Marshall McKann followed his wife and her friend Mrs. Post down the
aisle and up the steps to the stage of the Carnegie Music Hall with an
ill-concealed feeling of grievance. Heaven knew he never went to
concerts, and to be mounted upon the stage in this fashion, as if he were
a "highbrow" from Sewickley, or some unfortunate with a musical wife, was
ludicrous. A man went to concerts when he was courting, while he was a
junior partner. When he became a person of substance he stopped that sort
of nonsense. His wife, too, was a sensible person, the daughter of an old
Pittsburgh family as solid and well-rooted as the McKanns. She would
never have bothered him about this concert had not the meddlesome Mrs.
Mrs. McKann, and because she lived in Cincinnati she was always keeping
up with the world and talking about things in which no one else was
interested, music among them. She was an aggressive lady, with weighty
opinions, and a deep voice like a jovial bassoon. She had arrived only
last night, and at dinner she brought it out that she could on no account
miss Kitty Ayrshire's recital; it was, she said, the sort of thing no one
could afford to miss.
When McKann went into town in the morning he found that every seat in the
music-hall was sold. He telephoned his wife to that effect, and, thinking
he had settled the matter, made his reservation on the 11.25 train for
New York. He was unable to get a drawing-room because this same Kitty
Ayrshire had taken the last one. He had not intended going to New York
until the following week, but he preferred to be absent during Mrs.
Post's incumbency.
In the middle of the morning, when he was deep in his correspondence,
his wife called him up to say the enterprising Mrs. Post had telephoned
some musical friends in Sewickley and had found that two hundred
folding-chairs were to be placed on the stage of the concert-hall, behind
the piano, and that they would be on sale at noon. Would he please get
seats in the front row? McKann asked if they would not excuse him, since
he was going over to New York on the late train, would be tired, and
would not have time to dress, etc. No, not at all. It would be foolish
for two women to trail up to the stage unattended. Mrs. Post's husband
always accompanied her to concerts, and she expected that much attention
from her host. He needn't dress, and he could take a taxi from the
concert-hall to the East Liberty station.
The outcome of it all was that, though his bag was at the station, here
was McKann, in the worst possible humour, facing the large audience to
which he was well known, and sitting among a lot of music students and
excitable old maids. Only the desperately zealous or the morbidly curious
would endure two hours in those wooden chairs, and he sat in the front
row of this hectic body, somehow made a party to a transaction for which
he had the utmost contempt.
When McKann had been in Paris, Kitty Ayrshire was singing at the Comique,
and he wouldn't go to hear her--even there, where one found so little
that was better to do. She was too much talked about, too much
advertised; always being thrust in an American's face as if she were
something to be proud of. Perfumes and petticoats and cutlets were named
for her. Some one had pointed Kitty out to him one afternoon when she was
driving in the Bois with a French composer--old enough, he judged, to be
her father--who was said to be infatuated, carried away by her. McKann
was told that this was one of the historic passions of old age. He had
looked at her on that occasion, but she was so befrilled and befeathered
that he caught nothing but a graceful outline and a small, dark head
above a white ostrich boa. He had noted with disgust, however, the
stooped shoulders and white imperial of the silk-hatted man beside her,
and the senescent line of his back. McKann described to his wife this
unpleasing picture only last night, while he was undressing, when he was
making every possible effort to avert this concert party. But Bessie
only looked superior and said she wished to hear Kitty Ayrshire sing, and
that her "private life" was something in which she had no interest.
Well, here he was; hot and uncomfortable, in a chair much too small for
him, with a row of blinding footlights glaring in his eyes. Suddenly the
door at his right elbow opened. Their seats were at one end of the front
row; he had thought they would be less conspicuous there than in the
centre, and he had not foreseen that the singer would walk over him every
time she came upon the stage. Her velvet train brushed against his
trousers as she passed him. The applause which greeted her was neither
overwhelming nor prolonged. Her conservative audience did not know
exactly how to accept her toilette. They were accustomed to dignified
concert gowns, like those which Pittsburgh matrons (in those days!) wore
at their daughters' coming-out teas.
