Arthur Stringer

“ Then her thoughts went back to her car. From the crest of the hill which it had mounted like a swallow, Teddie could see the familiar gray ribbon of the road where it twined through the woodlanded valley below her. It was a very inviting road. It was more than inviting, in Teddie's present mood—it was challenging. And she breathed deeper as she saw that she couldn't even afford to keep an eye on her speedometer dial.
She was more than half-way down the long slope when she first caught sight of the motor-truck loaded with a double tier of cement blocks. ”

“ And all this took her thoughts on to Ruby Reamer, the businesslike young girl of the studios from whom, without quite realizing it, she had learned so much. Beside the worldly-wise and sophisticated Ruby, Teddie remembered, she had more than once felt like a petted and pampered and slightly over-fed Pomeranian beside a quick-witted street-wanderer who'd only too early learned to forage for a living. And the question as to what Ruby might do in any such contingency led her to a calmer and colder assessment of her own resources. ”

“ It struck Conkling as odd that her face should go pale over a decision so trivial. It struck him as equally odd, when he unfolded stool and easel in the shadow of the cedar hedge, that the thin face should just as suddenly flush again. For he had sagaciously made note of the direction in which the girl was working her way along this hedge, and he chose his position so that her activities, as time went on, would not take her farther away from him. ”

“ Teddie gravely continued, "and I've got to get in step with it or get walked over. There are people down here who have the gift of making poverty romantic, people who can turn an empty pocketbook into a sort of adventure. They can eat onion soup and spaghetti au gratin and wash cold-storage capon down with that eau-de-quinine stuff they drink and be happy on it because they know they are free, free to express themselves as they want to express themselves, free to work and live and think, and come and go as they like. And that's wonderful, Uncle Chandler, when you come to think of it." ”

“ Now, most girls of Teddie's set and inclination escape from their adolescent boredom by excursion into amorous adventure. But Teddie felt that she had exhausted love very early in life. For at the tender age of nine she had fallen in love with the Park policeman who'd so easily gathered her up in his arm after a fall on the Bridle Path just under the Seventy-Second Street bridge, where the deep shadow of the arch gave too abrupt a change from sunlight to gloom and caused her horse to swerve, buck, and then bolt riderless as far as the Sheep-fold. ”

“ Teddie, once she was alone in her studio, experienced a sense of confinement, a feeling of compression, which had hitherto been absent from her newer mode of life. She felt the need for untrammelled movement through fresh air, the craving to get out into open spaces and leave the suffocation of city walls behind her. She promptly decided, in fact, to drive her car out to Tuxedo, and even went to the telephone to order it from the garage. Then she remembered that she no longer had a car. ”

“ Life, my dear, is a waffle-iron that shuts down on us and squeezes us into nice little squares like all the other waffles in the world. It will come and take even the immortal You-ness out of you. It tames you, Teddie, and trims you down, and turns you out an altogether acceptable but an altogether commonplace member of society. ”

“ But the time came when Teddie was tired of golf, just as tired of making the rounds of her eighteen holes as she was of making the rounds of the circular ball-room of the Tuxedo Club with fox-trotting youngsters and sedately waltzing oldsters. She was tired of dinners at Table Rock, and tired of seeing the "No-One-Admitted-Without-Permit" signs, and tired of the Meadow Brook steeplechase, and tired of the stately and stupid dinners in town. She was tired of life and tired of even herself. ”

“ What troubled her, for a moment, was something coming down the opposing slope. It was a pigeon-gray roadster stripped of its top, a homely and heavy-bodied roadster which trailed rolling cumuli of road-dust in its wake. Her quick eye told her that as the different factors now revealed themselves the pigeon-gray roadster would pass the motor-truck before she could. This meant that she would have to give way and slow down and humbly wait for the autocrat piloting the pigeon-gray roadster. And this Teddie had neither the desire nor the intention of doing. For she knew who owned that roadster. ”

“ He turned about, dazed, as he heard the renewed shrill duet of voices in prayer. The two frenzied old women were on their knees side by side in front of the smoking sarcophagus. They were on their knees, swaying back and forth and calling on God to cleanse their house of its lewdness. In the sarcophagus lay nothing but a layer of smoldering ashes, subsiding slowly, like melting snow. And Conkling, who knew by this time entirely what it meant, felt a blind wave of hate untouched by pity well through his body. ”

“ And the Commodore in question, instead of being upset by this calamitous intimation of beauty in distress, adjusted his cravat and stopped in at Thorley's for the insertion of a Richmond rose-bud in the button-hole of his right-hand lapel. Then he toddled blithely down to the wilds of Greenwich Village, where he arrived at Teddie's studio just in time to see an urbane old gentleman pocket, with an air of quiet but unqualified satisfaction, a narrow slip of paper which looked remarkably like a bank-check. ”

