The Fighting Chance

R >> Robert W. Chambers >> The Fighting Chance

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31

Sylvia, at her escritoire, chin cradled in her hollowed hand, sat
listlessly inspecting her mail--the usual pile of bills and
advertisements, social demands and interested appeals, with here and
there a frivolous note from some intimate to punctuate the endless
importunities.

Her housekeeper had come and gone; the Belwether establishment could jog
through another day. Various specialists, who cared for the health and
beauty of her body, had entered and made their unctuous exits. The major
had gone to Tuxedo for the week's end; her maid had bronchitis; two
horses required the veterinary, and the kitchen range a new water-back.

Cards had come for the Caithness function; cards for young Austin
Wadsworth's wedding to a Charleston girl of rumoured beauty; Caragnini
was to sing for Mrs. Vendenning; a live llama, two-legged, had consented
to undermine Christianity for Mrs. Pyne-Johnson and her guests.

"Would Sylvia be ready for the inspection of imported head-gears to
harmonise with the gowns being built by Constantine?

"When--

"Would she receive the courteous agent of 'The Reigning Beauties of
Manhattan,' to arrange for her portrait and biographical sketch?

"When--

"Would she realise that Jefferson B. Doty could turn earth into heaven
for any young chatelaine by affixing to the laundry his anti-microbe
drying machine emitting sixty sterilised hot-air blasts in thirty
seconds, at a cost of one-tenth of one mill per blast?

"And when--"

But she turned her head, looking wearily across the room at the brightly
burning fire beside which Mrs. Ferrall sat, nibbling mint-paste, very
serious over one of those books that "everybody was reading."

"How far have you read?" inquired Sylvia without interest, turning over
a new letter to cut with her paper-knife.

Grace ruffled the uncut pages of her book without looking up, then
yawned shamelessly: "She's decided to try living with him for awhile,
and if they find life agreeable she'll marry him. . Pleasant situation,
isn't it? Nice book, very; and they say that somebody is making a play
of it. I"--She yawned again, showing her small, brilliant teeth--"I
wonder what sort of people write these immoral romances!"

"Probably immoral people," said Sylvia indifferently. "Drop it on the
coals, Grace."

But Mrs. Ferrall reopened the book where she had laid her finger to mark
the place. "Do you think so?" she asked.

"Think what?"

"That rotten books and plays come from morally rotten people?"

"I don't think about it at all," observed Sylvia, opening another letter
impatiently.

"You're probably not very literary," said Grace mischievously.

"Not in that way, I suppose."

Mrs. Ferrall took another bonbon: "Did you see 'Mrs. Lane's
Experiment'?"

"I did," said Sylvia, looking up, the pink creeping into her cheeks.

"You thought it very strong, I suppose?" asked Grace innocently.

"I thought it incredible."

"But, dear, it was sheer realism! Why blink at truth? And when an author
has the courage to tell facts why not have the courage to applaud?"

"If that is truth, it doesn't concern me," said Sylvia. "Grace, why will
you pose, even if you are married? for you have a clean mind, and you
know it!"

"I know it," sighed Mrs. Ferrall, closing her book again, but keeping
the place with her finger; "and that's why I'm so curious about all
these depraved people. I can't understand why writers have not found out
that we women are instinctively innocent, even after we are obliged to
make our morality a profession and our innocence an art. They all hang
their romances to motives that no woman recognises as feminine; they
ascribe to us instincts which we do not possess, passions of which we
are ignorant--a ridiculous moral turpitude in the overmastering presence
of love. Pooh! If they only knew what a small part love plays with us,
after all!"

Sylvia said slowly: "It sometimes plays a small part, after all."

"Always," insisted Grace with emphasis. "No carefully watched girl knows
what it is, whatever her suspicions may be. When she marries, if she
doesn't marry from family pressure or from her own motives of common-
sense ambition, she marries because she likes the man, not because she
loves him."

Sylvia was silent.

"Because, even if she wanted to love him," continued Grace, "she would
not know how. It's the ingrained innocence which men encounter that they
don't allow for or understand in us. Even after we are married, and
whether or not we learn to love our husbands, it remains part of us as
an educated instinct; and it takes all the scientific, selfish
ruthlessness of a man to break it down. That's why I say so few among us
ever comprehend the motives attributed to us in romance or in that
parody of it called realism. Love is rarer with us than men could ever
believe--and I'm glad of it," she said maliciously, with a final snap of
her pretty teeth.

