“I will say that you refuse to let me marry him, father and—” She hesitated a moment before she lifted her eyes fully and formidably to her father’s face. “And that I shall marry him anyhow.”
The professor did not cavort when this statement came from his daughter. He nodded and then passed into a period of reflection. Finally he asked: “But when? That is the point. When?”
The girl made a sad gesture. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Perhaps when you come to know Rufus better—”
“Know him better. Know that rapscallion better? Why, I know him much better than he knows himself. I know him too well. Do you think I am talking offhand about this affair? Do you think I am talking without proper information?”
Marjory made no reply.
“Well,” said the professor, “you may see Coleman on condition that you inform him at once that I forbid your marriage to him. I don’t understand at all how to manage these situations. I don’t know what to do. I suppose I should go myself and — No, you can’t see him, Majory.”
Still the girl made no reply. Her head sank forward and she breathed a trifle heavily.
“Marjory,” cried the professor, “it is impossible that you should think so much of this man.” He arose and went to his daughter. “Marjory, many wise children have been guided by foolish fathers, but we both suspect that no foolish child has ever been guided by a wise father. Let us change it. I present myself to you as a wise father. Follow my wishes in this affair and you will be at least happier than if you marry this wretched Coleman.”
She answered: “He is waiting for me.”
The professor turned abruptly from her and dropped into his chair at the table. He resumed a grip on his pen. “Go,” he said, wearily. “Go. But if you have a remnant of sense, remember what I have said to you. Go.” He waved his hand in a dismissal that was slightly scornful. “I hoped you would have a minor conception of what you were doing. It seems a pity.” Drooping in tears, the girl slowly left the room.
Coleman had an idea that he had occupied the chair for several months. He gazed about at the pictures and the odds and ends of a drawing-room in an attempt to take an interest in them. The great garlanded paper shade over the piano lamp consoled his impatience in a mild degree because he knew that Marjory had made it. He noted the clusters of cloth violets which she had pinned upon the yellow paper and he dreamed over the fact. He was able to endow this shade with certain qualities of sentiment that caused his stare to become almost a part of an intimacy, a communion. He looked as if he could have unburdened his soul to this shade over the piano lamp.
Upon the appearance of Marjory he sprang up and came forward rapidly. “Dearest,” he murmured, stretching out both hands. She gave him one set of fingers with chilling convention. She said something which he understood to be “Good-afternoon.” He started as if the woman before him had suddenly drawn a knife. “Marjory,” he cried, “what is the matter?” They walked together toward a window. The girl looked at him in polite enquiry. “Why?” she said. “Do I seem strange?” There was a moment’s silence while he gazed into her eyes, eyes full of innocence and tranquillity. At last she tapped her foot upon the floor in expression of mild impatience. “People do not like to be asked what is the matter when there is nothing the matter. What do you mean?”
Coleman’s face had gradually hardened. “Well, what is wrong?” he demanded, abruptly. “What has happened? What is it, Marjory?”
She raised her glance in a perfect reality of wonder. “What is wrong? What has happened? How absurd! Why nothing, of course.” She gazed out of the window. “Look,” she added, brightly, “the students are rolling somebody in a drift. Oh, the poor man!”
Coleman, now wearing a bewildered air, made some pretense of being occupied with the scene. “Yes,” he said, ironically. “Very interesting, indeed.”
“Oh,” said Marjory, suddenly, “I forgot to tell you. Father is going to take mother and me to Greece this winter with him and the class.”
Coleman replied at once. “Ah, indeed? That will be jolly.”
“Yes. Won’t it be charming?”
“I don’t doubt it,” he replied. His composure may have displeased her, for she glanced at him furtively and in a way that denoted surprise, perhaps.
“Oh, of course,” she said, in a glad voice. “It will be more fun. We expect to have a fine time. There is such a nice lot of boys going. Sometimes father chooses these dreadfully studious ones. But this time he acts as if he knew precisely how to make up a party.”
