VII
AN INDEFINITE WOMAN WAS in all of Kelcey’s dreams.
As a matter of fact it was not he whom he pictured as wedding her.
It was a vision of himself greater, finer, more terrible. It was
himself as he expected to be. In scenes which he took mainly from
pictures, this vision conducted a courtship, strutting, posing, and
lying through a drama which was magnificent from glow of purple. In
it he was icy, self-possessed; but she, the dream-girl, was
consumed by wild, torrential passion. He went to the length of
having her display it before the people. He saw them wonder at his
tranquillity. It amazed them infinitely to see him remain cold
before the glory of this peerless woman’s love. She was to him as
beseeching for affection as a pet animal, but still he controlled
appearances and none knew of his deep abiding love. Some day, at
the critical romantic time, he was going to divulge it. In these
long dreams there were accessories of castle-like houses, wide
lands, servants, horses, clothes.
They began somewhere in his childhood. When he
ceased to see himself as a stern general pointing a sword at the
nervous and abashed horizon, he became this sublime king of a vague
woman’s heart. Later when he had read some books, it all achieved
clearer expression. He was told in them that there was a goddess in
the world whose business it was to wait until he should exchange a
glance with her. It became a creed, subtly powerful. It saved
discomfort for him and for several women who flitted by him. He
used her as a standard.
Often he saw the pathos of her long wait, but his
faith did not faker. The world was obliged to turn gold in time.
His life was to be fine and heroic, else he would not have been
born. He believed that the common-place lot was the sentence, the
doom of certain people who did not know how to feel. His blood was
a tender current of life. He thought that the usual should fall to
others whose nerves were of lead. Occasionally he wondered how fate
was going to begin in making an enormous figure of him; but he had
no doubt of the result. A chariot of pink clouds was coming for
him. His faith was his reason for existence. Meanwhile he could
dream of the indefinite woman and the fragrance of roses that came
from her hair.
One day he met Maggie Johnson on the stairs.4 She had
a pail of beer in one hand and a brown-paper parcel under her arm.
She glanced at him. He discovered that it would wither his heart to
see another man signally successful in the smiles of her. And the
glance that she gave him was so indifferent and so unresponsive to
the sudden vivid admiration in his own eyes that he immediately
concluded that she was magnificent in two ways.
As she came to the landing, the light from a window
passed in a silver gleam over the girlish roundness of her cheek.
It was a thing that he remembered.
He was silent for the most part at supper that
night. He was particularly unkind when he did speak. His mother,
observing him apprehensively, tried in vain to picture the new
terrible catastrophe. She eventually concluded that he did not like
the beef-stew. She put more salt in it.
He saw Maggie quite frequently after the meeting
upon the stairs. He reconstructed his dreams and placed her in the
full glory of that sun. The dream-woman, the goddess, pitched from
her pedestal, lay prostrate, unheeded, save when he brought her
forth to call her insipid and childish in the presence of his new
religion.
He was relatively happy sometimes when Maggie’s
mother would get drunk and make terrific uproars. He used then to
sit in the dark and make scenes in which he rescued the girl from
her hideous environment.
He laid clever plans by which he encountered her in
the halls, at the door, on the street. When he succeeded in meeting
her he was always overcome by the thought that the whole thing was
obvious to her. He could feel the shame of it burn his face and
neck. To prove to her that she was mistaken he would turn away his
head or regard her with a granite stare.
After a time he became impatient of the distance
between them. He saw looming princes who would aim to seize her.
Hours of his leisure and certain hours of his labor he spent in
contriving. The shade of this girl was with him continually. With
her he builded his grand dramas so that he trod in clouds, the
matters of his daily life obscured and softened by a mist.
He saw that he need only break down the slight
conventional barriers and she would soon discover his noble
character. Sometimes he could see it all in his mind. It was very
skilful. But then his courage flew away at the supreme moment.
Perhaps the whole affair was humorous to her. Perhaps she was
watching his mental contortions. She might laugh. He felt that he
would then die or kill her. He could not approach the dread moment.
He sank often from the threshold of knowledge. Directly after these
occasions, it was his habit to avoid her to prove that she was a
cipher to him.
He reflected that if he could only get a chance to
rescue her from something, the whole tragedy would speedily
unwind.
He met a young man in the halls one evening who
said to him: “Say, me frien’, where d’ d’ Johnson birds live in
heh? I can’t fin’ me feet in dis bloomin’ joint. I been battin’
round heh fer a half-hour.”
“Two flights up,” said Kelcey stonily. He had felt
a sudden quiver of his heart. The grandeur of the clothes, the fine
worldly air, the experience, the self-reliance, the courage that
shone in the countenance of this other young man made him suddenly
sink to the depths of woe. He stood listening in the hall, flushing
and ashamed of it, until he heard them coming down-stairs together.
He slunk away then. It would have been a horror to him if she had
discovered him there. She might have felt sorry for him.
They were going out to a show, perhaps. That pig of
the world in his embroidered cloak was going to dazzle her with
splendor. He mused upon how unrighteous it was for other men to
dazzle women with splendor.
As he appreciated his handicap he swore with
savage, vengeful bitterness. In his home his mother raised her
voice in a high key of monotonous irritability. “Hang up yer coat,
can’t yeh, George?” she cried at him. “I can’t go round after yeh
all th’ time. It’s jest as easy t’ hang it up as it is t’ throw it
down that way. Don’t yeh ever git tired ’a hearin’ me yell at
yeh!”
“Yes,” he exploded. In this word he put a
profundity of sudden anger. He turned toward his mother a face,
red, seamed, hard with hate and rage. They stared a moment in
silence. Then she turned and staggered toward her room. Her hip
struck violently against the corner of the table during this blind
passage. A moment later the door closed.
Kelcey sank down in a chair with his legs thrust
out straight and his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets. His chin
was forward upon his breast and his eyes stared before him. There
swept over him all the self-pity that comes when the soul is turned
back from a road.