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 THE WINE OF LIFE
 
 BOOKS BY 
 ARTHUR STRINGER 
 
 THE SILVER POPPY 
 THE LOOM OF DESTINY 
 LONELY O M ALLEY 
 HEPHAESTUS AND OTHER POEMS 
 THE WIRE TAPPERS 
 
 THE WOMAN IN THE RAIN AND OTHER 
 POEMS 
 
 PHANTOM WIRES 
 
 THE GUN RUNNER 
 
 IRISH POEMS 
 
 THE HAND OF PERIL 
 
 THE SHADOW 
 
 OPEN WATER 
 
 THE DOOR OF DREAD 
 
 THE HOUSE OF INTRIGUE 
 
 THE MAN WHO COULDN T SLEEP 
 
 THE PRAIRIE WIFE 
 
 THE PRAIRIE MOTHER
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 By ARTHUR STRINGER 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 ALFRED A KNOPF 
 
 MCMXXI
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY 
 ARTHUR STRINGER 
 
 Published, April 1921 
 Second Printing, April 1921 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES M? AMERICA
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE
 
 CHAPTER ONE 
 
 STORROW stared about the empty hotel-room, now 
 denuded of its last appeasing touch of the personal. 
 Then he crossed to the still open window. 
 
 As he stood there, vaguely oppressed by the thought of 
 how life was for ever attaching itself to new soil and was 
 for ever being torn up from that rootage, the sound of a 
 hurdy-gurdy floated up through the hot August air. The 
 notes, mellowed by a rampart of intervening roofs and 
 further muffled by the distant drone of Broadway, insin 
 uated themselves into the colouring of Storrow s mood 
 and lent an overtone of wistfulness to his farewell survey 
 of those faded walls cobwebbed with fire-escapes. His 
 week of freedom in that shabby side-street hotel had 
 not been an unhappy one. He had found nothing repug 
 nant in its ugliness, in its gilded slatternliness, in its noc 
 turnal pianos and its noisy house-dogs, in the kimonoed 
 figures that fluttered about a hallway filled with the be 
 traying odours of illicit cookery. 
 
 It had at least conferred on Storrow the gift of free 
 dom. And freedom, he knew, was the one thing he 
 would always demand of life. Elbow-room, he felt, must 
 always be his, the right to come and go at his own sweet 
 will, the right to idle or work, to rise or fall, to tool his 
 own personal destinies upward or downward across the 
 Great Divides of life as he chose. He remembered, as 
 he stared idly down at a tarred and gravelled roof lit 
 tered with orange-peel and empty bottles and cigarette 
 ends, how the easy-going and slipshod atmosphere of this 
 third-rate Tenderloin hotel had appealed to him. Its un 
 ruffled and urban self -concernment, its shoddy and casual
 
 2 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 reticences, had provided him with the cover he craved, 
 cover as screening as the hemlocked and the blue-valleyed 
 solitudes that had once been his. 
 
 But now he had finished with it. Finished, too, he 
 would be with his eager and unattached wanderings about 
 the city, the city in undress because of its summer-end 
 heat, the city undraped in its panting misery to his ever- 
 questing eye. All the artist in him had joyed in the mid 
 night parks crowded with sleepers, in the half -clad fig 
 ures, the poses of utter abandon, the huddled and motion 
 less groups making the greensward look so like a battle 
 field strewn with its dead. He had gloried in the acci 
 dental grouping of half -nude children about a water-hy 
 drant. He had revelled in the Hogarthian intimate nudi 
 ties of the tenement districts, in the occasional statuesque 
 pose of an Italian girl asleep on the pavement of an 
 open area- way, in the lassitude of a painted woman sit 
 ting under midnight trees, panting for breath, shadowed 
 from the street-lamps by leaves so motionless they looked 
 as though they had been stencilled out of sheets of brazen 
 metal. He had loved to stare from the height of Murray 
 Hill down the midnight quietness of Fifth Avenue, where 
 the huge milky lamp-globes fell away in a double row, like 
 twin ropes of pearls drooping from a languid woman s 
 throat. He had gloried in gazing at the intermittent 
 splash of the Madison Square fountain, throbbing and 
 falling, throbbing and falling, as though it were the heart 
 beat of the tired city itself. He had liked that city in its 
 hours of sleep, etherealized by moonlight, transformed 
 by dusk and mystery into a tranquillized loveliness as 
 alluring as a star-bathed Coliseum under its violet Ital 
 ian skies. He had carried a sketching-block about with 
 him, and had snatched at groupings and poses and taken 
 notes and carried home pocketfuls of unco-ordinated and 
 unassimilated impressions, gorging his soul on them, as 
 voracious as a child let loose in a candy-shop. He was 
 used to the wilderness, and had long since acquired the
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 3 
 
 lone-wolf habit of wandering about at his own free will, 
 gathering up what lay in the path of his observation. 
 And in this newer wild erness of stone and steel and brick, 
 \vhich could stand to the stranger in its midst even more 
 desolate than the Barren Grounds themselves, Storrow 
 rode the flying hooves of Curiosity and Caprice. 
 
 Those feverish flights had both humbled him and inspir 
 ited him. He had barked his shins on the discovery of 
 how little he knew and how much there was to know. He 
 had wakened to find himself only one of an army, a mul 
 titudinous and ever-elbowing army whose mere magni 
 tude left him a little dizzy and homesick. New York, 
 he found, was too intent on the pursuit of its own febrile 
 ends to pay much attention to either him or his trunkful 
 of clay-modellings so carefully wrapped in cheesecloth. 
 But there was much to be seen and learned, and in that 
 vigorous young body was repeated the ancient miracle of 
 the nestling round-eyed confronting the universe, of 
 youth peering hungrily across the first ramparts of the 
 world. 
 
 Storrow, moist with the heat, pushed the window up as 
 far as it would go. He leaned out across the dusty sill, 
 staring more abstractedly than ever at the scabby and 
 close-shouldered precipices of brick down which cas 
 caded the countless fire-escapes of rusty iron. The metal 
 trellis directly in front of him, smitten by the afternoon 
 sun, made him think of a gridiron. It had been a 
 scorcher, that day, one of the worst of the summer-end 
 hot-spell which was leaving the city as wilted as a let 
 tuce-leaf on a range-shelf. The sun that slanted over 
 water-tanks and walls and roofs, Oriental in their hud 
 dling sky-line, threw creeping blue shadows across the 
 narrow valley of light-wells and back areas twisting like a 
 miniature Grand Canyon between the double row of 
 apartment-hotels and rooming-houses that ran westward 
 from Times Square towards the rattling Elevated of 
 Sixth Avenue.
 
 4 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 Storrow stared impersonally out at his vista of mottled 
 walls and littered fire-escapes and asphalted back-yards. 
 Through that echoing valley, by night, countless stray 
 cats had the habit of reiterating their amorous miseries, 
 mingled with the pulse of a three-piece Italian orchestra 
 and the insistent nearby roar of Broadway. Yet both the 
 sounds and the sights of that little valley had appealed to 
 him, impregnating his new-found desolation with an in 
 terweaving tangle of intimacies, leaving his city a little 
 more humanized, a little closer to him, like an over- 
 haughty beauty accidentally seen in deshabille. 
 
 Even the scene itself struck him as anything but ugly. 
 He was still too much a new-comer on that triangulated 
 island of unrest to find any corner of it without some 
 touch of appeal. Over that welter of sun-baked roofs, 
 indeed, hung a mist of pale gold, toning down to a thin 
 wash of green in the softer shadows, deepening again to 
 a valley-blue where the walls ended in the narrow area- 
 ways strung like musical instruments with their pulleyed 
 clothes-lines. Above the eaves, on his right, towered the 
 dormer-roof of a great hotel, pearled with its rows of 
 electric-globes. Closer to him, obliquely across the can 
 yon, stood a much humbler caravansary, plainly a theatri 
 cal apartment-hotel like his own. He had always thought 
 of the people in that hotel as cliff-dwellers, with the sills 
 of their narrow windows crowded by countless betrayals 
 of extremely frugal house-keeping, half-emptied milk- 
 bottles, biscuit-cartons, paper-covered marmalade-jars, an 
 apple or two beside the vivid yellow of oranges, an occa 
 sional row of beer-bottles, a container of sliced bacon 
 cheek by jowl with a seltzer-siphon. In the wider win 
 dows, opening on sleeping-rooms, he had often caught 
 sight of freshly washed underclothing, thin stockings and 
 swaying lingerie hanging a little forlornly in that none too 
 virgin air. Yet even in those humdrum drying garments 
 Storrow had always found a wayward and wordless ap 
 peal. He tried to tell himself that it was because their
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 5 
 
 whites and pinks, their suggestive lacy softnesses, pro 
 vided a needed touch of human warmth, of conciliating 
 frailnesses, to the urban and indurated hardness of line 
 all about him. They were like bird-feathers, he felt, 
 found in a coign along cliffs of granite. 
 
 Then Storrow s gaze, as he leaned further out the win 
 dow in quest of these ever-ameliorating intimacies of life, 
 fell on a figure which had hitherto escaped him. It was 
 that of a girl in an open window almost directly below his 
 own. She sat motionless on the wide sill, across which a 
 newspaper had been spread. Her feet were crossed 
 tailor- fashion and rested on the rusty iron slats of the fire- 
 escape in front of her, where an open book lay face down. 
 Beside her, on the newspaper, reposed a little scattering of 
 metal hair-pins, and in one hand, now resting idly on her 
 knee, she held a heavy white comb. So motionless did 
 she sit, in fact, that her posture quickly brought to Stor 
 row s mind the suggestion of a sun- worshipper. 
 
 Yet he knew, the next moment, that she had merely 
 been drying her hair. He could, in fact, plainly discern a 
 cluster of hair-pins still held between her lips. He no 
 ticed, as she tossed the loose torrent of hair back from her 
 face, that her arms and shoulders were quite bare, her skin 
 standing out a milk-weed white against that waving cur 
 tain of gloom. For this hair, Storrow noticed, was ex 
 tremely thick and heavy, a dull mahogany-brown in tone. 
 Yet it was quite without wave, as uncompromisingly 
 straight as an Indian s, less suggestive of beauty, in its 
 thick-flowing mass, than of strength. 
 
 Storrow realized, as he watched her, that she in turn 
 was intent on watching something at the back of the eat 
 ing-house where the Italian orchestra played by night. 
 Following the direction of her gaze, he caught sight of a 
 lean and hungry cat reaching up to a window-sill on 
 which rested a pan of freshly-boiled lobsters, as red as 
 a cardinal s cap. That odorous wealth, however, seemed 
 just beyond the reach of the hungry animal, which
 
 6 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 stretched and clawed and complained thinly as it contin 
 ued its ineffectual efforts to reach the pan. 
 
 It was a trivial enough incident, yet it made a picture 
 which in some way became memorable to Storrow, a lean 
 and padded Hunger writhing and pawing and whining for 
 that savoury meal, as rich in aroma as it was in colour, just 
 beyond its reach. It seemed Desire made manifest, un 
 controlled and torturing appetite typified by an eager and 
 lean-ribbed body quivering with its self-immuring ache 
 for the unattainable. It made him think of his long- 
 treasured print of Rodin s La Porte de I Enjer, of the 
 great door about which writhed and coiled and reached 
 the tormented creatures of desire, fevering for that which 
 they were denied, fighting, unsatisfied, for that which was 
 for ever beyond their hands. 
 
 Yet the next moment Storrow was thinking about 
 neither the Rodin frieze nor the drab-coloured street-cat 
 and its cardinal-red shell-fish, for his gaze had wandered 
 back to the girl in the window so much closer to him. 
 She had thrown back her loose hair, with a circular back- 
 toss of her head, and with slow and meditative fingers 
 was now coiling that heavy mane together. She seemed, 
 in fact, still to be watching the cat and the lobster-pan as 
 she abstractedly took hair-pin after hair-pin from her 
 compressed lips. Her face was quite uncovered by this 
 time, though it was not her face which Storrow first 
 studied. What first impressed him were the stockingless 
 feet resting on the fire-escape rods. These feet were 
 thrust into faded red Turkish slippers, which drooped 
 from the toes, leaving bare the line of the heel, as clear-cut 
 as the heel of a razor. Then, as she swayed forward in 
 her meditative up-coiling of that heavy rope of hair, he 
 noticed the thickness of the milky-white shoulders, which 
 seemed heavy for a body carrying so distinct a note of 
 slenderness. This impression of plastic solidity was re 
 peated in the leaning torso itself, so maturely thick from 
 the full shoulder-blade to the flat firm breast. He knew
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 7 
 
 enough of anatomy to accept this as an announcement of 
 physical vigour, as a symbol of bodily strength which he 
 found repeated in the round unmuscled arms, in the full 
 column of the throat, in, the calisthenic line of the hips 
 which even the girl s squatting position failed to fore 
 shorten into heaviness. That body, in fact, made him 
 think of a young colt s, though he was not sure whether 
 this arose from its hint of undisciplined vitality or from 
 something animal-like in the girl s serene unconcern as 
 to even that partial nudity. 
 
 This absence of sex consciousness, in fact, took Stor- 
 row s gaze back to her face. It was, in many ways, a 
 remarkable face., though he could not see it as distinctly 
 as he wished. His first impression of it was one of care 
 less vitality, of over-abundant and as yet unco-ordinated 
 ardour. But the next moment this was contradicted by a 
 subsidiary and more persistent impression of lassitude, of 
 something that seemed to approach languid and sophisti 
 cated self-concernment. He was anxious to see her eyes, 
 as though by them to contradict or confirm this impres 
 sion. But they were hooded in shadow by the heavy 
 brows, and all he could be sure of was that they were wide 
 apart, so wide apart, indeed, that they carried to his mind 
 a vague hint of Egyptian sarcophagal drawings. In col 
 our, he conjectured, those eyes would be dark, as dark as 
 the loosely coiled hair with which the slow white hands 
 were crowning the over-weighted head. Her mouth, he 
 could see, was undoubtedly large, and of a vivid red, a 
 red that gave buoyancy to a jaw already too heavy in its 
 width of line, accentuating some wordless suggestion of 
 Orientalism in her character, an Orientalism which the 
 lucid and wide-set eyes seemed always to contradict. The 
 nose was short and straight, too thin-bridged to seem re- 
 pellently sensual yet with a faint out-flare of the nostrils 
 which might in part have accounted for his earlier impres 
 sion of wild-animal eagerness. And if the eye-brows 
 were heavy they at least gave- an air of thought to a face
 
 8 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 not otherwise intellectual, an air of child-like and wistful 
 broodingness. 
 
 Why it impressed him as a face of depth Storrow could 
 not tell. That impression, he felt, might be based on its 
 very contradictions, for his final estimate of her became 
 one of loose-jointed compactness, of vigour in lassitude, 
 of strength in slenderness. But the woman, like the face, 
 was a challenge to him. In each seemed to lurk the peri 
 lous note of intimacy, the promise of mystery, the arrest 
 ing air of a barricaded citadel which could be carried 
 only by storm and violence. And yet he was staring at 
 a girl, he remembered, who was shameless enough to sit 
 half -dressed on the window-sill of a Rialto hotel and 
 dangle her heels on a dirty fire-escape. 
 
 What prompted that sudden revulsion of feeling Stor 
 row could never quite understand. But his interest in the 
 half-draped figure, for all its pictorial values, seemed to 
 seep away. His eyes had exhausted her, like a landscape 
 too minutely over-looked. She became merely a lazy- 
 bodied young animal sunning herself on the edge of an 
 unkempt rooming-house fire-escape. There would be 
 much that was sordid about her, he remembered, just as 
 the atmosphere in which she existed was sordid. Proof 
 of this all-pervading sordidness, in fact, came up to him 
 even as he stared down into the unclean area below. He 
 could hear the sound of wrangling voices from the base 
 ment doorway of the very building in which he stood, a 
 wordy warfare which was not altogether unfamiliar to 
 him. 
 
 He knew, even before that fiercely quarrelling couple 
 came out into the open, that it was Michael Mullaly, the 
 blowsy engineer of that ill-kept apartment-hotel, once 
 more fighting with his wife. In this case, however, their 
 quarrel soon gave every evidence of developing into some 
 thing more than the customary exchange of unclean lan 
 guage. It was already more than a mere clash of words, 
 for Mullaly, obviously depressed by that unmitigated heat
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 9 
 
 of a New York midsummer afternoon, had sought a 
 short-cut to oblivion by mingling cooling draughts of bot 
 tled beer with the firier assuagement of fusel-oil whiskey. 
 Whereupon, it was equally plain, he was exercising the 
 ancient and established prerogative of using his fists upon 
 the features of his protesting helpmate, who, Storrow no 
 ticed, was not taking this punishment without some slight 
 reciprocation of force. 
 
 Yet that combat now seemed something very remote 
 from Storrow. He had seen too much of life in the 
 wilds to be particularly moved by conflict as mere con 
 flict. The city, too, had already touched him with some 
 shadow of its self -immurement. It had sufficiently im 
 pressed him with its first social lesson of remembering to 
 mind his own business. And the last light-shaft of the 
 coppery afternoon <sun was slanting like a mellowed cal 
 cium-flare across the fire-escape platform on which the 
 bare-shouldered girl was now standing, enriching both 
 drapery and milky-skinned figure with new and arresting 
 shadows, picking her out line by line as she stood there 
 in her careless and preoccupied pose until she seemed plas 
 tic, statuesque, as marble-like as a Caryatid leaning from a 
 temple-wall. Again the pendulum-swing of emotion 
 carried his interest back to a subject which he had only 
 thought to be exhausted, though it piqued him a little that 
 this alert figure so near him could remain so unconscious 
 of his presence there above her. 
 
 The combat in the area, however, was already becom 
 ing more Homeric, more explosive in movement. Stor 
 row could see the girl on the fire-escape lean further out 
 over the rusty iron-railing, and for the second time he let 
 his eyes follow her line of -vision. He could see the big- 
 limbed engineer, in short-sleeved undershirt and soiled 
 denim jumper, strike viciously at the upturned face of 
 his mate. Yet even then the persistent artistic impulse of 
 the studious-eyed youth prompted him to take impersonal 
 note of the brawny chest and the huge-muscled biceps, for
 
 10 THEWINEOFLIFE 
 
 Mullaly in his younger day had toiled long and ardu 
 ously as a Pittsburgh steel-puddler and his strength was 
 still that of an Antaeus. If he seemed intent on exercis 
 ing what remained of this strength on the less sinewy 
 sharer of his joys and sorrows, that ragged-waisted fury, 
 still fighting like a cat, stood able to prevent the conflict 
 from being an altogether one-sided matter. She contin 
 ued to dispute his mastery, by tongue and nail and tooth, 
 until Mullaly managed to draw back his great fist and 
 bring it flat down on the face of the woman clawing and 
 clinging to him. 
 
 " You brute! " gasped out the bare-shouldered girl 
 from the fire-escape. 
 
 That expletive seemed to awaken in Storrow his first 
 active interest in the combat below. If it awakened in 
 him a corresponding impulse towards interference, the 
 impulse was not an overmastering one. And again Mul- 
 laly s well-placed fist fell on the upturned face so close to 
 his shoulder. 
 
 "Oh, you beast!" the girl called shudderingly down 
 into that echoing well of shadow. And that shrill chal 
 lenge both arrested and nettled the sottish man now sure 
 of his victory. He lifted his head, like a wounded moose, 
 and stared drunkenly upward. 
 
 " So it s yuh, yuh - ! " he trumpeted defiantly up 
 out of those echoing depths. And having delivered him 
 self of that ultimate epithet, absolute in its finality, unsur 
 passable in its contempt, he went on with the task more 
 immediately before him. 
 
 Storrow heard that foul word, that impossible word, 
 just as he had heard the throaty soprano of the high- 
 pitched voice which even shrillness failed to rob of its 
 richness. He could also catch the quick wince of the 
 girl s stooping body, as though a lash had fallen across 
 her bare shoulders. 
 
 He was never quite sure in his own mind as to which 
 it was that fired the train. But through his body went
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 11 
 
 the feral flash, like a splutter of fireworks. He tingled 
 and burned with a sudden righteous indignation, with 
 a quick rage that sent him vaulting through the open win 
 dow to the fire-escape platform in front of him as un 
 thinkingly as though the room-floor beneath him had 
 risen and projected him upward and outward. He heard 
 the girl s gasp of astonished fright as he went scrambling 
 down the iron ladder and swept past her timorously with 
 drawn body. But he went nimbly on, with the anger of 
 a Galahad singing in his ears. It had occurred to him, by 
 this time, that it was a terrible and unforgiveable thing 
 to strike a woman. And as he dropped as lightly as a 
 cougar from the lowermost iron platform to the asphalted 
 area-floor, close beside the astounded and somewhat 
 breathless Irishman, he was as drunk, in his own way, as 
 that denim-clad engineer confronting him. But it was 
 not on fusel-oil whiskey. 
 
 Yet befuddled as that lordly Hibernian may have been, 
 he understood clearly enough what interference at any 
 such moment implied. And there was neither concern 
 nor hesitation in his movements as he swung about and 
 squared for action. In his day Michael Mullaly had met 
 and worsted too many burly iron-workers to be intimi 
 dated by a youth who failed even to observe the ancient 
 ceremonial of removing his coat before venturing into 
 battle. Imperiously and impersonally he flung his bat 
 tered help-mate to one side, intent on disposing of this 
 trouble-maker who had dared to interfere with an honest 
 man in his honest diversions. 
 
 Nor was there any trace of hesitation, on the other 
 hand, in Owen Storrow s movements. He was smaller 
 than the bare-armed Hercules in the denim jumper, but 
 his four months of North Woods life had left him trained 
 to the bone. Life in the open, all that spring and sum 
 mer, had crowned his weeks of hardship with endurance 
 and self-confidence and the quick- footed resourcefulness 
 of a cat. More than once, too, he had stood up before
 
 12 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 \ 
 
 men quite as burly as Mullaly and had been able to hold 
 his own. Yet behind that hard-won self-assurance was 
 the fire of the Crusader, the will of the righter of wrongs, 
 the morale of the lover of decency outraged beyond en 
 durance. 
 
 This impression of knightly enterprise was intensified, 
 to Storrow, by the memory of the girl watching him 
 from her open window. It swayed him with a deter 
 mination to have the affair a clear-cut one, as brief and 
 decisive as it was dramatic. But the vast majority of 
 fights in real life, unfortunately, are not of this nature. 
 It is something peculiar to the pages of romance, that 
 quickly and carefully delivered blow of the clenched fist 
 which sends Evil sprawling ignominiously earthward. 
 And Storrow soon awakened to the disconcerting fact 
 that the present combat was not destined to be of that en 
 gagingly romantic disposition. There was no prompt 
 knock-out, no cool and lightning-like coup de grace. For 
 Mullaly, in the first place, was an opponent of unexpected 
 solidity, a hulk of quite amazing hardness. And the hu 
 man fist, no matter what the will behind it, is an instru 
 ment of qualified efficiency when it comes to a matter of 
 pile-driving repentance into corporeal grossness. Flex 
 ors and phalanges, when in too violent collision with bone 
 and sinew, cannot hope to survive such actions without in 
 jury. And fighting with sore knuckles is altogether as 
 uninviting as walking with sore feet. Then, too, the 
 singing fires of fusel-oil whiskey coursing through Mul- 
 laly s big veins left him disturbingly impervious to any 
 pains attendant upon well-clumped jaw-bone and hard- 
 pounded cheek-flap. Muddled as his slow Celtic mind 
 may have been, the moves and tricks and resources of a 
 life-time of combat did not altogether desert him. So 
 when he fought he was able to do so with a stubborn and 
 groggy science by no means contemptible. 
 
 The situation, in fact, began to worry Storrow not a 
 little, clearly as right was on his side and repeatedly as he
 
 THEWINEOFLIFE 13 
 
 was able to plant his blows on the hide of that thick- 
 muscled opponent. Intelligence was with him, as was 
 also alertness and the resiliency of youth. Yet the im 
 placable laws of Chance ordained that at least an occa 
 sional blow from that ponderous Celtic fist should reach 
 home, however parried by guard-arm or rendered oblique 
 by side-stepping. Storrow could taste the salt of sweat 
 on his dripping face. He could also see blood dripping 
 from a cut on his lip, and the numb pain in his bruised and 
 battered knuckles became something to be no longer over 
 looked. He remembered, through a mist of fatigue, that 
 he was not cutting the heroic figure he had expected. He 
 realized there was a definite limit to the period which all 
 such things could be endured. What was worse, he 
 awakened to the fact that there were more faces than one 
 now watching him and his ignominious efforts, fixed and 
 impassive faces in window after window above him. 
 And with a grip of the jaw he took himself in hand and 
 began to fight as he had never fought before. 
 
 Storrow startled his enemy by no longer giving ground 
 before superior weight. Even when forced to his knees, 
 he ducked, clenched, and in some way struggled again to 
 his feet. Yet if he fought fiercely, he also fought delib 
 erately. He knew now that there must be no waste of 
 energy. He worried over his finger-bones, oppressed by 
 a foolish fear that he might break one of these and find 
 himself with a useless hand. Skinned and burning as his 
 knuckles had become, from impact against that obdurate 
 hulk on which they so repeatedly thumped and thudded, 
 he remembered they were all he had to depend upon, that 
 they must do their work more adroitly, choose their tar 
 get more expertly. 
 
 The result of this access to science, of this coup d etat 
 of Reason against Passion, was a slight but a distinctly 
 perceptible change in the tide of conflict. A look of be 
 wilderment came into Mullaly s set face. A vague uncer 
 tainty began to mark his movements. He shambled and
 
 14 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 shuffled and circled about his narrow field of asphalt with 
 increasing evidences of distress. Storrow made note of 
 that indecision in the timing and placing of counter- 
 strokes, that telltale proneness to fan the air. And his 
 dragging spirits raised, revived, and expressed themselves 
 in a sudden vicious onslaught which brought a futile gasp 
 of protest from the sweat-drenched Irish face. Mullaly 
 was bleeding by this time, bleeding profusely and pictori- 
 ally, streaking a sleeveless undershirt already wet to the 
 waist as his huge paws flailed the air and fell so distress 
 ingly on emptiness. 
 
 So wavering were his uncontrolled stumbles about that 
 dusty arena, in fact, that Storrow could already coolly 
 foresee the end. He was even able to deliberate, with 
 one half of his still busy brain, which hand it would be 
 better to use for that final blow, that ultimate knock-out 
 which was surely going to be hard on the already over- 
 bruised phalanges. Anxious as he was for that end, he 
 schooled himself into a sort of second wind of deliberate- 
 ness. He remembered the bare-shouldered girl in the 
 window above him. He desired above everything that 
 she should witness that final effort and appreciate its 
 effect. So he withheld the end, mercilessly, manoeuvring 
 guardedly for position and grouping, even while he in 
 wardly cogitated just where the blow should be placed. 
 
 The chance for that blow was finally before him, and 
 the struggles of an overheated and ridiculously dishev 
 elled young Galahad would surely have been crowned 
 with triumph, had not Fate, in the form of Michael Mul- 
 laly s better-half, seen fit to take a hand in that contest. 
 The blood that flowed so freely from his hide, apparently, 
 had washed away from his mate the last of her enmity. 
 Mere personal issues vanished into thin air before the 
 more momentous indignities being inflicted upon her 
 lord and master. And disgrace, eternal and indisputable 
 disgrace, was about to be heaped upon the name of Mul 
 laly.
 
 THEWINEOFLIFE 15 
 
 So quite unnoticed by the preoccupied combatants 
 shuffling and grasping about that highwalled back-yard, 
 she vanished through her basement door and sought pos 
 session of that same coal-shovel with which Michael had 
 so recently demonstrated his strength on her own indig 
 nant person. Slipping back to the field of conflict, she 
 approached the still preoccupied Storrow, with this shovel 
 poised above her head. She did not deliberate, because 
 there was no need for deliberation. She saw her chance, 
 and she seized it. With a strength born of righteous in 
 dignation she brought the broadside of that heavy shovel 
 down on the head of the youth who had so lightly insin 
 uated his person into the intimacies of family relation 
 ships. 
 
 If it was an unmeditated blow, it was also a workman 
 like and well-placed one. It brought a world, covered 
 with asphalt, slapping up against Storrow s startled face. 
 It did not leave him altogether unconscious, but it left him 
 stunned, and limp, like a wet feather-pillow. It left him 
 with a child-like craving to rest there, prone on his back, 
 until a much-misbehaving universe could again swing 
 back into balance. It also left him with an altogether 
 new-born indifference as to that enemy on whom his in 
 terest had been so actively and so recently centred. 
 Storrow preferred resting there, on the comfortable as 
 phalt, until that momentary daze had deserted him. 
 
 When he opened his eyes and Intelligence once more re 
 mounted her outraged throne neither Michael Mullaly nor 
 his spouse was within hailing distance. They had tri 
 umphantly yet discreetly withdrawn, vanishing into home 
 ports for repairs. But Storrow, as he lay there blinking 
 ruefully upward, found no such harbourage at hand. He 
 found himself stretched out, indeed, very much like a 
 Dying Gladiator, the centre of a small but an extremely 
 deep-sided amphitheatre of spectators. From the serried 
 windows on each side of that narrow area faces stared 
 down at him, grinning faces, vaguely commiserative
 
 16 THE k WINE OF LIFE 
 
 faces, indifferent faces. They brought home to him the 
 bitter memory of his undoing. He had gone down ig- 
 nominiously, unheroically, at the hand of a woman. And 
 at that very moment other women were contemplating his 
 helplessness, his humiliation, his posture of self-acknowl 
 edged defeat. 
 
 The sting of that brought Storrow- back to his senses. 
 He scrambled to his feet and spat the blood from his 
 mouth. Then, still a little dizzy, he staggered towards 
 the only cover that presented itself. This, oddly enough, 
 happened to be the basement-door which opened into the 
 domain of Michael Mullaly himself. But Storrow, with 
 his head still throbbing, was indifferent to all such de 
 tails. The one thing he demanded was seclusion. He 
 ached for the quiet and peace of his private and personal 
 quarters, just as the sorely hurt grizzly aches for his lair 
 and the wounded lion for his cave. He wanted solitude 
 and the balm of Time on his bruises. For his lip was cut 
 and bleeding, his head was a ball of pulsing fire, and 
 about his body were many spots extremely sensitive to 
 the touch. Yet he dreaded the thought of public parade 
 up through that peering-eyed hotel, for his habitually fas 
 tidious person was bedraggled with gore and stained with 
 mingled dust and sweat. It would involve explanations, 
 and embarrassments, and lead in all probability to still 
 deeper complications. Then he remembered, after grop 
 ing his way past the boiler-room, that the elevator-shaft 
 extended clear to the basement where he stood, and this, 
 with the help of a tip to its operator, implied the chance of 
 being carried direct to his floor. He had already pushed 
 the bell-button beside the iron-grilled door when he 
 chanced to catch sight of the narrow stairway winding 
 upward, like a May-pole ribbon, about the shaft. He 
 was, in fact, speculating on which of these two possible 
 routes to follow when all thought on the matter was cut 
 short by the reappearance of Michael Mullaly. 
 
 Michael, fortified by two pints of beer and the first-aid
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 17 
 
 ministrations of his spouse, beheld that battered invader 
 of his own private premises and advanced upon him with 
 out scruple and without hesitation. He had by this time 
 recovered his wind and his earlier fixed pride in his prow 
 ess. And this time he proposed to reap a victory in no 
 way qualified by the taint of petticoated interference. 
 
 Storrow watched that advance, watched it out of a 
 studious and burning eye. He watched it with resent 
 ment, with a hot wave of protest at the injustices that 
 were being so repeatedly heaped upon him. And when 
 Mullaly came for him in what was to be one final taurine 
 and obliterating rush, Storrow, with his back against the 
 grill, remembered his own battered knuckles and won 
 dered just how much he could depend upon them. It 
 would not last long, he knew. He was already too dizzy 
 to endure many moments of punishment and too unsteady 
 on his pins for that quick duck and side-step which so 
 often eluded punishment. 
 
 He gaped at the great hulk confronting him, foreseeing 
 in his mind s eye that infuriated mass kicking at his fallen 
 body. His gaze wandered aimlessly over the wet and 
 blood-streaked undershirt. He discerned a vague trian 
 gular depression between the tips of the floating-ribs and 
 the wet leather belt. And that discovery brought him 
 hope. He saw, with a flash of joy, that Mullaly s fists 
 were poised high, forgetful of the sympathetic ganglia 
 with radiating nerve-fibers which couched in that three- 
 sided depression, as sensitive to shock as a Sevres vase 
 in a wall-niche. But he remembered, with even greater 
 joy, that this vulnerable plexus lay behind a soft layer of 
 flesh, that impact against it implied no vast injury to his 
 already tortured finger- joints. So he parried and feinted 
 to make sure of his opening for he knew in his despera 
 tion there would be only one opening. Then he let his 
 clenched right jab out with a piston-stroke, as quick and 
 explosive as the back-fire of an engine. 
 
 The blow fell against the taut belly-skin, fell as clean
 
 i8 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 as a wheel-tapper s hammer against its polished rim. 
 The solar-plexus, receiving that full stroke as a percus 
 sion-cap receives its trigger-blow, communicated its ex 
 plosion of sudden pain to the entire body behind it, and 
 that body went down with a blat like a stunned steer s. 
 
 It was a knock-out, a knock-out as clear-cut and de 
 cisive as the overthrow of a nine-pin. In the murky shad 
 ows of a cellar, with no eyes to behold it, with no audience 
 to applaud it, Storrow belatedly redeemed himself to his 
 own soul. There, in one unwitnessed yet spectacular 
 blow, he achieved his triumph, worsted his oppressor, and 
 sent Evil incarnate to earth.
 
 CHAPTER TWO 
 
 THAT fallen oppressor, Storrow remembered, 
 could lay claim to a helpmate who was both 
 active and irruptive. And he had no wish to 
 remain there and haggle over the fruits of victory. He 
 nursed no desire to face the complications attendant upon 
 the interference of the softer sex. He opened the little 
 fire-proofed door on his right and started up the metal- 
 paved stairway that took him circling round and round 
 the elevator-shaft until his head was dizzier than ever 
 and his heart was pounding like a trip-hammer. He had 
 intended to count the floors as he went. In fact, he did 
 count them. But that reckoning could not have been 
 as accurate as he had imagined, for when he reached what 
 he felt sure was his own landing and had groped down 
 the burlap-covered hall to the rear, he found the door that 
 should have been his own hospitable door firmly locked 
 in his face. This, naturally, both bewildered and an 
 gered him. He shook and tugged at that door, panting, 
 feeling that he would give all he owned for one deep and 
 cooling drink of water, oppressed by the leaden thought 
 that the world at large had in some way turned against 
 him. 
 
 He was still tugging and straining at the unyielding 
 brass knob when the companion door on his left was 
 thrown open. He neither turned nor looked up, at that 
 movement in his immediate neighbourhood, since his one 
 wish, at the moment, was for seclusion. Yet he was not 
 unconscious of the fact that from the oblong of light 
 framed by the open door he was being quietly and stu 
 diously inspected. 
 
 19
 
 20 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " What s the matter ? " asked a remarkably composed 
 and matter-of-fact voice out of the prolonged silence. 
 
 Storrow turned slowly about. He saw a woman in 
 white, with bare arms and shoulders that shone satin- 
 like in the strong side-light. He stared at her vacantly, 
 for the floor beneath him was now wavering like rails on 
 a sun-steeped road-bed. It was several seconds before 
 he fully awakened to the fact that it was the same girl 
 who had sat in the open window drying her hair. 
 
 " Nothing," was his none too gracious response, re 
 membering that he had had quite enough of women for 
 one day. Yet his aspect in general as he put out a hand 
 to steady himself against the door-frame caused the girl s 
 brows to come together in a slight frown of apprehension. 
 
 " What s the matter? " she repeated, stepping closer to 
 him. 
 
 " I want to get into my room," he protested, shaken 
 with the humiliation of lusty strength compelled to ac 
 knowledge its weakness. 
 
 " This isn t your room," she explained. " Yours must 
 be on the floor above." 
 
 She was still inspecting him, with indecision in her 
 studious eyes, when a door towards the front of the nar 
 row hallway opened and the sound of voices came to 
 them. She noticed the tendency of that limp and woe 
 begone figure to shrink back into the shadow. She 
 seemed to understand his predicament. 
 
 " You can go up by the fire-escape," she explained as 
 she piloted him in through the open door and swung it 
 shut with her heel. Then she turned and stared at him, 
 in the full light from the still open window. His ap 
 pearance seemed to frighten her. 
 
 " You are hurt ! " she gasped in a throaty and imper 
 sonal coo of surprise. It meant no more than her hand 
 clasp on his arm. " You re simply covered with blood ! " 
 
 He put a hand up to his lip. It was sore and swollen, 
 and bleeding slowly, stubbornly, oozing drop by drop.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 21 
 
 " It s not that! " he tried to explain. 
 
 "What is it?" she asked. 
 
 Instead of answering her he lifted a hand to his still 
 throbbing head. It seemed too big for his body, too 
 heavy to hold up. 
 
 " Yes, I saw it," she said with a gesture more of com 
 prehension than of indignation. 
 
 " It makes me a little dizzy the same as when you re 
 sea-sick when you want to get flat on your back," he 
 explained, oppressed by the meagreness of the sympathy 
 in her studious and abstracted eyes. Then he remem 
 bered that he was very thirsty. He looked anxiously 
 about to see if there was any water in sight. 
 
 The girl at his side misread that movement. 
 
 " You re not going to faint, are you? " she asked with 
 a sudden quaver in her voice. And without even wait 
 ing for his answer she slipped her bare arm about his 
 waist, as though determined to hold him up. She 
 scarcely came to his shoulder, he noticed. But she 
 guided him, very much as a nurse guides a child, across 
 the room to a wide couch-bed covered with an imitation 
 Turkish tapestry. She slipped a hand under his shoul 
 der, arching back her body to sustain his weight as he 
 went down. 
 
 He had no intention of fainting. But he was glad 
 enough to close his eyes for a minute or two as his head 
 sank back on a thick sofa-pillow which smelt slightly of 
 house-dust. He could feel her breath fanning his neck. 
 She was actually unknotting his scarf and unbuttoning 
 his wilted and sodden collar. 
 
 " Could you give me a drink of water? " he asked, re 
 membering the fire-escape and the fact that it led to his 
 own room. And it was solitude, he also remembered, 
 that he had been in search of. 
 
 She left him, and slipped across the room, with her 
 loose slipper-heels clacking after her. Storrow could 
 hear the hiss of tap- water through the bath-room
 
 22 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 door, and the not unpleasant clack of the returning 
 slipper-heels. He raised himself on his elbow and took 
 the glass from her hand. The water it held was tepid and 
 flat-tasting. But he drank it to the last drop. 
 
 He felt better, after that, though the act of swallow 
 ing reminded him of his hurt lip, painful against the glass- 
 edge. And that, in turn, made him think of his head, 
 which still throbbed. So with a cautious forefinger he 
 explored along the side of his skull, where the coal-shovel 
 had raised a lump like a poached egg. He was staring 
 somewhat ruefully at his bruised and tender knuckles 
 when the girl came back from the bathroom with a bowl 
 of hot water and a moistened towel in her hand. 
 
 " Hold still a moment," she quietly commanded. She 
 was stooping over him, the next moment, carefully wiping 
 the dust-stained and blood-smeared face. 
 
 It struck Storrow as being slightly ridiculous, but he 
 submitted, with his eyes closed. It was not until she 
 transferred her ministrations to his bruised finger-joints 
 that he opened his eyes, watching her abstractedly as she 
 just as abstractedly went on with her work. 
 
 It occurred to him, for the first time, that it was dis 
 tinctly pleasureable, having a quiet-eyed and soft-handed 
 woman bathing his blood-clotted knuckles. She was the 
 first white woman, he remembered, that he had talked to 
 in any way intimately during the past eighteen long 
 weeks. Over four months in the open, with nothing but 
 squaws and slatternly frontier breeds before his eyes, had 
 left him with a vague hunger for womanly beauty which 
 his impersonal wanderings about a new and unknown 
 city had done little to appease. It was a hunger which 
 tended to throw romance about the rustle of a skirt, 
 wayward and dusky loveliness into the accidental shadows 
 of a hair-coil. It was a hunger which prompted him, mo 
 mentarily unmindful of bruised body and soul alike, to 
 lift his eyes and study the face bending so close over 
 his own.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 23 
 
 His eye for form was quick and true, though his colour- 
 sense, on the other hand, was subsidiary and sometimes 
 even defective. The first thing he noticed was her hair, 
 which seemed over-heavy for the head it crowned. It 
 was neither fine nor coarse, and was remarkable primarily 
 for its mass. Equally heavy were the black fringes of 
 the thickly planted lashes, which made the abstracted 
 grey-green eyes darker-looking than they really were. 
 In the meditative outlook of these eyes was a sense of 
 woodland coolnesses, contradicted in turn by the ador 
 able outline of the straight short nose and the over-full 
 upper lip which left a somewhat incongruous impression 
 of child-like poutiness upon her face. The lips them 
 selves were so fullblooded that Storrow with his uncer 
 tain eye for colour might have called them a watermelon- 
 red, a red that would have been over-vivid except for the 
 perpetual sense of moisture about their heavy curves. 
 There was a touch of softness about the yielding oval 
 of the chin which so strangely opposed the coolness of 
 the wide brow and the habitual air of meditation marking 
 the upper part of the face. The drooping mass of the 
 Indian-like hair, he noticed, left the column of her neck 
 almost marble-like in the modified room-light. His eye, 
 trained in the study of form and line to its minutest 
 particularity, made note of the fact that there were no 
 veins showing in the flesh of her arms and shoulders, 
 where the blood-vessels seemed as deep-seated as though 
 covered by the finest of pebbled kid. On one shoulder, 
 just below the collar-bone, he noticed a scar, and won 
 dered what could have caused it. Yet for the second 
 time he was impressed by the compactness of the thick 
 though far from ponderous body, a sense of solidity 
 which made him think of marble. He tried to tell him 
 self that this was due to the milk-like texture of the skin, 
 from which the customary blue pencillings of the veins 
 w r ere absent. Then, as she raised one arm to push back 
 her hair, the suggestion of statuary was heightened by
 
 24 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 the discovery that the arm-pit was without hair, as smooth 
 as a child s. This puzzled him even more than the scar 
 on the milk-white shoulder, abashing him by a quick 
 consciousness of nudity which he found it hard to ex 
 plain. And as she looked up, awakening to the fact 
 of his scrutiny, he barricaded himself, as it were, behind 
 his quickly shut eyes. 
 
 "Is that better?" she asked as she sat back with a 
 sigh and wiped a fine dewing of moisture from her 
 temples. Storrow, opening his eyes to this movement, 
 remembered that it was an oppressively hot day. And 
 the sun, he could see through the open window, was al 
 ready well down beyond the house-tops. 
 
 Then his eyes followed the girl as she crossed to her 
 dressing-table. On this table he could see toilet-article:- 
 of cut-glass and silver, an alcohol-lamp, a pair of electric 
 curling-irons, a folding leather travelling clock. She 
 picked up a tiny porcelain jar and returned to his side. 
 The next moment the cool tip of her finger was smearing 
 some sort of ointment on his battered lip. 
 
 " Does it hurt ? " she abstractedly asked. He shook 
 his head in negation, submitting solemnly, almost con 
 tentedly, to the tempered pressure. Her stooping figure, 
 in that paling and mildly diffused light, merged into a 
 soft and shadowy mysteriousness which translated each 
 tone and accident of modelling into something momen 
 tous. It struck him as odd that he had been so slow 
 to discover the sheer physical appeal of that figure, since 
 the discovery of such things was supposed to be his first 
 business in life. She too was examining his face with a 
 new and less impersonal interest. 
 
 " How did you ever get so sunburned?" she asked as 
 she stared down at his uncovered neck. 
 
 " In the North Woods," he told her. 
 
 " The North Woods ? " she repeated, plainly not under 
 standing what he meant.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 25 
 
 " I ve been up north of Abbitibi studying my subjects," 
 he explained. 
 
 " Studying your subjects? " she echoed, still at sea. 
 
 "Studying wild-life animals and Indians and that 
 sort of thing." 
 
 " Do you mean you re an artist ? " 
 
 He shook his head. " I m only trying to be one. I ve 
 been modelling in clay a little." 
 
 " You mean you re a sculptor? " she asked, wondering 
 why he should seem so reluctant to acknowledge it. 
 
 Again he shook his head. " I want to learn to be 
 one," he told her. " I ve only been been in New York 
 for about a week." 
 
 She sat back, with her heavy brows slightly knitted, 
 studying his face. 
 
 "What makes you want to do that sort of thing?" 
 she finally inquired. 
 
 " It s what I ve been doing for over two years," he 
 found the courage to acknowledge. It even took an ef 
 fort to keep from adding that his Chippewa Chief, re 
 cast in bronze, stood against the north wall of the Cha 
 teau Laurier rotunda in Ottawa and that his Wounded 
 Moose held a place of qualified honour in Toronto s 
 public library. But he nursed the modest man s aver 
 sion to explaining himself. He was thinking, at the 
 moment, how panther-like were the movements of her 
 body, with all that smooth heaviness about its slender- 
 ness, that persistent, almost feline muscular sturdiness 
 masked by its flowing grace of line. 
 
 " But how can you make statues of wild animals here 
 in New York ? " she meditatively inquired. She was sit 
 ting on the edge of the couch now, as unconscious of self 
 as though she were talking from a car-seat. 
 
 " I didn t come for that," he explained. " I came down 
 here to study. I ve an order for a statue of Tecumseh, 
 from a Western Ontario park-committee. It s to be in
 
 26 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 bronze, life size. But I ve never done anything like that, 
 and Arthur Loring, the animal artist I worked with all 
 last winter in Toronto, couldn t help me out. He ad 
 vised me to come to New York, even though I had to be 
 gin at the Art League and work up, until I saw the 
 chance to get in with one of the bigger men with 
 Brainard or Modrynski, if I could." 
 
 She was the first woman, in that city of multitudinous 
 unknown faces, who had betrayed the slightest interest 
 in him or his existence, though she was less impressed by 
 his explanations of himself than he had expected. It 
 even startled him a little when she repeated the name 
 " Modrynski " in a tone of quiet contempt. 
 
 " You know him ? " asked Storrow. 
 
 " I know what he is," retorted the girl with a slight 
 upward thrust of one bare shoulder. Then, to his dis 
 appointment, she veered away from the subject, as though 
 it were an issue distasteful to her. " But I can t imagine 
 you ever settling down into one of those studio-rats," 
 she averred, once more studying him \vith her abstracted 
 eyes. 
 
 " Why not? " he demanded, with a quick touch of re 
 sentment. 
 
 Instead of answering him she continued to gaze down 
 at him with that mild and meditative stare, as intimate 
 and explorative as through window-glass. What she 
 saw was a large-boned youth with coppery-brown hair, 
 clipped close, yet not short enough to conceal the crisp 
 kink in its fibre. She saw a man, still young, who looked 
 very much as an intellectualized lumber-jack might have 
 looked, with a skin burned brown by sun and wind, with 
 a thick neck, thick-shouldered body, lean jaw, square 
 teeth as white as a hound s, and a slightly rebellious 
 mouth made more so by the heaviness of its cut and 
 swollen lip. The hands were not an artist s hands, but 
 were wide and muscular, brown as a Mexican s, with 
 heavy-sinewed fingers. It was only the eyes and the
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 27 
 
 upper part of the face, she saw, that tended to reclaim 
 the figure from the merely physical. For the eyes, with 
 their irises of Prussian blue, were as soft as a woman s 
 yet redeemed from effeminacy by an expression of un 
 satisfied hunger which apparently she found it no easy 
 matter to decipher. Certain bony convolutions of the 
 temples, too, gave him an air of Hamlet-like meditative- 
 ness, of aloofness from the merely physical, of specula 
 tive other-worldliness which the eager light in the Prus 
 sian blue eyes was apt to translate into wistfulness. Yet 
 her final impression of him, oddly enough, was not men 
 tal but physical, an impression of hard muscles and 
 clean-cut lines and as yet unexhausted animal spirits, 
 with a purely animal pensiveness in their moments of 
 idleness. But most of all she was struck by the vague 
 untamed eagerness of the man, an eagerness which 
 seemed always absent from the men of the city as she 
 had encountered them. He was something as new to 
 her as one of his wild animals out of the woods might 
 have been. 
 
 Yet whatever appeal he may have held for her, he 
 at the same time held that which was subliminally dis 
 turbing. She turned away from him and picked up 
 a slipper that had dropped from her bare heel. Then 
 abstractedly crossing the room and taking a pair of silk 
 stockings from her trunk-top, she sat down on a chair 
 and began pulling them on. There seemed something 
 dismissive in the movement, something which brought 
 the man on the couch to his feet. 
 
 " I guess," he said awkwardly, sharing her sudden 
 emergence from the impersonal, " I guess I d better be 
 getting up that fire-escape." 
 
 Yet he hesitated, at a loss as to how he should phrase 
 his parting message. He was thinking, in fact, of the 
 sexlessness of her actions as she leaned forward there in 
 her boyish and abandoned pose, silently pulling on the 
 stockings of thin silk. He stood still watching her as
 
 28 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 she stamped and shook down her white skirt with a 
 strangely doe-like movement. He wondered what lay 
 behind that divorce from sex-consciousness, asking him 
 self if it was mere unconcern, or due to some indurating 
 discipline that had stripped life of both its falseness and 
 its fineness. She detected that meditative look in his eye 
 and her forehead was tinged by a faint wave of colour 
 ing which he found it hard to account for. 
 
 You re blaming me for all this," she began, and 
 then broke off. 
 
 " No, I ought to thank you for it," he said with more 
 warmth than he had intended. 
 
 Her answer, whatever it might have been, was cut 
 short by the sound of a knock on the door behind them. 
 Their eyes met. 
 
 He seemed to understand her silent message. He 
 climbed, a little stiff and heavy, out on the fire-escape 
 landing. Then he went slowly up the rusty iron steps 
 until he came to his own open window. 
 
 Before that open window he stopped short. For in 
 the familiar-looking room, the room which he still re 
 garded as his, he beheld a strange figure, as unexpected 
 as it was arresting. It was the figure of a stout but ex 
 tremely tired-looking woman engaged in the act of draw 
 ing on a negligee. 
 
 He stared, slightly incredulous, at the faded walls and 
 the worn drab rug, the authenticating broken rocker, 
 the only too well-remembered bed of corroded brass rods, 
 on which a hat and an open travelling bag now reposed. 
 
 Then the truth of the situation seeped through to his 
 brain. A new guest had already been assigned to the 
 room, to the room from which his own belongings had 
 so recently been sent. And the moist and determined 
 jaw of that weary-eyed guest made it easy for him to 
 dramatize uncomfortable contingencies which might 
 arise from her discovery of him at that open window. 
 So he drew back, started down the rusty iron steps again,
 
 2 9 
 
 and then came to a stop. He remembered the knock on 
 the door, and for the second time was able to dramatize 
 contingencies that were anything but palatable. 
 
 Yet it was necessary to choose one of those two ave 
 nues of escape, and he preferred the lower one. His ap 
 proach to the window beneath him, however, was as 
 guarded as he was able to make it. But still again he was 
 arrested, this time by the sound of a quick and angry 
 voice. 
 
 " So long as I pay for this room, it s mine," he heard 
 the girl call out in incredibly hardened tones, " and I ll do 
 what I like in it! " 
 
 The reply to that challenge was so low that Storrow 
 failed to catch it. All he knew was that it was a man 
 speaking, a man who was angry but still in control of 
 himself. 
 
 " You dare to carry any tale like that down to the 
 office ! " the flattened girlish voice once more flung out. 
 "Just try it!" 
 
 " I suppose that s why you hang out in a dump like 
 this," the man s tremulous voice retorted. 
 
 " It s none of your business where I hang out," was 
 the counter-retort. " And the sooner you get out of 
 this room the better it ll suit me ! " 
 
 Storrow judged, by the sound of her receding voice, 
 that the girl was crossing to the door and opening it. 
 
 "You know what you ll pay for this, Torrie?" chal 
 lenged the deeper voice, still shaking a little, shot through 
 with a feeling that seemed deeper than anger. 
 
 "That s my own affair!" 
 
 The other s reply to this did not reach Storrow s ear. 
 
 " I don t care what you do with your part, or your 
 production, or your own oily carcase. I m sick of the 
 whole combination! I m through! Isn t that plain 
 enough for you to understand? I m through!" 
 
 This was followed by a moment of unbroken silence. 
 Then came the sound of a step crossing the floor, sue-
 
 30 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 ceeded by the pregnantly thunderous slam of a door in 
 the hot evening air. 
 
 Storrow, in the ensuing silence, moved slowly back 
 from the open window. He stood on the iron grating, 
 uncertain what to do, reluctant to re-enter that arena of 
 noisy combat. He was still there, debating the uninvit 
 ing alternative of running the blockade of the serried win 
 dows that stood between him and the basement area, 
 when the discoloured lace curtain was pushed aside and 
 the girl s face suddenly appeared, within three feet of his 
 own. She was obviously startled to find him there, but 
 that minor bewilderment was soon immersed in the bigger 
 waves of anger still surging through her. 
 
 " You heard that? " she asked, after a moment of sil 
 ent staring out through the open window. She spoke 
 with assumed unconcern, but there was recklessness be 
 neath it. 
 
 " I couldn t help hearing some of it," Storrow ac 
 knowledged, by this time the more uncomfortable of the 
 two. " I I hadn t intended to." 
 
 The apologetic note in his voice seemed to puzzle her. 
 She looked at him with clearing eyes. Then she laughed 
 a little, though still with a touch of recklessness. 
 
 " We both seem to be having our troubles today," 
 she said, with a listless push at her tumbled crown of 
 hair. 
 
 " I m afraid I ve been the cause of yours," he dep 
 recated. He made note of her upward glance towards 
 what had once been his own window. He forced a laugh, 
 to make light of his predicament. 
 
 " Oh, I m barred out up there. They thought I d 
 given up my room; they ve put a woman in it." 
 
 She noticed his movement as he lifted his sodden hand 
 kerchief up to his mouth, for his grimace of forced mirth 
 had started his bruised lip bleeding again. Her face grew 
 suddenly serious. She did not speak. But, after a mo 
 ment or two of meditation, she held the soiled curtain
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 31 
 
 back. It was clearly a signal for him to come in through 
 the window. His hesitation did not escape her. 
 
 "Are you afraid?" she demanded. 
 
 " Not for myself," he explained. 
 
 Then for what?" 
 
 " For you," he protested. But even as he spoke he 
 lowered himself in through the window. 
 
 " The worst has happened," she said with acidulated 
 levity. He noticed, the next moment, that she was point 
 ing towards his wilted collar and tie, still resting on her 
 dresser top. " He saw those! " 
 
 " Who saw them? " asked Storrow, colouring in spite 
 of himself. 
 
 That man Krassler," she said with a shrug. 
 
 " But who is Krassler? " 
 
 " He s the man who was just up here trying to pre 
 sume on his privileges." 
 
 " His privileges? " repeated Storrow. 
 
 " He s a third-rate producer who seems to think I 
 ought to kaitow to him because he s promised me a part 
 in one of his third-rate plays," was her apparently dif 
 fident answer. " But there were a few plain truths com 
 ing to him and I guess he got them." 
 
 "Then you re you re an actress?" ventured Stor 
 row, with a stress on that all-explanatory word which 
 she seemed to resent. 
 
 " About as much as you re a sculptor," she retorted, 
 by way of punishment for that demonstrated provincial 
 interpretation of her calling. Then as she fanned her 
 self with a ragged-edged palm-leaf she explained that 
 she had been in musical comedy for the last two seasons. 
 She had " worked " her first year in an English pony- 
 chorus, and then had a " show-girl " part in The Rialto 
 Widow, and at the beginning of the summer was doing 
 an eccentric dance in The Grapevine Girls when she 
 slipped and broke her ankle. It broke with a sound like 
 a pistol-shot, she told him, and they had to carry her
 
 32 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " off/ It had laid her up nearly all summer, and she had 
 been stifling there for two months, with the city as empty 
 as a wilderness. And it was that man Krassler, as much 
 as anything, who had kept her waiting there, for he had 
 promised her a speaking part in The Silent Singer and 
 now the whole applecart was over. 
 
 " But there are other chances, aren t there ? " asked 
 Storrow, oppressed by the embittered undercurrent of 
 her flippancy. 
 
 " I suppose so," was her listless retort. " But I can t 
 go back to dancing, even if I wanted to. And I won t go 
 back to the chorus. And it s not easy, in the legitimate, 
 until you ve shown them you ve got it in you." 
 
 It was all a new world to the man from the North, but 
 he acknowledged, perfunctorily, that he understood. She 
 couldn t help succeeding, he repeated to himself, as he 
 studied her. Yet that compactly modelled body was less 
 of an enigma to him now, since the root of its mysterious 
 sexlessness had been laid bare to him. That was some 
 thing peculiar to her profession, he remembered, the same 
 as with athletes, or with models, or with children still 
 in their careless age of innocence. 
 
 " Waiting s about the hardest work you can do, isn t 
 it? " she asked him. He did not answer her at once, for 
 he was watching the undulatory small movements of her 
 shoulders as she slipped into a rose-coloured kimono. It 
 was not until she snapped on the electric-lights, at each 
 side of her dresser, that he noticed the garment to be 
 both faded and threadbare. She paused, after a perfunc 
 tory dab at her face with a powder-puff, and looked at 
 him over her shoulder. 
 
 " You re hungry, aren t you?" she asked. There was 
 appeal in the easy companionability of that question. 
 
 " No," he acknowledged. " But I am thirsty. I could 
 drink a gallon ! " 
 
 She crossed to the telephone and sent an order for 
 ice-water down to the office. Then she set up a small
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 33 
 
 collapsible table, spread a fresh towel across its top, and 
 lifted the lid of the steel-bound Taylor trunk on the far 
 side of the room. From this trunk she took out a tin 
 box of biscuits, a marmalade- jar, and a pot of cream 
 cheese. When the bell-boy arrived with the ice-water, 
 she met him at the door with her stoneware pitcher, with 
 a careless " Thank you, Jake " as the broken ice rattled 
 from its granite container. Then she shut the door and 
 locked it. 
 
 " Don t drink that," she said, intercepting Storrow as 
 he stepped forward to take the pitcher from the table. 
 She crossed to the bathroom and produced two tumblers, 
 which she wiped on a face-towel. She next appeared 
 with a bottle wrapped in a wet cloth, a bottle not unlike an 
 Indian club in shape. The care with which she handled 
 this piqued Storrow s curiosity as her fingers lifted bits 
 of broken ice from the pitcher and dropped them into the 
 glasses. 
 
 " I ve two of these left from Pannie At will s party," 
 she explained as she took up the bottle again, unswathed 
 it, twisted the lead-foil from its neck and inserted a but 
 tonhook under its wiring. Then with her strong white 
 fingers she began working at the cork, turning the bottle 
 about as she pushed on its swollen cap. 
 
 The liquid from the opened bottle bubbled pleasantly 
 as it was poured into the tumblers. 
 
 " This ll be better for you than water." the bare-armed 
 girl assured her visitor. 
 
 That visitor, as he took the still bubbling glass from 
 her fingers, remembered that he had very seldom drunk 
 such stuff. As a boy once at a county-fair he had made 
 himself very sick by taking too much bottled ale. That 
 had left him with a vague aversion to alcohol in any form, 
 but he had held aloof from it chiefly for the reason that 
 he had never felt the need of it. His unjaded sense of 
 well-being had never called for any such lash. So he 
 stared down at the warm amber liquid in which the last
 
 34 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 of the ice had disappeared, stared down at it without 
 either appetite or enthusiasm. Then he remembered that 
 it was wet, and that his throat was dry. 
 
 He had gulped down a half-glass of it, scarcely con 
 scious of its tepidity, when he noticed that the girl who 
 had seated herself across the table from him was sip 
 ping her glass fastidiously, like a bird drinking from a 
 fountain-rim, and he blushed at the thought of what must 
 have seemed grossness on his part. She stopped, sober- 
 eyed, at his sudden movement of repudiation. 
 
 " It even spoils champagne, doesn t it, having to take 
 it like that?" she observed with a glance at the thick- 
 glassed tumbler. 
 
 But it had not altogether spoiled the wine for Storrow. 
 It made him think of warm apple-cider, and caused his 
 nose to sting, but the effect, on the whole, was much more 
 pleasureable than he had expected. He noticed, as he 
 finished his glass with more tempered gulps, that it was 
 bringing a faint tingle into his finger-tips and a steady 
 but not unpleasant throb to the poached-egg lump along 
 the side of his head. He became conscious of a faint 
 singing in his ears, such as he had heard about a bee-hive 
 on a sunny afternoon. Then he remembered that the 
 things which he had so recently accepted as misfortunes 
 were in some way touched with humour, if one only 
 looked at them in the right light. The world, after all, 
 was a pretty rosy place to live in, only there were certain 
 things, certain tremendously vital things, which he must 
 explain to the girl across the table from him. 
 
 He sat there, big with a desire to talk, yet with the 
 habit of a life-time shouldering him back into his Scotch 
 mist of reticence. He seemed satisfied to watch the 
 white-skinned girl moving about behind a thin veil of 
 mystery. That newer mood of his seemed to give a 
 warmer red to her lips. It threw a softer glimmer about 
 the satiny white skin, a new music in the sound of her 
 voice, which at times seemed to come to him from a
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 35 
 
 great distance and then again to be confidentially close to 
 his ear, so that it mingled musically with the sunny after 
 noon beehive singing. 
 
 His second glass, as they began to eat, gave him a 
 courage which was almost a puzzle to him. He wondered 
 why his companion should remain so quiet-eyed, so un 
 disturbed by the liquid miracle which was sending music 
 through all his veins. She leaned over, cool-handed, to 
 empty the last of the bottle into his tumbler. 
 
 " What made that scar?" he suddenly asked, looking 
 at her bare shoulder. She drew in her chin, with a side- 
 twist of the head that brought creases in the satiny neck- 
 skin, and glanced down at the scar. 
 
 "Oh, that!" she said. 
 
 " What made it ? " he repeated. 
 
 " I let a hot curling-iron fall there." 
 
 It seemed a deep scar, from so trivial a cause. 
 Swayed by an impulse which was still impersonal, he 
 reached out and ran an explorative finger along that 
 blemish on so perfect a plane. Many a time, in much 
 the same manner, he has thumbed a roughness out of his 
 modelling clay. It surprised him to find how cool and 
 firm her flesh was. 
 
 " Don t do that!" 
 
 Her command was so sharp, with a little intake of the 
 breath as she uttered it, that it startled him. She backed 
 away as Storrow s puzzled glance rose to her face. She 
 was still staring at him, with slightly widened eyes, as 
 she sank into her chair. The two of them sat there 
 in silence, for several moments, studying each other 
 across the narrow table that stood between them. Then 
 the girl, with a vague trouble on her lowered brow, re 
 sumed her eating of cheese and crackers. Storrow did 
 the same, oddly sobered, with a more tempered drone of 
 music in his ears. Yet her half-diffident shoulder-shrug, 
 as she licked the cheese-crumbs from her fingers, did not 
 escape him.
 
 36 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " I can t help wondering," she finally said as she sat 
 back in her chair, " why you don t do things of real men 
 and women, if you re going to be a sculptor. Haven t 
 you wanted to ? " 
 
 Storrow seemed glad of that excursion into a side- 
 issue. 
 
 " Yes ; but you can t get models, in the country I came 
 from," he explained. 
 
 This seemed incredible to her. " There must be mod 
 els," she ventured, " wherever there are men and women." 
 
 " Not up in Chamboro," he averred. 
 
 " What s Chamboro ? " she asked. 
 
 " That s where I d fitted up an old barn as a studio," 
 he explained to her, spurred into candour by her casual 
 acceptance of such things, but still thick-tongued from 
 the beaded amber liquid that had come out of the tumbler 
 beside him. " I wanted to do life studies. I knew I had 
 to do em. There was a young girl up there, a girl of 
 about eleven or twelve, half wild. I wanted to do her in 
 clay. So I went to her mother about it. They were a 
 shiftless lot, but she was glad enough of the money. Sit 
 ting around while I worked, though, seemed to get on 
 her nerves, so the third day she sent the youngster over 
 to my studio alone." 
 
 He laughed as he came to a stop. But it was not a 
 mirthful laugh. 
 
 " What happened? " demanded the girl across the table. 
 
 " A couple of elderly maiden ladies who were collecting 
 for the Social Purity League happened to look in and see 
 that youngster as I d posed her there. She was naked, of 
 course, with a side-twist of the skinny little torso that 
 made me feel I d be a second Robin if I could only catch 
 it." 
 
 " Go on ! " she prompted out of the ensuing silence. 
 
 " The two maiden-ladies carried the news of what 
 they d seen in to the village. Then about all Chamboro
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 37 
 
 came back. They came in a regular posse. They were 
 very foolish about it all." 
 
 " What d they do ? " she demanded as he came to a 
 stop for the second time. 
 
 " They burned down the barn, for one thing. It was 
 their original intention, I understand, to tar and feather 
 me but they didn t quite succeed in that. It left me a 
 marked man, though, as far as Chamboro s concerned. 
 So I swung back to the wild-animal stuff, and went up 
 over the Height of Land, up beyond Abbitibi, to study my 
 subjects." 
 
 The girl leaned slightly forward, with one hand grasp 
 ing each side of the table in front of her, her lips slightly 
 parted, bewilderment in her staring eyes. 
 
 " Do you mean to say," she slowly intoned, " that they 
 thought you d done something wrong? " 
 
 He was able to laugh at her amazement, an unmod- 
 erated laugh in which she was finally able to join him. 
 
 " You poor boy! " she said, suddenly sobering, with a 
 hand-movement towards him that implied both pity and 
 comprehension, abstraction creeping into her eyes again 
 as she meditated over what he had just said to her. It 
 seemed to give her a great deal to think over, for she sat 
 there as motionless as a statue, for several minutes. 
 Then, she began to laugh again, easily, bubblingly, as 
 though some hitherto unperceived humour of his pre 
 dicament was slowly revealing itself to her. 
 
 His first impulse was to resent that laughter, feeling 
 that it was in some way at his expense. But the light on 
 the upturned face was so appealing, the lines of the red 
 mouth were so warm in tone, the poise of the careless- 
 held body was so nymph-like, that he was ready enough 
 to swing in with her mood of merriment. Then they 
 both stopped short, as though demanding of themselves a 
 reason for laughing. 
 
 " After Chamboro, and things like that," she said out
 
 of that second silence, " no wonder you were afraid oi 
 me." 
 
 " But I m not afraid of you," he contended, warm with 
 a wine that was never poured from bottles. 
 
 You were" she cried, more than ever nymph-like. 
 
 " That was only because you seemed so beautiful," he 
 heard his own lips protesting, as he noticed for the second 
 time that convulsive intake of the breath. 
 
 " Say that again," she murmured, leaning forward with 
 a dreamy intentness on her face. 
 
 It was provocative in its sudden languid loveliness, that 
 face which swayed before him in a mist. He could feel 
 his pulses pound. 
 
 She seemed not altogether unconscious of that quick 
 bodily conflagration, for she rose slowly from her chair. 
 If it had been her intention to move away from the table 
 he arrested that movement by catching at the hem of the 
 rose-coloured kimono and swinging her about so that she 
 faced him where he sat. Yet he continued to sit there, 
 shaking a little as he stared up into her face. 
 
 "Oh, you boy! You adorable boy!" she cried out 
 with a sudden little forward swoop of the body as she 
 thrust her hands into the thick mat of his crisply-curling 
 hair. It seemed almost an expression of hunger, more 
 a movement of appropriation than one of surrender, as 
 she pushed back his face so that she stared directly into it 
 as she stood above him. 
 
 You are beautiful," he whispered, dizzily, as he rose 
 to his feet close beside her. 
 
 The movement freed his head from her clasp, so that 
 her drooping hands rested on his shoulders. Her draped 
 arm drooped closer about him, like a wing. He was 
 conscious, for one misty moment, of a besieging artillery 
 of perfumes, of her quick-taken breath, of the appeal of 
 the heavy red mouth. 
 
 Then he caught her in his arms with a savagery that 
 left her suddenly relaxed and heavy-lidded. He crushed
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 39 
 
 her closer and still closer with those uncomprehendingly 
 cruel muscles and sinews that seemed made of iron. Yet 
 she clung to him, more hungrily than ever, as though that 
 unthinking physical cruelty were something to be wel 
 comed, and her head sank back on one upcrowded shoul 
 der, abandonedly, as his hungering mouth sought and 
 found the heavy red lips. Time was forgotten, and the 
 world, and all the past that time had recorded upon its 
 troubled surface. . . . 
 
 Then time and the world came back to them, abruptly, 
 with the repeated shrill of a telephone-bell on the far side 
 of the room. 
 
 They opened their eyes as they stood there still locked 
 together like pterodactyls. In the man s eyes was ques 
 tioning bewilderment, in the woman s a heavy and lan 
 guorous protest. It was the tension in the man s arms 
 alone that relaxed as the shrill of the bell repeated itself. 
 
 " Don t go," she whispered, as he made a movement as 
 though to answer that call. She lifted her hand to the 
 back of his head, and bent his face closer to her own. 
 And it was her lips this time which met and clung to his. 
 
 He drew back suddenly, with alarm in his eyes, forget 
 ful of even the reiterated peal of the bell behind him. 
 
 " There s blood on your face," he gasped, lifting his 
 hand to the bruised and tender lip which he had so com 
 pletely forgotten. 
 
 Her face, now a dead white, looked almost grotesque 
 with its Columbine-like blotches of red. 
 
 " I don t care," she said, almost sleepily, with her limp 
 hands trailing after him as he drew still farther away. 
 
 Then, with a breath that was both deep and audible, 
 she crossed slowly to the telephone and twisted a handker 
 chief about the clapper of the still jangling bell, silencing 
 it. 
 
 Storrow watched her. He felt, as he stared across the 
 faded room at her in her faded rose drapery, that a thou 
 sand unseen masons were building a thousand-stoned wall
 
 40 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 about him. He watched her as she moved towards him 
 with slow and meditative strides. He even fell slowly 
 back, until his shoulders were against the wall. She 
 smiled, without mirth, at his vague frown of protest. 
 
 " What s the use? " she quietly asked, as she lifted her 
 face up to his.
 
 CHAPTER THREE 
 
 OWEN STORROW, one week later, was a not 
 altogether happy young man. His misery, in 
 fact, was a two-fold one. He found himself 
 not only unhappy in his surroundings but even more un 
 happy in his own mind. The memories which he brought 
 into that new environment were anything but tranquilliz 
 ing. 
 
 It had been a mistake, he told himself, to accept Au 
 gusta Kirkner s offer and establish his studio under her 
 roof. He had come to the wrong place, and in doing so 
 he had come in the wrong way and at the wrong time. 
 The change, both the inner and the outer one, had been 
 too abrupt. It had proved as cataclysmically disturbing 
 as an earthquake, involving too sharp a rupture of all 
 the filaments of habit and association. It had been 
 wrench enough to be deprived, at a stroke, of the rough 
 freedom of his woodsman s life. But the loss of that 
 primordial freedom of the body had been followed by an 
 episode and in his own mind Storrow still insisted that 
 it was merely an episode which gave every promise of 
 resulting in a captivity of the soul. 
 
 For Storrow looked back on his last night at The 
 Alwyn Arms as a sort of dream, some of it blurred in 
 outline, some of it photographic in vividness. He was 
 neither ascetic by instinct nor straight-laced in his out 
 look on the world. But this, his first adventure along 
 that water-way of passion which twines now silver and 
 now sullen across the huddled destinies of men, had come 
 upon him too abruptly for consideration. It had seemed 
 to leap upon his shoulders like a wild-cat from a tree-
 
 42 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 branch. And when the singing bees of wonder had died 
 down in his brain he had realized the necessity for escape. 
 
 The inevitable reaction of exhaustion had come, the 
 ebb-tide of emotion over-taxed. And his haunting im 
 pression of being walled up alive was still horrible to 
 him. 
 
 He had tried to slip away as stealthily and guiltily as 
 a burglar slips away from the scene of his crime. The 
 girl had stirred and wakened. But she had been too tired 
 to pay much attention to him. He had made his escape 
 without speaking to her again, without explaining what 
 he could scarcely explain to himself. He stole away with 
 an ache for freedom still in his soul, with a vague dread 
 of invisible filaments weaving about him, with a horror 
 of suffocation which above all things must be fought 
 against. 
 
 That feeling of stealth with which he had taken his de 
 parture, in fact, added materially to the sum of his shame. 
 It had stayed with him during his transit down through 
 that still slumbering hotel in the early morning hours. 
 He had felt the abominable necessity of making himself 
 inconspicuous to every casual eye. Even after his escape 
 from that house of tumultuous and hectic memories he 
 found himself further embarrassed, first by the need of 
 fresh linen and later by the surreptitious manner in which 
 this apparel had to be purchased. In that Sixth Avenue 
 store where he was looked over with questioning eyes he 
 felt remarkably like a porch-climber intent on a quick dis 
 guise. Then he had eaten heavily, though joylessly, 
 after which he had just as joylessly sought shelter in a 
 sordid side-street hotel, where he went to bed at a time 
 when the rest of the world, the honest world of honest 
 workers, was emerging to its daily tasks. He went to 
 bed sore in body, exhausted in spirit, with a chain of 
 newly-formed memories dragging through his brain. 
 Even his sleep in that small and stifling room was shot 
 through with dreams of intertwined bodies which seemed
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 43 
 
 in some mysterious way associated with his La Porte de 
 I Enfer. And these uncontrolled visions seemed to build 
 up still wider horizons of shame about him, horizons 
 along which he frontiered in a vague horror of homeless- 
 ness. 
 
 Then in his waking hours he struggled, as youth must, 
 to reorganize his shattered self-respect. The looms of 
 after-thought busied themselves in weaving some essen 
 tial fabric of extenuation. He told himself it had all 
 come upon him so suddenly, so overwhelmingly, that he 
 was little more than a wayfarer who had stooped to drink 
 from a pool but had wakened to find himself tumbled 
 headlong into its strangling depths. And if there had 
 been the threat of strangulation, he had at least effected 
 his escape. He had escaped, he assured himself, because 
 escape had seemed to him the only avenue to redemption. 
 He had thought, it was true, very much more of himself 
 than of anything he might be leaving behind him. But 
 he had staggered back to freedom impressed with the 
 feeling that if he nursed a wound, it was a wound which 
 the ever-healing hand of Time would make less painful. 
 
 Time, he discovered during the next few days, had in 
 deed made that wound less painful, and therein lay a new 
 source of distress to his fretful spirit. His feelings, he 
 began to find, were not as simple as he had striven to 
 make them. For tangled up with regret was a shadowy 
 yet persistent sense of triumph, of murkier distances that 
 had been added to the perspective of life. The vistas of 
 experience had been suddenly widened, and into those new 
 distance he stared with slightly eager if unhappy eyes. 
 This consciousness that he could even vaguely exult in 
 evil, in any black harvest of knowledge that was rooted 
 in wrong, gave birth to a later and subsidiary shame in his 
 breast. 
 
 Then, as the days dragged by, a new and even more dis 
 turbing discovery came to him. He beheld memory 
 throwing about that strange last night at The Alwyn
 
 44 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 Arms an ever wanner and warmer glow. As youth re 
 asserted its prerogatives of vigour he found himself go 
 ing back to those scenes much less unwillingly. He had 
 foolishly accepted the entire affair as something that was 
 over and done with, as something which had been taken 
 out of his life as conclusively as his hand-bags had been 
 carried out of his surrendered hotel-room. It was some 
 thing so episodic, so transient, he had argued with him 
 self, that it would eventually leave neither mark nor mem 
 ory. The thing had been violent, he kept assuring him 
 self, and its own violence had already shaken it to pieces. 
 It had also been sordid, and for that sordidness he felt 
 ironically grateful, recognizing in it his gateway of de 
 liverance. So it would never happen again. He would 
 see to that. He had never asked for such things. He 
 had avoided them. It was, he persisted, nothing more 
 than an episode. 
 
 Yet in its very abruptness, its very brevity, it remained 
 monumental. It kept confronting him as a blind rock- 
 wall of wonder, rather than as the gentle ascent and de 
 cline of often-travelled paths. Its very brevity left it 
 poignant, with no sense of completion, teasing to the 
 imagination. He found the beak of Curiosity in his 
 vitals, forbidding him peace. 
 
 Yet out of the laborious exploitation of that mental 
 unrest of his he wrung a final but attenuated consolation. 
 It was through such things, he remembered, that men 
 knew life. And to know life, after all, was the supreme 
 end of living. His mood even merged into that of the 
 flagellant who finds satisfaction in the lash which should 
 have brought him pain. What he most regretted, as time 
 went on, was the vesture of ugliness since the aesthetic 
 was so vital a factor in his existence with which a be 
 wildering new experience had come to him. 
 
 That gradual shift of front continued during the pre 
 occupied yet empty days when he was installing his be 
 longings in the music-room of the Kirkner house, frown-
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 45 
 
 ing solemnly down on its solemn Brooklyn avenue. He 
 had gone to that house as to a refuge. He was ready to 
 welcome its ponderous yet shielding respectabilities. He 
 would be glad of its restraints, its solemn surburban se- 
 clusiveness. And if he went into his step-aunt s home 
 oppressed by the feeling of being an impostor, of carry 
 ing with him a bundle of mysteries which he was com 
 pelled to keep tight-packed, like a spy in enemy territory, 
 he was frankly grateful for that interregnum of solitude 
 which preceded Augusta Kirkner s return from Narra- 
 gansett. He was glad enough of that interval by him 
 self, with nothing but a corps of self-effacing servants 
 between him and his thoughts. 
 
 He found himself, in fact, face to face with a series of 
 sharp readjustments in which no outsider could be of 
 any possible help to him. Yet as time went on he missed 
 more and more the companionable noises of The Alwyn 
 Arms. He had a hunger for something more than self- 
 effacing servants to speak to. He thought of Broadway 
 and its tributary streets of unrest as something remote, 
 as something no longer accessible. He thought of them 
 as an exile thinks of a lost fatherland. But more often 
 than of all the rest he thought of the girl called Torrie. 
 He felt the need of seeing her again, of explaining to her, 
 of proving that his flight had not been founded on cow 
 ardice. He remembered the milk-white shoulders, and 
 the scar at the base of the throat rounded like a pigeon s. 
 He remembered intimate nestling movements that 
 brought him up short in the midst of his meagre attempts 
 at work. 
 
 After such thoughts he found the luxurious emptiness 
 of the wax-floored music-room which had been given up 
 for his use impressing him as something bald and hard, 
 as impersonal as a monk s cell. He fought against this 
 impression by doing what he could to convert the big 
 room with the tempered north light into more of a work- 
 studio. He did this by a studied parade of his imple-
 
 46 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 ments of labour, and a more studied assorting of his own 
 casts about the room. He tacked his Chinese prints 
 against the wall-paneling and deliberately freckled the 
 over-polished floor with a spattering of modelling-clay. 
 But even the friendly inanimate forms of his own fash 
 ioning now seemed like souvenirs treasured by an exile. 
 He felt more and more like a prisoner engaged in the 
 decoration of his cell. For large and spacious as that 
 new abode seemed to him, he began to find a feeling of 
 restraint in its very shadows, an absence of elbow-room 
 in its very spaciousness. And even before the return of 
 Augusta Kirkner and her daughter he found himself won 
 dering if his relationship with the rest of that household 
 would not prove an impossible one. Their offer, ex 
 tended through some too tenuous tie of kinship, had 
 been generous enough. But to Storrow it began to 
 savour of that mediaeval benevolence once extended by 
 the munificent to the indigent troubadour. More and 
 more often he recalled his earlier freedom in the sister 
 city across the East River, his privilege of eating just 
 when and where he pleased, his unscrutinized comings 
 and goings at The Alwyn Arms. 
 
 That turned his mind still again back to the white- 
 armed girl who was now so often in his thoughts, to 
 recollections of gesture and pose and glance, to specula 
 tions as to how sincere she had been when she had whis 
 pered so sleepily and so close to his ear that now he must 
 never leave her. He even found it not unpleasant to 
 meditate on remembered hesitations and reviewed bewild 
 erments, for if by some obliquity of mental process he 
 had come to wring a mild sense of martyrdom out of 
 that experience, his martyrdom had already reached the 
 phase where he could bathe his hands in the flame.
 
 CHAPTER FOUR 
 
 STORROW was still engaged in his silent struggle 
 to fit himself into a less compromising environ 
 ment when Mrs. Kirkner and her daughter re 
 turned to their city home. So smoothly did the intricate 
 cogs mesh and revolve in that quiet-chambered abode that 
 the return had been effected before he was even aware of 
 it. The knowledge of that advent, in fact, came to him 
 from Medberry, the aged butler, in the adroit intimation 
 that he might possibly be expected to " dress " for dinner 
 that night. He was still in his studio, however, with his 
 well-smudged modelling-gown on, when Charlotte Kirk 
 ner tapped on the door and entered. 
 
