Owen Johnson

King O’Leary had made no mistake. Dangerfield was far from being tamed, and no one understood it better than Inga Sonderson. The day after their return to the Arcade had come the revulsion she had feared. When she had entered, he had looked up without sign of recognition and turned moodily to the solitaire which lay spread before him. She remained half an hour without a word passing between them. She went out and presently returned with a mass of yellow roses, which she distributed about the room, and resumed her waiting attitude. Finally he said:

“Seen the papers?”

“Yes,” she answered, though she knew only of the sensational details of the Garford history through Belle Shaler. But she did not wish to have him discuss them, for she comprehended how keenly the man must be suffering in his vanity.

He laughed his short, bitter laugh, the laugh which sounded like the bark of some wild animal, which was characteristic of his rebellious moods. To her, it was always a danger-signal. She rose and, moving easily, stood before him, young, awake, and smiling. He considered her thus with set glance, plainly resentful.

“Wonder if you know what I’m thinking,” he said, at last.

“I think I do. To-day you must hate me,” she said solemnly. “I’m sorry.”

His face showed too much surprise.

“No; I don’t hate you,” he said shortly, “not you—all the rest.”

“Yes; me, too,” she insisted. “I don’t mind. I understand it.”

He rose without notice of the flowers she had brought in timid offering, and, going to the desk, took up a newspaper, stared at it, and handed it to her. She glanced at it long enough to get the full significance of the photograph and the head-lines:

DAN GARFORD IN THE
LIMELIGHT AGAIN

Then she deliberately tore it into pieces and threw it into the waste-basket.

“It’s time for lunch; let’s go out.” He shook his head. The suggestion irritated him. “The walk will do you good.”

“Are you going to order me around?” he said, frowning.

“To-day, yes, because you can’t make up your mind,” she said, coming to him with his coat. It was rarely that she took a determined stand. He turned, resenting it.

“We must come to an understanding,” he said irritatedly. “I don’t intend to be told to do this and do that. If I want to cut loose, go wild, I’m going to do it!”

She faced him resolutely.

“Don’t worry; I’m not asking you to do anything—no promises.” She considered a moment, and corrected herself with a smile. “Only one promise.”

He drew back, prepared for an issue, frowning.

“What one?”

“Whatever you do, wherever you go, I am to go with you.”

He glanced at her sharply—the blurred look on his face that she dreaded.

“What! Even nights like night before last!” he said cunningly. That inward struggle which he had been fighting all morning completely transformed the usual kindly look in his eyes, bringing back the glare of a caged animal.

Then she deliberately tore it into pieces. Page 276.

“Especially nights when it’s hard,” she said, in her low, musical voice.

He laughed.

“There’ll be a lot of those!”

“I know there must be,” she said, laying her hand on his arm as though to calm him. “Perhaps it’s best that you should let go sometimes—at first.”

“What!” he said loudly. Then he laughed again; but already under the controlling pressure of her hand, the laugh had a softer note. “So you’re not going to reform me?”

She shook her head.

“No, no!” She thought a moment, “I’m just here to help—when you need me.”

He was so surprised at this unexpected attitude that he walked up and down, deliberating. Finally, he turned and stared at her.

“I understand you less than ever.”

She smiled and shook her head.

“I’m not so difficult.”

“Well, what do you want me to do now?”

“I want to get you away from here.”

He took up his things and followed her moodily. He was thinking of the head-lines which had startled him, of the mockery of the truth which had been published. Whenever they passed a news-stand, his glance went furtively to the papers displayed, dreading to see his name in the black, leaded spreads. She guessed this shrinking within him, and changed her position to shield him. Curiously enough, his mood led him toward the river-front, over the route past the gas-towers, where they had gone in the silences of the night. If he remembered anything of that fantastic journey, he gave no sign.

They wandered by the docks amid a confusion of trucks, greeted by strong, pungent smells, lingering lazily on a packing-case to watch the cranes, sweeping up their cargoes for foreign ports. Late in the afternoon they stopped in a sanded-floored restaurant for a bite of luncheon. A few loitering groups were at the tables, sailors in jerseys, with down-turned pipes and ruddy faces worked by sea and wind, queer types of briny adventurers.

Inga drew his attention to the men.

“Sometime you must paint a group like that. Wish I could,” she said, her eyes dwelling on the strong masses and deep colors. “There’s so much in New York—isn’t there?—if you’ll only look.”

He looked up, and, being in a momentary mood of tolerant amusement, smiled at her artifice.

“Want me to be a painter of the slums?”

“Why not?” she said defiantly. “Isn’t it realer than painting pretty pictures—simpering, sugary women—the same old thing again and again? Oh, if I were a man who could—who really could do what I wanted—I’d love it—to get down into the people themselves, to reflect what’s going on below, the color and the soul of the people! It’s only in places like this, where life is natural, that you feel one thing is different from another!”

“What a long speech!” he said, with an amused look. Then he turned serious and thoughtful. “Good sense—you don’t talk much, but when you do——”

He nodded to himself, put out his hand, patted hers, and, though he said no more, he began whistling to himself, his head aslant, his eyes narrowing as he studied the group across the sanded floor.

Then there were the dark moments, feverish days of aimlessness and regret, of heavy forgetfulness, long periods of taciturnity, with sudden, irrelevant speech—speech that came without warning, which seemed rather the man in the mists of his groping, taking counsel with himself. Sometimes what he said was only querulous, thrown out in anger or bitter self-hatred. At other times he seemed to be standing off and looking at himself, viewing his past dispassionately, analyzing his career without prejudice. Once he said to her, as they sat waiting for the dusk to enter the studio:

“Some people like life, like it for the sake of living—at least, I suppose it’s that—to find your rut and run on it smoothly, the same thing to-day as yesterday—routine.”