Kitty's gown that evening was really quite outrageous--the repartée of a
conscienceless Parisian designer who took her hint that she wished
something that would be entirely novel in the States. Today, after we
have all of us, even in the uttermost provinces, been educated by Baskt
and the various Ballets Russes, we would accept such a gown without
distrust; but then it was a little disconcerting, even to the
well-disposed. It was constructed of a yard or two of green velvet--a
reviling, shrieking green which would have made a fright of any woman
who had not inextinguishable beauty--and it was made without armholes, a
device to which we were then so unaccustomed that it was nothing less
than alarming. The velvet skirt split back from a transparent gold-lace
petticoat, gold stockings, gold slippers. The narrow train was,
apparently, looped to both ankles, and it kept curling about her feet
like a serpent's tail, turning up its gold lining as if it were squirming
over on its back. It was not, we felt, a costume in which to sing Mozart
and Handel and Beethoven.
Kitty sensed the chill in the air, and it amused her. She liked to be
thought a brilliant artist by other artists, but by the world at large
she liked to be thought a daring creature. She had every reason to
believe, from experience and from example, that to shock the great crowd
was the surest way to get its money and to make her name a household
word. Nobody ever became a household word of being an artist, surely; and
you were not a thoroughly paying proposition until your name meant
something on the sidewalk and in the barber-shop. Kitty studied her
audience with an appraising eye. She liked the stimulus of this
disapprobation. As she faced this hard-shelled public she felt keen and
interested; she knew that she would give such a recital as cannot often
be heard for money. She nodded gaily to the young man at the piano, fell
into an attitude of seriousness, and began the group of Beethoven and
Mozart songs.
Though McKann would not have admitted it, there were really a great many
people in the concert-hall who knew what the prodigal daughter of their
country was singing, and how well she was doing it. They thawed gradually
under the beauty of her voice and the subtlety of her interpretation.
She had sung seldom in concert then, and they had supposed her very
dependent upon the accessories of the opera. Clean singing, finished
artistry, were not what they expected from her. They began to feel, even,
the wayward charm of her personality.
McKann, who stared coldly up at the balconies during her first song,
during the second glanced cautiously at the green apparition before him.
He was vexed with her for having retained a débutante figure. He
comfortably classed all singers--especially operatic singers--as "fat
Dutchwomen" or "shifty Sadies," and Kitty would not fit into his clever
generalization. She displayed, under his nose, the only kind of figure
he considered worth looking at--that of a very young girl, supple and
sinuous and quicksilverish; thin, eager shoulders, polished white
arms that were nowhere too fat and nowhere too thin. McKann found it
agreeable to look at Kitty, but when he saw that the authoritative
Mrs. Post, red as a turkey-cock with opinions she was bursting to impart,
was studying and appraising the singer through her lorgnette, he gazed
indifferently out into the house again. He felt for his watch, but his
wife touched him warningly with her elbow--which, he noticed, was not at
all like Kitty's.
When Miss Ayrshire finished her first group of songs, her audience
expressed its approval positively, but guardedly. She smiled bewitchingly
upon the people in front, glanced up at the balconies, and then turned to
the company huddled on the stage behind her. After her gay and careless
bows, she retreated toward the stage door. As she passed McKann, she
again brushed lightly against him, and this time she paused long enough
to glance down at him and murmur, "Pardon!"
