Chambers Robert William
The Fighting Chance
Sylvia, at her escritoire, chin cradled in her hollowed hand, sat listlessly inspecting her mail—the usual pile of bills and advertisements, social demands and interested appeals, with here and there a frivolous note from some intimate to punctuate the endless importunities.
Her housekeeper had come and gone; the Belwether establishment could jog through another day. Various specialists, who cared for the health and beauty of her body, had entered and made their unctuous exits. The major had gone to Tuxedo for the week’s end; her maid had bronchitis; two horses required the veterinary, and the kitchen range a new water-back.
Cards had come for the Caithness function; cards for young Austin Wadsworth’s wedding to a Charleston girl of rumoured beauty; Caragnini was to sing for Mrs. Vendenning; a live llama, two-legged, had consented to undermine Christianity for Mrs. Pyne-Johnson and her guests.
“Would Sylvia be ready for the inspection of imported head-gears to harmonise with the gowns being built by Constantine?
“When—
“Would she receive the courteous agent of ‘The Reigning Beauties of Manhattan,’ to arrange for her portrait and biographical sketch?
“When—
“Would she realise that Jefferson B. Doty could turn earth into heaven for any young chatelaine by affixing to the laundry his anti-microbe drying machine emitting sixty sterilised hot-air blasts in thirty seconds, at a cost of one-tenth of one mill per blast?
“And when—”
But she turned her head, looking wearily across the room at the brightly burning fire beside which Mrs. Ferrall sat, nibbling mint-paste, very serious over one of those books that “everybody was reading.”
“How far have you read?” inquired Sylvia without interest, turning over a new letter to cut with her paper-knife.
Grace ruffled the uncut pages of her book without looking up, then yawned shamelessly: “She’s decided to try living with him for awhile, and if they find life agreeable she’ll marry him.... Pleasant situation, isn’t it? Nice book, very; and they say that somebody is making a play of it. I”—She yawned again, showing her small, brilliant teeth—“I wonder what sort of people write these immoral romances!”
“Probably immoral people,” said Sylvia indifferently. “Drop it on the coals, Grace.”
But Mrs. Ferrall reopened the book where she had laid her finger to mark the place. “Do you think so?” she asked.
“Think what?”
“That rotten books and plays come from morally rotten people?”
“I don’t think about it at all,” observed Sylvia, opening another letter impatiently.
“You’re probably not very literary,” said Grace mischievously.
“Not in that way, I suppose.”
Mrs. Ferrall took another bonbon: “Did you see ‘Mrs. Lane’s Experiment’?”
“I did,” said Sylvia, looking up, the pink creeping into her cheeks.
“You thought it very strong, I suppose?” asked Grace innocently.
“I thought it incredible.”
“But, dear, it was sheer realism! Why blink at truth? And when an author has the courage to tell facts why not have the courage to applaud?”
“If that is truth, it doesn’t concern me,” said Sylvia. “Grace, why will you pose, even if you are married? for you have a clean mind, and you know it!”
“I know it,” sighed Mrs. Ferrall, closing her book again, but keeping the place with her finger; “and that’s why I’m so curious about all these depraved people. I can’t understand why writers have not found out that we women are instinctively innocent, even after we are obliged to make our morality a profession and our innocence an art. They all hang their romances to motives that no woman recognises as feminine; they ascribe to us instincts which we do not possess, passions of which we are ignorant—a ridiculous moral turpitude in the overmastering presence of love. Pooh! If they only knew what a small part love plays with us, after all!”
Sylvia said slowly: “It sometimes plays a small part, after all.”
“Always,” insisted Grace with emphasis. “No carefully watched girl knows what it is, whatever her suspicions may be. When she marries, if she doesn’t marry from family pressure or from her own motives of common-sense ambition, she marries because she likes the man, not because she loves him.”
Sylvia was silent.
