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THE CINDER

FRANCIS HACKETT

THERE are you going, Eugene?" I heard his wife's voice calling from the ve

"To play tennis, Frida," he answered pleasantly, and he walked through to speak to her. "You don't mind?" he inquired. No man ever had a kindlier way with him.

"But you're only three of you," she said with surprise.

"Sure, dear; we can play three." "Yes," she flicked back, "you and Peggy. I know. But I'm going to play."

Eugene's voice was full of a sincere concern. "You can't, Frida dear; it would be mad. Look, it's late anyway; we'll call it off.”

"I can play with you perfectly well. You'll do the running. Let Peggy Wade play with Martin for a a change.

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There was a pause, and I slipped out on the most silent of sneakers. I hadn't meant to listen, not crudely, but I couldn't help picking up the words. Peggy and Eugene? It sounded odd. Yet that Frida Tallant was quiveringly in earnest there could not be a shadow of doubt.

When Frida came down to the court, I hailed her with the cheeriest hypocrisy. She took her side with Eugene while I had for partner the sunny substantial Peggy Wade. It wasn't good for Frida, yet, ashen and

grim, she stuck it out till the end of the second set. Then to my relief we stopped for tea, and after tea Peggy went off, leaving me to my host and hostess for our usual intimate week-end.

Peggy Wade, I asked myself, as I soaked in my hot bath. But it can't be Peggy Wade! While Frida's jealousy had trembled in every syllable of those few colorless words, it wasn't possible for me or for any one else to extract the least suspicion out of the friendly companionship of Peggy and Eugene. There are certain things one knows. Peggy was a plump jocund girl, who was clearly fated to marry a Yale man and bring up the class average for child-bearing. I could see her predestined familyfour prize children with heads like plum puddings. Eugene evidently liked her, the way one likes a cheerful red apple. But she wasn't at all his kind.

Was Frida his kind? Throughout our dinner, in the benign twilight of the candles, I gave direct thought to the Tallants for the first time.

I didn't think I knew them terribly well. Eugene would have said that he and I were good friends always, but we were unhandy at intimacy, and we never, as a rule, went below the safe surface of things. At that moment, I remember, the one thing I remarked in my own mind about

him was his charm. I found him, every one found him, charming. He wasn't any more brilliant than the candle-light, but he was just as mellowing and reassuring. His nature had an atmosphere, a climate, in which people felt enhanced. You You could have called him good, I suppose, because he was genuinely and unaffectedly good, yet he lacked the peculiar knack that the good have of making their neighbors uncomfortable. His goodness did not deny that he had common clay himself; it simply gave a depth to his embracing smile, his abrupt, shy, friendly gestures, his dots and dashes of words. I can hear and see him now-that serious voice, and the gentleness of his blue eyes that accompanied it, his reserve, his shortish strong figure. I often thought how his charm and his air of sincerity would have helped him to please women if he had happened to be interested in them; with half his endowment, I blush to think of what would have happened to me. But Eugene was married, submerged in marriage up to his ears.

Yet Frida was jealous. Why? I had to admit that, though he was modest and inarticulate, he did reveal a sort of naturalness with Peggy Wade that was pretty nearly talkative and fluent. Was I wrong about him, even though I could swear that Peggy was not his style?

I watched my host in the soft light host in the soft light as the three of us remained at table. Frida was silent in her usual weariness, while the two of us sat clinking the little gold-headed spoons of our coffee-cups and talking about Tilden's tennis. Yes, I'd call Eugene a passionate romantic man, I said to myself, a man with character and

force. About him, in spite of his hedged-in life, there was still a trace of free spirit. In his sparse brown hair there was the least tinge of fire, and in his deep blue eyes there was sometimes the horizon look. Yet to my mind, as I coolly reflected on him, he was infernally married, and to an exacting wife.

Now we had left the table, and she was lying on the chaise longue, while the host, not the lazy guest, was providing her with a big armful of cushions. Guest as I was, and supposed to be intimate, she irritated

me.

