The Titan 11 страница

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when with her and more pleasing to her. Cowperwood had protested,

but she held to it. " Do you remember that lovely blue of the old

man's coat? " (It was an " Adoration of the Magi. " ) " Wasn't that

be-yoot-i-ful? "

She drawled so sweetly and fixed her mouth in such an odd way that

he was impelled to kiss her. " You clover blossom, " he would say

to her, coming over and taking her by the arms. " You sprig of

cherry bloom. You Dresden china dream. "

" Now, are you going to muss my hair, when I've just managed to fix

it? "

The voice was the voice of careless, genial innocence--and the

eyes.

" Yes, I am, minx. "

" Yes, but you mustn't smother me, you know. Really, you know you

almost hurt me with your mouth. Aren't you going to be nice to me? "

" Yes, sweet. But I want to hurt you, too. "

" Well, then, if you must. "

But for all his transports the lure was still there. She was like

a butterfly, he thought, yellow and white or blue and gold,

fluttering over a hedge of wild rose.

In these intimacies it was that he came quickly to understand how

much she knew of social movements and tendencies, though she was

just an individual of the outer fringe. She caught at once a clear

understanding of his social point of view, his art ambition, his

dreams of something better for himself in every way. She seemed

to see clearly that he had not as yet realized himself, that Aileen

was not just the woman for him, though she might be one. She

talked of her own husband after a time in a tolerant way--his

foibles, defects, weaknesses. She was not unsympathetic, he

thought, just weary of a state that was not properly balanced

either in love, ability, or insight. Cowperwood had suggested

that she could take a larger studio for herself and Harold--do

away with the petty economies that had hampered her and him--and

explain it all on the grounds of a larger generosity on the part

of her family. At first she objected; but Cowperwood was tactful

and finally brought it about. He again suggested a little while

later that she should persuade Harold to go to Europe. There would

be the same ostensible reason--additional means from her relatives.

Mrs. Sohlberg, thus urged, petted, made over, assured, came finally

to accept his liberal rule--to bow to him; she became as contented

as a cat. With caution she accepted of his largess, and made the

cleverest use of it she could. For something over a year neither

Sohlberg nor Aileen was aware of the intimacy which had sprung up.

Sohlberg, easily bamboozled, went back to Denmark for a visit,

then to study in Germany. Mrs. Sohlberg followed Cowperwood to

Europe the following year. At Aix-les-Bains, Biarritz, Paris,

even London, Aileen never knew that there was an additional figure

in the background. Cowperwood was trained by Rita into a really

finer point of view. He came to know better music, books, even

the facts. She encouraged him in his idea of a representative

collection of the old masters, and begged him to be cautious in

his selection of moderns. He felt himself to be delightfully

situated indeed.

The difficulty with this situation, as with all such where an

individual ventures thus bucaneeringly on the sea of sex, is the

possibility of those storms which result from misplaced confidence,

and from our built-up system of ethics relating to property in

women. To Cowperwood, however, who was a law unto himself, who

knew no law except such as might be imposed upon him by his lack

of ability to think, this possibility of entanglement, wrath, rage,

pain, offered no particular obstacle. It was not at all certain

that any such thing would follow. Where the average man might

have found one such liaison difficult to manage, Cowperwood, as

we have seen, had previously entered on several such affairs almost

simultaneously; and now he had ventured on yet another; in the

last instance with much greater feeling and enthusiasm. The

previous affairs had been emotional makeshifts at best--more or

less idle philanderings in which his deeper moods and feelings

were not concerned. In the case of Mrs. Sohlberg all this was

changed. For the present at least she was really all in all to

him. But this temperamental characteristic of his relating to his

love of women, his artistic if not emotional subjection to their

beauty, and the mystery of their personalities led him into still

a further affair, and this last was not so fortunate in its outcome.

