The Step on the Stair (Woodrow)

by Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

 

The STEP
on the STAIR

 

By Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

 

ONE climbed many steps to reach the apartment of Anita, with its two or three tiny chambers high up in a tower; but upon arriving there one was obsessed by the fancy that this particular season's tardy and difficult spring had, for the sake of Anita, abjured her penury, and burst into summer and flower in this one small space.

It was all white and pink, like an apple-blossom, with pink climbing roses on the walls and flowered pink-and-white chintz hangings; and here and there were bits of fragile china and rare old silver on claw-legged mahogany tables, while from dim canvases in tarnished gilt frames, smiled the sweet, dark eyes of haughty Southern beauties of a generation unused to life's struggles.

Anita, sweet and dark as they, with a face like an apple-blossom and in a gown pink as a rose, stood gazing from her window. Far below, the city stretched like a sordid and dusty panorama of jumbled buildings divided into checker-board squares by intersecting streets. Men and women, in black, ant-like processions, crowded and jostled each other, and the echo of their footsteps, the strident whir of trolley-cars and rattling vehicles all added to the tumult of that mighty and raucous voice, which rose night and day to Anita's ears. With a shrug, and, yes, a sigh, too, she turned away, and seated herself before a table covered with paint-brushes, colors, a litter of candle-shades and menu cards. But these she pushed aside, and, leaning her head in her hands, scanned a letter on the table before her, while a gray kitten bit her ear and tangled its little claws unheeded in her cloudy hair. Suddenly she raised her head and listened intently to a step which creaked on the stair outside. Hastily crumpling the letter in her hand, she half-rose, her cheek flushing. “Entrez!” she called, in answer to a knock, and a man entered, middle-aged, grizzled, distinguished, with kind eyes and a stern mouth.

She stretched out a languid hand, the expectancy dying from her eyes. “Robert! You! Did you not get my note telling you not to come? I'm waiting for another visitor.”

The words themselves might seem to express a rather chilling welcome, but Anita's most commonplace utterance was full of warmth and color, her voice was a caress, her accent of the far South.

Wareing's smile was indulgent. “Yes; but not for another hour or two. I came early to urge you to go out and get a bite or two of dinner with me.”

“No,” she shook her head. “What are you thinking of? Fluff and I have had our dinner.”” She held the kitten against her cheek.

“Something tossed up in a chafing-dish, I'll be bound.” His tone was disgusted. “You ought to get out into the air. There is some heavy fragrance in this room that is enough to give you a headache.”

“Heavy fragrance!” she repeated indignantly. “I reckon you mean the jasmine in that vase yonder. Why, it's home.” There was a break in her voice, a mist of sudden tears in her eyes; then she hurried on with a plucky effect of spontaneous gaiety: “You poor, benighted Northerner. You've never smelled Southern jasmine before, and your dull, uncultivated senses can't appreciate it. And don't dare to speak in that way of my chafing-dish. Haven't I made you goodies in it? Haven't I? Haven't I?”

He refused to be cajoled. “It's a horrible way to live,” he grumbled. He had picked up one of the frail, dainty candle-shades and was turning it over absently in his hands; and now he cast it impatiently aside. “It accounts for that thin line in your cheek and the slenderness of your wrists,” taking possession of them. “Just wait till we're married. There'll be no such picnicking then. Those cheeks will become round and plump. My chef is one of the best in the country—ought to be; he costs enough. You wait. You'll get fat as butter.”

She winced a little. “Some people admire my—my ethereal appearance,” she answered defensively, half-defiantly.

“Humph! Ethereal is one word, little girl. I'd call it badly nourished, underfed.” He was smiling quizzically, but it was evident that he meant what he said.

“Oh, Robert, what horrid expressions!” she protested poutingly. “Ugh!” with a little shiver. “To change the subject, what do you think of my new frock?” With one of her quick transitions of mood, she caught up the gown on both sides and stood looking at him from under her dark lashes with a native and ineradicable coquetry.

Wareing gazed at her with amused and admiring eyes. “Pretty, but not half pretty enough.”

“I suppose you scorn it because it's cheap.” She flung up her head impatiently. “Of course it's cheap. Seventeen cents a yard. Dimity. But what more virtue to it if it cost seventeen dollars a yard?”

“You won't be that way long.” He laughed in brief, rather grim, amusement. “You'll be like all the rest—just as ready to make the dollars fly.”