"It was on that theory you advised me, I think," said Sylvia, looking
into the fire.

"Advised you, child?"

"Yes--about accepting Howard."

"Certainly. Is it not a sound theory? Doesn't it stand inspection?
Doesn't it wear?"

"It--wears," said Sylvia indifferently. Grace looked up from her open
book. "Is anything amiss?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"Of course you know, child. What is wrong? Has Howard made himself
insufferable? He's a master at it. Has he?"

"No; I don't remember that he has. . I'm tired, physically. I'm tired of
the winter."

"Go to Florida for Lent."

"Horror! It's as stupid as a hothouse. It isn't that, either, dear--only,
when it was raining so deliciously the other day I was silly enough to
think I scented the spring in the park. I was glad of a change you know
--any excuse to stop this eternal carnival I live in."

"What is the matter?" demanded Mrs. Ferrall, withdrawing her finger from
the pages and plumping the closed book down on her knee. "You'd better
tell me, Sylvia; you might just as well tell me now as later when my
persistence has vexed us both. Now, what has happened?"

"I have been--imprudent," said Sylvia, in a low voice.

"You mean,"--Mrs. Ferrall looked at her keenly--"that he has been here?"

"No. I telephoned him; and I asked him to drive with me."

"Oh, Sylvia, what nonsense! Why on earth do you stir yourself up by that
sort of silliness at this late date? What use is it? Can't you let him
alone?"

"I--No, I can't, it seems. Grace, I was--I felt so--so strangely about it
all."

"About what, little idiot?"

"About leaving him--alone."

"Are you Stephen Siward's keeper?" demanded Mrs. Ferrall, exasperated.

"I felt as though I were, for awhile. He is ill."

"With an illness that, thank God, you are not going to nurse through
life. Don't look at me that way, dear. I'm obliged to speak harshly; I'm
obliged to harden my heart to such a monstrous idea. You know I love
you; you know I care deeply for that poor boy--but do you think I could
be loyal to either of you and not say what I do say? He is doomed, as
sure as you sit there! He has fallen, and no one can help him. Link
after link he has broken with his own world; his master-vice holds him
faster, closer, more absolutely, than hell ever held a lost soul!"

"Grace, I cannot endure--"

"You must! Are you trying to drug your silly self with romance so you
won't recognise truth when you see it? Are you drifting back into old
impulses, unreasoning whims of caprice? Have you forgotten what I know
of you, and what you know of yourself? Is the taint of your transmitted
inheritance beginning to show in you--the one woman of your race who is
fashioned to withstand it and stamp it out?"

"I am mistress of my emotions," said Sylvia, flushing.

"Then suppress them," retorted Grace Ferrall hotly, "before they begin
to bully you. There was no earthly reason for you to talk to Stephen. No
disinterested impulse moved you. It was a sheer perverse, sentimental
restlessness--the delicate, meddlesome deviltry of your race. And if that
poison is in you, it's well for you to know it."

"It is in me," said Sylvia, staring at the fire.

"Then you know what to do for it."

"No, I don't."

"Well, I do," said Grace decisively; "and the sooner you marry Howard
and intrench yourself behind your pride, the better off you'll be.
That's where, fortunately enough, you differ from your ancestors; you
are unable to understand marital treachery. Otherwise you'd make it
lively for us all."

"It is true," said Sylvia deliberately, "that I could not be treacherous
to anybody. But I am wondering; I am asking myself just what constitutes
treachery to myself."

"Sentimentalising over Stephen might fill the bill," observed Grace
tartly.

"But it doesn't seem to," mused Sylvia, her blue gaze on the coals.
"That is what I do not understand. I have no conscience concerning what
I feel for him."

"What do you feel?"

"I was in love with him. You knew it."

"You liked him," insisted Grace patiently.

"No--loved him. I know. Dear, your theories are sound in a general way,
but what is a girl going to do about it when she loves a man? You say a
young girl can't love--doesn't know how. But I do love, though it is true
that I don't know how to love very wisely. What is the use in denying
it? This winter has been a deafening, stupefying fever to me. The sheer
noise of it stunned me until I forgot how I did feel about anything.
Then--I don't know--somehow, in the rain out there, I began to wake .
Dear, the old instincts, the old desires, the old truths, came back out
of chaos; that full feeling here"--she laid her fingers on her throat
--"the sense of expectancy, the restless hope growing out of torpid
acquiescence--all returned; and, dearest, with them all came memories of
him. What am I to do? Could you tell me?"

