XX

A week’s work was crowded into two days. As she sat on deck after breakfast the first morning out, Mimi felt a sense of security which made her comfortable for the first time since she had sat next to Jimmie Forrester at dinner. I’ll put these silly, childish notions out of my head, she resolved, and get back down to earth again. And after a few relentless pluckings of thoughts and fancies from her head she secured forgetfulness in reading. She swept through Carl Van Vechten’s Peter Whiffle, read the story of pathetic George F. Babbitt, walked the deck when she got tired, and then resumed her reading. She threw aside Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems⁠—they were too poignantly reminiscent of love and its disappointments, she wasn’t in a mood now for such revelations. And she was glad when the crags of Manhattan rose out of nothingness, for here was her familiar world where sanity could be found in hard work again.⁠ ⁠…

New York was sweltering in the terrific heat of early summer. Mimi, back in Manhattan one week, gave up the attempt to work and set forth to find relief somewhere in the greenness of Central Park.

“You ran away!” a familiar voice accused her as she stepped from Francine’s door into the street.

“Oh⁠—I thought I left you in Paris!” she parried, laughing nervously at the unexpected appearance of Jimmie Forrester.

“You did⁠—but I’m here now. Shall we eat dinner at the Plaza? Or Pierre’s? Or the Brevoort?”

“At none of them. I’m busy this evening.”

“You’re not!” he challenged her. “And even if you were, you surely wouldn’t deny me after I’ve come all the way from Paris to see you?”

After all, she decided, there’s no use in running away. I’ll face it now and get it over with. And then I’ll not see him again.

“Why did you leave so suddenly without giving me⁠—us⁠—a chance to see you again?” he demanded not unkindly when they had given their order.

“I finished my work and decided I was tired of Paris and wanted to get home.”

He said nothing but in his eyes she read his thoughts⁠—she had not succeeded in deceiving him. The consciousness he knew her fear gave him an advantage that made her uncomfortable.

“Tell me about Mrs. Crosby. ‘The dear old Behemoth,’ you called her, I believe,” she sought to divert him.

“She’s still buying junk⁠—and Horace is howling louder than ever. They’ll have to charter a ship to get the stuff home. Tell me, did I do anything that offended you?”

“Why do you ask me such a foolish question?”

“You ran away,” he answered simply.

“No, you didn’t do anything to offend me. And I didn’t run away. I just came home when my work was done.”

“I asked at the hotel and they said you had engaged your room through the fifteenth. And the Behemoth took me to Paquin’s and Beer’s and Worth’s and Drecoll’s and they all said you told them you’d had a cable calling you back to the States. And the steamship people told us you’d turned in passage on the Aquitania and made them squeeze you on the Mauretania. What was the cable that brought you back?” he demanded.

“You took a lovely method of enjoying a vacation in Paris, didn’t you?” she laughed, masking the perturbation she was feeling that he had gone to all that trouble to find out why she had gone. “Chasing around to modistes and steamship offices instead of enjoying Paris⁠—”

“Mimi, don’t you know why I did it?” he pleaded. Neither of them noticed that he had called her by her first name.

“No, I don’t,” she prevaricated and then was immediately sorry, not because she had told an untruth but because he might consider it as an invitation to tell her why he had followed her. That was exactly what he did.

“Don’t think me foolish, silly, childish. Perhaps I’m all three and if I am I don’t care. I’ve always laughed at the notion of ‘love at first sight’ but I won’t do it again⁠—”

“Don’t be foolish. You have seen me twice. You know nothing whatever about me other than that I work for my living at Francine’s. I might be an adventuress⁠—”

“Please don’t,” he pleaded. “Be serious. Let me finish.”

“No, I can’t let you go on. There are very good reasons why there can never be anything between us⁠—and I shan’t see you again,” she said firmly, as she rose from the table. “It’s best we let this drop right here⁠—and oh, Jimmie, it must end now.” Her voice, which had begun so bravely and positively, faltered. At the end it was almost a sob. She left him there and was gone before he could follow her.⁠ ⁠…

Three times the next day she picked up the receiver of the telephone on her desk and hung it up again when she heard his voice. As she started to leave the building for the day, she saw him waiting outside just in time to dart back into the building and go out by the back door. He wrote her but his letters were unanswered. Once she saw him crossing perilously Fifth Avenue, dodging taxicabs and buses by a hair’s breadth while their drivers cursed and shouted at him fluently but a nearby shop gave her friendly refuge.

