Part 37

“Yes,” he continued, “I find a rare combination of beauties in Staten Island. The stirring panorama of the bay, with ships from the four corners of the earth, the drowsy little hamlets, and the hills. The words of our national anthem have always seemed to me peculiarly applicable to the island--‘I love thy rocks and rills, thy woods and templed hills.’ May I ask if you are a resident?”

“You mean do I live there? Well, no,” said Miss Riordan. “I just go there sometimes, with my friend.”

“Ah!” said he. “There are so many delightful rambles--hilltop vistas which linger long in the memory.”

Miss Riordan and her friend were in the habit of taking the train at St. George and going direct to South Beach. The vistas on that journey had not appealed to her as memorable, nor had her rambles along the boardwalk been especially delightful; but she did not care to say so.

“I like the country,” she observed timidly, and was enchanted to see by his face that this pleased him.

He went on talking--which was what she desired. She would have sat there for hours, listening to him. Never had she heard such words, never imagined such refinement. She was filled with reverence that was almost awe. And when he talked poetry!

He quoted in his tremulous old voice:

“To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

It was too much! Miss Riordan’s own thoughts did not lie too deep. Her tears welled up and brimmed over. She wiped her eyes with her perfumed handkerchief, and mutely shook her head.

Her companion had long since passed the age of such facile relief. He peered at her in kindly distress, unable to find assuaging words for a grief so inexplicable.

“Please wait a moment!” he said, and with a little difficulty got upon his feet. “Just wait a moment, please! I’ll be back directly.”

She believed him, and while she waited, confident that he would return to her, she thought about this thing in a misty fashion.

Not yet in her life had Miss Riordan attempted to account for her emotions. She felt, and that sufficed. She had no idea why the old gentleman’s discourse upon the natural beauties of Staten Island should have made her weep. She did not know why his talk had so charmed her. She knew only, cared only, that a strange, tearful happiness had come upon her.

“I guess he liked to talk to me!” she thought, with satisfaction beyond measure.

Then she saw him coming toward her again, toddling along in his long overcoat, with a little bouquet of roses in his gloved hand.

“Oh, my goodness!” thought Miss Riordan, beginning to cry again. “Did you ever?”

He sat down beside her, a little out of breath.

“If you’ll allow me,” he said, proffering the flowers. “From one lover of Wordsworth to another. I saw that you were much moved by my little allusion.”

“You hadn’t ought to have done it!” said Miss Riordan, with a sob. “I just don’t know what to say!”

She held the flowers to her nose, and her tears rained upon them. This was her first bouquet. Her next would very likely come when she was no longer able to enjoy its fragrance or shed any more tears.

“A feeling heart!” said the old gentleman. “There! Isn’t that the bell? We’d better make our way on board, madam, or we shall be crowded out.”

“I can’t! I got to wait!” she cried in despair; “but I’ll go with you as far as the gates.”

So she did. When they got there, he removed his hat and held out his hand, standing before her bareheaded and in matchless dignity, in spite of the jostling crowd. She took his hand and squeezed it hard.

“Good-by!” she said. “Do take care of yourself!”

II

She watched the old gentleman as he made his way toward the cabin. Each time some one brushed against him, she cried under her breath:

“Stop that pushing! Ain’t you ashamed of yourself?”

“What you mutterin’ about?” asked a voice behind her.

Turning, she confronted her Louis.

“Well!” she exclaimed indignantly. “You’re a nice one, you are! But come on! Hurry up! We can get this boat.”

He caught her arm and held her back.

“No!” he said. “Too late to go down to the island to-day.”

“Too late!” said she. “And me waiting here all the afternoon! What do you mean, too late?”

“When I say too late, I mean too late,” replied Mr. Pirini, with his own special insolence.

“Well!” said Miss Riordan. “I don’t care!”

This speech was surely a cue for exit, but she did not go. She said to herself, as usual, that she just wanted to stay and tell that fellow what she thought of him--which was manifestly impossible, as she had never yet been able to discover what she really did think of him, except that she hated him.

