The Flirt

by Booth Tarkington

  With the fall of night, the street they faced had become still, save for an infrequent squawk of irritation on the part of one of the passing automobiles, gadding for the most part silently, like fireflies. But after a time a strolling trio of negroes came singing along the sidewalk.

  “In the evening, by the moonlight, you could hear

  those banjos ringing;

  In the evening, by the moonlight, you could hear

  those darkies singing.

  How the ole folks would injoy it; they would sit

  all night an’ lis-sun,

  As we sang I-I-N the evening BY-Y-Y the moonlight.’

  “Ah, THAT takes me back!” exclaimed Corliss. “That’s as it used to be. I might be a boy again.”

  “And I suppose this old house has many memories for you?” said Cora, softly.

  “Not very many. My, old-maid aunt didn’t like me overmuch, I believe; and I wasn’t here often. My mother and I lived far down the street. A big apartment-house stands there now, I noticed as I was walking out here this afternoon—the `Verema,’ it is called, absurdly enough!”

  “Ray Vilas lives there,” volunteered Hedrick, not altering his position.

  “Vilas?” said the visitor politely, with a casual recollection that the name had been once or twice emphasized by the youth at dinner. “I don’t remember Vilas among the old names here.”

  “It wasn’t, I guess,” said Hedrick. “Ray Vilas has only been here about two years. He came from Kentucky.”

  “A great friend of yours, I suppose.”

  “He ain’t a boy,” said Hedrick, and returned to silence without further explanation.

  “How cool and kind the stars are tonight,” said Cora, very gently.

  She leaned forward from her chair, extending a white arm along the iron railing of the porch; bending toward Corliss, and speaking toward him and away from Hedrick in as low a voice as possible, probably entertaining a reasonable hope of not being overheard.

  “I love things that are cool and kind,” she said. I love things that are cool and strong. I love iron.” She moved her arm caressingly upon the railing. “I love its cool, smooth touch. Any strong life must have iron in it. I like iron in men.”

  She leaned a very little closer to him.

  “Have you iron in you, Mr. Corliss?” she asked.

  At these words the frayed edge of Hedrick’s broad white collar was lifted perceptibly from his coat, as if by a shudder passing over the back and shoulders beneath.

  “If I have not,” answered Corliss in a low voice, I will have—now!”

  “Tell me about yourself,” she said.

  “Dear lady,” he began—and it was an effective beginning, for a sigh of pleasure parted her lips as he spoke—“there is nothing interesting to tell. I have spent a very commonplace life.”

  “I think not. You shouldn’t call any life commonplace that has escaped THIS!” The lovely voice was all the richer for the pain that shook it now. “This monotony, this unending desert of ashes, this death in life!”

  “This town, you mean?”

  “This prison, I mean! Everything. Tell me what lies outside of it. You can.”

  “What makes you think I can?”

  “I don’t need to answer that. You understand perfectly.”

  Valentine Corliss drew in his breath with a sound murmurous of delight, and for a time they did not speak.

  “Yes,” he said, finally, “I think I do.”

  “There are meetings in the desert,” he went on, slowly. “A lonely traveller finds another at a spring, sometimes.”

  “And sometimes they find that they speak the same language?”

  His answer came, almost in a whisper:

  “`Even as you and I.’”

  “`Even as you and I,’” she echoed, even more faintly.

  “Yes.”

  Cora breathed rapidly in the silence that followed; she had every appearance of a woman deeply and mysteriously stirred. Her companion watched her keenly in the dusk, and whatever the reciprocal symptoms of emotion he may have exhibited, they were far from tumultuous, bearing more likeness to the quiet satisfaction of a good card-player taking what may prove to be a decisive trick.

  After a time she leaned back in her chair again, and began to fan herself slowly.

  “You have lived in the Orient, haven’t you, Mr. Corliss?” she said in an ordinary tone.

  “Not lived. I’ve been East once or twice. I spend a greater part of the year at Posilipo.”

