Plum Bun

  Another element entered too. He had wounded her pride and he should salve it. And the only unguent possible would be a proposal of marriage. Oh if only she could be a girl in a book and when he finally did ask her for her hand, she would be able to tell him that she was going to marry someone else, someone twice as eligible, twice as handsome, twice as wealthy.

  Through all these racing thoughts penetrated the sound of Roger’s voice, pleading, persuasive, seductive. She was amazed to find a certain shamefaced timidity creeping over her; yet it was he who should have shown the shame. And she could not understand either why she was unable to say plainly: “You say you care for me, long for me so much, why don’t you ask me to come to you in the ordinary way?” But some pride either unusually false or unusually fierce prevented her from doing this. Undoubtedly Roger with his wealth, his looks and his family connections had already been much sought after. He knew he was an “eligible”. Poor, unknown, stigmatized, if he but knew it, as a member of the country’s least recognized group she could not bring herself to belong even in appearance to that band of young women who so obviously seek a “good match”.

  When he had paused a moment for breath she told him sadly: “But, Roger, people don’t do that kind of thing, not decent people.”

  “Angèle, you are such a child! This is exactly the kind of thing people do do. And why not? Why must the world be let in on the relationships of men and women? Some of the sweetest unions in history have been of this kind.”

  “For others perhaps, but not for me. Relationships of the kind you describe don’t exist among the people I know.” She was thinking of her parents, of the Hallowells, of the Hensons whose lives were indeed like open books.

  He looked at her curiously, “The people you know! Don’t tell me you haven’t guessed about Paulette!”

  She had forgotten about Paulette! “Yes I know about her. She told me herself. I like her, she’s been a mighty fine friend, but, Roger, you surely don’t want me to be like her.”

  “Of course I don’t. It was precisely because you weren’t like her that I became interested. You were such a babe in the woods. Anyone could see you’d had no experience with men.”

  This obvious lack of logic was too bewildering. She looked at him like the child which, in these matters, she really was. “But,—but Roger, mightn’t that be a beginning of a life like Paulette’s? What would become of me after we, you and I, had separated? Very often these things last only for a short time, don’t they?”

  “Not necessarily; certainly not between you and me. And I’d always take care of you, you’d be provided for.” He could feel her gathering resentment. In desperation he played a cunning last card: “And besides who knows, something permanent may grow out of this. I’m not entirely my own master, Angèle.”

  Undoubtedly he was referring to his father whom he could not afford to offend. It never occurred to her that he might be lying, for why should he?

  To all his arguments, all his half-promises and implications she returned a steady negative. As twilight came on she expressed a desire to go home; with the sunset her strength failed her; she felt beaten and weary. Her unsettled future, her hurt pride, her sudden set-to with the realities of the society in which she had been moving, bewildered and frightened her. Resentful, puzzled, introspective, she had no further words for Roger; it was impossible for him to persuade her to agree or to disagree with his arguments. During the long ride home she was resolutely mute.

  Yet on the instant of entering Jayne Street she felt she could not endure spending the long evening hours by herself and she did not want to be alone with Roger. She communicated this distaste to him. While not dishevelled they were not presentable enough to invade the hotels farther uptown. But, anxious to please her, he told her they could go easily enough to one of the small cabarets in the Village. A few turns and windings and they were before a house in a dark side street knocking on its absurdly barred door, entering its black, myterious portals. In a room with a highly polished floor, a few tables and chairs, some rather bizarre curtains, five or six couples were sitting, among them Paulette, Jack Hudson, a tall, rather big, extremely blonde girl whose name Angela learned was Carlotta Parks, and a slender, black-avised man whose name she failed to catch. Paulette hailed him uproariously; the blonde girl rose and precipitately threw her arms about Fielding’s neck.

  “Roger!”

  “Don’t,” he said rather crossly. “Hello, Jack.” He nodded to the dark man whom he seemed to know indifferently well. “What have they got to eat here, you fellows? Miss Mory and I are tired and hungry. We’ve been following the pike all day.” Miss Parks turned and gave Angela a long, considering look.

  “Sit here,” said Paulette, “there’s plenty of room. Jack, you order for them, the same things we’ve been having. You get good cooking here.” She was radiant with happiness and content. Under the influence of the good, stimulating food Angela began to recover, to look around her.

  Jack Hudson, a powerfully built bronze figure of a man, beamed on Paulette, saying nothing and in his silence saying everything. The dark man kept his eyes on Carlotta, who was oblivious to everyone but Roger, clearly her friend of long standing. She sat clasping one of his hands, her head almost upon his shoulder. “Roger it’s so good to see you again! I’ve thought of you so often! I’ve been meaning to write to you; we’re having a big house party this summer. You must come! Dad’s asking up half of Washington; attachés, ‘Prinzessen, Countessen and serene English Altessen’; he’ll come up for week-ends.”

  A member of the haut monde, evidently she was well-connected, powerful, even rich. A girl of Roger’s own set amusing herself in this curious company. Angela felt her heart contract with a sort of helpless jealousy.