She prayed he would become disheartened, angry with her. And even as she prayed, a malevolent spirit within her was battling with her prayer and making her hope fervently he would not forget. She knew that if she saw him she would not be able to check the seeds of love which she found had taken root miraculously and sprouted alarmingly. She did not call it “love”⁠—“silly infatuation which will pass away” was her name for it. She debated the wisdom of her course, wondered what would happen if she surrendered to the impulse to yield to this feeling towards him which came to her after she had switched off the night-lamp beside her bed and lay there between the cool sheets and listened to the street noises that came faintly up to her. She shielded the keen sensitiveness to each tiny impact of experience and of thought from heavy blows by trying to keep the heart of reality away from her. For reality frightened her while it fascinated her, made her long to creep away from it and find refuge in some realm of forgetfulness where she would be safe. Warring relentlessly and ruthlessly against that timidity was her common sense, which had been so largely increased by the experiences she had encountered.

Suppose I should marry him? I’d live in constant terror all my life, fearing that he would find out about Jean, about my race. The latter did not seem so important, but could she give up Jean forever? She knew she couldn’t. Fanciful plans sprang to her mind and as quickly were rejected. She thought of telling him Jean was a nephew, the child of some mythical and deceased sister or brother. No, she couldn’t do that⁠—she couldn’t live a lie like that. She thought of leaving him with the family in County. They had learned to love him as their own child and had looked alarmed when she had mentioned that someday she would take him with her. She could establish a trust fund with all the money she possessed and insure at least reasonable comfort for him. No, that was impossible⁠—she could never give him up that way.

Night after night she rolled and tossed and came no nearer a solution than before. Her eyes now had dark circles under them, she could not eat, she was nervous and irritable even to the customers. The knowledge that this state of affairs could not go on did not add to her comfort. And Jimmie Forrester would not be denied. He brought his mother to the shop to buy gowns but Mimi would not see them, sending word that she was frightfully busy and terribly sorry.⁠ ⁠…

Autumn and the rush season were upon her and she still wrestled with the riddle which seemed well-nigh insoluble to her. Mimi’s face had lost much of its colour, deep lines spread fan-like from the corners of her haggard eyes, from her body had gone much of its roundness. To her dismay she found that the more she struggled against the love which she feared, the more securely did it fasten its tentacles upon her. With her now was a stifling, strangling sensation as though she were held in the rib-cracking embrace of a boa constrictor who was crushing her in a room filled with acrid smoke. The passage of days and weeks and months had neither lessened her own distress, blissful in a measure though it was, nor had Jimmie Forrester’s zeal shown any sign of abatement. He resorted to telegrams, flowers, books. He used the mails to send proud but pleading letters asking her to permit him only to see her, to walk with her in the park, to go to the theatre or dinner. “Undoubtedly I’ve made myself a silly ass in your eyes,” he wrote her, “pursuing you, bombarding you, besieging you. My common sense tells me I should have taken refuge in pride and shown you that I can become angry enough never to see you again. I’ve even gone as far as to construct in my own mind little dramatic scenes when I loftily told you, after you had seen the devotion I offer you and had returned it in kind, that it was too late⁠—your coldness has killed my love. And, like one of the old-style villains in a cheap melodrama, I have gloated as I saw you humble while I stood cold and impassive. Oh, yes, Mimi, I’ve gone through all this and more⁠—more than ever a boy of sixteen in love for the first time has suffered.

“Yet I find that despite all I do to pluck you and the memory of you out of my heart I love you more devotedly every day that passes. Take pity, Mimi, just let me talk with you⁠—see you, sit beside you and hear your voice. I know now there’s nothing you can do which can kill my love. I cannot understand why you act as you do⁠—surely you do not hate me completely. If you won’t let me see you, won’t you write me just one little note and tell me why you have acted as you have?”

That night Mimi read the letter over and over again. She knew what it had cost him to write it⁠—to make such confessions of his inability to stop loving her despite all she had done to kill that love. For a long time she sat by the window and gazed out into the quiet street below. The roar of the East Side elevated trains came faintly to her like the gentle rumbles of far-off thunder. One by one the little groups of children playing near at hand dispersed with shrill shouts of parting until the morrow. A slightly chilling breeze from the East River swayed the yellowish silk curtains lazily. Ever and again it bustled through the windows in little gusts that swept in and were gone. She heard leaves of paper on the table behind her blowing to the floor but she made no move to pick them up. Life for her was like that, she thought. Little gusts came and swept her out of life just as she was beginning to find her way about in the new spot where she had been placed. They took her and tossed her about, this way and that, dropping her willy-nilly into some new place, some new situation in which she had to begin all over again the process of adjusting herself.