Frida's stunt was being an invalid. She was a sweetish invalid, full of a resigned nobility that did not prevent her from imposing her will on every one. She was a little older than Tallant, and when they were together, with her tall shrillness of figure, you felt she might have been, not his mother exactly, but almost his mother. Spiritually, they said, she was a rare being, and she certainly was a striking woman of the refined kind, but I always had an instinct to protect myself against her. I felt she was inimical.

Yet it wasn't because of their pleasant home that I enjoyed visiting them. It was a nice place in the country, or rather in the wilder suburbs, where we could wear corduroys and chop wood in the afternoon, and where the rustic appetite that we rapidly acquired in the afternoon could be gratified at a very urban table in the evening. But the real thing that brought me there was the two people themselves. She, as well as Eugene, had a personality. Nominally it was esthetic. She had a feeling for color, for artful bits of silk and

the right vase with the right blossoming branch in it. She had reached the Orient via Boylston Street, Boston, yet she conveyed the effect of an indisputable sensitiveness, like the stroke of a light dry hand. Her face was long and thin, etched by pain. Her hair was parted and drawn back, according to Rossetti, low on her neck in the classic style. Her gowns were draperies, clinging and in pastel shades. She made long gestures with her long hands. Yeats was her favorite poet; she was knee-deep in his finest emanations; and yet, lover of beauty as she seemed, I found a subtle acidity in everything she said to me, a queer impression of her resentfulness, her cruelty, and her power. She wanted to punish life for something it was doing to her, or had done to her. She was vengeful. When she got hold of me and began to probe me, in a "you men" fashion, I felt pure alarm.

To tell the truth, I rather despised Eugene for being so completely submissive. Not having lived through the years in which her health had become undermined, not having suffered with her or for her, I could not put myself in his position of constant, even noble, indulgence. He clearly felt it wasn't in the power of this hard-soft woman to be anything but what she was. He was born to be faithful, he was tender, he was wonderfully tolerant. I blamed him. In trivial things as well as big things she appeared to me to intrude on him and to overrule him. If he gave her that right, I said to myself, he'd live to regret it. I thought impatiently that it was a poor kind of exploiting behavior on the part of a woman who talked feminism and so on.

But if she had cause to be jealous? On this long evening, as Eugene read Yeats by request, I suddenly felt sentimentally sorry for her. Whatever was the matter, this good fellow wasn't doing anything for her. And I doubted if he were doing anything for himself. What can be done, when people's lives are so much less romantic than their wild, imprisoned, surging hearts? I felt very old and sage as I sat there, listening to this chained husband reading a poetry to his wife that was no more to her than a straw to a fire.

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I didn't go to see them very often. I had the sense of a situation in which I was an outsider and yet which struck me every time I visited them. There was no lessening of their amenity, whether I was there with other week-end guests or alone. Eugene never broke through his reserve into a useless and hopeless reference to a state of things which was manifestly none of my business; and Frida slid around it and swooped over it so obliquely that I could always pretend I didn't understand. I was not afraid of being treated as intimate, of being invited into their real lives, of being trusted. Yet I could never take confidences from people whose pride and whose instinct are against confidence. Confidence the very word implies a power to yield one's self that neither Eugene nor Frida possessed.

Yet of course they yielded their secret to any one who had eyes. Even an outsider who contributed tennis and chatter in return for bed and board, like myself, was not blind. The husband in this childless ménage was gradually disciplining himself so

that nothing came from him except the most firm politeness and the most governed consideration, while the wife was becoming as tense as a guyrope in a storm. Under the decencies that Eugene observed at any cost, and that almost hid the real situation, I felt the writhing of a deadly duel, unwilling on the husband's part, unwilled and yet compulsive on the wife's part, and conducted by her with a malignant earnestness that I could not fathom.

It wasn't Peggy Wade. That, at any rate, had been canceled out by her becoming engaged to a big smiling Minnesotan, who said not a word but shone like a new car.

When spring came, Eugene and I took tramps together, going by train from his Chicago suburb out into Illinois and even Iowa or up into Wisconsin. We'd leave Friday and hike till Sunday night, never touching macadam.