“Do talk of something else to-night,” turning from him with unmistakable petulance. “Food and clothes and money!”—contemptuously.

“They're not bad subjects to discuss,” he answered coolly. “I've put in too many years of my life scheming for them to sneer at them now.”

“But they are not everything,” a wistful passion in her voice and on her small, pale face. “Oh, life, life! I've been thinking about it all day, and I'm—oh, Robert, I'll tell you the truth, I'm frightened to death.”

“Frightened?” he exclaimed, serious in a moment. “Why, Anita, what is bothering you?”

“Just bugaboos, I suppose. Oh”—speaking with a quick impetuosity, her elbows on the table, her chin resting on the bridge of her clasped fingers—“I'm frightened, frightened, frightened. “Why, Robert Wareing, I'm going to marry you to-morrow, and I—do—not—love—you—one—bit.” She said the words slowly, tragically, with long pauses for added emphasis.

Wareing shot a quick, keen glance at her, and then his eyelids drooped over his eyes. His face, which for a moment had paled slightly, settled into the perfectly impassive and non-committal lines it wore when conducting an important business deal. “May I smoke?” he asked, taking a cigar from his case. As he leaned forward to light it, his hair shone brown on the top, but gray, almost white, where it was brushed back from the temples.

“You're upset”—settling himself back in his chair. “Something has occurred to put you out of tune”—he cast a swift glance at the crumpled letter on the table—“and you're in one of those morbid moods when women want to confess all the things they've ever done and all the things they've never done. That's all”—reassuringly. “Well, go ahead, my dear.”

“That's just it”—her face clouding—“if there only were something to confess! Something that had reached one's soul and become a part of it; something that, if it left regret and pain and even shame, left also a splendor of remembrance, a richness and depth of experience; and you could hold it to your heart forever; that is, if you had an unregenerate heart, like mine; and you could feel 'how mad and bad and sad it was—but, oh, how it was sweet'!” There was a throbbing note of longing in her voice as she stood, with eyes upraised, in a trance of regret for emotions she had never known.

When Wareing spoke it was with an obvious effort. “Anita, you've often told me that you were not sure that you loved me. It didn't bother me much, because I knew that you liked me, perhaps more than you thought; but I wish—if you can—that you'd try to tell me just why you are marrying me, since you don't love me, and since I don't believe that you're actuated by the same reasons as some of the rest—the reasons that would actuate most of the women I've known.”

“The reasons I'm marrying you”—there was a shade of bitterness in her glance and a deeper seriousness than he had ever seen there before—“I'm ashamed to tell them. They are all such shabby reasons. I believe I told you I'd marry you, Robert, because this last year I've been realizing that my hopes and ambitions will never amount to anything.”

Her eyes were lowered, but he could see the unshed tears gleam through her lashes. “I've missed every mark I aimed at. Down there in the South I thought I was a very gifted and accomplished person. You know a little talent goes a long way among admiring friends and relatives; but it certainly does shrivel up and appear mighty small in the fierce, white light of the market-place. My!”—with a long sigh—“I came up from the old plantation so laughing, so confident, so dead sure that all I had to do was to hold out my apron, and all the beautiful and delightful things would tumble into it. But this great city surely has taught me a lesson, and she's no very gentle teacher, either. I tried lots of things; but I soon discovered that I was lucky if my little two-bit accomplishments would earn me the barest living; so I took to painting candle-shades and menu cards”—giving them a contemptuous flip—“and I give dancing lessons two afternoons a week, and piano lessons one—to the children of rich friends. And—and,” there was a sob in her voice, “I shall never do any better. I haven't got it, that indefinable something that means success.”

He put his hand closely over hers, and softly patted her downbent head. “But you have other gifts that you haven't counted, Anita.”

She looked up in surprise, and slowly shook her head. “No, I've told you every last one of them.”

“Well, you haven't told me yet why you accepted me,” he insisted gently. “There are plenty of young fellows about. Good Lord! I'm always running into them. They're so thick I almost walk on them.”

“Oh!” she scoffed. “Those! Yes. Plenty of them. Ready to come and waste my time and stir up messes in my chafing-dish, and break my coffee- machine, and eat up at one gobble all the little stores I have on hand for two or three days; but if they saw me starving in the ash-bin, or freezing on a fire-escape, they'd only call an ambulance. They wouldn't offer me a home.”

