The Lees of Happiness

If you should look through the files of old magazines for the first years of the present century you would find, sandwiched in between the stories of Richard Harding Davis and Frank Norris and others long since dead, the work of one Jeffrey Curtain: a novel or two, and perhaps three or four dozen short stories. You could, if you were interested, follow them along until, say, 1908, when they suddenly disappeared.

When you had read them all you would have been quite sure that here were no masterpieces — here were passably amusing stories, a bit out of date now, but doubtless the sort that would then have whiled away a dreary half hour in a dental office. The man who did them was of good intelligence, talented, glib, probably young. In the samples of his work you found there would have been nothing to stir you to more than a faint interest in the whims of life — no deep interior laughs, no sense of futility or hint of tragedy.

After reading them you would yawn and put the number back in the files, and perhaps, if you were in some library reading-room, you would decide that by way of variety you would look at a newspaper of the period and see whether the Japs had taken Port Arthur. But if by any chance the newspaper you had chosen was the right one and had crackled open at the theatrical page, your eyes would have been arrested and held, and for at least a minute you would have forgotten Port Arthur as quickly as you forgot Chateau Thierry. For you would, by this fortunate chance, be looking at the portrait of an exquisite woman.

Those were tie days of “Florodora” and of sextets, of pinched-in waists and blown-out sleeves, of almost bustles and absolute ballet skirts, but here, without doubt, disguised as she might be by the unaccustomed stiffness and old fashion of her costume, was a butterfly of butterflies. Here was the gayety of the period — the soft wine of eyes, the songs that flurried hearts, the toasts and tie bouquets, the dances and the dinners. Here was a Venus of the hansom, cab, the Gibson girl in her glorious prime. Here was . . .

. . . here was you. Find by looking at the name beneath, one Roxanne Milbank, who had been chorus girl and understudy in “The Daisy Chain,” but who, by reason of an excellent performance when the star was indisposed, had gained a leading part.

You would look again — and wonder. Why you had never heard of her. Why did her name not linger in popular songs and vaudeville jokes and cigar bands, and the memory of that gay old uncle of yours along with Lillian Russell and Stella Mayhew and Anna Held? Roxanne Milbank-whither had she gone? What dark trap-door had opened suddenly and swallowed her up? Her name was certainly not in last Sunday’s supplement on the list of actresses married to English noblemen. No doubt she was dead — poor beautiful young lady — and quite forgotten.

I am hoping too much. I am having you stumble on Jeffrey Curtains’s stories and Roxanne Milbank’s picture. It would be incredible that you should find a newspaper item six months later, a single item two inches by four, which informed the public of the marriage, very quietly, of Miss Roxanne Milbank, who had been on tour with “The Daisy Chain,” to Mr. Jeffrey Curtain, the popular author. “Mrs. Curtain,” it added dispassionately, “will retire from the stage.”

It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming; she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible. Like two floating logs they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together. Yet had Jeffrey Curtain kept at scrivening for twoscore years he could not have put a quirk into one of his stories weirder than the quirk that came into his own life. Had Roxanne Milbank played three dozen parts and filled five thousand houses she could never have had a role with more happiness and more despair than were in the fate prepared for Roxanne Curtain.

For a year they lived in hotels, travelled to California, to Alaska, to Florida, to Mexico, loved and quarrelled gently, and gloried in the golden triflings of his wit with her beauty — they were young and gravely passionate; they demanded everything and then yielded everything again in ecstasies of unselfishness and pride. She loved the swift tones of his voice and his frantic, if unfounded jealousy. He loved her dark radiance, the white irises of her eyes, the warm, lustrous enthusiasm of her smile.

“Don’t you like her?” he would demand rather excitedly and shyly. “Isn’t she wonderful? Did you ever see —”

“Yes,” they would answer, grinning. “She’s a wonder. You’re lucky.”

The year passed. They tired of hotels. They bought an old house and twenty acres near the town of Marlowe, half an hour from Chicago; bought a little car, and moved out riotously with a pioneering hallucination that would have confounded Balboa.

“Your room will be here!” they cried in turn.

— And then:

“And my room here!”

“And the nursery here when we have children.”

“And we’ll build a sleeping porch — oh, next year.”

They moved out in April. In July Jeffrey’s closest friend, Harry Cromwell same to spend a week — they met him at the end of the long lawn and hurried him proudly to the house.

Harry was married also. His wife had had a baby some six months before and was still recuperating at her mother’s in New York. Roxanne had gathered from Jeffrey that Harry’s wife was not as attractive as Harry — Jeffrey had met her once and considered her —“shallow.” But Harry had been married nearly two years and was apparantly happy, so Jeffrey guessed that she was probably all right.

