# Instruments of Darkness (collection)/The Last Night

pp. 172–267. First serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, 1924 Dec 13, 20 & 27.

### THE LAST NIGHT
#### I

Well, Casley thought, as he folded his long spare body into a seat in the front row of the balcony, it came to this: If a man could not feel any emotion at the first night of his first play, he might as well die. Much of his six feet of height came between his knee and his hip; the railing of the balcony was uncomfortably close; he crossed his legs with difficulty and leaned back, folding his arms.
“Isn't it thrilling?” murmured his cousin Gertrude, laying her hand for a moment on the hard muscles of his forearm.
He did not answer her at all. He had realized from the first that it was a mistake to bring Gertrude. He had not, as a matter of fact, invited her to go with him; she had simply assumed that it would be a comfort to him to know that she was beside him in a crisis. Besides, she believed that there was a certain intellectual prestige in attending first nights; and she cherished a secret ambition to be the center of a literary group, which, as she was handsome, well off and not very intelligent, was both natural and possible.
He had said to her several times in the slow clear drawl that his lecture rooms knew so well, “It will bore you, Gertrude. It bores me.” But Gertrude had laughed with the manner of one well able to take a joke, and had bought an emerald-green silk wrap with a corn-colored lining, which seemed to her the correct garment for the beautiful inspiration of a successful playwright to wear on the production of his first play.
But Casley had not been joking. One of his crosses in life—or perhaps one of his sources of secret satisfaction, for people gain comfort from strange causes—was that no one ever could tell whether he was in fun or not. His play bored him; worse than that, he hated it—hated it as a man hates a woman to whom he remains bound in some horrible drudgery of daily life long after he has ceased to love her. Like most creative minds, his interest was only in creation, and to be kept working at his play in a manner wholly routine, technical and uncreative filled him with a sort of mental nausea.
At thirty-three he was a full professor of history in a small but respected college. His specialty was the Tudor period, his book, “Owen Tudor: A Parvenu,” having been widely read even outside of academic circles. In fact, he was a conspicuous success, except for the fact that he had discovered that he hated teaching and that from the point of view of his own enjoyment of life his choice of his profession had been mistaken.
One day two years before, he had been lecturing to his class and had found himself saying: “The life of Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII, is lacking in the political significance of that of her cousin, Anne Boleyn, his second wife, but is as tragic and more dramatic. The miniature beauty of the great house of Norfolk, while still a child, inspired an eternal passion in the heart of a buccaneering young relation; was married by the king when she was eighteen and beheaded when she was twenty, under circumstances——”
He thought suddenly, “Why shouldn't I write a play about her and get out of this infernal drudgery—teaching history, about which none of us knows anything, to a lot of young barbarians who don't want to know anything? After all, if Drinkwater has made the historical play possible, this is more romantic material than any he has used.”
He felt an interest in the idea such as he had not felt in anything for years. That very night, for he was a man in whom thought and action were closely connected, he set to work.
He wrote the play in three weeks, and for a third of that time—the first third—he had been almost happy. Then his confidence in it had begun to decline. His clear, unegotistical mind saw that it was not a good play. Nevertheless he had sent it off to Wilfred Weyburn, the most likely of any of the producers to accept it; and it had been accepted. No one was more surprised than Casley. It was characteristic of him that he mentioned the whole incident to nobody, and the first knowledge that came to the faculty and president of Boonton College was when a picture of Casley in cap and gown, walking beside a police dog, appeared in the Sunday papers, with a flattering caption about the youthful professor and his favorite pet and his new play. The photograph was years old and the dog belonged to one of the students—who was suspended subsequently because the dog attacked the night watchman—but the publicity of the Weyburn office was not famed for its accuracy so much as for its continuity and grace.
The president, meeting him the next morning on the campus, called out jovially—for the modern president likes to think he has a variety of creatures in his faculty, “What's this, Casley? I did not know I had a playwright on the staff.”
“I doubt if you have,” answered Casley with his slow, sad, crooked smile.
But the thing had moved on. Contracts had been sent to him, had been signed, a check had reached him, and finally the stage of rehearsals and rewriting had come. For just a few moments, when he heard the play first read by the company, all Casley's confidence in it had returned. Sitting at a bare rickety kitchen table, on an empty stage lit by one tall relentless electric light, the company had fluttered the pages of their small oblong part books and stumbled a little in reading, with many an “Oh, is that mine? The typing is so bad——” But even so, the first sound of trained actors pronouncing aloud in their clear authoritative accents those lines which heretofore had vibrated only in his own mind gave the words a new and more vivid meaning. For a few moments it seemed to him not only good but great.
This happy phase, however, had passed by the second rehearsal. Weariness and disgust had succeeded, until now, on the opening night, Casley felt that nothing would have brought him there at all except a certain wearied loyalty to Wilfred Weyburn, who had been steadily kind and encouraging, and who had spent a sum on the production the interest on which would have paid Casley's salary for the rest of his life.
The critics were beginning to come in—sure sign that the rising of the curtain was not far off. Casley was so remote from theatrical life that he did not even know them by sight, did not guess from their entrances and from the position of their seats that they were critics. Gertrude, however, pointed them out—the great height of one of these, his bulk increased by his flapping overcoat. Casley caught a glimpse of his profile as with a quick characteristic droop he slipped his hat under his seat and sat down in one long motion; the finely modeled nose and the queer contradiction between the tragic slant of the eyes and the fixed slight smile of the mouth, as if the face were divided between the masks of tragedy and comedy; another, treading the aisle as a horse turned out to grass treads spring pastures,
Gertrude settled into her place and with a wriggling movement of her shoulders shed her green wrap.
“Oh, look, Benedict!” she whispered. “There's Mr. Caldecott, of the Weekly Sphere. He's a great friend of mine—at least I've met him. I'm sure he'll give you a good notice. Isn't it nice he came?”
“Unlike us, Gertrude, he is obliged to come,” answered Casley.
A new and disagreeable thought had come to him—namely, that Weyburn would want the whole play rewritten the next day in accordance with all the criticism. He covered his eyes with his arched hand; that, it seemed to him, was simply impossible to face. When people told him how to write his third act—and every one who had been at the dress rehearsal except himself seemed to be in possession of the knowledge of how this should be done—he cut them short; not, as they supposed, because he felt insulted at the implied criticism, but simply because it is impossible, as psychologists tell us, for the mind to concentrate on anything that possesses no interest.
An idea occurred to him. If he did not see the play perhaps his mind would come fresher to the task to-morrow.
“Gertrude,” he said, “I assure you this is a dull play. Across the street there is a farce which every one says is entertaining. Suppose we slipped away——”
“Benedict, you're delicious,” said Gertrude.
Very slowly the lights began to sink, silently, to borrow from the poet, as the darkness comes when the day is done—silently except for the audience, which, having been standing outside and in the back of the theater, now, with faint murmurs of surprise at this indication that a play was to take place, began to crowd the aisles in a concerted effort to get to their seats all at the same instant.
The curtain rose on the offices of the great house of the Duke of Norfolk at Lambeth. Here Catherine Howard, the daughter of a younger brother of the duke, was being brought up, or rather was growing up, utterly neglected by the old dowager duchess, who was at the moment entirely occupied with the good fortune of another step-grandchild of hers—Anne Boleyn, who had just upset international relations, home politics and the Catholic Church in England by marrying the King.
Little Catherine seemed unlikely ever to be of the least importance to any one, and was allowed to run wild under the nominal charge of one of the old duchess' waiting women. Before she was fourteen she had fallen into the power or under the influence of a musician called Manox who taught her to play on the virginals, and seems to have made love to her in the best tradition of music teachers. From the clutches of this wicked man, Casley showed her rescued by the hero of the piece, Derham, a distant relation of the house of Howard, a soldier in the duke's train, a brave man and certainly a loyal and devoted lover. He supplied the neglected girl with all the little luxuries of dress, for which her beauty must have been eager, especial mention being made of an artificial flower called a French fennel, which she was unable to wear as the gift of Derham, but which a lady of the household was induced to say she had given. The lovers plighted their troth, an act which in those days was considered almost as binding as a marriage. The old duchess seems to have taken no care to safeguard the girl's morals, except to take into custody every night the keys of her bedroom. But the lovers had no difficulty in finding a serving maid to steal them away again; and Derham came, according to Catherine's own testimony at the time of her trial, “every night to her chamber, bearing strawberries, apples and wine and other things to make good cheer with, after my lady was gone to bed.”
Discovery of this happy clandestine love affair was inevitable, and before long it came. Catherine was beaten by the irate old lady, Derham dismissed to fight in Ireland.
This was the material of Casley's first act.
Hardly had the curtain risen when the author became aware that his interest in his own work had only slept. He had hardly heard the first word before he found that he cared more than he had ever cared before for this child of his brain. It seemed to him as unexpected as if he had never heard of it—to possess all the interest of an unknown work, and yet to be more his own than anything had ever been. He leaned over the railing, absorbed, unconscious. No one in the audience followed the action with an acuter sense of the unfolding of the drama. And when Gertrude, turning to him, murmured, “How could you say it was dull?” he asked himself whether he had actually ever thought so. When the act was over he rose to his feet.
“Oh,” cried Gertrude, “are you going to leave me?”
“Yes,” he replied, for he had early in life learned the extraordinary power of monosyllables.
“Of course,” said Gertrude, “you are going behind the scenes to congratulate Cynthia Brooks.”
He was not, but he did not answer. He was going to smoke a cigarette in the alley in order to get away from Gertrude. Gertrude would not have believed him if he had told her that his relations with Miss Brooks were so impersonal that he was not at all sure that the leading lady had ever distinguished him from the head electrician. Yet it was on account of her enthusiasm for the play that Weyburn had produced it, and it was certainly on account of her sincere, vivid, emotional performance that the first act had captured the audience—and incidentally the author. Casley's heart was still beating just a little faster with the memory of her voice as she bade good-by to her lover.
Suddenly the stage door opened and Weyburn's brisk little figure emerged.
“Well, Casley,” he said, “what are you doing? Trying to pick up a little unofficial criticism?”
“No,” said Casley
Like all experts in the monosyllable, he never gave offense with it—at least not unintentionally.
“What did you think of Cynthia?”
“I thought,” answered Casley, “that it would be impossible to be any better in every detail than she was.”
“I wish you'd come behind and tell her that,” said Weyburn, taking the professor's arm. “She was saying only yesterday that she had known authors who bawled her out, and authors who flattered her, but never before one who gave her no clew whatsoever as to what he thought of her performance.”
Casley smiled. He was surprised and a little annoyed to find that he was pleased at discovering that Miss Brooks had thought about his attitude at all.
“I wish you'd tell her,” he answered, “that I think she's superb; but I won't go behind just yet.”
He never meant to go. After Weyburn left him he stood alone, smoking and thinking how he would never teach again; he would offer his resignation at once—as soon at least as he could be reasonably sure the play was going to last.
He had not known how bitterly he had grown to hate his work until he saw a possibility of leaving it.
He started back to his seat before the bell began to buzz in the lobby, and found Caldecott just abandoning it. He felt a mild curiosity to know how Gertrude had succeeded in luring the critic of the great weekly up to the gallery, when it was well known that he always spent the entr'acte smoking on the sidewalk with the other critics. But knowing that Gertrude would say that she did it all for the sake of him and his play, he refrained from questioning her. And almost immediately the curtain rose.
The second act took place at a banquet given by the bishop of Winchester. Here the eyes of her sovereign and future husband first fell on the miniature beauty of Catherine Howard. By this time Henry had beheaded Anne Boleyn, had married and lost Jane Seymour, and now was bitterly weary of Anne of Cleves, whose lack of physical charms had angered him from the first. He appears to have fallen passionately in love with Catherine almost at first sight.
This act did not go well. The setting was beautiful, as all Weyburn's settings were; the costumes of the bishop, the guests and the retainers, the gold plate and the profusion of fruits and dishes made a fine spectacle. But now for the first time the king appeared. It had not been an easy part to cast. The physical appearance of Henry VIII is so well known that it was necessary to find an actor large and ruddy and vital. The selection finally fell on Brayton Halley, an actor who was not only experienced but who looked the part perfectly—a great, broad-shouldered, red-haired man, with a deep rolling voice. As he strode on the stage in his short furred coat, all embroidery and jewels, his flat feathered hat on his head and his thumb stuck in his belt, he looked so exactly like Holbein's portrait of Henry that the audience gave a cry of delight.
Unfortunately, however, Halley's past had been in slapstick farce. He was a sound actor and eager for the part, so that in rehearsal, under a wise and firm director, he had made an excellent performance. But on the first night, whether it was the excitement of an audience rather above what he was accustomed to or the subconscious effect of a past in which only a laugh was a success, or, as he afterward asserted, his honest conviction that the play needed lightening, he began almost from the moment of his entrance to play Henry as if he were the comic father in a pantomime. The first laugh seemed to drive everything that he had learned in rehearsal out of his mind, and he kept the audience in a continual gale, getting, as he himself boasted afterward, more laughs than the author knew were there.
In the second act this conduct did not matter so much. Halley was out of scale and threw Miss Brooks into the shade, but it was not disastrous. In the third and fourth acts, however, when tragedy, torture and treason and death sentences were the theme, laughs regular and almost continuous were the last thing to be desired. Every one wrestled with Halley behind the scenes, but it was quite useless; a species of madness seemed to have seized upon him, some of the robust egotism and pig-headedness of the great Henry himself. It was impossible that the other actors should not be affected. Just as round a dinner table one guest who shouts will raise every one's tone of voice, so on the stage one actor who overplays changes the key of every one's performance. Miss Brooks alone stood out against the infection, and she was soon almost wiped out of existence by Halley, who shouted and stamped and spoke directly to the audience when he should have been addressing members of the cast, and even, the great Caldecott said in his review, winked at the boxes; but this was contradicted.
