Their Only Way

That night, when the last guest had gone, Ketletas, approaching his wife, put an arm about her. With her hair done up with opals and her dress looped with diamonds, in the brilliant room she shone. But undulantly she backed and smiled and said⁠—and civilly enough: “Would you mind not mussing me?”

Ketletas strangled an oath. Still young, good natured, good looking, though not unreasonably so, a man of means and of what is amusingly termed position, before marriage he had been rather run after. So, too, had she. An heiress and a beauty, men in droves had knocked at her heart, or at least at what they thought was her heart, for while necessarily she had one, she was unware of it. Dormant and unaroused, it had never spoken. The men who knocked got for answer an uplift of her delicate chin, the level look of steady eyes and a smile not disdainful but aloof⁠—a smile such as that with which she had just gratified her husband, whom she had accepted, de guerre lasse, because even in these liberal days spinsterhood has its restrictions, yet mainly because, for an heiress and a beauty, marriage is the conventional thing and to be accepted as such.

Conventional she intended the marriage to be. She told him so. It was as though she had told him that truffles were intended merely to be looked at. He did not believe her. He did not believe either that she understood what she was talking about. Even otherwise he felt that he could change her views. But marriage effected no change in this girl who remained fair and frigid as a polar noon.

Apart from that she was a joy in the house and at the dinners and dances that she gave, she became recognised as one of the most charming hostesses in New York, where charming hostesses abound.

It was after one of these dances that she asked Ketletas not to muss her. Ordinarily, and particularly in the drawing room, he might not have attempted to. But it was always the same thing. Before him were truffles, odorant, delicious, yet not to be touched.

Mad as he was about her, the fact had long since envenomed. Now, strangling an oath, he felt that he could kiss her and kill her, but kiss her first. Either proceeding being hazardous, he caught at an unoffending gilt chair and smashed it to bits. It was a pretty if somewhat conventional act.

Helen backed and bubbled.

But Ketletas, his face flushed, threw at her: “One might as well ask alms of a statue as affection from you.”

Helen laughed again. “Some statues have not any.”

“Have not what?”

“Arms you said, didn’t you? There’s the Venus de Milo.”

“Damn the Venus de Milo,” thought Ketletas. But⁠—convinced that there must be some scandal about the lady⁠—he got out: “Anyway, somebody won her.”

“By breaking chairs?” Helen cut in and so tantalisingly that instantly she backed still farther. Again he was approaching her, and with a look in his eyes that even she knew rather well.

But in backing she had reached the wall. There there was a button. She touched it. Ketletas, who heard it ring, stopped short, speculatively.

At that, Helen looked him over, and inhumanly pretty she looked. “Don’t be tiresome,” she lightly admonished. For a second she paused, then added: “You have not seemed quite yourself lately. Why not see somebody? Yes, why not see Cally?”

She turned. A servant had entered. Indicating the wreckage she told the man to remove it.

Ketletas, turning also, walked to the end of the room. The end reached, he turned again. The servant was there, but Helen had gone.

Pursuit was idle. Before he could reach her, she would, he knew, be in her room, her women about her. Moreover the outburst with the chair had already mortified this man who, however primitive, was at least a gentleman.

Yet what could he do? he futilely wondered. The existence that he led was impossible. But at the moment, unable to conjecture any remedy for it, Helen’s mockery occurred to him and he thought of Cally⁠—Cagliostro for short, as grateful patients sometimes called him⁠—a man with whom he had chummed at Harvard, and gloomingly he wished himself back there. But that too being impossible he went on and up to bed, which is always a sane proceeding.

In bed, though he had ridden the whole afternoon and danced the whole evening, sleep delayed, but Cally returned. From him, his thought drifted to Gautier’s “Avatar,” a story in which a man in love with a woman who is not in love with him consults a physician and with such surprising results that ever since they have been manna to needy novelists. But that detail is negligible. Ketletas did not know of it, nor would it have interested if he had known. What preoccupied him was the story of this physician who, being an occultist, knew things that Lothario never imagined. But, for such knowledge, occultism is not always obligatory. Common sense is quite as serviceable and common sense was a commodity that Cally dispensed.

Ketletas sat up. “I’ll see him tomorrow,” he told himself. Then he lay back, sleep claimed him, and he dreamed of a regenerate Helen living only his behests to obey.

“Dreams are true while they last,” he found himself remarking to Cally when, on the morrow, he at last had speech with him. “What a nuisance it is that we cannot live in dream.”

Cally nodded. Tall, saturnine, remarkably well-dressed, he was seated before an enormous table on which there was nothing but a riding-crop and a cigar box.

The latter he opened. “What’s wrong with you now?”