“I’m making biscuits,” chattered Roxanne gravely. “Can you wife make biscuits? The cook is showing me how. I think every woman should know how to make biscuits. It sounds so utterly disarming. A woman who can make biscuits can surely do no ——”

“You’ll have to come out here and live,” said Jeffrey. “Get a place out in the country like us, for you and Kitty.”

“You don’t know Kitty. She hates the country. She’s got to have her theatres and vaudevilles.”

“Bring her out,” repeated Jeffrey. “We’ll have a colony. There’s an awfully nice crowd here already. Bring her out!”

They were at the porch steps now and Roxanne made a brisk gesture toward a dilapidated structure on the right.

“The garage,” she announced. “It will also be Jeffrey’s writing-room within the month. Meanwhile dinner is at seven. Meanwhile to that I will mix a cocktail.”

The two men ascended to the second floor — that is, they ascended half-way, for at the first landing Jeffrey dropped his guest’s suitcase and in a cross between a query and a cry exclaimed:

“For God’s sake, Harry, how do you like her?”

“We will go up-stairs,” answered his guest, “and we will shut the door.”

Half an hour later as they were sitting together in the library Roxanne reissued from the kitchen, bearing before her a pan of biscuits. Jeffrey and Harry rose.

“They’re beautiful, dear,” said the husband, intensely.

“Exquisite,” murmured Harry.

Roxanne beamed.

“Taste one. I couldn’t bear to touch them before you’d seen them all and I can’t bear to take them back until I find what they taste like.”

“Like manna, darling.”

Simultaneously the two men raised the biscuits to their lips, nibbled tentatively. Simultaneously they tried to change the subject. But Roxanne undeceived, set down the pan and seized a biscuit. After a second her comment rang out with lugubrious finality:

“Absolutely bum!”

“Really ——”

“Why, I didn’t notice ——”

Roxanne roared.

“Oh, I’m useless,” she cried laughing. “Turn me out, Jeffrey — I’m a parasite; I’m no goal ——”

Jeffrey put his arm around her.

“Darling, I’ll eat your biscuits.”

“They’re beautiful, anyway,” insisted Roxanne.

“They’re-they’re decorative,” suggested Harry.

Jeffrey took him up wildly.

“That’s the word. They’re decorative; they’re masterpieces. We’ll use them.”

He rushed to the kitchen and returned with a hammer and a handful of nails.

“We’ll use them, by golly, Roxanne! We’ll make a frieze out of them.”

“Don’t!” wailed Roxanne. “Our beautiful house.”

“Never mind. We’re going to have the library repapered in October. Don’t you remember?”

“Well ——”

Bang! The first biscuit was impaled to the wall, where it quivered for a moment like a live thing.

Bang! . . .

When Roxanne returned, with a second round of cocktails the biscuits were in a perpendicular row, twelve of them, like a collection of primitive spear-heads.

“Roxanne,” exclaimed Jeffrey, “you’re an artist! Cook? — nonsense! You shall illustrate my books!”

During dinner the twilight faltered into dusk, and later it was a starry dark outside, filled and permeated with the frail gorgeousness of Roxanne’s white dress and her tremulous, low laugh.

— Such a little girl she is, thought Harry. Not as old as Kitty.

He compared the two. Kitty — nervous without being sensitive, temperamental without temperament, a woman who seemed to flit and never light — and Roxanne, who was as young as spring night, and summed up in her own adolescent laughter.

— A good match for Jeffrey, he thought again. Two very young people, the sort who’ll stay very young until they suddenly find themselves old.

Harry thought these things between his constant thoughts about Kitty, He was depressed about Kitty. It seemed to him that she was well enough to come back to Chicago and bring his little son. He was thinking vaguely of Kitty when he said good-night to his friend’s wife and his friend at the foot of the stairs.

“You’re our first real house guest,” called Roxanne after him. “Aren’t you thrilled and proud?”

When he was out of sight around the stair corner she turned to Jeffrey, who was standing beside her resting his hand on the end of the banister.

“Are you tired, my dearest?”

Jeffrey rubbed the centre of his forehead with his fingers.

“A little. How did you know?”

“Oh, how could I help knowing about you?”

“It’s a headache,” he said moodily. “Splitting. I’ll take some aspirin.”

She reached over and snapped out the light, and with his arm tight about her waist they walked up the stairs together.
II

Harry’s week passed. They drove about the dreaming lanes or idled in cheerful inanity upon lake or lawn. In the evening Roxanne, sitting inside, played to them while the ashes whitened on the glowing ends of their cigars. Then came a telegram from Kitty saying that she wanted Harry to come East and get her, so Roxanne and Jeffrey were left alone in that privacy of which they never seemed to tire.

“Alone” thrilled them again. They wandered about the house, each feeling intimately the presence of the other; they sat on the same side of the table like honeymooners; they were intensely absorbed, intensely happy.

