Life and Gabriella Part 47

His voice was curiously distant, and she was conscious of a slight shock, as if she had run against one of the hard places in his character. "Well, I've done my best," she thought impatiently. "If he doesn't want to be friends he needn't be." Then, with a change of manner, she observed flippantly: "Sometimes one's relatives are useful and sometimes they're not." Really, he was impossibly heavy except in a crisis; and one could scarcely be expected to produce crises in order to put him thoroughly at his ease.

As he made no response to her trite remark, she, also, fell silent, while they turned into Twenty-third Street, and began the long walk to Ninth Avenue. Once or twice, glancing inquiringly into his face, which wore a preoccupied look, she wondered if he were thinking of Alice.

Then, as the silence became suddenly oppressive, she ventured warily in the effort to dispel it: "I hope you are not disturbed about anything?"

"Disturbed?" He turned to her with a start. "No, I was only wondering if you knew how much your friends.h.i.+p would mean to me."

It was out at last, and confirmed once more in her knowledge of men, she retorted gaily: "How can I know if you won't take the trouble to tell me?" After all, she reflected cheerfully, the education she had derived from George and Judge Crowborough, though lacking in the higher branches, was fundamentally sound. All men were alike in one thing at least--they invariably disappointed one's expectations.

"I've been trying to tell you for a quarter of an hour," he answered, "and I didn't know how to put it."

"But at last you didn't have to put it at all," she said laughingly; "it simply put itself, didn't it?"

"I am still wondering," he persisted gravely.

"Wondering if I know?" She spoke in the sweetly practical tone of one who is firmly resolved not to permit any nonsense. "Yes, I do know--that is, I know there are ways in which I might be useful to you."

"For instance?"

"Well, there are some little--some very little things I might tell you if we were friends--real friends," she made this plain, "just as two men might be."

"But the very last things two men would tell each other," he was laughing now, "are the little things--the things about slang and walking-sticks and oak furniture."

So he hadn't forgotten! The recollection of her impertinence confused her, and she hastened to make light of it by protesting gaily: "I was only joking. Of course, you didn't take that seriously."

"I don't know how much more seriously," he replied emphatically, "I could have taken it."

"But you haven't thought of it since?"

"What would you say if I told you I hadn't thought of anything else?"

"Then I wish I hadn't said it." She was obviously worried by his admission. "It was horrid of me--perfectly horrid. I ought to have been ashamed of myself. I had no right to criticise you, and you have been so heavenly kind."

"After that"--he appeared to be hammering the idea into her mind--"I was so grateful I'd have done almost anything. Do you know," he burst out with evident emotion, "that was the first criticism--I mean downright honest criticism--I've ever had in my life. n.o.body--that is n.o.body who knew--ever thought enough of me before to tell me where I was wrong."

It was all a pathetic mistake, she saw, but she saw also that it was impossible for her to explain it away. She could not tell him the ugly truth that she had been merely laughing at him when he had believed, in his beautiful simplicity, that she was speaking as a friend. Though she felt ashamed, humbled, remorseful, there was nothing that she could say now which would not hurt him more than the original misunderstanding had done.

In her desire to atone as far as possible, she remarked recklessly: "I only wish I could be of some real help to you."

"You can," he answered frankly. "You can let me come to see you sometimes before I go West again."

"You are going back in the spring?"

He laughed happily, drawing himself erect with a large, free movement as if he needed to stretch his limbs. "I can't stand more than six months of the East, and I've been here a year now, off and on. After a time I begin to want air. I want to breathe."

"Yet you lived here once."

"A sort of life, yes, but that don't count."

"What does count with you, I wonder?" She was smiling up at him, and as they pa.s.sed under a street light her eyes shone with a misty brightness through her veil of dotted net.

For a minute he thought over her question. "I guess fighting does," he answered at last. "Getting on in spite of hard knocks, and smas.h.i.+ng things that stand in your way. I like the feeling that comes after you've put through a big deal or got the better of the desert or the mountains. I got joy in Arizona out of my first silver mine; but I didn't get the joy exactly out of the silver. I don't suppose you understand."

"Oh, yes, I do. I understand perfectly. It's the pure spirit of adventure. Whenever we do a thing for the sake of the struggle, not for the thing itself, it's pure adventure, isn't it?"

"Well, I like money," he said with the air of being entirely honest.