Ketletas dropped in a chair. “I suppose a chap may tell his physician anything. Mayn’t he?”

“Unfortunately for the physician, most chaps do,” replied Cally who, as he spoke, helped himself to a cigar. “By the way, do you know I have not seen you in the Park lately?”

Ketletas sat back. “Well, latterly, I have taken to riding in the afternoon. I am going today. Will you join me?”

Cally, occupied in lighting the cigar, shook his head. “What have you got up your sleeve?”

Ketletas ran his long thin fingers through his thick bright hair. “It’s about my wife. She don’t care for me and I can’t make her. Last night she made me so furious that I nearly pulled the house down.”

Cally puffed and eyed him. “A very seductive method. Just the way to appeal to a woman, particularly a woman like Mrs. Ketletas.”

“But you don’t realise the confounded injustice of it.”

“Where a woman is concerned I don’t need to. To a woman there is something much superior to justice, and that is pity. Pity she can give. In return what she wants is sympathy and understanding⁠—not an individual who irritates her at every angle of life, and that, I suppose, is what you have been doing.”

Ketletas leaned forward. “Yes, but previously, I⁠—”

Cally waved at him. “Then it was previously that your mistakes began. Given tact, opportunity, propinquity and the desire, and any man, who is a man, can win any woman. These things, all of them, you have, except tact. Try and acquire a little. Meanwhile⁠—”

The physician paused and puffed and threw out: “Mrs. Ketletas, I take it, is entirely convinced that you care for her?”

“Convinced! Why, good Lord! Since I first saw her I have never looked at another woman.”

Cally wreathed himself with smoke. “Then look at one, look hard and see that Mrs. Ketletas sees you at it. In cases of this kind there is nothing like jealousy on the part of the woman, particularly when complicated by indifference on the part of the man. Indifference is very winning. But men generally swear and stamp about. That is so human and therefore so artless that it heightens a lady in her own esteem and fortifies her in her attitude. Yet when the man is serene, smiling and apparently occupied elsewhere, she will say to herself, if not to him: ‘What is the meaning of this?’ And that is the psychological moment. That is the time to walk in.”

“Perhaps,” Ketletas sighed. “But not with a woman like my wife. You don’t know her as I do.”

With magnificent disdain Cally strewed his ashes on the floor. “It may be that I know her better. Mrs. Ketletas is a young and sensitive woman, and a woman who is young and sensitive resembles nothing so much as a violin. In the hands of an artist, a violin becomes a harmonious thing. In the hands of an artisan, it is merely discordant. Necessarily there are violins so wretched that no artist would touch them. But given a Cremona and a virtuoso and what duos the conjunction will produce! A young and sensitive woman is a Cremona in flesh and blood. The harmonies of which she is capable depend on the maestria of the man by whom she is approached. Now fancy yourself a virtuoso and your wife a violin. If you are to make her care for you, you must treat her as an artist should. Have a cigar?”

“But I am not an artist,” the exasperated Ketletas exclaimed. “I am a plain, everyday sort of chap.”

Appreciatively Cally nodded. “Very good then, I’ll sing another tune. Now tell me, when you are not occupied in pulling the house down, do you ever take tea with Mrs. Ketletas? For if so I can give you something to put in her cup⁠—when she is not looking, you know.”

“Rubbish!” Ketletas snorted. “There are no love-philters any more.”

Cally threw away his cigar. “No, but instead there are pathogenic bacilli.”

Ketletas stared.

Again Cally nodded. “Do you happen to count Condillac among your acquaintances?” he asked.

Ketletas shook his head.

“Condillac,” Cally resumed, “was a philosopher. He undertook to analyze the human mind. For the purpose he imagined an adult capable of experiencing every emotion and of appreciating any idea, but having none whatever, and into the mind of this person he proposed to introduce the understanding of things, singly, one after the other. Theoretically the project was luminous. Practically it was impossible. He had no such person to play with. Moreover being, not a scientist, but a philosopher, he could not create one.”

“Well, what of it?” Ketletas, now very bored, inquired.

Cally took from the table the crop and waved it. “What he could not do I can accomplish. With certain bacilli I can give anybody a fever that will empty their mind of everything⁠—temporarily that is, but meanwhile it will be as wax. Wax to receive, marble to retain. Do you get it?”

Ketletas, a bit dazzled, blinked. “I think I am afraid to.”

With a smile, a trifle self-satisfied, Cally shook the crop. “There is nothing to fear, faint heart. Nothing. On the contrary. By means of the bacilli, Mrs. Ketletas’ mind could be made a blank. Then, little by little, her education could proceed. Little by little she would become what you wish. Little by little your ideas, and yours only, would be implanted in her. I could tell you how to do it and you would find the occupation ideal. For you would be fashioning a nature in consonance with your own, molding a heart in your own heart’s image.”