“Because, even if she wanted to love him,” continued Grace, “she would not know how. It’s the ingrained innocence which men encounter that they don’t allow for or understand in us. Even after we are married, and whether or not we learn to love our husbands, it remains part of us as an educated instinct; and it takes all the scientific, selfish ruthlessness of a man to break it down. That’s why I say so few among us ever comprehend the motives attributed to us in romance or in that parody of it called realism. Love is rarer with us than men could ever believe—and I’m glad of it,” she said maliciously, with a final snap of her pretty teeth.
“It was on that theory you advised me, I think,” said Sylvia, looking into the fire.
“Advised you, child?”
“Yes—about accepting Howard.”
“Certainly. Is it not a sound theory? Doesn’t it stand inspection? Doesn’t it wear?”
“It—wears,” said Sylvia indifferently. Grace looked up from her open book. “Is anything amiss?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you know, child. What is wrong? Has Howard made himself insufferable? He’s a master at it. Has he?”
“No; I don’t remember that he has.... I’m tired, physically. I’m tired of the winter.”
“Go to Florida for Lent.”
“Horror! It’s as stupid as a hothouse. It isn’t that, either, dear—only, when it was raining so deliciously the other day I was silly enough to think I scented the spring in the park. I was glad of a change you know—any excuse to stop this eternal carnival I live in.”
“What is the matter?” demanded Mrs. Ferrall, withdrawing her finger from the pages and plumping the closed book down on her knee. “You’d better tell me, Sylvia; you might just as well tell me now as later when my persistence has vexed us both. Now, what has happened?”
“I have been—imprudent,” said Sylvia, in a low voice.
“You mean,”—Mrs. Ferrall looked at her keenly—“that he has been here?”
“No. I telephoned him; and I asked him to drive with me.”
“Oh, Sylvia, what nonsense! Why on earth do you stir yourself up by that sort of silliness at this late date? What use is it? Can’t you let him alone?”
“I—No, I can’t, it seems. Grace, I was—I felt so—so strangely about it all.”
“About what, little idiot?”
“About leaving him—alone.”
“Are you Stephen Siward’s keeper?” demanded Mrs. Ferrall, exasperated.
“I felt as though I were, for awhile. He is ill.”
“With an illness that, thank God, you are not going to nurse through life. Don’t look at me that way, dear. I’m obliged to speak harshly; I’m obliged to harden my heart to such a monstrous idea. You know I love you; you know I care deeply for that poor boy—but do you think I could be loyal to either of you and not say what I do say? He is doomed, as sure as you sit there! He has fallen, and no one can help him. Link after link he has broken with his own world; his master-vice holds him faster, closer, more absolutely, than hell ever held a lost soul!”
“Grace, I cannot endure—”
“You must! Are you trying to drug your silly self with romance so you won’t recognise truth when you see it? Are you drifting back into old impulses, unreasoning whims of caprice? Have you forgotten what I know of you, and what you know of yourself? Is the taint of your transmitted inheritance beginning to show in you—the one woman of your race who is fashioned to withstand it and stamp it out?”
“I am mistress of my emotions,” said Sylvia, flushing.
“Then suppress them,” retorted Grace Ferrall hotly, “before they begin to bully you. There was no earthly reason for you to talk to Stephen. No disinterested impulse moved you. It was a sheer perverse, sentimental restlessness—the delicate, meddlesome deviltry of your race. And if that poison is in you, it’s well for you to know it.”
“It is in me,” said Sylvia, staring at the fire.
“Then you know what to do for it.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, I do,” said Grace decisively; “and the sooner you marry Howard and intrench yourself behind your pride, the better off you’ll be. That’s where, fortunately enough, you differ from your ancestors; you are unable to understand marital treachery. Otherwise you’d make it lively for us all.”
“It is true,” said Sylvia deliberately, “that I could not be treacherous to anybody. But I am wondering; I am asking myself just what constitutes treachery to myself.”
“Sentimentalising over Stephen might fill the bill,” observed Grace tartly.
“But it doesn’t seem to,” mused Sylvia, her blue gaze on the coals. “That is what I do not understand. I have no conscience concerning what I feel for him.”
“What do you feel?”
“I was in love with him. You knew it.”
“You liked him,” insisted Grace patiently.