 Of " Cousin Charlotte/ as by a stretch of truth he had 
 once called her, he still nursed a vague and boyish memory 
 of a very pale child with very big eyes, unspeakably 
 spindly legs, and a passion for a broken doll known as 
 " Alice-Emily." It came as a shock to him, accordingly, 
 to find himself confronted by a quiet-mannered and ex 
 tremely self-possessed young woman of at least twenty 
 years. Yet her smile was almost a timid one as she stood 
 studying him out of a pair of cogitative grey eyes that 
 were unmistakably friendly. 
 
 " Owen, how brown you are ! " she said as they shook 
 hands. And a tinge of colour showed along her pale 
 cheeks as she spoke. 
 
 " I d never have known you," admitted Owen, ob 
 viously constrained, prepared to dislike her at the first 
 intimation of hostility. But she impressed him as being 
 too neutral-tinted, too timorously passive, to awaken any 
 positive fires of opposition. She was shell-like, he felt, 
 
 47
 
 48 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 as delicately tinted and polished as mollusk labium, and 
 probably as soft in texture. 
 
 " Are you going to like it? " she asked, with a glance 
 about the new studio. She intended to do what she could, 
 he realized, to make him feel at home. 
 
 " Could one help liking it? " he evaded. And she col 
 oured again, dimly conscious of some lack of genuine 
 ness in his retort. 
 
 " Mother was sorry, of course, not to be here. But 
 our month at Narragansett wasn t up until last night. 
 And mother never changes her plans." 
 
 " I m afraid I ve already interfered with them," he ad 
 mitted, wondering as he spoke just how much the younger 
 woman s personality had been subjugated by the iron 
 will of the older w r oman. 
 
 " No, everything will go along exactly the same," was 
 the girl s almost listless reply. " After Narragansett 
 we always go to the Swansea cottage for a month. So 
 by next Monday you ll have the whole house to yourself 
 again." 
 
 " And you like being on the wing, that way ? " he 
 asked, following the meditative grey eyes as they studied 
 first The Sentinel Wolf and then The Last Of The Pack. 
 And it was his turn to colour a little at her head-nod of 
 approval after an inspection of the second figure. 
 
 " My liking it or not scarcely counts," she explained, 
 coming back to him. " Mother, you know, is not at all 
 well." 
 
 " I m sorry to hear that," was Storrow s perfunctory 
 murmur, swayed by the persuasion that the illness in 
 question was mostly that of too much wealth and too 
 great a burden of idleness. He realized, as Charlotte 
 half -humorously went on to explain her mother s method 
 of living, that Augusta Kirkner was one of those birds of 
 passage peculiar to American civilization, a spirit driven 
 from place to place by mysterious migratory impulses to 
 which she responded as implacably as wren and robin
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 49 
 
 responded to nature s call for seasonal advances and re 
 treats. There was the predestined winter flight to Flor 
 ida, the unvarying vernal shift to Lake wood, the inevi 
 table August at Narragansett, the duly allotted four weeks 
 at the cottage at Swansea-On-The-Sound, after which 
 came the accustomed twelve weeks in the City itself. 
 
 Yet Augusta Kirkner, Storrow realized as he sat across 
 the table from her that night at dinner, was anything but 
 a caprice-controlled and flighty-minded woman. She had 
 brought to the management of her estate that clear-head 
 edness which it demanded. To the sorrows of widow 
 hood she had likewise brought a stoicism too granitic to 
 give rootage to any touch of bitterness. She knew life, 
 demanded lucidity, and prided herself on her frankness 
 of speech. There was something methodic even in her 
 restlessness. Her vagaries of comment were as deliber 
 ate as those repeated shif tings from front to front which 
 were made with a calculated precision that tended to 
 translate them into the mechanical. It was only later on 
 that Storrow awakened to the fact that her often dis 
 concerting impatience of mind was based largely on a con 
 dition of body studiously and even heroically hidden 
 away from the rest of the world, a condition arising from 
 a disorder which only the knife could hope to remedy. 
 But Augusta Kirkner, with all her strength of will, had 
 not the strength to face that knife. With everything to 
 add to the colour and depth of life, that secret inner 
 malady was always there at her elbow, as soft-voiced as 
 a second Medberry, to remind her of a coming engage 
 ment which could not be avoided. And if she sighed 
 involuntarily as she stared at the newcomer under her 
 roof, it was at the memory that youth and vigour are in 
 deed a precious gift. 
 
 Your mother, Owen, was a wonderful woman," she 
 told him over her coffee-cup in the library, " wonderful 
 in everything but her choice of a husband." 
 
 If Storrow winced it was not so much because of her
 
 50 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 candour as it was for that thrust at the dead. His eye, 
 during that moment of tension, met Charlotte s. She too 
 flushed a little. But her quick glance of comprehension, 
 of sympathy, prompted him to remain silent. 
 
 He was conscious of that repeated tacit plea for pa 
 tience when later in the evening they went up to the 
 music-room for an examination of the new studio. The 
 older woman had cursorily inspected a handful of Stor- 
 row s pencil-studies and had abstractedly admitted that 
 a couple of his modellings in clay were " pretty." That 
 word stung, like the briar on a rose-stem. And again, 
 in Charlotte s quick glance of understanding, he was 
 conscious of a silent compact between himself and the 
 girl who found herself helpless to champion his cause by 
 anything more substantial than an outthrust of hand to 
 invisible hand. 
 
 " Are you going to do honest work here ? " demanded 
 the older woman. 
 
 " I hope to," he said with sudden constraint, once more 
 conscious of the perilous compression which was cheating 
 him of the very air his timber-wolf life demanded. And 
 his instinctive passion for elbow-room, for untrammelled 
 freedom of movement, prompted him to add : " But I 
 may have some trouble, of course, about getting models 
 over here! " 
 
 "Models?" demanded Augusta Kirkner. "What 
 kind of models ? " 
 
 " The kind I ll always need for my work," Storrow ex 
 plained with a suavity which would have been recognized 
 as dangerous by only those who knew him well, " figure 
 models." 
 
 " Figure models ? " repeated Augusta Kirkner. The 
 actual meaning of the words seemed to be filtering very 
 slowly through to her consciousness. " You don t mean 
 women women who make money out of their naked 
 
 ness 
 
 " They wouldn t be of much use to me," said Storrow,
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 51 
 
 with a tendency to exult in her slowly growing horror, 
 " unless they were naked! " 
 
 If he spoke with a calmness that bordered slightly on 
 flippancy, his feelings were more profoundly involved than 
 he pretended. He could remember only too vividly, in 
 fact, his trepidation at the engagement of his first figure- 
 model. He had known none of the ordinary art-students 
 life-class initiation into such things, and keen as he was 
 to correct his modelling in wax of an Indian girl s back, 
 he had been a very unhappy young man as that first model 
 came to him one morning in Montreal and quietly sug 
 gested that she could undress behind his screen. He had 
 stood listening to those sounds of unrobing, wincing at 
 the sight of lingerie flung carelessly up across the screen- 
 top. Then his courage had failed him. He had called 
 out that he had remembered an overlooked engagement 
 and had vanished from the studio to walk the streets for 
 countless miles, leaving a dollar-bill in one of the sadly 
 worn shoes of that sadly puzzled young woman. 
 
 " And it will be impossible for you to do your work, 
 without having those women come here? " his thoughtful- 
 eyed hostess was demanding of him. 
 
 " All artists seem to use them," he said with a perhaps 
 unnecessary assumption of world-weary sophistication, 
 followed by a pregnant enough glance up over his shoul 
 der towards a print of Titian s Sacred and Profane Love. 
 Augusta Kirkner and her daughter both followed the line 
 of his gaze. They both stood for a moment in silence 
 regarding the bodily splendour of that half -reclining fig 
 ure gazing so tranquilly out on a world where youth with 
 ered and passed away and beauty itself vanished in tears 
 and time. 
 
 The immemorial loveliness of the figure seemed to 
 tranquillize them, to touch them into a humility which 
 neither of them attempted to articulate. The older 
 woman, in fact, crossed to a chair and sat down in it, 
 with a sigh.
 
 52 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " I ve been in the Borghese, of course," she admitted, 
 with her gaze now fastened on Owen Storrow, and arriv 
 ing at the conclusion, without being quite conscious of it, 
 that this youth was much more attractive than anything 
 he might ever be able to cut out of wax or mould out of 
 clay. " I know the Louvre, and I ve an inkling of what 
 is art and what is not art. I ve always known that such 
 women were used, of course. But I ve never thought of 
 you, Owen, as mixed up with this sort of thing." 
 
 " Why not? " he demanded, depressed by the prospect 
 of those obsolete and futile old problems which it now 
 seemed so foolish to revive. 
 
 " I suppose it s because you re not a Titian, or a Zo- 
 loagua, or even an Epstein. You see, you re so young." 
 
 " That," retorted Storrow, " is a sin which Time may 
 possibly correct." 
 
 He was thinking, as he spoke, that he already knew 
 life much better than these women imagined, these shel 
 tered and shrouded women whose lives were ruled by rite. 
 His eye followed Charlotte Kirkner as she crossed the 
 studio, as though announcing her withdrawal from a dis 
 cussion which was proving distasteful to her. 
 
 A wave of impatience swept through him as he stared 
 after her, impatience at her reserves and reticences, her 
 conventional shynesses and her swift changes of colour. 
 Under all those pretences and pretexts, he told himself, he 
 knew her better than she knew herself. For now he un 
 derstood women. He knew even her minutest line of 
 body, under its undissimulating screen of clothing. 
 There was no longer any mystery about that body. 
 There was no longer the allurement of knowledge denied. 
 Her little poses and evasions of sex were almost an irrita 
 tion to him. They were tribal affectations and impos 
 tures, as hollow as the veil of harems, as transparent as 
 the abortive bride-flights of the Chippewas. 
 
 " I m a woman of the world, Owen," Augusta Kirkner 
 was saying to him. " You may think I m narrow, but
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 53 
 
 the one thing I like to see is results. And I can t help 
 wondering if you ll get results enough to make it worth 
 while for what you ll have to pay for this sort of thing." 
 
 " What," he demanded, " will I have to pay? " 
 
 " It seems to me you ll have to pay the natural man s 
 natural respect for women. No, don t misjudge me. I 
 know that all art is noble enough, when it s big art. But 
 I also know something about the studio-set that frets 
 about its fringes. I ve seen them, both in Paris and here 
 at home. And you can t get mixed up in that slack Bo 
 hemian set without losing more than you imagine. If 
 you do, you ll surely find yourself out of it, out of life, 
 out of the centre of things, the things that count." 
 
 Storrow laughed. But it was a mirthless laugh. 
 
 " Well, it s like war," he protested. " I ve got to take 
 my chance in that. But since form happens to be my 
 Tiedium, it s only through form that I can express myself." 
 
 " You mean that s the only thing that interests you? " 
 she asked, so intent on her own ends that she remained 
 unconscious of the degree to which she was persecuting 
 still ardent youth. 
 
 " I have to express myself," he stubbornly and some 
 what listlessly contended. 
 
 ; Well, if you must do that, why not do it respec 
 tably?" she inquired. And the worst of it, he found, 
 was that she was in earnest. 
 
 " I don t think I care to be respectable," he finally re 
 plied, realizing his Rubicon lay before him and might as 
 well be crossed. " I can t even waste time on it. I ve cer 
 tain ends to reach, and certain work to do. To reach 
 those ends I ve got to have life studies. I ve got to draw 
 and model from the nude. If that is going to involve 
 situations that are cramping, that are embarrassing, the 
 only thing left for me to do is to move back to quarters- 
 where I ll find freedom, the freedom I ve got to have." 
 
 She looked up quickly, at the quick note of passion in 
 that ultimatum of his. She was a woman who seldom
 
 54 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 encountered opposition and even less frequently counten 
 anced it. Then she drew herself together, with an effort 
 
 " My last promise to your mother, Owen, was that I d 
 always help you if I could. And I think I can help you, 
 for notwithstanding my loss of many liberties, I still 
 have a small amount of influence in this city. So don t 
 jump too youthfully at snap judgments. I have no in 
 tention of interfering with what you feel to be your life- 
 work. And if you need women without clothes on, for 
 that work, by all means do what the other artists have to 
 do only please keep them strictly to your studio." 
 
 That, Storrow was prompted to retort, was the trouble 
 with one s own family they refused to realize that one 
 ever grew up, that one ever had a mind and a mission 
 of one s own. But a glance across the studio at Char 
 lotte s face prompted him to sudden silence. On that 
 face he once more saw what was almost a look of plead 
 ing. She was imploring him, he felt, for patience, for 
 the endurance of that, apparently, which she herself had 
 so often endured. Yet the next moment his memory had 
 flashed back to the woman of The Alwyn Arms. He 
 pictured her as she had sat half -dressed on a trunk-top, 
 abstractedly pulling on a pair of thin silk stockings. 
 Then his thoughts flashed still deeper back into the past, 
 as thoughts have the habit of doing, and he saw still an 
 other woman, an older and gentler-eyed woman, sitting 
 on a broken marble bench above the misty blue of Lake 
 Erie. " Boy, boy, / want you to be good! " that woman 
 had cried out, tremulously, with one hand on his hair and 
 her brooding eyes fixed on his own slightly abashed eyes. 
 That woman had been his own mother, his own mother to 
 whom they had been neither just nor generous. And his 
 smile hardened with his heart as he looked up again at 
 the sound of Augusta Kirkner s voice. 
 
 " But we won t be interfering with you, Owen, as much 
 as you imagine," she was saying. " Before the middle 
 of the week we ll be away again, so you ll have your free-
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 55 
 
 dom, after all. And by the time we re back you ll be 
 feeling more at home." She rose from her chair and 
 crossed the room with that qualified dignity of a woman 
 of importance who has conceded ground to her enemy. 
 " By the way, we re lunching at Sherry s tomorrow with 
 the Roubetskois. They are people who might prove 
 very helpful to you. So I hope you will be able to join 
 us." 
 
 It had been very casually announced, that luncheon at 
 Sherry s. But even before he caught Charlotte s anx 
 ious eye he knew that it involved both a challenge and a 
 test. Still again he sensed some silent pleading for a 
 suspension of judgment. 
 
 " I ll be very glad to," he said. He forced a smile as 
 he spoke, though it annoyed him unreasonably to notice 
 that the girl across the room was watching him with the 
 quick expectancy of a circus-dog when the trainer slaps 
 a polished boot-leg with his whip. That flash of annoy 
 ance did not escape the older woman, though she misread 
 its meaning. 
 
 "By the way, Owen, what clubs do you belong to? " 
 she inquired, with a matter-of-factness that was not with 
 out its delicately chastening cruelty. 
 
 " None," retorted Storrow, puzzled by the sudden in 
 vocatory look from the girl on the far side of the studio. 
 
 " Then what clubs do you propose to get in touch 
 with?" asked the older woman, with slightly elevated 
 eyebrows. 
 
 " None," was Storrow s grim response. 
 
 " But won t you rather feel the need of contact with 
 your fellows," pursued Augusta Kirkner, her studied pa 
 tience not untouched with triumph, " with other men 
 working along the same lines? " 
 
 " It would help, of course," admitted Storrow. It was 
 the anxious eyes across the room, and nothing else, that 
 prompted him to passiveness. And the girl s infinitely 
 small smile of approval did not escape him.
 
 56 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " Yes, I rather imagine a nice club or two would 
 help ! " murmured his hostess. A faint trace of colour 
 had crept into her finely wrinkled cheek, and Storrow 
 knew, as he watched her over-dignified retreat, that he 
 had exasperated her. He was more disturbed, however, 
 by Charlotte s hand-clasp and her whispered words of 
 " Don t mind " as she smiled her fallaciously light good 
 bye to him. Still again her face took on its colouring of 
 delicate shell-pink and still again spirit wirelessed some 
 silent message to spirit. He realized more poignantly 
 than ever, when he was alone, that a secret had in some 
 way been established between them. Their partnership 
 in that silent understanding seemed to link them into 
 something closer than casual acquaintanceship. But the 
 thought of it touched him no more profoundly than sun- 
 glow at a city street-end touches a hungry and harried 
 stock-broker.
 
 CHAPTER FIVE 
 
 STORROW had thought the thing out. He nursed 
 no illusions as to the immediate course before him. 
 He foresaw the inevitable. He knew that he and 
 the Kirkner house were destined to part company, that 
 he must move on to a less restricted environment, that 
 he must have breathing-space about him, no matter what 
 the cost. Yet he had deferred that impending decision, 
 for" the simple reason that Charlotte Kirkner had openly 
 asked him to do so. 
 
 She talked to him on the way home, after the luncheon 
 at Sherry s. They were alone in the suede-upholstered 
 landaulet, having dropped the older woman for a com 
 mittee-meeting at the Gregorian Club. 
 
 You and mother are not going to agree," said the un 
 happy girl, with conviction. 
 
 " I m sorry," acknowledged Storrow. 
 
 " I m sorrier than you are, Owen," she found the 
 frankness to confess. Then she went on, as though to 
 screen that momentary surrender to candour. " What 
 mother would like, of course, is to find you fitting in. 
 She demands success, the kind of success you can recog 
 nize and label. She has no love for your tone-wolf kind 
 of life. Yet that s the kind I feel sure you will want to 
 lead." 
 
 " What makes you think that? " 
 
 " You ll always like to pick your own path, I know. 
 You ll always prefer being one of the insurgents, of the 
 non-conformers, just as I should, if I had the courage. 
 But mother would rather see you swinging in with our 
 
 57
 
 58 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 new Brooklyn Society of Artists, with something nice to 
 hang in the annual exhibition at the Pouch Gallery, and 
 an honourable mention by the art-critic of the Eagle! " 
 
 " And do you feel that way? " 
 
 " You have your own life to live," she slowly ac 
 knowledged. 
 
 "And haven t you?" he contended, with a wayward 
 sense of irritation at the sheer fragilities of the Dresden- 
 china spirit. 
 
 Her pale face deepened to a magnolia-pink under his 
 slightly contemptuous gaze. 
 
 " I ve never been free, the way you have," she finally 
 said, without looking at him. He wondered what she 
 would think if she knew just how free he had been. 
 
 " Don t you want to be ? " 
 
 " We all want to be," she conceded. Then she added, 
 after a minute of quiet thought : " And I ve a feeling 
 that you are going to help me along that line." 
 
 " How can I? " he asked. 
 
 " For one thing, when mother asks you up to Swansea 
 next week, would you mind coming, if it s only for a day 
 or two? " 
 
 He was arrested by the note of earnestness in her voice. 
 There was flattery in the thought of thus sharing a sec 
 ond confidence with her. 
 
 " Of course I ll come," he told her, in a lighter tone. 
 But he found it impossible to laugh the gravity out of 
 her eyes. 
 
 " Thank you, Owen," she said with a humility which 
 puzzled him a little. And during the rest of that drive 
 home they lapsed into those occasional silences which 
 mark the dethronement of formality and the accession of 
 intimacy. 
 
 Owen Storrow did as he had promised. But he did 
 so without enthusiasm. He accepted Augusta Kirkner s 
 invitation to spend a few days at their Sound cottage. 
 He caught a noon train, glad to escape from a city of still
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 59 
 
 torrid steel and stone, reminding himself that it was all 
 merely a slight prolongation of an armistice, a deferring 
 of final issues. For he knew now, more definitely than 
 before, that it would be out of the question for him to re 
 main in the Kirkner house, that freedom was too precious 
 to be sacrificed for mere personal considerations. He 
 must follow his own open trails, no matter where they 
 led. He must beat down the jungle of tradition until he 
 at least had breathing room. 
 
 His arrival at Swansea-On-The-Sound, however, was 
 not quite the dull and diffident occasion he had antici 
 pated. He reached the water-front, in fact, to hear a 
 very red-faced old gentleman with binoculars shout to 
 another old gentleman in white ducks that a cat-boat had 
 gone over. Storrow next caught sight of a flutter of 
 women and children along the boat-landing in front of 
 the secluded little Club-house. Without exception they 
 were staring out into the open Sound. One thin-legged 
 girl of about twelve, he noticed, was weeping audibly and 
 unreservedly. 
 
 " Boats ! Somebody get boats ! " one of the old gentle 
 men in white ducks was crying. This struck Storrow as 
 being rather foolish, for the simple reason that there 
 seemed to be no boats in the neighbourhood. Following 
 the quavering arm of the other old gentleman, he peered 
 beyond the little bay and was finally able to discern a 
 bobbing white head in the riffled blue-green stretches of 
 the open tide-way. The swimmer, whoever it was, had 
 for some reason left the overturned boat, and was trying 
 to reach shore. But that swimmer, Storrow s practised 
 eye discerned, had a great distance to travel. And no 
 body seemed to be doing anything. 
 
 Storrow had pushed through the crowd, and was star 
 ing about that lonely little bay for anything tha*t would 
 carry a pair of oars, when he caught sight of Augusta 
 Kirkner advancing slowly from one end of the club-house 
 towards the boat-landing.
 
 60 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 She stopped before him, with her hands pressed tight 
 against her breast, in a gesture that impressed him as 
 singularly dramatic. Her face looked pitiful, suddenly 
 stricken with age, vapid and yellow and flabby-lined 
 against its over-fastidiously coiffured hair, which showed 
 up more grey than he had expected in the betraying white 
 sunlight. There was mingled appeal and protest in her 
 gesture, a gesture which he could not understand. He 
 had thought her incapable, in fact, of any such disorganiz 
 ing surrender to emotion. 
 
 "Ifs Charlotte/ she cried out in a stifled voice, with 
 yet another startlingly dramatic hand-movement towards 
 the riffled blue tideway. 
 
 " Charlotte ! " repeated Storrow, backing away a step 
 or two, from sheer shock. 
 
 " It s the first time she ever openly disobeyed me," 
 sobbed the woman with stricken eyes. 
 
 Storrow heard that strange statement without attempt 
 ing to answer it or explain it to his own mind, for he was 
 busy jerking off his shoes and throwing aside as much 
 clothing as he could. Then, having assured himself that 
 the white bobbing head was still out there in the wind- 
 riffled tideway, he said, very quietly, " I ll get her," and 
 went over the edge of the landing-platform in a crisp and 
 clean-cut dive which brought a forlorn little cheer from 
 the petticoated group behind him. 
 
 Storrow knew he did not merit that cheer, much as it 
 meant to him as he surged out with a long and steady 
 stroke. He was conscious of a dual sense of buoyancy, 
 a buoyancy of the body which arose from the fact that 
 he found himself swimming in salt water after so many 
 months of floundering about in fresh water, and a buoy 
 ancy of the mind arising from the fact that he was doing 
 something to redeem himself in the eyes of Augusta Kirk- 
 ner. He had small doubt of the outcome of that ad 
 venture. His woodland life had left him as much at 
 home in water as on land. He was sure of his strength,
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 61 
 
 sure of his stroke, in the best of condition for any such 
 test of endurance. 
 
 Yet he saw, as he reached the open water, that it was 
 going to be a test of endurance, after all, a monotonous 
 and unimpressive plugging away against those wind- 
 riffles until he got safely back with her. It would be 
 easy enough, outside of the work. It would be so easy, 
 he felt that it might prove ridiculous, as destitute of any 
 tang of peril as pulling a child out of a three-foot pond. 
 They might even laugh at him, when he got back, for 
 that over-theatrical header from the boat-landing. 
 
 Then he remembered that there was a possibility of the 
 girl herself not being able to keep up until he got to her 
 side. So he started to shout towards the bobbing head. 
 
 But he could not be sure whether or not she heard him. 
 He could catch no answering signal from her. Her 
 strokes, apparently, were quite feeble. So he swam 
 harder, skirting the fringes of fatigue in an effort to 
 reach her as quickly as possible. Above all things, he 
 told himself, he must reach her without loss of time. He 
 must reach her quickly no matter what it cost him. He 
 must. He must! 
 
 He could hear her breathing, even before he got to her 
 side. It was stertorious, and laboured, through the 
 mouth, the frantic, panting gasps of a throat half- 
 strangled with brine. Her eyes were half-shut and the 
 white sailor-hat pinned on the back of her hair was wet 
 and sodden, giving an untimely touch of the ridiculous to 
 the pathetically colourless face with its open and drooling 
 mouth and its tragically sharp cough of breath. 
 
 He called out to her still again, when quite close to her, 
 but she did not seem to hear. She was swimming auto 
 matically, with eyes now open and a little wild. She was 
 struggling falteringly on, without sense of direction or 
 destination. Storrow remembered, as he saw the wild 
 look on that face so close to him, that he might have to 
 strike her, to stun her, before she would be passive enough
 
 62 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 to be handled as he would be compelled to handle her. 
 He had heard of such things being necessary. But he 
 felt, as he came nearer, that he could never have the 
 heart to plant a blow on that pathetically distorted face, 
 even if she seized him with the strangle-hold of the 
 drowning. 
 
 He remained discreetly alert, though, as he reached out 
 an arm and cupped a hand under her drooping chin, lift 
 ing it clear of the water. 
 
 " It s all right," he assured her. 
 
 " Blub-blub," was the only sound that came from her 
 lips. 
 
 " See, you can rest. I ve got you," he repeated. 
 
 He " treaded " water, holding her up and forcibly re 
 straining the still pulsing arms, obsessed as they were with 
 the blind conviction that their stroke must not stop. He 
 watched her as she filled her lungs, and ceased to blub- 
 blub, and cleared her throat of its strangling brine. He 
 even washed the mucus from her chin with Sound water. 
 
 " Now put your hand on my shoulder and rest, while 
 I tread water," he told her. She did as he commanded 
 quietly enough, still panting. 
 
 " If I could only breathe ! " she complained. 
 
 " You will, as soon as you rest," he assured her. 
 " No, don t fight to keep up. I ve got you. Just let your 
 self go. That s better. See, you re all right ! " 
 
 She floated there, lightly poised, with her eyes still 
 closed. He watched her intently, treading water as he 
 did so, to rest his own aching arms. " You re all right ! " 
 he repeated, without knowing he was speaking. He had 
 glanced back over his shoulder at the shore-line. It 
 seemed disturbingly far away. Then he looked back at 
 the girl. She was breathing deeply, gratefully, in heavy 
 shuddering breaths. But the tide had them in its teeth, 
 and every minute was precious. 
 
 " I d like to get off that skirt of yours," he told her. 
 
 She opened her eyes at that, for the first time. The
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 63 
 
 wildness had gone out of them. There was a tragic in- 
 tentness in their gaze as they dwelt bewildered on his 
 spray-streaked face. 
 
 " Do you mean we can get back ? " she asked. 
 
 "Of course," he promptly told her. And he forced a 
 laugh as he said the words. "Of course we ll get back. 
 It s not even worth worrying over." 
 
 " I don t believe, Owen, that I can swim much more." 
 
 " You won t even have to swim. I ll attend to all 
 that." 
 
 She smiled wanly, almost contentedly. 
 
 " What must I do ? " she asked. 
 
 " Come closer," he told her. " I m going to tear that 
 waist band loose, some way or other. Now we ll slip 
 out of it. Once more! That s better. It won t be in 
 your way, or mine either, now. But wait a minute until 
 we change sides. There! Now just rest that way, and 
 slow and steady will do it." 
 
 They moved forward in silence. It was not as easy 
 as it had promised. But Storrow kept at it, grimly, dog 
 gedly, determinedly. He wished he knew more about the 
 tides. He wished he had an oar. He wished a motor- 
 launch would happen along. He noticed that the full 
 dome of the sky was a robin-egg blue. It was a beauti 
 ful blue. 
 
 " That s fine," he said aloud, smiling into the blue- 
 white face so close to him. 
 
 " But we re not gaining," protested the girl. Storrow, 
 with an anxious eye, measured the land-marks along the 
 shore-line. A vague trouble began to eat at his heart. 
 The girl was right. They had made no appreciable pro 
 gress. But nothing was to be gained by acknowledging 
 defeat. 
 
 Storrow looked back at the girl beside him. Her teeth 
 were chattering, by this time, cluttering together like 
 castanets. He felt infinitely sorry for her. That fragile 
 body had never been fashioned for any such ordeal.
 
 64 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 Fate was making unfair demands on that timorous soul, 
 taxing it beyond its power of resistance. Life had not 
 prepared her for such things. Yet she was making a 
 tremendous effort to be brave. And there was a cor 
 responding obligation for him to play his part. 
 
 " We ll make it, all right," he told her, starting for 
 ward with a stronger stroke. " Don t worry, we ll make 
 it," he said still again, worried by a slap of brine in the 
 face which reminded him the wind was freshening and 
 was to be straight against him. And there were unmis 
 takable aches in his arms now, especially in the flexor of 
 the little ringer. That, he surmised, was because the little 
 finger was the weakest of the lot, the one most seldom 
 used. It puzzled him, none-the-less. And the poisons 
 of fatigue were beginning to course like acids through 
 his over-exerted body. He watched a white house 
 against the green clump of trees on the shore-line. 
 They were holding their own. They might even have 
 gained a little. But at that rate of advance, he realized, 
 the fight was practically a hopeless one. 
 
 He asked the girl to shift her hand to his other shoul 
 der, and when she had obeyed him he once more struck 
 out, this time with jaw set and laboured breath through 
 the distended nostrils. It s all quite useless, a voice some 
 where at the back of his brain kept saying to him. And 
 as he fought on, foot by foot, he had to warn himself 
 not to give way to panic. But he began to wonder if 
 death by drowning were painful. He even began to 
 count his strokes, saying to himself : " I ll do one hun 
 dred more ! I must do one hundred more ! " Then 
 fighting against the weariness that was making move 
 ment a torture, he said bitterly, " And a hundred more 
 a hundred whatever happens ! " 
 
 But there had to be an end. It was not humanly pos 
 sible to keep on. Yet his spirit revolted against that 
 end. It seemed too needless, too unjust, too gratuitous. 
 That revolt broke through the mist of indifferency en-
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 65 
 
 gulfing him. It prompted him to a moment or two of 
 galvanic struggle that left him weaker than ever. Then 
 the blackness once more descended upon him. 
 
 The girl, turning her face sideways against the slap of 
 the waves, was still alert enough to understand that black 
 ness which had written its record on his face. He was 
 breathing blubberingly, gasping and gagging, trying to 
 say, " Ten more " and still again, " Ten more." 
 
 " Owen, let me go," she said in a voice shaking with 
 the chill that tortured her body. " Don t bother . . . 
 with me ! Please don t ! " 
 
 " Ten more ! " gasped Storrow, without answering 
 her. It was a beautiful blue, that robin-egg sky that 
 would so soon be shut out from them. 
 
 " Then if we must . . . must go, Owen ... I want 
 to tell you . . . tell you I "... 
 
 A slap of brine shut off her words. 
 
 " Ten more," gurgled the man who wondered why all 
 sensation had gone out of his body. They would have to 
 go together, of course. It didn t seem fair. It 
 didn t 
 
 He suddenly stopped swimming. He shifted and 
 turned, treading water again, so that he could slip one 
 leaden arm about the puzzled girl. She stared into his 
 face as he drew her close in to his side. She saw a fool 
 ish-looking ghost of a smile on that wet face. 
 
 "It s all right," he gasped. They re coming in a 
 boat!" 
 
 He had heard the shout over his shoulder and knew it 
 was now merely a matter of waiting. There was no fur 
 ther need for even his earlier jealous husbanding of 
 strength, for that meticulous treasuring of effort. He 
 held her close, with her tremulous blue chin just above 
 the surface of the water, rejoicing in some wayward and 
 wild sense of companionship at having her so close. 
 
 But he had no time to think further about that, for 
 the boat was beside them. Storrow, ducking an oar,
 
 66 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 caught and held the gunwale over which three ex 
 cited youths were shouting contradictory commands and 
 suggestions. It was, after all, a much older story to the 
 man in the water than to the youths in the boat. But it 
 took a minute or two to get his breath back. 
 
 " Two of you come to the stern," he commanded. 
 " Now lift her easily easily there ! No, never mind 
 me ; trim your boat. And thank God you brought those 
 blankets with you." 
 
 There was a perilous moment or two of tipping and 
 bobbing and canting, an excited clutching at wet clothing, 
 followed by an awkward but effective heave of a limp 
 body into the boat. 
 
 " The Commodore sent this flask of brandy," explained 
 the oldest of the boys as Storrow drew himself aboard, 
 dripping like a Newfoundland-dog. There were, he saw, 
 an absurd number of blankets. So he wound a three-fold 
 layer of them about the shivering girl. Then he took her 
 in his arms, holding the brandy-flask to her lips and com 
 pelling her to drink. She swallowed the fiery liquor 
 obediently, until she choked and could swallow no more. 
 Then the shivering stopped, and with a contented stirring 
 or two of the body she lay closer to him. 
 
 " You d better take some of that yourself," suggested 
 one of the youths as he draped a blanket about Storrow s 
 wet shoulders. 
 
 Storrow drank from the flask, grateful for the sense of 
 warmth and well-being that coursed through his body. 
 He became conscious of an inter-communicating warmth, 
 too, between the blanket-wrapped figure in his arms and 
 himself. It was not unpleasant to hold her there. He 
 held her in his arms, in fact, all the way back to the boat- 
 landing. There, still thick-headed from the brandy he 
 had swallowed, he quite overlooked the fact that a wel 
 coming crowd was cheering him. It took all his atten 
 tion to keep the moist blanket about his half-clad figure
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 67 
 
 and at the same time carry the girl and himself with 
 dignity. 
 
 After a cup of hot coffee and a change into com 
 mandeered apparel that fitted him none too well, Storrow 
 found himself the possessor of a clearing head and a body 
 that ached acutely. He found himself also a little lonely 
 and restless in spirit, since the entire household seemed 
 preoccupied with the girl who was being put to bed and 
 wrapped in hot blankets. As he sat in a huge chair on 
 the huge piazza Medberry brought him a glass of old 
 port. Storrow tried it, found it distasteful, and was just 
 putting it to one side when the doctor who had been sent 
 for stopped, on his way out, to shake hands with the 
 younger man. His quick scrutiny of the tanned face 
 with the strong white teeth soon assured him that his 
 services would not be needed there. 
 
 " How is she ? " asked Storrow. 
 
 " She s asleep," explained the other. " And she s 
 swallowed enough three-star brandy, I imagine, to put 
 most of us asleep," he added as he started out to his car. 
 
 Charlotte s sleep, however, was not a prolonged one. 
 Within an hour she was awake again, drowsily but per 
 emptorily demanding that Owen be sent to her. 
 
 Storrow found her very flushed and over-burdened 
 with clothes but very small-looking in the big apple-wood 
 bed. She held out a hand as he crossed hesitatingly to 
 her side. 
 
 "You re all right?" he inadequately inquired. She 
 turned her head so as to see him better. 
 
 "Oh, Owen!" she said. She spoke rather thickly. 
 Her eyes filled with tears and she seemed unable to go on. 
 She pushed aside some of the over-burdening clothes. 
 
 " You saved my life! " she said in a whisper which she 
 could not keep from being tremulous. Her hand tight 
 ened about his big fingers. She seemed to be pulling him 
 towards her as her eyes filled with tears again.
 
 68 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " OH, that was nothing," he protested, fuming brick- 
 colour as she lifted both lean arms and pulled his abashed 
 head down close until it was pressed against her shoulder. 
 
 " It was everything, Owen," protested the girl, who 
 still kept her hands locked about his neck. 
 
 He no longer made an effort to draw away as the lean 
 young arms strained him abandonedly to her breast. But 
 he was stung into a meditative sort of impassivity by 
 the thought of the coincidence of his face being fanned 
 by a woman s breath, faintly redolent of alcohol, as that 
 woman s eyes gazed almost hungrily into his own. He 
 touched his lips to the flushed face that lay back so close 
 to his. That kiss, however, approached dangerously 
 close to the kind one gives the dead. The arms about his 
 neck tightened convulsively. 
 
 " Oh, Owen, I love you," she murmured as she buried 
 her face in the hollow of his neck. 
 
 " You mustn t say that," he told her, still with the 
 barricading touch of pity in his voice, with the unrest in 
 his heart which the timber-wolf knows when hostile shad 
 ows creep between him and his cover. 
 
 " Whatever happens, I ll always love you," she pro 
 tested, with still another gush of uncontrolled tears. And 
 he was compelled gently but firmly to disengage those 
 blindly appropriating arms, for Charlotte s mother had 
 come quietly into the room and stood viewing the scene 
 with a look of gathering perplexity on her face. 
 
 " You must take this while it s hot," she quietly an 
 nounced to the girl on the bed. 
 
 She was still leaning over that bed when she spoke to 
 Storrow. " You re a brave boy, Owen," she said with 
 a tremor of feeling which she seemed unable to control. 
 But she preferred to keep her face averted so that he 
 might not see the emotion in her customarily unpartici- 
 pating eyes. It was Charlotte who turned her head and 
 glanced at him, seeming to understand just how deeply
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 69 
 
 he would resent that word of " boy," with all its betray 
 als of an immovable but benignant condescension. And 
 it wasn t until she heard his careless small laugh of capi 
 tulation that her brow cleared again.
 
 CHAPTER SIX 
 
 STORROW did not analyse his propulsion for flight. 
 He had not even acknowledged it to be flight. But 
 when, before the end of his week, he found a 
 studio very much to his liking in a ruinous-fronted old 
 building not far from Madison Square, in East Twenty- 
 Fourth Street, he magnified that occasion into a chance 
 which it would be calamitous to miss. 
 
 Two days later he moved back to the city. It was not, 
 however, until the migration had been effected that he 
 made an effort to unedge the precipitancy of his move 
 ments by a carefully worded note of explanation to Au 
 gusta Kirkner, a note which brought no response from 
 the older woman. It was Charlotte, in fact, who three 
 days later sent a brief but friendly letter back to Stor- 
 row s studio, wishing him happiness in his new surround 
 ings and success in the work which she knew must mean 
 so much to him. 
 
 Storrow, at the time, was too preoccupied to give much 
 thought to this message. The slightly autumnal-looking 
 and hollow-chested poster-artist from whom he was so 
 precipitously releasing the huge sky-lighted room that 
 was to be his home had accepted a call to draw fashion- 
 plates for a Chicago mail-order house and was glad 
 enough to dispose of her furniture en bloc. But she was 
 less happy, Storrow realized, in leaving quarters with 
 which, apparently, so much of her life had been linked. 
 He found it easy enough to understand this, for already 
 he could feel the appeal of the place. It was spacious, 
 sequestered, amazingly quiet, a kernel of achieved com- 
 
 70
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 71 
 
 fort in a misleadingly rough husk of disorder. It was 
 exactly the sort of place he was in need of. 
 
 " It s all yours now," the loose-lipped poster-girl some 
 what pensively explained to him as she watched the last 
 of her trunks being carried away. " All except that Rus 
 sian samovar on the mantel there. You ll have to re 
 turn that to your next-door neighbour when he gets back 
 from Paris." 
 
 She spoke casually, but Storrow s sensitive nostrils 
 seemed assailed by the aroma of some undefined and 
 faded romance. 
 
 " Then I ought to know his name," he suggested as he 
 stood at her side and joined her in staring at the un 
 wieldy copper urn. 
 
 " His name is Alan Vibbard," the girl answered, with 
 out looking away from the samovar. And again, as he 
 caught the ghost of a sigh from her lips, he felt that he 
 had stumbled across the borders of some ghostly and 
 time-worn liaison, worlds away from him and his trivial 
 interests. He was more impressed than ever by the con 
 trast between the unkempt hallways and the ordered 
 homeliness of the high-ceilinged room, where the panel 
 ling of a solitary door so abruptly divided neglect from 
 comfort. It even occurred to him that this boney and 
 loose-lipped woman with whom life had not dealt over- 
 kindly must still hold in the core of her ungainly body 
 some secret chamber of quietness and grace. She had 
 called herself a " style sniper," he remembered, since most 
 of her time and energy had been diverted to the illicit ap 
 propriation, by means of a quick eye and a quicker pencil, 
 of newly imported dress-models not yet divulged to the 
 trade. It had not been altogether honest, this spying and 
 poaching on the preserves of the city s kinglier cos 
 tumiers, and Storrow wondered if that looseness of con 
 duct stood typified in her almost vulpine looseness of lip. 
 Then he fell to wondering if he too would grow old be 
 tween those walls and fall into the habit of staring back-
 
 ward instead of forward and make room in turn for some 
 unconcerned young newcomer. 
 
 " I hope you ll be happy here," ventured the woman 
 from the doorway, softened apparently by the betraying 
 shadow of thought on his own troubled brow. 
 
 " I want to do a lot of work here," qualified Storrow, 
 seeking protection within his shell of impersonality. Yet 
 as he looked up at the wistful-eyed woman in the strong 
 side-light he was still again reminded of the fact, and 
 almost jealously reminded of it, that much history had 
 been recorded between those old walls. It was history 
 which he could and would never know. Yet, during the 
 next few days, he was not ungrateful for that sense of 
 immersion in unrelated antiquities. It served, above all 
 things, to shut him off from his own immediate past. 
 That was something of which he preferred not to think. 
 
 It was not until the second week in his new studio that 
 he made a discovery, small in itself, yet significant enough 
 to send thought trooping back, again and again, to the 
 heavy-lipped woman who had stood so wistfully study 
 ing the borrowed samovar on the mantel. When he 
 lifted an oblong of imitation Gobelin that hung on his 
 east wall he found under it a door, a communicating door 
 which unmistakably opened on the studio next to his own. 
 This door had once been covered and sealed with wall 
 paper. That flimsy seal, however, had been broken apart. 
 Storrow, nettled by a curiosity by no means as rare as he 
 imagined, pushed back the heavy iron bolt in front of 
 him and tried the door. But to his disappointment 
 a disappointment which was just as promptly followed by 
 satisfaction he found the door held shut by what was 
 obviously a similar bolt on its other side. So he replaced 
 the sliding bar of metal, redraped the tapestry screen, 
 and once again sniffed the musty aroma of tawdry and 
 time-yellowed romance. 
 
 The mood for sustained work had not yet returned to 
 him, so he marked time by renewing his aimless wander-
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 73 
 
 ings about the heat-stricken city. As he roamed about, 
 once more astride the twin coursers of Curiosity and 
 Caprice, he felt little of the discomfort which still left 
 Manhattan so oppressive to others. Yet that city, he 
 could see, was enduring the last of its hot spell very much 
 as cities endure a siege. Daily its unsheltered planes of 
 stone and brick and asphalt were swept by a brazen 
 faced flame-thrower that became merciful only with 
 nightfall. Daily the canyons of the treeless streets were 
 rilled with an invisible poison-gas which left people too 
 listless to fight against further assault. They merely en 
 dured, and waited, and prayed for a change of wind. It 
 was the humidity, everybody about Storrow kept ex 
 plaining, the windless and saturated air which made cloth 
 ing hang limp and heavy on the languid body and evoked 
 a rank incense from any region where human beings were 
 foolish enough to pack themselves close. They went 
 about moodily, as a rule, carrying coats and hats, cover 
 ing their limbs with the lightest garments that could be 
 used. 
 
 This was harvest-time for Storrow, whose vigorous 
 young body faced that excessive heat without any great 
 distress. He drifted about the city as free as the wind, 
 eager for those pictorial aspects of life which only torrid 
 weather brought to the open. He watched the weltering 
 thousands streaming to the recreation-piers, the heat- 
 weary ghetto-dwellers crowding the withered grass of the 
 open parks, the half-clad children swarming about the 
 dripping hydrants and the hokey-pokey barrows, the bare- 
 throated men and women who moved languidly about in 
 the shadows, or sat smoking and fanning in open door 
 ways. When his legs grew tired he sat amongst them 
 and rested. When hunger assailed him he dropped into 
 some out-of-the-way little restaurant and ate, forgetting 
 the heat in the rich shadows born of the never-ending 
 battle between drawn blinds and beleaguering sun, revel 
 ling in the accidental beauty of some indifferent-eyed
 
 74 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 young waitress with the flimsiest of cambric stretched 
 across what might have been the pointed breasts of an 
 Artemis. 
 
 It was in one of these places, known as " Chop-House 
 Jake s," that Storrow had stumbled upon a surprisingly 
 appetizing luncheon. He looked up from a broiled por 
 terhouse which he had picked bare to the bone to find him 
 self being surveyed by a pair of studious and half ironical 
 eyes. 
 
 " This weather doesn t seem to have interfered much 
 with your appetite, young man ! " the stranger observed, 
 in a crisp yet companionable voice. 
 
 " That was a steak to make you forget about weather," 
 countered Storrow. He found himself confronted by a 
 spare and lanky man anywhere between thirty-five and 
 forty-five, a fastidiously apparelled and ascetic-looking 
 man with hair turned iron-grey over the ears, humorous 
 eyes, and a rather grim mouth. 
 
 " I come here for em occasionally," he acknowledged. 
 They re as good as you ll get in the city." He di 
 gressed into a light-hearted but comprehensive description 
 of Manhattan s eating-places. " I m saying all this," he 
 concluded, " because I know you haven t been here very 
 long." 
 
 What makes you think that?" demanded Stor 
 row, with a smile to unedge the brusqueness of the 
 question. 
 
 " By that coat of tan," declared the other. The 
 younger man thereupon explained how and where he had 
 acquired that Madura-brown skin. 
 
 " That s great," exclaimed the older man, with a quick 
 and unlooked-for thump of enthusiasm. " My name s 
 Hardy, by the way." 
 
 " Not Hardy the novelist? " asked Storrow. 
 
 "Merely one of em the little one," retorted the 
 other. 
 
 " Mine s Storrow," less easily acknowledged the
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 75 
 
 younger man, feeling less lonely in that vast city of un 
 known faces. 
 
 " I hope we re going to be friends," announced Hardy 
 from the serener plateaus of experience. " And I sup 
 pose you re here for work, or you wouldn t be on this 
 gridiron of an island at the end of August. I ve got 
 a play going on myself. But it s going to be a failure." 
 
 "Why a failure?" 
 
 " Another case of too many cooks and the broth 
 spoiled. I m only the author, you see. So all I have 
 to do is sit back and watch the doctors amputate ! It 
 hits you harder than ninety-six in the shade, after you ve 
 sweated blood to give em something more than the waffle- 
 iron product." 
 
 They talked on, for half an hour, through the com 
 panionable haze of tobacco-smoke, until Hardy detected 
 signs of restiveness in his younger friend. This restive- 
 ness was really based on the thirst of the woodsman s 
 lungs for unpolluted fresh air. 
 
 "Busy today?" casually inquired the novelist. 
 
 Storrow acknowledged that he was not. 
 
 " Then what s the matter with dropping up to my digs, 
 over on the Avenue. It s cool there, and I ve some early 
 Wolf Thompson animal sketches that will interest you." 
 
 Storrow was glad to go. He liked that older and 
 kindly-eyed man. He enjoyed that man s talk as they 
 sauntered across the city, skirted Greenwich Village, 
 invaded Washington Square, and approached the nar 
 rower but more resplendent canyon of Fifth Avenue. 
 
 Hardy did most of the talking. He ridiculed the com 
 mercialized bohemianism of " The Village," with its 
 bobbed hair and its bad art, its anarchistic free verse and 
 its still freer sex relationships. He wrung a laugh, too, 
 from the self-imposed pauperism of the MacDougall Alley 
 colony and the convivial anchoritism of " The Mews." 
 There were, of course, the producers as well as the po 
 seurs, the trail-blazers as well as the stump-jumpers, but
 
 76 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 the former were much too busy for attitudinizing. Stor- 
 row s guide paused long enough to point out a group or 
 two of Italian children in the Square, and the balanced 
 red-brick colonial of Henry James renown, and the 
 trade-doomed architecture of the Avenue debo aching up 
 through its ferruginous forest of skyscrapers. A very 
 passable omelette he solemnly explained, could still be 
 bought at The Brevoort. 
 
 " I like the old Street," Hardy acknowledged with 
 genuine feeling as they went side by side up the Avenue ; 
 " it s one of the few we have with a soul of its own." 
 It seemed an older and sedater city in which Storrow now 
 found himself, a city of quiet side-streets and window- 
 boxes and well-scrubbed marble steps, of polished brass 
 knockers on white-enamelled doors, of bronze handrails 
 leading up to panelled mahogany portals, of red brick 
 over-run with ivy, of unpretentious three-storey homes 
 mildly ornamented with tubbed evergreens and tiny quad 
 rangles of turf and roses and chrysanthemums. And 
 over all was the friendly and unsolicited tone of time, de 
 pressing Storrow at the same moment that it engaged 
 him, dimly disturbing him by its unalleviated air of re 
 moteness, reminding him as it did of movements and 
 civilizations of which he had not been and never could be 
 a part. He even saw a walled rector s garden that made 
 him think of England, an oblong of greensward with a 
 fountain at its centre and a flower-bordered pool in which 
 little silver and golden fishes swam about. But the epi 
 sodic soft odours of that garden evaporated in the univer 
 sal grim smell of exhaust-gases from the countless pass 
 ing motor-cars. 
 
 Hardy was still talking when they stopped to turn up 
 the sandstone steps of what had once been a millionaire s 
 mansion. But the receding tides of fashion had long 
 since left it on the dull siltage of the roomer and the 
 studio-renter. 
 
 " Here s where I hang out," he explained. " It has its
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 77 
 
 drawbacks, but it s worth the noise and the dust from 
 those eternal cars." 
 
 Storrow found Hardy s apartment much simpler than 
 he had expected. There was no clutter of rugs and armour 
 and old brass. Hardy s work-room, in fact, would have 
 seemed bald, but for its revolving stand of reference- 
 books. It had the appearance of being organized for 
 work, and work alone. Its almost commercial atmos 
 phere was increased by the presence of an elaborate filing- 
 cabinet and an electric-fan on its shelf above the sten 
 ographer s table. It was only in the living-room to the 
 front, overlooking the Avenue, that Storrow found some 
 slight tendency towards luxuriousness. On the walls of 
 that room he saw a pastel by Blum, three Zorn etchings, 
 and a Carrol Beckwith portrait of Hardy himself as he 
 must have appeared some ten or twelve years earlier in 
 life. What caught the visitor s attention, however, was 
 a small genre canvas in a faded gold frame. It showed 
 a nude woman sitting relaxed on the edge of a model- 
 throne, staring at a wide studio-window drenched with 
 rain. She stared out through the grey light listlessly, dis 
 consolately, lazily. There was ennui in the thick-shoul 
 dered figure with its meditative eyes and its over-burden 
 ing mass of dark hair, the momentary lassitude of a body 
 so vital that it carried a touch of animality. 
 
 But what brought Storrow up short was its quick 
 power to recall another and a quite different scene, the 
 scene of a half -clad figure sitting abstractedly on a fire- 
 escape slowly winding up the selfsame mass of dark hair 
 with the selfsame milky white fingers. 
 
 " Who did this ? " he asked. He tried to speak casu 
 ally. But he could feel his pulses quicken. He was pos 
 sessed of a faint sinking feeling somewhere under his 
 breastbone. 
 
 " That s one of Vibbard s," his host said, standing close 
 behind him. " He called it A Rainy Morning." 
 
 "Alan Vibbard s?"
 
 78 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 Hardy nodded. " That s the sort of thing he could do 
 to perfection. It s a sort of great-grandchild of Manet s 
 Breakfast On The Grass." 
 
 Storrow was more and more disturbed by the aura of 
 reminiscence about the white-fleshed figure on the canvas. 
 It brought to him a sense of betrayal which he found it 
 impossible to define. A vague impression of shame 
 mingled with his curiosity as he studied it still more 
 closely. 
 
 " It s unhealthy," he commented aloud. 
 
 " That s what Vibbard meant it to be," retorted Hardy. 
 " But Vibbard loves flesh so much that he lost his sermon 
 in the joy of painting it." 
 
 " Well, it s a joy I can t share in." 
 
 " But you can at least see the unhealthiness isn t in the 
 girl," argued the older man. " It s in the artist." 
 
 " I don t happen to know the artist." 
 
 " But I do. And I can understand how that jaded 
 hedonist from Harlem responded to trumpeting youth 
 like this. It caught Rodin the same way, in his old age. 
 It makes the thing a human document. That s one reason 
 why I m rather fond of it." 
 
 " But where d he get the woman? " demanded Storrow, 
 with his heart in his mouth. He compelled himself to 
 turn away, as he spoke, with a parade of indifference. 
 
 " Model, I suppose," admitted Hardy as he pointed out 
 a row of silver birches by Metcalf. If he noticed his 
 visitor s preoccupation he gave no further sign of it. 
 Nor did he comment on the fact that Storrow, as he took 
 his departure, after an abstracted inspection of the Wolf 
 Thompson drawings, stopped once more before the Vib 
 bard canvas in the faded gold frame. Yet he saw, or 
 thought he saw, what was almost a stricken look in the 
 studious blue eyes of the younger man.
 
 CHAPTER SEVEN 
 
 STORROW found contact with Hardy to be both 
 stimulating and disquieting. He honoured that 
 older man for his accomplishments and he liked 
 him for his frank spirit of friendliness. But he left that 
 older man s presence carrying with him an undefined and 
 accordingly an incontestable impression of his own callow 
 and inexperienced youth. He was a beginner, without 
 standing, with everything still to do. Hardy was right; 
 New York was made for workers. He remembered the 
 novelist s repeated advice to " organize," even for a life 
 of art. For organization eliminated waste, and artists, 
 above all, were apt to be wasters. Storrow, however, 
 had no intention of being what Hardy had called " a 
 studio lizard." The hunger for power was strong in his 
 vigorous young body. He already was old enough at the 
 game to know that triumph came through toil, and toil 
 alone. He had lost his earlier illusions as to any mirac 
 ulous accession to fame. That was a matter for romance 
 alone. He was willing enough to knuckle down. He was 
 in the midst of workers, and he was glad to be one of 
 them. It made him forget his loneliness. It kept him 
 from remembering what he told himself he must not 
 remember. 
 
 Hardy, a week later, found him deep in his modelling, 
 serious-eyed and smudged with wet clay. The Canadian 
 was glad to see the older man, to explain his work, even 
 to ask the other s advice. But Hardy s eyes, if still kindly, 
 remained unparticipating. Storrow was forced to the 
 conclusion that his new-found friend was not in sympa- 
 
 79
 
 80 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 thy with his work. So, ill-at-ease, he talked of other and 
 lighter things. It was not, in fact, until Hardy rose to go 
 that they seemed to reach solid ground again. 
 
 " I think I can see what you re trying to reach here/ 
 the novelist said as he paused before Storrow s half- 
 finished modelling of a she-bear standing on guard over 
 her cubs. " But aren t you going the wrong way about 
 it?" 
 
 " Is there any other way? " demanded Storrow, already 
 depressed by a suspicion of wasted effort. He felt the 
 need for guidance, felt it keenly and continually, yet he 
 nursed the instinctive distaste of the solitary worker for 
 the criticism of others. 
 
 " That s something I ve been wondering about," ac 
 knowledged Hardy with his capitulating smile. " I ve 
 been wondering if this turn of yours towards sculpture 
 isn t more of an accident than you imagine. Take these 
 animal groups you ve done, for instance! They re more 
 episodic than they are statuesque. They re more dra 
 matic than they are plastic. It seems to me that all along 
 you ve really been trying to tell a story. Look at your 
 Last Of The Pack there ! That s almost pure narrative. 
 I should think you could have expressed all that in a writ 
 ten story about a wolf, and had a freer swing with your 
 material." 
 
 " But when I ve tried to write, it s always been a 
 failure." 
 
 " By no means. You ve been trying to write in clay 
 here, and they re not altogether failures. You ve been 
 trying to tell a story without knowing it." 
 
 " The wild-life stuff has to be a story," argued Storrow. 
 
 " Deming doesn t make it that." 
 
 " Deming worked more with the Indian than with 
 animals." 
 
 " But you ve picked the hardest medium in the world 
 to tell your story," contended Hardy. " And now I 
 think of it, why did you pick the wild life stuff? "
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 81 
 
 " It was what I happened to be thrown up against," 
 explained the younger man. He told, somewhat reluct 
 antly, of the order for the Tecumseh statue. 
 
 " I ve heard Modrynski talk about those mortuary-urn 
 committees," retorted Hardy. " They regard the nude 
 as indecent and get their art-ideas from mausoleum tab 
 lets. They ll only break your heart, my boy. And 
 there s no hope in that type of work. It deals with the 
 dead, and not with life. And you ll want life. And the 
 more knowledge of life you gather up the more you ll 
 ache to interpret it and organize it. The more you see 
 the light the more you ll want to pass on the torch. And 
 what chance will mere modelling ever give you? " 
 
 Storrow felt, for a moment, that his new friend was 
 cutting the ground from under his feet. And his help 
 lessness was increased by the discovery that he was listen 
 ing to certain doubts of his own which he had always been 
 half-afraid to articulate. 
 
 "But haven t you ever wanted to write?" demanded 
 Hardy. " Haven t you felt a story in your system, a 
 story that kept trying to get itself into words ? " 
 
 " Just one," acknowledged the young artist, without 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 "What was it?" 
 
 Storrow hesitated. But the air of cool capability about 
 Hardy, the light of earnestness in the already slightly 
 faded eyes, gave him the courage to go on. 
 
 " I always wanted to write the story of a man and a 
 woman thrown empty-handed into the wilderness, tossed 
 through some trick of fate into our northern Barren 
 Grounds, for instance, as naked as Adam and Eve turned 
 out of the Garden! " 
 
 "And survive?" asked Hardy, a trifle breathlessly. 
 
 " Yes, survive." 
 
 "But how?" 
 
 " By human wit, or wood-craft, or whatever you want 
 to call it," was the answer.
 
 82 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 "Great!" cried Hardy. "Do it! But, why the 
 North?" 
 
 " Because the North s the only country I know well 
 enough for the work." 
 
 " That s right," admitted the older man after a moment 
 of meditation. " And the North is new. It would be a 
 change from the over-worked tropical-island setting. 
 That side of it s been done to death, and is mostly moon 
 shine, any way." 
 
 " But I don t even know how to approach the thing," 
 explained Storrow. " I ve got notes enough, and ideas 
 enough, but I wouldn t know how to handle them." 
 
 " Organize ! " shouted Hardy, falling back on his fa 
 vourite word again. " And if you get really stuck, send 
 for me. For I m more interested in that man and woman 
 of yours than in these menagerie things. And you ll find 
 most of the world ready to back me up in this ! " 
 
 Storrow was still deep in thought, turning the van 
 ished Hardy s advice over and over in his somewhat be 
 wildered mind, when a knock sounded on his door. He 
 answered that summons abstractedly, listlessly. He was 
 still disturbed by the sudden evaporation of some earlier 
 ardour, still depressed by the consciousness, always heavy 
 to the heart of youth, that his calling in life had been 
 tossed on the balance of wisdom and found wanting. 
 
 " Do you use models ? " demanded a demure young 
 voice from the twilight of his door-entry. Storrow s 
 searching eyes made out a mouse-coloured figure in a 
 mouse-coloured hat, a spare and sinewy figure with inso 
 lent eyes and laughter about the heavily rouged lips. 
 
 " Come in," he said. But as she rustled past him into 
 the studio with her high heels clicking on the wooden 
 floor, his courage suddenly failed him. "If you leave 
 your name and number, I can phone you, I suppose? " 
 
 She nodded, with her audacious young" eyes studying 
 his face. He reached for a pencil and scratch-pad, care 
 lessly, to mask his embarrassment.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 83 
 
 " Pannie Atwill, at The Alwyn Arms" said the girl in 
 the mouse-coloured hat. 
 
 He looked up slowly. The name came back to him, 
 sharp as a pistol-shot. The smiling rouged lips seemed to 
 be enjoying his discomfiture. 
 
 " Where s Torrie ? " he suddenly asked, in a constrained 
 voice. 
 
 Torrie Throssel? " 
 
 Storrow hesitated, puzzled as to the source of her quiet 
 laughter. It was the first time he had ever heard the 
 other woman s name. It struck him as a lyric sort of 
 name. That, he supposed, was why it brought a sudden 
 sense of singing in his veins. 
 
 " Yes," he replied at a venture, seeing himself still 
 studied by the half -amused eyes. 
 
 " Didn t you know ? " demanded the mouse-coloured 
 visitor. 
 
 "Know what?" 
 
 " That she s living next door to you now ? " 
 
 A wave of apprehension through which needled way 
 ward currents of something dangerously close to rapture 
 swept over him. 
 
 " But that s Alan Vibbard s studio," he continued, not 
 altogether conscious of what he was saying. 
 
 " He gave her the use of it until he gets back from 
 Paris," Pannie Atwill announced, with a shrug. 
 
 " How long has she been there? " Storrow demanded, 
 with his pulses pounding in spite of himself. He had 
 remembered the door under the imitation Gobelin and 
 again the wave of mingled triumph and apprehension sub 
 merged him. 
 
 " For two days," he was told. 
 
 "Then she doesn t know I m here?" demanded Stor 
 row, altogether unconscious of the egotism in that ques 
 tion. 
 
 " Search me," parried the girl, with her repeated laugh 
 of cool amusement The smile went out of her face as
 
 84 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 she stood studying his preoccupied eyes. She sighed, 
 without quite knowing it. Then she turned towards the 
 still open door. 
 
 " Call me up when you want me," she said over her 
 shoulder. And she closed the door as she went out, leav 
 ing Storrow standing stock-still in the centre of his studio. 
 
 All day long, in fact, he found himself stopping in his 
 work to listen for sounds from the neighbouring room. 
 He found it impossible to accomplish anything in that 
 mood. He could not keep his thoughts on the sketch be 
 fore him, for five minutes at a time. He could not even 
 remember the once clearly defined end he was trying to 
 reach. And it began to impress him as a very foolish 
 business, this puddling in wet mud and making little 
 animals out of clay. Hardy had been right. There was 
 a limit to what one could express in such a medium. It 
 was too confined, too cramping. Then Storrow stopped 
 short, listening intently, wondering at the faint and 
 mouse-like movement which fell on his ears from the 
 studio just beyond the wall, the studio which in some in 
 explicable manner had added depth and perspective and 
 mystery to what had once seemed nothing but a blank 
 plane of plaster and lath. 
 
 His heart jumped up into his throat, an hour later, 
 when he heard a sudden knock on his door. It proved 
 to be nothing more than a delivery-boy with a supply of 
 groceries for his depleted kitchenette. Once he was alone 
 again he fell to walking his floor, thinly troubled in spirit, 
 listening without quite knowing it for every sound in his 
 immediate neighbourhood. He heard the distant growl 
 of thunder in the south-east and realized from a glance 
 out of his windows that a storm was about to break over 
 the city. Those repeated challenging ro!ls of thunder 
 were too much for him. He had the love of the hill-top 
 wanderer for wind and rain. So he unearthed a faded 
 raincoat, closed his windows and caught up his hat. Then 
 he made for the street.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 85 
 
 He was half-way down the second flight of stairs be 
 fore he remembered his open skylight. The storm had 
 broken by this time and he could hear the rattle of the 
 heavy drops on roof and window-glass. His studio was 
 already so dark that he was forced to switch on his lights 
 before he could manoeuvre the crank and ratchet which 
 lowered the hinged sky-light frame. The rain was beat 
 ing so heavily against the glass by this time that he stopped 
 to stare at it. A model-throne, pushed close in against 
 one of the windows, made his thoughts flash back to Alan 
 Vibbard s canvas in the faded gold frame, to the white- 
 fleshed woman staring so listlessly out at just such another 
 torrent of falling rain. It brought a spear-head of an 
 guish through his breast; he scarcely knew why. It 
 prompted him to swing about and make for the still open 
 door, hungrier than ever for the huge sanities of wind 
 and air. He had almost reached this door when he was 
 arrested by a low and liquid bubbling of laughter. 
 
 "Look at me! " cried the careless and contralto-noted 
 voice of a girl from the gloomy hallway. 
 
 Storrow looked. He saw Torrie Throssel framed by 
 his doorway, almost as a picture is framed, holding the 
 folds of her wet skirt wide from her hips. Water dripped 
 from her skirt-edge, and under one arm of her thin waist, 
 now translucent with rain, she held what was clearly a 
 ruined hat. Her hair, beaten flat by the rain, streaked 
 across the milky brow now puckered with its half -inter 
 rogative laughter. 
 
 " You re soaking! " said Storrow, staring again at the 
 translucent wet waist where the texture, flat and fine- 
 wrinkled, made him think of a bas-relief by St. Gaudens. 
 
 " I did it on purpose," acknowledged Torrie, almost 
 joyfully. " I love it. I saw it coming and waited for it. 
 Hear my shoes squash! she cried as she walked across 
 the studio floor with exaggerated strides. 
 
 He was conscious of the ironic commonplaceness of 
 their speech. He was equally conscious of quickened
 
 86 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 pulses and an indeterminate dread smothered under a 
 wider sweep of desire. If she in any way shared in his 
 embarrassment she gave no sign of it. There was some 
 thing stabilizing, in fact, in her careless lightheartedness. 
 It gave Storrow the courage, at last, to face the predica 
 ment before him. 
 
 " How did you get here? " he almost bluntly demanded, 
 nodding without knowing it toward the wall with the com 
 municating-door. 
 
 Her smile vanished. 
 
 " I followed you," she retorted, quite simply. 
 
 "Followed me?" he echoed, with his eyes on hers. 
 He saw the reckless light on her face. It infected him 
 with an answering recklessness which he found hard to 
 control. But there should be no more surrenders, he ad 
 monished himself, to the easy tides of impulse. 
 
 She must have perceived that involuntary hardening of 
 his face, for she came closer to him, slowly, until her 
 groping fingers, as she studied his eyes, were able to 
 catch at the edge of his coat. 
 
 " You didn t think you could do what you did, and 
 then drop me like like a squeezed orange, did you ? " 
 
 " I wanted to do what was right," he said with unim 
 aginative honesty. 
 
 " But was it right? " she asked, clinging to his sleeve. 
 That mood of humility was something quite new in her. 
 " What happened up there in The Alwyn Arms had never 
 happened to me before." She lowered her head, so he 
 could no longer see her face, as her fingers clung child 
 ishly to one of the buttons on his sleeve. " And I thought 
 - I thought you would come back." 
 
 He could smell her hair, damp and heavy. He was 
 impressed by the discovery that she must be without per 
 sonal vanity, standing before him wet and bedraggled, 
 beaten down like a pelted flower-bed, and quite uncon 
 scious of her appearance. The back-thrown shoulders 
 gave a sense of solidity to the torso which the wet drapery
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 87 
 
 accentuated more than it concealed. There was appeal, 
 too, in the lines of passive vigour under that flattened wet 
 waist, in the humid eyes, in the lips slightly heavy with 
 their parted indecision. 
 
 But Storrow became less conscious of the questioning 
 red lips than of the words they had so recently uttered. 
 A dark joy had surged through him, the joy of acquisi 
 tion, of possession. He had been the only one. He had 
 been jealous of a painted figure on canvas, conjecturing 
 along avenues of intimacy which never existed. He had 
 made himself miserable for nothing. Then the joy quite 
 as suddenly surged out of him again, leaving in its wake a 
 darker reaction of remorse. He had been the only one. 
 And that meant that on him must lie all the weight of 
 their wrong-doing. On him w r as to be placed all the 
 blame. Without quite knowing what he had been doing, 
 he had, in all probability, broken her life. 
 
 He looked down at her, conscious still again of her 
 womanly fragilities, of weaknesses which made her peril 
 ous. Passion, he remembered, was cruel. It could be as 
 unconsidering as the beak of an eagle. He was swept by 
 an impression of having been hugely unjust to her. He 
 could not fight down the feeling that he had done her a 
 great wrong, a wrong which in some way must be ex 
 piated. 
 
 She misread that look of compassion in his eyes. 
 
 "You re not sorry, are you?" she asked. She re 
 membered, as she spoke, that the studio door still stood 
 open. Rather than cross the room to close it, she fell 
 back several steps, drawing Storrow with her, until she 
 stood beside the light-switch. She was still studying the 
 man s face as she lifted up a finger and pressed the switch- 
 button. 
 
 " Beloved," she said in the dusk, breathing heavily, 
 " you wouldn t leave me, would you? " 
 
 Her voice, incredibly timorous, scarcely rose above the 
 rattle of the rain on roof and skylight. He did not
 
 88 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 answer her. She stood quiescent, apparently awaiting 
 some movement from him. But Storrow found some 
 thing deferring that movement, strong as was the pro 
 pulsion to make it. He was afraid of her, and doubly 
 afraid of her in her moments of meekness. 
 
 " Why did you ever come here? " he demanded of her, 
 almost harshly, and at the same time almost hopelessly. 
 
 She remained silent a moment or two. 
 
 " I didn t intend you to know, until later," she finally 
 admitted. She reached for his hand, and took it in hers. 
 That hand of his, she found, was as cold as ice. Then 
 she sighed, almost contentedly, as though there was some 
 thing reassuring to be wrung from this discovery. 
 " What are you worrying about ? " she demanded. 
 
 " About you," he said, staring down at her in the un 
 certain light. 
 
 She looked ruinous in her wet and bedraggled clothing. 
 She would look like that, perhaps, in years to come, 
 broken and sodden and grown unlovely to the eye. 
 
 His involuntary movement of withdrawal did not alto 
 gether escape her notice. 
 
 She laughed sharply, almost triumphantly. She slipped 
 away from him, feeling along the wall for the light-switch. 
 Then she crossed the re-lighted studio to the door and 
 quietly closed it. Having done that, she turned and stood 
 regarding him with studious eyes. 
 
 " Listen to me," she said with a matter-of-factness 
 which surprised him. " I don t want you ever to worry 
 about me. If there s any worrying to be done, I can 
 do it. But there isn t any need for it, and there won t be 
 any need for it." 
 
 His questioning eyes were still on her as she stepped 
 back to his side. He noticed that the floor was pooled 
 with the drip of water where she had been standing. He 
 could hear the monotonous beat of rain against window- 
 glass. It seemed to isolate them, to leave them in a 
 world by themselves.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 89 
 
 " All I want now is to be near you," she said. 
 
 A tremor sped through him, a tremor which he could 
 not control. She picked up her wet hat and turned it 
 meditatively about in her hand, apparently waiting for 
 him to speak. But he neither spoke nor moved. 
 
 She turned slowly away from him, with a slight frown 
 of disappointment on her face. Her retreat, trivial as 
 it was, filled Storrow with a sudden sense of deprivation. 
 He was prompted to follow her, to accept her claim that 
 they could be happy, gloriously happy, if they only chose 
 to be. But some ghostly hand of instinct held him back. 
 
 He watched her as she came to a stop beside the win 
 dow, down which the rain was beating in steady runnels. 
 He saw her move disconsolately back against the edge of 
 the model-throne and settle there, like a wet pigeon on a 
 fountain-rim, while she stared wistfully out through the 
 rain-darkened window. 
 
 A stab of pain went through him as he beheld her there, 
 with her moist skirt flattened against the line of the 
 limbs. Both her pose and her expression reminded him 
 too sharply of the Vibbard picture. It sickened and an 
 gered him. It brought to a head a dozen unformulated 
 suspicions. 
 
 " Why are you in that man Vibbard s studio ? " he 
 found himself demanding. 
 
 She turned her head, without moving her body. She 
 was much cooler about it than he had expected. 
 
 " So that s what s been worrying you ! " she said with a 
 laugh. It struck Storrow as being almost a laugh of 
 relief. There was, at any rate, a trace of scorn in it. 
 She turned back, and fell to staring out the window once 
 more. " We are being childish, after all," she finally 
 said with a sigh. 
 
 " It doesn t strike me as altogether childish/ announced 
 the unhappy young man confronting her. 
 
 She turned and faced him, almost forbearingly. 
 
 " I m in Alan Vibbard s studio because he told me last
 
 go THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 April I could have the use of it if I wanted it. He s 
 somewhere in Europe for the summer. But I didn t want 
 it. I didn t want it, at least, until I knew you were here 
 next door to it. So you are really the reason why I m in 
 that studio, if you insist on knowing! " 
 
 You must have known Vibbard pretty well," he said 
 with his apparently heavy intent to hurt her. 
 
 " He has hundreds of friends in this city," was her 
 careless-noted retort. 
 
 " But he can t lend studios to all of them," was Stor- 
 row s harsh counter retort. 
 
 "He s big-hearted. And also big-minded!" 
 
 " I suppose that implies that I m small? " demanded the 
 other, out of his misery. 
 
 Your insinuation is. But I knew Alan Vibbard for 
 three years, or nearly three years, and in all that time he 
 never said one questionable word to me. And I hadn t 
 known you three hours before 
 
 " I thought we weren t going back over that," called 
 out the stricken-eyed Storrow. 
 
 " Then why do you say things that make me go 
 back to it? " she countered. As he moved closer to the 
 wall, so as to face her, the similarity of her posture to that 
 of the figure in the Vibbard canvas became more startling, 
 more disturbing. He felt the need of unburdening his 
 soul of its entire unsavoury weight. 
 
 " Because I know you posed for Vibbard," he told her, 
 with a tremor in his voice. 
 
 " I posed for Vibbard ? " she repeated, turning sharply 
 about. 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "And when did this happen?" she demanded. He 
 rejoiced inwardly that she was able to smile. 
 
 " I don t know." 
 Then how did it happen ? " 
 
 " I don t know," he repeated. 
 
 " Then why do you say such absurd things? "
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 91 
 
 " Because I saw the painting," he replied. But he 
 spoke with less assurance now. She was able to laugh 
 outright at this. 
 
 " And what did that prove? " she interrogated, almost 
 humorously. 
 
 " I -- 1 thought it was you," he told her. 
 
 " But I m not a model," she protested. The smile went 
 out of her face. " What was that picture?" she de 
 manded. 
 
 " It was a nude," he compelled himself to admit. 
 
 " And you thought that of me? " she challenged. Her 
 eyes, darkened with anger, were full on his face. 
 
 " I didn t want to believe it," he truthfully enough 
 acknowledged. 
 
 " But why should you? " 
 
 He intended to be, he wanted to be, honest with her 
 above all things. 
 
 " Because the figure struck me as being amazingly like 
 yours," he told her, doing his best to meet the scorn in 
 her eyes. She was able to laugh again. But it was not 
 a happy laugh. 
 
 " You had the advantage, of course, of being able to 
 compare them," she shot out at him. He made a move 
 ment of protest, but she began to speak again, more tem 
 pestuously. " Even if you had that advantage, doesn t it 
 strike you as being rather absurd, pinning an artist s paint 
 ing on me? It wasn t a photograph. And they don t 
 paint portraits like that, as far as I know. And I don t 
 pose for artists, whether they re my friends or my en 
 emies. And if I did, I d prefer doing it in clothes." 
 
 " That s what puzzled me," protested Storrow. " I 
 felt all along that " 
 
 She stopped him with a gesture that was almost im 
 perious. 
 
 "Just what was that picture?" she demanded. 
 " What was it like ? What did the lady happen to be do 
 ing at the time ? "
 
 92 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " It s not easy to describe a picture in words," he pro 
 tested. 
 
 " Then sketch it for me," she quietly commanded. 
 
 He hesitated for a moment, swept by a feeling that the 
 subject had already been sufficiently threshed out. Then 
 a craving to explore deeper into that murky cave prompted 
 him to reach for his sketching-block. 
 
 " Sit back where you were before," he told her, already 
 in his isolating upper strata of the creative vision. 
 
 She returned to the edge of the model-throne. There, 
 without question or protest, she sat down, facing him. 
 
 " Don t look at me look out the window," he com 
 manded. She made a moue at his solemnity, but it es 
 caped him, for he was already at work with his flying bit 
 of charcoal. His genius for line was quick to assert it 
 self. He caught the contours which the flattened wet 
 clothing only partly concealed. With his quick net-work 
 of running strokes he re-enacted the ancient miracle of 
 conjuring form out of flatness, of capturing on paper an 
 image which spelt completeness in itself. It was not until 
 he had finished the figure and stood staring impersonally 
 at the half-shadowed face of the woman herself that he 
 became thinly conscious of her sheer beauty of throat and 
 neck and brow. That was something he had almost for 
 gotten about. But the face, he concluded, was not im 
 portant. 
 
 " Finished yet? " asked Torrie, almost impatiently. 
 
 Instead of answering her, he handed over the sketch 
 in silence. He did so with an absurdly exaggerated idea 
 of the latent drama in the situation, as though vast issues 
 were to be decided in one way or the other. He even held 
 his breath as the girl took the drawing in her hand, the 
 drawing, which after some mysterious fashion, was to 
 convict her of guilt or of innocence. 
 
 His searching eyes, however, found no corresponding 
 gravity on her face. She merely laughed as she glanced 
 down at the sketch.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 93 
 
 " That s clever," she carelessly acknowledged, handing- 
 it back to him. " But I can t see that it means anything." 
 
 He looked down at the drawing, and then, with a shoul 
 der-movement of impatience, tossed it aside. 
 
 " You foolish, foolish boy," said Torrie s voice, quite 
 close to him, in a coo as quiet as a ring-dove s. The 
 pendulum of his emotion, having achieved its full swing 
 towards misery, was already moving in an opposite direc 
 tion. 
 
 " Why do you say that? " he asked, conscious of what 
 was almost condescension in her smile. 
 
 " Because I m glad you can pay me the compliment of 
 being jealous of me," she told him. " And since you care 
 that much, you can kiss me if you want to." 
 
 She stood in a mock-submissive attitude, with her heels 
 together and her hands behind her back. He noticed the 
 blue shadows about the half -lowered lids of her eyes and 
 certain minute spasmodic movements of her slightly up 
 raised chin. He noticed, too, the full column of the white 
 throat, the characteristic milky whiteness of the skin where 
 the line of the neck flowed into the plane of the thick-set 
 shoulder, the heavy redness of the slightly parted lips. 
 It agitated him, and even in his agitation he was able 
 to resent the fact that she had in some way obtained con 
 trol of his pulse-beat. Should she become conscious of 
 that fact, he forlornly remembered, he would be helpless 
 before her. 
 
 I thought that was over with," he weakly contended. 
 
 " Chasta Joseppha! " she whispered, without moving. 
 The allusion, however, was lost on him. She still stood 
 with her face upturned and her hands behind her back. 
 But slowly the relaxed lines about the half-smiling lips 
 settled into hardness. The eyes shadowed by the thick 
 lashes became less ruminative, less unfocussed, with an 
 alert and narrowing light in their misty hazel. It was 
 not until she had taken a deep breath, and as slowly ex 
 pelled it, that she was able to laugh again.
 
 94 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 :< You re right," she said with the faintest vibrata of 
 feeling still in her voice. " We d only make a muddle 
 of things, I suppose, and there ll soon be enough to worry 
 about, without that ! " 
 
 " What will you have to worry about? " he demanded, 
 promptly apprehensive. 
 
 " Work ! " she trilled with an effort at gaiety. 
 
 "What work?" he asked. 
 
 " The new part that Krassler s just given me. Yes, 
 Hermie s eaten crow and ladled out a real part in his 
 Seventh Wave. It s forty-eight sides. He keeps saying 
 it s the chance of a life-time. But I get chills down the 
 spine when I think of jumping into a straight part like 
 that and being billed next to a woman like Catherine 
 Klennert." 
 
 Storrow, whose grasp of the situation was not a com 
 plete one, stood watching Torrie as for the second time 
 she picked up her sodden hat. 
 
 " But you re not going to let anything come between 
 you and your chance, are you ? " he demanded, breathing 
 freer in this less intimate atmosphere of action. 
 
 ff You re the only thing that could come between me and 
 that chance," she retorted in a flash of candour. 
 
 " But I don t intend to," he said with an ardour and 
 promptness which in no way added to her happiness. 
 Her smile, in fact, was rather a wintry one. But it was a 
 smile. 
 
 " So while you re working away on your side of this 
 old wall," she told him as she stood patting the faded 
 paper, " I ll be studying away on my side of it. And 
 that will be something, after all." 
 
 He made an effort to impress on her that it would be 
 everything, but the ruminative hazel eyes were listless as 
 she listened to him. She apparently failed to see, as he 
 did, something brave and brilliant in their projected pro 
 gram of resolute defiance to impulse. They would work 
 side by side, he explained, intent on their own ends, and
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 95 
 
 with all their work they were going to remain the best 
 of friends. "Isn t that true?" he demanded. 
 
 " I suppose so," she retorted. 
 
 " Then shake on it," he said. 
 
 They shook hands, solemnly. She sighed for the sec 
 ond time as she turned towards the door. 
 
 " Now I ve got to get these wet duds off," she said in 
 a tired voice as she stepped out across the threshold.
 
 CHAPTER EIGHT 
 
 STORROW, during the preoccupied days that fol 
 lowed, did his best to argue himself into that con 
 tentment of mind which is supposed to flower out 
 of evil overcome and temptation defied. But he was con 
 scious, all the while, of a vague unrest, of a sense of sus 
 pended action. His ear was repeatedly assailed by the 
 intimate small noises of Torrie Throssel s activities, the 
 snap of a light-switch on their common wall, the tinkling 
 of a telephone call-bell, even the partition-filtered sounds 
 of her splashing body in its bath. He had heard her 
 preoccupied whistling of a current song-hit, in no way 
 disturbed by the flatness of the notes. Later on, he caught 
 the sound of a piano being opened and the keys being 
 tested. Then she had played, badly but noisily, a march- 
 song new to Broadway. 
 
 He became aware, the next day, that she had callers. 
 He never failed to hear the thump of the heavy antique 
 knocker affixed to the Vibbard doors, echoing like an an 
 vil-clang along the dusty hallway. Some of these visits 
 were contentious, and one at least was boisterous, accom 
 panied by fusillades of rag-time from the piano. Stor- 
 row, when it was over, thought he heard Pannie Atwill s 
 voice amid those of a departing trio. But he could not be 
 sure of this, and he compelled himself nevertheless to go 
 on with his modelling, more intent than ever on his work. 
 Yet his sense of deprivation deepened into one of loneli 
 ness. Late that night he went to his wide back-window 
 and stared out at the golden mist that hung over the moon 
 lit city, softening even the barrier of brick and mortar 
 ramparting so crazily across his northern sky-line. 
 