“Oh, it's for a home, then! You want a home! Doesn't this content you?”

“This?”—she glanced about her with an affectionate tolerance—“I know exactly how I'll look after about twenty years of this kind of life. I'll be one of those peaked, wistful-eyed old maids with rusty black clothes turning green and brown, and a general air of apology for living. I'll iron out the ribbons of my winter bonnet to trim my summer hat, and launder my own handkerchiefs and paste them on the window-panes to dry. And I'll have to send Fluff to the S. P. C. A. to be chloroformed. I won't be able to afford even a cat for companionship. It will eat too much.”

Wareing threw back his head and laughed. “A pleasant picture for your young eyes to gaze upon. Don't you think that what I offer is better than that?”

“Yes, oh, yes”—pulling Fluff's ears—“I've had enough hard knocks to realize what a fool I'd be not to marry you.”

“But——” he said very gently, very encouragingly.

“But, Robert”—in a burst of confidence—“to marry a very rich man means so many deadly responsibilities. I'll have to be correctly upholstered and stiff with jewels, I suppose. And think of the stupid, overfed people I'll have to meet! And life always running on oiled wheels. Everything done in a stately, solemn, well-ordered fashion. Nothing joyous, haphazard, no ingenious makeshifts, no delirious ups and downs, no more gambling on the unexpected, no more gipsyings—just one dead, monotonous level of comfort and luxury.”

He arched his eyebrows whimsically. “It does seem rather a solemn feast as you describe it.”

“We shall never escape your perfectly trained servants,” she mourned.

“Cheer up, Anita. You don't begin to give me and my money credit for what we can do. The servants ought easily to be disposed of, and we ought to be able to get up a very fair imitation of poverty. I've had an intimate acquaintance with the real thing.”

“Oh”—starting impatiently to her feet—“do not make fun of me when I'm serious, when I'm telling you everything I have been thinking over through these weeks that we've been engaged. Robert”—her delicate face irradiated by an intense and flamelike emotion—“Robert, it's life that's tormenting me. At first when you asked me to marry you, I thought that wealth would give me what I had missed, that it would enable me to realize all my beautiful, sumptuous, opulent dreams. But, oh”—she threw her arms upon the table, scattering the menu cards and candle-shades unheeded upon the floor—“I've realized lately that money can't really give me anything. You don't know what it means to have things in your heart that you can't express—to have beautiful things in your soul that vanish when you try to express them, so that you have to give piano and dancing lessons in order to live. You are just a business man. That's all you've ever cared for, that and success. And you've always won. You do not know what it's like to lose.”

“Anita, how long have you felt this way?”—his voice was crisp, restrained.

“A long time; but more since—since—yes”—lifting her head and looking at him with honest eyes—“since I knew Eugene was coming. You never knew 'Gene, did you? We were boy and girl together down on the plantation; and we used to dream of the big, unknown world, and of how we were going out to conquer it. We almost loved each other—almost, Robert,” with a quick change of tone. “Why do you, so staid and poised and terribly respectable, want to marry a—a—waif of the wind, like me?”

He stooped and kissed her fingers. Then, gathering both of her hands in one of his, he rested his cheek upon them a moment, his face hidden. “Because I love you,” he murmured. “You mustn't have any misconceptions about that, dear. You mustn't doubt it. Perhaps I haven't shown it enough. The circumstances of my life have increased my natural and disagreeable reserve. You see, I wasn't born like you, with inherited traditions of wealth and ease. In childhood I had sordid, ugly surroundings. I've been used to struggle and hard work ever since I can remember. Well, what's the use of talking about it? You know I won out. I beat the game. For a good many years the zest of trying to do that was enough. It takes about all a man's time and thoughts; but behind it all was the longing that I had as a ragged, little boy, and the belief in something bright and beautiful that was some day coming to me. And you seemed the embodiment of it, Anita; a little, lovely, nestling girl, with dancing feet and roses in her hair.”

“Oh!” she cried, rising and staring at him, a strange expression in her eyes, “that was what you wanted, too, was it? The eternal romance that our hearts and souls long for, and that we're always trying to find. And you've been true to it. You've believed in it and followed it, and I've denied it”—with a dry little sob.

