Chapter Six I
These facts Robert had his own reasons for hiding from Cornelia. To cut the cross-examination short, he walked up to a miniature portrait that hung on the wall over Cornelia’s desk.
“Why do you keep this picture of Percival Houghton enshrined here?”
“Why not?” asked Cornelia, taken by surprise.
“It is the only picture in the room,” replied Robert, evasively. “The face is that of an esthete under the influence of paranoia. It positively stares one out of countenance. Whenever I enter the room, I feel as if I mustn’t take a seat until I’ve bowed before it thrice.”
“I’m not responsible for other people’s erratic feelings.” Cornelia would have spoken with less acerbity if jealousy had prompted Robert’s remark. But his cool sardonic tone eliminated the theory of a jealous motive.
“Pardon the explosion, Cornelia. But why must this man of all men be the presiding genius of your room?”
“You know the reason very well, Robert.”
“Unfortunately, yes. You won’t let your friends forget it. By keeping this portrait in evidence, you actually force the reason on people’s attention. Do take him down, Cornelia, swathe him in incense, and lay him away amongst your most cherished souvenirs. Replace him, if you must replace him, with a picture of Saint Francis or Savonarola.”
She bristled up under his ironic words. Her craving for admiration vanished in her resentment of disapproval.
“I am proud to have known Percival Houghton, and to have been his friend. Thanks for your recommendation, though I’m not aware of having asked for it.”
“Don’t be angry. You must own that you constantly remind your visitors of this Houghton affair, though what advantage it is to your position and influence, Heaven only knows. Let sleeping dogs lie. Believe me, Cornelia, half the tragedies in life result from forgetting what we ought to remember; the other half from remembering what we ought to forget.”
“I’m not ashamed of the Houghton affair, as you call it,” said Cornelia coldly. “Why should I be? It was one of those rare friendships that are quite beyond the perception of vulgar-minded, low-thoughted souls. What other people think of it concerns me very little.”
She really believed this, although it was very wide of the mark.
“I know,” she went on melodramatically, “of the spiteful gossip behind my back. I know of the scarlet colors in which my relations with Percival Houghton are painted by my enemies. Let them declaim against me! To a few real friends I have told the truth. They believe me, and that is all I ask.”
She had in fact taken more than one friend into her confidence. It was a common saying in the Lorillard tenements that the token of admission to Cornelia’s inner circle was the almost sacramental rite of receiving her account of the Houghton episode.
The corner stone of this account—the supreme article of faith!—was the point that she and Percival Houghton had rigorously abstained from sexual intimacy throughout their voyage together in the same stateroom. Not from moral scruples, be it noted, but from a desire to prove to the world that free love and the severest tax on self-restraint were perfectly compatible.
Cornelia held passionately to the delusion that her account was accepted in every jot and tittle. Robert knew that behind her back, most of her friends greeted it with a cynical smile and pronounced it a pardonable but much too elaborate invention. When some one referred to Cornelia’s assertion that the voyage to England had involved no infraction of the seventh commandment, the women would say contemptuously: “If you’re going to be killed for a lamb, you might as well be killed for a sheep.” The men, more vulgarly, would exclaim: “What a shame if they wasted a chance like that!”
Hutchins Burley, in one of his most egregious moments, wagered any amount that Cornelia wasn’t half as big a fool as her story made her out to be.
It was owing to these and other coarse pleasantries circulating at her expense that Robert wished he could make Cornelia look the facts in the face.
What he regretted most of all, however, was that she seemed entirely to misconstrue the visits of the many men who sauntered in and out of her rooms. They came with the expectation voiced by Oscar Wilde, that “she who had sinned once and with loathing, would sin again many times, and with joy.” Clearly, they hoped to profit by the repetition. But this was a truth to which Cornelia was obstinately blind.
“You, Robert,” she said, aggrieved at his silence, “used to be counted among those who believed.”
“And I am still. Good Heavens, Cornelia, why should I, of all people, doubt your words? Think of my situation. Here am I, alone after midnight in an apartment with a young and interesting martyr in the cause of free marriage. And what do we do? We discuss the subject of sex affinities, with a complete suspension of conventional reserve. Yet I couldn’t so much as kiss you.”
“Oh, couldn’t you?” said Cornelia, in a half mocking, half challenging voice.
This tremendous talk, all about herself, had completely revitalized her spirits. She sat forward intent on Robert’s every word, the movement causing her dress to fall low in front and show all her languid beauty at its best.
“No!” he said, gazing at her and striving hard to steady himself.
“How do you know?” she murmured, in scarcely audible tones.
“I know,” asserted Robert firmly, returning to an almost inhuman perfection. “If I began to make love to you, I’d be turned out in a twinkling. But who would believe this? Not a soul. If you were to tell the facts to our fellow tenementers, they would laugh you to scorn, and if I were to tell them, they would send me to the Bloomingdale Asylum. Yet my virtue is quite safe with you, Cornelia.”
“You hardly do yourself justice, Cato,” she said, biting her lips, and adjusting the neck of her dress.
“Oh, men are more or less passive agents in these matters. I’m safe with you because your radicalism, with all its offshoots into free love, free thought and free religion is only skin deep. You are a fascinating instance in the flesh of the great modern feminist dilemma: the demand for independence and respectability coupled with the fatal longing to be a Cleopatra, ‘one of the women of all time.’”
Piqued at his innuendoes, Cornelia was getting ready to launch an acrid retort, when the door bell rang. It was one of those vicious jangles with which only a policeman or a pedlar ventures to announce himself.
But the man who roistered into the apartment was Hutchins Burley.
