XI And Chance Stages Melodrama Instead of Comedy
“
A brave day to ye!” A little bit of everything that made Patsy was wrapped in the smile she gave the man in the Balmacaan coat standing by the wheel-guard of the car before the town post-office, a hand on the front seat. “Maybe ye’re not knowing it, but it’s a rare good day for us both. If you’ll only take me for a spin in your car I’ll tell you what brings me—and who I am—if you haven’t that guessed already.”
Plainly the occupant of the coat and the car was too much taken by surprise to guess. He simply stared; and by that stare conveyed a heart-sinking impression to Patsy. She looked at the puffed eyes and the grim, unyielding line of the mouth, and she wanted to run. It took all the O’Connell stubbornness, coupled with the things Gregory Jessup had told her about his friend, to keep her feet firm to the sidewalk and her resolution.
“Maybe,” she thought, “he’s just taken on the look of a rascal because he thinks the world has written him down one. That’s often the way with a man; and often it takes but a bit of kindness to change it. If I could make him smile—now—”
Her next remark accomplished this, but it did not mend matters a whit. Patsy’s heart turned over disconsolately; and she was safety-locking her wits to keep them from scattering when she made her final plea.
“I’m not staying long, and I want to know you; there’s something I have to be saying before I go on my way. ’Twould be easiest if you’d take me for a ride in your car; we could talk quieter there.”
She tried to finish with a reasonably cheerful look, but it was a tragic failure. The man was looking past her to the post-office beyond, and the things Patsy had seemed to feel in his face suddenly rose to the surface and revealed themselves with an instant’s intensity. Patsy followed the look over her shoulder and shrank away perceptibly.
In the doorway of the office stood another man, younger and more—pronounced. It could mean but one thing: Billy Burgeman had lost his self-respect along with Marjorie Schuyler and had fallen in with foul company.
There were natures that crumbled and went to pieces under distrust and failure—natures that allowed themselves to be blown by passion and self-pity until they burned down into charred heaps of humanity. She had met a few of them in her life; but—thank God!—there were only a few.
She found herself praying that she might not have come too late. Just what she would do or say she could not tell; but she must make him understand that he was not the arbiter of his own life, that in spite of what he had found, there were love and trust and disinterested kindness in the world, lots of it. Money might be a curse, but it was a curse that a man could raise for himself; and a little lad who could shovel snow for half a day to earn two white roses for a dead friend was too fine to be lost out of life’s credit-sheet.
She did not wait for any invitation; silently, with a white face, she climbed into the car and sat with hands folded about the pilgrim staff. It was as if she had taken him for granted and was waiting for his compliance to her will. And he understood. He moved the starter, and, as the motor began its chugging, he called out to the man in the doorway:
“Better not wait for me. I seem to have a date with—a lady.” There was an unpleasant intonation on the last word.
“Please take a quiet road—where there will not be much passing,” commanded Patsy.
She did not speak again until the town lay far behind and they were well on that quiet road. Then she turned partly toward him, her hands still clasped, and when she spoke it was still in the best of the king’s English—she had neither feeling nor desire for the intimacy of her own tongue.
“I know it must seem a bit odd to have me, a stranger, come to you this way. But when a man’s family and betrothed fail him—why, some one must—make it up—”
He turned fiercely. “How did you know that?”
“I—she—Never mind; I know, that’s all. And I came, thinking maybe you’d be glad—”
“Of another?” he laughed coarsely, looking her over with an appraising scrutiny. “Well, a fellow might have a worse—substitute.”
Patsy crimsoned. It seemed incredible that the man she had listened to that day in Marjorie Schuyler’s den, who had then gripped her sympathies and thereby pulled her after him in spite of past illness and all common sense, should be the man speaking now. And yet—what was it Gregory Jessup had said about him? Had he not implied that old King Midas had long ago warped his son’s trust in women until he had come to look upon them all as modern Circes? And gradually shame for herself changed into pity for him. What a shabby performance life must seem to such as he!