But it would be untrue, as even Casley himself recognized, to attribute to Halley the decline of interest in the play as it went on. He himself had destroyed each thread, each theme that carried emotion by his too exact respect for historical and psychological truth. The audience could not be interested in the play as a love story after the execution of Derham, which took place in the third act. Nor could they feel any overwhelming sympathy with Catherine, at least no complete identification of their noble selves with her, when they found that during the torture of Derham she was far more concerned to know if he said anything to incriminate her than in the fact that he was enduring torture for her sake. And worst of all, the play was incredibly long. It was almost half after twelve before the final curtain fell on a half-empty house—fell on a recognized failure.
There is a strange primitive humiliation in the failure of a play. No one enjoys the printed rejection slip with a returned manuscript, but that is secret between the author and the editor. But a play is a public matter and demands an attitude toward the public. Casley felt no profound or soul-shaking emotion—only a wearied wonder that he should ever have imagined he could write a play, a state of mind which seemed to him to prove what he had long suspected—that he was entirely incapable of emotion. He exactly expressed his mental attitude when he said to Gertrude as they rose, for the exit of the audience was undelayed by applause, “Well, Gertrude, we never need do that again.”
Even Gertrude's desire to say the kind thing paled before this situation, and they began to make their way downstairs in silence; in silence at least on their part. The audience, with that happy unconsciousness that authors exist, were making their comments freely and aloud:
“Well, they say the first fifty years are the hardest.”
“Well, I guess that's a little too highbrow for me.”
“That's right, dearie, you save the old bean for your business.”
“A magnificent production.”
“Oh, you can count on Weyburn for that.”
“A perfect performance of Cynthia's.”
“I liked the old fellar who did the king.”
“You'd like to chop off a few wives' heads yourself, eh?”
“By the time I get to my fifth, I hope I'll have learned my lesson.”
At the foot of the stairs Weyburn's secretary was waiting.
“Could you be in Mr. Weyburn's office to-morrow at eleven, Mr. Casley? We must think of a way of cutting out an hour.”
“I know a way of cutting out four hours,” said Casley.
“But that wouldn't leave us any play,” said the secretary, who was no fool, but had found it safer to be absolutely literal.
“Have we one?” said Casley.
“Mr. Weyburn thinks so.”
“I'll be there—if I'm alive,” said Casley, and turning to Gertrude, said he must get a taxi and he'd take her home.
But Gertrude was obliged to explain that she had other plans. In the first entr'acte she had a word with Mr. Caldecott, and in fact promised to go out to supper with him, supposing that her cousin would be occupied with—she had been on the point of saying his triumphs, but changed it to his professional duties. She could not let it go, however, without some excuse, and she added:
“The Sphere is so powerful, Benedict, I think perhaps his attitude might be more favorable if—— Those things do help, you know.”
“Ah, Gertrude, be careful; nothing from a French farce, please,” said Casley. “Remember, I would rather fail than succeed on the grave of a cousin's honor.”
Gertrude, like most perfectly virtuous people, liked a joke of this sort, and was still smiling when she joined Caldecott in the lobby. She was thinking of a way of repeating it to him in what she described in her own mind as a perfectly nice way.
Casley, left alone, took a last glance at the photographs on the easel—Halley posed like a great Holbein, Cynthia in her crown and queenly robes.
“I'd like to have the photograph,” he thought, “if——”
Outside, the brilliant blue-white lights that had once spelled out the name of the play were turned out, the front of the theater was deserted and the street empty, although half a block away Broadway was still rolling along on wheels and crowding along on foot, as densely thronged as ever. Casley turned in the opposite direction, moving at his usual long-legged gait.
It was by no means the first time in his life that he had contemplated suicide; in fact, the idea was rarely absent from the undercurrent of his thoughts. Life for many years now had seemed to him boring at the best, tragic at the worst. He was entirely alone in the world, in the sense of having no nearer relations than Gertrude; and his cool, critical attitude toward life was inimical to intimacies. People came to him for advice, even for material help; but not for love. He was without love, without ambition, without hope or fear, without any form of emotion, and he was enough of a psychologist to know that emotion must be the basis of life. Even the failure of his play, he thought with a sigh, had given him nothing but an added sense of weariness. If he killed himself to-night people would say it was over the disappointment of his failure. No one but himself would know how little he had hoped of it.
Like all haughty reserved creatures from Persian cats up—or down—Casley disliked ridicule; but on the whole he cared very little about the attitude of the world on any subject. It was his own attitude that mattered to him. In his own estimation he was a failure.
As a student of history, death was a familiar idea to him—the long futile sequence of individual lives, of generations, of civilizations, all getting nowhere. Nor had he the subconscious illusion of earthly immortality which makes the idea of dying so astonishing to most people. But he had always felt that there was something humiliating in allowing so great a crisis to be thrust upon one without choice. Suicide appealed to him as an act of volition, not an execution performed upon him by an insolent fate.
This idea brought him back to his heroine—the wonderful representation of fear that Cynthia had given when, as Catherine, she first saw that she was likely to be condemned to death. Fancy people feeling like that about death—to sleep, no more! In a drawer of his desk he had an instantaneous poison obtained some years before from an unsuspecting professor of chemistry. How very simple and pleasant and peaceful the idea was! It was perhaps a little unjust to Weyburn, poor fellow; but he was quite capable of cutting out an hour. Then probably the publicity of his suicide would give the play a new lease of life. Perhaps Weyburn might even get his money back. Grimes, the publicity man, would be delighted. Casley disliked Grimes, who was always trying to get him to say and do things which were unnatural to him and, when he refused to do or say them, putting them in the papers anyhow.
He had started to cross Fifth Avenue where the green light had just flared, when a new idea occurred to him—namely, that his death might be of real service to Miss Brooks, to whom he felt under certain obligations. He had, it was true, hardly exchanged a dozen words with her; but watching her through rehearsals, he had formed a high opinion of her. She was generous and sincere, and was, or might be, a great artist. He remembered that Weyburn had once said of her that all she needed to put her over was a great scandal. Wasn't it possible, he thought, that his suicide might be turned to some account? The idea of offering her his death appealed to him as an excellent economy of effort.
It was a long way back to the theater and he hated crosstown blocks; nevertheless, he turned and walked directly back. Of course he might be too late, in which case he should let the whole thing go. He was not going to live through another day for any one, but if she were still there—— “College Professor Suicide for Actress' Love....” No, that wasn't right. Grimes would do something better with it than that. He smiled at the thought that it was really Grimes—Grimes, whom he so heartily disliked—who would be most pleased at his action.
In the alley he passed two young men, who, with derby hats set well down to their ears and overcoats with collars cut well up to the back of their necks, were giving definite judgments on everything, and calling all celebrities by their first names. Thus:
“The girl can dance; why put her in a rotten historical play?”
“Because Wilfred doesn't know a good play when he sees one.”
“Well, he put her on in the Green Girls, and that went big.”
“That's what I say—Cynthy can dance!”
So little had he been behind the scenes that Casley actually supposed that there might be difficulty in his reaching Miss Brooks, and had been careful to feel in his waistcoat pocket to be sure he had a card which would establish his identity; but there was nothing to check his entrance except a steady outpouring of those who had been before him—the fathers and mothers, the country cousins, the past wives and present sweethearts of various members of the company. Bank presidents and poets and ladies of fashion all swept by as the author flattened himself against the wall in the narrow space inside the stage door, all talking and laughing and most of them condemning the play.
Finally, in a pause in the procession, Casley managed to call across to the door man that he wanted to see Miss Brooks; and the door man, without looking up from one of those strangely ancient newspapers which door men are always reading, answered cryptically, “Number one!” As he could not obviously be referring to the number of her visitors, Casley deduced he was giving the number of her dressing room. Immediately opposite him a door stood open upon a tiny lighted room entirely filled with people who were saying, in various tones, keys and intonations, “My dear, you were wonderful!” “My dear you were too wonderful! Such tempo! Such authority!” “My dear, you were too beautiful!” “Darling, your entrance in the second act——”
A stately, middle-aged, colored maid came out carrying over her arm Miss Brooks' costume of the last act.
Casley stopped her and said, “Do you think I could speak to Miss Brooks a moment? My name is Casley.”
The woman surprised him by answering with a smile beyond even the friendly cordiality of her race:
“Oh, yes, Professor Casley, I know Miss Brooks would like to see you when all these people have gone, if you can wait a moment.”
He was surprised that she knew him and called him by a title not common in theatrical circles except as applied to pianists; but his ego was not nourished by such small crumbs, and he leaned, uncheered and unflattered, against the wall while the hubbub in Miss Brooks' dressing room continued.
Presently the maid came back, and almost as soon as she entered the dressing room again Casley heard a voice with which many weeks of rehearsal had made him familiar—a voice so low it seemed scarcely to stir the air, and yet so resonant that it would carry round the world, saying goodnight to every one or rather saying, “So kind of you to come, dear—so nice of you to like me in the part—such a lovely part, isn't it?—so sweet of you to come, dear. Thank you for the flowers, Jack—so sweet of you to come to-night——”
The outgoing throng again surged past him. The maid said, “Will you come in, Professor Casley?” He stepped in, the maid shut the door upon him and he found himself alone with Cynthia Brooks.
Her visitors had not apparently interfered with her toilet, for she was sitting in front of her dressing table clad in a meager white cotton garment more like a doctor's operating clothes than anything else. Her hair was pulled straight up and pinned in a tight knot on the top of her head and her face was covered with a layer of blue-white cold cream. Even so, she was beautiful. Her enormous brown eyes in the bright arch of unshielded bulbs that framed her mirror shone with wonderful yellow and purple lights and her perfect little nose was only more defined by the shining surface.
The floor of the little room was littered with telegrams, many which read “Congratulations on your success,” although their dates showed they had been sent hours before the curtain rose. Boxes of flowers, some opened, some with the string still intact, were leaned against the wall or piled on the dressing table.
As he entered she gave him a swift keen look—intense, questioning; he did not know exactly what it was, it was so quick. Then she picked up a wad of cotton and began to take the cold cream off her face with large, circular, sweeping motions.
In his youth, in the days when he had cared about life, he had been shy; and though nothing of this now remained, he had the habit of keeping silent until he was sure he had the situation well in hand. So in the pause that followed she looked at him again, and he was astonished to see that there were tears in her eyes as she said, “Oh, your lovely play! Don't tell me I spoiled it or I shall cry. I never loved any play as I love this one.”
It was quite true. Cynthia, unsuspected by any but a few intimate friends, had a secret passion for culture. This part was exactly the sort of part she had dreamed of playing, and she knew now that the play couldn't last a week. Even Weyburn, the most generous of producers, couldn't keep such an expensive production playing to empty houses—and they would be empty. She was largely responsible for Weyburn having put it on, for she had fallen in love with it when she first read it. Under its prolixity and lack of dramatic climax, she recognized in it the taste and flavor of real life—a quality which is particularly thrilling against the unfamiliar background of another epoch.
She had fallen in love with the play and she had not been entirely unconscious of the existence of the author. Unbelievable as it would have been to him, he had attracted Cynthia's attention from the moment that he had sauntered into the theater and listened with that immobile face of his to the reading of the play. She had set herself a sort of holiday task—to gain from him a mark of human interest—and had totally failed. Then, too, as has been said, she had a genuine admiration for knowledge, and Casley represented this romantic ideal to her. And then perhaps not the least potent element was the fact that he had a strange sort of beauty of his own. It would not be possible to describe him as handsome; yet his looks had for some people, of whom Cynthia was one, an enormous charm.
He was tall and thin and made of iron. His face was long and thin, too; more on the traditional Uncle Sam type than was desirable, but so well modeled—the curved nostril, and the clean-shaven upper lip projecting a little above the lower—that it would have made a good profile for a coin. His eyes were of a clear light gray, and they seemed to catch a great deal of light and to flare and grow black as lights went up and down.
He looked at her steadily and, seeing that she was sincere, he said, with his habitual leisurely enunciation:
“You were precisely and exactly right. As for that scene at the bishop's party where you first see the king is watching you, you conveyed everything—fear and flattered vanity, and excitement, and a resolution to go on wherever it might lead you. And then to look the part as you do! The lines call you beautiful, and then you come on, and you are! What an extraordinary courtesy to the playwright!”
She drank in his words, but they both had this in common—that neither was much affected by any outside praise or blame.
“It was nice of you to take the trouble to come and tell me,” she said.
“That isn't the reason for my coming,” he returned, and looked about for a chair.
The only one except the stool on which Cynthia herself was sitting was completely covered with clothes. Cynthia leaned over and threw all these to the floor. But Casley did not respond to the invitation. He leaned on the back of the chair, holding his soft hat in one hand as he did so. He stared at her as if he were interested only in the process by which she was removing the cold cream from her face. As a matter of fact, he was interested in that, but even more in the fact that any woman should dare to look as she did then and be so unconscious. He thought——
“What are you thinking about?” asked Miss Brooks.
“I was thinking how extraordinary it is that you should be beautiful even like this.”
“Mercy!” said Cynthia, as if there were a good many more extraordinary things in the world than that. “Is that what you came to say?” And she turned her chin up and began stroking her throat with a new piece of cotton.