There he stood, with his gray spats and his gray felt hat, worn rakishly, and even new gray gloves. She knew that he had no job, nothing at all to justify his swagger. Very likely he hadn’t enough in his pocket to pay for his dinner. What cared he? He wouldn’t even thank her if she paid for it.

“Now you just look here, Louis!” she began in a trembling voice.

“All right! I’m lookin’!” said he.

His white teeth showed in a broad smile, and his eyes were fixed steadily upon her. Though Miss Riordan, when she looked in the mirror, may have seen an image which somewhat flattered the truth, she had no illusions as to how she appeared in the eyes of Mr. Pirini. She tried to roll the magazine so that her hands should be concealed. She changed the position of her feet.

“All right!” she said. “You can keep on looking!”

“You bin cryin’,” observed her cavalier.

That was too much! Those tears were not to be mentioned by him.

“You mind your own business!” she retorted hotly. “I wasn’t crying over you, anyways!”

She saw that he didn’t believe that.

“Have it your own way,” he said soothingly. “Whadder you say we go an’ get some dinner?”

“No!” replied Miss Riordan, and sat down upon the nearest seat.

She always rejected his suggestions--at first; but, as always, she regretted what she had done. Here was the very situation she had dreaded--herself seated, flushed, struggling against her ever ready tears, while he stood there smiling.

“All right!” he said. “We’ll stay here, then.”

This was another familiar move. How many victories had he won by his patience, his smiling silence! He could wait, and he could hold his tongue, and she could do neither.

“And me waiting here all afternoon!” she burst out. “And then you come and you say it’s too late to go down to the island. Well, what made you come so late?”

He did not answer. Another crowd had begun to move toward the gates, like a herd seized with a migratory impulse. Perhaps something of that ancient instinct stirred now in Miss Riordan. Certainly she had a melancholy sensation of being left behind, abandoned, while her fellow creatures moved on toward a better land--toward a Staten Island green and fair, where in a glen a cataract came foaming down, and wild flowers grew, very much like a landscape which hung up in her furnished room. Well, didn’t she, too, wish to see that lovely spot?

“I’m going to take the next boat!” she announced, rising.

“All right!” said Louis. “I’m not. Good-by!”

She wavered shamefully between the quite real Louis and the imaginary Staten Island.

“I’m going!” she answered in a loud, firm voice, but added: “Unless you say you’re sorry you were so late.”

“Sure! I’m sorry!” answered Louis readily. “Now let’s go an’ get some dinner somewheres. All dressed up to kill, ain’t you? Bought yourself some flowers an’ everything!”

Miss Riordan had temporarily forgotten her bouquet. She glanced down at the pallid blossoms, fainting in her hot hands, and a very curious emotion came over her.

“No, I did not buy them for myself!” she said vehemently. “They were given to me.”

“Sure!” said Louis. “Rudolph Valentino give ’em to you, didn’t he?”

“Now you look here, Louis! A gentleman gave them to me--he _bought_ them for me.”

“Oh, Gawd!” said Louis.

“He did! You stop your laughing!”

But Mr. Pirini was so overwhelmed that he was obliged to drop into the seat beside her, and there he sat, his handsome head thrown back, all his strong white teeth showing in a prodigious and soundless laugh. Miss Riordan turned upon him in a fury.

“You stop that!” she commanded. “You just better believe me! It’s the truth! A gentleman came and sat down beside me and began talking to me, and by and by he got me them flowers.”

“Sure I believe you!” said Louis. “Why wouldn’t I?”

For a moment she could not speak. Her hate, and the insufferable conviction of her impotence, made her heart beat fast and violently. She felt stifled in a desperate struggle against complete submersion. Louis would not believe her. She could not make him believe in her gentleman, and to doubt his existence was to deny her a soul. That the old gentleman had talked poetry to her and given her flowers was the sole proof of her own immortal value.

“I tell you it’s true!” she said in a choked voice.