For a long while Mrs. Ferrall sat in troubled silence, her hand shading
her eyes. Sylvia, leaning over her desk, idling with pen and pencil,
looked around from time to time, as though awaiting the opinion of some
specialist who, in full possession of the facts, now had become
responsible for the patient.

"If you marry him," said Mrs. Ferrall quietly, "your life will become a
hell."

"Yes. But would it make life any easier for him?" asked Sylvia.

"How--to know that you had been dragged down?"

"No. I mean could I do anything for him?"

"No woman ever did. That is a sentimental falsehood of the emotional. No
woman ever did help a man in that way. Sylvia, if love were the only
question, and if you do truly love him, I--well, I suppose I'd be fool
enough to advise you to be a fool. Even then you'd be sorry. You know
what your future may be; you know what you are fitted for. What can you
do without Howard? In this town your role would be a very minor one
without Howard's money, and you know it."

"Yes, I know it."

"And your sacrifice could not help that doomed boy."

Sylvia nodded assent.

"Then, is there any choice? Is there any question of what to do?"

Sylvia looked out into the winter sky, through the tops of snowy trees;
everywhere the stark, deathly rigidity of winter. Under it, frozen, lay
the rain that had scented the air. Under her ambition lay the ghosts of
yesterday.

"No," she said, "there is no question of choice. I know what must be."

Grace, seated in the firelight, looked up as Sylvia rose from her desk
and came across the room; and when she sank down on the rug at her feet,
resting her cheek against the elder woman's knees, nothing was said for
a long time--a time of length sufficient to commit a memory to its grave,
lay it away decently and in quiet befitting.

Sore doubt assailed Grace Ferrall, guiltily aware that once again she
had meddled; and in the calm tenor of her own placid, marital
satisfaction, looking backward along the pleasant path she had trodden
with its little monuments to love at decent intervals amid the agreeable
monotony of content, her heart and conscience misgave her lest she had
counselled this young girl wrongly, committing her to the arid
lovelessness which she herself had never known.

Leaning there, her fingers lingering in light caress on Sylvia's bright
hair, for every doubt she brought up argument, to every sentimental
wavering within her heart she opposed the chilling reason of common
sense. Destruction to happiness lay in Sylvia's yielding to her caprice
for Siward. There was other happiness in the world besides the non-
essential one of love. That must be Sylvia's portion. And after all--and
after all, love was a matter of degree; and it was well for Sylvia that
she had the malady so lightly--well for her that it had advanced so
little, lest she suspect what its crowning miracles might be and fall
sick of a passion for what she had forever lost.

For a week or more the snow continued; colder, gloomier weather set in,
and the impending menace of Ash Wednesday redoubled the social pace,
culminating in the Westervelt ball on the eve of the forty days. And
Sylvia had not yet seen Siward or spoken to him again across the
wilderness of streets and men.

In the first relaxation of Lent she had instinctively welcomed an
opportunity for spiritual consolation and a chance to take her spiritual
bearings; not because of bodily fatigue--for in the splendour of her
youthful vigour she did not know what that meant.

Saint Berold was a pretty good saint, and his church was patronised by
Major Belwether's household. The major liked two things high: his game
and his church. Sylvia cared for neither, but had become habituated to
both the odours of sanctity and of pheasants; so to Saint Berold's she
went in cure of her soul. Besides, she was fond of Father Curtis, who,
if he were every inch a priest, was also every foot of his six feet a
man--simple, good, and brave.

However, she found little opportunity, save at her brief confession, for
a word with Father Curtis. His days were full days to the overbrimming,
and a fashionable pack was ever at his heels, fawning and shoving and
importuning. It was fashionable to adore Father Curtis, and for that
reason she shrank from venturing any demand upon his time, and nobody
else at Saint Berold's appealed to her. Besides, the music was hard,
commonplace, even blatant at times, and, having a delicate ear, she
shrank from this also. It is probable then that what comfort she found
under Saint Berold's big, brand-new Episcopal cross she extracted from
observing the rites, usages, and laws of a creed that had been accepted
for her by that Christian gentleman, Major Belwether. Also, she may have
found some solace from the still intervals devoted to an inventory of
her sins and the wistful searching of a heart too young for sadness. If
she did it was her own affair, not Grace Ferrall's, who went with her to
Saint Berold's determined always to confess to too much gambling, but
letting it go from day to day so that the penance could not interfere
with the next seance.