“ She knew it even before she saw the bareheaded driver alone in the high-backed seat, the tanned and goggled face with the oil-stained old putty-colored motor-coat buttoned close up under the bony young Cæsar-Augustus chin. It was Gerry West's car. And Gerry West was in it, imperially demanding his right-of-way as he pounded man-like down a road which he regarded as entirely and altogether his own. But it was not Teddie's intention, that afternoon, to play second fiddle to anyone. ”

“ Yet she heard diatribes on the new-rich with a rather disdainful indifference, for not a few of these Want-to-Be's seems much handsomer to the eye than most of the Have-Beens, to say nothing of being brighter and brisker. Teddie, in fact, nursed a secret disdain for the hereditary millionaire, since it was the dullness of the brood, she maintained, which was embittering her blighted young life. For Teddie still chafed against the bars of her gilded cage and nursed the pardonably human illusion that the thing you can't quite get is the thing you must have. ”

“ This played the added trick of making her seem, to Conkling, like a child prematurely aged, vaguely silvered by the life about her, the same as her roadside sycamores had been silvered by dust. Yet as his quick gaze rested on the gravely innocent eyes and the rose-like cream and pink of the arm above the gauntlet-top he was again perplexed by a persistent sense of girlishness. ”

“ Teddie, in time, came into possession of her roadster, a small wine-colored racer upholstered in dove-gray and neatly disguised as a shopping-car. And it seemed, during the first few weeks of its ownership, that the wings of personal freedom had finally been bestowed upon the recalcitrant Teddie, who went hillward in her roadster with claret and caviar sandwiches packed under its seat and went cityward with fat and disorderly little rolls of bank-notes tucked under its cushion-ends. ”

“ But he felt so like a wanderer into regions of desolation touched with mystery that the opening lines of Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came kept recurring to his mind. And it struck him as odd that he should spot a figure so vivid in a background so dolorous. For the girl's eyes were a cornflower blue, made deeper in color by the thickly planted black lashes. Her hair, which even the abundant hood of the sunbonnet could not altogether hide, was a burnished mahogany brown. ”

“ Instead, with his hand still on her shoulder, he stooped and kissed her.
Teddie recoiled three full steps, and stood with her arms straight at her sides and a black rage in her startled eyes. Gerry's own hands had dropped to his side, and his head fell forward, for all the world like a chrysanthemum that needed watering.
"O-o-o-o-o-o!" gasped Teddie, with the most unmistakable accents of loathing and anger in her voice. "Are all men like that?" ”

“ When Teddie left Gerald Rhindelander West's office she left behind her more than a blue-fox canteen muff. She left the last of her confidence in life, the last of her belief in mankind. She found herself compelled to face a world that seemed too big and brutal for even the valorous spirit of youth. ”

“ She went forth to the terra incognita of Nassau Street cuirassed in tailored and braided trimness and gauntleted in spotless kid with just the right array of wrinkles about her glove-tops. She was still further entrenched behind a four-skin scarf of blue-fox—which wasn't blue at all—and a canteen muff to match, to say nothing of seven cyanitic-looking orchids which completed the color-scheme and fluttered demurely above her slightly fluttering heart. ”

“ The apple was golden, but not more golden than the soft ivory glow of the woman's body, bathed in its wash of purifying color. That body made Conkling's mind flash back to the Borghese with its Sacred and Profane Love and a moment later revert to the Magdalen in the Pitti. There was the same divine fullness of throat and breast, the same wealth of red-gold hair, the unmistakable mellowness of color and melting loveliness of line. ”

“ And he realized, as he stared at her, how some unconsidered protective coloration was causing her to merge into the brocaded background of that ruinous old garden. For she wore a lilac-colored sunbonnet and a frock of flowered organdie, and her hands were incased in a pair of russet gauntlets which had plainly known better days. Conkling could see that she had been engaged in clipping streamers of wild grape from the hedge which half screened her. She still held a pair of rusty-looking rose shears in her fingers. ”

“ Then wakening to the extent to which he had overlooked her in his excitement, he linked his arm fraternally through hers as she stood studying the canvas.
"Yes, it's lovely," she murmured, without responding to the pressure on her arm. She seemed suddenly small and fragile there under the shadow of his shoulder.
"There's only one thing in all the world lovelier," he told her as he smiled down into her face, grown pitiful with its shadows of fatigue. ”

“ He was explaining, in broken English, that his exchequer stood much too limited to make change for a bill so big. Then, with a smile of inspiration, he placed the tray of violets in the girl's hands, pointed toward a near-by store on the side-street, and plainly implied that he would break the twenty and return with more negotiable currency.
So Teddie stood patiently holding the tray of violets, in the clear white light of the sunny Avenue, happy in the flowery perfumes which were being wafted up to her delicately distended nostril. ”

