Chapter 18. Anita Begins To Be Herself

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_ CHAPTER XVIII. ANITA BEGINS TO BE HERSELF

I had asked Sam Ellersly to dine with me; so preoccupied was I that not until ten minutes before the hour set did he come into my mind--he or any of his family, even his sister. My first impulse was to send word that I couldn't keep the engagement. "But I must dine somewhere," I reflected, "and there's no reason why I shouldn't dine with him, since I've done everything that can be done." In my office suite I had a bath and dressing-room, with a complete wardrobe. Thus, by hurrying a little over my toilet, and by making my chauffeur crowd the speed limit, I was at Delmonico's only twenty minutes late.

Sam, who had been late also, as usual, was having a cocktail and was ordering the dinner. I smoked a cigarette and watched him. At business or at anything serious his mind was all but useless; but at ordering dinner and things of that sort, he shone. Those small accomplishments of his had often moved me to a sort of pitying contempt, as if one saw a man of talent devoting himself to engraving the Lord's Prayer on gold dollars. That evening, however, as I saw how comfortable and contented he looked, with not a care in the world, since he was to have a good dinner and a good cigar afterward; as I saw how much genuine pleasure he was getting out of selecting the dishes and giving the waiter minute directions for the chef, I envied him.

What Langdon had once said came back to me: "We are under the tyranny of to-morrow, and happiness is impossible." And I thought how true that was. But, for the Sammys, high and low, there is no to-morrow. He was somehow impressing me with a sense that he was my superior. His face was weak, and, in a weak way, bad; but there was a certain fineness of quality in it, a sort of hothouse look, as if he had been sheltered all his life, and brought up on especially selected food. "Men like me," thought I with a certain envy, "rise and fall. But his sort of men have got something that can't be taken away, that enables them to carry off with grace, poverty or the degradation of being spongers and beggars."

This shows how far I had let that attack of snobbishness eat into me. I glanced down at my hands. No delicateness there; certainly those fingers, though white enough nowadays, and long enough, too, were not made for fancy work and parlor tricks. They would have looked in place round the handle of a spade or the throttle of an engine, while Sam's seemed made for the keyboard of a piano.

"You must come over to my rooms after dinner, and give me some music," said I.

"Thanks," he replied, "but I've promised to go home and play bridge. Mother's got a few in to dinner, and more are coming afterward, I believe."

"Then I'll go with you, and talk to your sister--she doesn't play."

He glanced at me in a way that made me pass my hand over my face. I learned at least part of the reason for my feeling at disadvantage before him. I had forgotten to shave; and as my beard is heavy and black, it has to be looked after twice a day. "Oh, I can stop at my rooms and get my face into condition in a few minutes," said I.

"And put on evening dress, too," he suggested. "You wouldn't want to go in a dinner jacket."

I can't say why this was the "last straw," but it was.

"Bother!" said I, my common sense smashing the spell of snobbishness that had begun to reassert itself as soon as I got into his unnatural, unhealthy atmosphere. "I'll go as I am, beard and all. I only make myself ridiculous, trying to be a sheep. I'm a goat, and a goat I'll stay."

That shut him into himself. When he re-emerged, it was to say: "Something doing down town to-day, eh?"

A sharpness in his voice and in his eyes, too, made me put my mind on him more closely, and then I saw what I should have seen before--that he was moody and slightly distant.

"Seen Tom Langdon this afternoon?" I asked carelessly.

He colored. "Yes--had lunch with him," was his answer.

I smiled--for his benefit. "Aha!" thought I. "So Tom Langdon has been fool enough to take this paroquet into his confidence." Then I said to him: "Is Tom making the rounds, warning the rats to leave the sinking ship?"

"What do you mean, Matt?" he demanded, as if I had accused him.

I looked steadily at him, and I imagine my unshaven jaw did not make my aspect alluring.

"That I'm thinking of driving the rats overboard," replied I. "The ship's sound, but it would be sounder if there were fewer of them."

"You don't imagine anything Tom could say would change my feelings toward you?" he pleaded.

"I don't know, and I don't care a damn," replied I coolly. "But I do know, before the Langdons or anybody else can have Blacklock pie, they'll have first to catch their Blacklock."