“Sure!” replied Louis, still grinning.

His unfaith was destroying her. Under his arrogant, smiling glance she was disintegrating. The woman whom the old gentleman had addressed, the woman who longed for the mystic beauties of Staten Island as one longs for Paradise, was being done to death, and there would remain only the creatures she saw in her mirror--this ungainly body, this flushed and troubled face. No! No! She had been worthy of the poetry and the flowers. It was Louis who was too base to see her worth.

III

Her hot anger began to cool, to harden into an emotion which she did not comprehend. She stared back at Louis, at first with scorn, but after a moment with puzzled curiosity. Had he always looked like this? Never any different from this?

“You look so kind of funny to-day!” she observed wonderingly.

“Funny? What d’you mean, funny?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” she said, still staring at him. “Just--so kind of--measly.”

His swarthy face turned dark red, and in a low voice he made a forcible retort; but Miss Riordan was past anger. She was looking at her bouquet, lifting up the drooping heads with anxious care.

“I’ll dry ’em in a nice little jar,” she thought. “I guess they’ll keep forever that way.”

Louis was still talking.

“You’d better go away,” she said casually. “I’m going down to the island.”

He got up promptly.

“I’ll go, all right!” said he. “An’ you can git down on your knees an’ beg me, an’ I’ll never come back. Let me tell you--”

“Oh, go on!” said Miss Riordan with mild impatience.

He walked away, swaggering, his gray felt hat to one side, his toes pointed out, his curly hair pushed up at the back of the neck by his high collar. He passed through the turnstile and out of the ferry house, and then, as far as she was concerned, he ceased to exist. Miss Riordan got up and sauntered toward the gates.

“He’s gone,” she thought. “He’d come back if I’d ask him, but I won’t!”

This was true. Mr. Pirini’s charm had been completely dissolved in his laughter. He had refused to believe in her gentleman.

Thinking of that elderly cavalier, her heart swelled with enormous aspirations. Here she was going to the country for a ramble, and carrying a high-class magazine and that mystically precious bouquet. It seemed to her that a monstrous burden had been lifted from her shoulders. Shame, resentment, and miserable anxiety had departed with Mr. Pirini.

She raised the bouquet to her face and sniffed it vigorously.

“I’m going to get a real _comfortable_ pair of shoes!” she said to herself. “A size--_two_ sizes--bigger!”

The freedom of Miss Riordan’s soul was achieved.

MUNSEY’S MAGAZINE

JUNE, 1925 Vol. LXXXV NUMBER 1

Sometimes Things Do Happen

HOW THE LIVES OF FOUR YOUNG MARRIED PEOPLE WERE UTTERLY RUINED--FOR A TIME, AT LEAST

By Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Mr. Samuel Pepys set down the happenings of his days with unique candor and spirit, and, by so doing, became immortal. Edward Cane also kept a diary. Like that of Mr. Pepys, it was written in cipher, and it had a good deal about the author’s wife in it; but in other ways it was very different.

Edward was passionately concerned with the future. He made prophecies, and it displeased him that these prophecies were not fulfilled. His was a just and reasonable mind. He knew--none better--how things ought to be, and he was displeased that they were not so.

He had, indeed, given up looking through the earlier pages of his diary, because it hurt too much; but he remembered some of the things. He remembered, if not the actual words, at least the spirit in which he had prophesied about this marriage of his. It was going to be different from all other marriages. Why not, since he and his Mildred were different from all other persons? It was going to be a splendid adventure.

“We shall never become stodgy,” he had written.

Well, as far as that went, they hadn’t. Quite the contrary!

This evening he began his daily record:

I have shut myself up in my--

“In my own room,” he was going to write, but that was not exact. It was Mildred’s room, too. She could come in if she liked. He couldn’t really shut himself up anywhere on earth. He crossed out the last two words, and leaned his head on his hands, struggling valiantly to be just, fair, and exact, and to crush down the extraordinary emotions that outrageous woman aroused in him.

