The Wheel of Life
CHAPTER VI
SHOWS THAT MR. WORLDLY-WISE-MAN
MAY BELONG TO EITHER SEX
Several afternoons later Trent was to have further light thrown
on the character of Christina Coles by a chance remark of Roger
Adams, into whose office he had dropped for a moment as he was on
his way to make his first call upon Mrs. Bridewell.
After a few friendly enquiries about the young man's own work,
and the report of a promising word from the great Benson, Adams
took up a letter lying loose among the papers on his big littered
desk.
"Half the tragedy in New York is contained in a letter like
this," he observed. "Do you know, by the way, that the mass of
outside literary workers drawn in at last by the whirlpool
constitutes almost a population? Take this girl, now, she is so
consumed by her ambition, for heaven knows what, that she comes
here and starves in an attic rather than keep away in comfort. That
reminds me," he added, with a sudden recollection, "she's from your
part of the country."
"Indeed!" An intuition shot like a conviction into Trent's mind.
"Could her name, I wonder, by any chance be Coles?"
"You know her then?"
"I've met her, but do you mean to say that ability is what she
hasn't got?"
"For some things I've no doubt she has an amazing amount, only
she's mistaken its probable natural bent. She strikes me as a woman
who was born for the domestic hearth, or failing that she'd do
admirably, I dare say, in a hospital."
"It's the literary instinct, then, that's missing in her?"
"Not the instinct so much as the literary stuff, and in that
she's not different from a million others. She is evidently on fire
with the impulse to create, but the power—the creative
matter—isn't in her. Let her keep up, and she'll probably go
on doing 'hack' work until her death."
"But she's so pretty," urged Trent with a chivalric
qualm—and he remembered her smooth brown hair parted over her
rosy ears, her blue eyes, fresh as flowers, and the peculiar
steadfastness that possessed her face.
"The more's the pity," said Adams, while the muscles about his
mouth twitched slightly, as they always did when he was deeply
moved, "it's a bigger waste. I wrote to her as a father might have
done and begged her to give it up," he went on, "and in return," he
tapped the open sheet, "she sends me this fierce, pathetic little
letter and informs me grandly that her life is dedicated.
Dedicated, good Lord!" he exclaimed compassionately, "dedicated to
syndicated stories in the Sunday press and an occasional verse in
the cheaper magazines."
"And there's absolutely nothing to be done?" asked Trent.
Adams met the question with a frown.
"Oh, if it would make it all come right in the end, I'd go on
publishing her empty, trite little articles until Gabriel blows his
trumpet."
"It wouldn't help, though, after all."
"Well, hardly—the quick way is sure to be the most
merciful," he laughed softly with the quality of kindly humour
which never failed him, "we'll starve her out as soon as possible,"
he declared.
As if to dismiss the subject, he refolded the letter, slipped it
in its envelope, and placed it in one of his crammed pigeon-holes.
"Thank God, your own case isn't of the hopeless kind!" he exclaimed
fervently.
"Somehow success looks like selfishness," returned Trent,
showing by his tone the momentary depression which settled so
easily upon his variable moods.
At the speech Adams turned upon him the full sympathy of his
smile, while he enclosed in a warm grasp the hand which the young
man held out.
"It's what we're made for," he responded cheerily, "success in
one way or another."
His words, and even more his look, remained with Trent long
afterwards, blowing, like a fresh strong wind, through the hours of
despondency which followed for him upon any temporary exaltation.
The young man had a trick of remembering faces, not as wearing
their accustomed daily look, but as he had seen them animated and
transfigured by any vivid moment of experience, and he found later
that when he thought of Adams it was to recall the instant's kindly
lighting of the eyes, the flicker of courageous humour about the
mouth and the dauntless ring in the usually quiet voice. He
realised now, as he walked through the humming streets, that
success or failure is not an abstract quantity but a relative
value—that a man may be a shining success in the world's eyes
and a comparative failure in his own. To Trent, Adams had for years
represented the cultured and scholarly critic—the writer who,
in his limited individual field, had incontestably "arrived." Now,
for the first time, he saw that the editor looked upon himself as a
man of small achievements, and that, inasmuch as his idea had been
vastly more than his execution, he felt himself to belong to the
unfulfilled ones of the earth.
When, a little later, he reached Mrs. Bridewell's house in
Sixty-ninth Street the servant invited him, after a moment's wait
below, into her sitting-room upstairs, and, following the man's
lead, he was finally ushered into a charming apartment upon the
second floor. A light cloud of cigarette smoke trailed toward him
as he entered, and when he paused, confused by broken little peals
of laughter, he made out a group of ladies gathered about a tiny
Oriental table upon which stood a tray of Turkish coffee. Gerty
rose from the circle as he advanced, and moved a single step
forward, while the pale green flounces of her train rippled
prettily about her feet. Her hair was loosely arranged, and she
gave him an odd impression of wearing what in his provincial mind
he called a "wrapper"—his homely name for the exquisite
garment which flowed, straight and unconfined, from her slender
shoulders. His mother, he remembered, not without a saving humour,
had always insisted that a lady should appear before the opposite
sex only in the entire armour of her "stays" and close-fitting
bodice.
