_ CHAPTER XII
Athalie ventured to send some Madonna lilies with no card attached; but even the thought of her white flowers crossing the threshold of Clive's world--although it was because of her devotion to him alone that she dared salute his dead--left her sensitively concerned, wondering whether it had been a proper thing for her to do.
However, the day following she wrote him.
"CLIVE DEAR,
"I do not mean to intrude on your grief at such a time. This is merely a line to say that you are never absent from my mind.
"And Clive, nothing really dies. This is quite true. I am not speaking of what faith teaches us. Faith is faith. But those who 'see clearly' _know_. Nothing dies, Clive. _Nothing._ That is even more than faith teaches us. Yet it, also, is true.
"Dear little boy of my childhood, dear lad of my girlhood, and, of my womanhood, dearest of men, I pray that God will comfort you and yours.
"I was twelve years old the only time I ever saw your father. He spoke so sweetly to me--put his arm around my shoulders--asked me if I were Red Riding Hood or the Princess Far Away.
"And, to obey him, I went to find _my_ father. And found him dead. Or what the world calls dead.
"Later, as I stood there outside the door, stunned by what had happened, back through the doorway came running a boy. Clive, if you have forgotten what you said to that child there by the darkened doorway of life, the girl who writes this has never forgotten.
"And now, since sorrow has come to you, in my turn I seek you where you stand by a darkened door alone, and I send to you my very soul in this poor, inky letter,--all I can offer--Clive--all that I believe--all that I am.
"ATHALIE." So much for tribute and condolence as far as she could be concerned where she remained among the other millions outside the sacred threshold across which her letter and her flowers had gone, across which the girl herself might never go.
After a few days he wrote and thanked her for her letter, not of course knowing about the lilies:
"It is the first time death has ever come very near me. I had been told and had always thought that we were a long-lived race.
"I am still dazed by it. I suppose the sharper grief will come when this dull, unreal sense of stupefaction wears away.
"We were very close together, my father and I. Oh, but we might have been closer, Athalie!--I might have been with him oftener, seen more of him, spent less time away from him.
"I _did_ try to be a good son. I could have been far better. It's a bitter thing to realise at such a time.
"And I had so much to say to him. I cannot understand that I can never say it now.... Athalie dear, my mother wishes me to take her abroad. I made arrangements yesterday at the Cunard office. We sail Saturday. Could I see you for a moment before I go?
"CLIVE." To which she replied:
"I shall be here every evening." He came Friday night looking very sallow and thin in his black clothes. Catharine, who was sewing by the centre table, rose to shake hands with him in sympathetic silence, then went away to her bedroom, where, once or twice she caught herself whistling some gay refrain of the moment, and was obliged to check herself.
He had taken Athalie's slender hands and was standing by the sofa, looking intently at her.
"That night," he said with an effort, "you sent me home--saying that I was needed."
"Yes, Clive."
"How did you know?"
"I knew."
"Did you see--anything?"
"Yes, dear," she said under her breath.
"Did you see _him_?"
"Yes."
"Tell me," he said, but his lips scarcely moved to form the words he uttered.
"I recognised him at once. I had never forgotten him.... It is difficult to explain how I knew that he was not--what we call living."
"But you knew?"
"Yes," she said gently.
"He--did he speak?" The young fellow turned away with a brusque, hopeless gesture.
"God," he muttered--"and I couldn't either see or hear him!"
"He did not speak, Clive." The boy looked up at her, his haggard features working.
She said: "When I first noticed him he was looking at you. Then he caught my eye. Clive--it was this time as it had been before--when I was twelve years old--his expression became so sweet and winning--like yours when I amuse you--and you laugh at me but--like me--"
"Oh, Athalie--I can't seem to endure it! I--I can't be reconciled--" His head fell forward; she put her arms around him and drew his face against her breast.
"I know," she whispered. "I also have passed that way."
After a few moments he lifted his head, looked around, almost fearfully.
"Where was it that he stood, Athalie?"
She hesitated, then took one of his hands in hers and he followed her until she stopped between the sofa and the fireplace.