 96
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 97 
 
 "Hello, honey! " softly fluted a voice not more than 
 six feet away from him. He turned and saw Torrie in 
 the next window, with the faded rose kimono thrown 
 over her white night-dress. 
 
 "You re not in bed yet?" he called back in a half- 
 whisper, thrilling in spite of himself as he saw the dark 
 cloud of her loosened hair falling about the familiar blur 
 of old rose. 
 
 " No, but I m going now," she said with her little wood- 
 pigeon coo of laughter. His heart sank. As he leaned 
 out across the dusty sill, shot through with a still keener 
 sense of deprivation, he saw her slowly lower her sash 
 and draw back into the unlighted room. He sat there 
 for a long time, looking out at the city. Then he went 
 listlessly to bed. 
 
 He was far from sorry, the next morning, to find Hardy 
 invading his studio. The older man inspected the model 
 ling still half -swathed in its moistened cheese-cloth, shook 
 his head, and asked when Storrow was going to start in 
 at real work. 
 
 " Sooner than you expect," Storrow surprised him by 
 asserting. 
 
 " Good ! " announced Hardy, sitting down beside the 
 other s littered work-table. He absently reached out and 
 took up an oblong of card-board lying there. He bent 
 over it in a study of such prolonged silence that Storrow 
 turned and stared at him. 
 
 " You at least have a wonderful memory," commented 
 Hardy as he put down the sheet again. Storrow could 
 see that it was his charcoal drawing of Torrie leaning 
 against the model-throne. 
 
 " Yes, that thing stuck in my craw," explained the 
 younger man as he took up the drawing. He tore it 
 slowly to pieces, without so much as looking at it. Then 
 he tossed it into his waste-paper basket. 
 
 " And so you took that way of working it out of your
 
 98 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 system ? " demanded the other, with a head-movement 
 towards the basket. 
 
 Storrow nodded, without meeting the other man s gaze. 
 
 " There s something else I wish you d work out of 
 your system as successfully as that," Hardy remarked 
 through his meditative cigarette-smoke. 
 
 "What?" queried Storrow, making ready to resent 
 any too casual intrusion on his privacy of life. 
 
 " That north woods story of yours," was the somew T hat 
 unexpected reply. Whereupon the younger man, vaguely 
 relieved, retorted that he intended to give up puddling for 
 the pen, at the end of the week. 
 
 Hardy, at this acidulated yet half-laughing confession, 
 acquired an unlooked-for air of sobriety. 
 
 " I suppose it s none of my business, in a way," he 
 finally ventured. " But it might help if I knew just how 
 you were situated. Do you have to live on what your 
 work brings in, I mean, or can you afford to be inde 
 pendent? " 
 
 " I ve enough to keep the wolf from the door," ex 
 plained Storrow with a laugh, " but not enough to keep 
 him entirely off the range." 
 
 " Well, that s more important than you ll ever imagine," 
 commented the other. " And since you re going to settle 
 down, supposing we see a bit of this city before the work 
 gets its grip on you." He mentioned a possible luncheon 
 at the Salmagundi Club, and the opening smoker of the 
 Kit-Kats, a glimpse at some pictures of Hawthorne s, and 
 a costume ball which Brownie Tell, the portrait-painter 
 down in the Square, was about to give. " It s all grist 
 for the mill," he explained. And Storrow, seeing in this 
 an escape from his mood of inertia, was glad enough to 
 catch at the chance of shaking the dust off his soul. 
 When that was done he would settle down to work, to 
 work that would mean something. 
 
 Hardy, on his own part, was conscious of no sacrifice 
 while taking in tow this newcomer to his city. The older
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 99 
 
 man, who had journeyed full swing about the circle of 
 experience, found a slightly jaded curiosity revitalized by 
 the other s freshness of outlook. He even found Stor- 
 row s reactions awakening dormant susceptibilities in his 
 own breast. Yet when rehearsals of Hardy s play were 
 resumed, with a new cast, Storrow seemed more inter 
 ested in the physical aspects of the excursion than in the 
 nature of the drama itself. It was the cavernous and 
 half-lit stage, the empty house, the self-hypnosis of actors 
 intent on achieving a certain end, the accidental pictorial 
 values of faces seen in strong side-lights, which proved 
 the more appealing to the young sculptor. But this 
 young sculptor, Hardy soon realized, had reserves and 
 reticences which it would be necessary to respect. He 
 carried himself credibly through the tea-hour of those 
 sedater homes which the summer-end found already open 
 to the peripatetic man of letters, and he was quietly ap 
 preciative when the talk went back to the older man s days 
 in Paris and Munich and Rome. 
 
 It was a pleasant enough task for Hardy, this appeas 
 ing of a leonine young appetite with the rib-bones of his 
 own past. It was not long, too, before his attachment 
 to Storrow became a less impersonal one. Less imper 
 sonal, also, became his speculations as to what a city like 
 New York would do to the Wild Man Of The Mountain, 
 as he sometimes half -humorously called Storrow. He 
 nursed no envy for the younger man and his type. They 
 messed things up, as a rule, and burned themselves out 
 before their time. It was the colder men, the harder men, 
 who manoeuvred life into success. Yet Storrow, Hardy 
 felt, had an incongruous streak of the covenanter in his 
 make-up. That, possibly, would serve to leave him more 
 preyed upon than preying. But, on the whole, Hardy 
 concluded, he was a man it would be profitable to watch, 
 for his own sake as well as the other s. 
 
 If Storrow was in any way conscious of this double- 
 edged surveillance, he kept his secret to himself. As a
 
 ioo THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 sculptor, he felt, he was already ridiculous in the eyes of 
 Hardy. He had no intention of appearing ridiculous be 
 fore him as a man. No word of Vibbard s studio or its 
 occupant escaped him, much as his thoughts still centred 
 about them. But a day or two later these same thoughts 
 wandered more than ever in that direction, for as he 
 stepped into his room at the end of the afternoon, Storrow 
 heard the sound of a piano from the other side of the 
 wall. He knew, after listening a moment, that it was 
 somebody playing "" Kennst du das Land? And he also 
 knew that this Mignon song had been a favourite of his 
 mother s, and, what was more, was being played by a 
 hand much too masterly to belong to Torrie Throssel. 
 It moved him, as he stood there intently listening, more 
 than he had imagined any music could do. Then came a 
 fragment of a Chopin nocturne, played aimlessly and be 
 tween broken scraps of talk, then another song, familiar 
 to him from his youth, a song he had always looked upon 
 as one of the loveliest in the world. 
 
 " Plaisir d amour ne dure qu un moment; 
 Chagrin d amour dour toute la vie "... 
 
 In strange contrast to the beauty of the accompaniment 
 he heard a man s voice, broken, quavering, timberless, 
 attempting in vain to follow the melting chords as a crip 
 pled beggar might hobble after a gliding bird. It im 
 pressed the listener as being the voice of a very old man. 
 Yet Storrow, oddly stirred, crossed to his window and 
 threw it open. He could hear the wheezy and asthmatic 
 voice plainer than ever, sustained and almost redeemed 
 by the pellucid notes of the piano. 
 
 The next instant there was a sharp knock on the door. 
 Storrow, still perplexed, slowly crossed the room. 
 
 He found Torrie there, with a small frown of anxiety 
 wrinkling her forehead. 
 
 " Modrynski s here," she said, visibly excited. Stor-
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 101 
 
 row did not respond to this statement, apparently, as she 
 had expected him to do. 
 
 " He could help you tremendously," she explained. 
 " We knocked, an hour ago, but you weren t in. That s 
 him in my studio, playing Schubert." 
 
 " And singing? " demanded Storrow, not concealing his 
 scorn. 
 
 The girl nodded. " It s awful, isn t it? The poor old 
 fellow has softening of the brain, or something worse. 
 At least they say so. But he still has more art in his 
 little finger than most men have in their whole head. I d 
 like him to see what you ve done." 
 
 " But he wouldn t be interested in animals," laughed 
 Storrow, to whom the name of Modrynski had once 
 spelled magic. 
 
 " He s one of the three greatest sculptors in America," 
 persisted Torrie with studied patience, " and I hate to 
 think of you missing the chance of a life-time." 
 
 Storrow could not altogether disagree with her. Yet 
 he stood studying her face. It has lost its passiveness and 
 seemed narrower and more alert than he had imagined 
 it to be. Excitement, for some reason, had given her a 
 splash of colour on either cheek, and there was less of the 
 rebel-look in the habitually meditative eyes. 
 
 " Shall I go in with you? " he asked. 
 
 " No, stay here. I ll bring Modrynski in. That ll 
 make it easier to get him started on sculpture. But don t 
 let anything he says offend you. He s like a child, re 
 member." 
 
 They were longer in getting to his door than Storrow 
 expected. And when Torrie appeared, leading Modryn 
 ski by the arm through the uncertain light of the hall, a 
 faint chill fluttered through Storrow s startled body. 
 That serious-eyed girl, radiating a vitality which she 
 found hard to repress to the laggard movement of the 
 man beside her, made Storrow s mind flash back to an 
 old print of Antigone leading a blinded CEdipus. For he
 
 102 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 saw a fumbling and doddering old man who walked with 
 difficulty, as though the will and the worn-out body were 
 no longer in co-ordination, a very lean and tall old man 
 with a narrow, high forehead and the beak of an eagle. 
 A sparse nimbus of hair failed to conceal the skull, as 
 shining and yellow as polished ivory, across which it was 
 so laboriously trained in thin streaks made docile by oil. 
 The skin of the face itself was cheese-colour, marked with 
 darker patches of scurfy brown, and everything about 
 that face seemed pendulous, from the nephritic sacs under 
 the eyes to the drooping cheek-flaps and the saggy dewlap 
 under the slightly tremulous chin. Yet an effort had been 
 made to conceal the scrawny throat behind a foolishly 
 high and imprisoning starched collar. The tall and de- 
 crepid body, too, was arrayed in the dandified apparel of 
 an earlier mode, a tight-fitting cutaway coat with a gar 
 denia in the button-hole, pointed shoes with pearl-coloured 
 gaiters, a coloured Parisian waist-coat across which 
 dangled a gold-rimmed monocle on a black silk ribbon. 
 
 It was not until his visitor was well in the room and 
 Modrynski s heavily-veined and slightly tremulous hand 
 was screwing this monocle in between the eagle beak and 
 the shaggy brow that Storrow noticed the old artist s 
 eyes. There and there alone the hand of Time had been 
 stayed. They remained, by some accident of organic 
 repair, the eyes of youth. From behind them Intelligence 
 looked out, as from a ruined tower. They seemed to 
 mock the senile mask of the body through which they 
 peered. And their still half-humorous alertness, their 
 full-irised ironic power of penetration, left the younger 
 man vaguely but unmistakably apprehensive. 
 
 "Ah, this is the boy from the land of the caribou!" 
 cackled the broken old voice. The flaccid lips, slightly 
 moist at one corner with saliva, were pursed up critically 
 as the bony and shaking fingers held the monocle poised. 
 Storrow, at the moment, was forcing himself to remember 
 what this sodden and worn-out hulk of a man had ac-
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 103 
 
 complished in his time, what dreams he had sought and 
 found, what beauty he had released from marble. Torrie, 
 making no effort to hide her laughter, was repeating the 
 younger man s name to the older, slowly and deliberately, 
 as though she were talking to a small child. 
 
 Modrynski dropped his monocle. Then he let one 
 tremulous hand rest on the shoulder of the girl beside him. 
 
 " And apparently much more appealing to the eye, my 
 dear, than anything he ll ever chisel out of Tennessee mar 
 ble! " croaked the old libertine. 
 
 " But this work of his is clever," argued Torrie. Mod 
 rynski, however, was not to be diverted. 
 
 " You young fools," he sighed, as he sank into the chair 
 Storrow placed for him, " you never know what youth 
 is worth until you lose it ! " And he sat there, blinking 
 like a captured eagle, mumbling over and over : " Youth 
 delicious youth! " 
 
 And since Mahomet refused to go to the mountain 
 Torrie brought the mountain to Mahomet. She did so 
 by resolutely taking up Storrow s models and placing them 
 directly in front of the ruminating old sculptor. He sat 
 confronting them, but he paid no attention to them. 
 Storrow even smiled as Torrie crowded them still closer 
 about Modrynski s knees, as one captures the attention of 
 a spoiled child with toys. But Modrynski s mind was 
 fixed on other things. 
 
 " So you re the young barbarian who has captured this 
 daughter of beauty," the flaccid lips mumbled. " You 
 and your silly, big, lumbering, thick-muscled, glorious, 
 wild-animal body! And I ll be damned if he hasn t got 
 a head I d like to model, now I come to think of it. But 
 what s the good? And he s yours, my dear, and I sup 
 pose you re his. That s the way of youth. The young 
 must walk with the young. Like appeals to like. Youth 
 calls to youth. And you put a wall between them, but 
 they soon have a hole in the hedge, as my French friends 
 phrase it ! "
 
 104 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 Storrow stared pityingly at the ruinous fagade behind 
 which lurked so much lost knowledge. Then he no longer 
 pitied the aged voluptuary with the gardenia and the 
 pomaded nimbus, for Modrynski had suddenly emerged 
 into a consciousness of the modellings before him. He 
 stiffened, like a soldier confronted by his commanding- 
 officer. The flaccid lines became tense; the weak mouth 
 grew authoritative. And as the aquiline eye made its 
 survey, point by point and line by line, Torrie herself 
 paled a little. 
 
 " Aren t they clever? " she prompted. 
 
 Modrynski blinked at her. Then he blinked back at 
 the models. 
 
 "Clever?" he exploded, " Barye without brains . . . 
 sample of Siwash realism . . . totem-pole technique! 
 No," he mocked in a falsetto of savagery, " this might 
 make a creditable lamp-stand. And those would not be 
 unsuited for lawn ornaments. But where s the beauty, 
 woman, where s the beauty in a mud vivarium? What s 
 it fallen to, this Art we followed if it turns away from 
 the God-given loveliness of man and woman and takes 
 up with rodents and barnyards. It means titmouses for 
 the Metropolitan and the ring-tailed lemur for the Louvre ! 
 Clever? Hah! It may be clever, as you call it, but get 
 me away from it before I have to spray myself with flea- 
 powder! Get me safe in my taxi before this mud Zoo 
 springs at my throat and gives me rabies ! " 
 
 He rose to his feet with an effort, snapping out phrases 
 -" Half-baked little Landseers! " " going to epicize the 
 jungle "- " put tubes in their mouths and turn em into 
 fountains ! " 
 
 " Modrynski ! " cried the girl, with blazing eyes, over 
 whelmed by the injustice of his outburst. But Modrynski 
 was already headed for the door, with Torrie fruitlessly 
 trying to intercept him. He waved her aside and van 
 ished down the half-lighted hallway, rumbling and cough 
 ing and groping his way to the stairs.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 105 
 
 Torrie stood motionless, with one hand against her thin 
 shirtwaist. Then she turned and advanced slowly to 
 wards Storrow. So tragic was the light in her eyes that 
 Storrow laughed, not altogether happily, but easily and 
 impersonally. The situation, after all, had clarified, clar 
 ified at a stroke. Hardy had been right. A master had 
 confirmed his hint. The era of the mud Zoo was over 
 for all time. 
 
 " And I thought he d help you," Torrie mourned, still 
 stunned by the force of that outbreak. 
 
 " He has" asserted Storrow, not without a touch of 
 bitterness. 
 
 There was still pity in the girl s eyes. " How could 
 he ? she demanded. 
 
 " By persuading me I m about finished with this stuff," 
 was the answer. There was a quaver in his voice as he 
 spoke, for no man can contemplate the abandonment of 
 what has been his life-work without a pang of regret. 
 Nor could he, immured in his own emotions as he was, 
 see his way to resent the other s instinctive movement of 
 sympathy as she placed her two hands on his shoulders and 
 turned his face towards the light. In that movement he 
 perceived no hint of appropriation. But before he be 
 came aware of it he stood within the aura of her influence, 
 and as she leaned closer with her fingers linked behind his 
 neck and her lips murmuring " I m sorry so sorry! " 
 he found, as other men before him have done, that there 
 was anodyne in a woman s touch. He enclosed that lean 
 ing figure in the sustaining clasp of his own arms and 
 his face bent closer to the face that was lifted close to 
 his own. 
 
 They were startled by a knock on the door. The two 
 relaxed bodies did not shift from where they stood, but 
 a rigidity came into their limbs and the two heads raised 
 and turned, strangely like wild animals that have sniffed 
 danger up-wind. They did not speak, as the knock was
 
 106 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 repeated, but Storrow accepted the pressure of the girl s 
 hand on his arm as a command to remain silent. 
 
 They were still standing there, with that summons un 
 answered, when the door was unexpectedly opened. 
 Storrow, at the moment that he backed away, saw a gloved 
 and veiled figure with a wicker hamper suspended from 
 one slender arm. There was a moment of unbroken si 
 lence. The air became electric with motion suspended. 
 
 " Forgive me for house-breaking," cried the beguiling 
 light voice of Charlotte Kirkner. " But I wanted to sur 
 prise you, Owen, with a basket of fruit." 
 
 Storrow, flushing to the eyes, advanced slowly and took 
 the wicker hamper from her hand. He saw the quick 
 glance that passed from one woman to the other, the inter 
 play of cold appraisal, the alert hostility behind the screen 
 ing bocage of indifferency. Charlotte Kirkner, he no 
 ticed, did not advance into the room. He was wondering, 
 abashed by the light in her barricaded eyes, just what 
 to say, just how to phrase his speech of introduction. 
 But before he arrived at that end his doorway was dark 
 ened by still another figure. 
 
 It was Chester Hardy. 
 
 " Hello, Storrow," he said as he sauntered in. Then 
 to the former s surprise he just as unceremoniously said 
 " Hello, Torrie," and came to a stop, slightly bewildered 
 by the sustained silence of the circle he had invaded. It 
 was not until he turned about that he saw the face of 
 the girl nearer the door. 
 
 " It s Miss Kirkner, of course," he said with his quiet 
 and easy smile. And the next moment they were shak 
 ing hands. " You remember how badly I skated last 
 winter at Tuxedo." 
 
 " It is nice to see you again," acknowledged the girl, 
 her colour slowly mounting as she moved ever so slightly 
 towards the still open door. " But Owen s busy and I 
 must be off."
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 107 
 
 Hardy re-inspected the trio, vainly waiting for some 
 word to resolve the situation into translucence. 
 
 " In that case we d better all be off," he announced. 
 " So I ll take you down to that opulent sedan of yours 
 on my way." 
 
 He was able to wave his cane lightheartedly as he went. 
 Their voices, high with a coerced hilarity as they de 
 scended the stairs, floated brokenly back through the dusty 
 hallway. Storrow crossed the room and closed the door. 
 
 " Who is that woman? " demanded Torrie Throssel as 
 Storrow stood with his back to the closed door, staring 
 at her. 
 
 " What difference does it make? " he said with rather 
 a reckless laugh.
 
 CHAPTER NINE 
 
 OWEN STORROW S early training had been 
 the direct antithesis of that bohemianism which 
 clings about the skirts of the metropolitan art- 
 colony. He found it more and more expedient, accord 
 ingly, to keep reminding himself that New York was not 
 like the rest of the world as he had known it. It was a 
 riddle which only time and study could decipher. 
 Tangled up with its moments of exaltation were unex 
 pected aspects of degradation, just as anachronistic ugli 
 nesses still cropped up in the midst of its material beau 
 ties. It was a world by itself, apparently, disorderly, 
 kaleidoscopic, contradictory. But behind its muddle of 
 broken hues and its fortuity of frontal design, Storrow 
 contended, it necessarily harboured some deep-hidden 
 dignity of purpose, some unifying spirit of aspiration. 
 It was the duty of the newcomer, therefore, to stand 
 silent, to suspend judgment, to look deeper and await the 
 final gift of understanding. 
 
 Yet the matter of Browning Tell and his costume-ball 
 proved a good deal of a perplexity to the newcomer in 
 question. Storrow had been told that it would be one of 
 the best things of the year, equal to anything he would 
 get in Paris, as good as the Quart Arts Ball of Ninety- 
 Two, about which the older men still spoke with wistful 
 wags of the head. There would be famous people there, 
 famous artists, famous beauties, authors, actresses, 
 models, musicians, society idlers, and, in all probability, 
 some fancy-dress apparel that would be frankly shocking. 
 Torrie Throssel, he found, had been at such things, and 
 had no intention of going to this one. From the first, 
 
 108
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 109 
 
 in fact, she spoke contemptuously of Tell and his 
 " stunts," as she called them. He was an impostor and 
 a climber, she claimed, one of the dance-mad Pans of 
 those pre-bellum dance-mad days who depended more on 
 his feet than his hands in the matter of capturing fash 
 ionable sitters. And he was a trickster even in his work, 
 claimed his detractor, since he had the habit of placing 
 these sitters behind a framed network of interwoven pic 
 ture-cord squares and drawing in their figures on can 
 vases carefully blocked out with the same number of 
 squares, which is one way of beating the pantograph, she 
 protested, when you happen to be overbusy taking money 
 away from foolish millionaries. 
 
 Chester Hardy, on the other hand, added to Storrow s 
 perplexity by taking a view directly opposite to Torrie s. 
 He insisted that the younger man should be a spectator 
 of that bal costume. And if reason more substantial 
 than the mere quest of amusement induced Hardy to take 
 this stand he at least kept them to himself. He even 
 refused to accept Storrow s revived excuses about being 
 hard at work laying out his North Woods novel. Nor 
 did the claim that it was already too late to have a costume 
 made prove as serviceable as it was intended. Hardy, in 
 fact, gave the Canadian a card to the wife of a tubercular 
 artist who, in that heyday of the dancing mania, con 
 siderably augmented the family income by maintaining 
 and renting out a fantastic wardrobe of apparel fashioned 
 for just such ends. So Storrow finally selected a Cap 
 tain Kidd costume, not because the sash and wig and 
 loose-topped Wellington boots appealed to him, but be 
 cause the clothing in question happened to fit his some 
 what brawny frame. 
 
 It was almost midnight when Hardy and his companion 
 made their way to Washington Square in a taxicab. 
 Along the shabbiest side of that Square Storrow beheld a 
 line of landaulets and sedans and limousines which im 
 pressed him even more than a heterogeneous and singing
 
 no THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 band which was arriving on foot from Greenwich Vil 
 lage. Storrow lost Hardy in the crowd on the narrow 
 stairway strung with Chinese lanterns, which smelt of 
 fur and scented talcum and perspiration. Already, over 
 the crowding heads of Columbines and Mandarins and 
 Marie Antoinettes and Indian Chiefs and Geisha Girls 
 and Jack Tars and Arabs in flowing burnouses, sounded 
 the strains of an orchestra pounding out " rag-time " 
 music. 
 
 "Pipe the Howard Pyle poster!" cried an artist-girl 
 in velveteens to her Cave-Man companion with a leopard- 
 skin draped over his shoulder, as she laughed openly into 
 Storrow s slightly abashed eyes. 
 
 "Get on to the Otto Cushing guy!" proclaimed still 
 another girl as she laughed back at Storrow from the 
 upper stairway. And Storrow began to feel that his 
 costume was a foolish one. 
 
 At the stair-head he found a short and somewhat 
 rotund man in pink " fleshings " and a pale blonde wig, 
 with a gilded Cupid s bow on his arm, riotously receiv 
 ing his equally riotous guests, most of whom accosted 
 him as " Brownie." And the still solemn-eyed Canadian 
 found it hard to believe that this undignified figure was 
 the Browning Tell who could claim at least three can 
 vases in the Metropolitan and could behold his name week 
 by week on the art-pages of the Sunday papers. But 
 Storrow found himself elbowed and shouldered on into 
 a jungle of palm and evergreen and more Chinese lan 
 terns, where on a large but crowded floor the dancing was 
 already taking place. Beyond this again was another 
 room duly labelled the " Grabeteria," where ices were 
 served by three somewhat startling young dccolletcs, 
 and sandwiches and bouillon jelly were laid out on an im 
 provised buffet beside three huge barrels of beer mounted 
 on wooden horses. In the centre of the room was a 
 punch-bowl as big as a wash-tub, about which the thirsty 
 dancers were already crowding in noisy and ever-shifting
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE ill 
 
 rows as high-coloured as the rings of Saturn. Already, 
 too, the air was blue with cigarette-smoke, and heavy 
 with the odour of the liquid from the dripping barrel- 
 spigots, of the spilled punch, of floor-dust mingling with 
 axillary exhalations. But never for a moment did the 
 din and music stop. 
 
 On the floor above, where a hurdy-gurdy had been 
 hoisted through a front window, Storrow found the 
 dancing to be even more energetic and the spirit of good- 
 fellowship even more elastic. In little man-made bowers 
 along one wall were murmuring couples, unashamed of 
 both their silences and their caresses. On an open cor 
 ner of the floor a padded policeman was giving an ex 
 hibition of the Matiche with a dimpled little convict in 
 stripes who held a papier-mache ball-and-chain in her 
 hand as she danced. When the music stopped there was 
 a tidal wave towards the beer and the punch-bowl, a 
 stream of colour and movement, of tinsel and metal and 
 feather and rice-powdered flesh so vari-coloured that it 
 tended to make the eyes ache. Then the hurdy-gurdy 
 struck up above the orchestra on the floor below, the ebb 
 tide became a flood-tide, and this time the interpolated 
 attraction was a Palette Dance given by two lean and 
 swarthy models from " The Village." These acrobatic 
 and lightly-garbed ladies were attended by two naked 
 negro-boys with clout-cloths about their loins and In 
 dian war-bonnets on their heads, each carrying a spear 
 improvised from a curtain-pole. The Palette Dance was 
 followed by a Dance of the Seven Pails, which proved 
 even more popular than its predecessor but impressed 
 Storrow as being over-lewd in its grotesqueries, prompt 
 ing him to drift on to other fields. As he moved away 
 a satin slipper, apparently tossed through the air from 
 nowhere, struck the abashed young Captain Kidd on the 
 shoulder. He heard muffled laughter from a darkened 
 arbour and a white hand was thrust through the screen 
 ing leafage to take possession of his cape. But he eluded
 
 112 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 those appropriating fingers and drifted down-stairs again, 
 where he found himself more ill-at-ease than ever. 
 
 "Hello, Apollo, why aren t you dancing?" demanded 
 a half-clad nymph in a cheese-cloth tunic spangled with 
 silver, interrupting Storrow in the midst of his morose 
 wandering about. 
 
 " I don t know how," acknowledged Storrow, arrested 
 by the high and silvery-sweet tones of her excited young 
 voice. 
 
 " But there s no reason you can t learn," declared the 
 girl, capturing him by the edge of his costume. He con 
 cluded from that airy and almost sexless immediacy of 
 address, that she was an artist s model. 
 
 " In one night? " he asked. 
 
 " In ten minutes," retorted the girl, drawing him 
 closer. " Look let me show you." 
 
 It was a time when syncopated music and dance-move 
 ments of African origin were at the height of popular 
 favour. There was little that was complex in either the 
 movements or the music, and Storrow surrendered easily 
 enough to that twin appeal of rhythm and sound. 
 
 " Try that again," commanded the wisp of a girl so 
 adroitly manoeuvring him about the floor. " And hold 
 me closer, kid! I m not gun-cotton, you know. That s 
 better. Now put some pep into it ! " 
 
 It was not easy, at first. But the crowding bodies 
 about him masked his mistakes and he was able to master 
 a number of the steps. It surprised him, as he became 
 more expert, to find his earlier repugnance at the spectacle 
 passing away, just as his earlier repugnance for the half- 
 draped girl herself had disappeared. He liked the con 
 tact of that firm young body against his. He liked the 
 harmony of movement in their limbs, the pulse of the 
 music, the utter abandonment to motion constituting an 
 end in itself. Hardy hadn t been so far wrong. Danc 
 ing, after all, was what kept the world young. Children 
 danced, waves danced, even the leaves of the trees danced.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 113 
 
 So why shouldn t men and women? And Storrow, be 
 coming more adept in those rudimentary movements, no 
 longer allowed his partner to guide him, but putting out 
 a strength which easily over-matched hers, fell to pilot 
 ing the girl in the silver tunic as he felt she ought to be 
 piloted. 
 
 " Gee, that s great! " she murmured, surrendering con 
 tentedly to his mastery. She relaxed in his clasp, becom 
 ing almost passive, permitting him to lift her clear of 
 the floor in certain of their more ecstatic whirlings. 
 
 " You ll make some little dancer, kid, after a night or 
 two of this," panted his partner, with a little squeeze of 
 appreciation as they came to a stop when the music ceased. 
 They were both thirsty, so they made their way arm in 
 arm to the punch-bowl, into which their host was putting 
 fresh strawberries and another bottle of cognac. 
 
 " Give it a kick, Brownie," cried the girl on Storrow s 
 arm as she watched the last of the brandy flow out of the 
 bottle. And the kick was there, Storrow felt, as he drank 
 his second glass of that beguiling concoction, so deceiv 
 ingly chilled and sweetened. The music started up again, 
 provocative, challenging, almost mystic in its aboriginal 
 monotony of beat. He had been living too long, he felt, 
 on the north side of life. 
 
 " I m next here," announced a fuller-toned voice, and 
 a girl with laughing eyes caught Storrow by the arm. 
 
 It was Pannie Atwill. She had been a trained stage 
 dancer and she moved with a quiet and moderated grace 
 which Storrow found easy to follow. The opposition of 
 limbs to limbs, in her case, was more impersonal. Her 
 mind seemed intent on movement alone. Storrow was 
 even conscious of the fact that at the moment he meant 
 nothing to her, beyond being the instrument through 
 which she achieved her deliberated end. It was plain 
 that she preferred dancing, and dancing well, to being 
 mauled. And it began to dawn on Storrow that there 
 was a delight above the carnal delight of physical contact
 
 n 4 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 in such things, that there was the aesthetic pleasure of 
 harmonious sound and step in these preordained move 
 ments about a polished floor. 
 
 " There s that souse Donnie Eastman," the dancing 
 girl said without a break in her steps. " Don t let him 
 get near me. . . . You re not so rotten as I thought you d 
 be. ... But don t walk on the dame, please, just because 
 she s so pie-eyed she has to go down. . . . Now bunt 
 through and get away from the Eastman gink until the 
 music starts again. . . . And go light on that punch or 
 believe me, you ll have a head like a Zep before morn 
 ing!" 
 
 Towards the end of their second dance together Pan- 
 nie Atwill had become both more silent and more serious 
 of mien. 
 
 " Let s beat it up to the roof," she suggested, starting 
 for the open without even waiting for his answer. 
 There, in the darkness, they stumbled upon an occasional 
 couple huddled together. From deeper shadows glowed 
 the tips of lighted cigarettes, and now and then a laughing 
 gasp, or a muffled scream of protest, rose through the 
 gloom. Why it impressed Storrow as being slightly 
 Babylonian he did not stop to question. But he was 
 grateful for the fresh air and the star-strewn spaces 
 above him. 
 
 " I want to talk to you," announced the girl as she made 
 room for Storrow on a coping-tile. That, apparently, 
 was the closest they could get to seclusion. 
 
 "About what?" asked the other, wondering why the 
 quietness about him should become so suddenly oppres 
 sive. 
 
 " About Torrie," was Fannie Atwill s altogether un 
 expected answer, as she fumbled about her stocking-top 
 for what proved to be a small silver box. " She s a 
 good friend of mine, that girl, and I don t want to see 
 her foot slip when she s got the chance of a life-time 
 waiting for her."
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 115 
 
 "What do you mean by her foot slip?" demanded 
 Storrow, warm and cold at one and the same time. 
 
 Pannie did not explain that phrase. Instead, she deftly 
 struck a match on her slipper-heel and lighted a ciga 
 rette. 
 
 " Torrie s not like my bunch," she continued after 
 slowly exhaling this smoke. " She takes things too 
 serious. She s got a heart as big as a moving-van, and 
 unless it s handled right it s going to get hurt. Just now 
 she s got the chance of a lifetime to make a hit with 
 Krassler. 
 
 "With Krassler?" echoed Storrow. 
 
 " Yes, if she ll only stick her head in the yoke and let 
 that kike drive her the way she otta be driven, he ll make 
 her into an actress and have her name in electrics inside 
 of a second season. He s pawing the stall-planks to do 
 it. And he can do it. But there s just one thing stand 
 ing between Torrie and her chance." 
 
 "What s that?" asked the man in the Captain Kidd 
 make-up. 
 
 " It s you," retorted the other, and before he could 
 break in with the protest his lips were framing she swept 
 on. " You know as well as I do that Torrie s foolish 
 about you. And I know her better than I do you, and I 
 know she s too big to be broken up for nothing." 
 
 " Perhaps," Storrow said with a not altogether suc 
 cessful attempt at dignity, " if you knew me better you d 
 not foresee that catastrophe quite so imminent ! " 
 
 " That s what I want to get at," explained the girl, 
 involved in perplexities which were apparently new to 
 her. " A woman as lovely as Torrie Throssel can t go 
 around loose in a rabbit-run like New York without hav 
 ing enough pop-eyed chasers at her heels to turn her 
 head, if she wanted it turned. But Torrie isn t built that 
 way. She s always preferred travelling light and travel 
 ling alone. She s never looked twice at a man, as long 
 as I ve known her at least not until she bumped into
 
 ii6 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 you and lost her bearings. Oh, there s no use humping 
 and edging away and getting up-stage over what I m 
 saying to you. I know what I know. And it s consider 
 able. But the real thing I want to know is, what re 
 you going to do about it?" 
 
 The effrontery of that demand rather took Storrow s 
 breath away. 
 
 " Isn t that something entirely between Torrie and 
 me? " he asked much more calmly than he had expected. 
 
 The girl beside him took another deep inhalation of 
 cigarette-smoke. Then she laughed a little. 
 
 " If I thought you were good enough for Torrie, or 
 if she was a girl who could take her own part in a thing 
 like this, I d most certainly say yes. But you ve got to 
 show me! " 
 
 It was Storrow s turn to laugh, a barricading but by 
 no means happy laugh. 
 
 " What particular form must that demonstration 
 take?" he demanded. 
 
 He was conscious of the girl s face being turned closer 
 to his in the darkness. 
 
 " It ought to look like what any white man would do 
 under the circumstances," she coolly and quietly averred. 
 She stopped him, the next moment, as he was about to 
 speak. " Man to man," she said, with her hand on his 
 arm, " and straight out, do you honestly care for that 
 girl?" 
 
 "And if I don t?" parried Storrow, resenting that 
 his reserves of life should be thus trespassed over and 
 trampled upon. 
 
 The girl slipped down off the coping-tiles. As she 
 did so she threw away her cigarette-end and sighed 
 audibly. "If you don t, you ought to break away and 
 amuse yourself with one of that bunch downstairs. It 
 would seem more like a square game! " 
 
 "And if I do care?" ventured Storrow. His com-
 
 THE NVINE OF LIFE 117 
 
 panion paused at the stair-head, arrested by the solemnity 
 of his voice. 
 
 " Oh, in that case," she retorted with an effort at 
 lightness, " I guess I m merely butting into somebody 
 else s business. But I ve said my little say, and here s 
 where I drop out." 
 
 She slipped down the narrow stairway into the sea of 
 light and sound and movement. She was lost in the 
 crowd by the time he had followed after her, abstracted- 
 eyed, for he had much to think over. He circled about, 
 aimlessly, to the door of a dimly-lighted cloak-room when 
 he was arrested by a hand on his. 
 
 " Honey-boy," murmured the voice in the uncertain 
 light. Storrow turned and looked at a velvety-skinned 
 Lady Pompadour with a painted ivory fan and a rope of 
 pearls about her powdered plump throat. 
 
 "What is it?" he coldly inquired. 
 
 "Can t you stay and amuse me?" she deliberately 
 challenged, struggling a little over the sibilants. 
 
 Storrow stared down at her as she laughed her foolish 
 laugh. Then he meditatively responded to the tug at his 
 sash and sat beside her. He continued to stare at the 
 soft lines of the matronly bosom, at the white and fastid 
 ious-looking fingers heavy with rings, at the swollen and 
 slightly parted lips. He even laughed, impersonally, 
 when she pulled the heavy wig from his head and pushed 
 her unsteady fingers through the mat of his hair. Al 
 ready his reactions to such things were no longer the 
 vivid and acute mental experiences they might have been 
 a few short months ago. He was more directly occupied, 
 in fact, in thinking of what Pannie Atwill had been saying 
 to him. When the woman at his side drew his passive 
 face close to hers he stared into the unnaturally dilated 
 pupils with an impersonal mild pity which she apparently 
 misinterpreted for amorous response. For the next mo 
 ment her plump bare arms were about him, encompassing
 
 ii8 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 him in a smothering clasp which it took an effort to 
 escape from. Her winey pantings, by this time, had be 
 come odious as well as odorous, and he held her at arm s 
 length, staring shamefacedly at the blowzy mouth and 
 the unsteady eyes which were beyond the fathom-line of 
 words. Dazed by that movement of repudiation, she 
 stared back at him, momentarily sobered. Then, seeming 
 at last to comprehend the contempt on his face, she made 
 the ghost of an effort towards drawing herself up, with 
 dignity. But she was flot sure of her equilibrium and 
 she staggered as she rose to her feet. Before she had re 
 covered her balance he escaped and turned and strode from 
 the room. 
 
 Several weeks later he found out that she was the 
 wife of a well-known architect, a man of position and 
 wealth. She seemed decorous enough in her black fox 
 furs as she stepped into a limousine, after a Fritz- 
 Kreisler recital at yEolian Hall. Their eyes met as 
 the car circled away. He could not tell, from her ex 
 pression, whether or not she had remembered his face. 
 But he wondered, in his bewilderment, which of those 
 two sides was her true side. The problem, however, was 
 less disturbing to him than it might have proved even 
 two months earlier in his career. 
 
 Storrow made his way back to the punch-bowl, more 
 disturbed by that malodorous small incident than he cared 
 to admit even to himself. It seemed to throw him out of 
 key with his surroundings and he felt the need of the 
 warming fluid in the huge cut-glass bowl to wash the 
 chill of the thing out of his body. He found himself 
 possessed of a vague disquiet and an equally vague dis 
 trust of the influences which the city had brought to bear 
 upon him. Nor was this diminished by the memory of 
 what Pannie Atwill had been saying to him. Yet when 
 he thought of Torrie Throssel he thought of her as he 
 had last seen her through the open door of her studio, 
 protesting that she would have to stay at home to study
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 119 
 
 her part and finish up her sewing. The thought of her 
 bent over that sewing, needle in hand, seemed as in 
 congruous as it was appealing. It was a new phase of 
 her character to which he had given little thought. Yet 
 it was something on which he found it not unpleasant to 
 dwell, until, by way of contrast, he stared about at the 
 company of which he found himself a member. He be 
 came conscious of the parade of flesh in half-costumed 
 models and bobbed-hair girl-artists with insurrectory eyes 
 and voices made loud by wine. The earlier freedom of 
 intercourse which had seemed so like sexlessness to him 
 was now not quite so innocent of aspect. There was 
 more abandon in the dancing, a frank and somewhat 
 dishevelled surrender to voluptuousness that was even 
 more marked in the tired and sprawling groups in the 
 half -lighted alcoves. The women who had appeared so 
 rose-like in their loveliness, earlier in the evening, now 
 seemed to carry a taint of lewdness. Their hair was 
 untidy and their costumes stained. Undeniably, too, they 
 smelt of perspiration which the musky aroma of their 
 deodorants failed to dissemble. And even the most girl 
 ish of the women began to look old, drained of their vital 
 young forces by those Bacchanalian hours where the 
 spirit of Carnival finally balanced her ledger, exacting 
 hostess that she is, and demanded final payment for 
 excess. Loosening and levitating as that atmosphere 
 was, with its negroid music and its noisy camaraderie, 
 Storrow was still insufficiently touched by its spirit to 
 overlook its laboured and strident lightheartedness. It 
 had the trick, when the music stopped, of flattening out 
 into over-coloured uglinesses. The joy that it harboured 
 had to be kept spinning, as a top is kept spinning, or it 
 tumbled heavily and lay inert along its dusty floors. 
 Storrow found himself asking if this was the New York 
 he had come in quest of, and if these were the illustrious 
 from whose lips he had once hoped to drink wisdom. 
 Almost as if in answer to that question he found him-
 
 120 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 self confronted by Chester Hardy with a regal-looking 
 woman on his arm. 
 
 Storrow, will you guard Miss Klennert from this 
 army of outlaws until I find her chauffeur for her? " 
 
 Storrow recognized the Broadway star, as she held out 
 her hand to him. from the familiar enough pictures in 
 the magazines. She complained, in a surprisingly full 
 and throaty voice, of being a little tired of the crowd and 
 noise. 
 
 " The Anglo-Saxon can t quite get away with it, can 
 he?" remarked Hardy, lingering for a moment to view 
 the multi-coloured mass of merrymakers about them. 
 
 " It seems to need a touch of the Latin," assented Miss 
 Klennert. 
 
 " I was wondering," observed Storrow, " if it wasn t 
 because they worked so hard that they found it necessary 
 to play so hard." 
 
 " Wait until the side-show starts," called back the de 
 parting Hardy. 
 
 " You re right in a way," said the Broadway star, turn 
 ing to Storrow. " But I m afraid they re not all work 
 ers. Donnie Eastman, I m sure, never worked at any 
 thing but enjoying life though that, I suppose, soon 
 becomes as onerous an undertaking as any man can face. 
 And these girls, for instance, seem to be the Greenwich 
 Village product, who try to give you Murger and Mont- 
 mart re with American trimmings. But to me it s always 
 terribly like the Cammerbcrt that comes from the Con 
 necticut creameries. The note seems forced. They 
 make ready for it too deliberately and work over it too 
 hard. It isn t a romp, you ll notice, a romp which young 
 people have suddenly decided upon. It s something as 
 carefully planned and staged as a theatrical production. 
 And there are too many oldish men about to let it keep 
 its air of innocence, even if it began with one. I could 
 even stand Brownie s Sodom-and-Gomorrah atmosphere, 
 for that merely affects one s morals, but I can t stand
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 121 
 
 air like this, for smoke affects my throat, and that s what 
 I have to make my living with." 
 
 " It s new to me, of course," admitted Storrow, " but 
 I can t help comparing it with the Tea Dance and the 
 Sun Dance of the Indians I ve been living with up in my 
 own country. There s more dignity in the Indian affair, 
 I think, and also more ecstasy. And with the Indian it 
 isn t an end in itself. It s ceremonial ; it stands for 
 something. On the whole, I d say this was the more 
 barbaric of the two." 
 
 He found himself being inspected by a pair of shrewd 
 eyes absinthe-green in colour. 
 
 " Of course it s barbaric," acknowledged the woman 
 at his side. " That s why it has swept this city off its 
 feet. It s tarantism, and tarantism spreads like any other 
 epidemic. But it s not worth worrying over too much, 
 I suppose, for the thing will work its own cure. It has 
 to, or where will we all end up? " 
 
 " It has the trick of getting into your blood, all right," 
 protested Storrow, edging away from what seemed like 
 useless philosophying. 
 
 " What has? " He could feel the disdainful absinthe- 
 green eyes once more judicially inspecting his person. 
 
 " The being keyed up to carnival pitch, even if it is 
 helped along by the punch-bowl." 
 
 " Since you have mentioned the punch-bowl," an 
 nounced the cool-eyed woman beside Storrow, " look at 
 the girl opposite us here, trying to dance with that man 
 with the leopard-skin over his shoulder. I don t like 
 women when they re drunk. I don t even like to see 
 them. It still gives me a shock, the same as as that 
 doddering old skeleton in the Beau Brummel get-up." 
 
 Storrow followed the line of her vision and stared 
 at the arresting enough figure which had just entered the 
 room. 
 
 That s Modrynski," he said, with a vague sense of 
 chilliness in his bones.
 
 122 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " I know it," admitted the wistful-eyed woman, " and 
 I imagine there s a moral in him if you cared to find it." 
 
 More eyes than Storrow s stared at Modrynski as he 
 made his entrance into the room. He carried a shep 
 herd s crook tied with dangling white ribbon, and was 
 dressed in cream-coloured knee-breeches, a satin tunic 
 with lace at the cuffs and neck, a brocaded waistcoat, silk 
 stockings, and very pointed pumps with silver buckles. 
 A heavily powdered periwig ornamented his bald head 
 and on one flaccid cheek a beauty-patch had been pasted. 
 He seemed to realize that he was the momentary target 
 of that company s attention, for he made an effort to 
 enter the room jauntily, with his head high and his thumb 
 and forefinger daintily touching, as though in the act of 
 dispensing a pinch of snuff. But a slight palsy shook the 
 fastidiously poised hand. The decrepid legs in the shim 
 mering silk stockings were without spring. 
 
 The woman beside Storrow stirred uneasily. 
 
 " He makes me think of a Watteau fan that s been 
 used as a fly-swatter," she meditatively observed. Then 
 she added, almost with a shudder, " And there are the 
 flies, still clustering about him ! " 
 
 To the equally meditative Storrow he seemed like a 
 figure of Father Time, with a Follies-Berg ere crook in 
 stead of the scythe of the .Reaper. But he seemed well 
 enough known to the rest of the room, especially the 
 younger girls in the more audacious costumes, for they 
 were clustering about the senile old figure, chippering 
 like sparrows, demanding him as a partner. He picked 
 out a plump young brunette and danced with her. But 
 the too rapid movements of those too modern dances 
 were over-much for him. He had to come to a stop, 
 breathing wheezily through his blue-nostrilled nose, lean 
 ing a little on his uproariously laughing partner, who kept 
 possession of him against all rivals and finally piloted 
 him in the direction of the punch-bowl. There Storrow 
 stood watching the withered figure in lace and ruffles,
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 123 
 
 with a circle of petticoated youth crowding about his 
 palsied uplifted fingers as he drank. 
 
 " I wonder if you get what I mean? " asked the woman 
 at Storrow s side, out of the silence which had fallen 
 over the two as they watched. 
 
 " I think I see the point," acknowledged Storrow, 
 catching sight of Hardy as he elbowed his way towards 
 them. The newcomer seemed to realize the object of 
 their attention. He too wheeled about and took a turn, 
 before carrying off the level-browed actress with the cool 
 green eyes, in inspecting Modrynski and the circle about 
 Modrynski. 
 
 " And think of the knowledge that was once packed 
 away in that poor old skull 1 " commented Hardy, as 
 much to himself as to the others. 
 
 " It makes you wonder if it s all worth while," ob 
 served the no longer youthful Miss Klennert as she gath 
 ered up her skirts. The movement was unconscious, 
 born of a life-long contention against dusty stage-wings. 
 
 " That Helen of his in the Louvre and those two 
 bronzes up in the Metropolitan ought to be answer enough 
 for that," was Hardy s reply. 
 
 "If that s what you judge him by! " 
 
 " That s the way we prefer to judge Poe and Villon 
 and Heine and half a hundred others." 
 
 " Yes," agreed the departing actress as she smiled 
 farewell to Storrow, " it s the sick oyster that seems to 
 make the perfect pearl, isn t it? " She turned again, to 
 give emphasis to her line, as though it were an exit-speech 
 on the stage. 
 
 Storrow was still standing there when Hardy returned 
 from the street-door. The latter, for a silent minute 
 or two, contemplated the busy scene before him. 
 
 "How does it impress you?" he finally asked of his 
 companion. 
 
 The younger man hesitated. " I d rather know what 
 you think about it," he parried, none too keen to be turned
 
 i2 4 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 about like a test-tube for the contemplation of purely per 
 sonal reactions. 
 
 " I don t think about it," retorted Hardy with a laugh. 
 " I prefer to jump into it and enjoy it." 
 
 " Then you do enjoy it? " 
 
 " Don t you?" 
 
 " Candidly, it strikes me as being a trifle unclean," 
 
 "A welter of sex?" prompted Hardy, with his mild 
 and impersonal eye on the younger man s face. 
 
 " If you care to put it that way," acknowledged Stor- 
 row. 
 
 " Well, that s what life is, really, when you look at it 
 with the lid off. And the lid seems to be off here ! " 
 
 They were jostled by a bevy of screaming girls pur 
 sued by a Mephistopheles in a red cloak much stained 
 with punch. 
 
 "Then I prefer life with the lid on!" Storrow an 
 nounced. 
 
 Hardy smiled. 
 
 " But isn t this a case of the artist hungering to get 
 earth under his feet, after a heap of soaring? Most of 
 those men are workers. They demand the right to re 
 lax, to play, to re-animalize themselves. And that strikes 
 me as a great deal for men to accomplish. Then there s 
 another point you run the danger of overlooking. If 
 you re nursing the artist s hunger for a genuine under 
 standing of the human soul, you can t afford to inspect 
 it only in its edifying aspects, when it has its company 
 manners on. If truth is what you re after, you ve got to 
 see it all, good and bad, and at the same time keep your 
 balance. Our disapproval has nothing to do with the 
 thing as a spectacle. This is society in the undress, the 
 Freudian wish with its mask off, the libido which even 
 you sculptors and painters have been compelled to rec 
 ognize. If you want to understand the human figure, 
 you have to study it in the nude. In the same way, if 
 you want to understand the human soul, you ve got to
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 125 
 
 study it in the undress. The only point that s important 
 is not to lose your viewpoint as well, I might almost 
 say, as a scholar and a gentleman. That allows you to 
 organize what you observe, and also what you experi 
 ence." 
 
 Storrow, turning those words over in his own mind, 
 felt their wisdom. Yet it was a wisdom with a sting in 
 it. Hardy was preaching at him. 
 
 " And there s one other thing I want to mention, while 
 we re still so tangled up with the orders of the day," the 
 older man went on. " Whatever does happen, don t let 
 it interfere with your work. Put your work first, and 
 keep it first. For the bigger the artist, you ll find, the 
 more he ll insist on I was going to say, on that selfish 
 ness, but it would be better to say, on that scheme of 
 sel f -preservation. 
 
 Pannie Atwill, passing at that moment, lightheartedly 
 threw a kiss from her clustered finger-tips to the thought 
 ful-eyed Captain Kidd. But that scourge of the high 
 seas did not seem to see the movement.
 
 CHAPTER TEN 
 
 STORROW went home, but not to sleep. As he 
 mounted the gloomy stairways that led to his 
 studio he stopped suddenly, sniffing in the dark 
 ness. There was an unmistakable smell of gas about 
 the building. That was one of the drawbacks, he men 
 tally remarked, in living in those ramshackle old ruins. 
 There was always the promise of defective plumbing, the 
 evidence of repairs deferred. And somewhere, without 
 a doubt, a pipe-joint had sprung a leak. 
 
 Once inside his studio, he crossed to the corner of the 
 room where a panelled clothes-horse, covered with 
 painted burlap, shut off from general view the kitchenette 
 which held his small gas-stove. He switched on the light 
 and examined this stove carefully, to make sure the leak 
 was not within his own territory. There, however, he 
 found nothing wrong. The air within the studio, in 
 fact, was quite untainted. 
 
 Frowning, he advanced towards the oblong of tapestry 
 on his wall. He threw back the imitation Gobelin and 
 sniffed along the doorcracks. This, however, did not 
 satisfy him. Without giving actual thought to the move 
 ment he slipped back the metal bolt and tried the door. 
 
 His first surprise came with the fact that it opened. 
 His second surprise lay in the discovery that the lights 
 were on in Torrie Throssel s studio. And his third sur 
 prise took the form of Torrie Throssel herself, standing 
 within three feet of him. She was wearing a man s 
 bath-robe, which was much too big for her, doubled about 
 her waist and held in by a girdle of plaited silk. Her 
 preoccupied face, he noticed, was almost colourless. The 
 
 126
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 127 
 
 studio behind her, he also noticed, impressed him as be 
 ing over-lavish in its decorations, almost theatrical in its 
 studiously achieved Orientalism. 
 
 " I ve been waiting for you," she said, very quietly, 
 and with a smile of slow constraint that was new to 
 her. 
 
 More than ever before, as he stood staring at her, he 
 was conscious of her appeal. But the preoccupation on 
 her face disturbed him. 
 
 "Is anything wrong?" he asked, slowly moving 
 through the open door. If that portal had once taken on 
 to him the significance of a Rubicon, he seemed to have 
 forgotten the fact. 
 
 " I m worried," the girl told him. She lifted one 
 shoulder, deprecatingly. " It may be foolish, but I can t 
 get the thing out of my head." 
 
 "What thing?" asked Storrow. She lifted a hand 
 as though to touch his arm, or to grope to him, if not 
 for support at least for personal contact. But to his dis 
 appointment she changed her mind and drew the hand 
 away again. 
 
 " There s been a smell of gas coming from young 
 Muselli s studio," he heard her saying. A selfish wave 
 of relief flowed through him as he listened. " And I m 
 
 I m afraid something may have happened." 
 "What could happen?" demanded Storrow. 
 
 That s what we ought to find out," she replied. 
 
 " Then you know him? " Storrow asked, the prey of a 
 quick and incongruous pang of jealousy, vaguely unhappy 
 at the recurring thought of how wide was the undefined 
 circle of her acquaintances. 
 
 " No," she explained. " But I ve noticed him at differ 
 ent times. He looked worried and struck me as being 
 
 as being in trouble in some way. And I know that he 
 was fond of those two canaries of his. That s the one 
 thing that made me wait up for you." 
 
 " Canaries? " echoed Storrow.
 
 128 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " Some time tonight he put his canary-cage outside his 
 door, before locking it." 
 
 It still struck Storrow as being slightly ridiculous. 
 And he was thinking more of the misty violet eyes in the 
 side-light and the misty rose of the grave lips than he 
 was of Muselli and his canary-cage. 
 
 " So that s the reason you waited up for me ! " he said, 
 slowly propelled towards her by a power which seemed to 
 lie beyond the realm of his own will. He could wonder 
 at that power, even as it gripped him, making him feel 
 that this body of his was still an embryo in reason but 
 centuries old in emotion, little more than a passive river 
 bed through which coursed the currents of undecipher 
 able ancestral tendencies. 
 
 She must have read his intention on his face, for she 
 lifted her two hands and held them against his shoulders, 
 as though to arrest his advance. 
 
 " Not now," she said in a whisper that had a quaver 
 of emotion in it. 
 
 " But I ve been thinking of you all night," he whis 
 pered back. 
 
 She took a deep breath. 
 
 " And I have been thinking of you," she admitted, 
 almost unhappily. " I m always thinking of you. I 
 can t help it." 
 
 He stood staring at her, with a rush of all the blood 
 in his body to his heart. He wondered why, at a mo 
 ment so inapposite, her loveliness should beleaguer him, 
 why she should seem so essentially Woman, in the volu 
 minous rough garment that left her so doe-soft in its 
 loose and rugged folds. And the tinder of his longing 
 had already caught fire from the small torch of her con 
 fession. 
 
 " We re both fighting against something that s too 
 strong for us," he protested, almost unconscious of what 
 he was saying. 
 
 " I know it," murmured the woman in the bath-robe
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 129 
 
 as rough-textured as a fellah s garment. Her head 
 bowed, not in shame, but more in submission to the in 
 evitable. She seemed anxious to avoid his eyes. But 
 the man beside her slowly lifted her face. Then with 
 a movement that seemed equally deliberate he drew her 
 towards him. Her breath caught, sharply, as he stooped 
 and kissed her in the warm hollow of the milk-white 
 throat. Then his arms closed about the muffled body and 
 on her upturned lips his awn lips closed. He remem 
 bered Modrynski. He remembered Vibbard. He 
 thought of Chester Hardy, and he had not altogether 
 forgotten Pannie Atwill. But they seemed figures in 
 finitely remote, crying in thin and faraway voices that 
 meant nothing to him. 
 
 " Beloved ! " murmured the warmer voice against his 
 face. She spoke drowsily, out of a contentment so com 
 plete it seemed wordless. And there was aggression, 
 he noticed, in her sudden passiveness itself. It seemed 
 to demand mastery and subjugation. It evoked an 
 cestral savageries from straining arms that seemed al 
 ready cruel in their unconsidering strength. 
 
 " Beloved," he repeated, bending back her body in 
 that sudden impulse of appropriation until she was com 
 pelled to cling to him to keep from falling. 
 
 He stared at her, like a sleeper awakening, when she 
 suddenly stiffened in his arms. She was trying to twist 
 away from him, white and wide-eyed. 
 
 "What is it?" he asked. 
 
 "That man," she gasped. "We ve forgotten him! 
 We don t know what might have happened! " 
 
 He reached for a chair-back, to steady himself. It 
 took time to throw a bridge of thought across a gulf so 
 wide. 
 
 " What could happen ? " he asked. Yet each of them 
 knew, as their eyes met, what the other was thinking. 
 
 " I couldn t get any answer when I knocked," she ex 
 plained, following him as he started towards the door.
 
 i 3 o THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 He stopped only for a moment, to pull off what remained 
 of his ridiculous costume. Then he went out to the 
 hall. 
 
 He found the smell of gas very strong there. He was 
 suddenly impressed by the tomb-like quietness of the 
 building. Torrie kept one hand on his arm as he made 
 his way towards Muselli s door. Beside this door he 
 saw a bird-cage. One of the canaries twittered sleepily, 
 disturbed, apparently, by movement so close to it. 
 
 Storrow lifted the cage away and dropped to his hands 
 and knees. Then he sniffed along the bottom of the 
 door. The smell of gas was stronger than ever there. 
 His face was grave as he looked up at the girl in the 
 bath-robe. Mechanically he tried the door and found it 
 locked. Then he backed slowly away, facing it. 
 
 "What are you going to do?" asked Torrie in a 
 whisper. The quietness of the empty halls seemed more 
 oppressive than ever. 
 
 " I m going to break in that door," he told her. " You 
 mustn t come in, remember." 
 
 Before she could reply to that question he flung himself 
 full force against the locked door. The impact of his 
 bony shoulder against the antique panelling sent it in with 
 a crash, splintering the lock away from the woodwork. 
 Storrow peered in through the darkness, but could make 
 nothing out. 
 
 " Do you want matches ? " whispered Torrie behind 
 him. He turned on her sharply. 
 
 " Matches? And blow the house up? " he demanded. 
 
 "Well, what shall I do?" she whisperingly inquired. 
 
 " Go back to your room and wait for me. Go back, 
 or you may be sorry." 
 
 Holding his breath against the poisoned air, he groped 
 his way in through the door and across the room to a 
 window, which he found closed and locked. It took him 
 some time to get it open. When he did so he was glad 
 to lean out over the sill, for a minute or two, and fill his
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 131 
 
 lungs with fresh air. Then, feeling the night-breeze 
 bellow cleansingly into the room, he crossed to the door 
 way and padded along the wall, groping for the light- 
 switch which should be there. He found it at last and 
 pressed his finger against the smooth-faced button. 
 
 He stood there, still half-turned towards the wall, star 
 ing over his shoulder. On the floor, between him and a 
 couch-bed against the farther wall, he saw the figure of 
 a young man lying on its face. On the disordered bed 
 he saw a woman, partly dressed. She, too, was young. 
 Her mouth was open and her eyes were staring, staring 
 in such a manner that for a moment Storrow thought she 
 was still alive. 
 
 Storrow felt the need of fresh air again, and he stood 
 at the open window for several seconds before turning 
 off a gas-jet connected with a hot-plate rubber-tube from 
 which poison was still hissing. Then he crossed to the 
 figure on the floor and quietly turned it over. The body 
 was quite cold. Storrow knew, even before he put his 
 hand over the heart, that any movement there would be 
 out of the question. He had heard somewhere that a 
 dead body should never be touched, should never be 
 moved, until a coroner or a police officer had been called 
 in to inspect it. That struck Storrow as a very absurd 
 proceeding. The position of the man, prone there on the 
 unclean floor, also struck him as unnecessarily humiliat 
 ing. So he lifted the inert body, startlingly light to 
 carry, and placed it decently on the bed, covering it with 
 the sheet. He noticed, as he proceeded to do the same 
 with the woman, that the skin of her bare shoulder was 
 marble-cold to the touch. He noticed, too, that her face 
 was much more tranquil than the man s. And they both 
 struck him as being young, absurdly young, for any such 
 end. And it was the end. Everything had come to a 
 stop in those two passive and unprotesting frames. The 
 light had gone out in the skulls behind the white masks. 
 
 He turned away and looked more methodically about
 
 132 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 the room. On the table he found two letters, sealed. 
 He saw where newspapers had been wedged in the door- 
 cracks, even the key-holes stuffed. The entire thing, of 
 course, had been planned, had been deliberately carried 
 through. But the man, Storrow concluded, must at some 
 time have repented of his bargain, must have weakened 
 and made an effort to reach a window. Storrow, with a 
 leaden weight in the pit of his stomach, was able to 
 dramatize those last struggles. He even tried to im 
 agine that final conference together, pondering over the 
 problem of whether it was placid or frantic, cowardly or 
 courageous. It struck him as strange that under the 
 same roof where he lived, where he harboured his own 
 small hopes and fears and aims, this other man on the 
 bed had been just as intensely involved in the machinery 
 of life, had just as ardently asked for happiness. And 
 he, Owen Storrow, within a biscuit s toss of it all, had 
 known nothing about it. 
 
 He was backing slowly away from the bed when he 
 felt a hand on his arm. He found Torrie beside him, 
 her lips parted, her eyes narrowed with a curiosity which 
 she could not control. She seemed quite collected to him, 
 unnaturally collected, until he noticed the hand holding 
 the folds of the loose bath-robe over her bosom. The 
 fingers of that hand, he could see, were shaking. 
 
 " You mustn t come in here," he commanded. But 
 she disregarded that command. 
 
 " There are two of them," she whispered slowly, a 
 troubled wonder wrinkling her white brow. Step by 
 step she advanced towards the bed, as though impelled by 
 a force which she could not overmaster. There was 
 something so suggestive of somnambulism, of intense 
 preoccupation, in her movements that Storrow wondered 
 if this could be the first time she had stood face to face 
 with Death. Torrie was stooping, with her chin for 
 ward, as though peering through mist. Then she stood 
 up straight, still frowning.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 133 
 
 " That s Nona Maynelle," she whisperingly intoned, 
 drawing closer to Storrow with a movement that was 
 both wistful and unwilled, stricken with the sudden need 
 of companionship. But all the time her eyes were on 
 the bed. 
 
 " Did you know her? " asked Storrow. 
 
 " She was a model," was the abstracted reply, " but all 
 last season she was at the Winter Garden ! " 
 
 Storrow made no response to this. He had awakened 
 to the fact that they were wasting time over incidentals, 
 that something must be done, and done at once. He be 
 came almost impatient at the sustained impersonal curi 
 osity of the peering-eyed girl beside him. 
 
 " But are they dead?" she whispered with a small 
 wringing motion of the hands as imploratory as a prayer. 
 "Caw they be?" 
 
 " Hours ago," said Storrow with forced curtness of 
 tone. He noticed, in the ash-tray on the table where the 
 two letters lay, eight cigarette-stubs side by side. Stor 
 row 7 counted them. They must, he concluded, have been 
 very deliberate about it all. His curt retort to Torrie, 
 he next noticed, had stung her into an unlocked for and 
 sudden activity. She wrapped the loose robe closer about 
 her waist, retied the girdle, and crossed to the table. 
 There she took up the two letters, seemed to understand 
 at a glance what they were, and promptly thrust them 
 down into the huge pocket of her garment. 
 
 " We must telephone for the police," Storrow was 
 repeating as he watched her go to the hot-plate, bend over 
 it, and then carefully close the stop-cock at the lower end 
 of the rubber tube. Then she deliberately pulled the 
 upper end of the tubing from the gas-pipe where Storrow 
 had already shut off the flow. 
 
 "What are you doing?" he demanded. She was 
 staring, white-faced and thoughtful, about the disordered 
 room. He repeated the question before she seemed to 
 hear him.
 
 j 3 4 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " That makes it an accident," she said pointing towards 
 the dangling hot-plate tubing. 
 
 "An accident?" he repeated, not understanding her 
 intentions. 
 
 " I m not going to have this whole city pawing over 
 those poor kids," she tremulously but determinedly an 
 nounced. " They ve paid enough without going to a 
 Potter s Field. And they ve got families, somewhere; 
 they must have. It ll hurt enough to know they re 
 dead, without having people say they ve killed them 
 selves." 
 
 Storrow, staring at her, found strength in that face 
 in which he had once seen only beauty. 
 
 " But that isn t for us to decide," he argued, recalling 
 vague impressions as to the law that obtained in such 
 circumstances. 
 
 " We liave decided," she protested, almost sharply. 
 
 " But we haven t the right," he still continued. 
 
 " Then we ll take it," was her retort. She stood silent 
 a moment, after another quick survey of the room. "If 
 you were like that, wouldn t it seem the decent thing to 
 do? Wouldn t you be glad to know that somebody was 
 doing what they could to keep your name clean ? " 
 
 A vague and chilling sense of discomfort flowed 
 through Storrow s body as she put that challenge to him. 
 He failed to see that it would make any difference. And 
 he had no intention of ever being like that. But he 
 knew it was useless to argue with her. 
 
 " You can telephone from my room," she was saying 
 to him. " I ll put out the light and fix the door so it 
 will stay shut. And neither of us must forget that it 
 was an accident, remember, an accident!" 
 
 He did as she asked. It flashed through him, as he 
 sat waiting for his connection after calling up Police 
 Headquarters, that life was crowding closer about him 
 than he had anticipated. It was crowding about him 
 raw and undraped, with its beauty and ugliness tragically
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 135 
 
 tangled together. Already that night somebody had 
 sought to inform him that he was inspecting life with 
 the lid off. That had been in reference to the foolish and 
 fantastic spectacle of a fancy-dress ball, the occasion of 
 a band of mummers drinking and gyrating to jazz-band 
 music. But here, almost at his own door, was a very 
 different kind of life with the lid off, a life that chilled 
 the marrow and benumbed the mind instead of loosening 
 the tongue and tickling the toes with the tinklings of rag 
 time. 
 
 He strode through the door that still stood open be 
 tween the two studios. He pulled off the heavy-topped 
 boots, contemptuously, and reached for his slippers and 
 dressing-gown, glad of the warmth of that heavier gar 
 ment about him. It seemed a long time, he remembered, 
 since he had left that studio and gone lightheartedly down 
 to join Hardy in his waiting taxi-cab. It impressed him 
 as odd that utter strangers should have the power thus 
 to disturb him, even in their death. The city, he saw, 
 brought one s fellow-beings a little closer about one. 
 There was no escape from its tangled interplay of in 
 fluences. It was a tribal convention between eternal 
 rivalries. It was a melting-pot in which personal inde 
 pendence merged and flowed into a drab communal com 
 pound. He was one of a colony, and nothing more. 
 He was, in a way, at the mercy of his neighbours. They 
 were always to be reckoned with, for they had the power, 
 obviously, both of raising him up and casting him down. 
 And behind it all, apparently, was the demand to unify 
 and fulfil life, to clarify some far-off dream. 
 
 Storrow, as he thought this over, sat staring vacantly 
 at the wall before him. It was Torrie s voice that roused 
 him. 
 
 " Here s your policeman," she announced, almost re 
 provingly, from the doorway. 
 
 Storrow met the officer at the head of the stairs. It 
 was much simpler, after all, than he had expected. He
 
 136 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 explained how he had come in late, had smelled gas, had 
 traced it to this man Muselli s door, and had felt that 
 something might be wrong. He had thought it best, 
 when they couldn t get any answer to their knocks, to 
 break in the door. 
 
 " And this is what we found," explained Storrow as 
 he pushed back the broken panels, reached in, and 
 switched on the electric-light. The heavy blue-clad fig 
 ure crossed to the couch-bed. Storrow, who noticed for 
 the first time that Torrie stood close behind him, did not 
 follow. He stood there waiting until the officer came 
 outside again. 
 
 " They re dead, all right," he heavily and impersonally 
 remarked as he reached into his hip-pocket for a small 
 note-book. "Who are they?" he just as impersonally 
 demanded. 
 
 " I never knew them," Storrow told him. " I ve only 
 been in this building a few weeks." 
 
 "What s your name?" 
 
 Storrow gave it. 
 
 "What d you do when you forced that door?" was 
 the next question. Storrow could feel the hand of the 
 girl at his side reaching for his arm. 
 
 " I opened the window and then turned off the jet 
 where the gas was escaping." 
 
 "What next?" 
 
 It was Torrie who answered. 
 
 " We realized there d been an accident and called up 
 police headquarters," she explained in tones so cool that 
 Storrow stood abashed in his own awkwardness. The 
 officer looked up from his note-book, with a quick in 
 spection of the robe-clad figure clinging to Storrow s 
 arm. 
 
 " It was an accident then? " he asked. 
 
 "Doesn t it look like one to you?" questioned the 
 girl. 
 
 " Sure," he assented as his big fingers once more fell
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 137 
 
 to penciling on the little page. "We ll report it that, 
 anyway." 
 
 The rest of the explaining was done by Torrie. Stor- 
 row awakened to the fact that the big-shouldered officer 
 was not unconscious of her beauty. He stood more 
 ponderously attentive when she spoke. He waited with 
 taurine patience until she had explained what was already 
 obvious to him. He even showed his teeth in a grin of 
 sympathy when he said he supposed she d rather be in 
 bed at an hour like this. Then he turned to Storrow and 
 announced that the latter would be wanted at the precinct 
 station sometime during the next day. It was, he ex 
 plained as he tucked away his note-book, merely a matter 
 of form. He stopped, arrested by the gleam of a white 
 ankle as the girl beside Storrow drew the over-volumin 
 ous folds of her bath-robe together. 
 
 " This woman your wife?" he casually inquired. 
 
 Storrow for a moment seemed not to have heard the 
 question. Then he just as casually retorted, " Yes." 
 
 It was not until they were alone in the studio, with the 
 door closed behind them, that Storrow noticed the con 
 templative and almost perplexed look on Torrie s face. 
 
 " Why did you say that? " she asked him. 
 
 "What?" 
 
 " That I was your wife? " 
 
 " I wanted to protect you," he explained. 
 
 "From what?" 
 
 He found the question not an easy one to answer. He 
 floundered through a phrase or two about " intimacy of 
 attire " and " unusual hour for being together." But 
 speech trailed away from him before the brooding cold 
 ness of her glance. 
 
 " Isn t it rather late for that sort of thing? " she asked 
 him. As no answer came to that question she sat down, 
 huddled and small, with a short shiver of weariness run 
 ning through her body. Storrow noticed the heavy 
 shadows under her eyes.
 
 138 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " Are you tired ? " he asked, so gently that for a mo 
 ment she glanced up at him. 
 
 " It s not being tired," she said with a look over her 
 shoulder towards the door. " It s that awful room 
 and what s in it. I can t get the thought of it out of my 
 head." 
 
 " I know," he told her, comprehendingly. 
 
 " We d both be better with some of this," she said as 
 she opened a black-wooded cabinet, and filled two glasses 
 with brandy and seltzer. Storrow stood staring at it. 
 He had no stomach for more drink that night. 
 
 "Are you sure that door is locked? " asked the girl, 
 out of the silence. She watched him from under lowered 
 brows as he slowly crossed the room and reassured her 
 that the lock was on. They were trying to bar out, he 
 remembered, something which no wood and no metal 
 could keep away from them. He stared at the other 
 door, the communicating door between the two studios 
 that stood side by side. He saw that it was open. There 
 too, he felt, they had tried to bar out something which 
 was equally impervious to obstruction. The house was 
 very silent. They seemed suddenly as alone in the world 
 as though a hemlocked wilderness lay about them. They 
 seemed alone, yet all the while they kept thinking of that 
 ghostly company which the same roof covered and the 
 same walls harboured. 
 
 Storrow sat down in a high-backed wing-chair, with 
 that sobering thought of death heavy on his mind. Tor- 
 rie, without moving, watched him for a moment or two. 
 Then she slipped out of her chair and crossed listlessly 
 to where he sat. There she dropped to the rug at his 
 feet, with her arms falling over his knees. She twisted 
 her body, in a series of birdlike and nestling movements, 
 until she was comfortably placed. He rested a hand on 
 the dark mass of her hair, looking down at her bowed 
 head. Slowly she looked up at him as he fell to stroking 
 the heavy plaits.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 139 
 
 " I can t stay alone tonight," she said whisperingly as 
 her arms tightened about his knees. 
 
 He stared down at the shadowy face, questioningly. 
 
 " I can t," she repeated, with vehemence. " I can t 
 with those in there, so close to me! " 
 
 He nodded his comprehension. 
 
 " It must be almost morning," he said in a voice heavy 
 with fatigue. " Shouldn t you go to bed ? " 
 
 Her hands relaxed and she rose slowly to her feet. 
 " I suppose so," she said with a sigh. Languidly she 
 reached over and switched out the lights, leaving only 
 one small bulb half-hidden under the Ruskin-green arm 
 of a Hebe in bronze on the console table beside her. 
 Storrow in the half-light could see her untying the 
 knotted girdle about her waist. He heard the soft fall 
 of the bath- robe as she flung it across a chair-seat, the 
 faint whine of covered metal springs as she sank on the 
 low Russian bed of carved teak-wood. 
 
 He rose slowly as she called to him, raising on one 
 arm in the blue-green light so rich with shadows. 
 
 " By the way, there s a letter or something on the 
 table there for you. I almost forgot." 
 
 Storrow groped his way towards the table. 
 
 " How did it get here? " he asked. 
 
 " Somebody s chauffeur or coachman or thing-um-abob 
 brought it about an hour after you d left for Brownie 
 Tell s," was the casual-noted reply from the Russian 
 bed. " I heard them at your door and said I d deliver 
 it when you got back." 
 
 Storrow found the sealed envelope, partly covered by 
 an ash-tray, and opened it. He had to hold the tinted 
 page close to the small light under the Hebe s arm before 
 he could make it out. Then he saw that it was from 
 Charlotte Kirkner. 
 
 " Mother is not at all well," ran the note, " and is 
 anxious to see you. We ve had to give up all thought of 
 going South. Would it be too much to ask you to run
 
 HO THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 out tonight with Munsell? It may be important." 
 Storrow put the note back in its envelope and crossed 
 to the window. He stared out over the serrated skyline 
 of housetops where a faint grey in the sky showed the 
 earliest light of morning. The night was already over. 
 Storrow pushed the note down in his dressing-gown 
 pocket. 
 
 " You re not going to leave me?" asked a drowsily- 
 cadenced voice out of the heavier darkness of the room 
 behind him. 
 
 Slowly Storrow turned and crossed to the Russian 
 bed. He reached for the wing-chair and sank down in 
 it. As he did so a hand was thrust into his, a warm 
 hand, softly cushioned about the thumb-joint, passive 
 only in its motionlessness. He held it, silent and thought 
 ful, as he sat there waiting for the daylight. 
 
 It was the following afternoon that Storrow, in answer 
 to Charlotte s message, made his way over to Brooklyn. 
 He waited ill at ease in the huge library of the Kirkner 
 home. It was Medberry, as immobile as ever, who 
 brought a somewhat tardy message down to him. Mrs. 
 Kirkner had taken a turn for the better. But the doctor 
 had given orders that she was not to be disturbed. 
 
 Storrow, weighed down by a sense of estrangement, 
 asked if he could possibly see Charlotte. Miss Kirkner, 
 he was told, was not at home. But Medberry would see 
 to it that any message which might be left would reach 
 her on her return. 
 
 Storrow, beyond an expression of conventional re 
 grets, knew of no message, and with no ponderable lessen 
 ing of restraint took his departure. Two days later he 
 received a short note from Charlotte explaining that her 
 mother had so greatly improved that she would be taken 
 South as soon as she could be safely moved. She hoped
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 141 
 
 Owen would have a happy and successful winter. It 
 struck Storrow as odd that the expression of a hope so 
 benignant should carry with it so keen a barb of discom 
 fiture to its recipient.
 
 CHAPTER ELEVEN 
 
 THE sound of gasps and wails, of pleadings and 
 imprecations, echoed through the gloomy old 
 building off Madison Square. 
 
 " Awful ! " shouted a man s voice when the agony had 
 come to an end. " Simply awful ! " 
 
 " Then why can t you let me do it my own way ? " de 
 manded the tearful voice of a woman. 
 
 " That s just what s the matter. You haven t got any 
 way. If you d pull a few feathers from the wings of 
 your imagination and stick them in the tail of your judg 
 ment, you might get somewhere." 
 
 " Then stop ridiculing me ! " 
 
 " I ll ridicule you as long as you don t do things right. 
 I m the big ki-ky of this kennel, and you re going to do 
 what I say." 
 
 "If you re claiming to be a dog, I agree with you," was 
 the impassioned retort. 
 
 " Then we ll let it go at that and get back to our work. 
 And just save a little of that pep, please, for professional 
 purposes ! " 
 
 It was the labour-pains of Art, and the olive-skinned 
 Hebrew known as Herman Krassler come to coach Torrie 
 Throssel in her new part. He had worked with her an 
 hour, at first quietly and patiently, then excitedly and ex 
 plosively, before Storrow in the next room fully under 
 stood what was taking place. He realized, during what 
 became an incredibly noisy scene, that the fiery-hearted 
 little man of the stage was putting forth every effort to 
 impart fire to the protesting and somewhat bewildered 
 girl confronting him. It was an emotional " bit," ap- 
 
 142
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 143 
 
 parently, and the novice was neither sure of her way nor 
 fully conscious of what was expected of her. 
 
 " Now, try that again, and for the love of God get 
 a little life into it!" Storrow could hear her all but 
 exasperated coach demand. 
 
 " I tell you, Hermie, I can t! I can t do it! " was the 
 almost sullen protest of the girl, in a voice already heavy 
 with fatigue. 
 
 " You ve got to," commanded the other. And he pro 
 ceeded to goad and taunt her into renewed activity, jock 
 eying her into position again and again as a rider urges 
 a spirited hunter up to an exceptionally hazardous jump. 
 
 Storrow resented that arbitrary assumption of control 
 over the mind and body of the girl. He began to com 
 prehend what was taking place on the other side of the 
 wall. He realized the domination, for the moment at 
 least, of that quicker will over the less adroit will of his 
 pupil. Krassler was trying to empty a human body of 
 its own personality and thrust an altogether different one, 
 a make-believe one, into its place. He was taking pos 
 session of her, manipulating her, reassembling her to suit 
 his own ends. 
 
 " No ! No ! No ! Don t whine that ! That s your 
 big line and you ve got to get some heart-break into it. 
 Don t sing it like a sick parrot. Feel it, woman, feel it ! " 
 
 " I can t feel it. It s a fool of a line, and you know 
 it!" 
 
 " It s certainly a fool of a line when you read it that 
 way," was the other s impassioned retort. " Any line 
 would be. But the line s there, and you ve got to squeeze 
 the last drop of life out of it. That s what God gave 
 you a brain for. So go back and try it again. And 
 don t swallow your voice as though you had a hot potato 
 against your tonsils. Throw it out straight out in 
 front of you. Throw it out so it ll hit eight hundred 
 people flat in the face." 
 
 It was tried again, and Krassler groaned aloud. Then
 
 H4 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 still again came explanation, expostulation, the lash of 
 mockery, the high-pitched curt commands. And again a 
 voice which did not seem Torrie s voice pleaded and shook 
 with its factitious emotion, rose and fell with its waves 
 of purely imaginary woe, choked in a frantically achieved 
 imitation of a sob. 
 
 You re getting it, girl, you re getting it," cried the 
 excited voice of Krassler. " Now keep on and go 
 through the whole scene. . . . Drop your voice on that, 
 and don t move until you come to the words I never 
 knew I never knew . . . . Keep your spine stiff. . . . 
 No, no, you can t beat your chest-bone like a baboon. 
 You can t do that on Broadway they canned that 
 twenty years ago. . . . Look, like this. . . . And freeze 
 on that word Forever don t move a muscle until 
 Randolph flings the letters in your face ! " 
 
 Storrow overheard it all with a vague disquiet in his 
 soul. He more and more resented this seeming appro 
 priation of Torrie s personality, even in the name of Art. 
 He resented the thought of her being exploited and 
 swayed and harassed by this professional exploiter of 
 emotion. It seemed to involve the submergence of her 
 own individuality. It tended to translate her into some 
 thing new, something chillingly remote. And the thought 
 of any such estrangement was already painful to him. 
 
 He paced his room, trying to think the thing out, trying 
 to persuade himself that it was something more than 
 sheer physical jealousy. His heart was still a parliament 
 of these silent debating voices when he heard Krassler 
 saying good-night to Torrie. It was not Krassler the 
 impresario but Krassler the man who spoke now, cor 
 dially and a little wearily, as he laughingly complained 
 that even on Broadway you have to break your eggs be 
 fore you can make your omelette. At almost the same 
 moment, in the contentious forum of his own soul, Stor 
 row suddenly perceived that there was only one way out 
 for him.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 145 
 
 Torrie would have to marry him. 
 