Antoinette Nowak had come to him fresh from a West Side high school

and a Chicago business college, and had been engaged as his private

stenographer and secretary. This girl had blossomed forth into

something exceptional, as American children of foreign parents are

wont to do. You would have scarcely believed that she, with her

fine, lithe body, her good taste in dress, her skill in stenography,

bookkeeping, and business details, could be the daughter of a

struggling Pole, who had first worked in the Southwest Chicago

Steel Mills, and who had later kept a fifth-rate cigar, news, and

stationery store in the Polish district, the merchandise of

playing-cards and a back room for idling and casual gaming being

the principal reasons for its existence. Antoinette, whose first

name had not been Antoinette at all, but Minka (the Antoinette

having been borrowed by her from an article in one of the Chicago

Sunday papers), was a fine dark, brooding girl, ambitious and

hopeful, who ten days after she had accepted her new place was

admiring Cowperwood and following his every daring movement with

almost excited interest. To be the wife of such a man, she

thought--to even command his interest, let alone his affection

--must be wonderful. After the dull world she had known--it seemed

dull compared to the upper, rarefied realms which she was beginning

to glimpse through him--and after the average men in the real-estate

office over the way where she had first worked, Cowperwood, in his

good clothes, his remote mood, his easy, commanding manner, touched

the most ambitious chords of her being. One day she saw Aileen

sweep in from her carriage, wearing warm brown furs, smart polished

boots, a street-suit of corded brown wool, and a fur toque sharpened

and emphasized by a long dark-red feather which shot upward like

a dagger or a quill pen. Antoinette hated her. She conceived

herself to be better, or as good at least. Why was life divided

so unfairly? What sort of a man was Cowperwood, anyhow? One night

after she had written out a discreet but truthful history of himself

which he had dictated to her, and which she had sent to the Chicago

newspapers for him soon after the opening of his brokerage office

in Chicago, she went home and dreamed of what he had told her,

only altered, of course, as in dreams. She thought that Cowperwood

stood beside her in his handsome private office in La Salle Street

and asked her:

" Antoinette, what do you think of me? " Antoinette was nonplussed,

but brave. In her dream she found herself intensely interested

in him.

" Oh, I don't know what to think. I'm so sorry, " was her answer.

Then he laid his hand on hers, on her cheek, and she awoke. She

began thinking, what a pity, what a shame that such a man should

ever have been in prison. He was so handsome. He had been married

twice. Perhaps his first wife was very homely or very mean-spirited.

She thought of this, and the next day went to work meditatively.

Cowperwood, engrossed in his own plans, was not thinking of her

at present. He was thinking of the next moves in his interesting

gas war. And Aileen, seeing her one day, merely considered her

an underling. The woman in business was such a novelty that as

yet she was declasse. Aileen really thought nothing of Antoinette

at all.

Somewhat over a year after Cowperwood had become intimate with

Mrs. Sohlberg his rather practical business relations with Antoinette

Nowak took on a more intimate color. What shall we say of this

--that he had already wearied of Mrs. Sohlberg? Not in the least.

He was desperately fond of her. Or that he despised Aileen, whom

he was thus grossly deceiving? Not at all. She was to him at

times as attractive as ever--perhaps more so for the reason that

her self-imagined rights were being thus roughly infringed upon.

He was sorry for her, but inclined to justify himself on the ground

that these other relations--with possibly the exception of Mrs.

Sohlherg--were not enduring. If it had been possible to marry

Mrs. Sohlberg he might have done so, and he did speculate at times

as to whether anything would ever induce Aileen to leave him; but

this was more or less idle speculation. He rather fancied they

would live out their days together, seeing that he was able thus

easily to deceive her. But as for a girl like Antoinette Nowak,

she figured in that braided symphony of mere sex attraction which

somehow makes up that geometric formula of beauty which rules the

world. She was charming in a dark way, beautiful, with eyes that

burned with an unsatisfied fire; and Cowperwood, although at first

only in the least moved by her, became by degrees interested in

her, wondering at the amazing, transforming power of the American

atmosphere.

" Are your parents English, Antoinette? " he asked her, one morning,

with that easy familiarity which he assumed to all underlings and

minor intellects--an air that could not be resented in him, and

which was usually accepted as a compliment.

Antoinette, clean and fresh in a white shirtwaist, a black

walking-skirt, a ribbon of black velvet about her neck, and her

long, black hair laid in a heavy braid low over her forehead and

held close by a white celluloid comb, looked at him with pleased

and grateful eyes. She had been used to such different types of

men--the earnest, fiery, excitable, sometimes drunken and swearing

men of her childhood, always striking, marching, praying in the

Catholic churches; and then the men of the business world, crazy

over money, and with no understanding of anything save some few

facts about Chicago and its momentary possibilities. In Cowperwood's

office, taking his letters and hearing him talk in his quick,

genial way with old Laughlin, Sippens, and others, she had learned

more of life than she had ever dreamed existed. He was like a

vast open window out of which she was looking upon an almost

illimitable landscape.