There was no pity for herself in Mimi’s reflections. She had been flung this way and that, buffeted by winds that often threatened to capsize the tiny boat which was her life. But with it all her lot had not been as hard as it might have been. There had been compensation⁠—Jean and Petit Jean, her work, the love of people, human beings she had studied at first to take herself out of herself, and later because she found in them interest and joy in that interest. But all the things hitherto now seemed easy, for through them all she had kept her soul free. Now she was threatened with inundation, the great rising of a wave that rose up⁠—up⁠—up and, bursting into a million silver bubbles, took shape again and formed the face of Jimmie Forrester. That face haunted her with its pleading, its suffering, eloquent of the struggle which he too was making.

From below voices came to her. She recognized one of them as that of Mrs. Mahoney, the wife of the janitor, out for a breath of air before going to bed.

“And I says to him, says I,” Mrs. Mahoney was declaring in tones redolent of shamrocks and St. Patricks and harps, “you can’t get nowhere by dodging the truth. If you got a hard job in front of you, the only thing to do is to jump at it and clean it up.⁠ ⁠…”

Mrs. Mahoney was probably speaking of housework but her words filtered through the fog of thoughts which enveloped Mimi. “You can’t get nowhere by dodging the truth!” The only thing to do is to jump at it and clean it up! She had been dodging the truth and shrinking from doing the very thing which she had known from the beginning she must do. There could be no happiness either for her or Jimmie if there was deceit or concealment of facts which he should know. She determined to tell him everything. If he was repelled by these facts, as she felt sure he would be, then the telling would end this strain for both of them and they could pass quietly out of each other’s lives.

Fearing that if she waited until morning her mind might be changed, she rose from the window and hurried, head held high and all her indecision and haggard fears fled, to the telephone. Her lips were set in a grim line, pressed so tightly together they made a thin red gash across her chalky-white bloodless face. Perversely, her mind flew back to that other crisis⁠—when she waited outside the door which closed her from the operating-room in which Petit Jean was being put to sleep, perhaps never to waken again. Then, nerves raw and tingling, she had hovered dangerously near the brink of a collapse in the consciousness that flesh of her flesh was about to die. Now she felt the same quivering nerves stabbing her with fiery daggers as she knew that a thing, close and beautiful and precious, closer to her even than flesh, was even at the moment in danger of destruction, yes, was almost sure to wither up and pass into oblivion. She took the telephone in her hand, for some minutes holding down the receiver with the forefinger of her right hand, even then fearing to take the step which she feared but which she knew must be taken.⁠ ⁠…

Jimmie was at home. Incredulously he spoke to her, hardly daring to believe that it really was she. Come over, Jimmie, I want to talk with you⁠—to tell you some things you must know, she whispered hoarsely. As she sat on the side of her bed after hanging up the receiver, she stared vacantly ahead of her, wondering, wondering.⁠ ⁠…

Hardly had she had time to dash a bit of powder on her face and arrange her hair before he rang the bell. She was shocked when she saw him, the first time in several weeks. His face was drawn and there were telltale hollows in his cheeks, and his eyes were far back in his head.

“Mimi, tell me, have you decided? You need not answer now about marrying me⁠—if you don’t want to answer⁠—but won’t you let me try to show you how I love you?” he pleaded. “I’ve suffered agonies, Mimi darling⁠—sometimes I believed I was almost crazy⁠—”

“No⁠—no, Jimmie, you mustn’t say such things to me⁠—I didn’t ask you to come over for that⁠—” Mimi sought to stop him.

“Then why⁠—why did you ask me?” His voice was low-pitched, little more than a whisper, but there was in it a huskiness that showed the strain he was undergoing. Mimi felt sick at heart as she saw the changes that had taken place in him. He was no longer the laughing, debonair, assured individual he had been that day they met in Paris. His eyes burned with a blazing intensity from the deep sockets in which they were sunk, his hands twitched as he alternately closed and opened them, he kept his lips pressed tightly together, and his words came short and crisp from the emotion that lay behind them. Mimi felt her resolution to tell him all slipping away into thin air. She did not want to hurt him further, though she knew that for his own good and hers she must tell him now. She braced herself as though she were about to plunge into an icy bath in January.

“I’ll tell you why I sent for you,” she began. “I did run away from you in Paris. And I’ve been running from you here in New York because I knew it was the only way I saw of keeping from hurting you⁠—”

“Hurting me?” he asked, puzzled.

