The Thread of Flame

Chapter 11

But I was troubled by all this, and puzzled. That I couldn't afford the complication of a love-affair will be evident to any one; but that a love-affair threatened was by no means clear. As far as that went it was as fatuous on my part to think of it as it would have been for Drinkwater, except in so far as it involved danger to myself.

For a few hours that danger did not suggest itself. That is, I was so busy speculating as to Mildred Averill's meaning that I had no time to analyze the way I was taking it. Weighing her words, her impulses, her impatiences, I saw no more than that she might be offering her treasures at the feet of a wooden man, a carved and painted figment, without history or soul.

That is, unless I mistook her meanings as Malvolio mistook Viola's!

There was that side to it, too. It was the aspect of the case on which I dwelt all through my lonely dinner. I had not forgotten Boyd Averill's reception of me on the Sunday of the luncheon; I never should forget it. There is something in being in the house of a man who is anxious to get you out of it unlike any other form of humiliation. The very fact that he refrains from pointedly showing you the door only gives time for the ignominy to sink in. Nothing but the habit of doing certain things in a certain way carried me through those two hours and enabled me to take my departure without incivility. On going down the steps the sense that I had been kicked out was far more keen than if Averill had given way to the actual physical grossness.

Some of this feeling, I admit, was fanciful. It was due to the disturbed imagination natural to a man whose mental equipment has been put awry. Averill had been courteous throughout my visit. More than that, he was by nature kindly. Anywhere but in his own house his attitude to me would have been cordial, and for anything I needed he would have backed me with more than his good-will.

Nevertheless, that Sunday rankled as a poisoned memory, and one from which I found it impossible wholly to dissociate any member of his family. Though I could blame Mrs. Averill a little, I could blame Miss Averill not at all; and yet she belonged to the household in which I had been made to feel an unwelcome guest. That in itself might give me a clue to her sentiment toward me.

As I went on with my dinner I came to the conclusion that it did give me such a clue. I was the i***t Malvolio thinking himself beloved of Viola. Where there was nothing but a balked philanthropy I was looking for the tender heart. The dictionary teemed with terms that applied to such a situation, and I began to heap them on myself.

I heaped them on myself with a sense not of relief, but of disappointment. That was the odd discovery I made, as much to my surprise as my chagrin. Falling in love with anybody was no part of my program. It was out of the question for obvious reasons. In addition to these I was in love with some one else.

That is to say, I knew I had been in love; I knew that in the portion of my life that had become obscured there had been an emotional drama of which the consciousness remained. It remained as a dream remains when we remember the vividness and forget the factsbut it remained. I could view my personality somewhat as you view a countryside after a storm has passed over it. Without having witnessed the storm you can tell what it was from the havoc left behind. There was some such havoc in myself.

Just as I could look into the glass and see a face young, haggard, handsome, if I may use the word without vanity, that seemed not to be mine, so I could look into my heart and read the suffering of which I no longer perceived the causes. It was like looking at the scar of a wound received before you can remember. Your body must have bled from it, your nerves must have ached; even now it is numb or sensitive; but its history is lost to you. It was once the outstanding fact of your childish existence; and now all of which you are aware is something atrophied, lacking, or that shrinks at a touch.

In just that way I knew that passion had once flashed through my life, but had left me nothing but the memory of a memory. I could trace its path almost as easily as you can follow the track of a tornado through a townby the wreckage. I mean by the wreckage an emotional weariness, an emotional distress, an emotional distaste for emotion; but above everything else I mean a craving to begin the emotion all over again.

I often wondered if some passional experience hadn't caused the shattering of the brain cells. I often wondered if the woman I had loved was not dead. I wondered if I might not even have killed her. Was that the crime from which I was running away? Were the Furies pursuing me? Was it to be my punishment to fall in love with another woman and suffer the second time because the first suffering had defeated its own ends in making me insensible?

All through the evening thoughts of this kind, now and then with a half-feverish turn, ran through my mind, till by the time I went to bed love no longer seemed impossible. It was appalling; and yet it had a fascination.