  The dark man, despairing of recapturing Carlotta’s attention, suddenly asked Angèle if she would care to dance. He was a superb partner and for a moment or two, reinvigorated by the food and the snappy music, she became absorbed in the smooth, gliding motion and in her partner’s pleasant conversation. Glancing over her shoulder she noted Carlotta still talking to Roger. The latter, however, was plainly paying the girl no attention. His eyes fixed on Angela, he was moodily following her every motion, almost straining, she thought, to catch her words. His eyes met hers and a long, long look passed between them so fraught, it seemed to her, with a secret understanding and sympathy, that her heart shook with a moment’s secret wavering.

  Her partner escorted her back to the table. Paulette, flushed and radiant, with the mien of a dishevelled baby, was holding forth while Hudson listened delightedly. As a raconteuse she had a faint, delicious malice which usually made any recital of her adventures absolutely irresistible. “Her name,” she was saying loudly, regardless of possible listeners, “was Antoinette Spewer, and it seems she had it in for me from the very first. She told Sloane Corby she wanted to meet me and he invited both of us to lunch. When we got to the restaurant she was waiting for me in the lobby; Sloane introduced us and—she pulled a lorgnette on me,—a lorgnette on me!” She said it very much as a Westerner might speak of someone “pulling” a revolver. “But I fixed that. There were three or four people passing near us. I drew back until they were well within hearing range, and then I said to her: ‘I beg pardon but what did you say your last name was?’ Well, when a person’s named Spewer she can’t shout it across a hotel lobby! Oh, she came climbing down off her high horse; she respects me to this day, I tell you.”

  Roger rose. “We must be going; I can’t let Miss Mory get too tired.” He was all attention and courtesy. Miss Parks looked at her again, narrowing her eyes.

  In the car Roger put his arm about her. “Angèle, when you were dancing with that fellow I couldn’t stand it! And then you looked at me,—oh such a look! You were thinking about me, I felt it, I knew it.”

  Some treacherous barrier gave way within her “Yes, and I could tell you were thinking about me.”

  “Of course you could! And without a word! Oh, d
arling, darling, can’t you see that’s the way it would be? If you’d only take happiness with me there we would be with a secret bond, an invisible bond, existing for us alone and no one else in the world the wiser. But we should know and it would be all the sweeter for that secrecy.”

  Unwittingly he struck a responsive chord within her,—stolen waters were the sweetest, she of all people knew that.

  Aloud she said: “Here we are, Roger. Some of the day has been wonderful; thank you for that.”

  “You can’t go like this! You’re going to let me see you again?

  She knew she should have refused him, but again some treacherous impulse made her assent. He drove away, and, turning, she climbed the long, steep flights of stairs, bemused, thrilled, frightened, curious, the sense of adventure strong upon her. To-morrow she would see Jinny, her own sister, her own flesh and blood, one of her own people. Together they would thresh this thing out.

  Chapter II

  A CURIOUS period of duelling ensued. Roger was young, rich and idle. Nearly every wish he had ever known had been born within him only to be satisfied. He could not believe that he would fail in the pursuit of this baffling creature who had awakened within him an ardour and sincerity of feeling which surprised himself. The thought occurred to him more than once that it would have been a fine thing if this girl had been endowed with the name and standing and comparative wealth of—say Carlotta Parks,—but it never occurred to him to thwart in this matter the wishes of his father who would, he knew, insist immediately on a certified account of the pedigree, training and general fitness of any strange aspirant for his son’s hand. Angela had had the good sense to be frank; she did not want to become immeshed in a tissue of lies whose relationship, whose sequence and interdependence she would be likely to forget. To Roger’s few questions she had said quite truly that she was the daughter of “poor but proud parents”;—they had laughed at the hackneyed phrase,—that her father had been a boss carpenter and that she had been educated in the ordinary public schools and for a time had been a school teacher. No one would ever try to substantiate these statements, for clearly the person to whom they applied would not be falsifying such a simple account. There would be no point in so doing. Her little deceits had all been negative, she had merely neglected to say that she had a brown sister and that her father had been black.

  Roger found her unfathomable. His was the careless, unreasoned cynicism of the modern, worldly young man. He had truly, as he acknowledged, been attracted to Angela because of a certain incurious innocence of hers apparent in her observations and in her manner. He saw no reason why he should cherish that innocence. If questioned he would have answered: “She’s got to learn about the world in which she lives sometime; she might just as well learn of it through me. And I’d always look out for her.” In the back of his mind, for all his unassuming even simple attitude toward his wealth and power, lurked the conviction that that same wealth and power could heal any wound, atone for any loss. Still there were times when even he experienced a faint, inner qualm, when Angela would ask him: “But afterwards, what would become of me, Roger?” It was the only question he could not meet. Out of all his hosts of precedents from historical Antony and Cleopatra down to notorious affinities discovered through blatant newspaper “stories” he could find for this only a stammered “There’s no need to worry about an afterwards, Angèle, for you and I would always be friends.”