Gerty, as she mentioned the names of her callers, subsided with
her ebbing green waves into the chair from which she had risen, and
held her cigarette toward Trent with a pretty inviting gesture. Her
delicate grace gave the pose a piquant attraction, and he found
himself watching with delight the tiny rings of smoke which curled
presently from her parted lips. As she smoked she held her chin
slightly lifted, and regarded him from beneath lowered lids with an
arch and careless humour.
"If you'd been the Pope himself," she remarked, as an
indifferent apology, "I'd hardly have done more than fling the
table-cover over my head. Even you, after you'd spent a morning
trying on a velvet gown, would require a lounge and a good
smoke."
He admitted that he thought it probable, and then turned to one
of the callers who had spoken—a handsome woman with gray
hair, which produced an odd effect of being artificial.
"I wish I'd done nothing worse than try on clothes," she
observed, "but I've been to lunch with an old lover."
"Poor dear," murmured Gerty, compassionately, as she passed
Trent a cup of coffee, "was he so cruel as to tell you you'd
retained your youth?"
"He did worse," sighed the handsome woman, "he assured me I
hadn't."
"Well, he couldn't have done more if he'd married you," declared
Gerty, with her gleeful cynicism.
"He was too brutally frank for a husband," remarked a second
caller as she sipped her coffee. "You showed more discretion,
Susie, than I gave you credit for."
"Oh, you needn't compliment me," protested Susie; "in those days
he hadn't a penny."
"Indeed! and now?"
"Now he has a great many, but he has attached to himself a wife,
and I a husband. Well, I can't say honestly that I regret him," she
laughed, "for if he has lived down his poverty he hasn't his
passion for red—he wore a red necktie. Why is it," she
lamented generally to the group, "that the male mind leans
inevitably toward violent colours?"
"Perhaps they appeal to the barbaric part of us," suggested
Trent, becoming suddenly at ease amid the battle of inanities.
"Have you a weakness for red, too, Mr. Trent?" enquired
Gerty.
The sparkle in his eyes leaped out at her challenge.
"Only in the matter of hair," he retorted boldly.
She regarded him intently for a moment, while he felt again as
he had felt at Laura Wilde's, not only her fascination—her
personal radiance—but the conviction that she carried at
heart a deep disgust, a heavy disenchantment, which her
ostentatious gayety could not conceal. Even her beauty gave back to
him a suggestion of insincerity, and he wondered if the brightness
of her hair and of her mouth was as artificial as her brilliant
manner. It was magnificent, but, after all, it was not nature.
"Because I warn you now," she pursued, after the brief pause,
"that if you bind your first play in red I shall refuse to read
it."
"You can't escape on that ground," rejoined Trent, "I'll make it
green."
"Well, you're more civilised than Perry," declared Gerty, with
one of her relapses into defiant ridicule, which caused Trent to
wonder if she were not acting upon an intuition which taught her
that a slight shock is pleasantly stimulating to the fancy, "and I
suppose it's my association with him that convinces me if we'd
leave your sex alone it would finally revert to the savage state
and to skin girdles."
"Now don't you think Perry would look rather nice in skins?"
enquired the handsome woman. "I can quite see him with his club
like the man in—which one of Wagner's?"
"It isn't the club of the savage I object to," coolly protested
Gerty, "it's the taste. Perry has been married to me five years,"
she continued, reflectively, "a long enough period you would think
to teach even a Red Indian that my hair positively shrieks at
anything remotely resembling pink. Yet when I went to the Hot
Springs last autumn he actually had this room hung for me in
terra-cotta."
Trent cast a blank stare about the tapestried walls.
"But where is it?" he demanded.
"It's gone," was Gerty's brief rejoinder, and she added, after a
moment devoted to her cigarette, "now that's where it pays to have
the wisdom of the serpent. I really flatter myself," she admitted
complacently, "that I've a genius, I did it so beautifully. Your
young innocent would have mangled matters to the point of butchery
and have gloried like a martyr in her domestic squabbles, but I've
learned a lesson or two from misfortune, and one of them is that a
man invariably prides himself upon possessing the quality he hasn't
got. That's a perfectly safe rule," she annotated along the margin
of her story. "I used to compliment an artist upon his art and an
Apollo upon his beauty—but it never worked. They always
looked as if I had under-valued them, so now I industriously praise
the folly of the wise and the wisdom of the fool."
"And the decorative talent of Perry," laughed one of the
callers.
"You needn't smile," commented Gerty, while Trent watched the
little greenish flame dance in her eyes, "it isn't funny—it's
philosophy. I made it out of life."
