ERIS went home early in August.
One fine afternoon, a week later, lonely as a dog that has lost its master, and, like a lost dog, finding all things perplexing in the absence of the Beloved, Annan, wandering along, chanced to pass one of the great Broadway picture-theatres; and noticed Betsy Blythe and Rosalind Shore standing in the lobby.
They always welcomed him with affection. They did so now. Betsy fairly bubbled energy, radiant in the warm sun-rays of success, impatient for further triumphs, excited, gossipy, cordial, voluble.
“I told Albert Smull I wouldn’t renew my contract unless Frank Donnell went with it,” she said. “And I’ve nailed Frank for five more years, Barry,—and my camera-man, too. That is the only way to handle people—tell them exactly where they get off. And off they’ll get every time!”
“I’d like,” remarked Rosalind lazily, “to see anybody handle Mom that way.”
“What are you going to do next season?” inquired Annan without much curiosity.
“Sing a little song in a punk little play, for that’s where I belong and that’s my little lay.”
“She’s got a sure fire comedy,” added Betsy, “and she’s the whole show. She wears practically nothing, by the way. But it’s horribly expensive.”
“Where does it get me?” drawled Rosalind. “I’m fed up. I don’t want to work.”
“What do you want to do?” inquired Annan, amused.
“You’d be surprised.... I’d like to get married and quit.”
“Betsy knows. I’ll tell you, too, ducky. I’d like to marry Mike.”
“Who?” he demanded, astonished.
“Mike Coltfoot, ducky. He makes a living. And I make Mom’s. There’s the hitch. Mom would have my life. And Mike would draw a corpse.”
Annan took her by both hands: “Bless your nice little heart,” he said, “I never dreamed that you and Mike cared for each other.”
“I don’t know how he feels; I only know how he says he feels,” she said cynically. “But, oh God, the fireworks if Mom gets next! Do you wonder I’m fed up with work?”
Betsy said: “I tell her that if she feels that way about her profession she’d better walk out on her mother and marry Mike. I follow what I love. Every person ought to.... By the way, what has become of Eris, Barry?”
“She has gone home for a rest,” he said carelessly.
“Where? Back to the pigs and cows?”
He reddened. “She’s gone to her home at Whitewater Farms.”
After he had departed, Betsy looked at Rosalind; her rosy mouth made a small oval.
“What did I do to him?” she asked.
“He’s spiked,” nodded the latter. “I’m spiked myself, but if ever you see me as solemn about it as Barry is, why, kick my shins, dear, and accept gratitude in advance.”
Then she turned to shake hands with Coltfoot, who came sauntering up, hat in hand.
“Hello, old top,” she said. “You’re half an hour late, but I’d wait a lifetime for anybody who resembles you. Come on in and see Betsy cut up on the scr-r-r-een!”
Since the departure of Eris, Annan’s appetite had become an increasing source of worry to Mrs. Sniffen.
That evening he left most of his dinner untouched. When he had been writing all day he often did that. But he had done no writing for days.
To Mrs. Sniffen’s fears and remonstrances he turned a deaf ear, denying that he was not perfectly well.
“When does the last mail arrive?” he asked. He asked her this every evening, now, and she always instructed him, but he seemed to forget.
He went upstairs to his study, dropped onto the lounge, lighted a pipe. What else was he to do—with the main-spring broken.
He didn’t want to work. He didn’t intend to do any more writing, anyway, without the close coöperation of Eris. Something, evidently, was the matter with his work and he was certain that she was capable of telling him what it was. He knew that he was going to take a new view of things in general, but he wanted her to point it out. He wanted to start right; and be kept on the track for a while until accustomed.
That, insensibly, he had become dependent upon the mind of another person, did not occur to him. At least not definitely.
He realised that the world meant Eris, and that without Eris he had no other interest in the world, now.
And, to this man who never before had evinced any interest in the world except as it concerned himself, it did not seem odd that every vital principle in him now surged around and enveloped this girl. The girl he had found asleep in a public park.
Wherever he went, whatever he was doing, his mind was on her. Not selfishly; although a deep instinct was always telling him that whatever real work he ever was to do would come through her.
Nor did he seem to think it odd that his personal ambition now remained in abeyance. Fluency, too, seemed to have departed: nimble mind and facile pen, the careless arrogance of youth and power, the almost effortless ability, flippant juggling with phrase and word, and the gay contempt for the emotion with which his audience responded when he tossed up the letters of the alphabet and let them fall into words—all these seem to have died.
Without analysing it he was feeling already the tension of a new gravity in his character. It came, perhaps, from the constant presence of an unknown god—the one that always seemed to be waiting at the elbow of Eris—waiting to be recognized before speaking. The god with a thousand faces whose name is Truth.
He appeared to be on friendly terms with Eris. But Annan had not yet become familiar with his faces.