 Up to that time, indeed, he had given scant thought to 
 marriage, as marriage. He had been played on but 
 lightly by the social forces about him, and the established 
 covenant of mating seemed to him as essentially a social 
 ceremony. Yet in his case, he felt, it was something 
 distinctly more than a movement to legalize the illicit. 
 He nursed a natural enough desire to be honest and 
 aboveboard in his human relationships. But there was 
 a more personal aspect of the situation. He was already 
 in a position from which he could not extricate himself, 
 a position in which he found no wish to extricate him 
 self. Retreat, under the circumstances, was impossible. 
 And since he could not go back, since what had been done 
 had been done, he must now push through to the end of 
 the tunnel. What he had taken must be made entirely 
 and unquestioningly his own. It would surely be a clarify 
 ing of the situation, he felt, that establishment of pro 
 prietorship. It would bring things down to earth. It 
 would materialize what otherwise might stand over- 
 romantic and over-exacting. It would do away with 
 those too disturbing accidental meetings which were re 
 membered now as storms and tempests are apt to be re 
 membered. Meetings such as those, he felt, would in 
 some way lead to tragedy. 
 
 They would have to marry, if only to save themselves. 
 The wild bird would become a tame one, but the music 
 of life would be forever at his elbow, would be tied to 
 him, would become a part of him. He felt the need of 
 superseding all other claimants to Torrie s time and at 
 tention. She had spelled, and still spelled, wonder and 
 rapture to him. And he was still youthful enough to 
 demand that this same wonder and rapture of the passing 
 moment should be made absolute as well as permanent. 
 It was a strange situation, he acknowledged. It loomed 
 before him as something almost too disturbingly new to 
 be intimately inspected. Yet it was merely the ancient
 
 146 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 miracle of life repeating itself. A man had fallen in love 
 with a woman, and wanted that woman as his own. 
 
 He crossed to the communicating door and seized the 
 knob. Then, after a moment of hesitation, he inquir 
 ingly tapped on the panel. 
 
 " May I come in? " he asked. 
 
 "Of course," answered Torrie s voice, unnaturally 
 quiet through the muffling panel of wood. 
 
 Storrow opened the door and stepped into her studio. 
 She was partly undressed, but this did not deter him. 
 
 "What is it, Honey?" she asked, arrested by the 
 look of solemnity on his face, staring at him over her 
 bare shoulder. 
 
 He stood with his back to the wall, with a dueller s 
 space between them. 
 
 " I want you to marry me," he said, more abruptly 
 than he had intended to say it. 
 
 She stopped in the act of unhooking her corsets, her 
 torso indrawn with that characteristic visceral writhe 
 and contraction which always impressed him as reptilious. 
 She looked up at him, wide-eyed with wonder. Then, 
 still without speaking, she slowly continued to release the 
 steel-banded cuirass of brocaded silk from her body, 
 standing deep in thought as she dropped it on the chair 
 beside her. 
 
 " What good would that do ? " she finally asked. 
 
 " Every good in the world," he contended. 
 
 She reached, still thoughtful-eyed, for the tissue of silk 
 and lace that lay within reach of her hand. He turned 
 and walked to the end of the room, as though some new 
 relationship had given rise to some new abashment in 
 him. There he stood with his back to her as she ab 
 stractedly proceeded with her disrobing. 
 
 He resented, without quite deciphering the reason for 
 doing so, that offhanded intimacy of action. Yet it was 
 both too unconscious and too characteristic to be set
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 147 
 
 down as audacity. It was innocent, he reminded him 
 self, because it was unstudied. But he remained reso 
 lutely turned away from the soft confusion of sounds 
 behind him. 
 
 "Will you marry me?" he repeated. 
 
 His ear caught the sigh that escaped her : it was almost 
 one of forbearance. 
 
 " Wait until I crawl into my downy, Honey. I m so 
 dog-tired! " 
 
 He waited. He waited until he heard her fatigued 
 little coo of subsidence, listening to the complaint of the 
 burdened coil-springs with a sense of history repeating 
 itself. 
 
 " Owen," she called out to him. 
 
 He swung about, nettled by a feeling of frustration. 
 But he made no movement towards her. She lay with 
 her hand supporting her head, studying him out of veiled 
 eyes. 
 
 " Come here," she said in a strangely altered voice. 
 
 Slowly he crossed to her side, puzzling as to what 
 unknown hand could be wringing the glory out of a 
 situation from which he had once anticipated both rap 
 ture and triumph. She too seemed to feel that something 
 was lacking from that encounter, something rare and 
 indefinable, something already vanished and evaporated. 
 She dropped back on her pillow, almost listlessly, and 
 lay there for a moment or two without speaking. 
 
 " Do you love me? " she finally demanded. 
 
 " You know I do," was Storrow s retort. 
 
 "But are you sure? " 
 
 " I m trying to prove it." 
 
 "How?" 
 
 " By asking you to marry me," he contended, wonder 
 ing at the combative note which he could not keep from 
 his voice. 
 
 " What difference can that make ? " she demanded.
 
 148 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " Having some old man mumble a few words and then 
 poking a metal ring on my third finger? Would it 
 change us, one single bit ? " 
 
 " It would change everything," he contended, amazed 
 at what seemed sheer paganism in her. Once more she 
 fell to studying his face. In it, apparently, she read all 
 the arguments which his tongue had failed to utter, for 
 her own milky brow was slowly clouded with a frown of 
 thought. 
 
 " Krassler would kill me," she said, as much to herself 
 as to the man beside her. 
 
 "What has Krassler got to do with it?" quickly 
 countered the other. 
 
 That question appeared to be no easy one to answer. 
 It seemed to involve a studious turning of the matter over 
 and over in her mind. 
 
 " Can t you see, Owen, what Krassler s doing for me ? 
 He s trying to make me into an actress. He says he s 
 giving me the chance of a lifetime. He says he ll pitch 
 me head-first into Broadway if I ll only put myself in 
 his hands. He even claims he can make me a star, in 
 side of two seasons." 
 
 " What do you mean by putting yourself in his 
 hands ?" 
 
 She was, apparently, making it a point to be very pa 
 tient with him. 
 
 " I mean doing my work, my part, the way he wants 
 it done, the way it ought to be done." 
 
 " I imagine there are more Krasslers than one in this 
 city," retorted Storrow, embittered by some incongruous 
 sudden sense of estrangement between him and the woman 
 so close to him. 
 
 " That s where you re wrong," she amended. 
 " There s only one Krassler. I may be empty-headed, 
 but I ve brains enough to see that. If I can ever do 
 anything on the stage it s only because he s standing 
 behind me. He knows acting, every trick and move of
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 149 
 
 it. He makes me feel that I m only a mask and that 
 it s his spirit stepping inside that mask and doing what 
 I ought to. He holds me up where I d go down in two 
 minutes. 
 
 It discomfited Storrow to find his own inner conclu 
 sions thus openly reiterated. 
 
 " There seem to be several hundred that Krassler isn t 
 holding up, as you put it." 
 
 " But don t you see, Owen, that I m different? Acting 
 isn t just an instinct ; it s an art. It s an art you acquire 
 after years of study. And what chance have I ever had 
 to study it that way? What training do you ever get 
 out of stage dancing and show-girl parts? What good 
 does a few seasons of being a clothes-horse or a front 
 line jumping-jack ever do you for real art, for real 
 acting? And I hate the very thought of having to go 
 back to that sort of thing." 
 
 " But you ll never have to go back to that sort of 
 thing," asserted the man at her side, resenting even this 
 sudden and solemn attitude towards an art which he had 
 never been taught to accept as a serious one. 
 
 There was an air of luxuriousness in her slow move 
 ment on the bed. 
 
 " You d find me a very expensive luxury," she said, 
 smiling for the first time. 
 
 " I m willing to face that," he retorted. 
 
 " But would it be fair for me to ask you to face it? " 
 she asked. " We ve both got our work, and we both 
 ought to be free to follow it." 
 
 " I m not asking," he contended, " for any surrender 
 of freedom. What I want you to do it for is really to 
 get our freedom back to us, to get our feet on solid ground 
 so we can use our hands or our heads when we feel the 
 need for it." 
 
 She seemed unable to follow his line of thought. 
 
 "Then what is it you want?" she asked, once more 
 with a wrinkled brow.
 
 150 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 "You!" was his reply. 
 
 The weariness went out of her face at the vibrata of 
 feeling which had crept into that one expository cry. 
 
 " But you can have me, Beloved One, for the asking, 
 every ounce of my body and soul. It s all yours!" 
 
 " That s not enough," he surprised her by replying. 
 
 " That would seem a great deal to most men," she told 
 him, after a moment of silence. 
 
 " Then you ll have to regard me as different to most 
 men," he persisted. 
 
 "In what way?" 
 
 " In wanting to keep our love sane and clean and holy," 
 he found himself saying. " In not having it dragged 
 down to any Muselli and Nona Maynelle plane and 
 ending as you saw theirs end." 
 
 She sat up, thinking this over. 
 
 " I m afraid, Owen, I m more of a barbarian than you 
 are. It doesn t seem the least bit important to me, so 
 long as we re true to each other, whether we ve scratched 
 our names in some fat old city clerk s register or not. 
 That may make " 
 
 " Then if it s that trivial to you," he interrupted, " why 
 can t you respect my wishes in the matter? " 
 
 " But it s not so trivial, in one way. There s my work 
 to think of. People aren t interested in a married stage- 
 star. They re not, at least, unless she s a great artist, 
 and I know well enough I m not that, and never can be. 
 And Krassler would never stand for it, even from the 
 business view-point. It would end everything." 
 
 " Then why not let it, if that s the absurd condition it 
 imposes on you? " he demanded through the dust of his 
 own cyclonic upheavals. He failed to decipher latent 
 reproof in the quick look which she threw at him over 
 her shoulder. 
 
 " Are you making this," she said with an arrested 
 judicial note in her voice, " a choice between you or my 
 work?"
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 151 
 
 " They shouldn t have anything to do with each other," 
 he countered. " There s nothing I m asking you to give 
 up, except an endless chain of evasions and humiliations 
 and sacrifices of self-respect. And I don t see how those 
 things can help any woman in her work! " 
 
 She inspected him with a half -humorous forbearance. 
 Smiling resignedly, she slipped down between the tumbled 
 covers, with a series of small movements touched with 
 impatience, as though to banish discomfort of the mind 
 in deliberately achieved comfort of the body. Then she 
 reached languidly out and took possession of Storrow s 
 hand. 
 
 " Stop worrying over trifles, Honey ! " 
 
 He drew back, freeing his hand. 
 
 " But this thing has to be settled," he averred. " Will 
 you marry me ? " 
 
 She opened her eyes again. 
 
 "Come here," she whispered. "No closer. Still 
 closer. . . . Do you love me? " 
 
 " You know I do." 
 
 " But you must say it. Say it and say it again. Tell 
 it to me in some different way. I don t seem to care what 
 happens when I hear you say that. Do you love me? " 
 
 She turned about, heavily, with her hands clinging to 
 his shoulders, so that his stooping body was brought 
 closer to hers. " Do you love me? " she reiterated, with 
 his head clasped against the hollow of her shoulder. She 
 held him there, hungrily. And under the invisible bat 
 teries of the old appeal the old capitulation once more 
 took place. He told her, with a sudden flare-back of 
 passion, that he loved her better than life itself, that life 
 without her would mean nothing, that he wanted her as 
 no man had ever before wanted woman. 
 
 " Then I ll marry you," she told him with a sigh of 
 moderated surrender. " But there s one thing you must 
 promise me, Owen." 
 
 "What is that?"
 
 152 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " For the next few months at least no one must know." 
 
 He was less ready to accede to this than she had ex 
 pected. 
 
 " But you can t keep it from being known," he ex 
 plained. " It has to go on a public record and be an 
 nounced." 
 
 " Then we ll have to slip over to Jersey and have it 
 done there," she told him. 
 
 " But don t you have to live in that state a certain 
 length of time before you can get a license? " he asked, 
 disturbed by the air of the illicit clustering about what 
 he had already accepted as a movement toward rehabilita 
 tion. 
 
 " No, not in Jersey. I m almost sure of that. But if 
 I m wrong we ll have to find a state where you don t. 
 And I won t use my stage-name of Throssel, but my 
 own name of Roder, Millie Roder. And that ought to 
 pretty well cover up the tracks." 
 
 " Yes, it ought to pretty well cover up the tracks," 
 he admitted with a flash of antagonism which he was not 
 quite able to suppress.
 
 CHAPTER TWELVE 
 
 TORRIE THROSSEL S marriage to Owen Stor- 
 row took place one rainy day early in October. 
 It took place under conditions which were any 
 thing but exhilarating, proving of a nature that tended 
 to persuade the groom that Torrie s original attitude to 
 wards such ceremonies was not altogether an absurd one. 
 From those moments which were to bring a wife to his 
 arms he was able to extract scant suggestion of a goddess 
 stepping from a cloud, scant semblance to a rare and 
 beautiful rite being beautifully consummated. 
 
 Over it all, in the first place, was an inalienable taint 
 of the surreptitious. It carried with it, in fact, the stub 
 born and disturbing sense of a smuggling expedition 
 somewhat hastily planned and somewhat lugubriously 
 carried out. Storrow, as he stared out the rain-streaked 
 window of his day-coach on a side-line in New Jersey, 
 with Torrie veiled and apprehensive-eyed at his elbow, 
 found it hard to accept the expedition as something not 
 in defiance of the law but in accord with it. They had 
 taken advantage of her more or less tenuous friendship 
 with a friend of a friend of a justice of the peace, in a 
 remoter town, who had announced his willingness to 
 make things smooth for them, though this involved a none 
 too inviting train-trip, a tiresome wait at a junction- 
 point, a stupidly prolonged tour of investigation in a 
 dripping and odoriferous " cab," and a half hour of 
 solemn jocularity and dissimulated high tension in an un 
 speakably disordered and stuffy office which smelt of 
 mouldy calf -skin and stale tobacco inextricably blended. 
 
 J53
 
 154 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 All this Torrie endured with a thoughtful-eyed alert 
 ness through which the sensitized Storrow probed in vain 
 for some touch of reproof. Her face was whiter than 
 usual, he noticed, when he slipped the ring on her finger. 
 This same finger, he even found to his surprise, was shak 
 ing a little. And on the way back to the city, in a day- 
 coach which was as chilly as the earlier one had been over 
 heated, the same momentary pallor overtook her as she 
 drew the ring from her finger and tucked it away in one 
 corner of her leather hand-bag. 
 
 " You shouldn t do that." 
 
 "Why not?" she asked. 
 
 " They say it s bad luck," he reminded her. 
 
 " I m yours, Honey, whether it s on or off," she said 
 as she crowded up closer to him. That movement was 
 apparently undertaken for the sake of warmth, both of 
 the body and mind. He stared down at her, oppressed 
 by the wintriness of her smile. Then a surge of pity 
 went through him, pity for her at his sheer incompetence 
 to engineer any ray of splendour into a situation from 
 which women instinctively expected splendour. He took 
 possession of her hand, hungrily, and held it close in his, 
 under a fold of his raincoat, wondering how, in the days 
 to come, he could compensate her for that loss. He re 
 membered that she had even forbidden him to send 
 flowers to her room and had shrunk from his suggestion 
 of a dinner in state at one of the Fifth Avenue hotels. 
 They could have all that, she contended, later on. And 
 in the meantime she had him. 
 
 Once home again, however, Torrie found a note under 
 her door, a masculine scrawl of a note from Krassler 
 reminding her that her two stage gowns had to be decided 
 on that afternoon and that Madame Kavoni could not be 
 kept later than five. This meant a hurried call for a 
 taxi, a hurried kiss and hug in the half -lighted hallway, 
 and an incredibly desolate remainder of the day for the 
 mood-swept Storrow.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 155 
 
 At seven a messenger-boy appeared with a note from 
 Torrie explaining that she could not get back for dinner 
 as an evening rehearsal had been ordered. It might last 
 to any old hour in the morning, she went on to say, and 
 in the meantime she would snatch a bite on the wing and 
 think of him every moment until they could be together 
 again. 
 
 This message left Storrow in a none too happy frame 
 of mind. Already, he saw, there were forces gnawing 
 at the bands with which he had tried to tie Torrie the 
 closer to him, forces which left even marriage altogether 
 in the background. And yet, he kept telling himself, the 
 situation had arisen through no fault of his wife s. She, 
 in all likelihood, was quite as miserable over it as her 
 husband, if the realization that she was the possessor of 
 a husband had yet crept home to her. 
 
 Still swayed by a restlessness which seemed beyond his 
 control, he went out to dinner. He ate alone, oppressed 
 for the first time since his advent to the city by a con 
 sciousness of his isolation. Then he just as moodily 
 wandered along Forty-Second Street to Broadway and 
 its hectoring sky-signs, pausing with the crowd before 
 the shuttling street-traffic of Times Square. With eyes 
 that were idle and not altogether free of antagonism, he 
 edged back against the curb to make way for a limousine 
 which admitted of no argument as it imperiously cut the 
 corner. Then his diffused resentment focussed into a 
 sudden startled stare, for in that limousine he clearly 
 caught sight of Torrie and Herman Krassler. 
 
 He watched the car sweep down Seventh Avenue. His 
 first quick flush of resentment gave way to a feeling of 
 humiliation which he found it hard to define and equally 
 hard to master. What impressed him most was the 
 frank enjoyment on Krassler s face. And the more he 
 thought of this the more a slowly enlarging suspicion 
 grew up in his mind. He dreaded to formulate that sus-
 
 156 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 picion. But the wings of it carried him back to an earlier 
 scene in The Alwyn Arms. 
 
 He was half way home, in fact, before he even digni 
 fied his imworded fears by making a movement to end 
 them, or if the worst came to the worst, to confirm 
 them. Turning in at a pay-station, he called up the 
 theatre where he knew Krassler s company usually re 
 hearsed, and making his inquiry as curt and casual as 
 he was able, asked if a rehearsal of The Seventh 
 Wave was taking place there tonight. This theatre, it 
 was promptly explained to him over the wire, was hous 
 ing a company of its own, with an evening performance 
 under way. The Seventh Wave people could be found 
 rehearsing down at Acorn Hall, somewhere on lower 
 Seventh Avenue. 
 
 Storrow, as he continued his way homeward, found 
 clearing skies above him. He had been foolish, of 
 course. There was nothing tragic in the fact that Kras- 
 sler had given Torrie a lift in his car. That was an ac 
 cident, and nothing more, an unconsidered emergency 
 cropping up in the course of the day s work. It was his 
 own fool s readiness to resentment that could be called 
 the tragic part of the thing. 
 
 But, alone in his studio that night, Storrow gave a 
 great deal of thought to the situation immediately con 
 fronting him. He also arrived at a number of decisions. 
 One of them was that Torrie would have to give up Vib- 
 bard s studio. He had no intention of seeing his wife 
 dependent on an outsider for even a temporary place of 
 abode. And later on, he also decided, he would see to 
 it that Torrie gave up the stage. He would settle down 
 and work hard, Storrow told himself, and that would 
 make smaller any sacrifices which Torrie might have to 
 face. For, as she had said, the only thing that really 
 counted was whether they loved each other or not. That 
 was the vital thing, and of that, thank Heaven, he nursed 
 no shadow of doubt.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 157 
 
 He reached out, absently, and picked up from his table 
 the silver backed hair-brush which Torrie, with her light- 
 hearted contempt for orderliness, had left between his 
 books. He turned it over and over in his hands. As 
 he held the brush closer to his face he caught from it 
 the heavy capillary odour that seemed suddenly able to 
 visualize her before him. It prompted him to look at 
 his watch, again and still again, wondering when Torrie 
 would get back. 
 
 It was two o clock in the morning when Torrie re 
 turned. She came in quietly, tired but triumphant, with 
 her habitual little coo of delight as she discovered that 
 Storrow had waited up for her. But she did not run 
 to him with her equally habitual wing-flutter of the 
 arms, as he had half-expected her to do. She stood 
 arrested and a little chilled by the solemnity on his 
 face. 
 
 " It s an awful hour, isn t it? " she said as she unspeared 
 her hat and tossed it to one side. " I thought they were 
 never going to get through the thing." 
 
 "How did you get home? asked Storrow, without 
 looking at her. 
 
 " In a yellow taxi with Mattie Crowder," explained 
 Torrie as she looked about for a cigarette. " Krassler 
 said he d give me a lift this far, but I preferred the taxi." 
 
 "And were you able to snatch a bite on the wing? " 
 he next inquired, with an obliquity of which he was 
 secretly ashamed. She stopped short in the act of light 
 ing her cigarette, studying her husband with impersonal 
 yet meditative eyes. Then she laughed a little. 
 
 " It was more than a bite, Owen, after all. That man 
 made me eat with him. He said it was his only chance 
 to go over a number of points he wanted to make plain 
 to me. There were two or three of the big men there 
 to look us over, and Krassler didn t want me to fall down 
 at what was almost my first public performance." 
 
 Storrow found the last of the fog, the thin but chilling
 
 158 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 fog which had kept returning to his valley of moodiness, 
 whisked away into the upper airs of reasonableness. 
 
 "And how did you get along?" he asked with a 
 relenting smile of interest. Torrie sat for a moment 
 thinking over this question. 
 
 " Oh, I don t know," she finally replied. " I tried 
 hard enough, but it s all so new to me. I got tired in 
 the last act and couldn t make my voice carry the way I 
 wanted to. And the whole piece didn t go the way 
 Krassler had expected." 
 
 Storrow, staring at her face, realized that for all her 
 air of suppressed excitement she was utterly tired out. 
 
 "Poor kid!" he murmured as he reached for her 
 hand. She seemed to have been awaiting some such 
 signal or movement from him, for the tension went out 
 of her body and the blankness out of her eyes. She did 
 not get up from her chair, but pushed it on its heavy 
 castors so that it stood close beside his. From this posi 
 tion she could lean across the padded chair-arm against 
 his shoulder. 
 
 " Be good to me! " she pleaded. The note of wistful- 
 ness in her voice reminded him that she had been placed 
 there at his side for protection, for sustainment. They 
 were both, apparently, very much alone in the world, lost 
 in the heart of a turbid and preoccupied city. They were 
 also, to all intents and purposes, without antecedents, 
 without relatives and family interests to consider. Such 
 interests, on such a day, would have loomed large on the 
 horizon, would have made themselves momentous in that 
 furtive suburban ceremony which already seemed some 
 thing faded and far-away. And this prompted Storrow 
 to wonder if their own speedy return to the earlier state 
 of things, leaving so little to show for their hurried 
 journey into New Jersey, was the reason that their mar 
 riage was already appearing so remote and so phantasmal. 
 
 Torrie was still too wide awake to think of sleeping. 
 So they made Swiss cheese sandwiches and drank bottled
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 159 
 
 beer together. Storrow felt, at first, that Tome s 
 facetiousness was a trifle forced. But this he finally 
 put down to over-strained nerves. She seemed so 
 childishly happy to be with him again that he decided to 
 postpone all his carefully thought out arguments and 
 ultimatums until a time more fitting. Yet it struck him 
 as odd that she said nothing about their marriage, that 
 it seemed so little in her mind. Her only reference to it, 
 in fact, was as oblique as it was unpremeditated. 
 
 " No one can stop me from doing that now," she had 
 proclaimed as she held his head pressed against her bosom 
 and left the taste of beer and cheese on his upturned 
 mouth. Whereupon she lapsed into silence, with a small 
 frown of trouble on her half-shadowed face. 
 
 " Then do it again," he said to banish the frown. And 
 she repeated the act more abundantly than before. 
 
 " Oh, Lover, Lover! " she murmured, contentedly, like 
 a note of music struck from drowsy strings. 
 
 It was almost noon, the next day, when Storrow wak 
 ened. It took some time to shake off the sense of guilt 
 aroused by hours so unseemly for a worker, since there 
 after he intended to be a worker. The fact that Torrie 
 was already one of that guild served as a goad to his rest 
 less spirit, so that in his moments of abstraction his mind 
 harped back to the laying out of his novel, fretting about 
 it as a farm collie frets about a woodchuck hole. Torrie, 
 he realized for the first time, would always want to sleep 
 late. This, he also realized, meant that his mornings 
 would be lost, unless he had a corner of his own to work 
 in. And above all things he wanted to get his teeth set 
 on the bone of invention while the appetite to create was 
 strong within him and the demands to justify existence 
 were rigorous about him. 
 
 Then he no longer thought about himself. Instead, 
 he sat up in bed and stared down at the still sleeping 
 woman beside him. It could always hold his attention, 
 that sleeping face, touched with a mystery that was sec-
 
 160 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 ond only to the mystery of death. And she slept as 
 peacefully and abandonedly as a child. Her lips, slightly 
 parted, were red and viscid, the foreshortened lines curv 
 ing into what looked like a pout of protesting childish 
 ness. He could see the steady pulse-beat in the hollow 
 of the white neck and the ramified blue veining in the 
 dusky eyelids where the faint fan-like tracery of the 
 laughter-lines gave a countering touch of maturity to 
 the face. Yet the entire attitude of the relaxed body 
 impressed him as one of trust, of trust in him, of trust in 
 some sterner force to which it had forlornly surrendered. 
 It was, after all, he himself who was the guardian of that 
 softly rising and subsiding machinery of life. And lean 
 ing closer, he brooded over it with an impulse of tender 
 ness which he could not articulate. She was something 
 more, he tried to tell himself, than a wave washed up the 
 shore of his desire. She was, fundamentally and 
 primordially, his mate, his life partner. And there was 
 no trace of carnality in the kiss, light as a feather-touch, 
 with which he brushed the upturned point of her bare 
 shoulder. She stirred and turned a little, with an in 
 drawn breath that was almost a sigh, and then lapsed back 
 into unbroken slumber. Storrow, holding his breath, 
 moved slowly and cautiously away and finally slipped out 
 of bed, guarding each movement to make sure that he 
 was not awakening her. Later, disturbed by the chilli 
 ness of the room from the opened window, he tiptoed to 
 the bedside and softly drew the tumbled coverings up 
 about her shoulders. Then he as quietly tiptoed away 
 again. 
 
 Storrow, when Torrie wakened, was hard at work, with 
 an empty coffee-cup beside him and an ever-increasing 
 array of written sheets before him. The determination 
 to create, as he sounded the possibilities of his long- 
 nursed romance of the North-land, merged into a fever 
 to create. But it was stiff labour, that manipulation of
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 161 
 
 a new medium, and involved a concentration tending to 
 leave him unconscious of time and place. Torrie, with 
 eyes still heavy from sleep, stared at him for a puzzled 
 moment or two, murmured : " You old ink-coolie ! " 
 and slipped away for her bath. Storrow, all the while, 
 was far off in the sub-Arctics, unconscious of those 
 ablutionary sounds which had once so held his attention, 
 oblivious to Torrie s return in her heelless Turkish slip 
 pers and loose-fitting bath-robe. It was actual hunger 
 more than her movements about the room that finally 
 brought him out of his trance. 
 
 They prepared their meal together, in Storrow s 
 kitchenette which camp-life had taught him to keep or 
 derly. Every woodsman, he explained to Torrie as he 
 presided over skillet and coffee-pot with a quiet dexterity 
 which startled her, had to learn to cook. There were 
 no restaurants and delicatessen-shops in the Barren 
 Grounds. Torrie, girdling up her loose robe until the 
 white ankles showed above the Turkish slippers, brought 
 the matutinal newspaper and milk and rolls from the 
 studio door, and went about laying the table for two, 
 crooning as she worked. 
 
 They ate side by side, with Torrie s arm across the 
 back of her husband s chair. They ate, in fact, with the 
 honest appetites of the healthy young animals they were, 
 and when they had finished they sat with their slippered 
 feet up on the radiator-top and the grey coils of cigarette- 
 smoke slowly ascending to the skylight. 
 
 " It s a great life if you don t weaken," contentedly 
 remarked Torrie with her head against Storrow s shoul 
 der, repeating a Broadway catch-line of the day. 
 
 " What ll make us weaken ? " demanded Storrow, not 
 understanding the allusion. 
 
 That question, however, remained unanswered. For 
 almost as it was uttered the studio door opened and a 
 pert young figure in grey came to a sudden standstill.
 
 162 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " Hully gee! " she said aloud as she surveyed the two 
 figures on the far side of the room. " Here s where I 
 beat it! " 
 
 " Pannie," cried Torrie sharply, as the intruder started 
 to back out through the still open door. And Pannie, 
 with a stare of comprehension still on her sophisticated 
 young face, came to a stop. 
 
 The three stood there, in a moment of constrained 
 silence across which unspoken questions and retorts 
 seemed to flash like heat-lightning. 
 
 " Tell her," Torrie suddenly commanded Storrow. 
 And Storrow told her, inwardly irritated at the discov 
 ery that his words seemed more a confession than an an 
 nouncement. 
 
 You nuts ! You two nuts ! " cried Pannie, in the 
 language of her world. " But if you ve didded it, I 
 s pose I ve gotta kiss you both ! " And this Pannie pro 
 ceeded to do, considerably to Storrow s discomfort, for 
 it was a brazen and full-blooded smack which she planted 
 on his lips. This, indeed, she threatened to repeat, but 
 Torrie, with a pretence at indignation, tore her away. 
 
 That belongs to me," she said with her habitual and 
 throaty little coo of happiness, as she walled Storrow s 
 body off with her outstretched arms.
 
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN 
 
 DURING the week that ensued the new inter 
 preter of the North-land found time a-plenty 
 to give to his work. Torrie was surprisingly 
 little at home. Her day, and sometimes half her night, 
 seemed filled with rehearsals and fittings and photogra 
 phers and ever-revised preparations for a two-week try- 
 one of The Seventh Wave " on the road." Yet even the 
 preoccupied Storrow was able to garner a hint or two that 
 things were not going as smoothly with the new produc 
 tion as they should. 
 
 Nor did he find the approach to his own new venture 
 altogether plain sailing. He was doubly anxious to es 
 cape failure, not only because it was the first step in a 
 new field, but also because it seemed success alone that 
 could now justify existence for him. He was not sorry, 
 accordingly, when at the tail end of a day of hard work 
 Chester Hardy dropped in to see how he was getting 
 along. 
 
 " That s the only answer to your question," retorted 
 Storrow, pointing none too hopefully at the pile of manu 
 script that lay before him, confronted by that bareness of 
 the horizon which comes after supreme endeavour. 
 
 Hardy, at a nod from the other, took up the scattered 
 sheets and tamped their edges methodically together. 
 
 " In the first place," he said, " get a typewriter. Script 
 is too hard to read and too slow to write, for these busy 
 times." Then he sat silent, with his keen and slightly 
 faded eye rowelling over line after line. Storrow sat 
 watching him, more anxious than he would have been 
 
 163
 
 164 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 willing to admit. For he knew that whatever happened, 
 Hardy would tell him the truth. But for a half-hour 
 without movement or gesture Hardy continued to pore 
 over the pages. And no word of approval escaped him 
 as he put them down. 
 
 " In the second place," he resumed as though he had 
 been speaking but a moment before, " while you ve ex 
 plained the presence of your city girl in the wilderness 
 satisfactorily enough, why hang crepe on the front door 
 by killing off her father in your very first chapter? He 
 isn t essential to your story, either dead or alive, and in 
 this work you ve got to keep down to essentials. Then 
 when your man pulls the girl out of the rapids, after the 
 entire outfit is wrecked, have her as naked, or as next to 
 naked, as he is himself, the way you first said you were 
 going to do it." 
 
 " But as I worked it out it seemed sure to shock peo 
 ple s sensibilities," explained Storrow. 
 
 " Don t let cowardice edge you away from your 
 theme," bruskly persisted the older man. "If what 
 [you ve got seems like the truth, say it, and let the sensi 
 bilities take care of themselves. You intend to show your 
 two people reverting suddenly to Adam and Eve condi 
 tions. And if you keep clothes on em you don t get em 
 back to the Adam and Eve age at all. Strip em, my boy, 
 strip em bare to the bone, and let em learn to take care 
 of their nakedness of soul in the same way they re taking 
 care of their nakedness of body. That s your theme, and 
 that s what ll carry you through." 
 
 " But will it carry me through? " asked Storrow, try 
 ing to keep the question down to the plane of the common 
 place. 
 
 Hardy knew the hope that lay ambuscaded in that 
 seemingly casual query. He knew also the difficulties 
 that beset the way of the artist not yet accustomed to the 
 edged tools of creation. And he was sincere enough to 
 be honest.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 165 
 
 " I can t answer that until you ve rounded out your 
 structure a little more. But you ve got a basic idea that 
 is arresting, that is arresting even to me and I can 
 assure you I m a sad-eyed old dog at this business of 
 inspecting stories. Then you ve got a new field, and 
 ground that you know. So take advantage of that. Be 
 definite. Be graphic and concrete. Don t be afraid to 
 describe exactly how your master of woodcraft makes 
 that wilderness soap for the lady. And tell exactly how 
 they cured and sewed together that rabbit-skin suit of 
 hers, and make it quite plain how they prepared the fish 
 bone needles and the cedar-root thread. You have him 
 keep her warm, that first night after the rescue, by bury 
 ing her in the down from bull-rushes. I m not naturalist 
 enough to know whether this could be done or not, but 
 it sounds amazingly poetic. I m inclined to think, on 
 the whole, that it would take an incredible number of 
 bull-rush heads to inter the lady." 
 
 " You re wrong," explained Storrow, now on ground 
 that he was sure of. " There are coulees in the country 
 where I m laying this action carpeted with bull-rushes. 
 I ve seen them thick enough to fill a hay-rack with down 
 in an hour s work. They re so plentiful that the Indians 
 dry and grind the bulbs for a kind of flour. Tomorrow, 
 in fact, I intend to have my man explain the process to 
 his mate." 
 
 "Good!" proclaimed Hardy. "Give em all of that 
 stuff you can crowd in, all the wild-life and wood-craft 
 material you ve got to use. For that s what ll carry you 
 over. And that s not only your individual note, your 
 distinctive note, in this case, but it s the stuff that city 
 people crave." 
 
 When Hardy took his departure, leaving Storrow like 
 a cub-lion with his first taste of blood, he went with a 
 renewed and more complicated interest in the young 
 Canadian who was showing more changes than the mere 
 loss of the woodland tan. Hardy, in prospecting the
 
 166 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 casual lodes of curiosity, had unearthed what promised 
 to prove the more precious metal of efficiency. There 
 was a chance, if he kept his head, that the stranger from 
 the North might eventually win out. And in that final 
 winning out, if it was to be brought about, Hardy had a 
 sincere and far from selfish wish to be a factor. 
 
 Hardy returned, before the end of the week, with a 
 smile of approval for both the newly installed typewriter 
 and the newly completed chapters. There were, of 
 course, criticisms to be proffered and changes to be 
 suggested and timely hints to be thrown out. The 
 younger author, in fact, was governed by these much more 
 than he imagined. He had reached the stage, by this 
 time, where he felt that he could stand alone. So there 
 was much talk and argument and clash of theory against 
 theory, but it ended, as a rule, in Storrow s tacit submis 
 sion to the older man s will. 
 
 " The first rule of art," that older man had averred, 
 " is to escape dulness." At another time he had de 
 clared : " It s only work, remember, that can efface the 
 footsteps of work. * And as though to confirm this at 
 titude he carried away bodily all of Storrow s manu 
 script that could be spared, " to chew over at his leisure," 
 as he expressed it. 
 
 " I want you to make good on this, young man," he 
 went on to explain, " for this United States of ours, 
 you ll find, has mighty small sympathy with failure, no 
 matter how romantic the attendant circumstances may 
 be." 
 
 Storrow, under this kindly lash of encouragement, 
 worked harder than ever. Even Torrie acquired a quali 
 fied respect for his preoccupation and fell to complaining 
 of his absentmindedness. 
 
 " Hello, old book-worm ! " was her greeting as she 
 came into his studio one morning to dry her hair over his 
 radiator. She was in neglige, that, he began to see, 
 was a habit which women of the stage found imposed
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 167 
 
 upon them and as she sat leaning forward with her 
 still damp hair cascading down over the metal of the 
 warm radiator he stared absently at the accidental gleam 
 of the bare white shoulder in the strong side light. The 
 sight of that smooth and milky texture always stirred in 
 him a vague longing to return to his modelling. 
 
 " Torrie," he abstractedly inquired, " just how d you 
 ever come to have that wonderful skin? " 
 
 She lifted a corner of the dusky mane shadowing her 
 face and looked at him. Then, having made sure there 
 was no mockery in his eyes, she massaged a satiny shoul 
 der with meditative finger-tips. 
 
 " I was born with it, Honey-Bun," she explained, " the 
 same as you were born with those wide shoulders of 
 yours. Mother used to have exactly the same skin. 
 Even up to the week she died she was as pink and white 
 as a baby." 
 
 He remembered, as he went back to his work, that he 
 knew startlingly little of her antecedents, of her own 
 earlier life. Human beings, after all, were enigmas to 
 other human beings. And with that half-formulated 
 deduction he re-entered the rustling forest of his imagina 
 tion and rounded up the scattered voices of creation. 
 
 So immersed was he in his work that when a few 
 minutes later a knock sounded on his door he called out an 
 abstracted " Come in." He looked up to see Hardy with 
 a bundle of manuscript on his threshold and Torrie with 
 a cry of protest diving for the communicating-door. 
 
 Hardy beheld that vanishing white-shouldered figure, 
 imperious in line as the Flying Victory, and somewhere 
 deep in his unparticipating eyes Storrow thought he de 
 tected a look that savoured of contempt. He resented 
 that look, and found his resentment double-edged at the 
 thought that it was not definite enough to combat. Yet 
 at the same time a vague dread of finding it, or what it 
 must have stood for, translated into actual and irretriev 
 able words prompted him to speak.
 
 168 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " We were married last week, Torrie Throssel and 
 I!" 
 
 He saw Hardy wheel about as though he had been 
 shot. 
 
 " Good God ! " gasped the man holding the manu 
 script under his arm, with a foolish look of vacuity on 
 his face. The next moment, however, he seemed once 
 more master of himself, excepting only a slow flush of 
 embarrassment which stained the lean and slightly lined 
 cheek as Storrow stood in front of him, challenging his 
 gaze by one equally deliberate. 
 
 " That seems to startle you," parried the younger man, 
 with a note of harshness in his voice. 
 
 " Naturally," said the other, willing to give ground 
 until his shock had been digested. 
 
 " Is there anything so dreadful about a thing like 
 that?" Storrow found himself driven into demanding. 
 
 Hardy, by this time, was able to laugh a little. But 
 it was a laugh marked by neither merriment nor ease. 
 
 " But you shouldn t fling a thing like this slap-bang 
 into the face of your friends/ he protested with a pon 
 derable effort at lightness. " Marriage, my boy, is mo 
 mentous. It s about the biggest gun in the battle of life. 
 And when you find it going off right under your nose 
 this way, it s naturally going to make you jump a little ! " 
 
 Storrow, grim of lip, nursed no intention of making 
 the situation any easier for his unhappy guest. 
 
 "You ve known Torrie for some time?" he half in 
 quired and half suggested. 
 
 Guarded as Hardy stood, he could not keep a barricaded 
 look from showing in his eyes. 
 
 " Yes ; I ve known her. But never, naturally, as you 
 must know her." 
 
 " Do you like her or dislike her? " 
 
 This inquisitorial proceeding, however, was no longer 
 palatable to the cool-headed man of letters. He laughed 
 openly this time.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 169 
 
 " Since you do," he acknowledged, " it s surely my duty 
 to fall in line with the others." 
 
 " The others what others ? " Storrow demanded 
 with unexpected sharpness. 
 
 " Torrie, I think, has many friends," patiently ex 
 plained Hardy as he put the bundle of manuscript down 
 on the table beside him. The movement was plainly a 
 dismissive one. And the quietness of the older man had 
 already begun to awaken in Storrow a suspicion that he 
 himself had been ridiculous, that he might be straining 
 the bonds of friendship beyond reason. Yet along the 
 ramparts of his suspicion paced a ghostlike and all too 
 familiar thought. If Torrie was beautiful to him, she 
 must have appeared beautiful to others. And always 
 there would be that undefined uncertainty of the past, 
 that equally unformulated threat of the future, since 
 what made her precious also made her perilous. 
 
 He sat down, heavily, staring at the waxed floor be 
 tween his feet. It was Hardy who spoke first. 
 
 " Haven t you been pegging away a little too hard at 
 this? " he asked with a hand-movement towards the man 
 uscript. 
 
 Storrow, scenting that effort at extenuation, laughed a 
 little. 
 
 " I seem to be developing temperament, don t I ? " he 
 suggested, not without a touch of bitterness. 
 
 " And not developing muscle," countered the older 
 man. " A man of your bulk has got to use his body. 
 You ve got to keep hard in a flat as well as in the forest. 
 And I think I ll lead you around to the Racquet Club gym 
 where you can work the acid out of your system and 
 freshen up with a plunge every afternoon." 
 
 " I m not quite sure where the acid is," acknowledged 
 Storrow. 
 
 " A squash-court will pretty soon show you," was the 
 other s retort. 
 
 " Then let s leave it until I get this cleared away a
 
 170 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 little more," requested Storrow with a nod towards his 
 work-table. 
 
 " And we ll leave our talk about these opening chap 
 ters," added Hardy, once more on his feet, " until some 
 other morning when we both have more time." 
 
 He left Storrow oppressed by a sense of reservation 
 studiously sustained and of judgments over-considerately 
 withheld. Yet the moment the door had closed on that 
 departing guest the inner door opened and Torrie stood 
 confronting him. 
 
 " Well, you ve spilt the beans, haven t you ? " she cried 
 with a note that was quite new to Storrow. It was the 
 first time he had seen anger at him convulse her face. It 
 took the luminous draperies out of her eyes, leaving them 
 as flat and bald as the windows of an empty house. It 
 betrayed a tendency to leave the full-blooded lips more 
 square in line, giving them a slight appearance of loose 
 ness. 
 
 " Spilt the beans? " he repeated, amazed beyond meas 
 ure by the unexpected antagonism in her eyes. 
 
 " Why did you tell that man we d been married? " de 
 manded the Medea with the loosened hair. 
 
 "Didn t you tell Pannie Atwill?" countered her still 
 mystified husband. 
 
 " Pannie Atwill s a friend of mine," was the quick re 
 tort. 
 
 " Well, Chester Hardy s a friend of mine," announced 
 Storrow with an ascending note of challenge in his voice. 
 
 " But he s no friend of mine," declared the angry-eyed 
 Torrie. " And it was clearly understood between us 
 that nothing was to be said about my marriage." 
 
 " Are you ashamed of it? " asked Storrow with acidu 
 lated coldness. 
 
 " I m ashamed of you," she shot back at him, " for not 
 respecting my wishes, and my interests." 
 
 " I wish you d explain just what interests are likely to 
 suffer."
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 171 
 
 She did not reply to that taunt, since beneath all its 
 quietness of tone it was a taunt. She was too intent in 
 following her own unhappy lanes of thought. 
 
 " You might as well have put it in the Morning Tele 
 graph as pass it out to Chester Hardy." 
 
 " I don t see why it shouldn t be put in the Morning 
 Telegraph, for that matter." 
 
 " If it is," she flung out, " it ought to go in the obituary 
 column." 
 
 " Is it that fatal? " he flung back. 
 
 " The fatal part is being a fool and not knowing 
 it." 
 
 He rose from his chair at that, flushing up to the fore 
 head. Yet he was able to stand and study her with 
 coldly appraising eyes. He noticed, for the first time, 
 that there was an animal like heaviness about her out- 
 thrust face and a touch of coarseness in the hair of In 
 dian-like straightness. Yet even through the fog of 
 belligerency that drifted and hung between them she 
 struck him as being in some way pathetic, as being incon 
 gruously and pitifully in need of succour, as being alone 
 in empty wastes to which he ought to reach out a sustain 
 ing hand. 
 
 " Torrie," he said, trying to speak calmly but not quite 
 succeeding in doing so, " it seems to me we re not start 
 ing out right." 
 
 " It most decidedly does," she promptly agreed. 
 
 " There are certain things we ve got to face," he went 
 on with self-imposed deliberateness, " and we may as 
 well face them right now." 
 
 " I don t think I ve got time to be preached at," she 
 declared, with a lip-curl of scorn. She seemed suddenly 
 and bewilderingly remote from him. Yet even in that 
 moment of tension he wondered if women who led 
 careers of their own, if women who were economically 
 independent, were not to be made allowances for in their 
 pursuit of personal liberty.
 
 172 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " It s not a question of preaching. It s a question of 
 decency." 
 
 " On my part, Sir Manfred ? " she mockingly de 
 manded. " Or on yours? " 
 
 " On yours," he said, solemn with the consciousness of 
 approaching crisis. " I want you to give up that Vibbard 
 studio, and give it up at once." 
 
 She stood for a moment of utter silence, as though 
 startled by the direction in which his masterfulness was 
 expressing itself. Then the scorn once more mounted to 
 her angry eyes. 
 
 " You ve certainly picked a queen of a time to drag me 
 into your cage! " she called out with a new shrillness in 
 her voice. 
 
 " Do you regard it as a cage? " he asked, wincing in 
 spite of himself at a coarseness of fibre which seemed 
 capable of hurting him more than all her anger. 
 
 " It will be if I go into it under any such circumstances 
 as these," she recklessly proclaimed. 
 
 He felt like a stone-mason with his skiest scaffolding 
 giving way. 
 
 "And you intend to stay out of it?" he demanded, 
 tingling in the face of what he knew to be an ultimatum. 
 
 " I intend to remain a human being," she hotly retorted 
 as she reached for the door behind her, " with the pre 
 rogatives of a human being." With that she stepped 
 through the door into the Vibbard studio and swung it 
 thunderously shut behind her. 
 
 Storrow stood looking after her. She had said " per- 
 rogatives," he inappositely remembered. And that 
 seemed to leave the thing more tragically unjust than ever.
 
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN 
 
 IT was late at night when Storrow returned to his 
 studio after a day of restless wandering about the 
 city that seemed without vistas and vision. The 
 dregs of his trivially momentous quarrel with Torrie 
 still lay sour at the bottom of his heart. He unlocked his 
 door, tired of body and listless in spirit. He was startled, 
 on stepping into the studio, to find his reading lamp 
 switched on. He was still further startled to find Torrie 
 huddled up in his big arm-chair of faded green velour. 
 
 She did not look up as he stood before her, and for a 
 moment, as he studied the relaxed figure and the droop 
 ing head with its tumbled hair, he thought that she had 
 fallen asleep. Then he caught the sound of an unmis 
 takable small sob. It was a sound that bewildered him 
 at the same time that it devastated him, for he had never 
 learned to associate Torrie with tears. She had always 
 seemed to him too vital and too strong-willed for any 
 such surrender. And he waited, shocked into silence, 
 wondering as to the cause of this relapse. The wait was 
 a long one. But it was finally broken by Torrie herself. 
 
 " I ve been an awful fool, Owen," she said quickly, 
 without lifting her face. But the note of contrition in 
 that acknowledgment was too much for him. Before it 
 he felt his ice walls of injured pride melt away. She 
 was holding out one hand to him, blindly, still without the 
 courage, apparently, to face him, still with her head bent 
 low over the faded green chair-arm. So he dropped on 
 his knee beside her, catching the groping hand in his, with 
 a sudden tightening of the throat and an equally prompt 
 relaxation of the iron hoops about his heart. 
 
 173
 
 174 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " Beloved," he whispered, amazed at the miraculous 
 debacle of the emotions which lay beyond his power either 
 to withhold or control. 
 
 She reached out for him and clung to him with little 
 gasps, half hungrily, half triumphantly. Her nose, red 
 with crying, looked pointed and pinched. And there was 
 a meekness in her demeanour which he had never before 
 seen there. 
 
 " I was wrong," she acknowledged, studying his face 
 with her bloodshot eyes. 
 
 " We were both wrong," he largely conceded, with a 
 taste of brine in the kisses which he pressed against her 
 wet lashes. 
 
 " But you must never make me angry, Honey," she 
 said, hiding her head on his shoulder. " It makes me say 
 things and do things I m sorry for afterwards." 
 
 He found at the core of that acknowledgment some 
 thing keenly able to disturb him. 
 
 " What have you done? " he asked, trying to make the 
 question a casual one. 
 
 " I ve done what you wanted me to," she told him. 
 
 "What?" he repeated. 
 
 " I ve given up that room. I ve given up everything." 
 
 "Everything?" he echoed. 
 
 " All I want is you," she maintained, still clinging to 
 him. 
 
 " But what have you given up? " he still insisted, ap 
 prehensive before the unknown. 
 
 She sat back in the wide-armed chair, mopping the 
 pointed red nose with her tiny damp rag of a handker 
 chief. Her face was heavy, with its last look of youth 
 vanished. 
 
 " I m not going on with that stage work," she an 
 nounced. 
 
 This was more than he had looked for, more than he 
 had reason to expect. 
 
 " Do you mean you ve quarrelled with Krassler? " he
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 175 
 
 heard himself demanding, with that prospect too obvi 
 ously anything but a disturbing one. 
 
 Torrie shook her head. 
 
 " The whole thing s been taken off. The Seiberts said 
 the play hadn t a chance for Broadway, and there was a 
 dispute about bookings. Then the backer refused to put 
 up the last two thousand dollars for costumes and Kras- 
 sler said that was the straw that broke the camel s back." 
 
 Storrow s relief, at this acknowledgment, was overcast 
 by a colouring of disappointment in the discovery that the 
 return to the status quo had not been as entirely a vol 
 untary one as it had promised. But it was a big cloud, 
 he remembered, which hung above Torrie. Yet it was 
 clearly one with a silver lining, from his point of view. 
 And she in time would come to see it as he saw it. 
 
 "Do you feel bad about this?" he finally asked her. 
 Her attitude, as she sat readjusting the hair-pins in her 
 thick crown of hair, took on a touch of the judicial. 
 
 " I did, Honey, when I couldn t keep from thinking 
 that you hated me," she said as she stood up and shook 
 out her skirts. " And that play may have been rotten, 
 as Lee Seibert said it was. But I wasn t doing my part 
 so rottenly, and Seibert knows it ! " 
 
 This caused Storrow to look about at her. It was a 
 new note from her, that naive trumpeting of her own 
 power. 
 
 " You mean you ve a feeling it might lead him to of 
 fering you something else ? " he asked. 
 
 She hesitated for a moment. Then she swung about 
 with a shrug of abandonment. 
 
 " I m not thinking about it at all. The thing s over. 
 I ve got to take my medicine without kicking." Then, 
 arrested by his suddenly sobered face, she added, speak 
 ing first quietly and then in a slowly ascending key: 
 " And it s brought us together, Honey, no matter how 
 crazily we may have been acting. All I ve got now is 
 my solemn-eyed old Cave-Man and instead of just get-
 
 176 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 ting the crusts of life together, we re going to sit down to 
 the whole blessed big pie ! So kiss me, kiss me quick, or 
 I ll start to scream and disgrace you before this whole 
 stifling old building! " 
 
 Instead of kissing her, however, he stood staring at 
 her in wonder, alarmed at that strongly rising note of 
 hysteria in her throaty voice. For the first time in his 
 life, indeed, he found himself without any inclination to 
 kiss her. What was more, he quite failed to see what 
 kisses had to do with the situation. 
 
 " Kiss me quick!" she commanded. 
 
 For the first time, as he turned away from her, he saw 
 the square-faced bottle of dry gin on the table, with the 
 sugar and seltzer and squeezed lemons beside it. She 
 had been drinking, he saw, drinking a good deal more 
 than could be good for her. Not that she was drunk, or 
 even thick-tongued and muddled. He had never seen her 
 in that condition, and he imagined that he never should. 
 But instinct and early training combined to make a 
 woman s use of intoxicants still repulsive to him. The 
 men and women in Torrie s world, he remembered, took 
 a view quite opposite to his, which they would have 
 laughed at as provincial, as smug and mid-Victorian. 
 And that world, in a way, was already his own world. 
 He had entered it and was being made a part of it ; and 
 in Rome, he concluded, it was acknowledged best to do 
 what the Romans did. There were still certain aspects 
 of that world which he could not comprehend. Its casual 
 liberties, its freedom of intercourse, its topsy-turvydom 
 of standards, were still a bewilderment to him. Repeat 
 edly he was being confronted by that freemasonry of 
 bohemia which kept warning him there would have to 
 be ever-renewed shifts in the outposts of behaviour, in 
 explicable contractions at one point and equally inexplica 
 ble expansions at another. He dreaded, as all men of 
 sensibilities dread, the accusation of narrowness. In 
 iquity, he knew, was not peculiar to the city. He had seen
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 177 
 
 enough of country life to remember that impurity could 
 walk in lilaced lanes as corruptingly as it sidled along 
 lamp-lit pavements. But in the crowded centres it 
 brushed more disconcertingly close to one. And still 
 again he made it a point to remember that he was a new 
 comer to that great city so contradictory in aspect and 
 so indecipherable in impulse. It was not only too big to 
 be changed ; it was also too complex in its blind inter 
 weaving of strata for him to choose and cleave to any one 
 particular plane. It was he himself, and not the city, 
 that must change. Yet inevitable as those changes were, 
 he had no intention of leaving life little more than a mush 
 of concessions. He would always insist on elbow-room 
 for his soul. 
 
 And it was becoming more and more difficult, he felt 
 as he crossed to Torrie s side and kissed her for the sake 
 of peace, and purely for the sake of peace, to distinguish 
 between advance and retrogression, between enslavement 
 and emancipation. For just a moment, before he drank 
 down the gin-rickey which she had mixed for him, he 
 entertained a suspicion that his wife s insistence on physi 
 cal contact was for inflammatory and obliterative ends, to 
 burn up in a flame of passion all traces of more trivial 
 emotion, as the burglar has been known to burn the man 
 sion after ransacking its treasure-chests. But by the 
 time he had finished his second gin-rickey he no longer 
 gave harbourage to such battered suspicions. It was a 
 new world, he told himself, and he was there to make the 
 most of it, to make the most of it with Torrie at his side. 
 And as though to seal that determination, he asked for 
 still another gin-rickey.
 
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN 
 
 STORROW, in making the most of his new world 
 with Torrie at his side, found a number of things 
 to tax both his patience and his resolution. His 
 studio, in the first place, betrayed symptoms of becoming 
 embarrassingly overcrowded, once the Vibbard apartment 
 had been cleared of his wife s belongings and the com 
 municating door had been duly locked and sealed. Tor 
 rie, too, had little of Storrow s sense of orderliness, and 
 sustained application to that work with which he knew 
 life could alone be justified became more and more diffi 
 cult. Yet he was unable to accuse Torrie of not doing 
 her part. She had imposed on her friends, he grew to 
 understand, a tacit conspiracy of absenteeism, and few 
 indeed were the callers, outside of the irrepressible Pan- 
 nie Atwill and the persistently loyal Hardy, who came to 
 interrupt them. 
 
 It struck Storrow as odd, as the weeks slipped by, that 
 the constraint existing between Torrie and Hardy, in 
 stead of diminishing, grew both more active and more ob 
 servable. He spoke of this one night, after coming home 
 in time to witness Torrie bidding his friend from the 
 Avenue a none too cordial farewell. 
 
 " Why don t you learn to like Hardy a little better? " 
 he asked as Torrie proceeded to shake up the cocktails 
 with which they now invariably preceded dinner. 
 
 Instead of answering that question Torrie turned and 
 asked him another. 
 
 " What does the note of Ecclesiastes mean? " she half- 
 indifferently inquired. 
 
 178
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 179 
 
 "The note of Ecclesiastes ? " he repeated. "Who 
 used that phrase ? " 
 
 " Chester Hardy did. He seemed to insinuate that 
 that s the note we re going to end up on. He may know 
 what it means, but I don t." 
 
 Storrow stopped short. 
 
 " What was Hardy talking about? " he demanded. 
 
 Torrie, before answering that question, drank down 
 her cocktail. 
 
 " As far as I can make out he doesn t seem to think 
 we re suited to each other. He says we look at life from 
 altogether different sides. And he announced to me, 
 Honey Bun, that now you were in my hands, I d have to 
 treat you as though you were made of Dresden china." 
 
 " And what particular business is all that of Hardy s? " 
 asked Storrow out of the silence that had fallen over 
 him. 
 
 " That s what I ve been wondering," observed Torrie 
 as she handed Storrow his cocktail. He stared down at 
 the thin-shanked glass abstractedly. That, he remem 
 bered, was one of Tome s contributions to their menage. 
 After he had emptied it, still without speaking, he re 
 alized that he had been tired in both body and mind. 
 
 "By the way, how did you happen to know Hardy? " 
 
 Torrie, before answering that question, crossed to the 
 kitchenette and just as slowly returned to the table. 
 
 " Doesn t everybody know him ? I happened to meet 
 him, the same as other people do." 
 
 "When?" 
 
 " Two or three years ago," she patiently replied. 
 
 " And he s been nothing but a casual friend? " 
 
 Torrie, stooping over the table, looked up sharply. 
 
 " He s never even been that. \Vhat d interest me in 
 that dried up fish who s always prowling around inspect 
 ing people as though they were museum specimens ? And 
 I know what s the matter with him at this very moment. 
 He s souring with envy, just plain everyday envy. He
 
 i8o THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 missed his chance of getting any happiness out of life, 
 and he s sore, without knowing it, at seeing us trying to 
 be happy! " 
 
 " That dried up fish," Storrow carefully reminded her, 
 " has been a good friend of mine." 
 
 " But you can t get away from the fact, Honey, that it 
 was me you married. And I intend to come first, no 
 matter what the outsiders may say. And we re going to 
 be happy, aren t we, Owen, no matter what Hardy may 
 imagine? " 
 
 " That, I think, depends more on ourselves than on 
 Hardy." 
 
 She came and sat on the arm of his chair, apprehensive 
 of returning solemnities. 
 
 " If we love each other, my own, it s nobody s business, 
 and nothing matters. But you must love me. You 
 must. I ve got to have it. Do you? Do you? 
 
 " Of course," he said, capitulating before the barrage 
 of her caresses, at the same moment that he stood con- 
 scions of the celerity with which that artillery could al 
 ways be wheeled into place. 
 
 "Then kiss me! No, not that way. My way!" 
 Then muffled, through her contented cries of protest, she 
 murmured: "You . . . beloved . . . big . . . brute!" 
 
 It was Pannie Atwill who invaded the studio the next 
 night as Storrow sat at a paper-littered work-table ab 
 sorbed in his story, the loquacious Pannie more loose- 
 jointed than ever. There was something conspicuously 
 uncouth, Storrow saw, even in her newer manner of 
 speech. 
 
 " Hello, Torrie, how s tricks? I just gotta get a peek 
 at your map to make sure they haven t planted you over 
 to Greenwood! Hello there, Capt n Kidd. But gimme 
 a gasper quick or I ll pass away." The next moment her 
 exuberant young lungs were filled with smoke. Then 
 she regarded Storrow out of one corner of her eye. 
 " Say, Torrie, why is that big Woof -Woof of yours so
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 181 
 
 afraid o me? No, Shakespeare, don t stop the master 
 piece. Keep right on dreamin , for rent-day s on the 
 road and the high cost o lovin ain t lowerin any as far 
 as I can see. But look here, Torrie Throssel, don t you 
 get fat, whatever happens. There ain t no such animal 
 as a perfect thirty-eight, not in our world. And, Dearie, 
 you sure ought to doll up a little, even if that soul-mate 
 o yours isn t askin for a pink mesh over the peach- 
 basket." 
 
 " Can that ! " was Torrie s preoccupied command, 
 keyed down to the plane of Pannie s comprehension. 
 But Pannie was not to be silenced. 
 
 " If I owned that book-worm over there I d make him 
 sit up nights and dig out an Amurrican C mill for me to 
 star in and put that Klennert dame out o business. 
 What s doin ? Yes, of course; I knew you d take it 
 serious once you got it. Well, as Donnie Eastman used 
 to say, it s a great life if you keep the lining in! And 
 speakin o that toiler reminds me. Donnie took the 
 bunch out to Krebbler s last night, and, believe me, it was 
 some party ! The bubble-watter flowed knee-deep. And 
 Demmy Varge Dyckman got doin her Castle-stunt on 
 the table and w r e was all put out at three a. m. And 
 Donnie was askin me what mausoleum you was nailed 
 up in and if you was too dead to sit in a Rolls-Royce 
 some afternoon when the walkin was heavy. But of 
 course the Big Push over there d blow up if he thought 
 you was gettin a lungful of open air. That s men for 
 you! " 
 
 " Oh, no it isn t," quickly corrected Torrie through the 
 intervening blue haze of smoke. " It was the state of 
 matrimony I entered, not a state prison." 
 
 " What s the difference, Dearie? " 
 
 " The difference is that I m in it because I like it, be 
 cause I prefer it, and not because I can t escape it." 
 
 " Coo on, birdie ! " mocked her loquacious visitor. " I 
 was that way once, but he was a plumber and he took to
 
 182 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 usin the pipe-tongs on me. But what I come up to tell 
 you was that I d given posin the shake and signed up with 
 The Girl of Girls company. And Bennie Veals is sure 
 workin the feet off n us in that new beach-dance he 
 brought straight back from H waya with him. He 
 cussed me today until that Adam s Apple o his was 
 workin with a three-inch plunge and ended up by in- 
 quirin if I ever suspected I d got nothin north o my 
 neck-bones. And when we was peelin back in the duds- 
 room I asked them Broadway fairies if havin to take 
 langwige like that lyin down had anything on gettin 
 goose-flesh doin the Spring nymph stuff in a draughty 
 studjeo wit the steam off and the janitor dead at the 
 wheel ! " 
 
 " Then why do you stay where Veals can treat you that 
 way? " asked Torrie as her husband got up from his chair 
 and walked with a suppressed groan to the \vindow. 
 
 " You know what the stage is, Dearie, once you get bit 
 with the bug," remarked Pannie as she turned and in 
 spected the distressed Storrow with an indifferent eye. 
 "Do I disturb you, Homer?" she smilingly inquired. 
 
 Storrow swung about on her, stung beyond endurance 
 by that final impertinence. 
 
 " Not as much as you disgust me," he cried, seeming 
 to see personified in Pannie all that was abhorrent in 
 the new life into which he was so insidiously being el 
 bowed. 
 
 Pannie, digging a rouge-stick from her hand-bag and 
 passing it imperturbably across her tips, continued to 
 survey her host with contemptuously appraising eyes. 
 
 " Sweeten up, old top, or that grouch ll be takin you 
 back to where the caribou graze," she had the effrontery 
 to assert. 
 
 It was uttered lightly enough, that careless taunt of a 
 slangy chorus-girl, but it struck sharp as an arrow-point 
 against the nettled flank of consciousness. It awakened 
 in Storrow s mind his first faint spark of longing for
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 183 
 
 that saner world of peace and open spaces which was 
 now denied him. It made him think of an arching sky of 
 robin-egg blue, of steel-grey waters lapping against lich- 
 ened rocks, of pine-clad ridges black against the setting 
 sun, of the sound of the wind through spruce and fir, and 
 the smell of burning tamarack. And for the first time, 
 deep in the core of his heart, he nursed a vague but un 
 mistakable regret for other days. 
 
 " I don t think Pannie deserved that," reproved Torrie 
 when the apparently unperturbed Miss Atwill had taken 
 her departure. 
 
 " Is that the type of woman you want to spend your 
 life with?" countered her still indignant husband. 
 
 " That sounds intolerant." 
 
 " Then it s a type I intend to be intolerant with," was 
 the other s prompt response. Torrie sat silent for a 
 time, apparently weighing what she was about to say. 
 
 " People are apt to misjudge Pannie," she finally ob 
 served. " Her bark is always a good deal worse than 
 her bite. She keeps up that trick of clowning because her 
 friends demand it of her. And she has more friends in 
 this town, Owen, than you would ever imagine. And 
 having friends, don t you think, is really one of the final 
 tests of life?" 
 
 " At Krebbler s about three o clock in the morning ? " 
 demanded Storrow, detecting a knife-edge buried in the 
 rose-leaves of Torrie s quietly uttered interrogation. 
 
 " That," retorted the meditative-eyed woman in the 
 faded arm-chair, " was probably her little revolt against 
 the drabness of life, the kind of revolt that too much 
 monotony and too much restraint can start in almost any 
 woman." 
 
 Storrow, on thinking this over, decided to make no 
 reply to it. But the import of the message, if message 
 it was meant to be, remained deep in his mind, leaving 
 there an area of sensitiveness, as sore to the touch as flesh 
 in which a thorn lies embedded.
 
 184 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 Torrie, on the other hand, had the satisfaction of find 
 ing him less intolerant than of old to the friends who 
 formed the habit of dropping in more and more often to 
 see her. Pannie Atwill herself proved incapable of nurs 
 ing a grudge, though Torrie s secret advice as to re 
 straint left her with a new and unlooked-for bashfulness 
 in the presence of the slightly bewildered Storrow. Yet 
 he was able, as he understood her better, to formulate 
 an opinion of her and her kind which was not untouched 
 with admiration. Under their thinness of mind and 
 roughness of speech, he found, \vas often enough to be 
 discerned odd out-croppings of integrity and blithe seri 
 ousnesses of purpose. But the idleness of stage-life, he 
 felt, was too much for them. Their work, over-hectic 
 at first only to become over-mechanical in the end, event 
 ually left them with empty hands and empty days. So 
 they were driven into foregathering, after a fashion of 
 their own, in side-street apartment-hotels and rooming- 
 houses, in none too orderly studios and crowded flats, to 
 whip up their jaded hours with tobacco and talk and 
 alcohol. For they seemed never to have learned, these 
 gregarious wanderers, the art of being self-sufficient. 
 They could not live without companionship. 
 
 Modrynski, when he invaded Torrie s studio before 
 the end of the month, brought with him an altogether dif 
 ferent atmosphere. He made his appearance as immacu 
 late as ever but complaining of the neuritis in his legs 
 which made the climbing of so many stairs an inheritance- 
 tax on devotion. With Storrow, as he sat sipping Ver 
 mouth and nibbling arrowroot biscuits, he was both af 
 fable and courtly, talking art with the airy and imperious 
 volubility of a Whistler. With Torrie he was abstract 
 edly and paternally affectionate, leaving with her as he 
 took his departure a crumpled handful of seats for the 
 Metropolitan which he felt sure she and her young 
 friends could make use of. 
 
 " It s a great thing, Torrie, this being young," he said
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 185 
 
 as with slightly palsied fingers he buttoned his fur-lined 
 overcoat. " But that s something you and your muscular 
 Romeo over there won t know until your fine young 
 bodies start to wear out ! Good-bye, my dear, and re 
 member not to be too happy. There s nothing so de 
 vastating to an interesting woman as too much happiness. 
 It kills line. And line, to the artist, is life! " 
 
 Torrie, as she closed the studio door, turned and faced 
 her still frowning husband. 
 
 " You see what you ve got to do, Honey-Bun ? You ve 
 got to beat me! If you want to keep me fit to look at 
 you ve got to keep me miserable. Modrynski says so. 
 And Modrynski is an authority." 
 
 " That man seems to look on human beings as nothing 
 more than bone and muscle," remarked Storrow. 
 
 " That s what he pays, I suppose, for being a sculptor. 
 That s what you pay for having been one. Sometimes I 
 feel that you ve forgotten I ve got a soul and only want 
 to remember that I ve got a body, a body that s not un 
 comfortable to hold, when it s not getting in your way." 
 
 Storrow glanced about quickly, at this unlocked for 
 note from her. It was a reproof, he felt in his heart, 
 though still tacit reproof. And he was firmly yet 
 secretly resolved that it should prove unmerited. 
 
 When Donnie Eastman appeared the next day, with 
 a high-powered touring-car stripped of its hood, Storrow 
 found that resolution of his being put to the acid test. 
 He had no desire for joy-riding with a " Johnnie " who 
 lisped. He was anxious to get on with his work so that 
 Hardy could run a guiding hand over his last half dozen 
 chapters, as the older man had promised. But Torrie 
 was insistent. She was first petulant and then imperious. 
 Rather than see his authority put to the test, rather than 
 behold her riding off with the quite undisturbed Donnie 
 Eastman and the three rainbow-hued show-girls already 
 piled in his back seats, Storrow yielded the point and 
 climbed into the rakish-lined car of battleship grey.
 
 186 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 The excursion did not begin auspiciously. Torrie sat 
 in the driver s seat beside Donnie Eastman, laughing and 
 talking as her husband had not seen her laugh and talk 
 for months. The loquacity of the three beaded-eyed 
 girls about Storrow depressed him. An unceasing but 
 indeterminate undertone of obliquity in their talk seemed 
 to bar him back from the currents of their levity. 
 Denied the secret of their continual laughter and chat 
 tering, he no longer made an effort to talk. He became 
 silent and then morose. He hated the perfumes emanat 
 ing from their over-dressed bodies, seeming to taint even 
 the fresh air that blew in his face. He despised their im 
 moderate laughter and their smartness and their lobster- 
 palace slang. He nettled with secret shame when Torrie 
 light-heartedly joined them in a cabaret-song of the day. 
 The strident music of Tin-Pan Alley seemed a defilement 
 of the purling brooks and the chrome-coloured meadows 
 past which they hummed. 
 
 " Sing, you melancholy dog, sing ! " laughed Torrie 
 over her shoulder at him. But Storrow had no intention 
 of singing. 
 
 When they arrived at the road-house with a glassed-in 
 porch crowded with tables, the owner of the car greeted 
 the head-waiter by name, waved companionably to the 
 orchestra-leader, railed at the wine-list and sent word to 
 the chef that when he ordered ruddy duck he expected it 
 that way or he d ruddy the demned Neopolitan s nose. 
 This threat, lispingly uttered, was carried away by an 
 ingratiatingly attentive waiter, a waiter with eyes as 
 melancholy as Don Quixote s, who duly returned to 
 authenticate the label on Donnie s vintage wine and in 
 quire if monsieur would have his favourite salad. 
 
 Storrow, realizing that he remained an outlander in 
 that noisy and convivial party, drank steadily and deter 
 minedly. He drank, hoping to find his heaviness of 
 heart soluble in the amber liquids from those narrow- 
 necked bottles. But the reaction, for some reason, failed
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 187 
 
 to make itself manifest. The wine seemed sour on his 
 lips, even sourer in his heart, and the rest of the com 
 pany, after an ironic effort or two to prod him into the 
 currents of their merriment, left him entirely to his own 
 devices. He burned with a perilous resentment when 
 one of the hydrogenated blondes sitting next to Donnie 
 Eastman leaned over and said something about " The 
 melancholy Dane." That, he inwardly raged, was the 
 fruit of his own wife s taunt from the front of the car. 
 He waited, like a leopard on a rock-ledge, for his delicate- 
 fingered host to echo that affront, even to acknowledge 
 it, secretly dramatizing the expeditiousness with which he 
 would land on that weakling and exterminate him. 
 
 But Donnie, puzzled by the look on Torrie s suddenly 
 sobered face, was for once discreet. And on the way 
 back to the city Torrie insisted on being old-fashioned 
 enough to sit beside her husband. She did not join in 
 the singing as they flashed and hummed homeward 
 through lamp-strewn valleys past blinding headlights and 
 silent woodlands and echoing bridge-walls. She had seen 
 that semaphoric flash from his eyes, glowing with the 
 banked fires that were converting his soul into a miniature 
 Vesuvius, and she knew enough to respect it. Nor was 
 she so indiscreet, after that night, as to refer unneces 
 sarily to Donnie Eastman and his road-house dinner 
 party. Storrow s own reference to Eastman, a day or 
 two later, was an unpremeditated one. 
 
 "If that s a sample of your millionaire class," he was 
 heard to say, " it s no wonder your country s starting to 
 run to socialism." 
 
 This remark was made to Chester Hardy, still the most 
 frequent visitor at the Twenty-Fourth Street Studio and 
 still intent on piloting Storrow through the mine-field of 
 his first manuscript. That guiding hand, indeed, was 
 much more active than Storrow understood at the time. 
 Equally persistent were the older man s efforts to lead 
 Storrow off, now and then, into a cooler and higher area
 
 188 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 of existence. This involved an occasional lunch at an 
 impressively torpid club, an occasional patrol of the pic 
 ture-galleries, an occasional cup of tea in a house where 
 the muffled machinery of life made his thoughts turn 
 back to the Kirkner home. 
 
 These casual entertainments, indeed, ramified into en 
 gagements more formal, so that as the winter set in Stor- 
 row found himself contending between two forces in 
 that city which now harboured him, the segregative in 
 stinct of the creative artist jealous of accomplishment 
 and the fraternizing impulses of youth confronted by the 
 ever-opening vistas of a new environment. And the 
 closer he approached the centre of the maelstrom, he 
 found, the greater proved the suctional power of its 
 vortex. It was only too easy, he saw, to plunge into 
 those manifold activities and distractions which sur 
 rounded him, which sought to make him a flying part of 
 the flying current. Yet joined to the tug of the contrary 
 impulse towards seclusion, the desire of quiet hours for 
 work and meditation, was always the thought of Torrie. 
 It was an armistice, and only an armistice, that existed 
 between her and Hardy. And Storrow, in arguing that 
 the city could give him much but on the other hand could 
 rob him of even more, for a time refused to surrender 
 completely to either force. It was a concession, he knew, 
 but he was beginning to feel that life was made up of 
 concessions. 
 
 This truth was all the more impressed on him when he 
 returned to the studio one night after dining with the 
 Rhinelanders where, Hardy had casually intimated, he 
 would have a chance of meeting Arthur Scranton, the 
 publisher, who was keenly interested in wood-craft and 
 wild-life material. It w r as a meeting that carried the 
 promise of future developments, though Storrow little 
 dreamed how adroitly and painstakingly it had been en 
 gineered by the astute Hardy. He went home, accord 
 ingly, with his triumph tempered by a vague sense of
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 189 
 
 shame at what more and more assumed the colour of 
 neglect of Torrie. Yet this vanished at a breath as he 
 opened the studio door and found her quietly talking with 
 Krassler. 
 
 His bow, as he drew off his gloves, was devoid of 
 warmth, suspiciously akin to the parliamentary bow of a 
 politician to his opponent. 
 
 Krassler, studying him with his chipmunky brown eyes 
 through a haze of tobacco-smoke, declined to be intimid 
 ated by any such austerities. 
 
 " Tome s just been talking about your book," he ex 
 plained. 
 
 " That must have been something very remote from 
 your interests," was Storrow s unbending retort. 
 
 " That s where you re wrong," was the quick and quite 
 unhostile retort. " It s hit me hard. And being hit by 
 stories is more a part of my business than you probably 
 imagine. Only it s a hell of a long time between hits ! " 
 
 It was Torrie who spoke next, with an odd little flutter 
 of nervousness in her voice. 
 
 " He thinks, Owen, that it would have wonderful pos 
 sibilities as a motion-picture." 
 
 " I m more interested in its possibilities as a book, just 
 now," Storrow non-committally reminded them. 
 
 Krassler s smile, for all its shrewdness, was a condon 
 ing one. 
 
 " Naturally, before you make your pie you ve got to 
 catch your rabbit. And the motion-picture is an after 
 consideration. But we re all going more and more into 
 that business and some time later on there might be a 
 couple of thousand in it for you. I say there might be, 
 remember, for both books and cakes, I understand, have 
 the habit of occasionally coming out of the oven without 
 rising. And producers aren t overly anxious to send 
 companies up to the Sub-Arctics for location." 
 
 That was all that came of the matter, at the time, but 
 it had already served to remove a paling or two from
 
 i 9 o THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 intervening barriers of reserve. The two men sat until 
 after midnight, smoking and talking, with Torrie in the 
 shadowy background, a fleeting look of contentment on 
 her abstracted face as she watched them from time to 
 time. 
 
 " That man," acknowledged Storrow when Krassler 
 had finally taken his departure, " is more intelligent than 
 I had reason to suppose." 
 
 " And you treated him," rejoined Torrie, " with more 
 consideration than I had reason to expect." 
 
 " I wouldn t have been without excuses for doing other 
 wise," was Storrow s retort, conscious of an unnecessary 
 bitterness in his wife s remark. But Torrie, deeming 
 silence the better part of discretion, quietly crossed to the 
 windows and opened them, to let out the smoke that hung 
 over-heavy in the room where they would have to sleep. 
 
 There were, however, still other intangible palings that 
 were going down, still other barriers that were being 
 eroded away by the steady currents of circumstance. 
 Storrow, agreeing with Torrie that his place was at her 
 side, seemed to grow less and less reluctant to join her in 
 those " parties " which he had at first attended only under 
 protest. He even found himself, at times, ready to de 
 fend them, ready to extenuate the heavy drinking and the 
 casual profanity of the women, ready to aver that these 
 lighthearted vagabonds of art were by no means as black 
 as they painted themselves. Some of them, it is true, he 
 could not fathom; and some of them, on the other hand, 
 he grew to like. But none of them any longer regarded 
 him as a kill-joy. 
 
 One night, indeed, he returned from an exceptionally 
 convivial affair at The Blacton exceptionally light in the 
 head and unsteady on his feet. Torrie, cooing with 
 laughter, even had to help him up the stairs. But once 
 safe in the studio, he stood in front of his wife s panel- 
 mirror, staring intently at his own white face, with the 
 pupils of his eyes showing black. He stared at himself
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 191 
 
 for a long time. He was quite drunk, and he knew it. 
 He seemed to be looking, not at himself, but at another 
 man, a man not unfit to be wept over, a pitiful and de 
 graded man with a weak mouth and a quite colourless 
 skin. But as he stared, shaken with pity, at that mir 
 rored ghost of himself, his tendency to tilt unexpectedly 
 forward on his feet brought him lurching flat-nosed 
 against the glass, where he leaned for a moment or two, 
 unable to recover himself. Torrie tumbled headlong 
 into the big wing-chair, shrieking with laughter, as she 
 caught sight of him. That brought him to his feet, stung 
 into a resentment which at the moment he could neither 
 define nor express. Yet he was able, by some strange 
 duality accompanying his intoxication, to step out of his 
 own skin, as it seemed, and impersonally inspect and ap 
 praise the thing that he was becoming, that he had already 
 become. He said nothing to the girl still shaking with 
 laughter in the faded green wing-chair. But a great 
 wave of self -hate swept through his sick and shaken 
 body. Drunkenness, after all, was not happiness, and 
 he d had quite enough of it. And somewhere at the calm 
 and central core of his dizzy being he knew that such 
 things would have to end, and end soon. He owed it to 
 himself. He owed it to that faint and unfairly trampled 
 spark which, if it went out, meant the obliteration not 
 only of happiness, but of the hope of happiness.
 
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN 
 
 "T T" J HAT about your play, The Pilot Bird?" 
 
 % /\ I Storrow inquired of Hardy a few days 
 
 y y later as they made their way up to the 
 
 Beaux Arts Studios to inspect a couple of new pictures 
 
 by Henri Veneur. 
 
 " Dead but not buried," was Hardy s cryptic retort. 
 
 " What do you mean by that ? " 
 
 " I mean that they ve killed it for Broadway but left it 
 presentable for a winter s run on the road. In the 
 theatrical world, however, it s a case of ant Caesar out 
 nihil. And a production nowadays is a whale; if it can t 
 get up to Broadway to breathe it can t hope to live." 
 
 "But whose fault does it seem to be? " 
 
 " I don t suppose it s the fault of any particular per 
 son," explained the older man. " It s the fault of a con 
 dition. A production s no longer a personal matter. It s 
 something that has become institutional. But its insti- 
 tutionalism is messed up with a taint of vagabondage, the 
 same vagabondage that leaves it the most foolish and the 
 most romantic business in America today." 
 
 " Why do you call it a business? " 
 
 " Because that s all it is. Only it s a business com 
 plicated with Woman, and that s what most of the trouble 
 arises from. The stage, you see, is still a magnet for one 
 type of woman, the physical type, the type intent on ex 
 ploiting its own beauty and charm. The mere presence 
 of any such woman on the stage presupposes personal 
 vanity. So it isn t primarily intelligence that you have 
 to deal with, but a petted and petulant star and a support 
 ing company who re thinking more about late suppers 
 
 192
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 193 
 
 than the way they read their lines. And when you come 
 down to the musical comedy type, the show-girl and the 
 chorus-girl, you get something as frankly physical, of 
 course, as the artist s model. Her business is strictly 
 the parade of flesh. She hasn t the slightest need for 
 brains. And if she went into that calling with brains, 
 she d have to blow em out with a revolver, or wash em 
 out with a river of high-balls which seems to be the 
 more approved plan of the two ! " 
 
 " But there are cases," contended Storrow, " where 
 the atmosphere isn t bad." 
 
 " The atmosphere may not always be bad," retorted the 
 other, " but the influences are. You can t set up a clear 
 ing-house for sex and that s what our lighter stage, 
 stripped of its mask, really is and expect it to be the 
 abiding-place of Puritanism." 
 
 Storrow, conscious of the fact that Hardy might be hit 
 ting nearer home than he imagined, especially with the 
 allusion to high-balls, was stung into a quick but futile 
 spirit of opposition. The extent to which Torrie drank, 
 for a woman, had been disturbing him of late. And he 
 stood equally disturbed by the ease with which he seemed 
 to be following in her steps. He had never, it was true, 
 seen her entirely under the influence of liquor. She 
 seemed able always to " trim the boat," as Pannie Atwill 
 had once expressed it. But a few nights before, he re 
 membered, a dreamy intonation had crept into her voice 
 and she had merely laughed when the heaped-up tray of 
 their dishes had crashed to the floor. 
 