He chatted the normal amount, but never by any chance about himself, and he had a way of abstracting himself which annoyed me at first but which I learned to accept and to pride myself on accepting, since it was the genuine man. He really seemed to be living a life of his own, underneath and away from his daily life. He had extraordinarily steep silences, and into his deep sockets there would come a lonely self-centered light like the light of a remote camp-fire. I liked to see him go away from me, though I hated inattention in other people. With Eugene it was utterly instinctive, like a trace of something pure and untamed, an infidelity that had no shame in it and yet was a profound infidelity. I say I say it had no shame in it because he came

out of it without a bit of sullenness. He saw you again with a sudden awareness, and he smiled welcomingly. He hadn't known he was

away.

But Frida knew. During that year I often caught her looking at him with a kind of rapacity. Her very face, I could see at times, was becoming the face of a harpy. The process by which a certain beauty was growing into its own caricature was taking place under my attentive eyes.

Frida was really a wonderful figure, I now perceive. When Eugene first met her I imagine she might have been almost queenly, but even before she was thirty-five an air of intense calculation hung about her, which was accentuated by her skinniness and the cruel curve of her nose, a curve that was answered by the thrust of her chin. She was indubitably a sensitive woman. Her long pliant hands were witnesses to it, her complexion waxen and almost transparent, her gray eyes deep and shadowed in that pallid invalid face. But she made me horribly uncomfortable when I saw her watching him like a beast of prey. She loved him. I never doubted that for an instant. But it was a devouring love, a fierce and jealous possessiveness. Some mothers eat up their children with such a love. Frida's slight stoop seemed to become a crouch when she sat back to watch him intensely. And her single lock of white hair deepened that dangerous intensity.

It was curious for me to see it, when I thought of Eugene Tallant's peculiar innocence, and the wish he had for an innocent, a fresh and natural world. I shall never forget

one summer evening when he and I had slogged our way all day in a hot sun walking over the prairie, dodging settlements as much as possible, frizzling our own lunch over a small fire in the shade of a wood, after we'd had a good plunge in a cold stream. Toward evening we had come into a small town, and after a quick dinner, straight from the frying-pan of course, we wandered out to hire a boat, to row into the center of the grassy lake.

It was a blue moonless evening, but the sky sparkled with a starlight that had in it that freshness and luster and youthful radiance which lay in the depths of Eugene Tallant's heart. Without a word, in that lambent silence, he began singing, at the other end of the boat. I was looking at the stars. He sang old songs, very old English songs, that were like wild roses and daisies and fields of bluebells and banks of thyme. I had never heard such songs before, and I didn't know Eugene knew them. "Go on, go on," I told him; and out of a packed memory he sang one after another while my heart melted in side me. The man put his whole being into his singing. So dumb in himself, he found in these songs the music of his nature; he poured it out for me with a perfect freedom and simplicity. It amazed me. He was more genuine in singing these songs than he had ever been in conversation. He showed that he felt tragedy, that he felt pathos, and that he had a mirth in him like the mirth of flowers opened to the sun. I was glad I had had such confidence in his nature from the start, and when we rowed back in silence I knew he was not sorry he had sung.

In Chicago in the winter I saw them again. It wasn't at all the same. She was rattly, and he was stifled. He kept his own counsel, which I regretted, and Frida stiffened into a dry temper, as if lava from her fires had hardened.

Then, in the course of time, without a word being said by one or the other of them, but with the unfailing communications of their tone of voice, the light of their eye, the pressure of their hands, and the thousand modes of expressiveness that people have even without knowing it, I saw that a change had come into their lives. Tallant was happier than I had ever known him; his wife was more unhappy. She could not say a word against him on the score of his attentiveness. He showered her with attentions, and I was sure, as I observed them, that they were sin

cere.

But the more he glowed with the happiness that was within him, the more his sick wife crisped her fingers in spasms of anger and gave him sharp perverse commands. Something drove her to clash with him. Time and again I was present when it was absolutely painful to feel her antagonism. At best, she was couched in temporary quietness, unusually friendly and docile, but perpetually lying in wait.

And then a change came in Frida herself. She got better. Eugene was unfeignedly glad, but she brushed him aside. She was independent, or at least resolved to be independent. A somber light in her eyes told me that she was prepared to fight to the limit against whatever it was that she considered she was being tortured or afflicted with.

This was the state of things when

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