“No—loved him. I know. Dear, your theories are sound in a general way, but what is a girl going to do about it when she loves a man? You say a young girl can’t love—doesn’t know how. But I do love, though it is true that I don’t know how to love very wisely. What is the use in denying it? This winter has been a deafening, stupefying fever to me. The sheer noise of it stunned me until I forgot how I did feel about anything. Then—I don’t know—somehow, in the rain out there, I began to wake… Dear, the old instincts, the old desires, the old truths, came back out of chaos; that full feeling here”—she laid her fingers on her throat—“the sense of expectancy, the restless hope growing out of torpid acquiescence—all returned; and, dearest, with them all came memories of him. What am I to do? Could you tell me?”
For a long while Mrs. Ferrall sat in troubled silence, her hand shading her eyes. Sylvia, leaning over her desk, idling with pen and pencil, looked around from time to time, as though awaiting the opinion of some specialist who, in full possession of the facts, now had become responsible for the patient.
“If you marry him,” said Mrs. Ferrall quietly, “your life will become a hell.”
“Yes. But would it make life any easier for him?” asked Sylvia.
“How—to know that you had been dragged down?”
“No. I mean could I do anything for him?”
“No woman ever did. That is a sentimental falsehood of the emotional. No woman ever did help a man in that way. Sylvia, if love were the only question, and if you do truly love him, I—well, I suppose I’d be fool enough to advise you to be a fool. Even then you’d be sorry. You know what your future may be; you know what you are fitted for. What can you do without Howard? In this town your rôle would be a very minor one without Howard’s money, and you know it.”
“Yes, I know it.”
“And your sacrifice could not help that doomed boy.”
Sylvia nodded assent.
“Then, is there any choice? Is there any question of what to do?”
Sylvia looked out into the winter sky, through the tops of snowy trees; everywhere the stark, deathly rigidity of winter. Under it, frozen, lay the rain that had scented the air. Under her ambition lay the ghosts of yesterday.
“No,” she said, “there is no question of choice. I know what must be.”
Grace, seated in the firelight, looked up as Sylvia rose from her desk and came across the room; and when she sank down on the rug at her feet, resting her cheek against the elder woman’s knees, nothing was said for a long time—a time of length sufficient to commit a memory to its grave, lay it away decently and in quiet befitting.
Sore doubt assailed Grace Ferrall, guiltily aware that once again she had meddled; and in the calm tenor of her own placid, marital satisfaction, looking backward along the pleasant path she had trodden with its little monuments to love at decent intervals amid the agreeable monotony of content, her heart and conscience misgave her lest she had counselled this young girl wrongly, committing her to the arid lovelessness which she herself had never known.
Leaning there, her fingers lingering in light caress on Sylvia’s bright hair, for every doubt she brought up argument, to every sentimental wavering within her heart she opposed the chilling reason of common sense. Destruction to happiness lay in Sylvia’s yielding to her caprice for Siward. There was other happiness in the world besides the non-essential one of love. That must be Sylvia’s portion. And after all—and after all, love was a matter of degree; and it was well for Sylvia that she had the malady so lightly—well for her that it had advanced so little, lest she suspect what its crowning miracles might be and fall sick of a passion for what she had forever lost.
For a week or more the snow continued; colder, gloomier weather set in, and the impending menace of Ash Wednesday redoubled the social pace, culminating in the Westervelt ball on the eve of the forty days. And Sylvia had not yet seen Siward or spoken to him again across the wilderness of streets and men.
In the first relaxation of Lent she had instinctively welcomed an opportunity for spiritual consolation and a chance to take her spiritual bearings; not because of bodily fatigue—for in the splendour of her youthful vigour she did not know what that meant.
Saint Berold was a pretty good saint, and his church was patronised by Major Belwether’s household. The major liked two things high: his game and his church. Sylvia cared for neither, but had become habituated to both the odours of sanctity and of pheasants; so to Saint Berold’s she went in cure of her soul. Besides, she was fond of Father Curtis, who, if he were every inch a priest, was also every foot of his six feet a man—simple, good, and brave.