“Most are like that,” she said, not yet seeing where he wished to come.

“Most—yes. But if you’re not satisfied with that—if you want something—want to create something, to get somewhere—to some fixed object, then you’ve got to face the thing in the end.”

“What thing?”

“The fact that you’ve got to recognize to yourself, whatever you’re hoping for, that you’ve gone as far as you can go.” He thought a moment. “If you could only fool yourself! Some do—that’s where conceit comes in—a mighty saving quality that, to be wrapped up in vanity, not to know when you’ve stopped.”

She was so puzzled by this and the tense introspection which she felt in him that she ventured a question.

“What are you talking about, Mr. Dan?”

He turned and said:

“Remember once I told you how I used to climb up Montmartre and look down on Paris, and believe the day would come when I’d set them all talking about me—when I believed I was going to be a great man?”

She came and settled on the ground beside him as he sat in the great armchair, looking gravely into his face.

“Remember?”

She nodded.

“Well, it’s great to believe that, even for a year, to be working passionately, hungrily, sure of where you’re going,” he said, smiling back into the past. “It’s worth—even what comes after. But you pay for it—Lord, but you pay for it!—when you look at yourself in the end, and know the time’s to come when you’ve got to stand still and watch others go on.”

“But you are going on—you are!”

He took her head in his hands, as she sat there close to him, and said:

“If you could only make me believe that, child—if you could even fool me into believing that—you might get hold of me. You see, that’s what you’re up against. There’s nothing to get to. Oh, the rest doesn’t count! I’ve had notoriety, what some people call fame. Do you think it means anything to me to paint what I have been painting, do it over again and again?” He shook his head. “It’s not the knocks that’s the trouble. No; I’ll be honest. If this—this thing that’s ended had come ten years—five years ago, it might have done me good.”

She nodded her head eagerly.

“It will now—I know it!”

“No; not now. It wasn’t what others did to me; it was what I did to myself. Five years ago, I should have run away; I should have been cruel. I didn’t. I was a sentimentalist. I didn’t want to do another harm. I stayed and sacrificed the other thing—the thing that can’t be shared. I made my choice then; now it is too late.”

“But why? You can work now as you want.”

“Yes; but the power to dream isn’t there, and that’s the whole of it. And that doesn’t come—it just doesn’t seem to come,” he said nervously, his hands twisting, and a blank look coming across his eyes.

She understood now the depth of the task before her, as she understood, too, how much he wanted to disbelieve the things he announced. And there rose before her clearly that the only way to reclaim him was to put a purpose into his aimless life.

“Mr. Dan,” she said softly.

His eyes came back to hers.

“Pretty hard task you’ve got, Inga.”

“Please be patient—just a while longer. I know it’ll all come back.”

“Wish you were right.”

“It will; it will. I’ve even seen it in your eyes, the way you look at things, that group in the restaurant, the old woman with the newspapers.”

“Seeing is one thing; doing is another.”

“But why don’t you try?” she said hesitatingly. At this, he turned and glanced longingly at the easel in the corner.

“Oh, if you only would! I’d pose for you all day long!” she cried eagerly.

But at this he shrank back, a tortured, doubting look passed over his face, and he sprang up angrily, crying,

“No, no, no!”

At other times, he would fix his dull glance on her and say, without kindness:

“See what you’ve dragged me back to!”

These were the secret black hours, when he lay in stupor after periods of heavy, obstinate drinking. For something had come which frightened him. He had boasted, in the wild days when he was new to the Arcade, that he did what he did because he wanted to do it, proclaiming scornfully that he could stop it whenever he chose. And, in his pride, he believed this. Now he came to the frightened realization that this was no longer true, and that there lay before him a struggle against a dark and shapeless enemy which filled the day with its crushing shadow.

At first, he deluded himself with the thought that he was seeking relief, a numbed forgetfulness out of the vacant world—that it was his right to escape the depression in his soul, and that this seeking was deliberate. This delusion was the stronger in that he believed he was testing the girl, challenging her right to reclaim him by a last obstinate rebellion. But Inga, neither by word nor expression, made the slightest criticism. This patient acquiescence, this mute devotion that followed where he went and watched the inevitable moment when he called her in his weakness, at first surprised him and then awoke his latent chivalry.

The day came when, in remorse, he turned to take up the fight himself. Then he found that the dark companion that he had called upon so often to shut out the aching reality could no longer be thrown aside, that, instead of a servant, he had found a master. He found himself gripped in with a hunger he had not realized. At times, frightened, he recoiled and sought to struggle, as though his body were sinking into a lurking quicksand that drew him down, down, and ever down.

There was yet a darker thing which hung shapelessly in this gradually settling obscurity, a thing of dread that waited beside the other shadowy comforter. For, at times, he came struggling back to life with a feeling of blurred, vacant spaces behind, where something had slipped from him, when he had been but a shell inhabited by muddled desires and gropings.

These were days of rough going, of tense straining on every nerve of the girl who watched him. Strange, opposite flashes, the sublime and the ridiculous of the man’s soul, shifted and whirled before her. At times, from long periods of inner torment, there came a sudden pitch of exaltation, wild, colorful moments of eloquence, when he discoursed on life and art, justice and morality, when he analyzed mercilessly established prejudices and beat through to a clearer verity—when she listened breathlessly, enthralled at his dramatic tossings. Then, when the prophetic rage had passed in its fine fury, the reaction would come, and for hours he would lie clinging to her hand, shuddering in the dark at terrors he did not dare to phrase. These moments of groping weakness, of intermingled bombast, wisdom, and cringing brought her always to the same impasse—either she must instil some object into this denial of life, or see him slowly crumble, morally and physically, before her eyes.