The Coming of Bill · Book I · Chapter 1 7 (1/2)

VII

Sufficient Unto Themselves

Some months after John Bannister had spoken his ultimatum in the library two drought-stricken men met on the Rialto. It was a close June evening, full of thirst.

“I could do with a drink,” said the first man. “Several.”

“My tongue is black clear down to the roots,” said the second.

“Let’s go up to Kirk Winfield’s,” proposed the first man, inspired.

“Not for me,” said the other briefly. “Haven’t you heard about Kirk? He’s married!”

“I know⁠—but⁠—”

“And when I say married, I mean married. She’s old John Bannister’s daughter, you know, and I guess she inherits her father’s character. She’s what I call a determined girl. She seems to have made up her mind that the old crowd that used to trail around the studio aren’t needed any longer, and they’ve been hitting the sidewalk on one ear ever since the honeymoon.

“If you want to see her in action, go up there now. She’ll be perfectly sweet and friendly, but somehow you’ll get the notion that you don’t want to go there again, and that she can bear up if you don’t. It’s something in her manner. I guess it’s a trick these society girls learn. You’ve seen a bouncer handling a souse. He doesn’t roughhouse him. He just puts his arm round his waist and kind of suggests he should leave the place. Well, it’s like that.”

“But doesn’t Kirk kick? He used to like having us around.”

His friend laughed.

“Kick? Kirk? You should see him! He just sits there waiting for you to go, and, when you do go, shuts the door on you so quick you have to jump to keep from getting your coat caught in it. I tell you, those two are about all the company either of them needs. They’ve got the Newlyweds licked to a whisper.”

“It’s always the best fellows that get it the worse,” said the other philosophically, “and it’s always the fellows you think are safe too. I could have bet on Kirk. Six months ago I’d have given you any odds you wanted that he would never marry.”

“And I wouldn’t have taken you. It’s always the way.”

The criticisms of the two thirsty men, though prejudiced, were accurate. Marriage had undeniably wrought changes in Kirk Winfield. It had blown up, decentralized, and rearranged his entire scheme of life. Kirk’s was one of those natures that run to extremes. He had been a wholehearted bachelor, and he was assuredly a much-married man. For the first six months Ruth was almost literally his whole world. His friends, the old brigade of the studio, had dropped away from him in a body. They had visited the studio once or twice at first, but after that had mysteriously disappeared. He was too engrossed in his happiness to speculate on the reasons for this defection: he only knew that he was glad of it.

Their visits had not been a success. Conversation had flowed fitfully. Some sixth sense told him that Ruth, though charming to them all, had not liked them; and he himself was astonished to find what bull dogs they really were. It was odd how out of sympathy he felt with them. They seemed so unnecessary: yet what a large part of his life they had once made up!

Something had come between him and them. What it was he did not know.

Ruth could have told him. She was the angel with the flaming sword who guarded their paradise. Marriage was causing her to make unexpected discoveries with regard to herself. Before she had always looked on herself as a rather unusually reasonable, and certainly not a jealous, woman. But now she was filled with an active dislike for these quite harmless young men who came to try and share Kirk with her.

She knew it was utterly illogical. A man must have friends. Life could not be forever a hermitage of two. She tried to analyse her objection to these men, and came to the conclusion that it was the fact that they had known Kirk before she did that caused it.

She made a compromise with herself. Kirk should have friends, but they must be new ones. In a little while, when this crazy desire to keep herself and him alone together in a world of their own should have left her, they would begin to build up a circle. But these men whose vocabulary included the words “Do you remember?” must be eliminated one and all.

Kirk, blissfully unconscious that his future was being arranged for him and the steering-wheel of his life quietly taken out of his hands, passed his days in a state of almost painful happiness. It never crossed his mind that he had ceased to be master of his fate and captain of his soul. The reins were handled so gently that he did not feel them. It seemed to him that he was travelling of his own free will along a pleasant path selected by himself.

He saw his friends go from him without a regret. Perhaps at the bottom of his heart he had always had a suspicion of contempt for them. He had taken them on their surface value, as amusing fellows who were good company of an evening. There was not one of them whom he had ever known as real friends know each other⁠—not one, except Hank Jardine; and Hank had yet to be subjected to the acid test of the new conditions.

There were moments when the thought of Hank threw a shadow across his happiness. He could let these others go, but Hank was different. And something told him that Ruth would not like Hank.

But these shadows were not frequent. Ruth filled his life too completely to allow him leisure to brood on possibilities of future trouble.