“No,” said Casley; “no, it isn't, although it seems to me more interesting than you apparently think it is. No, I came to say something to you which I can say only to an unusually sensible, clear-headed woman; also on the assumption that you will not interrupt me or attempt to dissuade me.”
“Yes—to all of them,” said Cynthia.
At this, Casley sat down and laid his hat on the floor, crossed first his legs and then his arms, and began in his slowest drawl:
“Good! Then here is the situation: for reasons with which I need not trouble you and which, as a matter of fact, have very little to do with the failure of my play, I have decided not to live until to-morrow morning.”
At this Cynthia gave him a quick glance, but, met by an icy stare from his cool gray eyes, she looked back into her mirror and almost succeeded in going on with her task. “I was crossing Fifth Avenue on my way home,” Casley continued, “when the idea suddenly occurred to me that my death might in some way be of service to you.”
“To me?” exclaimed Miss Brooks.
“No? Isn't there any one whose throat you'd like cut? For be assured that a person about to take his own life thinks lightly of other people's. Or think how Millicent Mills' whole success in the theater was built on that young Italian nobleman who so thoughtfully blew out his brains on her lawn. Though I have the disadvantage of being a mere Anglo-Saxon, and coming from rather plain ancestry, I rather fancied that there was something about my being a college professor which that objectionable young man who does your publicity for you might turn into what I believe he calls a stunt. I thought in return for the interest you have taken in my play, and for the wonderful performance you gave of it to-night, I ought at least to offer you the opportunity.”
Cynthia had listened to him in silence, but with her eyes getting larger until they seemed to take up all the upper half of her face. It was an important part of her profession to catch an idea, either from an author or a director, and she grasped Casley's now without asking a single question.
“This is terrible!” she said.
“On the contrary,” replied her visitor, “it is almost entertaining. I am, of course, quite ignorant of such matters; but just to start your mind working, suppose I left a letter behind me saying that you had inspired me with so violent a passion that life without you had become intolerable. Wouldn't that be rather—er—advantageous?”
“It wouldn't be true,” said Cynthia, but try as she would she could not keep a faintly questioning tone out of her voice.
“No, it wouldn't,” Casley agreed; “but then truth seems to have but little to do with anything that our young friend—whom I dislike so much——”
He snapped his fingers and Cynthia supplied the name.
“Grimes,” she said.
“Mr. Grimes, of course—with anything Mr. Grimes prints. It isn't true that you break broncos and shoot mountain lions; it isn't true that you train marmosets; and yet I have seen all of these statements about you in the papers, accompanied by the most convincing photographs. His imagination seems to run to animals, and I am sure he would enjoy having you photographed with the great Dane or the canary which I left you in my will.”
“I can't joke about your death,” said Cynthia, and two large tears which had been gathering in her eyes splashed down on the dressing table. “It's just that I'm a little unstrung,” she exclaimed politely, for fear that he might find her emotion too personal.
“My dear child, how charming of you!” said Casley. “The only tears that will be shed are shed here before me—so much better than oceans shed after the event. But this is not tragic. I'm doing what I want to, as much as I can be said to want to do anything.”
At this moment there was a knock at the door, and the maid came in again to say in a cold blank voice that Mr. Robertson was waiting in his car to take Miss Brooks to supper.
“To supper?” said Cynthia, rather angrily, as if she had never heard of the meal before. The maid merely nodded and began to pick up the clothes which Cynthia had flung upon the floor. “Now really, Maud, I can't go to supper with him. Did I say I would?”
“You certainly did,” replied Maud.
Remote in some ways as was Casley's connection with the theater, he could not help absorbing a certain amount of the gossip of the day, and he knew that young Robertson, the son of a banking potentate, was offering Cynthia marriage as a last resort, quite against the wishes of his parents.
“Well, I shan't go,” said Cynthia. She took the pins out of the knob of hair on the top of her head and shook her head until her hair fell to her shoulders; then with a few quick motions she pinned it into an equally minute knot at the nape of her neck. “Tell him I'm exhausted—that I have a splitting headache. Tell him anything you like, Maud—oh, you might say I loved the orchids. They were orchids?”
“They were gardenias,” said Maud, and left the room.
“Maud's wonderful,” said Cynthia. “She knows just who I want to see and who I don't, and how to get rid of them without hurting their feelings. I couldn't live without Maud.”
“But you can live without young Robertson?” said Casley in his drawl.
“Mercy, yes!” replied Cynthia; and she added in explanation, “Only his father was rather rude to me.... But to go back to what we were talking about, there are some things I simply couldn't do, and one of them is to profit in any way by your death. I couldn't do that.”
“It shows,” he said, “what a generous woman you are since you have not asked for the head of Halley. It also shows how well prepared for death I am since I do not really hate him.”
He stood up, and Cynthia gave a little cry.
“Oh, don't go! Oh, Mr. Casley, you are certain to write a great play some day! Don't——”
He held up his hand.
“If you don't feel you can use this situation, Miss Brooks,” he said, “you must let it alone.” And he picked up his hat, and putting it on his head at its customary slight angle, he walked to the door.
“I can use it—of course I can!” exclaimed Cynthia feverishly. “Only you must give me a moment to think. If it wasn't used right it would be a terrible boomerang. You must give me time.”
“Only till dawn,” said Casley. “I really couldn't give you any more than that.”
They looked at each other, she from the dressing table and he from the door.
“Would you mind terribly,” she said, “if I consulted Grimesy?”
“I'm afraid I should,” replied Casley. “I object to Mr. Grimes being mixed up in any way with my private affairs. Besides, he seems to me a conscientious young man. I fear he would feel it his duty to circumvent me.”
“I don't think so where a good story was involved,” said Cynthia. “I have never seen a trace of conscience where publicity was concerned.”
Casley shook his head, but the request was so reasonable that he ultimately allowed himself to be persuaded.
Grimes was reported by the door man to be in Mr. Weyburn's office, and summoned thence, he presently appeared. He was a fat young man, but of a firm, polished fat. His expression varied very little, but he allowed his eyes to rove round and round, and even to dart from point to point, proving that he was not a graven image. Thus, though the presence of the author in Cynthia's dressing room surprised him, his only expression of that surprise was to move his eyes rapidly from one to the other.
“Grimesy,” said Cynthia, with her crisp enunciation, and that tone of authority which makes actors listened to off as well as on the stage, “Mr. Casley has a friend who is going to commit suicide to-night, and has very kindly offered it to us as a publicity story.”
Instead of darting his eyes, Mr. Grimes now rolled them.
“Millicent Mills stuff,” he observed.
“Except this isn't a prince,” said Cynthia; and then detecting in her sentence a hint of discourtesy to the professor, she added sweetly, “Not that that matters.”
“I should say it did matter,” replied Grimes ruthlessly. “A lot better if it were a prince.”
“I'm afraid we can't make it a prince at this late date,” said Casley. “And if a strictly middle-class suicide is of no use we——”
“Of course it's of use,” said Grimes. “Just about the best thing ever happened to you, Cynthia—that's what it is. Absolutely!”
Casley examined Grimes as if he had been some ancient palimpsest.
“Develop that idea, Mr. Grimes,” he said. “Why will it be so useful to Miss Brooks?”
Mr. Grimes was not one of these people who speak about their specialty without a reasoned background. He answered fluently and at once:
“The American public loves a pure actress—some one they might, if they had the chance, bring right into their own homes, introduce to their mother and ask to sit down beside the stove. Well, what publicity can you get for a type like that? None! All right when she has attained publicity—Mary Pickford, the American sweetheart. But to get 'em there—there's the problem. Publicity without scandal—that's the American publicity man's difficulty. In Europe, they tell me, it's different. They like scandals. Here, too, for certain types, but not Miss Brooks' type—not the best type. Jewel robberies, aeroplane trips, queer pets—that's all I've been able to hit on. But this idea of yours seems to me valuable. Suicide—suicide on account of rejected love! It must be made clear, you know, that it was rejected from the start. She was cold to him, but not hard.” He turned to Cynthia, “You get that distinction, Cynthia. You didn't mean to hurt him; you were just too pure and good——”
“For human nature's daily food,” said Casley.
Grimes shook his large round head.
“I wouldn't use the word 'food,'” he said. “Your friend is not a married man, I hope.” He was reassured on this point and fell into profound thought. He came out of his reverie shaking his head. “Swell, it would be swell,” he murmured; “but I don't dare touch it.”
“You have a prejudice against suicide?” inquired Casley.
Grimes dismissed this idea with a gesture.
“Every one knows their own business best,” he said. “No, it's not that. But what guaranty have I that he'll do it? He might change his mind after the papers with the story in it went to press. I couldn't let Miss Brooks into anything of that kind. That would make us ridiculous. I don't dare touch it, unless”—he looked at Casley—“unless it's you yourself.”
“I am very much flattered, Mr. Grimes,” said Casley, “at your confidence in my integrity.”
“Yes,” said Grimes, “you strike me as a feller that would mean what he said—neither more nor less.” Casley bowed; he was not really flattered—no one is—at being complimented on the possession of a virtue which he knew he possessed.
Without the awkwardness of a positive avowal, they fell to discussing the form which the suicide note should take. This was not easy. Every form which Casley suggested Grimes rejected as too cold.
“You must get some emotion into it,” he said; “it isn't like serving notice on your landlady that you're going to move. You must make the world feel that you're bidding good-by to the great passion of your life because you yourself recognize that she's out of your class.”
“Oh, Grimesy!” said Cynthia, a little shocked at the mere idea.
“Sure,” the relentless young man went on; “out of his class.”
“'Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing,'” suggested the professor.
Grimes' face lit up.
“Now, there—at last,” he said. “That's a good line.”
“Not my own.”
Grimes was inclined to be magnanimous.
“Oh, well,” he said, “we can't always be original. The point is to be right.” He glanced at his wrist watch. “We could still catch the last edition of the morning papers.”
He produced a pencil and began making notes on the back of an envelope.
“I don't suppose you care particularly about seeing it before I send it in, do you?”
“I am afraid you'll think me interfering,” said Casley; “but I intend not only to see it but to write it.”
“Yes,” said Cynthia, “Mr. Casley is going to take me to supper. Come round to Bernandini's in half an hour and we'll have it all ready for you.”
Grimes hesitated. The whole trouble, he thought, with modern American life was that we don't trust our experts. Here he was engaged at what even he thought a good salary to do Miss Brooks' publicity, and the first big story she had ever had she left to an amateur. He wouldn't expect Casley to let him deliver a lecture on history, but every one thought he could do publicity. Grimes felt deeply discouraged and disappointed. He knew by experience, however, that there wasn't much chance of his changing Miss Brooks' mind when she had made it up. Besides, he reflected, he would be able to change the letter according to his own ideas. How could they stop him? So, with a few last suggestions about suicide notes, he went away.
Casley, left alone with Miss Brooks, looked at her fixedly for a few seconds and then said, with a manner slightly constrained, though not exactly embarrassed, “I really don't think I can take you out to supper.”
“What?” cried Miss Brooks. “You have another engagement? Break it! There's a telephone at the stage door.”
He shook his head.
“It isn't that.”
“What is it, then?”
“Well,” said Casley, “I don't want to. That must seem strange to you when so many men would sell their souls for the chance, but——”
“Please don't talk nonsense,” answered Miss Brooks. “No one would sell his soul to take me or any one out to supper. Why do you mind?”
“It isn't that I mind,” said Casley. “Put it like this: if I wanted to take you to supper, I should not want to end my life. It is because nothing has the slightest interest for me that I find it impossible to go on.”
He was going to develop this idea further, but Cynthia politely but with a brisk firmness cut him short.
“I'm sorry,” she said, “but if it's only that, I'm afraid you must. You see, I've let every one else go, and I'm hungry. After all, it can't make much difference to you one way or the other. You wouldn't like me to starve, would you?”
He sighed and yielded. But outside in the alley, where he was sent to smoke a cigarette while she put on her dress, he regretted his concession. That was one of the troubles with being without wishes of your own—you had no mental momentum to oppose to the wishes of others. He did not blame Cynthia; she could have no conception how distasteful the idea was to him—a restaurant, people—people who had seen the play—who would want to talk about it, Cynthia herself, so lovely, so disturbingly sincere. It seemed like stepping back into the troubled and bitter waters of life. He thought of his quiet room and the peaceful little packet in the drawer of his desk. He found himself stepping down the alley toward the street with a quick resolute step.
A light running step was behind him, and Cynthia called “Mr. Casley!” He turned. There she was in an incredibly short time dressed and ready. Gertrude would have taken five times as long. Her dress was simple in the extreme; she looked like a child.
“You were going to desert me,” she said.
There was no use in denying it, and he merely nodded. She realized for the first time how serious the situation was, but nothing in her manner betrayed it. “There's a taxi,” she said; “one of those nice red ones I like.” He hailed it and they got in.
They drove for some minutes before she burst out with: “I can't see why you mind just supper!”
“I don't believe you could see why a person should be unwilling to live.”
“No,” she answered. “I can't—not unless they were terribly unhappy about something. And you're not, are you?”
“No, and I never intend to be again.”
There was another pause, and then Cynthia said, “I suppose it's very silly, but it hurts my feelings that you wanted to leave me flat—like that.”
“Really?” said Casley, so noncommittally that there was a hint of a certain impertinence in having her feelings hurt. 'Well,” he added, “that is another reason why people in my frame of mind are better out of the way—they hurt the feelings of well-meaning friends who try to do them a kindness.”
Cynthia swallowed hard. She had never been called a well-meaning friend before, and she did not like it.
They were both silent until the taxi drew up before Bernandini's.

