Fulfillment

Part Third. Diana.. . 207 i

T HE papers on his desk were, or ought to have been, impressive in their finality, symbol of success after lean years. Yet Brent Appleton impatiently shoved them aside that September afternoon and turned to look through his high windows at the amazing panorama of lower Manhattan.

It was one of those rare days that native New Yorkers know and wait for, a day when their haphazard, prosaic city becomes trans¬ formed—a trick of atmosphere—from an in¬ choate mass of steel and stone into a splendor of lofty pinnacles and swinging spider webs seen against a sky of enchantment.

For assuredly Manhattan is a creature of baffling moods. One moment alluring, she sud¬ denly turns perverse; yesterday gay, to-morrow she becomes grim, menacing. It is in this last phase that she stabs the dreamers and the unsuccessful old with a realization of their plight as cruel as youth, that hard bright first youth still untouched by the leaven of pity or understanding.

To-day, however, this potential bully was as captivating as a whimsical girl. Her air was heady wine, her sunlight burnished splendor, and even her most hopeless buildings suggested merely the awkward promise of adolescence. The young lawyer found her sponging from his mind office details and legal intricacies. He saw sea and city glittering like some vast fabric sprinkled with diamond dust, and the sheer beauty of it caught him, lifted him out of him¬ self, and then reminded him, as beauty so often does, of loss and disillusion.

He turned back to the papers on his desk. Here, at least, was a record of achievement. Closed at last, the great case, involving millions of money and the combative intellects of many men, had brought Frost, Foley and Appleton recognition as one of the small group of law firms handling the really important business that passes through the New York Courts.

Yet Brent was less conscious of what he had accomplished than of what he personally lacked. In him was a fierce lust for beauty, adventure and delight, for the miracle youth forever seeks and maturity also covets, when it has missed that salient contentment Life brings to a fortunate few.

As he sat perversely idle his door opened and a thin elderly man entered, a man who might have been the physical expression of the legal spirit, so lean and dry and carefully negative was his whole personality. The click¬ ing of typewriters accompanied him until he closed the door. Then he crossed the room and sat down in a chair facing Brent. He was the Senior partner of the firm, Mr. Andrew Frost.

“ Miss Gail tells me that the papers are ready for my signature, Appleton,’’ he said crisply. “Yon see, I’m anxious to catch the early train, but I wanted to see you a moment first. ’ ’

He paused, slightly lifted his heavy gray brows and then smiled at the younger man, a surprisingly human smile.

“Foley and I have been talking about you in my office. You have carried this load with very little help from the rest of us, and you you have done exceptionally able work. My congratulations, Brent. And we are grateful.”

Brent found himself flushing at this rare praise. He had been associated with the firm for seven years and never before had Frost expressed any such personal appreciation.

“I’ve done what was up to me to do, no more,” he said briefly, but Andrew Frost smiled again, that tight little smile of his which yet was kind, and then signed his name, legibly, as attorneys rarely write.

“If only a few more of us did as much—” he said in his dry, fastidious voice. “But Foley thinks you’re seedy, run down. Why don’t you take a few weeks off, any time be¬ tween now and Christmas?”

“How about the Cheyne case!” said Brent.

Mr. Frost had pulled out his watch and was calculating how much time he had to catch his train. “The Cheyne case—ah, yes—I had for¬ gotten. But perhaps a little later—”

His tone was apologetic; it was Brent’s turn to smile. ^ .

“Luckily holidays bore me, Mr. Frost. I’ll get one some time, when I need it.”

They nodded amicably and Frost departed. In a mood of fresh irritation Brent asked him¬ self why he couldn’t be like Frost, content with a definite routine and two paramount interests —a successful law office and an excellent golfcourse ! Unmarried, and over sixty, the senior partner should have been the dejected old bachelor of female fiction; actually he seemed to Brent a most satisfied, even complacent per¬ son. No, that was unfair, to damn as keen a man as Frost with such an adjective. . . .

