CHAPTER VIII

So it was, through the curious little twirl of circumstance which took Fliss, elated, and Cecily, reluctant, to the Palladium Hotel on the same night, that Matthew Allenby met Cecily. He saw her across the room at first. The Palladium was one of those public places to which people went to get rid of the ennui caused by their own circle of friends, but they were always careful to surround themselves with enough of their friends to put their attendance in the proper light. The fact that you were at the Palladium had no significance. The point was--with whom were you at the Palladium?

Fliss was delightfully conscious of the “rightness” of her companions. Matthew Allenby and the young Frederick Craigs were an effective trio and Fliss was radiant in the red georgette. Allenby watched her with enjoyment. He liked vivid things, alive things, and possibly it was to that fever for life in Fliss that her invitation to-night was due. She tried to teach him to dance, scolding him for his awkwardness in her impudent way and he seemed to like that too.

They were seating themselves after a dance when he followed Fliss’s gay little nod with his eyes and saw Cecily. She had not been dancing, but her head was lifted to smile at Dick and Mollie, coming back breathless.

“Who is that girl?” asked Matthew.

“What girl?”

“The one over there smiling at Dick Harrison.”

The Craigs and Fliss laughed together. “Why, that’s his wife!”

“Of course,” said Matthew. “I’d forgotten he was married. He did it up in haste and I was East all last spring. Her name was Moore, wasn’t it?”

“Good-looking, isn’t she?”

“Very.”

He looked again at Cecily. “Funny--I haven’t seen a girl who looked like that in a long while.”

“How do you mean?”

“Dick Harrison is a lucky wretch, as usual.”

“He’s been vamped,” said Fliss. “Come over and I’ll introduce you to her.” It was one of those openings which Fliss could never resist.

“Here’s a man who has been begging to meet you,” she said a moment later to Cecily. She might have said more, but she was not quite free with Cecily yet.

Cecily gave Matthew her hand and the shadow of the smile that she had given Dick. Then, as the music began and Fliss and Dick danced away, the Heathcotes followed suit.

“I’d ask you to dance,” apologized Matthew, “but I’m rotten at it.”

“I’m tired of it, anyway. I was just wondering if I was getting middle-aged.”

“Only in the first stages, I should judge.”

“Don’t laugh at me.”

“I assure you I won’t. I was looking at you from the other side of the room and thinking that it was strange that I didn’t want to laugh. Most girls do affect me that way. Do you mind if I ask you something? Are you an ardent anything?”

Cecily looked bewildered.

“I mean feminist, sociologist, politician--have you a heavy purpose?”

“Dick,” said Cecily definitely.

“There you are. I knew it. I hadn’t seen a girl look at a man in years as you looked at Dick. Men aren’t the heavy interests of women any more.”

“Nonsense. It seems to me girls aren’t interested in anything else.”

“You don’t understand me. I used the wrong word anyhow. Girls are interested enough in men, but not singly in a man. That’s what I mean. You don’t see that ’till death do us part’ look around on girls’ faces.”

“Are you just being silly?”

“Probably,” Matthew grinned, “but I expressed myself anyway. It did me good. I feel that I have made a real contribution to thought.”

Cecily looked at him. He was older than Dick, she thought, probably approaching forty, though his face might be older than his age warranted. It had lines set on a skin that was hardly ready for them. It might have been a discouraged face, or a sad face, but the eyes kept it from being that. They were too interested, too alert for sadness or despondency. She liked the smile in his gray eyes. She liked his strong, alert figure. It lacked Dick’s lean athleticism and he was heavy about the shoulders as a man near forty might be, but he had the appearance of power. “Have you been amusing Fliss Horton with contributions to thought?”

“No. I have merely stepped on her feet. But I like to look at her. She’s so immensely vigorous and vigor in frail things is always inspiring, isn’t it?”

“I wonder if that’s what I feel about her.”

“Maybe. Watch her now. Watch her amusing your husband. She’s working at it hard.”

“He is amused,” said Cecily. “I can tell by the way his eyes slant down at her. He likes her.”

“That must be,” said Matthew, reflectively, “just the way she was working on me the other night. I had the most insistent desire to be amused again, so I got up this party.”

“You’re hardly gracious.”

