The Wheel of Life.
by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow.
PART I
IMPULSE
CHAPTER I
IN WHICH THE ROMANTIC HERO IS CONSPICUOUS BY HIS ABSENCE
As the light fell on her face Gerty Bridewell awoke, stifled a yawn with her pillow, and remembered that she had been very unhappy when she went to bed. That was only six hours ago, and yet she felt now that her unhappiness and the object of it, which was her husband, were of less disturbing importance to her than the fact that she must get up and stand for three minutes under the shower bath in her dressing-room. With a sigh she pressed the pillow more firmly under her cheek, and lay looking a little wistfully at her maid, who, having drawn back the curtains at the window, stood now regarding her with the discreet and confidential smile which drew from her a protesting frown of irritation.
"Well, I can"t get up until I"ve had my coffee," she said in a voice which produced an effect of mournful brightness rather than of anger, "I haven"t the strength to put so much as my foot out of bed."
Her eyes followed the woman across the room and through the door, and then, turning instinctively to the broad mirror above her dressing table, hung critically upon the brilliant red and white reflection in the gla.s.s. It was her comforting a.s.surance that every woman looked her best in bed; and as she lay now, following the lines of her charming figure beneath the satin coverlet, she found herself wondering, not without resentment, why the possession of a beauty so conspicuous should afford her only a slight and temporary satisfaction. Last week a woman whom she knew had had her nose broken in an automobile accident, and as she remembered this it seemed to her that the mere fact of her undisfigured features was sufficient to be the cause of joyful grat.i.tude. But this, she knew, was not so, for her face was perfectly unharmed; and yet she felt that she could hardly have been more miserable, even with a broken nose.
Here she paused for an instant in order to establish herself securely in her argument, for, though she could by no stretch of the imagination regard her mind as of a meditative cast, there are hours when even to the most flippant experience wears the borrowed mantle of philosophy.
Abstract theories of conduct diverted her but little; what she wanted was some practical explanation of the mental weariness she felt. What she wanted, she repeated, as if to drive in the matter with a final blow, was to be as happy in the actual condition as she had told herself that she might be when as yet the actual was only the ideal. Why, for instance, when she had been wretched with but one man on the box, should the addition of a second livery fail to produce in her the contentment of which she had often dreamed while she disconsolately regarded a single pair of shoulders? That happiness did not masquerade in livery she had learned since she had triumphantly married the richest man she knew, and the admission of this brought her almost with a jump to the bitter conclusion of her unanswerable logic--for the satisfaction which was not to be found in a footman was absent as well from the imposing figure of Perry Bridewell himself. Yet she told herself that she would have married him had he possessed merely the historical penny, and the restless infatuation of those first months was still sufficiently alive to lend the colour of its pleasing torment to her existence.
Lying there, in her French embroidered night dress, with her brilliant red hair pushed back from her forehead, she began idly to follow the histories of the people whom she knew, and it seemed to her that each of them was in some particular circ.u.mstance more fortunate than she. But she would have changed place with none, not even with her best friend, Laura Wilde, who was perfectly content because she lived buried away in Gramercy Park and wrote vague beautiful verse that n.o.body ever read.
Laura filled as little part in what she called "the world" as Gramercy Park occupied in modern progress, yet it was not without a faint impulse of envy that Gerty recalled now the grave old house mantled in brown creepers and the cheerful firelit room in which Laura lived. The peace which she had missed in the thought of her husband came back to her with the first recollection of her friend, and her hard bright eyes softened a little while she dwelt on the vivid face of the woman to whom she clung because of her very unlikeness to herself. Gradually out of the mist of her unhappiness the figure of Laura rose in the mirror before her, and she saw clearly her large white forehead under the dark wing-like waves of hair, the singular intentness of her eyes, and the rapt expectancy of look in which her features were lost as in a general vagueness of light.
Though it was twenty years since she had first seen Laura Wilde as a child of ten, the meeting came to her suddenly with all the bright clearness of an incident of yesterday. She remembered herself as a weak, bedraggled little girl, in wet slippers, who was led by a careless nurse to a strange German school; and she felt again the agony of curiosity with which, after the first blank wonder was over, she had stared at the children who hung whispering together in the centre of the room. As she looked a panic terror seized her like a wild beast, and she threw up her hands and turned to rush away to the rea.s.suring presence of grown up creatures, when from the midst of the whispering group a little dark girl, in an ugly brown frock, ran up to her and folded her in her arms.
"I shall love you best of all because you are so beautiful," said the little dark girl, "and I will do all your sums and even eat your sausage for you." Then she had kissed her and brought her to the stove and knelt down on the floor to take off her wet slippers. To this day Gerty had always thought of her friend as the little girl who had shut her eyes and gulped down those terrible sausages for her behind her teacher"s back.
The maid brought the coffee, and while she sat up to drink it the door of her husband"s dressing-room opened and he came in and stood, large, florid and impressive, beside her bed.
"I"m afraid I shan"t get back to luncheon," he remarked, as he settled his ample, carefully groomed body in his clothes with a comfortable shake, "there"s a chap from the country Pierce has sent to me with a letter and I"ll be obliged to feed him at the club, but--to tell the truth--there"s so little one can get really fit at this season."
