The Dust Flower Part 11

With this she agreed. "I know you're not. I can't think for a minute why I take it or why I should like you. But I do. That's straight."

"And I adore you, Barbe."

She shrugged her shoulders with a little, comic grimace. "Oh, well! I suppose every one has his own way of showing adoration, but I must say that yours is original."

"If it's original to be desperate when the woman you wors.h.i.+p drives you to despair----"

There was another little comic grimace, though less comic than the first time. "Oh, yes, I know. It's always the woman whom a man wors.h.i.+ps that's in the wrong. I've noticed that. Men are never impossible--all of their own accord."

"I could be as tame as a cat if----"

"If it wasn't for me. Thank you, Rash. I said just now I was fond of you, and I should have to be to--to stand for all the----"

"I'm not blaming you, Barbe. I'm only----"

"Thanks again. The day you're not blaming me is certainly one to be marked with a white stone, as the Romans used to say. But if it comes to blaming any one, Rash, after what happened yesterday----"

"What happened yesterday wasn't begun by me. It would never have entered my mind to do the crazy thing I did, if you hadn't positively and finally--as I thought--flung me down. I think you must do me that justice, Barbe--that justice, at the least."

"Oh, I do you justice enough. I don't see that you can complain of that. It seems to me too that I temper justice with mercy to a degree that--that most people find ridiculous."

"By most people I suppose you mean your aunt."

"Oh, do leave Aunt Marion out of it. You can't forgive the poor thing for not liking you. Well, she doesn't, and I can't help it. She thinks you're a----"

"A fool--as you were polite enough to say just now."

She spread her hands apart in an att.i.tude of protestation. "Well, if I did, Rash, surely you must admit that I had provocation."

"Oh, of course. The wonder is that with the provocation you can----"

"Forgive you, and try to patch it up again after this frightful gash in the agreement. Well, it _is_ a wonder. I don't believe that many girls----"

"I only want you to understand, Barbe, that the gash in the agreement was made, not by what I did, but what you did. If you hadn't sent me to the devil, I shouldn't have been in such a hurry to go there."

She was off. "Yes, there you are again. Always me! I'm the one! You may be the gunpowder, the perfectly harmless gunpowder, but it would never blow up if I didn't come as the match. _I_ make all the explosions. _I_ set you crazy. _I_ send you to the devil. _I_ make you go and marry a girl you never laid eyes on in your life before."

So it was the same old scene all over again, till both were exhausted, and she had flung herself into a chair to cover her face with her hands and burst into tears. Instantly he was on his knees beside her.

"Barbe! Barbe! My beloved Barbe! Don't cry. I'm a brute. I'm a fool.

I'm not satisfied with breaking my own heart, but I must go to work and break yours. Oh, Barbe, forgive me. I'm all to pieces. Forgive me and let me go away and shoot myself. What's the good of a poor, wrecked creature like me hanging on and making such a mess of things?

Let me kill myself before I kill you----"

"Oh, hus.h.!.+"

Seizing his head, she pressed it against her bosom convulsively. By the shaking of his shoulders, she felt him sob. He _was_ a poor creature. She was saying so to herself. But just because he was, something in her yearned over him. He _could_ be different; he could be stronger and of value in the world if there was only some one to handle him rightly. She could do it--if she could only learn to handle herself. She _would_ learn to handle herself--for his sake. He was worth saving. He had fine qualities, and a good heart most of all. It was his very fineness which put him out of place in a world like that of New York. He was a delicate, brittle, highly-wrought thing which should be touched only with the greatest care, and all his life he had been pushed and hurtled about as if he were a football player or a business man. With the soul of a poet or a painter or a seer, he had been treated like the typical rough-and-ready American lad, till the sensitive nature had been brutalized, maimed, and frenzied.

She knew that. It was why she cared for him. Even when they were children she had seen that he wasn't getting fair treatment, either at home or in school or among the boys and girls with whom they both grew up. He was the exception, and American life allowed only for the rule.

If you couldn't conform to the rule, you were guyed and tormented and ejected. Among all his a.s.sociates she alone knew what he suffered, and because she knew it a vast pity made her cling to him. He had forced himself into the life of clubs, into the life of society, into the life of other men as other men lived their lives, and the effect on him had been so nearly ruinous that it was no wonder if he was always on the edge of nervous explosion. His very wealth which might have been a protection was, under the uniform pressure of American social habit, an incitement to him to follow the wrong way. She knew it, and she alone. She could save him, and she alone. She could save him, if she could first of all save herself.

With his head pressed against her she made the vow as she had made it fifty times already. She would be gentle with him; she would be patient; she would let him work off on her the agony of his suffering nerves, and smile at him through it all. She would help him out of the idiotic situation in which he found himself. The other girl was only an incident, as the show-girl had been to the Bellington boy, and could be disposed of. She attached to that only a secondary importance in comparison with the whole thing--her saving him. She would save him, even if it meant rooting out every instinct in her soul.