He reached for her hand and grasped it vise-like. “Marjory,” he breathed, passionately, “don’t treat me so. Don’t treat me—”
She wrenched her hand from him in regal indignation. “One or two rings make it uncomfortable for the hand that is grasped by an angry gentleman.” She held her fingers and gazed as if she expected to find them mere debris. “I am sorry that you are not interested in the students rolling that man in the snow. It is the greatest scene our quiet life can afford.”
He was regarding her as a judge faces a lying culprit. “I know,” he said, after a pause. “Somebody has been telling you some stories. You have been hearing something about me.”
“Some stories?” she enquired. “Some stories about you? What do you mean? Do you mean that I remember stories I may happen to hear about people?”
There was another pause and then Coleman’s face flared red. He beat his hand violently upon a table. “Good God, Marjory! Don’t make a fool of me. Don’t make this kind of a fool of me, at any rate.
Tell me what you mean. Explain—”
She laughed at him. “Explain? Really, your vocabulary is getting extensive, but it is dreadfully awkward to ask people to explain when there is nothing to explain.”
He glanced at her, “I know as well as you do that your father is taking you to Greece in order to get rid of me.”
“And do people have to go to Greece in order to get rid of you?” she asked, civilly. “I think you are getting excited.”
“Marjory,” he began, stormily.
She raised her hand. “Hush,” she said, “there is somebody coming.” A bell had rung. A maid entered the room. “Mr. Coke,” she said. Marjory nodded. In the interval of waiting, Coleman gave the girl a glance that mingled despair with rage and pride. Then Coke burst with half-tamed rapture into the room. “Oh, Miss Wainwright,” he almost shouted, “I can’t tell you how glad I am. I just heard to-day you were going. Imagine it. It will be more — oh, how are you Coleman, how are you?”
Marjory welcomed the new-comer with a cordiality that might not have thrilled Coleman with pleasure. They took chairs that formed a triangle and one side of it vibrated with talk. Coke and Marjory engaged in a tumultuous conversation concerning the prospective trip to Greece. The Sunday editor, as remote as if the apex of his angle was the top of a hill, could only study the girl’s clear profile. The youthful voices of the two others ran like bells. He did not scowl at Coke; he merely looked at him as if he gently disdained his mental calibre. In fact all the talk seemed to tire him; it was childish; as for him, he apparently found this babble almost insupportable.
“And, just think of the camel rides we’ll have,” cried Coke.
“Camel rides,” repeated Coleman, dejectedly. “My dear Coke.”
Finally he arose like an old man climbing from a sick bed. “Well, I am afraid I must go, Miss Wainwright.” Then he said affectionately to Coke: “Good-bye, old boy. I hope you will have a good time.”
Marjory walked with him to the door. He shook her hand in a friendly fashion. “Good-bye, Marjory,’ he said. “Perhaps it may happen that I shan’t see you again before you start for Greece and so I had best bid you God-speed — or whatever the term is — now. You will have a charming time; Greece must be a delightful place. Really, I envy you, Marjory. And now my dear child” — his voice grew brotherly, filled with the patronage of generous fraternal love,—” although I may never see you again let me wish yo
u fifty as happy years as this last one has been for me.” He smiled frankly into her eyes; then dropping her hand, he went away.
Coke renewed his tempest of talk as Marjory turned toward him. But after a series of splendid eruptions, whose red fire illumined all of ancient and modern Greece, he too went away.
The professor was in his library apparently absorbed in a book when a tottering pale-faced woman appeared to him and, in her course toward a couch in a corner of the room, described almost a semi-circle. She flung herself face downward. A thick strand of hair swept over her shoulder. “Oh, my heart is broken! My heart is broken!”
The professor arose, grizzled and thrice-old with pain. He went to the couch, but he found himself a handless, fetless man. “My poor child,” he said. “My poor child.” He remained listening stupidly to her convulsive sobbing. A ghastly kind of solemnity came upon the room.
Suddenly the girl lifted herself and swept the strand of hair away from her face. She looked at the professor with the wide-open dilated eyes of one who still sleeps. “Father,” she said in a hollow voice, “he don’t love me. He don’t love me. He don’t love me at all. You were right, father.” She began to laugh.
“Marjory,” said the professor, trembling. “Be quiet, child. Be quiet.”