He was suddenly different. “I didn’t mean to be rude, Mrs. Harrison. I was only thinking aloud. You mustn’t think I don’t feel immensely obliged to Miss Horton--awfully grateful to her for being willing to put up with me for an evening.”

“Of course,” said Cecily, “I didn’t think you were rude.”

“Do you know that I used to be quite a friend of your husband?”

“Used to be? I remember writing your name on an invitation to our reception.”

“Only I was out of town and missed it. Don’t you think that, because I did miss it, I’m entitled to see more of you now, to make up for what I lost?”

Dick, coming back to the table again, bore him out. “I remember telling Cecily that I was going to bring you to see her when you got back to town. He’s a great fellow, Cecily. One of our leading politicians--one of these amateur European generals! Never lets it interfere with business though, do you, Matt?”

Fliss and Matthew wandered back to their own table and Matthew, devoting himself to Fliss, apparently forgot the sudden interest he had taken in Cecily. He gave all his attention to Fliss, took her home, flattered her, laughed with her--gave Fliss the tingle of a thoroughly successful evening. Then he wandered home and read a book on French politics until he was half asleep. The European political situation was absorbing him these days since the war had begun. His rooms were full of war stuff, both English and French; “Land and Water,” full of Hilaire Belloc’s guarded prophecies, dozens of pamphlets, maps.

It was characteristic of him that he could read French--not in translation, not with the help of a dictionary, but fluently, with enjoyment and understanding. He could read it because he had wanted to so much and he understood the technique of wanting things until they became realized desires. He had wanted knowledge, success and friends and he had these things now in spite of an education cut cruelly short when he was sixteen, in spite of lack of money and of having been born in the obscurity of a little village. Through poverty and opposition he had quietly pushed his way and established himself. Carrington did not question him. He had been a successful young man when he came there. He had come to look after mining interests near Carrington and smaller interests in the city. Now he was wealthy and useful to the city in a hundred ways. They wanted him in politics and he gave some of the time which he might have had for leisure to that. But he would not let political interests absorb him. He advised, did some speaking, lent his influence where it seemed fit and let it go at that.

He had apparently never yet needed women or he would have managed to get the one he wanted, if he had followed the simple processes of his philosophy. Or perhaps he found his companionship with women in the books he read. On his laden, well-used bookshelves there were so many stories, poems, thoughts of beautiful women and noble women. Little contemporary fiction--it was the library of a man who had guided himself through literature, full of books which were cross references to each other, books which showed how his mind, setting out to pursue some line of thought, had gone off at a tangent on some philosophical quest. He needed no order or cataloguing of all his books; he could always put his hand on the one he wanted.

The rooms in which he lived were on the second floor of an old house which had been turned into an apartment building. There was an old-fashioned alcove in his living-room, and the circular walls were lined with books except where a long window cut into the structure of shelves. The rest of the living-room was furnished with a taste and skill which hit just the right note of spaciousness without seeming bare--a few easy-chairs, a dark red Turkish rug and a black oak table. It was on this table that he ate his meals, prepared for him by the Swedish woman who cooked and cleaned for him. There was a bedroom which was furnished almost with ascetic plainness, and that was all except for the kitchen and the room occupied by the cook. It was not an elaborate establishment for as wealthy a man as Matthew Allenby, but he had lived there in complete satisfaction for five years.

A week after the encounter at the Palladium he called on the Harrisons and found them at home. They were pleasant enough in their welcome and before half an hour he had justified himself for breaking in on one of their deliberately domestic evenings. He knew how to be entertaining, how to talk business with Dick in such a way that Cecily was not excluded from the conversation, how to make the conversation broaden itself into interesting fields outside of the specific ones in which the talk might begin. Dick enjoyed himself hugely. He had always liked Matthew Allenby and had various plans for business deals with him. Matthew was some years older and had drifted into the companionship of older men than Dick.

They talked war for the most part, as people did in 1915--with abstract enthusiasm, impersonal analysis. Then Cecily played for them. She played well, without brilliance, but with an accuracy and feeling for melody that the convent was directly responsible for. It was less her playing than the fact of her playing, the picture she made at the piano, singing and playing softly in the light of the tall candles which framed her, that was charming. The men watched her silently from across the room.

