Culwin, so sunk into his chair that he seemed like a heap of his own empty clothes, stirred a little, as if in surprise at my question. He appeared to have half-forgotten what he had been telling us.
"How long? Oh, off and on all that winter. It was infernal. I never got used to them. I grew really ill."
Frenham shifted his att.i.tude silently, and as he did so his elbow struck against a small mirror in a bronze frame standing on the table behind him. He turned and changed its angle slightly; then he resumed his former att.i.tude, his dark head thrown back on his lifted palm, his eyes intent on Culwin"s face. Something in his stare embarra.s.sed me, and as if to divert attention from it I pressed on with another question:
"And you never tried sacrificing Noyes?"
"Oh, no. The fact is I didn"t have to. He did it for me, poor infatuated boy!"
"Did it for you? How do you mean?"
"He wore me out--wore everybody out. He kept on pouring out his lamentable twaddle, and hawking it up and down the place till he became a thing of terror. I tried to wean him from writing--oh, ever so gently, you understand, by throwing him with agreeable people, giving him a chance to make himself felt, to come to a sense of what he _really_ had to give. I"d foreseen this solution from the beginning--felt sure that, once the first ardour of authorship was quenched, he"d drop into his place as a charming parasitic thing, the kind of chronic Cherubino for whom, in old societies, there"s always a seat at table, and a shelter behind the ladies" skirts. I saw him take his place as "the poet": the poet who doesn"t write. One knows the type in every drawing-room. Living in that way doesn"t cost much--I"d worked it all out in my mind, and felt sure that, with a little help, he could manage it for the next few years; and meanwhile he"d be sure to marry. I saw him married to a widow, rather older, with a good cook and a well-run house. And I actually had my eye on the widow ... Meanwhile I did everything to facilitate the transition--lent him money to ease his conscience, introduced him to pretty women to make him forget his vows. But nothing would do him: he had but one idea in his beautiful obstinate head. He wanted the laurel and not the rose, and he kept on repeating Gautier"s axiom, and battering and filing at his limp prose till he"d spread it out over Lord knows how many thousand sloppy pages. Now and then he would send a pailful to a publisher, and of course it would always come back.
"At first it didn"t matter--he thought he was "misunderstood." He took the att.i.tudes of genius, and whenever an opus came home he wrote another to keep it company. Then he had a reaction of despair, and accused me of deceiving him, and Lord knows what. I got angry at that, and told him it was he who had deceived himself. He"d come to me determined to write, and I"d done my best to help him. That was the extent of my offence, and I"d done it for his cousin"s sake, not his.
"That seemed to strike home, and he didn"t answer for a minute. Then he said: "My time"s up and my money"s up. What do you think I"d better do?"
""I think you"d better not be an a.s.s," I said.
"He turned red, and asked: "What do you mean by being an a.s.s?"
"I took a letter from my desk and held it out to him.
""I mean refusing this offer of Mrs. Ellinger"s: to be her secretary at a salary of five thousand dollars. There may be a lot more in it than that."
"He flung out his hand with a violence that struck the letter from mine.
"Oh, I know well enough what"s in it!" he said, scarlet to the roots of his hair.
""And what"s your answer, if you know?" I asked.
"He made none at the minute, but turned away slowly to the door. There, with his hand on the threshold, he stopped to ask, almost under his breath: "Then you really think my stuff"s no good?"
"I was tired and exasperated, and I laughed. I don"t defend my laugh--it was in wretched taste. But I must plead in extenuation that the boy was a fool, and that I"d done my best for him--I really had.
"He went out of the room, shutting the door quietly after him. That afternoon I left for Frascati, where I"d promised to spend the Sunday with some friends. I was glad to escape from Gilbert, and by the same token, as I learned that night, I had also escaped from the eyes. I dropped into the same lethargic sleep that had come to me before when their visitations ceased; and when I woke the next morning, in my peaceful painted room above the ilexes, I felt the utter weariness and deep relief that always followed on that repairing slumber. I put in two blessed nights at Frascati, and when I got back to my rooms in Rome I found that Gilbert had gone ... Oh, nothing tragic had happened--the episode never rose to _that_. He"d simply packed his ma.n.u.scripts and left for America--for his family and the Wall Street desk. He left a decent little note to tell me of his decision, and behaved altogether, in the circ.u.mstances, as little like a fool as it"s possible for a fool to behave ..."
IV
CULWIN paused again, and again Frenham sat motionless, the dusky contour of his young head reflected in the mirror at his back.
"And what became of Noyes afterward?" I finally asked, still disquieted by a sense of incompleteness, by the need of some connecting thread between the parallel lines of the tale.
Culwin twitched his shoulders. "Oh, nothing became of him--because he became nothing. There could be no question of "becoming" about it. He vegetated in an office, I believe, and finally got a clerkship in a consulate, and married drearily in China. I saw him once in Hong Kong, years afterward. He was fat and hadn"t shaved. I was told he drank. He didn"t recognize me."
