Eris

“ There was a letter from his aunt on his desk. He tore it open; glanced through it without the usual grin; laid it aside.
A slight, rather vacant smile remained on his lips: he kept moving the lapel of his coat and inhaling the odour of a white clove-pink—one of a cluster that had stood in a little rose-bowl between Eris and himself at breakfast.
A pencil, dislodged, rolled over his pad and dropped onto the floor. He let it lie.
Neither work nor sleep attracted him. ”

“ Smull in addition to the frozen mint offered to Eris—and smilingly declined.
After the grave one had retired with the empty coffee cups and had closed the folding glass doors, Eris looked enquiringly at Mr. Smull, awaiting the broaching of what most closely concerned her.
But Smull, half draining his frosted glass, assumed a familiarity almost boisterous.
“See here, Eris, you’re not going to get on unless you’re a good fellow. You’re not going to get anywhere if you don’t learn to keep up your end.” ”

“ He halted at the kitchen door, buttoning his snowy jacket, gaping stolidly at Fanny’s child.
For he knew her instantly—Eris, daughter of Discord.
“Hello, Dad,” she said uncertainly.
“Hello.... Waal, waal, I’ll be jiggered! Waal, dang it all!... So you took a notion to come back, did you?”
“If you’ll let me stay for a little while——”
“Why, Eris, how you talk!” exclaimed Mazie. “This is your home; ain’t it, Pa?”
Elmer buttoned the last button of his milking jacket:
“She can stay if she’s a mind to. She allus does as she’s a mind to,” he replied grimly. ”

“ Whatever is snatched away from man or beast instantly becomes disproportionately desirable.
It was so with Annan. Suddenly he realised how much he wanted Eris. Really he had not thought much about this dinner, except immediately after their meeting at the Looking Glass.
He had borne it in mind, impatiently the first day, pleasurably the second, with complacent equanimity thereafter. But he had remembered it.
For the moments of surprise and emotion so charmingly experienced in the projection room had little else except surprise for a foundation. Curiosity alone perpetuated them. ”

“ It was high time that the world made no mistake about it. Men of Albert Smull’s sort had better understand what was his status vis-à-vis with Eris.
Intensely annoyed—and without any reason, as he realised—he went out in a characteristically masculine frame of mind, hailed a disreputable taxi on Greenwich Avenue, and drove to Jane Street. ”

“ Cooing doves are her favorite birds, and roses and myrtle are sacred to her.
Louvre, Paris.
Venus de Milo.
At the wedding of Thetis, a water nymph, all the gods and goddesses except Eris were seated at the banquet. [Pg 117] Eris is the goddess of discord, and she had not been invited, as she always causes people to quarrel and so is loved by no one. She was angry at this slight, and, coming to the door of the banquet hall, she threw a golden apple upon the table. ”

“ Elmer rose on one elbow: “Say, you don’t think he wants our Eris, do yeh?”
“Why not? Isn’t Eris good enough for any man?”
“Well, well, dang it all, Stew Graydon seems diff-runt.... He’s too educated ’n’ stylish for plain folks—’n’ he’s got a big position in the mill. He don’t want our Eris——”
“Why not?” repeated Mazie.
Odell shook his frowsy head: “He’ll want a rich girl. Eris hain’t got only that heifer-money. I can’t give her more’n a mite——”
“That don’t count with me, Elmer.” ”

“ Over the telephone he told Hattie to place these in her bed-room before she returned.
So now he picked up the evening paper in the little living-room and composed himself to wait.
The culinary clatter of Hattie in the kitchen came to him fitfully; shrill voices from ragged children at play in the sunset-flooded street; the grinding roar of motor trucks herded like leviathans toward their west-side corrals; the eternal jar and quiver of the vast, iron city. Otherwise, silence; a heated stillness in the isolated abode of Eris, “Daughter of Discord” ”

“ Pretty, gloomy, lovely, dreary—oasis or desert, it doesn’t matter; I’m always in the market for spots.”
“Are you looking for a farm?” inquired Eris.
“Farm? Well, that’s in my line, too,—farms, mills, nice old stone bridges,—all that stuff is in my line,—in fact, everything is in my line,—and nothing on my line——” He lifted a dripping bait, lowered it again, winked at Eris.
“I suppose,” he said, “there isn’t a single thing in all the world that isn’t in my line. Why, even you are!” ”