He put his desk in order, rang for his ste¬ nographer, and in five minutes was out of the building, walking swiftly up lower Broadway, a tall man, in the late thirties, with a touch of distinction about his fine aquiline profile and vigorous figure. As he went people looked after him, often with a touch of envy, men ap¬ proving his broad shoulders and deep chest and women noticing his look of breeding. Yet what acquaintances and friends remembered as most characteristic of Brent Appleton were his eyes. They were sea-blue, usually observant and humorous. But at times they seemed eager and burning, lit by the dangerous flame of im¬ agination.

He had meant to walk all the way; the three miles to his house a little above Washington Square often counted as a moral cocktail before dinner. But he remembered thal Frances had asked him to come home early because they were going to the theater. So at the City Hall he took a subway train, in a vestibule of which he found himself one of a compact group wedged tightly together, several men, and a tall woman in gray. The woman was young, and she was determinedly reading a novel in the bad light, while the train lurched and swayed uptown.

He caught himself studying her absorbed face, delicately drawn yet full of character. He noticed the color in her cheeks: it did not seem to have come from a vanity case. The persistent way she read interested him, for she concentrated upon the book with the eagerness of the confirmed bookworm who fears interrup¬ tion as the i ‘dope fiend” dreads separation from his beloved drug.

Then the train swerved so suddenly that she dropped the book. Brent dived for it, and man¬ aged to recover it without being stepped upon. As he gave it to her, with a smile, he was keenly aware of dark gray eyes under a velvet toque. Her coat was gray, too, and her fur, but her hair was very soft and dark about an oval face.

“Thank you so much,” she said, in a voice lie found delightful, and wished he might hear again. Then he had reached his own station, and the train thundered away from him through its echoing corridors of steel.

As he walked to West Eleventh Street he was thinking that the woman with the book was a person one ought to know. He already knew the novel, 1 i Fortitude,’’ by Walpole. Brent had found it full of freshness and truth, with a youthful, almost reluctant beauty. He wished suddenly that Frances cared for books, that they had that one taste in common. Then he turned into his own street and saw a girl run¬ ning toward him, her slender, very tall figure full of vitality and grace.

“Unc’ Brent, you old darling,—I’ve been waiting for you—ages! Pat Congdon, Laura’s brother, is coming right after dinner, to take me out to their place for over Sunday. And I wanted to know about the case—is it really won and finished, as you thought it would be if the top-Court Judge backed you up?”

“It’s won,” said Brent, and forgot his tiny adventure and his earlier mood of depression, conscious only of the glowing sensation which Boblee so often gave him. His dead brother’s child was perhaps the one creature who loved him as all men wish to be loved, without doubt, sense of obligation, or the desire to criticise or alter. He caught her hand and swung it affectionately as they stood for a moment on the steps of the trim red brick house, with its window boxes freshly filled with dwarf firs.

“No left-overs, no higher courts, Boblee. The slate’s wiped clean! ’ 9

The child—she was five feet nine, though only seventeen,—stood quite still, looking at him, her brown eyes glowing, her red lips parted, her whole personality radiating eager¬ ness and affection. The door had slammed to, and as her uncle hunted for his key the girl squeezed his arm with a pressure that hurt.

“Brent, you’re splendid! I’m prouder of you than of anything else in the world!”

He smiled at her extravagance, but said, rather sheepishly: “Frost was decent about it —came to my office to congratulate me—some¬ thing he has never done before.”

She laughed, a joyous childish laugh. “He’d better—old Pig! But of course they know how wonderful you are—even when they don’t say it.”

They entered a wide bright hall, and a voice reached them:

“Oh, Brent, you’re late. And you have to dress. I do think you might get home on time, when we’re going out!”

Brent apologized to the voice, met Boblee’s laughing eyes with a careful chuckle, and then hurried upstairs to change. At the dinner table he asked his wife about her work at the studio and praised the soup, but said nothing about the great case. When Boblee would have touched upon the subject, Mrs. Appleton in¬ timated that at home it was a good thing for tired lawyers to forget prosaic business, and the girl promptly subsided. Brent reflected that sometimes she had, with this beautiful wife of his, the manner of a spoiled puppy, surprisingly snubbed by one of the many adults who do not care for dogs.

