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Dust Flower

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<h2>Chapter VI</h2> “Good morning, Steptoe. Will you ask Mr. Allerton if he’ll speak to Miss Walbrook?” “Mr. Allerton ’as gone to the New Netherlands club for ’is breakfast, miss.” “Oh, thanks. I’ll call him up there.” She didn’t want to call him up there, at a club, where a man must like to feel safe from feminine intrusion, but the matter was too pressing to permit of hesitation. Since the previous afternoon she had gone through much searching of heart. She was accustomed to strong reactions from tempestuousness to penitence, but not of the violence of this one. Summoned to the telephone, Allerton felt as if summoned to the bar of judgment. He divined who it was, and he divined the reason for the call. “Good morning, Rash!” His voice was absolutely dead. “Good morning, Barbara!” “I know you’re cross with me for calling you at the club.” “Oh, no! Not at all!” “But I couldn’t wait any longer. I wanted you to know—I’ve got it on again, Rash—never to come off any more.” He was dumb. Thirty seconds at least went by, and he had made no response. “Aren’t you glad?” “I—I could have been glad—if—if I’d known you were going to do it.” “And now you know that it’s done.” He repeated in his lifeless voice, “Yes, now I know that it’s done.” “Well?” Again he was silent. Two or three times he tried to find words, producing nothing but a stammering of incoherent syllables. “I—I can’t talk about it here, Barbe,” he managed to articulate at last. “You must let me come round and see you.” It was her voice now that was dead. “When will you come, Rash?” “Now—at once—if you can see me.” “Then come.” She put up the receiver without saying more. He knew that she knew. She knew at least that something had happened which was fatal to them both. She received him not in the drawing-room, but in a little den on the right of the front door which was also alive with Miss Walbrook’s modern personality. A gold-colored portière from Albert Herter’s looms screened them from the hall, and the chairs were covered with bits of Herter tapestry representing fruits. A cabinet of old white Bennington faience stood against a wall, which was further adorned with three or four etchings of Sears Gallagher’s. Barbara wore a lacy thing in hydrangea-colored crêpe de chine, loosely girt with a jade-green ribbon tasselled in gold, the whole bringing out the faintly Egyptian note in her personality. They dispensed with a greeting, because she spoke the minute he crossed the threshold of the room. “Rash, what is it? Why couldn’t you tell me on the telephone?” He wished now that he had. It would have saved this explanation face to face. “Because I couldn’t. Because—because I’ve been too much of an idiot to—to tell you about it—either on the telephone or in any other way.” “How?” He thought she must understand, but she seemed purposely dense. “Sit down. Tell me about it. It can’t be so terrible—all of a sudden like this.” He couldn’t sit down. He could only turn away from her and gulp in his dry throat. “You remember what I said—what I said—yesterday—about—about the—the Gissing fellow?” She nodded fiercely. “Yes. Go on. Get it out.” “Well—well—I’ve—I’ve done that.” She threw out her arms. She threw back her head till the little nut-brown throat was taut. The cry rent her. It rent him. “You—fool!” He stood with head hanging. He longed to run away, and yet he longed also to throw himself at her feet. If he could have done exactly as he felt impelled, he would have laid his head on her breast and wept like a child. She swung away from him, pacing the small room like a frenzied animal. Her breath came in short, hard pantings that were nearly sobs. Suddenly she stopped in front of him with a sort of calm. “What made you?” He barely lifted his agonized black eyes. “You,” She was in revolt again. “I? What did I do?” “You—you threw away my ring. You said it was all—all over.” “Well? Couldn’t I say that without driving you to act the madman? No one but a madman would have gone out of this house and—” She clasped her forehead in her hands with a dramatic lifting of the arms. “Oh! It’s too much! I don’t care about myself. But to have it on your conscience that a man has thrown his life away––” He asked meekly, “What good was it to me when you wouldn’t have it?” She stamped her foot. “Rash, you’ll drive me insane. Your life might be no good to you at all, and yet you might give it a chance for twenty-four hours—that isn’t much, is it?