“Yes, hurting you! Don’t you remember that night just after you came back from Paris and I left you so abruptly at dinner?” He nodded. “I told you then there was no use of your seeing me, that there could never be anything between us. That’s why I’ve deliberately done everything I could to make you angry at me, tired of me, so exasperated you would go your way and I mine⁠—”

“But, Mimi, don’t you love me? Look at me! Tell me you don’t love me, and I’ll not say another word!”

He seized her by the arms and turned her around so that they faced each other. She looked directly at him.

“That’s just the trouble, Jimmie, I do love you⁠—love you as I’ve never loved before⁠—love you as I know I’ll never love again. That’s just the reason you and I must have this talk and then end our friendship⁠—” Her eyes filled slowly with tears as she pulled her arms free. He looked dazed, puzzled, distrait, and let her go.

“You love me? Therefore we’ve got to end everything here? Tell me, Mimi, what is back of all this?”

Mimi dashed the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand, her handkerchief gone and she too upset to look for it. Determination replaced the expression of pain.

“Here is what is back of it! I told you that you didn’t know anything about me or my life⁠—” she began.

“But I do. Mrs. Crosby has given me your whole history, she went to Francine for what she herself didn’t know already.”

“But neither Mrs. Crosby nor Francine knows anything about me before I went to Francine’s eight years ago to work. And there’s a lot in my life back of that, I’m going to tell you the whole story and then you’ll see why⁠—”

Jimmie shook off his lethargy, his air of supplication.

“Mimi, you’ll do nothing of the sort,” he said firmly. “I know you⁠—and that’s enough for me. Whatever it is you’re worried about, I know you well enough to know that the things you’re trying to magnify into an insurmountable barrier between us were done through no fault of yours. You’re too fine, too decent⁠—”

“No⁠—no, Jimmie,” she cried, “you must let me finish⁠—”

“There’ll be no finishing. You and I both will be much happier if we just let that drop⁠—dropped for all time. If you told me and we married, you’d feel all the rest of your life that I was holding against you what you want to tell me now. Or that you’d been mighty foolish in worrying about it at all. And your trying to tell me just proves what I said about your being fine and decent⁠—if you’d been less than that, you’d never have let it worry you at all. There’s never been the slightest thing against you⁠—you can bet your life Mrs. Crosby would have found it⁠—and she thinks you are the most marvellous person she’s ever met!”

“But, Jimmie⁠—” Mimi made one last, despairing effort to stop him.

“But nothing, Mimi. There’s just one thing that counts now, nothing else in the world matters. I love you and you love me⁠—oh, darling, I do love you so!” he almost cried softly as he took her in his arms and prevented utterance of any other words from her lips with his own.⁠ ⁠…

They were married on Thanksgiving Day⁠—“those old Puritans who started this custom never knew what wise birds they were!” Jimmie gaily remarked when they came out of the church into the crisp November sunlight. The Crosbys gave a most elaborate wedding breakfast for them in their Park Avenue apartment⁠—even in her happiness Mimi felt she was in a fantastic curio shop. Just a few friends, Mrs. Crosby had said when she asked the privilege of furnishing the bridal breakfast. There sat down some sixty guests and the supply of Veuve Clicquot and Pommery Sec seemed inexhaustible.

“I’ve got a cunning little surprise for you, Mimi,” Mrs. Crosby coyly whispered. “I know you’ll like it, for you told me you did. You and dear Jimmie run into the library and look at it all by your own little selves.” They did look. It was the marble monstrosity of Cupids and bows and arrows Mrs. Crosby had bought in Paris from the romantic-looking sculptor with “the big, dark eyes and long hair and the sweetest velvet jacket.” But Mr. Crosby, gruff and kindly and intensely practical, gave them a cheque⁠—“You youngsters’ll know what you want better’n an old man like me⁠—get what you want with it.”

Madame Francine wept throughout the ceremony and her tears were because she loved Mimi and not⁠—well, not very much because she did not know what she would do now that Mimi was going to leave the shop. Mimi had wanted to keep on working but Jimmie had been adamant. “You’ve worked long enough already⁠—now you’re going to play!” he had declared, and there was no changing his mind. Jimmie’s mother was there, white-haired and kindly and self-effacing, but she had kissed Mimi tenderly and said: “My dear, you’re the only woman I’ve ever seen who’s good enough for my Jimmie!” Jimmie became mildly tipsy from the imbibing of many glasses of champagne drunk as toasts, and the breakfast was yet in progress, that is, the liquid portion of it, when Mimi, more lovely than ever in a coral green gown with a hat to match which Madame Francine herself had designed, slipped away with Jimmie at three in the afternoon.