II

The play that night was one destined for a long run on Broadway, a play by a young woman with a somewhat grim outlook upon life, whose work invariably contained a curious combination of imagination and logic.

Brent Appleton had read a novel by the same author a year earlier, and had been struck by the subtle delineation of character and by a degree of boldness and originality. The play, however, had a more simple and primitive ap¬ peal—the old appeal of passion, both of body and spirit—against a conventional marriage in which neither husband nor wife had found hap¬ piness.

To Brent the story, the atmosphere of tense emotion and the exceptionally fine acting, all proved arresting and at the same time vaguely irritating. Only yesterday he would have felt secure in his isolation from the dramatic in¬ tensity and throbbing desires of youth. After all he was only a few years under forty, he had had his chance, like the others, and had fum¬ bled it badly. Long ago he had accepted the tenets of the Episcopal Church, gone through the form of confirmation and communion, and then at twenty-four or five had found himself 11 mentally alien to the whole close-woven fabric of religions faith—a common experience among the men of his generation.

So for many years no religions organization had meant more to him than a vague set of rules for the control of the masses, rules that might, of course, prove a civilizing and re¬ straining influence—for them. For himself he was conscious of being influenced by two ideals, one his conviction as to the importance of personal integrity, the other a defined fastidiousness in matters of taste. Perhaps the last had more to do with his faithfulness to Frances than the conventional code that so many men he knew had openly or secretly broken.

To-night he watched the play with an un¬ easy sympathy for those two storm-swept people for whom duty and desire were so com¬ pletely divorced. Never had he seen a stronger portrayal of a love at once an intellectual choice and a leaping flame. In this instance the woman who loves, and breaks through con¬ ventional barriers, is no cheap adventuress, no pliant Marguerite yielding to the insidious suggestion of the tempter, but a frank, cleanhearted woman convinced that in her case turn¬ ing from her lover would mean merely a cow¬ ardly acceptance of an outworn code. Brent noticed that the post-war audience sympathized with the lovers, that neither the suspicious wife nor the brutally possessive husband aroused more than a perfunctory commiseration. But he was suddenly aware of his wife’s exclama¬ tion, of her averted head:

44 Brent, what a disgusting play! I wish we hadn’t come. I’m thankful we didn’t bring Boberta.”

They left the theater slowly, caught by the crowd, and speaking to acquaintances here and there. Brent was conscious, as he always was in public, of his wife’s pale refined beauty, which other men noted with envy of him as its obvious possessor. She was dressed to-night in a filmy black gown set with tiny gold beads sewn in an effective pattern outlining the low corsage and short scant sleeves. The bright coronet of hair upon her small and beautifully poised head was that happy hue between honey and gold, and had kept its distracting tend¬ ency to curl in little bright rings upon her fore¬ head and the nape of her neck. As they waited for their car Brent adjusted her cloak of black velvet and fur, thinking for the hun¬ dredth time that her slim throat and white breast were the loveliest he had ever seen.

In the car, after they had turned from the glitter of Broadway, he was caught by an im¬ pulse he had thought atrophied long ago. Suddenly he kissed her throat.

She stiffened instantly, like a child in a spasm of nervous fear or anger.

44 Brent! Not here. You’ll tear my frock.”

With a sensitive shiver he caught that note in her voice which was unforgettable, though he had not heard it in years, saw the repel¬ ling gesture of her lovely body. He drew away.

“I beg your pardon, Frances. I’m sorry.”

She said nothing more and they drove home in silence. Brent was once again encased in his carefully adjusted armor of impersonality. After all he knew Frances, had known her for years,—her combination of a provocative love¬ liness with a frigidity that made all passion repellent to her. This attitude she had not concealed from Brent since the end of the first year, when they had lost the one child of their union, a tiny girl. Frances had suffered acutely, and for her there had been no op¬ portunity to forget the pangs of childbirth in the joy of motherhood. Brent had often won¬ dered whether she would have developed dif¬ ferently if the child had lived, yet this question seemed repeatedly answered in the negative when he heard her express her horror of child¬ bearing, her determination never again to face the ordeal.

