The young Chinese lady turns toward the harlequin. There is some laughter in her voice and a great deal of surprise.
"Why, Ted, of course--why, why shouldn"t I?--You"re Peter"s friend and--"
"Oh, I don"t mean _that_!" The harlequin"s hands twist at each other till the knuckles hurt, but he seems to have recovered most voluble if chaotic powers of speech.
"That was silly, asking that--but it"s hard--when you care for anybody so much you can"t _see_--when you love them till they"re the only thing there _is_ you care about--and you know you"re not fit to touch them--not worthy of them--that they"re thousands of times too good for you but--oh, Elinor, Elinor, I just can"t stand it any more! Do you love me, Elinor, because I love you as I never loved anything else in the world?"
The young Chinese lady doesn"t seem to be quite certain of just what is happening. She has started to speak three times and stopped each time while the harlequin has been waiting with the suspense of a man hanging from Heaven on a pack-thread. But then she does speak.
"I think I do, Ted---oh, Ted, I know I do," she says uncertainly--and then Oliver, if he were there, would have stepped forward to bow like an elegant jack-knife at the applause most righteously due him for perfect staging, for he really could not have managed better about the kiss that follows if he had spent days and days showing the princ.i.p.als how to rehea.r.s.e it.
And then something happens that is as sudden as a bubble"s going to pieces and most completely out of keeping with any of Oliver"s ideas on how love should be set for the theatre. For "Oh, what am I _doing_?"
says the harlequin in the voice of a man who has met his airy double alone in a wood full of ghosts and seen his own death in its face, and he crumples into a loose bag of parti-colored silks, his head in his hands. [Ill.u.s.tration: The Young Chinese Lady is Shrinking Inside Her Silks] It would be nothing very much to any sensible person, no doubt--the picture that made itself out of cold dishonorable fog in the instant of peace after their double release from pain. It was only the way that Elinor looked at him after the kiss--and remembering the last time he saw his own diminished little image in the open eyes of a girl.
The young Chinese lady is shrinking inside her silks as if frost had touched her--all she knows is that she doesn"t understand. And then there is the harlequin looking at her with his face gone suddenly pinched and odd as if he had started to torture himself with his own hands; and the fact that he will not touch her, and what he says.
"Oh, Elinor, darling. Oh, I can"t tell you, I can"t."
"But what _is_ it, Ted?"
"It"s this--it"s what I meant to tell you before I ever told you I loved you--what I haven"t any right not to tell you--and I guess that the fact I didn"t, shows pretty well what sort of a fellow I am. Do you really think you know about me, dear--do you really think you do?"
"Why, of course, Ted." The voice is still a little chill with the fright he gave her, but under that it is beautifully secure.
"Well, you don"t. And, oh Lord, why couldn"t it have happened before I went to France!--because then it would have been all different and I"d have had some sort of a right--not a right, maybe--but anyhow, I could have come to you--straight. I can"t now, dear, that"s all."
The voice halts as if something were breaking to pieces inside of it.
"I can"t bring you what you"d bring me. Oh, it isn"t anything--physically--dangerous--that way--I--was--lucky." The words s.p.a.ce themselves as slowly as if each one of them burnt like acid as it came. "It"s--just--that. Just that--while I was in France--I went over--all the hurdles--and then a few more, I guess--and I"ve got to--tell you about it--because I love you--and because I wouldn"t dare love you, even--if I didn"t--tell you the truth. You see. But, oh my G.o.d, I never thought it would--hurt so!" and the parti-colored body of the harlequin is shaken with a painful pa.s.sion that seems ridiculously out of keeping with his motley. But all that the young Chinese lady feels is that for a single and brittle instant she and somebody else had a star in their hands that covered them with light clean silver, and that now the conjuror who made the star out of nothing and gave it to her is showing her just why there never was any star. Moreover, she has only known she was in love for the last five minutes--and that is hardly long enough for her to discover that love itself is too living to be very much like any nice girl"s dreams of it--and the shock of what Ted has said has brought every one of her mother"s reticent acid hints on the general uncleanliness of Man too p.r.i.c.kling-close to her mind. And she can"t understand--she never will understand, she thinks with dull pain.