I saw Langdon had made him uneasy, despite his belief in my strength. And he was groping for confirmation or reassurance. "But," thought I, "if he thinks I may be going up the spout, why isn't he more upset? He probably hates me because I've befriended him, but no matter how much he hated me, wouldn't his fear of being cut off from supplies drive him almost crazy?" I studied him in vain for sign of deep anxiety. Either Tom didn't tell him much, I decided, or he didn't believe Tom knew what he was talking about.

"What did Tom say about me?" I inquired.

"Oh, almost nothing. We were talking chiefly of--of club matters," he answered, in a fair imitation of his usual offhand manner.

"When does my name come up there?" said I.

He flushed and shifted. "I was just about to tell you," he stammered. "But perhaps you know?"

"Know what?"

"That--Hasn't Tom told you? He has withdrawn--and--you'll have to get another second--if you think--that is--unless you--I suppose you'd have told me, if you'd changed your mind?"

Since I had become so deeply interested in Anita, my ambition--ambition!--to join the Travelers had all but dropped out of my mind.

"I had forgotten about it," said I. "But, now that you remind me, I want my name withdrawn. It was a passing fancy. It was part and parcel of a lot of damn foolishness I've been indulging in for the last few months. But I've come to my senses--and it's 'me to the wild,' where I belong, Sammy, from this time on."

He looked tremendously relieved, and a little puzzled, too. I thought I was reading him like an illuminated sign. "He's eager to keep friends with me," thought I, "until he's absolutely sure there's nothing more in it for him and his people." And that guess was a pretty good one. It is not to the discredit of my shrewdness that I didn't see it was not hope, but fear, that made him try to placate me. I could not have possibly known then what the Langdons had done. But--Sammy was saying, in his friendliest tone:

"What's the matter, old man? You're sour to-night."

"Never in a better humor," I assured him, and as I spoke the words they came true. What I had been saying about the Travelers and all it represented--all the snobbery, and smirking, and rotten pretense--my final and absolute renunciation of it all--acted on me as I've seen religion act on the fellows that used to go up to the mourners' bench at the revivals. I felt as if I had suddenly emerged from the parlor of a dive and its stench of sickening perfumes, into the pure air of God's Heaven.

I signed the bill, and we went afoot up the avenue. Sam, as I saw with a good deal of amusement, was trying to devise some subtle, tactful way of attaching his poor, clumsy little suction-pump to the well of my secret thoughts.

"What is it, Sammy?" said I at last. "What do you want to know that you're afraid to ask me?"

"Nothing," he said hastily. "I'm only a bit worried about--about you and Textile. Matt,"--this in the tone of deep emotion we reserve for the attempt to lure our friends into confiding that about themselves which will give us the opportunity to pity them, and, if necessary, to sheer off from them--"Matt, I do hope you haven't been hard hit?"

"Not yet," said I easily. "Dry your tears and put away your black clothes. Your friend, Tom Langdon, was a little premature."

"I'm afraid I've given you a false impression," Sam continued, with an overeagerness to convince me that did not attract my attention at the time. "Tom merely said, 'I hear Blacklock is loaded up with Textile shorts,'--that was all. A careless remark. I really didn't think of it again until I saw you looking so black and glum."

That seemed natural enough, so I changed the subject. As we entered his house, I said:

"I'll not go up to the drawing-room. Make my excuses to your mother, will you? I'll turn into the little smoking-room here. Tell your sister--and say I'm going to stop only a moment."

Sam had just left me when the butler came.

"Mr. Ball--I think that was the name, sir--wishes to speak to you on the telephone."

I had given Ellerslys' as one of the places at which I might be found, should it be necessary to consult me. I followed the butler to the telephone closet under the main stairway. As soon as Ball made sure it was I, he began:

"I'll use the code words. I've just seen Fearless, as you told me to."

Fearless--that was Mitchell, my spy in the employ of Tavistock, who was my principal rival in the business of confidential brokerage for the high financiers. "Yes," said I. "What does he say?"

"There has been a great deal of heavy buying for a month past."

Then my dread was well-founded--Textiles were to be deliberately rocketed. "Who's been doing it?" I asked.

"He found out only this afternoon. It's been kept unusually dark. It--"

"Who? Who?" I demanded.

"Intrepid," he answered.

Intrepid--that is, Langdon--Mowbray Langdon!

"The whole thing--was planned carefully," continued Ball, "and is coming off according to schedule. Fearless overheard a final message Intrepid's brother brought from him to-day."

So it was no mischance--it was an assassination. Mowbray Langdon had stabbed me in the back and fled.

