Complete weird tales of.., p.690
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 690
“I had to. Now, does your vanity believe that my return to Silverwood was influenced by your piteous appeal over the wire — and your bad temper, too?”
“No,” he said solemnly.
“Well, then! I came here partly to put my notes in better shape for Mr. Sissly, partly to clear up odds and ends and leave him a clear field to plow — in your persistent company,” she added, with such engaging malice that even the name of Sissly, which he hated, made him laugh.
“You won’t do that,” he said confidently.
“Do what, Mr. Desboro?”
“Turn me over to anything named Sissly.”
“Indeed, I will — you and your celebrated collection! Of course you could go South, but, judging from your devotion to the study of ancient armour — —”
“You don’t mean it, do you?”
“What? About your devotion?”
“No, about Sissly.”
“Yes, I do. Listen to me, Mr. Desboro. I made up my mind that sleighing, and skating, and luncheon and tea, and — you, are not good for a busy girl’s business career. I’m going to be very practical and very frank with you. I don’t belong here except on business, and you make it so pleasant and unbusinesslike for me that my conscience protests. You see, if the time I now take to lunch with you, tea with you, skate, sleigh, talk, listen, in your very engaging company is properly employed, I can attend to yards and yards of business in town. And I’m going to. I mean it, please,” as he began to smile.
His smile died out. He said, quietly:
“Doesn’t our friendship count for anything?”
She looked at him; shrugged her shoulders:
“Oh, Mr. Desboro,” she said pleasantly, “does it, really?”
The blue eyes were clear and beautiful, and a little grave; only the upcurled corners of her mouth promised anything.
The car drew up at the house; she sprang out and ran upstairs to her room. He heard her in animated confab with Mrs. Quant for a few minutes, then she came down in her black business gown, with narrow edges of lawn at collar and cuffs, and the bright lock already astray on her cheek. A white carnation was tucked into her waist; the severe black of her dress, as always, made her cheeks and lips and golden hair more brilliant by contrast.
“Now,” she said, “for my notes. And what are you going to do while I’m busy?”
“Watch you, if I may. You’ve heard about the proverbial cat?”
“Care killed it, didn’t it?”
“Yes; but it had a good look at the Queen first.”
A smile touched her eyes and lips — a little wistfully.
“You know, Mr. Desboro, that I like to waste time with you. Flatter your vanity with that confession. And even if things were — different — but they couldn’t ever be — and I must work very hard if I’m ever going to have any leisure in my old age. But come to the library for this last day, and smoke as usual. And you may talk to amuse me, if you wish. Don’t mind if I’m too busy to answer your folly in kind.”
They went together to the library; she placed the mass of notes in front of her and began to sort them — turned for a second and looked around at him with adorable malice, then bent again to the task before her.
“Miss Nevers!”
“Yes?”
“You will come to Silverwood again, won’t you?”
She wrote busily with a pencil.
“Won’t you?”
She made some marginal notes and he looked at the charming profile in troubled silence.
“She turned leisurely.... ‘Did you say anything recently, Mr. Desboro?’”
About ten minutes later she turned leisurely, tucking up the errant strand of hair with her pencil:
“Did you say anything recently, Mr. Desboro?”
“Out of the depths, yes. The voice in the wilderness as usual went unheeded. I wished to explain to you how we might give up our skating and sleighing and everything except the bare necessities — and you could still come to Silverwood on business — —”
“What are the ‘bare necessities’?”
“Your being here is one — —”
“Answer me seriously, please.”
“Food, then. We must eat.”
She conceded that much.
“We’ve got to motor to and from the station!”
She admitted that, too.
“Those,” he pointed out, “are the bare necessities. We can give up everything else.”
She sat looking at him, playing absently with her pencil. After a while, she turned to her desk again, and, bending over it, began to make meaningless marks with her pencil on the yellow pad.
“What is the object,” she said, “of trying to make me forget that I wouldn’t be here at all except on business?”
“Do you think of that every minute?”
“I — must.”
“It isn’t necessary.”
“It is imperative, Mr. Desboro — and you know it.”
She wrote steadily for a while, strapped a bundle of notes with an elastic band, laid it aside, and turned around, resting her arm on the back of the chair. Blue eyes level with his, she inspected him curiously. And, if the tension of excitement still remained, all her high spirits and the indiscreet impulses of a gay self-confidence had vanished. But curiosity remained — the eternal, insatiable curiosity of the young.
How much did this man really mean of what he said to her? What did his liking for her signify other than the natural instinct of an idle young man for any pretty girl? What was he going to do about it? For she seemed to be conscious that, sooner or later, somewhere, sometime, he would do something further about it.
Did he mean to make love to her sometime? Was he doing it now? It resembled the preliminaries; she recognised them — had been aware of them almost from the very first.
Men had made love to her before — men in her own world, men in his world. She had learned something since her father died — not a great deal; perhaps more from hearsay than from experience. But some unpleasant knowledge had been acquired at first hand; two clients of her father’s had contributed, and a student, named Harroun, and an amateur of soft paste statuettes, the Rev. Bertie Dawley.
