Читать книгу: «The Widow [To Say Nothing of the Man]», страница 4

VII
A Short Cut

"WHAT ought I to do," asked the widow, carefully licking all the gum off the flap of a violet envelope and then trying to make it stick, "to a silly boy, who – asked me for a kiss?"

"What ought you to do?" repeated the bachelor, laying down his cigar and regarding the widow severely. "Refuse him, of course."

"Oh, of course," agreed the widow, rubbing the envelope spasmodically with the end of her handkerchief, "but what ought I do to teach him better?"

"I can't think of anything – better," replied the bachelor, charitably reaching for the violet envelope and closing it firmly with his fist.

"How about just taking the kiss – without asking for it?" inquired the widow naively, as she leaned luxuriously back among the cushions of the divan. "Wouldn't that have been better – for him, I mean?"

"Would it?" The bachelor looked the widow straight in the eye.

"Well," replied the widow weakly, toying with some fringe on a satin sofa pillow and carefully avoiding the bachelor's gaze, "he would have gotten it."

"And now he never will," rejoined the bachelor with a confidence he did not feel.

"Oh, I don't know." The widow became suddenly interested in the arrangement of the fringe on the satin sofa pillow. "But it isn't the man who asks a woman for a kiss or – or anything – who gets it. It's the man who takes for granted."

"Takes – what?"

"Takes her by surprise, Mr. Travers," explained the widow, "and doesn't give her time to think or to say no. The short cut to managing a woman is not argument or reason. It's action. She may like to be coaxed, but it's the man who orders her about whom she admires – and obeys. Eve has never forgotten that she is only a rib and when Adam forgets it, she – "

"Makes him feel like a small part of the vertebræ," interpolated the bachelor tentatively.

"Naturally," returned the widow, tying the sofa pillow fringe in a hard knot and then untying it again, "when a man comes to her on his knees she is clever enough to keep him there; but when he comes to her with a scepter in his hand and determination in his eye, she has a wholesome respect for him. It's not the man who begs but the one who demands that receives. It's not the man who asks a girl to marry him, but the one who tells her that she is going to marry him, who gets her. It's not the husband who requests the privilege of carrying a latch-key or staying down town at night who can do so without fear and trembling, but the one who calmly takes the latch-key and telephones his wife that he is going to stay down town and then rings off as though the matter were settled. The question of who's going to have the whip hand in love or matrimony is decided the very first time a man looks at a woman and lets her know who's master."

The bachelor flicked the ashes off his cigar and regarded the widow curiously.

"Are you talking Christian Science or Hypnotism?" he inquired patiently.

"Neither," replied the widow, "I'm talking facts, Mr. Travers. Haven't you ever seen a little short-legged man with a snub nose married to a beautiful, queenly creature, whom he ordered about as if she were the original Greek slave and who obeyed him as if he were Nero himself, and adored him in proportion to his overbearing qualities? And have you never seen a magnificent, six-foot-two specimen of masculine humanity, who was first in war and first everywhere but in his own home, where he was afraid to put his feet on a chair or light a pipe or make an original remark, because some little dried-up runt of a woman had him hypnotized into believing that he was the thirty-second vertebræ and she all the rest of the bones and sinew of the human race? A woman is like a darky, who fancies that 'freedom' means three-quarters of the sidewalk, or a small boy who imagines that doing as he pleases means smashing his sister's toys and stealing sweets from the pantry. Put her in her place and she will stay there; but give her an inch of power and she'll take an ell of liberty and boss you off your own door sill. The biggest, boldest woman that ever lived is built like a barge, to be towed; and any little man who puffs up enough steam and makes a loud enough noise can attach her to himself and tow her all the way up the river of life."

The bachelor laid down his cigar and gazed at the widow in awe.

"And I never knew it," he whispered huskily.

"I suppose," said the widow, beginning to toy with the fringe again, "that you've been asking girls to kiss you, all this time."

"Not all the time," protested the bachelor.

"And, of course," continued the widow maliciously, "they've all refused you."

"Not all," repeated the bachelor, pensively.

"What?" The widow glanced up quickly.

"Once," explained the bachelor apologetically, "I didn't have a bald spot."

"When a man asks for a kiss," pursued the widow, thoughtfully, "a girl HAS to refuse him; but when he takes it – "

"She has to take it, too," said the bachelor, chuckling.