"Oh how _could_ you, Ted? How _could_ you?" she says as he waits as a man walking the plank might wait for the final gentle push that will send him overboard.
"Oh, I know it was fine of you to tell me--but it"s just spoiled everything forever. Oh, Ted, how _could_ you?" and then she is half-running, half-walking, up the path toward the porch and all she knows is that she must get somewhere where she can be by herself. The harlequin does not follow her.
x.x.xII
Oliver, in the middle of a painfully vivid dream in which he has just received in the lounge of a Yale Club crowded with whispering, pointing spectators the news that Miss Nancy Ellicott of St. Louis has eloped with the Prince of Wales, wakes, to hear someone stumbling around the room in the dark.
"That you, Ted?"
"Yes. Go to bed."
"Can"t--I"m there. What"s time?"
""Bout five, I guess." Ted doesn"t seem to want to be very communicative.
"Um." A pause while Oliver remembers what it was he wanted to ask Ted about and Ted undresses silently.
"Well--congratulations?"
Ted"s voice is very even, very controlled.
"Sorry, Ollie. Not even with all your good advice."
"_Honestly_?"
"Uh-huh." "Well, look here--better luck next time, anyway. It"s all--"
"It"s all over, Ollie. I"m getting out of here tomorrow before most of them are up. Special breakfast and everything--called back to town by urgent legal affairs." He laughs, rather too barkingly for Oliver to like it.
"Oh, h.e.l.l!"
"Correct."
"Well, she"s--"
"She"s an angel, Ollie. But I had to tell her--about France. That broke it. D"you wonder?"
"Oh, you poor, d.a.m.n, honorable, simple-minded, blessed, blasted fool!
_Before_ you"d really begun?"
Ted hesitates. "Y-yes."
"Oh, h.e.l.l!"
"Well, if all you can do is to lie back in bed there and call on your Redeemer when---Sorry, Ollie. But I"m not feeling too pleasant tonight."
"Well, I ought to know--"
"Forgot. You ought. Well--you do."
"But I don"t see anything yet that--"
"She does."
"But--"
"Oh, Ollie, what"s the use? We can both of us play Job"s comforter to the other because we"re pretty good friends. But you can see how my telling her would--oh well there isn"t much percentage in hashing it over. I"ve done what I"ve done. If I"d known I"d have to pay for it this way, I wouldn"t have--but there, we"re all made like that. There"s one thing I can"t do--and that is get away with a thing like that on false pretences--I"d rather shoot the works on one roll and c.r.a.p than use the sort of dice that behave. I went into the thing with my eyes open--now I"ve got to pay for it--well, what of it? It wouldn"t make all the difference to a lot of girls, perhaps--a lot of the best--but it does to Elinor and she"s the only person I want. If I can"t have her, I don"t want anything--but if I"ve made what all the Y.M.C.A. Christians that ever sold nickel bars of chocolate for a quarter would call a swine out of myself--well, I"m going to be a first-cla.s.s swine. So put on my glad rags, Josie, I"m going to Rector"s and h.e.l.l!"
All this has been light enough toward the end but the lightness is not far from a very real desperation, all the same.
"Meaning by which?" Oliver queries uneasily.
"Meaning by which that some of my address for the next two-three weeks will be care of Mrs. Rose Severance, 4th floor, the Nineveh, Riverside Drive, New York--you know the place, I showed it to you once from a bus-top when we were talking the mysterious lady over. And that I don"t think Mr. Theodore Billett will graduate _c.u.m laude_ from Columbia Law School. In fact, I think it very possible that Mr. Billett will join Mr. Oliver Crowe, the celebrated unpublished novelist on a pilgrimage to Paris for to cure their broken hearts and go to the devil like gentlemen. Eh, Ollie?"
"Well, that"s all right for _me_," says Oliver combatively. "And I always imagined we"d find each other in h.e.l.l. I"m not trying to be inhospitable with my own pet red-hot gridiron, but all the same--"