BEFORE she could inherit this boy who had willed himself to her, Eris had to do everything for herself and she knew it.
For a day or two she abandoned herself utterly to Annan. Night alone separated them. Early morning saw them united.
The hot, sunny July days they spent in the surf at Long Beach, or in motoring through Westchester. Evenings they dined together on some cool roof, or by the sea, and returned to whisper happy intimacies together until long into the morning hours.
Every lovely self-revelation of this girl more utterly turned the boy’s head. Desire became absolute necessity. Necessity became dependence. He did not understand that. He supposed the dependence was hers—that, in the turbulent torrent of Life he was the rock to which she clung.
It was well that he thought that. It was well that she let him think so. It always is best for a man.
Once, during those heavenly days, he met Coltfoot walking with Rosalind Shore on Fifth Avenue.
“I thought Eris would break with Albert Smull,” drawled Rosalind. “What a sketch he is!—schmoozing about and telling everybody he had to let her go! Betsy’s got him buffaloed. He’s afraid of her parents; that’s all that holds Albert.... I get banged around a lot, but Mom’s a pretty good policewoman, and God help the Johnny with fancy intentions towards her little Rosie.” She looked at Coltfoot, standing beside her, with faintest malice.
Coltfoot’s sophisticated retort was a bored smile. But it was to Annan he spoke, asking him how his work was going.
“What do you care how my story is going?” said Annan, laughing. “You’re an enemy to realism, and that’s all I write.”
“Realism! You don’t know what it means,” said Coltfoot bluntly. “What you write isn’t realism. If you want realism, study your pretty friend Eris! She’s real. Everything about her is genuine. Study her story. That’s realism. Not as you once wrote it,” he added disgustedly, “but devoid of ugliness and tragedy and sob-stuff. She doesn’t whimper. She doesn’t know how to pose. The beau geste and the attitude mean nothing to her. Sob-stuff is wasted on her. Health never snivels. Do you get that, Barry? Health! That’s the key. And by the Eternal, it is the usual, not the unusual that is wholesome. The great majority are healthy. That’s realism. And when health is your keynote you have beauty, too. And that is Realism, my clever friend!”
“Am I real because I am beautiful, Mike?” drawled Rosalind, “or beautiful because I am real?”
So these three parted with the light jest of Rosalind floating between them in the sunshine.
But Annan went on, a trifle out of countenance, to keep a rendezvous with Eris at the Ritz.
At luncheon he said abruptly: “The stuff I do, Eris—you know I’d like your opinion—I mean while I’m doing it.... Or rather, I’d like to talk over the story with you, first, before I begin it.”
The girl looked up over her peach-ice. Her eyes were very clear and still.
“What I want,” he explained, “is a perfectly fresh eye—a fresh mind and a—a bystander’s point of view.... Not that I don’t most deeply respect you as an artist——”
“It would make me very happy,” she said, “to have your confidence in such things.”
“Well, I have a lot of confidence in your judgment. I’d like to consult you.... Perhaps—I don’t know—no man does know when his nose is too close to his work—but I’m rather afraid I’ve been getting away from things—facts—”
Her eyes grew tenderly humorous: “Whatever you get away from, Barry, you can’t ever get away from me. I’m the Nemesis called in to chasten you and clip those irresponsible wings.... I know a little about wings. I used to dream of them. Do you remember I once told you?”
“About your flight. And how you found the god of Wisdom seated all alone on the peak of Parnassus dissecting a human heart?”
“So you remember.”
“Yes; and I remember that little play you wrote in school—the story of the wish, the wings, and the new hat.”
She laughed, but there was the slightest shadow over the grey eyes. The shadow which renunciation casts, perhaps.
“I took a longer flight than to Olympus,” she said, “and it was you I discovered above the clouds;—all by yourself, Barry,—on a funny little world, spinning up there——”
“Was I busy dissecting somebody’s heart?”
“Mine—I guess.”
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing, sweetheart; you never shall regret marrying me. Never shall I by look or word or deed interfere with your career. If I do, chuck me!”
She smiled—that tender, intelligent smile which lately was one of her charming revelations that vaguely surprised him. For the gods were granting her a little time yet—a little respite for a career the limit of which already was visible to her.
He had told her, diffidently, that he was not obliged to live economically; that what he had was hers, also; that there always was sufficient to finance any arrangement she wished to make for her own productions.
But the girl who had returned a hundred dollars to him when she had only twenty more in all the world was no more capable of accepting such an offer than of requesting it.
Besides, no sooner had it been rumored that Eris Odell and Albert Smull no longer coöperated, than telegrams began to pour in from all sorts of people, responsible and irresponsible. Offers arrived from keen, clever, capable and ruthless producers, with releases guaranteed, and who wished to fetter her for years at the lowest figure; from enthusiastic people new in the game, with capital guaranteed but no release. Scores of communications came from various birds of prey who infest the fringes of the profession—the “don’t-do-anything-till-you-hear-from-me” boys; the noisy, persistent Gentile who lies for a living and whose only asset is the people he traps; the Jew, penniless and discredited, determined to make a commission out of anybody and undeterred by the dirt of the transaction.
All of these communications Eris laid before Frank Donnell.
Theirs was a close and sober friendship,—sombre even, at times—because Frank Donnell had been in love with her since her first awkward step in the Betsy Blythe company. The girl knew it; both knew, also, that the matter was hopeless.
