1.

GOING back to the office the next morning, Felix had the sense of his absence—so momentous to himself—not having been particularly remarked.... True, there had been no new plays opening that week; and the editorial page could get along without his assistance. But it was strange to go back to the real world and find that it does not know you have been away!... He worked all morning, distractedly, on a column for the Saturday page, and arranged a layout of photographs of actors and actresses.

He had glanced that morning into the busy editorial writers’ room, and Clive had not been there. He had been assailed by a vague feeling of self-reproach, as his imagination presented to him the possible meaning of that absence. He had quite amazingly—it now seemed to him—left Clive out of his considerations altogether. How all this might affect Clive had simply not occurred to him.... They all of them had had a way of treating each other as super-people. They had disdained the notion of sparing each other’s feelings; they had not even been willing to admit that they had feelings which might require to be spared!... But there was no reason to believe that Clive, any more than himself, should come out of this emotional earthquake unscathed.

At noon he went in to ask about his friend. But as soon as he entered, Willie Smith looked up and said,

“Oh, here you are! Well, tell us what it’s all about!”

“What what’s about?” Felix asked, confused.

“Clive’s getting married. You know about it, don’t you? You don’t? Well, I thought you’d know all about it!”

“Is he married?”

“Where’s that card, Hosmer? Well, I’m surprised. I thought you’d be in on it.—Can’t you find that card? He’s married all right. To some girl named—I forget her name. And you didn’t know anything about it! Well, he had us guessing all week. He didn’t show up, and we thought he must be sick. And then Hosmer saw in the morning papers that a license had been issued to John C. Bangs and some girl. Hosmer’s entitled to all the credit for deducing that John C. Bangs was our old friend Clive—I wouldn’t believe it. And then the announcement came.—Oh, here it is, right here. Have you got any idea who the girl is?”

Felix took the card, on which was written in Clive’s small, precise handwriting:

“Today!” he said. “Yes.... I know the girl. Will you give me the card? I suppose there’s one waiting for me at home, but I’d like to have this now.”

2

California!... Rose-Ann went about her work that same morning with the thought always in her mind. Going away would simplify everything. In California one could start one’s life anew.

There was no need to make a fuss about anything. She had her work. Life would go on. She would make new friends.... Yes, going away made it easy. She wouldn’t even have to plan for a new place to live, if she were going away soon; she could just take a room anywhere, and not tell any one where it was. Or she might even stay on in the studio. It was only for a little longer.

Yes, she would stay there; she wouldn’t hide herself. Nobody need pity her. After all, she and Felix had been drifting apart for a long time; they had been seeing less and less of each other; the break had come gradually; this was merely the end. There were some things about it that she did not understand—but no matter. She accepted the situation as it stood.

In that spirit of bravado, she went that noon to the little Hungarian restaurant where she and Felix and Clive and Phyllis had lunched so often. She went to her accustomed table, and sat there, remembering what Clive had once said and they had all laughingly agreed to, in the days when they believed themselves wonderful young people who could talk about anything—that if anything ever happened to them of the sort that “couldn’t be discussed,” they would come here and discuss it “in the teeth of God and Nature.”

Well, she was here and they were not.

She wondered at little at Clive’s absence. Was he off breaking his heart somewhere? Or had he, as they had all boasted of themselves, no heart to break? At all events, she had stood her ground.

Some one entered, and she looked up, as of old habit when she arrived first.

It was Felix.

3

She sat quietly and waited for him. He came over, seeming glad to see her, and slouched into a chair. “I wondered if I’d find you here,” he said.

“I wondered if you’d come!” she said. She was astonished to find in herself no emotion except that of being glad that he had come—simply that.

“Last night,” he said, “I wanted to come to see you. And I was afraid to, I guess. Because of things I didn’t want to tell you about—that I thought you wouldn’t understand.”

The table, that place dedicated to the telling of impossible truths, still had for them its old magic. “Last night,” she said, smiling ruefully, “I set the alarm clock to go off at midnight.... If you didn’t come by then, I was going to forget you.”

