CHAPTER VIII

THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL

THE reaction from the strain of her fight with her best friend and lover left Ellen West in a condition of collapse. The bitterness of the first big defeat in her impulsive life was sickening.

“The fool--the conventional weakling,” she exclaimed in disgust.

Her sense of humiliation was keen. She had offered herself in abject submission--to give herself freely without condition to a man who had refused to take the gift. It was maddening! That her beauty had fascinated him she knew by intuition keener than reason. And yet her charms had fallen short of victory.

Her soul rose in rebellion against the shame of his rejection, of his assumption of moral superiority.

“His ignorance and stupidity!” she hissed.

Waves of helpless anger swept her. And yet the more she considered his stern refusal the more reasonable and honorable from the man’s point of view it seemed. In spite of her creed a sneaking admiration persisted in the back of her indignant mind.

At last this admiration dared to come into full consciousness. She stamped on it with indignant fury. Her anger at her own inherited weakness was even greater than her wrath against the man who had rejected her generous offer.

“It’s true!” she muttered. “Woman has no soul--she’s merely a mass of gelatine on which the will of man acts and reacts. I’ll die before I’ll submit!”

A faint but distinct tap on her wall from Field’s library stopped the train of her angry thought.

He had rapped many messages during the past month and had called many times from the balcony rail in vain. She had forgotten his very existence in the unfolding of her love for Manning.

She listened with an amused smile.

“This is old reliable, fair lady,” he was saying. “Every day I call in vain. Have pity, pray! Your humble slave awaits you on the backyard fence--your faithful Tomascat!”

She rose with a light laugh, walked to the rear window and looked out.

He had just leaped on the balcony rail. His imitation of a cat was perfect.

“O-o--Maria--M-a-r-i-i-a!” he called.

“Come over, Tomascat,” she answered, “and cheer me up!”

“I come on the run!” he cried as he leaped from the rail and re-entered his apartment.

In two minutes he was at her door.

“You needn’t apologize, Ellen,” he began.

“I’m not apologizing, sir!” she answered quickly.

“I say you _needn’t_ apologize for your shameful treatment of the man who really loves you. I know all about your dreadful carrying-on with that other fellow.”

She waved him to a seat and sat down facing him.

“And from the length of your face this morning I can guess the ending of the sad story.”

“Indeed?”

“Oh, yes indeedy,” he continued glibly, “for the past month I’ve held myself aloof.”

“Quite so; you’ve only rapped once a day.”

“Exactly. I used to rap twice. And, moreover, I used to come right up and knock at your door with or without an invitation at times. Not once have I done this in thirty days. I repeat, I have held myself aloof, not because I feared the outcome of this interloper’s attentions, but because I thought it best to let the affair run its course--as in measles and all immature love.”

“I like that!” Ellen broke in.

“I’m glad you do. I hoped your mind was still sufficiently alert to get it. Still, you never can tell. The kind of affair in which you have been floundering has a most benumbing effect on the female mind.”

“Thank you!”

“Don’t mention it. No fee expected. My advice is purely friendly, not legal. Would you mind telling me the exact stage at which you have arrived with our young friend of bucolic aroma?”

She looked at him a moment defiantly.

“Not in the least. We have declared our love. He asked me to marry him. I refused and offered myself without a marriage ceremony.”

“And he indignantly refused?”

“He did.”

“I knew he would--the poor rube. And I have come into the kingdom for such a time as this! I alone can save you from folly. You are, after all, dear Ellen, supremely feminine in your attempt to claim the privileges of man----”

“You’re a liar, Randy----”

“I deny the allegation, but I will not spurn the ‘alligator’! On the other hand I draw nearer. I make myself plain. You refuse my offer of a free alliance?”

“Indignantly.”

“Just so; although I am your comrade in creative art, our tastes are similar, the fiber of character the same----”

“I don’t love you----”

“You say that because you don’t know the meaning of love. There is no true love save the love of comrade and workers. All else is blind impulse. The impulse to be a father--the impulse to be a mother,----”

“Pish--tush!”

“Pish--tush yourself! I’m telling you the deepest secrets of human life. You believe in a free alliance. I offer it. I am a philosopher of artistic and creative calling. So are you. We are perfectly fitted for happiness in each other’s society, in each other’s love. You reject me like a silly school girl--why?”

“Because I don’t love you--fool!”

“Because you don’t love me in the idiotic way of the old romantic poets--the way the boy loves, for example. He swears to make you a goddess and will end by making you his slave.”

“I’ll never marry him!”

“Legally, no. You have worked out a logical creed of individual freedom from purely legal restraints, but what you’re really trying to do is to bind him and bind yourself with a new and more aggravated form of matrimony.”

“What do you mean?”

“Simply what I say. That the tyranny into which you would lure this poor simp is more ‘holy,’ more ‘sacred,’ more galling in its chains than the old ceremony. In it you have raised the old ceremony to the nth power.”

“Our love would be as free as the beat of the human heart.”

“But you propose to so smother the human heart in the intimacy of this personal freedom that it can’t beat. You forswear the chains of matrimony for a free alliance whose tyranny you intend to make ten times more tyrannical than the old conventional marriage. Why an ‘alliance’? An alliance is made of agreements and promises and obligations. It’s just another kind of iron-clad marriage you’re trying to impose on the world in the name of freedom. It’s a fake, child--a rank fake. Come, have common sense. You and I are mates, in mind and body.”

She shook her head.

“It’s true. I offer you the real free alliance without bonds, without promises, without agreements. I offer the glory and beauty of love without chains of any kind. We will work together. We will roam the fields together. We will think high thoughts and do great deeds in creative art as chums and comrades without fighting, hating, or quarrelling or getting on one another’s nerves. Divest yourself of the obsession of sex. Woman will never be free as man until she does this. Use your magnificent sex endowment as an inspiration in life. You are still making it the supreme end of life. You understand me?”

“Yes--go home, Randy--you tire me.”

“All right. I’ve told you the truth. Remember old reliable is your neighbor. I’m your best bet in life. I recommend myself highly----”

“Go home!”

With a grin and a friendly nod he left her brooding.