Infatuation
Adair, with one hand in his trousers pocket, was restlessly turning over
the two nickels that were there--all he had.
"I don't think so," he said. "Anyway, she's worth that, and more."
"I was hardly authorized to commit Mr. Ladd to such an amount," objected
Mr. Campbell, "though I will not say right off that I might not
entertain it. But you understand, Mr. Adair, that it implies you will
not resist an action for divorce, and-- Well, you know we'd like to
have the matter absolutely settled and done with."
"For fifty thousand dollars?"
The heavy-lidded eyes were obscured by a momentary glaze.
"We will meet you," said Mr. Campbell.
Adair rubbed the nickels together, and asked, with a slight catch of his
breath, if he could have something on account.
"Certainly," assented the lawyer, producing his pocket-book. He removed
a sheaf of bills, and Adair perceived that they were in denominations of
a thousand dollars each. He had never seen a thousand-dollar bill
before in his whole life, and here was a thick packet of twenty or more.
No wonder that he was overawed. Campbell noticed his fascinated stare,
and dilly-dallying with the notes, spread them out with an elaborate
carelessness. To Adair, it was all a blur of $1,000, $1,000, $1,000,
$1,000, a green mist of money, a crisp, crinkling, dizzying
affluence.--Campbell was saying something to him. There was a paper to
be signed. It was a temporary memorandum to be replaced later by a more
formal document. Buzz, buzz, buzz! The paper was handed to him. Buzz,
buzz, buzz, and the room going round and round. He was standing on his
feet, shaking with the pent-up passion that he had been so long holding
back. The actor in him had been waiting for that, but the actor was
lost in the man.
"You're a damned hound!" he cried hoarsely, "And the man who sent you is
a damned hound, and here is your damned paper, and may it choke you
both! My wife isn't for sale, do you hear that! My wife isn't for
sale, whether it's for fifty thousand or fifty million! Is that plain?
Do you concede the principle, or shall I boot it into you? I thought I'd
lead you on; I thought I'd just see how far you'd go--you with your
sable overcoat, and fat pocket-book, and your stinking respectability. I
had you sized up all right, and was only giving you rope to hang
yourself. Get out of here, and get out quick, or I'll kick you from
here to your cab. Get out!"
It was needless to say that John Hampden Campbell did not need to be
pressed. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace could have
scarcely been in a bigger hurry. Cramming the notes and papers in his
pockets, he sped from the visitors' room like a large, imposing
projectile which had been fired from some monster cannon. A second
later his flying coat-tails were deposited in his cab, and he was
speeding away, considerably shaken in spirit and body, for the mountain
quiet of his twenty-eight story office.
Lying on Phyllis' table, all ready for mailing, was a long letter to her
father. Pride had crumbled and she had determined to seek his help.
She had begun it with constraint, attempting, none too effectually, to
conceal her sense of injury and injustice; but as page followed page the
old tenderness returned with an irresistible force. That gray, handsome
head was before her, that mellow voice was in her ears, and the
wretchedness and folly of alienation came home to her with a new and
piercing significance. The request for money; the cold, exact
exposition of her need--was passed and forgotten in the impetuous rush
of her pen. She loved her husband, she loved her father, and this
estrangement was unbearable. Like many women under the stress of a deep
emotion she wrote with a singular eloquence. She wept as she described
Cyril--his unceasing goodness, his loyalty, his fortitude, his good
humor and devotion. He was everything a woman loved best in a man; and
instead of her marriage having been a mistake, a failure, it was more
than she thought life could ever give her. Would not her father forget
all that had passed, as she, too, would forget? Their love was too
deep, too dear, to make reconciliation impossible. She would climb into
his lap again, and put her arms about him--his sad, worn, desolate
little girl--and they would whisper to each other what fools they had
been, and kiss away the last shadow of misunderstanding.
So it ran, page after page, in her fine, delicate hand, an appeal that
no father could have resisted. A beautiful letter, touched with the
quality of tears; full of womanly longing; heart crying to heart, across
an aching void. Alas, that it never went. It was torn to pieces, and
thrown passionately on the floor. Campbell had intervened, and the news
of his offer was thus received in the little flat on East Fifty-eighth
Street. "That's the end of it," cried Phyllis, regarding the scraps of
paper. "That's the end of everything between Papa and me!"
*CHAPTER XXV*
It is one of the peculiarities of looking for a theatrical engagement
that hope is never quite extinguished. There is always some one who
wants you to call next week; there is always a company just short of a
part they are considering you for; there is always some friendly member
of the Thespians who has "mentioned your name," and gives you a
scribbled address or a telephone number. This is stated to explain the
fact why Adair, instead of surrendering to circumstances, as any other
man would have done in any other walk of life, still snatched at straw
after straw with egregious determination. His circumstances were
becoming absolutely desperate. Suspension from the club was staring him
in the face; in eight days his sticks of furniture and his trunks would
be dumped out on the street; it was only by the most rigid parsimony
that body and soul could be kept together. Phyllis said the dormice
were floating on a shingle, and with tearful laughter would expatiate on
the pitiful, half-drowned things, so scared and hungry on a bobbing sea.