"Would you mind," asked the widow, ignoring the last flippant bit of persiflage and picking up the violet envelope, "posting a letter for me?"

"May I look at the address?" demanded the bachelor.

"It's to the boy," began the widow, "who – who – "

"Took the roundabout way?" finished the bachelor, helpfully.

The widow nodded.

"I have written him," she explained, "that he mustn't – that it would be best if he wouldn't come here any more. That will keep him in his place, I think."

"On his knees?" inquired the bachelor sarcastically.

"And I told him," proceeded the widow, with a reproachful glance at the bachelor, "how very rude and foolish – "

"Did you explain," interrupted the bachelor, "that the foolishness consisted in not taking the kiss?"

"Mr. Travers!"

"And that the rudeness lay entirely in assuming that you might not want to be – "

"How dare you!" cried the widow, flaming as red as the scarlet satin sofa pillow behind her head. "I gave him a dreadful scolding!" she added, looking pensively at the sealed note and toying with the edge of the flap, as though she half wished it would come open again.

"In other words," remarked the bachelor laconically, "having him down, you proceeded to wipe your feet on him. Since he had turned the left cheek, you made him turn all the way round, so that you could stick pins in his back and make him feel like the thirty-second vertebræ and – "

"I had to, Mr. Travers," cried the widow pleadingly. "It was my duty."

"Your – what?"

"To teach him a lesson," explained the widow promptly. "He's got to learn that in the situation between man and woman there's only one throne and that whoever gets up on it first wields the sceptre. He's got to learn that the conquest of woman is not, like the Battle of Waterloo, an affair of strategy, but like the Battle of Bunker Hill or Sennacherib – "

"Or the Boston Tea Party or the Massacre of the Innocents," broke in the bachelor. "But aren't you a little hard on the girl? If you get him too well trained he'll beat her."

"Well," replied the widow promptly, "if he does she'll adore him. Besides, it's much better to have the matrimonial medicine administered in allopathic doses than in the little homeopathic pellets of caution and deceit, and lies and arguments which end in the divorce court, and a woman enjoys being bossed and bullied and ordered about by the man she loves quite as much as he enjoys the bossing and bullying. It's her natural instinct to look up, but she can't look up to a man who is figuratively at her feet. She may struggle against the man who attempts to conquer her by main force, but she enjoys being conquered just the same, and it takes a great burden off her soul to be able to lay her head on a broad, masculine shoulder and to know that every affair in life is going to be settled and decided for her.

"She may talk about thinking for herself and voting and all that, but she is always glad enough to sit back and be thought for and voted for by some man who has magnetized her into believing him the incarnation of intelligence. And any man can do it. If the average husband only had a little more nerve and fewer nerves, he could master his wife with one hand and his eyes shut. The heathen Turk can get along better with a whole harem full of women than the civilized man gets along with one lone, lorn wife. It isn't because he's any wiser or cleverer or kinder, but because the first Turk learned the short cut to managing a woman and passed the secret down in the family. They don't ask them to marry them over there, they order them; they don't request them to run an errand or sew on a button, they merely wave their hands and the women fight for the privilege of obeying. They have known for ages what the white man never seems to have learned, that the way to take a woman is by storm and the way to hold her is by force and that any man can manage any woman if he only knows how and has the audacity and the courage – What are you trying to do, Mr. Travers?"

"I'm taking a short cut to the divan," replied the bachelor, sitting down beside the widow, "and I've got the courage at last – "

"How dare you, Billy Travers!"

"And the audacity – "

"Stop! Stop!"

"And the nerve – "

"Mr. Taylor," announced the maid, appearing suddenly between the portieres at this critical moment.

"Oh, mercy!" cried the widow, "and my hair is just – "

"Am I intruding?" asked a fresh-faced young man, entering briskly between the portieres.

"Not at all, Bobby," said the widow sweetly, holding out one hand and feeling her back hair with the other. "You arrived just at the – psychological moment. We have been talking about you for the last half hour."

VIII
After Love – (?)

"WHY is it," asked the widow, swinging her chatelaine pensively as she strolled down the avenue beside the bachelor, "that the man who is most in love is most apt to get over it suddenly?"

The bachelor withdrew his eyes from the pretty pair of ankles across the street and glanced down at the widow with the lenient smile of superior wisdom.