 These disquieting memories were ended by his entrance 
 to The Beaux Arts, where the telephone and the elevator 
 interposed between the artist and his callers. And in that 
 artist s studio, with its altar-cloths from Alatrio and its 
 marbles from Rome and its wall-tapestries from the pal 
 ace of a mediaeval prince, Storrow found a carefully 
 fabricated luxuriousness strangely in contrast with the 
 achieved humbleness of the MacDougall Alley studios
 
 194 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 which he had visited but a week before the little paved 
 court flanked by converted coach-houses, as clean-swept 
 as the street of a peasant-village, where children played 
 quietly and quaintly, unterrified by the thought of tram 
 or motor-car. Yet these impressions were swept aside 
 by a still stronger one, born of a chance-heard remark 
 that passed between Veneur and Hardy as the former for 
 the second time passed about the heavily perfumed Egypt 
 ian cigarettes. 
 
 " I see that Vibbard is sailing for home this week." 
 
 Hardy accepted this piece of news without comment, 
 beyond a scarcely perceptible shrug of one diffident shoul 
 der. Storrow, on his part, was equally willing to let 
 pass unobserved intelligence which could prove so fool 
 ishly and so indeterminately disturbing. Yet it filled and 
 shadowed a wide area of his consciousness, touching his 
 spirit with a vague and teasing sense of unrest. 
 
 Torrie herself, that night, oddly enough re-echoed his 
 own vague undertone of disquiet. 
 
 " I wish, Honey, that w r e could slip away from this 
 old hovel for a few weeks." 
 
 " Why?" he asked, startled by that initial expression 
 of restlessness from her. 
 
 Her moment of hesitation did not escape him. 
 
 " Oh, I don t know," she said with a show of listless- 
 ness. " It s only that I ve been thinking how you ve 
 drudged at that old book of yours and how a little holiday 
 would do us both good a little holiday somewhere 
 where we could be by ourselves and just hear the sound 
 of water or wind in the tree-tops! " 
 
 " Has something happened this week to make you feel 
 that way?" he asked. 
 
 "Of course not," she replied, looking up quickly. 
 
 " Then it s something you ve heard?" he persisted. 
 
 "Something I ve heard?" she repeated. "What 
 could I have heard?" 
 
 He had decided, earlier in the day, to say nothing
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 195 
 
 about it. But now he merely knew the necessity of un 
 burdening his soul of the truth. 
 
 " That Vibbard s coming back here to this studio of 
 his," he said as he stood up and faced her. 
 
 She stared up at him with no visible change of expres 
 sion. 
 
 "Who told you that?" she finally asked. 
 
 " Veneur," was his reply. He watched her as she 
 stooped and picked up a fallen hair-pin from the floor. 
 
 " And what has Vibbard s coming back to his studio 
 got to do with us? " she demanded. 
 
 " That s what I wanted to find out," was his retort. 
 
 She leaned back in her chair, apparently deep in 
 thought. 
 
 " Owen," she finally said with an achieved quietness 
 which did not altogether take the vibrant tones from her 
 voice, " I have given myself to you. I m giving my life 
 up to you. I feel, in a way, that I ve put myself in your 
 hands, and that you can mould me and shape me about 
 the same as you used to shape a lump of moist clay into 
 what you most want it to be. I fell in love with you, and 
 let you do what you wanted with me. I love you now. I 
 know that as well as I know I m sitting in this chair 
 and I think you know it too. You mean more to me 
 than anything in my old life ever meant, ever could mean. 
 But I can t help feeling that the power this gives you 
 over me, the power to make me happy or miserable, car 
 ries with it an obligation to be fair to what I m trying to 
 be, and do. I hate to think of you questioning me, and 
 being suspicious of me, and probing about in the past for 
 things that aren t worth digging up and that have nothing 
 to do with our lives now when they are dug up. I once 
 said that we could be as happy as two children, if we only 
 had the common-sense to keep the trick of happiness 
 within reach. You remember that, don t you ? " 
 
 " I remember it," he acknowledged, both relieved and 
 depressed by these words which she was uttering with a
 
 196 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 new and unlocked for gift of articulation. He was, too, 
 acutely conscious of her beauty, touched now with a new 
 overtone of wist fulness that struck him as almost 
 autumnal in its tenderness. 
 
 " Life, after all," she went on almost wearily, " is a 
 race between happiness and the undertaker and the 
 undertaker is always so apt to win. And " 
 
 " That sounds like Modrynski," cut in her husband, 
 sharply. 
 
 " I guess that was thought of long before Modrynski 
 was born," replied Torrie, forlornly tranquillized by her 
 fleeting little contemplation of time s infinitudes. Her 
 face, relaxing into pensiveness, disturbed Storrow by its 
 remoteness. It made him think of Rodin s Le Penseur. 
 Yet he stood shadowed by the same cloud that darkened, 
 however momentarily, her own soul, a cloud born of the 
 consciousness that life was short and death came to 
 everything and love after all seemed only a passionate 
 embrace on the brink of a grave, and the foolish cry of 
 his darkened heart for something permanent in the midst 
 of the things that must surely pass. He stared at the 
 shadowy-eyed woman in the faded green arm-chair, seem 
 ing to find her made suddenly precious through very im- 
 permanence. She appeared more than ever remote from 
 him, and yet very near. She seemed finished and free, 
 courageous, capable always of choosing her own paths 
 and her own ends. Yet the next moment she carried to 
 him the impression of a harried and beaten ship being 
 driven before the wind, buffeted by currents over which 
 she had no control, the toy of tides, infinitely older and 
 stronger than her own body. An indefinable pity for her 
 crept up into his heart, a wide pity in which his temporal 
 perplexities betrayed a tendency to become attenuated, as 
 thin and futile as a row of gas-lamps found burning after 
 daybreak. 
 
 They talked no more of the matter in hand, that night,
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 197 
 
 though he was not without an occasional suspicion that 
 it was still occupying much of Torrie s thought. 
 
 Nor did he find his own soul swept quite clean of its 
 problems by this tenuous broom of emotionalism. To 
 wards the end of the week, when he knew that Torrie 
 was away for the afternoon, he expended three dollars 
 for the purchase and delivery of an empty piano-case. 
 Then, with saw and hammer, he deliberately and cool- 
 headedly set about nailing up the communicating door 
 between the two studios. He removed the debris, im 
 pressed with a sense of finality, replacing the imitation 
 Gobelin tapestry with the preoccupied gravity that at 
 taches to a ceremony fittingly executed. 
 
 It was several days before Torrie herself discovered 
 that unexpected and significant bit of carpentry. Stor- 
 row, bent over his work-table, caught the sound of her 
 sudden gasp and looked up in time to see the sharp recoil 
 of her body as she let the tapestry fall back in place. 
 
 " Did it surprise you? " he quietly demanded. 
 
 " No," she said, after a moment s silence, without turn 
 ing about. " But it makes me think of a coffin. It looks 
 exactly exactly like a casket-box on end ! " 
 
 " Then dc mortuis nil nisi bonum," remarked the man 
 at the table, remembering the ancient phrase from one of 
 his earliest school-boy orations. And of that dead past, 
 indeed, nothing good or bad was said, though Torrie re 
 mained inordinately quiet during the next few days and 
 spent a greater amount of her time away from the studio. 
 If Storrow, preoccupied with the closing chapters of his 
 book, was conscious of these absences, he offered no com 
 ment on them. 
 
 On a day of driving snow, with the wind rattling the 
 casements and the street-noises of the city strangely 
 muffled, Storrow bundled up his manuscript and an 
 nounced that it was in fit and final shape for Hardy s 
 judicial eye. He decided, with the impatience of the
 
 i 9 8 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 artist still warm with the fires of creation, to hear at once 
 the best or the worst that his older friend might have to 
 say. 
 
 " You don t mind, do you? " he asked of Torrie as he 
 noticed the hesitating light in her eye. He was dis 
 turbingly conscious of recent neglect, but he was equally 
 conscious, on the other hand, that a new and less worried 
 regime awaited them. 
 
 " Of course I don t mind," she told him. " But you 
 must bundle up, for this storm. And be sure and wear 
 your rubbers." 
 
 He laughed a little at that. To him, the son of the 
 North, any such gentle little flurry of goose-feathers 
 seemed scarcely worthy of being called a storm. He was 
 even anxious to feel the wind, cutting from river to river 
 through the narrow cross-streets, bite at his face and 
 sweep the cobwebs from his brain. Yet it pleased him 
 to think, as he dutifully pulled on the rubbers, which he 
 despised, that she could worry thus foolishly about his 
 welfare, that she could nurse an excuse for any such 
 chance of " mothering " him. 
 
 " And if I m not back for luncheon," he explained, 
 " don t worry. Hardy may keep me there for three or 
 four hours." 
 
 She followed him to the door, signifying her under 
 standing by a silent nod of the head. He was intent, at 
 the moment, on speculating as to what Hardy s verdict 
 would be. It meant a great deal to him. It meant a 
 great deal to them both. 
 
 " Good luck, Honey," she said, with a wintry little 
 smile strangely in contrast to the throaty intensity of her 
 voice. 
 
 He stopped, arrested by that unlooked for note. Then 
 he turned back to her in the gloomy hallway. 
 
 " What is it? " he demanded. 
 
 " Nothing," she told him.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 199 
 
 "What is it?" he repeated, coming still closer. 
 
 " You forgot something," she reminded him. " Some 
 thing I need." 
 
 He laughed, almost sorrowfully, as he took her in his 
 arms and held her close against his rough tweed ulster. 
 He kissed her, depressed by a sense of incompetence, of 
 heavy clumsiness, a prey to the shyness which sways the 
 naturally reticent man, and a moment later made a hurried 
 escape down the stairs, intent on hiding some wayward 
 ebullition of emotion from her eyes. As he went he 
 overheard the strains of a piano, muffled and far-away, 
 from some remoter door along the gloomy hallway. He 
 recognized the air from Mignon, the air he had always 
 loved. 
 
 " Knowest thou the land where the citron grows ? " 
 he murmured as he faced the driving snow, weaving that 
 movement so accidentally overheard into a vague and 
 new-born mood of aspiration, and accepting it, without 
 stopping to reason why, as a good omen. 
 
 Yet he was wrong in this, he found when he had 
 reached Fifth Avenue, for Hardy was not at home. So 
 he scribbled a note of explanation, left it beside the manu 
 script, and once more faced the driving snow that seemed 
 to put a soft pedal on the multitudinous noises of the 
 city. He wandered idly on, released from all thought of 
 time and destination, isolated by the whirling screen that 
 made even a skyscraper a thing of romance, exhilarated 
 by the whip of the wind, exulting in the air of novelty 
 which a mantling whiteness was imposing upon every 
 day street-corners and once familiar buildings. But his 
 delight in that snow-storm, it suddenly occurred to him, 
 was selfish. He would get Torrie and they would revel 
 in it together. So he swung about and let the wind drive 
 him homeward, with a lightness of heart which was too 
 airy even to stop and question its source. 
 
 He was at the studio door, with his hand thrust out to
 
 200 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 grasp the knob, when the sound of voices came to him. 
 His approach, he remembered, had been silenced by the 
 rubbers which he wore. 
 
 " But arc you happy? " he heard a man s voice demand 
 ing. It was a voice new to Storrow. It was a voice 
 with some slightest tinge of foreign intonation, a smooth 
 and mellow voice with a note of calm authority which 
 seemed to approach the insouciant. And Storrow 
 promptly disliked that voice as a voice, translating his 
 antipathy into a tenuous justification for remaining there 
 motionless, with his hand arrested on the knob of the 
 door which he declined to throw open. 
 
 " Of course I m happy, or I wouldn t be here," was 
 Torrie s reply. It was uttered coolly, yet with a touch 
 of irritability in its frigidness. There was the sound of 
 a laugh, low and confident, a man s laugh which proved 
 unreasonably disturbing to the second man beyond the 
 door. 
 
 " You say that," argued the voice with the slightly 
 Gallicized intonation, " but something in your eyes tells 
 me that it s not quite the truth." 
 
 The eavesdropper, from that moment, nursed no fur 
 ther qualms of conscience. He merely waited, foolishly 
 tense, for what might come next. 
 
 " Then you d better depend more on what I say than 
 what I happen to appear," was Torrie s almost listless 
 retort. 
 
 Her companion, it was apparent, stood determined to 
 ignore any note of hostility from her. 
 
 " But when you happen to appear so unlike the old 
 Torrie I used to know, I am distrait, murmured the 
 other, in a voice so low that Storrow had difficulty in 
 overhearing it. 
 
 "Then why worry about it?" was Torrie s curt de 
 mand. And Storrow knew, by this time, that it was 
 Vibbard talking to his wife. He knew it, without quite 
 knowing why he knew. And he was almost glad of it,
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 201 
 
 in a way, for at the mere vibrations of that human voice 
 a thousand suspended antipathies and animosities were 
 definitely precipitated, and made visible in the stagnant 
 pools of suspicion, giving a focal point towards which 
 attention might thereafter be bent, a nucleus of offence at 
 last ponderable to groping intelligence. 
 
 " I can t help worrying about it, my dear." 
 
 "And what gave you that right?" Torrie demanded. 
 
 " The dead past that is never quite as dead, my dear, 
 as we imagine," was the other s softly enunciated re 
 sponse. 
 
 " Then you d better wait and discuss that right with 
 my husband," challenged Torrie, obviously angered by 
 the other s careless fortitude. 
 
 " Husband ! " cried Vibbard. " That word, Torrie, 
 seems ridiculous on your lips. It sounds unreal. I can t 
 imagine you married." 
 
 " But I am," was the low-toned response. 
 
 " Then I can t imagine your staying married, any more 
 than I can imagine a stormy petrel in a sixpenny willow 
 cage. You re not made for that sort of life. Your 
 spirit, my dear, is too free and big for that sort of thing. 
 It s what they do to market-ducks when they crowd them 
 into a shipping-crate. They tie them together, stupidly. 
 It s what they do to jail-birds when they want to make 
 sure of their captivity hand-cuff them together, like 
 the market-ducks. But for a woman who has known 
 liberty, who has known the wing-sweep of untrammelled 
 adoration, who has learned the taste of freedom, it won t 
 do, it simply won t do ! " 
 
 It was Torrie who laughed this time, though there was 
 more defiance than mirth in the sound of that laughter. 
 
 "Then what do you intend doing about it?" she 
 mocked. Her demand was followed by a silence of sev 
 eral seconds. 
 
 " I intend to take you in my arms, you beautiful white 
 flower, and crush the essence of rapture from your lips,"
 
 202 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 intoned the self -intoxicated aesthete confronting her. 
 
 "Against my will?" asked Torrie. The question 
 seemed so calmly uttered that it took on a touch of the 
 meditative. 
 
 Those are the things that women forget," murmured 
 the other. 
 
 " And that s the way a nigger treats a woman and 
 occasionally gets lynched for it," the incisive-voiced girl 
 reminded him. 
 
 " Lynching is easy compared to the torture I feel when 
 I see you standing there ! " The voice lowered, and the 
 last of the mockery went out of it. 
 
 " Oh, I want you, Torrie, no matter what it costs ! " 
 
 The silence was broken by a sound of movement within 
 the room. 
 
 " Wait ! " It was Torrie s voice, a little shrill with 
 apprehension. 
 
 " I can t wait," cried the other, with a quaver in his 
 voice. 
 
 It was at that moment that Storrow swung open the 
 studio door. 
 
 Torrie, standing under the wide-diffused light from 
 the snow-sprinkled skylight above her, did not move. 
 The only movement that took place in the room, once 
 Storrow had swung shut the door behind him, was from 
 Vibbard. He wheeled about, with a transformation that 
 was as adroit as it was sudden, and faced the cast of 
 The Sentinel Wolf that stood on its pedestal against the 
 wall. 
 
 Yes, as I say, there is undoubtedly power in the basic 
 idea. And there is power, too, in the modelling," he 
 intoned with a quick assumption of critical detachment. 
 It was both foolish and futile, advertising a dexterity in 
 subterfuge which tended to fan Storrow s rage to a still 
 whiter heat. For in it the newcomer only too easily 
 detected an odious sophistication in intrigue, an adroit 
 ness at protective attitudinizing, which bespoke the gal-
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 203 
 
 lant of many affairs. And Vibbard, desperately con 
 scious of the farce, stopped speaking and turned slowly 
 about and stared at the intruder with his back to the 
 door. 
 
 Silently and deliberately Storrow took off his hat and 
 gloves, and then his overcoat, tossing them on the floor 
 beside him. He wanted nothing to interfere with his 
 freedom of movement. He was white, almost sick-look 
 ing in the uncertain light, all the forces of life suddenly 
 concentrated at the core of his being, marshalled and 
 crowded there for that impending supreme effort which 
 the outposts of instinct announced as perilously near. 
 
 The silence was not broken even as Storrow stepped to 
 wards the other man, eyeing him with steel-blue medita- 
 tiveness, as preoccupied as a surgeon, apparently, before 
 an operation. Vibbard, he observed, was a much larger 
 man than he had been led to expect from the timbre and 
 intonations of his voice. Storrow found himself almost 
 able to exult in this, for it meant that what was about to 
 come would not come with too unnerving a facility. He 
 also nursed a vague fear that the other man might in 
 some way seek safety in flight. But pride was too 
 strong, he was glad to see, in that grey-faced and slightly 
 gaping-mouthed opponent who sensed to the full what 
 was coming and preferred to face it without falling back. 
 So strong was personal pride with Vibbard, in fact, that 
 he essayed a futile and forlorn movement to save his 
 face, even at the last. 
 
 " I suppose/ he said in an exceptionally thin voice, 
 " this is some new brand of American blackmail ! " 
 
 It was a doubly unfortunate remark. And it proved 
 to be the last one from Vibbard. It was a lash on the 
 rawest flank of Storrow s overtried nerves, yet a lash 
 which turned him aside from his intention of knocking 
 the other man down, as he had decided to do. 
 
 He declined to bestow on his enemy even that qualified 
 dignity. Instead, he caught Vibbard by the Avenue de
 
 204 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 la Paix cravat in which nested his Place Vendome cameo 
 and slapped the face, contorted with sudden loud pro 
 tests, from side to side, as a kitten slaps a spool. It was 
 a slap with the open hand, painful in impact, but doubly 
 humiliating in its note of toying condescension, of easy 
 contempt. When Vibbard attempted to clinch and save 
 himself from this punishment Storrow fell to mauling 
 the dandified body as he had once seen a grizzly maul a 
 hunting-hound. And then Vibbard, driven to the natural 
 extremity of the hopeless, fell to clawing and biting at 
 his assailant. But that opposition was no longer neces 
 sary to the man who still wore a pair of slush-stained 
 rubbers on his feet. He had smouldered for months 
 with the Vesuvian fires that were now letting themselves 
 go. He was releasing in action the poisons which week 
 by week he had kept within him, eating like acid. Soured 
 inhibitions, stifled impulses, swarmed to the surface. 
 The prolonged physical inactivity of a body active by 
 instinct and training seemed to obliterate itself in one 
 passionate and unreasoning outburst. He hated this 
 soft-handed philanderer, this hunter of women. He even 
 remembered what Hardy had once said to him, to the 
 effect that every so-called lady s man stood mysteriously 
 yet eternally kickable, stood always despicable, in the 
 eyes of other men. 
 
 And then the reaction came. 
 
 It came about the time that Torrie, standing narrow- 
 eyed and breathless, finally gasped out : " Owen, you ll 
 kill him! But Owen, it was plain, was swayed by no 
 such fears. He remembered that it was not the first fist- 
 fight into which he had been ushered because of the 
 woman behind him. And it suddenly struck him as an 
 absurd and unreasoning and bestial sort of business. 
 It was not the way, he knew, in which any problem worthy 
 the name had ever been settled or ever could be settled. 
 It merely deferred final issues and intoxicated with its 
 false impression of triumph. It degraded life by giving
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 205 
 
 factitious value to the brutish thump of fist against op 
 posing flesh. And he had known enough of it. 
 
 Storrow, with a sudden withering of hate which left 
 him listless and heavy-hearted, picked his sodden oppon 
 ent up bodily and dragged him to the door. Through 
 that door, with a feeling of nausea as acutely physical as 
 the mat de mer born of a rolling ship-deck, he flung the 
 man with the blood-stained face. Then, dreading that 
 Torrie s keen eye should behold the misery and meekness 
 on his own face, he fabricated a sustaining appearance of 
 ferocity and strode to the kitchenette tap, where he let the 
 cold water run over his bruised knuckles. 
 
 " And I guess that settles Alan Vibbard for us," he 
 proclaimed as he secretly steadied himself against the 
 sink-edge. 
 
 " But," began Torrie, almost in a whisper. She did 
 not continue. Storrow, however, seemed able to read 
 her thoughts. 
 
 "If he comes back, I ll do the same thing over again," 
 he announced, staring at the white-faced woman to see 
 if any shadow of pity lurked in her eyes. But they were 
 barricaded eyes, enigmatic, inscrutable, no longer touched 
 with triumph. 
 
 And Alan Vibbard betrayed no intention of coming 
 back. Two days later a moving-van backed up to the 
 curb and three men, of whom the owner was not one, 
 stripped the adjoining studio of its hangings and fur 
 niture and obfets d art. In the hallway Storrow hap 
 pened to pass one of these men carrying in his arms a 
 Russian samovar.
 
 A 
 
 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 
 
 * j DECENT book isn t written, as a rule; it s 
 re-written," Chester Hardy had announced 
 in extenuation of the somewhat sweeping 
 changes which he had suggested to Storrow after going 
 through the younger author s manuscript. And the 
 truth of this came home to Storrow as he did what he 
 could to carry out these suggestions. Even his final con 
 viction that the older man was right did not serve to 
 render his labour any less difficult and any less lugubrious. 
 Once persuaded that the issue was closed, that the work 
 was complete, its reopening took on the nature of a post 
 mortem, proving almost as gloomy a bit of business as 
 the re-opening of a coffin. He was tired of the thing. 
 The last of his enthusiasm seemed burned out, and the 
 puppets of his creation, to his jaundiced eye, took on the 
 soiled and faded aspect of counter-goods too frequently 
 handled. 
 
 But he worked on doggedly, even if under difficulties. 
 It began to tell a little, both on nerves and temper, for he 
 found that he slept now only after a more and more sub 
 stantial " night-cap." He also found Torrie s incon 
 sequential comings and goings, her haphazard callers, her 
 lighthearted lack of order, a provocation to quick and 
 unreasoning irritability. And this in turn reacted on 
 Torrie, who complained of his preoccupation, of the lack 
 of comforts in the studio, of the housekeeping hardships 
 involved in such quarters. She became more and more 
 silent, more and more self-contained. 
 
 "If we re going to live in this dump," she announced 
 one morning after journeying for the second time down 
 
 206
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 207 
 
 to the studio of a wall-paper artist on the second floor to 
 answer telephone calls, " I ve at least got to have a 
 phone." 
 
 "Can we afford it?" queried Storrow, looking up 
 from his type-writer, for only the night before they had 
 taken up the matter of expenditure and her husband had 
 awakened to the disturbing fact that he had been living 
 beyond his income. He had remembered the even more 
 disturbing fact that she had once protested that he would 
 find her an expensive luxury. 
 
 " If we can t stand that," retorted Torrie, " we may 
 as well give up." 
 
 " Give up what ? " asked Storrow, trying to keep the 
 note of alarm out of his voice. 
 
 Torrie shrugged a shoulder as she walked to the win 
 dow. 
 
 " Give up pretending to be civilized," she replied with 
 an obvious effort at moderation. But her cool look of 
 disdain, as he sat staring at her with abstracted eyes, did 
 not escape him. 
 
 " Yes, I think we d better have a telephone put in," he 
 acknowledged quietly, as he turned back to his work. 
 
 " Surely your book will bring you in something," ven 
 tured Torrie, touched by afterthought into a fleeting mo 
 ment of remorse. 
 
 " It ought at least to pay for a phone," acknowledged 
 Storrow, with his attention already directed towards the 
 page in front of him. 
 
 " Will you be through with it by a week from tomor 
 row? " he heard her asking. 
 
 " Yes with luck," he answered. " Why? " 
 
 Torrie slowly struck a match and lighted a cigarette. 
 
 " Because that happens to be my birthday, O lord and 
 master, and Mattie Crowder s just warned me the bunch 
 are going to spring a surprise party on us. Will you 
 mind?" 
 
 He felt that there was a veiled note of mockery in her
 
 2o8 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 meekness. But it was so veiled that it left him touched 
 with doubt. 
 
 " Of course I won t mind," he protested, " so long as I 
 can be one of the party. And when this thing is cleared 
 away, Torrie, we ll have more chance of getting a little 
 fun out of life. And, speaking of that, let s go over to 
 the Delia Robbia Room at the Vanderbilt for dinner to 
 night." 
 
 But Torrie shook her head. 
 
 " I couldn t enjoy it." 
 
 "Why not?" he demanded. 
 
 " The answer is just one word, Owen, clothes! " 
 
 This seemed to puzzle him. 
 
 " Why, the last time we were there you enjoyed it. 
 And you looked pretty good to me." 
 
 Torrie sat on the wide window-sill, viewing him with 
 meditative eyes. 
 
 " I may have pretended to enjoy it, but I didn t. I 
 don t think you realize, Owen, what clothes mean to a 
 woman." 
 
 " In the matter of keeping her warm? " suggested Stor- 
 row, with an ironical matter-of-factness which Torrie 
 decided to ignore. 
 
 " That may be all right for the woman you re writing 
 about there," she said with a head-nod towards his manu 
 script. " But the city woman doesn t wear clothes to 
 keep warm. She wears clothes to make herself attrac 
 tive and show that she s in the style. And that word 
 style, my dear, is the biggest word in the American lan 
 guage. It stands for the biggest force in all our world. 
 The things that you men think are so big, the things you 
 call hunger and religion and honour and love, aren t even 
 able to stand up beside it, in the long run. The right sort 
 of clothes can give us women a glory we can t even get out 
 of love. Knowing we re properly dressed can give us a 
 peace of soul we can t possibly get out of religion." 
 
 Storrow sat confronting this coldly enunciated truth,
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 209 
 
 wondering if men, after all, were destined forever to mis 
 judge women, were prompted eternally to attribute to 
 them over-visionary ideals. 
 
 " But the thing is so absurdly relative," he contended. 
 " Take the Chippewa squaw as I ve seen her, for in 
 stance. A red blanket and a string of glass beads can 
 satisfy her soul just as fully as a Paquin model might do 
 for you." 
 
 " And she d satisfy the reservation buck in that get-up, 
 but she d never satisfy the New Yorker," countered Tor- 
 rie. " It s really a matter of keeping up with your own 
 circle. And it s a sort of warfare, where we have to 
 fight to the last breath, whether we want to or not. Look 
 at those shops along Fifth Avenue, the shops for which 
 our New York men slave and work their lives out ! Look 
 at the working-girls who spend their wages in the Sixth 
 Avenue imitations of those shops. And look at the stage- 
 girls who drift up and down the Rialto rooting for work, 
 togged out in their flashy imitations of the Sixth Avenue 
 imitations. They re all battling, every one of them, bat 
 tling to keep their heads above water in our awful Ameri 
 can ocean of style." 
 
 Storrow had no difficulty in recalling the types. His 
 difficulty lay more in accepting the argument. 
 
 " But those Rialto ladies, as I remember em," he re 
 minded his wife, " usually wear a diamond or two about 
 the size of a salt-cellar." 
 
 " Yes, and not more than one in ten of them the real 
 thing! That s the pathetic part of it, the never-ending 
 need for pretence. And it s just as pathetic when they 
 are real, once you understand what they ve gone without 
 and given up to keep that solitary stone. For stage- 
 people, you see, have a childish belief that diamonds are 
 always a good investment, even though the interest on 
 what they borrow on them amounts to three per cent a 
 month, when it comes to the question of the pawn-shop." 
 
 Storrow, before this parade of worldly wisdom, could
 
 210 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 afford to laugh. It was, however, a slightly acidified 
 laugh. 
 
 " But you d be without even that life-line, wouldn t 
 you ? " he told her. 
 
 " How do you mean? " 
 
 " It s just occurred to me that I ve never given you a 
 jewel in your life," he explained. 
 
 " You don t need to," Torrie replied. 
 
 "And why not?" 
 
 " I guess I ve got about all I care for," was her reply. 
 
 " I ve never seen you wear them," he retorted. 
 
 " I ve been ashamed to," was her counter-retort. 
 
 "Why?" he demanded, with a slight stirring of un 
 rest. 
 
 " I d look too much like your Rialto lady with the salt 
 cellar," was the almost listless response. 
 
 " Are they so magnificent ? " 
 
 Torrie, with a slightly curled lip, glanced slowly about 
 the crowded studio. 
 
 " No; but they d seem incongruous," was her none too 
 tranquillizing reply. Storrow wheeled about in his chair, 
 with a darker impulse creeping across the horizon of 
 consciousness. 
 
 " Would you mind letting me see them ? " he said with 
 an assumption of nonchalance. 
 
 " \Vhat s the use?" was Torrie s lazily intoned inter 
 rogation. But after he had repeated that request she 
 slowly crossed the room to where her steel-bound theatri 
 cal trunk stood against the wall. She lifted the lid of 
 this, and from a canvas-covered compartment made to 
 receive it, took out a japanned tin make-up box. Then 
 from behind the leather backing of a small square hand- 
 mirror she extracted a key. An odour, a slightly stale 
 and heavy odour of cosmetics, floated up from the trunk 
 as the stooping woman lifted out first one and then an 
 other of the wide canvas-covered trays. From the very 
 bottom of that chamber of faded perfumes and memories
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 211 
 
 she took out a second tin make-up box wrapped in a 
 towel blotched with sanguinary-looking stains of lip- 
 rouge. She carried this box to a chair and sat with it on 
 her knees as she unlocked it. Storrow caught sight of a 
 faded package of papers, a photograph or two, and what 
 looked like a bundle of letters tied together with a cherry- 
 coloured ribbon. From under these Torrie lifted out a 
 small chamois bag, very soiled. She closed the make-up 
 box, thrust it behind her, and having untied the bag, 
 emptied it on her lap. 
 
 Storrow knew little about precious stones, cared little, 
 with his defective colour-sense, for their beauty, had 
 thought little about their value. But it struck him, as he 
 stared down at that array of rings and clasps and trinkets, 
 as an unexpectedly impressive collection of ornaments. 
 What even more forcibly struck him, however, was the 
 seeming carelessness with which they had been tossed to 
 gether, with a dusting of face-powder on the unburnished 
 metal, with dirt between the little platinum claws that bit 
 at the edges of the brilliants, with a loose garnet that had 
 obviously broken away from its setting. And this re 
 lieving air of contempt was accentuated by Torrie s in 
 different gesture as she scrambled them about in the little 
 valley of drapery between her knees. Storrow picked 
 up a marquise ring, made up of a white diamond sur 
 rounded by rubies. 
 
 " Wouldn t you call that rather valuable? " he inquired 
 as he dusted its face. Torrie, with an indifferent eye, 
 glanced up at it for a moment. 
 
 " I d call it rather cheap and showy," she retorted as 
 she made an effort to shove the loose garnet back into its 
 bruised setting. 
 
 " Where did it come from? " asked Storrow, trying to 
 make the question a casual one. 
 
 Torrie laughed at the solemnity on his face. 
 
 That, Honey Bun, came from one of your unsuc 
 cessful rivals," she proclaimed as she began tossing the
 
 212 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 jewellery back into its chamois container. But his brow 
 remained clouded, for in his world, he remembered, 
 women neither accepted nor kept jewels in this light and 
 airy fashion. He was about to tell her so when he was 
 interrupted by a caller at his door, a solemn-eyed and 
 threadbare girl who dispiritedly inquired if he used 
 models. 
 
 When Storrow turned back into the studio Torrie had 
 replaced the trunk-trays and slammed down and snapped 
 shut the top-catches, with a valedictory slapping together 
 of the finger-tips, to brush from them the dust with which 
 Time powders the unused. And it struck Storrow, as 
 he went back to his work, that little could now be gained 
 by reopening the issue. 
 
 He plunged into that work with a new impatience in 
 his blood, oppressed by a vague ache of past incom- 
 petencies, determined to, stand no longer between Torrie 
 and her rehabilitation. This attitude of self-accusation 
 had a tendency to leave him more than ever submissive 
 before Torrie s disturbingly ramifying preparations for 
 that surprise-party which betrayed scant promise of pos 
 sessing the slightest element of the unexpected. 
 
 Two days before that event, by working night and day, 
 he succeeded in completing the manuscript which to his 
 own eyes had become as stale and colourless as a circus- 
 bill on a December barn-end. The casual and unemo 
 tional manner in which it was carried off by Chester 
 Hardy, the next day, tended to accentuate this impression 
 of its worthlessness. Storrow, alone in the studio, 
 weighed down in spirit, depressed by the insidious and 
 distorting toxins of mental fatigue, stared at the new 
 cut-glass decanters with which Torrie had decorated his 
 battered buhl table. He remembered, as he studied the 
 rich amber frustum made by the light striking across the 
 contents of one of these decanters, that there, close at 
 hand, lay a key of release from the desolating stagnation 
 that possessed him. He reached for a glass, filled it half
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 full, and hissed into it a spurt or two from one of the 
 seltzer-siphons. 
 
 Having drunk this off, he sat down, morosely awaiting 
 the desired effect. Then, finding not the slightest sign 
 of exhilaration manifesting itself, he repeated the opera 
 tion. This resulted in a vague feeling of uplift, touched 
 with recklessness. Deciding to convert that feeling into 
 something more definite, he took still another drink. 
 After that he no longer cared about either his moods or 
 his movements. 
 
 When Torrie returned to the studio that night she 
 stopped short with her parcels, startled by the figure that 
 he presented. 
 
 " Owen ! " she called out sharply. 
 
 His answer was as care-free as it was inarticulate. 
 Slowly the look of anxiety ebbed out of her eyes. She 
 could even afford to laugh a little as she threw aside her 
 hat and gloves. 
 
 "But where did you get it?" she demanded with a 
 humorous inspection of him at closer range. 
 
 "God id all by m she f!" proudly but heavily an 
 nounced the swaying figure before her. She backed her 
 husband into a chair, and stood looking down at him. 
 
 " Aren t you just a day or two too early ? " she asked. 
 
 " Th early bird casshes th worm," he explained with 
 a prodigious conviction of wisdom. The enormity of 
 that wisdom so impressed him, in fact, that he solemnly 
 reiterated the aphorism. If, through those fogs of in- 
 ebriacy, he looked for some reproof from her, he was 
 muddily perplexed by the absence of all rancour on her 
 part. 
 
 " I don t think you can ever afford to preach to me, 
 after this," she said to him as she buttoned up the jacket 
 of his pyjamas. " I was never in that condition in my 
 life." 
 
 He slept heavily and late the next morning. Torrie, 
 in fact, was up and dressed and had the studio put to
 
 214 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 rights before he so much as stirred. Nor did he stir, 
 an hour later, when a knock sounded on the door. 
 
 Torrie, answering that knock, confronted Chester 
 Hardy asking for her husband. 
 
 " He s in," she acknowledged after a moment of hesi 
 tation, " but I m afraid you can t see him." 
 
 " He s not ill, is he? " inquired the caller, remembering 
 the past weeks of overwork which seemed to have taken 
 not a little of the spring out of Storrow s step. 
 
 " No, he s not ill," was Torrie s deliberate reply. 
 " But he got very drunk last night and he hasn t slept it 
 off yet." 
 
 She met Hardy s stare with an enigmatic stare that 
 seemed almost one of triumph. It was the man who 
 eventually lowered his eyes. 
 
 " Well, when he s in a condition to understand the 
 message, will you explain to him that I had Arthur 
 Scranton personally read his manuscript at once. Scran- 
 ton s house has accepted it for publication. He phoned 
 me about it this morning and gave me a record decision. 
 And I rather felt that you d both want to hear the good 
 news." 
 
 Torrie looked up at him, humbled in spite of herself. 
 
 " That is good news," she murmured. 
 
 " And it comes, as I remember it, on your birthday," 
 added the man with the uncomfortably penetrating eyes. 
 
 " It s the finest birthday gift that you could have 
 brought to me," she said without looking up. 
 
 " It will bring a thousand dollars, in advance royal 
 ties," Hardy coldly announced. 
 
 " I wasn t thinking of that part of it," was Torrie s 
 quick retort. 
 
 " But it s a part," observed Hardy, noting the faint 
 flush that crept up to her forehead, " that can t afford to 
 be overlooked. I had another message for your husband, 
 but it can wait." 
 
 Torrie, when he had gone, sat in the faded green arm-
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 215 
 
 chair deep in thought. Then, emerging from her ab 
 straction, she made coffee and prepared breakfast with 
 exceptional care. There was a tray, studiously laid, 
 awaiting Storrow when he awakened. He sat up and 
 inspected it with a lack-lustre eye. 
 
 "Feel better, Honey?" Torrie casually inquired. 
 
 " Yes," he said, sour with self-hate. 
 
 " Can you eat something? " was her next query. The 
 man on the bed shook his head from side to side. He 
 lifted his hands and pressed them against his temples. 
 But that definite and decipherable pain, he felt, was more 
 endurable than the dull ache of shame that weighed on 
 his heart. He remembered the Dionysian revels at 
 Brownie Tell s bal masque, the revels he had railed at. 
 He remembered the historic night at The Blacton. He 
 thought of Pannie Atwell and her bubble-water friends 
 at Krebbler s at three o clock in the morning. He had 
 fallen as low as any of them. He was one of them now, 
 stamped with the same brand, squeezed into the same 
 mould. 
 
 " Would you like to hear some good news? " demanded 
 Torrie, disturbed by the misery on his face. He turned 
 and regarded her with bloodshot eyes, with an expression 
 dangerously akin to distaste on his face. There was no 
 news just then, he felt, that could be good news. He 
 stared at his cooling breakfast, heavily conscious of the 
 solicitude that had prompted its preparation. Mingled 
 with his shame was a newer note of contrition, contri 
 tion for service unrecognized. 
 
 " What news ? " he asked, with an effort. 
 
 " The Scrantons are going to publish your novel," she 
 told him, waiting in vain for some visible reaction to that 
 announcement. 
 
 " Who told you that? " he finally asked. 
 
 " Hardy came here this morning, especially to let you 
 know." 
 
 A new light came into the dulled eyes regarding her.
 
 216 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 "And you explained why he couldn t see me?" de 
 manded Storrow. 
 
 Torrie hesitated. 
 
 " I told him the truth," she finally admitted. Yet she 
 was hardly prepared for the utter misery that over-spread 
 his face. 
 
 " Then he understands now that I m one of you," 
 ejaculated the unhappy man on the disordered bed. Tor 
 rie flinched a little at the reproach in that exclamation. 
 
 " Why should you be so biggety-feeling, just because 
 you ve sold a book? " she coolly inquired. " And if be 
 ing in the state you are means being one of us, I scarcely 
 need to remind you that you began it pretty early in the 
 game. You were that way about the first night I ever 
 saw you, if I remember correctly." 
 
 " Yes, I began it pretty early in the game," echoed the 
 unhappy Storrow, supine in his utter self-abasement. 
 And he lay there murmuring " O God, O God ! " in a 
 manner so disagreeably impressive to his wife that she 
 left his side and busied herself with purely gratuitous 
 tasks about the room. 
 
 He got out of bed and took a cold bath, a rite which 
 under ordinary circumstances seldom failed to lure back 
 his vanished sense of well-being. But in this case it only 
 accentuated the sharp and throbbing pressure about his 
 temples. So he mixed himself a " John Collins," after 
 the manner of the circle of which he had become so un 
 wittingly a member, and finding a modified relief from 
 the lash of this chilled but warming liquid, in half an hour 
 repeated the treatment. Throughout the day, in fact, he 
 seemed set on keeping Intelligence from emerging from 
 its fumey lair. He seemed intent on ushering After 
 thought from the threshold of consciousness. Since it 
 hurt him to think, he decided to do away with thinking. 
 So he dulled his mind with alcohol, remaining in a mild 
 anaesthesia which mounted almost to exhilaration as 
 evening approached.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 217 
 
 " What s got into you, anyway? " demanded his wife, 
 with her first touch of apprehension at a mood which she 
 could not comprehend. 
 
 " The spirit of the city," he retorted with a curt laugh. 
 
 " Wouldn t spirits be nearer the mark? " asked Torrie 
 as she glanced at a half -empty decanter. 
 
 " Well, for once I m going to be one of you," 
 he explained with reckless levity, though beneath 
 that levity Torrie could detect a disturbing touch of 
 mockery. 
 
 Yet he most indisputably made himself one of the 
 circle on that night of nights. He seemed intent on 
 demonstrating to the light-hearted throng that came strag 
 gling up to the studio that he was no longer a kill-joy in 
 their midst, that he could be a good fellow with the best 
 of them. He greeted stage-girls still in their make-up 
 with noisy arid offhanded camaraderie. He shook hands 
 fraternally with unknown men in evening dress, men 
 whose shirt-fronts stood out of the shadows like tomb 
 stones. He entered gaily into the long and vociferous 
 arguments as to the proper mixing of drinks, as to the 
 relative merits of rye and Scotch, as to the correct kind 
 of Vermouth for certain cocktails, and as to the proper 
 recipes for whiskey slings and cobblers and milk punches 
 and mint juleps. When no fresh strawberries were in 
 evidence for the latter, a pale youth in a fur-lined over 
 coat called loudly for his chauffeur and proclaimed that 
 he would find strawberries for that party, even if he had 
 to jimmy his way into Charles and Hicks or ransack 
 the last ice-box in the Biltmore and the Plaza. After he 
 had left on this beneficent crusade, amid cheers, Storrow 
 found himself tutoring a stout lady, in extreme decollete, 
 through the intricate steps of an Indian ghost-dance. He 
 also found himself, a little later, rhapsodically responding 
 to Modrynski s toast to Torrie, to Torrie Throssel, " and 
 well-named, my friends, for as I remember it the Scotch 
 throssil is a contrivance for the twisting up of threads,
 
 2i8 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 and here is a Throssel who twists np our heart-strings 
 the moment we bask in the light of her eyes! " 
 
 Storrow replied to that toast, without being fully con 
 scious of what he was saying. Even the cheers and the 
 hand-clappings came to him thinly, as though travelling 
 over great wastes of distance. But that impression was 
 in turn obliterated by the intrusion of a tom-tom and a 
 Scotch bag-pipe commandeered from a neighbouring 
 studio, to the music of which a number of barbaric dances 
 were improvised. Then Brownie King s efforts to do a 
 life-size portrait on the wall, with a burnt champagne- 
 cork, prompted Storrow to attempt a portrait-bust of 
 Mattie Crowder, the medium for the same being a pound 
 of butter from the kitchenette ice-box. But this medium, 
 refusing to hold its line in the warm room, was taken 
 up bodily and impressed against Mattie s screaming face, 
 in an even more futile effort to achieve a life-mask. 
 
 It lasted until well towards morning, that swirling and 
 shouting revel, and always Storrow seemed to be in the 
 thick of it. But always, at the same time, deep within 
 the core of consciousness a lonely sentinel seemed to pace 
 a lonely rampart, a sentinel with a voice which kept mut 
 tering : " This is folly. This is madness and empti 
 ness. And things such as this may be, but they must 
 never be again. Never never again ! " 
 
 It was not until the crowd had thinned a little that Stor 
 row found himself sitting on the overturned buhl table, 
 staring solemnly but unsteadily into the half-satyric face 
 of Pannie Atwill. 
 
 " Pannie, I m as drunk as a lord," he finally and slowly 
 averred. 
 
 " You don t need to advertise that! " announced Pan 
 nie w r ith her quiet laugh. 
 
 " But it s the last time," contended Storrow, putting his 
 shoulders back, " the last time." 
 
 " Tell that to S\veeney," remarked the unimpressed 
 girl in front of him. Then she turned and swept him
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 219 
 
 with her coolly appraising eye. " And I m not so sure 
 but what it ll do you good. Perhaps it ll wash a little of 
 the starch out of your make-up, you frozen-necked 
 Canuck!" 
 
 Storrow sat worrying over that light-hearted remark, 
 worrying over it even more than over his condition. 
 Would he come to see things in that light? Would the 
 ability to decide what was right or wrong slip away from 
 him? Would he, too, lose his power of judging, of be 
 ing able to recognize what was evil and cramping and 
 what was strengthening and liberating? In that case he 
 could see, muddled as he was, that he should indeed have 
 become one of them. Then it struck him as odd that he 
 should worry at all. Wine, he had always heard, left 
 men light-hearted and care-free. Yet in his case he was 
 being duped. It was not leaving him joyous at heart. 
 It was merely giving him a mask of merriment, a mask 
 behind which misery could still lurk. When he asked 
 himself the reason for this, he was unable to answer. 
 But capriciously and suddenly there came to him the 
 memory of pine-clad hills sharp against ruddy sunsets, of 
 rustling valleys of bracken filled with the scent of the 
 balsam, of water lapping against pebbly shores and over 
 arching skies of serene and brooding azure. 
 
 He looked up, dizzily, staring abstractedly before him 
 as though the gold-green vistas of a robin-haunted twi 
 light were to be visioned there. Instead, he saw a disor 
 dered room still blue-grey with tobacco-smoke, a litter of 
 glasses and unclean dishes, a welter of sullen shadow and 
 light, and two vaguely defined figures which lost their 
 remoteness as he stared at them. One of these figures, 
 he saw, was Torrie. He could see the pearly lustre of the 
 milk-white skin along one shoulder, cut by the black- 
 velvet shoulder-strap of her gown. The other figure was 
 Modrynski s, so tall and statue-like in his long-caped 
 great-coat that he stood by the open door strangely like a 
 gaunt and hooded figure of Death. Storrow, viewing
 
 220 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 them with a singularly detached mind, saw Modrynski 
 slowly turn about and stoop down, with the black cape 
 falling about his shoulders in almost a monk-like effect. 
 He saw the lined and yellow face bend still lower and 
 thrust itself into the soft hollow of Torrie s neck. 
 
 It was as startling as though he had beheld her kissed 
 on the bare flesh by the lips of Death. He expected al 
 most to hear the rattle of bones as he perceived that an 
 tique, stooping frame shake with its senile palsy accentu 
 ated by some momentary emotion. But it was too odious 
 even to contemplate. 
 
 For the second time Storrow let his head sink into his 
 hands, submerged with an immense new misery of be 
 trayal. He was being duped that night, he felt, for the 
 second time, irreparably, unfathomably duped. Yet it 
 amazed him to find that he was incapable of action, that 
 he could contemplate a situation undermining the solidest 
 timbers of his happiness and make no effort to combat it. 
 He sat without moving, no longer conscious of even the 
 throbbing ache in his temples, absorbing to the full a 
 shock which could leave him more stupified than alcohol. 
 
 It was not until Torrie closed the studio-door and 
 crossed the room that he made an effort to get to his 
 feet. 
 
 " I saw it," he said as he confronted her. 
 
 "Saw what?" she sharply demanded, appraising his 
 none too steady posture with an eye in which burned both 
 antagonism and disdain. It was an unnaturally bright 
 eye, made almost luminous by the extraordinary white 
 ness of her face. And even in that inapposite moment 
 Storrow was stung sharply by the sense of her beauty. 
 
 " You and Modrynski," he replied, averse even to put 
 ting into words a thing still too odious for expression. 
 
 " What about me and Modrynski ? " she challenged. 
 
 " You know as well as I do," he counter-challenged, 
 awakening to the fact that she herself was none too steady 
 on her feet.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 221 
 
 " Know what? " she insisted, apparently intent on mak 
 ing him phrase what he was so reluctant to drag out into 
 the open. He turned away from her and stared at the 
 cast of his Sentinel Wolf. About the lean jaw of that 
 animal some one had snapped a girl s garter with a gold 
 buckle. It stood there, like a gaily ornamented muzzle. 
 Around the rough neck had also been tied a strand of 
 wide pink ribbon. It was more than ludicrous; it was 
 pathetic. 
 
 "Know what?" his wife was reiterating. 
 
 " I m beginning to know you," he equivocated, scarcely 
 finding the courage to meet her gaze. 
 
 "Are you?" she murmured with half-closed eyes. 
 "And what about it?" 
 
 "That s just what I ve been wondering: what about 
 it ? " he repeated, much more lucidly than she must have 
 expected, for she turned on him again with a quick and 
 defensive movement of impatience. 
 
 " You d better get sober before you start saying such 
 utterly ridiculous things," she observed, with an apprecia 
 tive glance over his person. 
 
 " I am sober." 
 
 " You look it," she said with a laugh. 
 
 He turned and walked away from her, confounded by 
 a sense of frustration, oppressed by the feeling of some 
 vast issue left clouded and inconsequential. And as he 
 gulped down a glass of ice- water and Torrie on the other 
 side of the room with a parade of unconcern began to 
 make ready for bed, he wished with all the strength of 
 his being that for a time at least he might claim the luxury 
 of solitude, the consoling dignity of at least sleeping 
 alone. 
 
 If his wife in any way shared that feeling she did not 
 give the thought utterance. Before he was quite aware 
 of it, in fact, she was lying asleep, or in a pretence of 
 sleep. And when, an hour later, he placed himself 
 wearily on the same bed she neither stirred nor moved.
 
 222 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 Yet when he wakened several hours later, with the high 
 light of noonday flooding the studio, he found himself 
 with his right arm thrown over her hot bare shoulder 
 and the soft curve of her back lying in its habitual nestling 
 posture close in against his body. He saw, to his relief, 
 that she was still sleeping heavily. So quietly and slowly, 
 and almost with a sense of shame, he withdrew his arm 
 from the slowly rising and falling flesh on which it was 
 cushioned. Then inch by inch he moved over to his own 
 side of the bed.
 
 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 
 
 STORROW was roused out of his reverie by the 
 shrill of the telephone-bell. He glanced at Tor- 
 rie, to see if it had awakened her, and then slipped 
 quietly out of bed. He found that it was Chester Hardy 
 calling him. 
 
 " There s something you don t know, I m afraid, and 
 I feel that you ought to be told," said the voice over its 
 space-annihilating thread of metal. 
 
 " What is it? " asked Storrow, with a quick tightening 
 of the throat as his thoughts involuntarily flew back to 
 the woman so serenely asleep on the bed behind him. 
 What new humiliation, he wondered, was to be flung in 
 his face. But he soon found any apprehension of that 
 nature to be groundless. 
 
 " Have you had any word from Charlotte Kirkner ? " 
 Hardy was asking him. 
 
 " None whatever." 
 
 " I was afraid not. Yet a couple of days ago a tele 
 gram was sent to you, a telegram " 
 
 " That telegram never reached me," cut in Storrow, re 
 calling that this was not the first message from the quar 
 ter in question which had been held up in transit. He 
 found the smell of the wine-glasses crowded about the 
 desk where he sat more than ever offensive. 
 
 " It was a telegram, I m sorry to say, announcing the 
 death of Mrs. Kirkner at Asheville," explained the un- 
 participating voice over the wire. 
 
 Storrow sat silent for a moment or two. It was not 
 the news that was so much a shock to him, it was more 
 the discovery that his world could have been such a nar- 
 
 223
 
 224 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 rowly preoccupied one, such a deadeningly self -immuring 
 one. 
 
 " Where is Charlotte ? " he asked. 
 
 " She went out to Swansea yesterday afternoon, right 
 after the service," explained Hardy. 
 
 " The service ? " repeated Storrow. 
 
 " The funeral service," Hardy quietly amended. 
 " And I m afraid she feels very much alone there." 
 
 Still again a moment of silence came in the talk. 
 
 " Perhaps she would prefer being that way, under the 
 circumstances," Storrow said, heavy with a vague misery 
 which was not untouched with self-hate. 
 
 " She is a wonderful girl, Owen," explained Hardy, for 
 the first time using the other s Christian name as he as 
 cended to a new earnestness of note, " and I know that 
 she is very fond of you, ineradicably fond of you." 
 
 " Do you mean I could still be of any possible service 
 to her?" asked the none too happy Storrow, pushing 
 aw r ay the glasses from which the smell of stale liquor rose 
 in the air about him. 
 
 " I think you could," said the kindly and patient voice 
 which even the transferring metal failed to rob of its 
 timbre. 
 
 " I ll go right out to her," announced Storrow after 
 one short moment of hesitation. 
 
 He made his preparations quietly, puzzled by the sus 
 tained sense of relief which came from his discovery that 
 Torrie could sleep through it all. Yet it seemed clearer 
 as he stood with his bag in his hand staring down at her 
 sleeping face. That face, he could see, was more full- 
 blooded than usual, and slightly swollen about the lips 
 and nostrils. In the thick and heavy mat of the tangled 
 hair still lurked a faint odour of smoke and winy emana 
 tions. About the mouth, unnaturally heavy with its still 
 distended labial blood-vessels, he could see a faint mark 
 ing of uraemic deposit. Under conditions such as those, 
 he remembered, most faces would have looked sottish,
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 225 
 
 would have proved repellent. But he could still decipher 
 on that sleeping face an orchid-like and exotic beauty. 
 And the consciousness of this disturbed him profoundly. 
 It seemed to confound the future for him, to leave more 
 complicated the paths that awaited his feet, to cast across 
 what should have been wide vistas of contempt a wistful 
 overtone of adoration, of adoration touched with desire. 
 And he was foolishly grateful for the chance of escaping 
 from the studio, with all its residual aspects and odours 
 of vanished merriments, while Torrie slept on unmindful 
 of the early afternoon sunlight slanting through the sky 
 light with its undrawn shadow-cloth. 
 
 This sense of escape, of suddenly acquired breathing- 
 space, remained with him even after he had dispatched 
 what impressed him as an over-long and inadequate tele 
 gram to Charlotte Kirkner and had settled himself in 
 the train for Swansea-On-The-Sound. He forgot the 
 weariness which an hour before had seemed anchored 
 in his very bones. It was a long time, he remembered, 
 since he had been in the country. All the earlier years 
 of his life had been linked with the open. He was, in a 
 way, a son of the wilderness. Life, for him, had never 
 really struck root through the concrete that floored the 
 city of his adoption. And the larger sanities of sun and 
 wind and hilltop spaciousness would always be essential 
 to him, would always be calling to him. 
 
 It was a crystalline February-end afternoon of open 
 sunlight, with the earth bald of ice and snow. Once the 
 raw and ugly husk of the city s suburbs had been left 
 well behind he found himself confronted by umber hills 
 mottled with pale green that stretched away to an opal 
 skyline, umber hills with only the occasional monstrosity 
 of gaudy-hued sign-boards to remind one of the city ad 
 jacent. There was a cool and mellow richness in the 
 mellow tones of the broken swamplands, and already the 
 wintry willows wore a crown of vivid yellow. There 
 was an almost bewildering wash of light above the tangled
 
 226 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 laceries of the tree-tops. And always before him was a 
 suave and receding sky, suggestive of distances infinitely 
 remote, as disquieting and provocative as the silver- 
 sweet challenge of ever vanishing and invisible bugles. 
 It came fully home to him, for the first time in months, 
 that he had been missing something both stabilizing and 
 momentous out of life. 
 
 When Storrow alighted at Swansea he found Charlotte 
 awaiting him, flanked by what he took to be a footman 
 in uniform, with a fur-lined rug draped over one arm, 
 and a chauffeur equally statuesque. But it was a Char 
 lotte somewhat different to the Charlotte he had so re 
 cently and so laboriously fabricated in his own mind. 
 She was both less subdued and less funereal-looking than 
 he had expected. She stood before him, unmistakably in 
 the sombre black of full mourning, but with a quiet-eyed 
 self-possession which did something more than merely 
 proclaim that the last of her girlishness was gone. It 
 served also as an announcement that she in her own way 
 had known sorrow and in her own way had risen superior 
 to it. There was, in fact, no tremor in her voice as she 
 shook hands with him and thanked him for coming. 
 
 " Shall we send the car home," she asked in her clear 
 and reedy voice, " and walk back across the hills? " 
 
 " Yes, let s walk back," Storrow said to her. His eyes 
 followed her as she turned to speak to the chauffeur in 
 the fur-trimmed service coat. If the dark dress under 
 the equally dark furs was unmistakably simple, it was 
 the simplicity of distinction, an ordered and doubly art 
 ful austerity which resulted in a final impression of rich 
 ness. He noticed, as the footman took possession of his 
 bag, that there seemed imposed upon her earlier air of 
 shell-pink fragility an overtone of maturity touched with 
 patience. He wondered if this arose from the fact that 
 even against the dark furs her face carried a tint of pale 
 bronze, an almost athletic-like darkening of pigment sug 
 gestive of wind and open air.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 227 
 
 She smiled when he spoke of this as they struck out 
 along the hard white road that wound hillward before 
 them. 
 
 " That s nothing but sunburn," she said, colouring a 
 little. They walked on for several minutes before she 
 spoke again. " You see, Owen, I had to take myself in 
 hand, down there at Asheville. I knew all along exactly 
 what was ahead of me, and I had a feeling that I ought 
 to organize for it." 
 
 Storrow stopped short. 
 
 " Wasn t it Chester Hardy first used that word to 
 you? " he demanded. 
 
 " I think he did say something like that," admitted 
 Charlotte, colouring still again. " But I had a problem 
 or two to think out for myself. And I felt, sometimes, 
 that I was going to pieces. I knew I had to get a grip 
 on myself. So I adopted poor old Spencer s advice about 
 our first duty to ourselves consisting in being a healthy 
 animal. I rode every day, even when I didn t want to. 
 I golfed and walked, and kept busy, to keep from think- 
 ing/ 
 
 " And your mother ? " began Storrow. 
 
 " There was so little to do, there," explained the girl 
 at Storrow s side, with a quietness which proved a sur 
 prise to him. " She was kept under morphine, for the 
 last two months." 
 
 "Then it was hopeless, that long?" he inadequately 
 asked. 
 
 " It was always hopeless," was the quiet-toned re 
 sponse. And they walked on in silence again, for many 
 minutes. 
 
 " And I was only making everything harder," said 
 Storrow, breaking the silence. 
 
 " Mother thought more of you than you imagine," 
 went on the girl, as though intent on ignoring that cry 
 of protest. " She has given you the Lake Erie farm."
 
 228 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " But I don t want the Lake Erie farm," asserted the 
 other. 
 
 " Then I m afraid you ll have to take it against your 
 will. Legally, in fact, it s already yours." 
 
 " How do you mean, legally? " 
 
 " It was mentioned in the will. And, as you know, it 
 ought to have been your mother s, from the first." 
 
 " But I d rather not talk about those things now, of 
 all times." 
 
 Charlotte smiled with a wintry sort of wistfulness. 
 
 " Surely, Owen, you and I don t need to be stupid and 
 conventional. The sting has gone out of all that, and 
 out of other things too." When she spoke again, out of 
 the silence that ensued, it was on an altogether different 
 subject. " I m so glad about your book." 
 
 "Who told you?" 
 
 " Chester Hardy. And it s wonderful to think that 
 you ve succeeded in that first big effort." 
 
 " It s not so wonderful, if you bear in mind how Hardy 
 helped me," acknowledged Storrow. 
 
 They were on the crest of a hill, by this time, and they 
 stopped instinctively, to stare into the distance about 
 them. From the windows of villas nestling low in the 
 valley the sunlight flashed ruddily back at them, jewelling 
 the sombre green slopes with fire. In the distance were 
 the shouldering crests of sister hills, purple in the soften 
 ing light. The wind that blew against their faces was 
 cold, but in its mellow chilliness was a lost promise of 
 Spring, a whisper of sternnesses relaxed, a prophecy of 
 birth mysterious in its very remoteness. 
 
 Storrow, with a deep breath, turned and looked at the 
 girl beside him. He was struck by a sense of rareness, 
 an inalienable fineness of fibre, in the poised body as 
 slim as the young elm beside which it stood. There was 
 a new note of reliance in the abstracted eyes, apparently 
 so eager to drink in that wide-flung vista of earth and 
 sky translated into beauty by the ancient miracle of light.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 229 
 
 He turned and looked away as the small black-gloved 
 hand lifted and pointed towards the west. 
 
 " There s the Sound, where you and I nearly went 
 under," she quietly remarked. 
 
 He stared at the blue-green stretch of colour, flashing 
 with its silver and golden scales of drift-ice. 
 
 " There are so many different ways of going under," 
 he finally asserted. 
 
 " But you never will, Owen," was Charlotte s equally 
 low-toned reply. " I like to think of you as invincible." 
 
 " That seems to imply that I impress you as having 
 odds to fight against," he replied, foolishly over-sensitive 
 to the demands he must have made on her faith. 
 
 " But you ll never regard them as that," she bravely 
 contended. " In some way, at the end, you ll win out. 
 I know you will." 
 
 Then I m losing, as things now are? " he asked, meet 
 ing her gaze. 
 
 " I didn t say that," she replied, knitting her brows, 
 without knowing it, as she lost herself in a prolonged and 
 judicial inspection of his face. She noticed the slow 
 wave of colour that crept up to his forehead, and turned 
 away to stare out over the Sound. It was not until they 
 had crossed a meadow and passed through a gate that 
 brought them back to the highway that Charlotte spoke 
 again. 
 
 " You know, Owen, that nearly everything in my life 
 has tended to make me smug. And I hate smugness. 
 Sometimes, lately, I have even felt that I hate goodness. 
 It seems to imply the things that are neutral and passive 
 and trivial. At least that s the kind of goodness that 
 has always seemed to shut me in. And I ve come to 
 have a horror of being shut in, as though I was always 
 being kept behind window-glass. And when you come 
 to think of it, I always have been behind window-glass 
 the window-glass of home, the window-glass of hotels, 
 the window-glass of railway trains, the window-glass of
 
 230 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 a limousine. I never asked for it ; I never wanted to be 
 sheltered that way. But I was. And all the while I was 
 a kind of impostor without quite knowing it. Inside of 
 me was a big black spirit of revolt, like a barrel of dyna 
 mite buried in a prim little New England flower-garden. 
 That s one reason why I m here. I couldn t stand that 
 solemn, big Brooklyn house. I couldn t have endured 
 all those unspeakable people in black for another hour. 
 So I took the bit in my teeth and bolted. I began to see 
 just how you must have felt last autumn, when you went 
 back to the city. The only difference was that I d always 
 been too cowardly to fight for my freedom." 
 
 Storrow s thoughts went back to that over-stately and 
 over-secluded home, stamped with the ponderous seal of 
 its well-being, standing so imperturbably and so firmly 
 established in the upper airs of that hungrily crowded city 
 where all such altitude once seemed something to be en 
 vied. Yet its dignity was a retrospective one, made up 
 of restraint and ponderous respectability fagaded with 
 liveried servants, a fussily slow-moving semi-cloistral 
 and semi-nomadic life concocted of periodic migrations 
 and polite charities, of subscription concerts and de 
 corous church interests, of sedately restrained shopping- 
 tours and heavily engineered receptions, of a jealously 
 meticulous cultivation of the Old Order and a closed door 
 against the New. And in the midst of it, apparently, this 
 girl who had been brought up behind window-glass, as 
 she complained, had been forced to fight for her pallid 
 vitality as grass covered by a board must fight for life. 
 
 " You have no idea, Owen," she was saying to him, 
 " of the wickednesses I d be capable of. I don t think 
 I m more of an outlaw than other women, but I feel that 
 I ve been cheated. I ve a sort of ache to get even with 
 the world, the same sort of hunger to dance your feet 
 off that a girl has when she finds a car-accident has kept 
 her two hours late for an Assembly night at Sherry s/ 
 
 Storrow was no longer laughing at her.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 231 
 
 " We all want our share of happiness," he acknowl 
 edged. " And trying to get it is what makes such a 
 muddle of life." 
 
 She stopped short and looked at him with almost de 
 fiant eyes. 
 
 " But it s not happiness that I want," she contended. 
 " What I want is life itself. I want to be bigly and 
 keenly alive, even if it s going to make me suffer. I m 
 beginning to have a sort of horror of just wasting and 
 withering up. I d rather see a cyclone smash the whole 
 conservatory. I ve tired of being suppressed and sedate 
 and guarded. I m beginning to realize that I m a really 
 dangerous woman. It s not that I feel something com 
 ing; it s more the necessity for something to come. And 
 I warn you, Owen, that if you cross my path when I m 
 flying my red flag of anarchy, I ll make you open 
 your eyes considerably wider than they are at this 
 moment." 
 
 He could afford, by this time, to laugh at her openly. 
 
 " Being wicked in that awful way, Charlotte," he told 
 her, " is really an art, and like all arts it has its own 
 particular technique, a technique which has to be ac 
 quired." Then of a sudden he grew serious again, for 
 his thoughts were swinging back to the city he had left 
 behind him and the woman he had left behind him. He 
 himself had been callow and cramped and narrow, and 
 Torrie had known the wise woman s clouded glory of 
 bringing him wisdom. Then he remembered what she 
 had once said about the drabness of life and how too 
 much monotony might not unnaturally be expected to lead 
 to an eruption. 
 
 " And acquiring a technique implies a teacher, doesn t 
 it?" Charlotte was inquiring. 
 
 " Sometimes several of them," retorted her companion, 
 with his thoughts still back in the city. 
 
 " You don t seem to take my wickedness very seri 
 ously," complained the solemn-eyed girl at his side.
 
 232 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " I can t. It s too self-conscious. And nothing, as 
 some one has said, survives being thought of." 
 
 " Then I ll have to shock you into respecting it, after 
 all," was the other s meditative reply. 
 
 Yet that night at dinner, as he sat opposite her in the 
 high-ceilinged and shadowy dining-room, almost op 
 pressed by the ordered silence which the quiet movements 
 of the liveried servants only seemed to accentuate, he 
 wakened to a realization that her confession had not been 
 without its causes. She seemed an infinitely fragile and 
 isolated figure muffled in the over-voluminous tapestry 
 of tradition, a tapestry too unwieldy to be draped as she 
 wished. She stood forlornly involved in the complicated 
 agencies of comfort which failed to bring comfort, as 
 oppressed by their meaningless ramifications as a song- 
 sparrow intimidated by the drone of a machine-shop. 
 And in her, only too plainly, was awakening some need 
 for rhapsody, some call of the soul for its human right 
 to know and suffer. 
 
 "What would you advise?" she asked across the ob 
 long of white damask that separated them, apparently 
 reading his thoughts. 
 
 " I d advise prayers being offered up, Charlotte, for the 
 idle rich, the same as for those in peril on the sea," he 
 replied, with an effort to shoulder aside her solemnity. 
 But her answering smile was as brief as it was preoc 
 cupied. 
 
 " I ve been thinking of taking up nursing," she an 
 nounced, " of going into training." 
 
 " But what would you do about about all this ? " 
 asked Storrow, with a glance about the ponderously fur 
 nished room. 
 
 " Escape from it," was the prompt reply. 
 
 Storrow, as the liveried servant placed the gold-lined 
 cup of cafe noir before him, and beside it the cognac, 
 and beside the cognac the heavily chased cigarette-box,
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 233 
 
 and beside that again the little blue-flamed alcohol-torch 
 in its burnished silver container, could not help remem 
 bering that this efficient machinery of service was not 
 without its consolations. There crept back to his mind a 
 picture of the crowded and disordered studio which he 
 had so recently forsaken. He recalled the sense of be 
 ing cabined and cramped, the discomfort of enforced 
 and over-intimate contact with another, the recurrent 
 momentously puny questions of housekeeping, the matu 
 tinal worry as to supply and demand, the inconveniences 
 and exiguities of a daily routine which seemed so unduly 
 to magnify the importance of appetite and its appease 
 ment. That, after all, was what men and women strug 
 gled to escape. And this other, in the end, was what 
 most men toiled and plotted to achieve. It was only an 
 other phase of that eternal quest for freedom for which 
 men sold their souls and women not infrequently their 
 bodies. 
 
 " But why should you want to be a trained nurse ? " 
 Storrow asked, not unconscious of the sacrifices any such 
 move would involve. 
 
 Charlotte, before replying, dismissed the liveried man 
 servant with the impassive and mask-like face. 
 
 " There isn t much I believe in, Owen," she said when 
 they were alone. " But I do know that somewhere deep 
 inside of me is a spark that must be kept alive, that 
 brings a sort of tragedy into our lives when we let it go 
 out. It s something more than the wonder of life, though 
 the wonder of life is something we can t permit to die 
 in us. I suppose it s more a gift, the gift of some final 
 belief in things. And that s mixed up in some way with 
 another gift which women have. You can call it devo 
 tion, or you can call it the blind longing to be of service. 
 You can call it anything you like. But it s there, and if 
 you ignore its voice, you pay for that neglect, the same 
 as you pay for the neglect of your body."
 
 234 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 Storrow, as he stared across the table at the girl in the 
 high-backed chair, found something solemnifying in this 
 unexpectedly candid confession of faith. 
 
 "If you feel that way, Charlotte," he said out of the 
 silence that had fallen over them, " why don t you 
 marry? " 
 
 " That," she told him, " is out of the question." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " Because," she said with quiet candour, " the man I 
 was in love with married another woman." 
 
 Her gaze, directed valiantly into Storrow s slightly 
 flinching eyes, left no shadow of doubt as to her mean 
 ing. 
 
 " But there are so many men," he murmured, extenuat- 
 ingly, out of a silence even more prolonged than the 
 first. 
 
 " But wasn t it a fellow-countryman of yours who 
 once said: 
 
 " The night has a thousand eyes, 
 And the day but one." 
 
 You know the rest! " 
 
 Storrow knew the rest. He also knew as he sat gazing 
 across the intervening oblong of damask, that the quiet- 
 eyed girl with the wistful smile was no longer the shell- 
 pink shepherdess of Dresden china that he had once con 
 sidered her. Time had brought its changes to her, had 
 brought maturity, had brought courage, had brought a 
 ripening vigour which could even prove disquieting to 
 the man on whom her eyes were resting with an almost 
 meditative defiance. Yet more disturbing to him than 
 their defiance was the intervening milder light which sut- 
 fused and softened them. In that gaze, too, he beheld 
 audacity, though he tried to tell himself it was merely 
 the unconsidering audacity of youth. He remembered, 
 with an eruptive bodily warmth which left him with a 
 nettling skin, an earlier scene in that house, a scene which,
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 235 
 
 through no decipherable fault of his own, recurred to 
 him with a persistent sense of the ignominious. 
 
 Charlotte herself must have fathomed the cause of his 
 momentary discomfort, for she laughed a little as she 
 pushed back her chair. 
 
 " Are you still impregnable ? " she asked as she came 
 and stood beside him. 
 
 " I m afraid I m still stupid," he clumsily replied, puz 
 zled by a fluttering note of what seemed like disdain in 
 her voice. Yet a vast tranquillity possessed her face as 
 she placed one hand on his head. 
 
 " It s not stupidity, Owen," she told him. " It s 
 honesty. It s that dreadful disheartening honesty which 
 I thought they were taking away from you." 
 
 " I wouldn t bank on it too much," he said with a 
 forlorn effort at lightness, acutely conscious of her near 
 ness. And that nearness had brought flashing back to 
 his mind the familiar intimate approaches of Torrie. 
 
 " Look at me," she commanded, as she turned his 
 slightly averted head. " Even now, at this very moment, 
 you are thinking about another woman ! " 
 
 " On the contrary," he protested, " I was thinking very 
 much about you." 
 
 " What were you thinking? " she diffidently inquired. 
 
 " How lovely you look," he compelled himself to ac 
 knowledge. And that declaration was true enough, in 
 its way, but she seemed conscious of its deficiencies. 
 
 " Dear old dissembler," she said with her wintry 
 smile. " You won t even give me a taste of power, the 
 power every woman is so famished to feel. And you 
 are impregnable ! " 
 
 He rose to his feet close beside her, and their glances 
 met and locked. They locked together, not altogether 
 challengingly, not altogether combatively. But in that 
 long look dwelt something denuding and isolating, as 
 though the world were ebbing slowly away beneath them, 
 leaving them poised in inter-stellar emptiness.
 
 236 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " You are not impregnable," she said very quietly, as 
 she closed her eyes. 
 
 He took a step towards her. He took a step in her 
 direction and then turned towards the table. For a door 
 had opened and a servant stood before him. As Storrow 
 made that movement the memory of Vibbard s movement 
 towards his Sentinel Wolf flashed back in his mind, bring 
 ing with it an inundating and emancipating wave of self- 
 hate. 
 
 " You are wanted at the telephone, sir," he heard the 
 servant announcing. 
 
 "I?" he asked. 
 
 " Yes, sir," was the impassive response. 
 
 " But it must be some mistake. There s no one could 
 possibly want " 
 
 He did not finish. 
 
 " It s Mrs. Storrow, sir," explained the footman. 
 " And she said that it was urgent."
 
 CHAPTER NINETEEN 
 
 THE air of ghostliness about every-day objects, 
 the vague sense of unreality in familiar things, 
 taking possession of Storrow on his return to 
 the city did not remain with him for any ponderable 
 length of time. Old scenes and old habits promptly 
 caught him up in their course, as the steel rails catch a 
 car making a flying switch, and guided him back into a 
 flat and familiar world. 
 
 Even Torrie s matter of urgency, so mysteriously with 
 held, failed to impress him, once he was back in the studio, 
 as anything approaching the momentous. It was merely 
 that The Seventh Wave company had been reorganized 
 for a road tour and Krassler had sent a hurried call for 
 her to rejoin the departing forces. 
 
 " And why couldn t that have been mentioned over the 
 telephone ? " asked Storrow, resenting the natural in 
 ference that he had been deliberately manipulated, that 
 for an ulterior purpose he had been kept on the tenter 
 hooks of anxiety. Yet Torrie s almost colourless face 
 remained impassive, even before his unmodified note of 
 mockery. 
 
 " I felt that you might not want me to go out with that 
 road company. And long-distance wasn t the place for 
 carrying on an argument about it especially after 
 spending over an hour in finding you." 
 
 He stared at her, with a singular detachment of mind, 
 unimpressed by the note of bitterness in her voice, for 
 all its quietness. What did succeed in impressing him, 
 however, was the weariness of the white face, heavy 
 about the eyes and mouth, the listlessness that had im- 
 
 237
 
 238 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 posed itself upon the once ardent and child-like contours. 
 
 " You weren t always so considerate of my feelings," 
 he retorted, steeling his heart against her pose of unpro- 
 testing world-weariness. 
 
 "What do you mean by that?" she almost triumph 
 antly challenged, glad, apparently, to find a prolonged 
 and benumbing constraint breaking out at last into a 
 clarifying storm of words. 
 
 " I mean that a telegram was delivered here three days 
 ago, and I never got it. A message for me ! " 
 
 She looked up at him steadily. 
 
 " You were much too drunk to do anything when that 
 wire came, even if you could have understood it," she 
 quietly explained. 
 
 " But that message was for me," he reiterated. 
 
 " Well, it s somewhere about. Nobody s keeping it 
 from you." 
 
 " But it was kept from me," he contended. " And 
 you succeeded in humiliating me before " 
 
 " Before whom? " she cut in, jealously, at his moment 
 of hesitation. 
 
 " Before my relatives." It sounded inadequate, and 
 he knew it. 
 
 " Well, I can t see that those relatives ever did very 
 much for me, or for you either," she scornfully ex 
 claimed. 
 
 He began to see how foolish and futile it all was. He 
 turned away from her with a movement that was both 
 angry and dismissive. But she still stood before him, 
 with what he accepted as a mere pretence of timidity. 
 
 " After all, it was me you married," she said in a 
 voice that was thin with misery. Her moods, he de 
 cided, were beyond him. They were incomprehensible 
 in their capriciousness, a mixture of steel and rose-leaves, 
 a confusion of ice and flame. 
 
 " Yes, it was you I married," he slowly repeated, be 
 holding the point of that scornful reiteration pierce like
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 239 
 
 a sabre into the softness of her body, as he had intended 
 that it should. Yet there was no touch of joy to his 
 triumph. He had looked for another outburst from her, 
 at that, a noisy fusillade of anger that would have eased 
 his soul of its rancour, that would have purged from his 
 mind the accumulating miseries which seemed without an 
 honest and adequate outlet. But she suddenly impressed 
 him as pitiful before the crude flail of his scorn. He 
 wondered how men could come to hate that which had 
 once been so involved with their rapture and desire. The 
 contact of body with body, he found, resulted in some 
 thing more psychic and more enduring than the mere con 
 junction of flesh. What was known as love between 
 man and woman, establishing itself as something more 
 than the sexual glow through which it expressed and ex 
 hausted itself, by a mysterious out-thrusting of emotional 
 filaments could still bind bewilderingly together the 
 bodies that darker passion seemed bent on dividing. 
 The glow remembered, the secrecies shared, he was to 
 find, could still with their ghostly voices recall and re 
 claim the past. And now, with something dangerously 
 close to hate burning in his heart, he found pity unnerv 
 ing him. Women, he remembered, were frail and flex 
 ible, were more played upon by their environment, were 
 susceptible to influences unknown to men. It was the 
 duty of the strong, accordingly, to protect the weak. 
 And with Torrie, after all, it was a matter of weakness, 
 of surrender to impulse. She did not differ from other 
 women, except that she was more vital. Even Charlotte 
 Kirkner, sheltered and sensitive, as fine-fibred as women 
 were made, had betrayed a promise of outlawry, a po 
 tentiality of revolt from the timeworn paths of Right. 
 It was man who sentimentalized women, who established 
 false standards towards which they were forced to strain. 
 That was something he had learned from the city which 
 harboured him. And with it he wistfully feathered the 
 nest of Compromise.
 
 240 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 "Then the thing is settled!" It was the voice of 
 Torrie speaking in a tone singularly remote and final. 
 Already she seemed to be accosting him from beyond a 
 gulf of terrifying dimensions. 
 
 "What thing?" he demanded, disturbed in spite of 
 himself. 
 
 " About my going," was her answer. Already, he 
 fancied, he could detect about her a valedictory air, a 
 retrospective and autumnal pensiveness which brought a 
 wave of misery once more surging over him. 
 
 "What settled it?" he asked, waywardly impelled to 
 reach out to her even as he realized that such an approach 
 would be too vast a surrender. 
 
 " The fact that you re tired of me," was her answer. 
 
 " Have I ever said that? " he temporized. 
 
 " No, but it s made plain enough by your actions." 
 
 " It s not only my actions that have been open to ques 
 tion," he countered. 
 
 " Then I ought to go where mine won t be a source of 
 trouble to you," was Torrie s retort. It was said with 
 apparent thoughtlessness, and yet it came to Storrow 
 barbed with menace. He recalled haphazard impres 
 sions of road-companies, impressions picked up from 
 motion-pictures and Broadway romances and studio gos 
 sip. He remembered what Chester Hardy had said to 
 him about stage-life. And the thought of her once more 
 engulfed in that devastating environment became un 
 bearable. To surrender her to such a life seemed a con 
 tradiction of every protectional instinct in his being. It 
 seemed the end the end of everything. 
 
 He crossed the room to the window and stood staring 
 out. 
 
 " I d rather you didn t go," he said in a strained voice, 
 without turning his head. 
 
 She stood watching him, without changing her posi 
 tion. " Why not? " she asked.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 241 
 
 " I don t want you to go," he repeated, almost 
 brusquely. 
 
 And that was all that came of the matter, at the time, 
 for Torrie, with the unrelaxed lines of thought still fur 
 rowing her creamy forehead, made it a point to absent 
 herself from the studio as soon as she could withdraw 
 without any seeming sacrifice of dignity. 
 
 Yet the question was brought up again, two hours 
 later, when Pannie Atwill invaded the studio and found 
 Storrow there, alone in the paling afternoon light. 
 
 " How s things? " she lightly inquired as she discarded 
 the white fox furs which encased her up to the eyes. 
 
 " Tangled up, as things most always seem to be," re 
 sponded Storrow, anticipating her hand-reach for the 
 cigarette-box. 
 
 " Where s the odalisk ? " asked Pannie, with a glance 
 about the room. 
 
 "What do you mean?" demanded Storrow. 
 
 Where s the /raw?" 
 
 " Shopping, I believe," answered Storrow. 
 
 " Gettin ready for the grape-vine circuit? " 
 
 Still again Storrow did not understand her. 
 
 " Gettin ready to go out with that Krassler bunch? " 
 she said by way of exegesis. 
 
 " I hardly think so." 
 
 "She s goin , ain t she?" demanded Pannie. 
 
 " She is not," asserted Storrow. 
 
 " Odalisk is right," observed Pannie, under her breath. 
 Then she blew a smoke-ring, and through that blew a 
 smaller one. " Hermie will throw a fit, when he gets 
 hep to that. He thinks he can smooth out that play on 
 the rubes and bring it back to Broadway a knock-out. 
 And he intended Torrie to be the big splash when they 
 hit this Hudson levee again." 
 
 " But Torrie wasn t the star of that production," con 
 tended Storrow. " She didn t even have the lead."
 
 242 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " Of course she didn t, dearie," acknowledged Pannie. 
 " But Krassler was nursin her like an eighteen-inch naval 
 gun. He was keepin her tarpaulined down until the 
 Broadway openin , and then he was goin to let her loose 
 and smother the performance. Hully gee, man, why do 
 you suppose he was belascoin round here in private, and 
 coachin her under cover, and frettin and workin his 
 crazy little kike heart out if it wasn t to give her her Big 
 Chance? " 
 
 Storrow seemed slow to absorb the situation which 
 Pannie thought she had made plain to him. 
 
 " But why should Krassler go out of his way to 
 manoeuvre her into a chance which couldn t have been 
 quite legitimate?" he asked. 
 
 " Oh, it s legitimate all right, once you can get away 
 with it," announced Pannie, with the wisdom of the ser 
 pent in her artless young eyes. 
 