"Here?"
"Yes, Clive."
"So _near_!" he said aloud to himself. "Couldn't he have spoken to me?--just one word--"
"Dearest--dearest!"
"God knows why you should see him and I shouldn't! I don't understand--when I was his son--"
"I do not understand either, Clive."
He seemed not to hear her, standing there with blank gaze shifting from object to object in the room. "I don't understand," he kept repeating in a dull, almost querulous voice,--"I don't understand why." And her heart responded in a passion of tenderness and grief. But she found no further words to say to him, no explanation that might comfort him.
"Will he ever come here--anywhere--again?" he asked suddenly.
"Oh, Clive, I don't know."
"Don't you know? Couldn't you find out?"
"How? I don't know how to find out. I never try to inquire."
"Isn't there some way?"
"I don't really know, Clive. How could I know?"
"But when you see such people--shadows--shapes--"
"Yes.... They are not shadows."
"Do they seem real?"
"Why, yes; as real as you are."
"Athalie, how _can_ they be?"
"They are to me. There is nothing ghostly about them."
For a moment it almost seemed to her as though he resented her clear seeing; then he said: "Have you always been able to see--this way?"
"As long as I can remember."
"And you have never tried to cultivate the power?"
"I had rather you did not call it that."
"But it is a power.... Well, call it faculty, then. Have you?"
"No. I told you once that I did not wish to see more clearly than others. It is all involuntary with me."
"Would you try to cultivate it because I ask you to?"
"Clive!"
"Will you, Athalie?"
The painful colour mantled her face and neck and she turned and looked away from him as though he had said a shameful thing.
He continued, impatiently: "Why do you feel that way about it? Why should you not cultivate such a delicate and wonderful sense of perception? Why are you reluctant? What reason is there for you to be ashamed?"
"I don't know why."
"There is no reason! If in you there happen to be faculties sensitive beyond ours, senses more complex, more exquisitely attuned to what others are blind and deaf to, intuitions that to us seem miraculous, a spirituality, perhaps, more highly developed, what is there in that to cause you either embarrassment or concern? That in certain individualities such is the case is now generally understood and recognised. You happen to be one of them."
She looked up at him very quietly, but still flushed.
"Why do you wish me to try--make any effort to develop this--thing?"
"So that--if you _could_ see him again--and if, perhaps, he had anything to say to me--"
"I understand."
"Will you try, Athalie?"
"I'll try--if you wish it. And if I can learn how to try."
Had he asked her to strip her gown from her shoulders under his steady gaze, it had been easier than the promise she gave him.
* * * * *
And now the hour had come for him to bid her good-bye. He said that he and his mother would not remain abroad for more than the summer. He said he would write often; spoke a little more vaguely of seeing her as soon as he returned; drew her cool, white hands together and kissed them, laid his cheek against them for a moment, eyes closed wearily.
The door remained ajar behind him after he had gone. Lingering, her hand heavy on the knob, she listened to the last echo of the elevator as it dropped into lighted depths below.
Then, very far away, an iron grille clanged. And that ended it.
But she still lingered. There was one more shape to pass through the door which she yet held open;--the phantom of her girlhood. And when at last, it had passed across the threshold, never to return, she shut the door softly, sinking to her knees there, her pale cheek resting against the closed panels, her eyes fixed on vacancy.
* * * * *
So departed those twain out of the room and out of her life, together--her lover by brevet, and her lingering girlhood,--leaving behind them a woman in a world of men suddenly strange and menacing and very still.
But Clive went back into a familiar world--marred, obscured, distorted for the moment by shock and sorrow--but still a familiar world. Because neither his grief nor his love--as he had termed it--had made of him more than he had been,--not yet a man, yet no longer a boy, but something with all the infirmities of both and the saving graces of neither.
In that borderland where he still lingered, morally and spiritually, the development of character ceases for a while until such time as the occult frontier be crossed. What is born in the cradle is lowered into the grave, but always either in nobler or less noble degrees. For none may linger in that borderland too long because the unseen boundary moves for him who will not stir when his time is up--moves slowly, inexorably nearer, nearer, passing beneath his feet, until it is lost far in the misty years behind him.
