Phases of an Inferior Planet

"I should have first to learn the lesson myself," he answered.

"Would you, if you could?" asked Mariana.

For an instant he looked at her thoughtfully. "Teach you what?" he questioned. "Teach you to endure instead of to enjoy? To know instead of to believe? To play with skulls and cross-bones instead of with flowers and sunshine? No, I think not."

Mariana grew radiant. She felt a desire to force from him a reluctant confession of liking. "Why wouldn't you?" she demanded.

"Well, on the whole, I think your present point of view better suited to you. And everything, after all, is in the point of view." He leaned against the railing, looking down into the street. "Look over and tell me what you see. Is it not the color of those purple egg-plants in the grocer's stall? the pretty girl in that big hat, standing upon the corner? the roguish faces of those ragamuffins at play? Well, I see these, but I see also the drooping figure of the woman beside the stall; the consumptive girl with the heavy bundle, going from her work; the panting horses that draw the surface cars."

They both gazed silently from the balcony. Then Mariana turned away. "It is the hour for my music," she said. "I must go."

The sunlight caught the nimbus around her head and brightened it with veins of gold.

"All joy goes with you," he answered, lightly. "And I shall return to work."

"All frivolity, you mean," laughed Mariana, and she left him with a nod.

CHAPTER IX

According to the theory that vices are but virtues run to seed, moderation was the dominant characteristic of Anthony Algarcife. At the time of his meeting with Mariana, his natural tendencies, whatever they may have been, were atrophied in the barren soil of long self-repression. It is only when one is freed from the prejudices engendered by the play of the affections that one's horizon is unbroken by a vision of the objects in the foreground, and the forest is no longer lost in consideration of the trees.

And it was under the spell of this moderation that Mariana had fallen. Her own virtues were of that particular quality of which the species is by no means immutable, and of which the crossing often produces an opposite variety, since a union of negative virtues has not infrequently begotten a positive vice. But Mariana's character, of which at that time even the verdict of society had not deprived her, possessed a jewel in its inconsistency. Her very faults were rendered generous by their vivacity, and redeemed her from inflexibility, that most unforgivable trait in womanhood, which, after all, is merely firmness crystallized. And as the lack of formativeness in Mariana left her responsive to the influences beneath which she came, so the anger of yesterday was tempered into the tenderness of to-day, and her nature modified by the changes rung upon her moods.

So far, the influence of Anthony had worked for good. The girl was startled at the wave of gentleness which pervaded her. With a sudden fervor she strained towards an indistinct ideal of goodness, an ideal borrowed in its sanctity from a superficial study of Thomas à Kempis, and in its unreality from the faded recollection of certain Sunday-school literature read in her childhood. She aspired to be good almost as much as she had once aspired to be famous, and set about it with quite as unprincipled an abandon. But her ambition for holiness was ill-timed. An excess of virtue is often as disastrous a form of dissipation as an excess of vice, and the wreck of one's neighbor's peace of mind no less to be deplored than the wreck of one's own physique. For a fool may jog shoulder to shoulder with a comfortable sinner, but it takes a philosopher to support the presence of an unmitigated saint.

So it was as well that Mariana's aspirations were short-lived. She confessed them to Anthony, and they were overruled.

"My dear girl," he said, "stop fasting, and don't wear away your knees at prayer. All the breath in your body isn't going to affect the decision of Omniscience. The only duty you owe to the universe is to scatter as much pleasure in life as you can. Eat good red beef and ward off anæmia, and give the time you have wasted in devotions to exercise and fresh air. If we are all doomed to hell, you can't turn the earth out of its track by bodily maceration. Evil plus evil doesn't equal good."

Mariana ceased praying and went out to walk. She was conscious of strange quickenings of sympathy. She loved the world and the people that passed her and the children laughing in the gutter. She bought a pot of primroses from the flower-stall at the corner, and, having spent a week's car-fare, walked a couple of miles in the sun to carry them to a rheumatic old lady who had once been kind to her. With patient good-humor she sat an hour in the sick-room, and, when she left, the rheumatic old lady kissed and blessed her.