Looking back, it struck him that on their wedding-day they had been almost strangers. They had taken each other blindly, trusting to instinct. Since then he had been getting to know her. It was astonishing how much there was to know. There was a fresh discovery to be made about her every day. She was a perpetually recurring miracle.

The futility of his old life made him wince whenever he dared think of it. How he had drifted, a useless log on a sluggish current!

He was certainly a wholehearted convert. As to Saul of Tarsus, so to him there had come a sudden blinding light. He could hardly believe that he was the same person who had scoffed at the idea of a man giving up his life to one woman and being happy. But then the abstract wife had been a pale, bloodless phantom, and Ruth was real.

It was the realness of her that kept him in a state of perpetual amazement. To see her moving about the studio, to touch her, to look at her across the dinner-table, to wake in the night and hear her breathing at his side⁠ ⁠… It seemed to him that centuries might pass, yet these things would still be wonderful.

And always in his heart there was the gratitude for what she had done for him. She had given up everything to share his life. She had weighed him in the balance against wealth and comfort and her place among the great ones of the world, and had chosen him. There were times when the thought filled him with a kind of delirious pride: times, again, when he felt a grateful humility that made him long to fall down and worship this goddess who had stooped to him.

In a word, he was very young, very much in love, and for the first time in his life was living with every drop of blood in his veins.

Hank returned to New York in due course. He came to the studio the same night, and he had not been there five minutes before a leaden weight descended on Kirk’s soul. It was as he had feared. Ruth did not like him.

Hank was not the sort of man who makes universal appeal. Also, he was no ladies’ man. He was long and lean and hard-bitten, and his supply of conventional small talk was practically nonexistent. To get the best out of Hank, as has been said, you had to let him take his coat off and put his feet up on the back of a second chair and reconcile yourself to the pestiferous brand of tobacco which he affected.

Ruth conceded none of these things. Throughout the interview Hank sat bolt upright, tucking a pair of shoes of the dreadnought class coyly underneath his chair, and drew suspiciously at Turkish cigarettes from Kirk’s case. An air of constraint hung over the party. Again and again Kirk hoped that Hank would embark on the epic of his life, but shyness kept Hank dumb.

He had heard, on reaching New York, that Kirk was married, but he had learned no details, and had conjured up in his mind the vision of a jolly little girl of the Bohemian type, who would make a fuss over him as Kirk’s oldest friend. Confronted with Ruth, he lost a nerve which had never before failed him. This gorgeous creature, he felt, would never put up with those racy descriptions of wild adventures which had endeared him to Kirk. As soon as he could decently do so, he left, and Kirk, returning to the studio after seeing him out, sat down moodily, trying to convince himself against his judgment that the visit had not been such a failure after all.

Ruth was playing the piano softly. She had turned out all the lights except one, which hung above her head, shining on her white arms as they moved. From where he sat Kirk could see her profile. Her eyes were half closed.

The sight of her, as it always did, sent a thrill through him, but he was conscious of an ache behind it. He had hoped so much that Hank would pass, and he knew that he had not. Why was it that two people so completely one as Ruth and himself could not see Hank with the same eyes?

He knew that she had thought him uncouth and impossible. Why could not Hank have exerted himself more, instead of sitting there in that stuffed way? Why could not Ruth have unbent? Why had not he himself done something to save the situation? Of the three, he blamed himself most. He was the one who should have taken the lead and made things pleasant for everybody instead of forcing out conversational platitudes.

Once or twice he had caught Hank’s eye, and had hated himself for understanding what it said and not being able to deny it. He had marked the end of their old relationship, the parting of the ways, and that a tragedy had been played out that night.

He found himself thinking of Hank as of a friend who had died. What times they had had! How smoothly they had got on together! He could not recall a single occasion on which they had fallen out, from the time when they had fought as boys at the prep school and cemented their friendship the next day. After that there had been periods when they had parted, sometimes for more than a year, but they had always come together again and picked up the threads as neatly as if there had been no gap in their intimacy.

He had gone to college: Hank had started on the roving life which suited his temperament. But they had never lost touch with each other. And now it was all over. They would meet again, but it would not be the same. The angel with the flaming sword stood between them.

For the first time since the delirium of marriage had seized upon him, Kirk was conscious of a feeling that all was not for the best in a best of all possible worlds, a feeling of regret, not that he had married⁠—the mere thought would have been a blasphemy⁠—but that marriage was such a complicated affair. He liked a calm life, free from complications, and now they were springing up on every side.

