1907.
He had called her "his Brunhilda" with honest sincerity; with all his heart he thought he meant it. Ofcoursehe was fighting for success to put in Martha's hands. His honor was pledged to win for Martha's sake. His deep affection for Martha underlay his delight in learning to play the game. All this went without saying, and he said it even to himself with less and less frequency during the next year.
He had, as a matter of fact, less and less time and strength to give to anything outside his business. This focussing of energies began to have its usual result. He felt the eyes of the older men in the organization turned on him with curiosity, with approval, and with a little jealous alarm which gave him the utmost pleasure. He saw in the younger men's eyes the appraising, combative, watchful look with which one tackle surveys his opponent. All his life-long mystic intensity of conviction of the worthwhileness of winning games, flared and blazed hot and lusty in his heart as he recognized that he was now head over ears in the turmoil of the biggest game he had yet encountered.
Of course the real purpose of the game was to take care of Martha—that was axiomatic!
The middle of his third year in business was marked by a considerable raise in salary and an enlargement of territory with corresponding increase from sales commissions, which proved conclusively that he was now accepted as one of the live-wires of the organization. And when barely a week later, Professor Wentworth was notified of his appointment as exchange professor for the next academic year to one of the German universities, the moral of the two events was clear. It was time for a rather long engagement to end; time forMartha to set a definite date for the wedding before her father's departure for Berlin.
With the setting of the date the relations of the three took on another aspect—like a change of lighting at the theater. Everything was as it had been, and yet everything was different. Professor Wentworth considered himself already eliminated by the younger generation, and although they invited him to share the new home on his return from the year in Germany, he assured them that he would under no conditions cumber up the background in any such fashion, and began to make plans for joining forces with another widowed professor whose children were now all married. His resigned, philosophic acceptance of his soon-to-be exit from their stage set them further from him and closer to each other, as if he had already stepped out from their lives and closed the door behind him. They occasionally felt a little self-conscious awareness of being alone with each other which was new to them. As Martha quaintly phrased it, she now began to feel not only that she was engaged but that she was going to be married. The feeling was a new one, gave a new color to her thoughts and sometimes made her feel a little queer.
Neale told her that he understood this and felt with her that he was stepping forward into a new phase of their relation; and he did feel this at intervals. But while this was the only change that had occurred in Martha's life, it was overshadowed in Neale's by his intuition that he had now come to a crucial moment in his business career. He recognized perfectly the feel of the moment in the game when one side or the other wins, although half the time may yet remain to be played through. In football it lasted but an instant, that well-remembered poise on the very crest of the will-to-win. In business it would last—he had no idea how long—but he felt that he had been well coached by life, that his training had left him with the endurance to stick it out—years if necessary. His pride as a fighter hardened and set. He felt again the single-hearted passion to win out at any cost to himself or others which had been the meat and marrow of his football days. In short he began to be considered by all the experienced eyes about him as a remarkably promising young American business-man.
But now for the first time he did not pass on to Martha the excited exuberant sense of triumphant force, the salty tang of pushing a weaker man where he had not wished to go. Nowadays when he stepped into Professor Wentworth's apartment he found Martha with excitements and interests of her own—of her own and his too. After the first slightly startled recognition that he had opened the door upon a quite unexpected scene, he always focussed his eyes to the other distances, and discussed as animatedly as Martha the relative advantages of suburban and upper-west-side locations, and looked over with her the list of apartments to let. But when he left her, he had scarcely reached the bottom of the stairs before he was again in his own world, crouching warily with tense muscles, alert to catch his opponents off their balance. He occasionally cast a mental glance back at the scene he had left, but it was already out of focus. As a matter of plain fact he did not care a picayune whether they lived in a suburb or on 145th Street, or in what kind of book-case they kept their books, nor whether they had twin beds of mahogany or white enamel. He told himself that what he did care about was that Martha should be suited in those details about which she seemed to care so much.
One evening he found even as he was with her, his attention wavered, dimmed, and fixed itself on a deal he was planning with his grandfather, a small affair which he hoped to put through on the side, but from which, as he was to handle it by himself, he expected quite a brilliant percentage of profit. He answered Martha at random, came back to her world with a guilty start, excusing his lapse by explaining to himself that he was eager for that profit only because it would considerably add to the sum he was laying by for the equipment of the new home. As he sat listening to Martha and agreeing with her, and at the same time speculating about the age and condition of the oak on the tract he hoped to buy, and how much of it was big enough to make quarter-sawing profitable, he thoughtwhimsically that he was as good as married already, that he was doing just what was done by all the husbands he knew.