* * * * *
He wrote her from the steamer twice, the letters being mailed from Plymouth; then he wrote once from London, once from Paris; later again from Switzerland, where he had found it cooler, he said, than anywhere else during that torrid summer.
[Illustration: "One lovely morning in May she arose early in order to write to Clive."]
Winifred Stuart and her mother had joined them for a motor trip through Dalmatia. He mentioned it in a letter to Athalie, but after that he did not refer to them again. In fact he did not write again for a month or two.
It proved to be a scorching summer in New York. May ended in a blast of unseasonable weather, cooling off for a week or two in June, but the furnace heat of July was terrible for the poor and for the horses--both of which we have always with us.
Also, for Athalie, it seemed to be turning into one of those curious, threatening years which begin with every promise but which end without fulfilment, and in perplexity and care. She had known such years; she already recognised the symptoms of changing weather. She seemed to be conscious of premonitions in everybody and everything. Little vexations and slight disappointments increased; simple plans miscarried for no reason at all apparently.
Like one who still feels a fair wind blowing yet looking aloft, sees the uneasy weather-cock veer and veer in varying flaws, so she, sensitive and fine in mind and body, gradually became aware of the trend of things; felt the premonition of the distant change in the atmosphere--sensed it gathering vaguely, indefinitely disquieting.
One lovely morning in May she arose early in order to write to Clive. Then, her long letter accomplished and safely mailed, she went downtown to business, still delicately aglow, exhilarated as always by her hour of communion with him.
Mr. Wahlbaum, as usual, received her with the jolly and kindly humour which always characterised him, and they had their usual friendly, half bantering chat while she was arranging the papers which his secretary had laid on her desk.
All the morning she took dictation; the soft wind fluttered the curtains; sparrows chirped noisily; the sky was very blue; Mr. Wahlbaum smoked steadily.
And when the lunch hour arrived he did a thing which he had never before done; he asked Athalie to lunch with him.
Which so completely astonished her that she found herself going down in the private lift with him before she realised that she was going at all.
The luncheon proved to be very simple but very good. There were a number of other women in the ladies' annex of the Department Club,--nice looking people, quiet, and well dressed. Mr. Wahlbaum also was very quiet, very considerate, very attentive, and almost gravely courteous. Their conversation concerned business. He offered Athalie no cocktail and no wine, but a jug of chilled cider was set at her elbow and she found it delicious. Mr. Wahlbaum drank tea, very weak.
When they returned to the office, Athalie began to transcribe her stenographic notes. It occupied most of the afternoon although she was wonderfully rapid and accurate and her slim white fingers hovered mistily over the keys like the vibrating wings of a snowy moth.
[Illustration: "Mr. Wahlbaum ... was very quiet, very considerate, very attentive."]
Mr. Wahlbaum, always smoking, watched her toward the finish in placid silence. And for a few moments, also, after she had finished and had turned to him with a light smile and a lighter sigh of relief.
"Miss Greensleeve," he said quietly, "I have now been here in the same office with you, day after day--excepting our summer vacations--for more than five years."
A trifle surprised and sobered by his gravity and deliberation she nodded silent acquiescence and waited, wondering a little what else was to come.
It came without preamble: "I have the honour," he said, "to ask you to marry me."
Still as a stone she sat, gazing at him. And for a long while his keen eyes sustained her gaze. But presently a slow, deep colour began to gather on his face. And after a moment he said: "I am sorry that the verdict is against me."
Tears filled her eyes; she tried to speak, could not, turned on her pivot-chair, rested her arms on the back, and dropped her face in them.
It was a long while before she was able to efface the traces of emotion. She did all she could before she forced herself to look at him again and say what she must say.
"If I could--I would, Mr. Wahlbaum," she faltered. "No man has ever been kinder to me, none more courteous, none more gentle."
He looked at her wistfully for a moment, and she thought he was going to speak. But he was wise in the ways of the world. He had lost. He understood it. Speech was superfluous. He was a quaint combination of good sportsman and philosophic economist.