She had an irresistible desire to take him with her behind the scenes and show him what it really was; to point out how with a change of line here, a new cue there, and a different drop behind; with a choice of fellow-players, and better lights, and the right spirit back of it all—what a good thing he could make of his particular part. But would he see—could she make him understand? It was worth trying.
“You are every bit wrong,” she said, evenly. “Look at me. Do I look like an adventuress? And haven’t you ever had anybody kind to you simply because they had a preference for kindness?”
The two looked at each other steadily while the machine crawled at minimum speed down the deserted road. Her eyes never flinched under the blighting weight of his, although her heart seemed to stop a hundred times and the soul of her shrivel into nothing.
“Well,” she heard herself saying at last, “don’t you think you can believe in me?”
The man laughed again, coarsely. “Believe in you? That’s precisely what I’m doing this minute—believing in your cleverness and a deuced pretty way with you. Now don’t get mad, my dear. You are all daughters of Eve, and your intentions are very innocent—of course.”
Pity and sympathy left Patsy like starved pensioners. The eyes looking into his blazed with righteous anger and a hating distrust; they carried to him a stronger, more direct message than words could have done. His answer was to double the speed of the car.
“Stop the car!” she demanded.
“Oh, ho! we’re getting scared, are we? Repenting of our haste?” The grim line of his mouth became more sinister. “No man relishes a woman’s contempt, and he generally makes her pay when he can. Now I came for pleasure, and I’m going to get it.” An arm shot around Patsy and held her tight; the man was strong enough to keep her where he wished her and steer the car down a straight, empty road. “Remember, I can prove you asked me to take you—and it was your choice—this nice, quiet spin!”
She sat so still, so relaxed under his grip that unconsciously he relaxed too; she could feel the gradual loosening of joint and muscle.
“Why didn’t you scream?” he sneered at length.
“I’m keeping my breath—till there’s need of it.”
Silence followed. The car raced on down the persistently empty road; the few houses they passed might have been tenantless for any signs of human life about them. In the far distance Patsy could see a suspension-bridge, and she wished and wished it might be closed for repairs—something, anything to bring to an end this hideous, nightmarish ride. She groaned inwardly at the thought of it all. She—Patricia O’Connell—who would have starved rather than play cheap, sordid melodrama—had been tricked by chance into becoming an actual, living part of one. She wondered a little why she felt no fear—she certainly had nothing but distrust and loathing for the man beside her—and these are breeders of fear. Perhaps her anger had crowded out all other possible emotion; perhaps—back of everything—she still hoped for the ultimate spark of decency and good in him.
Her silence and apparent apathy puzzled the man. “Well, what’s in your mind?” he snapped.
“Two things: I was thinking what a pity it was you let your father throw so much filth in your eyes, that you grew up to see everything about you smirched and ugly; and I was wondering how you ever came to have a friend like Gregory Jessup and a fancy for white roses.”
“What in thunder are you talking—”
But he never finished. The scream he had looked for came when he had given up expecting it. Patsy had wrenched herself free from his hold and was leaning over the wind-shield, beckoning frantically to a figure mounted on one of the girders of the bridge. It was a grotesque, vagabond figure in rags, a battered cap on the back of its head.
“Good God!” muttered the man in the car, stiffening.
Luckily for the tinker the car was running again at a moderate speed; the man had slowed up when he saw the rough planking over the bridge, and his hand had not time enough to reach the lever when the tinker was upon him. The car came to an abrupt stop.
Patsy sank back on the seat, white and trembling, as she watched the instant’s grappling of the two, followed by a lurching tumble over the side of the car to the planking. The fall knocked them apart, and for the space of a few quick breaths they half rose and faced each other—the one almost crazed with fury, the other steady, calm, but terrifyingly determined.
Before Patsy could move they were upon each other again—rolling about in the dust, clutching at each other’s throat—now half under the car, now almost through the girders of the bridge, with Patsy’s voice crying a warning. Again they were on their feet, grappling and hitting blindly; then down in the dust, rolling and clutching.