Martha stopped suddenly, as if he had spoken aloud, or as if she had been struck by a new thought, "Neale, do you realize it! We're really going to be married—just like anybody else. I don't believe I ever thought we really would!"
"Didn't you?" he said. "I always had a sort of notion we would." But although this was not the first time she had expressed this feeling, something about her accent, or aspect, crystallized into tangible form anticipations which had been as vague in his case as in hers.
About this time he began to notice that instead of misty, in-the-distant-future glances at what marriage was to mean, came concrete, definite, recurring pictures of one scene after another in the life before them. His imagination, never very quickly aroused or very flexible by nature, began to be prodded by circumstances into an unwonted activity on the subject of Martha and this marriage. He saw her in his mind's eye across the breakfast table, on the other side of the hearth, or even sitting on the arm of his chair with his arm around her, as she often sat now while they talked over their plans. But (it was one of the first intimations he had of the storm before him) he encountered some curious dumb resistance deep in his heart when he tried to think of her more intimately with the veils of girlhood gone, as his wife. Something within flashed up with chivalric swiftness to shut out such thoughts. He amazed himself once or twice by feeling his face hot, as though with shame at the idea of making Martha, Martha whom he loved so much, his wife. What sort of morbid prudery was this? As soon as it was passed he found it incredible; and felt it again. "Perhaps it wasn't so incredible after all. Maybe that was the price you paid for knowing something about life." It was inevitable—what must be felt by every man who had not been brought up in a vacuum. And it was really all right and nothing to be squeamish over. Human nature is what it is, and there's no use dressing it up in high-sounding names!
If that had been all he had to worry him! But there were other things. More than once he had felt a new exasperation rise in him when Martha would go on discussing the color of wall-paper and window-curtains. Hang it all, he was ready to agree with her whatever way she wanted it—wasn't that enough without dragging him into a discussion of details he didn't understand or care about? Nothing of any great importance, such passing moments of impatience, and yet he had gloried in his certainty that Martha and he agreed on everything! More troubling still—he remembered so distinctly the first time—bending together over a book, a strand of Martha's hair had touched his cheek. He could still feel the shiver with which he had drawn away—true, he had not realized what was taking place—had felt subconsciously as if a spider were walking across his face—but just the same, three years ago though he might have recoiled, his next impulse would have been to snatch that tress of hair and kiss it. Why didn't he kiss it now? Why, here it was again, just as if they were married already: that was the way so many husbands he knew acted with their wives! Of course all this was to be expected, too: you get used to things; you can't go on being thrilled by familiar sensations. In the nature of things marriage could not be as transcendent as people pretended, when men and women are so far from being transcendent!
And yet little by little whenever in the pauses of his business he gave a thought to his personal future he felt it all there again, heavier and heavier, weighing down leadenly every thought which he tried to send ahead into the life he meant to make so happy for Martha.
At this, for a short time, he fell into an inner panic, lost his head, thought himself abnormal, incapable of ordinary human life. He was afraid to see Martha, and was in his heart immeasurably relieved when she was called off by a wedding in her Aunt's family to a somewhat lengthy visit in Ohio. He wanted to have it all out with himself while she was gone—make an end of all this nonsense. But what he did was to think of it as little as possible.
With Martha gone he was able to occupy his mind entirelywith business problems, and the release from tormenting personal worries was grateful to him. He had been intensely ill-at-ease. He was relieved that his discomfort was passed, quite passed.
He opened Martha's first letter with pleasure. Letters were all right: they didn't harry you with emotional over-tones. He read her entertaining account of the prostrate condition of both families over the elaborate wedding ceremony impending. Everybody it seemed was frantic with nerves—except the bride-to-be and her young man, of course, who paid no attention to anybody or anything but themselves. Neale thought he felt a note of good-natured satire in this, and smiled appreciatively. That was exactly whathefelt about fussy weddings. Martha always felt as he did.