Never, before his marriage, had he felt such fury, such unreasonable, ungovernable exasperation. He had had a well deserved reputation for being a strong, self-controlled, moderate young man. That was one reason why he had risen high in the credit department of a mammoth store--because he could handle angry, cajoling, or desperate customers so firmly and calmly; and here in his own home he was utterly defeated.

He raised his head and looked about him. He saw Mildred’s things everywhere, crowding and jostling his things--even her silly white comb standing up in one of his military brushes.

“Well, what of it?” he asked himself. “I’m orderly and she’s not. I always knew that.”

No use--he could not be philosophic about it. He got up and removed the comb with a jerk. As he did so, he caught sight of his own face in the mirror. It startled him. It was a strained and haggard face.

“I can’t stand this!” he said to himself. “This can’t go on!”

And just at this moment the door burst open and she--the cause of all his exasperation--appeared in the doorway.

“Edward!” she said in a furious, trembling voice. “Will you get that ladder, or won’t you?”

“I will not,” he replied.

His own voice was not altogether steady, but he was much calmer than she. She had been crying--he could see that; and, as he faced her, she began to cry again.

“You beast!” she cried. “You selfish, heartless--”

“Look here!” said Edward. “I can’t--I won’t stand any more of this! I’m sick and tired--”

“And what about me?” she retorted. “After your promising to make me happy!”

That was too much. Edward could have reminded her of things she had promised, but he scorned to do so. Contempt overwhelmed him. She had no scruples. The only thing on earth she cared about was to get her own way; and she wasn’t going to get it--not this time! Her monstrous unfairness, her ruthless egotism, appalled him. He felt anger mounting to his brain, destroying his fine moderation.

“Look here!” he began.

“I won’t!” said she. “If I’d had any idea what you were really like, I’d never have married you, Edward Cane!”

“No doubt!” said Edward frigidly. “However, another woman--”

All he had been going to say was that another woman--any other woman in the world, indeed--would have considered him a fairly good husband; but Mildred chose to take his words in a different spirit.

“Another woman!” said she, and laughed.

“If things happened as they should,” Edward went on, with heightened color, “I’d go away--now. I’d go off--”

“With another woman!” said she, and laughed again.

He was glad to hear the doorbell ring. If he hadn’t gone out of the room just then, he felt that he would certainly have put himself in the wrong. His patience was exhausted.

“Oh, are you leaving me now, Edward?” Mildred called after him mockingly. “Hadn’t you better take a clean collar--or a toothbrush, at least?”

Evidently she hadn’t heard the bell, and he did not condescend to enlighten her. He made up his mind not to speak to her again, no matter what the provocation. He went on down the stairs to the front door, and opened it.

“Edward!” she cried.

Ha! She was giving herself away now! She was worried!

He opened the door wider, and, as he did so, he heard her start down the stairs. It was only a bill, left lying on the veranda. He stepped out to pick it up.

“Edward!” he heard her call. “_Eddie!_”

A sudden gust of wind blew the door to with a crash, and an equally sudden impulse made him go hastily down the steps and along the path.

The front door opened.

“Eddie!” she called. “Come back this instant!”

He strode up the road and turned the corner.

“Do her good!” he said grimly to himself. “Now I’m out, I’ll just stay out for a while. I’ll smoke, and take a stroll.”

Unfortunately, however, he had changed into an old coat, and had nothing to smoke with him, and no money to buy anything. Also, he was hatless. He shrugged his shoulders with a fine gesture of indifference. He could stroll, anyhow, and think--think this thing out to the bitter end.

It was all bitter, beginning and middle as well as the end. Mildred wished to make a slave of him, to break his spirit, to destroy his manly pride. No--this should not be!

It was a strange, uneasy sort of night--blowing up for rain, he thought. Filmy black clouds went racing across a pallid sky, and the trees rocked and tossed. It was cool, too, for May. He quickened his steps a little.

“I’m upset,” he thought. “I’m more upset than I realized.”