  “Where is that?”

  “On the fringe of Naples.”

  “Do you live in a hotel?”

  “No.” A slight surprise sounded in his voice. “I have a villa there.”

  “Do you know what that seems to me?” Cora asked gravely, after a pause; then answered herself, after another: “Like magic. Like a strange, beautiful dream.”

  “Yes, it is beautiful,” he said.

  “Then tell me: What do you do there?”

  “I spend a lot of time on the water in a boat.”

  “Sailing?”

  “On sapphires and emeralds and turquoises and rubies, melted and blown into waves.”

  “And you go yachting over that glory?”

  “Fishing with my crew—and loafing.”

  “But your boat is really a yacht, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, it might be called anything,” he laughed.

  “And your sailors are Italian fishermen?”

  Hedrick slew a mosquito upon his temple, smiting himself hard. “No, they’re Chinese!” he muttered hoarsely.

  “They’re Neapolitans,” said Corliss.

  “Do they wear red sashes and earrings?” asked Cora.

  “One of them wears earrings and a derby hat!”

  “Ah!” she protested, turning to him again. “You don’t tell me. You let me cross-question you, but you don’t tell me things! Don’t you see? I want to know what LIFE is! I want to know of strange seas, of strange people, of pain and of danger, of great music, of curious thoughts! What are the Neapolitan women like?”

  “They fade early.”

  She leaned closer to him. “Before the fading have you—have you loved—many?”

  “All the pretty ones I ever saw, he answered gayly, but with something in his tone (as there was in hers) which implied that all the time they were really talking of things other than those spoken. Yet here this secret subject seemed to come near the surface.

  She let him hear a genuine little snap of her teeth. I THOUGHT you were like that!”

  He laughed. “Ah, but you were sure to see it!”

  “You could ‘a’ seen a Neapolitan woman yesterday, Cora,” said Hedrick, obligingly, “if you’d looked out the front window. She was working a hurdy-gurdy up and down this neighbourhood all afternoon.” He turned genially to face his sister, and added: “Ray Vilas used to say there were lots of pretty girls in Lexington.”

  Cora sprang to her feet. “You’re not smoking,” she said to Corliss hurriedly, as upon a sudden discovery. “Let me get you some matches.”

  She had entered the house before he could protest, and Hedrick, looking down the hall, was acutely aware that she dived desperately into the library. But, however tragic the cry for justice she uttered there, it certainly was not prolonged; and the almost instantaneous quickness of her reappearance upon the porch, with matches in her hand, made this one of the occasions when her brother had to admit that in her own line Cora was a miracle.

  “So thoughtless of me,” she said cheerfully, resuming her seat. She dropped the matches into Mr. Corliss’s hand with a fleeting touch of her finger-tips upon his palm. “Of course you wanted to smoke. I can’t think why I didn’t realize it before. I must have–-“

  A voice called from within, commanding in no, uncertain tones.

  “Hedrick! I should like to see you! Hedrick rose, and, looking neither to the right nor, to the left, went stonily into the house, and appeared before the powers.
r />   “Call me?” he inquired with the air of cheerful readiness to proceed upon any errand, no matter how difficult.

  Mr. Madison countered diplomacy with gloom.

  “I don’t know what to do with you. Why can’t you let your sister alone?”

  “Has Laura been complaining of me?”

  “Oh, Hedrick!” said Mrs. Madison.

  Hedrick himself felt the justice of her reproof: his reference to Laura was poor work, he knew. He hung his head and began to scrape the carpet with the side of his shoe.

  “Well, what’d Cora say I been doing to her?”

  “You know perfectly well what you’ve been doing,” said Mr. Madison sharply.

  “Nothing at all; just sitting on the steps. What’d she SAY?”

  His father evidently considered it wiser not to repeat the text of accusation. “You know what you did,” he said heavily.

  “Oho!” Hedrick’s eyes became severe, and his sire’s evasively shifted from them.

  “You keep away from the porch,” said the, father, uneasily.