So for the next few days I walked with a vision pure, unobtrusive, subdued, holy in its way, which nevertheless broke into light and passion and flame that nobody but myself was probably aware of. I also gleaned from Lydia Blair, who had a journalistic facility in gathering personal facts, that Mildred Averill's place in New York life was not equal to her opportunities.

"There are always girls like that," Miss Blair commented. "They've got all the chances in the world, and don't know how to make use of them. She's not a bad looker, not when you come to study her; and yet you couldn't show her off with the dressiest models in New York."

I ventured to suggest that showing off might not be Miss Averill's ambition.

"And a good thing too, poor dear. If it was it would be the limit. She sure has the sense to know what she can't do. That's something. Look here, Harry," she continued, sharply, "I told you before that if you're going to take letters down from the dictaphone you've got to read them through to the end before you begin to transcribe. Then you'll know where the corrections come in. Now you've got to go back and begin all over again. See here, my dear. If you think I'm going to waste my perfectly good time giving you lessons that you don't listen to you've got your nerve with you."

It was one of my rare visits to Miss Flowerdew's dark front parlor, of which Drinkwater had the use, and I was making the call for a purpose. I knew there were certain afternoons when Miss Blair "breezed in," as she expressed it, to give some special lesson to her pupil; and I had heard once or twice that on such occasions Miss Averill, too, had come to lend him her encouragement. Nominally she brought a cylinder from which Drinkwater was to copy the letters her brother had dictated; but really her mission was one of sympathy. Seeing the boy in such good hands, and happy in his lot, I had the less compunction in leaving him alone. I left him alone, as I have said, in order not to be identified more than I could help with two stenographers.

My visit of this day was notably successful in that I obtained from Miss Blair her own summing up of the social position of the Averill family.

As far as they carried a fashionable tag it was musical. Mrs. Averill had a box at the opera, and was seen at all the great concerts. She entertained all the great singers and all wandering celebrities of the piano and violin. Before she went to Europe she had begun to make a place for herself with her Sunday afternoons, at which one heard the most renowned artists of the world singing or playing for friendship's sake. In her own special line she might by now have been one of the most important hostesses in New York had it not been for her constitutional weakness in "chucking things."

She had always chucked things just when beginning to make a success of them. She had chucked her career as a girl in good society in order to work for the concert stage. She had chucked the concert stage in order to marry a rich man. She had chucked the advantages of being a rich man's wife while in the full tide of social recognition. With immense ambitions, she lacked steadiness of purpose, and so, according to Miss Blair, she was always "getting left." Getting left implied that as far as New York was concerned Lulu Averill was nowhere when she might easily have been somewhere, with a consequent feeling on her part of boredom and disappointment.

It reacted on her husband in compelling him to work in unsettled conditions and without the leisure and continuity so essential to research. Miss Blair's expression was that the poor man never knew where he was at. Adoring his wife, he was the more helplessly at her beck and call, for the reason that he had long ago come to the knowledge that his wife didn't adore him. Holding her only by humoring her whims, he was just now struggling with her caprice to go back to the concert stage again.

To Mildred Averill all this made little difference because she had none of the aims commonly grouped as social. Miss Blair understood that from her childhood she had been studious, serious, living quietly with her elderly parents at Mornstown, and acquiring their elderly tastes. "Its fierce the way old people hamper a girl," Lydia commented. "Just because they're your father or mother they think they've a right to suck your life-blood like a leech. My mother died when I was sixteen," she added, in a tone of commendation. "Of course you're lonely-like at timesbut then you're free." Freedom to Mildred Averill, however, was all the same as being bound. She didn't know how to make use of liberty or give herself a good time. When her father died she stayed on with her mother at Morristown, and when the mother "punched the clock for the next life"the figure was Miss Blair'sshe simply joined her brother and sister-in-law in New York. After she went out of mourning she was sometimes seen at a concert or the opera with Mrs. Averill. There was no more to her social life than that and an occasional dinner. "Gray-blooded, I call it," Miss Blair threw in again, "and a sinful waste of good chances. My! if I had them!"

"Perhaps you can have them," I suggested, Harry Drinkwater having gone for a minute to his room. "Miss Averill told me one day that she thought of taking a house and asking you to live with her."