"Did you hear what I said?" asked Ball. "Is that you?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Oh," came in a relieved tone from the other end of the wire. "You were so long in answering that I thought I'd been cut off. Any instructions?"

"No," said I. "Good-by."

I heard him ring off, but I sat there for several minutes, the receiver still to my ear. I was muttering: "Langdon, Langdon--why--why--why?" again and again. Why had he turned against me? Why had he plotted to destroy me--one of those plots so frequent in Wall Street--where the assassin steals up, delivers the mortal blow, and steals away without ever being detected or even suspected? I saw the whole plot now--I understood Tom Langdon's activities, I recalled Mowbray Langdon's curious phrases and looks and tones. But--why--why--why? How was I in his way?

It was all dark to me--pitch-dark. I returned to the smoking-room, lighted a cigar, sat fumbling at the new situation. I was in no worse plight than before--what did it matter who was attacking me? In the circumstances, a novice could now destroy me as easily as a Langdon. Still, Ball's news seemed to take away my courage. I reminded myself that I was used to treachery of this sort, that I deserved what I was getting because I had, like a fool, dropped my guard in the fight that is always an every-man-for-himself. But I reminded myself in vain. Langdon's smiling treachery made me heart-sick.

Soon Anita appeared--preceded and heralded by a faint rustling from soft and clinging skirts, that swept my nerves like a love-tune. I suppose for all men there is a charm, a spell, beyond expression, in the sight of a delicate beautiful young woman, especially if she be dressed in those fine fabrics that look as if only a fairy loom could have woven them; and when a man loves the woman who bursts upon his vision, that spell must overwhelm him, especially if he be such a man as was I--a product of life's roughest factories, hard and harsh, an elbower and a trampler, a hustler and a bluffer. Then, you must also consider the exact circumstances--I standing there, with destruction hanging over me, with the sense that within a few hours I should be a pariah to her, a masquerader stripped of his disguise and cast out from the ball where he had been making so merry and so free. Only a few hours more! Perhaps now was the last time I should ever stand so near to her! The full realization of all this swallowed me up as in a great, thick, black mist. And my arms strained to escape from my tightly-locked hands, strained to seize her, to snatch from her, reluctant though she might be, at least some part of the happiness that was to be denied me.

I think my torment must have somehow penetrated to her. For she was sweet and friendly--and she could not have hurt me worse! If I had followed my impulse I should have fallen at her feet and buried my face, scorching, in the folds of that pale blue, faintly-shimmering robe of hers.

"Do throw away that huge, hideous cigar," she said, laughing. And she took two cigarettes from the box, put both between her lips, lit them, held one toward me. I looked at her face, and along her smooth, bare, outstretched arm, and at the pink, slender fingers holding the cigarette. I took it as if I were afraid the spell would be broken, should my fingers touch hers. Afraid--that's it! That's why I didn't pour out all that was in my heart. I deserved to lose her.

"I'm taking you away from the others," I said. We could hear the murmur of many voices and of music. In fancy I could see them assembled round the little card-tables--the well-fed bodies, the well-cared-for skins, the elaborate toilets, the useless jeweled hands--comfortable, secure, self-satisfied, idle, always idle, always playing at the imitation games--like their own pampered children, to be sheltered in the nurseries of wealth their whole lives through. And not at all in bitterness, but wholly in sadness, a sense of the injustice, the unfairness of it all--a sense that had been strong in me in my youth but blunted during the years of my busy prosperity--returned for a moment. For a moment only; my mind was soon back to realities--to her and me--to "us." How soon it would never be "us" again!

"They're mama's friends," Anita was answering. "Oldish and tiresome. When you leave I shall go straight on up to bed."

"I'd like to--to see your room--where you live," said I, more to myself than to her.

"I sleep in a bare little box," she replied with a laugh. "It's like a cell. A friend of ours who has the anti-germ fad insisted on it. But my sitting-room isn't so bad."

"Langdon has the anti-germ fad," said I. She answered "Yes" after a pause, and in such a strained voice that I looked at her. A flush was just dying out of her face. "He was the friend I spoke of," she went on.

"You know him very well?" I asked.

"We've known him--always," said she. "I think he's one of my earliest recollections. His father's summer place and ours adjoin. And once--I guess it's the first time I remember seeing him--he was a freshman at Harvard, and he came along on a horse past the pony cart in which a groom was driving me. And I--I was very little then--I begged him to take me up, and he did. I thought he was the greatest, most wonderful man that ever lived." She laughed queerly. "When I said my prayers, I used to imagine a god that looked like him to say them to."