“But,” she said, “I thought he loved me — I was sure of it. But it don’t — don’t matter. I — I can’t get over it. Women — women, the — but it don’t matter.”
“Marjory,” said the professor. “Marjory, my poor daughter.”
She did not heed his appeal, but continued in a dull whisper. “He was playing with me. He was — was — was flirting with me. He didn’t care when I told him — I told him — I was going — going away.” She turned her face wildly to the cushions again. Her young shoulders shook as if they might break. “Women — women — they always—”
CHAPTER V.
BY a strange mishap of management, the train which bore Coleman back toward New York was fetched into an obscure side-track of some lonely region and there compelled to bide a change of fate. The engine wheezed and sneezed like a paused fat man. The lamps in the cars pervaded a stuffy odor of smoke and oil. Coleman examined his case and found only one cigar. Important brakemen proceeded rapidly along the aisles, and when they swung open the doors, a polar wind circled the legs of the passengers. “Well, now, what is all this for?” demanded Coleman, furiously. “I want to get back to New York.”
The conductor replied with sarcasm, “Maybe you think I’m stuck on it? I ain’t running the road. I’m running this train, and I run it according to orders.” Amid the dismal comforts of the waiting cars, Coleman felt all the profound misery of the rebuffed true lover. He had been sentenced, he thought, to a penal servitude of the heart, as he watched the dusky, vague ribbons of smoke come from the lamps and felt to his knees the cold winds from the brakemen’s busy flights. When the train started with a whistle and a jolt, he was elate as if in his abjection his beloved’s hand had reached to him from the clouds.
When he had arrived in New York, a cab rattled him to an uptown hotel with speed. In the restaurant he first ordered a large bottle of champagne. The last of the wine he finished in sombre mood like an unbroken and defiant man who chews the straw that litters his prison house. During his dinner he was continually sending out messenger boys. He was arranging a poker party. Through a window he watched the beautiful moving life of upper Broadway at night, with its crowds and clanging cable cars and its electric signs, mammoth and glittering, like the jewels of a giantess.
Word was brought to him that the poker players were arriving. He arose joyfully, leaving his cheese. In the broad hall, occupied mainly by miscellaneous people and actors, all deep in leather chairs, he found some of his friends waiting. They trooped up stairs to Coleman’s rooms, where as a preliminary, Coleman began to hurl books and papers from the table to the floor. A boy came with drinks. Most of the men, in order to prepare for the game, removed their coats and cuffs and drew up the sleeves of their shirts. The electric globes shed a blinding light upon the table. The sound of clinking chips arose; the elected banker spun the cards, careless and dexterous.
Later, during a pause of dealing, Coleman said: “Billie, what kind of a lad is that young Coke up at Washurst?” He addressed an old college friend.
“Oh, you mean the Sophomore Coke?” asked the friend. “Seems a decent sort of a fellow. I don’t know. Why?”
“Well, who is he? Where does he come from? What do you know about him?”
“He’s one of those Ohio Cokes — regular thing — father millionaire — used to be a barber — good old boy — why?”
“Nothin’,” said Coleman, looking at his cards. “I know the lad. I thought he was a good deal of an ass. I wondered who his people were.”
“Oh, his people are all right — in one way. Father owns rolling mills. Do you raise it, Henry? Well, in order to make vice abhorrent to the young, I’m obliged to raise back.”
“I’ll see it,” observed Coleman, slowly pushing forward two blue chips. Afterward he reached behind him and took another glass of wine.
To the others Coleman seemed to have something bitter upon his mind. He played poker quietly, steadfastly, and, without change of eye, following the mathematical religion of the game. Outside of the play he was savage, almost insupportable.
“What’s the matter with you, Rufus?” said his old college friend, “ Lost your job? Girl gone back on you? You’re a hell of a host. We don’t get anything but insults and drinks.”
Late at night Coleman began to lose steadily. In the meantime he drank glass after glass of wine. Finally he made reckless bets on a mediocre hand and an opponent followed him thoughtfully bet by bet, undaunted, calm, absolutely without emotion. Coleman lost; he hurled down his cards. “Nobody but a damned fool would have seen that last raise on anything less than a full hand.”