In the moment her bright, curious eyes rested upon him, McKann seemed to
see himself as if she were holding a mirror up before him. He beheld
himself a heavy, solid figure, unsuitably clad for the time and place,
with a florid, square face, well-visored with good living and sane
opinions--an inexpressive countenance. Not a rock face, exactly, but a
kind of pressed-brick-and-cement face, a "business" face upon which years
and feelings had made no mark--in which cocktails might eventually blast
out a few hollows. He had never seen himself so distinctly in his
shaving-glass as he did in that instant when Kitty Ayrshire's liquid eye
held him, when her bright, inquiring glance roamed over his person. After
her prehensile train curled over his boot and she was gone, his wife
turned to him and said in the tone of approbation one uses when an infant
manifests its groping intelligence, "Very gracious of her, I'm sure!"
Mrs. Post nodded oracularly. McKann grunted.
Kitty began her second number, a group of romantic German songs which
were altogether more her affair than her first number. When she turned
once to acknowledge the applause behind her, she caught McKann in the act
of yawning behind his hand--he of course wore no gloves--and he thought
she frowned a little. This did not embarrass him; it somehow made him
feel important. When she retired after the second part of the program,
she again looked him over curiously as she passed, and she took marked
precaution that her dress did not touch him. Mrs. Post and his wife again
commented upon her consideration.
The final number was made up of modern French songs which Kitty sang
enchantingly, and at last her frigid public was thoroughly aroused.
While she was coming back again and again to smile and curtsy, McKann
whispered to his wife that if there were to be encores he had better make
a dash for his train.
"Not at all," put in Mrs. Post. "Kitty is going on the same train. She
sings in _Faust_ at the opera tomorrow night, so she'll take no chances."
McKann once more told himself how sorry he felt for Post. At last Miss
Ayrshire returned, escorted by her accompanist, and gave the people what
she of course knew they wanted: the most popular aria from the French
opera of which the title-rôle had become synonymous with her name--an
opera written for her and to her and round about her, by the veteran
French composer who adored her,--the last and not the palest flash of his
creative fire. This brought her audience all the way. They clamoured for
more of it, but she was not to be coerced. She had been unyielding
through storms to which this was a summer breeze. She came on once more,
shrugged her shoulders, blew them a kiss, and was gone. Her last smile
was for that uncomfortable part of her audience seated behind her, and
she looked with recognition at McKann and his ladies as she nodded good
night to the wooden chairs.
McKann hurried his charges into the foyer by the nearest exit and put
them into his motor. Then he went over to the Schenley to have a glass
of beer and a rarebit before train-time. He had not, he admitted to
himself, been so much bored as he pretended. The minx herself was well
enough, but it was absurd in his fellow-townsmen to look owlish and
uplifted about her. He had no rooted dislike for pretty women; he even
didn't deny that gay girls had their place in the world, but they ought
to be kept in their place. He was born a Presbyterian, just as he was
born a McKann. He sat in his pew in the First Church every Sunday, and he
never missed a presbytery meeting when he was in town. His religion was
not very spiritual, certainly, but it was substantial and concrete, made
up of good, hard convictions and opinions. It had something to do with
citizenship, with whom one ought to marry, with the coal business (in
which his own name was powerful), with the Republican party, and with all
majorities and established precedents. He was hostile to fads, to
enthusiasms, to individualism, to all changes except in mining machinery
and in methods of transportation.
His equanimity restored by his lunch at the Schenley, McKann lit a big
cigar, got into his taxi, and bowled off through the sleet.
There was not a sound to be heard or a light to be seen. The ice
glittered on the pavement and on the naked trees. No restless feet were
abroad. At eleven o'clock the rows of small, comfortable houses looked as
empty of the troublesome bubble of life as the Allegheny cemetery itself.
Suddenly the cab stopped, and McKann thrust his head out of the window. A
woman was standing in the middle of the street addressing his driver in
a tone of excitement. Over against the curb a lone electric stood
despondent in the storm. The young woman, her cloak blowing about her,
turned from the driver to McKann himself, speaking rapidly and somewhat
incoherently.
"Could you not be so kind as to help us? It is Mees Ayrshire, the singer.
The juice is gone out and we cannot move. We must get to the station.
