The Greater Inclination

THE GREATER INCLINATION

Oberville. I lost my head a little – I forgot how long it is since we have met. When I saw you I forgot everything except what you had once been to me. (She is silent.) I thought you too generous to resent that. Perhaps I have overtaxed your generosity. (A pause.) Shall I confess it? When I first saw you I thought for a moment that you had remembered – as I had. You see I can only excuse myself by saying something inexcusable.

Isabel (deliberately). Not inexcusable. Oberville. Not – ?

Isabel. I had remembered.

Oberville. Isabel!

Isabel. But now –

Oberville. Ah, give me a moment before you unsay it! Isabel. I don’t mean to unsay it. There’s no use in repealing

an obsolete law. That’s the pity of it! You say you lost me ten years ago. (A pause.) I never lost you till now.

Oberville. Now?

Isabel. Only this morning you were my supreme court of justice; there was no appeal from your verdict. Not an hour ago you decided a case for me – against myself! And now – . And the worst of it is that it’s not because you’ve changed. How do I know if you’ve changed? You haven’t said a hundred words to me. You haven’t been an hour in the room. And the years must have enriched you – I daresay you’ve doubled your capital. You’ve been in the thick of life, and the metal you’re made of brightens with use. Success on some men looks like a borrowed coat; it sits on you as though it had been made to order. I see all this; I know it; but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything...

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anywhere... I’m numb. (A pause.) Don’t laugh, but I really don’t think I should know now if you came into the room – unless I actually saw you. (They are both silent.)

Oberville (at length). Then, to put the most merciful interpretation upon your epigrams, your feeling for me was made out of poorer stuff than mine for you.

Isabel. Perhaps it has had harder wear. Oberville. Or been less cared for?

Isabel. If one has only one cloak one must wear it in all weathers.

Oberville. Unless it is so beautiful and precious that one prefers to go cold and keep it under lock and key.

Isabel. In the cedar-chest of indifference – the key of which is usually lost.

Oberville. Ah, Isabel, you’re too pat! How much I preferred your hesitations.

Isabel. My hesitations? That reminds me how much your coming has simplified things. I feel as if I’d had an auction sale of fallacies.

Oberville. You speak in enigmas, and I have a notion that your riddles are the reverse of the sphinx’s – more dangerous to guess than to give up. And yet I used to find your thoughts such good reading.

Isabel. One cares so little for the style in which one’s praises are written.

Oberville. You’ve been praising me for the last ten minutes and I find your style detestable. I would rather have you find fault with me like a friend than approve me like a dilettante.

Isabel. A dilettante! The very word I wanted!

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Oberville. I am proud to have enriched so full a vocabulary. But I am still waiting for the word I want. (He grows serious.) Isabel, look in your heart – give me the first word you find there. You’ve no idea how much a beggar can buy with a penny!

Isabel. It’s empty, my poor friend, it’s empty. Oberville. Beggars never say that to each other. Isabel. No; never, unless it’s true.

Oberville (after another silence). Why do you look at me so curiously?

Isabel. I’m – what was it you said? Approving you as a dilettante. Don’t be alarmed; you can bear examination; I don’t see a crack anywhere. After all, it’s a satisfaction to find that one’s idol makes a handsome bibelot.

Oberville (with an attempt at lightness). I was right then – you’re a collector?

Isabel (modestly). One must make a beginning. I think I shall begin with you. (She smiles at him.) Positively, I must have you on my mantel-shelf! (She rises and looks at the clock.) But it’s time to dress for dinner. (She holds out her hand to him and he kisses it. They look at each other, and it is clear that he does not quite understand, but is watching eagerly for his cue.)

Warland (coming in). Hullo, Isabel – you’re here after all?

Isabel. And so is Mr. Oberville. (She looks straight at Warland.) I stayed in on purpose to meet him. My husband – (The two men bow.)

Warland (effusively). So glad to meet you. My wife talks of you so often. She’s been looking forward tremendously to your visit.