And for Frank Donnell, Eris was conscious of a gravely tender affection she never had felt for anybody else in her brief life.
He had saved enough money to finance one picture for her; and he could have secured guarantees from the best of the releasing companies on his own name alone. But, again, it was one of those things that Eris could not do. It was desirable; it was legitimate business. But to use the resources of any man to whom she had given any intimate fragment of herself was not possible for Eris.
And, although Frank Donnell never had said one word of love to the girl; and she always had ignored a fact that from the beginning had been touchingly plain to her; there never could be any speculative combination between them. It was her way.
But, following his advice, an arrangement had been made possible for one year between her and a great producing company. And of this proposed contract she informed Annan.
Together they consulted Annan’s attorney, Judge Wilmer; and the first steps, in her suit for annulment of that unconsummated farce of marriage, were taken.
Eris had not thought of going away that summer, although her contract did not call her to report for duty until October.
But early in August she began to feel a desire to be alone for a while—a need for solitude,—leisure for self-examination.
Lately, too, she had thought much of her home. Not that she missed the people who inhabited it. There never had been any tie between her and her father.
But the girl cherished no resentment toward him. And toward Mazie all her instincts always had been friendly.
Often she had thought of Whitewater Farms, not regretting, not even missing the home where she had been born, unwelcomed.
Yet, in these last weeks, a desire to go home for a while had developed, and had slowly increased to a point where she coupled it with her increasing necessity for quiet and rest.
The girl was tired—saddened a little, perhaps. That is the aftermath of all effort, the reaction from all attainment, the shadow that dogs knowledge. And it is the white shadow cast by Happiness.
There were other things, too, which directed her thoughts unconsciously toward the only home she ever had known.
Eddie Carter had been annoying her again. She never spoke to Annan about it. But her husband was always writing to her, now. Every few days brought begging letters, maudlin appeals, veiled threats concerning Albert Smull’s supposed attentions to her,—maundering, wandering, incoherent epistles born of the drugs he used, perhaps.
And this was not all. Little Leopold Shill, Smull’s partner, wrote to her in behalf of Smull, begging her to pardon his unpardonable offences, expressing concern over Smull’s desperate state of mind, begging her to be generous and merciful to a man whose flagrant conduct had been due to love alone—to a mighty and overwhelming passion which bewildered him and made him really irresponsible.
To Leopold Shill’s two letters she made no reply. And Shill did not write again. But Smull did. He had been writing to her twice a day. She never replied. After the first letter she destroyed the others without opening them.
But the annoyance was telling on her.
Sometimes, from her window, she saw Smull’s limousine pass and repass her door, and the man’s red face at the window peering up at her house.
At times the car stood for hours on Greenwich Avenue, where its occupant commanded a view of Jane Street.
More than once, on the street, Smull had accosted her, even followed on behind her.
Lately, too, it became apparent to the girl that her husband also had been watching and spying on her, because he wrote a violent, crazy letter insisting that she warn Smull to keep his car out of her neighbourhood:
“—I’ve been keeping tabs on you,” he wrote. “Now, I’ll keep an eye on that”—unprintable epithets followed, nauseating Eris; and she burned the letter without reading the remainder.
One evening in early August Albert Smull, standing beside his car on Greenwich Avenue and waiting for Eris to leave her house, noticed a shabby individual apparently watching him from the opposite corner.
On a similar occasion, a day or two later, he noticed the same shabby man on the same corner, staring steadily across the street at him.
After a few recurrent glances, a vague idea came into Smull’s brain that the shabby man’s features were familiar to him.
Ordinary cowardice was not Smull’s kind. He walked leisurely across the street and came up to the shabby man and coolly scrutinised him.
“Well, by God,” he said calmly, “I thought I’d seen you before. I heard you were out of prison. What’s your graft now, Eddie?”
“Yours,” replied Carter.
Smull, puzzled, awaited further explanation. Carter, twitching all over, stood digging at the bleeding roots of his finger nails.
“Well,” inquired Smull with his close-eyed, sanguine smile, “what do you suppose is my graft, Eddie?”
“My wife.”
“Hey?”
“My wife, Eris Carter.”
Smull’s features turned a heavy crimson. After a silence:
“So that’s the situation,” he said heavily.
Carter ceased twitching. He said very distinctly: “When you and Shill sent me up the River, that’s what you did to me, too.... On the day I was married to her, that’s what you did to me. You made a crook out of me because you didn’t pay me living wages when I worked for you. Then you made a jail-bird out of me. Now, you’ve made me a bum.
“And that isn’t enough for you. You want to make a prostitute out of my wife.”
“Shut your filthy mouth,” said Smull coolly.
“I’ll stop your filthy mouth if you don’t keep away from my wife,” said Carter in a still, uncanny voice.
Smull laughed. “Beat it,” he said.
And, as Carter did not stir: “Get a move on, you dirty bum. Come on!... Or shall I have to hunt up a cop to give you the bum’s rush?”
Carter’s visage turned ghastly:
“All right; I’ll go.... But you’ll go farther yet if you don’t let my wife alone.”
He took one step toward Smull, hesitated, then, twitching all over, he turned and shuffled away down Greenwich Avenue, digging his thumbnails into his mangled fingers.