He held his peace.
When she left that evening after saying good night to him she paused at the door, irresolutely, and then came back to his desk where he was still standing. For he had never failed to rise when she entered in the morning or took her leave at night.
In silence, now, she offered him her hand, the quick tears springing to her eyes again; and he took it, bent, and touched the gloved fingers with his lips, gravely, in silence.
* * * * *
A few days later, for the first time in her experience there, Mr. Wahlbaum was not at the office.
Mr. Grossman came in, leered at her, said that Mr. Wahlbaum would be down next day, lingered furtively as long as he quite dared, then took himself off, still leering.
In the afternoon Athalie was notified that her salary had been raised. She went home, elated and deeply touched by the generosity of Mr. Wahlbaum, scarcely able to wait for the morrow to express her gratitude to this good, kind man.
But on the morrow Mr. Wahlbaum was not there; nor did he come the day after, nor the day after that.
The following Tuesday she was seated in the office and generally occupied with business provided for her by the thrifty Mr. Grossman, when that same gentleman came into the office on tiptoe.
"Mr. Wahlbaum has just died," he said.
In the sudden shock and consternation she had risen from her chair, and stood there, one hand resting on her desk top for support.
"Pneumonia," nodded Mr. Grossman. "Sam he smoked too much all the time. That is what done it, Miss Greensleeve."
Her hands crept to her eyes, covered them convulsively. "Oh!" she breathed--"Oh!"
And, for a moment was not aware of the arm of Mr. Grossman around her waist,--until it tightened unctuously.
"Dearie," he murmured, "don't you take on so hard. You ain't goin' to lose your job, because I'm a-goin' to be your best friend same like he was--"
With a shudder she stepped clear of him; he caught her by the waist again and kissed her; and she wrenched herself free and turned fiercely on him as he advanced again, smirking, watery of eye, arms outstretched.
Then in the overwhelming revulsion and horror of the act and of the moment chosen for it when death's shadow already lay dark upon this vast and busy monument to her dead friend, she turned on him her dark blue eyes ablaze; and to her twisted, outraged lips flew, unbidden, the furious anathema of her ragged childhood:
"Damn you!" she stammered,--"damn you!" And struck him across the face.
* * * * *
Which impulsive and unconsidered proceeding left two at home out of work, herself and Doris. Also there was very little more for Catharine to do, the dull season at Winton's having arrived.
"Any honest job," repeated Doris when she and Athalie and Catharine met at evening after an all-day's profitless search for that sort of work; but honest jobs did not seem to be very plentiful in June, although any number of the other sort were to be had almost without the asking.
Doris continued to haunt agencies and theatrical offices, dawdling all day from one to the next, sitting for hours in company with other aspirants to histrionic honours and wages, gossiping, listening to stage talk, professional patter, and theatrical scandal until her pretty ears were buzzing with everything that ought not to concern her and her moral fastidiousness gradually became less delicate. Repetition is the great leveller, the great persuader. The greatest power on earth, for good or evil, is incessant reiteration.
Catharine lost her position, worked at a cheap milliner's for a week, addressed envelopes for another week, and was again left unemployed.
Athalie accepted several offers; at one place they didn't pay her for two weeks and then suggested she take half the salary agreed upon; at another her employer became offensively familiar; at another the manager made her position unendurable.
By July the financial outlook in the Greensleeve family was becoming rather serious: Doris threatened gloomily to go into burlesque; Catharine at first tearful and discouraged, finally grew careless and made few real efforts to find employment. Also she began to go out almost every evening, admitting very frankly that the home larder had become too lean and unattractive to suit her.
[Illustration: "Doris continued to haunt agencies and theatrical offices."]
Doris always went out more or less; and what troubled Athalie was not that the girl had opportunities for the decent nourishment she needed, but that her reticence concerning the people she dined with was steadily increasing.
"Oh, shut up! I can look out for myself," she always repeated sullenly. "Anyway, Athalie, _you_ are not the one to bully me. Nobody ever presented me with a cosy flat and--"
"Doris!"