The praise stirred her pulses with pleasure. She wondered if she might not become a Sister of Charity and spend her life in ministering to others, and when a ragged boot-black in the street begged for a dime she gave him the money she had saved for a pair of gloves, and glorified the sacrifice by the smile of a Saint Elizabeth. She felt that she would like to give some one the coat from her back, and, as she passed in and out of the crowd around her, her heart stirred in imaginative sympathy for humanity. That vital recognition of the fellowship of man which is as transient as it is inspiring, uplifted her. She wished that some one from the crowd would single her out, saying, "I am wretched, comfort me!" or, "I am starving, feed me!"

But no one did so. They looked at her with indifferent eyes, and her impulses recoiled upon themselves. At that moment she felt capable of complete self-abnegation in the cause of mankind, and even commonplace goodness possessed an attraction. But she realized that the desire to sacrifice is short-lived, and that, after all, it is easier to lay down one's life for the human race than to endure the idiosyncrasies of its atoms.

To us who adopt the proprieties as a profession and wear respectability for a mantle, unauthorized impulses in any form are to be contemned, and Mariana, flushed with generous desires, was as unacceptable as Mariana submerged in self.

After paying a couple of calls the girl's spirit of altruism evaporated. It was warm and close, and the sun made her head ache, while the fatigue from the unusual exercise produced a fit of ill-humor. She wondered why she had left her room, and then looked at her soiled gloves and regretted her encounter with the boot-black. The recollection of the pot of primroses and the week's car-fare caused her even more annoyance.

A block from The Gotham she ran upon Jerome Ardly, and her irritation vanished.

"Hello!" he ejaculated, "you are as white as a sheet. Too much September sun. Had luncheon?"

"Yes," responded Mariana; and she added, plaintively, "I am so tired. I have walked myself to death – and all for nothing."

"Form of monomania?" he inquired, sympathetically. "Nothing short of arrant idiocy would take any one out for nothing on a day like this."

Mariana looked at him and laughed. "I have been paying calls," she said. "I went to see Mrs. Simpson and she told me all about the rights of women. It was very instructive."

"If they resemble the rights of man," remarked Ardly, "they are not to be seen, heard, or felt."

"Ah, but it is all the fault of men," responded Mariana; "she told me so. She said that men were the only things that kept us back."

Ardly laughed.

"And you?" he inquired.

"I! Oh, I agreed with her! I told her that if men hindered us we would stamp them out."

"The devil you did!" retorted Ardly. "I know of no one better fitted for the job. You will begin on your fellow-lodgers, I suppose. As if you had not been treading on our hearts for the last year!"

Mariana lowered her parasol and entered The Gotham. As she mounted the stairs she turned towards him. The time had been when the presence of Jerome Ardly had caused a flutter among the tremulous strings of her heart, but that had been before Anthony crossed her horizon. And yet coquetry was not extinguished. "Our?" she emphasized, smiling.

Ardly grasped at the hand which lay upon the railing, but Mariana eluded him.

"Why, all of us," he returned, with unabashed good-nature – "poor devils that we are! Myself, Nevins, Mr. Paul, to say nothing of Algarcife."

Mariana's color rose swiftly. "Oh, nonsense!" she laughed, and sped upward.

Upon the landing Mr. Nevins opened the door of his studio and greeted them.

"I say, Miss Musin, won't you come and have a look at 'Andromeda'?"

Mariana entered the studio, and Ardly followed her. In the centre of the room a tea-table was spread, and Miss Freighley, a smear of yellow ochre on the sleeve where she had accidentally wiped her brush, was engaged in brewing the beverage. Upon the hearth-rug Juliet Hill was standing, her tall, undeveloped figure and vivid hair relieved against a dull-brown hanging, and around the "Andromeda" a group of youthful artists were gathered.

"How delightful!" exclaimed Mariana, genially. She kissed Miss Freighley, and pressed the extended hands of the others with demonstrative cordiality.

"Oh, if I could only paint!" she said to Miss Freighley, in affectionate undertones. "If I could only go about with a box of brushes, without feeling silly, and wear a smudge of paint upon my sleeve without being dishonest." And she wiped Miss Freighley's sleeve upon her handkerchief.

"Thanks," responded that young lady, amiably; "but you can carry a music-roll, you know, which is much handier and a good deal tidier."

Mariana had turned to the "Andromeda." "Oh, Mr. Ponsonby!" she remarked, to one of the group surrounding it, "don't you uphold me in thinking the shadows upon the throat too heavy?"