“ We do it, too, don’t we?”
“I never did,” said Eris naïvely.
Betsy’s smile faded and she gave Eris a sharp look. Then, abruptly, she took both her hands and sat regarding her.
“I’ll tell you something,” she concluded, finally. “Men won’t fool you: you’ll fool them.”
“I shan’t try to,” said Eris.
“That’s how you’ll do it.... You’re unusual; do you realize it? What is it that interests you most?”
“I want to learn.”
“I thought so. I’ve known one or two girls like you. Pretty ones.... Almost as pretty as you, Eris. They raise the devil with men.”
“How?” asked Eris, astonished. ”

“ Coltfoot?”
“All right,” he murmured, scratching away on his copy.
“And Eris? Do you ever see her, Barry?”
“Now and then.”
“Is it all over?”
“What?”
“Your affair with her——”
“Can it, Rosalind!——”
“You’re the canner, my fickle friend. We’re all pickles and you jarred us.... Sour pickles.... When you’re through with a girl she’s a schmeer.
“Look at me! I’m a schmeer. I was innocent and happy till you came schmoozing.... You know what I hear about Eris?”
No answer.
“Albert Smull is crazy about her.... He’s married, isn’t he?” ”

“ A woman can tell, no matter what a pig of a man might think. I like you, Eris. I want you to get on. I’d love to have you make good some day.” She added naïvely: “—If only to put Barry Annan’s nose out of joint.”
Eris had covered her wet lashes with her fore-arm. Now she removed it.
“Mr. Annan has been wonderful,” she said in a tear-congested voice.
“Three cheers!” said Betsy, laughing. “You’re a loyal youngster, aren’t you? Everybody likes Barry Annan. Several love him. But you mustn’t,” she added with a gravity that deceived Eris. ”

“ At that Betsy’s clear laughter rang out in the room. Eris blushed furiously; then, suddenly and swiftly en rapport, laughed too.
“He’s so nice and so spoiled,” said Betsy. “That bland grin of his!—and he is clever—oh, very. He knows how to make your heart jump when he writes. In private character he’s kind but mischievous. He’ll experiment with a girl if she’ll let him. It interests him to try cause and effect on us. Don’t you let him. He has that terrible talent for swift intimacy. ”

“ Betsy B.
“P. S.—I forgot to say that your little protégée, Eris, does extremely well whatever is required of her. She plays one of those self-conscious rustics, half educated, vain, credulous, and with a capacity for a world of mischief. I’m a pig, I suppose, but I’m glad Crystal Gray cut the part to slivers. Eris has no experience and no training, of course, but she screens well, is intelligent, and does exactly what Frank Donnell tells her to do. ”

“ Smull want me?”
“We’re all set. Leo Shill is to announce it. You’re to group with Albert and Ratty Creevy and receive bouquets. [169] Come, Eris; let that young man’s educated hands alone——”
Eris, unconscious until then that Annan still retained her hands, withdrew them without embarrassment. Rosalind passed a beautifully plump arm around her waist, letting her amused glance linger on Annan:
“The immaculate lover,” she drawled, “always busy.” And to Eris: “You’ll like him better, though, after it’s all over,—after the teething, my dear. We all bite on Barry.” ”

“ Then the candour of her chaste self-revelation grew clear to him—her exquisite ignorance, her virgin confidence in the heavenly inviolability of love.
“Do you understand, Barry?”
“I think so.”
“You see,” she explained, “unmarried I can go and still have you.... But careers often end when children come.”
“Don’t you ever want them, Eris?”
“Well—as I’ve never had any, isn’t it natural I should prefer you and a career to you and a baby?” ”

“ She said, tranquilly: “It is kind of you to be interested in me. I feel it deeply, Mr. Annan. It seems wonderful to me, that a man so—a man like yourself—should have—have time to care what happens to a perfectly strange nobody.... But I can’t go home.... Not yet.... I shouldn’t care to live if I can’t have an opportunity to learn.... So—so that’s that.”
He, finally, laughed. “Is it, Eris?”
“Yes,” she said, smiling at him, “I’m afraid it is.”
“And that’s that,” he concluded.
“Yes, really it is.”
“All right.” He got up, stood fumbling with a cigarette. “All right, Eris. ”

“ Scores of communications came from various birds of prey who infest the fringes of the profession—the “don’t-do-anything-till-you-hear-from-me” boys; the noisy, persistent Gentile who lies for a living and whose only asset is the people he traps; the Jew, penniless and discredited, determined to make a commission out of anybody and undeterred by the dirt of the transaction.
All of these communications Eris laid before Frank Donnell. ”