The town of Marlowe, though a comparatively old settlement, had only recently acquired a “society.” Five or six years before, alarmed at the smoky swelling of Chicago, two or three young married couples, “bungalow people,” had moved out; their friends had followed. The Jeffrey Curtains found an already formed “set” prepared to welcome: them; a country club, ballroom, and golf links yawned for them, and there were bridge parties, and poker parties, and parties where they drank beer, and parties where they drank nothing at all.

It was at a poker party that they found themselves a week after Harry’s departure. There were two tables, and a good proportion of the young wives were smoking and shouting their bets, and being very daringly mannish for those days.

Roxanne had left the game early and taken to perambulation; she wandered into the pantry and found herself some grape juice — beer gave her a headache — and then passed from table to table, looking over shoulders at the hands, keeping an eye on Jeffrey and being pleasantly unexcited and content. Jeffrey, with intense concentration, was raising a pile of chips of all colors, and Roxanne knew by the deepened wrinkle between his eyes that he was interested. She liked to see him interested in small things.

She crossed over quietly and sat down on the arm of his chair.

She sat there five minutes, listening to the sharp intermittent comments of the men and the chatter of the women, which rose from the table like soft smoke — and yet scarcely hearing either. Then quite innocently she reached out her hand, intending to place it on Jeffrey’s shoulder — as it touched him he started of a sudden, gave a short grunt, and, sweeping back his arm furiously, caught her a glancing blow on her elbow.

There was a general gasp. Roxanne regained her balance, gave a little cry, and rose quickly to her feet. It had been the greatest shock of her life. This, from Jeffrey, the heart of kindness, of consideration — this instinctively brutal gesture.

The gasp became a silence. A dozen eyes were turned on Jeffrey, who looked up as though seeing Roxanne for the first time. An expression of bewilderment settled on his face.

“Why — Roxanne ——” he said haltingly.

Into a dozen minds entered a quick suspicion, a rumor of scandal. Could it be that behind the scenes with this couple, apparently so in love, lurked some curious antipathy? Why else this streak of fire, across such a cloudless heaven?

“Jeffrey!”— Roxanne’s voice was pleading — startled and horrified, she yet knew that it was a mistake. Not once did it occur to her to blame him or to resent it. Her word was a trembling supplication —“Tell me, Jeffrey,” it said, “tell Roxanne, your own Roxanne.”

“Why, Roxanne —” began Jeffrey again. The bewildered look changed to pain. He was clearly as startled as she. “I didn’t intend that,” he went on; “you startled me. You — I felt as if some one were attacking me. I— how — why, how idiotic!”

“Jeffrey!” Again the word was a prayer, incense offered up to a high God through this new and unfathomable darkness.

They were both on their feet, they were saying good-by, faltering, apologizing, explaining. There was no attempt to pass it off easily. That way lay sacrilege. Jeffrey had not been feeling well, they said. He had become nervous. Back of both their minds was the unexplained horror of that blow — the marvel that there had been for an instant something between them — his anger and her fear — and now to both a sorrow, momentary, no doubt, but to be bridged at once, at once, while there was yet time. Was that swift water lashing under their feet — the fierce glint of some uncharted chasm?

Out in their car under the harvest moon he talked brokenly. It was just — incomprehensible to him, he said. He had been thinking of the poker game — absorbed — and the touch on his shoulder had seemed like an attack. An attack! He clung to that word, flung it up as a shield. He had hated what touched him. With the impact of his hand it had gone, that — nervousness. That was all he knew.

Both their eyes filled with tears and they whispered love there under the broad night as the serene streets of Marlowe sped by. Later, when they went to bed, they were quite calm. Jeffrey was to take a week off all work — was simply to loll, and sleep, and go on long walks until this nervousness left him. When they had decided this safety settled down upon Roxanne. The pillows underhead became soft and friendly; the bed on which they lay seemed wide, and white, and sturdy beneath the radiance that streamed in at the window.

Five days later, in the first cool of late afternoon, Jeffrey picked up an oak chair and sent it crashing through his own front window. Then he lay down on the couch like a child, weeping piteously and begging to die. A blood clot the size of a marble had broken his brain.
III

There is a sort of waking nightmare that sets in sometimes when one has missed a sleep or two, a feeling that comes with extreme fatigue and a new sun, that the quality of the life around has changed. It is a fully articulate conviction that somehow the existence one is then leading is a branch shoot of life and is related to life only as a moving picture or a mirror — that the people, and streets, and houses are only projections from a very dim and chaotic past. It was in such a state that Roxanne found herself during the first months of Jeffrey’s illness. She slept only when she was utterly exhausted; she awoke under a cloud. The long, sober-voiced consultations, the faint aura of medicine in the halls, the sudden tiptoeing in a house that had echoed to many cheerful footsteps, and, most of ail, Jeffrey’s white face amid the pillows of the bed they had shared — these things subdued her and made her indelibly older. The doctors held out hope, but that was all. A long rest, they said, and quiet. So responsibility came to Roxanne. It was she who paid the bills, pored over his bank-book, corresponded with his publishers. She was in the kitchen constantly. She learned from the nurse how to prepare his meals and after the first month took complete charge of the sick-room. She had had to let the nurse go for reasons of economy. One of the two colored girls left at the same time. Roxanne was realizing that they had been living from short story to short story.