She gazed beyond him toward the window with almost vacant eyes. “Look!” she exclaimed, sweeping over to it and snatching the curtain aside—“look! See the dark creep up over the city! A little while ago I saw only commonplace, dusty streets, crowded with people, and heard only a crazy, creaking old piano-organ, grinding away below me; but now there are purple vistas and glittering lights and fairy towers. It's all mystery and magic. A nightingale wouldn't be out of place, would it? And somewhere out there is life, is romance.”

Wareing gazed in silence over the city; at last he turned and looked down at her very earnestly.

“Anita,” he said slowly, “you won't find the romance where you seek it, nor when.” After a moment's hesitation: “Perhaps I've been slow in understanding some things. I've thought only of myself. Of the joy it would be to give you the toys and the baubles, and open your eyes to the wonders of the world; and I guess I've been all wrong. I think we'd better start again. I want you to feel that you are free, that you needn't marry me to-morrow or any other time, if you don't want to; but don't make any decision in a hurry. We sometimes follow false lights. Do you understand”—taking her by the shoulders and looking deep into her eyes—“that you are free?”

“Free,” she repeated dreamily, a little frown puckering her brows, “I do not know whether I want to be or not, and”—hastily—“I'm not thinking of the things you offer, Robert; I'm thinking of you.”

There was a sudden flash in his eyes, “Then you haven't found me a terrible, prosy old bore?”

“Oh, no; we're very”—hesitating for a word—“we“re very congenial. Listen!”—turning sharply from him—“what was that?”

They waited a moment in silence. “A step on the stair,” he answered, the life gone out of his tones. “Good-by, my dear. I may stop in late this evening. You see, I may find it difficult to sleep, unless I know which way your happiness lies.” He took up his hat and moved toward the door, but paused a moment with his hand on the latch. “You are free, you know, Anita.” There was a break in his strong, almost harsh, voice.

“Free! Ah, yes,” she answered mechanically; but she had scarcely heard him. Her eyes were fastened on the door; she listened to that quick, bounding step coming nearer and nearer. Her color had risen, and her breath came quickly through her parted lips.

Wareing smiled half-bitterly, half-indulgently, and passed through the door. A moment later there was an imperative knock, followed by a young fellow, lithe, dark, and slender, with clear-cut, high-bred features and gay, bold eyes.

“Anita, Rosita, Chiquita”—he caught her hands in his. “You wicked girl to go and nearly get married without asking my permission. Why, the minute I got your miserable little scrap of a letter telling me the news, I took the train. 'Oh, young Lochinvar has come out of the West!' Don't I look as if I had ridden long and hard? 'And now I am come with this lost love of mine, to tread but one measure, drink one cup of wine.'”

“Eugene!” Wareing was for the moment forgotten. She stood smiling at “Young Lochinvar,” her cheeks as pink as her gown, her eyes sparkling. “You haven't forgotten to quote poetry, have you? Well, we'll have one of those old Spanish dances we used to do down on the plantation, and you shall drink a cup of wine, that is, if you stop glaring at me as if you'd never seen me before.”

“I never have. You've got another dimple, and that makes you a new and lovelier Anita.”

“Oh, Eugene!”

“Oh, Anita!”

The “do you remembers” and the “have you forgottens,” bubbled from their lips, punctuated by laughter, young, happy, joyous laughter. And when they had laughed until they cried and talked until they quarreled, Anita made a salad and cut sandwiches, while Eugene busied himself with the coffee-machine.

“Is the salad all right, or has my hand lost its cunning?” she asked anxiously.

“I should say it has gained in technique,” he replied judicially, “and the salad is as cool as your intellect, as sharp as your discernment, as bland as your sympathy, and as stimulating as your wit.”

“'Gene! How nice and Southern! And it sounds exactly like you, just like the old 'Gene.”

He was rolling a cigarette with his long, slender, artist fingers, but he paused a moment, his eyes on hers, before he answered: “The old 'Gene has never changed.”

She flushed deeply under his eyes. “How—how are the pictures going, Eugene?”

“Oh, I'm beginning to sell them at last. The glassy eyes of the millionaires are turning toward me, and I've several commissions to make, beautiful on canvas their pug-nosed, fat-faced wives. Those ladies hail me as a great psychological artist. Their mirrors have always been so cruel to them, that when my brushes flatter them, they say I paint their souls; strip away the husk of the flesh and reveal enduring loveliness. The work I'm doing is certainly pretty; but I'd hardly call it art.” His eyes were full of a moody bitterness, and his sensitive, delicately cut mouth had fallen into lines of discontent.