#### II

The restaurant which Cynthia had selected was one of the most expensive in a city not famous for the cheapness of its restaurants. It was a place of striped silk sofas against the wall, of subtle-faced head waiters, of mysterious chafing dishes trundled to the sides of tiny tables, of peaches in cotton wool, of frosted bottles quite openly produced, and of enormous fawn-colored menu cards half as large as newspapers, printed in dark brown.
Cynthia, greeted by name by the head waiter and ushered to the best table—that is to say, the smallest and most remote—had the superb courage to order scrambled eggs, cocoa and brown-bread toast.
“But I hope you'll do better for the management,” she said.
“The equivalent of quail on toast?” murmured Casley, studying the menu.
The head waiter, who, happily, had no reason to be familiar with the conventions of the English penal system, made a gesture indicating that quail was a thing of the past; and Casley ordered broiled lobster, and, on being assured that Cynthia never touched the stuff, a pint of Lanson, 1911.
Cynthia pushed away the plates and forks to lean her elbows better on the table and, without even looking about to see who was there, said, “And now to work.”
“To work?” asked Casley, coming back from a great distance.
“Yes,” she answered. “Grimesy will be here in half an hour. The letter, you know. Here, we can use the back of the menu, if you have a pencil.”
“Yes, I have,” he answered sadly, detaching a gold object from his watch chain. “Every college professor always has a pencil in case some day he might have an idea.” He turned the menu card over. There was something tempting about its smooth fawn-colored expanse. “I think, under the circumstances, I may call you Cynthia.”
“Oh, please do,” said Miss Brooks eagerly, and then added less gayly:
“Oh, I see! You mean in your letter. Of course. Fancy any one's killing themselves for the sake of some one he did not call by her first name!”
“That's very easy to imagine,” replied Casley, writing down near the top of the sheet the words “Dearest Cynthia,” in a running university hand which was perfectly legible. “Romance often reaches its climax in a first meeting.”
“Do you really think so?” asked Cynthia softly.
He nodded.
“Love affairs are often a slow decline from the first meeting to marriage—or whatever form of permanent indifference happens to be called for.”
“You are very cynical,” said Cynthia. “Don't you believe in love?”
“In its devastating, tragic aspects—yes. In this idea that it is a source of joy—no. I've never seen the faintest connection between love and happiness, and I doubt if any one has.”
“You don't think love makes people happy?” asked Cynthia, really surprised.
He shook his head.
“The opposite. It makes them wretched and makes them make other people wretched, particularly the unfortunate objects of their passion.”
And as if this subject were now exhausted, he took up his pencil and began to write again. Cynthia, however, had not quite finished.
“Oh, dear,” she sighed, “I had always imagined that when I fell in love I was going to live happily ever after.”
At this Casley looked up and smiled at her his sad twisted smile, this time with something paternal in it.
“I dare say you will be happy,” he said, “whether you fall in love or not, because you——”
He hesitated and she suggested a phrase to him:
“——are a sort of moron?”
“No, because you radiate something beautiful and joyous, and so I suppose you must have an inner fund of beauty and joy.”
“I'm glad you think that,” she said, and made an effort to look into those cold gray eyes of his, but they were already fixed on his composition.
“Dearest Cynthia,” he read aloud in a peculiarly professional drawl, “I hope you will not reproach yourself when you hear of my death, for, indeed I am in full accord with your decision that I am not a fitting object for your love. But life, which has always seemed to me a pretty tragic adventure, seems, without you, to be utterly unbearable. I love you with so—with a——” He scowled reflectively as he looked up at her. 'How the deuce do I love you?” he demanded crossly.
“Excuse, please,” said the waiter, bringing Cynthia's scrambled eggs and Casley's lobster.
It was necessary to lay the letter aside for a moment; and as Casley laid it aside face downward—that is to say, menu upward—it had a narrow escape from being whisked away to inform a neighboring table, not about the latest fashion in suicide notes, but about the special dishes of the restaurant.
“That's a very pretty pencil you have,” said Cynthia, and she picked it up and turned it about with her pointed finger tips, and pressed it between the palms of her hands, while the waiter was taking off the covers of the dishes with an egotistical flourish as if he had cooked them all himself. “Something tells me it was given to you by a lady.”
“Yes, and under very romantic circumstances,” said Casley.
He was contemplating the beautiful coral-colored lobster lying in its shallow silver dish.
“I cannot say I want to eat that lobster, but having, like all college officials, a tremendous sense of fitness, I suppose I shall.”
“I hope you know,” replied Cynthia, “that I have a terrible time making up my mind when you're in fun and when you're serious.”
“But think how my classes feel,” said Casley. “It is an axiom with college students that the sure way to flunk a course is not to laugh when the professor means to be funny; or, per contra, to laugh when he doesn't mean to be. They complain bitterly—they have even gone to the president complaining formally that I give them no clew.” And at the recollection a faint smile curved his lips.
“Oh, how I feel for them!” answered Cynthia, turning each piece of buttered toast to find an ideal one to begin with.
Casley poured himself out a second glass of champagne.
“I have a colleague in the mathematical department who always says, 'The interpretation of the problem is an essential part of the examination.' In my course I say, 'The interpretation of the professor is an essential part of the course.' But then they don't seem to be sure how I mean that to be taken.... Do you consider the claws the best part of a lobster? Might I lay one of these at your feet?”
Cynthia shook her head.
“Tell me about the pencil,” she said. “Did you love her?”
“Not a bit. She was a great big handsome girl—I don't care for large women.”
“That's nice,” said Cynthia, but he would not follow her lead, and continued his narrative.
“I was in the history room of the library. You must know that I am a specialist in the Tudor period and have written a rather tiresome book about Owen Tudor. Well, she was asking for it, she was demanding it, and it happened that all the copies——”
“I've read it,” said Cynthia, “and it isn't dull—it's wonderful.”
“——were out. That made her angry, and when the librarian offered her another which he said covered the same period, that made her angrier still. Nothing, she said, covered the same ground as my book—nothing could. My attention was attracted by hearing my own name, and on observing that a handsome woman was saying flattering things about my work, I took a hand. I said, 'Madam, you are mistaken in saying that Morgan and Bennett do not cover the same ground—one, it is true, in an inaccurate and the other in a wearisome manner; but still——' She turned on me like a wildcat and said I must be a very indiscriminating student of history to compare either man to Casley.”
“And then you told her who you were.”
“Certainly not. I spent half an hour proving to her that Bennett's book was a better book than mine, until in fact we made so much noise that we were requested to go and do our talking somewhere else, and so I took her out to lunch.”
“And she gave you the pencil?”
“No, she dropped it under the table, and the waiter found it after she had gone and gave it to me; but as I did not know her name, I could not return it to her. And when at last I did see her again——”
“Oho,” said Cynthia, “you did see her again, did you?”
“She is now the wife of my colleague, Professor Bennett.”
“I bet she finds him dull after you,” said Cynthia.
“Very probably,” answered Casley; “but it must console her to reflect that if the circumstances had been reversed she would have found me equally dull after him.”
“There it is again!” cried Miss Brooks. “Haven't you ever been in love?”
“That's what it did for me,” he returned. Then picking up the pencil and turning over the menu, he said, “I suppose we must have this ready for our fat friend.”
“Aren't you going to tell me the story of how you fell in love?”
He shook his head.
“It isn't a story,” he answered. “Things like that—death and birth and love—they can't be made into stories, really. They are just ugly commonplace emotions.”
Her brown eyes fixed themselves on him.
“I want to hear,” she said.
“Oh,” he answered, “'it was a long time ago. I was studying for my Ph.D.” His drawl died away. “I don't think I can tell you,” he said. “It's so dull. It wouldn't amuse you and it would bore me.”
“What did she look like?” asked Cynthia.
He sighed and said, “Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem.”
“We'll find out what that means later,” answered Cynthia. “What did she look like?”
“She was small and fragile, and had one of these white-rose skins that look as if a speck of dust would injure it, but which actually never tan or burn or roughen, and she had immense brown eyes, almost as good as yours—in fact she wasn't so very unlike you.”
The first time he had seen her he had fallen in love with her, completely and passionately; he didn't sleep or eat or work. They became engaged. There was always another man—other men; he had been wildly, bitterly jealous; she had explained with explanations he knew were lies. Then it appeared that she was engaged to both men at once.
“She thought that funny?” asked Cynthia.
“She had almost no sense of humor,” answered Casley. “I think it was the risk that appealed to her. She was a gambler; she loved danger, although she eventually married the chairman of the board of trustees.”
“But I think she sounds terrible,” said Cynthia. “I don't see how you could have liked her.”
“I didn't like her,” answered Casley. “I loved her and hated her and desired her and despised her—those are the emotions that go together. It wouldn't have made any difference if I had known from the first what she was. This cruel, humiliating passion took hold of me like a cyclone and wrecked me like a frame house in Kansas.”
“Wrecked you?” she questioned.
“I think so,” he answered moderately; “wrecked me emotionally. I have not really felt anything since then, and as emotion is the only basis of action—the spring of life—it really killed me. It's been all over for five or six years, but the aftermath of it is that I haven't the interest to go on with this dull, complex, losing game of living.”
“You haven't felt anything since then?”
He smiled a little.
“If I stub my toe it hurts me, and if my play fails I'm sorry; but——”
“Suppose,” said Cynthia, “that some one really nice fell in love with you—some one like me.” She gave a little smile to indicate that she knew she oughtn't to say she was nice, and yet that after all she was. “Suppose I should begin to make love to you—what would you do?”
“I should leave the restaurant,” he answered, accepting it as a purely hypothetical case. “Psychologists would say that I had built up a particularly strong defense against love; all my associations with it are painful. If I thought I was falling in love I wouldn't wait to go home and take poison; I should run down the street and jump into the river. But,” he added, quite clearly, “I'm not.” He looked down at the menu. “But we must not forget the approach of Mr. Grimes,” he said. “I believe I was in the midst of describing my hopeless passion. Hadn't we better get on with it?”
There was a distinct pause before Cynthia replied, “Oh, yes; read me what you've written so far.”
He read aloud as he might have read an abstract of universal history.
“Dearest Cynthia, I hope you will not——”
They had been so occupied with their own affairs that they had not noticed two people at an adjacent table—Gertrude and Caldecott.
Gertrude, like Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing—indeed, like every one in the world—did not prize to the full the things she had; but when they were lacked and lost, or even threatened with loss, she began at once to find, as the bard has said, the virtue which possession did not show. Though she felt confident that her cousin, if not hers, was certainly no other woman's, she allowed herself to find him at times dreary. But when she saw him supping with a beautiful actress, a bottle of champagne between them—two heads bent over a pencil and paper—her evening with Caldecott was completely ruined. Earlier in the night the great critic had seemed to her big game, but now she felt as a man might feel who has been distracted by a rabbit from tracking down some monarch of the glen.
Nor was Caldecott any better pleased. He had a great affection for Cynthia—an affection which was assumed in theatrical circles to be love—and he knew that if Cynthia were having a romance with Casley an adverse criticism of the play would be considered by his public as an interesting example of jealousy.
“What do you suppose they're writing?” said Gertrude, who was intensely curious.
“Not a fifth act, I hope,” said Caldecott.
As they went out they stopped at Casley's table and Gertrude's quick eye had seen “Dearest Cynthia” written at the top of the sheet before Casley's quick hand had time to turn it over.
“So this is where you are,” she said with a tone of false gayety.
“It is impossible to contradict you, Gertrude,” he answered, rising wearily to his feet. It seemed to him as if he were never going to get this infernal letter finished.
Gertrude began flattering Miss Brooks on her beautiful performance. He noticed that Cynthia, like so many actresses, had acquired to perfection the art of receiving a compliment; she showed a friendly, civil gratitude without a hint that her opinion of herself was unduly raised.
As Caldecott made a motion to go Gertrude turned back to her cousin.
“I suppose you'll be in to tea as usual, Benedict,” she said.
“If I have tea with any one to-morrow, it will probably be with you, Gertrude,” he replied, amusing no one but himself.
When they had gone and he had sat down again Cynthia stared at him with her chin in her hand and said thoughtfully, “Benedict! I never knew any one called that before.”
Casley saw with alarm that in his own ears his name suddenly sounded different. His first impulse was to make her pronounce it again; his next, to leave the restaurant.
He was actually relieved to see the round figure of Grimes making its way with difficulty between the tables, and dashed off the last lines of the letter just as Grimes reached them.
“Just time to catch the last edition,” he said, putting the menu, folded, into his inner pocket without even glancing at it. “Now one other thing,” he said: “If this goes to the papers, it will be out by eight o'clock. You won't change your mind, or anything like that, will you?”
“Grimesy!” said Cynthia severely, but Casley would not let her speak.
“Mr. Grimes,” he said, “I am about to pay my check, to leave Miss Brooks at home—and that will be all.”
Grimesy nodded, and without another word turned and hurried away.
The calmness of this interchange, the quickness of Grimes' departure, gave Cynthia her first real shock. Hitherto the idea of Casley's suicide had been a matter of words—words which somehow had served to bring her close to him. But with the exit of Grimes, bearing the letter for the papers, she saw that the great wheels of action had begun to move. She was frightened—terribly frightened. With that terror in her eyes, she looked up and saw that Casley was paying the check; everything was moving forward toward the inevitable conclusion and she could do nothing whatsoever to stop it.
“Good evening, Miss Brooks. I am relieved to see you so completely recovered from your late headache,” said a voice beside her, heavy with sarcasm.
She knew before she looked up that it was the voice of young Robertson. She saw Casley make a faint motion to rise, ending with a bow across the table—quite enough acknowledgment of the boy's presence.