  “You mean what I said about Ray Vilas?” asked the boy.

  Both parents looked uncomfortable, and Mr. Madison, turning a leaf in his book, gave a mediocre imitation of an austere person resuming his reading after an impertinent interruption.

  “That’s what you mean,” said the boy accusingly. “Ray Vilas!”

  “Just you keep away from that porch.”

  “Because I happened to mention Ray Vilas?” demanded Hedrick.

  “You let your sister alone.”

  “I got a right to know what she said, haven’t I?”

  There was no response, which appeared to satisfy Hedrick perfectly. Neither parent met his glance; the mother troubled and the father dogged, while the boy rejoiced sternly in some occult triumph. He inflated his scant chest in pomp and hurled at the defeated pair the well-known words:

  “I wish she was MY daughter—about five minutes!”

  New sounds from without—men’s voices in greeting, and a ripple of response from Cora somewhat lacking in enthusiasm—afforded Mr. Madison unmistakable relief, and an errand upon which to send his deadly offspring.

  Hedrick, after a reconnaissance in the hall, obeyed at leisure. Closing the library door nonchalantly behind him, he found himself at the foot of a flight of unillumined back stairs, where his manner underwent a swift alteration, for here was an adventure to be gone about with ceremony. “Ventre St. Gris!” he muttered hoarsely, and loosened the long rapier in the shabby sheath at his side. For, with the closing of the door, he had become a Huguenot gentleman, over forty and a little grizzled perhaps, but modest and unassuming; wiry, alert, lightning-quick, with a wrist of steel and a heart of gold; and he was about to ascend the stairs of an unknown house at Blois in total darkness. He went up, crouching, ready for anything, without a footfall, not even causing a hideous creak; and gained the top in safety. Here he turned into an obscure passage, and at the end of it beheld, through an open door, a little room in which a dark-eyed lady sat writing in a book by the light of an oil lamp.

  The wary Huguenot remained in the shadow and observed her.

  Laura was writing in an old ledger she had found in the attic, blank and unused. She had rebound it herself in heavy gray leather; and fitted it with a tiny padlock and key. She wore the key under her dress upon a very thin silver chain round her neck. Upon the first page of the book was written a date, now more than a year past, the month was June—and beneath it:

  “Love came to me to-day.”

  Nothing more was written upon that page.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Laura, at this writing, looked piquantly unfamiliar to her brother: her eyes were moist and bright; her cheeks were flushed and as she bent low, intently close to the book, a loosened wavy strand of her dark hair almost touched the page. Hedrick had never before seen her wearing an expression so “becoming” as the eager and tremulous warmth of this; though sometimes, at the piano, she would play in a reverie which wrought such glamour about her that even a brother was obliged to consider her rather handsome. She looked more than handsome now, so strangely lovely, in fact, that his eyes watered painfully with the protracted struggle to read a little of the writing in her book before she discovered him.

  He gave it up at last, and lounged forward blinking, with the air of finding it sweet to do nothing.

  “Whatch’ writin’?” he asked in simple carelessness.

  At the first sound of his movement she closed the book in a flash; then, with a startled, protective gesture, extended her arms over it, covering it.

  “What is it, Hedrick?” she asked, breathlessly.

  “What’s the padlock for?”

  “Nothing,” she panted. “What is it you want?”

  “You writin’ poetry?”

  Laura’s eyes dilated; she looked dangerous.

  “Oh, I don’t care about your old book,” said Hedrick, with an amused nonchalance Talleyrand might have admired. “There’s callers, and you have to come down.”

  “Who sent you?”

  “A man I’ve often noticed around the house,” he replied blightingly. “You may have seen him—I think his name’s Madison. His wife and he both sent for you.”

  One of Laura’s hands instinctively began to arrange her hair, but the other remained upon the book. “Who is it calling?”

  “Richard Lindley and that Wade Trumble.”

  Laura rose, standing between her brother and the table. “Tell mother I will come down.”