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A CUP OF COLD WATER

It was three o’clock in the morning, and the cotillion was at its height, when Woburn left the over-heated splendor of the Gildermere ballroom, and after a delay caused by the determination of the drowsy footman to give him a readymade overcoat with an imitation astrachan collar in place of his own unimpeachable Poole garment, found himself breasting the icy solitude of the Fifth Avenue. He was still smiling, as he emerged from the awning, at his insistence in claiming his own overcoat: it illustrated, humorously enough, the invincible force of habit. As he faced the wind, however, he discerned a providence in his persistency, for his coat was fur-lined, and he had a cold voyage before him on the morrow.

It had rained hard during the earlier part of the night, and the carriages waiting in triple line before the Gildermeres’ door were still domed by shining umbrellas, while the electric lamps extending down the avenue blinked Narcissus-like at their watery images in the hollows of the sidewalk. A dry blast had come out of the north, with pledge of frost before daylight, and to Woburn’s shivering fancy the pools in the pavement seemed already stiffening into ice. He turned up his coat-col- lar and stepped out rapidly, his hands deep in his coat-pockets.

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As he walked he glanced curiously up at the ladder-like door-steps which may well suggest to the future archaeologist that all the streets of New York were once canals; at the spectral tracery of the trees about St. Luke’s, the fretted mass of the Cathedral, and the mean vista of the long side-streets. The knowledge that he was perhaps looking at it all for the last time caused every detail to start out like a challenge to memory, and lit the brown-stone house-fronts with the glamor of sword-barred Edens.

It was an odd impulse that had led him that night to the Gildermere ball; but the same change in his condition which made him stare wonderingly at the houses in the Fifth Avenue gave the thrill of an exploit to the tame business of ball-going. Who would have imagined, Woburn mused, that such a situation as his would possess the priceless quality of sharpening the blunt edge of habit?

It was certainly curious to reflect, as he leaned against the doorway of Mrs. Gildermere’s ball-room, enveloped in the warm atmosphere of the accustomed, that twenty-four hours later the people brushing by him with looks of friendly recognition would start at the thought of having seen him and slur over the recollection of having taken his hand!

And the girl he had gone there to see: what would she think of him? He knew well enough that her trenchant classifications of life admitted no overlapping of good and evil, made no allowance for that incalculable interplay of motives that justifies the subtlest casuistry of compassion. Miss Talcott was too young to distinguish the intermediate tints of the moral spectrum; and her judgments were further simpli-

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fied by a peculiar concreteness of mind. Her bringing-up had fostered this tendency and she was surrounded by people who focussed life in the same way. To the girls in Miss Talcott’s set, the attentions of a clever man who had to work for his living had the zest of a forbidden pleasure; but to marry such a man would be as unpardonable as to have one’s carriage seen at the door of a cheap dress-maker. Poverty might make a man fascinating; but a settled income was the best evidence of stability of character. If there were anything in heredity, how could a nice girl trust a man whose parents had been careless enough to leave him unprovided for?

Neither Miss Talcott nor any of her friends could be charged with formulating these views; but they were implicit in the slope of every white shoulder and in the ripple of every yard of imported tulle dappling the foreground of Mrs. Gildermere’s ball-room. The advantages of line and colour in veiling the crudities of a creed are obvious to emotional minds; and besides, Woburn was conscious that it was to the cheerful materialism of their parents that the young girls he admired owed that fine distinction of outline in which their skilfully-rippled hair and skilfully-hung draperies coöperated with the slimness and erectness that came of participating in the most expensive sports, eating the most expensive food and breathing the most expensive air. Since the process which had produced them was so costly, how could they help being costly themselves? Woburn was too logical to expect to give no more for a piece of old Sèvres than for a bit of kitchen crockery; he had no faith in wonderful bargains, and believed that one got in life just what one was willing to pay for. He had

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no mind to dispute the taste of those who preferred the rustic simplicity of the earthen crock; but his own fancy inclined to the piece of pâte tendre which must be kept in a glass case and handled as delicately as a flower.