 " But why should he do it, or want to do it? " 
 
 An invisible shutter was drawn down over the wise 
 young face. 
 
 " I guess Hermie had banked on Torrie gettin away 
 with it," she offhandedly acknowledged. 
 
 It occurred to Storrow that Hermie was banking alto 
 gether too much on the lady in question, though he re 
 sisted the impulse to assert the same to the sophisticated 
 young woman confronting him. He was growing into 
 a clearer perception of the fact that Krassler s interest in 
 Torrie was something more than a professional one. 
 And once that fact became established in his mind he 
 grew more fixed in his opposition to his wife s adventur 
 ing forth with a road-company. And Torrie herself, 
 after a day or two of opposition, gave up the idea. She 
 bent to his will, apparently impressed by the fact that an 
 opposite course would lead to a break that would prove 
 final. Her surrender, however, was not an unqualified 
 one. There was a note of constraint, sometimes almost 
 a note of bitterness, in her attitude towards Storrow.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 243 
 
 She was depressed for a day when a Buffalo paper, sent 
 back through the mail, brought an exceptionally long and 
 enthusiastic review of The Seventh Wave. 
 
 But she said nothing about it to her husband. 
 
 Storrow himself, with his novel finally disposed of, 
 was already hard at work at a short story or two. His 
 struggles in this new medium were not mild ones, for he 
 was determined to push them through to an end without 
 in any way calling on Hardy for help. His progress 
 was slow and his first results were far from satisfactory. 
 When his second efforts seemed equally futile he became 
 depressed and morose. Torrie, in fact, even announced 
 that living with a bilious author was worse than living 
 with a bear with a sore paw, and advertised her intention 
 of giving him the studio to himself as much as she was 
 able. This policy of absentation flowered in a later an 
 nouncement that Donnie Eastman was getting up a series 
 of historical tableaux, at the Biltmore, and that she 
 had accepted his offer to take part in a couple of the 
 groups. 
 
 To this Storrow offered no objections, though he found 
 it presented as an excuse for more and more prolonged 
 absences, for unexpected telephone-calls, for surprisingly 
 late home-comings to the studio. And through it all 
 Storrow nursed a sense of waiting for something, some 
 thing which he was unable to define. When he asked 
 himself if it were release, he was unable to define the 
 thing from which he sought liberation. When he pon 
 dered if it were merely the promise of Spring working 
 in his nomad s blood, he could see no possible change to 
 come from the changing season. 
 
 But as the Winter slipped away he found himself pos 
 sessed by a listlessness which he could not explain. The 
 appeal seemed to have gone out of the city about him, 
 which cared neither for his happiness nor his misery, his 
 success nor his failure. He became a victim of that 
 vague indifferency imposed upon him by the dwarfing
 
 244 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 influences of numbers. The city humbled a man, he 
 found. And it also tended to obliterate him. 
 
 Yet he remembered, word for word, what Charlotte 
 Kirkner had said about life. " Somewhere deep inside 
 of us is a spark that must be kept alive, a light that brings 
 a sort of tragedy into our lives when we let it go out." 
 And whatever happened, he told himself as he went back 
 to his work very much like going back to the side of an 
 old and dependable comrade, that light must live. 
 
 One raw and blustery afternoon when March gave 
 every promise of going out like a lion he was alone in his 
 studio, going over the proofs of his book. This task, 
 with its evidences of definite accomplishment, brought 
 with it an unexpected revival of spirits. He had, after 
 all, created something, of his own wit made something to 
 redeem him from blank namelessness, left a record for 
 others to read and understand. And this thing of his 
 own, clothed now in the authority of print, fortified him 
 with a new and timorous pride. When a knock sounded 
 on his door he rose to answer it abstractedly, still think 
 ing of a purple patch which had been able to quicken his 
 pulse a trifle. He even wondered, in a brief and frag 
 mentary way, if the resolution of life s fever were but 
 tressed on work, and work alone. 
 
 " D yuh use models, at all models such as me? " a 
 husky and none too hopeful voice was inquiring of him 
 out of the gloom. 
 
 Storrow found himself staring at a great hulk of a 
 man, with rain dripping from his ragged coat-edges. 
 There was something reminiscent about that Titanic and 
 melancholy figure, a mist of memory shot through with 
 pain. Then Storrow understood. 
 
 It was Michael Mullaly, the one-time engineer of The 
 Alzvyn Arms, the drunkard who had beaten his wife at 
 the bottom of a fire-escape and opened the door of an 
 adventure leading to dark and unlocked for consequences. 
 
 " Come in," said Storrow, stepping back as the sodden
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 245 
 
 figure lumbered past him. And he was neither gladdened 
 nor saddened to behold that once defiant Hercules so 
 sorry and suppliant a figure. Calamity and the cup that 
 cheers had plainly marked him as their own. Silently 
 the two men confronted each other in the clearer light 
 of the studio. Slowly recognition crept into the blinking 
 Celtic eyes. 
 
 " Why, yuh re the lad "- - began Mullaly. Then dis 
 cretion brought him up short, with an uncomfortable 
 hitch of the giant hips. 
 
 " Yes, I m the man," said Storrow, understandingly, 
 with a glance down at the other s open and leaking shoes. 
 
 The dilapidated Goliath studied his old-time enemy. 
 He stood a little bewildered at the discovery that no 
 enmity lurked in the other s glance. 
 
 " That was a grand fight," he finally averred, with 
 guile. "A grand fight!" 
 
 " Did it strike you that way?" asked Storrow, his 
 thoughts a mile away. 
 
 " Yuh had me beat, me lad, yuh had me beat from the 
 first ! " He shook his bull head heavily. " But yuh ll 
 niver find wimmen-f oik fightin fair. Yuh will not ! " he 
 protested, by way of extenuation, as he looked about for 
 a chair, sank into it unbidden, and placed his wet hat on 
 the floor beside him. 
 
 Storrow remained silent. It had been a foolish fight, 
 he remembered, a tragically foolish fight. He noticed 
 Mullaly s wandering eye come to a stop at the decanter 
 on the buhl table. That decanter, during the ensuing 
 silence, seemed to loom larger and larger in his visitor s 
 consciousness, until it alone remained, mountainously re 
 mindful, with the light striking amber and gold and 
 provocatively mellow through its core. 
 
 So Storrow, still without speaking, carried the rye 
 and a glass and a plate of biscuits to the side of the wet 
 and bedraggled Hercules. And Mullaly, no longer 
 blinking, filled the glass and took it " neat." The blue
 
 246 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 lips smacked appreciatively. Then the faded blue eye 
 gazed dolorously down at the emptied glass. So lugubri 
 ous was that contemplation of patent emptiness, in fact, 
 that Storrow nodded. The man was wet and chilled, 
 and in need of warmth. And without further ceremony 
 Mullaly repeated the operation of promptly rilling and 
 just as promptly emptying the glass again. 
 
 "And that gerrl?" asked Mullaly, after another si 
 lence, as he crossed his ponderous moist legs. " Had 
 yuh iver seen her b fore that day? " 
 
 Storrow acknowledged that he had not. 
 
 " And I ve been thinkin yuh hadn t, this many a 
 time," retorted Mullaly. 
 
 " Why do you say that? " demanded the other, nettled 
 by the note of vague triumph in his visitor s voice. 
 
 " She was a bad lot, that gerrl." 
 
 Storrow, with a tightening about his heart which was 
 reflected in the sudden hardening of his face, refilled his 
 visitor s glass. 
 
 " I didn t know that," he observed, with argumentative 
 impersonality, yet in the grip of that torturing vulpine 
 craft which is the hand-maiden of suspicion. 
 
 " Why that gerrl," asserted Mullaly, leaning confi 
 dentially forward in his chair, " was a " 
 
 " Don t use that word," Storrow sharply cut in. He 
 remembered, with a dizzy flash of despair, how he had 
 first heard it, that hot summer afternoon, through the 
 rusty iron rods of a fire-escape. And it seemed a very 
 long time ago. 
 
 " Tis the only worrud, sir/ Mullaly solemnly main 
 tained. 
 
 " But I don t believe it," cried Storrow, white to the 
 eyes. " I can t believe it ! " 
 
 " Thin ask a little Joo stage-man be the name av 
 Kreisler or Krissler, and see what answer yuh ll be get- 
 tin , calmly pursued his sodden torturer. " Or that 
 skinny ould Roosian wid a face like a tombstone and a
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 247 
 
 weakness f r young gerrls, the same ould Roosian that 
 O Leary wanst put out av the Alwyn Arrums and 
 Gawd knows, sir, that same Alwyn Arrums was niver the 
 abidin place av angels ! " 
 
 " That s nonsense," protested Storrow in his forlorn 
 and bitter spirit of opposition. " She was never put out 
 of The Alwyn Arms, and we re talking about her." 
 
 " No, she wasn t," he averred, from under glowering 
 brows. " She wasn t, seein she had a pull wid O Leary 
 himself, down in the office. And it was pull enough to 
 have me put out ov a job I d hild steady f r three years, 
 doin the best a man could wid " 
 
 " Was that after after the fight you ve just had the 
 kindness to remind me of?" demanded Storrow. 
 
 " It was," retorted Mullaly, digressing into a long and 
 lachrymose recountal of the resultant disasters. But that 
 recital of woe and injustice was already falling on deaf 
 ears. Storrow s mind, electrified into a morbid activity, 
 was going over the past step by step and day by day, 
 reviewing incidents which at the time had seemed in 
 nocent, reinterpreting them by the light of his dubious 
 new knowledge. But he refused to accept the incredible. 
 He lashed himself with the accusation of stark stupidity, 
 in listening to the maunderings of a drunken and vindic 
 tive Irish janitor. The entire thing was becoming loath 
 some, unendurable. And as Mullaly, played on by the 
 united warmths from without and within, betrayed un 
 mistakable signs of surrendering to slumber, he was none 
 too gently roused from his alcoholic stupor and helped 
 out through the door, still quaveringly lamenting the 
 old days when an honest man wasn t thrown out of a 
 job without reason.
 
 CHAPTER TWENTY 
 
 STORROW, alone in his studio, sat down and strug 
 gled to straighten out a disorganized world. But 
 always between him and what promised to be tran 
 quillity stood that mocking and leering suspicion which 
 proved too intangible to be combated and too persistent 
 to be ignored. As he sat confronted by uncertainties 
 which could prove more torturing than truth itself his 
 unhappy and wandering eyes rested on his wife s trunk, 
 the steel-bound theatrical trunk which stood so definite 
 and so personal a part of her belongings. He had un- 
 questioningly and unconsciously respected the privacy of 
 that trunk, accepting what it held as something essentially 
 and personally hers, the accrued possessions of the past it 
 was her privilege to cherish and to screen, if she so de 
 sired. Then he remembered the little chamois bag of 
 jewels, the locked make-up box which held them, and the 
 carefully tied bundle of letters which rested there beside 
 them. 
 
 Then he looked away, finding the thought of spying 
 inexpressibly abhorrent. But still again his glance went 
 back to the dark mass of the trunk, sarcophagus-like in 
 its ponderousness, and still again he felt the tug of sus 
 picion, demanding that it be verified or for all time re 
 jected. Finally he surrendered to an impulse which 
 proved too strong for him, and crossed to the trunk and 
 opened it. 
 
 He could vaguely foresee, as he lifted out the first 
 make-up box, in which, he remembered, the key to the 
 lower box was hidden, that what he was about to do in 
 volved the danger of bringing him vast misery, of thrust- 
 
 248
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 249 
 
 ing into his hands some damning truth which might for 
 ever strike down what was left of his happiness. Yet 
 the demand for knowledge, he found, was stronger than 
 his dread of it. To know, to be certain; that was the 
 only, the vital, the essential thing. 
 
 Then, as his search through the make-up box ended 
 and revealed the key to be missing, a surge of something 
 oddly akin to relief swept through him. Circumstance, 
 less tluid than his own will, was compelling him to draw 
 back from that disheartening prospecting after misery. 
 And he was glad to be through with it. Yet, he con 
 tended as he fell to pacing the room, the mere fact that 
 the key had been taken away from its customary hiding- 
 place implied a reason for its removal. Torrie, suspi 
 cious of his own possible suspiciousness, had not unnat 
 urally decided to protect herself, had recognized some 
 newer need for secrecy. 
 
 He went back to the trunk again, searching it from end 
 to end for the missing key. He was assailed as he did so 
 by a strange mingling of odours, the faint smell of 
 grease-paint and cosmetics, the vague perfumes, from 
 formless silk finery, of orris and patchouli and Apres 
 Londi, the heavy mustiness of garments long unused. 
 They brought to him a disturbing sense of their owner s 
 nearness, a silently rebuking ghost of her gazing down 
 over his shoulder. But this did not deter him. He was 
 now determined, in fact, that nothing should deter him. 
 
 So fixed was he in this purpose that when he disin 
 terred the second make-up box from under its paint- 
 soiled towel in a lower tray he first made sure that it was 
 locked and then carried it across the room to his work- 
 desk. Then he returned to the trunk, replaced the trays, 
 and shut down the lid. 
 
 Before proceeding deeper into that campaign of es 
 pionage he crossed to the studio door and locked it. His 
 fingers were trembling a little, he noticed, as he took up 
 the japanned tin box, so battered and stained and bruised,
 
 250 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 and attempted to force up the lid with a knife from his 
 kitchenette. This was possible, he saw, but it would 
 leave the lock broken, the irrefutable evidence of his 
 violation of confidence. By this time, too, he had become 
 calmer. The guile of the stalker, even with his own hap 
 piness as the quarry, had returned to him. 
 
 He wrapped up the box in a sheet of drawing-paper 
 and carried it to a Twenty-Third Street basement lock 
 smith, explaining that he had lost the key and would like 
 a duplicate. An uncomfortable sense of guilt crept over 
 him as the locksmith took the box in his hand, inspected 
 it, and then with an equally pointed stare inspected Stor- 
 row. It would not be an easy key to cut, the mechanic 
 explained, but it could be done by noon the next day, if 
 the box were left with him. That, Storrow confusedly 
 explained, was out of the question. Then the simplest 
 procedure, the locksmith retorted, pointing to the maker s 
 name on the lid, was to take the box to the Broadway 
 store where it had been bought and have a duplicate 
 fitted. 
 
 Storrow, with the feelings of a safe-cracker burdened 
 with over-suspicious loot, proceeded to the Broadway 
 store in question. There the box was promptly fitted 
 with a key which he paid for and pocketed. Then with 
 a quickened pulse he made his way back to the studio. 
 
 As he crossed Fifth Avenue at Twenty-Sixth Street 
 he heard himself accosted from a passing taxi-cab. 
 
 " Hello, Captain Kidd ! " cried a voice close beside 
 him. The appositeness of that salute sent a tingle 
 through the body against which a ravaged treasure-chest 
 was so tightly pressed. He glanced up to see Mattie 
 Crowder s hectically calsomined face laughing down at 
 him from the door of the slowly moving cab. He re 
 covered himself and called back at her with an assumption 
 of lightheartedness which later impressed him as vapidly 
 ludicrous. He was relieved when he was once more able 
 to lock himself safely in the studio.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 251 
 
 There, with a deliberation which was a mild surprise 
 to him, he proceeded to examine the contents of the box. 
 He found the soiled chamois bag with its rings and 
 trinkets. He found a small silver watch without a 
 crystal, a sheaf of newspaper-clippings and theatrical 
 programs, and a champagne-cork with a date written on 
 it, in lead-pencil. He found a druggist s prescription and 
 the dinner-card of a coast-steamer, overscored with un 
 mistakably clever drawings interspersed with humorous 
 and affectionate comments. He found two reservation- 
 slips, with the dates obliterated, for drawing-rooms on 
 the West Shore Railway, between Weehawken and Buf 
 falo. Then came a few soiled dance-favours, the rem 
 nants of a small cluster of violets which had once, ap 
 parently, been pressed between the leaves of a book, and 
 a small gold pocket-pencil minutely indented, as though it 
 had been repeatedly and meditatively held between firm 
 and pointed teeth. Next came a photograph of Torrie, 
 in costume, with the inscription, " My first part," written 
 in ink across the bottom, a snap-shot of five laughing girls 
 clustered about the steps of a Pullman car, and still an 
 other small picture of Torrie in her youth, revealing a 
 soft-eyed and smooth-cheeked girl in her early teens, 
 flower-like in her freshness, with wonder touched by 
 curiosity on the rapt young face above the archaic-look 
 ing fichu and the over-heavy locket that nestled in its 
 frills. 
 
 The last thing which Storrow lifted out was the pack 
 age of letters tied together with a cherry-coloured ribbon. 
 He had responded, without being quite conscious of it, 
 to some law of dramatic climax which prompted him to 
 defer what promised to prove the vital movement until 
 the end. He remembered, as he untied the tightly knotted 
 ribbon with the feeling that he was opening a door on the 
 past, how a great dramatist had once proclaimed the 
 future to be only the past entered by another door. Yet 
 he was unnaturally calm as he crossed that threshold
 
 252 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 from which he felt he might turn away a strangely al 
 tered man. He even prided himself on his self-control, 
 though his quickened breathing stood an acknowledgment 
 of the tax which that control was imposing upon him. 
 Then he stopped breathing altogether, for the first letter 
 which he unfolded and inspected began with the pregnant 
 words " My Beloved Wild-Bird." 
 
 He read it through until he came to the signature, 
 which was the one word " Alan." He read them all, 
 page by page, every impetuous and passionate line, every 
 endearing diminutive, every acknowledgment of immense 
 and abandoned love. After that, there was no more 
 doubt. Carefully he re-read an allusion to the painting 
 of The Rainy Morning, an allusion which implied it had 
 been done before a lover s quarrel with Torrie. It left 
 no question as to Torrie herself being the model for 
 that canvas. Yet this discovery came to him now with 
 small sense of shock. It was merely one voice in a dron 
 ing choir of accusation. And he read on, harvesting his 
 grim sheaves of knowledge, stopping only once, with a 
 convulsive twitching of the body, when he happened on a 
 ragged-edged sheet of note-paper in Torrie s own writ 
 ing, a sheet apparently sent back to her in a moment of 
 reproof. 
 
 " Oh, My Own, my Belovedest Own who is All Mine," 
 she had written in her sharp-angled script, though in this 
 instance much less cramped and pointed than usual. " I 
 feel today that it s glorious to be a woman! It s glori 
 ous, glorious to be loved, to know that you are in a man s 
 thoughts, to remember that you control him, even when 
 he is away from your touch, to remember too that he is 
 longing for you, no matter how far he goes, you, just 
 you, nobody in all the wide, wide world but you! And 
 it s glorious to feel yourself in his arms, and his eyes 
 drinking the depths of yours, when he s with you again, 
 hungry for you, eager for you, aching for you! Yes,
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 253 
 
 dear, it s glorious to be a woman to be a woman in 
 love, and a woman beloved ! " 
 
 Storrow sat for a full moment, without moving, after 
 reading this for the second time. Then he deliberately 
 restored the sheet to its place and just as deliberately 
 went on with his examination. His movements were 
 quiet, with the quietude of that torpor which comes from 
 over-tensioned nerves and over-taxed feeling. He re 
 fused to be startled, even to the end, assuring and reas 
 suring himself that he had already discounted everything 
 upon which he might stumble. He imposed upon himself 
 a restraint which turned in upon his own soul the fires to 
 which he refused any freedom of escape. He had sown 
 his dragon s teeth, and now he could reap the whirl 
 wind. . . . 
 
 The one dominant feeling that remained with him as 
 he tied up the letters and replaced them in the make-up 
 box and restored that box to the trunk where it belonged, 
 was a feeling of having been duped, tragically and colos- 
 sally duped. Yet even this impressed him as pettish and 
 deficient in dignity, trivial before the gigantic sweep of 
 passion which was supposed to ensue upon all such dis 
 coveries as his. Beyond this vague and far-reaching 
 sense of betrayal, however, he found the crystallization 
 of mere suspicion into certainty to be shot through with 
 a colouring of relief. He knew now what he had to 
 fight against. 
 
 He had reached the stage, in fact, when he could stand 
 forlornly proud of his self-possession. He even made it 
 a point to establish his self-control by returning to his 
 work on the proof-sheets. He held himself to that task 
 with a will of iron, going through them page by page, 
 with a sullen and self-defeating determination. Often, 
 indeed, he found his thoughts wandering. But always he 
 shepherded them relentlessly back, finding it necessary to 
 read a sentence several times before its true import fil 
 tered through to his mind. When he had reached the
 
 254 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 last page he methodically rearranged the loose sheets, 
 folded them together, and sealed them in their brown 
 manilla envelope. On this envelope he wrote the name 
 and address of his publishers and affixed an unnecessary 
 number of postage stamps. Then with the movements 
 of a man who was very tired he put on his hat and coat 
 and carried his package to the nearby sub-station drop- 
 wicket at the Eastern end of the Metropolitan Building, 
 just north of Twenty-Third Street. He went through 
 these movements automatically, with practically no mem 
 ory of having executed them. When he saw that it was 
 midnight by the huge illuminated dial so high above him 
 he just as automatically turned homeward again, re 
 minding himself that the hour was late and that men at 
 some such hour as this had the habit of going to bed. 
 
 He stopped at the corner of Twenty-Fourth Street as 
 he beheld a lean and hungry-looking cat reaching up to 
 the top of a garbage-can placed on the curb. It made his 
 thoughts go back to The Alwyn Arms and the gaunt and 
 straining cat he had once caught sight of, through the 
 bars of a fire-escape, as it reached whining with desire 
 up to a windowsill on which a pan of cardinal-red lobsters 
 stood cooling. 
 
 Then he thought of Rodin s La Porte de I Enfer and 
 the creatures of desire writhing and coiling about that 
 great door. He would satisfy at least one hunger, he 
 decided, as he made an effort to catch the animal skulking 
 in the corner of his house-steps. He would take it up to 
 his room and feed it, give it the meal of its life. But 
 that harried street-cat, unused to kindness, was not easy 
 to approach. Storrow even followed it into the shadowed 
 area beneath the steps themselves, stooping low and striv 
 ing to disarm its suspicions. 
 
 He suddenly stood erect, still in the shadow, for a 
 motor-car had stopped at the curb within ten paces of 
 him. From this car he saw a man step slowly down and 
 swing open the door. At the same time that he realized
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 255 
 
 this man to be Donnie Eastman he saw the second alight 
 ing figure. 
 
 He knew it was Torrie even before he caught the 
 sound of her contented little coo of laughter as the 
 heavily-ulstered man ushered her up the worn sandstone 
 steps, with one hand clasping her crooked arm at the elbow. 
 
 On the top step they came to a full stop. No word 
 was spoken, but each, apparently swayed by the same 
 impulse, glanced first eastward and then westward along 
 the empty street. Then, still without a spoken word, 
 they stood clasped for a moment in each other s arms. 
 And still without speaking the woman withdrew into the 
 darkness of the house and the man in the ulster, after 
 standing for a moment in abstracted contemplation of 
 his car, slowly went down the steps, lighted a cigarette, 
 and slithered off eastward into the night, with a ruby 
 light winking back as he bobbed over the car-tracks of 
 Fourth Avenue. 
 
 Slowly Storrow emerged from his sheltering shadow, 
 feeling his way up the sandstone steps as a blind man 
 might. He stood under the faded door-lintel, with one 
 shoulder against the worn and blistered frame, staring 
 out at the brownstone arroyo of blank doors and drawn 
 blinds and quavering with a nauseous ague which he 
 seemed unable to control. It was not anger that shook 
 him. It was not shame and it was not disgust. It 
 seemed, at the moment, a black and all-suffusing hope 
 lessness, a hopelessness which left his body cold and his 
 heart numb. 
 
 Then a reaction apparently more physical than mental 
 set in, and he found himself burning with an inarticulate 
 fury of protest, wave by mounting wave, until relief in 
 action seemed essential. Yet he fought against that sud 
 den hot thirst to mount to the studio and confront the 
 woman who sooner or later would have to be confronted. 
 Before that encounter, he warned himself, he must be 
 under complete self-control. He was sure of himself
 
 256 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 now, and of his line of procedure. He could afford to 
 await his time. 
 
 He stepped out into the midnight street with a poign 
 ant feeling of homelessness gnawing at his heart, 
 scarcely conscious of the direction in which he was mov 
 ing. The sight of a belated panhandler or two drifting 
 eastward along Twenty-Third Street arrested his atten 
 tion. He watched those homing birds beating their way 
 towards the cheap and verminous lodging-houses that lay 
 near the East River, wondering why the human body, 
 when ill-fed and ill-clad, ambulated thus with upthrust 
 shoulders and forward-drooping spine. He himself, he 
 remembered, would have to find a sleeping-place for the 
 night. Being without hand-baggage, he sheered away 
 from the more pretentious hotels. He felt the need, in 
 fact, of oblivion, of violent submergence in some neutral 
 izing physical discomfort, like that which comes to a 
 distracted ewe flung bodily into a sheep-dip. So, after 
 walking for an hour without sense of direction or destina 
 tion, he entered without repugnance a side-street cara 
 vansary with tiers of bald little rooms above its over 
 gilded ground-floor saloon. There, after paying for his 
 meagre quarters in advance, he went to bed. 
 
 But he slept little. When, towards morning, fitful 
 and broken slumber overtook him, he was tortured with 
 dreams of lascivious feline bodies swarming and climbing 
 about a door draped with black. So disturbing were 
 these dreams that he was glad to open his eyes and see 
 sunlight slanting in through his narrow uncurtained win 
 dow. He got up and dressed with the slow heaviness of 
 an athlete after a field-day marked with many defeats, 
 sore in body, but infinitely more bruised in soul. At the 
 lunch-counter belowstairs he bought a roast-beef sand 
 wich and a cup of coffee. The sandwich of indurated 
 beef and rye-bread proved uneatable and he was staring 
 at it with heavy listlessness when his attention was at-
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 257 
 
 tracted by a short and wide-shouldered Italian with a 
 willow basket of plaster casts swung by a strap from his 
 shoulder. Storrow as he gulped down his steaming but 
 stale cup of coffee continued to watch him. The pedlar 
 was doing his best to persuade an indifferent-eyed Irish 
 bartender to purchase two undraped and diminutive 
 wood-nymphs in plaster-of-Paris. But his efforts were 
 unavailing. 
 
 Storrow stopped the Italian as he replaced his nymphs 
 and started towards the door. 
 
 " Who makes these for you? " he asked, looking over 
 the basket of reposing white figures. They were very 
 badly modelled, Storrow saw, mostly nudes and demi- 
 nudes of Phrynes and Venuses and bacchantes and bath 
 ing-girls, that type of naively pornographic art which 
 had so firmly established itself beside the barber s mirror 
 and the tapster s pyramided drinking-glasses. 
 
 " I maka dem myself," the Italian responded, not with 
 out pride. 
 
 " Do you ever feel that you d like something better? " 
 inquired Storrow, taking up an obese plaster dryad with 
 ankles sufficiently generous for a Hercules. 
 
 " Wha s da matter wid dat, meester man? " demanded 
 the Italian as he resumed jealous possession of the cast 
 and held it up to the light. 
 
 " I ll show you what s the matter with it," responded 
 the other, taking from his pocket the drawing pencil 
 which he had the habit of always carrying with him. 
 He commandeered a segment of the plaster-pedlar s 
 wrapping paper, placed the cast on the end of the bar, 
 and with a series of quick and miraculous strokes repro 
 duced the figure of the dryad, translating it as he did so 
 into a sprightly and slender-bodied nymph with life in 
 every line. 
 
 The Italian took up the drawing and inspected it with 
 studious and seal-brown eyes.
 
 258 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 "You maka dese t ings some time?" he asked, still 
 artist enough to recognize artistry in another. 
 
 " Yes, I ve made that sort of thing," acknowledged the 
 other. 
 
 " You wanta work, maybe? " asked the owner of the 
 studious seal-brown eyes. 
 
 " Yes," was Storrow s answer. For it suddenly 
 struck him as desirable, this possible chance of losing 
 himself in the maelstrom w T hich he could no longer hope 
 to master, of ebbing away into impenetrable corners where 
 he would be untrammelled and untainted and unknown. 
 
 "Wat kinda work?" asked the other, still skeptical. 
 
 " Why, I could model you a raft of these things, some 
 thing with life in them, something you could job out by 
 the hundred to other pedlars, something that d give you 
 a real business, if you handled it right." 
 
 " Wat ees your name? " 
 
 " I ll tell you that when I come to see you. Have you 
 got a studio ? " 
 
 " Eet ees a cellaire," explained the Italian, with his 
 Latin shrug of deprecation. 
 
 " Then I ll come and see you, if you ll write your name 
 and address on this paper." 
 
 Laboriously the man of the plaster casts wrote on the 
 piece of wrapping-paper " Angelo Dellazio " and after it 
 the address-number on East Eleventh Street. It was 
 satis fyingly remote, Storrow saw, that cellar work-room 
 so close to the crowded fringe of the East River. 
 
 " All right, Angelo," he said as he pocketed his slip, 
 " I ll be around before long." And he laughed, almost 
 lightheartedly, as he stepped out through the swing doors. 
 
 Yet his face hardened as he confronted the open light 
 of the street. He remembered, with a tightening of the 
 throat, that he would now have to go home, or to what he 
 had once called his home. He made an effort to defer 
 all thought as to what stood ahead of him. He tried to 
 concentrate his attention on the street scenes about him,
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 259 
 
 on the Spring-like smell of the air which even city dust 
 could not dissemble, on the immensity of the city itself, 
 of which he was such a microscopic part. Then he 
 thought of his modelling, and for a minute or two lost 
 himself in the fabrication of a figure emblematic of that 
 city. He thought of that figure as a sort of Sphinx, not 
 a desert Sphinx of inanimate stone, but as something half 
 tigress and half woman, crouched above a pile of bones. 
 These bones, he told himself, were the bones of her vic 
 tims. 
 
 Then as he turned into Madison Square, he caught 
 sight of the gilded Diana poised high above her Sevillian 
 towers, and he dismissed that thought of an urban Sphinx 
 as a foolish one.
 
 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 
 
 TWO things impressed Storrow as he let himself 
 into the studio with his own latch-key. One 
 was the quietness and gloom of the building, 
 after the stark sunlight and noise of the open street. 
 The other was his personal reaction to this new environ 
 ment, prompting him to move almost stealthily. It made 
 him think of the big moment of suspense in a melodrama, 
 with the stage expectantly darkened and that anticipa- 
 tional hush which precedes a dramatic outburst. 
 
 Yet he found, as he quietly closed the door behind 
 him, that no big moment awaited him. Torrie lay asleep 
 on the bed, with her back to him. The curtain by an 
 opened window was blowing lazily in the breeze. A 
 litter of lingerie cascaded over a chair-back. A faint 
 drone of steam came from one of the radiators. 
 
 Storrow looked back at the bed. The curve of his 
 wife s back reminded him of the back of a sleeping kitten. 
 He searched the lines of that relaxed figure for some 
 appeasing ugliness, for something to start into motion 
 the sullen machinery of indignation. But he stood 
 slightly bewildered, slightly disheartened, by the aspect 
 of innocence which she could still wear in her slumber. 
 About the soft line of the neck, below the heavy cloud 
 of the tumbled hair, was a disturbing air of delicacy. 
 What he could see of her face seemed perversely child 
 like, with its smooth milkiness of skin. And even the 
 fact that she could sleep so soundly, so abandonedly, that 
 she could lie so passive and unresisting before his eyes, 
 seemed to blunt the edge of all his earlier determinations. 
 
 He knew he would have to wait. 
 
 260
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 261 
 
 He crossed to the small bath-room in the corner of 
 the room and looked at himself in the mirror. He stood 
 startled at his own appearance. He saw a face that was 
 unshaven, dishevelled, strangely hard and bony, with a 
 sinister expression of age and cruelty about the 
 red-rimmed eyes. He was not even clean. He re- 
 minded himself of a stoker emerging from a furnace- 
 room. 
 
 Automatically he proceeded to shave. Then he 
 stripped to the waist and washed the thick mat of his 
 hair, almost forgetting himself as he splashed like a 
 walrus in the water that he always loved to feel on his 
 skin. He was wiping his eyes with a heavy bath-towel 
 when a voice sounded from the room without. 
 
 " Is that you, Honey? " 
 
 It was a soft voice, still careless-noted with sleepiness, 
 a quietly inquiring and disturbingly friendly voice. 
 
 " Yes," Storrow answered. He could feel his heart 
 pound. But he warned himself to be calm, for he knew 
 he would still have to wait. So he went on with his 
 towelling. 
 
 He was interrupted by a little flutter of laughter from 
 the open door. But he declined to turn around. 
 
 " Why, Honey, you re like a steel-puddler. You re 
 like a ship s gunner stripped for action ! " 
 
 She referred, he remembered, to his absence of cloth 
 ing from the waist-line up. 
 
 " Am I ? " he coldly inquired. She was close beside 
 him, by this time, in her thin crepe-de-Chinc night-dress. 
 It seemed like an unclean and unpardonable intrusion, 
 and it took an effort to keep him from turning and fling 
 ing her through the open door. She reached over his 
 averted shoulder for her tooth-brush, with the unconsid- 
 ering careless intimacy of the past. It seemed only a 
 morning or two back that she had laughingly caught his 
 bare arm between her two hands and had just as laugh 
 ingly shouted:
 
 262 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " And the muscles of his brawny arms 
 Were strong as iron bands." 
 
 But now when her elbow accidentally came in contact 
 with his flesh he suddenly flinched away, as from a burn. 
 If she noticed that movement, she ventured no comment 
 on it. She was humming a little as she reached out and 
 turned the tap. 
 
 " What time did you get back last night? " asked Stor- 
 row. It took a great effort to make the question appear 
 a casual one. 
 
 " About midnight," replied Torrie, apparently preoc 
 cupied with the task in hand. 
 
 " How did you come?" was Storrow s next question. 
 Torrie straightened up at this, disturbed by the hardness 
 of the other s voice. 
 
 " Mattie and I came down in a bus," she replied, with 
 a bored intonation. 
 
 " But a bus couldn t bring you home," argued Stor- 
 row. 
 
 " No, my dear, but it brought us to Madison Square, 
 and from there I walked to my lordly abode." 
 
 He was grateful for that note of mockery in her voice. 
 It was food for his hate, fuel for his rancour. 
 
 "And you walked home?" he repeated, with undue 
 deliberation. 
 
 " And without acquiring the habit of staying out all 
 night," she coolly amended, beginning to resent his in 
 quisitorial efforts at cross-questioning her. 
 
 " It would have been more honest, if you had," he 
 cried out, suddenly confronting her. 
 
 She fell back a step or two, studying his face. 
 
 " Just what does that mean? " she demanded. It was 
 more hostility than fear that crept into her narrowed 
 eyes. 
 
 " It means that I know, now, just what you are," cried 
 her husband, flinging aside the wet bath-towel.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 263 
 
 " And what enlightened you ? " she asked, her voice 
 slightly shrill with scorn. 
 
 " You have," he shouted. His hands were shaking 
 and an uncontrollable twitching took possession of the 
 muscles of his shoulders. The woman in the thin night 
 dress put down the tooth-brush and the tube of dentifrice 
 she had been holding in her ringers. Then she stepped 
 back a pace or two, as though to command a better view 
 of him. 
 
 " Are you still drunk? " she asked, sweeping him with 
 her stare of disgust. 
 
 " No, thank God, I ve at last got my senses," he pas 
 sionately averred. "Oh, you liar! You liar!" 
 
 He thought, for a moment, that her retreat towards the 
 door had been prompted by fear. But she stopped short, 
 with her shoulders drawn up. 
 
 " It makes me sick to look at you," he cried, now in 
 the full sweep of the passion which he could no longer 
 withhold. But as he repeated that cry she advanced 
 slowly towards him. Her face was white, like paper. 
 The pupils of her eyes were enlarged, making them look 
 almost black. Her movements were tauntingly slow and 
 deliberate. But her breathing was quick. 
 
 " Keep out of here ! " he cried, not so much as a warn 
 ing that she should remain beyond the radius of his rage 
 but more because it was the only ground, at the moment, 
 on w r hich he could confront her with opposition. Yet 
 he knew he was no longer master of his own movements, 
 and he was afraid of himself. He even shrank back, as 
 though there were still deliverance in distance. Yet she 
 followed him step by step, with her face out-thrust and 
 the challenge of unutterable hate in her eyes. 
 
 " You steel-puddler ! " she gasped out. " You common 
 cur ! You coward ! Oh, you coward ! " 
 
 "Keep out o here!" he repeated, thickly, foolishly. 
 And as she stood with her face thrust against his he flung
 
 264 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 out at her the one word he knew would hurt her most, 
 the word that had floated so revoltingly up to his ears the 
 first day he had ever seen her. 
 
 That word electrified her into sudden and feline move 
 ment. She struck at his face, foolishly, frenziedly, as he 
 made a last effort to push her away from him, to get her 
 out through the door before the last of his reason slipped 
 away from him. But she resisted him, relapsing blindly 
 to the plane of blind force, clawing at his bare shoulders, 
 scratching with her hooked finger-nails until the blood 
 showed on the white flesh. 
 
 That seemed to madden him. He caught her suddenly 
 by the throat, sending her swaying and staggering back. 
 But she clung to him, clawed at him, panting and sob 
 bing with the fury of her anger. " You coward," she 
 blubbered, loose-lipped, as she fought against him, re 
 sisted him to the utmost. 
 
 But he was too strong for her. Even as he held her by 
 the firm column of the neck some forlorn ghost of chiv 
 alry forbade him to strike her. All his instincts were 
 against striking her. It was not what white men did. 
 Yet he felt a great hunger to hurt that body of hers, the 
 grim demand to inflict suffering on it. Repressed im 
 pulses clamoured for liberation, aborted intentions and 
 thwarted desires re-arose on the stirred pool of his pas 
 sion. No; he must not strike her. Yet he must hurt 
 her ; he must hurt her, to make up for the past. 
 
 He lifted her bodily and twisted her back over the lip 
 of the enamel bath-tub, in an effort to fling her from him. 
 But she was lithe, lithe as a cat. As he forced her down, 
 vaguely wondering if the strain would break her back, 
 she tried to set her teeth in the firm white flesh of his 
 shoulder. That sudden pain brought a reaction that was 
 unwilled and unconscious. He imprisoned her arms and 
 held her upright, threshing her from side to side, shaking 
 her as a terrier shakes a rag. Then her struggles sud 
 denly ceased.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 265 
 
 For a moment he thought that she was unconscious. 
 But her eyes were open, he saw, and her body was still 
 twitching. She stared up at him, apparently without 
 seeing him, limp, passive, inert, no longer ready to op 
 pose him, appearing willing to endure his blows, as 
 though some black joy lurked in the pain he had been 
 inflicting upon her, a stare of stupid and voluptuous con 
 tent on her unclean face. 
 
 He dropped her at that, in shame, in disgust, in sudden 
 humiliation. She balanced along the edge of the tub 
 for a moment, hung there, and then slid limply down into 
 the porcelain bath, lying there full length, face up, al 
 most as though she lay in her coffin. 
 
 He stood staring down at her. He could see the short 
 sobs that tore her bosom, where the thin crcpe-de-Chine 
 had been mauled away. 
 
 He turned and staggered out through the door, making 
 his way blindly towards one of the studio windows. 
 There he awakened, for the first time, to the fact that he 
 was sobbing aloud. He was sobbing and gasping with 
 unutterable self-shame. He had ill-treated a woman, 
 had beaten and abused her. He had reached the lowest, 
 the lowest depths beyond which there was nothing, noth 
 ing in any way human. He had at last touched bottom. 
 
 Wave after wave of remorse welled through him, melt 
 ing him into a new-born and unendurable storm of pity. 
 He went back to the bathroom. He stooped over the 
 tub, where she still lay, white as the porcelain beside her. 
 He slipped one hand under her shoulder, and another 
 under her softly yielding hips. Then he lifted her up. 
 He felt her weight, cool and limp and pliant, against his 
 body. In that way he carried her to the bed and placed 
 her on it, very carefully, finding a wordless relief in even 
 that small service. Then he moistened a towel with 
 warm water, and wiped the saliva and froth from her 
 face, and adjusted sheet and blanket and coverlet over 
 the bruised body, as languid now as a sleepy child s.
 
 266 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 He returned to the bath-room, rubbed alum on his 
 scratched shoulders, drenched his throbbing head in cold 
 water, and put on the rest of his clothes. Then he caught 
 up his hat and strode from the room. 
 
 He escaped to the street, oppressed by the whiteness of 
 the sunlight, vaguely afraid to look men and women in 
 the face, burning to walk off the poisons which were sour 
 ing his body, dumbly longing for the lapse of time, time 
 which alone could heal such deep and ugly lacerations of 
 the spirit. 
 
 Yet time, he told himself, could not even do this. The 
 wound would always be there, for it was a wound in life 
 itself. It was too profoundly involved with the past to 
 be escapable. 
 
 Hour after hour he walked unrecognized streets, hop 
 ing for the relief of weariness. But it was beyond physi 
 cal effort to bring the anaesthesia that he craved. When 
 he found himself back on Broadway, before one of those 
 gaily faqaded restaurants which are known to the Rialto 
 as " lobster-palaces," he turned in through the highly 
 ornamented doorway, remembering that many a man, 
 before this, had drowned his sorrows in drink. 
 
 So he drank, determinedly, joylessly, silently. He 
 drank until memory was dulled, until co-ordination be 
 came a matter of difficulty, until a veil swung between 
 him and the few impersonally curious figures scattered 
 about that place of nocturnal revelry. He sat there for 
 what seemed a long time. He sat there impervious to the 
 swelling tide which came in with the dinner hour, impas 
 sive to their arrival and to their departure. 
 
 It was Pannie Atwill, adventuring four hours later 
 into what was a familiar haunt to her, who stopped before 
 his table and stared down at him. He sat, sodden and 
 inarticulate, unable to reply to her careless-noted greet 
 ing. The smile went out of her face as she sat down be 
 side him.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 267 
 
 " Say, kiddo, aren t you turnin this trick a little too 
 often for a short-horn? " she inquired, with obvious con 
 cern. Then, after a moment or two of deep thought, she 
 called a waiter, ordered a taxi-cab, and supported Stor- 
 row s one arm while the waiter supported the other as 
 they made their way to the open. 
 
 No word or movement of protest came from Storrow 
 as she carried him to her rooms, piloted his all but help 
 less body up a flight of stairs and permitted him to col 
 lapse neatly and contentedly across the bed towards which 
 she had ushered him. Then she promptly turned him 
 over, straightened him out, and unlaced his shoes. Be 
 fore she came to a stop she had taken off most of his 
 outer clothing. Then, after covering him up and tucking 
 him in, she produced aromatic spirits of ammonia and 
 mixed a glassful of bromo-seltzer, each of which he in 
 turn declined to swallow. 
 
 " I guess dreamland s the drug you re lookin for," she 
 sagaciously observed, as she adjusted his comatose head 
 to the pillow. 
 
 She sat watching him, with an oddly impersonal and 
 half satyric light in her eyes. Yet her movements, as 
 she wrung out a towel and laid it across his feverish fore 
 head, were touched with a solicitude that was almost 
 maternal. As he continued to sleep, she took off her 
 own shoes and loosened her clothing, making herself as 
 comfortable as she could in the undulatory Morris-chair 
 beside the bed. She looked at her watch, smoked a cig 
 arette, and waited. Finally her head drooped forward, 
 and she fell asleep. 
 
 It was almost morning when she awakened. 
 
 " Some night ! " she murmured as she inspected the 
 still sleeping figure on her bed and fell to massaging her 
 neck, which suspension over a chair-back had left with a 
 crick. Then she went to the telephone and called up 
 Storrow s wife.
 
 268 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " Say, Torrie, I ve got that man o yours here," she 
 explained over the wire. " I got him here, soused to the 
 gills ! " 
 
 Storrow, roused from his lethargy by the advent of 
 Torrie half an hour later, preferred to keep the lids 
 closed over his still burning eyes. Even through the 
 fumes that clouded his brain he was conscious of an im 
 measurable shame. He was ashamed of his helplessness, 
 of what he remembered of the past, of his unclean and 
 dishevelled clothing, of the sour and shaking body which 
 he was still unable to control. 
 
 " I must get him back," he heard Torrie s voice say. 
 She spoke quietly, almost resignedly. She stood close to 
 him, and yet her voice seemed to come from a great dis 
 tance. She was stooping to pick his coat and vest from 
 the floor when a light tap sounded on the door. 
 
 " That s only Mattie," explained Storrow s wife to 
 the owner of the room, in little more than a whisper. 
 
 "Why s Mattie breezin round so early? " asked Pan- 
 nie Atwill. 
 
 " I asked her to," was Torrie s low-toned retort, fol 
 lowed by an inaudible conference between the three of 
 them. 
 
 " What n the name o Gawd ever marked your neck 
 up that way?" suddenly demanded the voice of Mattie 
 Crowder. 
 
 Torrie remained silent for a moment or two. 
 
 "He did!" she finally said, in a dead voice. 
 
 Mattie breathed a half-whistled note of surprise. 
 
 " Say, Torrie, that neck-stab old Modrynski handed 
 you a couple o years ago ain t got nothin on this! " 
 
 " Hush ! " said Torrie, with a quick glance towards the 
 bed. 
 
 It was Pannie s voice that broke the silence. " This 
 kind o takes me back to my plumber-boy. But bein 
 man-handled that way, Dearie, sure otta be great f r your 
 Art!"
 
 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 
 
 STORROW lay in bed, unable to sleep. He lay 
 painfully awake, staring out through the open 
 window at a star which hung in the sky, slightly 
 above the black ramparts of the house-roofs towering as 
 gloomily above him as the walls of a gaol-yard. He 
 went back over his life, page by page, with that imper 
 sonal detachment which comes only to the wakeful after 
 midnight. And as he lay there, deliberately and labor 
 iously balancing up the over-complicated ledger of ex 
 istence, it struck him as odd that the star at which he 
 stared should hang so serene in the midst of a sky equally 
 serene, while he himself remained so humanly fevered and 
 troubled in spirit. Night, he remembered, had once been 
 able to bring him peace. Sleep, until he came to that 
 great city of unrest, had never seemed reluctant to refill 
 the lowered reservoirs of vitality. Always, before that, 
 he had found the hours of darkness ready to dedicate 
 themselves to the quiet restoration of mind and body, no 
 matter whether his pillow had been a pine-bough or a 
 folded Hudson-Bay blanket or even the thwart of a Rice- 
 Lake canoe. Always the sigh of the wind in tree-tops 
 or the lap of water on pebbly shores had lulled him away 
 from any distractions that crowded his day. 
 
 But now, with the nocturnal hum of the city in his 
 ears, he found no art to relax the over-tensioned bow. 
 The fault, he knew, lay in his own heart, sour with dis 
 gust, heavy with defeat, tortured with the thought that 
 he had made a failure of life. Step by step he recalled 
 his earlier hopes and aspirations, his older and cleaner 
 ways of life, his more eager and lighthearted outlook on 
 
 269
 
 270 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 the world. He reviewed his first advent to the city, his 
 meeting with Torrie, his surrender to the impulses of the 
 body, his quixotic marriage, his aborted attempts at re 
 volt against an environment which he had only half- 
 recognized as degrading, his mis-steps and mistakes, and 
 his entrance into that culminating consciousness of be 
 trayal which now left him as poignantly alone as though 
 he stood the last man on the last ice-floe of a planet lost 
 in space. 
 
 A sense of the strangeness of earthly things returned to 
 him, as he lay there as rigid as the blade of a sword, in 
 remembering the gulfs which now yawned between him 
 and the quietly breathing body reposing with such ironic 
 intimacy on the same bed with him. He was no longer 
 swayed by that earlier unreasoning passion to inflict in 
 jury on it, to impose suffering on what had brought suf 
 fering to him. His feelings had merged into something 
 more passive, a vague and perplexed indifferency, a de 
 sire for silence and the obliterating dust of time, a hunger 
 for even the hope of quietness and remoteness where the 
 healing forces of life might in some devious way reassert 
 themselves. 
 
 He had sunk low, he remembered, and had surrendered 
 much; but he had not altogether given up the hope of 
 hope. Somewhere, in the unsleeping core of his being, 
 there was the trampled spark which could not and should 
 not go out. If that went, all indeed was lost. In some 
 way and by some means, at whatever cost, he must re 
 cover his grip on life. He must go back to the beginning 
 of things, grope through the fog, struggle on until he 
 once more reached solid and decipherable ground. Some 
 where in the world there was a great serenity which was 
 being denied him. He was meant to be a part of that 
 serenity, above the harrying disorder and distractions of 
 life. And above that blind welter, he felt, must dwell 
 some far-off purpose, some larger order which he was as 
 yet unable to see in perspective, some wider scheme of
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 271 
 
 things in which even earthly passion might find its reason 
 and its redemption. 
 
 Storrow felt it to be there, even as he realized that it 
 lay beyond his reach. And his secondary sense of 
 frustration brought with it a new and deeper misery. It 
 left him apparently mocked at by the very God on whom 
 he stood unable to call for help. Yet as he lay there, in 
 his silent conflict of soul, he prayed without knowing 
 that he was praying. He was unconscious of prayer, 
 since no answer came to those frantic and only half- 
 articulate appeals to the unknown. He was conscious 
 only of his suffering, of a sleepless tension that seemed 
 unendurable, of a feeling of being prematurely old and 
 exhausted. The only tatter of hope that remained with 
 him lay in the memory of that unobliterated spark lost 
 somewhere in the trodden husks of his past, the spark in 
 which he still forlornly refused to relinquish belief. It 
 prompted him to remember, as he lay there in his misery 
 waiting for the morning, that even as the ache would in 
 time go out of the body which had been so ill-used, so 
 the subtler ache would in time pass away from the spirit 
 which no longer seemed his to control. 
 
 Yet before he could know that restoration, he felt, he 
 would have to know quietness for thought and elbow- 
 room for reverie. He must have breathing-space for 
 both body and soul. He must get away : that \vas some 
 thing which his inalienable passion for the open had im 
 posed upon him. There was no longer any doubt about 
 the matter. To stay between those walls, in the old rut, 
 played on by the old influences and surroundings, was out 
 of the question. He must go. 
 
 He thought of Angelo Dellazio and his cellar studio 
 very much as a man dying of thirst might think of a 
 spring bubbling out of a hillside. There, he told himself, 
 was a cave into which he might crawl with his wounds. 
 There, he remembered, he could know the consolation of 
 temporary nonentity, of submerging himself unremem-
 
 272 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 bered among the unknown. And the more he thought 
 the matter over the more fixed he became in purpose. 
 His spirit grew quieter. He no longer dreaded the 
 thought of the morning. 
 
 When Torrie, waking early, hurriedly slipped out of 
 bed and began dressing, he lay with his eyes closed, pre 
 ferring that she accept him as still sleeping. Yet he 
 found it hard to control his breathing when she came to 
 the bedside and stood over him. The knowledge that 
 she was staring down at him brought a pang to his heart ; 
 he did not know why. He was determined, however, to 
 betray no sign of feeling. It was not until she stooped 
 closer, and with a movement or two that was both so 
 licitous and tender drew the covers up about his shoul 
 ders, that feeling too strong for his control welled up in 
 his body. His eyes were still closed, but a sort of sob 
 burst from him, a ghost of a sob which he found himself 
 utterly unable to repress. 
 
 " What is it, Honey? " asked Torrie, still stooping over 
 him, with a debilitating little flutter of anxiety in her 
 voice. 
 
 " I guess I was dreaming," he said, almost gruffly, as 
 he made an effort to turn on his side, determined that she 
 should not see the tears which were wet on his face. He 
 was ashamed of his weakness. He was determined, too, 
 that there should be no more perilous passage of words 
 between them, though the stooping woman stood for 
 several moments gazing down at her husband s averted 
 head. He distinctly caught the sound of her sigh as she 
 turned away, at last, and busied herself at the homely 
 little duties of the kitchenette. Those tasks, for some 
 reason, took on a tragic aspect, even in their triviality. 
 They seemed permeated with a colouring of pathos which 
 he could not fathom. Even the thought that she was eat 
 ing that hurried breakfast alone weighed ponderously 
 on his heart. And it was with a definite sense of relief
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 273 
 
 that he awakened to the fact that she was making herself 
 ready for the street. 
 
 He neither moved nor opened his eyes until she had 
 taken her departure. But, once sure that she was gone, 
 he slipped hurriedly out of bed and just as hurriedly 
 dressed. He gathered together the things which he felt 
 he might need, packed them in his hand-bag, and slowly 
 and deliberately inspected the studio. Then, with that 
 valedictory look still in his eyes, he took up the packed 
 hand-bag and stepped out of the room, carefully and 
 quietly closing the door behind him. 
 
 An hour later he carried his heavy bag down the nar 
 row stairway leading to Angelo Dellazio s cellar in 
 Shinier Place. 
 
 " Well, I ve come," he calmly announced to the plaster- 
 pow r dered Italian stooping over a white-pine box in which 
 three dozen casts of Dante s head were being packed in 
 chopped straw. 
 
 But little more than blank incredulity showed on the 
 face of the brown-eyed Angelo. 
 
 " I mean it," explained Storrow, putting down his bag. 
 " And you needn t worry about my not working. I ll 
 give you all you can handle. All I want is enough to eat 
 and a place to sleep. That s fair, isn t it, until I show 
 you what I can do ? " 
 
 But Angelo, as he stood scratching his crisp black 
 curls, had his doubts about it being fair enough. He 
 studied the newcomer with much concern, and then the 
 cast-covered cellar walls, and then the brown-tinted bust 
 of Dante which he still held in his hand. Then he re 
 treated to the living-quarters above-stairs and consulted 
 with Maria, his rotund and wren-like wife, who sur 
 reptitiously inspected Storrow through a crack in the 
 door and perceived that he was good to look upon and 
 carried no obvious ear-marks of a refugee from justice. 
 
 So the matter was decided, then and there. Storrow
 
 2 74 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 became one of that little family in Shimer Place shadowed 
 by the mottled walls of tenements, submerging himself 
 in that crowded corner of the East Side where even to 
 hear his native tongue was to prove a novelty. There 
 he proceeded to make himself phantasmally at home, en 
 tering into the work allotted to him with a preoccupied 
 ferocity which more and more tended to perplex the mild- 
 eyed Angelo. There, down the narrow canyon of a side- 
 street a-flutter with multi-coloured bedding and wash 
 ings, a joyous and noisy side-street that seemed almost 
 Neopolitan in its colour and movement, Storrow saw 
 Spring come to the city. He beheld the hurdy-gurdies 
 emerge and the Bock Beer signs appear on the gilt-cor 
 niced saloon towards the water-front and the hokey-pokey 
 barrows come out like crocuses and swart children en 
 raptured with the strains of a tarantella dancing like 
 grass-hoppers on the broken concrete. He felt the sun 
 shine warm on the smoke-stained bricks, and noticed 
 greens in the carts of the street-vendors, and caught a 
 ghostly aroma of outland budding and burgeoning on 
 the languid breeze that crept in across the East River. 
 And down that echoing canyon, in the paling afternoons, 
 he saw the shadows grow purple and the golden mist that 
 hung over the city deepen to a wine-glow like the wine- 
 glow that once hung warm over his native mountains. 
 And if in his heart a great unhappiness lay sealed and 
 coffined, he struggled none the less determinedly to keep 
 the lid tight down on that casket where his lost hopes 
 slept. 
 
 It was this which kept him so doggedly and so desper 
 ately close to his work. Angelo saw to it that he was 
 well supplied with modelling clay and wax. And the 
 new-found maker of images, freed from all restraints, 
 contemptuous of criticism, careless of results, played with 
 his lost art. He let his fancy laugh, lightly and cyni 
 cally, into the ha penny forms that were demanded of 
 him. He learned quickly enough from Angelo the limit-
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 275 
 
 ations in form and line imposed upon him, the necessity 
 for that modified pornography which carried its appeal 
 to modified intelligence. Yet what he modelled was 
 something more than the bifoutry whose natural haven 
 was the beer-parlour and the barber-shop wall. If he 
 approached his work with a cynical and careless hand 
 he also brought to it the airiness born of indifferency. 
 And day by day he built up his models until there came 
 into being that small array of figures which brought joy 
 to the heart of Angelo and Maria and were destined later 
 on to run like a nettle-rash across the country. His 
 first figure, The Bather, was an obvious imitation of 
 Bouguereau, with the Dellazio influence too much to the 
 front. But his second figure, The Direr, caught at 
 first-hand from a naked urchin on the string-piece of 
 an East River wharf-end, had in it the unsuppressed 
 spirit of youth and vitality, made doubly effective after 
 the inspired Angelo hit on the expedient of dipping the 
 finished cast in a stain of copper-brown. Then Storrow 
 turned to animals, essaying a figure or tw r o which gave 
 him much personal satisfaction but eventually confirmed 
 Angelo s prediction that they would never sell like a 
 nude. So he went back to the nudes, turning them out 
 with a blithe bitterness of heart born of the memory that 
 he was prostituting a gift which had once seemed sacred 
 to him. In this spirit, half of mockery, half of shame- 
 lessness, he created that poignant little study known to 
 the world as The Tired Model, the crouching and 
 lean-ribbed figure, too pensively youthful and human 
 ever to offend by its nakedness, which was later to smile 
 down from half a million book-shelves and plate-rails 
 and what-nots. And Angelo, seeing that the work was 
 good, prepared his moulds and mixed his plaster and 
 tinted the finished casts, persuaded that a new era was 
 overtaking his business. 
 
 This promise of trebled trade seemed in no way to 
 interest Storrow. He worked and lived like a man in a
 
 276 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 dream. He ate meals of spaghetti and sour wine, with 
 a braised pullet on Sundays. He sat trance-like at a 
 table where half a dozen excited Sicilians argued 
 frenziedly and endlessly as to condiments and Caruso and 
 lemon-shipments from Palermo. He ate unknown dishes 
 savoury with garlic, and smoked rat-tail stogies handed 
 forth by unknown companions. For a holiday he oc 
 casionally went with Angelo and a comrade Neopolitan 
 in an extremely dirty motor-launch down the Bay, where 
 they fished for eels and Lafayettes, kicking home sun 
 burned and tired with the incoming tide. Once, too, he 
 joined his new friends in an excursion to Coney Island, 
 where he moved about with constraint and finally pur 
 chased from a dispenser of holiday souvenirs a small 
 basket of woven sweet-grass. From the aromatic fibres 
 of this basket he was able to extract a quick but keen 
 consolation, for the heavy fragrance of sweet-grass had 
 never failed to carry him back, at a bound, to the roads 
 and hill-sides of his native province. But all the time, 
 during that outing, he watched Midway and street-crowd 
 and bathing-beaches with apprehension, secretly dreading 
 that some friend from his old world might chance to 
 confront him with startled and accusatory eyes. 
 
 That emissary from his old world, in fact, came to 
 him much more abruptly and bewilderingly than he had 
 counted on. He came a week later, in the form of 
 Modrynski himself, who made his way creakingly and 
 wheezingly down Dellazio s narrow stairway and con 
 fronted Storrow as the latter stood at the iron sink wash 
 ing up after his morning s work. 
 
 " I salute you, sir," said Modrynski with his stately 
 yet half satyric bow. And Storrow, without speaking, 
 stood staring at his enemy of other days. It seemed a 
 very long time ago, since they had faced each other. 
 
 " And I must further inquire," continued Modrynski 
 as he took a parcel wrapped in tissue-paper from under 
 his caped coat, " if this happens to be your work? "
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 277 
 
 Storrow saw the tremulous old fingers tear away the 
 folds of tissue-paper, revealing one of Angelo s freshly 
 minted casts of The Tired Model. 
 
 " It is," acknowledged Storrow. 
 
 " I thought so," said the older man, moving his head 
 slowly from side to side, for all the world like a Polar 
 bear in a zoo-cage. " And to run down the perpetrator 
 of that enormity, sir, has taken three whole days of my 
 time!" 
 
 " Then why bother about it? " demanded Storrow, with 
 imperfectly masked antagonism. He was troubled, at 
 the moment, with none too happy memories of earlier 
 comments on his art work. 
 
 "Why bother about it?" repeated Modrynski, undis 
 turbed by the other s hostility. " Because behind all its 
 badness, my dear young misanthrope, behind all its mis 
 placing of muscles and false marshalling of masses, is 
 enough of the breath of life to compel a man who has 
 grown old in the search of beauty to respect its creator." 
 He turned, for the first time, and stared slowly about the 
 crowded and cast-littered chamber. " But what, in the 
 name of God, are you doing in a catacomb like this?" 
 
 " I m living my own life," averred Storrow, meeting 
 the older man s sunken and ochre-framed eye. Still 
 again, and even through the fogs of hostility, he could 
 detect the beauty of that unageing eye, full-coloured and 
 deep and limpid in the midst of the yellowed and wrinkled 
 face. 
 
 " You mean burying your life," countered Modrynski, 
 with yet another stare about the room. " And the in 
 terring of that which is still alive impresses me as not 
 only a calamity, but as a crime," he added with slow 
 deliberation, as he seated himself on one of Angelo s 
 cases of plaster images. 
 
 " It s at least my own," retorted Storrow, plainly with 
 no wish to prolong the interview. But Modrynski was 
 not to be shaken off.
 
 2? 8 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " Not altogether," he meditatively reminded the other 
 man. Then he stood up again. " There s Torrie, you 
 know. And I feel, sir, that you have not been quite fair 
 to her." 
 
 It was a full moment before Storrow spoke again. 
 
 " I ll be obliged if you ll not discuss my wife," he 
 finally declared. 
 
 Again the eyes of the two men met. It was only the 
 face of the older man that carried any touch of gentle 
 ness. 
 
 " But I m afraid we are compelled to discuss her," 
 contended Modrynski, the slight foreign intonation of 
 his voice seeming to give a touch of impersonality to a 
 statement still essentially personal. " And Torrie is a 
 girl very dear to my heart." 
 
 " I ve had considerable evidence of that," was Stor- 
 row s quick and embittered retort. 
 
 The deep-set eyes gazed unwaveringly out of the faded 
 old face, as meditative and melancholy as an eagle s. 
 
 " I am complimented by your jealousy, my lad, even 
 while I am compelled to acknowledge that it is unjust," 
 Modrynski quietly replied. " In two years I shall be 
 seventy. I am an old man. And time, you must re 
 member, brings its immunities. You are young, and 
 your blood is hot and for that I envy you. But I who 
 am old have learned to know that no problem is solved by 
 running away from it." 
 
 " I ve been conscious of no particular problem con 
 fronting me," contended the younger man. 
 
 " But there is a problem. I know that, now, as I see 
 the unhappiness in your face. Women, of course, should 
 be accidents, and only accidents, in the life of the true 
 artist. But that is something we keep failing to remem 
 ber. We also sometimes fail to remember that it is the 
 woman of beauty and warmer blood, the woman of keen 
 feeling and quick impulses, who first affects and inflames 
 us. That woman s life must be kept full. It is the rich
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 279 
 
 soil that cannot He fallow or barren. It must be a garden 
 of quiet rapture, or a riot of weeds. And if we fail to 
 meet her demands and keep full her life, we must not be 
 surprised if she is driven to seek consolation from other 
 sources." 
 
 " What are you driving at? " was Storrow s brusk de 
 mand. 
 
 " I am driving at nothing," Modrynski responded with 
 carefully maintained deliberateness. " I am merely at 
 tempting to point out to you that at a time like this your 
 place is at your wife s side." 
 
 Storrow swung about, trying to dissemble the creeping 
 chill in his blood by a show of anger. 
 
 " There seem to be a number of persons actively nurs 
 ing the same conviction," was his almost passionate re 
 tort. 
 
 " Precisely," coldly admitted the older man. " And 
 that is what has given me the courage to search you out 
 and suggest to you the possibility of disputing their 
 claim." 
 
 " But I have no intention of disputing their claim," 
 cried the other. 
 
 Modrynski, still studying the younger man s face, 
 slowly buttoned up the voluminous caped overcoat. 
 
 " All such final decisions must, of course, remain with 
 you. But having done what I conceived to be my duty, 
 I can now bid you good-morning, sir, and take my de 
 parture." 
 
 Yet in taking his departure, with creaking steps and a 
 pathetic effort at bravado in the brokenly hummed air 
 from " Rigoletto," Modrynski took away with him the 
 last of Storrow s laboriously fabricated peace of mind. 
 It was like the tearing open of a wound but half healed. 
 It brought the thought of his wife torturingly back to 
 him. It reminded him that his immersion in a trivial 
 slum-cellar occupation was nothing more than an armis 
 tice, an interregnum of false tranquillity, a burrowing of
 
 2 8o THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 the head of misery beneath the sands of self-deception. 
 Yet he fought against remembrance, just as he fought 
 against the recurring picture of Torrie, of Torrie as a 
 latter-day Penelope without either the fortitude or the 
 distaff of her old-world sister. He struggled to am 
 buscade himself behind a barrier of frantically engineered 
 activities, persuading Angelo to give him an upstairs 
 room where the light would permit him to work directly 
 from models, arguing that he must attempt figures in 
 life size, must try for something bigger and better than 
 plaster cupids and coffee-tinted busts of Columbus. 
 
 So Angelo, compliant but perplexed, brought frame 
 work and chicken wire and wax and plaster for sketch 
 models and a screen behind which swarthy young women 
 not averse to posing pour I ensemble might decently dis 
 robe. And Storrow worked with a fever in his fingers 
 almost as mad as the fever in his blood. But the re 
 sults, as a whole, were disappointing. They were fore 
 ordained to be such. For Art, Storrow wistfully re 
 membered, was something more than an antipyretic, 
 something beyond a mere cooling immersion for over- 
 fevered minds and bodies. In thinking too much about 
 forgetting the past, he forgot that over-exacting mistress 
 who must demand all or nothing. His accumulating con 
 sciousness of defeat, too, was complicated with a keen yet 
 indeterminate longing, an ache which, incongruous as it 
 seemed, established itself as something much more physi 
 cal than it was mental. To keep his mind on his work 
 was out of the question. The nudity of even a profes 
 sional model became repugnant to him. It brought back 
 memories that were over-disturbing. And he slowly 
 awakened to the fact that a change of some sort was 
 inevitable, though he stood unable to apprehend even the 
 nature of that change. 
 
 In his restlessness, one night, he accompanied Angelo 
 and Maria to a diminutive Italian theatre in Varick
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 281 
 
 Place. It was little more than a beer-hall with " En- 
 trata Libera " inscribed above its soiled and dingy en 
 trance, but on that night, Angelo fierily protested, a com 
 patriot of his named Zacconi was to sing, an artist of the 
 first water, a genius with a voice of gold, who should have 
 been holding out at the San Carlo and La Scala, but for 
 an unfortunate love-affair complicated with a stilettoed 
 rival and a somewhat peremptory flight to South Amer 
 ica. 
 
 The artist of the first water, in that hot and crowded 
 little hall where the audience thumped its approval with 
 beer-mugs on table-tops and the air was heavy with garlic 
 and tobacco, proved to be a fat and attitudinizing tenor 
 whose voice of gold altogether failed to impress the 
 morose-eyed Storrow. He was effecting an early es 
 cape, in fact, when he was arrested by a second singer 
 who stepped out on the narrow stage, a girl in a short 
 pink skirt and little else, a tired-eyed girl with a Greek 
 profile and a heavily rouged and powdered face. He 
 dropped into an empty chair as she sang Monzzocci s 
 E Piscatori. It appealed to him in a way which he could 
 not fathom, and he forgot the garlic and tobacco and the 
 sawdust on the floor. It took him back to other clays, 
 to the spring of life, to the time when he too could be as 
 lighthearted as the young Italian fruit-vendor and his 
 downy-cheeked sweetheart across the aisle from him. 
 Then the girl on the stage was joined by the Zacconi of 
 the golden voice, and together they sang a French duet, 
 a suggestive and risque song in which the rotund tenor 
 pressed the tired-eyed girl in the short pink skirt to his 
 bosom. And for the second time Storrow was about to 
 make his escape in disgust, when he was pushed quietly 
 back into his chair by a thin white hand. 
 
 When he looked up he beheld Pannie Atwill demurely 
 seating herself at the other side of his scarred and mot 
 tled little table.
 
 282 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 "Hello, you mutt!" she coolly murmured, unedging 
 the bluntness of that salutation by the softness of her 
 smile. 
 
 " Hello," was Storrow s startled and altogether in 
 adequate reply, as he followed Pannie s stare about to the 
 door at the back of the hall. 
 
 Towards that portal she nodded a diffident and ex 
 planatory head. 
 
 " I just sent that Pittsburg white-goods buyer I was 
 showin the sights to off to dig me up a dozen American 
 Beauties or the night was ended. Which same ought o 
 keep him busy sloothin out a flower-shop for the next 
 half-hour or so. Where re you livin now? " 
 
 " I don t pretend to be living," was Storrow s non 
 committal retort. 
 
 " Certainly not like a white man, 1 asserted Pannie, with 
 a suddenly sobered face. 
 
 "Just what do you mean by that?" demanded the 
 other, touched with wonder at the memory of how des 
 tiny had interwoven his career with this painted and 
 pert-eyed child of the chorus. 
 
 " I mean anything you want to make it mean," was her 
 reply. " But if you re nursin any doubts as to what 
 I m drivin at I ll blink the bromide by explainin that 
 you don t impress me as treatin Torrie Throssel as I d 
 expect a white man to treat her." She smiled, almost 
 wearily at his quick movement of protest. " Oh, no ; 
 you can t flag me off the landscape that light and airy 
 way, at least not until I spill a little of the chin-goods 
 I ve been gatherin up for you. I ve been in on this 
 bonehead play from the first, and I m entitled to speak 
 a few kind words, now I ve collared the chance." 
 
 " Words, Pannie, won t do the slightest good in the 
 world," Storrow announced to her, out of a sudden vast 
 weariness of soul which seemed too profound to plumb. 
 And Pannie, for a moment, sat regarding him with 
 studious and contemplative eyes.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 283 
 
 " You don t strike me as lookin any too scrumptious," 
 she impersonally remarked. 
 
 " Perhaps I m not feeling that way," he countered. 
 
 " And what s the answer ? " she pertly demanded. 
 
 " That s something it would be only a waste of time to 
 discuss," he told her. 
 
 " I can t see that hidin away from it has helped 
 much," she coolly amended. It was not the flash of con 
 tempt from her eyes that hurt him. What wounded him 
 deepest was her ill-concealed kindliness of intent. And 
 at that particular time he was asking for neither pity nor 
 help. 
 
 " Debating about it would have the same drawback," 
 he asserted in self-defence. 
 
 She looked him up and down, appraisingly. 
 
 " Well, you can at least wise me up on one thing : 
 Do you intend to take the full count ? " 
 
 He had to acknowledge his failure to understand what 
 she meant. 
 
 " When a game gink goes to the mat," she said by way 
 of explanation, " he sweats blood to get up on his feet 
 again b fore they count him out, for good. When he lays 
 down and takes it like a dead man, they say he s taken 
 the count. Have you?" 
 
 That uncouth hand, insinuating itself about the roots 
 of his soul, was anything but a welcome intrusion to 
 Storrow. But he stood without the power to repel it. 
 
 " Let me tell you something straight," went on his 
 calm-eyed tormentor. " I know Torrie about as well 
 as anybody on Gawd s green earth. She s alive and 
 warm-blooded and eager f r the joy o livin . She never 
 was a dead one. If the right man doesn t fill her life, 
 there s goin to be others to step in and turn the trick. 
 But it s got o be filled; it s got o! And just now 
 there s a guy or two breakin their necks to persuade her 
 you ve thrown her down, for good. She doesn t want 
 to believe em. She s tryin not to believe em. But
 
 284 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 women are women, son, and there s a time when they get 
 tired o waitin for the right man to say the right word. 
 And if you ain t got the answer she s waitin for about 
 your person, somebody else is goin to beat you to it ! " 
 
 " Somebody else, I m afraid, has already beaten me to 
 it," he deliberately announced. He tried to speak 
 calmly, but it disturbed him more than he imagined to 
 find Pannie Atwill presenting to him a rechauffe of the 
 same dish which Modrynski had already held out to 
 him. 
 
 " Do you know what s the matter with you? " Pannie 
 was demanding, with a sudden show of scorn. " The 
 trouble with you is that you ain t old enough to know 
 how to handle a woman. Old Dave was right ; a guy s 
 got o pass forty before he finds out how to treat em 
 right! All you young cubs think about is yourself, and 
 your own feelin s, and your own sore thumbs. You re 
 too wrapt up in what you want, to bother much about the 
 woman, and whether you re makin her happy or not. 
 You re frettin too much about what you re gettin out of 
 it to stop and inquire if there s anything big or fine in 
 the way you re treatin the other party ! " 
 
 On the narrow stage at the far end of the smoke-filled 
 room the girl in the short pink skirt was singing the 
 Musetta Waltz from Bohcme. Storrow heard it and yet 
 failed to hear it, for he sat there beside the grave of his 
 lost hopes, sabering himself with the self-questionings 
 of the unhappy, demanding of himself if indeed it could 
 be true that much of the fault could lay with him, for 
 lornly inquiring if there were not still some path which 
 might lead him back, back to the older and happier days, 
 back to some St. Marten s Summer of contentment with 
 even less of rapture and more of wisdom in it. Then 
 came an abysmal sense of loneliness, sweeping over him 
 black wave by wave, leaving him with a desolating con 
 sciousness of estrangement from the things after which 
 he had once hungered.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 285 
 
 " But I can t find any reason for treating the other 
 party, as you express it, in any other way," he finally 
 asserted, in his inadequate gesture of self-defence. 
 
 " Then what re you goin to do about it? " demanded 
 the girl on the other side of the table. 
 
 " About what? " parried Storrow. 
 
 " About your wife and family," said Pannie, with 
 great deliberation. 
 
 " My wife and family? " repeated Storrow as his gaze 
 came to rest on Pannie s rouged face. The interrogative 
 blankness of his eyes seemed to puzzle her for a moment 
 or two. 
 
 " You ain t tryin to tell me," she asked as she leaned 
 impressively forward across the table, " that you haven t 
 been hep to what s happened?" 
 
 " Hep to what s happened? " he still repeated, as their 
 glances locked. 
 
 "You knew Torrie was caught?" demanded Pannie, 
 with narrowed and accusatory eyes. 
 
 " Caught? What do you mean by caught? " asked the 
 other. His bland ignorance of the idiom of her world 
 seemed to exasperate Pannie. 
 
 " Do you mean to say," she slowly intoned, " that you 
 didn t know Torrie was going to have a baby? That in 
 five or six months you d be havin something to walk the 
 floor with ? " 
 
 Slowly the colour ebbed out of Storrow s face. He 
 sat for a full minute without moving, with his unseeing 
 eyes on the face of the girl who abstractedly took a 
 powder-paper from her silver vanity-case and with it 
 dusted her retrousse young nose. 
 
 "That isn t true?" he murmured, with a look that 
 was half horror and half incredulity still in his stricken 
 eyes. 
 
 Pannie snapped shut her vanity-case. 
 
 " Of course it s true," she said as she leaned in over 
 the table again. " And while I ve got the chance I want
 
 286 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 to plant one bee in your bonnet. If you intend to play 
 ostrich after you ve brought this on Torrie, you re yel 
 lower than any real man I ever knew. And that s about 
 all for tonight, Capt n Kidd, for I see my Pittsburg gink 
 over there with what looks like a coffin under his arm, 
 and I guess we ll be ramblin on to where the lights are 
 white!"
 
 CHAPTER TWENTY- THREE 
 
 STORROW, after a night of troubled thought, knew 
 that he would have to go back to Torrie. He was 
 reluctant to acknowledge it, even to himself. Yet 
 he began to realize that it would be useless to combat 
 further those combined currents of impulse and obliga 
 tion carrying him back to the older order of things. He 
 was the prey of feelings too powerful for his own will. 
 And he was tired of passivity, tired, too, of the tedium 
 of suspended action. 
 
 But he stood, as yet, convinced of nothing, of nothing, 
 at least, beyond the knowledge that the present situation 
 had become unendurable. He could not stay on with 
 Angelo. That was out of the question. And he could 
 not go back to the old order without beholding there vast 
 and calamitous changes. There was, in fact, no such 
 thing as the old order. Yet he must go back to what was 
 left of it. It would be still another compromise imposed 
 upon him by life. But it was a compromise for the sake 
 of survival and to survive was still a final and sullen 
 instinct with him. The trampled spark, he told himself, 
 must not go entirely out. . . . 
 
 It was not until his taxi-cab swung from Lexington 
 Avenue into Twenty-Fourth Street that he thought 
 primarily of Torrie and her predicament. That brought 
 to him a less ponderable sense of disturbance, an inde 
 terminate feeling of guilt touched with pity, a shadowy 
 consciousness of incompetence shot through with the twi 
 light hope of vague renewals, a hunger to make amends 
 and reconstruct what was threatening to fall into ruins. 
 There was the need now for some newer outlook. Fate 
 had reached out its iron hand and linked him up with 
 
 287
 
 288 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 the chain of life. A child was to be born to him, bone of 
 his bone, flesh of his flesh. 
 
 Storrow stopped short. He could not even be sure 
 of that. Deception, he remembered, could only too 
 easily extend to those over-vulnerable frontiers. And 
 he found himself groping with frantic misery back into 
 the immediate past, measuring the months and weeks, 
 reviving and reviewing the days which aligned them 
 selves before him as the days of peril. Yet he emerged 
 from that feverish inspection thinly fortified, persuaded 
 that his suspicions were groundless, must be groundless. 
 His thoughts, in fact, reverted to certain vivid-memoried 
 scenes of Torrie lying passive and heavy-lidded in his 
 arms. Once she had even rested there sobbing, appar 
 ently without rhyme or reason. But it was only now 
 that he realized they had not been free agents adventuring 
 along the paths of desire. They had been the toys of 
 Nature warping and bending them to her implacable de 
 mands, playing on them for her own subterranean and 
 dissembled ends. And as he climbed the gloomy old 
 stairs that led back to his studio he found it momentarily 
 impossible to think of Torrie as his enemy and his be 
 trayer. He thought of her more as a straw blown in the 
 wind, as something hunted and harried down the aisles 
 of destiny, as something so fragile that it stood touched 
 with pathos, as something to be pitied. 
 
 His heart was beating fast as he took out his pass-key 
 and opened the door. For that threshold, he felt, was 
 the Rubicon of his life. Yet about his movements as he 
 closed the door behind him was an aspect of deliberation, 
 of judicial quietness, strangely at variance with the 
 tumult in his quick-pounding heart. 
 
 The first thing he saw was Torrie. He saw her seated 
 in the faded and familiar green-backed chair, with the 
 milky softness of her face and throat accentuated by the 
 darkness of her tumbled hair. She was leaning forward, 
 relaxed, with her knees apart, in the midst of darning a
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 289 
 
 pair of black silk stockings. Down the leg of one stock 
 ing Storrow could see her drop the broken door-knob 
 which she used for such purposes. He could see her 
 work this knob into the toe of the stocking, and then ply 
 her needle across the white dimple of glazed porcelain 
 that showed through the worn silk. 
 
 She looked up, startled by his movement as he stepped 
 forward into the room. Then in almost the same in 
 stant her eyes fell again to the stocking in her hand. 
 She stared down at it, as though intent on her work, but 
 the hand that held the threaded needle remained motion 
 less. 
 
 Storrow felt an iron band tighten about his heart, 
 tighten until it seemed to force a cry from his throat. 
 He flung himself down on the floor in front of her and 
 buried his face in the skirt that hung loose between her 
 relaxed knees. He did not know why he was doing it, 
 but he found himself kneeling there shaken with sobs. 
 No word passed between them. But a hand was placed 
 first on the bony shoulders so racked with their inarticu 
 late anguish and then lifted to the bowed head. She 
 stroked his hair, pityingly, almost maternally. It was 
 not until he grew quieter that she spoke. 
 
 " It s all right, Honey," she said in a strangled voice. 
 " It s all right," she kept repeating, as though speaking 
 to a child. 
 
 When he looked up, at last, he found her own face 
 streaked with tears, even though no spasm of remorse 
 had shaken her body. 
 
 " No, no ; it s all wrong," he said as he lowered his 
 head and moved it slowly from side to side. He was 
 ashamed now of his tears, and he did his best to control 
 them. Then he caught at her hand, and clung to it, 
 childishly, as though he were in need of sustenance. 
 
 "I ve come back," he said, still without looking at 
 her. 
 
 " I knew you would," she quietly responded.
 
 CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR 
 
 NOTHING in the life of man, Storrow was be 
 ginning to learn, was either absolute or perma 
 nent. Hope itself came to him shadowed with 
 a great Perhaps, triumph arrived tinged with defeat, con 
 quest inextricably tangled up with subjugation. Even 
 happiness, at its highest pitch, was not without an under 
 tone of regret, and love itself too often took on a colour 
 ing of pain, just as humour, uncouth and incongruous, 
 could unexpectedly return to rob the deepest grief of its 
 dignity. 
 
 Pliant as Storrow tried to leave himself during the 
 ensuing days of readjustment, there were moods and 
 moments when he was tempted to nurse the suspicion 
 that the whole thing was a mockery, a studiously sus 
 tained pretence. Something, he felt, was wanting, even 
 though that deficiency remained undefined. Yet against 
 this feeling he fought both actively and stubbornly, know 
 ing that since he had made his bed he must lie in it. He 
 must make the best of things. He no longer had any 
 choice in the matter. He found himself thrust into a 
 forlorn campaign of reconstruction in which he was des 
 perately resolved not to fail. 
 