“I don’t want in the least to go home,” said Matthew, as Cecily turned to them finally. “I could sit here for days and days sipping this very remarkable liqueur that your husband is offering up and watching a very perfect picture of what homes may be--and rarely are outside of the Victrola advertisements.”

“Haven’t you a home, Mr. Allenby?”

“Two of them. One is a little frame house in Indiana where my mother lives and where she insists she will always live. It is a very small house, atrociously furnished and heated by a Franklin stove and a coal range, but she likes it. That’s my home--maternal home, homestead--the place where I don’t have to knock or ring a bell, you know. The other home is on the second floor of the big green house at River Street and Fourth Avenue. It is a pleasant place, a very pleasant place, but it lacks life in a way. All bachelor places do. Bachelor places are safe, but they never quite touch the high spots. A bachelor never lives a very rich life and his home reflects that.”

“But you think bachelor places are safer?” asked Dick smiling.

“It’s always safer to be alone than to risk close companionship, isn’t it?”

“I know what you mean,” said Cecily. “I never could see why homes were considered dull places. People in relations to each other always seem wonderful to me. My mother’s home was always exciting to me. There were my mother with my two stepbrothers--who worship her just as I do--and mother and I and mother and father--all of us reacting on each other. Then when I began to keep my own home I found it even more interesting. I am completely responsible for everything that happens in the house; that’s quite a lot of excitement.”

“Of course you’re new at it,” said Dick. “In time habit may wear off the edge of looking after my meals and my comfort.”

“No, I will not let the edge wear off!”

“You won’t,” said Matthew. “Life will deepen for you.”

It was odd that, though Cecily was looking at her husband, Matthew was reassuring her. Dick laughed a little. He thought the conversation somewhat obscure and over-personal and poured Matthew another tiny glass of cordial.

“Well, I’ve nothing to say for bachelor living. Here’s to charming wives, Allenby, and may you find one soon. Cecily will help you.”

* * * * *

They met again within a week. Cecily was walking home from the convent one afternoon, where she sometimes stopped to see Mother Fénelon, and she met Matthew at his very doorstep. Cecily felt curiously well-acquainted with him and was glad when he asked to walk with her. She told him about the convent and how much she liked to stop there for a few minutes to feel again the atmosphere of the cloister.

“And then you go away with your appetite for home whetted?”

“Not because the convent is less attractive than a home in its own way, but they set each other off so stunningly.”

He laughed in great amusement.

“You have a way of making me most confidential,” said Cecily. They had reached the brick walk leading up to her house. “I’d ask you in, but it’s too near dinner time. Some day you must come to dinner with us.”

“Any day.” He went briskly down the street and Cecily forgot him. She was not feeling quite so gay as she had sounded or tried to sound. Strange things seemed to be happening to her. She had recently gone to her stepfather’s house and spent an afternoon in his library looking up important medical words and finding little information. She supposed the things that were happening meant that she was going to have a baby and she was frightened. So she could not tell Dick. She felt terribly ashamed of her own fears. They had talked about it and it had seemed very beautiful and fine in talking. Now when it had to be done--done by her, through her, with these strange processes diagrammed in encyclopedias--it was different. It was very different. It seemed to cut her off from Dick instead of bringing her closer--it absorbed her thoughts. And with the fears went this strange weakness and dizziness, so foreign to her. That was why she had gone to the convent. And there the little white chapel had seemed to ring with the words of the Jesuit priest in his last instruction, “the sacrament which has for its purpose the bringing up of children.” Cecily’s whole soul seemed to rebel. Marriage was not that. Marriage was Dick--Dick to play with, talk with--Dick to make a home for--Dick to love. This other business was not Dick. The chapel helped her not at all.

Mother Fénelon, meeting her as she had done before, had helped. She had stopped and kissed Cecily swiftly on each cheek and asked about Dick and her mother. Mother Fénelon had a way of reconciling the worldly and the divine. Then she looked at Cecily very steadily and asked, “Still afraid, Cecily?”

“A little, Mother.”

“That will pass, my dear. Experience will help you--and prayer to our Blessed Lady.”

That was all, but somehow Cecily felt that the nun understood the whole business and that she was right. She went out into the afternoon toned up a little.