Innocently and wholesomely equipped to encounter evil, cool and clear eyed mistress of herself so far, she had felt, with happy contempt, that her fate was her own to control, and had wondered what the word “temptation” could mean to any woman.
What Cynthia had admitted made her a little wiser, but still incredulous. Cold, hunger, debts, loneliness — these were not enough, as Cynthia herself had said. Nor, after all, was Cynthia’s liking for Cairns. Which proved conclusively that woman is the arbiter of her own destiny.
Desboro, one knee crossed over the other, sat looking into the fire, which burned in the same fireplace where he had recently immolated the frivolous souvenirs of the past.
Perhaps some gay ghost of that scented sacrifice took shape for a moment in the curling smoke, for he suddenly frowned and passed his hand over his eyes in boyish impatience.
Something — the turn of his head and shoulders — the shape of them — she did not know what — seemed to set her heart beating loudly, ridiculously, without any apparent reason on earth. Too much surprised to be disturbed, she laid her slim hand on her breast, then against her throat, till her pulses grew calmer.
Resting her chin on her arm, she gazed over her shoulder into the fire. He had laid another log across the flames; she watched the bark catch fire, dully conscious, now, that her ideas were becoming as irresponsible and as reasonless as the sudden stirring of her heart had been.
For she was thinking how odd it would be if, like Cynthia, she too, ever came to care about a man of Desboro’s sort. She’d see to it that she didn’t; that was all. There were other men. Better still, there were to be no men; for her mind fastidiously refused to consider the only sort with whom she felt secure — her intellectual inferiors whose moral worthiness bored her to extinction.
Musing there, half turned on her chair, she saw Desboro rise, still looking intently into the fire, and stand so, his well-made, graceful figure, in silhouette, edged with the crimson glow.
“What do you see in it, Mr. Desboro?”
He turned instantly and came over to her:
“A bath of flames would be very popular,” he said, “if burning didn’t hurt. I was just thinking about it — how to invent — —”
She quoted: “‘But I was thinking of a plan to dye one’s whiskers green.’”
He said: “I suppose you think me as futile as that old man ‘a-settin’ on a gate.’”
“Your pursuits seem to be about as useful as his.”
“Why should I pursue things? I don’t want ‘em.”
“You are hopeless. There is pleasure even in pursuit of anything, no matter whether you ever attain it or not. I will never attain wisdom, but it’s a pleasure to pursue it.”
“It’s a pleasure even to pursue pleasure — and it’s the only pleasure in pleasure,” he said, so gravely that for a moment she thought with horror that he was trying to be precious. Then the latent glimmer in his eyes set them laughing, and she rose and went over to the sofa and curled up in one corner, abandoning all pretense of industry.
“Once,” she said, “I knew a poet who emitted such precious thoughts. He was the funniest thing; he had the round, pale, ancient eyes of an African parrot, a pasty countenance, and a derby hat resting on top of a great bunch of colourless curly hair. And that’s the way he talked, Mr. Desboro!”
He seated himself on the other arm of the sofa:
“Did you adore him?”
“At first. He was a celebrity. He did write some pretty things.”
“What woke you up?”
She blushed.
“I thought so,” observed Desboro.
“Thought what?”
“That he came out of his trance and made love to you.”
“How did you know? Wasn’t it dreadful! And he’d always told me that he had never experienced an emotion except when adoring the moon. He was a very dreadful young man — perfectly horrid in his ideas — and I sent him about his business very quickly; and I remember being a little frightened and watching him from the window as he walked off down the street in his soiled drab overcoat and the derby hat on his frizzly hair, and his trousers too high on his ankles — —”
Desboro was so immensely amused at the picture she drew that her pretty brows unbent and she smiled, too.
“What did he want of you?” he asked.
“I didn’t fully understand at the time — —” she hesitated, then, with an angry blush: “He asked me to go to Italy with him. And he said he couldn’t marry me because he had already espoused the moon!”
Desboro’s laughter rang through the old library; and Jacqueline was not quite certain whether she liked the way he took the matter or not.
“I know him,” said Desboro. “I’ve seen him about town kissing women’s hands, in company with a larger and fatter one. Isn’t his name Munger?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Certainly. And the fat one’s name is Waudle. They were a hot team at fashionable literary stunts — the Back Alley Club, you know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Oh, it’s just silly; a number of fashionable and wealthy young men and women pin on aprons, now and then, and paint and model lumps of wet clay in several severely bare studios over some unfragrant stables. They proudly call it The Back Alley Club.”
“Why do you sneer at it?”
“Because it isn’t the real thing. It’s a strutting ground for things like Munger and Waudle, and all the rag-tag that is always sniffing and snuffling at the back doors of the fine arts.”
“At least,” she said, “they sniff.”
He said, good-humouredly: “Yes, and I don’t even do that. Is that what you mean?”
She considered him: “Haven’t you any profession?”