 He was helped in this resolution by his newer attitude 
 towards Torrie. In that attitude was a quiet tenderness, 
 a tendency to be more deliberate in his movements, an 
 autumnal wistfulness in his regard for her, a permuta 
 tion of midsummer passion into the cooler and thinner 
 sunlight of November. This vague desire for tranquil 
 lity, for that peace in which the currents of renewal flow 
 
 290
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 291 
 
 freest, left him reluctant to talk about the immediate 
 past and the situation which had led to his disappearance. 
 To discuss that still seemed too much like the reopening 
 of wounds not yet entirely healed. But it was impos 
 sible, on the other hand, to keep entirely out of the past, 
 just as it was impossible to foretell into what paths the 
 idlest of talk might venture. 
 
 " I suppose you know," Torrie said to him one morn 
 ing, nearly a week after his return, " how well your 
 book s been going? And the page the Sunday Herald 
 had about your adventures in the Barren Grounds? " 
 
 Storrow, in acknowledging that he had heard nothing 
 of this, could not repress a pang of regret that his native 
 land, that his old woodland life, that the sun-clad hills 
 of his youth, seemed now such worlds and worlds away 
 from him. 
 
 " Chester Hardy says that book is apt to bring you in 
 more money than you imagine," Torrie continued. 
 
 The mention of Hardy s name, as he explained that 
 he wasn t much interested in money matters, both dis 
 turbed and depressed him. 
 
 " But you ll have to be, before very long," announced 
 Torrie as her gaze met his. She seemed surprised by 
 the look of embarrassment in his eyes. " Krassler says 
 he wants your book for the movies," she went on in an 
 effort to bridge a silence touched with discomfort. " He 
 even said the company he s interested in will give you two 
 thousand dollars for the rights." 
 
 Storrow got up from his chair. 
 
 "Then Krassler s been here?" he demanded, more 
 sharply than he had intended. 
 
 " Yes ; he drops up now and then," was the studiously 
 indifferent reply from his wife. Then she added, as 
 though in after-thought : " He keeps saying that I 
 ought to be back on the stage." 
 
 Storrow did not seem to hear her. 
 
 " And how about Modrynski ? " he asked, almost
 
 292 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 harshly, as though intent on clearing the board, now that 
 the task had been begun. 
 
 Torrie, for one brief moment, swept his face with a 
 close and questioning glance, as though demanding of 
 herself the real motive for those interrogations. 
 
 " I have seen him only twice," she said with a carefully 
 maintained patience. " He says our stairs are too much 
 for him." 
 
 "And Vibbard?" 
 
 Torrie shook her head from side to side. 
 
 " No, I haven t seen him since " She came to a 
 stop, apparently unwilling to recall in words a scene still 
 too distasteful to her. 
 
 " And how about that man Eastman? " continued Stor- 
 row, intent on going to the end of his unsavoury excur 
 sion. His wife s hesitation did not escape him, ready 
 as he stood to attribute to it a significance which could 
 only spell anguish for his own heart. 
 
 " Bonnie s been here, several times," she acknowledged, 
 the effort with which she spoke seeming to imply that 
 she was forcing herself to be honest with an inquisitor 
 whose right she could still question. " He s been here, 
 just as he s been everywhere. But I don t think he ll 
 bother me much more." 
 
 " No, I don t think he will," averred Storrow, with a 
 passion which he was unable to control. For the past, 
 which was equally beyond his control, was reaching out 
 its hands to strangle what was left of his hope. 
 
 " Owen," said Torrie, arresting him in his febrile 
 striding back and forth. " Now that you ve mentioned 
 these men, there s something I want to say to you." 
 
 " About them? " he abruptly demanded. 
 
 " Not so much about them as about ourselves and what 
 you said the other day about us making the best of our 
 lives. You still want to do that, don t you ? " 
 
 He stood gazing down at her, keenly conscious of the 
 beauty which had this tragic power to wound him. He
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 293 
 
 knew, as he stared at the deep and humid eyes, at the soft: 
 and yielding contours with still so much of youth about 
 them, at the red and almost wilful lips with the fatal 
 dower of desire in their over-vivid curves, that she was 
 in some way beautiful to the eye, that she stood beau 
 tiful to him and must only naturally appear beautiful be 
 fore others. The thought suddenly occurred to him that 
 if she were ugly, if she were old and faded, she might 
 remain entirely and indisputably his own. Even before 
 his day, he supposed, men had wished such things. 
 
 " You still want to do that, don t you? " she patiently 
 repeated. 
 
 " Yes," he murmured, conscious of the inadequacy of 
 his reply. But a sudden new humility had taken the gift 
 of words away from him. 
 
 " Then what s the use of harping back on the past and 
 making yourself miserable, and me miserable too, about 
 what s over and done with?" she asked with her wide- 
 eyed stare of interrogation, untroubled, apparently, by 
 the more complex reactions which were washing him back 
 and forth along the shores of misery. 
 
 " It s because we can t get rid of that past," he pro 
 tested. " It s because those men still happen to be a 
 factor in your life, a factor that is hateful to me! " 
 
 " But those men are fond of me, Owen. They like to 
 be with me. They take me for what I am. They don t 
 stop to question every word and movement from me." 
 
 " If they did, they wouldn t be there," was his em 
 bittered retort. 
 
 " There was nothing so terrible about them being where 
 they were," she replied with more spirit. " I may have 
 been foolish, in doing what I did. But there was nothing 
 wrong in it all nothing really wrong. And until 
 you re willing to believe that, I suppose, you ll have to 
 keep on making yourself miserable." 
 
 " There was nothing wrong? " he repeated, staring into 
 her uplifted face. He realized, as he looked down at
 
 294 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 her, the impossibility of mere argument on a question so 
 fundamental. It would be like trying to discuss the 
 Athanasian Creed with an infant. It would be as fool 
 ish as trying to talk theology with a child. 
 
 "You believe me when I say that, don t you?" she 
 was asking him. And he wanted to believe her; above 
 everything else he felt the need of that belief. But 
 After-thought, the darker sister of desire, stood forever 
 at his elbow holding him back. 
 
 " Oh, what s the good of it all? " he cried out in his 
 despair. " What s the good? " 
 
 " That s just what I ve been asking you," protested 
 Torrie, in a tone of modified triumph. " It s the future 
 we ve got to think about now." 
 
 " The future, with everything you ve done and been 
 piled high in its lap," he none too happily amended. And 
 she sat with knitted brow, perplexed by that accusatory 
 cry of protest which she could not quite comprehend. 
 
 " I don t think you should blame me," she finally as 
 serted, " for things which happened before you ever came 
 into my life." 
 
 " But I didn t know I was coming into that sort of 
 life," he found the cruelty to retort. 
 
 She sat staring at him, almost abstractedly. 
 
 " Yet you probably remember how you came into it ? " 
 she reminded him. 
 
 Yes, I remember," he none too happily acknowledged. 
 
 Then, if you re so afraid of my past, and if you want 
 to keep me for yourself, as you pretend you do, why can t 
 you take me away from all this ? " 
 
 He stopped short and turned about on her. It was 
 something he had never thought about. It was some 
 thing which, as he meditated upon it, opened wider and 
 ever wider vistas of possibility. 
 
 " Oh, Owen," she continued, after a moment s silent 
 study of his face, " let s get away somewhere where we
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 295 
 
 can start all over again! Let s slip away somewhere 
 where we can be by ourselves, just the two of us ! " 
 
 He did not answer her, for he was thinking of the 
 open, of roads winding ribbon-like through grey-green 
 valleys mottled with purple shadows, of sun-bathed cliffs 
 overlooking wide reaches of water dappled with foam, 
 of bracken-covered islands where the partridge drummed 
 and the call of the moose echoed out of lonely and pine- 
 clad hinterlands. 
 
 " Isn t there any place we could go to ? " she per 
 sisted, as though that thought of migration had brought 
 a new purpose and hope to life. But Storrow did not 
 answer her. He was remembering how other men had 
 lived down situations even darker than his, how under 
 new skies came new aspirations and energies. 
 
 Torrie watched him with a clouded face, more hurt 
 than intimidated by his silence. 
 
 " What would you have done," she quietly inquired, 
 " if Donnie Eastman himself had taken me off that way? 
 Would you have been glad or sorry? " 
 
 " Did he intend to? " demanded her husband, arrested 
 by some momentary flash of recklessness from her face. 
 
 " He at least wanted to. And since I m going to be 
 absolutely honest with you, I may as well tell you so." 
 
 " And just what was his plan for running away with 
 another man s wife?" asked Storrow. 
 
 " I don t think it quite reached the planning stage. 
 But he said the Nautilaka was a sea-going boat that s 
 the yacht he chartered a little over two years ago. He 
 said we could go down to Havana, and then slide around 
 into the Gulf, or even slip across to Europe by the south 
 ern route. He meant it. He really wanted to. And I 
 don t suppose Donnie ever really wanted anything in his 
 life without being able to get it, at some time or other." 
 
 She stopped for a moment, arrested by the gasp of 
 humiliation from her husband s puckered lips. And she
 
 296 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 smiled wintrily, as though able to garner some scattering 
 seed of triumph from his unhappiness. 
 
 " I know it hurts, to hear me say things like that," she 
 calmly acknowledged. " But it shows you what a girl 
 who s left alone in a city like this has to face." 
 
 " You mean the type of girl that fops like that can 
 buy," he angrily interjected. 
 
 " No," she meditatively replied, " it s not the kind they 
 can buy that they really want. It s the kind they can t 
 quite reach that they fret and worry over and let every 
 thing go smash just to get." She looked up with an 
 almost child-like curiosity in her wide-set eyes. " And 
 I ve been wondering just what you d have done if Donnie 
 Eastman had carried me off." 
 
 " I d have killed him," cried Storrow, with a vehemence 
 which sounded startling even to his own ears. 
 
 " Then you do care, after all," was Torrie s almost 
 exultant proclamation. " You do ! You do ! You 
 must ! " 
 
 He stared at her, unable to comprehend the perverse 
 and phantasmal consolation which she was hugging to 
 her breast. It impressed him as a theatricality extended 
 into a grim debate in which were involved all the darker 
 issues of life. And he bewildered her by shrinking back 
 when she reached out a hand to him. Yet the nature 
 of his question, when he spoke next, was even more be 
 wildering to her. 
 
 " Would you be willing to go up to Canada? " 
 
 It was only for a moment, however, that the deliberate 
 and judicial tone of that demand chilled her. 
 
 " I d go anywhere, anywhere with you," was her an 
 swer. And then she added, as though in afterthought: 
 "But why to Canada?" 
 
 He told her of the old Amasa Kirkner fruit-farm 
 which had become his at the time of Augusta Kirkner s 
 death. He described it as best he could, from the time- 
 distorted memories of childhood. She sat, relaxed and
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 297 
 
 ruminative, as he explained that the old red-brick colonial 
 house in the midst of its pine-grove would be lonely, and 
 fallen into neglect, but that around them they would 
 have orchard-lands and clover-fields and coppices filled 
 with mourning-doves. As she leaned back listening to 
 him, with violet shadows under her eyes, she even sighed 
 audibly in the midst of her languid vizualization of the 
 scene which he was attempting to paint for her. 
 
 It was not until he suddenly announced that he would 
 have to have a talk with Charlotte Kirkner about the 
 matter that any cloud crept into Torrie s new-found 
 horizon of contentment. 
 
 "What has she got to do with it?" was his wife s 
 quick question barbed with suspicion. 
 
 " Everything, unfortunately," answered Storrow, re 
 membering his arrant neglect of material things during 
 the past few months. And realizing that he was set on 
 that interview, Torrie no longer actively opposed it. 
 She knew, by the look in his eyes and the firmer line 
 about his mouth, that her husband was resolved on 
 prompt and pregnant action. 
 
 Three hours, in fact, after a talk over the long-dis 
 tance wire had assured him that Charlotte was still at 
 Swansea, he was stepping into the wine-coloured roadster 
 with which she met him at the trim-plotted little Long 
 Island station. She said little, on the way home, but 
 she made no effort to conceal the fact that she was glad 
 to see him. She glanced at him searchingly when he ex 
 plained that he had come to talk about the Amasa Kirk 
 ner farm. 
 
 " You mean the Owen Storrow farm," she quietly cor 
 rected. " Or haven t you wakened up to the fact yet 
 that it belongs as completely to you as well, as this 
 car does to me? " 
 
 Beyond that, however, she troubled him with no ques 
 tioning and no criticism. And he found relief in that 
 lucid and care- free relationship, uncomplicated by mis-
 
 298 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 givings and doubts and suspicions. It seemed like step 
 ping out of fetid rooms into fresh air. 
 
 Nor did it surprise him, when she reached home, to 
 hear her declare that it was a crime to waste even an 
 hour of such a perfect June day indoors. 
 
 " Let s tramp those hills again, Owen," she suggested, 
 " and we can talk things over as we go." 
 
 So they started out across the open country, on foot, al 
 most gaily, almost with a sense of truancy in their hearts. 
 Yet it was only spasmodically and incidentally that they 
 touched on the affairs of the Lake Erie farm, for their 
 thoughts were elsewhere engaged. They skirted the 
 parked grounds of a club-house and mounted high above 
 the vivid green slopes of a golf-links where they could see 
 flannel-clad figures moving ant-like across the lower 
 emerald levels. It was not until they had reached a hill 
 top solitude with nothing but leafy whisperings about 
 them that Storrow told her he was about to leave New 
 York. 
 
 " For good? " she said, coming to a stop. 
 
 " Yes, for good," he acknowledged, with his gaze fixed 
 on the sweeping line of the Sound, as clean and hard as 
 the curving blade of a simitar. 
 
 " And that s why you re going up to the farm ? " she 
 asked, suddenly moved by the look of desolation in his 
 eyes. 
 
 He nodded, and her face became grave. Then into 
 her questioning eyes leaped a light which he had seen 
 there before, a light of which he was almost afraid. 
 
 " Owen," she said, out of the silence which had fallen 
 over them both. " Supposing I asked you to take me 
 up there with you. What would you say?" 
 
 She spoke quietly, yet he noticed that the colour had 
 faded out of her face. It had been unfair, he suddenly 
 realized, to hold back what he should have told her be 
 fore. And now it was going to be very hard to explain. 
 It was going to be almost impossible to explain.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 299 
 
 " No," she called out, with a quick and warning ges 
 ture. " Don t say it ! " The colour had flowed back 
 into her face, perceptibly deeper than when she had first 
 turned to him. " I mean you ve said it already, without 
 speaking a word." 
 
 " But Caddie," he began, unthinkingly using the name 
 of her early childhood. She cut him short, however, 
 with the music of her laughter, slightly forced. 
 
 " Let s walk," she commanded. And he had to hurry 
 to catch up with her as she struck out across-fields. 
 
 " Isn t it odd," she remarked after they had walked 
 on in silence for several minutes, " how little life s big 
 moments can be and how big the little moments some 
 times seem ! " 
 
 The note of wistfulness in her voice left him depressed 
 and ill-at-ease. He had the feeling of standing before 
 her a blind and blundering failure. She was much the 
 more self-possessed of the two as he stopped to help her 
 over a broken stone-wall. But instead of mounting that 
 wall she sat down on its rough surface and stared out 
 over meadowlands of undulating and rippling green. 
 
 " I ve something to tell you," she said, " that is going 
 to surprise you. At least I think it s going to surprise 
 you," she amended as she looked at him with clear and 
 courageous eyes. " I m going to marry Chester Hardy." 
 
 " Hardy? " repeated Storrow, feeling the need of time 
 in which to digest his shock. And Charlotte, as she 
 watched the meadow-grasses, moved her head slowly up 
 and down. 
 
 " He s been thoughtful and kind in such unexpected 
 ways, these last few months," she went on. " And I 
 really like him. I like him a lot. And as time goes on 
 I know that I ll get to like him more than ever. There s 
 something so orderly and dependable about him, quite 
 outside his kindliness. And that s always a comfortable 
 thing to know." 
 
 She accepted his silence without questioning, and a
 
 300 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 vague ache crept into his heart as they came to a stop 
 on the breezier crest of the hills overlooking farmland 
 and villa and Sound and the blue-grey shoreland beyond. 
 It was not love winged with desire, for desire, he knew, 
 was beyond him. It was more a ghostly yet poignant 
 regret at the absence of desire, a knowledge of implacable 
 loss and deprivation, an ache almost as sorrowfully 
 strong as the ache of love itself. Her mouth, for all the 
 smile that played about it as she stared out across the 
 open country, seemed unhappy. And deep in the misty 
 violet of her eyes was a trouble which he could not and 
 dare not define. 
 
 His scrutiny seemed to embarrass her, for she sud 
 denly looked down at her skirt of black serge, laughing a 
 little as she shook out the folds of cloth. 
 
 " See the burrs," she cried, half in dismay, for their 
 tramp had taken them far from beaten paths. " Last 
 year s cockles and beggar-ticks and devil s boot-jacks ! " 
 
 He knelt on the ground in front of her and picked the 
 burrs from the cloth, one by one. The wind whipped it 
 from side to side, so that he was compelled to hold it by 
 a loose fold until the last burr had been removed. Then, 
 still kneeling before her, he placed his arms about her 
 knees. He clasped them, with his head bowed. There 
 was unexpected humility in his attitude, and also hunger, 
 a forlorn and undefined hunger touched with a vast hope 
 lessness. 
 
 Her breast heaved as she continued to stare across 
 field and hill and valley to the Sound so far below them, 
 the Sound which had once brought them together. But 
 she did not speak. For a moment or two, as he knelt 
 there, the tips of her fingers rested on his head. For a 
 moment or two, also, as he stood at her side again, her 
 hand clung to his arm. It reminded him that there would 
 be times when she would know the need for help and 
 that the glory of sustaining her would never be his. 
 Things had been otherwise ordained. But the memory
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 301 
 
 of what she might have brought to him left a vagiie and 
 wordless misery compressing about his heart. He stood 
 looking at her in a sort of valedictory wistfulness, in no 
 wise bitterly, but more as one looks at the tender dead. 
 She was holding her lips tightly together, proudly, almost 
 combatively. The wind had whipped her hair loose and 
 held the serge skirt close in against her knees, making 
 him think of St. Gauden s Victory. The ghost of a 
 smile came to her face as their eyes met. 
 
 " We must go back now," was all she said. But her 
 breast heaved again as she started on ahead of him, along 
 the downward sloping path. 
 
 Five minutes later she looked up and said to him: 
 " Justin can motor you in to town tonight, after dinner. 
 That will get you back by ten o clock." 
 
 When Storrow opened his studio door that night he 
 was accosted first by an exceptional glare of light and 
 next by an unmistakable odour of ether. He was in 
 through that door, in fact, before he quite realized the 
 alterations in a once-familiar room. His heart stopped 
 and skipped a beat as he beheld a bearded man in a white 
 surgical gown standing beside his buhl table, over which 
 a fresh sheet had been placed. On this sheet rested a 
 white porcelain tray on which in turn lay a curette and 
 speculum, beside a number of instruments with a scatter 
 ing of high lights from their polished metal surface. 
 On the couch-bed, w r hich had been moved out toward the 
 centre of the room, lay Torrie, and beside her, with her 
 finger-tips pressed against one wrist, sat a woman in the 
 white cap and uniform of a trained nurse. Another 
 woman, also in white, was engaged in quietly but ex- 
 peditiously putting the room to rights. She stopped for 
 a moment in the midst of folding a rubber sheet at the 
 sudden sight of Storrow and his colourless face. The 
 bearded man in the surgical gown must have been con 
 scious of that arrested movement, for he swung about
 
 3 02 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 and with a coldly appraising eye inspected the newcomer. 
 
 "What s happened? What in the name of God has 
 happened ? " Storrow cried out in sudden terror, for 
 from Torrie s drooling lips were coming those incoherent 
 and animal-like sounds not unusual in a patient emerg 
 ing from an anaesthetic. 
 
 " Is your name Storrow ? " asked the man in the white 
 gown, utterly undisturbed by all that seemed so harrow 
 ing to the other man. 
 
 " Yes but what is it? " gasped that other man. 
 
 " I m Doctor Eggert, the house physician at The San- 
 sonia." 
 
 11 Yes, yes go on ! " 
 
 " I attended Torrie at The Alwyn Arms when she broke 
 her ankle last year. She is a wonderful girl." 
 
 Storrow stared at him with almost hate in his eyes. 
 
 " But what has happened ? " he repeated with a quickly 
 rising inflection which caused the surgeon in the gown to 
 lift his eyebrows a little as he led the younger man slightly 
 to one side. 
 
 " There is nothing to be unduly alarmed about," he 
 asserted with cool and professional impersonality. " It 
 is merely that your wife has had an accident, a not un 
 usual accident. I regret to say, though, that she has lost 
 her child." 
 
 " Lost her child ! " echoed Storrow, vacuously, staring 
 towards the bed from which the diminishing animal 
 sounds were coming with less frequency. Then shame 
 overtook him at his impending hysteria, as he looked 
 from figure to figure and realized that they at least were 
 entirely self-controlled and self-possessed. His eyes, as 
 they sought the doctor s face, were haggard. " But how 
 could a thing like that happen to Torrie ? " he asked, with 
 his lips twitching. 
 
 " Watch the pulse, please, Miss Slocum," Doctor Eg 
 gert called back over his shoulder, as sounds of stentori- 
 ous breathing came from the bed. Then he turned back
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 303 
 
 to the white- faced man beside him. " As far as I un 
 derstand the circumstances, an elderly man visited your 
 apartment this afternoon, a man by the name of Mod- 
 rynski. Here he had a sharp, in fact, a fatal heart- 
 attack. Torrie, apparently, tried to lift him from the 
 bed and carry him out to the hall. It was unfortunate, 
 of course, for the strain " 
 
 " Modrynski ! " whispered Storrow. He was uncon 
 scious of the fact that he was standing alone again, for 
 the white-gowned figure had left his side and was stoop 
 ing over the reviving woman on the bed. 
 
 He saw misty white figures moving decorously about. 
 He heard the sound of voices, controlled and quiet, im 
 personal and authoritative. Then he awakened to the 
 fact that Doctor Eggert was speaking to him. 
 
 " Torrie wants you," he heard that coolly indifferent 
 voice call out to him. 
 
 He crossed to the bed, and stared down into Torrie s 
 face, still swollen and slightly purplish in hue. Her eyes 
 seemed unnaturally dark in the strong light, and some 
 difficulty in focussing them made it hard, for a moment, 
 for her to distinguish her husband. She reached out 
 weakly for his hand. 
 
 " Oh, Owen," she cried as the tears welled from her 
 eyes and ran down the still swollen face. " I wanted my 
 baby! My poor Til baby! My poor 1 il baby!" 
 
 Storrow took her groping fingers and held them. It 
 was all there seemed to do. For a vast and denuding 
 apathy had taken possession of him. It was the past, he 
 remembered, the implacable past, reaching out a hand 
 for its own.
 
 CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE 
 
 TORRIE THROSSEL and her husband had been 
 three weeks at " Pine-Brae," as Amasa Kirkner 
 had once christened the Ontario fruit-farm 
 which sloped down from The Ridge to the slate-cliffs 
 overlooking the tumbling blue waters of Lake Erie. 
 
 It was high noon of a flawless June-end day. Flat 
 on his back, on a Navajo rug stretched out in a grassy 
 hollow along the cliff-edge, lay Storrow with a sweat- 
 stained felt hat pulled low over his tanned and stubbled 
 face, to keep the sun out of his eyes. Slightly higher up 
 on the sloping shelf of greensward lay Torrie, bare 
 headed, in a soiled " middy-blouse " and a much crumpled 
 skirt of duck. She had kicked off her incongruous jet- 
 beaded slippers, and lay on her stomach with her chin in 
 her hands and her silk-stockinged feet drumming lazily 
 and intermittently on the turf. She stared at her hus 
 band, who after a morning of farm-toil seemed glad 
 enough of this half-hour of contented and animal-like 
 inactivity. 
 
 " You lazy hound," she said sleepily and affectionately 
 as she tossed a handful of grass along his hat-rim. But 
 he neither moved nor spoke. Then she sat up and stared 
 at the red-brick house shaded by its cluster of lordly 
 pines. She could see Absalom, the aged negro man 
 servant who had so recently been transported from the 
 neighbouring county-seat to Pine-Brae, slowly and croon- 
 ingly clearing the dinner table that had been set in the 
 cooler shadow of the side-porch with its bright new awn 
 ings of taupe and willow-green stripes. Absalom, who 
 boasted of having been a chef of fame in his younger 
 
 304
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 305 
 
 days, still wore the white cotton gloves with which he 
 invariably served a meal. Torrie, who had promptly 
 shortened his name into " Abe " and later expanded it to 
 " Uncle Abe," found it possible to talk with this old 
 negro by the hour. And now, as he moved about the 
 cool shadows and from time to time disappeared into the 
 cooler gloom of the house itself, he seemed a fit and ven 
 erable figure to be presiding about so old and venerable 
 a homestead. And it had been an amazingly substantial 
 dinner of asparagus soup and roast-beef and vegetables 
 and strawberry dumpling and coffee and clotted cream, a 
 dinner which had prompted Torrie, before tapping her 
 cigarette-end on her polished thumb-nail, to resort to 
 certain subterranean and surreptitious movements of 
 waist-band releasings. The open air and the somewhat 
 heady bottled ale which her husband had laid in for her, 
 on a compact to abstain from more ardent spirits during 
 her period of convalescence, had left her singularly 
 drowsy and contented in spirit. She turned lazily about 
 to rescue her slipper from Skookum, the collie pup which 
 Owen after much travel and trouble had obtained from a 
 neighbouring farm, on her ultimatum that she must have 
 a dog. But Skookum s companionship had proved not 
 entirely without its drawbacks, since with the voracity of 
 youth this pup indiscriminately chewed up hats and pa 
 pers and shoes, and frayed the ends of the new striped 
 awnings, and started runs in Torrie s silk stockings by 
 affectionately biting at her ankles after clamorous and 
 excited racings about the pine grove in which Skookum 
 invariably proved how easily four legs could outrun two. 
 Torrie, after another glance at her motionless hus 
 band, turned and stared out over the misty blue of the 
 lake, along which drifted an opal sail or two. High 
 over her she could see cliff-swallows darting and circling. 
 Faintly, from the beach below, came the sound of water. 
 The air was filled with the quiet droning of bees, engaged 
 in their repetitious visits to over-weighted dandelion-
 
 3 o6 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 heads. Back in the dark green boughs of the pines, 
 which murmured unceasingly in the soft breeze, a wood- 
 pigeon repeated its monotonous complaint. 
 
 " Kill-a-coon ! Kill-a-coon ! " Torrie lazily repeated in 
 mockery of the bird as she commandeered the lower half 
 of her husband s Navajo rug and after dusting his nose 
 with a head of blue-grass drew Skookum closer in against 
 the hollow of her relaxed body. Once or twice she 
 stroked the furry neck with her sunburned hand. Then 
 sun and air and tranquillizing noonday noises seemed to 
 combine and surround her like an anaesthetic. She 
 sighed profoundly, reached up for Storrow s worn felt 
 hat, covered her face with it, and fell asleep. 
 
 Storrow, with the hot sun directly in his eyes, stirred 
 and sat up. He looked at his watch, remembering there 
 was still much to be done that day. Then he looked at 
 the warm red brick of the house mottled with cooler 
 patches of shadow, and decided that before another year 
 a new roof would be necessary and that the threateningly 
 ruinous east chimney would have to be rebuilt. He was 
 finding, in fact, an almost bewildering amount of work 
 in the rehabilitation of that long abandoned farm. But it 
 was work in which he lost himself with a quite uncom 
 plaining and contented spirit. It tired his body and 
 dulled his mind and kept him from thinking of the past. 
 He felt, in a way, that it was a process of rebarbarization. 
 But it brought him peace, and peace, after all, was a great 
 and wonderful thing in life. 
 
 He turned and looked down at Torrie. The felt hat 
 had slipped a little to one side, leaving her face exposed. 
 He was amazed by the changes which he could see there. 
 She had filled out and gained in weight. Open air life, 
 in fact, had brought about some mysterious process of 
 rejuvenation with her. The once milky white skin had 
 taken on a deeper colouring. The passive and sleeping 
 face, he could see, was unmistakably sunburned, with a 
 small runway of turkey-spots across the narrow bridge of
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 307 
 
 the nose. She looked half-gypsy, almost peasant-like to 
 him, until from beneath her tumbled duck skirt he caught 
 sight of the finest of silk underskirts which she still per 
 sisted in wearing, and the sheer silk stockings against 
 which Skookum rested a quietly sleeping nose. She was 
 not, he remembered, a child of the soil. She still looked 
 upon this, her first taste of life in the country, as a sort 
 of continuous picnic where hardships were an adventure 
 to be laughed at, where recurring wonder at utterly new 
 conditions tended to make up for an environment that 
 was far from eventful. He smiled as he remembered 
 her futile little efforts at gardening, her plots of trans 
 planted and patted-down wild-flowers, carefully marked 
 with sticks, seemingly more the product of a child s hand 
 than a woman s. She lamented audibly over the droop 
 ing and broken- rooted ferns, which she had quite forgot 
 ten to water, just as she railed against the injustice of 
 nature in allowing flies to cluster about and torment the 
 body of their newly purchased Jersey cow, which she had 
 promptly christened " Aprilis," after a one-time Casino 
 stage-associate of hers. For a day or two she had even 
 laboriously and patiently fanned these flies away from the 
 tawny flanks of " Aprilis," using branches of elderberry 
 which she broke from the fence-line. And invariably, 
 when evening came, she heralded milking-time by in 
 quiring if she could help " page " Aprilis, though it took 
 her fully a week to overcome her distaste for milk so 
 disturbingly associated with its biologic process of pro* 
 duction. She stormed at the robins for encroaching on 
 her neglected and none too productive patch of straw 
 berries, for never before had she picked that fruit from 
 the vine, and she usually came from the patch with her 
 mouth stained scarlet, like a greedy child s. So keen 
 was her delight in gathering eggs that Storrow had more 
 than once secretly augmented the contents of a nest, for 
 the mere sake of over-hearing her shrill shout of 
 triumph as she dropped to her knees and excitedly com-
 
 3 c8 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 puted the extent of her harvest. But she looked on a 
 clover-field as something merely to careen across with 
 her hair flying and the carefully mounded cocks of fresh- 
 cut hay as merely something odorous and inviting to 
 tumble about and bury oneself in. 
 
 What had surprised Storrow, however, was the com 
 pleteness of her contentment in it all. There had already 
 grown up between them a tacit agreement to make no 
 mention of that past on which they had so completely 
 turned their backs. If she thought of that past at all, 
 she did so in secret Yet Storrow knew that she was not 
 entering into the life of Pine-Brae as he had entered into 
 it. She was merely catching from it the momentary de 
 lights of the momentary pagan. She could munch 
 inordinate quantities of green apples, and call with ex 
 citement at the sight of a wild rabbit, and coo with 
 admiration at her first glimpse of a cat-bird s nest filled 
 with its four small eggs of heavenly blue, or wade bare 
 footed with her skirts held high above her golden knees, 
 along the shallow beach of rippled sand. But she un 
 derstood little what Storrow meant when he complained 
 that he had come to Pine-Brae too late to take the farm 
 in hand for that season. And at night, when he sat with 
 his pipe, slightly heavy-eyed with physical weariness, 
 poring over plans and compiling ever-growing lists of 
 their household needs, she would wheedle old Abe into 
 romancing about the days of the Fenian Raid and the 
 more antiquated and accordingly more highly-coloured 
 adventures of The Underground, whereby the southern 
 slaves of the old days had once escaped into Canada. 
 Then Abe, ceremoniously donning his white gloves, would 
 bring cheese and crackers and the bottled ale from the 
 cellar, and Torrie, drowsy with that heady brew, would 
 take Storrow s pipe away from him and ask : " Isn t it 
 bed-time, Honey?" 
 
 She liked to sleep late, though on one pellucid morning 
 of opal and pearl and pale rose she had got up with him
 
 THE .WINE OF LIFE 309 
 
 a little after four in the morning, to see the sun-rise. 
 She had greeted that ball of molten gold with song, 
 throaty and care-free and slightly flat, from the highest 
 knoll along their cliff-front, and later they had dodged 
 from sumach-bush to sumach-bush shaking little showers 
 of dew down on each other from the dripping leaves. 
 Then they had clambered down the cliff-front to the beach 
 and bathed there together, naked as Adam and Eve, in 
 the motionless water of the lake. There she had drawn 
 his attention to how sunburned her neck and shoulders 
 were, dark by comparison with the milky whiteness of the 
 torso-skin. But as she leaned back against the cliff, wist 
 ful and abstracted-eyed, her attitude and expression sent 
 his mind flashing back to Vibbard and Vibbard s earlier 
 painting of her. The glory went out of that perfect 
 June morning, and he ate breakfast that day in a heavy 
 and none too happy silence. For he was struggling in 
 vain to keep from thinking of the dead past, which is 
 never quite dead. And when he thought of the future, 
 it was always with one ever-disturbing and ever-unan 
 swered question recurring to him : the question of how 
 long that fragile card-house of contentment might last.
 
 CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX 
 
 THE quietly flowing days ran into weeks, and the 
 weeks widened into months, and the green faded 
 a little in leaf and lawn, and Summer grew old. 
 Storrow, still deep in his work of reconstruction, watched 
 the shortening of the days, watched them with that in 
 determinate regret which attaches to the passing of all 
 earthly beauty. He watched them, too, with a small and 
 slowly growing anxiety. Torrie could still be heard sing 
 ing now and then as she worked or idled about in the 
 open sunlight. She still raced with Skookum, and talked 
 interminably with the adoring old Abe, and remained 
 discreetly silent on everything but the present. But a 
 change was taking place. A dormant restlessness of 
 spirit which still manifested itself only in oblique and 
 accidental ways seemed to be creeping over her. This 
 restlessness, the guardedly watchful Storrow was able to 
 perceive, invariably became more marked just after their 
 evening meal. That, he remembered, was the theatre 
 hour, the hour which in her old life had imposed excep 
 tional movement and activity on his wife. A vestigial 
 remnant of that old call seemed still to stir her blood, 
 making it hard for her to remain quiet at the very hour 
 when all the world about her seemed settling into slumber. 
 Once, too, as she sat on the wide verandah, staring out 
 over the slate-blue waters of the lake, she had startled 
 him by jumping to her feet with an exclamation of angry 
 protest. 
 
 Those mourning-doves nearly drive me crazy," she 
 protested. " They sound like a hearse-plume set to 
 
 310
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 311 
 
 music. Kill-a-coon! Kill-a-coon! Hour after hour 
 the same old thing over and over again! " 
 
 One day when the wind was out of the North and the 
 sky-line of the lake was a dark green, Storrow thought 
 he detected a small shiver sweep through her relaxed 
 body. He looked up and asked her if she was cold. 
 
 " No," she said in a disturbingly flat and listless voice. 
 " I was only wondering what this place is going to be 
 like in winter. And Uncle Abe tells me your Canadian 
 winters last a good half of the year." 
 
 " And to anybody but a nigger," protested Storrow, 
 " it s the finest of all our seasons." 
 
 Torrie laughed. " Then you can count me among the 
 coloured folks," she said as she began to pace back and 
 forth along the verandah. 
 
 Storrow watched those restless movements, vaguely 
 depressed. A feeling crept through him that, after all, 
 his carefully carpentered structure of contentment had 
 been built on dubious foundations. It was built, in fact, 
 on no foundation whatever. At its best, it was only a 
 bivouac. He was able, as he thought this over, to at 
 tribute a deeper meaning to certain trivial incidents and 
 moods of the last few weeks. Torrie was not as happy 
 as she had pretended, just as he had not been as con 
 tented as he had desired. Always over his head had 
 hung that Damocles sword of a life still chiefly governed 
 by caprice. Yet always he had planned and campaigned 
 to hold together what was left of existence, feeling that 
 this campaign was one of self-preservation for both of 
 them. And there was still the glimmer that must not be 
 let go entirely out. 
 
 "What are you thinking about?" demanded Torrie, 
 coming to a stop in front of him. 
 
 " I was thinking how you d enjoy that two-mile walk 
 to the post-office for the mail," he evaded, " now that the 
 weather s cooler." 
 
 She caught at that suggestion much more eagerly than
 
 3 i2 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 he had expected, donning tarn and sweater and tan boots 
 and catching up the antiquated riding-crop of Amasa 
 Kirkner as she called gaily for Skookum. And as she 
 disappeared, in a flurry of skirts and laughter, the cloud 
 which had so quickly gathered seemed to have just as 
 rapidly disappeared from the horizon. 
 
 Torrie, in fact, had lately formed the habit of walking 
 daily to the post-office for the mail. She needed that 
 four-mile tramp, she explained to Storrow, to harden up. 
 She had " been letting herself go," as she expressed it, 
 until it was a struggle even to get her corsets on in the 
 morning. And if she grew dumpy and humpy her hus 
 band wouldn t love her any longer. And ladies had to 
 have their husbands love them, even if they were a thou 
 sand miles from civilization. 
 
 Storrow stared after her. A summer of open-air life 
 had brought a more vivid tone to the satin-like skin, a 
 clearness to the ruminative and wide-set eyes, a deeper 
 red to the softly curved lips, a fulness and firmness of 
 line to the still buoyant figure. Once more it reminded 
 him, in its vigour and resiliency, of something 
 animal-like, of a paddocked thoroughbred, impatient of 
 restraint. 
 
 It was a week later that Torrie returned from her 
 daily tramp with the light of a new interest in her eyes. 
 Storrow, disturbed by it, bided his time in silence. 
 
 " Owen, what would you say if I told you I was going 
 to visit Detroit for a day or two? " she asked that day at 
 luncheon. 
 
 " It s something which your neighbours very fre 
 quently do," he announced, with a laugh of relief. 
 
 " I never knew I had any neighbours," she amended. 
 That s because you ve never shown any interest in 
 them," he pointed out to her. And she shrugged a dif 
 fident shoulder. 
 
 " Well, I m in rags, anyway," she went on, " com 
 pletely in rags. I ve simply got to stock up with some
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 313 
 
 new duds. And Mattie Crowder s going to be in Detroit 
 next week with The Gold Wing Girls, so I thought it 
 would be a good chance to kill Mattie and the store 
 keepers with the same stone." 
 
 Storrow s relief, at the mention of that name out of 
 their old life, was shorter-lived than he expected. But 
 it would be inexpedient, he concluded, to oppose Torrie s 
 excursion. 
 
 He drove her in to the county-seat to catch her train, 
 not a little disquieted by the suddenness with which she 
 had assumed a miraculously citified appearance. He 
 watched her train pull out, waving blithely enough after 
 her as she stood on the platform of the chair-car, yet 
 wordlessly depressed by what he remembered was the 
 first vision of her being carried bodily away from him. 
 He went back to Pine-Brae and to his work of fence- 
 building and roof -mending and fall-pruning, but he was 
 lonely and listless. It dawned on him, for the first time, 
 that life in the country could be a very desolate matter, 
 without some form of companionship. 
 
 " Tain t the same, sah, wif Mis Torrie away," averred 
 Uncle Abe, in no way lightening the load that hung on 
 Storrow s heart. 
 
 Torrie, however, did not return on the second day, as 
 she had expected, but remained away until the end of the 
 week. There had been alterations to make, she ex 
 plained, and it was the busy season for the shops and 
 dressmakers. But she demanded of Storrow, as she 
 exhibited herself in her new and transforming apparel, 
 if it had not been worth the wait. She was proud of her 
 clothes, and even prouder of the fact that she had suc 
 cessfully smuggled them across the Line. Beyond this, 
 however, she came back unexpectedly sober-eyed and 
 self-contained, announcing that Mattie was as crazy as 
 ever and that chorus-girls were a pack of children. She 
 even seemed more reconciled to the quiet tenor of life at 
 Pine-Brae, taking up her tasks again with a sort of
 
 3 i4 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 jocund preoccupation and resuming her daily walks to the 
 village post-office. 
 
 It was two weeks later that Storrow, engaged in team 
 ing his wind-fall apples to the village evaporator, remem 
 bered to stop in at this same office and ask for his mail. 
 He was given a couple of papers and a cream-coloured 
 envelope embossed in gold with the name of a Fifth 
 Avenue hotel, addressed to his wife. He turned it over, 
 at first indifferently, and then with a sudden flash of 
 suspicion shooting through his body. Once more back 
 on his wagon-seat he studied the post-mark and the hastily 
 scrawled address. Then he pushed the letter down in 
 his coat-pocket, and once more took it out and studied 
 it. Then with a sudden tightening of the lines about his 
 mouth he inserted a forefinger under the flap of the sealed 
 envelope and tore it open. He took out the folded sheet 
 and read it. 
 
 " Am motoring to Detroit again on the twenty-ninth. 
 D. E." 
 
 That was all he found written there. 
 
 It was non-committal enough. But it was sufficient. 
 That " D. E." he knew, could stand only for Donnie 
 Eastman. And it was not what was openly stated, but 
 all that was implied, which sufficed to take the gladness 
 out of the high-arching autumn sky and bring a dull and 
 leaden ache to the heart of the man so carefully tearing 
 a cream-coloured scrap of paper into small tatters and 
 then letting the breeze whisk them away like a small 
 flurry of snow. 
 
 It was not rage that took possession of him, this time; 
 it was more a thin and listless hopelessness which he 
 found himself without the will and without the weapons 
 to combat. And it brought to him a forewarning of the 
 future which he seemed unable to face. 
 
 Ten minutes later he met Torrie herself swinging to-
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 315 
 
 wards him down the road, with Skookum running circles 
 ibout her. The colour in her cheeks was high, and as 
 he drew up at the roadside and awaited her he was in 
 wardly disturbed by the air of openness and honest 
 vigour about her. 
 
 " Climb in," he called out in a mockery of gaiety, for 
 he realized now that he must exercise a craft to meet her 
 own. 
 
 " But I m going for the mail," she explained. 
 
 " The mail ? Oh, I got that on my way," he carelessly 
 announced, with his hand against the coat-pocket into 
 which the papers had been thrust. 
 
 " Anything worth while ? " she just as carelessly in 
 quired as she clambered up into the wagon-seat beside 
 him. 
 
 His eyes were on the road ahead of him as he reached 
 into his pocket and handed her the papers. But her little 
 moue of disappointment as she took them in her hand 
 and turned them over did not escape him. 
 
 It was trivial enough, he told himself. In some ways, 
 indeed, it was almost laughable, that double-sided game 
 of deception, but the more he thought about it the more 
 it impressed him as becoming tremendous in both signifi 
 cance and dimensions. For on trivialities such as these, 
 he remembered, would surely hinge some vast and im 
 pending movement which he dreaded to define. Yet, to 
 the casual eye, there was no change in his attitude to 
 wards Torrie. He merely became more self-contained 
 and more guarded in his watchfulness, surprising him 
 self, now and then, in a newly acquired habit of inspect 
 ing his wife as though she were a newcomer into his life 
 and all knowledge as to her character remained still a 
 matter of guess-work. Sometimes, as he found himself 
 becoming more and more adept in craft, ready to match 
 duplicity with duplicity and with the habit of covertly 
 watching her more relentlessly imposed upon him, he 
 suffered from a secret and indeterminate resentment
 
 3 i6 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 which only rarely flamed up into anything approaching a 
 dull rage. In those occasional moments of stronger 
 emotion he felt the need of making her suffer, even as he 
 stood doubly confounded by the suspicion that in all like 
 lihood she already stood beyond the power of being made 
 to suffer by him. 
 
 One night when a promise of frost had prompted them 
 to light an open fire in the dark-beamed living-room, 
 homely with its old walnut and brass, he sat watching her 
 from under lowered lids. He sat watching her, sheltered 
 behind his carefully sustained pretence of drowsiness. 
 She was mending his work-shirts and had complained as 
 she went on with her stitching that he was terribly hard 
 on his clothes, almost as hard on them as he \vas on his 
 wife. She was sitting in the diffused rose-glow from the 
 hickory-logs and the loveliness of her face as she bent 
 smilingly over her task struck him to the heart with al 
 most the keenness of a knife-thrust. He felt the need of 
 her, just as he felt the impossibility of holding her there 
 once her will desired to carry her elsewhere. He had no 
 means of anchoring or encaging her. It would be as 
 impossible to capture and imprison her as it would be to 
 capture and imprison a soap-bubble. She had alighted 
 in his life as a golden-oriole alights on one of his orchard- 
 trees, to sing busily enough for its moment, and then pass 
 on again. 
 
 Torrie stopped in her work and glanced up at him, 
 disturbed by his sudden small body-movement of misery. 
 She smiled at him companionably, but there was no an 
 swering smile on his preoccupied face. 
 
 " Here I am working my fingers to the bone," she 
 lightly complained, " for a husband who doesn t even 
 care for me any more ! " 
 
 She laughed as she said it, but her eyes became ab 
 stracted as she turned her face to the fire. 
 
 "What makes you think that?" demanded Storrow, 
 almost fiercely, as he caught her wrist in an iron clasp.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 317 
 
 " Because you re so icebergy," she told him, looking 
 down at the wrist which he had imprisoned. 
 
 " Is that the only reason? " asked her husband, swing 
 ing her about by the shoulders so that her eyes faced 
 his. 
 
 " It s reason enough, when you know there s a reason 
 for the reason/ she cryptically announced, lowering her 
 gaze before the suddenly unreasoning and masterful 
 stare of the other. For something far removed from 
 the mere consciousness of her beauty had fired the train 
 of dormant sex-impulse in Storrow. He knew a forlorn 
 craving to bend her still to his will, to proclaim his mas 
 tery over the body \vhich housed the spirit which denied 
 and defied him. He was swept by a sudden passion to 
 make her his, if only for the moment. 
 
 She made an effort to thrust him back, as he took pos 
 session of her, and stared up almost startled into his 
 storm-clouded eyes. But she became passive as he 
 caught her in his arms and crushed her against his body, 
 with his lips on hers in an impassioned kiss which per 
 plexed her much more than it moved her. Then she be 
 came pliant and relaxed in his clasp. And he understood, 
 as reason returned to him, why she kept her face averted 
 from his eyes.
 
 CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN 
 
 IT was a week later that Torrie, after one of her 
 solitary walks, returned home later than usual. Her 
 air of suppressed excitement alternating with periods 
 of abstraction did not escape the watchful-eyed Storrow. 
 He was disturbed, subliminally, as creatures of the wild 
 are disturbed by vague scents of an unseen enemy wafted 
 up-wind. He watched her that day, and on the days 
 that followed, with guarded and jealous eyes. But he 
 said nothing and did nothing, for the simple reason that 
 instinct told him there was nothing to say or do. 
 
 He had been prompted, at first, to follow Torrie. But 
 that was an impulse which he dismissed, glad as he would 
 have been of the chance to bring things to a head. He 
 hated the thought of dodging and skulking after her. 
 And she could not be watched forever, no matter how he 
 stooped to the tricks and degradations of espionage. 
 The situation, he came to feel, was something which now 
 lay in the lap of the gods. 
 
 Torrie, in the meantime, had twice secretly met Donnie 
 Eastman, and had twice returned home from those meet 
 ings with a strangely contradictory feeling of power 
 mingled with frustration. Keen as was her woman s 
 joy born of the knowledge that she could control a fellow- 
 being, and a fellow-being who had drunk deep of life, 
 by her smile or frown, she was intimidated by the dis 
 covery that the reckless-eyed Donnie had come to her to 
 demand the impossible. And while nothing, as yet, had 
 come of either those meetings or those demands, Torrie 
 also carried the disquieting conviction that her destiny 
 
 318
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 319 
 
 was in some way high above her reach on the lap of the 
 gods. 
 
 Bonnie Eastman, as Torrie Throssel had once in 
 timated, practically always got what he wanted. This 
 was due to the fact, perhaps, that his wants were gen 
 erally material and corporeal. After migrating from 
 three seats of learning where the atmosphere had proved 
 over-austere to his unfettered spirit, and on leaving Har 
 vard before the end of his second year at that institution, 
 he found himself the sole and undisputed possessor of a 
 fortune officially estimated at close to seventeen million 
 dollars. This fortune had been accumulated by an over- 
 cerebral and over-active parent, who, after living a year 
 and a half on zwieback and peptonized milk, died quite 
 unexpectedly and miserably of malnutrition. Since any 
 movement appertaining to or even resembling the dis 
 persal of wealth so sedulously garnered was instinctively 
 distasteful to this parent, it so happened that an only son 
 in whom he had no confidence and for whom he had no 
 respect became the possessor of a somewhat bewildering 
 estate which had not been actually destined for his owner 
 ship. 
 
 So Donnie became a spender. It was all that he stood 
 equipped to become, and it was all that was demanded of 
 him. In this, however, he betrayed no particular talent 
 and even less originality, his spending following the 
 urban and predetermined grooves of custom. He 
 eschewed, it is true, the sterner sports of the polo-field 
 and the hydroplane, and his earlier experiments with rac 
 ing-yachts did not long survive the discovery that com 
 fort on all such craft was relentlessly sacrificed to speed. 
 He was equally unhappy in his efforts at establishing a 
 " stable," and was glad enough to relinquish his interest 
 in track-horses, which never seemed to acquire the art of 
 running first, for the sedater and more pictorial task of 
 " tooling " a coach-and-four up Fifth Avenue and out to
 
 320 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 Rye. He was not, however, without certain definite im 
 pulses towards distinction. He could wring a clearly 
 defined glory out of being known as the only member of 
 the Cloister Club whose bar-bill for one year had ex 
 ceeded twenty-five thousand dollars. For a dinner- 
 dance which he gave one Spring, the ball-room of Del- 
 monico s was transformed into an actual apple-orchard 
 in bloom, as duly recounted and moralized over in the 
 public prints. An equally historic dinner of Bonnie s 
 was one which was brought from Paris to New York by 
 a French chef, on a French steamer, and three hours 
 after that steamer had docked the Lucullus with a slight 
 lisp was dining amid his satellites, more Galileo, to the 
 music of a French Orchestra reinforced with a grand- 
 opera singer who sandwiched The Marseilles between two 
 dubious French songs first made known to the world by 
 Yvette Guilbert. 
 
 But that great waffle-iron known as New York soon 
 turned Donnie Eastman from an individual into a type. 
 He seemed to find his natural element more and more 
 in that subterrania so mistakenly denominated as 
 "Broadway" life. He did not altogether abjure his 
 clubs, or his Indian River house-boat, or his villa at 
 Villefranche, or his lodge in the Adirondacks. But 
 more and more his amusements centred about women. 
 This meant that he more and more frequented those 
 planes and purlieus where the gilt-lettered decameron of 
 urban night-life is written. He ruffled it along the 
 White Light Lane, identifying himself with that lighter 
 form of theatrical entertainment known as musical 
 comedy. Yet even here his activities occasionally took 
 on the atmosphere of a commercial venture, since he 
 found as keen a zest in backing aspiring personality, in 
 the form of " angel," as he had once found in backing 
 race-horses, in the form of owner. While this brought 
 him no immediate personal success, it sometimes brought 
 him that contiguity with success which occasionally can
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 321 
 
 be almost as appeasing as success itself. It brought him, 
 too, into contact with extremely engaging and provoca 
 tive ladies, amid whom in their idle hours he fluttered like 
 a pigeon about a granary. If there were many of them 
 that he desired, it may also be written that there were 
 few of them that he desired for long. He developed, in 
 fact, into an assiduous if not over-adept hunter of heads, 
 after the manner of the Dyaks, not so much because of 
 any intrinsic value of the heads, but more because of the 
 satisfaction to be derived from their acquisition. 
 
 It was for this reason that Torrie Throssel had chal 
 lenged him, from the first. She had always laughingly 
 but alluringly held herself beyond his reach. She had 
 even hurt him, at times, by her airy contempt, evading his 
 not unsophisticated machinations towards some more and 
 more personal enmeshment, even mocking his slight lisp 
 and smiling at his vague and visionary threats. And as 
 he was more rudimentary than he appeared, for all his 
 craving to make life complex, he reacted to an opposition 
 so novel in a manner quite to be expected. When he 
 wanted a thing, he wanted it. He had never learned to 
 accept actual defeat. He declined even to nurse the 
 thought of defeat. And that which evaded him only 
 added tang to a triumph deferred. 
 
 All this he had intimated to Torrie, on more occasions 
 than one, but never more frequently and forcibly than 
 during the tableaux vivants at The Biltmore. But she 
 had merely smiled down at him from her abstracted and 
 shadowy eyes, allowing him to advance so far, and no 
 farther. And that was something new to Donnie East 
 man. She stood not unflattered by his desperation, not 
 unexhilarated by a sense of power born of her growing 
 mastery over his moods and movements. Nor was she, 
 having known poverty, altogether ignorant of the conso 
 lations of wealth. But when, in his desperation, he even 
 admitted his willingness to marry her, protesting that 
 he could stand for the " Reno racket " if he had to, she
 
 322 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 explained to him that she was really serious about her 
 stage-work and had known quite enough of married life, 
 for at that time she and Storrow were ominously unset 
 tled in their relations. Donnie had then bitterly accused 
 her of being in love with Krassler, who valued her, he 
 protested, only as a human phonograph. Krassler, he 
 proclaimed, would make her a star, but he would kill her 
 soul and break her spirit in the process. 
 
 " And what will you do ? " Torrie had calmly asked 
 him. 
 
 " I ll give you the biggest house on Ocean Drive," pro 
 tested Donnie. 
 
 " That, Donnie dear, is not enough, Torrie had just 
 as calmly replied, slightly in doubt as to what particular 
 city " Ocean Drive " might be said to decorate. 
 
 Donnie, with life confronting him with his first actual 
 defeat, resorted to that meagre consolation which may 
 be wrung from the fermented juice of the grape. He 
 resorted also to the purchase of a new and more power 
 ful motor-car, "which he took a hectic joy in driving at 
 top-speed, with his own hand. This dull-toned and 
 over-engined monster of power he preferred to drive 
 stripped of its top very much as old drinkers prefer 
 to take their spirits neat since his first demand was 
 for the full effect of speed. Yet neither heavy drinking 
 nor illegal speeding quite sufficed to obliterate the trouble 
 which was breaking his sleep by night and devastating 
 his life by day. He had failed in the first big want of 
 his existence. And as he stood unequipped to face all 
 such failure, he eventually broke his promise to Torrie 
 and after twice writing to her he tooled his huge super- 
 twelve up the valley of the Hudson toward the Great 
 Lakes. 
 
 He did not go directly into Canada, for there was still 
 some trace of reason in his madness. But he motored 
 to the border-city of Detroit, making that point the
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 323 
 
 rendezvous for repeated impatient ventures along the 
 highways of western Ontario. He was drinking heavily 
 again, and his driving along these highways was not al 
 ways controlled. This he realized when he came to a 
 sharp bend in the Lake Road a few miles east of Leam 
 ington. There the highway, turning sharply back from 
 the eroded lake-cliffs, formed an acute angle which could 
 be safely approached only at a low rate of speed. But 
 low rates of speed were obnoxious to Donnie, even in 
 unknown territory, and the result was that although he 
 saved his car from caroming straight out over the cliff- 
 edge, he went crashing and uncontrolled into the road 
 side fence. 
 
 He climbed down from the stalled car and walked un 
 steadily out to the edge of the cliff. There was a sheer 
 fall, he saw, of almost a hundred feet. He was still 
 staring down at the crawling lake-waves tipped with 
 white when a stooped-shouldered and much bewhiskered 
 native with a pitch-fork over his shoulder came and 
 walked inquisitively about the car with the broken head 
 lights. Having completed that inspection, he just as in 
 quisitively inspected the moody-eyed stranger returning 
 from the cliff-edge. 
 
 " Had a smash-up, eh? " he cheerily inquired. 
 
 " No ; this is the way I always stop at a corner," an 
 nounced Donnie Eastman, with a snap of his thin jaws. 
 He had an odd affection for that huge-engined car of his, 
 and willing as he was to over-drive it, he hated to see 
 bodily harm done to it. Only that day, as he crossed on 
 the ferry to Windsor, a wharf-rat in looking it over had 
 said, with the rising inflection of inarticulate admiration : 
 " Some car! " And Donnie was in no wise prepared to 
 disagree with him. 
 
 " So that s how yeh stop ? Hee-hee ! Guess it d pay 
 yeh to keep on a-goin , then," responded the native with 
 the pitch- fork.
 
 324 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " Well, it s a hell of a road you hicks around here give 
 a man to keep going on," retorted Donnie, turning to 
 investigate the extent of the damage. 
 
 " Right yeh air, stranger, and I ve told th Reeve as 
 much as three times in the past month somethin ought o 
 be done about ironin out this here flare-back, now that 
 so many rabbit-heads be a-motorin along the lake front, 
 disregardin the road-laws bout the same as they disre 
 gard common-sense. It gives th County a bad name, 
 havin a turn in the finest bit o road in the township 
 known as Death s Curve. And old Eph Johnson has 
 hed to re-wire that bit o fence o his no less n seven times 
 in one summer ! " 
 
 But Donnie was less interested in Eph Johnson s mis 
 fortunes and rural road-building than he was in re-start 
 ing his car and disentangling its fenders from fence-wire 
 and beholding it crawl safely back to the road-bed. He 
 went on his way feeling that all life was against him, that 
 nothing much remained to live for, and that it wouldn t 
 have mattered a great deal even if he had taken that final 
 leap out over the cliff-edge at Death s Curve. Yet be 
 fore the end of an hour, as he sped eastward, he came 
 face to face with Torrie Throssel. 
 
 He parked the car in a buttonwood grove down a side- 
 road and walked back to meet her. She was nervous 
 and guarded, but she was not altogether antagonistic, for 
 his presence there had at least brought a splash of colour 
 into the monotony of her endless and over-drab days. 
 There was satisfaction, too, in the discovery that time 
 had brought no diminution in her power over him. But 
 she insisted on discretion. And as they sat on the run 
 ning-board of the car behind the fluttering-leafed grove 
 of buttonwoods, smoking their last cigarettes together, 
 she promised to meet him again in two days time. 
 
 They met again, as arranged, but something in Don- 
 nie s bloodshot eyes and the unsteadiness of his hands 
 prompted to make Torrie wary. She cut the meeting
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 325 
 
 short, protesting that she could talk to him only when he 
 was sober. She was equally disturbed in spirit when 
 they met for the third time, the following week. And 
 still again she told him, as plainly as she could, that his 
 hopes were useless, that she could not ever see him again. 
 Yet she yielded to his persistence when he steadily and 
 stubbornly demanded that she at least have one last ride 
 with him. 
 
 She sat beside him, with a watchful eye divided be 
 tween the road and the speedometer-dial, knowing that 
 he was not himself, and still further disturbed when he 
 began to quote to her what he described as a poem of 
 Browning s : 
 
 " I and my mistress, side by side, 
 Shall be together, breathe, and ride." . . . 
 
 Then he slowed down, not because of her cry of warn 
 ing, but to reach into the door-pocket beside him and take 
 out a leather-covered flask. He needed a nip of brandy, 
 he explained, to steady his nerves. 
 
 He merely laughed when Torrie, with troubled eyes, 
 told him to drive slowly. He thrust a toe down on the 
 accelerator, as he had done so often before when some 
 lighter-spirited chorus-girl had called out to him : " Step 
 on her tail, Sweetie!" For he liked that feeling of 
 power, the power of a god, under his foot-lever. It 
 transported him to some higher plane. It converted the 
 sound of the wind against his ear-drums into a long 
 trumpeting of triumph. Two eagernesses nested in his 
 narrow body as he sat there, with the dusty miles swim 
 ming under his foot-boards. One was the eagerness for 
 rapture, the other was the eagerness for expenditure. 
 That, in fact, was all that his life had been designed for, 
 all that he had ever been capable of. Existence itself 
 was beyond his control, but he sat the king of this ma 
 chine of winged wheels. There he seemed to become the 
 culmination of all endeavour, the ultimate flower of all
 
 ;:: THE WDCE OF UFE 
 
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 THE WIXE OF LJFE 
 
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 328 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 as theirs. That upward leap of the flying car, combined 
 with her own instinctive and galvanic movement, served 
 to send her body catapulting high in the air, where it 
 described a broken arc not unlike an equestrian tumbler 
 attempting a deliberate and measured somersault, and 
 then fell huddled across the barb-wires of the road- 
 fence, from which it rebounded like a body falling into 
 a fireman s net, and lay face downward on the dust-cov 
 ered grass. 
 
 But the car itself did not stop. Its driver, held closely 
 in place by the wheel, remained where he sat as the en- 
 gined monster of steel plunged through the wire fencing, 
 leaped to the cliff-edge, and from there out into space, 
 where it turned in one leisurely half-circle before falling 
 top-down into the gravelly shallows of the lake. 
 
 Torrie lay for what seemed a long time with her face 
 pressed down against the dusty grass, stunned into in- 
 differency, without even the desire for movement. Then 
 consciousness came back to her, and with it a memory of 
 undefined catastrophe, and with that again a nauseous 
 weakness of the body which she had to fight against. 
 Then her thoughts grew clearer and she sat up. After 
 that she found not even a shadow of doubt with which to 
 console her shaken mind. He must have been killed! 
 
 She crawled along the dry grass to the cliff-edge, pain 
 fully and slowly, for the barbs of the wire-fencing on 
 which she had been thrown, penetrating several thick 
 nesses of clothing, had torn her leg just above the knee. 
 At the lip of the cliff she lay stretched out, face down, 
 studying the monstrous sight of the over-turned car, be- 
 wilderingly uncouth and complicated in that attitude of 
 visceral betrayals, lying in at least three feet of lake- 
 water. He was dead. There could be no doubt of that. 
 Donnie Eastman was dead. 
 
 She fought back a momentary feeling of faintness as
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 329 
 
 she edged away from the cliff. Then, with a guilty look 
 back along the road, and with her teeth still chattering, 
 she tore away a portion of her underskirt and with it 
 bound up her cut and bleeding knee. Then, still watch 
 ing the road, she crept eastward along the inner fence- 
 line, passing through a stretch of woodland, skirting the 
 rail-fence of an orchard, and losing herself again in a 
 field of rustling corn much higher than her head. In this 
 way she travelled until she felt her strength giving out. 
 So she headed north again until she came to the road that 
 ran along the lake-ridge. There she was overtaken by a 
 red-faced woman driving a Ford car with its back seat 
 piled high with egg-crates, a red- faced, sedate-souled, 
 homely-mannered woman who, on noticing her limp, 
 drew up at the roadside and inquired if she could give 
 the girl with the white face and the tortured eyes a lift. 
 
 Torrie was glad of that lift. She explained, as they 
 once more got under way, that she had given a bad twist 
 to her weak ankle, and had felt that walking would be 
 the best thing for it. She listened patiently to long and 
 explicit directions as to more efficacious medication for 
 the same, grateful enough to remember that every minute 
 put still greater distance between her and the scene of a 
 horror that was still unthinkable. 
 
 The light had begun to fade by the time she reached the 
 broken stone gate-pillars of Pine-Brae. But on arriving 
 at the house she found, to her great relief, that Owen 
 was not yet back with his load of cement that was needed 
 for the rebuilding of the root-cellar. So she repeated 
 her story of the sprained ankle to the startled and sympa 
 thetic Uncle Abe, who promptly fell to toting linen- 
 bandages and warm water and hot coffee to Torrie s bed 
 room, supplemented with a precious and never-failing 
 bottle of liniment from that anxious-eyed old servitor s 
 own walnut chest. But Torrie, once she was safely in 
 bed, found herself suffering from a smart which no lini 
 ment could allay and a wound which no linen could bind
 
 330 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 up. She lay there, anxiously watching for her husband s 
 return, remembering that a great deal would depend on 
 the nature of that return. She had had proof enough, in 
 the past, of the incredible rapidity with which news could 
 travel up and down the entire lake shore, by what was 
 known as " moccasin telegraph." She knew that before 
 another day had passed, perhaps even before another 
 day had dawned, newspapers would appear with their 
 printed recountal of what had happened at Death s Curve. 
 Already, she surmised, the telegraph wires were busy 
 with their first unorganized details of the case. It would 
 be easy enough, she remembered, to identify both the car 
 and the body. And Owen would know that Bonnie 
 Eastman had been in Canada, had been in the neighbour 
 hood. 
 
 He would know, she acknowledged ; but how much 
 would he know ? There was no material evidence to con 
 nect her in person with the accident, for surely, in the 
 end, it would be accepted as an accident. It depended 
 solely on the way in which she continued to play out her 
 part. And luck, so far, had favoured her. 
 
 It was nearly eight o clock when Storrow returned to 
 the house. That alone was a somewhat disquieting oc 
 currence. He came quietly, moving about the outer 
 rooms with what seemed the listlessness of a very weary 
 man. Torrie, lifting her head from the pillow, could 
 hear him ask for her, just as she could hear Uncle Abe s 
 excited and somewhat amplified description of the in 
 jured ankle. This was followed by a silence, a fortify 
 ing and yet a disquieting silence, a silence that might mean 
 anything. A minute later Torrie s room-door was 
 pushed open and Storrow stepped inside. 
 
 " Are you hurt? " he asked, very quietly, coming to a 
 stop in the centre of the darkened room. 
 
 Still again, and with a coldness of tone which she could 
 not fight back, she repeated the story of the turned 
 ankle.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 331 
 
 "Where did this happen?" asked her husband. 
 
 " A little way up the Ridge Road," she told him. 
 
 " How did you get back to Pine-Brae? " was his next 
 question. 
 
 " I was given a ride by a farmer s wife in a Ford car," 
 she told him. He stood silent for a moment or two. 
 
 " Is there anything I can do for you? " he finally asked. 
 
 " No," she replied, matching the iciness of his voice 
 with the iciness of her own. " Uncle Abe has brought me 
 everything I need." 
 
 He seemed on the point of saying something, but on 
 second thought preferred remaining silent. He turned 
 and stepped out of the room, closing the door behind 
 him. 
 
 Torrie did not sleep that night. He knew. She felt 
 sure that he knew. So shaken did she feel in body and 
 mind that she remained in bed for the rest of the week, 
 brooding in silence over what she was secretly longing to 
 ventilate by open speech. But nothing more was said, 
 during all her period of recuperation, by Storrow when 
 he came regularly but briefly to inquire after her prog 
 ress. Nor was anything said when she had emerged from 
 her room and once more projected herself into the placidly 
 moving life of Pine-Brae. 
 
 Torrie and Storrow were in daily contact, spending, 
 in fact, many hours of each day together. Yet they 
 were not together. Between them, always, there loomed 
 a wall of reticence as solid as concrete. Each went about 
 armoured in steely reservations, oppressed not only by a 
 sense of suspended action but also by the consciousness 
 of covert and silent scrutiny. This, to Torrie, became 
 almost unendurable. She would have preferred open 
 contention and quarrelling to any such false calm of wait 
 ing and watching. But it was not in her power to end it. 
 
 So seeing that it was not to be ended, as the weeks 
 dragged by, she achieved a belated and somewhat des 
 perate decision to make the best of it. Sometimes she
 
 332 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 even ventured out into the open and joined Sforrow in 
 his farm-work, fretted by a perverse inclination to be 
 near him, as though rinding in that physical propinquity 
 some atonement for an inner estrangement which they 
 could no longer hope to heal. One cool autumn morning 
 when the sun fell clear and flat on their southern-sloping 
 peach-orchard she joined him in the long aisles of green 
 and wine-red branches weighed down with their fruit, 
 globes of down-covered yellow and pink, faintly aroma 
 tic, which she took a delight in breaking away from their 
 stems. 
 
 " These Crawfords are too small and scabby," he com 
 plained. 
 
 " But look at that basketful with the sun on them," 
 she said, with the uncritical joy of the city-bred in par 
 taking of the providence of nature. " They are lovely." 
 
 But her husband shook his head. 
 
 " They ll only sell as seconds. This orchard wasn t 
 sprayed last spring, and it s run to wood. A peach or 
 chard doesn t last long, anyway. It s a question whether 
 I d better not clear it away next year." 
 
 " Next year," she repeated, squatting down on the 
 ground beside the basket of peaches. She sat staring 
 along the narrow aisle of green and wine-red foliage, 
 staring with unseeing eyes off into the distance. 
 
 "Aren t they worth saving?" she asked out of the 
 silence that had fallen over them both. 
 
 " It s too late," he replied as he moved his ladder to 
 another side of the tree. Yet their eyes met as he stood 
 arrested in sudden thought. For to each of them, ap 
 parently, had come the quick impression of something 
 symbolic in that statement. 
 
 It was a week later that Torrie returned to Pine-Brae 
 ojie afternoon with the mail, an unusual touch of colour 
 on the faint hollow of the cheeks from which the mid 
 summer tan was beginning to fade. Storrow, who had 
 joined her in becoming an adept at reading any accidental
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 333 
 
 signs that might flash through their silences, was not 
 long in discovering that something out-of-the-way had 
 happened. The exact nature of this, however, was not 
 made known by Torrie until towards the end of their 
 evening meal. 
 
 " I ve just had a letter from Herman Krassler," she 
 offhandedly announced, after a somewhat prolonged 
 period of speechlessness. 
 
 " I thought so," he admitted, as their eyes met. And 
 so established was her Indian Summer of silent timidi 
 ties that her colour deepened even in the face of her care 
 less reaching out for a cigarette and her equally careless 
 movement as she struck a match and slowly inhaled and 
 exhaled a thin cloud of smoke. 
 
 "What made you think so?" she asked, as imper 
 sonally as she could. 
 
 " He s about the last of the of the interested ones 
 who remain," was her husband s reply, not without its 
 touch of latent bitterness. And again her colour deep 
 ened. But this did not frighten her away from the sub 
 ject in hand. 
 
 " Krassler," she went on with a quiet resolution which 
 brought a minute quaver to her otherwise well-controlled 
 voice, " writes that he has a part waiting for me." 
 
 Storrow did not look up at her. 
 
 " He always has a part waiting for you, hasn t he?" 
 he demanded. Yet a moment later he bore the appear 
 ance of a man who regretted what he had said. And 
 Torrie herself did not choose to reply to that question. 
 
 " I think I ought to take it," she said, instead. 
 
 "Why?" asked her husband, not altogether deceived 
 by the note of hesitancy she had succeeded in throwing 
 into that statement. 
 
 " Because things can t keep on like this," she an 
 nounced, meeting Storrow s gaze with a sudden flash of 
 audacity. 
 
 " They won t," he told her.
 
 334 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 "Why won t they?" she asked. Her face looked 
 fatigued, and touched with age. He realized, as he 
 stared at her, that she was no longer a girl, but a woman 
 who must have explored life to its heights and its depths. 
 
 " Because we can t let them," he said, with his own 
 face shadowed as what seemed the hopelessness of the 
 situation reasserted itself. 
 
 " That s why I think it would be so much better if I 
 took this part when I ve the chance," she explained, once 
 more completely mistress of herself. " It s only for 
 eight or nine weeks, apparently, until Orris Ormonde 
 can get back from Europe in time to take it over. And 
 eight or nine weeks like that ought to give us a chance 
 of getting things back into perspective. Don t you think 
 that I m right?" 
 
 He did not answer her, for he was busy, at the mo 
 ment, trying to picture what Pine-Brae would be like 
 without her. And his heart sank, in spite of himself, at 
 the prospect of what lay before him. Yet it was inevita 
 ble, inescapable. Torrie, he knew, had already come to 
 her decision. He just as clearly saw, too, that her 
 euphuism as to its being merely a temporary absence was 
 grimly akin to the blindfolding of two unfortunates 
 about to face the firing-squad. It would be forever. 
 He knew it, and she knew it ; yet each of them remained 
 too cowardly to admit it, too weak to face it in its bald 
 and unqualified ugliness. 
 
 You d surely go back to New York for the winter 
 months? " she was asking. 
 
 He had never thought of that. But thought was be 
 ing suddenly and sternly forced into unexplored channels. 
 
 " Yes, I think I d go back for the winter months," he 
 asserted. And it was her turn to be secretly harassed 
 by the look of age and unhappiness on the other s face. 
 " Then that makes everything simple enough," she 
 announced, almost with triumph. " I ve always hated to 
 think of you as alone up here."
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 335 
 
 "Then you have thought about it?" he asked, very 
 quietly. Still again the faint tinge of colour flowed into 
 her cheeka, but the obligation to answer his question 
 seemed to vanish with the advent of Uncle Abe, who had 
 come to clear the table. Both Torrie and Storrow, how 
 ever, knew that the matter had been settled. 
 
 She set about her packing methodically and calmly, 
 grateful for the liberty of movement which her hus 
 band s pretence at preoccupation with the field-work was 
 giving her. Yet it was a process which prolonged itself 
 into a matter of several days, ably as the lachrymose old 
 Uncle Abe came to her help with flat-iron and wash 
 board and polishing-brush. They were strange days of 
 silences and repressed emotions and trivialities which had 
 the trick of assuming prodigious and disturbing signifi 
 cances. 
 
 " Ah rakon you ll be totin that houn dawg along wif 
 you, Mis Torrie?" Uncle Abe asked with an audible 
 sniffle as Skookum, sensing some untoward change, 
 whined and whimpered about the shadowy living-room. 
 
 " No; I ll not take Skookum," said Torrie, after a mo 
 ment or two of solemn thought. She called the pup to 
 her and bent down to caress the nervous and pointed nose. 
 " Poor old Skookum," she said again and again. Then 
 she stood up and looked out over the lake and again 
 stared down at the animal with his nozzle against her 
 leather-shod ankle. " I wonder if he will remember 
 me?" 
 
 " He shore will, Mis Torrie," was Uncle Abe s dog 
 gedly valiant retort. " And Ah raikon we all shore 
 will!" 
 
 The day for her departure came with a steady south 
 east wind, unusually mild for that time of the year. It 
 left the clay road to the county-seat muddy and deep- 
 rutted, so that Storrow, as he drove the farm-team hitched 
 to the covered fruit-wagon with Torrie s trunks piled 
 high behind them, found excuse enough for his silences
 
 336 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 in the attention which he had to give to his driving. And 
 he was anxious that the wait at the railway-station should 
 be as short as it could be managed with safety. 
 
 Thanks to the rain and the heavy roads, that long- 
 dreaded wait proved to be mercifully brief. By the 
 time Storrow had bought tickets and checked trunks and 
 returned from making sure that his team was safely tied, 
 the long whistle of the incoming express could be heard 
 through the quietly falling rain. 
 
 Torrie s face blanched. She looked up at her husband, 
 with the set jaw-muscles of his lean face showing through 
 the tanned and wind-roughened face, and her lip quiv 
 ered. 
 
 " Oh, Owen," she said, foolishly, as her tears began to 
 flow. 
 
 " It s all right," he assured her, scarcely knowing what 
 he was saying. " It s all right." 
 
 He carried her two hand-bags to the edge of the wet 
 platform. She followed him, her face contorted with 
 misery. 
 
 " We can t ! " she suddenly cried out. " We can t go 
 this way we can t ! " 
 
 He imagined, for one weak moment, that she had re 
 lented of all her purpose, that the thought of flight was 
 proving too much for her. And then he remembered. 
 He remembered that it was inevitable, and that it was 
 for ever. 
 
 " Kiss me, Owen," Torrie was whispering to him, with 
 upturned face, for the dripping train had come to a stop 
 beside them and a porter had thrown open the Pullman 
 end-door. "Kiss me!" 
 
 He took her suddenly and almost fiercely in his arms 
 and kissed her. He kissed her tenderly, with a tightening 
 of the throat which made it hard for him to breathe. 
 He heard the conductor s impersonally yodelled " Ail- 
 aboard " and saw the coloured porter lift the two hand 
 bags into the car after her. He saw the train get under
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 337 
 
 way, the last car pass the platform, the early lit tail- 
 lights grow misty and vanish in the falling rain. When 
 he turned slowly about and splashed through mud and 
 water to where his team stood waiting, steaming in the 
 wet air, he carried on his lips a taste of brine, from the 
 lips he had loved and never in all his life would kiss 
 again.
 
 CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT 
 
 STORROW, when he returned to New York two 
 months later, went back to the city with the feeling 
 that he was re-entering an arena. He went back 
 oppressed by a sense of defeat, defeat which in some way 
 must be converted into victory. 
 
 Those intervening weeks at Pine-Brae, after Torrie s 
 departure, had been anything but happy weeks. The 
 place seemed too permeated with her presence, too haunted 
 with unexpectedly disturbing memories. He did what 
 he could to purge it of these, by quietly yet studiously 
 removing every possible trace of her, from the over-run 
 kid-slippers which Skookum delighted in carrying into 
 the open to the accordion-pleated silk underskirt, worn 
 through at the edges, which still hung behind her bed 
 room door. But there were less material things which 
 could not be hidden aw r ay, aromas and associations and 
 reminiscences which reached out like unseen hands to 
 draw him aside to that past on which he had determined 
 to turn his back. And the loneliness of the old house, as 
 the days grew shorter and the south-east winds brought 
 the waves pounding mournfully and continually against 
 the lake cliffs, became unendurable. So Storrow set 
 about making his arrangements for departure. These 
 kept him busy for a fortnight made doubly miserable by 
 alternating snow and rain and wind, so that when he fi 
 nally landed in New York, still basking under a belated 
 stretch of warm and balmy sunlight, it seemed like a mi 
 gration into a tumultuous but an infinitely merrier world. 
 Nor did Storrow return without a definitely mapped 
 outline of conduct. He had known too much of drift- 
 
 338
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 339 
 
 ing. For too long he had stood merely marking time. 
 He found himself possessed by a second wind of ambi 
 tion, an impatience to assert himself, a hunger to re-enter 
 that world from which circumstances not of his own 
 choosing seemed to have elbowed him. To this end he 
 had consulted his over-pompous Park Committee in the 
 matter of the long-deferred statue of Tecumseh, pointing 
 out to them his decision that an exedra with a decorative 
 frieze, surmounted by a figure in heroic size, would be 
 more effective than the earlier considered life-size figure 
 of the Chieftain on a block of Scotch granite. It was 
 only after much argument, and much consultation over 
 costs and specifications and sketch-models, that the newer 
 and more ambitious plan was agreed to, although that 
 agreement came with a number of more or less absurd 
 qualifications which he accepted and interpreted as a mere 
 sop to his directors personal dignity. But when he re 
 turned to the city, and to the old Twenty-Fourth Street 
 studio which he had decided to use now merely as a work 
 room, he began to nurse the relieving knowledge of elab 
 orate and engrossing tasks ahead of him. 
 
 He had need for this. He felt a hunger for order 
 after disorder, for stability after confusion. He began 
 to see what Chester Hardy had meant by that often re 
 peated word of " organization." And Hardy himself, 
 on his return to the city after an autumn of secluded toil 
 in a fellow-artist s abandoned villa at Lennox, seemed 
 to realize the younger man s predicament. He did more 
 than merely gather up the broken threads of friendship. 
 He did all that lay in his power to warp Storrow back 
 into the duly buoyed and buoyant channels of life. He 
 entered into benevolent conspiracies with Charlotte to re- 
 enmesh her sober-eyed cousin in the activities of that up 
 per world from which he had shown a tendency to turn 
 away. And Storrow, swinging back with the pendulum, 
 surrendered to these gentle propulsions. He nursed an 
 active enough craving for the respectabilities of life, just 
 as he had always nursed an innate distaste for that dis-
 
 340 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 ordered province of laxness and license which is known as 
 bohemia. 
 
 But his surrender was not as complete as it appeared. 
 He went about, for all his pretences of preoccupation, 
 carrying the secret conviction that the most vital issue of 
 life had been left in the air, as grotesque and unfinished 
 as the span of an abandoned bridge. The memory of 
 his marriage did not trouble him so much during those 
 first few weeks, when he knew that Torrie was out " on 
 the road." It was not until her return to New York 
 that the situation began to perplex him. He read the 
 announcements that she was about to emerge as a full- 
 fledged star in Smoke Signals, a new play by a new 
 .but neurotic author whom Krassler had disinterred from 
 a hydropathic resort at Mount Clemens. Then followed 
 a campaign of that publicity which emanates from im 
 aginative press-agents, artfully fabricated romances of 
 Torrie Throssel s origin and early youth, discreetly cen 
 sored recountals of her past stage experiences, and fit 
 tingly picturesque descriptions of her coming role, of her 
 expensive costumes, of her love for animals and her ec 
 centric methods of study. 
 
 None of these, Storrow found to his great relief, con 
 tained any reference to her marriage. When portraits 
 of her began to appear in theatrical weeklies and Sunday 
 supplements, he studied these patently new photographs 
 with great care, disturbed, as a rule, by certain changes 
 in that only too well-known face, changes which he could 
 not quite decipher. They merely seemed to accentuate 
 her remoteness, just as the press-agent paragraphs, as 
 suavely untruthful as obituaries, tended to translate her 
 more and more into the legendary. There were times, 
 however, when it struck him as odd that both he and 
 Torrie should be working in the same city and yet to all 
 intents and purposes remain as completely separated as 
 the poles. His own days, it is true, had become more 
 and more crowded, especially after his decision to study
 
 THE ,WINE OF LIFE 341 
 
 architecture for a few months in one of the larger city 
 offices, since the designing of the Tecumseh exedra had 
 made plain his weakness in this branch of the sculptor s 
 art. It was not, indeed, until he had begun work, at 
 Hardy s suggestion, on a portrait-bust of Catherine Klen- 
 nert that he stumbled on any direct and personal allusion 
 to Torrie s advance. 
 