" No, sir, " she replied, dropping her slim, firm, white hand, holding

a black lead-pencil restfully on her notebook. She smiled quite

innocently because she was pleased.

" I thought not, " he said, " and yet you're American enough. "

" I don't know how it is, " she said, quite solemnly. " I have a

brother who is quite as American as I am. We don't either of us

look like our father or mother. "

" What does your brother do? " he asked, indifferently.

" He's one of the weighers at Arneel & Co. He expects to be a

manager sometime. " She smiled.

Cowperwood looked at her speculatively, and after a momentary

return glance she dropped her eyes. Slowly, in spite of herself,

a telltale flush rose and mantled her brown cheeks. It always

did when he looked at her.

" Take this letter to General Van Sickle, " he began, on this occasion

quite helpfully, and in a few minutes she had recovered. She could

not be near Cowperwood for long at a time, however, without being

stirred by a feeling which was not of her own willing. He fascinated

and suffused her with a dull fire. She sometimes wondered whether

a man so remarkable would ever be interested in a girl like her.

The end of this essential interest, of course, was the eventual

assumption of Antoinette. One might go through all the dissolving

details of days in which she sat taking dictation, receiving

instructions, going about her office duties in a state of apparently

chill, practical, commercial single-mindedness; but it would be

to no purpose. As a matter of fact, without in any way affecting

the preciseness and accuracy of her labor, her thoughts were always

upon the man in the inner office--the strange master who was then

seeing his men, and in between, so it seemed, a whole world of

individuals, solemn and commercial, who came, presented their

cards, talked at times almost interminably, and went away. It was

the rare individual, however, she observed, who had the long

conversation with Cowperwood, and that interested her the more.

His instructions to her were always of the briefest, and he depended

on her native intelligence to supply much that he scarcely more

than suggested.

" You understand, do you? " was his customary phrase.

" Yes, " she would reply.

She felt as though she were fifty times as significant here as she

had ever been in her life before.

The office was clean, hard, bright, like Cowperwood himself. The

morning sun, streaming in through an almost solid glass east front

shaded by pale-green roller curtains, came to have an almost

romantic atmosphere for her. Cowperwood's private office, as in

Philadelphia, was a solid cherry-wood box in which he could shut

himself completely--sight-proof, sound-proof. When the door was

closed it was sacrosanct. He made it a rule, sensibly, to keep

his door open as much as possible, even when he was dictating,

sometimes not. It was in these half-hours of dictation--the door

open, as a rule, for he did not care for too much privacy--that

he and Miss Nowak came closest. After months and months, and

because he had been busy with the other woman mentioned, of whom

she knew nothing, she came to enter sometimes with a sense of

suffocation, sometimes of maidenly shame. It would never have

occurred to her to admit frankly that she wanted Cowperwood to

make love to her. It would have frightened her to have thought

of herself as yielding easily, and yet there was not a detail of

his personality that was not now burned in her brain. His light,

thick, always smoothly parted hair, his wide, clear, inscrutable

eyes, his carefully manicured hands, so full and firm, his fresh

clothing of delicate, intricate patterns--how these fascinated her!

He seemed always remote except just at the moment of doing something,

when, curiously enough, he seemed intensely intimate and near.

One day, after many exchanges of glances in which her own always

fell sharply--in the midst of a letter--he arose and closed the

half-open door. She did not think so much of that, as a rule--it

had happened before--but now, to-day, because of a studied glance

he had given her, neither tender nor smiling, she felt as though

something unusual were about to happen. Her own body was going

hot and cold by turns--her neck and hands. She had a fine figure,

finer than she realized, with shapely limbs and torso. Her head

had some of the sharpness of the old Greek coinage, and her hair

was plaited as in ancient cut stone. Cowperwood noted it. He

came back and, without taking his seat, bent over her and intimately

took her hand.

" Antoinette, " he said, lifting her gently.

She looked up, then arose--for he slowly drew her--breathless, the

color gone, much of the capable practicality that was hers completely

eliminated. She felt limp, inert. She pulled at her hand faintly,

and then, lifting her eyes, was fixed by that hard, insatiable

gaze of his. Her head swam--her eyes were filled with a telltale

confusion.