However, she found little opportunity, save at her brief confession, for a word with Father Curtis. His days were full days to the overbrimming, and a fashionable pack was ever at his heels, fawning and shoving and importuning. It was fashionable to adore Father Curtis, and for that reason she shrank from venturing any demand upon his time, and nobody else at Saint Berold’s appealed to her. Besides, the music was hard, commonplace, even blatant at times, and, having a delicate ear, she shrank from this also. It is probable then that what comfort she found under Saint Berold’s big, brand-new Episcopal cross she extracted from observing the rites, usages, and laws of a creed that had been accepted for her by that Christian gentleman, Major Belwether. Also, she may have found some solace from the still intervals devoted to an inventory of her sins and the wistful searching of a heart too young for sadness. If she did it was her own affair, not Grace Ferrall’s, who went with her to Saint Berold’s determined always to confess to too much gambling, but letting it go from day to day so that the penance could not interfere with the next séance.
Agatha Caithness was there a great deal, looking like a saint in her subdued plumage; and very devout, dodging nothing—neither confession nor Quarrier’s occasionally lifted eyes, though their gaze, meeting, seemed lost in dreamy devotion or drowned in the contemplation of the spiritual and remote.
Plank came docilely from his Dutch Reformed church to sit beside Leila. As for Mortimer, once a vestryman, he never came at all—made no pretence or profession of what he elegantly expressed as “caring a damn” for anything “in the church line,” though, he added, there were “some good lookers to be found in a few synagogues.” His misconception of the attractions of the church amused the new set of men among whom he had recently drifted, to the unfeigned disgust of gentlemen like Major Belwether; “club” men, in the commoner and more sinister interpretation of the word; unfit men, who had managed to slip into good clubs; men, once fit, who had deteriorated to the verge of ostracism; heavy, over-fed, idle, insolent men in questionable financial situation, hard card players, hard drinkers, hard riders, negative in their virtues, merciless in their vices, and whose cynical misconduct formed the sources of the stock of stories told where such men foregather.
Mortimer had already furnished his world with sufficient material for jests of that flavour; now they were telling a new one: how, as Leila was standing before Tiffany’s looking for her carriage, a masher accosted her, and, at her haughty stare, said sneeringly: “Oh, you can’t play that game on me; I’ve seen you with Leroy Mortimer!”
The story was repeated frequently enough. Leila heard it with a shrug; but such things mattered to her now, and she cried over it at night, burning that Plank should hear her name used jestingly to emphasise the depth of her husband’s degradation.
Mortimer stayed out at night very frequently now. Also, he appeared to make his money go farther, or was luckier at his “card killings,” because he seldom attempted to bully Leila, being apparently content with his allowance.
Once or twice Plank saw him with an unusually attractive girl belonging to a world very far removed from Leila’s. Somebody said she was an actress when she did anything at all—one Lydia Vyse, somewhat celebrated for an audacity not too delicate. But Plank was no more interested than any man who can’t afford to endanger his prospects by a closer acquaintance with that sort of pretty woman.
Meanwhile Mortimer kept away from home, wife, and church, and Plank frequented them, so the two men did not meet very often; and the less they met the less they found to say to one another.
Now that the forty days had really begun, Major Belwether became restless for the flesh-pots of the south, although Lenten duties sat lightly enough upon the house of Belwether. These decent observances were limited to a lax acknowledgment of fast days, church in moderation, and active participation in the succession of informal affairs calculated to sustain life in those intellectually atrophied and wealthy people entirely dependent upon others for their amusements.
To these people no fear of punishment hereafter can equal the terror of being left to their own devices; and so, though the opera was over, theatres unfashionable, formal functions suspended and dances ended, the pace still continued at a discreet and decorous trot; and those who had not fled to California or Palm Beach, remained to pray and play Bridge with an unction most edifying.
And all this while Sylvia had not seen Siward.
Sylvia was changing. The characteristic amiability, the sensitive reserve, the sweet composure which the world had always counted on in her, had become exceptions and no longer the rules which governed the caprice and impulse always latent. An indifference so pointed as to verge on insolence amazed her intimates at times; a sudden, flushed impatience startled the habitués of her shrine. There was a new, unseeing hardness in her eyes; in her attitude the faintest hint of cynicism. She acquired a habit of doing selfish things coldly, indifferent to the canons of the art; and true selfishness, the most delicate of all the arts, requires an expert.
