FRED OTTENBURG, smartly dressed for the after-
noon, with a long black coat and gaiters was sitting
in the dusty parlor of the Everett House. His manner was
not in accord with his personal freshness, the good lines of
his clothes, and the shining smoothness of his hair. His
attitude was one of deep dejection, and his face, though it
had the cool, unimpeachable fairness possible only to a
very blond young man, was by no means happy. A page
shuffled into the room and looked about. When he made
out the dark figure in a shadowy corner, tracing over the
carpet pattern with a cane, he droned, "The lady says you
can come up, sir."
Fred picked up his hat and gloves and followed the crea-
ture, who seemed an aged boy in uniform, through dark
corridors that smelled of old carpets. The page knocked
at the door of Thea's sitting-room, and then wandered
away. Thea came to the door with a telegram in her hand.
She asked Ottenburg to come in and pointed to one of the
clumsy, sullen-looking chairs that were as thick as they
were high. The room was brown with time, dark in spite
of two windows that opened on Union Square, with dull
curtains and carpet, and heavy, respectable-looking furni-
ture in somber colors. The place was saved from utter dis-
malness by a coal fire under the black marble mantelpiece,
--brilliantly reflected in a long mirror that hung between
the two windows. This was the first time Fred had seen
the room, and he took it in quickly, as he put down his hat
and gloves.
Thea seated herself at the walnut writing-desk, still
holding the slip of yellow paper. "Dr. Archie is coming,"
she said. "He will be here Friday morning."
"Well, that's good, at any rate," her visitor replied with
a determined effort at cheerfulness. Then, turning to the
fire, he added blankly, "If you want him."
"Of course I want him. I would never have asked such
a thing of him if I hadn't wanted him a great deal. It's a
very expensive trip." Thea spoke severely. Then she went
on, in a milder tone. "He doesn't say anything about
the money, but I think his coming means that he can let
me have it."
Fred was standing before the mantel, rubbing his hands
together nervously. "Probably. You are still determined
to call on him?" He sat down tentatively in the chair Thea
had indicated. "I don't see why you won't borrow from
me, and let him sign with you, for instance. That would
constitute a perfectly regular business transaction. I could
bring suit against either of you for my money."
Thea turned toward him from the desk. "We won't take
that up again, Fred. I should have a different feeling about
it if I went on your money. In a way I shall feel freer on
Dr. Archie's, and in another way I shall feel more bound.
I shall try even harder." She paused. "He is almost like
my father," she added irrelevantly.
"Still, he isn't, you know," Fred persisted. "It would
n't be anything new. I've loaned money to students
before, and got it back, too."
"Yes; I know you're generous," Thea hurried over it,
"but this will be the best way. He will be here on Friday
did I tell you?"
"I think you mentioned it. That's rather soon. May
I smoke?" he took out a small cigarette case. "I sup-
pose you'll be off next week?" he asked as he struck a
match.
"Just as soon as I can," she replied with a restless move-
ment of her arms, as if her dark-blue dress were too tight
for her. "It seems as if I'd been here forever."
"And yet," the young man mused, "we got in only four
days ago. Facts really don't count for much, do they? It's
all in the way people feel: even in little things."
Thea winced, but she did not answer him. She put the
telegram back in its envelope and placed it carefully in one
of the pigeonholes of the desk.
"I suppose," Fred brought out with effort, "that your
friend is in your confidence?"
"He always has been. I shall have to tell him about my-
self. I wish I could without dragging you in."
Fred shook himself. "Don't bother about where you
drag me, please," he put in, flushing. "I don't give--"
he subsided suddenly.
"I'm afraid," Thea went on gravely, "that he won't
understand. He'll be hard on you."
Fred studied the white ash of his cigarette before he
flicked it off. "You mean he'll see me as even worse than
I am. Yes, I suppose I shall look very low to him: a fifth-
rate scoundrel. But that only matters in so far as it hurts
his feelings."
Thea sighed. "We'll both look pretty low. And after
all, we must really be just about as we shall look to
him."
Ottenburg started up and threw his cigarette into the
grate. "That I deny. Have you ever been really frank with
this preceptor of your childhood, even when you WERE a
child? Think a minute, have you? Of course not! From
your cradle, as I once told you, you've been `doing it' on
the side, living your own life, admitting to yourself things
that would horrify him. You've always deceived him to
the extent of letting him think you different from what
you are. He couldn't understand then, he can't under-
stand now. So why not spare yourself and him?"
She shook her head. "Of course, I've had my own
thoughts. Maybe he has had his, too. But I've never done
anything before that he would much mind. I must put
myself right with him,--as right as I can,--to begin
over. He'll make allowances for me. He always has. But
I'm afraid he won't for you."
"Leave that to him and me. I take it you want me to see
him?" Fred sat down again and began absently to trace
the carpet pattern with his cane. "At the worst," he spoke
wanderingly, "I thought you'd perhaps let me go in on the
business end of it and invest along with you. You'd put
in your talent and ambition and hard work, and I'd put
in the money and--well, nobody's good wishes are to be
scorned, not even mine. Then, when the thing panned out
big, we could share together. Your doctor friend hasn't
cared half so much about your future as I have."