With the thought an inner door clanged open, and sickeningly there was the whole thing to begin again! What if Marthahadbeen feeling as he had? What did a decent girl feel before her marriage anyhow? Did she dread it perhaps—or on the other hand, had she too lost the thrill—were they already like some of the married couples he knew who kissed with listless lips, looked at one another with stolid glassy eyes? No, Martha was all right! Martha wouldn't change! But didn't that make it worse? What did she expect to find in marriage? Could he give Martha what she expected to find in marriage? He had never once before thought of that, absorbed as he had been by his own disquiet. He was overwhelmed by this new complication, and for many days would not allow himself even to glance at it. He hated the idea of thinking about it. He hated the whole idiotic tangle he kept getting into. Why, damn it, getting married was no such complicated affair! Look at all the imbeciles who sailed into it, a vacuous smile on their lips and nothing whatever in their heads, and made a success of it! A man wasn't a woman, thank God! and couldn't be expected to divine what a woman wanted out of marriage. People who did not expect too much of it, or of anything, were the only ones with intelligence.
Just at this time he got his first chance at a big order. An industrial suburb was projected to house the operatives of anew machine-tool manufacturing plant in the Connecticut valley. The contractors had never been Gates customers and no one in the office thought that young Crittenden had the ghost of a show of landing the order—no one, that is, but young Crittenden himself. The contract would run up into the millions of board feet: forgetting Martha, marriage, every personal element in life, Neale started after it.
He studied the buyer, the situation, the sort of lumber needed. He sat up nights going over the architect's specifications; made up alternative schedules for spruce, oak, yellow pine interior trim; clear or "grade A" shingles. Then, delving deep in the information he himself had collected, he rechecked his figures, shaving the margin of safety down till he was sure his bid would be lower than any other firm's, and yet safe—no danger of leaving the firm in the hole. The Gates Lumber Co. could count on its usual percentage of profit and Neale Crittenden on his biggest commission yet, to add to the sum he was laying aside for the new home.
When his bid was finally in the contractor's hands, and routine office and road work threatened to leave him with time to think, Neale turned hastily back to his private deal with Grandfather. Grandfather's intimate knowledge of all the possible timber-tracts in his region was a gold mine. There were always wood-lots in the back valleys being sold for taxes, or for very little because, all the older generation dying off, the western heirs did not care enough about the little old family land-holdings to come east and investigate them. And even if they had, knowing nothing of the eastern or indeed of any lumber market, they had no notion of the potential value of their inheritance. Neale resolved to take part of his little savings for the use of the new household, to buy up a few such wood-lots, and turn them over at a big profit. He felt sure of himself now, sure he could swing such an operation, and taking advantage of the Labor Day vacation, he went up to West Adams to spend the week-end and talk it over with Grandfather.
Nothing ever changed in Grandfather's home. Grandfather and Grandmother did not look so very much older to Nealeat twenty-four than they had to the eight-year-old, having always looked as old as possible. Jennie, the hired girl, had aged more than the old folks, he noted, as she went with him up the steep stairs to the little slant-ceilinged room now incredibly low and tiny.
He sat down on his little-boy bed, a thousand forgotten memories standing thick about him. He saw his mother leading in the sleepy little Neale, and now he saw that she was young, young as Martha, so young herself ... as young as Martha! He was the strong, purposeful, determined young man, sitting on the bed and looking at that long-past scene, and yet he was also the sleepy little boy, feeling on his lips his young mother's kiss. "Good-night, Neale." "Good-night, Mother."
"Oh, damn it!" he cried impatiently, dismayed to feel that with the memory of his mother, he was aware as though of a palpable presence in the room there, of women ... of women as different from men, emotionally exacting, wanting something different from men, with some fine-spun impossible ideal of what could be had out of human nature, troubling, hampering the real business of life ... and yet all the time an inevitable part of things! For an instant he felt brutally angry with them, with their superfine weakening notions, and had for the first time the exasperated feeling that they were an element in life which you could neither do anything with, nor do without. The ewig-weibliche,—good heavens! All it did was to snarl things up! Neale got up from the bed and went over to the wash-stand, amazed at himself, his fit of fury passed, unable to conceive what had started him off on such an explosion. What under the sun possessed him, veering around like a crazy weather-cock from one high-strung mood to another, more shifts of feeling in a day than he had ever used to know in a year! He would put it all out of his mind, all! He simply would not allow himself to think of it again, to think of all that, he would not!
