Thus it came about that they met at the City Hall license bureau, got their license, and half an hour later were married at the house of a minister in East Thirty-third Street, within a block of the Subway station. He was feverish, gay, looked years younger than his thirty-seven. She was quiet, dim, passive, neither grave nor gay, but going through her part without hesitation, with much the same patient, plodding expression she habitually bore as she sat working at her machine--as if she did not quite understand, but was doing her best and hoped to get through not so badly.
"I've had nothing to eat," said he as they came out of the parsonage.
"Nor I," said she.
"We'll go to Delmonico's," said he, and hailed a passing taxi.
On the way, he sitting in one corner explained to her, shrunk into the other corner: "I can confess now that I married you under false pretenses. I am not prosperous, as I used to be. To be brief and plain, I'm down and out, professionally."
She did not move. Apparently she did not change expression. Yet he, speaking half banteringly, felt some frightful catastrophe within her. "You are--poor?" she said in her usual quiet way.
"WE are poor," corrected he. "I have at present only a thousand dollars a month--a little more, but not enough to talk about."
She did not move or change expression. Yet he felt that her heart, her blood were going on again.
"Are you--angry?" he asked.
"A thousand dollars a month seems an awful lot of money to me," she said.
"It's nothing--nothing to what we'll soon have.
Trust me." And back into his eyes flashed their former look. "I've been sick. I'm well again. I shall get what I want. If you want anything, you've only to ask for it. I'll get it. I know how. . . . I don't prey, myself--I've no fancy for the brutal sports. But I teach lions how to prey, and I make them pay for the lessons." He laughed with an effervescing of young vitality and self-confidence that made him look handsome and powerful. "In the future they'll have to pay still higher prices."
She was looking at him with weary, wondering, pathetic eyes that gazed from the pallor of her dead-white face mysteriously.
"What are you thinking?" he asked.
"I was listening," replied she.
"Doesn't it make you happy--what you are going to have?"
"No," replied she. "But it makes me content."
With eyes suddenly suffused, he took her hand--so gently. "Dorothy," he said, "you will try to love me?"
"I'll try," said she. "You'll be kind to me?"
"I couldn't be anything else," he cried. And in a gust of passion he caught her to his breast and kissed her triumphantly. "I love you--and you're mine--mine!"
She released herself with the faint insistent push that seemed weak, but always accomplished its purpose.
Her lip was trembling. "You said you'd be kind," she murmured.
He gazed at her with a baffled expression. "Oh--I understand," he said. "And I shall be kind. But I must teach you to love me."
Her trembling lip steadied. "You must be careful or you may teach me to hate you," said she.
He studied her in a puzzled way, laughed. "What a mystery you are!" he cried with raillery. "Are you child or are you woman? No matter. We shall be happy."
The taxicab was swinging to the curb. In the restaurant he ordered an enormous meal. And he ate enormously, and drank in due proportion. She ate and drank a good deal herself--a good deal for her. And the results were soon apparent in a return of the spirits that are normal to twenty-one years, regardless of what may be lurking in the heart, in a dark corner, to come forth and torment when there is nothing to distract the attention.
"We shall have to live quietly for a while," said he.
"Of course you must have clothes-at once. I'll take you shopping to-morrow." He laughed grimly.
"Just at present we can get only what we pay cash for.
Still, you won't need much. Later on I'll take you over to Paris. Does that attract you?"
Her eyes shone. "How soon?" she asked.
"I can tell you in a week or ten days." He became abstracted for a moment. "I can't understand how I let them get me down so easily--that is, I can't understand it now. I suppose it's just the difference between being weak with illness and strong with health." His eyes concentrated on her. "Is it really you?" he cried gaily. "And are you really mine? No wonder I feel strong! It was always that way with me. I never could leave a thing until I had conquered it."
She gave him a sweet smile. "I'm not worth all the trouble you seem to have taken about me," said she.
He laughed; for he knew the intense vanity so pleasantly hidden beneath her shy and modest exterior.
"On the contrary," said he good-humoredly, "you in your heart think yourself worth any amount of trouble.
It's a habit we men have got you women into. And you-- One of the many things that fascinate me in you is your supreme self-control. If the king were to come down from his throne and fall at your feet, you'd take it as a matter of course."
She gazed away dreamily. And he understood that her indifference to matters of rank and wealth and power was not wholly vanity but was, in part at least, due to a feeling that love was the only essential. Nor did he wonder how she was reconciling this belief of high and pure sentiment with what she was doing in marrying him. He knew that human beings are not consistent, cannot be so in a universe that compels them to face directly opposite conditions often in the same moment. But just as all lines are parallel in infinity, so all actions are profoundly consistent when referred to the infinitely broad standard of the necessity that every living thing shall look primarily to its own well being.
Disobedience to this fundamental carries with it inevitable punishment of disintegration and death; and those catastrophes are serious matters when one has but the single chance at life, that will be repeated never again in all the eternities.
After their late lunch or early dinner, they drove to her lodgings. He went up with her and helped her to pack--not a long process, as she had few belongings.