Mademoiselle cannot miss the train; she sings tomorrow night in New York.
It is very important. Could you not take us to the station at East
Liberty?"
McKann opened the door. "That's all right, but you'll have to hurry. It's
eleven-ten now. You've only got fifteen minutes to make the train. Tell
her to come along."
The maid drew back and looked up at him in amazement. "But, the
hand-luggage to carry, and Mademoiselle to walk! The street is like
glass!"
McKann threw away his cigar and followed her. He stood silent by the door
of the derelict, while the maid explained that she had found help. The
driver had gone off somewhere to telephone for a car. Miss Ayrshire
seemed not at all apprehensive; she had not doubted that a rescuer would
be forthcoming. She moved deliberately; out of a whirl of skirts she
thrust one fur-topped shoe--McKann saw the flash of the gold stocking
above it--and alighted.
"So kind of you! So fortunate for us!" she murmured. One hand she placed
upon his sleeve, and in the other she carried an armful of roses that had
been sent up to the concert stage. The petals showered upon the sooty,
sleety pavement as she picked her way along. They would be lying there
tomorrow morning, and the children in those houses would wonder if there
had been a funeral. The maid followed with two leather bags. As soon as
he had lifted Kitty into his cab she exclaimed:
"My jewel-case! I have forgotten it. It is on the back seat, please. I am
so careless!"
He dashed back, ran his hand along the cushions, and discovered a small
leather bag. When he returned he found the maid and the luggage bestowed
on the front seat, and a place left for him on the back seat beside Kitty
and her flowers.
"Shall we be taking you far out of your way?" she asked sweetly. "I
haven't an idea where the station is. I'm not even sure about the name.
Céline thinks it is East Liberty, but I think it is West Liberty. An odd
name, anyway. It is a Bohemian quarter, perhaps? A district where the law
relaxes a trifle?"
McKann replied grimly that he didn't think the name referred to that kind
of liberty.
"So much the better," sighed Kitty. "I am a Californian; that's the only
part of America I know very well, and out there, when we called a place
Liberty Hill or Liberty Hollow--well, we meant it. You will excuse me if
I'm uncommunicative, won't you? I must not talk in this raw air. My
throat is sensitive after a long program." She lay back in her corner and
closed her eyes.
When the cab rolled down the incline at East Liberty station, the New
York express was whistling in. A porter opened the door. McKann sprang
out, gave him a claim check and his Pullman ticket, and told him to get
his bag at the check-stand and rush it on that train.
Miss Ayrshire, having gathered up her flowers, put out her hand to take
his arm. "Why, it's you!" she exclaimed, as she saw his face in the
light. "What a coincidence!" She made no further move to alight, but sat
smiling as if she had just seated herself in a drawing-room and were
ready for talk and a cup of tea.
McKann caught her arm. "You must hurry, Miss Ayrshire, if you mean to
catch that train. It stops here only a moment. Can you run?"
"Can I run!" she laughed. "Try me!"
As they raced through the tunnel and up the inside stairway, McKann
admitted that he had never before made a dash with feet so quick and sure
stepping out beside him. The white-furred boots chased each other like
lambs at play, the gold stockings flashed like the spokes of a bicycle
wheel in the sun. They reached the door of Miss Ayrshire's state-room
just as the train began to pull out. McKann was ashamed of the way he was
panting, for Kitty's breathing was as soft and regular as when she was
reclining on the back seat of his taxi. It had somehow run in his head
that all these stage women were a poor lot physically--unsound, overfed
creatures, like canaries that are kept in a cage and stuffed with
song-restorer. He retreated to escape her thanks. "Good night! Pleasant
journey! Pleasant dreams!" With a friendly nod in Kitty's direction he
closed the door behind him.