"But what about the terra-cotta?" enquired Susie.
"Oh, as I've said, I did nothing reckless," resumed Gerty,
relaxing among her cushions, "I neither slapped his face nor went
into hysterics—these tactics, I've found, never work unless
one happens to be a prima donna—so I complimented him upon
his consideration and sat down and waited. That night he went to a
club dinner—after the beautiful surprise he'd given me he
felt that he deserved a little freedom—and the door had no
sooner closed upon him than I paid the butler to come in and smoke
the walls. He didn't want to do it at all, so I really had to pay
him very high—I gave him a suit of Perry's evening clothes.
It's the ambition of his life, you know, to look like Perry."
"How under heaven did he manage it?" persisted Susie. "The
smoke, I mean, not the resemblance."
"There are a good many lamps about the house and we brought them
all in, every one. The butler warned me it was dangerous, but I
assured him I was desperate. That settled it—that and the
evening clothes—and by the time Perry returned the room was
like an extinct volcano."
"And he never found out?" asked Susie, as the callers rose to
go.
"Found out! My dear, do you really give him credit for feminine
penetration? Well, if you will
go—good-bye—and—oh—don't look at my gown
to-morrow night or you'll turn blue with envy," then, as Trent
started to follow the retreating visitors, she detained him by a
gesture. "Stay awhile, unless you're bored," she urged, "but if
you're really bored I shan't say a word. I assure you I sometimes
bore myself."
As he fell back into his chair Trent was conscious of a feeling
of intimacy, and strange as it was, it dispelled instantly his
engrossing shyness.
"I'm not bored," he said, "I'm merely puzzled."
"Oh, I know," Gerty nodded, "but you'll get over it. I puzzle
everybody at first, but it doesn't last because I'm really as clear
as running water. My gayety and my good spirits are but the joys of
flippancy, you see."
"I don't see," protested Trent, his eyes warming.
She laughed softly, as if rather pleased than otherwise by the
frankness of his admiration. "You haven't lost as yet the divine
faith of youth," she said, carelessly flicking the ashes of her
cigarette upon the little table at her elbow. Then, tossing the
burned end into a silver tray, she pushed it from her with a
decisive movement. "I've had six," she observed, "and that's my
limit."
"What I'm trying to understand," confessed Trent, leaning
forward in his earnestness, "is why you should care so greatly for
Miss Wilde?"
Gerty flashed up suddenly from her cushions. "And pray why
shouldn't I?" she demanded.
"Because," he hesitated an instant and then advanced with the
audacity born of ignorance, "you're as much alike as a thrush and a
paroquet."
She laughed again.
"So you consider me a paroquet?"
"In comparison with Laura Wilde."
"Well, I'd have said a canary," she remarked indulgently, "but
we'll let it pass. I don't see though," she serenely continued,
"why a paroquet shouldn't have a feeling for a thrush?"
He shook his head, smiling. "It seems a bit odd, that's
all."
"Then, if it's any interest to you to know it," pursued Gerty,
with a burst of confidence, "I'd walk across Brooklyn Bridge, every
step of the way, on my knees for Laura. That's because I believe in
her," she wound up emphatically, "and because, too, I don't happen
to believe much in anybody else."
"So you know her well?"
"I went to school with her and I adored her then, but I adore
her even more to-day. Somehow she always seems to be knocking for
the good in one, and it has to come out at last because she stands
so patiently and waits. She makes me over every time she meets me,
shapes me after some ideal image of me she has in her brain, and
then I'm filled with desperate shame if I don't seem at least a
little bit to correspond with it."
"I understand," said Trent slowly; "one feels her as one feels a
strong wind on a high mountain. There's a wonderful bigness about
her."
"It's because she's different," explained Gerty, "she's kept so
apart from life that she knows it only in its elemental
freshness—she has a kind of instinct for truth just as she
has for poetry or for beauty, and our little quibbles, our
incessant inanities have never troubled her at all."
The servant entered with a card as she finished, and after
reading the name she made a quick movement of interest.
"Ask him to come up," she said to the man, adding immediately as
Trent rose to go, "it's Arnold Kemper. Will you stay and see
him?"
Trent shook his head, while he held out his hand with a laugh.
"I won't stay," he answered; "I don't like him."
She looked up puzzled, her brows bent in an enquiring frown.
"Not like him! Why, you've never met."
"What has that to do with it?" he persisted lightly. "One
doesn't have to meet a man to hate him."
"One does unless one's a person of stupid prejudices."
"Well, maybe I am," he admitted, "but I have my side."
As the portières were drawn back, he turned hastily away,
to come face to face with Gerty's caller the next instant upon the
threshold. Keen as his curiosity was he took in, at his brief
glance, only that Kemper presented a bright and brave appearance
and walked with a peculiarly energetic step.