Agatha Caithness was there a great deal, looking like a saint in her
subdued plumage; and very devout, dodging nothing--neither confession nor
Quarrier's occasionally lifted eyes, though their gaze, meeting, seemed
lost in dreamy devotion or drowned in the contemplation of the spiritual
and remote.

Plank came docilely from his Dutch Reformed church to sit beside Leila.
As for Mortimer, once a vestryman, he never came at all--made no pretence
or profession of what he elegantly expressed as "caring a damn" for
anything "in the church line," though, he added, there were "some good
lookers to be found in a few synagogues." His misconception of the
attractions of the church amused the new set of men among whom he had
recently drifted, to the unfeigned disgust of gentlemen like Major
Belwether; "club" men, in the commoner and more sinister interpretation
of the word; unfit men, who had managed to slip into good clubs; men,
once fit, who had deteriorated to the verge of ostracism; heavy, over-
fed, idle, insolent men in questionable financial situation, hard card
players, hard drinkers, hard riders, negative in their virtues,
merciless in their vices, and whose cynical misconduct formed the
sources of the stock of stories told where such men foregather.

Mortimer had already furnished his world with sufficient material for
jests of that flavour; now they were telling a new one: how, as Leila
was standing before Tiffany's looking for her carriage, a masher
accosted her, and, at her haughty stare, said sneeringly: "Oh, you can't
play that game on me; I've seen you with Leroy Mortimer!"

The story was repeated frequently enough. Leila heard it with a shrug;
but such things mattered to her now, and she cried over it at night,
burning that Plank should hear her name used jestingly to emphasise the
depth of her husband's degradation.

Mortimer stayed out at night very frequently now. Also, he appeared to
make his money go farther, or was luckier at his "card killings,"
because he seldom attempted to bully Leila, being apparently content
with his allowance.

Once or twice Plank saw him with an unusually attractive girl belonging
to a world very far removed from Leila's. Somebody said she was an
actress when she did anything at all--one Lydia Vyse, somewhat celebrated
for an audacity not too delicate. But Plank was no more interested than
any man who can't afford to endanger his prospects by a closer
acquaintance with that sort of pretty woman.

Meanwhile Mortimer kept away from home, wife, and church, and Plank
frequented them, so the two men did not meet very often; and the less
they met the less they found to say to one another.

Now that the forty days had really begun, Major Belwether became
restless for the flesh-pots of the south, although Lenten duties sat
lightly enough upon the house of Belwether. These decent observances
were limited to a lax acknowledgment of fast days, church in moderation,
and active participation in the succession of informal affairs
calculated to sustain life in those intellectually atrophied and wealthy
people entirely dependent upon others for their amusements.

To these people no fear of punishment hereafter can equal the terror of
being left to their own devices; and so, though the opera was over,
theatres unfashionable, formal functions suspended and dances ended, the
pace still continued at a discreet and decorous trot; and those who had
not fled to California or Palm Beach, remained to pray and play Bridge
with an unction most edifying.

And all this while Sylvia had not seen Siward.

Sylvia was changing. The characteristic amiability, the sensitive
reserve, the sweet composure which the world had always counted on in
her, had become exceptions and no longer the rules which governed the
caprice and impulse always latent. An indifference so pointed as to
verge on insolence amazed her intimates at times; a sudden, flushed
impatience startled the habitues of her shrine. There was a new,
unseeing hardness in her eyes; in her attitude the faintest hint of
cynicism. She acquired a habit of doing selfish things coldly,
indifferent to the canons of the art; and true selfishness, the most
delicate of all the arts, requires an expert.

That which had most charmed--her unfeigned pleasure in pleasure, her
unfailing consideration for all, her gentleness with ignorance, her
generous unconsciousness of self--all these still remained, it is true,
though no longer characteristic, no longer to be counted on.

For the first time a slight sense of fear tinctured the general
admiration.

In public her indifference and growing impatience with Quarrier had not
reached the verge of bad taste, but in private she was scarcely at pains
to conceal her weariness and inattention, showing him less and less of
the formal consideration which had been their only medium of
coexistence. That he noticed it was evident even to her who carelessly
ignored the consequences of her own attitude.

Once, speaking of the alterations in progress at The Sedges, his place
near Oyster Bay, he casually asked her opinion, and she as casually
observed that if he had an opinion about anything he wouldn't know what
to do with it.