“Ah, Anita,” a real emotion in his voice, “think what life might have been to us if—— But there, what's the use? We've had the 'one cup of wine,' let us have the 'measure' now. Dance, Anita, as you used to dance down on the plantation.”

She snatched up a fan and slid away over the polished floor. “Play,” she commanded, tossing him a banjo, which he caught deftly and strummed with accustomed fingers, while she floated about the room like a thistle-down, and made sudden provocative pauses, with fan held high above her head, then swayed like a flower in the wind and took quick, running, little steps, and stamped her heels upon the floor and bent languorously backward. At last, with a final curtsy, she stopped, her hand on her heart, her face as pink as the roses on her walls.

Eugene sprang to his feet, with laughing eyes, bowed low, and flung his hat, with real Spanish courtesy, at her feet.

“Anita, Rosita, Chiquita, the dreams of my youth you recall.”

The smile died from her face, her eyes grew wistful. “The dreams of our youth,” she repeated, “I'm young yet; but they haunt me. They were beautiful dreams, down there on that old, gray river. Can't you shut your eyes, 'Gene, and see the terraces sloping down to the water; the lovely, neglected garden, with its tangle of roses and jasmine?”

“Do I remember?” His eyes looked deep into hers. “I swear I never smell jasmine without thinking of the old place and of you. Oh, Anita”—he caught her hands and drew her toward him—“think what life might be if it wasn't for our accursed poverty. If we'd only had just a little between us. 'Each life's unfulfilled, you see, and both hang patchy and scrappy.' If we'd only had the courage to face things hand in hand, we'd have gotten along somehow, and we surely would have 'sighed deep, laughed free, starved, feasted, despaired, been happy.' But we didn't have the courage, did we? We wouldn't believe in our dreams. That's the worst of life: she won't let you.”

“'Gene,” she whispered, her breath on his cheek, “suppose I told you that I'm almost ready to let everything else go, and just believe in the dreams and follow them! I'm—I'm free, 'Gene; I'm not going to be married to-morrow. Robert gave me my freedom to-night.”

“Not really!” After a moment he dropped her hands. “Of course you are joking; but, believe me, the dreams are lovely, ungrateful things. We can give them our hearts' devotion; but they make no return. We've got to build our houses on the rock of the substantial things, stodgy, bread-and-butter facts.”

She had drawn away from him, and was now locking at him earnestly, her eyes as cool as his own.

“Then you think I wouldn't give up the material luxuries for the things I really believe in?”

“I do not, my dear little Anita, Rosita, Chiquita, nor would any woman. You are a dainty little jasmine flower, Anita, and a heavy, drenching rain would soon finish you.”

The sudden glitter of anger in her eyes was quickly controlled. “But if I assured you that I meant it?”

“You might tell me so to-night; but as sure as to-morrow's dawn, I'd get a little note from you, saying that the morn had brought wisdom. Ah, Anita,” his eyes softening with something like tears and a real passion in his voice, “had I been free, and you been true!”

“Free! Are you not free, Eugene?”

“Tove, no! Even as you have your millionaire, so I have my widow. She is a little older, a little grayer, a little stouter than I; but she is still charming, and always a very rich woman.”

Anita's laughter—laughter with an edge on it—rang through the room. “Eugene, now I see. You couldn't be true to anything, to the things you really believed in—to your dreams, to art, or to me. That was why you couldn't believe that I could be true.”

“Of course I couldn't, star-eyed Anita,” he returned cynically; “are you not a woman?”

She turned from him with a slow and haughty scorn, and walked to the window. There for a moment or hours, she never knew which, she stood, looking out into the night. At last, the silence in the room was broken by a faint, repeated sound. Anita turned about and listened.

“It is a step on the stair,” said Eugene, as if in answer to an unspoken question,

“I know. He is coming. Eugene, look from the window a moment. Do you see the night; all the mystery and magic of it? I wanted to go out among its fairy towers, and purple shadows, and glittering lights in search of the real romance—but he told me that I'd never find it by going out to seek it. And I've been standing here all this time, Eugene, not thinking of you at all, but wondering what he meant. And when I heard his step on the stair, all at once I understood. It doesn't lie outside in vistas of mystery and beauty. It is deep in our hearts, the eternal romance, which is life, which is love. Good-by, Eugene.”