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<h2>Chapter XVII</h2> It was because she was a lady, as she understood the word lady, that by the time she had walked the few steps into Fifth Avenue Miss Walbrook already felt the inner reproach of having done something mean. To do anything mean was so strange to her that she didn’t at first recognize the sensation. She only found herself repeating two words, and repeating them uneasily: “Noblesse oblige!” Nevertheless, on the principle that all’s fair in love and war, she fought this off. “Either she must go or I must.” That she herself should go was not to be considered; therefore the other must go, and by the shortest way. The shortest way was the way she had shown her, and which the girl herself was desirous to take. There was no more than that to the situation. There was no more than that to the situation unless it was that the strong was taking a poor advantage of the weak. But then, why shouldn’t the strong take any advantage it possessed? What otherwise was the use of being strong? The strong prevailed, and the weak went under. That was the law of life. To suppose that the weak must prevail because it was weak was sheer sentimentality. All the same, those two inconvenient words kept dinning in her ears: “Noblesse oblige!” She began to question the honesty which in Letty’s presence had convinced her. It was probably not honesty at all. She had known girls in the Bleary Street Settlement who could persuade her that black was white, but who had proved on further knowledge to be lying all round the compass. When it wasn’t lying it was bluff. It was possible that Letty was only bluffing, that in her pretense at magnanimity she was simply scheming for a bigger price. In that case she, Barbara, had called the bluff very skilfully. She had put her in a position in which she could be taken at her word. Since she was ready to go, she could go. Since she was ready to go to the bad.... Miss Walbrook was not prim. She knew too much of the world to be easily shocked, in the old conventional sense. Besides, her Bleary Street work had brought her into contact with girls who had gone to the bad, and she had not found them different from other girls. If she hadn’t known.... She could contemplate without horror, therefore, Letty’s taking desperate steps—if indeed she hadn’t taken them long ago—and yet she herself didn’t want to be involved in the proceeding. It was one thing to view an unfortunate situation from which you stood detached, and another to be in a certain sense the cause of it. She would not really be the cause of it, whatever the girl did, since she, the girl, was a free agent, and of an age to know her own mind. Moreover, the secret of the door was one which she couldn’t help finding out in any case. She, Miss Walbrook, could dismiss these scruples; and yet there was that uncomfortable sing-song humming through her brain: “Noblesse oblige! Noblesse oblige!” “I must get rid of it,” she said to herself, as Wildgoose admitted her. “I’ve got to be on the safe side. I can’t have it on my mind.” Going to the telephone before she had so much as taken off her gloves she was answered by Steptoe. “This is Miss Walbrook again, Steptoe. I should like to speak to—to the young woman.” Steptoe who had found Letty crying after Miss Walbrook’s departure answered with resentful politeness. “I’ll speak to Mrs. Allerton, miss. She may be aible to come to the telephone.” “Ye-es?” came later, in a feeble, teary voice. “This is Miss Walbrook again. I’m sorry to trouble you the second time.” “Oh, that doesn’t matter.” “I merely wanted to say, what perhaps I should have said before I left, that I hope you won’t—won’t use the information I gave you as I was leaving—at any rate not at once.” “Do you mean the door?” “Exactly. I was afraid after I came away that you might do something in a hurry––” “It’ll have to be in a hurry if I do it at all.” “Oh, I don’t see that. In any case, I’d—I’d think it over. Perhaps we could have another talk about it, and then––” Something was said which sounded like a faint, “Very well,” so that Barbara put up the receiver. Her conscience relieved she could open the dams keeping back the fiercer tides of her anger. Rash had talked about her to this girl! He had given her to understand that she was a fool! He had allowed it to appear that “he didn’t think much of her!” No matter what he had said, the girl had been able to make these inferences. What was more, these inferences might be true. Perhaps he didn’t think much of her! Perhaps he only thought he was in love with her! The idea was so terrible that it stilled her, as approaching seismic storm will still the elements. She moved about the drawing-room, taking off her gloves, her veil, her hat, and laying them together on a table, as if she was afraid to make a sound. She was standing beside that table, not knowing what to do next, or where to go, when Wildgoose came to the door to announce, “Mr. Allerton.” “I’ve seen her.” Without other form of greeting, or moving from beside the table, she picked up her gloves, threw them down again, picked them up again, threw them down again, with the nervous action of the hands which betrayed suppressed excitement. “I didn’t believe her—quite.” “But you didn’t disbelieve her—wholly?” “It’s a difficult case.” “I’ve got you into an awful scrape, Barbe.” She threw down the gloves with special vigor. “Oh, don’t begin on that. The scrape’s there. What we have to find is the way out.” “Well, do