下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
At last Max spoke.
"Why do you call me that?"
The tone in which the question was put was extremely low, the gray eyes were steady almost to coldness, the strong, slight fingers began mechanically to fold up the hair, strand upon strand.
Jacqueline's candle swayed, until a stream of the melted wax guttered to the floor.
"Because—"
"Yes?"
"Because—oh, because—because—I have always known!"
Then indeed a silence fell. Jacqueline, too petrified to embellish her statement, let her voice trail off into silence; Max, folding—mechanically folding—the strands of hair, offered neither disclaimer nor acceptance. With the force of the inevitable the confession had struck home, and deep within him was the strong soul's respect for the inevitable.
"You have always known?" he said, slowly, when the silence had fulfilled itself. "You have always known—that I am a woman?"
It sounded abominably crude, abominably banal—this tardy question, and never had Max felt less feminine than in the uttering of it.
The lips of Jacqueline quivered, her blue eyes brimmed with tears of distress.
"Oh, I could wish myself dead!"
"And why?"
"Because I have made myself an imbecile!"
The humiliation, the self-contempt were so candid, so human, that something changed in Max's face and the icy rigidity of pose relaxed.
"Come here!"
The guilty child to the life, Jacqueline came timidly across the room, the candlestick still drooping unhappily from her right hand, the mysterious mug clutched in her left.
Max's first action was to take possession of both, and to set them side by side upon the dressing-table. The candle Jacqueline delivered up in silence, but as the mug was wrested from her, she cried out in sudden vindictiveness:
"And that—look you—that is the cause of all! It was Lucien's idea! I served a cup of bouillon to him and to his friend at midnight, for they had talked much; and finding it good, nothing would serve but I must place a cup also for Monsieur Max, to await him on his return. Alas! Alas!"
Max pushed the cup away, as if to remove a side issue.
"Answer the question I put to you! You know that I am a woman?"
"Yes; I know."
"Since when? Since the night at the Bal Tabarin?"
"Oh, but no!"
"Since the morning we met upon this doorstep?"
"No."
"Since the morning you made the coffee for M. Blake and me?"
Jacqueline was twisting the buckle of her belt in nervous perturbation.
"Answer me! It was since that morning?"
"No! Yes! Oh, it was before that morning. Oh, madame—monsieur!" She wrung her hands in a confusion of misery. "Oh, do not torture me! I cannot tell you how it was—or when. I cannot explain. You know how these things come—from here!" She lightly touched the place where she imagined her heart to be.
Max, sitting quiet, made no betrayal of the agony of apprehension at work within.
"And how many others have had this—instinct? M. Cartel? M. Blake?"
So surprising, so grotesque seemed the questions, that self-confidence rushed suddenly in upon Jacqueline. She threw back her head and laughed—laughed until her old inconsequent self was restored to power.
"Lucien! Monsieur Édouard! Oh, la, la ! How droll!"
"Then they do not know?"
"Know? Are they not men? And are men not children?"
The vast superiority—the wordly wisdom in the babyish face was at once so comical and so reassuring that irresistibly Max laughed too; and at the laugh, the little Jacqueline dropped to her knees beside the dressing-table and looked up, smiling, radiant.
"I am forgiven?"
"I suppose so!"
"Then grant me a favor—one favor! Permit me to touch the beautiful hair!"
Without waiting for the permission, the eager little hands caught up the coiled strands, and in a moment the candlelight was again chasing the red tints and the bronze through the dark waves.
"My faith, but it is beautiful! Beautiful! And what a pity!"
"A pity—?"
"That no man may see it!" For an instant Jacqueline buried her face in the silky mass; then, like a little bright bird, looked up again. "A man would go mad for this!"
"For a thing like that? Absurd!"
"Yet a thing like that can demolish Monsieur Max, and leave in his place—"
"What?"
"How shall I say? His sister?" She looked up anew, disarming in her naïve candor: and a swift temptation assailed her listener—the temptation that at times assails the strongest—the temptation to unburden the mind.
"Jacqueline," Max cried, impetuously, "you speak a great truth when you say that! We have all of us the two natures—the brother and the sister! Not one of us is quite woman—not one of us is all man!"
The thought sped from him, winged and potent; and Jacqueline, wise in her child's wisdom, offered no comment, put forward no opinion.
"It is a war," Max cried again, "a relentless, eternal war; for one nature must conquer, and one must fail. There cannot be two rulers in the same city."
"No," Jacqueline murmured, discreetly, "that is most true."
"It is. Most true."
"Why, then, was madame adorning herself with her beautiful hair when I had the unhappiness to enter? Has not madame already waged her war—and conquered?"
The eyes were full of innocent question, the soft lips perfectly grave.
Max paused to frame the falsehood that should fit the occasion; but, like a flood-tide, the frankness, the courage of the boy nature rose up, and the truth broke forth.