In those early years Brent had fought for his happiness, but had never learned to seize, as a marital possession, what he persisted in re¬ garding as the privilege of a lover. Frances had taken an attitude that she seemed to re¬ gard as irreproachable, an air of passive ac¬ quiescence, should he care to force the issue, an air of descending from high ground of her own to meet her husband on his lower level. Brent had resented this by no means unique point of view, and had done his best to change

it.

At first, deeply in love, he had believed that stronger nerves and better health would de¬ velop in her understanding, normal response. But time had not changed her, although her health had improved and the character of her beauty had deepened. From the beginning she had managed her household with consummate skill, each detail of Brent’s material existence perfectly wrought: the place ran on wheels, the meals were well cooked and well served, order and grace and real artistic distinction gave to his house in the dignified old neighbor¬ hood a charm as marked as Frances’ personal appeal. Tradesmen and clerks admired Mrs. Appleton: men who knew her slightly envied Brent, and, as few knew her more than slightly, her popularity was assured, save with one or two crotchety people who cared especially for Brent and his private happiness.

It was Frances herself who expressed characteristically her own reactions toward marriage, and with a literal, unimaginative clarity which seemed to suggest that further effort on Brent’s part would be merely ridicu¬ lous.

“ Please understand that I do acknowledge your claim, Brent, the claim people feel mar¬ riage gives. If you look back you’ll see that

I’ve never really—refused. But I can’t make myself like things—to me they’re ugly. There’s no use pretending I see anything beautiful in what people call ‘Nature.’ I just don’t!”

After this conversation, which had occurred some years earlier, Brent had told himself that the thing for him to do was to turn his back on the whole problem of sex, that burnished thread woven, sometimes so beautifully, into the warp and woof of human life. On the whole he succeeded fairly well: work was some¬ times a panacea and sometimes a narcotic. Yet at long intervals deep-rooted instinct would spring up afresh, to be instantly thwarted by Frances’ equally deep-rooted an¬ tagonism. Some suggestion, like this play to¬ night, that life might be more vivid and inter¬ esting, would bring him out of his shell, only to hurry him back, in a rage at himself for allowing his wife’s indifference to sting his sensitive pride.

To-night, after their return to the house, she ignored the incident in the car as it seemed to him she always ignored things she disliked or wished to pretend did not exist. Sometimes Brent envied her this ability, but angrily, as he envied her even her lack of passion. Now she harked back to the subject of the play, saying how much she disliked it, that the whole theme was “unpleasant,” a word she used frequently, and one that Brent as well as Boblee had come to dread. A waste of time, but it was over, thank Heaven!

So before Brent’s study fire she talked brightly now of the subject nearest her heart, her skill in the work that filled her time. For the past year she had had a studio in West Fifty-Seventh Street, where she designed pot¬ tery, made sketches for wall paper and rugs, and interviewed people who wished to have their houses or apartments decorated with the proper emphasis on periods and color schemes. Frances could talk effectively about color and line, chintzes, tapestries, and embroideries, ancient and modern.

To-night she told Brent of a new design for curtains in a spacious country house.

“The border is to be Egyptian, done in old blues and Pompeian red, with the lotus blos¬ som scattered over the curtains and introduced into other hangings through the room. Does it sound attractive ? * ’

Brent was smoking an ancient and comfort¬ ing pipe, and he answered politely:

“Very. I think you have a real gift, Fran¬ ces, that all your designs have character.”

Her slim foot, in its black satin slipper with a gilt buckle, was tracing fanciful arabesques on a rug which she did not wholly approve. For this was Brent’s room, here were his few personal possessions—his books, several old family portraits, some Persian rugs that he had chosen years ago. Yet, even while he comforted himself with the homelike quality of the one place entirely his in a house which reflected Frances, Brent realized that the low-keyed masculine room made an extraordinarily effec¬ tive background for her. As she looked over at him her cheeks were flushed and her eyes gleaming, while the firelight played on her white hands and emphasized the grace of her figure and the luster of her hair.