That which had most charmed—her unfeigned pleasure in pleasure, her unfailing consideration for all, her gentleness with ignorance, her generous unconsciousness of self—all these still remained, it is true, though no longer characteristic, no longer to be counted on.
For the first time a slight sense of fear tinctured the general admiration.
In public her indifference and growing impatience with Quarrier had not reached the verge of bad taste, but in private she was scarcely at pains to conceal her weariness and inattention, showing him less and less of the formal consideration which had been their only medium of coexistence. That he noticed it was evident even to her who carelessly ignored the consequences of her own attitude.
Once, speaking of the alterations in progress at The Sedges, his place near Oyster Bay, he casually asked her opinion, and she as casually observed that if he had an opinion about anything he wouldn’t know what to do with it.
Once, too, she had remarked in Quarrier’s hearing to Ferrall, who was complaining about the loss of his hair, that a hairless head was a visitation from Heaven, but a beard was a man’s own fault.
Once they came very close to a definite rupture, close enough to scare her after all the heat had gone out of her and the matter was ended. Quarrier had lingered late after cards, and something was said about the impending kennel show and about Marion Page judging the English setters.
“Agatha tells me that you are going with Marion,” continued Quarrier. “As long as Marion has chosen to make herself conspicuous there is nothing to be said. But do you think it very good taste for you to figure publicly on the sawdust with an eccentric girl like Marion?”
“I see nothing conspicuous about a girl’s judging a few dogs,” said Sylvia, merely from an irritable desire to contradict.
“It’s bad taste and bad form,” remarked Quarrier coldly; “and Agatha thought it a mistake for you to go there with her.”
“Agatha’s opinions do not concern me.”
“Perhaps mine may have some weight.”
“Not the slightest.”
He said patiently: “This is a public show; do you understand? Not one of those private bench exhibitions.”
“I understand. Really, Howard, you are insufferable at times.”
“Do you feel that way?”
“Yes, I do. I am sorry to be rude, but I do feel that way!” Flushed, impatient, she looked him squarely between his narrowing, woman’s eyes: “I do not care for you very much, Howard, and you know it. I am marrying you with a perfectly sordid motive, and you know that, too. Therefore it is more decent—if there is any decency left in either of us—to interfere with one another as little as possible, unless you desire a definite rupture. Do you?”
“I? A—a rupture?”
“Yes,” she said hotly; “do you?”
“Do you, Sylvia?”
“No; I’m too cowardly, too selfish, too treacherous to myself. No, I don’t.”
“Nor do I,” he said, lifting his furtive eyes.
“Very well. You are more contemptible than I am, that is all.”
Her voice had grown unsteady; an unreasoning rush of anger had set her whole body a-thrill, and the white heat of it was driving her to provoke him, as though that might cleanse her of the ignominy of the bargain—as though a bargain did not require two of the same mind to make it.
“What do you want of me?” she said, still stinging under the angry waves of self-contempt. “What are you marrying me for? Because, divided, we are likely to cut small figures in our tin-trumpet world? Because, united, we can dominate the brainless? Is there any other reason?”
Showing his teeth in that twitching snicker that contracted the muscles of his upper lip: “Children!” he said, looking at her.
She turned scarlet to her hair; the deliberate grossness stunned her. Confused, she stood confronting him, dumb under a retort the coarseness of which she had never dreamed him capable.
“I mean what I say,” he repeated calmly. “A man cares for two things: his fortune, and the heirs to it. If you didn’t know that you have learned it now. You hurt me deliberately. I told you a plain truth very bluntly. It is for you to consider the situation.”
But she could not speak; anger, humiliation, shame, held her tongue-tied. The instinctive revolt at the vague horror—the monstrous, meaningless threat—nothing could force words from her to repudiate, to deny what he had dared to utter.