I echoed her laugh heartily. The idea of Mowbray Langdon as a god struck me as peculiarly funny, though natural enough, too.

"Absurd, wasn't it?" said she. But her face was grave, and she let her cigarette die out.

"I guess you know him better than that now?"

"Yes--better," she answered, slowly and absently. "He's--anything but a god!"

"And the more fascinating on that account," said I. "I wonder why women like best the really bad, dangerous sort of man, who hasn't any respect for them, or for anything."

I said this that she might protest, at least for herself. But her answer was a vague, musing, "I wonder--I wonder."

"I'm sure _you_ wouldn't," I protested earnestly, for her.

She looked at me queerly.

"Can I never convince you that I'm just a woman?" said she mockingly. "Just a woman, and one a man with your ideas of women would fly from."

"I wish you were!" I exclaimed. "Then--I'd not find it so--so impossible to give you up."

She rose and made a slow tour of the room, halting on the rug before the closed fireplace a few feet from me. I sat looking at her.

"I am going to give you up," I said at last.

Her eyes, staring into vacancy, grew larger and intenser with each long, deep breath she took.

"I didn't intend to say what I'm about to say--at least, not this evening," I went on, and to me it seemed to be some other than myself who was speaking. "Certain things happened down town to-day that have set me to thinking. And--I shall do whatever I can for your brother and your father. But you--you are free!"

She went to the table, stood there in profile to me, straight and slender as a sunflower stalk. She traced the silver chasings in the lid of the cigarette box with her forefinger; then she took a cigarette and began rolling it slowly and absently.

"Please don't scent and stain your fingers with that filthy tobacco," said I rather harshly.

"And only this afternoon you were saying you had become reconciled to my vice--that you had canonized it along with me--wasn't that your phrase?" This indifferently, without turning toward me, and as if she were thinking of something else.

"So I have," retorted I. "But my mood--please oblige me this once."

She let the cigarette fall into the box, closed the lid gently, leaned against the table, folded her arms upon her bosom and looked full at me. I was as acutely conscious of her every movement, of the very coming and going of the breath at her nostrils, as a man on the operating-table is conscious of the slightest gesture of the surgeon.

"You are--suffering!" she said, and her voice was like the flow of oil upon a burn. "I have never seen you like this. I didn't believe you capable of--of much feeling."

I could not trust myself to speak. If Bob Corey could have looked in on that scene, could have understood it, how amazed he would have been!

"What happened down town to-day?" she went on. "Tell me, if I may know."

"I'll tell you what I didn't think, ten minutes ago, I'd tell any human being," said I. "They've got me strapped down in the press. At ten o'clock in the morning--precisely at ten--they're going to put on the screws." I laughed. "I guess they'll have me squeezed pretty dry before noon."

She shivered.

"So, you see," I continued, "I don't deserve any credit for giving you up. I only anticipate you by about twenty-four hours. Mine's a deathbed repentance."

"I'd thought of that," said she reflectively. Presently she added: "Then, it is true." And I knew Sammy had given her some hint that prepared her for my confession.

"Yes--I can't go blustering through the matrimonial market," replied I. "I've been thrown out. I'm a beggar at the gates."

"A beggar at the gates," she murmured.

I got up and stood looking down at her.

"Don't _pity_ me!" I said. "My remark was a figure of speech. I want no alms. I wouldn't take even you as alms. They'll probably get me down, and stamp the life out of me--nearly. But not quite--don't you lose sight of that. They can't kill me, and they can't tame me. I'll recover, and I'll strew the Street with their blood and broken bones."

She drew in her breath sharply.

"And a minute ago I was almost liking you!" she exclaimed.

I retreated to my chair and gave her a smile that must have been grim.

"Your ideas of life and of men are like a cloistered nun's," said I. "If there are any real men among your acquaintances, you may find out some day that they're not so much like lapdogs as they pretend--and that you wouldn't like them, if they were."

"What--just what--happened to you down town to-day--after you left me?"

"A friend of mine has been luring me into a trap--why, I can't quite fathom. To-day he sprang the trap and ran away."

"A friend of yours?"

"The man we were talking about--your ex-god--Langdon."