It was not merely by the external grace of these drawingroom ornaments that Woburn’s sensibilities were charmed. His imagination was touched by the curious exoticism of view resulting from such conditions; He had always enjoyed listening to Miss Talcott even more than looking at her. Her ideas had the brilliant bloom and audacious irrelevance of those tropical orchids which strike root in air. Miss Talcott’s opinions had no connection with the actual; her very materialism had the grace of artificiality. Woburn had been enchanted once by seeing her helpless before a smoking lamp: she had been obliged to ring for a servant because she did not know how to put it out.

Her supreme charm was the simplicity that comes of taking it for granted that people are born with carriages and country-places: it never occurred to her that such congenital attributes could be matter for self-consciousness, and she had none of the nouveau riche prudery which classes poverty with the nude in art and is not sure how to behave in the presence of either.

The conditions of Woburn’s own life had made him peculiarly susceptible to those forms of elegance which are the flower of ease. His father had lost a comfortable property through sheer inability to go over his agent’s accounts; and this disaster, coming at the outset of Woburn’s school-days, had given a new bent to the family temperament. The fa-

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ther characteristically died when the effort of living might have made it possible to retrieve his fortunes; and Woburn’s mother and sister, embittered by this final evasion, settled down to a vindictive war with circumstances. They were the kind of women who think that it lightens the burden of life to throw over the amenities, as a reduced housekeeper puts away her knick-knacks to make the dusting easier. They fought mean conditions meanly; but Woburn, in his resentment of their attitude, did not allow for the suffering which had brought it about: his own tendency was to overcome difficulties by conciliation rather than by conflict. Such surroundings threw into vivid relief the charming figure of Miss Talcott. Woburn instinctively associated poverty with bad food, ugly furniture, complaints and recriminations: it was natural that he should be drawn toward the luminous atmosphere where life was a series of peaceful and good-humored acts, unimpeded by petty obstacles. To spend one’s time in such society gave one the illusion of unlimited credit; and also, unhappily, created the need for it.

It was here in fact that Woburn’s difficulties began. To marry Miss Talcott it was necessary to be a rich man: even to dine out in her set involved certain minor extravagances. Woburn had determined to marry her sooner or later; and in the meanwhile to be with her as much as possible.

As he stood leaning in the doorway of the Gildermere ball-room, watching her pass him in the waltz, he tried to remember how it had begun. First there had been the tailor’s bill; the fur-lined overcoat with cuffs and collar of Alaska sable had alone cost more than he had spent on his clothes

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for two or three years previously. Then there were theatretickets; cab-fares; florist’s bills; tips to servants at the countryhouses where he went because he knew that she was invited; the Omar Khayyám bound by Sullivan that he sent her at Christmas; the contributions to her pet charities; the reckless purchases at fairs where she had a stall. His whole way of life had imperceptibly changed and his year’s salary was gone before the second quarter was due.

He had invested the few thousand dollars which had been his portion of his father’s shrunken estate: when his debts began to pile up, he took a flyer in stocks and after a few months of varying luck his little patrimony disappeared. Meanwhile his courtship was proceeding at an inverse ratio to his financial ventures. Miss Talcott was growing tender and he began to feel that the game was in his hands. The nearness of the goal exasperated him. She was not the girl to wait and he knew that it must be now or never. A friend lent him five thousand dollars on his personal note and he bought railway stocks on margin. They went up and he held them for a higher rise: they fluctuated, dragged, dropped below the level at which he had bought, and slowly continued their uninterrupted descent. His broker called for more margin; he could not respond and was sold out.

What followed came about quite naturally. For several years he had been cashier in a well-known banking-house. When the note he had given his friend became due it was obviously necessary to pay it and he used the firm’s money for the purpose. To repay the money thus taken, he increased his debt to his employers and bought more stocks; and on

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