To a man for whom the pleasures of the table represented the larger share of his daily enjoyment, this was a question not without a serious importance of its own; and while he paused to settle it he stood, squaring his chest, with an expression of decided annoyance on his handsome, good-humored face. Then, having made a satisfactory choice of dishes, his features recovered their usual look of genial contentment, and he felt carelessly in his pocket for the letter which he presently produced and laid on Gerty"s pillow. His life had corresponded so evenly with his bodily impulses that the perfection of the adjustment had produced in him the amiable exterior of an animal that is never crossed.
It was a case in which supreme selfishness exerted the effect of personality.
Leaving the letter where he had placed it, Gerty sat sipping her coffee while she looked up at him with the candid cynicism which lent a piquant charm to the almost doll-like regularity of her features.
"You did not get three hours sleep and yet you"re so fresh you smell of soap," she observed as an indignant protest, "while I"ve had six and I"m still too tired to move."
"Oh, I"m all right--I never let myself get seedy," returned Perry, with his loud though pleasant laugh. "That"s the mistake all you women make."
Half closing her eyes Gerty leaned back and surveyed him with a curious detachment--almost as if he were an important piece of architecture which she had been recommended to admire and to which she was patiently trying in vain to adjust her baffled vision. The smaller she screwed her gaze the more remotely magnificent loomed his proportions.
"How you manage it is more than I can understand," she said.
Perry stared for a moment in an amiable vacancy at the coffee pot. Then she watched the animation move feebly in his face, while he pulled at his short fair moustache with a characteristic masculine gesture.
Physically, she admitted, he had never appeared to a better advantage in her eyes.
"By the way, I had a game of billiards with Kemper and we talked pretty late," he said, as if evolving the explanation for which she had not asked. "He got back from Europe yesterday you know."
"He did?" Her indifferent gaiety played like harmless lightning around his ma.s.sive bulk. "Then we may presume, I suppose, on Madame Alta for the opera season?"
He met the question with an admiring chuckle. "Do you really mean you think he"s been abroad with her all this time?"
"Well, what else did he get his divorce for?" she demanded, with the utter disillusion of knowledge which she had found to be her most effective pose.
Perry"s chuckle swelled suddenly into a roar. "Good Lord, how women talk!" he burst out. "Why, Arnold has been divorced ten years and he never laid eyes on Jennie Alta till she sang over here three years ago.
There was nothing in it except that he liked to be seen with a celebrity--most men do. But, my dear girl," he concluded in a kind of awful reverence, "what a tongue you"ve got. It"s a jolly good thing for me that I"m your husband or you wouldn"t leave me a blessed patch of reputation to my back."
His humor held him convulsed for several minutes, during which interval Gerty continued to regard him with her piquant cynicism.
"Well, if it wasn"t Madame Alta it was somebody who is voiceless," she retorted coolly. "I merely meant that there must have been a reason."
"Oh, your "reasons"!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Perry. Then he stooped and gave the letter lying on Gerty"s pillow a filip from his large pink forefinger.
"You haven"t told me what you think of this?" he said.
Picking up the letter Gerty unfolded it and read it slowly through from start to finish, the little ripple of sceptical amus.e.m.e.nt crossing and recrossing her parted lips,
RAVENS NEST, Fauquier County, Virginia, December 26, 19--.
_My Dear Perry_: n.o.body, of course, ever accused you of being literary, nor, thank Heaven, have I fallen under that aspersion--but since the shortest road to success seems to be by circ.u.mvention, it has occurred to me that you might give a social shove or two to the chap who will hand you this letter sometime after the New Year.
His name is St. George Trent, he was born a little way up the turnpike from me, has an enchanting mother, and shows symptoms of being already inoculated with the literary plague. I never read books, so I have no sense of comparative values in literature, and consequently can"t tell whether he is an inglorious Shakespeare or a subject for the daily press. His mother a.s.sures me that he has already written a play worthy to stand beside Hamlet--but, though she is a charming lady, I"m hardly convinced by her opinion. The fact remains, however, that he is going to New York to become a playwright, and that he has two idols in the market place which, I fancy, you may be predestined to see demolished. He is simply off his head to meet Roger Adams, the editor of _The_--something or other I never heard of--and--remember your budding days and be charitable--a lady who writes poems and signs herself Laura Wilde.
I prepared him for the inevitable catastrophe by a.s.suring him that the harmless Mr. Adams eats with his knife, and that the lady, as she writes books, isn"t worth much at love-making--the purpose for which woman was created by G.o.d and cultivated by man. Alas, though, the young are a people of great faith!
Commend me to Mrs. Bridewell, whom I haven"t seen since I had the honour of a.s.sisting at the wedding.
Yours ever, BEVERLY PIERCE.
As she finished her reading, Gerty broke into a laugh and carelessly threw the letter aside on the blue satin quilt.
"I"m glad to hear that somebody has read Laura"s poems," she observed.
"But what in thunder am I to do with the chap?" enquired Perry. "G.o.d knows I don"t go in for literature, and that"s all he"s good for I dare say."
"Oh, well, he can eat, I guess," commented Gerty, with consoling irony.
"I"ve asked Roger Adams to luncheon," pursued Perry, too concerned to resent her lack of sympathy, "but there are nine chances to one that he will stay away."
"Experience has taught me," rejoined Gerty sweetly, "that your friend Adams can be absolutely counted on to stay away. Do you know," she resumed after a moment"s thought, "that, though he"s probably the brainiest man of our acquaintance, I sometimes seriously wonder what you see in him."
A flush of anger darkened Perry"s clear skin, and this sudden change gave him an almost brutal look. "I"d like to know if I"m a blamed fool?"
he demanded.