“And I didn’t come,” he said.

“No.... I waited till the clock went off. I said that if you came before that I would forgive you everything—anything.”

“How could I come?” he asked. “Before one can be forgiven, one must be ashamed. And I wasn’t ashamed. I’m not now.”

“Why should you be?” she asked.

“But you don’t know,” he said. “Or do you? Have you seen Phyllis?”

“Phyllis? No!”

“Neither have I—for three days.”

“But I thought—”

“No you didn’t.” He leaned forward. “Tell me—did you ever believe—not your mind, but with your emotions!—that I was in love with Phyllis? Were you ever really jealous of her? Did you ever take her seriously, as your rival?”

“No—not the real Phyllis—no. The real Phyllis I liked, and was sorry for and ... perhaps a little afraid of—but not as a rival. I was jealous of the Phyllis who—who existed only in your mind.”

“My illusion of her, yes. But why?”

“Felix, you robbed me to give to that illusion. You loved in her what you refused to see in me to love. I might have been all that she was to you—and you wouldn’t let me! When you spoke of her, I kept thinking, ‘He might say those things of me!’—and you might, much more truly.”

“Then why did you push me into her arms—into the arms of the real Phyllis ... the one you were afraid of! Because you knew she’d hurt me? Was that it?”

They were talking in the eager low tones of their accustomed discussion, cut off by the influences of this spot from any disturbing sense of outer things—alone in an enchanted solitude, a magic circle into which none but the waiter could intrude.

“Hurt you?” A look of tenderness shone fleetingly in Rose-Ann’s eyes, half-contradicted by a triumphant smile. “Did she hurt you? I’m sorry, Felix.”

“Are you?”

“No—I’m glad! I wanted you to be hurt! I wanted to punish you—for dreaming of her—punish you by making you find out....”

“It would serve you right if the illusion had turned out to be true after all, wouldn’t it?”

“I thought it had, Felix. What happened?”

“I don’t know exactly. But look at this!”

He took the card from his pocket and put it before her.

At that moment the waiter came up, bowing them welcome. “You haf’ not been here for many days now,” he said. “I begin to think you desert us! Haf’ you your order ready?”

“You know what we want,” said Felix absently.

“Yes, sir. Everything shall be as always!” He beamed and ceased to exist.

Felix turned again to Rose-Ann, who sat staring quietly at the card.

“You aren’t surprised?” he asked.

“I feel that I knew it all along, somehow!” she said.

“Yes, so did I.... That’s the queer thing. All this other—”

“Was just Phyllis’s game with Clive. I don’t mean she did it on purpose. She couldn’t help it!”

“It was Clive’s game too,” he insisted.

“In a sense, yes.... She tormented him, ran away from him—and played up to you—all for Clive’s sake.... I’m sorry, Felix!”

“For me? You needn’t be. You were victimized too. By your pride—just as I by my vanity.”

“Yes,” she said, “and now—at last—they can have their happiness!”

They were silent for a moment, contemplating the tragic farce in which they had acted their tragi-comic parts.

“So,” he said ironically, “it was to make their marriage possible that we were so busy destroying our own!”

“No—I won’t have that. If she’s hurt you, I’m sorry, Felix; I really am. But I can’t think of us just as helpless victims. Why did we do it? We have our own quarrel, Felix.”

“Yes—a quarrel in which no one else counts. I know. But first let me explain. She did hurt me. But I found consolation.”

“In whom?” she asked sharply.

“Elva Macklin.”

“That queer egotistic little theatre-waif! Felix!”

“Say what you like—I’m not ashamed of it.”

“You couldn’t love her!”

“No—I never pretended to. Nor she.”

“I’m ashamed for you, Felix, if you’re not!”

“Be ashamed, then. I can’t be. I’ve tried.”

“Why try?”

“People that are ashamed—can be forgiven.”

“But I can’t understand it....”

“Neither can I.”

“If it had been some one you loved—”

“You might have lost me.”