He was somewhat surprised to find his own bag, his Pullman ticket in the
strap, on the seat just outside Kitty's door. But there was nothing
strange about it. He had got the last section left on the train, No. 13,
next the drawing-room. Every other berth in the car was made up. He was
just starting to look for the porter when the door of the state-room
opened and Kitty Ayrshire came out. She seated herself carelessly in the
front seat beside his bag.
"Please talk to me a little," she said coaxingly. "I'm always wakeful
after I sing, and I have to hunt some one to talk to. Céline and I get so
tired of each other. We can speak very low, and we shall not disturb any
one." She crossed her feet and rested her elbow on his Gladstone. Though
she still wore her gold slippers and stockings, she did not, he thanked
Heaven, have on her concert gown, but a very demure black velvet with
some sort of pearl trimming about the neck. "Wasn't it funny," she
proceeded, "that it happened to be you who picked me up? I wanted a
word with you, anyway."
McKann smiled in a way that meant he wasn't being taken in. "Did you? We
are not very old acquaintances."
"No, perhaps not. But you disapproved tonight, and I thought I was
singing very well. You are very critical in such matters?"
He had been standing, but now he sat down. "My dear young lady, I am not
critical at all. I know nothing about 'such matters.'"
"And care less?" she said for him, "Well, then we know where we are, in
so far as that is concerned. What did displease you? My gown, perhaps? It
may seem a little _outré_ here, but it's the sort of thing all the
imaginative designers abroad are doing. You like the English sort of
concert gown better?"
"About gowns," said McKann, "I know even less than about music. If I
looked uncomfortable, it was probably because I was uncomfortable. The
seats were bad and the lights were annoying."
Kitty looked up with solicitude. "I was sorry they sold those seats. I
don't like to make people uncomfortable in any way. Did the lights give
you a headache? They are very trying. They burn one's eyes out in the
end, I believe." She paused and waved the porter away with a smile as
he came toward them. Half-clad Pittsburghers were tramping up and down
the aisle, casting sidelong glances at McKann and his companion. "How
much better they look with all their clothes on," she murmured. Then,
turning directly to McKann again: "I saw you were not well seated, but I
felt something quite hostile and personal. You were displeased with me.
Doubtless many people are, but I seldom get an opportunity to question
them. It would be nice if you took the trouble to tell me why you were
displeased."
She spoke frankly, pleasantly, without a shadow of challenge or hauteur.
She did not seem to be angling for compliments. McKann settled himself
in his seat. He thought he would try her out. She had come for it, and he
would let her have it. He found, however, that it was harder to formulate
the grounds of his disapproval than he would have supposed. Now that he
sat face to face with her, now that she was leaning against his bag, he
had no wish to hurt her.
"I'm a hard-headed business man," he said evasively, "and I don't much
believe in any of you fluffy-ruffles people. I have a sort of natural
distrust of them all, the men more than the women."
She looked thoughtful. "Artists, you mean?" drawing her words slowly.
"What is your business?"
"Coal."
"I don't feel any natural distrust of business men, and I know ever so
many. I don't know any coal-men, but I think I could become very much
interested in coal. Am I larger-minded than you?"
McKann laughed. "I don't think you know when you are interested or when
you are not. I don't believe you know what it feels like to be really
interested. There is so much fake about your profession. It's an
affectation on both sides. I know a great many of the people who went to
hear you tonight, and I know that most of them neither know nor care
anything about music. They imagine they do, because it's supposed to be
the proper thing."
Kitty sat upright and looked interested. She was certainly a lovely
creature--the only one of her tribe he had ever seen that he would cross
the street to see again. Those were remarkable eyes she had--curious,
penetrating, restless, somewhat impudent, but not at all dulled by
self-conceit.
"But isn't that so in everything?" she cried. "How many of your clerks
are honest because of a fine, individual sense of honour? They are
honest because it is the accepted rule of good conduct in business. Do
you know"--she looked at him squarely--"I thought you would have
something quite definite to say to me; but this is funny-paper stuff,
the sort of objection I'd expect from your office-boy."