"Langdon," she repeated, and her tone told me that Sammy knew and had hinted to her more than I suspected him of knowing. And, with her arms still folded, she paced up and down the room. I watched her slender feet in pale blue slippers appear and disappear--first one, then the other--at the edge of her trailing skirt.

Presently she stopped in front of me. Her eyes were gazing past me.

"You are sure it was he?" she asked.

I could not answer immediately, so amazed was I at her expression. I had been regarding her as a being above and apart, an incarnation of youth and innocence; with a shock it now came to me that she was experienced, intelligent, that she understood the whole of life, the dark as fully as the light, and that she was capable to live it, too. It was not a girl that was questioning me there; it was a woman.

"Yes--Langdon," I replied. "But I've no quarrel with him. My reverse is nothing but the fortune of war. I assure you, when I see him again, I'll be as friendly as ever--only a bit less of a trusting ass, I fancy. We're a lot of free lances down in the Street. We fight now on one side, now on the other. We change sides whenever it's expedient; and under the code it's not necessary to give warning. To-day, before I knew he was the assassin, I had made my plans to try to save myself at his expense, though I believed him to be the best friend I had down town. No doubt he's got some good reason for creeping up on me in the dark."

"You are sure it was he?" she repeated.

"He, and nobody else," replied I. "He decided to do me up--and I guess he'll succeed. He's not the man to lift his gun unless he's sure the bird will fall."

"Do you really not care any more than you show?" she asked. "Or is your manner only bravado--to show off before me?"

"I don't care a damn, since I'm to lose you," said I. "It'll be a godsend to have a hard row to hoe the next few months or years."

She went back to leaning against the table, her arms folded as before. I saw she was thinking out something. Finally she said:

"I have decided not to accept your release."

I sprang to my feet.

"Anita!" I cried, my arms stretched toward her.

But she only looked coldly at me, folded her arms the more tightly and said:

"Do not misunderstand me. The bargain is the same as before. If you want me on those terms, I must--give myself."

"Why?" I asked.

A faint smile, with no mirth in it, drifted round the corners of her mouth.

"An impulse," she said. "I don't quite understand it myself. An impulse from--from--" Her eyes and her thoughts were far away, and her expression was the one that made it hardest for me to believe she was a child of those parents of hers. "An impulse from a sense of justice--of decency. I am the cause of your trouble, and I daren't be a coward and a cheat." She repeated the last words. "A coward--a cheat! We--I--have taken much from you, more than you know. It must be repaid. If you still wish, I will--will keep to my bargain."

"It's true, I'd not have got into the mess," said I, "if I'd been attending to business instead of dangling after you. But you're not responsible for that folly."

She tried to speak several times, before she finally succeeded in saying:

"It's my fault. I mustn't shirk."

I studied her, but I couldn't puzzle her out.

"I've been thinking all along that you were simple and transparent," I said. "Now, I see you are a mystery. What are you hiding from me?"

Her smile was almost coquettish as she replied:

"When a woman makes a mystery of herself to a man, it's for the man's good."

I took her hand--almost timidly.

"Anita," I said, "do you still--dislike me?"

"I do not--and shall not--love you," she answered. "But you are--"

"More endurable?" I suggested, as she hesitated.

"Less unendurable," she said with raillery. Then she added, "Less unendurable than profiting by a-creeping up in the dark."

I thought I understood her better than she understood herself. And suddenly my passion melted in a tenderness I would have said was as foreign to me as rain to a desert. I noticed that she had a haggard look. "You are very tired, child," said I. "Good night. I am a different man from what I was when I came in here."

"And I a different woman," said she, a beauty shining from her that was as far beyond her physical beauty as--as love is beyond passion.

"A nobler, better woman," I exclaimed, kissing her hand.

She snatched it away.

"If you only knew!" she cried. "It seems to me, as I realize what sort of woman I am, that I am almost worthy of _you_!" And she blazed a look at me that left me rooted there, astounded.

But I went down the avenue with a light heart. "Just like a woman," I was saying to myself cheerfully, "not to know her own mind."

A few blocks, and I stopped and laughed outright--at Langdon's treachery, at my own credulity. "What an ass I've been making of myself!" said I to myself. And I could see myself as I really had been during those months of social struggling--an ass, braying and gamboling in a lion's skin--to impress the ladies!

"But not wholly to no purpose," I reflected, again all in a glow at thought of Anita. _

Read next: Chapter 19. A Windfall From "Gentleman Joe"

Read previous: Chapter 17. A Genteel "Hold-Up"

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