing that saves the race from ruin through pa.s.sion is the rarity of those by nature or by art expert in using it. Norman felt that he was paying the penalty for his persistent search for this rarity; one of the basest tricks of destiny upon man is to give him what he wants--wealth, or fame, or power, or the woman who enslaves. Norman felt that destiny had suddenly revealed its resolve to destroy him by giving him not one of the things he wanted, but all.

The marriage was not quite two weeks away. About the time that the ordinary plausible excuses for Norman's neglect, his abstraction, his seeming indifference were exhausted, Josephine's vanity came forward to explain everything to her, all to her own glory. As the elysian hour approached--so vanity a.s.sured her--the man who loved her as her complex soul and many physical and social advantages deserved was overcome with that shy terror of which she had read in the poets and the novelists. A large income, fas.h.i.+onable attire and surroundings, a carriage and a maid--these things gave a woman a subtle and superior intellect and soul. How? Why? No one knew. But everyone admitted, indeed saw, the truth. Further, these beings--these great ladies--according to all the accredited poets, novelists, and other final authorities upon life--always inspired the most awed and wors.h.i.+pful and diffident feelings in their lovers. Therefore, she--the great lady--was getting but her due. She would have liked something else--something common and human--much better. But, having always led her life as the conventions dictated, never as the common human heart yearned, she had no keen sense of dissatisfaction to rouse her to revolt and to question. Also, she was breathlessly busy with trousseau and the other arrangements for the grand wedding.

One afternoon she telephoned Norman asking him to come on his way home that evening. "I particularly wish to see you," she said. He thought her voice sounded rather queer, but he did not take sufficient interest to speculate about it. When he was with her in the small drawing room on the second floor, he noted that her eyes were regarding him strangely.

He thought he understood why when she said:

"Aren't you going to kiss me, Fred?"

He put on his good-natured, slightly mocking smile. "I thought you were too busy for that sort of thing nowadays." And he bent and kissed her waiting lips. Then he lit a cigarette and seated himself on the sofa beside her--the sofa at right angles to the open fire. "Well?" he said.

She gazed into the fire for full a minute before she said in a voice of constraint, "What became of that--that girl--the Miss Hallowell----"

She broke off abruptly. There was a pause choked with those dizzy pulsations that fill moments of silence and strain. Then with a sob she flung herself against his breast and buried her face in his shoulder.

"Don't answer!" she cried. "I'm ashamed of myself. I'm ashamed--ashamed!"

He put his arm about her shoulders. "But why shouldn't I answer?" said he in the kindly gentle tone we can all a.s.sume when a matter that agitates some one else is wholly indifferent to us.

"Because--it was a--a trap," she answered hysterically. "Fred--there was a man here this afternoon--a man named Tetlow. He got in only because he said he came from you."

Norman laughed quietly. "Poor Tetlow!" he said. "He used to be your head clerk--didn't he?"

"And one of my few friends."

"He's not your friend, Fred!" she cried, sitting upright and speaking with energy that quivered in her voice and flashed in her fine brown eyes. "He's your enemy--a snake in the gra.s.s--a malicious, poisonous----"

Norman's quiet, even laugh interrupted. "Oh, no," said he. "Tetlow's a good fellow. Anything he said would be what he honestly believed--anything he said about me."

"He pleaded that he was doing it for your good," she went on with scorn.

"They always do--like the people that write father wicked anonymous letters. He--this man Tetlow--he said he wanted me for the sake of my love for you to save you from yourself."

Norman glanced at her with amused eyes. "Well, why don't you? But then you _are_ doing it. You're marrying me, aren't you?"

Again she put her head upon his shoulder. "Indeed I am!" she cried. "And I'd be a poor sort if I let a sneak shake my confidence in you."

He patted her shoulder, and there was laughter in his voice as he said, "But I never professed to be trustworthy."

"Oh, I know you _used_ to--" She laughed and kissed his cheek. "Never mind. I've heard. But while you were engaged to me--about to marry me--why, you simply couldn't!"

"Couldn't what?" inquired he.