"Didn't your young man give you this flat?"
"Don't speak of him or of me in that manner," said Athalie, flushing scarlet.
"Why are you so particular? It's the truth. He's given you about everything a man can offer a girl, hasn't he?--jewellery, furniture, clothing--cats--"
"Will you please not say anything more!"
But Doris was still smarting under recent admonition, and she meant to make an end of Athalie's daily interference: "I will say what I like when it's the truth," she retorted. "You are very free with your unsolicited advice. And I'll say this, and it's true, that not one girl in a thousand who accepts what you have accepted from Clive Bailey, is straight!"
Athalie's tightening lips quivered: "Do you intimate that I am not straight?"
"I didn't say that."
"You implied it."
There was a silence; Catharine lounged on the sofa, watching and listening with interest. After a moment Doris shrugged her young shoulders.
"Does it matter so much, anyway?" she said with a short, unpleasant laugh.
"Does _what_ matter--you little ninny!"
"Whether a girl _is_ straight."
"Is that the philosophy you learn in your theatrical agencies?" demanded Athalie fiercely. "What nauseating rot you do talk, Doris!"
"Very well. It may be nauseating. But what is a girl to do in a world run entirely by men?"
"You know well enough what a girl is _not_ to do, don't you? All right then,--leave that undone and do what's left."
"What _is_ left?" demanded Doris with a mirthless laugh. "There's scarcely a job that a girl can hold unless she squares some man to keep it--and keep--her!"
"Shame on you! I held mine for over five years," said Athalie with hot contempt.
"Yes, and then along came the junior partner. You wouldn't square him: you lost your job! There's always a junior partner in every business--when there isn't a senior. There's nothing to it if you stand in with the firm. If you don't--good night!"
"You managed to remain at the Egyptian Garden during the entire season."
"But the fights I had, my dear, and the tricks I employed and the lies I told and the promises I made! Oh, it's sickening--sickening! But--" she shrugged--"what are you to do? Thousands of girls go queer because they're forced to by starvation--"
"Nonsense!" cried Athalie hotly, "that is all stage twaddle and exaggerated sentimentalism! I don't believe that one girl in a thousand is forced into a dishonourable life!"
"Then why do girls go queer?"
"Because they want to; that's why! When they don't want to they don't!"
Catharine, very wide-eyed, said solemnly: "But think of all the white slaves--"
"They'd be that if they had been born to millions!" retorted Athalie. "Ignorance and aptitude, that is white slavery. It's absolutely nothing else. And in cases where the ignorance is absent, the aptitude is there. If a girl has an aptitude for becoming some man's mistress she'll probably do it whether she's ignorant or educated."
Doris, who had taken to chewing-gum furtively and in private, discreetly rolled a morsel under her tongue.
"All I know is that your salary is advanced and you're given a part at the Egyptian Garden if you stand in with Lewenbein or go to supper with Shemsky. Of course," she added, "there _are_ theatres where you don't have to be horrid in order to succeed."
"Then," said Athalie drily, "you'd better find work in those theatres."
Doris glanced sideways at Catharine, who silently returned her glance as though an understanding and sympathy existed between them not suspected or shared in by Athalie.
It was not very much of a secret. Some prowling genius of the agencies whom Doris had met had offered to write a vaudeville act for her and himself if she could find two other girls. And she had persuaded Catharine and Genevieve Hunting to try it; and Cecil Reeve and Francis Hargrave had gaily offered to back it. They were rehearsing in Reeve's apartments--between a continuous series of dinners and suppers.
And it had been her sister's going to Reeve's apartments to which Athalie had seriously objected,--not knowing why she went there.
* * * * *
This was one of many scenes that torrid summer in New York, when Athalie intuitively felt that the year which had begun so happily for her with the entrance of Clive into her life, was growing duller and greyer; and that each succeeding day seemed to be swinging her into a tide of anxiety and mischance,--a current as yet merely perceptible, but already increasing in speed toward something swifter and more stormy.