The waiter brought the change and expressed himself thoroughly satisfied with his tip; and still young Robertson was indulging in a speech the object of which was to fill Cynthia with remorse for having wounded him by proving to her that he was not in the least wounded.
She hardly heard the boy, and yet found him almost intolerable; and looking straight across the table at Casley, she appealed to him with her large wide-open eyes to save her from this tirade.
Casley moved in his chair, leaned his forearms on the table, and bending forward until his head was close to hers, he said in his slow assured accents:
“As I was saying, the only possible criticism of your rendering of the part would be, to my mind, in your first scene with the king. There, I think, you too much foreshadow the tragedy that is coming. You are not quite gay enough, for I am told that to be made love to by a king has a gay side.”
Cynthia's mind, like her eyes, entirely abandoned young Robertson, who, after a few seconds, fell silent; for you cannot go on talking, however great your gift for sarcasm, to the tops of two bent heads. And after a few seconds more he turned on his heel and strode out of the restaurant—a very good exit, only nobody except the head waiter saw it, for it was now getting late and every one else had gone home.
Then Casley, too, stood up, for he saw that Cynthia, under the circumstances, would think it discourteous to make the move; and they went through the empty room toward the door. The head waiter bowed and expressed a hope that they would come again.
“There is no restaurant in New York to which I am as likely to return,” said Casley, which pleased the head waiter immensely; that is, if his manner was a clew to his feeling.
Casley received his hat, given to him as if it were a kingly crown instead of rather a shabby felt hat.
A taxi—a very small taxi, driven by an enormous hunched-over driver, was standing lurking at the door; but Cynthia turned from it. It was a cool October night, the stars at the end of the street were, as Byron has described them, wildly, spiritually bright, and a northerly breeze was sweeping down the Hudson Valley.
“Let's walk,” said Cynthia. “It isn't far. Do you mind?” He shook his head as if a little tired of explaining that he did not care an atom what he did, and she went on: “Let's walk beside the park, where we can walk on earth and smell the trees. We might even sit down on a bench for a minute. See how the stars twinkle. Do you mind sitting down here?”
“My dear Miss Brooks,” he answered, “I don't mind anything, except a suspicion that you are trying in a kindly spirit to delay my going home. Now let us settle this matter once and for all—I am going home—I am going to commit suicide.”
She did not answer this, but she did not sit down. It was so late that Fifth Avenue was deserted and only an occasional bus rolled by them. Suddenly she put her hand on his arm and they walked along thus in silence.
“You feel awfully strong,” she said. “Do you take a lot of exercise?”
“I used to box a little,” he answered. “I am one of those fortunate people whose muscles stay hard without exercise.”
She gave a little laugh.
“That's the first thing about yourself that I've heard you admit was good,” she said, and skipped to adapt her steps to his long stride.
He looked down at her.
“Would any one consider me to be envied?” he asked, more simply than he had so far spoken to her.
“Oh, yes,” cried Cynthia. “Oh, isn't life a mess? I envy you. You have something I want more than anything—except success in my profession.”
“I have?” said Casley more astonished than he could convey.
She nodded.
“Being educated—the way you are—knowing things. Oh, when I hear people quote something in the original Italian—when they say, 'Of course it's exactly the same as the German word “grumblegumble,”' or when you say something in Latin, as if every one knew what you meant, my heart turns over with envy.” She stopped and laid both hands on her breast.
“I want to be well educated,” she said passionately.
“But aren't you?” he asked. “Your enunciation, your choice of words——”
“I'm just a mimic,” she answered. “I don't know anything, except what some ladies in the company taught me when I was playing Ariel—ages ago. Theo Benson was playing Miranda and she taught me how to pronounce and to love Shakspere. I do know a lot of poetry.... Talk of the dangers of the stage for children—all I ever really learned was from her. I taught myself to read French. I suppose you speak French and German and Italian.”
He nodded.
“And anything else?”
“A little bad Spanish.”
She stamped her foot.
“And Latin and Greek, and I can't speak anything but English. Isn't that unfair? I'm not a fool. I could learn. I don't know anything about history. I read Wells—I almost learned it by heart.”
“You should have read Breasted,” he answered.
“There!” she cried. “To be able to do that! That's what I envy; not because I want to show off, but because, if I happen to know anything, it would seem so queer to me I'd be self-conscious about saying I knew it. I want to take it calmly. I want to be cultivated.”
He looked down at her eager little face, and for the fraction of a second the thought came to him that it would be amusing to mold so keen a mind in a body so extremely lovely; but it was only for a fraction of a second. His answer came in a long sigh.
“Do I bother you talking so much about myself?” she asked.
“No.”
They went on in silence for a little while, and then she said, “We ought to turn east here—three long blocks.” He did not respond to the faint apology in her tone. She ought to know by this time, he thought, that what he did between now and dawn made very little difference.
They crossed Madison Avenue. A young policeman was standing at the corner dangling his night stick. A watchman, hearing the feet of possible house owners, came out of the shadows of an areaway and walked about looking vigilant and protective. They crossed the park—monumental and empty except for one taxi racketing down the hill. Cynthia's hand on his arm grew heavier and her steps slower. She began to feel sick with the sense of this doom that she could not prevent. Sensitive, wise and humble-minded, she knew that no direct appeal would have the least effect on him. If she asked him to live because his death seemed too horrible to her, she could see his slight mocking smile, could hear his drawling question as to whether she really thought he was likely to set her temporary shock against his deep-seated horror of life.
They reached Lexington Avenue, and there, before she crossed, she paused, and, withdrawing her hands, she said, 'Mr. Casley——”
Exactly the smile, exactly the tone she had dreaded. “Miss Brooks, please don't,” he said.
“I was only going to ask if you wouldn't come in and see my little flat. It's rather nice, and I could give you some fruit and——”
“Not to-night, thank you,” he answered, and smiled at his own little joke.
Cynthia did not smile. She was at the end of her rope. She saw that it was a matter of seconds now before he would take off his hat, shake her by the hand, crack some last bitter joke and be gone forever.
“Oh, kind heaven,” she thought, “if I were clever! If I could think of anything to do to stop him!”
And then, without knowing it, she did it. She stepped off the sidewalk without looking to right or left, and an enormous truck, taking advantage of the empty street, came lurching and rumbling along at thirty-five miles an hour and just touched the point of her shoulder.
It just touched the point of her shoulder, but the impact was sufficient to spin her round and fling her on the sidewalk. She felt a sudden thick numbness back of her nose as if she had tried to scream and had been gagged or strangled; she was flat on the pavement as if molded into it; she was up again, aware of strange pains shooting about in various corners of her body; she was sick or faint; then she was half sitting, half leaning against a hydrant, while she felt different spots of her torso for injuries she was not clear-headed enough to place.
“I'm afraid I'm hurt,” she said, and hearing her words penetrate the night unanswered, she looked about to see why her companion had not come to her assistance.
The reason was at once apparent, even to a mind slightly dazed—Casley was engaged in knocking down the truck driver again and again. Twice, before Cynthia grew too giddy to look at the process, she saw the unfortunate man pick himself out of the gutter only to fall there again, with a sort of tossing roll that had something gay and aërial about the high trajectory which brought him always to identically the same spot.
At this eleventh hour of his life Casley had experienced a genuine emotion. The truck, after knocking down Cynthia, had arrested its rollicking course a few yards beyond her; and the driver, thrusting a grinning face round the corner of his vehicle, had demanded as he saw her pick herself up why she did not watch where she was going. At this question, or perhaps at the manner of it, a simple and primitive anger swept over the professor. He took three running steps to the truck, hopped up on the hub of the wheel, grabbed the driver round the neck, pulled him from his box, set him on his feet and then began knocking him down; how many times he never could remember, the driver's subsequent testimony that it was ten being obviously exaggerated.
Nor did Casley allow the motives of his conduct to go unexplained. Each time he knocked the man down he said with a clarity born of enunciation in his classroom, “I'll teach you to knock a lady down and then laugh at her!” It became an almost continuous repetition.
The driver wasted no time in protesting his innocence; he began shouting for help, and presently the same young policeman whom Casley and Cynthia had passed so indifferently a moment before came running round the corner, his club in hand ready for action; he ran, as some people do, with a motion that looks as if their hips grew longer and longer as they run.
“Here, here!” he said. “Stop that!”
The driver, innocently believing that his opponent would obey the voice of the law even twenty feet away, relaxed his vigilance and began to shout his side of the story; at which Casley, seeing a superb opportunity, knocked him down again, thus prejudicing his case in the eyes of the police, who like to be obeyed instantly. The officer swept Casley aside with an unexpected swirl of his club.
“What do you think you're doing?” he said.
“Officer, I know exactly what I'm doing,” answered Casley. “I'm teaching this fellow——” Only he did not say “fellow.” The driver broke in.
“As God's my witness, brother,” he said, laying his hand on the policeman's shoulder, “I didn't lay a finger to him; he just hopped up on my truck——”
“Oh, yes, I suppose so,” said the policeman, who was as much a master of irony as Casley—more perhaps. “The truck drivers of this city don't ever do anything wrong—oh, no, not at all. Us and they have no differences of opinion.”
“He knocked this lady down, going about fifty miles an hour,” said Casley.
“Took at me, officer,” said Cynthia, very plaintively from the hydrant. The art of conveying emotion had not deserted her, and she looked a sad, appealing little victim, perched on that uncomfortable seat.
The officer did look at her.
“Well, miss,” he said, “I do see you; but look at this exhibit here!” And he indicated the driver, who had a cut on his forehead, an eye almost closed, and who, having bitten his tongue in one of his falls, was freely spitting blood.
Cynthia felt outraged that any injuries should be compared to hers and was injudicious enough to answer, “There's nothing the matter with him. He's just pretending.”
At this the policeman laughed.
“He ought to go on the stage then,” he said, “for he's a swell pretender.”
Casley thought the time had come to interfere with all the weight of his personality—a power which had never failed him.
“Officer,” he said, “perhaps I should not have taken the law into my hands; but when this man, having knocked this lady down, stuck his ugly face round the truck and asked her why she did not look where she was going——”
“I didn't—I never did!” cried the driver.
“And why didn't you?” said the policeman. “It sounds likely to me. And even if he did,” he added, turning on Casley with that magnificent ability to award blame to every one concerned, shared only by policemen and experienced children's nurses—“and even so, what call had you to half murder him?”
“If you had seen a lady almost killed under your eyes——”
“I never touched the little lady, brother,” said the driver, who seemed to have great faith in this fraternal note.
“Oh, officer, he did, he did!” said Cynthia. She had risen in the excitement of the argument, but now she felt so queer again that she was obliged to sink down on the lowest step of a house. “He was going like smoke, and he knocked me down, and I think he broke my ribs, and my hip feels terribly.”
“I never come within a mile of them! Say, they wasn't within half a block of my truck!”
“Oh, cut it out, cut it out!” said the policeman, suddenly deciding that the whole thing had gone too far in every direction. “Tell it to the lieutenant. Come along with me—the two of you.”
“Now see here, officer,” said Casley, “you are not going to arrest me, because the lady I was with was knocked down and almost killed.”
“Right you are,” answered the policeman; “I am going to arrest you for beating up a fellow citizen.”
“But what about me?” said Cynthia, looking up from her position on the steps, her face small and intensely pale in the electric light. She made a motion to rise, and Casley, coming forward to help her, found her in his arms. “I must have him to take me home,” Cynthia murmured, her head resting exactly against his heart, which she was delighted to hear was beating violently.
“Is he your husband?” asked the officer.
“No,” said Cynthia.
“Ho-ho,” said the driver, feeling that this was a distinct point for him. His tone was annoying, and Cynthia, stirred by this, and conscious that her position was a somewhat compromising one, had the inspiration to say, “We're not married yet—we're engaged.”
It appears that nowadays the word “engaged” has some of the qualities attributed in a well-known saying to charity.
The policeman was justified in asking, “You mean you two are going to get married?”
“Yes,” said Cynthia.
She knew Casley would not say this, but she also felt convinced that he would not think it worth while to contradict her. The officer was obviously impressed.
“Where does she live?” he asked Casley over her head.
Her position enabled her to whisper her address to him, and he tossed it to the policeman—“One hundred and seventy-six in this block.”
The officer hesitated. But as ill luck would have it, at that moment another policeman appeared upon the scene and the problem from the point of view of the law was solved. The second officer was directed to take the two men to the station house, while the first one summoned a taxi to take Cynthia, not home, but to the hospital only a few blocks away. Cynthia saw that the game was up, but she did not move from her position within Casley's left arm. She looked up at him.
“Good-by,” she said.
He answered quietly, “Good-by.”
“Kiss me,” said Cynthia.
He bent his head and their lips clung together for a second—a brief kiss, and yet not without meaning; only what meaning exactly was it, Cynthia wondered as she was lifted into the taxi by the policeman.
There had been several moments in Cynthia's life when she had experienced the extreme potency of being a celebrity. She thought this might be one.
“Officer,” she said faintly, “I'm Cynthia Brooks.”
“Yes?” said the officer, who was not in the least interested in the theater. There was a pause. Two years before, Cynthia had done a motion picture, and that picture had been at the officer's local motion-picture house the week before. It began to come back to him. “I saw you last week in The Kid Grows Up,” he said. “My wife and I liked that picture better than any we've seen this year. Sure, it was you!”