He went hastily down the stairs and fell to talking business with Grandfather, talking to very good purpose, too. To-day their projects went far beyond the little tract of second-growth oak they had first thought of. Grandfather, wily old spider,at the center of a wide-flung web, knew many tips which he was more than willing to pass on to his favorite, Neale,—Neale who had the other half of the combination and could sell at top prices what Grandfather could buy at rock-bottom. He was in fact delighted with Neale's ideas and the energy with which Neale laid his plans. "Why, you're worth two of your father!" he cried exultantly, as they sat again, the next morning on the porch and went into details. "I never could see why Dan'l didn't get on better! He never seemed to care enough about it, and by thunder, you got to care if you're going to get anywhere." The old man paused, took breath, and brought out, with an attempt to sound casual, "I've thought sometimes 'twas your mother made him that way. She's a nice girl, your mother is, Neale, but I never thought shepushedyour father the way she ought to."
He glanced at Neale a little apprehensively, but the young man said nothing. He was following out a thought, not entirely new, a guess which he had subconsciously made before, that there was a long hostility between his mother and his grandfather. The idea stirred a great deal in his own head, which he felt no desire to examine.
"I tell you what, Neale," said the old man, observing the other's silence and emboldened by it. "I tell you what, Neale," the old man took his pipe out of his mouth and spoke more loudly, "don't you get to thinking women are too darnedimportant. That's what your father did. He was going good ... but that softened him right up."
Neale still said nothing, a succession of well-remembered scenes from his early home-life evoked by his grandfather's words.
The old man cried out now, in a burst of long-contained resentment, "Your father ought to have gone enough sight further than he did! Yes, he had ought to!" He looked keenly into the hard, strong face of his grandson and said proudly, "Butyouwill!"
Neale felt so queer a disquiet at all this, that he got up abruptly and clapped on his hat. All kinds of different pieces were fitting together before his eyes into some sort of a pattern. He wanted to get away by himself and look at it to see what pattern it was.
"I'm going up to the far wood-lot," he said. "I can remember when the pines were just coming in there. I want to see how much they grow in fifteen or twenty years." But he had no interest in the young pines, and he was not at all thinking of them as he strode hurriedly up the stony sunken wood-road. He was thinking of Martha. Out of nowhere there had come to him the recollection of saying good-by to her at the station. He had kissed her good-by, and as clearly as though he had just now stooped to her, he could remember that the very instant their lips met he had been wondering if he would have time to get down to the office before Mr. Gilman came in from Chicago. He wanted Gilman's support for his scheme to follow the shifting center of supply with a branch office in the Gulf States. Were the figures he wanted filed under L for Louisiana or Y for Yellow pine?
He laughed rather grimly to himself, marching rapidly up through the second-growth birch on which with one corner of his eye he was automatically setting a possible value. If Grandfather only knew, he wouldn't think he needed any exhortation to avoid uxoriousness. He was not very proud of that remembered moment at the station. It was all very well not to be uxorious but ...
When a clear tiny brook crossed the road, he stopped to draw breath, for, without knowing it, he had been hurrying as if not to miss an appointment up on the mountain. He saw his father stooping to say good-by to his mother at the train as the yearly summer vacation began. He had seen that good-by every June of his little boyhood, but he had never looked at it, till, a man grown, he now stood stock-still on the mountain and stared back through the years into his father's face. What he saw there was startling and troubling to him. He stood frowning sternly down at the brook. He was very, very unhappy and he resented his unhappiness. But his unhappiness was nothing to the remorse which now shook him. If that was what marriage could mean to a man and a woman, what right had he to ask Martha to accept whathe had to give? Martha was so fine, so true—dear, dear Martha! To his amazement, almost to his fright, he saw the brook waver and flicker and knew that the tears were in his eyes. For God's sake, what was the matter with him?
He sat down on a fallen log, looking back down towards the valley and found that far beneath him lay the sunburned, flat, upper pasture where in his junior year he had practised so fiercely to learn how to punt. He cast a glance of heart-sick envy back at the sweating, anxious boy who could conceive of nothing worse in life than to have a kick blocked. How lucky kids were, only they didn't know it, never for a moment to dream of such a heavy burden of obscure misery as that which now sickened his heart.