"Then you don't think it silly for a lot of people to get together and
pretend to enjoy something they know nothing about?"
"Of course I think it silly, but that's the way God made audiences.
Don't people go to church in exactly the same way? If there were a
spiritual-pressure test-machine at the door, I suspect not many of you
would get to your pews."
"How do you know I go to church?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, people with these old, ready-made
opinions usually go to church. But you can't evade me like that." She
tapped the edge of his seat with the toe of her gold slipper. "You sat
there all evening, glaring at me as if you could eat me alive. Now I give
you a chance to state your objections, and you merely criticize my
audience. What is it? Is it merely that you happen to dislike my
personality? In that case, of course, I won't press you."
"No," McKann frowned, "I perhaps dislike your professional personality.
As I told you, I have a natural distrust of your variety."
"Natural, I wonder?" Kitty murmured. "I don't see why you should
naturally dislike singers any more than I naturally dislike coal-men. I
don't classify people by their occupations. Doubtless I should find some
coal-men repulsive, and you may find some singers so. But I have reason
to believe that, at least, I'm one of the less repellent."
"I don't doubt it," McKann laughed, "and you're a shrewd woman to boot.
But you are, all of you, according to my standards, light people. You're
brilliant, some of you, but you've no depth."
Kitty seemed to assent, with a dive of her girlish head. "Well, it's a
merit in some things to be heavy, and in others to be light. Some things
are meant to go deep, and others to go high. Do you want all the women in
the world to be profound?"
"You are all," he went on steadily, watching her with indulgence, "fed on
hectic emotions. You are pampered. You don't help to carry the burdens of
the world. You are self-indulgent and appetent."
"Yes, I am," she assented, with a candour which he did not expect. "Not
all artists are, but I am. Why not? If I could once get a convincing
statement as to why I should not be self-indulgent, I might change my
ways. As for the burdens of the world--" Kitty rested her chin on her
clasped hands and looked thoughtful. "One should give pleasure to others.
My dear sir, granting that the great majority of people can't enjoy
anything very keenly, you'll admit that I give pleasure to many more
people than you do. One should help others who are less fortunate; at
present I am supporting just eight people, besides those I hire. There
was never another family in California that had so many cripples and
hard-luckers as that into which I had the honour to be born. The only
ones who could take care of themselves were ruined by the San Francisco
earthquake some time ago. One should make personal sacrifices. I do; I
give money and time and effort to talented students. Oh, I give something
much more than that! something that you probably have never given to any
one. I give, to the really gifted ones, my _wish,_ my desire, my light,
if I have any; and that, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, is like giving one's blood!
It's the kind of thing you prudent people never give. That is what was
in the box of precious ointment." Kitty threw off her fervour with a
slight gesture, as if it were a scarf, and leaned back, tucking her
slipper up on the edge of his seat. "If you saw the houses I keep up,"
she sighed, "and the people I employ, and the motor-cars I run--And,
after all, I've only this to do it with." She indicated her slender
person, which Marshall could almost have broken in two with his bare
hands.
She was, he thought, very much like any other charming woman, except that
she was more so. Her familiarity was natural and simple. She was at ease
because she was not afraid of him or of herself, or of certain half-clad
acquaintances of his who had been wandering up and down the car oftener
than was necessary. Well, he was not afraid, either.
Kitty put her arms over her head and sighed again, feeling the smooth
part in her black hair. Her head was small--capable of great agitation,
like a bird's; or of great resignation, like a nun's. "I can't see why I
shouldn't be self-indulgent, when I indulge others. I can't understand
your equivocal scheme of ethics. Now I can understand Count Tolstoy's,
perfectly. I had a long talk with him once, about his book 'What is Art?'