“ She ought to give every moment to her art,” explained the girl naïvely.
“Is—that—so? Well, you can chase that idea outa your head, my girl, because you ain’t never going to be no actress. And that’s that!”
“Some day,” said Eris, with a flushed smile, “I shall follow my own judgment and give myself to art.... And that’s that!”
As they stood there, father and daughter, confronting each other in the pale April sunshine, the great herd-bull bellowed from the cattle-barn, shaking the still air with his thunderous reverberations. ”

“ And now Eris knew that their hour for understanding had arrived. She had much to say to him. Her clasped hands tightened nervously in her lap but the level eyes were steady.
She said, very slowly: “I have known unhappiness, Mr. Annan. And ugliness. And hardship. But I’d be ashamed to let my mind dwell upon these things.... Stories where life begins without hope and continues hopelessly, seem needless and more or less distorted. And rather cowardly.... One’s mind dwells most constantly on what one likes.... I do not like deformity. ”

“ Mazie looked at her husband in a distressed way, her black eyes full of tears:
“Elmer, you can’t use a girl like a boy. A girl’s a tender thing. And I was afraid of this—something like this.... Because Eris is a mite different. She likes to read and study. She likes to figure out what she reads about. ”

“ But you and Barry may admire indefinitely if you like.”
The lovely colour of embarrassment came into the girl’s face as she took the photograph thrust upon her:
“Mr. Stoll gets the best out of one,” she protested. “The rest is all in the make-up, Rosalind——”
“The rest is all in you,” retorted Rosalind. “You’re scaring us all stiff with your beauty. God help us to bear it.”
[125] Eris, holding her own picture, let her flushed glance stray toward Annan as he bent beside her.
“You’re coming into your own, Eris,” he said gaily. “I can see what you have done for yourself already.” ”

“ Complacency is a great stimulation to memory. A bland satisfaction in the ardent mental attitude of Eris toward himself incited him to real effort in his letters. He became expansive—a trifle sentimental when he thought of the girl’s beauty—but only airily so—and he rather settled down to a Chesterfieldian attitude toward his unusual and odd little protégée.
Wisdom in wads he administered with a surprising solemnity foreign to his accustomed attitude toward himself. ”

“ I am Eris, daughter of Discord.... But for you, Eris and Eros are merged and one. I strike out the i!... Forever, Barry. I and i melt into U and you! My eyes, too. Darling! Did you ever suspect such silly wit in me?
“Your attorney writes to me occasionally. He assures me he is speeding the annulment. To me, that brief phase was vaguer than a dream of which one remembers only an indefinable discomfort.
“When it is brushed away forever I shall marry you. If children come I can’t go on acting—or only between times. Not even then, because I shan’t leave them or you;—or you, Barry—chiefly you.... ”

“ I know it is a very great deal to ask of such a man. But you are kind, and you are famous; and I am ignorant and a nobody. Whatever you say helps. Just your voice, even your smile, acts on me like intellectual tonics—that lazy, wise, kindly, perplexing smile, so mischievously experienced, that encourages yet warns! I wanted it so desperately. I needed it—and you—just when I felt that my career was beginning. Oh, Mr. Annan, please understand and please, please don’t forget me.
“Eris.” ”

“ I guess you know best, Elmer.”
“We all gotta work,” he said. “That means Eris, too.”
“She allus helps me,” remarked Mazie, simply.
“I dunno what she does,” grunted Odell; “—sets a hen or two, fools around the incubators, digs up a spoonful of scratch-feed—what does she do, anyhow?”
“The child mends and irons——”
“When she ain’t readin’ or tendin’ her flowers or moonin’ ’round the woods ’n’fields,” retorted Odell. “Eris reckons she’s too fine a lady for farm folk, I guess. I want her to keep busy. And that’s that.”
“Somebody’s got to tend the flowers,” remonstrated Mazie. ”

“ Again this young man was rapidly losing his balance in the girl’s candour.
“Whenever you care to see me,” he said, “I’ll come.... Any day, any hour.”
She said, with surprise and emotion: “You are very kind to me, Mr. Annan. You always have been——”
“It is you who are kind. You seem unconscious of your own generosity. Will you come to see me, or shall I come to you, Eris?”
“You know,” she explained with happy animation, “I’ve taken the entire floor where I had my room in Jane Street. [167] It would be quite all right for you to come.” ”