“ Thank you, Brent. It’s nice of you to take an interest. It’s fascinating work—design¬ ing—but there’s more money in furnishing houses. I’ve got a nibble—some people in Morristown with a mint of money.—Oh, Brent, I don’t know what I did with myself before the war, when I couldn’t see beyond housekeeping! Now the days aren’t long enough—and of course the house still takes some time. I try to make it run itself, but good as the maids are I have to keep my hand on the machinery. ’ ’

Brent glanced about him, at his beautifully ordered room; at the hundreds of books upon open shelves, actually dusted; at his desk, its papers undisturbed, yet even there the mark of the exquisite housewife. For a moment he felt that he hated his wife’s virtues, all her housewifely pride. He told himself that he would willingly have lived in disorder with some ugly awkward woman, if she could have given him love that had in it elemental splen¬ dor and beauty, love that might be discerning, mentally satisfying, and at the same time warmly human. His thought was so hot and eager that for an instant he was tongue-tied, searching for the commonplace that would serve him with Frances, when she surprised him, as she sometimes did %

Rising from her chair she dropped her cloak, and in her low frock, with its touches of gold, she reminded Brent of some mythical prin¬ cess—was she the Ice Queen or the Snow Maiden?—he asked himself. She came to his side, put her hand on his shoulder.

“Brent, you think me queer, sometimes. But you wouldn’t want me to he like that woman in the play, would you?”

“Which one?” said Brent carefully.

She stood close to him, the faint fragrance about her, some costly French perfume, arousing in him a curious feeling, longing mixed with irritation.

“The wife—who runs off with that dread¬ ful sculptor. Oh, Brent, you would rather have me as I am than like that —”

Brent moved back a little. “Would I, Frances?”

She laughed, bent and kissed him, a cool im¬ personal kiss.

“You certainly would, my dear. I may be old-fashioned, passive, but I am a lady. And women who act and feel like that—they’re never nice, on the stage or in real life! ’ ’

Brent said quietly: “I’m probably not very ‘nice’ myself, Frances.”

She stood for an instant at the door, looking back at him.

“Good night, Brent. But—even if we feel differently about things—you know I have never— refused — ’ ’

He felt a surge of hot anger. For a moment he wished he were a primitive brute, and that they were male and female in some environ¬ ment utterly unlike this modern house. “Caveman stuff—” the cheap phrase was sud¬ denly a challenge. And then as the door closed upon her he came to himself. He was not elemental enough to cope with this sort of woman—there were men who would not mind, who might prefer captured frigidity to re¬ sponsive emotion. Those were the men who in the end might even create response itself, but he was not of their breed; to him love and pas¬ sion were mutual or they were nothing.

For a long time he sat smoking his pipe, listening to the dulled roar of the city. He had his work just as Frances had hers; he had health, comparative youth, good friends, best of all he had the satisfaction of watching his young niece develop from childhood into lovely eager youth.

Roberta Lee Appleton—named after her mother’s hero, and nicknamed by her father when still a chubby infant—was a niece to be proud of, more, a young person to capture the avuncular imagination. She was affection¬ ate, full of vivid promise and young idealism,

FEANCES AND ALINE 21

but such a contrast to Frances in every way that Brent sometimes wondered at the girl’s admiration for the woman. He would have supposed each would irritate the other, and yet this happened rarely, although sometimes the child seemed curiously subdued when with her aunt. Frances could be charming, and to her beauty she added the tartness of talent, the modem woman’s independence. It was only her husband, apparently, who found in her any lack, any puzzling abnormality.

Finally he went up to his room, the large front room in the third story. His wife’s was in the rear, catching the sun all day; between their bed rooms were a large dressing room and bath. Brent undressed, opened his windows and got into bed. It was after midnight, but in the street he heard a woman’s low laugh, a man’s voice saying good night, murmuring sounds flowing on for a long time. At last the woman’s voice came again, clear and young, uttering the one word 44 To-morrow!” Then a door slammed and quick feet passed along the pavement toward the Avenue.