"Why is it," he retorted, "that the man who drinks the most champagne at dinner has the worst headache next morning?"

"That isn't any explanation at all, Mr. Travers." The widow's chatelaine jingled impatiently. "Champagne is intoxicating."

"So is love."

"Champagne leaves you with an – an all-gone feeling."

"And love leaves you with – 'that tired feeling'."

"Not me," said the widow promptly, "I always feel exhilarated after – after – "

"Afterwards," finished the bachelor helpfully. "But you're a woman. It's the man who has the 'tired feeling'."

"What is it like?" persisted the widow.

"Well," the bachelor flipped his cane thoughtfully, "did you ever eat a fourteen course dinner, and then go to Sherry's afterward for supper and then go to Delmonico's for a snack and to Rector's for – "

"I've been through it," sighed the widow.

"You didn't want any more, did you?" asked the bachelor sympathetically. "That's the way a man feels when he's had enough of love – or a woman."

"But – but love isn't indigestible."

"Too much of anything – love or dinner or champagne – is apt to take away your appetite. And too much of a woman is sure to make you hate the sight of her."

The widow's chatelaine was dancing madly in the afternoon sunlight.

"I don't suppose," she said witheringly, "that it would be possible for a woman to get too much of a man!"

"No," agreed the bachelor cheerfully, as he squinted at another pair of pretty ankles, "women are sentimental topers. They sip their wine or their sentiment slowly and comfortably; they don't gulp it down like a man. That's why the man has usually finished the bottle before the woman has touched her glass. He is ready to turn out the lights and put an end to the affair just as she has begun to get really interested. But," and the bachelor turned suddenly upon the widow, "who is the man? Show him to me!" and he brought his cane down fiercely on the sidewalk.

"Wh-what man?" asked the widow, turning pink to the tips of her ears.

"The man who has jilt – gotten over it. I don't see how it's possible," he added thoughtfully, "with you."

"Me!" The widow's voice was as chill and crisp as the autumn air. "I wish," she added musingly, "that I knew how to patch it up."

"That's right!" retorted the bachelor. "Try to revive his interest in champagne by offering it to him – the morning after. What he needs, my dear lady, is – ice. When he has had a little ice and a little tabasco sauce – "

"He may want more champagne?" asked the widow hopefully.

"Yes," replied the bachelor, swinging his cane cheerfully, "but not from the same bottle. Will women ever learn," he mused, "that it is as impossible to revive a man's interest in a woman he has completely gotten over loving as to make him want stale champagne with all the fizz gone out of it?"

"I don't see why," said the widow. "A woman often falls in love with the same man twice."

"Because she never falls too much in love with him – once," explained the bachelor.

The widow's chatelaine rattled indignantly.

"Nonsense!" she cried, "A woman's love is always stronger and deeper than a man's."

"But it isn't so effervescent. She is a natural miser and she hoards her feelings. A man flings his sentiment about like a prodigal and naturally when it's all gone – there isn't any left."

"Is that when he gets the 'tired feeling?'" inquired the widow sympathetically.

"Yes," said the bachelor, "and nothing is worse than waking up in the morning with a dark brown taste in your mouth – to find the woman standing before you offering you more champagne. But she always does. A woman never seems to know when the logical conclusion of a love affair has arrived. She clings with all her strength to the tattered remnants of sentiment and shuts her eyes and tries to make believe it isn't morning, when she ought to go away – "

"And let him sleep it off," suggested the widow.

"That's it," agreed the bachelor, "I once knew a man who was infatuated with a woman who used attar of roses on her gloves and things. When he woke up – I beg your pardon – after they had broken off, he never could abide the smell of roses."

"I suppose," said the widow, holding her muff against her cheek sentimentally, "it reminded him of all the tender little tête-à-têtes and moonlight nights and the way her hair curled about her forehead and the way she used to smile at him, and of her gloves and her ruffles and the color of her eyes and – "

"It didn't!" said the bachelor emphatically. "It nauseated him. It's the woman who always remembers the pleasant part of a love affair. A man remembers only – the next morning – and the hard time he had getting out of it."

"And the headache," added the widow.

"And the 'tired feeling'."

"And the other woman," suggested the widow contemptuously.