"Me? Do you see me playing second fiddle to a girl as sure bound to be an old maid as I'm bound to be"

"An adventuress."

"I'm bound to be an adventuressif I like."

"Oh, then there's a modification to your program. The last time we talked about it you were going to do it. Now it's onlyif you like."

Her lovely blue eyes shot me a look of protest. "You wouldn't want me to do itif I didn't like. The worst of being an adventuress is the kind of guys you must adventure with. You don't mean to thrust them down my throat."

"Oh, I'm not urging you at all. I did happen to see you one evening at the restaurant Blitz"

She nodded. "I saw you. What were you doing there? You don't feed at places like that."

"How do you know I don't?"

"Well, I don't know. That's just the trouble. Sometimes I think you're a"

"I'm awhat?"

"See here! You give me the creeps. Do you know it?"

"How?"

"Well, you saw that guy I was with at the Blitz."

"Looked like a rich fathead."

"Yes; but you know he's a rich fathead. He's as clear as a glass of water. You're like"she paused for a simile"you're like something that might be a cocktailand might be a dose of poison." She turned on me with a new flash in her blue eyes. "Look here! Tell me honest, now. Are you a swell crookor ain't you?"

"Suppose I say thatthat I ain't."

"Say, kid!" she responded, coldly, "talk like yourself, will you?" She threw her hands apart, palms outward. "Well, if you're not a swell crook I can't make you out."

"But as a swell crook you could. Is that it?"

"Why do you keep hanging round Miss Averill?" she asked, bluntly. "What do you expect to get by that?"

"What do you expect to get by asking me?"

Her reply was a kind of challenge. "The truth. Do you know it?"

I felt uncomfortable. It was one of the rare occasions on which I had seen this flower-like face drop its bantering mask and grow serious. The voix de Montmartre had deepened in tone and put me on the defensive.

"I thought you told me on board ship that you looked on all people of Miss Averill's class as the prey of those inin ours."

"I don't care what I told you on board ship. You're to keep where you belong as far as she's concernedor I'll give the whole bloomin' show away, as they say in English vawdville."

"There again; it's what you said you wouldn't do. You said you'd be my friend"

"I'll be your friend right up to therebut that's the high-water mark."

I thought it permissible to change my front. "If it comes to that, I've done no hanging round Miss Averill on my own account. It's you who've come for me to the Hotel Barcelona every time"

"Harry made me do that; but even sowell, you don't have to fall in the water just because you're standing on a wharf."

"It doesn't hurt the water if you do. You can get soaked, and make yourself look ridiculous, but the beautiful blue sea doesn't mind."

"You can make it splash something awful, and send ripples all over the lot. Don't you be too sure of not being dangerous. You wouldn't be everybody's choicebut you have that romantic waylike a prince-guy off the leveland she not used to menor having a lot of them around her all the time, like"

"Like you."

"Like me," she accepted, composedly; "and so if I see anything that's not on the square I'llI'll hand out the right dope about you without the least pity."

"And when you hand out the right dope about me what will it be?"

"You poor old kid, what do you think it will be? If you make people think you're a swell crook it's almost the same as being one."

"But do I make people think I'm a swell crook?"

"You make me."

"What do I do to"

"It's not what you do, it's what you don't door what you don't say. Why don't you tell people who you are, or what your business is, or where you come from? Everybody can hitch on to something in a world, but you don't seem to belong anywhere. If any one asks you a question it's always No! No! No! till you can tell what your answer will be beforehand. Surely there's a Yes somewhere in your life! If you always hide it you can't blame people for thinking there's something to be hidden."

"And yet you'd be my friend."

"Oh, I've been friends to worse than that. I wasn't born yesterdaynot by a lot. All I say is, 'Hands off little old Milly Averill!' but for the rest you can squeak along in your own way. I'm a good sort. I don't interfere with any one."

Drinkwater being on the threshold and the conversation having yielded me all I hoped to get, I made an excuse for going. Miss Averill had not appeared, and now I was glad of it. Had she come I could not have met her under Lydia's cold eye without self-consciousness. It began to strike me, too, that the best thing I could do was to step out from the circle of all their lives and leave no clue behind me.