Mr. Ponsonby protested that he would uphold her in any statement she might choose to make, so long as he was not expected to agree with her. Mariana appealed to Mr. Nevins, who declared that he would agree with her in any matter whatsoever, so long as he was not expected to change his "Andromeda."

Mariana frowned. "Mr. Ardly thinks as I do – now don't you?"

Ardly sauntered over to them.

"Why, of course," he assented. "That shadow was put on with a pitchfork. I am positively surprised at you, Nevins."

"On your conscience?" demanded Mariana.

"Haven't any," protested Ardly, indolently. "Left it in Boston. It is indigenous to the soil, and won't bear transplanting."

"Miss Ramsey brought hers with her," replied Mariana, with a smile. "It worries her dreadfully. It is just like a ball on the leg of a convict. She has to drag it wherever she goes, and it makes her awfully tired sometimes."

"A good Bohemian conscience is the only variety worth possessing," observed Mr. Nevins. "It changes color with every change of scene and revolves upon an axis. Hurrah for Bohemia!"

"Hear! hear!" cried Mariana, gayly. She lifted a glass of sherry, and, lighting a cigarette, sprang upon the music-stool. Mr. Ponsonby drew up a chair and seated himself at the piano, and, blowing a cloud of smoke about her head, Mariana sang a rollicking song of the street.

As she finished, the door opened and Algarcife stood upon the threshold. For a moment he gazed at the scene – at Mariana poised upon the music-stool with upraised arms, her hat hanging by an elastic from her shoulder, her head circled by wreaths of cigarette smoke, her eyes reckless. His look was expressive of absolute amazement. Innocent as the scene was in reality, to him it seemed an orgy of abandon, and there was not a man in the room who would not have understood Mariana at that moment better than he did.

"I beg your pardon, Nevins," he said, abruptly. "No, I won't come in." And the door closed.

But Mariana had seen his face, and, with a flutter of impulse and a precipitate rush, she was after him.

"Mr. Algarcife!" Her voice broke.

He turned and faced her.

"What is it?"

"You – you looked so shocked!" she cried.

She stood before him, breathless and warm, the smoking cigarette still in her hand.

"Throw that away!" he said.

She took a step forward, struggling like a netted bird beneath the spell of his power.

"How absurd!" she said, softly. The cigarette dropped from her fingers to the floor.

He laughed. His eyes burned steadily upon her. Before his gaze her lashes wavered and fell, but not until she had seen the flashing of latent impulse in his face.

"But you dropped it," he said.

"Yes."

"Why did you?"

Mariana made a desperate effort at her old fearlessness. It failed her. Her eyes were upon the floor, but she felt his gaze piercing her fallen lids. She spoke hurriedly.

"Because – because I did," she answered.

He came a step nearer. She felt that the passion in his glance was straining at the leash of self-control. She did not know that desire was insurgent against the dominion of will, and was waging a combat with fire and sword.

She put up her hands.

"You are my friend," she said. Her tones faltered. The haze of idealism with which he had surrounded her was suffused with a roseate glow. He caught her hands. His face had grown dark and set, and the lines upon his forehead seemed ineffaceable.

Mariana was conscious of a sudden uplifting within her. It was as if her heart had broken into song. She stood motionless, her hands closing upon his detaining ones. Her face was vivid with animation, and there was a suggestion of frank surrender in her attitude. He caught his breath sharply. Then his accustomed composure fell upon him. His mouth relaxed its nervous tension, and the electric current which had burned his fingers was dissipated.

At the other end of the corridor a door opened and shut, and some one came whistling along the hall.

"It is Mr. Sellars," said Mariana, smiling. "I recognize his whistling two blocks away, because it is always out of tune. He thinks he is whistling 'Robin Hood,' but he is mistaken."

"Is he?" asked Anthony, abstractedly. His mind was less agile than Mariana's, and he found more difficulty in spanning the space between sentiment and comic opera.

Mr. Sellars greeted them cheerfully and passed on.

"I must go," said Mariana. "I promised to dine with Miss Ramsey."