—before you—” She caught herself up. “Tell me. You don’t mean to say that you’re married?” He nodded. “To whom?” “Her first name is Letty. I’ve forgotten the second name.” “Where did you find her?” “Over there in the Park.” “And she went and married you—like that?” “She was all alone—chucked out by a stepfather––” She burst into a hard laugh. “Oh, you baby! You believed that? The kind of story that’s told by nine of the––” <div class='figcenter'> <ANTIMG src='images/illus-068.jpg' alt='' title='' style='width: 333px; height: 452px;' /> BY THE TIME HE HAD FINISHED, HIS HEART WAS A LITTLE EASED AND SOME OF HER TENDERNESS BEGAN TO FLOW TOWARD HIM </div> He interrupted quickly. “Don’t call her anything, Barbe—I mean any kind of a bad name. She’s all right as far as that goes. There’s a kind that couldn’t take you in.” “There’s no kind that couldn’t take you in!” “Perhaps not, but it’s the one thing in—in this whole idiotic business that’s on the level—I mean she is. I’d give my right hand to put her back where I found her yesterday—just as she was—but she’s straight.” She dropped into a chair. The first wild tumult of rage having more or less spent its force, she began, with a kind of heart-broken curiosity, to ask for the facts. She spoke nervously, beating a palm with a gold tassel of her girdle. “Begin at the beginning. Tell me all about it.” He leaned on the mantelpiece, of which the only ornaments were a child’s head in white and blue terra cotta by Paul Manship, balanced by a pair of old American glass candlesticks, and told the tale as consecutively as he could. He recounted everything, even to the bringing her home, the putting her in the little, back spare-room, and her adoption by Beppo, the red cocker spaniel. By the time he had finished, his heart was a little eased, and some of her tenderness toward him was beginning to flow forth. She was like that, all wrath at one minute, all gentleness the next. Springing to her feet, she caught him by the arm, pressing herself against him. “All right, Rash. You’ve done it. That’s settled. But it can be undone again.” He pressed her head back from him, resting the knot of her hair in the hollow of his palm and looking down into her eyes. “How can it be undone?” “Oh, there must be ways. A man can’t be allowed to ruin his life—to ruin two lives—for a prank. We’ll just have to think. If you made it worth while for her to take you, you can make it worth while for her to let you go. She’ll do it.” “She’d do it, of course. She doesn’t care. I’m nothing to her, not any more than she to me. I shan’t see her any more than I can help. I suppose she must stay at the house till—I told Steptoe to look after her.” She took a position at one end of the mantelpiece, while he faced her from the other. She gave him wise counsel. He was to see his lawyers at once and tell them the whole story. Lawyers always saw the way out of things. There was the Bellington boy who married a show-girl. She had been bought off, and the lawyers had managed it. Now the Bellington boy was happily married to one of the Plantagenet Jones girls and lived at Marillo Park. Then there was the Silliman boy who had married the notorious Kate Cookesley. The lawyers had found the way out of that, too, and now the Silliman boy was a secretary of the American Embassy in Rome. Accidents such as had happened to Rash were regrettable of course, but it would be folly to think that a perfectly good life must be done for just because it had got a crack in it. “We’ll play the game, of course,” she wound up. “But it’s a game, and the stronger side must win. What should you say of my going to see her—she needn’t know who I am further than that I’m a friend of yours—and finding out for myself?” “Finding out what?” “Finding out her price, silly. What do you suppose? A woman can often see things like that where a man would be blind.” He didn’t know. He thought it might be worth while. He would leave it to her. “I’m not worth the trouble, Barbe,” he said humbly. With this she agreed. “I know you’re not. I can’t think for a minute why I take it or why I should like you. But I do. That’s straight.” “And I adore you, Barbe.” She shrugged her shoulders with a little, comic grimace. “Oh, well! I suppose every one has his own way of showing adoration, but I must say that yours is original.” “If it’s original to be desperate when the woman you worship drives you to despair––” There was another little comic grimace, though less comic than the first time. “Oh, yes, I know. It’s always the woman whom a man worships that’s in the wrong. I’ve noticed that. Men are never impossible—all of their own accord.” “I could be as tame as a cat if––” “If it wasn’t for me. Thank you, Rash. I said just now I was fond of you, and I should have to be to—to stand for all the––” “I’m not blaming you, Barbe. I’m only––” “Thanks again. The day you’re not blaming me is certainly one to be marked with a white stone, as the Romans used to say. But if it comes to blaming any one, Rash, after what happened yesterday––” “What happened yesterday wasn’t begun by me. It would never have entered my mind to do the crazy thing I did, if you hadn’t positively and finally—as I thought—flung me down. I think you must do me that justice, Barbe—that justice, at the least.” “Oh, I do you justice enough. I don’t see that you can complain of that. It seems to me too that I temper justice with mercy to a degree that—that most people find ridiculous.” “By most people I suppose you mean your aunt.” “Oh, do leave Aunt Marion out of it. You can’t forgive the poor thing for not liking you. Well, she doesn’t, and I can’t help it. She thinks you’re a––” “A fool—as you were polite enough to say just now.” She spread her hands apart in an attitude of protestation. “Well, if I did, Rash, surely you must admit that I had provocation.” “Oh, of course. The wonder is that with the provocation you can––” “Forgive you, and try to patch it up again after this frightful gash in the agreement. Well, it is a wonder. I