  Their frequent meetings now were little more than a trial of strength. Young will and determination were pitted against young will and determination. On both the excitement of the chase was strong, but each was pursuing a different quarry. To all his protestations, arguments and demands, Angela returned an insistent: “What you are asking is impossible.” Yet she either could not or would not drive him away, and gradually, though she had no intention of yielding to his wishes, her first attitude of shocked horror began to change.

  For three months the conflict persisted. Roger interposed the discussion into every talk, on every occasion. Gradually it came to be the raison d’être of their constant comradeship. His arguments were varied and specious. “My dearest girl, think of a friendship in which two people would have every claim in the world upon each other and yet no claim. Think of giving all, not because you say to a minister ‘I will’, but from the generosity of a powerful affection. That is the very essence of free love. I give you my word that the happiest couples in the world are those who love without visible bonds. Such people are bound by the most durable ties. Theirs is a state of the closest because the freest, most elastic union in the world.”

  A singularly sweet and curious intimacy was growing up between them. Roger told Angela many anecdotes about his father and about his dead mother, whom he still loved, and for whom he even grieved in a pathetically boyish way. “She was so sweet to me, she loved me so. I’ll never forget her. It’s for her sake that I try to please my father, though Dad’s some pumpkins on his own account.” In turn she was falling into the habit of relating to him the little happenings of her every-day life, a life which she was beginning to realize must, in his eyes, mean the last word in the humdrum and the monotonous. And yet how full of adventure, of promise, even of mystery did it seem compared with Jinny’s!

  Roger had much intimate knowledge of people and told her many and dangerous secrets. “See how I trust you, Angèle; you might trust me a little!”

  If his stories were true, certainly she might just as well trust him a great deal, for all her little world, judging it by the standards by which she was used to measuring people, was tumbling in ruins at her feet. If this were the way people lived then what availed any ideals? The world was made to take pleasure in; one gained nothing by exercising simple virtue, it was after all an extension of the old formula which she had thought out for herself many years ago. Roger spent most of his time with her, it seemed. Anything which she undertook to do delighted him. She would accept no money, no valuable presents. “And I can’t keep going out with you to dinners and luncheons forever, Roger. It would be different if,—if we really meant anything to each other.” He deliberately misunderstood her, “But nothing would give me more pleasure than for us to mean the world to one another.” He sent her large hampers of fruit and even the more ordinary edibles; then he would tease her about being selfish. In order to get rid of the food she had asked him to lunch, to dinner, since nothing that she could say would make him desist from sending it.

  Nothing gave her greater joy really than this playful housekeeping. She was very lonely; Jinny had her own happy interests; Anthony never came near her nor did she invite him to come; Martha Burden seemed engrossed in her own affairs, she was undergoing some secret strain that made her appear more remote, more strongly self-sufficient, more mysterious than ever. Paulette, making overt preparations to go to Russia with Hudson, was impossibly, hurtingly happy. Miss Powell,—but she could not get near her; the young coloured girl showed her the finest kind of courtesy, but it had about it a remote and frozen quality, unbreakable. However, Angela for the moment did not desire to break it; she must run no more risks with Roger, still she put Miss Powell on the list of those people whom she would some day aid,—when everything had turned out all right.

  The result of this feeling of loneliness was, of course, to turn her more closely to Roger. He paid her the subtle compliment of appearing absolutely at home in her little apartment; he grew to like her plain, good cooking and the experiments which sometimes she made frankly for him. And afterwards as the fall closed in there were long, pleasant evenings before an open fire, or two or three last hours after a brisk spin in the park in the blue car. And gradually she had grown to accept and even inwardly to welcome his caresses. She perched with an air of great unconsciousness on the arm of the big chair in which he was sitting but the transition became constantly easier from the arm of the chair to his knee, to the steely embrace of his arm, to the sound of the hard beating of his heart, to his murmured: “This is where you belong,
Angèle, Angèle.” He seemed an anchor for her frail insecure bark of life.

  It was at moments like these that he told her amazing things about their few common acquaintances. There was not much to say about Paulette. “I think,” said Roger judicially, “that temperamentally she is a romantic adventurer. Something in her is constantly seeking a change but she will never be satisfied. She’s a good sport, she takes as she gives, asking nothing permanent and promising nothing permanent.” Angela thought it rather sad. But Roger dismissed the theme with the rather airy comment that there were women as there were men “like that”. She wondered if he might not be a trifle callous.

  More than once they had spoken of Martha Burden; Angela confessed herself tremendously intrigued by the latter, by that tense, brooding personality. She learned that Martha, made of the stuff which dies for causes, was constantly being torn between theory and practice.

  “She’s full,” said Roger, “of the most high-falutin, advanced ideas. Oh I’ve known old Martha all my life, we were brought up together, it’s through her really that I began to know the people in this part of town. She’s always been a sort of sister. More than once I’ve had to yank her by the shoulders out of difficulties which she herself created. I made her marry Starr.”