There was an aggrieved note in her voice, but it had no connection with Anthony. With the passing of the enjoyment of emotion for the sake of the mental exaltation which accompanied it, the dramatic instinct reasserted itself. She even experienced a mild resentment against fate that the emotional altitude she had craved should have been revealed to her in the damp and unventilated corridor of The Gotham apartment-house. At a glance from Anthony the resentment would have vanished, and Mariana have been swept once more into a maze of romanticism. But he did not look at her, and the half-conscious demand for scenic effects was unsatisfied.

"Yes," said Anthony, "it is late." His voice sounded hushed and constrained, and, as he stood aside to allow her to pass, he looked beyond and not at the girl.

She turned from him and entered her room.

CHAPTER X

Mariana found Miss Ramsey lying at length upon the hearth-rug in her tiny sitting-room, her head resting upon an eider-down cushion.

At the girl's entrance she looked up nervously. "I can't rest," she said, with a plaintive intonation, "and I am so tired. But when I shut my eyes I see spread before me all the work I've got to do to-morrow."

She sat up, passing her hand restlessly across her forehead. In her appearance there might be detected an almost fierce renunciation of youth. Her gown was exaggerated in severity, and her colorless and uncurled hair was strained from her forehead and worn in a tight knot upon the crown of her head. The prettiness of her face was almost aggressive amid contrasting disfigurements.

Miss Ramsey belonged to that numerous army of women who fulfil life as they fulfil an appointment at the dentist's – with a desperate sense of duty and shaken nerves. And beside such commonplace tragedies all dramatic climaxes show purposeless. The saints of old, who were sanctified by fire and sword, might well shrink from the martyrdom sustained, smiling, by many who have endured the rack of daily despair. To be a martyr for an hour is so much less heroic than to be a man for a lifetime.

But in Miss Ramsey's worn little body, incased in its network of nerves, there was the passionless determination of her Puritan ancestors. Life had been thrust upon her, and she accepted it. In much the same spirit she would have accepted hell. Perhaps, in meeting the latter, a little cheerfulness might have been added to positive pain – since of all tragedies her present tragedy of unfulfilment was the most tragic of all.

Mariana knelt beside her and kissed her with quick sympathy.

"I can't rest," repeated the elder woman, fretfully. "I can't rest for thinking of the work I must do to-morrow."

"Don't think of it," remonstrated Mariana. "This isn't to-morrow, so there is no use thinking of it."

In Miss Ramsey's eyes there shone a flicker of girlishness which, had fate willed it, might have irradiated her whole face.

"I have been wondering," added Mariana, softly, "what you need, and I believe it is a canary. I will buy you a canary when my allowance comes."

For the girl had looked into her own heart and had read an unwritten law. She had seen sanctification through love, and she felt that a woman may owe her salvation to a canary.

"How could I care for it?" asked the other, a little wistfully. "I have no time. But it would be nice to own something."

Then they left the hearth-rug and ate dinner, and Mariana drove the overhanging cloud from Miss Ramsey's eyes. The desire to be first with all who surrounded her had prompted her to ingratiate herself in every heart that throbbed and ached within. The Gotham, from little, overworked Miss Ramsey to the smaller and more overworked maid who dusted her chamber.

After dinner, when Mariana returned to her room, she found a letter awaiting her. It was from her father, and, as was usual with his utterances, it was straight and to the mark.

"I have met with reverses," it stated, "and the family is growing large. In my present position I find it impossible to continue your allowance, and I think that, on the whole, your duty is at home. My wife has much care with the children, and you would be of service in educating them."

Mariana dropped the letter and sat motionless. In a flash she realized all that it meant. It meant returning to drudgery and hideous monotony. It meant returning to the house she hated and to the atmosphere that stifled her. It meant a colorless life of poverty and sordid self-denial. It meant relinquishing her art and Anthony.

With a rush of impulse she stepped out upon the fire-escape, the letter fluttering in her hand.

"Mr. Algarcife!" she called, softly.

As his figure darkened the lighted space between the window-sashes she went towards him. He faced her in surprise. "What is it?" he inquired, abruptly.

Mariana held out the letter, and then followed him as he re-entered his room.

"I cannot do it!" she said, passionately. "I cannot! I cannot!"

Without heeding her, Anthony unfolded the letter, read it and reread it with judicial composure; after which he folded it again, placed it in the envelope, and stood holding it in his right hand. The only visible effect it produced upon him was a nervous twitching of his thin lips.

"And what have you decided?" he asked, slowly.

