For it is plain enough now that my tactics were precisely the worst in the world. What could have been better calculated to attract the girl than this studied unapproachableness, this air of remoteness and superiority? Particularly when one recalls that she herself was drawn to me from the beginning, and also that she was at that very time struggling almost obsessedly to get away from her own sense of inferiority and obscurity. The result was that I became for her a symbol; I was the obstacle itself: for the time being, the goal itself; I was something to be overcome. I doubt whether she phrased this explicitly, or separated out the various elements of which the complex was composed. She only knew, instinctively, that she was there, in that queer house, simply to be near me, and in the hope of getting nearer still. Much later, years later, she told me that she had from the outset thought me the nicest man she had ever met, and the wisest—adding, to soften the blow, that she had also always thought me something of a fool. She didn’t exactly want to fall in love with me—what she wanted was to learn from me, to make me a kind of father, or even (I don’t know at which stage she thought of this) a father-lover. But the motive anyway was a desire for knowledge; she simply thought I could help her.… I often wonder whether I ever did.
II.
Certainly not at the first climax of our little affair, our absurd little affair. There was never anything more grotesque, more delicious, more ridiculous, more lovely, more pathetically or beautifully a failure. It was early in the spring that it came about. Suddenly, one day, my wife was invited by wire to give a lecture in Baltimore as substitute for another lecturer who had failed to appear. As it happened, we had just lost our two maids; a comic interlude into which I won’t digress. Mabel was in a panic. Who was to look after things—the dog, the cat, the canary, not to mention poor Philip, her husband? It was then that Coralyn stepped forward; this was her cue for effective—oh, very effective—entrance. This was the chance for which she had been waiting, and for which she and I, for months past—she consciously and I unconsciously—had been elaborately preparing. It was not for nothing now that we had had so little to do with each other, had spoken together so little, had appeared even to avoid each other. More than once Mabel had reproached me for my indifference to Coralyn. She had, therefore, not an atom of a suspicion that she was about to be betrayed. She accepted Coralyn’s offer with joy, took the first train out of New Haven, to be gone for three nights, and there, heaven help us, we were.
What happened was inevitable; if only because we had resisted it so long. We came together as naturally as leaf touches leaf or the grass bends to the wind. As soon as we sat down together at the dinner table, and looked at each other across the candles, we both knew it; our talk became a mere subterfuge; and when afterwards we went out to the garden, where it was growing dark, and she put out her hand to touch a lilac bud, it was really to me she put out her hand, and I took it. When I kissed her, she laughed into my mouth, and turned her face away, and then turned it back again. After that, everything was madness.
And the next day it was madder still, but in a different way. For the first time I knew Coralyn as she really was—a hoyden, a tomboy, the very wildest of creatures; her mouse-like demureness had merely been a surface. She assured me she was not in love with me—why should she be? She laughed at me for being a sentimental fool—I told her that I, for my part, was falling in love with her; which indeed I was. I sat on a tree stump in the garden, while she smoked a cigarette. I felt very wretched.
“You’ll get over it, nice old Philip”—she ruffled my hair—“You ought to know better. Why drag in feelings and things? I was in love once myself, or thought I was, but now I think it’s all the ‘bunk.’ You know what that means? Or are you too old-fashioned in New Haven.”
“You’re a demon, Coralyn.”
“I’m a changeling. I have no heart.”
“Some day you’ll find it—maybe too late.”
“Oh, don’t for God’s sake be sententious.… All the same I’m afraid! I’m afraid.…”
“What of?”
“Oh, ask me another. I don’t know. I wish I did. Where do we go from here?”
It was then that she told me about Michael, her sweetheart. She had been engaged to him for two years. He was an ensign in the Navy. Finally she had decided that she really wasn’t in love with him at all.
“But I thought I’d give the poor kid a square deal,” she said, looking at me soberly, “so I came to Newport to meet him and tell him about it. I spent a week with him—just, you know—to make it easier for him.”
“You mean you lived with him?”
“Sure. Why not?… Which is why you found me in New Haven.”
“What about Michael.”
She shrugged her young shoulders, arched her eyebrows, made a light gesture as of dusting some infinitesimal object off her fingers.
“He was nice.… But why should we get married and ruin each other?… Oh, no! Oh, no! I’d outgrown him. Outclimbed him. And that was that.”
“Well, well.”
“Well, well … let’s go for a ride.”
We rode, we walked, we dined, we danced, we dropped in at a show of paintings (where I kissed her in a deserted room before a brilliant water-color by Dodge MacKnight), and all the while we talked feverishly, jokingly, uneasily, in a kind of attempt to find just what our odd relationship was going to be. She was very detached, very cynical, very passionate, but also very remote. I was—I am ashamed to say—eager; it was my first transgression, and I hoped it would be prolonged.
Coralyn made fun of me.
“Don’t look at me like that when we’re dancing. The cops’ll pinch you.”
“They’ll think we’re engaged.”
“They’ll think you’re my sugar daddy!… I love this thing—what is this thing?”
And then there was Mabel. Would she mind, would she guess? Would she mind very much if she did guess?
“But there won’t,” said Coralyn, gently, murmuringly, “be very much to mind, will there?”
And as a matter of fact, there wasn’t; Coralyn saw to that. She farced the whole thing. Divinely passionate one moment, she was a clown the next. If I may put it in the vernacular, she deliberately set out to raise hell with anything that might threaten to become a “grand passion.” And she was singularly successful. In twenty-four hours she had, as she herself put it, spanked it out of me. I accused her of being heartless—I accused her of being everything. I was angry, I threatened her with a dire future, a future without home, without friends, without love—she laughed and threw a slipper at me. She told me that I ought to have been a Shakspearean actor. She suggested that my eyebrows ought to have been purple, that I needed a beard (at which point she imitated quite admirably the bleat of a goat), and then, abruptly kissing me, she said that she liked me best when I was slightly tight. (She had seen me tight just once.) I was not only defenseless—I actually found myself liking this new Coralyn, and this new friendship, better than the old.… By the time that Mabel came back, our new terms had been so well formulated that Mabel saw or suspected nothing. Our three lives went on just as before, until, some while later, Coralyn suddenly announced that she had a chance for a job in New York. She went, and for three months we heard not a word from her.