What was the trouble? Whatwasthe trouble? He had everything in the world a man could work for. Why then, did he stand there leaden-hearted, as wretched as a man who cannot pay his debts?
The feeling of oppression, of weight was intolerable, like a physical constriction. He stretched his great arms and shook himself and drew a long breath, trying to throw it off physically. In the back of his mind stood his father, looking down at his mother, but now he would not look him in the face, for if he did he would see that he was not in love with Martha, deep and tender as was his affection for her.
With this sudden involuntary formulation of what he had been fighting not to formulate, the trouble and restlessness and disquiet dropped away, and left Neale, sitting, his face gray and grim, looking steadily at what he ought to have seen long ago, at what he had known for a long time.
That was what the trouble was: hewasa man who could not pay his debt, and he owed it to the person he loved best.
Well, it was better, infinitely better now that he knew what there was to face. He could face anything, anything, if he could see it. His native energy rose up, that energy which had been so carefully and steadily trained to aggressive strength. He wouldn't take anything lying down! He would stand up to this!
The young man with the hard strong face sat as silent andmotionless as though he did not breathe. The bright sun wheeled slowly across the sky. The shadows stretched longer.
When he finally rose to his feet, stiff and lame with his long immobility, he had constructed a new little world in which to live, different from what he had foreseen but tolerable, probably all that could be expected by any one who had an honest mind. At least it was constructed on things exactly as they were.
These were the foundations and boundaries of his new world: a profound doubt as to whether any one outside of books is ever in love as men and women are traditionally supposed to be; a certainty that with his deep affection for Martha, his respect for her, his liking for all her ways, he could make her happy ... happy enough ...; and be happy with her ... as happy as any one in this world was likely to be; the probability that a normal healthy man married to a young and comely woman would fall in love with her sufficiently at least to satisfy any conception she would be likely to have of love, sufficiently to satisfy what any honest open-eyed man had a right to expect from love; a guess that in the long run such a marriage would be more to his taste (possibly also to Martha's) than a more absorbing, exciting union. It would certainly be all right for Martha if they had children. The point was that he could do infinitely more for her, advance and succeed and triumph, unclogged by too much personal life. He did not, he decided, looking back over his life, seem to be the sort of man who really cared much for personal life. He never had. His few tentative steps towards it had always made him miserable, a fish out of water. What he really did care for, what he had always liked when he got it, was a chance to use his strength and wits in competition with other men. Wasn't that after all the real business of life? Wasn't that after all what women wanted of men? That was at the bottom of the marriages he saw about him, in the homes of the older men where he occasionally was asked to dinner. He could give Martha all they gave to their apparently quite-satisfied wives ... and more, much more! ... because Martha was such a dear, dear girl.
And that was enough! Enough for any one! He did not feel very light-hearted, it is true. But life evidently was not a very light-hearted business. And he was no grimacing, God's-in-His-Heaven, professional optimist. You took what was coming to you. And what was coming to him was plenty good enough for anybody!
The thought of Father and Mother knocked at the door, but he turned the key in the lock, and started down the mountain to his grandfather, the most promising young business man who had ever entered the employ of the Gates Lumber Company.
Martha came into the room with a little rush as though she had been waiting impatiently to see Neale, and yet when she saw him she gave a little quavering "oh!" as of fright, and stood stock-still near the door.
Neale, conscious of nothing but his own heavy heart, was so startled that he had for an instant the fantastic notion that his mountain colloquy with himself was perhaps written on his face, and that Martha had read it at a glance. But before he could move, she had moved herself and come towards him as swiftly as she had first entered the room. She spoke swiftly too, as though she were afraid of losing her breath before she could say what she had to say; and yet she had already lost her breath, and was panting.
"Neale, dear, dear Neale ..." her voice was quavering and very low, "I must tell you quickly. Neale, I'm afraid I've done you a great wrong. Neale, I love you better than any one I ever saw, but," her voice sank so low Neale could scarcely hear her, "I don't want to marry you."
Her lips began to tremble. She hung her head, and Neale could see the dark red flooding up to the roots of her hair.