Established thus in his favorable acquaintance, Cynthia started her story—a great deal may be told even in two blocks. She told him how she was acting in Professor Casley's play, what a great man he was, how celebrated, how the play had been a failure, how they were terribly in love, but how they had had a ridiculous quarrel and as a result Casley was threatening to kill himself. She knew there would be no use in telling any one as full of life as the policeman that he was going to kill himself because he was bored with living—this was much better. She felt that if she were not so sick, and did not have such a pain in her side, she could have thought of a better story still. However, this one seemed to do very well.
“Don't let him kill himself, will you?” she said.
“No, indeed I will not,” said the officer. “I'll get him locked up until you come round and get him.”
He spoke seriously, and she suddenly realized that suicide was no unlikely possibility to him; he must have seen so many of them that there was no need to explain the danger.
It was the best she could do, she thought, as she limped into the hospital. People in white, who seemed to her to be of enormous height, began to surround her. The officer was evidently going away. She murmured, “Remember,” and then everything grew first green and then yellow, and then a dancing, dazzling black before her eyes, and she fainted quietly away.
In the meantime the second policeman was conducting the prisoners to the station house; and since it was, of course, impossible to leave the truck alone and unguarded, they were going in the truck, the driver driving, Casley on the seat beside him and the policeman standing in a menacing position on the step.
Two young men who might have been the same two young men whom Casley had passed in the alley of the theater, but who were not, called out to the officer as the truck went solemnly by them, “Hullo, Donahue, what have you got? A couple of silk thieves?”
“Nothing important—just a couple of bums,” said Donahue, without the least intention of giving offense.
The truck trundled slowly along—very different was its pace now from its former gay career. A sleek young cat, springing home, stopped midway across Lexington Avenue, astonished no doubt at so unusual a sight as a large truck moving slowly, and would have been run over but that the driver was enabled to stop within a few feet.
“You see how I drive, brother? I'm no speed king,” he said appealingly.
“I guess you drive a little different with an officer standing on your step,” said Donahue, who lacked the pungent power of scarcasm possessed by the first policeman. “Do you think I have no sense at all?”
“He hopes not, officer,” said Casley. “I know all about it. I am a teacher, and the perennial hope of my students is that I am an utter fool.”
“A teacher it is you are?” said the officer, who, like Cynthia, had an exaggerated respect for learning. “And what do you teach?”
“I teach—I attempt to teach history, officer; but you have no notion how difficult it is, because history is just a series of incidents like this one; and there is always my story and the truck driver's story—and who is there to settle which is true?”
“The lieutenant will settle that,” said the policeman, thus completely disposing of Casley's simile as the truck, still driven as if on eggshells, drew up before the lights of the police station, which were like two sickly drunken green moons in the night.
Casley had always—or at least for many years now—gone through life insured against a certain sort of disaster by a strong and convincing individuality. When he spoke everybody listened; when he asserted no one doubted his word. This quality is as easily recognizable as physical beauty—recognizable even in history, so that we know that Saint Paul and John Nicholson possessed it, and Napoleon and Lincoln, for all their greatness, did not. It has a little magic in it and a little mysticism and a great deal of integrity. There had never been any disorder in a classroom of Casley's, never any petty difficulty in the history department getting what it asked of the trustees.
It never crossed his mind that he would have any trouble in making the lieutenant see the situation as he saw it. As he rode through the empty streets he did not even review what he was going to say. A certain calming of the mind and freeing of the will were necessary—that was all.
The three passed up the steps between the two green lights, and into the bare space of the station house. Casley looked thoughtfully at the lieutenant and decided he was an intelligent man. The policeman who brought them in, not having been present at the series of events that led to the arrest, was not able to speak with complete authority, and the truck driver's voluble untruthfulness told against him from the start. Besides, the lieutenant, whose own car, standing peacefully before his door, had been smashed to splinters only the week before by just such a fellow as this, had no prejudice in favor of truck drivers. Everything, according to Casley's ideas, was going perfectly, when the first policeman, the man who had made the arrest, came running up the steps and, reaching the desk, held a hurried whispered conversation with his superior.
The next thing Casley knew was that he was taken downstairs and locked up in a cell, and for the first time in his life nothing that he said seemed to make the smallest impression on any one.
He had a great deal to think about—or, more accurately, a great deal to remember—the swift delicious impact of his fist against the truckman's jaw, the round warmth of Cynthia's little head against his heart, her tone, her expression as she had said “Kiss me,” the undoubted emotion of the next few seconds, her desire for education, and how he would bring it to her if—all the innumerable little flatteries by which she had soothed his spirit through the evening—the restaurant—the champagne—even the lobster—the suicide note. Awkward if he were still alive when that appeared, but a close thing—a matter of an hour at most—before he could get home. For a man who had ceased to feel he had a variety of emotions to recall—from that first one of all—his exuberant pride in his own physical powers.
He was aware of anxiety about Cynthia's condition. From something the patrolman had said he gathered she had fainted at the hospital. Suppose her career was injured, her life endangered, all owing to his generous impulse to offer her his suicide.
And then a curious thing happened to him. It was as if his creative instinct flared up, lit by a spark from all these other emotions. Without any conscious effort on his part, almost as if handed to him by an outside power, he saw exactly what to do with the fourth act—why the play was wrong. In following historical fact—fact as he saw it, though who knew whether he were right or wrong?—he had thrown away every thread of human interest. The story was a love story—or ought to be—the story of the love of Catherine and Derham. It unrolled before him like a map. Drama—emotion—that was what was needed. A play was not the place for him to exploit his theories as to the king's character, the political policies of Cranmer. This was a love story. Every one had told him that, and yet now for the first time he saw it—discovered it for himself. Love! That was what people wanted to hear about. Well he'd give it to them.
Rather to his surprise, he found no trouble in getting paper from the attendant. For the next four hours he rewrote his fourth act. At six he drank a cup of coffee. His play was magnificent. He'd almost be willing to live another day to see it in this form. If it weren't for that note——
At half past seven—a little after—he was taken uptown in the patrol wagon with some fifteen or sixteen other prisoners—crap shooters and violators of the Volstead Act—a brilliant, lovely autumn morning. Casley actually enjoyed the drive.
At court he was again locked up, but this time in company with his fellow prisoners—not so good for creative thought, but his work was done—just one or two points about phrases. The great scene was to be that in which the queen said good-by to her lover, after he had been tortured to confess and had confessed nothing.
Other cases were being tried, and it began to look as if Casley's had been forgotten. He yawned, Some policeman, coming in for a prisoner, had tossed down a morning paper. It had gone through several hands, and now, a good deal crumpled, was lying on the floor at Casley's feet. He felt a mild curiosity to know what John Alban, the critic of this particular journal, had said of his play. He reached a long arm to the floor and gathered it up—the want ads, the real estate page, the shipping news, the stock-market He decided to start at the beginning in his search for the dramatic column, and turning the paper right side out, his eye lit upon the following headline on the front page: “Playwright Suicide for Love of Star. Benedict Casley Reported Self-slayer.” A letter was in one of those enhancing frames called a box. But, good heavens, not his letter—signed with his name—his own beloved name! But the letter——
“My wonderful darling, my cold, unattainable angel, I don't want your splendid black eyes to shed one tear because I have passed over into the silence. I believe, Cynthia, we shall not be divided always, though I know now you will never love me in this world. Why should you, with your youth and beauty and talent, which sets you so far above every actress on the American stage to-day?”
Oh, Grimes, Grimes!
“Ah, my angel, my tender little girl, you offered me such a sweet pure friendship as a sister might offer me, but I, who am maddened for that sweet red mouth of yours——”
He actually could not read any more; a dancing mist came before his eyes and blotted out the words. He had been a violent, quick-tempered child; but never in all his life had he been angry as he was angry now.
He took a visiting card from his pocketbook, with his college address on it—an impressive card; he said exactly the right thing, but the hand that wrote was not perfectly steady. He tore out the letter from the paper and sent it with the card to the magistrate. A few minutes later he was summoned to the bench. The Judge dangled an arm over the edge of the desk and peered at Casley.
“You are Professor Benedict Casley?”
“Yes, your honor.”
“Of Boonton College?”
“Yes, your honor.”
A son of a friend of the magistrate's had been there—had been in Casley's course. Casley knew the boy. This went off very well. His honor was prepared to listen, while Casley explained that a letter, extremely compromising to his reputation, had appeared in the morning papers—a letter which he had not written.
“Nor authorized?” said the judge.
“Read it,” answered Casley effectively.
The judge did read it very slowly and thoroughly. He seemed to weigh every syllable.
The authoritative personality was having its effect. The judge was impressed. Besides, he himself some years before had had a disillusionizing experience with a lady of the theatrical profession, and only the day before he had lost a golf match on account of a long dragging case which had been brought into his court—a question of a jewel robbery and a trapeze dancer—all nothing but publicity hunting as it turned out. He saw Casley's situation through friendly eyes.
“It had even occurred to me,” said Casley, “that they maneuvered my arrest so that they might be free to get this thing into the papers.” It had occurred to him.
The judge beckoned the policeman who had made the arrest to approach nearer; and the policeman, having nothing to conceal, at once admitted that the professor's arrest had been urged upon him by Miss Brooks. Casley looked at him sharply. It had not occurred to him that Cynthia was a participant in this ugly plot. He had distrusted Grimes—even possibly Weyburn; but Cynthia——
“The young lady said, your honor,” continued the officer, “that she and the prisoner were engaged to be married, and that they had had some sort of a misunderstanding between them, and that she was afraid he'd kill himself before morning, she being pretty well knocked out herself, and would we keep him safe for her until she could get around in the morning.”
The judge looked at Casley.
“Were you engaged?” he asked.
“Certainly not,” said Casley. “I never spoke to the woman until last evening.”
“Was she sober when she made this statement?” said the judge to the officer.
“Oddly enough, the three of them was cold sober,” said the officer.
A few minutes later Casley walked out a free man. He stopped at the corner and bought all the morning papers. Some of them were early editions and did not contain Grimes' literary product; but most of them did—on the front page. Casley had led the judge to believe, without exactly saying so, that his first action would be to seek out the college authorities and explain his innocence.
But his plan, and it was quite obvious that he had a plan, was different. As soon as he had torn the heart out of the newspaper stories, he hailed a taxi and told it to drive to the University Club, of which he was not a member. There he asked for Judge Lauderdale, and hearing that the judge was just finishing his breakfast, he sat down in the stranger's room and waited for him.

#### III

Grimes was in the habit of boasting to those not likely to betray him that he had a cast-iron arrangement which made it impossible that those for whom he worked should reach him before 10:30 in the morning. The arrangement was not a complex one; he shared an apartment with a friend who wrote statistical articles for a technical paper, and this friend always answered the telephone and said Mr. Grimes had just gone out—at least he said this until 10:30.
But the morning after the first performance of Catherine Howard the system broke down, for it was hardly seven o'clock—not five hours of sleep had been accomplished—when Grimes was roused by his friend's shaking him by the shoulder and shouting at him that Miss Brooks was on the phone.
“I told you,” Grimes shouted back, unclosing first one eye and then the other, “that never under any circumstances——”
“I know,” said his friend; “but she understood all about that. She has to speak to you. She's in some sort of a t'rific mess.”
Holding his pajamas clutched about him, Grimes shuffled to the telephone. No sorrow, he thought, though not familiar with the Bible, could be like unto his sorrow—a heavy fat young man without sleep—practically without it.
“Hullo,” he said in a husky, sulky voice.
He heard that Cynthia had had a serious accident—a rib broken and contusions. He could not get that last word over the telephone, and when he did hear it he didn't know exactly what it meant. It sounded painful. She was back in her own apartment; she'd been hours in the hospital, getting her rib strapped and her contusions taken care of; but she was going to be able to play that evening, and he must come to her at once—something terrifically important which she could not possibly discuss over the telephone; but she could say this—she hoped he had not sent Mr. Casley's letter to the papers—or had he?
“Certainly not,” said Grimes, and was going on to explain that the professor's letter had been simply idiotic—so tame that it wouldn't have constituted an incident at a Sunday-school picnic. But Cynthia interrupted him with an almost hysterical joy in her voice.
“Oh, Grimesy, you are an angel!” she said. “You have your moments of genius. Come at once. I need you.”
He came, reluctantly but promptly, and found Cynthia in a marvelous garment—all lilac and blue and pink like the inside of a mussel shell, stretched on a chaise longue in her small, crowded, pretty, little sitting-room, while Maud was just bringing in her break fast tray. The garment had pink swan's-down round the neck and sleeves, and Cynthia's slim neck and arms coming out of this fluff looked as small and white as a child's.
She looked rather small and white altogether; but Grimes did not notice this, because her greeting was gay, and Grimes never knew that people felt badly unless they told him so—or died.
“How nice of you to be so quick, Grimesy,” she said. “A cup for Mr. Grimes, Maud. I don't suppose you've had any breakfast yet, have you?”
“Any breakfast yet!” said Grimesy bitterly. “I haven't had any sleep yet.”
“Oh, poor thing!” said Cynthia. Her tone was sincere, but she made it clear that all the sympathy he was going to get had been compressed into those three words. “But I simply had to tell you how grateful I am to you for not printing that letter.”
“No publicity man in this city would have printed it,” replied Grimesy, inhaling greedily as Cynthia poured coffee into the cup which Maud had brought. “It was the dumbest, bummest letter—all about himself to begin with—hardly a word about you. How you could have let him write such a letter——”
“He isn't the kind of man you can order about, you know,” said Cynthia gently.
“Well, of course, I'm trained; I'm a specialist,” Grimes went on, willing to yield something; “but I should think any one could have seen that that letter was no good. Now the one I got out——”
Cynthia gave a shriek.