" Antoinette! "

" Yes, " she murmured.

" You love me, don't you? "

She tried to pull herself together, to inject some of her native

rigidity of soul into her air--that rigidity which she always

imagined would never desert her--but it was gone. There came

instead to her a picture of the far Blue Island Avenue neighborhood

from which she emanated--its low brown cottages, and then this

smart, hard office and this strong man. He came out of such a

marvelous world, apparently. A strange foaming seemed to be in

her blood. She was deliriously, deliciously numb and happy.

" Antoinette! "

" Oh, I don't know what I think, " she gasped. " I-- Oh yes, I do,

I do. "

" I like your name, " he said, simply. " Antoinette. " And then,

pulling her to him, he slipped his arm about her waist.

She was frightened, numb, and then suddenly, not so much from shame

as shock, tears rushed to her eyes. She turned and put her hand

on the desk and hung her head and sobbed.

" Why, Antoinette, " he asked, gently, bending over her, are you so

much unused to the world? I thought you said you loved me. Do you

want me to forget all this and go on as before? I can, of course,

if you can, you know. "

He knew that she loved him, wanted him.

She heard him plainly enough, shaking.

" Do you? " he said, after a time, giving her moments in which to

recover.

" Oh, let me cry! " she recovered herself sufficiently to say, quite

wildly. " I don't know why I'm crying. It's just because I'm

nervous, I suppose. Please don't mind me now. "

" Antoinette, " he repeated, " look at me! Will you stop? "

" Oh no, not now. My eyes are so bad. "

" Antoinette! Come, look! " He put his hand under her chin. " See,

I'm not so terrible. "

" Oh, " she said, when her eyes met his again, " I--" And then she

folded her arms against his breast while he petted her hand and

held her close.

" I'm not so bad, Antoinette. It's you as much as it is me. You

do love me, then? "

" Yes, yes--oh yes! "

" And you don't mind? "

" No. It's all so strange. " Her face was hidden.

" Kiss me, then. "

She put up her lips and slipped her arms about him. He held her

close.

He tried teasingly to make her say why she cried, thinking the

while of what Aileen or Rita would think if they knew, but she

would not at first--admitting later that it was a sense of evil.

Curiously she also thought of Aileen, and how, on occasion, she

had seen her sweep in and out. Now she was sharing with her (the

dashing Mrs. Cowperwood, so vain and superior) the wonder of his

affection. Strange as it may seem, she looked on it now as rather

an honor. She had risen in her own estimation--her sense of life

and power. Now, more than ever before, she knew something of life

because she knew something of love and passion. The future seemed

tremulous with promise. She went back to her machine after a

while, thinking of this. What would it all come to? she wondered,

wildly. You could not have told by her eyes that she had been

crying. Instead, a rich glow in her brown cheeks heightened her

beauty. No disturbing sense of Aileen was involved with all this.

Antoinette was of the newer order that was beginning to privately

question ethics and morals. She had a right to her life, lead

where it would. And to what it would bring her. The feel of

Cowperwood's lips was still fresh on hers. What would the future

reveal to her now? What?

Chapter XVII

An Overture to Conflict

The result of this understanding was not so important to Cowperwood

as it was to Antoinette. In a vagrant mood he had unlocked a

spirit here which was fiery, passionate, but in his case hopelessly

worshipful. However much she might be grieved by him, Antoinette,

as he subsequently learned, would never sin against his personal

welfare. Yet she was unwittingly the means of first opening the

flood-gates of suspicion on Aileen, thereby establishing in the

latter's mind the fact of Cowperwood's persistent unfaithfulness.

The incidents which led up to this were comparatively trivial

--nothing more, indeed, at first than the sight of Miss Nowak and

Cowperwood talking intimately in his office one afternoon when the

others had gone and the fact that she appeared to be a little bit

disturbed by Aileen's arrival. Later came the discovery--though

of this Aileen could not be absolutely sure--of Cowperwood and

Antoinette in a closed carriage one stormy November afternoon in

State Street when he was supposed to be out of the city. She was

coming out of Merrill's store at the time, and just happened to

glance at the passing vehicle, which was running near the curb.