"He's cared a good deal. He doesn't know as much
about such things as you do. Of course you've been a great
deal more help to me than any one else ever has," Thea
said quietly. The black clock on the mantel began to
strike. She listened to the five strokes and then said, "I'd
have liked your helping me eight months ago. But now,
you'd simply be keeping me."
"You weren't ready for it eight months ago." Fred
leaned back at last in his chair. "You simply weren't ready
for it. You were too tired. You were too timid. Your
whole tone was too low. You couldn't rise from a chair
like that,"--she had started up apprehensively and gone
toward the window.-- "You were fumbling and awkward.
Since then you've come into your personality. You were
always locking horns with it before. You were a sullen
little drudge eight months ago, afraid of being caught at
either looking or moving like yourself. Nobody could tell
anything about you. A voice is not an instrument that's
found ready-made. A voice is personality. It can be as
big as a circus and as common as dirt.-- There's good
money in that kind, too, but I don't happen to be interested
in them.-- Nobody could tell much about what you might
be able to do, last winter. I divined more than anybody
else."
"Yes, I know you did." Thea walked over to the old-
fashioned mantel and held her hands down to the glow of
the fire. "I owe so much to you, and that's what makes
things hard. That's why I have to get away from you
altogether. I depend on you for so many things. Oh, I did
even last winter, in Chicago!" She knelt down by the
grate and held her hands closer to the coals. "And one
thing leads to another."
Ottenburg watched her as she bent toward the fire. His
glance brightened a little. "Anyhow, you couldn't look as
you do now, before you knew me. You WERE clumsy. And
whatever you do now, you do splendidly. And you can't
cry enough to spoil your face for more than ten minutes.
It comes right back, in spite of you. It's only since you've
known me that you've let yourself be beautiful."
Without rising she turned her face away. Fred went on
impetuously. "Oh, you can turn it away from me, Thea;
you can take it away from me! All the same--" his spurt
died and he fell back. "How can you turn on me so, after
all!" he sighed.
"I haven't. But when you arranged with yourself to
take me in like that, you couldn't have been thinking
very kindly of me. I can't understand how you carried it
through, when I was so easy, and all the circumstances were
so easy."
Her crouching position by the fire became threatening.
Fred got up, and Thea also rose.
"No," he said, "I can't make you see that now. Some
time later, perhaps, you will understand better. For one
thing, I honestly could not imagine that words, names,
meant so much to you." Fred was talking with the des-
peration of a man who has put himself in the wrong and
who yet feels that there was an idea of truth in his conduct.
"Suppose that you had married your brakeman and lived
with him year after year, caring for him even less than you
do for your doctor, or for Harsanyi. I suppose you would
have felt quite all right about it, because that relation has
a name in good standing. To me, that seems--sickening!"
He took a rapid turn about the room and then as Thea
remained standing, he rolled one of the elephantine chairs
up to the hearth for her.
"Sit down and listen to me for a moment, Thea." He
began pacing from the hearthrug to the window and back
again, while she sat down compliantly. "Don't you know
most of the people in the world are not individuals at all?
They never have an individual idea or experience. A lot
of girls go to boarding-school together, come out the same
season, dance at the same parties, are married off in
groups, have their babies at about the same time, send
their children to school together, and so the human crop
renews itself. Such women know as much about the reality
of the forms they go through as they know about the
wars they learn the dates of. They get their most per-
sonal experiences out of novels and plays. Everything is
second-hand with them. Why, you COULDN'T live like that."
Thea sat looking toward the mantel, her eyes half closed,
her chin level, her head set as if she were enduring some-
thing. Her hands, very white, lay passive on her dark
gown. From the window corner Fred looked at them and
at her. He shook his head and flashed an angry, tormented
look out into the blue twilight over the Square, through
which muffled cries and calls and the clang of car bells
came up from the street. He turned again and began to
pace the floor, his hands in his pockets.
"Say what you will, Thea Kronborg, you are not that
sort of person. You will never sit alone with a pacifier and
a novel. You won't subsist on what the old ladies have put
into the bottle for you. You will always break through
into the realities. That was the first thing Harsanyi found
out about you; that you couldn't be kept on the outside.
If you'd lived in Moonstone all your life and got on with
the discreet brakeman, you'd have had just the same
nature. Your children would have been the realities then,
probably. If they'd been commonplace, you'd have killed
them with driving. You'd have managed some way to
live twenty times as much as the people around you."
Fred paused. He sought along the shadowy ceiling and
heavy mouldings for words. When he began again, his
voice was lower, and at first he spoke with less conviction,
though again it grew on him. "Now I knew all this--oh,
knew it better than I can ever make you understand!
You've been running a handicap. You had no time to lose.
I wanted you to have what you need and to get on fast--
get through with me, if need be; I counted on that. You've
no time to sit round and analyze your conduct or your
feelings. Other women give their whole lives to it. They've
nothing else to do. Helping a man to get his divorce is a
career for them; just the sort of intellectual exercise they
like."