But as he made his way blindly back to the club, his own conclusions were different. He must go to the devil. He must go to the devil now, whatever else he did. Going to the devil would set her free from him.

It was the only thing that would. It would set him free from the other woman, set him free from life itself. Life tortured him. He was a misfit in it. He should never have been born. He had always understood that his parents hadn't wanted children and that his coming had been resented. You couldn't be born like that and find it natural to be in the world. He had never found it natural. He couldn't remember the time when he hadn't been out of his element in life, and now he must recognize the fact courageously.

It would be easy enough. He had worked up an artificial appet.i.te for all that went under the head of debauchery. It had meant difficult schooling at first, because his natural tastes were averse to that kind of thing, but he had been schooled. Schooled was the word, since his training had begun under the very roof where his father had sent him to get religion and discipline. There had been no let-up in this educational course, except when he himself had stolen away, generally in solitude, for a little holiday.

But as he put it to himself, he knew all the roads and by-paths and cross-country leaps that would take him to the gutter, and to the gutter he would go.

Chapter VII

And all this while Letty was in the dining-room, learning certain lessons from her new-found friend.

For some little time she had been alone. Steptoe finished his conversation with Miss Walbrook on the telephone, but did not come back. She sat at the table feeding Beppo with bread and milk, but wondering if, after all, she hadn't better make a bolt for it. She had had her breakfast, which was an a.s.set to the good, and nothing worse could happen to her out in the open world than she feared in this great dim, gloomy house. She had once crept in to look at the cathedral and, overwhelmed by its height, immensity, and mystery, had crept out again. Its emotional suggestions had been more than she could bear. She felt now as if her bed had been made and her food laid out in that cathedral--as if, as long as she remained, she must eat and sleep in this vast, pillared solemnity.

And that was only one thing. There were small practical considerations even more terrible to confront. If Nettie were to appear again ...

But it was as to this that Steptoe was making his appeal. "I sye, girls, don't you go to mykin' a fuss and spoilin' your lives, when you've got a chanst as'll never come again."

Mrs. Courage answered for them all. To sacrifice decency to self-interest wasn't in them, nor never would be. Some there might be, like 'Enery Steptoe, who would sell their birthright for a mess of pottage, but Mary Ann Courage was not of that company, nor any other woman upon whom she could use her influence. If a hussy had been put to reign over them, reigned over by a hussy none of them would be. All they asked was to see her once, to deliver the ultimatum of giving notice.

"It's a strynge thing to me," Steptoe reasoned, "that when one poor person gets a lift, every other poor person comes down on 'em."

"And might we arsk who you means by poor persons?"

"Who should I mean, Mrs. Courage, but people like us? If we don't 'ang by each other, who _will_ 'ang by us, I should like to know? 'Ere's one of us plyced in a 'igh position, and instead o' bein' proud of it, and givin' 'er a lift to carry 'er along, you're all for mykin' it as 'ard for 'er as you can. Do you call that sensible?"

"I call it sensible for everyone to stye in their proper spere."

"So that if a man's poor, you must keep 'im poor, no matter 'ow 'e tries to better 'imself. That's what your proper speres would come to."

But argument being of no use, Steptoe could only make up his mind to revolution in the house. "The poor's very good to the poor when one of 'em's in trouble," was his summing up, "but let one of 'em 'ave an extry stroke of luck, and all the rest'll jaw against 'im like so many magpies." As a parting shot he declared on leaving the kitchen, "The trouble with you girls is that you ain't got no cla.s.s s.p.u.n.k, and that's why, in sperrit, you'll never be nothink but menials."

This lack of _esprit de corps_ was something he couldn't understand, but what he understood less was the need of the heart to touch occasionally the high points of experience. Mrs. Courage and Jane, to say nothing of Nettie, after thirty years of domestic routine had reached the place where something in the way of drama had become imperative. The range and the pantry produce inhibitions as surely as the desk or the drawing-room. On both natures inhibitions had been packed like feathers on a seabird, till the soul cried out to be released from some of them. It might mean going out from the home that had sheltered them for years, and breaking with all their traditions, but now that the chance was there, neither could refuse it. To a virtuous woman, starched and stiffened in her virtue, steeped in it, dyed in it, permeated by it through and through, nothing so stirs the dramatic, so quickens the imagination, so calls the spirit to the purple emotional heights, as contact with the sister she knows to be a hussy. For Jane Cakebread and Mary Ann Courage the opportunity was unique.

"Then I'll go. I'll go straight now."

As Steptoe brought the information that the three women of the household were coming to announce the resignation of their posts, Letty sprang to her feet.

"May I arsk madam to sit down again and let me explyne?"

Taking this as an order, she sank back into her chair again. He stood confronting her as before, one hand resting lightly on the table.

"Nothink so good won't 'ave 'appened in this 'ouse since old Mrs.