II
It was difficult to think of this corpulent, bullying brawler as one of the leading newspaper men of the metropolis; he looked so very much more like a shoddy loafer from the underworld. His legs were still fairly steady, although his head was quite the reverse. His alcoholic exertions had been so ardent, however, that he sank on the couch with a loud snort of satisfaction.
“Where’s Janet Barr?” he demanded, after getting his breath. “I followed her to Charlotte’s flat, but she wasn’t there. That’s where Lydia Dyson said she was going to, the little liar.”
Cornelia shook her finger at him in mock remonstrance.
“You have seen quite enough of Janet for one night, Hutch, judging from reports that have reached me. I’d be doing no more than was good for you if I put Mrs. Burley on your trail.”
“What d’ye think Lizzie’d do?” he roared. “She’d scratch your eyes out for your pains!”
He gave himself up to a burst of horrible guffaws. As Robert looked at the man’s gross, overheated, pitted face and at the Falstaffian neck and trunk, he was overcome with intense disgust.
This disgust was only in part shared by Cornelia. True, she did not relish Burley in his present drunken condition, but ordinarily she confessed to a curious weakness for him. “There’s something about the brute that I like,” she once frankly said.
She found his grossness and animal passion a relief from the refinement and fastidiousness of men like Robert. There was a certain quantitative satisfaction in the spectacle of his enormous bulk at her feet. Anyhow, all male slaves looked alike to her, the fact being that her appetite for attention or devotion was at once undiscriminating and insatiable.
Meanwhile Burley had turned to Robert.
“Listen, my boy,” he said, clamorously, “when you marry, get a good stupid dray horse like my dame. One that’ll believe in you even if God Almighty’s against you. A good plodding dray horse. That’s the best recipe I know for marital felicity.”
In an explosion of repellent laughter he roared out his self-applause.
“You know as much about women as about this tunic I’m cutting out,” said Cornelia, rebuking him mildly with her voice, but not at all with her eye.
“Well, Corny,” said Hutchins, in high excitement, “I’ll tell you what I do know about them.” He rose from the lounge and dumped himself amorously on one of the arms of her easy chair. “There are only three things a man need do to make a hit with women: give ’em food, give ’em clothes, give ’em hugs. It’s a sure-fire rule for managing them, too.”
He roared louder than ever. Robert wished Cornelia wouldn’t encourage him under a pretense of doing the reverse.
“Now, Hutch, go home, please,” she said, prompted by his silent disapproval. “You’ll wake up all the neighbors with your loud laughter. Remember, the walls here are as thin as cardboard.”
By way of answer, the irrepressible roisterer put his arm familiarly around her waist and tried to draw her back into the chair.
“Be human, Corny, old girl,” he said. “Don’t be a psychic adventuress. I’ve got to stay somewhere tonight, and I might as well stay here.”
Cornelia wrenched herself from his grasp and, opening the outer door with a tempestuous gesture, told him to leave at once.
“You’d better go, Hutchins,” said Robert, quietly. “Cornelia will be more than a match for you.”
Burley began to abuse him at the top of his lungs.
“For a penny, I’d break every bone in your body,” he shouted.
“I’ll give you twice that sum to refrain,” said Robert coolly.
Burley’s latent bestiality was now thoroughly aroused. Breathing threatenings and slaughter, he advanced towards Robert, working himself into a greater passion and shaking his fist more savagely every step of the way. Cornelia screamed and threw herself in the huge man’s path. After a tussle of a few seconds, during which her cries rang through the open door, he shoved her forcibly aside. Robert’s slim stature was already poised for the uneven combat, when a tall, agile, coatless figure dashed in from the adjoining apartment and deftly arrested the fist that Burley was sending with considerable momentum towards Robert’s pale face.
“This way out!” exclaimed the newcomer in a voice almost ludicrously gentle.
But there was nothing gentle about his strength. The thwarted man sputtered abusive, incoherent indecencies. In vain. His expletives were cut short by two hands of steel that whirled his lumbering hulk forward, steered him past Cornelia with professional adroitness, and escorted him irresistibly into the corridor. A moment later an inchoate mass of humanity was torpedoed, with projectile swiftness, down the first flight of stairs. To make doubly sure, the direct actionist followed his missile.
Rumblings, sputterings and groans ascended discordantly up the stairway. Presently the noise grew fitful and then more and more subdued, as if some one had damped Vesuvius or banked its fires for the night. At length came silence.
Cornelia had sunk into a chair over which Robert was solicitously bending when Burley’s subjugator returned. In reply to Cornelia’s thanks he blushed like a boy and hid his embarrassment by edging towards the door.
In the hall outside he deprecated Robert’s warm words.
“Just practice work,” he said, in the same mild voice and Manhattan accent. “A little trick of concentration. A man brings all his muscular power to bear on a few weak points. And joints. The Japs can teach you. So can I.”
He drew a card from his waistcoat pocket. Meanwhile, Cornelia, who had followed Robert to the door, chanted:
“You are wonderful, Mr. Gorilla, wonderful! How do you accomplish it?”
“Ah, Miss, a child could do it. The main thing is to be a powerful breather; you can’t do much if you’re only a powerful eater or drinker. You’ve got to fill your lungs and your bel—your abdomen, with good fresh wind; then you travel on velvet.”
He gave Robert his card.
“Come in and I’ll show you,” he said cordially.
His eyes meeting Cornelia’s again, the vanquished victor withdrew in evident confusion to his retreat in number thirteen.
Robert looked at the card and turned it over to Cornelia. She recognized with a smile the legend about Harry Kelly, the Harlem Gorilla and Champion of the Mat.