Fred dived fiercely into his pockets as if he would rip
them out and scatter their contents to the winds. Stop-
ping before her, he took a deep breath and went on
again, this time slowly. "All that sort of thing is foreign
to you. You'd be nowhere at it. You haven't that kind of
mind. The grammatical niceties of conduct are dark to
you. You're simple--and poetic." Fred's voice seemed
to be wandering about in the thickening dusk. "You won't
play much. You won't, perhaps, love many times." He
paused. "And you did love me, you know. Your railroad
friend would have understood me. I COULD have thrown you
back. The reverse was there,--it stared me in the face,--
but I couldn't pull it. I let you drive ahead." He threw
out his hands. What Thea noticed, oddly enough, was the
flash of the firelight on his cuff link. He turned again.
"And you'll always drive ahead," he muttered. "It's your
way."
There was a long silence. Fred had dropped into a chair.
He seemed, after such an explosion, not to have a word
left in him. Thea put her hand to the back of her neck and
pressed it, as if the muscles there were aching.
"Well," she said at last, "I at least overlook more in you
than I do in myself. I am always excusing you to myself.
I don't do much else."
"Then why, in Heaven's name, won't you let me be your
friend? You make a scoundrel of me, borrowing money
from another man to get out of my clutches."
"If I borrow from him, it's to study. Anything I took
from you would be different. As I said before, you'd be
keeping me."
"Keeping! I like your language. It's pure Moonstone,
Thea,--like your point of view. I wonder how long you'll
be a Methodist." He turned away bitterly.
"Well, I've never said I wasn't Moonstone, have I? I
am, and that's why I want Dr. Archie. I can't see anything
so funny about Moonstone, you know." She pushed her
chair back a little from the hearth and clasped her hands
over her knee, still looking thoughtfully into the red coals.
"We always come back to the same thing, Fred. The name,
as you call it, makes a difference to me how I feel about
myself. You would have acted very differently with a girl
of your own kind, and that's why I can't take anything
from you now. You've made everything impossible. Being
married is one thing and not being married is the other
thing, and that's all there is to it. I can't see how you
reasoned with yourself, if you took the trouble to reason.
You say I was too much alone, and yet what you did was
to cut me off more than I ever had been. Now I'm going
to try to make good to my friends out there. That's all
there is left for me."
"Make good to your friends!" Fred burst out. "What
one of them cares as I care, or believes as I believe? I've
told you I'll never ask a gracious word from you until I
can ask it with all the churches in Christendom at my
back."
Thea looked up, and when she saw Fred's face, she
thought sadly that he, too, looked as if things were spoiled
for him. "If you know me as well as you say you do, Fred,"
she said slowly, "then you are not being honest with your-
self. You know that I can't do things halfway. If you kept
me at all--you'd keep me." She dropped her head wearily
on her hand and sat with her forehead resting on her
fingers.
Fred leaned over her and said just above his breath,
"Then, when I get that divorce, you'll take it up with me
again? You'll at least let me know, warn me, before there
is a serious question of anybody else?"
Without lifting her head, Thea answered him. "Oh, I
don't think there will ever be a question of anybody else.
Not if I can help it. I suppose I've given you every reason
to think there will be,--at once, on shipboard, any time."
Ottenburg drew himself up like a shot. "Stop it, Thea!"
he said sharply. "That's one thing you've never done.
That's like any common woman." He saw her shoulders
lift a little and grow calm. Then he went to the other side
of the room and took up his hat and gloves from the sofa.
He came back cheerfully. "I didn't drop in to bully you
this afternoon. I came to coax you to go out for tea with
me somewhere." He waited, but she did not look up or
lift her head, still sunk on her hand.
Her handkerchief had fallen. Fred picked it up and put
it on her knee, pressing her fingers over it. "Good-night,
dear and wonderful," he whispered,--"wonderful and dear!
How can you ever get away from me when I will always
follow you, through every wall, through every door, wher-
ever you go." He looked down at her bent head, and the
curve of her neck that was so sad. He stooped, and with
his lips just touched her hair where the firelight made it
ruddiest. "I didn't know I had it in me, Thea. I thought
it was all a fairy tale. I don't know myself any more." He
closed his eyes and breathed deeply. "The salt's all gone
out of your hair. It's full of sun and wind again. I believe
it has memories." Again she heard him take a deep breath.
"I could do without you for a lifetime, if that would give
you to yourself. A woman like you doesn't find herself,
alone."
She thrust her free hand up to him. He kissed it softly,
as if she were asleep and he were afraid of waking her.
From the door he turned back irrelevantly. "As to your
old friend, Thea, if he's to be here on Friday, why,"--he
snatched out his watch and held it down to catch the light
from the grate,--"he's on the train now! That ought to
cheer you. Good-night." She heard the door close.
Read next: PART V. DOCTOR ARCHIE'S VENTURE#Chapter 3
Read previous: PART V. DOCTOR ARCHIE'S VENTURE#Chapter 1
Table of content of Song of the Lark
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your reviewYour review will be placed after the table of content of this book
