Short Fiction

sleep. There was music from the Ambassador grill till late and a fringe of working girls hung about the carriage entrance waiting for their favorites to come out. Then a long-protracted quarrel between a man and a woman began in the hall outside, moved into the next room and continued as a low two-toned mumble through the intervening door. He went to the window sometime toward three o’clock and stared out into the clear splendor of the California night. Her beauty rested outside on the grass, on the damp, gleaming roofs of the bungalows, all around him, borne up like music on the night. It was in the room, on the white pillow, it rustled ghostlike in the curtains. His desire recreated her until she lost all vestiges of the old Jenny, even of the girl who had met him at the train that morning. Silently, as the night hours went by, he molded her over into an image of love⁠—an image that would endure as long as love itself, or even longer⁠—not to perish till he could say, “I never really loved her.” Slowly he created it with this and that illusion from his youth, this and that sad old yearning, until she stood before him identical with her old self only by name.

Later, when he drifted off into a few hours’ sleep, the image he had made stood near him, lingering in the room, joined in mystic marriage to his heart.

V

“I won’t marry you unless you love me,” he said, driving back from the studio. She waited, her hands folded tranquilly in her lap. “Do you think I’d want you if you were unhappy and unresponsive, Jenny⁠—knowing all the time you didn’t love me?”

“I do love you. But not that way.”

“What’s ‘that way’?”

She hesitated, her eyes were far off. “You don’t⁠—thrill me, Jake. I don’t know⁠—there have been some men that sort of thrilled me when they touched me, dancing or anything. I know it’s crazy, but⁠—”

“Does Raffino thrill you?”

“Sort of, but not so much.”

“And I don’t at all?”

“I just feel comfortable and happy with you.”

He should have urged her that that was best, but he couldn’t say it, whether it was an old truth or an old lie.

“Anyhow, I told you I’ll marry you; perhaps you might thrill me later.”

He laughed, stopped suddenly. “If I didn’t thrill you, as you call it, why did you seem to care so much last summer?”

“I don’t know. I guess I was young. You never know how you once felt, do you?”

She had become elusive to him, with that elusiveness that gives a hidden significance to the least significant remarks. And with the clumsy tools of jealousy and desire, he was trying to create the spell that is ethereal and delicate as the dust on a moth’s wing.

“Listen, Jake,” she said suddenly. “That lawyer my sister had⁠—that Scharnhorst⁠—called up the studio this afternoon.”

“Your sister’s all right,” he said absently, and he added: “So a lot of men thrill you.”

“Well, if I’ve felt it with a lot of men, it couldn’t have anything to do with real love, could it?” she said hopefully.

“But your theory is that love couldn’t come without it.”

“I haven’t got any theories or anything. I just told you how I felt. You know more than me.”

“I don’t know anything at all.”

There was a man waiting in the lower hall of the apartment house. Jenny went up and spoke to him; then, turning back to Jake, said in a low voice: “It’s Scharnhorst. Would you mind waiting downstairs while he talks to me? He says it won’t take half an hour.”

He waited, smoking innumerable cigarettes. Ten minutes passed. Then the telephone operator beckoned him.

“Quick!” she said. “Miss Prince wants you on the telephone.”

Jenny’s voice was tense and frightened. “Don’t let Scharnhorst get out,” she said. “He’s on the stairs, maybe in the elevator. Make him come back here.”

Jacob put down the receiver just as the elevator clicked. He stood in front of the elevator door, barring the man inside. “Mr. Scharnhorst?”

“Yeah.” The face was keen and suspicious.

“Will you come up to Miss Prince’s apartment again? There’s something she forgot to say.”

“I can see her later.” He attempted to push past Jacob. Seizing him by the shoulders, Jacob shoved him back into the cage, slammed the door and pressed the button for the eighth floor.

“I’ll have you arrested for this!” Scharnhorst remarked. “Put into jail for assault!”

Jacob held him firmly by the arms. Upstairs, Jenny, with panic in her eyes, was holding open her door. After a slight struggle, the lawyer went inside.

“What is it?” demanded Jacob.

“Tell him, you,” she said. “Oh, Jake, he wants twenty thousand dollars!”

“What for?”

“To get my sister a new trial.”

“But she hasn’t a chance!” exclaimed Jacob. He turned to Scharnhorst. “You ought to know she hasn’t a chance.”

“There are some technicalities,” said the lawyer uneasily⁠—“things that nobody but an attorney would understand. She’s very unhappy there, and her sister so rich and successful. Mrs. Choynski thought she ought to get another chance.”

“You’ve been up there working on her, heh?”

“She sent for me.”

“But the blackmail idea was your own. I suppose if Miss Prince doesn’t feel like supplying twenty thousand to retain your firm, it’ll come out that she’s the sister of the notorious murderess.”

Jenny nodded. “That’s what he said.”

“Just a minute!” Jacob walked to the phone. “Western Union, please. Western Union? Please take a telegram.” He gave the name and address of a man high in the political world of New York. “Here’s the message:

The convict Choynski threatening her sister, who is a picture actress, with exposure of relationship stop Can you arrange it with warden that she be cut off from visitors until I can get East and explain the situation stop Also wire me if two witnesses to an attempted blackmailing scene are enough to disbar a lawyer in New York if charges proceed from such a quarter as Read, Van Tyne, Biggs & Company, or my uncle the