Aileen, although uncertain, was greatly shocked. Could it be

possible that he had not left town? She journeyed to his office

on the pretext of taking old Laughlin's dog, Jennie, a pretty

collar she had found; actually to find if Antoinette were away at

the same time. Could it be possible, she kept asking herself,

that Cowperwood had become interested in his own stenographer? The

fact that the office assumed that he was out of town and that

Antoinette was not there gave her pause. Laughlin quite innocently

informed her that he thought Miss Nowak had gone to one of the

libraries to make up certain reports. It left her in doubt.

What was Aileen to think? Her moods and aspirations were linked

so closely with the love and success of Cowperwood that she could

not, in spite of herself, but take fire at the least thought of

losing him. He himself wondered sometimes, as he threaded the

mesh-like paths of sex, what she would do once she discovered his

variant conduct. Indeed, there had been little occasional squabbles,

not sharp, but suggestive, when he was trifling about with Mrs.

Kittridge, Mrs. Ledwell, and others. There were, as may be imagined,

from time to time absences, brief and unimportant, which he explained

easily, passional indifferences which were not explained so easily,

and the like; but since his affections were not really involved

in any of those instances, he had managed to smooth the matter

over quite nicely.

" Why do you say that? " he would demand, when she suggested, apropos

of a trip or a day when she had not been with him, that there might

have been another. " You know there hasn't. If I am going in for

that sort of thing you'll learn it fast enough. Even if I did, it

wouldn't mean that I was unfaithful to you spiritually. "

" Oh, wouldn't it? " exclaimed Aileen, resentfully, and with some

disturbance of spirit. " Well, you can keep your spiritual

faithfulness. I'm not going to be content with any sweet thoughts. "

Cowperwood laughed even as she laughed, for he knew she was right

and he felt sorry for her. At the same time her biting humor

pleased him. He knew that she did not really suspect him of actual

infidelity; he was obviously so fond of her. But she also knew

that he was innately attractive to women, and that there were

enough of the philandering type to want to lead him astray and

make her life a burden. Also that he might prove a very willing

victim.

Sex desire and its fruition being such an integral factor in the

marriage and every other sex relation, the average woman is prone

to study the periodic manifestations that go with it quite as one

dependent on the weather--a sailor, or example--might study the

barometer. In this Aileen was no exception. She was so beautiful

herself, and had been so much to Cowperwood physically, that she

had followed the corresponding evidences of feeling in him with

the utmost interest, accepting the recurring ebullitions of his

physical emotions as an evidence of her own enduring charm. As

time went on, however--and that was long before Mrs. Sohlberg or

any one else had appeared--the original flare of passion had

undergone a form of subsidence, though not noticeable enough to

be disturbing. Aileen thought and thought, but she did not

investigate. Indeed, because of the precariousness of her own

situation as a social failure she was afraid to do so.

With the arrival of Mrs. Sohlberg and then of Antoinette Nowak as

factors in the potpourri, the situation became more difficult.

Humanly fond of Aileen as Cowperwood was, and because of his lapses

and her affection, desirous of being kind, yet for the time being

he was alienated almost completely from her. He grew remote

according as his clandestine affairs were drifting or blazing,

without, however, losing his firm grip on his financial affairs,

and Aileen noticed it. It worried her. She was so vain that she

could scarcely believe that Cowperwood could long be indifferent,

and for a while her sentimental interest in Sohlberg's future and

unhappiness of soul beclouded her judgment; but she finally began

to feel the drift of affairs. The pathos of all this is that it

so quickly descends into the realm of the unsatisfactory, the

banal, the pseudo intimate. Aileen noticed it at once. She tried

protestations. " You don't kiss me the way you did once, " and then

a little later, " You haven't noticed me hardly for four whole days.

What's the matter? "

" Oh, I don't know, " replied Cowperwood, easily; " I guess I want

you as much as ever. I don't see that I am any different. " He

took her in his arms and petted and caressed her; but Aileen was

suspicious, nervous.

The psychology of the human animal, when confronted by these

tangles, these ripping tides of the heart, has little to do with

so-called reason or logic. It is amazing how in the face of passion

and the affections and the changing face of life all plans and

theories by which we guide ourselves fall to the ground. Here was

Aileen talking bravely at the time she invaded Mrs. Lillian

Cowperwood's domain of the necessity of " her Frank" finding a

woman suitable to his needs, tastes, abilities, but now that the

possibility of another woman equally or possibly better suited to

him was looming in the offing--although she had no idea who it

might be--she could not reason in the same way. Her ox, God wot,

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