“But,” Ketletas protested, “she might die of the fever.”

Cally laughed. “People never die of fever. They die of idiots, of apothecaries, of imbeciles who call themselves M.D.’s. But of fever⁠—never!”

“I never heard such rot.”

Cally put down the crop. “It is a bountiful Providence that has enabled us to despise whatever we do not understand. But to get back to our muttons, or rather to my bacilli. At some time or other every man has cause, or thinks he has cause, to complain of his wife. Against the best of women, the best of husbands will, at sometime or other, have a grievance. That is the law of matrimony. From that law my bacilli can exempt you. What do you say?”

Ketletas sprang to his feet. “I say that if I cannot win my wife by fair means, I won’t win her by foul. Damn it, Cally, you are more devilish than the old wizard in Gautier’s ‘Avatar.’ ”

Cally caressed his chin. “Since you wish to be complimentary, you might call me, not more devilish, but more modern. Flatter me, you know.”

“It amounts to the same thing,” Ketletas, making for the door, threw back. “I’ll disinfect myself of you in the Park.”

Cally saw him go and, as it happened, saw to him later. For in the Park Ketletas’ horse when going full tilt, shied widely and slipped, and Ketletas who, at the moment, was inattentively intent on his wife, came a crumpler.

Carted to his house and put on a lounge in the drawing room, it was there that Cally, summoned by Helen, saw to him.

Quickly but methodically the physician examined, diagnosed and pronounced: “Fracture of the skull.”

Helen twisted her hands. “Will he die?”

Darkly Cally surveyed her. “Call your men. Have him put to bed. I’ll attend to the rest.”

He was as good as his word. But later, as he was leaving, Helen, intercepting him, timorously repeated that question.

“Will he die?”

Cally who was fumbling with a glove, balefully turned on her. “It is not your fault, if he doesn’t. He told me today how happy you make him! The fracture is the result.”

With that lie for knife, there and then he operated on her. Beneath it she shrank and shriveled. One hand went to her head, the other to her throat.

But Cally had not finished. “In exchange for the confidence, I told him to pay no attention to you and to interest himself elsewhere. But he could not, he is too honest. Then I offered to make you plastic, the servant of his will. It would have necessitated a preliminary illness on your part, and that I was prepared to induce. Another man⁠—less honest⁠—would have accepted. He reviled me and went off⁠—to that!”

Helen’s head was bent. From her eyes two great tears fell perpendicularly without touching the cheek. Cally, his glove in the air, watched them. Then, with a shrug, he was gone.

Thereafter for a while it was as though Ketletas were dead, drowned rather, sunk into depths where nothing can follow, into those deepest depths where life is without movement, without impulse, without sensation of any kind. But ultimately, death, loosening its hold, retreated; life beckoned, calling him from where he lay, and imperceptibly, little by little, after infinite hesitations, relapses, retrievals, drifting upward from those depths he awoke to the light of day.

The first thing that he saw was Helen⁠—or else a vision.

In a delicious torpor he closed his eyes. But had he dreamed it? When he again awoke, beside him was a strapping nurse, flanked by Cally who told him that he was better.

Ketletas did not need to be told. It was long though before he was up, longer still before he was about. But finally he was both, and one day, when he was feeling rather fit, a great event occurred, for he heard someone coming and, turning, rebeheld the vision.

At the entrance she hesitated, looked at him, moved to where he stood and, though her face spoke for her, she too was speaking, and at once he was drinking words that made his mouth champagne.

“I have been wrong,” he heard her saying. “But for your accident, but for something too that Cally told me, something else that I discovered, I might not have known it ever.” How good it tasted!

“Since then,” she added. “I have had so long to think it over. Can you forgive me?” And what vintage was there that could compare with that!

In the intoxication of it, tactlessly he took her hand. But that hand, instead of drawing away, drew him nearer, until actually his arms were about her, and there was no protest at being mussed.

So do miracles occur.

The marvel of it she increased. “Can you forgive me?” she repeated. “Oh,” she ran on, “that night you broke the chair, do you remember? You looked so wretched that I should have asked you then. But afterward, if you had tried any of Cally’s methods I never could have. You found a better way. You made me sorry for you. I could not have told you that before. I did not know it. I did not know what love was, either. It was you that taught me, and you found the only way to do it, for love, real love, all love is pity.”

She looked up at him. “Don’t you think so?”

“No, I don’t,” thought Ketletas. But he did not say it. He said nothing. He did better. Drawing her closer, he kissed her and he kissed her. That there are other ways of answering a lady, he knew. But that was his way, his only way, and it did not seem to him that it could be improved.