Mariana interlaced her fingers impatiently. She looked small and white, and excitement caused her eyes to appear abnormally large. Her features quivered and her tone was tremulous.

"I will not go back," she protested. "I will not! Oh, I will not!"

"Is it so bad?" He still held the letter.

"Bad! It is worse than – than anything. If I had stayed there I should have gone mad. It was paralyzing me inch by inch. Oh, if you could only know what it is – a dusty, dirty little house, smelling of cabbage, a troop of screaming children, and quarrels all day long."

He met her outburst with a remonstrative gesture, but there was a mellow light in his eyes and his face had softened. As if resenting a voluntary restraint, he shook back a lock of hair that had fallen upon his forehead.

"But your father?"

Mariana looked at him as if he represented the bar of judgment and she were pleading her cause. She spoke with feverish conviction.

"Oh, he doesn't want me! If you only knew what a relief it was to him when I came away. Things were so much quieter. He likes his wife and I hate her, so we don't agree. There is never any peace when I am there – never."

"And the children?" His eyes met Mariana's, and again his lips twitched nervously. He held the check-rein of desire with a relentless hand, but the struggle told.

"They are horrid," responded Mariana, insistently. "They are all hers. If they had really belonged to me, I wouldn't have left them, but they didn't, not one. And I won't teach them. I'd rather teach the children of that shoemaker across the way. I'd rather scrub the streets."

Anthony smiled, and the tenderness in his eyes rained upon her. The fact that she had thrown herself upon his sympathy completed the charm she exercised over him.

Still he held himself in hand.

"You know of nothing that could call you back?" he asked.

"Nothing," answered Mariana. "I shouldn't like to starve, but I'd almost as soon starve as live on cabbage." Then she faced him tragically. "My father's wife is a very coarse woman. She has cabbage one day and onions the next."

The smile in Anthony's eyes deepened. "It would be impossible to select a more wholesome article of food than the latter," he observed.

But Mariana was unmoved.

"Before I left, it was horrible," she continued. "Whenever onions were served I would leave the table. My father's wife would get angry and that would make me angry."

"A congenial family."

"But when we get angry we quarrel. It is our nature to do so." She lifted her lashes. "And when we quarrel we talk a great deal, and some of us talk very loud. That is unpleasant, isn't it?"

"Very," Algarcife commented. "I find, by the way, that I am beginning to harbor a sympathy for your father's wife."

Mariana stared at him and shook her head.

"I wasn't nice to her," she admitted, "but she is such a loud woman. I am never nice to people I dislike – but I don't dislike many."

She smiled. Algarcife took a step forward, but checked himself. "We will talk it over – to-morrow," he said, and his voice sounded cold from constraint.

"I won't go back," protested Mariana. "I – I will marry Mr. Paul first."

He held out his hand, and it closed firmly over the one she gave him. "You will not do that, at all events," he said; "for Mr. Paul's sake, as well as your own."

Then he drew aside, and Mariana went back to her room.

Anthony recrossed the window-sill and paced slowly up and down the uncarpeted floor. His head was bent and his gaze preoccupied, but there was composure in his bearing. He had sent the girl away that he might think before acting. Not that he was not fully aware what the result of his meditation would be, but that for six years he had been in training to resist impulse, and the habit was strong. But there are things stronger than habit, and emotion is among them. In a man who has neither squandered feeling in excesses nor succumbed to the allurement of the senses, passion, when once aroused, is trebly puissant, and is apt to sweep all lesser desires as chaff before the whirlwind. In the love of such a man there is of necessity the freshness of adolescence and the tenacity of maturity. When one has not expended lightly the fulness of desire, the supply is constantly augmented, and its force will be in proportion to the force of the pressure by which it has been restrained. Algarcife, pacing to and fro between his book-lined walls, felt the current of his being straining towards emotion, and knew that the dominance of will was over. In the realization there existed a tinge of regret, and with the rationality which characterized his mental attitude he lamented that the pulseless sanity of his past was broken. And yet he loved Mariana – loved her with a love that would grow with his growth and strengthen with his weakness. He bowed his head, and his hands clinched, while the edge of his blood was sharpened. He beheld her eyes, curtains veiling formless purity – he felt the touch of her hands, the breath of her lips – he heard the rustle of her skirts – and the virginal femininity of her hovered like an atmosphere about him.