Athalie Part 41

"Plenty, too, I'll bet! Oh, it's in your pretty face, in your eyes!--it's in you, all about you. I'm not much in that line but I can feel it in the air. Why I felt it as soon as I came into your room, but I was that stupid--thinking of Mrs. Del Garmo--and never a.s.sociating it with you!... Do you do any trance work?"

"No.... I have never cultivated--anything of that sort."

"I know. The really gifted don't cultivate the power as a rule. Only one now and then, and here and there. The others are pure frauds--almost every one of them. But--" she looked searchingly at the girl,--"you're no fraud! Why you're full of it!--full--saturated--alive with--with vitality--psychical and physical!--You're a glorious thing--half spiritual, half human--a superb combination of vitality, sacred and profane!"--She checked herself and turned on the girl almost savagely: "Who was the fool of a man you were looking for in the crystal?... Very well; don't tell then. I didn't suppose you would. Only--G.o.d help him for the fool he is--and forgive him for what he has done to you!... And may I never enter this room again and find you with the tears freshly scrubbed out of the most honest eyes G.o.d ever gave a woman!... Good night, Miss Greensleeve!"

"Good night," said Athalie.

After she had closed the door and locked it she turned back into the empty room, moving uncertainly as though scarcely knowing what she was about. And then, suddenly, the terror of utter desolation seized her, and for the first time she realised what Clive had been to her, _and what he had not been_--understood for the first time in her life the complex miracle called love, its synthesis, its every element, every molecule, every atom, and flung herself across the bed, half strangled, sobbing out her pa.s.sion and her grief.

Dawn found her lying there; but the ravage of that night had stripped her of much that she had been, and never again would be. And what had been taken from her was slowly being replaced by what she had never yet been. Night stripped her; the red dawn clothed her.

She sat up, dry-eyed, unbound her hair, flung from her the crumpled negligee. Presently the first golden-pink ray of the rising sun fell across her snowy body, and she flung out her lovely arms to it as though to draw it into her empty heart.

Hafiz, blinking his jewelled eyes, watched her lazily from his pillow.

CHAPTER XVI

As she came, pensively, from her morning bath into the sunny front room Athalie noticed the corner of an envelope projecting from beneath her door.

For one heavenly moment the old delight surprised her at sight of Clive's handwriting,--for one moment only, before an overwhelming reaction scoured her heart of tenderness and joy; and the terrible resurgence of pain and grief wrung a low cry from her: "Why couldn't he let me alone!" And she crumpled the letter fiercely in her clenched hand.

Minute after minute she stood there, her white hand tightening as though to strangle the speech written there on those crushed sheets--perhaps to throttle and silence the faint, persistent cry of her own heart pleading a hearing for the man who had written to her at last.

And after a while her nerveless hand relaxed; she looked down at the crushed thing in her palm for a long time before she smoothed it out and finally opened it.

He wrote:

"It is too long a story to go into in detail. I couldn't, anyway. My mother had desired it for a long time. I have nothing to say about it except this: I would not for all the world have had you receive the first information from the columns of a newspaper. Of that part of it I have a right to speak, because the announcement was made without my knowledge or consent. And I'll say more: it was made even before I myself was aware that an engagement existed.

"Don't mistake what I write you, Athalie. I am not trying to escape any responsibility excepting that of premature publicity. Whatever else has happened I am fully responsible for.

"And so--what can I have to say to you, Athalie? Silence were decenter perhaps--G.o.d knows!--and He knows, too, that in me he fas.h.i.+oned but an irresolute character, void of the initial courage of conviction, without deep and st.u.r.dy belief, unsteady to a true course set, and lacking in rugged purpose.

"It is not stupidity: in the bottom of my own heart I _know_!

Custom, habit, acquired and inculcated acquiescence in una.n.a.lysed beliefs--these require more than irresolution and a negative disposition to fight them and overcome them.

"Athalie, the news you must have read in the newspapers should first have come from me. Among many, many debts I must ever owe you, that one at least was due you. And I defaulted; but not through any fault of mine.

"I could not rest until you knew this. Whatever you may think about me now--however lightly you weigh me--remember this--if you ever remember me at all in the years to come: I was aware of my paramount debt: I should have paid it had the opportunity not been taken out of my own hands. And that debt paramount was to inform you first of anybody concerning what you read in a public newspaper.

"Now there remains nothing more for me to say that you would care to hear. You would no longer care to know,--would probably not believe me if I should tell you what you have been to me--and still are--and still are, Athalie!