“I’ve lost you now,” she said sadly.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll tell you one thing I am ashamed of. No—I don’t know whether I can or not. It’s too silly.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ll tell it backwards.... This morning I found a bottle of wine in my apartment—the relic of that orgy of which you are so scornful. It was unopened. I decided to make a present of it to my landlady. She thanked me and rummaged on a shelf and gave me in return a book—a book with my name in it that she had found in her area-way. She had been saving it for me.... That’s the end of the story. Here’s the book.”

He took from his pocket a soiled copy of the Bab Ballads. She gazed at it.

“Oh! you took it with you?”

“To my new home, yes—to remember you by. But wait. It did make me remember you—too well—and so I flung it out the window. That’s what I am ashamed of, Rose-Ann. I know it’s absurd. But we’re telling each other the truth.... And it’s not Elva, nor anything else—but just what I did to that book, that I want to ask your forgiveness for....”

“Was she there?”

“Yes. That was why.”

“I’m glad you did it!”

“You don’t understand. That book—it’s more than just you, Rose-Ann: it’s all you stand for to me.... I wanted to get rid of it all.”

“What do I stand for, to you?”

He thought a moment, and then answered, as if the word had pushed itself up out of the deeps of his mind.

“Reality.”

“Merely that?” Her voice was disdainful and challenging.

He took up its challenge.

“No—more than that. Pain. You stand for that.”

“I?”

“And heartbreak.”

“I?”

“And yesterday and tomorrow.”

“And am I,” she demanded quietly, “never to stand for any of the beautiful things?—Must you find them—or think you find them—in Phyllis ... and Elva?...”

He felt as though they had reached the crux of their discussion at last. And he felt, too, that it was a perilous moment. He could sense the forces of an intense resistance gathering in her mind.

“Yes, that’s our quarrel,” he said.

“What?”

He spoke with a sudden anger, only half repressed.

“You won’t help me. You never have. You tell me lies....”

“Felix!”

“Yes, you do. And I—I believe you, because it is you who tell them. Lies about life.”

“What have I told you?”

“That I could be free. I was free, Rose-Ann. With Elva. For three days. That was quite enough. And that’s why I am not ashamed or sorry. I learned something from her that you refused to tell me.”

“What did you learn—from her?”

“That I don’t want freedom.”

“Don’t you?” she mocked gently. “The truth, Felix!”

“Oh, it’s beautiful enough! As death is more beautiful than life. As for me, after a little cupful of death, I prefer pain and heartbreak. I prefer you.”

“But—it’s as if you wanted me to make you unhappy, Felix.... That’s what you are saying!”

“Isn’t it true? You have made me unhappy. And happy, too, Rose-Ann. The two things go together. I want them both. Not this mad, mystical peace that is like death.”

“The mad mystical peace of death,” she repeated. “You make it very alluring, Felix. One gets tired of life.... Just as you got tired of me. But perhaps—perhaps I am not what you think I am. Perhaps I can understand the joys of a little cupful of death—I, too.”

The waiter arrived with a savoury stew. He uncovered the dish with a flourish. It reeked of nutritiousness. They stared at it helplessly. The waiter went away.

“I can’t eat,” Rose-Ann said appealingly.

Sympathetically he passed her a cigarette.

“Felix,” she said, “I know what you think you want. It’s like that stew. You ought to want it; but you don’t. You want coffee and cigarettes and talk and poetry—not the solid food of life.... You try to fool yourself. And you try to fool me.”

She paused and then went on with sudden passion, “You’ve accused me of lying to you. It’s you who have lied! Whose fault is it if I didn’t mean what I said—that time? You’ve never been honest with me. You were never willing to face the future. I tried to talk with you, but you wouldn’t. You made me feel that I was wrong. And so I tried to believe differently about our marriage. And when the real truth came out—yes, the truth!—I wasn’t prepared to meet it. I was a coward.—Perhaps I’m a coward still. I don’t know. But I know this—I’m not willing to do what you say you want me to do—bind you, tame you, keep you. No! I won’t be ... a wife.”