The man who owned what was perhaps the most attractive house in the block turned un¬ easily in bed, stabbed by an envy as sharp as physical pain.

Ill

During the next week Brent was completely absorbed in affairs at his office, and spent sev¬ eral long evenings at the law library of the Bar Association working on a new case which promised to develop some of those unexpected twists and entertaining personal idiosyncrasies that tend to humanize and individualize even the practice of Corporation Law. Frances had a friend staying with her, an old schoolmate whom she always found entertaining, and Boblee was still at the Congdons’ in New Rochelle. So Brent worked late, and even dined at the club, without arousing in Frances that vicious antagonism to evening work which has no relation to marital felicity, since the least affectionate of wives invariably resents a husband’s absorption in prosaic business or mere ‘‘shop.”

But on an evening near the end of the week he came home to dinner, glowing with a sense of achievement and wishing that Frances pos¬ sessed real interest in his work. When Boblee was home she was always asking questions about the office, often childish and irrelevant, but somehow comforting to the lawyer whose office meant more to him than a mere money- 22 mill. Brent would have described himself as a man’s man, yet his keenest happiness would always center about his relations with women. Unlocking his door at seven o’clock he thought regretfully of Boblee. Her welcome was al¬ ways as fresh and eager as though he had been away for weeks instead of a working day, whereas Frances was usually pleasant, but ap¬ pallingly matter of fact. To-night there would he no Boblee, only Frances and her friend Mrs. Armstrong, an attractive woman, but not one who interested Brent particularly. She had come to New York for the winter and was stay¬ ing with the Appletons until she could find the apartment she wanted.

He was hanging his coat up in the hall when a woman’s voice fell agreeably on his ear.

“Oh, Brent, I’m so glad you’ve come! Frances has gone out to Morristown to see the house they want her to decorate, and she asked me to play hostess at dinner. She won’t be home till late.”

Aline Armstrong, a widow a little over thirty, red-haired, fashionably slim without be¬ ing angular, stood on the stair above him. As she came on down Brent thought that she was finer looking than he had realized.

With none of Frances’ beauty, she was individual, graceful, and she dressed with a touch of French daintiness and authority. To¬ night she wore a thin green frock that fitted her closely, accenting her slenderness yet revealing no such flatness as one often sees in thin women. There were touches of silvery white here and there, and white and green brought out the luster of her one real beauty, hair of burnished copper. Her face was deli¬ cately pointed, her nose a little thin, but her mouth small, curved and red. In her little flat ears, set close to her head and showing their tips even in the earless day of bobbed hair, she wore pendant earrings of pearl and red gold, and the fashion was extrordinarily becoming to the clear-skinned sophisticated face.

Brent was conscious of pleasure in her ap¬ pearance, and in the note of welcome in her voice. As he dressed for dinner he forgot even Boblee in his fresh sense of adventure over this prospective tete-a-tete. Of late years he had rather avoided women; Frances’ friends seldom attracted him, and moreover he realized the danger, rarely absent when a married man is at once mentally lonely and conscious of unsatisfied senses. So this would be the first time he had dined alone with any woman but Frances in years, and he was amused by his fresh anticipation. Still, he would have liked Boblee to be at home. She would have enjoyed sitting at the head of the table, would have appreciated the ruddy hair and green frock. Often Brent was enter¬ tained by the similarity of Boblee’s reactions to his own.

At the dinner table, a low bowl of valley lilies between them, Brent found himself talk¬ ing to Frances’ friend as be never talked to Frances. He told her of the recent victory for the firm, which bad been a feather in bis own cap, and then outlined for her the case he was now working on, involving an old estate and several heirs under age, a case which would probably be in chancery many years. Mrs. Armstrong asked intelligent questions and dis¬ played a knowledge of legal matters that seemed to him surprising. He said so, but she merely laughed, showing delightful little teeth and biting her underlip in a fashion Brent found attractive.