you see it any more clearly?” “Do you?” He came near to her. “I see this—that I can’t let her throw herself away for me. I’ve been thinking it over, and I want to ask your opinion of this plan. Let’s sit down.” She thought his plan the maddest that was ever proposed, and yet she accepted it. She accepted it because she was suspicious, jealous, and unhappy. “It’ll give me the chance to watch—and see,” she said to herself, as he talked. In his opinion Letty couldn’t take their point of view because she was so inexperienced. It seemed to her a simple thing to go away, leaving them with the responsibilities of her future on their consciences; and it would not seem other than a simple thing till she saw life more as they did. To bring her to this degree of culture they must be subtle with her, and patient. They <ins class="trnote" title="musn’t in original text">mustn’t</ins> rush things. They mustn’t let her rush them. To end the situation in such a way as to make for happiness they must end it at a point where all would be best for all concerned. For Barbara and himself nothing would be best which was not also best for the girl. What would be best for the girl would be some degree of education, of knowledge of the world, so that she might go back to the life whence they had plucked her less likely to be a prey to the vicious. In that case, if they supplied her with a little income she would know what to do with it, and would perhaps marry some man in her own class able to take care of her. Barbara’s impulse was to cry out: “That’s the most preposterous suggestion I ever heard of in my life!” But she controlled this quite reasonable prompting because another voice said to her: “This will give you the opportunity to keep an eye on them. If he’s not true in his love for you—if there is an infatuation on his part for this common and vulgar creature—you’ll be able to detect it.” Jealousy loving to suffer she was willing to inflict torture on herself for the sake of catching him in disloyalty. Expecting a storm, and bringing out what he considered his wise proposals with great embarrassment, Allerton was surprised and pleased at the sympathetic calm in which she received them. “So that you’d suggest––?” “Our keeping her on a while longer, and making friends with her. I’d like it tremendously if you’d be a friend to her, because you could do more for her than anyone.” “More than you?” “Oh, I’d do my bit too,” he assured her, innocently. “I could put her up to a lot of things, seeing her every day as I should. But you’re the one I should really count on.” Because the words hurt her more than any she could utter; she said, quietly: “I suppose you remember sometimes that after all she’s your wife.” He sprang to his feet. Knowing that he did at times remember it he tried to deny it. “No, I don’t. She’s not. I don’t admit it. I don’t acknowledge it. If you care anything about me, Barbe, you’ll never say that again.” He came and knelt beside her, taking her hands and kissing them. Laying his head in her lap, he begged to be caressed, as if he had been a dog. Nevertheless by half past nine that evening he was at home, sitting by the fireside with Letty, and beginning his special part in the great experiment. “She’s not my wife,” he kept repeating to himself poignantly, as he walked up the Avenue from the Club; “she’s not—she’s not. But she is a poor child toward whom I’ve undertaken grave responsibilities.” Because the responsibilities were grave, and she was a poor child, his attitude toward her began to be paternal. It was the more freely paternal because Barbe approved of what he was undertaking. Had she disapproved he might have undertaken it all the same, but he couldn’t have done it with this whole-heartedness. He would have been haunted by the fear of her displeasure; whereas now he could let himself go. “We don’t want to keep you a prisoner, or detain you against your will,” he said, with regard to the incident of the morning, “but if you’ll stay with us a little longer, I think we can convince you of our good intentions.” “Who’s—we?” She shot the question at him, as she lay back in her chair, the red book in her lap. He smiled inwardly at the ready pertinence with which she went to a point he didn’t care to discuss. “Well, then, suppose I said—I? That’ll do, won’t it?” She shot another question, her flaming eyes half veiled. “How long would you want me to stay?” “Suppose we didn’t fix a time? Suppose we just left it—like that?” The question rose to her lips: “But in the end I’m to go?” only, on second thoughts she repressed it. She preferred that the situation should be left “like that,” since it meant that she was not at once to be separated from the prince. The fact that she was legally the prince’s wife had as little reality to her as to him. Could she have had what she yearned for law or no law would have been the same to her. But since she couldn’t have that, it was much that he should come like this and sit with her by the fire in the evening. He leaned forward and took the book from her lap. “What are you reading? Oh, this! I haven’t looked at it for years.” He glanced at the title. “The Little Mermaid! That used to be my favorite. It still is. When I was in Copenhagen I went to see the little bronze mermaid sitting on a rock on the shore. It’s a memorial to Hans Andersen. She’s quite startling for a minute—till you know what it is. Where are you at?” Pointing out the line at which she had stopped her hand touched his, but all the