The Imitator Part 8

There it is, as easy, as easy--"

"Hasn't it always been there?" asked her dear, dense husband. A woman may brood over a thing, you see, for months, and the man will not get so much as a suspicion.

She went on as if he had never spoken. "Literature is the easiest.

Clarence, you must write novels!"

He b.u.t.tered himself another slice of toast.

"Certainly, my dear," he nodded, with a pleasant smile. "Quite as you please."

It was in this way that the Spalding-Wentworth novels were incited. The art of writing badly is, unfortunately, very easy. In painting and in music some knowledge of technic is absolutely necessary, but in literature the art of writing counts last, and technic is rarely applauded. The fact remains that the smart set thought the Spalding-Wentworth novels were "so clever!" Mrs. Van Fenno was utterly crushed. Mary Wentworth informed an eager world that her husband's next novel would be ill.u.s.trated with caricatures by herself; she had developed quite a trick in that direction. Now and again her husband refused to bother his head with ambitions, and devoted himself entirely to red coats and white b.a.l.l.s. Mrs. Wentworth's only device at such times was to take desperately to golf herself. She really played well; if she had only had staying power, courage, she might have gone far. But, if she could not win cups, she could look very charming on the clubhouse lawn. One really does not expect more from even a queen.

It did not disturb Mrs. Wentworth at all to know that, where he was best known, her husband's artistic efforts were considered merely a joke. She knew that everyone had some mask or other to hold up to the world; and she knew there was nothing to fear from a brute of a man or two. In her heart she agreed with them; she knew her husband was a large, kindly, clumsy creature; a useful, powerful person, who needed guidance.

Kindly and clumsy--Clarence Spalding-Wentworth had t.i.tle to those two adjectives: there was no denying that. It was his kindliness that moved him, after a busy day at a metropolitan golf tournament, toward Orson Vane's house. He had heard stories of Vane's illness; they had been at college together; he wanted to see him, to have a chat, a smoke, a good, chummy hour or two.

It was his clumsiness that brought about the incident that came to have such memorable consequences. Nevins told him Mr. Vane was out; Wentworth thought he would go in and have a look at Vane's rooms, anyway; sit down, perhaps, and write him a note. Nevins had swung the curtain to behind him when Wentworth's heel caught in the wrapping around the new mirror.

He looked into the pool of gla.s.s blankly.

"Funny thing to cover up a mirror like that!" he told himself. He flung the stuff over the frame carelessly. It merely hung by a thread. Almost any pa.s.sing wind would be sure to lift it off.

"Wonder where he keeps his smokes?" he hummed to himself, striding up and down, like a good natured mammoth.

He found some cigars began puffing at one with an audible satisfaction, and at last let himself down to an ebony escritoire that he could have smashed with one hand. He wrote a scrawl; waited again, whistled, looked out of the window, picked up a book, peered at the pictures, and then, with a puff of regret, strode out.

As he pa.s.sed the Professor's mirror the current of air he made swept the curtain from the gla.s.s and left it exposed.

CHAPTER X.

At about the time that Wentworth was scrawling his note in Vane's rooms a slender young woman, dressed in a grey that s.h.i.+mmered like the winter-sea in sunlight, wearing a hat that had the air of having lit upon her hair for the moment only,--merely to give the world an instant's glance at the gracious combination that woman's beauty and man's millinery could effect--was coming out from one of those huge bazaars where you can buy almost everything in the world except the things you want. As she reached the doors, a young man, entering, brushed her arm; his sleeve caught her portemonnaie. He stooped for it, offered it hastily, and then--and not until then, gave a little "Oh!"

of--what was it, joy? or mere wonder, or both?

"Oh," he repeated, "I can't go in--now. It's--it's ages since I could say two words to you. 'Good-morning!' and 'How do you do?' has been the limit of our talk. Besides, you have a parcel. It weighs, at the very least, an ounce. I could never think of letting you tire yourself so."

He took the flimsy mite from her, and ranged his steps to hers.

It was true, what he had said about their brief encounters. Do what she would to forget that morning in the Park, and the weeks before it, Jeannette Vanlief had not quite succeeded. Not even the calm dissertations of her father, the arguments pointing to the unfathomable freakishness of human nature, had altogether ousted her aversion to Orson Vane. It was an aversion made the more keen because it came on the heels of a strong liking. She had been prepared to like this young man.

Something about him had drawn her; and then had come the something that had simply flung her away. Yet, to-day, he seemed to be the Orson Vane that she had been prepared to like.

She remembered some of the strange things her father had been talking about. She noted, as Orson spoke, that the false tenor note was gone out of his voice. But she was still a little fluttered; she could not quite trust herself, or him.

"But I am only going to the car," she declared. "It will hardly be worth while. I mustn't take you out of your way."

"I see," he regretted, "you've not forgotten. I can't explain; I was--I think I was a little mad. Perhaps it is in the family. But--I wish you would imagine, for to-day, that we had only just known each other a very little while, that we had been in that little bookshop only a day or so ago, that you had read the book, and we had met again, and--." He was looking at her with a glow in his eyes, a tenderness--! Her eyes met his for only an instant, but they fathomed, in that instant, that there was only homage, and wors.h.i.+p, and--and something that she dared not spell, even to her soul--in them. That burning greed that she had seen in the Park was not there.