“You don't mean to tell me you did print a letter from Mr. Casley?”
Grimes looked at her as if to say that women had no continuity of thought.
“Of course I did,” he said. “What was all that about anyhow? I printed a letter which I wrote myself; and it was a swell one, too, if I do say so. I used some of his—I ended with that quotation he got off, which turned out to be from Shakspere, 'Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing,' but I managed to get in a lot about you, Cynthia; which, after all, was what we were interested in—your position on the American stage and your beauty, your deep maddening eyes—I thought that was a pretty good phrase—your deep maddening eyes and your little red mouth—not so good, but then I was writing in a hurry.”
“Oh, heavens!” said Cynthia, and she covered her face with her hands. “Oh,” she moaned, “what will he say to me!”
“What will he say?” cried Grimesy. “What can he say? He's dead, isn't he?” She shook her head without removing her hands from her face, and Grimes burst out, “Well, if that isn't the limit! It seems as if you couldn't trust any one nowadays. He gave us his word—it amounted to that. You see what a fool it makes of me, and of you, too, Cynthia. I feel like giving the whole thing up and going back to selling collars. This is worse for you than if it hadn't happened. How our friends will laugh! The kind of girl that a fellow thinks he might commit suicide for and doesn't—that's the way you'll be regarded. And I dare say you let him quit, urged him to give up the idea, never thinking of me at all. The quitter—the coward!”
These terms roused Cynthia.
“Grimesy,” she said seriously and looking up at last, “he could not commit suicide. It was impossible. He is locked up.”
“Locked up!” said Grimesy. His manner made it clear that though he was not prepared to accept any excuse or explanation, at first glance this one sounded good. “Well,” he said, “there might be a story in that. Locked up for attempted suicide, you mean?”
“No,” answered Cynthia, and she told him the whole story. As she spoke his irritation vanished. He drank his hot stimulating coffee in short gulps, his eyes never leaving her face, as if he were afraid of missing an expression, an inflection. As she ended he sighed luxuriously.
“It's got so many angles to it you don't know which one to take hold of,” he said. “The idea of a man on the brink of eternity losing his temper with a truck driver; the idea of a college professor locked up for street fighting, and being the better fighter; the idea of his not being able to fulfill his death compact on account of being in jail. But the love motivation is the best of all: he gives up death to defend the woman he loves—and the truth as well, as it happens,” added Grimesy generously.
He was not a man to throw out truth if it happened to come up to the best fiction, as, his opinion being contrary to that of the author of the Art of Lying, it very seldom did.
“Oh, no,” said Cynthia, and then she added in a voice that would have lured a bird from a branch: “Dear Grimesy, my interest is in saving his life. He still means to kill himself—and will the instant the court turns him loose. I want you to go to the police station, or to the court, or wherever he is, and say that I must see him—bring him here.”
“You bet your life I will,” said Grimes, looking like a bulldog. “These police-court reporters—if they get hold of this first! They're fellows with no delicacy, no taste; they might give it an ugly angle. They lack,” he added regretfully, “sensitiveness, if you know what I mean.”
Before he could be assured that Miss Brooks did know what he meant, that, in fact, her mind had met his, Maud came in to say that a lady was weeping in the hall and would Miss Brooks see her for just a minute. It was, of course, Gertrude, with a morning paper crumpled in her hand.
“Oh, Miss Brooks,” she cried, “this terrible story about Benedict! It can't be true! Do you know anything about it? If he has killed himself I'm afraid it's my fault. We were engaged, you know—at least practically engaged.”
As Cynthia looked at Gertrude her eyes drooped and her throat seemed to grow longer and more swanlike; but she was not a cruel woman, and she said at once—almost at once, “No, Professor Casley has not committed suicide.”
Gertrude sank into a chair as if her knees would no longer support her. She was not actually trembling at all, but she was suffering from what the French might call the madness of the front page—if the French had such things as our front pages; that is to say, her natural emotion about her cousin was rendered histrionic and unreal by her knowledge that he was in the public eye and she was not. It was the same emotion which makes even the most truthful people tell you that they had fully intended to take the vessel that went down or the train that was wrecked, when, as a matter of fact, the idea had hardly occurred to them as a possibility.
“Oh, thank heaven!” she murmured, pressing her hand to her forehead. “No outsider could guess from his cold cynical manner—but I know him so well. I understand him. Of course I knew at once he could never have written that vulgar, illiterate letter that appeared in the papers over his name.”
Grimes, who had been hesitating at the door, wondering whether any better story could be developing at the police court than here, started at these words.
“What's the matter with that letter?” he demanded fiercely. His thought was that here was another amateur criticizing professional work.
Cynthia pressed her hand to her side, for laughing hurt her rib, although her face was like a mask, as she named Grimes to her visitor.
“The trouble with that letter, Mr. Grimes,” said Gertrude, “is that Mr. Casley could not have written it—no gentleman could have written it.”
“Perhaps,” said Grimes, “you don't know just how a gentleman will write when he's going to commit suicide on account of a hopeless passion. Real true human emotion is not always the way it's written about in books.”
Every syllable in the sentence was disagreeable to Gertrude—the intimation that Casley had a passion for another and that the other had rejected it, but worse still the suggestion that she, Gertrude, had not been drenched in real emotion all her life. She felt herself, however, too much of a lady to argue such a point; and in the slightly reproving pause that followed, Cynthia broke in, urging upon Grimes the necessity of haste. It was hard for him to go and leave his letter undefended, but he recognized his duty and went.
Cynthia had rung the bell.
“A cup of coffee for this lady, Maud,” she said.
“I couldn't eat,” said Gertrude. “Well, just a cup of coffee.”
“And a peach,” said Maud, who for some unfathomable reason really cared whether or not Cynthia's visitors had everything they could want.
“Why, yes, perhaps a peach,” replied Gertrude as if she were doing Maud the greatest possible favor. “Would you mind,” she added to Cynthia, “if I telephoned to Professor Casley? You see, we were engaged—practically engaged.”
“No, please do,” said Cynthia, and she pushed the instrument, which stood on a little table at her elbow, toward her visitor.
She was not a small-minded woman; indeed, in a profession noted for the bitterness of its rivalries, she was thought generous; but there was something about Gertrude that stirred in every other woman a poisoned antagonism. Cynthia actually enjoyed the idea of Gertrude's telephoning his rooms when he was safely locked up in the police station.
The telephone had a dial, and Gertrude, with the most charming incompetence, did not know how to manipulate it. Cynthia thrust out a slim arm and took it from her.
“Do let me do it for you,” she said. She dialed quickly with one pointed forefinger. She leaned her ear against the receiver, while her eyes were fixed on Gertrude with a soft beam. “They don't seem to answer,” she said at last.
“But he can't be out!” cried Gertrude. “It isn't ten o'clock yet.”
“Perhaps,” said Cynthia, “he has never come in.”
Gertrude attempted to smile, as if this were the suggestion of a complete outsider, but she found herself obliged to do something that was more bitter than death to her—to ask for information from a rival.
“How can you be so sure that Professor Casley is not dead?” she inquired.
Cynthia now for the first time allowed herself to be openly annoying.
She glanced down and said in a low tone, “I can't answer that without betraying his confidence. But I can assure you he is safe—quite safe—at the moment.”
“Of course you can tell me,” returned Gertrude sharply. “You don't seem to understand. I am terribly worried about him. I have a right to the truth. He and I were engaged—practically engaged.”
“So you have said three times.”
“You mean you don't believe me?”
“You put it,” said Cynthia, “a little coarsely, but you have the idea.”
“Certainly,” said Gertrude, “you cannot think any nice woman would say she was engaged if she had not good reason for saying so.”
“No, indeed,” replied Cynthia; and so strangely constituted is human nature that it never occurred to her that this was precisely what she herself had done only a few hours before.
Her whole thought was taken up with the possibility that what Gertrude said might be true. She pretended to disbelieve it, because at that moment to give pain to Gertrude was delightful, but what the creature said might be true. How did she know that some lover's quarrel had not been the real cause of his resolution to commit suicide—that all his long story of early tragedies and present philosophic indifference were not just a veil he threw over his actions to conceal their real motives from her? If she wanted to save his life, perhaps the best and honestest thing she could do would be to send Gertrude to him. Did she want to save him on those terms? It was just like the lady or the tiger.
There was a ring at the bell and her heart gave a great sickening bound, although she knew Grimes could not possibly have gone and come in this time. It was Weyburn—up at this phenomenal hour. He strode into the room and kissed Cynthia.
“My dear girl,” he said, “I never was so surprised in my life Well, he's a fine fellow, and I like him all the better for getting himself locked up for fighting. I don't see you exactly as a college professor's wife, but I hope he won't make you leave the stage.”
“Wilfred, what do you mean?” asked Cynthia; but a terrible suspicion of what he meant was coming over her.
“Didn't think you were going to keep it all a sweet secret, did you?” said Weyburn, and he gave her an evening paper—for it was now getting to be ten o'clock of a fine autumn morning.
There, in large type somewhat blurred, but of immense size, she read the headline: “Cynthia Admits She Will Wed Professor.” The whole story was there—so colorful there was no need to heighten it, and the intelligent reporter had done nothing to it but give it the flavor of truth. The academic shades—the first play—the first night—the purple passion—the suicide note—the last meeting—the street fight—the reconciliation there in the street under the eye of the law—the arrest—the hospital. Then short sketches of the past careers of the two principal characters; Casley's degrees and published works; Cynthia's rôles and a rumor that the King of Spain had looked favorably upon her at San Sebastian, and that she had once been engaged to a great thread manufacturer from Connecticut—stories which, though untrue, had not seemed undesirable before, now shocked and disgusted her. And all the time Weyburn was running on: “They've been making my life a burden since six o'clock—lucky for you, my dear, that you have a private wire. Some smart young reporter picked it up at the hospital and followed it up to the police station. I sent my secretary up to court, thinking Casley might not know his way about there, but I did him an injustice. He'd put it over the judge somehow or another and had got out an hour before.”
“You mean he's free?” cried Cynthia. “Good heavens, where is he then?”
Weyburn laughed and glanced at Gertrude as if willing to include her in the joke.
“Well,” he said, “I thought there was a possibility that I might find him here. But I suppose a bath and a shave after a night in a police cell——”
Cynthia's face grew slowly as white as paper. He was dead. She had mismanaged everything, and now he was dead. Either he would have come to her at once—in love or in anger—or else he would have kept to his original plan and gone home and quietly killed himself. She had been sitting there, talking and hating Gertrude, while the only man she had ever loved—— Perhaps it was not too late. If she only knew where he lived! Gertrude knew—that telephone number—as she sat there listening to it ringing perhaps he had heard it, too, with his dying ears. Some one must go to him immediately. This other woman who said he loved her——
“What's the matter, Cynthia? Are you ill?” she heard Weyburn's voice remotely asking.
“I'm afraid there has been an accident,” she said. “I want you and Miss—this lady to go at once to Professor Casley's rooms, wherever they are, and see how he is. I'm afraid he may have killed himself.”
“Not a chance,” said Weyburn. “A man just engaged to you, my dear, might commit a good many follies, but suicide would not be one.”
Cynthia felt a growing weakness of body, but her will was strong.
“You must go at once, Wilfred. It may be too late, but——” The agony in her eyes and the drawing of her little white face convinced Weyburn more than the incoherent words which she continued to pour forth. He would have done more than this for Cynthia, though he regarded this as a foolish expedition.
“No harm in going,” he said kindly; but at that moment the bell rang—a firm, continuous buzzing. “I bet that's he now,” he said.
Nobody answered, none of the three spoke again, until Maud answered the door, and, as Weyburn had prophesied, Casley himself walked into the room.
“Ah, there you are!” cried Weyburn, very cordial and sane.
Gertrude rose.
“Benedict,” she murmured in a tone full of splendid but repressed emotion; and she went to him, and taking his hand in both of hers leaned her brow against the point of his shoulder.
Cynthia said nothing; but sitting up on her couch, she fixed her eyes on him—her eyes, which now seemed to occupy about two-thirds of her little white face. As a mother who has thought her child dead has time, on discovering that it is not, for such a trivial emotion as anger, so Cynthia now in her intense relief at seeing him alive had yet time to feel not only jealousy but fear of the humiliation which she must shortly experience before her rival, for even if he were not engaged to Gertrude, as she really did not believe that he was, he certainly was not engaged to her either. She looked at him in a last faint hope that he would look kindly at her, but his face was hard as stone. Nevertheless, his first words astonished her. He said in his cool drawl, “And how is my bride?”
She knew it was an insult; and not accustomed to insult, she felt the blood rush to her cheeks; but no one else seemed to recognize it as such.
Gertrude stepped back from him as if he had struck her, and Weyburn exclaimed heartily, “Oh, look at Cynthia blush! Well, I never saw that before.” He came and grasped the hand that Gertrude had released. “My dear fellow,” he said, “I wish you joy. I've known Cynthia for a long time and I think she's about the grandest person I ever saw. You're luckier than perhaps you know yet.”
Casley did not answer, and Gertrude felt it necessary to make her little speech. Her most ardent wish was that Casley might be remembering how in one stage of the play she had described Cynthia as an uneducated little puppet.
“I am so pleased, Benedict,” she said. “I think you and Miss Brooks so well suited to each other.”
An example followed of why there was never disorder in Casley's classroom. He did not interrupt Gertrude, for her voice died away as it became evident to her that he was going to speak. When he did speak he did not raise his voice or hurry his enunciation. He said:
“There is a taxicab downstairs, Gertrude. Take it and go home. A friend of mine is in it, but he will do you no harm. Don't try to talk to him; he's nervous and it will bother him. Send it straight back here, with him in it.”