Except as the effrontery of brutality, except as a formless menace born of his anger, the reason he flung at her for his marrying her conveyed nothing to her in its grotesque impossibility. Only the intentional coarseness of it was to be endured—if she chose to endure it; for the rest was empty of concrete meaning to her.
Lent was half over before she saw him again. Neither he nor she had taken any steps to complete the rupture; and at the Mi-carême dance, given by the Siowa Hunt, Quarrier, who was M. F. H., took up the thread of their suspended intercourse as methodically and calmly as though it had never quivered to the breaking point. He led the cotillon with agreeable precision and impersonal accuracy, favouring her at intervals; and though she wasted no favours on him, she endured his, which was sufficient evidence that matters were still in statu quo.
She returned to town next morning with Grace Ferrall, irritable, sulky, furious with herself at the cowardly relief she felt. For, spite of her burning anger against Quarrier, the suspense at times had been wearing; and she would not make the first move—had not decided even to accept his move if it came—at least, had not admitted to herself that she would accept it. It had come and the tension was over, and now, entering Mrs. Ferrall’s brougham which met them at Thirty-fourth Street Ferry, she was furious with herself for her unfeigned feeling of relief.
All hot with self-contempt she lay back in the comfortably upholstered corner of the brougham, staring straight before her, sullen red mouth unresponsive to the occasional inconsequent questions of Grace Ferrall.
“After awhile,” observed Grace, “people will begin to talk about the discontented beauty of your face.”
Sylvia’s eyebrows bent still farther inward.
“A fretful face, but rather pretty,” commented Grace maliciously. “It won’t do, dear. Your rôle is dignified comedy. O dear! O my!” She stifled a yawn behind her faultlessly gloved hand. “I’m feeling these late hours in my aged bones. It wasn’t much of a dance, was it? Or am I disillusioned? Certainly that Edgeworth boy fell in love with me—the depraved creature—trying his primitive wiles there in the conservatory! Little beast! There are no nice boys any more; they’re all too young or too sophisticated.... Howard does lead well, I admit that.... You’re on the box seat together again I see. Pooh! I wasn’t a bit alarmed.”
“I was,” said Sylvia, curling her lip in biting self-contempt.
“Well, that’s a wholesome confession, anyway. O dear, how I do yawn! and Lent only half over.... Sylvia, what are you staring at? Oh, I—see.”
They had driven south to Washington Square, where Mrs. Ferrall had desired to leave a note, and were now returning. Sylvia had leaned forward to look up at Siward’s house, but with Mrs. Ferrall’s first word she sank back, curiously expressionless and white; for she had seen a woman entering the front door and had recognised her as Marion Page.
“Well, of all indiscretions!” breathed Grace, looking helplessly at Sylvia. “Oh, no, that sort of thing is sheer effrontery, you know! It’s rotten bad taste; it’s no worse, of course—but it’s bad taste. I don’t care what privileges we concede to Marion, we’re not going to concede this—unless she puts on trousers for good. It’s all very well for her to talk her plain kennel talk, and call spades by their technical names, and smoke all over people’s houses, and walk all over people’s prejudices; but there’s no sense in her hunting for trouble; and she’ll get it, sure as scandal is scandal!”
And still Sylvia remained pale and silent, eyes downcast, shrinking close into her upholstered corner, as though some reflex instinct of self-concealment was still automatically dominating her.
“She ought to be spanked!” said Grace viciously. “If she were my daughter I’d do it, too!”
Sylvia did not stir.
“Little idiot! Going into a man’s house in the face of all Fifth Avenue and the teeth of decency!”
“She has courage,” said Sylvia, still very white.
“Courage! Do you mean fool-hardiness?”
“No, courage—the courage I lacked. I knew he was too ill to leave his room and I lacked the courage to go and see him.”
“You mean, alone?”
“Certainly, alone.”
“You dare tell me you ever contemplated—”
“Oh, yes. I think I should have done it yet, but—but Marion—”
Suddenly she bent forward, resting her face in her hands; and between the fingers a bright drop ran, glimmered, and fell.
“O Lord!” breathed Mrs. Ferrall, and sank back, nerveless, into her own corner of the rocking brougham.