 " Watch that Throssel woman," the older actress with 
 the absinthe-green eyes had remarked during one of her 
 sittings, quite unconscious that the quiet-eyed artist be 
 fore her stood in any way personally interested in the sub 
 ject. " You ll notice the splash in three or four weeks. 
 Krassler intends to throw her right off into deep water, 
 just to show that a Krassler star needn t ever learn to 
 swim ! " 
 
 "Why do you call it deep water?" inquired Storrow 
 as he went on with his work. 
 
 " Because six months can t make a show-girl into a 
 stage star," retorted the statuesque beauty who had 
 bloomed and faded under less auspicious planets. And 
 her face, as she spoke, was not without a touch of re 
 sentment. " It can t be done, legitimately, even with a 
 Krassler behind you. But in this case he s fitted his 
 woman with one of those freak emotional parts where 
 delirium tremens makes up for lack of technique. And 
 when he throws her onto Broadway she ll probably land 
 on her feet, the same as a cat. He s a wizard at tricking 
 that stuff over, if you give him something pliant enough 
 to work with. It s really ventriloquism, of course, for 
 it s always Krassler you get, every move and word and 
 intonation. It s merely Krassler working through some 
 empty-headed woman who s willing to be scooped out of 
 her own body, the same as you scoop out a Hallow-E en 
 pumpkin and stick your own head inside. But Krassler 
 isn t in sight when the trick is done, so the audience sits 
 back and accepts the new star as the real thing." 
 
 " Well, isn t she what you d call the real thing," Stor-
 
 342 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 row was prompted to argue, " so long as she gets her re 
 sults?" 
 
 " But they re not her results ; they re Krassler s. And 
 when the time comes for Krassler to step out, there s noth 
 ing left but another collapsed balloon." 
 
 "Supposing, then, that Krassler keeps behind her?" 
 suggested Storrow, with a perfunctory movement or two 
 about his study. For his mind was very far from being 
 on his work. 
 
 " That," retorted the absinthe-eyed woman of the 
 world, " all depends on just how she s holding him there." 
 
 Nothing more was said on the matter, though the in 
 cident left Storrow with a good deal to think over. By 
 the time the Klennert bust was completed and its creator 
 had the dubious satisfaction of beholding it installed in 
 a Fifth Avenue jeweller s window, trickily backed by a 
 drapery of dark green velvet, Krassler s production of 
 Smoke Signals was duly announced for Broadway. 
 One day Storrow, idly watching a bill-poster as he af 
 fixed a " four-sheet " to a Sixth Avenue sign-board, 
 found a faint thrill course through his body as he spelled 
 out the large and gaudy letters of " Torrie Throssel." A 
 week later he saw the same name on Broadway, picked 
 out in luminous electric bulbs. 
 
 Then came the play itself. Storrow, after many si 
 lent and self-abortive debates, decided not to see it. But 
 he did not remain long in doubt as to Torrie s success. 
 The criticism of the play itself was preponderantly ad 
 verse. The acknowledgment of Torrie s personal 
 triumph, however, was unqualified. As Katherine 
 Klennert had predicted, the new-made star had " landed 
 on her feet." And as the new play settled down for 
 what promised to be a winter s run, and those friends 
 of Storrow s who knew of his marriage sympathetically 
 sustained their conspiracy of silence as to what had come 
 to be regarded as a mis-step of his earlier life, the out 
 wardly busy man who was outwardly so preoccupied
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 343 
 
 with his projected statue of Tecumseh began to feel that 
 after all he might find it possible to sink like a mollusk 
 beneath the tides of time and lie there, enclosed in his 
 shell, undisturbed by the forces of an older and less 
 tranquillized world. For reticence, perhaps quite as 
 much racial as it was personal, was still a dominating 
 feature of his make-up. He had become, in fact, almost 
 morbidly averse to attention, over-sensitive to outside 
 appraisal and opinion. And his own career began to 
 impress him as one where it would be preferable to keep 
 shut the cross-written pages of the past. 
 
 But twice that musty and much-thumbed book was un 
 expectedly opened. It happened the first time when 
 Storrow attended the annual Fakirs Show of the Art 
 Students League. As he elbowed his way through the 
 youthful and buoyant and bubbling crowd laughing at 
 the freaks of the improvised " Side-Show," he came face 
 to face with Alan Vibbard, standing hand in hand with 
 an extremely thin girl in a short skirt, in front of a cage 
 which bore the inscription : " Maniac Marmaduke, the 
 Wild Man of Mazatlan." Vibbard, at the moment, was 
 laughing at the demoniacal struggles of the over- whisk 
 ered Wild Man. Then he glanced over his shoulder and 
 saw Storrow close beside him. The pendant-jowled 
 painter melted adroitly away through the crowd, during 
 the next minute or two, but that unlooked-for encounter 
 served to take the effervescing spirit of youth and gaiety 
 out of the children of art pirouetting about a sombre- 
 eyed young man with a prematurely shadowed face. 
 
 The second unheralded return to the past occurred late 
 one afternoon when the light in Storrow s studio had 
 become too uncertain for further work. A knock, so 
 light as to seem almost timorous, had sounded on his 
 door. Before he could answer it the door itself had 
 opened and Torrie herself had stepped into the room. 
 She was veiled, and muffled in heavy black furs, but he 
 recognized her at once, even before she spoke.
 
 344 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " May I come in, Owen ? " she asked, almost timidly. 
 Her voice, for all its momentary quaver, struck him as 
 deeper and fuller in tone. Through the folds of the 
 veil her face looked thinner and whiter than before. 
 
 He placed a chair for her, but she remained standing, 
 staring slowly about the room with its blurring lines 
 receding into unbroken shadow. She even stopped him, 
 with a little gesture, which seemed quite new to her, as 
 he moved to switch on the lights. 
 
 " I can stay only a moment," she murmured, with 
 what seemed an almost apprehensive glance back towards 
 the still open door. Of the two, he was much the more 
 self-possessed. 
 
 " It was kind of you to come," he said, disturbed that 
 he was unable to make his tone anything more than per 
 functory. 
 
 " I was wondering," she hesitatingly began, after the 
 silence had lengthened abysmally between them, " if 
 you d have the time, later on, to do a a bust of me, 
 something like the Klennert bust." 
 
 It was impossible, he found, to keep from probing for 
 some motive behind this suggestion. But the motive, if 
 there was one, eluded him. 
 
 " That was a terribly bad bust," he averred, almost 
 lightly, wondering just how he should phrase his refusal 
 of her suggestion. 
 
 "No, no; I ve heard only nice things about it," she 
 protested, trying to counter a depressing consciousness 
 of formality by a smile which was at first hesitating and 
 then pitiful. " But perhaps you re busy with other 
 work." 
 
 " I ve got old Tecumseh to work out, if I can ever get 
 a model who s lean and sinewy enough for what I need." 
 
 " Oh, yes ; Tecumseh," she echoed, her mind obviously 
 not on what she said. She turned away, and her hand 
 went up to her veil. Through that veil he seemed to 
 read on her face an odd mingling of perplexity and dis-
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 345 
 
 appointment. He himself was perplexed by some new 
 born shyness about her, an air of timorousness which he 
 found hard to reconcile with his earlier memories of Tor- 
 rie. Without knowing why, as he watched her, he 
 thought of a bird with a broken wing. Her pale face 
 coloured a little as she became conscious of his studious 
 eyes upon her. 
 
 " Are you sorry I came? " she asked, speaking with an 
 effort. 
 
 " Yes," he was compelled in honour to admit. " I m 
 sorry." 
 
 She nodded her head, as though in belated conscious 
 ness of some infinite and forgotten remoteness between 
 them. Then she turned away. Her husband watched 
 her as she moved slowly towards the door. 
 
 " Must you go ? " he mechanically inquired. 
 
 Torrie, still without looking back at him, nodded her 
 head. Her steps, as she walked towards the door, were 
 slow, like the steps of a person wading through water. 
 But she passed out into the dim-lit and many-odoured 
 hallway without stopping or looking back. Storrow, 
 after staring a moment at the still open door, crossed to 
 the wall-switch and lighted the studio. 
 
 The room, with its shadowy recesses that had seemed 
 haunted by a huddle of thin shapes and memories, be 
 came at a hand s turn a place of flat walls and uncom 
 promisingly hard lines. His eyes wandered on to the 
 clay-stained frame- work to which so much of that day 
 had gone in toil. It suddenly impressed him as tragically 
 inconsequential and foolish, this refashioning of dead 
 Indians out of mud. It was not manly work. It was 
 not even engrossing, though he had stood too cowardly 
 ever to admit that over-disquieting truth to his own soul. 
 But it helped to fill in the emptiness of life. It seemed 
 about all that was left to him. He would go on at that 
 sort of thing, he supposed, keeping up an appearance of 
 contentment, buttressing up his make-believe of accom-
 
 346 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 plishment, until the unrest in his soul burned itself out, 
 like a lamp. For, some day, he contended, the oil that 
 fed this flame must exhaust itself. 
 
 Storrow was still standing there, deep in thought, when 
 he was aroused by the sound of quick and nervous foot 
 steps crossing his floor-boards. He swung about to find 
 himself confronted by Herman Krassler in a fur-lined 
 Melton overcoat which merely seemed to add to his dim- 
 inutiveness. 
 
 " Is Torrie here? that unannounced intruder promptly 
 inquired. 
 
 " She is not," Storrow just as promptly retorted. 
 
 " Has she been here? " 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 This man, Storrow remembered, was his enemy, his 
 one remaining enemy. In that thin and nervously strung 
 body with its rat-like audacity merging on insolence he 
 could behold personified those more sordid and selfish 
 forces which were walling his wife off in a world of her 
 own. Always, to Storrow, he had remained a sinister 
 back-ground figure, awaiting the chance which he had 
 known would some day be his. And now, in a way, he 
 had triumphed. His patience had been rewarded. 
 
 " Because it s rather important," was Krassler s an 
 swer to the other s interrogative rebuff. 
 
 "To whom?" demanded Storrow, as he remembered 
 the futile physical violence with which he had met other 
 enemies, enemies strangely different to this small and 
 rat-like body with the extraordinary light in its deep-set 
 eyes. And much as he longed to clear the air with some 
 purging and relieving outburst of passion, Storrow found 
 it impossible to wring any consolation from the thought 
 of physical assault on anything so defenceless. 
 To all of us," retorted Krassler. 
 
 " What do you want, anyway? " challenged the other, 
 a little out of control, conscious, even in his anger, that 
 it was the smaller man s power and the fortitude born
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 347 
 
 of this power which was inflaming him to opposition. 
 
 " I want to talk about Torrie," he said with a second 
 quiet yet quickly appraising stare at the other man. 
 
 " I hope it will be a brief talk," retorted Storrow. 
 
 " That all depends on you," announced Krassler, still 
 cool in the face of the younger man s hostility. 
 
 " Then we can regard it as ended, right now," was 
 Storrow s prompt ultimatum. 
 
 " That would be welcome enough to me, but unfort 
 unately it doesn t bring us to any solution of our prob 
 lem." 
 
 " I wasn t aware that we had one in common." 
 
 " But we have." 
 
 "What is it?" 
 
 " Torrie." 
 
 It was Storrow s turn to renew his appraisal of the 
 man confronting him. In that alert and finely wrinkled 
 face with the quick glance which contradicted the look 
 of weariness about the femininely soft eyes he detected 
 a courage and directness which he was reluctantly com 
 pelled to respect. Krassler, he knew, had the singleness 
 of will which spelt success, which carried him over every 
 obstacle to the end in view. And the man who saw his 
 far-off goal and struggled towards it, without digression 
 or diversion, was always to be envied. 
 
 "And what is your interest in Torrie?" Storrow de 
 manded. 
 
 " I am her manager," retorted Krassler. 
 
 " Well, I am her husband," just as crisply retorted the 
 other. 
 
 " Nominally, but not actually," corrected Krassler. 
 
 " Is that your problem? " 
 
 Krassler did not wince, but it took him a moment or 
 two to organize his answer to that over-curt question. 
 
 " Torrie is my star. I ve landed her on Broadway 
 with a success. If she s handled right she can repeat that 
 success season by season, as long as she wants to call
 
 348 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 herself an actress. That means her name and personal 
 ity have taken on a definite commercial value." 
 
 " I know all that." 
 
 " Then you also know that any personal entanglement, 
 anything that stands unsavoury and sordid to her public, 
 is going to effect her name and her future." 
 
 " Do you regard marriage as an entanglement? " 
 
 " In this case, I do," was Krassler s prompt reply. 
 
 " Then what do you propose ? " 
 
 " I suggest that you give Torrie a divorce." 
 
 Still again Storrow studied the slight and nervous- 
 bodied man in front of him. And still again he yielded 
 reluctant tribute to his enemy s audacity. 
 
 " And what good would that do either Torrie or me ? " 
 he demanded, slightly amazed at the coolness with which 
 he could discuss a problem once painful and still emin 
 ently personal. 
 
 " It would leave Torrie unhampered, to go on with her 
 work." 
 
 " I can t see that being married has hampered her any 
 in her work." He remembered, at the moment, what 
 Chester Hardy had once said about marriage: that it 
 naturally closed a number of doors, but that divorce 
 closed and locked a much greater number. 
 
 " Your failure to realize a situation doesn t correct 
 it," Krassler was saying. " I repeat that that situation 
 exists. And as Torrie comes to stand more and more 
 prominently before the public the more that situation will 
 become a drag on her." 
 
 11 You mean that / am the drag! " 
 
 " I prefer not expressing it in that particular man 
 ner," Krassler explained with a coolness that was not 
 without its barb. 
 
 " But that s about what you mean? " 
 
 " That depends very much on the course of action 
 which you propose to follow! " 
 
 " But I propose to follow no course of action," was
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 349 
 
 Storrow s prompt announcement. Krassler shook his 
 head, almost impatiently. 
 
 " That, under the circumstances, is not quite possible. 
 You ve either got to approve of such a move, or oppose 
 it." 
 
 " On the contrary, I decline even to bring it into ex 
 istence." 
 
 " That is equally impossible." 
 
 "What makes it impossible?" 
 
 " The fact that your wife is already in possession of 
 sufficient evidence to obtain the end I ve spoken of." 
 
 " Do you mean evidence against me ? " 
 
 "Yes!" 
 
 " What kind of evidence? " 
 
 " I understand that you were detected by the necessary 
 witness in a situation necessarily compromising, a lit 
 tle over a year ago, in " 
 
 " Evidence against me? " repeated the astonished Stor- 
 row. 
 
 " In the room," pursued Krassler with a carefully 
 maintained matter-of-factness, " of a Broadway chorus- 
 girl known as Pannie Atwill." 
 
 Storrow s thoughts flew back to the situation which 
 Krassler s words had so suddenly recalled. He remem 
 bered the scene and Mattie Crowder s calm-eyed inspec 
 tion of it. 
 
 " But that situation was an innocent one, absolutely 
 and entirely innocent," he explained, nettled to find him 
 self on the defensive. 
 
 " It would not be accepted as innocent by any open- 
 minded judge of the supreme court," was Krassler s im 
 personal retort. It took an effort, on Storrow s part, to 
 keep himself under control. 
 
 " Has Torrie ever expressed a willingness to make use 
 of that incident?" he demanded. 
 
 " She may be compelled to," was Krassler s non-com 
 mittal retort.
 
 350 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 "But is she willing to?" 
 
 " She realizes that things can t possibly go on as they 
 are," was the other s answer. 
 
 " And you intend to use this," began Storrow. 
 
 " I don t think you will be stupid enough to make that 
 necessary," Krassler told him. But Storrow, the next 
 moment, had swung about on him. 
 
 " It isn t a matter of stupidity. It s a matter of de 
 cency. And, if I m not mistaken, the stupidity is on 
 your side. No matter what happened in connection with 
 this Pannie Atwill affair you ve, mentioned, Torrie knew 
 of that affair at the time, was a witness to it, and openly 
 condoned it by living with me for nearly a year. And as 
 I remember it the condoning of any such offence exempts 
 it from action for divorce." 
 
 Krassler, still shrewd-eyed and thoughtful, shrugged a 
 diffident shoulder. 
 
 "I m neither a judge nor a lawyer. But if what you 
 say is true it remains equally true that if Torrie wants 
 to sacrifice a half-year out of her work she can go to 
 Nevada and obtain her decree there on the grounds of 
 cruelty and non-support. But that s something which 
 you both ought to fight shy of." 
 
 Storrow met the other man s eye, still marked by an 
 absence of open combativeness. 
 
 " Why are you so interested in all this ? " he suddenly 
 demanded. 
 
 " Because, as I ve already pointed out, I happen to be 
 Torrie Throssel s manager. And I want to see her free 
 to win over the public that she s waiting to win over." 
 
 Storrow s gesture was one of impatience. Then a new 
 thought came to him. 
 
 " Does Torrie intend to marry another man? " he de 
 manded. 
 
 " I ve never heard her express such an intention," was 
 Krassler s cool-noted reply.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 351 
 
 "Do you intend to marry her?" asked Storrow, in 
 specting his small-bodied enemy. 
 
 Krassler laughed. 
 
 " Thanking you, I have quite troubles enough as her 
 manager," he said. 
 
 " But you do intend to see that she secures a divorce ? " 
 demanded Storrow, once more amazed at the coolness 
 with which he could fence over a theme so intimate and 
 at the same time so odious. 
 
 " Since you ve put it that way," was the quiet re 
 sponse, " I do intend seeing that she gets a divorce." 
 
 " And you came here for the purpose of obtaining my 
 co-operation in an action which, under the circumstances, 
 must be a collusary one? " 
 
 " Not necessarily. I came here more to find out what 
 your attitude was. Whether you oppose any such ac 
 tion, or whether you agree to it, hasn t very much bear 
 ing on the case. In either event, you see, it will go on 
 exactly the same." 
 
 " Who says so? " 
 
 " I say so." 
 
 " Then what I happen to say couldn t be of much con 
 sequence? " 
 
 " Not unless you re big enough to feel the appropri 
 ateness of making things as easy as possible for Torrie," 
 was Krassler s slowly enunciated reply. 
 
 " Aren t you proving yourself sufficiently expert at 
 that ? " was Storrow s equally deliberate demand. But 
 that taunt altogether failed to bring any answering taunt 
 from the man whom he had regarded so long as his 
 enemy. Storrow, indeed, was surprised to see a look of 
 pathos in the deep-set Hebraic eyes of the face confront 
 ing him. Yet it was a look that came and went again in 
 a moment s time. 
 
 " Whatever I m doing," retorted Krassler with his first 
 parade of open anger, " isn t being done for my own
 
 352 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 selfish satisfaction. I m not thinking about myself. I m 
 not posing as a martyr. And what s more, I m not try 
 ing to straddle two horses at once. I m thinking of a 
 woman s future, the future she s got to fight for. What s 
 more, I m banking everything I ve got on that future. 
 I m banking more than money on it and I m not worry 
 ing about what I m going to win or lose. But if you 
 haven t manhood enough to leave this girl free to put 
 up the fight she s got to put up, then I m glad to find out 
 how we stand, so that I can act accordingly." 
 
 Storrow s first impression, at this almost theatrical out 
 burst, was a suspicion of being manipulated by an adroit 
 and accomplished juggler in emotional values, a feeling 
 that he was being goaded into an opposition which must 
 later on serve to extenuate unsavoury extremes. But 
 as the force of what his diminutive enemy had said came 
 fully home to him this initial suspicion was submerged 
 by an answering wave of anger, quick and uncontrolled. 
 
 " Well, I ll tell you what I have manhood enough for," 
 he cried out, unconscious of the picture of a patient-eyed 
 little man with a soul of fire and a swarthy and shrunken 
 face as haggard as a lost and hungry dog s in front of 
 him. " I ve manhood enough not to see my name 
 dragged through the mire by a bunch of theatrical para 
 sites and an exploiter of women like you. The divorce 
 court may be a joke in your circle, but it s not in mine. 
 And since you ve had the effrontery to announce that 
 you re going to put me through it about the same as 
 you d put a clown through a paper hoop, I m going to 
 announce to you right here and now that I intend to fight 
 you, tooth and nail! I ll fight you and I ll fight you 
 to the last ditch !"
 
 CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE 
 
 IF Storrow wrung any satisfaction out of his open 
 declaration of opposition to Krassler, that satisfac 
 tion was not an enduring one. He realized, as he 
 thought things over, that his words had been big and 
 that his ability to translate them into action was limited. 
 And as Krassler himself, apparently sharing in that re 
 alization, withdrew with the promptness of a lawyer s 
 clerk who has served his subpoena, Storrow was not with 
 out the disturbing consciousness of beholding what had 
 seemed a highly dramatic situation wither away into 
 nothingness. 
 
 Yet there were other things which disturbed him even 
 more. One of these was the discovery that Pannie At- 
 will might still again appear in the drama of his life, a 
 painted Columbine with the dignifying attributes of a 
 Greek Chorus. It seemed, on the whole, expedient that 
 he should see Pannie. So without further loss of time 
 he began making inquiries and soon found that she was 
 holding forth in a musical-comedy entitled The Princess 
 of Pecos, recognized as one of the Broadway successes 
 of the season. 
 
 Storrow, when he applied at the stage-entrance of her 
 theatre, found Pannie too preoccupied with costume and 
 make-up to waste valuable time in talk. 
 
 " Say, it d be like sleepin in a nest o copperheads, 
 tryin to talk private in this bunch o bone-heads," Pannie 
 promptly informed him. " Come round after the show 
 and steer me over to Barney s, where we can sit in com 
 fort. And if you ve gotta kill time, why don t you get a 
 look in at this piece? Skip round front and grab a seat 
 
 353
 
 354 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 while you can, for it s a riot, all right. And keep your 
 eye peeled for that colour-scheme o mine at the end of 
 the second act, for the ribs round here have been knockin 
 my lonjery-tints and I want the word of a gink who s 
 tried and true ! " 
 
 Storrow, at the box-office of The Princess of Pecos, 
 had the good luck to obtain a solitary " turn-in." He 
 sat through the play patiently and a little bewildered, 
 puzzled by the manner in which the audience about him 
 responded to that stridulous and over-driven entertain 
 ment. It was not a cheap audience. If anything, it was 
 an over-decorous one. It impressed Storrow as being 
 typically American in its amiability and personal kindli 
 ness, in its ability to react promptly and whole-heartedly 
 to the stimuli of the present, in its keen and amazingly 
 simple powers of vision, in its preoccupied forbearance 
 of shallowness and shoddiness, and in that general drowsy 
 insomnia of the soul, half-awake, half-asleep, with which 
 the over-tensioned citizen of an over-tensioned city sur 
 renders to his amusements. The play itself was estab 
 lished on old and well-approved lines, its one novelty, as 
 far as Storrow could see, being its unduly accelerated 
 tempo, where scene and song and movement s\vept on, 
 before the startled eye could adjust itself to the perspec 
 tives of criticism. He was out of tune with its spirit 
 and intent, so that instead of amusing him it merely be 
 numbed him. He was glad enough when it was over. 
 
 Yet he had to wait longer than he had expected beside 
 that dimly lighted stage-entrance which impressed him as 
 ridiculously dingy and sordid in comparison with the same 
 theatre s incandescent foyer grandeurs. Stamped by the 
 same ironic dinginess, he noticed, were the chorus-girls 
 who began to emerge from that door, hurrying and pre 
 occupied girls with tired faces and militantly unseeing 
 eyes, with the odour of cosmetics still about them. Stage 
 singers and dancers drifted past him, all the sparkle and 
 daintiness and devil-may-careness quite gone from them,
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 355 
 
 for now they were serious-minded working people with 
 the serious enough business of the day completed. They 
 were merely toilers in the fields of gladness, sombrely in 
 tent on their escape from that frugal harvesting of laugh 
 ter and dolorously in need of a meal and a pillow under 
 their heads. 
 
 In the later and more leizurely stragglers from the 
 stage door, it is true, Storrow found an increasing gaiety 
 of apparel and intent, since these queenlier idlers were 
 the pink slaves of that once dominating tradition which 
 held that "the show girl " as she was at that time de 
 nominated always " brought money into the house," 
 and the more conspicuous she stood in the night-life of 
 Broadway the more valuable she could hold herself to the 
 management which made a pretence of controlling her 
 movements. It was one of these queenlier personages 
 who was bunted unceremoniously aside as Pannie Atwill 
 dodged out through the door. 
 
 " Pawdon me! " she said with mock deference as she 
 hopped forward and slipped an arm through Storrow s. 
 She was busy buttoning up her coat and tugging on her 
 gloves as they emerged from the dark alleyway into the 
 side-street. 
 
 " I guess you re sore, after pawin the asphelt this 
 long," she said by way of explanation. " But I had me 
 laundry to get ready and a she-hokum in there was tryin 
 to crab my Wendies. So let s beat it to Barney s before 
 the fairy-rings get swamped in Bock! " 
 
 Once duly installed at Barney s, at a table as secluded 
 as could be found in that night-blooming Sirius of a 
 Rathskeller, Pannie gave her undivided attention to a 
 Golden Buck Rabbit and a thrice-filled stein of Pilsner. 
 Then, with an honest appetite honestly appeased, she be 
 came disposed to entertain any more abstract problem 
 which might be presented to her. Storrow noticed, as 
 he explained Krassler s visit to him, that Pannie had 
 taken pains to remove the heavy make-up which had dis-
 
 356 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 figured her face as he had seen it earlier in the evening. 
 He was glad of this, for that face as he had first beheld it, 
 with its great blotches of carmine spread along either 
 cheek-bone, its geranium-painted lips and beaded lashes 
 and azured eye-lids, had impressed him as a face disturb 
 ingly clown-like to be called into conference over a prob 
 lem very far removed from jocularity. Even now, with 
 its fatigued eyes and its evidences of having been well 
 scrubbed with cold-cream, it seemed incongruously pert 
 and frivolous for insinuating into the solemnest intimacies 
 of his life. But Pannie s face was dignified enough as 
 the man across the table explained to her the intent and 
 purport of Krassler s ultimatum. 
 
 " Poor little kyke ! " she said with ruminative eyes, 
 when Storrow had finished. 
 
 " Then you re with Krassler in this? " demanded Stor 
 row, astonished by that unlocked for expression of 
 sympathy with his enemy. 
 
 " Now, Buddy, don t get your war-bonnet on, Pannie 
 warned him. " I didn t say I was for Krassler. The 
 only person I m for, in this, is Torrie. And I m for her 
 strong. But I do say I m sorry for the kyke, the same 
 as I d be sorry for any gink who s only gettin somebody 
 else s empty oyster-shell ! He s only gettin an oyster- 
 shell, but Krassler s puttin one over on all of us by takin 
 that shell and carvin it into a Baralong pearl." 
 
 " I don t quite understand what you mean by that," 
 Storrow was compelled to admit. 
 
 " Then I ll wise you up," rejoined Pannie. " That 
 little guy s a genius, at his own special line o work. All 
 he wants is a woman with a voice and a face that won t 
 warp the plush off the balcony-rail. He can take her 
 and work with her and breathe the breath o life into 
 her, the same as that old Greek boob did with his Galatea 
 dame with the stony midriff. That s what he s doin 
 with Torrie, or with all that s left of Torrie. For you 
 can t side-step the fact, Capt n Kidd, that it was you who
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 357 
 
 scooped out the oyster of Torrie s life. I guess you got 
 about all she had to give. Perhaps it didn t altogether 
 agree with your Little Mary, bein more used to the frigid 
 eats of the native Esquimau. But that ain t exactly the 
 problem we re here to beef about. What we re limekiln- 
 clubbin over is Krassler. And as I lamp the whole 
 thing, by and large, Krassler s the only man who can 
 keep Torrie inside the track-rail. For the only way that 
 girl s goin to be happy now is in her work. That s all 
 that can keep her goin . And it ain t so much, remember, 
 when there s nothin behind it. But it s better than sub- 
 sidin on the toboggan and hittin the grade where the 
 down-and-outers hand the roundsman a weekly rake-off 
 for gettin colour-blind when the green-lights pass on the 
 wink to the red. That s something you ve gotta face, 
 whether it hurts the enamel or not. Torrie s got her 
 good points. And she s also got her weak ones. And 
 one o them is this," continued Pannie, with a clink of 
 her metal-ringed ringer against the glass beside her. 
 " With Krassler she ll keep away from that, because she s 
 gotta keep away from it. She s just an engine, to Kras 
 sler. And he won t stand for any loose-jointed work in 
 that engine. He ll want her to run like a Rolls-Royce 
 and what s more, he ll make her. He knows you can t 
 star with a burned-up larnyx, any more n you can nurse 
 a hang-over and emote your way through that heavy 
 stuff. He can put hobbles and blinders on her and hold 
 her through her work. But he s gotta hold her still 
 closer n that. He s gotta know he s in control, and she s 
 gotta know he s in control. And the only way he can 
 do that, as I dope it out, is to be something more than her 
 manager! " 
 
 Storrow s questioning eyes stared into the audacious 
 and slightly combative eyes of the pert- faced girl con 
 fronting him. 
 
 You you don t mean that he s got to marry her? " 
 asked the man with the slowly hardening face.
 
 358 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " That, Capt n Kidd, is exactly what I mean. He s 
 gotta marry her. He s gotta put the neck-yoke under 
 her tossin mane and be able to say which turn comes 
 next." 
 
 " But he doesn t even intend a move like that, cried 
 the unhappy and altogether bewildered Storrow. Pan- 
 nie s lip curled with a scorn which, for all its quickness, 
 still held a touch of kindliness. 
 
 You poor muddle-lamped mutt you, can t you see 
 that Krasslers been crazy about that girl from the first 
 crack out o the box ? Can t you see how he s stood off to 
 one side and waited for her about the same as a last 
 year s bird s nest waits for the lady-wren to hop back into 
 the neighbourhood ? He s let her try out her wings, and 
 fight the wind, and lose a feather or two, and even come 
 down in a nose-dive with all the song knocked out of her. 
 But he s always been there, waitin , just waitin . With 
 you, kiddo, it s different. You had a run for your 
 money. And you re one o those clean-mapped Bmm- 
 mels that the unthinkin female of the species seems to 
 have a weakness for, mistakin your quietness for cold 
 ness and dreamin it would be some jinks to thaw you 
 out. I ain t so sure that I wouldn t like to show you what 
 a grand little thawer I am myself, if I could only get you 
 woke up once. No, son, don t send for the reserves. 
 You re still safe. I ain t she-vampin any Canucks these 
 days without a little encouragement and you ve never 
 even given me a pinch-hitter s openin . But in spite of 
 all that, Capt n Kidd, I ain t against you. I m for you, 
 strong. But I m just a little stronger for Torrie. And 
 if she s got a chanct to make harbour, I m goin to be the 
 busy little buntin tug to help warp her in. If I ve gotta, 
 I m goin to testify to every eagle-eyed beak on the bench 
 that you was fond and foolish, that night when the only 
 longin you had was a longin for ice-water and solitood. 
 It ll sure nail me down as a charter member of the An 
 anias Club, but I ve got the gumption to see it through
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 359 
 
 because I ve got the hunch it s the only way that s left 
 to straighten out Torrie s life. And now I want another 
 pint o Pilsner, for I ve talked until I ve got a throat like 
 a limekiln ! " 
 
 Storrow sat staring at the pert-eyed child of the chorus 
 who had gone pirouetting through his close-shuttered 
 house of life, amazed at her audacity, yet even more 
 amazed at what that audacity had revealed to him. It 
 would take time, he knew, to reassemble and reorganize 
 what had been thrown into such sudden riot. 
 
 " And there s another point I want o put into your 
 ear," continued the cool-eyed Pannie. " Torrie s too new 
 at this stage game, of course, to take a tumble to when 
 the old-handers behind her are crabbin her points. And 
 stage-work, when you once get to know it, is sure war to 
 the knife. Torrie, you see, is still so busy puttin over 
 her part she can t keep an eye peeled for the wolfers she 
 has to work with. But just let little Hermie spot one o 
 those old-timers tryin to shoulder off into the backdrop, 
 or wiggle so much as a finger on one of his star s big 
 lines, or cut a laugh short or cross in on a scene arid 
 flatten the punch out of her picture just let the eagle- 
 eyed Hermie lamp any o those dodges and see him come 
 down on em like a ton o bricks. Does he watch her? 
 Say, he watches that woman the same as a she-tiger 
 watches her offspring! " 
 
 But Storrow was not interested in the tricks of drama 
 tic rivalry. He was more interested in the suddenly 
 snarled-up drama of his own existence. 
 
 " Then it s all settled on and decided," he asked as 
 Pannie put down her glass, " that I m to be the victim of 
 a collusive divorce, whether I want it or not, whether I 
 approve or disapprove of entering into conspiracies?" 
 
 Pannie nodded her head. 
 
 " Yes ; you re it," she calmly acknowledged. " You re 
 the beetle on the big pin. And wrigglin won t do any 
 thing more n give you an extra pain in your little in-
 
 360 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 nards. But since you mention it, son, why re you so set 
 against givin Torrie her freedom ? " 
 
 " I ll answer that question by asking another," was 
 Storrow s retort. " Can any such action as that be taken 
 in a city like this without having the whole sordid mess 
 dragged through the newspapers? Can a woman who s 
 become a Broadway star obtain a divorce without having 
 every detail of it bandied about? " 
 
 " No, Cap n Kidd, you can t. You can t cook up a 
 case like this and then primp up your kisser and say you 
 want the papers sealed. All you can do is put the soft 
 pedal on by havin the case unopposed. And even then 
 they ll sure get it into big type, for the stars is what the 
 rubes want o sit up nights readin about. It ll be ban 
 died, all right." 
 
 The stricken look that crept into his eyes at the same 
 time that a deeper colour swept up over his face did not 
 escape her. She studied her half -empty beer-glass for a 
 full minute before speaking again. 
 
 " This doesn t listen like painless dentistry, I know. 
 And Pannie isn t goin to pull that old stuff about it 
 hurtin poppa more n it hurts little Willie. But it s one 
 o the times when plain talk is the only kind that s goin 
 to do any good. And if I ve had to hand you out some 
 thing that s goin to give you a cramp in your think-tank, 
 don t run away with the idear I m not for yon, kid ! " 
 
 Storrow continued to brood over what Pannie had 
 said as he took her home to her rooming-house and left 
 her at that side-street rookery which stood as a sort of 
 ironic monument to her respectability. Even after he 
 had turned back into Broadway, and without being con 
 scious of either time or direction moved northward with 
 the thinning tide of midnight stragglers, he continued to 
 review the situation which Pannie had revealed to him. 
 
 It had been a tangled skein, he admitted as he crossed 
 Columbus Circle and surrendered to the silent invitation 
 of the Park and its appeasing wintry solitudes, a welter
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 361 
 
 of bright threads and dark. It now seemed without pur 
 pose, unless one were willing to dignify as purpose a 
 constant and unreasoning hunger for happiness. Yet 
 all the world wanted to be happy, he contended as he 
 strode on, following the curving driveway deeper into 
 those midnight solitudes until the twin rows of lamps 
 and the stately elms reminded him that he had reached 
 The Mall. And he had only done what all the world 
 did. 
 
 He stopped, in the midst of that night as mild as a 
 night in May, and stared up at the stars that hung above 
 the tangled lacery of the elm-tops. Then he looked east 
 ward and westward, towards Fifth Avenue and Eighth, 
 from which even now the subdued noises of the city stole 
 to him. But they came musically, moderated and mod 
 ulated by distance. And that, he told himself as he paced 
 the whispering quietness of The Mall, is what life must 
 be: an achieved and guarded tranquillity in the midst of 
 tumult. 
 
 Then the stronger aura of light above Broadway caused 
 him to think of Torrie again. And he remembered that 
 she too had been hungry for happiness had been over- 
 hungry for happiness, he amended, and he found in that 
 new phrase a new avenue for speculation. Yet invariably 
 and inevitably that avenue led back to himself. He too, 
 in his over-eagerness, had thought only of himself, was 
 still thinking only of himself, of the atom which counted 
 so little in the infinitudes of time. 
 
 Most men, when confronted by conditions such as his, 
 would have sought the companionship and counsel of 
 their kind. But Storrow, in this respect, stood different 
 to most men. He nursed both the instincts and the habits 
 of the confirmed solitaire, the pagan-like inclination for 
 solitude during his moments of stress. And having en 
 dured his uncompanioned travail, he found the whelps 
 of peace once more nosing against his body. In the midst 
 of his darkness came light. That relieving delivery
 
 362 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 failed to take on any touch of high emotional colouring. 
 It was marked by no sudden and vast transformation. 
 But he was conscious of a change, a clarifying and re 
 leasing change, mystified as he remained as to its source 
 and its inspiration. Somewhere deep down in his heart, 
 as the first inkling of this change crept over him, a small 
 glimmer of warmth seemed to return to life. It was the 
 light, he told his own slightly bewildered soul, which no 
 man must let go entirely out. He was confronted by 
 ignominy, and he must save himself from it. Above 
 everything else he must guard and redeem his own self- 
 respect. And as he once more took thought of his own 
 infmitesimally small and struggling ego, confronted by 
 forces it could never overcome, he grew into a compre 
 hension of the timeless paradox that he who gives, re 
 ceives. It was Torrie, now, that he had to think of. He 
 could make the only sacrifice that was left him to make. 
 He would give Torrie her divorce. 
 
 He knew well enough what this meant. It meant 
 nothing spectacular or heroic, no gathering of serried 
 spear-points into his own breast. But he would have to 
 leave New York, leave it for good, leave it so Torrie 
 could have that field for her own. In going, he could 
 carry away with him the thought that he had done it for 
 her own good. He would at least have that to sustain 
 him. 
 
 Yet his decision brought with it a subsidiary impulse 
 which he found hard to understand. It left him with a 
 keen yet half-impersonal desire to see Torrie again, a 
 feeling, now that he had made sure in his own mind that 
 he was going back to Canada, not unlike the longing which 
 one has for a farewell glimpse of the once beloved dead. 
 He could go to her now, he knew, without trepidation, 
 almost without regret. Then he stopped short, with a 
 question which brought a bitter-sweet pang to his body. 
 Supposing, even yet, and in the face of everything - 
 supposing, should that meeting prove auspicious, Torrie
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 363 
 
 might startle him with the claim that it was not too late, 
 that life began ane\v with every new day, that they too 
 might still - But he smothered the thought as a woods 
 man smothers the coals which if unguarded might grow 
 into a conflagration. 
 
 Storrow, the next day, lost no time in attempting to 
 carry out his decision to see Torrie. Those attempts, 
 however, were not altogether satisfactory. He tele 
 phoned twice to the huge apartment-hotel in which she 
 was installed since her success, before being able to speak 
 to her for a moment over the wire. Even then she 
 seemed oddly hesitating and restrained, so much so, in 
 fact, that Storrow finally concluded that she had been 
 speaking with other persons undesirably close to her. 
 But she made an appointment readily enough, suggesting 
 the next afternoon, which was not a matinee-day, at four 
 o clock. 
 
 The next day at noon, however, a sedate-voiced woman 
 who explained herself as Miss Throssel s private secre 
 tary called Storrow up on the telephone and requested 
 that the appointment be postponed until Thursday at 
 three, when Miss Throssel would be disengaged and very 
 glad to see him. 
 
 It was Torrie herself who called up, when Thursday 
 arrived, and asked him if he could conveniently make 
 his call at five that afternoon instead of three. She was 
 very, very busy, she explained in a hollow and somewhat 
 listless tone over the wire, and she hoped the later hour 
 would not be inconvenient for him. Storrow, as he hung 
 up the receiver and went methodically on with his pack 
 ing, solaced himself with the thought that she still re 
 mained in ignorance of his decision as to Krassler s ac 
 tion. And she would be less indifferent and less his 
 enemy, he felt, when she knew the truth. 
 
 Yet that momentary depression of spirits returned to 
 him when on Thursday afternoon he presented himself 
 at Torrie s hotel and ran the gamut of door-man and
 
 364 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 office-clerk and uniformed page and solemn-eyed secre 
 tary. Miss Throssel, it appeared, was dressing, but 
 would be able to receive him in five minutes time. It 
 began to dawn on him, even before he entered the ante 
 room where a small and sinewy masseuse waited beside 
 a shabby and patient-eyed lace-pedlar, that the nurturing 
 currents of triumph were already causing Torrie to 
 emerge from a mere person into a personage. He wit 
 nessed the delivery of a box of American Beauty roses, 
 as long as a child s coffin, and beheld a capped and aproned 
 maid lead a snapping King Charles spaniel out through 
 the room where he waited. He heard the tinkle of a 
 telephone-bell, followed by the carefully modulated voice 
 of the bespectacled secretary. Then he caught the sound 
 of Torrie s voice, in the room beyond the closed door, the 
 once familiar voice with an altogether novel contralto lilt 
 to it, even in its listlessness. Then the door opened and 
 a brisk and blonde man with pale blue eyes and a bristling 
 moustache stepped out. He carried a black bag in his 
 hand, and in his movements was an odd mingling of the 
 autocratic and the deferential. Storrow was inwardly 
 debating whether he was a Swedish " rubber " or a Ba 
 varian hair-dresser when the woman with the suppressed 
 and secretarial manner announced that Miss Throssel 
 was now at liberty. 
 
 Storrow, as he stepped through the opened door, found 
 Torrie waiting for him. 
 
 She had apparently just slipped on a loose and flow 
 ing dressing-gown of unrelieved black. In it, as she 
 stood confronting him from the centre of the room, 
 she looked exceptionally tall, with an almost intimidat 
 ing hint of the pontifical in her attitude. She was 
 paler and thinner than usual, the tissue of the once milky 
 skin having taken on a translucence which was new to 
 it. Yet it was only her face, Storrow saw, which had 
 lost its old-time contours, the throat and arms, for all 
 their effect of bloodlessness, remained as round and firm
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 365 
 
 in line as ever. Her hair, he noticed as he stood there 
 assailed by the mingled odours of benzoin and cut flowers 
 and pcau dc Espagne, was much lighter than it had been. 
 And as he stood there, trying to decipher why these out 
 ward alterations could produce the impression of a Torrie 
 depersonalized and translated into a stranger, he found 
 himself very unhappy and ill-at-ease. His reaction to 
 that condition \vas a heavy effort at facetiousness. 
 
 " And who is the stately person in spectacles ? " he 
 inquired as the impersonal-eyed secretary quietly closed 
 the door behind him. It was little more than an effort 
 on his part, as perverse as it was forlorn, to brush aside 
 the veils of formality that had been draped between 
 them, between them who had once been so intimate. 
 But he could not help recalling, as the untimeliness of that 
 query came home to him, what Charlotte Kirkner had 
 once said about the big moments of life having the trick 
 of taking on the aspects of littleness. 
 
 " That s my watch-dog," was Torrie s slowly intoned 
 answer. Her face hardened a little and she forced her 
 self to meet Storrow s frankly uncomprehending eyes. 
 Then she shrugged a shoulder, with a diffidence which 
 seemed new to her, as she moved across the room in her 
 flowing black to speak for a moment into a telephone 
 concealed in what looked like a doll s house of brocaded 
 silk. 
 
 Storrow, as he waited, caught sight of the small fig 
 urine of The Tired Model on the far side of the room. 
 
 " I m sorry I had to keep you waiting," he found Tor 
 rie saying to him. " But that was Schoenberg who just 
 went out. And to get Schoenberg to work with you for 
 an hour is like getting a visit from royalty." 
 
 Storrow was impressed, as she spoke, by the deeper 
 and fuller timbre in her voice, as though the organ had 
 taken on some new and unnatural power. He noticed, 
 too, the elision of the " r s " in her speech, which left it 
 more Anglicized, more formalized and full-throated. It
 
 366 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 was the speech, he remembered, which tradition had al 
 ways imposed upon the stage-star. And Torrie was 
 now one of them. 
 
 " It doesn t matter in the least," he said, referring to 
 his wait. " You re busy, of course, now you ve got a 
 success on your hands." 
 
 " But it s not a success, Owen," she said in a manner 
 which reminded him that she was much the more self- 
 possessed of the two. " Smoke Signals hasn t been a 
 success." 
 
 " It seems to have the ear-marks of one," he unctuously 
 contended. And again she shrugged her shoulder. It 
 was a new trick of gesture that was exotic, unmistakably 
 theatric. Storrow even wondered if it were something 
 she had learned under the tutorship of Krassler. He 
 stirred restlessly, with an involuntary movement of im 
 patience. 
 
 " I wish I could ask you to smoke," she said in her mild 
 and impersonal tones, noticing the movement. " But 
 Krassler insists that it s bad for my throat." 
 
 " It would be, of course," acknowledged the other, 
 without giving thought to what he was saying. 
 
 " There are so many things one has to be careful about, 
 now," she told him, almost in a tone of complaint. But 
 his mind was still on other days. It seemed odd that he 
 should remember her as he had seen her once as he stood 
 beside her bed. Her face had seemed slightly swollen, 
 and her mcuth was open as she breathed, so that he could 
 see her tongue. A sour odour of wine had hung about 
 that sleeping body, even as he had noticed the snow-white 
 purity of the uncovered neck and breast. And now he 
 tried to solace himself with the thought that she was at 
 least escaping that sort of thing. Her drink, from this 
 time forward, was to be the champagne of success. That 
 would leave no call for other intoxicants. 
 
 " Krassler s been forcing the run of Smoke Signals," 
 she was saying to him. " It was his star, you see, and
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 367 
 
 not his play that made the hit. So the play has got to 
 go back to the warehouse, and I ve got to go through that 
 awful battle again." 
 
 " What battle ? " asked Storrow, disturbed by the 
 weariness in her voice. 
 
 " Why, this new production of mine that Krasslers 
 working on. He s amazingly shrewd and clever at this 
 sort of thing, Owen, so much cleverer than the outsider 
 ever imagines! He prophesied exactly how Smoke Sig 
 nals would go, and" he made his plans accordingly. 
 That s why he snapped up the American rights for Clear 
 ance Papers while the other New York managers were 
 still waiting to see how it was going to go in London. 
 He saw that Smoke Signals would do for a launching, 
 but that it couldn t carry me far. With Clearance Papers 
 it will be different. That will have to be a legitimate 
 success. We ll have the London production to stand up 
 against, and I ll have more of a straight part to make 
 good in. And look at the size of it," she added as she 
 crossed the room and took up a much soiled and thumbed 
 and over-scrawled manuscript in its tattered blue cover. 
 " Imagine merely having to memorize that number of 
 sides ! And besides all the work we re doing on Clear 
 ance Papers, rehearsing some days as much as seven 
 hours at a time, we ve got our eight performances every 
 week of Smoke Signals, and all the other things that you 
 simply can t escape." She stared with preoccupied eyes 
 out of the rose-draped window, as she added: " It leaves 
 so much depending on just one person!" 
 
 " So, after all, there s nothing really more enslaving 
 than success ! " he ventured as he grew into a realization 
 that what he had foolishly interpreted as a spirit of 
 tremendous reservation between them was actually a pre 
 occupation with more imminent materialities. 
 
 She looked about at him, with a slow movement of the 
 elaborately coiffured head, as though pricked by some 
 muffled asperity in his words.
 
 368 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 " Oh, no ; everybody s awfully kind," she languidly 
 acknowledged. "But I seem to be always tired, nowa 
 days. I don t sleep the way I used to, and I so often get 
 up tired in the morning. And every day there is that 
 same awful grind. And I have to watch my health, of 
 course, and take the very best care of my throat, and find 
 time, in some way, for an hour s sleep every evening be 
 fore I go on, and " 
 
 She was interrupted by the muffled shrill of her tele 
 phone-bell. Storrow noticed her sigh as she reached for 
 the instrument and answered the call. Then she sat 
 staring ahead of her, for an abstracted moment or two. 
 
 " No," she repeated, " they are all very kind and good. 
 But I always seem to be tired. And I feel sometimes, 
 that I m nothing but a machine, a machine that belongs to 
 other people and must never be allowed to get dusty, or 
 out of order, or lie idle, no matter how creaky the ma 
 chine may feel in some of its joints. And sometimes, 
 when I m left alone with nothing to think about, it seems 
 almost foolish. But when I m back at the theatre, with 
 my make-up finished and my first-act gown on, and I 
 hear the orchestra and the opening lines and get a glimpse 
 from the wings of that big audience waiting waiting 
 for me, Owen, for me, I forget all the rest. And all I 
 remember is that I m going to hold that audience, and 
 make it laugh and cry and acknowledge my power over it. 
 And that somehow seems to make up for all the rest." 
 
 Storrow, as he heard her, remembered what Pannie 
 Atwill had already said to him. And he began to see, as 
 Torrie sat explaining in detail to him just how Krassler 
 wanted her to handle her role in Clearance Papers, that 
 she was indeed lost, not only to him, but to the rest of 
 the world. She was lost to that world, he felt, in spite 
 of the fact that she had given herself to it. She im 
 pressed him as a woman about to be sacrificed to some 
 pagan and unappeased idol. So engrossed was she in 
 that hieratic immolation that it suddenly impressed him
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 369 
 
 as foolish even to recall the purpose which had brought 
 him into her presence. It would be kinder, he told him 
 self, to leave unsaid what he had intended to say. And 
 he was not sorry when the lady with the secretarial air 
 tapped lightly but determinedly on the outer door. 
 
 " You see," Torrie said with a resentful head-move 
 ment towards that door, " I can t even have ten minutes 
 to myself ! " 
 
 He took his departure, disturbed by a confusion of im 
 pressions. The most prominent of these was the re 
 membered coolness of her fingers as he shook hands with 
 her and the awkwardness of his own tongue as he at 
 tempted to wish her unqualified success in her work. He 
 went away wretched, with an indeterminate desolation 
 eating at his heart, yet at the same time and in some 
 mysterious manner more satisfied in mind, as though 
 that visit, for all that it had left unsaid on his part, had 
 given a sense of completion to what might otherwise 
 have retained a disturbing air of being unfinished. 
 
 Two hours later he succeeded in getting in touch with 
 Herman Krassler over the telephone. He explained 
 that he was no longer in a position to oppose any action 
 which his wife might take towards obtaining her free 
 dom, and that Krassler could act accordingly. The lat 
 ter coolly, and with no slightest trace of triumph in his 
 voice, announced that this course was undoubtedly the 
 best for all concerned. 
 
 Two days later, as Storrow was packing the last of his 
 belongings in the last of his trunks, he was summoned to 
 the door of his denuded studio by a sedentary and chloro- 
 tic-looking clerk from an attorney s office, who thrust 
 into his hand a document of undoubted legal aspect. 
 
 You re Owen Storrow, aren t you ? " asked the em 
 issary of the law. 
 
 And Storrow, in acknowledging that he was, knew that 
 he had duly and formally accepted service in his wife s 
 impending action for an absolute divorce.
 
 CHAPTER TH IRTY 
 
 SPRING comes tardily but none the less beautifully 
 to that country which may be said to lie in the lap 
 of the Great Lakes. It comes with a sense of 
 release after imprisonment, of abandonment after re 
 straint, of tenderness after tempest. It comes with a 
 more riotous surrender of bud and leaf and blossom, a 
 more rhapsodic outburst from April s innumerable choir 
 ing throats, a more impassioned craving for loveliness in 
 every azure-mirroring runnel and trillium-starred valley 
 and robin-haunted hillside. It comes over lake and field 
 and pine land and burgeoning orchard with the breath of a 
 thousand strange odours, as silvery sweet as wind-blown 
 bugles, transforming umber into emerald, awakening 
 magically into life that Sleeping Beauty known as Earth 
 and arraying her in a radiance so etherealized that man, 
 beholding it, finds his vernal gladness in some way shot 
 through with sadness and the immemorial rapture of liv 
 ing in some way touched with tears. 
 
 Storrow, once more installed at Pine-Brae, beheld this 
 return of Spring to his native land, and beheld it with 
 a confusion of feelings. He was not altogether happy, 
 and he was not altogether unhappy. Periods of vague 
 restlessness seemed to alternate with periods of content 
 ment equally indeterminate. But he remained, on the 
 whole, in a neutral zone of toleration touched with ex 
 pectancy, as though somewhere and at some unlooked-for 
 time the even tenor of his life might snap off into tumult, 
 tumult like that of a white-watering rapid snatching the 
 sluggishness out of a river. He was oppressed at times 
 with a feeling of convalescence, as though he were emerg- 
 
 370
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 371 
 
 ing from a long and weakening illness which had sapped 
 his power of reacting to things. He nursed, in his more 
 self-conscious moments, an impression of being older 
 than he ought to have been, with an invalid-like detach 
 ment from activities and influences that should have meant 
 so much to him. 
 
 But the colouring of life, outside this persistent apathy 
 which he soon saw it would be useless to combat, was not 
 unpleasurable and not untouched with its satisfactions. 
 He even discovered, as he found himself more and more 
 involved in the reconstruction of a property too long 
 neglected, that daily toil and material distractions could 
 medicine those teasing and less tangible susceptibilities 
 of the spirit, so that as Spring advanced his interest in 
 the work about Pine-Brae became both more engrossing 
 and more personal. It brought, however, a new clearness 
 to his eye, a deepened colour to his lean cheek, an old- 
 time hardening of hand and limb-muscles. Sometimes, 
 indeed, after a full day of labour in open sunlight arid 
 ozonic northern air, he seemed narcotized into an indif- 
 ferency that stood side by side with contentment and 
 reached out a russet hand to well-being. 
 
 But the one thing that weighed on him, during those 
 earlier weeks at Pine-Brae, was his loneliness. He had 
 declined to reinstate Uncle Abe in his old-time position 
 of housekeeper, preferring that all ties with the past 
 should be kept as tenuous as possible. Even as things 
 were, that past had the habit of cropping unexpectedly 
 out, with a geologic sort of remoteness, as it did when 
 he found one of his wife s hat-pins stuck in the back of 
 the old oak mantel-piece, and still again when he stumbled 
 on what remained of one of Torrie s inadequate little 
 flower-beds with its scattering of fern-roots and wood- 
 violets which she had so carefully yet so childishly trans 
 planted. 
 
 He had difficulty, in fact, in finding a suitable house 
 keeper. For the first two months, indeed, he had en-
 
 372 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 dured an old Englishman and his wife, each equally ad 
 dicted to the use of gin and each equally capable, when 
 under its influence, of prolonged and noisy combat. The 
 cooking was far from acceptable, the disorder of the 
 house increased, and the projected work on orchards and 
 buildings and line-fences fell far behind schedule. Then 
 came an orgy and battle too open to be condoned. After 
 dismissing the still gin-soaked combatants from Pine- 
 Brae, Storrow lived quite alone for a few weeks. But 
 this effort at " batching it/ as the vernacular of the coun 
 tryside phrased such experiences, proved neither desirable 
 nor profitable. When a neighbour told Storrow of an 
 orphan-girl " up the Lake " whose mother and father had 
 been drowned crossing the ic.e to Pelee Island, he jour 
 neyed to the farmer who was giving the unfortunate girl 
 temporary harbourage, in the hope that she might be 
 suitable as a housekeeper. When he learned that she 
 was still a mere girl of twenty, however, he was disposed 
 to let the matter drop. But her temporary guardian en 
 tertained no such qualms. 
 
 " She s a good girl, is Crystal Cant well," the younger 
 man was assured, " a girl who s always kept to herself, 
 sir, with no nonsense about men-folks. She s quiet- 
 tongued, sir, and as willin a worker as you d wish, and 
 not the kind to be botherin a young gentleman who s not 
 disposed to be botherin with her ! " 
 
 Storrow, as he waited while the girl was being sum 
 moned into his presence, seemed to find the room touched, 
 not so much with the atmosphere of the slave-market, 
 but more with the calloused and careless materialities of 
 the stock-yard. And this impression was in no way 
 diminished when Crystal stepped silent and embarrassed 
 through the door. She stood, after one quick and com 
 prehensive glance at him, with her eyes fixed on the floor, 
 blushing rose-red as Storrow reiterated his doubts as to 
 the expediency of a woman so young assuming control 
 of his household.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 373 
 
 " That woman, sir, is one in a hundred," proclaimed 
 the Legree of the invisible auction-block. And still again 
 the younger man studied the girl with the waves of rose- 
 colour suffusing her slightly averted face. The first im 
 pression she gave him was one of heaviness, of rustic 
 timidity. The exposed skin of her neck and arms was a 
 butternut brown, and the mouth was undeniably large, 
 just as the lips carried a line of undeniable sensitiveness. 
 It was only her hair and her eyes, at that first inspection, 
 which seemed attractive to him. Her hair, bleached by 
 the open sun from a hazel-nut hue to almost the tint of 
 Roman gold, gave him the impression of something tawny 
 and untamed, with a look of desert vastnesses in her face. 
 And the eyes themselves were large and limpid, a clouded 
 grey-blue that showed violet in a strong side-light. They 
 had the trick of taking on a look of pathos as she fixed 
 her gaze on any one object, a look of wistfulness which 
 might have been termed beautiful if it had appeared 
 more consciously alert. Her russet neck was full and 
 round and unlined, with more a suggestion of columnar 
 strength than of softness. Her hands, too, were large, 
 but startlingly well-shaped and suggestive of secret re 
 finements and secret capabilities. It was the black fringe 
 of lashes, Storrow s trained vision promptly noted, which 
 made her eyes look darker than they really were. He 
 noticed, as he questioned her, that she did not speak 
 quickly, and assumed that things would seldom stir her 
 acutely. Yet she carried an odd impression of capacity 
 for feeling, of emotions carefully herded and corralled. 
 And as her shyness vanished and the blood-waves re 
 turned less frequently to the dusky pigment of the cheek 
 he found his earlier misgivings slipping away from him. 
 She herself, he felt, was answer enough to those mis 
 givings. 
 
 So the bargain was struck, and two days later Crystal 
 Cantwell and her cow-hide trunk tied with rope arrived 
 at Pine-Brae.
 
 374 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 With her advent came a change to the neglected ami 
 musty-aired house in the midst of its whispering pine 
 groves. Chaos in some way became comfort. Even 
 solitude became less oppressive. The new maid set to 
 work with a peasant-like inarticulateness, agreeing to any 
 thing which Storrow, as her master, might suggest, with 
 her large and limpid eyes resting abstractedly on his face 
 as he talked to her. They were not stupid eyes, he was 
 beginning to see, and what he had first thought of as their 
 bovine placidity seemed more the serenity of a soul incor- 
 ruptibly at peace with itself. Sometimes, too, the model 
 ling of her bared arm, of her uncovered neck or shoulder, 
 startled him into a momentary admiration. As she went 
 on with her countless household tasks, without comment 
 or complaint, he began to respect her capacity for silence. 
 She seldom smiled, it was true, but on those rare occa 
 sions when the slow red lips did relax, there was a quiet 
 w r armth to the smile which seemed to atone for its tardi 
 ness. Yet this spirit of reluctant mirth seldom extended 
 to her eyes, which were habitually mournful. When she 
 sat, she usually stooped forward a little, and if her slow 
 ness of movement, when not at work, impressed Storrow 
 as swan-like, the absence of easy grace from those move 
 ments made him think, not of a swan floating along 
 tranquil surfaces, but of one that had ventured on land 
 and was moving a little wistfully towards some lost and 
 more natural element. What puzzled him most, perhaps, 
 was her air of sky-line spaciousness when in the open. 
 There she had the trick of falling into unconsidered pose s 
 and positions which came to him with the seal of the 
 immemorial on them, impressing him as instinctively true 
 and poignant and universal. 
 
 But all the -while, as Spring merged into Summer and 
 Summer brought its promise of fulfilments, she went 
 about her tasks apparently fortified by some large and 
 secret knowledge. Just what it was, Storrow could not 
 guess. He was able to talk to her with less restraint as
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 375 
 
 he became more accustomed to her presence there. But 
 she was never the one to begin these talks. She listened 
 patiently, with her limpid eyes always on his face. In 
 time, she even added a ribbon to her hair and fell to 
 consulting the mail-order catalogues on the matter of 
 emollients and underwear. In hot weather she would 
 unbutton her shirt-waist and roll down the loose collar, 
 exposing a whiter fulness of throat and shoulder. Stor- 
 ro\v caught himself, at different times, studying the mild 
 roundness of that full throat, with a feeling as remote 
 and yet as disturbing as the beat of nocturnal tom-toms 
 to the children of the children of the jungle. The girl 
 would go on with her work, giving no sign of her knowl 
 edge that she was being covertly watched. And Storrow 
 would suddenly remember uncompleted labours in field 
 and orchard and packing-shed, for the task of transform 
 ing Pine-Brae into the order and beauty which he more 
 and more wished for it was not one calling for idleness. 
 
 The summer-end, indeed, brought a stress of labour 
 that proved a tax on the time of both master and maid, 
 for the position of master and maid had been preserved 
 between them. She had eaten only after he had left the 
 table, though once or twice he had returned and seated 
 himself opposite her, to clear up more fully some point 
 about the household or the farm-work. Then came the 
 day, when the season of small fruits was at its height, 
 when he announced that the old arrangements about meals 
 was a waste of time and labour. From then on, he told 
 her, it would be better for them to have their meals to 
 gether. And from then on, too, he fell into the habit of 
 addressing her as " Crystal." 
 
 So Crystal, instead of waiting until he had finished, 
 quietly took her place opposite him. Storrow found that 
 change both so pleasant and so convenient that it struck 
 him as foolish in being so late in suggesting itself. Yet 
 more than ever that companion confronting him across 
 their small island of snow-\vhite linen seemed fortified
 
 376 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 by some large and secret knowledge which he could neither 
 name nor understand. Her limpid eyes carried no look 
 of elation, but there were times when some elusive note 
 in her bearing implied that she had won a victory. She 
 became more fastidious in her dress, more studious in the 
 manner in which she did up her heavy braids of hair. 
 She even asked for books to read in the evening when 
 her work was done, books which he considered " improv 
 ing." Once or twice he made an effort to describe to her 
 what his life in New York had been like, with a moment 
 ary wistful desire to revive memories which were becom 
 ing disconcertingly phantasmal. But imagination and 
 curiosity alike seemed unable to bridge, with her, the inter 
 stellar immensities between Pine-Brae and that far-off 
 city on its triangular island of unrest. And finding that 
 his intentions led only to a mutual depression, Storrow 
 made no effort to repeat them. 
 
 One night, on coming in for his evening meal, leg- 
 weary and rubicund and placid-minded from his long 
 hours of labour in the open air, he found Crystal in diffi 
 culties. She had cut a gash in her hand while trying 
 to open a glass sealer of fruit, and when he first caught 
 sight of her she was struggling, none too successfully, 
 to tie a strip of cotton over the wound. He stopped and 
 stared at her as she held one end of the cotton-strip be 
 tween her strong white teeth and with her free hand at 
 tempted to draw the knot tight. 
 
 " Hadn t I better do that for you? " he suggested. 
 
 " I think I can manage it," she said, without looking 
 up at him. He laughed, and an answering smile came to 
 her grave face, at her lack of success. 
 
 " We ve got to have a neater job than that," he said 
 as he placed a chair for her and she sank obediently into 
 it. 
 
 Then he took the wounded hand in his own and in 
 spected the cut. It was neither deep nor disturbing, but 
 Storrow bent over it abstractedly, arrested by the rich
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 377 
 
 scarlet of the blood which oozed slow drop by drop from 
 the short wound. It impressed him as the flaunting 
 crimson banner of bodily vigour and health, as an ad 
 vertisement of some superb animal vitality which had 
 hitherto escaped his attention. And as he carefully re- 
 wrapped the hurt hand he found a sudden satisfaction in 
 the nearness of her breathing body to his own. He 
 turned away hurriedly, in fact, as soon as the knot had 
 been tied in the strip of red-stained cotton, disquieted by 
 a reaction which could come with so little warning. For 
 at that accidental contact of flesh with flesh he had felt 
 in his blood, remote and mysterious, the beating of an 
 cestral tom-toms. He became suddenly aware of a pre 
 cipice, a precipice which skirted disturbingly close to the 
 path he had been following. 
 
 As they ate their meal together that night Storrow 
 found his mind dwelling more actively on the loneliness 
 which engulfed them, on their remoteness from the outer 
 world and its interests. As he stared across the table at 
 the woman confronting him he saw that her colour was 
 higher than usual. Her eyes, too, seemed unwilling to 
 meet his, and the silence that fell on the room became 
 electric, alarming. 
 
 He sat watching the rise and fall of the faded but 
 freshly ironed pink shirtwaist which covered her bosom. 
 He watched it for a long time. Then he slowly rose 
 from his chair, crossed to her side of the table, and stood 
 beside her. 
 
 She neither glanced up nor moved as he rested one 
 hand on her heavily plaited hair. With his other hand 
 he slowly lifted her chin and stared into her face. There 
 was no look of wonder in her eyes. She neither moved 
 nor spoke. And the next moment, stooping lower, he 
 kissed her. 
 
 Why he did so. he scarcely knew. Instinct told him 
 that it was inexpedient. After-thought warned him, even 
 as he felt the vital warmth of the full red lips, that the
 
 37 8 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 movement was in the nature of a compromise, a capitula 
 tion to a wayward and momentary impulse. But the 
 scar of some old wound ached in his heart. He felt 
 alone in the world, as alone in the world as he knew the 
 woman at his side to be. Life, he felt, still owed him 
 something, though he was unable to define the nature 
 of that debt. Yet the thing was all wrong, he reiterated 
 as his thoughts went back to other and earlier days. 
 And the memory of those days caused him suddenly to 
 feel sorry for the limpid-eyed woman whose hand he still 
 abstractedly held in his. He had remembered how little 
 it was he could ever give her ; the husks and ashes of his 
 wasted youth, the remnants of a life worn shoddy and 
 thin. His spirit had been left dry, he told himself, even 
 though his veins could still sing with the wayward blood 
 of man s desire. 
 
 As he stared down at the girl s hand, roughened by 
 wind and water, hardened and calloused by toil, it struck 
 him as equally tragic that she might demand nothing 
 more of him than this same remnant of a wasted life, 
 that she might stand ready to be doubly cheated, by her 
 self as well as by him. And that filled him with a vague 
 pity which prompted him for a moment to cover that 
 thrice pitiful hand with his own, almost protectingly, be 
 fore he turned and walked out of the room, without a 
 spoken word. 
 
 But the ice had been broken. The silent compact of 
 intimacy had been established. It was only too easy, 
 when they sat alone and idle again, for him to reach over 
 and draw her passive head down against his shoulder. 
 When he kissed her, this time, he did so with less hesita 
 tion and less self-torturing exhumation of memories. 
 It was less impersonal, that kiss, and less meditative. 
 Yet even then, and still later when he kissed her still more 
 impetuously and more frequently, he felt sorry for her. 
 He was haunted by the impression that he was doing her 
 a vast injustice. But their meals, as they sat one on
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 379 
 
 each side of the scrupulously white-covered table, became 
 more animated with talk. Through the lengthening 
 autumn evenings he fell into the habit of reading aloud 
 to her as she sewed beside him. And in that companion 
 ship he found a completeness which was even disturbing, 
 hinting as it did at the immaterial masonries of self- 
 sufficiency which were slowly and insidiously immuring 
 them from the rest of the world. 
 
 The completeness of that divorce came unexpectedly 
 home to him when the mail brought to Pine-Brae the 
 heavily embossed announcement of Charlotte Kirkner s 
 marriage to Chester Hardy. Along with it came a letter 
 from Charlotte herself, a brief but blithe letter telling 
 him they were off to Capri for the winter and that if 
 Owen would meet them in Naples about the end of March 
 they could all have a wonderful Easter together in Rome. 
 
 " You ve had bad news/ said the red-handed girl who 
 had paused for the second time, in her task of clearing 
 away the supper dishes, to glance at Storrow as he sat 
 before the fire turning this letter over and over in his 
 hand. 
 
 " Two old friends of mine have been married," he said 
 as he realized the uselessness of going into further ex 
 planations. But he was able to laugh a little. " And 
 you wouldn t call that bad news, would you, Crystal; a 
 man marrying the woman he loves ? " 
 
 She looked at him with solemn eyes. 
 
 " Not if the woman loves him back," she said as she 
 piled dish after dish on her round black tray. And the 
 unconsidered sagacity of that statement did not come 
 home to him until he had lighted his lantern and trudged 
 out to the stables to make sure his stock was all safe and 
 sound for the night. 
 
 It was not, indeed, until the end of a winter which had 
 proved strangely mild for the Lake region that anything 
 occurred to disrupt the quiet flow of the uncounted days. 
 Storrow noticed, one crisp March morning of inter-
 
 380 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 mingled frost and sunlight which had sent him in to 
 breakfast with tingling body and momentarily elated 
 spirits, that Crystal s face as she poured his coffee was 
 both clouded and colourless. 
 
 "Aren t you feeling well?" he asked as he took the 
 steaming cup from her hand. 
 
 " I m frightened," she said, avoiding his eyes. 
 
 "Frightened?" he repeated, disturbed by the pathos 
 in her downcast face. " What are you frightened 
 about?" 
 
 " About something that s happened," she finally ac 
 knowledged. 
 
 " What is it? " he asked, still at sea. 
 
 " It s something we should have thought about, in time," 
 she said as she compelled her gaze to meet his. And she 
 knew, the next moment, that he finally understood. 
 
 He found himself accepting, without any positive re 
 action, a truth which should have been not only disturb 
 ing but alarming. That she herself should have accepted 
 it calmly, as the women of her race had doubtlessly ac 
 cepted it for ages back, did not impress him as unusual. 
 But he remained puzzled by the discovery that he himself 
 was not as deeply stirred as he ought to have been. In 
 one way, indeed, he stood not ungrateful for this new 
 contingency which had been thrust upon him, since it 
 carried a promise of giving selvage to the fabric of ex 
 istence, direction and purpose to what had hitherto been 
 merely drifting. 
 
 They were married promptly and without ceremony by 
 the Baptist minister of a neighbouring town. Storrow, 
 who had encountered a number of small but irritating 
 obstacles in obtaining a license, since the Dominion in 
 which he resided seemed disposed to ignore the legal 
 status of a foreign divorce decree, did not take his hollow- 
 chested reverend friend into his confidence with regard 
 to that earlier marriage, though he made the fee as sub 
 stantial as his purse would allow.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 381 
 
 Out of the happenings of that day Storrow remem 
 bered the threadbare parsonage parlour with its worn 
 plush furniture, the pinched and plaintive face of the 
 clergyman mumbling so hurriedly through the abbreviated 
 ritual, the imperturbable quiet dignity of the girl who 
 hung on his arm, the peering faces of children, appar 
 ently as thick as rabbits in a warren, and the tired voice 
 of a woman speaking beyond a closed door and repeating 
 her warning of " Don t feed the gold-fish, dearie ! " He 
 remembered the cool and thoughtful eyes of his wife as 
 they drove home side by side, and he remembered another 
 ceremony of the same nature, in an unspeakably disor 
 dered and stuffy office which had smelt of tobacco-smoke 
 and mouldy books. But he was stirred and disturbed 
 less by the memory than the atmosphere of mustiness and 
 forlorn emptiness which hung about it. Time, he began 
 to see, was working its purpose, Time the avenger, Time 
 the healer. 
 
 His wife, as the quiet tenor of life was resumed at 
 Pine-Brae, did not seem to ask for any added intimacy. 
 They soon took up the old routine again, and fell back 
 into the old ways. But there was a difference. Incon 
 spicuous filaments of feeling and association were day 
 by day thrown out; subliminal ties more and more as 
 serted themselves ; more ponderable and at the same time 
 more imprisoning became the obligations to a newer and 
 unlocked for life. If Storrow struggled at all against 
 this sense of impending anchorage, of ineluctable rootage, 
 his struggle was both a secret and an ineffectual one. 
 Yet as Spring came once more to the lap of the Great 
 Lakes he found himself possessed by an unreasoning and 
 slowly increasing unrest. He explained to Crystal that 
 there were business reasons why he should go to New 
 York for a week. 
 
 To this she offered no trace of objection. She sur 
 prised him, indeed, by saying the change would do him 
 good, and crowned him with a vague misery by the
 
 382 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 meticulous care with which $he made ready and packed 
 the things he would need for the journey. 
 
 " If I never come back," he said, laughing to dissemble 
 the vague homelessness that gnawed at his heart, as he 
 said good-bye to her, " you ll see that Lady Dorcas 
 doesn t eat that second setting of eggs, won t you?" 
 
 " You ll come back," quietly responded his wife, with 
 her cool and limpid eyes resting for a moment on his 
 face, where, for some unaccountable reason, the colour 
 slowly mounted and receded.
 
 CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE 
 
 STORROW, as his train came to a stop beneath the 
 arches of the New York viaduct, was troubled by 
 a world-strangeness w T hich tended to chill and 
 cramp his soul. The spectacle of countless thousands, 
 intent on their own ends, still again impressed him with 
 his insignificance, reviving the thought that he was noth 
 ing more than an infinitesimal atom in that whirling mael 
 strom of life. He found himself surrounded by fellow- 
 travellers immured in their own interests, hurrying on, 
 with an empty-eyed preoccupation peculiar to city throngs, 
 to their unknown tasks and destinations. He stared into 
 flat-windows and caught glimpses of life, bald life in 
 crowded and sordid hives, incredibly close at hand and at 
 the same time incredibly remote from him. He emerged 
 into a world of colour, of hurried intentness touched 
 with lightheartedness, of grinding wheels and proces 
 sional street-crowds, of uncomprehended panoramic 
 movements about gay-windowed shop-fronts, of dizzy 
 iron structures concealing their gaunt limbs under casings 
 of stone as white as ivory, of clean-swept morning 
 avenues with an old-world quietness still on them and 
 the huddled centuries confounded by those tip-tilted 
 streets known as skyscrapers within a stone s throw of a 
 chalet from France and a Roman palassio and a Greek 
 temple of books, pallid-walled and pagan-simple, that 
 might have survived through the cool and quiet of time 
 from the day of Eratosthenes. 
 
 It was a mellower and a more pictorial world, Storrow 
 found, a world which was not slow to weave about him 
 its old allurement at the same time that he awakened to 
 
 383
 
 384 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 his increasing estrangement from it. He was coming 
 back to it, he saw, as a traveller visits a foreign country, 
 unengulfed by its anaesthetizing tides of action, sensitized, 
 because of his very aloofness, to that glamour which at 
 taches to any terra incognita, yet vaguely wistful for 
 some accidental tie to renew his relationship with his own 
 kind. For, even in a year or two, Time, in that city of 
 change, had wrought its changes. And as though in 
 sympathy with his own secret emotions, that April morn 
 ing was slowly overcast with clouds blown in from the 
 sea, the shadows in the narrow street-canyons became 
 less defined, traffic-policemen and taxi-drivers appeared 
 in tarpaulins, and by noon the city had settled down to a 
 half -day of warm but steady Spring rain. . . . 
 
 It was late in the afternoon when a dripping taxi-cab, 
 with the tire-chains slapping its rear fenders, turned 
 from the deserted east side of Madison Square into 
 Twenty-Fourth Street and drew up at the curb before an 
 old red-brick studio building. The passenger in the grey 
 raincoat stepped out of the taxi, paid his fare, and watched 
 that vehicle as it went slapping off again through the 
 steady torrent that seemed to have washed clean the very 
 bones of the city. Then he looked briefly but thought 
 fully up at the red-brick house-front, surprised at the 
 sense of contraction that reigned there, as though the 
 walls in front of him had shrunk and withered and rough 
 ened like the skin of a winter apple. He hesitated for a 
 moment as he stepped in through the gloomy doorway, 
 and hesitated still again to sniff the assailing odours as he 
 slowly mounted the stairs. 
 
 When he came to the top floor he stopped, leaning ab 
 stractedly against the worn balustrade and staring along 
 the half -lighted hallway. Then he advanced slowly to 
 wards the second door on the left where, hearing the 
 sound of music, he stood with knitted brows, listening. 
 It was a piano that he heard, played half idly as a 
 woman s voice hummed the air, at times scarcely audible.
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 385 
 
 But he knew that it was the " Kennst du Das Land ? " 
 song from Mignon, and he continued to listen, more to 
 the notes than to the humming voice, with a sudden and 
 uncontrolled constriction of the throat. 
 
 After the last chord had died away he continued to 
 stand there with one hand against the shabby door-frame. 
 But he took a deep breath as he finally raised this hand 
 and tapped on the faded panel. 
 
 There was a wait of several moments. He was on the 
 point of repeating the knock, in fact, when the door was 
 opened by a surprisingly young but sedentary-looking 
 woman with bobbed hair. She wore a smudged painter s 
 smock on which a small bunch of violets held together 
 with tin-foil seemed to have been freshly pinned. And 
 her own almost colourless face, still unlined and round 
 with youth, seemed to echo in its shadows the violet-blue 
 colour-tones from the little nose-gay that rose and fell 
 with the breathing of her round young breast. 
 
 The stranger in the doorway, for a moment, seemed to 
 experience some difficulty in explaining himself. 
 
 " I wonder," he finally ventured, " if I might have a 
 look at this studio of yours?" 
 
 The girl with the bobbed hair seemed unable to under 
 stand him. Yet a more pointed inspection of his figure 
 assured her he was something more than a mere street- 
 beggar. And the Prussian-blue eye with the animal-like 
 glow in it impressed her as an amazingly gentle eye, as 
 an eye to remember, and, if she could get rid of the slight 
 haggardness which gave it an untimely impression of 
 age, as an eye which she would some day like to paint. 
 
 " I m afraid I m interrupting you," the stranger was 
 saying. " But the truth of the matter is, this room was 
 once I mean that I myself lived here once, and " 
 
 That must have been some time ago," interrupted 
 the girl with the bobbed hair, almost sceptically. And 
 her visitor remembered that, as time was reckoned in her 
 city of unrest and change, it was a very long time ago.
 
 386 THE WINE OF LIFE 
 
 He moved his head slowly up and down, in assent. 
 Then the young \voman, as she swung the door wider, 
 laughed awkwardly, apparently infected by the awkward 
 ness of her visitor. It was then and only then that this 
 visitor caught sight of the long-haired young man seated 
 on the piano-bench, with his back to them. His position 
 there implied suspended action, patient withdrawal from 
 a colloquy in which he could have no interest, and served 
 to increase the embarrassment of the sober-eyed intruder 
 who stood peering about into the shadowy corners of an 
 all too familiar chamber. 
 
 " I m afraid it s not very tidy," ventured its new pro 
 prietor as she followed that slow-moving stare about the 
 room. " And I suppose this old skylight leaked in your 
 day, just as it does in mine? " 
 
 But that question, if it was meant for a question, re 
 mained unanswered. The quiet-eyed man seemed still 
 intent on his inspection of the studio, wall by wall and 
 point by point. Between the two big windows, where 
 his Sentinel Wolf had once stood, were pinned an 
 array of girls heads in sepia, all amazingly alike, all 
 amazingly doll-like in their dehumanizing prettiness. 
 Some of them, he remembered, he had seen on magazine- 
 covers, but he gave them little time or thought, for they 
 were not to be reckoned among the links which were lead 
 ing him back to the past. Yet many other trivial details 
 of the room, as the rain continued to beat on roof and 
 skylight with an immeasurably sorrowful sound, he 
 drank in hungrily and with an increasing look of abstrac 
 tion in his eyes. For it seemed a very long time ago, 
 now, since this was his home. And as he continued to 
 stand there, communing with his memories, confronting 
 the days of his dead past, the youth with the averted face 
 reached up to the piano-top for a small stringed instru 
 ment known as a ukelele, and sounded a not insignificant 
 chord or two on its wires. The woman in the smock 
 also moved half impatiently to one of the windows,
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE 387 
 
 against which the rain was beating quietly and steadily. 
 
 Her visitor s rough face, which seemed to have lost its 
 earlier russet tone, coloured slightly with embarrassment. 
 He murmured something about being very sorry, and 
 also being grateful, and turned and walked slowly to 
 wards the door. 
 
 Yet when he had passed out through that door he 
 turned and looked back again. He did so without seem 
 ing to be conscious of the girl who had resumed her posi 
 tion at the keyboard, while the youth with the ukelele 
 stood close beside her. He heard, yet did not hear, the 
 concerted chords which the two instruments threw out 
 across the quiet shadows, for at the moment he was con 
 sorting with the kindly ghosts of other days. And as 
 he saw the youth with the ukelele lean closer over the girl 
 on the piano-bench it came poignantly home to him how 
 he himself was merely an atom in the infinite currents of 
 Time, a moment s whisper in the vast and inexplicable 
 chorus of life. The dimly-lighted room with its shadows 
 and disorder, its faded furniture and its time-yellowed 
 walls from which the shallow sepia faces smiled so mock 
 ingly, took on a ghostly aspect as he stared at it. Yet 
 its very drabness seemed for a moment to stand touched 
 with glamour, enriched with irrecoverable memories. 
 They were not happy memories, a great many of them. 
 But Time, in some way, was striving to redeem them, to 
 heal them of their uglinesses. In that room, he felt, the 
 best of his life lay sealed and coffined. It held his past, 
 his dead past, that could never again know wonder and 
 rapture and youth. 
 
 He turned away and went slowly down the familiar 
 worn treads of the stairs, feeling old and neutral, with 
 abstraction in his eyes and a dull ache in his heart. He 
 stepped out into the grey light of the late afternoon 
 weighed down by a vague regret for his wasted life. He 
 wondered if it might have been different, if only he had 
 awakened earlier to his power of directing it differently.
 
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