"And the eyes?" I asked, after another pause which Frenham"s continued silence made oppressive.
Culwin, stroking his chin, blinked at me meditatively through the shadows. "I never saw them after my last talk with Gilbert. Put two and two together if you can. For my part, I haven"t found the link."
He rose stiffly, his hands in his pockets, and walked over to the table on which reviving drinks had been set out.
"You must be parched after this dry tale. Here, help yourself, my dear fellow. Here, Phil--" He turned back to the hearth.
Frenham still sat in his low chair, making no response to his host"s hospitable summons. But as Culwin advanced toward him, their eyes met in a long look; after which, to my intense surprise, the young man, turning suddenly in his seat, flung his arms across the table, and dropped his face upon them.
Culwin, at the unexpected gesture, stopped short, a flush on his face.
"Phil--what the deuce? Why, have the eyes scared _you?_ My dear boy--my dear fellow--I never had such a tribute to my literary ability, never!"
He broke into a chuckle at the thought, and halted on the hearth-rug, his hands still in his pockets, gazing down in honest perplexity at the youth"s bowed head. Then, as Frenham still made no answer, he moved a step or two nearer.
"Cheer up, my dear Phil! It"s years since I"ve seen them--apparently I"ve done nothing lately bad enough to call them out of chaos. Unless my present evocation of them has made _you_ see them; which would be their worst stroke yet!"
His bantering appeal quivered off into an uneasy laugh, and he moved still nearer, bending over Frenham, and laying his gouty hands on the lad"s shoulders.
"Phil, my dear boy, really--what"s the matter? Why don"t you answer?
_Have_ you seen the eyes?"
Frenham"s face was still pressed against his arms, and from where I stood behind Culwin I saw the latter, as if under the rebuff of this unaccountable att.i.tude, draw back slowly from his friend. As he did so, the light of the lamp on the table fell full on his perplexed congested face, and I caught its sudden reflection in the mirror behind Frenham"s head.
Culwin saw the reflection also. He paused, his face level with the mirror, as if scarcely recognizing the countenance in it as his own. But as he looked his expression gradually changed, and for an appreciable s.p.a.ce of time he and the image in the gla.s.s confronted each other with a glare of slowly gathering hate. Then Culwin let go of Frenham"s shoulders, and drew back a step, covering his eyes with his hands ...
Frenham, his face still hidden, did not stir.
THE BLOND BEAST
I
IT had been almost too easy--that was young Millner"s first feeling, as he stood again on the Spence door-step, the great moment of his interview behind him, and Fifth Avenue rolling its grimy Pactolus at his feet.
Halting there in the winter light, with the clang of the ponderous vestibule doors in his ears, and his eyes carried down the perspective of the packed interminable thoroughfare, he even dared to remember Rastignac"s apostrophe to Paris, and to hazard recklessly under his small fair moustache: "Who knows?"
He, Hugh Millner, at any rate, knew a good deal already: a good deal more than he had imagined it possible to learn in half an hour"s talk with a man like Orlando G. Spence; and the loud-rumouring city spread out there before him seemed to grin like an accomplice who knew the rest.
A gust of wind, whirling down from the dizzy height of the building on the next corner, drove sharply through his overcoat and compelled him to clutch at his hat. It was a bitter January day, a day of fierce light and air, when the sunshine cut like icicles and the wind sucked one into black gulfs at the street corners. But Millner"s complacency was like a warm lining to his shabby coat, and heaving steadied his hat he continued to stand on the Spence threshold, lost in the vision revealed to him from the Pisgah of its marble steps. Yes, it was wonderful what the vision showed him. ... In his absorption he might have frozen fast to the door-step if the Rhadamanthine portals behind him had not suddenly opened to let out a slim fur-coated figure, the figure, as he perceived, of the youth whom he had caught in the act of withdrawal as he entered Mr. Spence"s study, and whom the latter, with a wave of his affable hand, had detained to introduce as "my son Draper."
It was characteristic of the odd friendliness of the whole scene that the great man should have thought it worth while to call back and name his heir to a mere humble applicant like Millner; and that the heir should shed on him, from a pale high-browed face, a smile of such deprecating kindness. It was characteristic, equally, of Millner, that he should at once mark the narrowness of the shoulders sustaining this ingenuous head; a narrowness, as he now observed, imperfectly concealed by the wide fur collar of young Spence"s expensive and badly cut coat.
But the face took on, as the youth smiled his surprise at their second meeting, a look of almost plaintive good-will: the kind of look that Millner scorned and yet could never quite resist.
"Mr. Millner? Are you--er--waiting?" the lad asked, with an intention of serviceableness that was like a finer echo of his father"s resounding cordiality.
"For my motor? No," Millner jested in his frank free voice. "The fact is, I was just standing here lost in the contemplation of my luck"--and as his companion"s pale blue eyes seemed to shape a question, "my extraordinary luck," he explained, "in having been engaged as your father"s secretary."