Somehow, the familiar suburban street had a new and almost sinister aspect. The trim houses with their lighted windows looked like houses on the stage--delusions, with no backs to them. Faint and eerie music was coming through some one’s radio. A dog howled, far away. Everything was different.

“This is a fool trick,” he thought suddenly. “I can’t stay out here. I’ll go back and--and simply not answer her.”

II

A taxi came round the corner. The wheels, spinning over the road, sounded like rain. He turned back.

“Sir!” cried a voice. “Please!”

The taxi had stopped, and a woman was leaning out of the window. Was she calling him? It must be so, for there was no one else in sight.

“Can you please tell me where Mrs. Rice lives?” said the woman.

“Er--no,” said he. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know any one of that name here.”

He spoke a little stiffly, because he did not _like_ that voice. It was musical enough, but lacking in calm. She was not discouraged, however.

“If you’d just please look at this--card,” she said. “Perhaps I’ve read the name wrong.”

Now Edward was frankly suspicious. He did not want to approach that taxi, but he had not the moral courage to refuse. He would have preferred to be set upon by bandits, to be blackjacked and robbed, rather than show his reluctance. He stepped off the curb and crossed the road. He _knew_ that something was going to happen.

The woman in the taxi handed him a card; and at the same moment she clutched his collar, and, leaning forward, whispered in his ear:

“Say that Mrs. Rice lives in that house! Pretend to read the card! Quick!”

What could he do? He didn’t want to say anything, but he did not know how to refuse this agitated creature. He took the card, went around to the front of the taxi, and pretended to read the card by the fierce white glare of the headlights.

“Oh!” he said. “Mrs. _Bice_! I see! _She_ lives there--in that house.”

“Thank you!” said the woman in the taxi.

The instinct of self-preservation warned him to be off then, but he had also another instinct--that of helping other people who were in trouble. Something was obviously wrong here, and, prudent or not, he could not turn his back and walk off. The woman had got out, and stood beside him in the road.

“Please pay him and send him away!” she whispered.

So that was the game!

“I’m sorry,” said Edward blandly, “but I’ve come out without a penny in my pockets.”

“Here!” said she, and thrust a purse into his hand. “Only _please_ get rid of him!”

He saw he had been wrong. With a certain compunction, he approached the driver.

“Five dollars!” said the man.

Edward leaned over and looked at the meter.

“Two forty,” he said.

“She made a special rate with me--” the driver began.

“Two forty,” said Edward briefly.

He opened the little purse, and found it crammed with bills--large bills, some of them--an extraordinary amount of cash. He was searching for change when the driver commenced.

Now Edward, as assistant credit manager, was not unaccustomed to remonstrances from persons who could not get what they wanted; nor was his nature a submissive or timid one. He felt quite able to withstand the driver’s attack; but women are not like that. Bluster impresses them, and this woman was impressed.

“Oh, please!” she cried. “Give him the five dollars! Give him anything! Only do get rid of him!”

After all, it was her money. Edward gave the driver a five-dollar bill, with a low and forcible remark. The engine started up, and off went the taxi. It seemed extraordinarily quiet after it had gone.

“Drunk,” observed Edward.

“I know!” said the woman. “He was perfectly awful!”

She was going to cry, if she had not already begun; and he wanted no more of _that_.

“Now, then!” he said, in a loud, cheerful voice. “Shall I get you another taxi?”

“Please!” said she.

She was crying now--no doubt about it. What was worse, she took his arm and clung to it.

“If you’ll wait here for a few minutes--” suggested Edward.

“Oh, I can’t!” she cried. “Oh, please don’t go away and leave me all alone!”

He saw himself that it wouldn’t do to leave her standing here in the street while he walked half a mile to the station for a taxi.

“I’ll go into the Baxters’ and telephone for one,” he thought.

But Mrs. Baxter was a particular friend of Mildred’s. She would bother him. She would ask questions. She would want to know what he was doing, wandering about at ten o’clock at night. She would suspect that there had been a quarrel.