“ Teddie's head was much clearer by the time she had motored out to Tuxedo. Her head was clearer, but the contradictory tides of feeling that eddied about her troubled young heart seemed as muddled up as ever. Even her Uncle Chandler was not entirely oblivious of the fact that some newer ferment was working in the depths of that bottled-up young soul. ”

“ She fought down her sudden weak impulse to cry out, her equally absurd propulsion to flight, her even more ridiculous temptation to break the window-panes in front of her with her clenched fist and scream for help.
For she realized, even before he made a move, that he was impervious to the weapons that had always served her. He stood beyond the frontiers of those impulses and reactions in which she moved and had her being. The very laws of her world meant nothing to him. It was like waking up and finding a burglar in the house, a burglar who knew no law but force. ”

“ It was not often that he'd enjoyed the luxury of finding Teddie Hayden on the defensive, and he intended to make the most of it. "It's quite apparent he isn't afraid of you!"
"I was hoping you could make him that way," acknowledged Teddie. She said it quietly, but there was a barb in it which Gerry couldn't quite overlook.
"Well, we'll get him that way," he announced with vigor, as he rose to his feet. "If it's action they're after, they'll get all they want!"
A consciousness of clearing skies both elated and depressed the brooding-eyed Teddie. ”

“ I have seen thine adulteries and thy neighings, the lewdness of thy whoredom and thine abominations on the hills in the fields—and thou wilt be made clean!"
Conkling, emerging from the well of the narrow stairway, stood panting and stunned. The air was thick with smoke, and for a moment or two he found it far from easy to see. But he made out two gaunt old women, disheveled and rapt, so intent on their own ends that they neither challenged nor regarded him. He saw the taller one kneeling beside the bone-white sarcophagus which stood toward the center of the attic floor. ”

“ He waited for almost half an hour. Then Julia Keswick came ghost-like out of the dusk, heavy with its mingled smell of phlox and mignonette. He stood up, once he was sure who it was. She, too, stood, without speaking, face to face with him in the filtered moonlight.
"Was it hard?" he asked inadequately and with a quaver in his voice. She missed his small gesture of self-accusation in the darkness.
"It was dangerous," she admitted, more composedly than he had expected. ”

“ That was a great hour in the life of our over-ennuied Teddie, who, in fact, formed so substantial a friendship with those helmeted heroes that she was thereafter permitted to slide down the polished brass pole which led from the sleeping-quarters to the ground floor of the Fire Hall. So active was her interest in their burnished apparatus, and so dominating grew her hunger to hear the great red motors roar and see the Ladder-Truck wheels strike fire as they took the car-rails at the Avenue-crossing, that she turned in a quite unnecessary alarm. ”

“ And even then he seemed to hesitate so long that Teddie, with a sinking heart, began to wonder if Raoul Uhlan had passed away from his injuries and she was about to be indicted as a murderess.
Seeing that sharp look of distress in her eyes, the attorney for the plaintiff became more urbane than ever, and protested that from the first he had advocated adjustment of some sort, a quiet and respectable settlement out of court that would cast no reflection on a family as prominent as hers and would obviate, of course, a distressing and perhaps humiliating campaign of publicity. ”

“ Conkling, on returning to the Keswick house for the second time, nursed an elusive sense of frustration. He nursed, as well, a sense of playing little more than a secondary role in a drama of deferment. For the accessories of the drama were not arranging themselves as he might have wished. On his way back to the manor-house he had come face to face with Lavinia Keswick, and that austere old figure, seated in a decrepid canopied phaëton drawn by a rawboned mare, had either failed or refused to recognize him. ”

“ The girl did not answer his question. Instead, she placed a smaller canvas for his inspection and said: "Would you care to see the Corot now?"
It was the same story over again, only this time the copy was of a canvas with which he was not familiar; and again he wondered how he was going to be able to tell her. She became conscious of his increasing gravity.
"You don't like them?" she asked at a venture.
The only thing he liked in all that dusty-aired attic was the slender, stooping figure with its aura of repressed ardencies. But this, he knew, was not the time to say so. ”

“ In this wide basin of marble she had built what first impressed him as a funeral pyre. Heavy coils of smoke were rising from it as she rocked her body back and forth and prayed aloud. But a vaguely familiar smell about that heavy smoke brought Conkling toward her at a bound, for his nostrils, he knew, were sniffing the odors of burning canvas impregnated with oil. But he stopped midway in his flight and ran to the far side of the room, where he knew the Titian stood. He saw there only the empty frame from which the canvas had been slashed. That took him at a leap back to the sarcophagus. ”

“ Her heart tightened a little, for she knew it would take promptness to swing out to the left and back to the right again before the lordly roadster pounded opposite the motor-lorry. If he had to slow up, at the last moment, so much the better, for he seemed, at the moment, to stand typical of those steam-rollers of life which she had always so actively resented. It was a bigger car than hers, a distinctly male car, and as such it owed her consideration. The burden of courtesy naturally must rest upon it. ”