"Yes," agreed the bachelor, "the other woman, of course. But," he added thoughtfully, "if a woman could only take the hint in time – "

"What time?" asked the widow. "When a man begins to be late for his engagements?"

"Yes; or to forget them altogether."

"And to make excuses and enlarge on his rush of business."

"And to seem abstracted during the conversation."

"And to stop noticing her jokes or her frocks or the way she does her hair."

"And to stay away from places where he could be sure to meet her."

"But," protested the widow, "they always make such plausible excuses."

"Nothing," said the bachelor confidently, "will keep a man away from a woman except a lack of interest in her – "

"Or an interest in another woman," added the widow promptly. "But," she concluded tentatively, "there ought to be a cure for it."

"For what? The other woman?"

"That tired feeling, Mr. Travers."

"There isn't any cure," replied the bachelor promptly, "but there's a good preventive. When you were a very little girl," he continued patronizingly, "and liked jam – "

"I like it now!" declared the widow.

"How did your mother manage to preserve your interest in it?"

"She took the jam away, Mr. Travers, and put it on the top shelf always – just before I had had enough."

"Well, that's the way to preserve a man's interest in a woman," declared the bachelor. "Deal yourself out to him in homeopathic doses. Put yourself on the top shelf, where it is hard for him to get at you. Feed him sugar out of a teaspoon; don't pass him the whole sugar bowl. Then he will be always begging for more. One only wants more of anything that one can't get enough of, you know. Now, if a woman would use her judgment – "

"As if a woman in love had any judgment!" mocked the widow.

"That's it!" sighed the bachelor, "She never has. She just lays the whole feast before the man, flings all her charms at his head at once, surfeits him with the champagne of her wit and lets him eat all the sugar off his cake right away. The love affair springs up like a mushroom and – "

"Oh, well," interrupted the widow impatiently, "I like mushroom love affairs. I like a man who can fling himself headlong into an affair and – "

"Of course you do!" sighed the bachelor, "every woman does. The sensible and temperate man who will love her all his life – "

"A little!" said the widow contemptuously.

"Well, a little is enough," retorted the bachelor, "at a time."

"That depends," said the widow, "on how many times – one is loved. There are some women who are so saving of their sugar and frugal with their sentiment that they never know the real joy of a grand passion or of having a man love them properly. What's the use of having money if you are always going to keep it in the bank?" she added conclusively.

The bachelor looked down at her and said nothing. There was a smile of hopeless resignation in his eyes.

"Here we are!" cried the widow, suddenly stopping in front of a tall brownstone house and holding out her hand politely. "So glad to have – "

"Aren't you going to invite me in?" demanded the bachelor, in astonishment.

The widow lifted her eyebrows in faint surprise.

"What," she asked sweetly, "after – "

"You broke an engagement with me last night!" blurted out the bachelor, looking the widow straight in the eyes. But the widow shifted her gaze to the park across the street and swung her chatelaine indifferently.

"And you weren't 'at home' to me the day before yesterday and you were out of town for a week before that; and you promised me that this afternoon – "

"Did I?" asked the widow, looking up innocently.

"Yes, you did!" declared the bachelor.

"Oh, well," laughed the widow, as she tripped up the steps with a wave of her muff, "I was only showing you the sugar bowl; but I didn't mean you could have another spoonful; besides," she added, turning round and talking through the tunnel in her muff, "there's somebody waiting inside."

"Who?" demanded the bachelor.

"The man with the 'tired feeling'," said the widow.

"But," began the bachelor in a puzzled voice, "if he is tired of – of you – "

"Me!" the widow laughed. "He isn't tired of me, Mr. Travers. It's – the other woman. He came to me for – for – "

"A bracer?" suggested the bachelor. "What are you going to give him?" he added.

"Vinegar, mustard, pepper, salt," said the widow counting off the buttons of her coat, child fashion.

The bachelor looked at her out of the corner of his eye.

"Anything else?" he asked.

"A little – ice," said the widow, gazing out over the park.

"Anything else?" persisted the bachelor.

The widow studied her muff musingly.

"Oh – I don't know," she said, doubtfully.

"Any – sugar?" demanded the bachelor.

The widow shook her head smilingly.

"No," she said, "I'm saving that for another – "

"Another!"

"Another time," said the widow ambiguously as she let the door close softly behind her.