It was plain melodrama of the most banal form; and the most convincing part of it all was the evident personal enmity that directed each blow. Somehow it was borne in upon Patsy that her share in the quarrel was an infinitesimal part; it was the old, old scene in the fourth act: the hero paying up the villain for all past scores.
Like the scene in the fourth act, it came to an end at last. The time came when no answering blow met the tinker’s, when the hand that gripped his throat relaxed and the body back of it went down under him—breathless and inert. Patsy climbed out of the car to make room for the stowing away of its owner. He was conscious, but past articulate speech and thoroughly beaten; and the tinker kindly turned the car about for him and started him slowly off, so as to rid the road of him, as Patsy said. It looked possible, with a careful harboring of strength and persistence, for him to reach eventually the starting-point and his friend of the post-office. As his trail of dust lengthened between them Patsy gave a sigh of relieved content and turned to the tinker.
“Faith, ye are a sight for a sore heart.” Her hand slid into his outstretched one. “I’ll make a bargain with ye: if ye’ll forgive and forget the unfair things I said to ye that night I’ll not stay hurt over your leaving without notice the next morning.”
“It’s a bargain,” but he winced as he said it. “It seems as if our meetings were dependent on a certain amount of—of physical disablement.” He smiled reassuringly. “I don’t really mind in the least. I’d stand for knockout blows down miles of road, if they would bring you back—every time.”
“Don’t joke!” Patsy covered her face. “If—if ye only knew—what it means to have ye standing there this minute!” She drew in her breath quickly; it sounded dangerously like a sob. “If ye only knew what ye have saved me from—and what I am owing ye—” Her hands fell, and she looked at him with a sudden shy concern. “Poor lad! Here ye are—a fit subject for a hospital, and I’m wasting time talking instead of trying to mend ye up. Do ye think there might be water hereabouts where we could wash off some of that—grease paint?”
But the tinker was contemplating his right foot; he was standing on the other. “Don’t bother about those scratches; they go rather well with the clothes, don’t you think? It’s this ankle that’s bothering me; I must have turned it when I jumped.”
“Can’t ye walk on it? Ye can lean on this”—she passed him the pilgrim staff—“and we can go slowly. Bad luck to the man! If I had known ye were hurt I’d have made ye leave him in the road and we’d have driven his machine back to Arden for him.” She looked longingly after the trail of dust.
“Your ethics are questionable, but your geography is worse. Arden isn’t back there.”
“What do ye mean? Why, I saw Arden, back yonder, with my own eyes—not an hour ago.”
“No, you didn’t. You saw Dansville; Arden is over there,” and the tinker’s hand pointed over his shoulder at right angles to the road.
“Holy Saint Branden!” gasped Patsy. “Maybe ye’ll have the boldness, then, to tell me I’m still seven miles from it?”
“You are.” But this time he did not laugh—a smile was the utmost he could manage with the pain in his ankle.
Patsy looked as if she might have laughed or cried with equal ease. “Seven miles—seven miles! Tramp the road for four days and be just as near the end as I was at the start—” An expression of enlightenment shot into her face. “Faith, I must have been going in a circle, then.”
The tinker nodded an affirmative.
“And who in the name of reason was the man in the car?”
“That’s what I’d like to know; the unmitigated nerve of him!” he finished to himself. His chin set itself squarely; his face had grown as white as Patsy’s had been and his eyes became doggedly determined. “If it isn’t a piece of impertinence, I’d like to ask how you happened to be with him, that way?”
Patsy flushed. “I’m thinking ye’ve earned the right to an answer. I took him for the lad I was looking for. I thought the place was Arden, and—and the clothes were the same.”
“The clothes!” the tinker repeated it in the same bewildered way that had been his when Patsy first found him; then he turned and grasped Patsy’s shoulders with a sudden, inexplicable intensity. “What’s the name of the lad—the lad you’re after?”
“I’ll tell you,” said Patsy, slowly, “if you’ll tell me what you did with my brown clothes that morning before you left.”
And the answer to both questions was a blank, baffling stare.