Already, to her, the future had become overcast, obscure, disquieting.
Steer as she might toward any promising harbour, always she seemed to be aware of some subtle resistance impeding her.
Every small economy attempted, every retrenchment planned, came to nothing. Always she was met at some corner by an unlooked-for necessity entailing further expense.
No money was coming in; her own and her sister's savings were going steadily, every day, every week.
There seemed no further way to check expenditure. Athalie had dismissed their servant as soon as she had lost her position at Wahlbaum and Grossman's. Table expenses were reduced to Spartan limits, much to the disgust of them all. No clothes were bought, no luxuries, no trifles. They did their own marketing, their own cooking, their own housework and laundry. And had it not been that the apartment entailed no outlay for light, heat, and rent, they would have been sorely perplexed that spring and summer in New York.
Athalie permitted herself only one luxury, Hafiz. And one necessity; stamps and letter paper for foreign correspondence.
The latter was costing her less and less recently. Clive wrote seldom now. And always very sensitive where he was concerned, she permitted herself the happiness of writing only after he had taken the initiative, and a reply from her was due him.
No, matters were not going very well with Athalie. Also she was frequently physically tired. Perhaps it was the lassitude consequent on the heat. But at times she had an odd idea that she lacked courage; and sometimes when lonely, she tried to reason with herself, tried to teach her heart bravery--particularly during the long interims which elapsed between Clive's letters.
As for her attitude toward him--whether or not she was in love with him--she was too busy thinking about him to bother her head about attitudes or degrees of affection. All the girl knew--when she permitted herself to think of herself--was that she missed him dreadfully. Otherwise her concern was chiefly for him, for his happiness and well-being. Also she was concerned regarding the promise she had made him--and to which he usually referred in his letters,--the promise to try to learn more about this faculty of hers for clear vision, and, if possible, to employ it for his sake and in his unhappy service.
This often preoccupied her, troubled her. She did not know how to go about it; she hesitated to seek those who advertised their alleged occult powers for sale,--trance-mediums, mind-readers, palmists--all the heterogeneous riffraff lurking always in metropolitan purlieus, and always with a sly weather-eye on the police.
As usual in her career since the time she could first remember, she continued to "see clearly" where others saw and heard nothing.
Faint voices in the dusk, a whisper in darkness; perhaps in her bedroom the subtle intuition of another presence. And sometimes a touch on her arm, a breath on her cheek, delicate, exquisite--sometimes the haunting sweetness of some distant harmony, half heard, half divined. And now and then a form, usually unknown, almost always smiling and friendly, visible for a few moments--the space of a fire-fly's incandescence--then fading--entering her orbit out of nothing and, going into nothing, out of it.
Of these episodes she had never entertained any fear. Sometimes they interested her, sometimes even slightly amused her. But they had never saddened her, not even when they had been the flash-lit harbingers of death. For only a sense of calmness and serenity accompanied them: and to her they had always been part of the world and of life, nothing to wonder at, nothing to fear, and certainly nothing to intrude on--merely incidents not concerning her, not remarkable, but natural and requiring no explanation.
But she herself did not know and could not explain why, even as a child, she had been always reticent regarding these occurrences,--why she had always been disinclined to discuss them. Unless it were a natural embarrassment and a hesitation to discuss strangers, as though comment were a species of indelicacy,--even of unwarranted intrusion.
One night while reading--she had been scanning a newspaper column of advertisements hoping to find a chance for herself or Catharine--glancing up she again saw Clive's father seated near her. At the same moment he lifted his head, which had been resting on one hand, and looked across the hearthstone at her, smiling faintly.
Entirely unembarrassed, conscious of that atmosphere of serenity which always was present when such visitors arrived, the girl sat looking at what her eyes told her she perceived, a slight and friendly smile curving her lips in silent response.
Presently she became aware that Hafiz, too, saw the visitor, and was watching him. But this fact she had noticed before, and it did not surprise her.
And that was all there was to the incident. He rose, walked to the window, stood there. And after a little while he was not there. That ended it. And Hafiz went to sleep again. _