Once, too, she had remarked in Quarrier's hearing to Ferrall, who was
complaining about the loss of his hair, that a hairless head was a
visitation from Heaven, but a beard was a man's own fault.

Once they came very close to a definite rupture, close enough to scare
her after all the heat had gone out of her and the matter was ended.
Quarrier had lingered late after cards, and something was said about the
impending kennel show and about Marion Page judging the English setters.

"Agatha tells me that you are going with Marion," continued Quarrier.
"As long as Marion has chosen to make herself conspicuous there is
nothing to be said. But do you think it very good taste for you to
figure publicly on the sawdust with an eccentric girl like Marion?"

"I see nothing conspicuous about a girl's judging a few dogs," said
Sylvia, merely from an irritable desire to contradict.

"It's bad taste and bad form," remarked Quarrier coldly; "and Agatha
thought it a mistake for you to go there with her."

"Agatha's opinions do not concern me."

"Perhaps mine may have some weight."

"Not the slightest."

He said patiently: "This is a public show; do you understand? Not one of
those private bench exhibitions."

"I understand. Really, Howard, you are insufferable at times."

"Do you feel that way?"

"Yes, I do. I am sorry to be rude, but I do feel that way!" Flushed,
impatient, she looked him squarely between his narrowing, woman's eyes:
"I do not care for you very much, Howard, and you know it. I am marrying
you with a perfectly sordid motive, and you know that, too. Therefore it
is more decent--if there is any decency left in either of us--to interfere
with one another as little as possible, unless you desire a definite
rupture. Do you?"

"I? A--a rupture?"

"Yes," she said hotly; "do you?"

"Do you, Sylvia?"

"No; I'm too cowardly, too selfish, too treacherous to myself. No, I
don't."

"Nor do I," he said, lifting his furtive eyes.

"Very well. You are more contemptible than I am, that is all."

Her voice had grown unsteady; an unreasoning rush of anger had set her
whole body a-thrill, and the white heat of it was driving her to provoke
him, as though that might cleanse her of the ignominy of the bargain--as
though a bargain did not require two of the same mind to make it.

"What do you want of me?" she said, still stinging under the angry waves
of self-contempt. "What are you marrying me for? Because, divided, we
are likely to cut small figures in our tin-trumpet world? Because,
united, we can dominate the brainless? Is there any other reason?"

Showing his teeth in that twitching snicker that contracted the muscles
of his upper lip: "Children!" he said, looking at her.

She turned scarlet to her hair; the deliberate grossness stunned her.
Confused, she stood confronting him, dumb under a retort the coarseness
of which she had never dreamed him capable.

"I mean what I say," he repeated calmly. "A man cares for two things:
his fortune, and the heirs to it. If you didn't know that you have
learned it now. You hurt me deliberately. I told you a plain truth very
bluntly. It is for you to consider the situation."

But she could not speak; anger, humiliation, shame, held her tongue-
tied. The instinctive revolt at the vague horror--the monstrous,
meaningless threat--nothing could force words from her to repudiate, to
deny what he had dared to utter.

Except as the effrontery of brutality, except as a formless menace born
of his anger, the reason he flung at her for his marrying her conveyed
nothing to her in its grotesque impossibility. Only the intentional
coarseness of it was to be endured--if she chose to endure it; for the
rest was empty of concrete meaning to her.

Lent was half over before she saw him again. Neither he nor she had
taken any steps to complete the rupture; and at the Mi-careme dance,
given by the Siowa Hunt, Quarrier, who was M. F. H., took up the thread
of their suspended intercourse as methodically and calmly as though it
had never quivered to the breaking point. He led the cotillon with
agreeable precision and impersonal accuracy, favouring her at intervals;
and though she wasted no favours on him, she endured his, which was
sufficient evidence that matters were still in statu quo.

She returned to town next morning with Grace Ferrall, irritable, sulky,
furious with herself at the cowardly relief she felt. For, spite of her
burning anger against Quarrier, the suspense at times had been wearing;
and she would not make the first move--had not decided even to accept his
move if it came--at least, had not admitted to herself that she would
accept it. It had come and the tension was over, and now, entering Mrs.
Ferrall's brougham which met them at Thirty-fourth Street Ferry, she was
furious with herself for her unfeigned feeling of relief.

All hot with self-contempt she lay back in the comfortably upholstered
corner of the brougham, staring straight before her, sullen red mouth
unresponsive to the occasional inconsequent questions of Grace Ferrall.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31