consciousness of the accident was on her side. He seemed to notice nothing, beginning to read aloud to her, with no suspicion that sentiment existed. “Many an evening and morning she rose to the place where she had left the prince. She watched the fruits in the garden ripen and fall; she saw the snow melt from the high mountains; but the prince she never saw, and she came home sadder than ever. Her one consolation was to sit in her little garden, with her arms clasped round the marble statue which was like the prince––” “That’d be me,” Letty whispered to herself; “my arms clasped round a marble statue—like my prince—but only a marble statue.” “Her flowers were neglected,” Allerton read on, “and grew wild in a luxuriant tangle of stem and blossom, reaching the branches of the willow-tree, and making the whole place dark and dim. At last she could bear it no longer and she told one of her sisters––” “I wouldn’t tell my sister, if I had one,” Letty assured herself. “I’d never tell no one. It’s more like my own secret when I keep it to myself. Nobody’ll ever know—not even him.” “The other sisters learned the story then, but they told it to no one but a few other mermaids, who told it to their intimate friends. One of these friends knew who the prince was, and told the princess where he came from and where his kingdom lay. Now she knew where he lived; and many a night she spent there, floating on the water. She ventured nearer to the land than any of her sisters had done. She swam up the narrow lagoon, under the carved marble balcony; and there she sat and watched the prince when he thought himself alone in the moonlight. She remembered how his head had rested on her breast, and how she had kissed his brow; but he would never know, and could not even dream of her.” Letty had not kissed her prince’s brow, but she had kissed his feet; but he would never know that, and would dream of her no more than this other prince of the little thing who loved him. Allerton continued to read on, partly because the old tale came back to him with its enchanting loveliness, partly because reading aloud would be a feature of his educational scheme, and partly because it soothed him to be doing it. He could never read to Barbara. Once, when he tried it, the sound of his voice and the monotony of his cadences, so got on her nerves that she stopped him in the middle of a word. But this girl with her uncritical mind, and her gratitude for small bits of kindliness, gave him confidence in himself by her rapt way of listening. She did listen raptly, since a prince’s reading must always be more arresting than that of ordinary mortals, and also because, both consciously and subconsciously, she was taking his pronunciation as a standard. <hr class='tb' /> And just at this minute her name was under discussion in a brilliant gathering at The Hindoo Lantern, in another quarter of New York. If you know The Hindoo Lantern you know how much it depends on atmosphere. Once a disused warehouse in a section of the city which commerce had forsaken, the enthusiasm for the dance which arose about 1910, has made it a temple. It gains, too, by being a temple of the esoteric. The Hindoo Lantern is not everybody’s lantern, and does not swing in the open vulgar street. You might live in New York a hundred years and unless you were one of the initiated and privileged, you might never know of its existence. You could not so much as approach it were it not first explained to you what you ought to do. You must pass through a tobacconist’s, which from the street looks like any other tobacconist’s, after which you traverse a yard, which looks like any other yard, except that it is bounded by a wall in which there is a small and unobtrusive door. Beside the small and unobtrusive door there hangs a bell-rope, of the ancient kind suggesting the convent or the Orient. The bell-rope pulls a bell; the bell clangs overhead; the door is opened cautiously by a Hindoo lad, or, as some say, a mulatto boy dressed as a Hindoo. If you are with a friend of the institution you will be admitted without more inspection; but should you be a stranger there will be a scrutiny of your passports. Assuming, however, that you go in, you will find a small courtyard, in which at last The Hindoo Lantern hangs mystic, suggestive, in oriental iron-work, and panels of colored glass. Having passed beneath this symbol you will enter an antechamber rich in the magic of the East. In a reverent obscurity you will find Buddha on the right, Vishnu on the left, with flowers set before the one, while incense burns before the other. Somewhere in the darkness an Oriental woman will be seated on the ground, twanging on a sarabar, and now and then crooning a chant of invitation to come and share in darksome rites. You will thus be “worked up” to a sense of the mysterious before you pass the third gate of privilege into the shrine itself. Here you will discover the large empty oval of floor, surrounded by little tables for segregation and refreshment, with which the past ten years have made us familiar. The place will be buzzing with the hum of voices, merry with duologues of laughter, and steaming with tobacco smoke. A jazz-band will strike up, coughing out the nauseated, retching intervals so stimulating to our feet, and two by two, in driblets, streamlets, and lastly in a volume, the guests will take the floor. In the way of “steps” all the latest will be on exhibition. You will see the cow-trot, the rabbit-jump, the broom-stick, the