Athalie!--"

The letter ended there with her name. She kept it all day; but that night she destroyed it. And it was a week before she wrote him:

"--Thank you for your letter, Clive. I hope all is well with you and yours. I wish you happiness; I desire for you all things good. And also--for _her_. Surely I may say this much without offence--when I am saying good-bye forever.

"ATHALIE."

In due time, to this came his answer, tragic in its brevity, terrible in its attempt to say nothing--so that its stiff cerement of formality seemed to crack with every written word and its plat.i.tudes split open under the fierce straining of the living and unwritten words beneath them.

And to this she made no answer. And destroyed it after the sun had set.

Her money was now about gone. Indian summer brought no prospect of employment. Never had she believed that so many stenographers existed in the world; never had she supposed that vacant positions could be so pitifully few.

During October her means had not afforded her proper nourishment.

The vigour of young womanhood demands more than milk and crackers and a rare slab from some delicatessen shop.

As for Hafiz, to his astonishment he had been introduced to chuck-steak; and the pleasure was anything but unmitigated. But chuck-steak was more than his mistress had.

Mrs. Bellmore was inclined to eat largely of late suppers prepared on an oil stove by her own fair and very fat hands.

Athalie accepted one or two invitations, and then accepted no more, being unable to return anybody's hospitality.

Captain Dane called persistently without being received, until she wrote him not to come again until she sent for him.

n.o.body else knew where she was except her sisters. Doris wrote from Los Angeles complaining of slack business. Later Catharine wrote asking for money. And Athalie was obliged to answer that she had none.

Now "none" means not any at all. And the time had now arrived when that was the truth. The chuck-steak cut up on Hafiz's plate in the bathroom had been purchased with postage stamps--the last of a sheet bought by Athalie in days of affluence for foreign correspondence.

There was no more foreign correspondence. Hence the chuck-steak, and a bottle of milk in the sink and a packet of biscuits on the shelf.

And a rather pale, young girl lying flat on the lounge in the front room, her blue eyes wide, staring up at the fading sun-beams on the ceiling.

If she was desperate she was quiet about it--perhaps even at moments a little incredulous that there actually could be nothing left for her to live on. It was one of those grotesque episodes that did not seem to belong in her life--something which ought not--that could not happen to her. At moments, however, she realised that it had happened--realised that part of the nightmare had been happening for some time--that for a good while now, she had always been more or less hungry, even after a rather reckless orgy on crackers and milk.

Except that she felt a little fatigued there was in her no tendency to accept the _chose arrivee_, no acquiescence in the _fait accompli_, nothing resembling any bowing of the head, any meek desire to kiss the rod; only a still resentment, a quiet but steady anger, the new and cool opportunism that hatches recklessness.

What channel should she choose? That was all that chance had left for her to decide,--merely what form her recklessness should take.

Whatever of morality had been instinct in the girl now seemed to be in absolute abeyance. In the extremity of dire necessity, cornered at last, face to face with a world that threatened her, and watching it now out of cool, intelligent eyes, she had, without realising it, slipped back into her ragged childhood.

There was nothing else to slip back to, no training, no discipline, no foundation other than her companions.h.i.+p with a mother whom she had loved but who had scarcely done more for her than to respond vaguely to the frankness of inquiring childhood.

Her childhood had been always a battle--a happy series of conflicts as she remembered--always a fight among strenuous children to maintain her feet in her little tattered shoes against rough aggression and ruthless compet.i.tion.

And now, under savage pressure, she slipped back again in spirit to the school-yard, and became a watchful, agile, unmoral thing again--a creature bent on its own salvation, dedicated to its own survival, atrociously ready for any emergency, undismayed by anything that might offer itself, and ready to consider, weigh, and determine any chance for existence.

Almost every cla.s.sic alternative in turn presented itself to her as she lay there considering. She could go out and sell herself. But, oddly enough, the "easiest way" was not easy for her. And, as a child, also, a fastidious purity had been instinctive in her, both in body and mind.

There were other and easier alternatives; she could go on the stage, or into domestic service, or she could call up Captain Dane and tell him she was hungry. Or she could let any one of several young men understand that she was now permanently receptive to dinner invitations. And she could, if she chose, live on her personal popularity,--be to one man or to several _une maitresse vierge_--manage, contrive, accept, give nothing of consequence.

For she was a girl to flatter the vanity of men; and she knew that if ever she coolly addressed her mind to it she could rule them, entangle them, hold them sufficiently long, and flourish without the ultimate concession, because there were so many, many men in the world, and it took each man a long, long time to relinquish hope; and always there was another ready to try his fortune, happy in his vanity to attempt where all so far had failed.