"I'm not a romantic chap, don't think that about me. I care a lot about money, only after I've made it, somehow, I never know what to do with it. All I want for myself is a place to sleep and a bite to eat--I'm not over-particular what it is--and clothes to wear, good clothes, too--but I don't give a hang for motor cars except to go long distances in when there are no trains running."

It was the commonplace problem, worked out in intricate detail, of the newly rich, of the uncultivated rich, of the rich whose strenuously active processes of enrichment had permanently closed all other highways to experience. Seventeen years ago the Gabriella of Hill Street would have had only disdain for the newly rich and their problems; but life, which had softened her judgment and modified her convictions, had completely reversed her inherited opinion of such a case as O'Hara's.

Though he was as raw as unbaked brick, she was penetrating enough to discern that he was also as genuine; and, so radically had events altered her point of view, that at thirty-seven she found genuine rawness more appealing than superficial refinement. George had wearied her of the sham and the superficial, of gloss without depth, of manner without substance, of charm without character.

"But there is so much that you might do to help," she said presently.

"After all, money is power, isn't it?"

"Misused power too often," he answered. "Of course, you can always build lodging-houses and tenements and hospitals; but when you come squarely down to facts, I've never in my life tried to help a man by giving him money that I haven't regretted it. Why, I've ruined men by helping to make their way too easy at the start."

"Perhaps you're right," she admitted; "I don't know much about it, I confess; but I should have been spared a great deal of suffering if I had had something to start with when I was obliged to make my living."

"That's different." His voice had grown gentle in an instant. "I can't think of your ever having had a hard time. You seem so strong, so successful, so happy."

If she had answered straight from her heart, Gabriella would have retorted frankly: "A good deal of that is in the shape of my face and the way I dress," but instead of speaking sincerely, she remarked with impersonal cheerfulness: "Oh, well, happiness, like everything else, is mainly a habit, isn't it? I cultivated the habit of happiness at the most miserable time of my life, and I've never quite lost it."

"But I don't like to think of your ever having worried," he protested.

Of her ever having worried! Was he becoming dangerously sentimental or was it merely a random spark of his unquenchable Western chivalry?

Though she told herself emphatically again that she was not falling in love with O'Hara, though she was perfectly faithful in her heart to the memory of Arthur, still she was vividly aware with every drop of her blood, with every beat of her pulses, of the man at her side. And through her magnetic sense of his nearness there flowed to her presently a deeper and clearer perception of the mult.i.tudinous movements of life which surrounded her--of the variable darkness out of which lights flashed and gigantic spectacular outlines loomed against a dim background of sky, of the vague shapes stirring, swarming, creating there in the darkness, and always of the pitiless, insatiable hunger from which the city had sprung. For the first time, flowing like a current from the mind of the man beside her, there came to her an understanding of her own share in the common progress of life--for the first time she felt herself to be not merely a woman who lived in a city, but an integral part of that city, one cell among closely packed millions of cells. Something of the responsibility she felt for her own children seemed to spread out and cover the city lying there in its dimness and mystery.

"But I don't like to think of your ever having worried," he repeated.

"Oh, it's over now," she returned, severely matter-of-fact. "It took me years to make my way, but I've made it at last, and I may settle down to a comfortable middle-age without the dread of the poorhouse to spur me into activity. My business is doing very well; our custom has doubled in the last two or three years."

"But wasn't it a tough pull at one time?"

"It was hard; but what isn't? Of course, when I was obliged to work from nine till six and then come home to cook the children's dinner and teach them their lessons, I used to be tired out by the end of the day--but that lasted only a few years: five or six at the most--and now I can afford to let f.a.n.n.y wear imported gowns when she goes out to parties."

Though she spoke gaily, making a jest of her struggle, she saw the gravity of his face deepen until his features looked almost wooden.

"And through it all you kept something that so many other women seem to lose when they work for a living," he said. "You've kept your--your charm."

Again she found herself on the point of exclaiming frankly: "heaven knows I've tried to!"--and again, checking herself, she proceeded cautiously: "I've never understood why charm should be merely a hothouse flower."

"I suppose it does depend a good deal upon a sunny temper," he rejoined in his blindness.

They had reached the gate, and stopping him when he would have entered, she said with the directness of a man: "So we're friends, and you're coming to see me?"

"Yes, I'm coming," he replied gravely. Then, standing beside the gate, he watched her while she went up the walk and opened the door with her key.

Upstairs, with her knitting on her lap and her feet on the fender, Miss Polly looked up to observe: "You're late, Gabriella. You must have walked all the way."