washerwoman’s dip. Everyone who is anyone will be here, if not on one night then on another, in a jovial fraternity steeped in the spirit of democracy. Revelry will be sustained on lemonade and a resinous astringent known locally as beer, while a sense of doing the forbidden will be in the air. For commercial reasons it will be needful to keep it in the air, since in the proceedings themselves there will be nothing more occult, or more inciting to iniquity, than a kindergarten game. Hither Mr. Gorry Larrabin had brought Mademoiselle Odette Coucoul, to teach her the new dances. As a matter of fact, he had just led her back to their little table, inconspicuously placed in the front row, after putting her through the paces of the camel-step. Mademoiselle had found it entrancing, so much more novel in the motion than the antiquated valses she had danced in France. Mr. Larrabin had retreated like a camel walking backwards, while she had advanced like a camel going forwards. The art was in lifting the foot quite high, throwing it slightly backwards, and setting it down with a delicate deliberation, while you craned the neck before you with a shake of the Adam’s apple. To incite you to produce this effect the jazz-band urged you onward with a sob, a gulp, a moan, an effect of strangulation, till finally it tore up the seat of your being as if you had been suddenly struck sea-sick. “Mon Dieu, but it is lofely,” mademoiselle gurgled, laughing in her breathlessness. “It is terr-i-bul to call no one a camel—un chameau—in France; but here am I a—chameau!” Gorry took this with puzzled amusement. “What’s the matter with calling anyone a camel? I don’t see any harm in that.” Mademoiselle hid her face in confusion. “Oh, but it is terr-i-bul, terr-i-bul! It is almost so worse as to call no one a—how you say zat word in Eenglish?—a cow, n’est ce pas?—une vache—and zat is the most bad name what you can call no one.” Looking across the room Gorry was struck with an idea. “Well, there’s a—what d’ye call it—a vashe—over there. See that guy with the girl with the cream-colored hair—fella with a big black mustache, like a brigand in a play? There’s a vashe all-righty; and yet I’ve got to keep in with him.” As he explained his reasons for keeping in with the “vashe” in question mademoiselle contented herself with shedding radiance and paying no attention. Neither did she pay attention when he went on to tell of the girl who had disappeared, and of her stepfather’s reasons for finding her. She woke to cognizance of the subject only when Gorry repeated the exact words of Miss Tina Vanzetti that morning: “Name of Letty Gravely.” It was mademoiselle’s turn for repetition. “But me, I know dat name. I ’ear it not so long ago. Name of Let-ty Grav-el-ly! I sure ’ear zat name all recently.” She reflected, tapping her forehead with vivacity. “Mais quand? Mais oui? C’était—Ah!” The exclamation was the sharp cry of discovery. “Tina Vanzetti—my frien’! She tell me zis morning. Zat girl—Let-ty Grav-el-ly—she come chez Margot with ole man—what he keep ze white slave—and he command her grand beautiful trousseau—Tina Vanzetti she will give me ze address—and I will tell you—and you will tell him—and he will put you on to riche affairs––” “It’ll be dollars and cents in the box office for me,” Gorry interpreted, forcibly, while the band belched forth a chord like the groan of a dying monster, calling them again to their feet. <hr class='tb' /> “‘Remember,’ said the witch,” Allerton continued to read, “‘when you have once assumed a human form you can never again be a mermaid—never return to your home or to your sisters more. Should you fail to win the prince’s love, so that he leaves father and mother for your sake, and lays his hand in yours before the priest, an immortal soul will never be granted you. On the same day that he marries another your heart will break, and you will drift as sea-foam on the water.’ ‘So let it be,’ said the little mermaid, turning pale as death.’” Allerton lifted his eyes from the book. “Does it bore you?” There was no mistaking her sincerity. “No! I love it.” “Then perhaps we’ll read a lot of things. After this we’ll find a good novel, and then possibly somebody’s life. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Her joy was such that he could hardly hear the “Yes,” for which he was listening. He listened because he was so accustomed to boring people that to know he was not boring them was a consolation. “Is there anybody’s life—his biography—that you’d be specially interested in?” She answered timidly and yet daringly. “Could we—could we read the life of the late Queen Victoria—when she was a girl?” “Oh, easily! I’ll hunt round for one to-day. Now let me tell you about Hans Andersen. He was born in Denmark, so that he was a Dane. You know where Denmark is on the map, don’t you?” “I think I do. It’s there by Germany isn’t it?” “Quite right. But let me get the atlas, and we’ll look it up.” He was on his feet when she summoned her forces for a question. “Do you read like this to—to the girl you’re engaged to?” “No,” he said, reddening. “She—she doesn’t like it. She won’t let me. But wait a minute. I’ll go and get the atlas.” “‘On the same day that he marries another,’ Letty repeated to herself, as she sat alone, ‘your heart will break, and you will drift as sea-foam on the water.’ ‘So let it be,’ said the little mermaid.” <hr class='major' /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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