What was to happen when they slid off?--Oh, but Booful wasn't to mind.
She'd hold his poor, pretty, dormouse head up, and swim him off to a
lovely island where there were peanuts on peanuts, and an alabaster
mousery with all modern improvements.
That lovely island seemed a terribly long way off. As the emblem of an
engagement it lay so far over the horizon that Adair began to doubt its
very existence. His eyes grew lack-luster; he lost his confident
bearing; poverty and failure stamped him, as they stamp every man with
an unmistakable mark. We instinctively move away from the unsuccessful.
We see that mark, and widen our distance. Success likes success. It
isn't decent to be very, very poor. Fingers tighten on pocketbooks, and
respectable, prosperous legs quicken their steps.--Adair was sinking,
though the dismal masquerade still went on--the immaculate cuffs, the
once smart tie, the pressed clothes, shiny with constant ironing. There
is many such a figure on Broadway--and in some mean room there is
usually a woman who believes in him, stinting herself and starving for
his sake.
One dark, wintry Sunday afternoon in early spring, as Phyllis was
sitting near the frosted window, sewing and thinking and dreaming by the
scanty light, she was roused by the tramp of many footsteps on the stair
outside, and a confused bumping, scuffling sound, accompanied by a
hoarse murmur of voices. With a horrible premonition she ran to the
door and opened it, giving a cry as she recognized Adair being supported
in by two companions. His face was swollen and discolored; one eye was
closed in a rim of crimson; his mouth was dribbling blood; sawdust and
filth befouled his clothes, and a stench of vile whisky exhaled from him
like a nauseating steam. He was helped over to a sofa, and allowed to
collapse, while the men hurried away as though ashamed of their task,
and thankful to have done with it.
It was the first time he had ever appeared repugnant to Phyllis; he was
drunk, and she knew it, and the fumes of the disgusting stuff stifled
her with loathing. But she unloosened his collar, laid a couple of
pillows under his head, unlaced his shoes; and bringing a basin, rinsed
the oozing blood from his lip. With pity, yes, but with the raging,
furious pity that goes with lost illusions, and the falling of one's
little world; a pity less for him than for herself that this should be
the end of a love that to her had been the very breath of life.
He regarded her stupidly with his one open eye, moaning faintly, and
drawing himself laboriously near the basin, spat into it. Then he put
out his hand, and tried to touch her, but she shrank from him.
"Phyllis," he said, in a raucous whisper, "Phyllis"; and then, as though
overcome by the exertion, closed that single bleary eye, and dozed off.
But it was not for very long. He awakened again. "They loaded me up
with that cursed whisky," he whispered. "I was all in, and needed it.
God, if they didn't pour a bottle of it down my throat!"--For a while he
rambled on brokenly, spluttering with laughter as he held up his
clenched fist as though he found a strange, childish entertainment in
the action.--Little by little he pulled himself together. He was a
powerful man, sound to the core, and though he was badly spent, health
and nature were rallying to his side.
"Come here," he said, in the same husky whisper, but with a noticeable
increase of vigor and self-command. "Come here, I wanter
tellyerboutit."
Phyllis crouched by his side, so dejected and heartsick that it was well
for him she hid her face.
"I was with Morty Stokes and a whole lot of them," he went on, his words
running together tipsily. "Tagging on, too, you know--royal,
open-handed fellow, Morty, good fren' of mine, always something to
eat--gives bell-boy tip that would keep us for a week. And it was down
at the Queensbury Club, pay ten dollars, and, member--one-day member,
you know--though the fight we went to see was tipped off--wasn't any,
you know--but we stayed on, Morty opening champagne, and Kid Kelly was
there who beat Cyclone Crandall last month; and somehow Morty and the
Kid got into a row about Tammany corruption, and both so blind that
neither of them could have spelled Tammany for a million, and everybody
had to pull them apart. Then Morty, just blazing said: 'I can't lick
you, but here's a fellow that can,' and he pointed at me, and says,
'Cyril, I'll give you five hundred dollars to wipe this dirty loafer off
the map!' And I took it as a joke, and said yes I would, and before I
knew it they were appointing a referee, and Kid Kelly was stripping down
to the skin."
Adair stopped and laughed--a groaning kind of laugh, as mirthless as the
wind that rattled the window-panes. "He had only been out of training
ten days, and as for my standing up against him he might have been
Battling Nelson. But it suddenly came into my head, why here's a chance
to make something--not Morty's five hundred dollars for licking him--I'd
only drunk half a glass of wine, and knew better--but a bit at the other
end of it; and so I said, yes, four hundred for the winner, and a
hundred for the man out, and all as insultingly as I could make it, as
though that hundred was for the Kid instead of me. And finally, when it
was all settled, it all wasn't--Morty standing out for two ounce gloves,
and the others for sixes, he saying he wanted to mark the dirty mutt
with something to stay; and that it was to be two ounces or nothing,
though what was to happen to me in the mix-up wasn't mentioned, the fact
being he didn't care as long as he could see the Kid pounded; and it was
two shakes the Kid didn't pound _him_, it all worked up to such a