She smiled, wistfully, hesitatingly. Yet it was enough for him to cling to; it buoyed his mood to higher courage.

"Let us pretend," he went on, "that there are no streetcars in the town.

Let us be primitive; let us play we are going to take a peep-show from the top of the Avenue stage! Oh--please! It gets you just as near, you know; and if you like we can go on, and on, and do it all over again.

Think of the tops of the hats and bonnets one sees from the roof! It's such a delightful picture of the avenue; you see all the little marionettes going like beads along the string. And then, think of the danger of the climb to the roof! It is like the Alps. You never know, until you are there, whether you will arrive in one piece or in several.

Come," he laughed, for she was now really smiling, openly, sweetly, "let us be good children, come in from Westchester County, to see the big city."

"Perhaps," she ventured, "we will make it the fas.h.i.+on. And that would spoil it for so many of the plainer people."

"Oh," and he waved his hand, "after us--the daily papers! Let us pretend--I beg your pardon, let me pretend--youth, and high spirits, and the intention to enjoy to-day."

A rattling and a sc.r.a.ping on the asphalt warned them of an approaching stage, and after a scramble, that had its shy pleasures for both, they found themselves on the top of the old relic.

"It is a bit of the Middle Ages," said Orson, "look at those horses!

Aren't they delightfully slender? And the paint! Do you notice the paint? And the stories those plush seats down below us could tell! Think of the misers and the millionaires, the dowagers and the drabs, that have let these old stages b.u.mp them over Murray Hill! You can't have that feeling about a street-car, not one of the electric ones, at any rate. Do you know the story of the New Yorker who was trying to sleep in a first-cla.s.s compartment on a French railway? There was a collision, and he was pitched ten feet onto a coal-heap. He said he thought he was at home and he was getting off the stage at Forty-Second street."

They were pa.s.sing through the most frequented part of the avenue. Noted singers and famous players pa.s.sed them; old beaux and fresh belles; political notabilities and kings of corruption. A famous leader of cotillions, a beauty whose profile vied with her Boston terriers for being her chief distinction, and a noted polo-player came upon the scene and vanished again. Vane and his companion gave, from time to time, little nods to right and left. Their friends stared at them a little, but that caused them no sorrow. Automobiles rushed by. They looked down upon them, lofty in their ruined tower.

"As a show," said Vane, "it is admirably arranged. It moves with a beautiful precision. There is nothing hurried about it; the illusion of life is nearly complete. Some of them, I suppose, really are alive?"

"I am not sure," she answered, gravely. "Sometimes I think they merely move because there is a b.u.t.ton being pressed somewhere; a b.u.t.ton we cannot see, and that they spend their lives hiding from us."

"I dare say you are right. In the words of Fay Templeton, 'I've been there and I know.' I have made my little detours: but the lane had, thank fortune, a turning."

She saw through his playfulness, and her eyes went up to his in a sympathy--oh, it made him reel for sweetness.

"I am glad," she said, simply.

"But we are getting serious again," he remonstrated, "that would never do. Have we not sworn to be children? Let us pretend--let us pretend!"

He looked at the grey roofs, the spires oozing from the hill to the sky.

He looked at the grey dream beside him: so grey, so fair, so crowned with the hue of the sun before the world had made him so brazen. "Let us pretend," he went on, after a sigh, "that we are bound for the open road, and that we are to come to an inn, and that we will order something to eat. We--"

"Oh," she laughed, "you men, you men! Always something to eat!"

"You see, we are of coa.r.s.e stuff; we cannot sup on star-dust, and dine on bubbles. But--this is only to pretend! An imaginary meal is sometimes so much more fun than a real one. At a real one, you see, I would have to try to eat, and I could not spend the whole time looking at you, and watching the suns.h.i.+ne on your hair, and the lilies--" He caught his breath sharply, with a little clicking noise. "Dear G.o.d," he whispered, "the lilies again! And I had never seen them until now."

"You are going to be absurd," she said, though her voice was hardly a rebuke.

"And wouldn't I have excuse," he asked, "for all the absurdities in the world! I want to be as absurd as I can; I want to think that there's nothing in the world any uglier than--you."

"And will you dine off that thought?"

"Oh, no; that is merely one of the condiments. I keep that in reach, while the other things come and go. I tell you: how would it be if we began with a bisque of crab? The tenderest pink, you know, and not the ghost of any spice that you can distinguish; a beautiful, creamy blend."

"You make it sound delicious," she admitted.

"We take it slowly, you know, religiously. The conversation is mostly with the eyes. Dinner conversation is so often just as vapid as dinner-music! The only point in favor of dinner-music is that we are usually spared the sight of it. There is no truth more abused than the one that music must be heard and not seen. When I am king I mean to forbid any singing or playing of instruments within sight of the public; it spoils all the pleasure of the music when one sees the uglinesses in its execution."

"But people would not thank you if you kept the sight of Paderewski or De Pachmann from them."