"I thought until to-night, Jacqueline, that the battle was won; but to-night, while I supped with M. Blake, a little play was played out before me—a little human play, where real people played real parts, where the woman clung to her womanhood, as you cling to yours, and the man to his manhood, as does M. Cartel; where the stage effects were smiles and glances and eyes and hair—"
Jacqueline nodded, but said not a word.
"And as I watched, the thought came to me—the mad thought, that I had, perhaps, lost something—that I had, perhaps, put something from me. Oh, it was a possession! A possession of some evil spirit!"
Max sprang from the chair, and began to pace up and down the shadowed room, while the little Jacqueline, sitting back upon her heels in a stillness almost Oriental, watched, evolving some thought of her own.
"And so madame desired to strangle the evil spirit with her beautiful hair?"
The hurried steps ceased.
"I wished to see the woman in me—and to dismiss her!"
"And was she easily dismissed?"
The new question seemed curiously pregnant. Max heard it, and in swift response came back again to the dressing-table, took the hair from Jacqueline's hands and began again to intertwist it with the boyish locks.
Jacqueline raised herself from her crouching position, the more easily to gratify her curiosity.
"It is extraordinary—the change!" she murmured. "Extraordinary! Madame, let us complete it! Let us remove that ugly coat!" Excitedly, and without permission, she began to free Max of the boy's coat, while Max yielded with a certain passive excitement. "And, now, what can we find to substitute? Ah!" She gave a cry of delight and ran to the bed, over the foot of which was thrown a faded gold scarf—a strip of rich fabric such as artists delight in, for which Max had bargained only the day before in the rue André de Sarte.
"Now the tie! And the ugly collar!" She ran back, the scarf floating from her arm; and Max, still passive, still held mute by conflicting sensations, suffered the light fingers to unloose the wide black tie, to remove the collar, to open a button or two of the shirt.
"And now the hair!" With lightning-like dexterity, Jacqueline drew a handful of hairpins from her own head, reduced her short blonde curls to confusion, and in a moment had brushed the thick waves of Max's clipped hair upward and secured them into a firm foundation.
"Now! Now, madame! Close your eyes! I am the magician!"
Max's eyes closed, and the illusion of dead hours rose again, more vivid, more poignant than before. With the familiar sensation of deft fingers at work upon the business of hairdressing, a thousand recollections of countless nights and mornings—countless preparations and wearinesses—countless anticipations and disgusts, born with the placing of each hairpin, the coiling of the unfamiliar—familiar—weight of hair.
"Now, madame! Is it not a picture?"
With the gesture and pride of an artist, Jacqueline cast the wide scarf round Max's shoulders and stepped back.
Max's eyes opened, gazing straight into the mirror, and once again in that night of contrasts, emotion rose paramount.
It was most truly a picture; not the earlier, puzzling sketch—the anomalous mingling of sex—but the complete semblance of the woman—the slim neck rising from the golden folds, the proud head, seeming smaller under its coiled hair than it had ever appeared in the untidiness of its boy's locks.
"And now, madame, tell me! Is the evil spirit one lightly to be dismissed?"
All the woman in the little Jacqueline—the creature of eternal tradition, eternal intrigue—was glorying in her handiwork, in the consciousness of its potency.
But Max never answered; Max continued to stare into the glass.
"You will dismiss it, madame?"
Max still stared, a peculiar light of thought shining and wavering in the gray eyes.
"Madame, you will dismiss it?"
Max turned slowly.
"I will do more, Jacqueline. I will destroy it utterly."
"Madame!"
"I have a great idea."
"Madame!"
"If a spirit—no matter how evil—could be materialized, it would cease to affect the imagination. I shall materialize mine!"
"Madame!"
"Yes; I have arrived at a conclusion. I shall render my evil spirit powerless by materializing it. But I must first have a promise from you; you must promise me to keep my secret."
"Madame—madame!" Jacqueline stammered.
"You will promise?"
"Yes."
"And how am I to trust you?"
Jacqueline's blue eyes went round and round the room, in search of some overwhelming proof of her fidelity; then swiftly they returned to Max's.
"Not even to Lucien, madame, shall it be revealed!" And silently Max nodded, realizing the greatness of the pledge.
Many hours later, when all the lights were out in the rue Müller and all the doors wore closed, the slight figure of the boy Max might have been seen by any belated wanderer slipping down the Escalier de Sainte-Marie to post a letter—a letter that had cost much thought, and upon which had been dropped many blots of ink; and had the belated wanderer been possessed of occult powers and wished to probe inside the envelope, the words he would have read were these—scrawled with bold impetuosity:
Mon Ami ,—My idea—the true idea—has come to me. It was born in the first hour of this new day, and with it has come the knowledge that, either you were right and some artists need solitude, or I am one of the fools I talked of yesterday!
All this means that I am ill of the fever of work, and that for many, many days—many, many weeks—I shall be in my studio—locked away even from you.
Think no unkind thing of me! All my friendship is yours—and all my thought. Be not jealous of my work! Understand! Oh, Ned, understand! And know me, for ever and for ever, your boy.
MAX.