There was the matter of the models. Kirk had supposed that it was only in the comic papers that the artist’s wife objected to his employing models. He had classed it with the mother-in-law joke, respecting it for its antiquity, but not imagining that it ever really happened. And Ruth had brought this absurd situation into the sphere of practical politics only a few days ago.

Since his marriage Kirk had dropped his work almost entirely. There had seemed to be no time for it. He liked to spend his days going round the stores with Ruth, buying her things, or looking in at the windows of Fifth Avenue shops and choosing what he would buy her when he had made his fortune. It was agreed upon between them that he was to make his fortune some day.

Kirk’s painting had always been more of a hobby with him than a profession. He knew that he had talent, but talent without hard work is a poor weapon, and he had always shirked hard work. He had an instinct for colour, but his drawing was uncertain. He hated linework, while knowing that only through steady practice at linework could he achieve his artistic salvation. He was an amateur, and a lazy amateur.

But once in a while the work fever would grip him. It had gripped him a few days before Hank’s visit. An idea for a picture had come to him, and he had set to work upon it with his usual impulsiveness.

This had involved the arrival of Miss Hilda Vince at the studio. There was no harm in Miss Vince. Her morals were irreproachable. She supported a work-shy father, and was engaged to be married to a young gentleman who travelled for a hat firm. But she was of a chatty disposition and no respecter of persons. She had posed frequently for Kirk in his bachelor days, and was accustomed to call him by his first name⁠—a fact which Kirk had forgotten until Ruth, who had been out in the park, came in.

Miss Vince was saying at the moment: “So I says to her, ‘Kirk’s just phoned to me to sit.’ ‘What! Kirk!’ she says. ‘Is he doin’ a bit of work for a change? Well, it’s about time.’ ‘Aw, Kirk don’t need to work,’ I says. ‘He’s a plute. He’s got it in gobs.’ So⁠—”

“I didn’t know you were busy, dear,” said Ruth. “I won’t interrupt you.”

She went out.

“Was that your wife?” inquired Miss Vince. “She’s got a sweet face. Say, I read the piece about you and her in the paper. You certainly got a nerve, Kirk, breaking in on the millionaires that way.”

That night Ruth spoke her mind about Miss Vince. It was in vain that Kirk touched on the work-shy father, dwelt feelingly on the young gentleman who travelled in hats. Ruth had made up her mind. It was thumbs down for Miss Vince.

“But if I’m to paint,” said Kirk, “I must have models.”

“There must be hundreds who don’t call you by your Christian name.”

“After about five minutes they all do,” said Kirk. “It’s a way they’ve got. They mean no harm.”

Ruth then made this brilliant suggestion: “Kirk, dear, why don’t you paint landscapes?”

In spite of his annoyance, he laughed.

“Why don’t I paint landscapes, Ruth? Because I’m not a landscape painter, that’s why.”

“You could learn.”

“It’s a different branch of the trade altogether. You might just as well tell a catcher to pitch.”

“Well, anyhow,” reported Ruth with spirit, “I won’t have that Vince creature in the place again.”

It was the first time she had jerked at the reins or given any sign that she was holding them, and undoubtedly this was the moment at which Kirk should have said: “My dearest, the time has come for me to state plainly that my soul is my own. I decline to give in to this absurd suggestion. Marriage is an affair of give and take, not a circus where one party holds the hoop while the other jumps through and shams dead. We shall be happier later on if we get this clearly into our heads now.”

What he did say was: “Very well, dear. I’ll write and tell her not to come.”

He knew he was being abominably weak, but he did not care. He even felt a certain pleasure in his surrender. Big, muscular men are given to this feebleness with women. Hercules probably wore an idiotic grin of happiness when he spun wool for Omphale.

Since then the picture had been laid aside, but Kirk’s desire to be up and at it had grown with inaction. When a lazy man does make up his mind to assail a piece of work, he is like a dog with a bone.

The music had stopped. Ruth swung round.

“What are you dreaming about, Kirk?”

Kirk came to himself with a start.

“I was thinking of a lot of things. For one, about that picture of mine.”

“What about it?”

“Well, when I was going to finish it.”

“Why don’t you?”

Kirk laughed.

“Where’s my model? You’ve scared her up a tree, and I can’t coax her down.”

Ruth came over to him and sat down on a low chair at his side. She put her arm round his waist and rested her head in the hollow of his shoulder.