Tramping on Life Part 64

There came to the artworkers one day a young Southern woman, a six months' widow ... she was gentle and lily-coloured and lovely. She had great, swimming, blue eyes, a sensitive red bow of a mouth ... and the lashes of her eyes lay far down on her cheeks. She was the first woman I had met who approximated my poet's ideal of what a woman should be.

I was working for Spalton during my stay, which I meant to make a brief one. I was shovelling coal for him, and firing a furnace.

Wash as I might, I could not remove a faint blackness that clung to the edges of my eyes. This made my eyes glow and seem larger than they were.

On such an extraneous and whimsical exterior circ.u.mstance hinged the young widow's interest in me.

And I decided that I'd stay a little longer at the Eos Studios ... all winter, if she stayed all winter. And I no longer asked for an easier job. For I wanted my eyes to remain large-seeming, since, half in jest, she admired their present appearance.

She manifested a close and affectionate friends.h.i.+p for me, and all day long all I thought of, as I kept the furnace going, was the evening after dinner, when I could sit close by her reading poetry in a low voice to her.

I leaned over her on every pretext to smell her hair,--her body, through her low-necked dress--to breathe in giddily that delicate fragrance that emanates from the bodies of beautiful women, as perfume from flowers.

Once, in spite of my timidity, I dared place my arm about her shoulders, there in the dark. There was a lecture on over in the "chapel" and mostly everybody had gone to it. Spalton, in pa.s.sing through where we sat together, asked her if she was coming. "No, she was too tired." She remained sitting by me. Spalton shot me a glance of scarcely concealed resentment and went on. We were left alone.

She began telling me of her deceased husband ... of their devotion to each other ... she applied a dainty thing of lace to her eyes, pausing a moment....

"John? may I call you by your name, not by the odious name they have for you here?..."

She leaned her head against my shoulder.

"Johnnie, you are a fine, sensitive soul, and I know you'll be a great poet some day ... but why don't these people take you more seriously?

"I think it must be your childlikeness ... and your spirit of horse-play, that breaks through at the most inopportune moments, that encourages these fools to treat you with levity."...

"Dear woman," I began, "dearest woman," and my throat bunched queerly so that I could not speak further.

She stroked my hair....

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-three."

"I am just a year younger."

"May I kiss you?" I asked, stumblingly.

"Yes, Johnnie, you may kiss me"....

"Why, you dear child, you ... you kiss just like a small boy ..." in a lower voice, "can it be possible that you, with all your tramping, your knowledge of life in books, of people?--"

I bent my head, ashamed, silently acknowledging my inexperience of women.

"No, it's nothing to be ashamed of, dearest boy ... I think you are a fine man--to have gone through what you have--and still--"

Her voice trailed off. She put her arm around my neck, drew me to her, and kissed me!

As we sat close together, a brooding silence. Then, with a transition of thought to the practical, she remarked....

"I'm angry with these people ... they over-charge for everything."

"Just think of it--I--I feel I may speak of it to you ... we seem to have come so near to each other to-night--"

"They brought my laundry back yesterday, and for one piece of silk lingerie I was charged--guess?"

I couldn't imagine how much.

"Seventy-five cents--think of that!"

As the Eoites came tramping back from the lecture, they found us still seated there. At the first footstep we had swiftly moved apart.

I had been half-reclining, my head in her lap, strangely soothed and happy as she ran her fingers through my hair. For a long time neither of us had said a word.

Now I sat apart from her, awkward and wooden.

Spalton did not speak, inclined his head icily, as he strode by.

"He's mad because I didn't come to his talk," she whispered.

"I see my finish," I replied.

Now, Spalton was as much in love with Dorothy, his second wife, as I have ever known a man to be in love with a woman. But that could not entirely exclude his jealousy over my sympathetic relation with the "Southern Lady," as the artworkers termed her. And he feared for her on another score. She was, to use a constantly recurring phrase of the Master's, whenever he wished to describe anyone as being wealthy, "lousy with money," and he suspected, not without good cause, that I would warn her against paying exorbitant prices for books and objects of art....

One night I was the cause of an accident which gave him a handle to seize on.

We were having a musicale. A new musician had come to Eos. The former Eos musician, Von Hammer, the father of the prodigy who played the piano, had quarrelled with the Master and had retired to Buffalo. Where, after a brief struggle as teacher of music, he had turned to playing for the movies. It must have nearly slain the man, for he was a sincere artist, a lover of cla.s.sical music ... and now compelled to play ragtime and popular melodies for a living.

All that I held of him, despite myself, was an unkind remembrance--his breath had been charnel-foul, and always, when discussing anything, he insisted on taking the lapel of his listener's coat and talking directly into his nose....

But his successor was playing at an introductory musicale....

A tall, alert, dark young man ... Italian-dark ... his eyes shone behind his gold-rimmed gla.s.ses, swimming large and distorted under the magnification of the lenses ... his lips were full and red, his moustache of a heavy, bristly black that made them look redder and fuller still, almost negroid.

He played the piano with violent, expert energy ... his favourite work was the "Turkish Patrol," which, Spalton exclaimed, as he applauded vigorously, he would now adopt as the Eos anthem.

The drawing-room was crowded ... a few visiting celebrities ... Eoites, too, but only the quasi-celebrities among them. The ma.s.s of the workers was as rigidly excluded now, under the new regime, as ordinary retainers ever are.

I stood by my "Southern Lady." She was in evening dress ... wore a lorgnette ... I trembled as I leaned over her, for I could see the firm, white-orbed upper parts of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s ... I was trying to be lightly playful, and was clumsy at it. I took up her lorgnette and toyed with it. I sat on the edge of a table ... and where I sat stood a supposed Greek vase of great antiquity and value.