  Hedrick moved a little nearer, whereupon, observing his eye, she put her right hand behind her upon the book. She was not deceived, and boys are not only superb strategic actors sometimes, but calamitously quick. Appearing to be unaware of her careful defence, he leaned against the wall and crossed his feet in an original and interesting manner.

  “Of course YOU understand,” he said cosily. “Cora wants to keep this Corliss in a corner of the porch where she can coo at him; so you and mother’ll have to raise a ballyhoo for Dick Lindley and that Wade Trumble. It’d been funny if Dick hadn’t noticed anybody was there and kissed her. What on earth does he want to stay engaged to her for, anyway?”

  “You don’t know that she is engaged to Mr. Lindley, Hedrick.”

  “Get out!” he hooted. “What’s the use talking like that to me? A blind mackerel could see she’s let poor old Lindley think he’s High Man with her these last few months; but he’ll have to hit the pike now, I reckon, ‘cause this Corliss is altogether too pe-rin-sley for Dick’s class. Lee roy est mort. Vive lee roy!”

  “Hedrick, won’t you please run along? I want to change my dress.”

  “What for? There was company for dinner and you didn’t change then.”

  Laura’s flushed cheeks flushed deeper, and in her confusion she answered too quickly. “I only have one evening gown. I—of course I can’t wear it every night.”

  “Well, then,” he returned triumphantly, “what do you want to put it on now for?”

  “PLEASE run along, Hedrick,” she pleaded.

  “You didn’t for this Corliss,” he persisted sharply. You know Dick Lindley couldn’t see anybody but Cora to save his life, and I don’t suppose there’s a girl on earth fool enough to dress up for that Wade Trum–-“

  “Hedrick!” Laura’s voice rang with a warning which he remembered to have heard upon a few previous occasions when she had easily proved herself physically stronger than he. “Go and tell mother I’m coming,” she said.

  He began to whistle “Beulah Land” as he went, but, with the swift closing of the door behind him, abandoned that pathetically optimistic hymn prematurely, after the third bar.

  Twenty minutes later, when Laura came out and went downstairs, a fine straight figure in her black evening gown, the Sieur de Marsac—that hard-bitten Huguenot, whose middle-aged shabbiness was but the outward and deceptive seeming of the longest head and the best sword in France—emerged cautiously from the passageway
and stood listening until her footsteps were heard descending the front stairs. Nevertheless, the most painstaking search of her room, a search as systematic as it was feverish, failed to reveal where she had hidden the book.

  He returned wearily to the porch.

  A prophet has always been supposed to take some pleasure, perhaps morbid, in seeing his predictions fulfilled; and it may have been a consolation to the gloomy heart of Hedrick, sorely injured by Laura’s offensive care of her treasure, to find the grouping upon the porch as he had foretold: Cora and Mr. Corliss sitting a little aloof from the others, far enough to permit their holding an indistinct and murmurous conversation of their own. Their sequestration, even by so short a distance, gave them an appearance of intimacy which probably accounted for the rather absent greeting bestowed by Mr. Lindley upon the son of the house, who met him with some favour.

  This Richard Lindley was a thin, friendly looking young man with a pleasing, old-fashioned face which suggested that if he were minded to be portrayed it should be by the daguerreotype, and that a high, black stock would have been more suitable to him than his businesslike, modern neck-gear. He had fine eyes, which seemed habitually concerned with faraway things, though when he looked at Cora they sparkled; however, it cannot be said that the sparkling continued at its brightest when his glance wandered (as it not infrequently did this evening) from her lovely head to the rose in Mr. Corliss’s white coat.

  Hedrick, resuming a position upon the top step between the two groups, found the conversation of the larger annoying because it prevented him from hearing that of the smaller. It was carried on for the greater part by his mother and Mr. Trumble; Laura sat silent between these two; and Lindley’s mood was obviously contemplative. Mr. Wade Trumble, twenty-six, small, earnest, and already beginning to lose his hair, was talkative enough.