“Steady. Come off. What’s wrong with you, Rufus?” cried his guests.
“You’re not drunk, are you?” said his old college friend, puritanically.
“‘Drunk’?” repeated Coleman.
“Oh, say,” cried a man, “let’s play cards. What’s all this gabbling?”
It was when a grey, dirty light of dawn evaded the thick curtains and fought on the floor with the feebled electric glow that Coleman, in the midst of play, lurched his chest heavily upon the table. Some chips rattled to the floor. “I’ll call you,” he murmured, sleepily.
“Well,” replied a man, sternly, “three kings.”
The other players with difficulty extracted five cards from beneath Coleman’s pillowed head. “Not a pair! Come, come, this won’t do. Oh, let’s stop playing. This is the rottenest game I ever sat in.
Let’s go home. Why don’t you put him to bed, Billie?”
When Coleman awoke next morning, he looked back upon the poker game as something that had transpired in previous years. He dressed and went down to the grill-room. For his breakfast he ordered some eggs on toast and a pint of champagne. A privilege of liberty belonged to a certain Irish waiter, and this waiter looked at him, grinning. “Maybe you had a pretty lively time last night, Mr. Coleman?”
“Yes, Pat,” answered Coleman, “I did. It was all because of an unrequited affection, Patrick.” The man stood near, a napkin over his arm. Coleman went on impressively. “The ways of the modern lover are strange. Now, I, Patrick, am a modern lover, and when, yesterday, the dagger of disappointment was driven deep into my heart, I immediately played poker as hard as I could and incidentally got loaded. This is the modern point of view. I understand on good authority that in old times lovers used to languish. That is probably a lie, but at any rate we do not, in these times, languish to any great extent. We get drunk. Do you understand, Patrick?”
The waiter was used to a harangue at Coleman’s breakfast time. He placed his hand over his mouth and giggled. “Yessir.”
“Of course,” continued Coleman, thoughtfully. “It might be pointed
out by uneducated persons that it is difficult to maintain a high standard of drunkenness for the adequate length of time, but in the series of experiments which I am about to make I am sure I can easily prove them to be in the wrong.”
“I am sure, sir,” said the waiter, “the young ladies would not like to be hearing you talk this way.”
“Yes; no doubt, no doubt. The young ladies have still quite medieval ideas. They don’t understand. They still prefer lovers to languish.”
“At any rate, sir, I don’t see that your heart is sure enough broken. You seem to take it very easy.”
“Broken!” cried Coleman. “Easy? Man, my heart is in fragments. Bring me another small bottle.”
CHAPTER VI.
Six weeks later, Coleman went to the office of the proprietor of the Eclipse. Coleman was one of those smooth-shaven old-young men who wear upon some occasions a singular air of temperance and purity. At these times, his features lost their quality of worldly shrewdness and endless suspicion and bloomed as the face of some innocent boy. It then would be hard to tell that he had ever encountered even such a crime as a lie or a cigarette. As he walked into the proprietor’s office he was a perfect semblance of a fine, inexperienced youth. People usually concluded this change was due to a Turkish bath or some other expedient of recuperation, but it was due probably to the power of a physical characteristic.
“Boss in?” said Coleman, “Yeh,” said the secretary, jerking his thumb toward an inner door. In his private office, Sturgeon sat on the edge of the table dangling one leg and dreamily surveying the wall. As Coleman entered he looked up quickly. “Rufus,” he cried, “you’re just the man I wanted to see. I’ve got a scheme. A great scheme.” He slid from the table and began to pace briskly to and fro, his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets, his chin sunk in his collar, his light blue eyes afire with interest. “Now listen. This is immense. The Eclipse enlists a battalion of men to go to Cuba and fight the Spaniards under its own flag — the Eclipse flag. Collect trained officers from here and there — enlist every young devil we see — drill ’em — best rifles — loads of ammunition — provisions — staff of doctors and nurses — a couple of dynamite guns — everything complete — best in the world. Now, isn’t that great? What’s the matter with that now? Eh? Eh? Isn’t that great? It’s great, isn’t it? Eh? Why, my boy, we’ll free—”
Complete Works of Stephen Crane Page 42