As nearly as I could get it, he believes that we are a race who can exist
only by gratifying appetites; the appetites are evil, and the existence
they carry on is evil. We were always sad, he says, without knowing why;
even in the Stone Age. In some miraculous way a divine ideal was
disclosed to us, directly at variance with our appetites. It gave us a
new craving, which we could only satisfy by starving all the other
hungers in us. Happiness lies in ceasing to be and to cause being,
because the thing revealed to us is dearer than any existence our
appetites can ever get for us. I can understand that. It's something one
often feels in art. It is even the subject of the greatest of all operas,
which, because I can never hope to sing it, I love more than all the
others." Kitty pulled herself up. "Perhaps you agree with Tolstoy?" she
added languidly.
"No; I think he's a crank," said McKann, cheerfully.
"What do you mean by a crank?"
"I mean an extremist."
Kitty laughed. "Weighty word! You'll always have a world full of people
who keep to the golden mean. Why bother yourself about me and Tolstoy?"
"I don't, except when you bother me."
"Poor man! It's true this isn't your fault. Still, you did provoke it by
glaring at me. Why did you go to the concert?"
"I was dragged."
"I might have known!" she chuckled, and shook her head. "No, you don't
give me any good reasons. Your morality seems to me the compromise of
cowardice, apologetic and sneaking. When righteousness becomes alive and
burning, you hate it as much as you do beauty. You want a little of each
in your life, perhaps--adulterated, sterilized, with the sting taken out.
It's true enough they are both fearsome things when they get loose in the
world; they don't, often."
McKann hated tall talk. "My views on women," he said slowly, "are
simple."
"Doubtless," Kitty responded dryly, "but are they consistent? Do you
apply them to your stenographers as well as to me? I take it for
granted you have unmarried stenographers. Their position, economically,
is the same as mine."
McKann studied the toe of her shoe. "With a woman, everything comes back
to one thing." His manner was judicial.
She laughed indulgently. "So we are getting down to brass tacks, eh? I
have beaten you in argument, and now you are leading trumps."
She put her hands behind her head and her lips parted in a half-yawn.
"Does everything come back to one thing? I wish I knew! It's more than
likely that, under the same conditions, I should have been very like your
stenographers--if they are good ones. Whatever I was, I would have been a
good one. I think people are very much alike. You are more different than
any one I have met for some time, but I know that there are a great many
more at home like you. And even you--I believe there is a real creature
down under these custom-made prejudices that save you the trouble of
thinking. If you and I were shipwrecked on a desert island, I have no
doubt that we would come to a simple and natural understanding. I'm
neither a coward nor a shirk. You would find, if you had to undertake any
enterprise of danger or difficulty with a woman, that there are several
qualifications quite as important as the one to which you doubtless
refer."
McKann felt nervously for his watch-chain. "Of course," he brought out,
"I am not laying down any generalizations--" His brows wrinkled.
"Oh, aren't you?" murmured Kitty. "Then I totally misunderstood. But
remember"--holding up a finger--"it is you, not I, who are afraid to
pursue this subject further. Now, I'll tell you something." She leaned
forward and clasped her slim, white hands about her velvet knee. "I am
as much a victim of these ineradicable prejudices as you. Your
stenographer seems to you a better sort. Well, she does to me. Just
because her life is, presumably, greyer than mine, she seems better. My
mind tells me that dulness, and a mediocre order of ability, and poverty,
are not in themselves admirable things. Yet in my heart I always feel
that the sales-women in shops and the working girls in factories are more
meritorious than I. Many of them, with my opportunities, would be more
selfish than I am. Some of them, with their own opportunities, are more
selfish. Yet I make this sentimental genuflection before the nun and the
charwoman. Tell me, haven't you any weakness? Isn't there any foolish
natural thing that unbends you a trifle and makes you feel gay?"
"I like to go fishing."
"To see how many fish you can catch?"
"No, I like the woods and the weather. I like to play a fish and work
hard for him. I like the pussy-willows and the cold; and the sky,
whether it's blue or grey--night coming on, every thing about it."