don’t believe that many girls––” “I only want you to understand, Barbe, that the gash in the agreement was made, not by what I did, but what you did. If you hadn’t sent me to the devil, I shouldn’t have been in such a hurry to go there.” She was off. “Yes, there you are again. Always me! I’m the one! You may be the gunpowder, the perfectly harmless gunpowder, but it would never blow up if I didn’t come as the match. I make all the explosions. I set you crazy. I send you to the devil. I make you go and marry a girl you never laid eyes on in your life before.” So it was the same old scene all over again, till both were exhausted, and she had flung herself into a chair to cover her face with her hands and burst into tears. Instantly he was on his knees beside her. “Barbe! Barbe! My beloved Barbe! Don’t cry. I’m a brute. I’m a fool. I’m not satisfied with breaking my own heart, but I must go to work and break yours. Oh, Barbe, forgive me. I’m all to pieces. Forgive me and let me go away and shoot myself. What’s the good of a poor, wrecked creature like me hanging on and making such a mess of things? Let me kill myself before I kill you––” “Oh, hush!” Seizing his head, she pressed it against her bosom convulsively. By the shaking of his shoulders, she felt him sob. He was a poor creature. She was saying so to herself. But just because he was, something in her yearned over him. He could be different; he could be stronger and of value in the world if there was only some one to handle him rightly. She could do it—if she could only learn to handle herself. She would learn to handle herself—for his sake. He was worth saving. He had fine qualities, and a good heart most of all. It was his very fineness which put him out of place in a world like that of New York. He was a delicate, brittle, highly-wrought thing which should be touched only with the greatest care, and all his life he had been pushed and hurtled about as if he were a football player or a business man. With the soul of a poet or a painter or a seer, he had been treated like the typical rough-and-ready American lad, till the sensitive nature had been brutalized, maimed, and frenzied. She knew that. It was why she cared for him. Even when they were children she had seen that he wasn’t getting fair treatment, either at home or in school or among the boys and girls with whom they both grew up. He was the exception, and American life allowed only for the rule. If you couldn’t conform to the rule, you were guyed and tormented and ejected. Among all his associates she alone knew what he suffered, and because she knew it a vast pity made her cling to him. He had forced himself into the life of clubs, into the life of society, into the life of other men as other men lived their lives, and the effect on him had been so nearly ruinous that it was no wonder if he was always on the edge of nervous explosion. His very wealth which might have been a protection was, under the uniform pressure of American social habit, an incitement to him to follow the wrong way. She knew it, and she alone. She could save him, and she alone. She could save him, if she could first of all save herself. With his head pressed against her she made the vow as she had made it fifty times already. She would be gentle with him; she would be patient; she would let him work off on her the agony of his suffering nerves, and smile at him through it all. She would help him out of the idiotic situation in which he found himself. The other girl was only an incident, as the show-girl had been to the Bellington boy, and could be disposed of. She attached to that only a secondary importance in comparison with the whole thing—her saving him. She would save him, even if it meant rooting out every instinct in her soul. But as he made his way blindly back to the club, his own conclusions were different. He must go to the devil. He must go to the devil now, whatever else he did. Going to the devil would set her free from him. It was the only thing that would. It would set him free from the other woman, set him free from life itself. Life tortured him. He was a misfit in it. He should never have been born. He had always understood that his parents hadn’t wanted children and that his coming had been resented. You couldn’t be born like that and find it natural to be in the world. He had never found it natural. He couldn’t remember the time when he hadn’t been out of his element in life, and now he must recognize the fact courageously. It would be easy enough. He had worked up an artificial appetite for all that went under the head of debauchery. It had meant difficult schooling at first, because his natural tastes were averse to that kind of thing, but he had been schooled. Schooled was the word, since his training had begun under the very roof where his father had sent him to get religion and discipline. There had been no let-up in this educational course, except when he himself had stolen away, generally in solitude, for a little holiday. But as he put it to himself, he knew all the roads and by-paths and cross-country leaps that would take him to the gutter, and to the gutter he would go. <hr class='major' /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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