He was for a moment literally incapable of speech. She went on falteringly, "Out in Cleveland, at Margaret's wedding you know, everybody talking about getting married, and Margaret ... she's like my sister ... we're so near each other ... and we talked. She was just going to be married, and she thought I was, too. And I thought so. Truly, Neale, I'd never dreamed of anything else. And she talked to me as one woman about to be married talks to another—not girls' talk."
She began to cry a little now, though she made a great effort to control herself, drawing long, long breaths, and halting between her words, trying to bring them out quietly, "Neale,I'm afraid you won't understand. I don't know how to tell you, I don't know how to tell you! You see I never knew my mother and I never liked to talk intimately with other girls about ... about ... but Margaret is so fine and——" She cried out what she had to say in one burst, in a loud voice of pain, "Oh, Neale, when I saw Margaret with her lover I knew, I knew, I'd never loved you at all. I knew I'd hate you if we were married."
She turned away and leaned against the wall, sobbing, her face hidden in the crook of her arm. "What's the matter with me!" she cried desperately, brokenly. "Why don't I? Am I different from other women? I can't bear to hurt you so! I want to love you! What can I do with myself if I don't?"
The two stood there, the broken pieces of their life lying in a heap between them.
Over the heap, Neale took one long step and put his arms around Martha, so tenderly, so quietly, that she did not start or shrink away. She stopped sobbing, she stood still in his arms, breathlessly still as though she were listening intently, as though she were taking in some knowledge from a source not articulate.
She turned her face to his, and said abruptly, "Neale, it's just come to me.... I hadn't thought of that ... perhaps you don't really love me either, not inthatway ... perhaps you never did. Perhaps I've just found all of it out in time."
Neale was startled, frightened, unutterably desolate but he made no pretense of being taken by surprise. "I can't bear to give you up, Martha," he said looking down at her. "Perhaps what we have is all we could ever have. We may lose this and have nothing. Perhaps there really is nothing else. What we have is ... is ... very good to have." His face contracted in a pain that really did surprise him by its keenness. He was horrified at the idea of losing Martha altogether.
Martha gazed steadily into his face as if trying to understand what he said, their old habit of sharing things, of talking things over, strong on her. He noted how pale and drawn her face was, with dark rings under her eyes. She had been suffering, she too had had broken nights. And as he lookedhe saw from her eyes that she was no longer seeing him, but some inner vision.
She shivered and drew away from him. "Yes, there is something else ... something we haven't ... and it's what makes it all right," she said. "I'd rather have nothing at all ... nothing ...ever! than something that would make part of me shrink away from you. I couldn't stand that! I couldn't stand that!"
She had said the last words wildly, and she was back by the door now, as if ready for flight.
Neale sat down heavily in a chair, and hid his face in his hands. "All that this means," he said to himself as much as to Martha, "all that this means, any of it, is that I have not been man enough to make you love me."
At this she came flying back to him, incarnate tenderness, "No, no, Neale, Idolove you. I know in my heart that even if I should ever marry any one else, I'll never feel for anybody the affection, the trust ... I couldn't ... it's not that. Loving you as I do only makes it more impossible, more utterly impossible. You mustn't think this is just the nervous reaction from any sudden shock of knowledge. I knew ... I knew well enough what marriage is! But I hadn't felt it."
She moaned aloud in her bewilderment, "How can I tell you? How can I make you understand? I don't understand, myself. Why can't I give you what Margaret has to give?"
She was bending over him and now snatched his hand and caught it up to her breast, "Neale, I'd give anything to want to marry you! Anything! I've tried and tried. It's like a mountain between us.... I can't reach you through it. Neale, perhaps we're too much alike. Perhaps that is what brought us together, but that is what keeps us apart! We can't unite! I thought of so many things! We're like two chemicals that can't combine. They can't! That's the way they're made!"
Neale found himself resisting her certainty, although it had been his own. He sat up, suddenly astounded at all that was being said, and cried roughly, "Martha, do you know what this means? You are sending me away. What can I do withoutyou?" He caught at her hand. "Martha, why hunt for rainbows when we have the pot of gold in our hands?"
She shook her head. "It wouldn't be the pot of gold," she said sadly. "It would be a mess of pottage, and you mustn't sell your heritage for it, any more than I."
He looked at her hard, and saw that he had no hold on her.
"Oh, it's finished for me!" he cried bitterly, out of all patience. "If you send me away for some romantic notion, you need have no idea that I will marry any one else. I shall never have anything to do with a woman again."
