"What is the railroad fare?"
"Oh, about twenty-five dollars--with sleeper."
"Yes--I can fly that far."
"Do you mean to say you"ve no ties of any kind?"
"None. Not one." Her eyes opened wide and her nostrils dilated. "Free!"
"You love it--don"t you?"
"Don"t you?"
"Above everything!" he exclaimed. "Only the free _live_."
She lifted her head higher in a graceful, attractive gesture of confidence and happiness. "Well--I am ready to live."
"I"m afraid you don"t realize," he said hesitatingly. "People wouldn"t understand. You"ve your reputation to think of, you know."
She looked straight at him. "No--not even that. I"m even free from reputation." Then, as his face saddened and his eyes glistened with sympathy, "You needn"t pity me. See where it"s brought me."
"You"re a strong swimmer--aren"t you?" he said tenderly. "But then there isn"t any safe and easy crossing to the isles of freedom. It"s no wonder most people don"t get further than gazing and longing."
"Probably I shouldn"t," confessed Susan, "if I hadn"t been thrown into the water. It was a case of swim or drown."
"But most who try are drowned--nearly all the women."
"Oh, I guess there are more survive than is generally supposed.
So much lying is done about that sort of thing."
"What a shrewd young lady it is! At any rate, you have reached the islands."
"But I"m not queen of them yet," she reminded him. "I"m only a poor, naked, out-of-breath castaway lying on the beach."
He laughed appreciatively. Very clever, this extremely pretty young woman. "Yes--you"ll win. You"ll be queen." He lifted his champagne gla.s.s and watched the little bubbles pushing gayly and swiftly upward. "So--you"ve cast over your reputation."
"I told you I had reached the beach naked." A reckless light in her eyes now. "Fact is, I had none to start with. Anybody has a reason for starting--or for being started. That was mine, I guess."
"I"ve often thought about that matter of reputation--in a man or a woman--if they"re trying to make the bold, strong swim. To care about one"s reputation means fear of what the world says.
It"s important to care about one"s character--for without character no one ever got anywhere worth getting to. But it"s very, very dangerous to be afraid for one"s reputation. And--I hate to admit it, because I"m hopelessly conventional at bottom, but it"s true--reputation--fear of what the world says--has sunk more swimmers, has wrecked more characters than it ever helped.
So--the strongest and best swimmers swim naked."
Susan was looking thoughtfully at him over the rim of her gla.s.s.
She took a sip of the champagne, said: "If I hadn"t been quite naked, I"d have sunk--I"d have been at the bottom--with the fishes----"
"Don"t!" he cried. "Thank G.o.d, you did whatever you"ve done--yes, I mean that--whatever you"ve done, since it enabled you to swim on." He added, "And I know it wasn"t anything bad--anything unwomanly."
"I did the best I could--nothing I"m ashamed of--or proud of either. Just--what I had to do."
"But you ought to be proud that you arrived."
"No--only glad," said she. "So--so _frightfully_ glad!"
In any event, their friendship was bound to flourish; aided by that dinner and that wine it sprang up into an intimacy, a feeling of mutual trust and of sympathy at every point. Like all women she admired strength in a man above everything else. She delighted in the thick obstinate growth of his fair hair, in the breadth of the line of his eyebrows, in the aggressive thrust of his large nose and long jawbone. She saw in the way his mouth closed evidence of a will against which opposition would dash about as dangerously as an egg against a stone wall. There was no question of his having those birthmarks of success about which he talked. She saw them--saw nothing of the less obtrusive--but not less important--marks of weakness which might have enabled an expert in the reading of faces to reach some rather depressing conclusion as to the nature and the degree of that success.
Finally, he burst out with, "Yes, I"ve made up my mind. I"ll do it! I"m going to New York. I"ve been fooling away the last five years here learning a lot, but still idling--drinking--amusing myself in all kinds of ways. And about a month ago--one night, as I was rolling home toward dawn--through a driving sleet storm--do you remember a line in "Paradise Lost""
"I never read it," interrupted Susan.
"Well--it"s where the devils have been kicked out of Heaven and are lying in agony flat on the burning lake--and Satan rises up--and marches haughtily out among them--and calls out, "Awake!
Arise! Or forever more be d.a.m.ned!" That"s what has happened to me several times in my life. When I was a boy, idling about the farm and wasting myself, that voice came to me--"Awake! Arise!
Or forever more be d.a.m.ned!" And I got a move on me, and insisted on going to college. Again--at college--I became a dawdler--poker--drink--dances--all the rest of it. And suddenly that voice roared in my ears, made me jump like a rabbit when a gun goes off. And last month it came again. I went to work--finished a play I"ve been pottering over for three years.
But somehow I couldn"t find the--the--whatever I needed--to make me break away. Well--_you"ve_ given me that. I"ll resign from the _Commercial_ and with all I"ve got in the world--three hundred dollars and a trunk full of good clothes, I"ll break into Broadway."
Susan had listened with bright eyes and quickened breath, as intoxicated and as convinced as was he by his eloquence.
"Isn"t that splendid!" she exclaimed in a low voice.
"And you?" he said meaningly.
"I?" she replied, fearing she was misunderstanding.
"Will you go?"
"Do you want me?" she asked, low and breathlessly.
With a reluctance which suggested--but not to her--that his generosity was winning a hard-fought battle with his vanity, he replied: "I need you. I doubt if I"d dare, without you to back me up."
"I"ve got a trunk full of fairly good clothes and about a hundred dollars. But I haven"t got any play--or any art--or any trade even. Of course, I"ll go." Then she hastily added, "I"ll not be a drag on you. I pay my own way."
"But you mustn"t be suspicious in your independence," he warned her. "You mustn"t forget that I"m older than you and more experienced and that it"s far easier for a man to get money than for a woman."
"To get it without lowering himself?"
"Ah!" he exclaimed, looking strangely at her. "You mean, without bowing to some boss? Without selling his soul? I had no idea you were so much of a woman when I met you that day."
"I wasn"t--then," replied she. "And I didn"t know where I"d got till we began to talk this evening."
"And you"re very young!"
"Oh, but I"ve been going to a school where they make you learn fast."
"Indeed I do need you." He touched his gla.s.s to hers. "On to Broadway!" he cried.
"Broadway!" echoed she, radiant.
"Together--eh?"
She nodded. But as she drank the toast a tear splashed into her gla.s.s. She was remembering how some mysterious instinct had restrained her from going with John Redmond, though it seemed the only sane thing to do. What if she had disobeyed that instinct! And then--through her mind in swift ghostly march--past trailed the persons and events of the days just gone--just gone, yet seeming as far away as a former life in another world.