“I’m a farmer.”
“Why aren’t you busy with it, then?”
“I have been, disastrously. There was a sickening deficit this autumn.”
She said, with pretty scorn: “I’ll wager I could make your farm pay.”
He smiled lazily, and indulgently. After a moment he said:
“So the spouse of the moon wanted you to go to Italy with him?”
She nodded absently: “A girl meets queer men in the world.”
“Did you ever meet any others?”
She looked up listlessly: “Yes, several.”
“As funny as the poet?”
“If you call him funny.”
“I wonder who they were,” he mused.
“Did you ever hear of the Reverend Bertie Dawley?”
“No.”
“He was one.”
“That kind?”
“Oh, yes. He collects soft paste figurines; he was a client of father’s; but I found very soon that I couldn’t go near him. He has a wife and children, too, and he keeps sending his wife to call on me. You know he’s a good-looking young man, too, and I liked him; but I never dreamed — —”
“Sure,” he said, disgusted at his own sex — with the exception of himself.
“That seems to be the way of it,” she said thoughtfully. “You can’t be friends with men; they all annoy you sooner or later in one way or another!”
“Annoy you? Do you mean make love to you?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t; do I?”
She bent her head and sat playing with the petals of the white carnation drooping on her breast.
“No,” she said calmly. “You don’t annoy me.”
“Would it seriously annoy you if I did make love to you some day?” he asked, lightly.
Instinct was whispering hurriedly to her: “Here it is at last. Do something about it, and do it quick!” She waited until her heart beat more regularly, then:
“You couldn’t annoy — make love — to a girl you really don’t care for. That is very simple, isn’t it?”
“Suppose I did care for you.”
She looked up at him with troubled eyes, then lowered them to the blossom from which her fingers were detaching petal after petal.
“If you did really care, you wouldn’t tell me, Mr. Desboro.”
“Why not?”
“Because it would not be fair to me.” A flush of anger — or she thought it was, brightened her cheeks. “This is nonsense,” she said abruptly. “And I’ll tell you another thing; I can’t come here again. You know I can’t. We talk foolishness — don’t you know it? And there’s another reason, anyway.”
“What reason?”
“The real reason,” she said, clenching both hands. “You know what it is and so do I — and — and I’m tired of pretending that the truth isn’t true.”
“What is the truth?”
She had turned her back on him and was staring out of the windows into the mist.
“The truth is,” she answered deliberately, “that you and I can not be friends.”
“Why?”
“Because we can’t be! Because — men are always men. There isn’t any way for men and women to be friends. Forgive me for saying it. But it is quite true. A business woman in your employment — can’t forget that a real friendship with you is impossible. That is why, from the very beginning, I wanted it to be purely a matter of business between us. I didn’t really wish to skate with you, or do anything of that kind with you. I’d rather not lunch with you; I — I had rather you drew the line — and let me draw it clearly, cleanly, and without mistake — as I draw it between myself and my employees. If you wish, I can continue to come here on that basis until my work is finished. Otherwise, I shall not come again.”
Her back was still toward him.
“Very well,” he said, bluntly.
She heard him rise and walk toward the door; sat listening without turning her head, already regretting what she had said. And now she became conscious that her honesty with herself and with him had been a mistake, entailing humiliation for her — the humiliation of letting him understand that she couldn’t afford to care for him, and that she did already. She had thought of him first, and of herself last — had conceded a hopeless situation in order that her decision might not hurt his vanity.
It had been a bad mistake. And now he might be thinking that she had tried to force him into an attitude toward herself which she could not expect, or — God knew what he might be thinking.
Dismayed and uncertain, she stood up nervously as he reëntered the room and came toward her, holding out his hand.
“I’m going to town,” he said pleasantly. “I won’t bother you any more. Remain; come and go as you like without further fear of my annoying you. The servants are properly instructed. They will be at your orders. I’m sorry — I meant to be more agreeable. Good-bye, Miss Nevers.”
She laid her hand in his, lifelessly, then withdrew it. Dumb, dreadfully confused, she looked up at him; then, as he turned coolly away, an inarticulate sound of protest escaped her lips. He halted and turned around.
“It isn’t fair — what you are doing — Mr. Desboro.”
“What else is there to do?”
“Why do you ask me? Why must the burden of decision always rest with me?”
“But my decision is that I had better go. I can’t remain here without — annoying you.”
“Why can’t you remain here as my employer? Why can’t we enjoy matter-of-fact business relations? I ask no more than that — I want no more. I am afraid you think I do expect more — that I expect friendship. It is impossible, unsuitable — and I don’t even wish for it — —”
“I do,” he said.
“How can we be friends, from a social standpoint? There is nothing to build on, no foundation — nothing for friendship to subsist on — —”
“Could you and I meet anywhere in the world and become less than friends?” he asked. “Tell me honestly. It is impossible, and you and I both know it.”
And, as she made no reply: “Friends — more than friends, possibly; never less. And you know it, and so do I,” he said under his breath.