She said steadfastly though her lips were trembling, "I think when it's a question of what's the finest in us, that nothing at all is better than a halting compromise."
"I don't know what you're talking about," he said angrily and for the moment truthfully. "You're ruining our two lives for some hair-spun fancy."
She grew paler, and said in a deep voice, "Neale, I have told you that I would hate you if you were my husband."
He turned away to the door. "Good-by," he said coldly.
She did not answer.
He went out of the door, and down the stairs. At the bottom he turned and came up again. He found her standing where he had left her. He said gently, "You're right, Martha."
She held out her arms to him. They kissed, sadly, wistfully, like brother and sister parting for a long separation.
Neale went away silently in a confusion so great that from time to time he stopped on the sidewalk till the street straightened itself out before him, and he could see where to take the next step.
Neale had set the wheels of his business life whirring at such speed and there were so many of them that they continued to turn clatteringly around and around after Martha had gone away, not only from him but from America; for she had sailed at once with her father for Berlin. Neale watched them whirring for weeks before he perceived that they were running down, and for weeks after that before he perceived that he felt no impulse to keep them moving. There didn't seem to be much point to things, any more. Martha had done what in his heart he wanted done. And yet he was far from satisfied. He missed her outrageously, missed having her there, didn't know what to do with himself. And yet he had not been overjoyed at what he had been on the point of doing with himself. He must be hard to suit, he thought, fretting to feel himself still confused and uncertain, with no zest in things. Damn it, whatdidhe want?
A week after Martha's departure he had a letter from Grandfather, written on blue-lined paper, reading, "Dear Neale: Wharton just came in to say he wants the Melwin spruce and heard you had bought them. He wanted 'em for twelve hundred (couldn't find out what you'd paid for them I guess). I said fifteen hundred and stuck to it. He squirmed some. But I knew through Ed that he wanted them for a New York order he's got for big stuff. And there aren't any others around here that'll come up to his specifications. So I made him toe the mark. He left a check for $300 (which I enclose) and will pay spot cash for the rest before beginning to cut."
Neale sat at his desk, looking hard at the piece of cheap paper which brought him the news that in a short time he would have eight hundred dollars more in the bank than he had had before. And without turning his hand over. All he haddone was to know that the Melwin spruce were worth a lot more than was thought by the Iowa cousin who had inherited that distant wood-lot. Easy money! Somebody had paid him high for that piece of knowledge,—who? Wharton, of course, would certainly get it out of somebody's else hide, or he would never have gone in for the deal.
He sat dreaming, remembering his timber-cruising trip, remembering the choppers and woodmen he had known around Grandfather's. Men like that would work all a year around in all weathers, all their days, to get as much as he would have for doing nothing.
He drew a long breath and turned to enter the check in his check-book. A queer sort of a world. And after all, he stood in much the same relation to the Gates family as the lumbermen did to him, working enough sight harder for enough sight less money. That seemed to be the way things were. But it didn't seem quite square.
A hasty mental calculation showed him that with this money he would have over two thousand dollars. Clear. Not so bad! He considered the matter, wondering why he felt no more elation, and decided that it was because he could not for a moment think of anything he specially wanted to do with two thousand dollars. Always before this he had thought he was making money to give to Martha. Was it possible that he had been using Martha as an excuse? No, no, he explained hastily to himself, the point was that Martha had, all women had, some definite use to make of money. It bought things they wanted and thought important, suburban houses and mahogany twin beds and what not. Martha could easily have spent that sum to buy things that pleased her. The only use he could think of for it was to use it over again to make more money. And then what? It didn't seem much of a life to do that over and over.
He looked around him at the busy outer office, filled with haste and a sense of the importance of its processes. There was more to it than making money. That was the foolish, reforming-professor's idea of "sordid business." You were in it, not because you wanted the money but because it was thebiggest game in the world, and it was fun to win out. All right then. Hewouldwin out.
But no matter how much time he put into his efforts to win out, there was a lot of time left over. Neale did not succeed in filling that leisure to his satisfaction. He went out more than he had ever before, accepted invitations to dinner from all the married men in the office and lunched with all the unmarried, and had them out for meals with him. But still there was time left over. He went to the theater, to loud hearty farces that made him laugh, at first; but they very soon seemed all cut by the same pattern and he found himself sitting them out as grimly and smilelessly as Americans read their comic supplements.