The most frequent visitor was Harry Cromwell. He had been shocked and depressed by the news, and though his wife was now living with him in Chicago he found time to come out several times a month. Roxanne found his sympathy welcome — there was some quality of suffering in the man, some inherent pitifulness that made her comfortable when he was near. Roxanne’s nature had suddenly deepened. She felt sometimes that with Jeffrey she was losing her children also, those children that now most of all she needed and should have had.

It was six months after Jeffrey’s collapse and when the nightmare had faded, leaving not the old world but a new one, grayer and colder, that she wait to see Harry’s wife. Finding herself in Chicago with an extra hour before train time, she decided out of courtesy to call.

As she stepped inside the door she had an immediate impression that the apartment was very like some place she had seen before — and almost instantly she remembered a round-the-corner bakery of her childhood, a bakery full of rows and rows of pink frosted cakes — a stuffy pink, pink as a food, pink triumphant, vulgar, and odious.

And this apartment was like that. It was pink. It smelled pink!

Mrs. Cromwell, attired in a wrapper of pink and black, opened the door. Her hair was yellow, heightened, Roxanne imagined by a dash of peroxide in the rinsing water every week. Her eyes were a thin waxen blue — she was pretty and too consciously graceful. Her cordiality was strident and intimate, hostility melted so quickly to hospitality that it seemed they were both merely in the face and voice — never touching nor touched by the deep core of egotism beneath.

But to Roxanne these things were secondary; her eyes were caught and held in uncanny fascination by the wrapper. It was vilely unclean. From its lowest hem up four inches it was sheerly dirty with the blue dust of the floor; for the next three inches it was gray — then it shaded off into its natural color, which, was — pink. It was dirty at the sleeves, too, and at the collar — and when the woman turned to lead the way into the parlor, Roxanne was sure that her neck was dirty.

A one-sided rattle of conversation began. Mrs. Cromwell became explicit about her likes and dislikes, her head, her stomach, her teeth, her apartment — avoiding with a sort of insolent meticulousness any inclusion of Roxanne with life, as if presuming that Roxanne, having been dealt a blow, wished life to be carefully skirted.

Roxanne smiled. That kimono! That neck!

After five minutes a little boy toddled into the parlor — a dirty little boy clad in dirty pink rompers. His face was smudgy — Roxanne wanted to take him into her lap and wipe his nose; other parts in the of his head needed attention, his tiny shoes were kicked out at the toes. Unspeakable!

“What a darling little boy!” exclaimed Roxanne, smiling radiantly. “Come here to me.”

Mrs. Cromwell looked coldly at her son.

“He will get dirty. Look at that face!” She held her head on one side and regarded it critically.

“Isn’t he a darling?“ repeated Roxanne.

“Look at his rompers,” frowned Mrs. Cromwell.

“He needs a change, don’t you, George?”

George stared at her curiously. To his mind the word rompers connotated a garment extraneously smeared, as this one.

“I tried to make him look respectable this morning,” complained Mrs. Cromwell as one whose patience had been sorely tried, “and I found he didn’t have any more rompers — so rather than have him go round without any I put him back in those — and his face —”

“How many pairs has he?” Roxanne’s voice was pleasantly curious, “How many feather fans have you?” she might have asked.

“Oh — ” Mrs. Cromwell considered, wrinkling her pretty brow. “Five, I think. Plenty, I know.”

“You can get them for fifty cents a pair.”

Mrs. Cromwell’s eyes showed surprise — and the faintest superiority. The price of rompers!

“Can you really? I had no idea. He ought to have plenty, but I haven’t had a minute all week to send the laundry out.” Then, dismissing the subject as irrelevant —“I must show you some things —”

They rose and Roxanne followed her past an open bathroom door whose garment-littered floor showed indeed that the laundry hadn’t been sent out for some time, into another room that was, so to speak, the quintessence of pinkness. This was Mrs. Cromwell’s room.

Here the Hostess opened a closet door and displayed before’ Roxanne’s eyes an amazing collection of lingerie.

There were dozens of filmy marvels of lace and silk, all clean, unruffled, seemingly not yet touched. On hangers beside them were three new evening dresses.

“I have some beautiful things,” said Mrs. Cromwell, “but not much of a chance to wear them. Harry doesn’t care about going out.” Spite crept into her voice. “He’s perfectly content to let me play nursemaid and housek............