Cynthia, who had not been in the least afraid of Casley's violence when she saw the truckman turning in the air, was frightened now as she watched Gertrude's silent retreat before his cold crooked smile—Gertrude, a person not sensitive to psychic impression. Cynthia's heart began to beat with the curious beat of terror, as if it leaped up and then dropped down, each time a little lower in her bosom than before.
Weyburn looked at his watch.
“Love is all very well, my dear fellow——”
“Some people might disagree about that,” said the author.
Weyburn did not notice him.
“We've called a rehearsal at three, and between now and then we must cut out an hour and a half——”
Casley took from his pocket the manuscript, written in that fine legible hand of his, and gave it to the producer.
“It's done,” he said; and as if almost everything had been cleared away, his eyes now returned to the little face of Cynthia, white as the lace pillow it lay upon.
But there was one more issue to be disposed of, and that now walked in as Gertrude went out—Mr. Grimes came back from the station house. He hurried in so unconscious that Cynthia almost called out to him in warning as if he were walking into some material trap.
“Oh, Casley,” he said, “I'm glad to see you hale and hearty after all.”
“That greeting, Mr. Grimes,” answered Casley, “shows me what I already knew—namely, that you will never understand the enormity of printing a ludicrous, obscene letter of your own and signing another man's name to it.”
“Oh, what's the matter with all of you?” exclaimed Grimes with irritation. “That's exactly the letter a man would write under——”
“It's exactly the letter you would write, Mr. Grimes,” said Casley; “that is to say, it is vulgar, unrestrained and entirely lacking in real emotion. I find, however, that though it was news that I should write it, it is not news that I did not. I find I cannot get any retraction into the papers in a form that satisfies me. For news, Mr. Grimes, as you undoubtedly know, is very much like action in a play. It is the deed, not the word, that carries. Fortunately, in this case the deed is not hard to find.”
“I don't get you,” said Grimes.
“It is my profession to make myself clear,” replied Casley, “and you will understand me—thoroughly. At twenty-five minutes past eight this evening, in front of Mr. Weyburn's theater, Mr. Grimes, I shall do to you what I did to the truck driver. Did you happen to see the truck driver in court this morning? Yes? Well, I was not particularly interested in hurting him. That will be news, Mr. Grimes; as an expert, you will agree with me about that. It will make it clear to all newspaper readers that I did not write your letter and that I object to its tone.”
There was a silence. Grimes did not answer, because he was thinking whether if he did not come to the theater that evening it would mean losing his job. Cynthia did not protest, because the doom of others had become a matter of but little interest to her. Weyburn did not protest, because he was absorbed in reading the new last act.
The silence in the room, however, attracted his attention, and raising his head, he said, “Look here, Casley, this is great stuff. This will go over with a bang. This—not to exaggerate unduly—is it.”
Love and death might be floating about him, but to Weyburn the play was the priceless thing, the great climax and interpretation of life. He was alive with electric energy.
“Here, Grimes,” he said, “get this to the typewriter and have her type the parts, and take one yourself to Derham. It's all new for him—and for Cynthia. Not so much for the others, fortunately. If she knew it we could put it on to-night. We can try anyhow. Get along, Grimes.” He himself moved to the door. “At three, Cynthia,” he said.
“No, not at three,” said Casley. “At four, or,” he added, as Weyburn shut the door behind him, “not at all.” He touched the bell. “Tell your servant,” he said, “to take away these trays, and then not to interrupt us again until you ring—or I do.”
It did not occur to Cynthia to do anything different, and Maud took the trays away. When she had left the room Casley walked to the door and locked it. Then he leaned against it, folded his arms, bent one knee slightly, an attitude in which he was accustomed to lecture, and began:
“You, being interested in historical culture, will be interested in a general discussion of chivalry. In an age when any man—especially any armed man—could outrage any woman almost without risk, chivalry was an agreement on the part of men not to use their superior physical strength in relation to women in the way in which it is most natural to them to use it. And as spiritual nature as well as physical nature abhors a vacuum, chivalry in taking away this instinctive satisfaction from a man, gave him a substitute, something else to do for a woman—he was to protect her. But you, Miss Brooks, who have had to do with contracts all your life, know that no contract is binding if it is entirely onesided. A certain standard of conduct was expected of the ladies if they did not want their heads lightly smitten off. Technical faithlessness was sometimes forgiven—witness the naked sword lying harmlessly across the throats of the sleeping lovers—but an elaborate humiliation of a knight in order to amuse the lady and increase her publicity value—that, I think, would have been considered as entirely releasing the knight from any of the obligations of protection.
“You may be an adherent of the modern American school of chivalry which holds that nothing releases men from this obligation, but I am not. I hope this does not bore you,” he added, “but if it does, we have now finished with the general and may come down to the particular, which is always more entertaining.” And then, as if his anger at last broke through his studied calm of manner, he said, “What kind of men have you been accustomed to—that you should imagine you could treat me like this and escape all penalty?”
She looked at him very gently. A great many men had been angry at Cynthia one time and another; but, right or wrong, she had never treated any of them gently before. Always before she had assumed that for any man to be angry at her was an insolent error deserving of punishment. She might have fared better if she had made the same assumption now, for there is a kind of anger to which the soft answer is like kerosene to the kitchen stove.
“You have not heard my explanation yet,” she said.
“No; oh, no,” he replied, beginning to stride about the room, and finding a small table covered with bibelots in his path, he gave it a sidelong kick which sent it crashing to the ground, and he did not even turn his head to see the destruction. “Of all the disagreeable and wearisome things I must do, listening to your explanations is not one of them.”
“I don't know why you should assume that they will be wearisome,” said Cynthia.
Casley fixed his gray eyes upon her like two points of white-hot steel.
“Much that is true and much that is fiction is wearisome, but anything made up of both is intolerable. Your explanation—oh, I can imagine it!—a little fact, a little fiction. No, I won't hear it.”
“I have always told you the truth,” said Cynthia, opening her tired brown eyes.
“You don't know what truth is,” he answered. “You can't even understand how ugly what you have done is—how common and vile. And to look as you do, as if you were a sensitive, lovely spirit—and then to betray me to a vulgar beast like Grimes, to confide in a policeman in order to get into the papers——”
“Stop!” said Cynthia. “No one shall speak to me like that.”
“From now on,” said Casley, “I shall speak to you and behave toward you exactly as I please.” His eye fell upon the telephone standing conveniently at her elbow. He took it up and removed it to the distance that its wire permitted—too far for any unexpected call for aid. Cynthia pretended to ignore the action; but, as a matter of fact, it shook her nerves a little.
“I don't understand what you're talking about,” she said.
“You are about to understand. You have been telling every one that you and I were going to be married. Well, we are!”
A moment before, Cynthia had felt that nothing in the world could have enabled her to lift her head from the lace pillow, but at this news she sat bolt upright.
“Good heavens,” she said, “why should you want to marry a person you despise?”
He laughed.
“Well, not, as you have cleverly guessed, because I have any affection for you,” he answered. “That crowning humiliation I have been spared.”
“You hate me?” she asked, and her voice had a sort of husky thrill in it.
He shook his head.
“I have you too completely in my power to hate you,” he returned.
“Not even that,” she said, and tears began to fill her eyes and eventually to roll down her cheeks.
“Perhaps I do hate you a little,” he returned, regarding her critically, “because I faintly enjoy seeing you cry. But I have not yet answered your question as to why I intend to marry you. First, because it gives me complete power over you—a man can torture his wife a long time before the law steps in. Second, it makes me appear slightly less ridiculous in the eyes of the world. Third, it pleases my sense of justice to bring one of your inventions true; and fourth, you have for me, as I suppose you have for most men, a certain physical allure.”
“You love me,” said Cynthia.
He smiled.
“There you will find you are mistaken,” he returned very quietly.
“All right,” said Cynthia, “if you don't love me, I won't marry you.”
“We shall be married,” he answered, “in about ten minutes.”
“In this state,” said Cynthia, “you cannot be married without a license.” She said it triumphantly; but, as a matter of fact, she regretted her superior knowledge of law.
“There,” said Casley, “you are wrong. Marriage by a magistrate or justice is binding, although no license has been obtained. The unfortunate magistrate lays himself open to certain penalties, but a friend will do that much for a friend. Such a friend is now waiting downstairs—if the taxicab has come, as I believe by this time it must have.”
“But this is absurd,” said Cynthia, and she felt sorry that so strong and brave a man in such a fine fury should make such a silly mistake. “No man, friend or foe, would marry two people if the woman refuses to be married.”
“That is true,” he returned quietly.
“And had you considered the possibility that I might refuse?”
“Yes, indeed, I had thought of that,” said Casley, and he now approached the chaise longue and stood at the foot of it, looking down at her. “And that brings us to an alternative which in many ways I prefer to marriage. If I marry you, I shall be obliged to take up life again for a few weeks at least in order to complete my little lesson; but this way I can be free in an hour. If you are really courageous enough to refuse to marry me, I shall kill you. That also will give me a sense of power over you—that also will make me less ridiculous in the eyes of the world. And I need not point out to you that a man who has faced taking his own life does not attach an undue importance to the lives of others.”
“I don't think you really would kill me,” she murmured.
“A good many women, I imagine, have died with that sentence on their lips.”
They looked straight into each other's eyes for a few seconds, and then Cynthia said, “Well, we needn't argue about that, for I don't intend to refuse.”
“I wouldn't if I were you.”
“I'm not going to refuse,” she went on bravely, “because it's the thing of all others I want to do. I love you.”
She held out her slim arms to him.
“Now that's rather clever of you,” he answered, immovable at the foot of the couch. “An effort to take the sting out of it by pretending that you like it. Rather clever—very clever indeed.”
“I love you so much,” said Cynthia, fixing her drenched eyes on him, “that you couldn't frighten me, for both of your alternatives had their points—even being killed by you; but to be married to you—I hardly dared to think it was possible.”
“Fortunately, my worst enemies have never accused me of being a vain man,” said Casley.
“Well,” replied Cynthia, “if we are to be married, I don't care whether you believe me or not. I shall have plenty of time to make you. Let me see—this is 1924. Well, perhaps about the year 1940, when some one says, 'Who are you speaking to? Your dog?' you will answer, 'No; the creature is my wife, who has been following me about all these years. I begin to think she loves me.'”
And now it seemed as if their rôles were reversed, for as he stood there scowling at her a certain terror seemed to creep into his face, growing and growing, as she went on solemnly:
“Oh, Benedict, every woman would love you, if you did not frighten them all to death with your remote contempt. You're wonderful to look at, and strong and wise and violent and mad and superior and all the things women adore. You know almost everything, darling, except the most obvious thing in the world, which you don't seem ever to have suspected.” And she rose, and, kneeling like a beggar in the streets, she walked the length of her chaise longue on her knees until she could put her arms about his neck. “You're in love with me, Benedict, and you have been since we started rehearsals.”
He undid her hands gently, but with a power like steel. She sank down, grasping one ankle with her hand, and watched him as he again began to stride bout the room like an animal in pain.
“Though you wouldn't speak to me,” she said, “you never looked at any one else. I used to feel your eyes following me—following me. I dreamed about them every night. And when at last you came into my dressing room—I was so disappointed, Benedict. I thought you were going to take me in your arms then and there. I thought perhaps you would have if I had not been all covered with cold cream, and I wiped it off as quick as ever I could. Then I saw you didn't know—didn't know that you loved me, and I saw I must give you time.”
A cry broke from him.
“Oh, God!” he said. “No, I won't travel that road again—not love.”
This struck her as so pathetic that she began to cry again.
“Oh, don't you see,” she said, “that's what you've needed so much—love—that you've been pushing away all the time? But you can't push me away because I won't be pushed. That's why I told the policeman—because I was afraid you would kill yourself before you understood. We are going to be happy, Benedict—really, we are.”
He approached her in a sort of slow wonder. “Love is not happy,” he said. “Love is tragic and terrible.”
“I hear different,' she said, and as she laughed she began to cry more than before and to shake all over, so that he took her in his arms and held her very tightly.
She was so small that anybody entering the room—only no one could enter, for the door was still locked—might have imagined that Casley was comforting some frightened little child—unless they had heard her gasp out between her sobs:
“There, darling, don't be frightened. Nothing shall hurt you this time. This time it will be all right; you see if it isn't.”
And at this protecting declaration his strained face, looking out over her head, relaxed into his own peculiar crooked smile, and he bent his head until his cheek rested rather uneasily on the top of her shaking head. They sat thus for several minutes, and then suddenly he laid her down on the chaise longue as if he were laying a baby in its crib, and walked to the door.
“Don't—don't leave me!” Cynthia cried, but even as she spoke she saw he was only ringing the bell and unlocking the door; and when Maud came he explained to her that there was a gentleman downstairs in the taxi and would she be so kind as to ask him to come up.
Maud, who had been alarmed at this tall tense man and the locked door and the sound of the crashing table, was much relieved by the courtesy of his manner. She had been almost afraid that something sinister had been going on in the sitting room. But something in Casley's voice and manner assured her that he could never be anything but calm and authoritative. So she delivered his message to the gentleman in the taxi and went back to her former occupation, which was pressing Miss Brooks' costume for the third act.
But she did not get very far before the bell rang again, and she was summoned to dress Miss Brooks immediately, as she was going out.
“I hope,” said Maud, “that you are not going very far, for you look tired.”
“I'm going as far as the City Hall,” said Cynthia.