He spoke devoutly, and Kitty watched him through half-closed eyes. "And
you like to feel that there are light-minded girls like me, who only care
about the inside of shops and theatres and hotels, eh? You amuse me, you
and your fish! But I mustn't keep you any longer. Haven't I given you
every opportunity to state your case against me? I thought you would have
more to say for yourself. Do you know, I believe it's not a case you have
at all, but a grudge. I believe you are envious; that you'd like to be a
tenor, and a perfect lady-killer!" She rose, smiling, and paused with her
hand on the door of her stateroom. "Anyhow, thank you for a pleasant
evening. And, by the way, dream of me tonight, and not of either of those
ladies who sat beside you. It does not matter much whom we live with in
this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of." She noticed
his bricky flush. "You are very naive, after all, but, oh, so cautious!
You are naturally afraid of everything new, just as I naturally want to
try everything: new people, new religions--new miseries, even. If only
there were more new things--If only you were really new! I might learn
something. I'm like the Queen of Sheba--I'm not above learning. But you,
my friend, would be afraid to try a new shaving soap. It isn't
gravitation that holds the world in place; it's the lazy, obese cowardice
of the people on it. All the same"--taking his hand and smiling
encouragingly--"I'm going to haunt you a little. _Adios!_"
When Kitty entered her state-room, Céline, in her dressing-gown, was
nodding by the window.
"Mademoiselle found the fat gentleman interesting?" she asked. "It is
nearly one."
"Negatively interesting. His kind always say the same thing. If I could
find one really intelligent man who held his views, I should adopt them."
"Monsieur did not look like an original," murmured Céline, as she began
to take down her lady's hair.
* * * * *
McKann slept heavily, as usual, and the porter had to shake him in
the morning. He sat up in his berth, and, after composing his hair with
his fingers, began to hunt about for his clothes. As he put up the
window-blind some bright object in the little hammock over his bed caught
the sunlight and glittered. He stared and picked up a delicately turned
gold slipper.
"Minx! hussy!" he ejaculated. "All that tall talk--! Probably got it from
some man who hangs about; learned it off like a parrot. Did she poke this
in here herself last night, or did she send that sneak-faced Frenchwoman?
I like her nerve!" He wondered whether he might have been breathing
audibly when the intruder thrust her head between his curtains. He was
conscious that he did not look a Prince Charming in his sleep. He dressed
as fast as he could, and, when he was ready to go to the wash-room,
glared at the slipper. If the porter should start to make up his berth in
his absence--He caught the slipper, wrapped it in his pajama jacket, and
thrust it into his bag. He escaped from the train without seeing his
tormentor again.
Later McKann threw the slipper into the waste-basket in his room at the
Knickerbocker, but the chambermaid, seeing that it was new and mateless,
thought there must be a mistake, and placed it in his clothes-closet. He
found it there when he returned from the theatre that evening.
Considerably mellowed by food and drink and cheerful company, he took the
slipper in his hand and decided to keep it as a reminder that absurd
things could happen to people of the most clocklike deportment. When he
got back to Pittsburgh, he stuck it in a lock-box in his vault, safe from
prying clerks.
* * * * *
McKann has been ill for five years now, poor fellow! He still goes to the
office, because it is the only place that interests him, but his partners
do most of the work, and his clerks find him sadly changed--"morbid,"
they call his state of mind. He has had the pine-trees in his yard cut
down because they remind him of cemeteries. On Sundays or holidays, when
the office is empty, and he takes his will or his insurance-policies
out of his lock-box, he often puts the tarnished gold slipper on his
desk and looks at it. Somehow it suggests life to his tired mind, as his
pine-trees suggested death--life and youth. When he drops over some day,
his executors will be puzzled by the slipper.
As for Kitty Ayrshire, she has played so many jokes, practical and
impractical, since then, that she has long ago forgotten the night when
she threw away a slipper to be a thorn in the side of a just man.