It was not that he was lonely because he was alone. Never in his life had he found the slightest alleviation to loneliness in merely having some one, any one, with him. The truth was that when he was alone he fell to thinking. And he did not know what to make of his thoughts. They mostly consisted of an answerless question, so answerless in the nature of things, that it was foolish to formulate it—the same old question you always ran into when you stopped to think, "what are you doing all thisfor, anyhow?"
In football days that question had been silenced by the instant fierce, all-sufficient answer, "For the team!" What was the present equivalent of the team now? It looked remarkably like Neale Crittenden, all by himself—not such a very big inspiring goal when you stopped to think of it. The best thing evidently was not to do much stopping to think.
One evening unwarily he allowed something alarming to happen to him, something worse than stopping to think. After a solitary dinner at Reisenweber's he strolled along 59th Street, and, as it seemed too early to go back to his room and he had nothing else to do that evening, stepped into a concert at Carnegie Hall. He stepped in to get rid of a few hours of his restless uneasiness and he came out so devoured by restless uneasiness that he could not think of going to bed, but walked up and down the streets for hours trying to forget theshouts of the brass, the long sweet cries of the violins. They seemed to call his name over and over ... to summon him out, up, to some glory ... little by little they died away, leaving him in the same flat, inner silence as before, hearing nothing but the banging clatter of the elevated and the clang of the surface-car bells. A little before dawn he went back to bed, exhausted. What sort of a life was this, anyhow?
He was less away from the city than usual, now, spent more time at his desk, which was usually in those days heaped with work that had formerly been done by other men. The office was shifting its routine, rearranging the work to meet the strain of the Manager's failing health. It was whispered that Mr. Gates—the "young Mr. Gates"—though only fifty-three, might have to pull out altogether. That would mean promotion all around. Neale knew by the character of the work on his desk that when promotion was served out, he would get his share.
Flittingly once or twice, it occurred to him that all the managers of departments were but mortal, and that in time all their private offices would be filled by the men now working at desks in the outer rooms. How would he like in the end to move into Mr. Gates' office, he wondered? This thought, casual and fantastic though it was, moved him to inquire whatever was the matter with Mr. Gates' health anyhow? He was told that the older man was "threatened with a complete nervous breakdown due to overwork." Neale like all other American business-men had heard that phrase all his life. The very wording of it was as familiar to him as the name of a standard make of soap or collar. But he found he did not after all really know what it meant. What happened to anybody who had a complete nervous breakdown? Mr. Gates came and went about as usual although not so regularly, looking about the same—spare, dry, hard, well dressed, well shaved, attentive, silent. Neale looked at him with some curiosity, wondering how a threatened nervous breakdown showed itself, and deciding skeptically that there was probably the same amount of nervousness about it as about everything—less in it than people made out—money for specialists mostly.
One day he was consulting a letter-file near the door to the manager's office, which stood ajar. Over the file, Neale could see the familiar scene: Mr. Gates' private secretary standing to the right of his employer in a respectful attitude, a bunch of letters in his hand. Mr. Gates adjusted his eye-glasses, their fine gold chain gleaming yellow against the hard gray of his thin cheeks. He took a letter off the pile and held it up before him. To Neale's astonishment the paper shook as though a high wind were blowing through the room. A look of anxious effort came into the older man's face. He leaned his elbows on the table and tried to take the letter in both hands, but it fell out of his trembling fingers upon the desk and slid to the floor. Mr. Gates stooped, secured it with difficulty and lifted his head to recover his position. As he did this, with rather a jerk to get his balance, the drooping loop of his eye-glass chain caught on the key of the drawer and tore his glasses off. They fell on the desk with a little tinkling clatter, broken; and instantly Mr. Gates flung the letter from him, put both hands over his face and burst into tears. Neale heard the sound of his sobbing. His secretary, looking concerned, but not surprised, sprang to the heavy door and slammed it shut.
Neale stood frozen with one hand on a letter in the file, frightened for the first time in his life, so frightened that it made him sick. When he recovered presence of mind enough to move, he tip-toed away to his own desk and sat down before it, shaken. So that was a nervous breakdown! Good God!
He wasn't so sure he wanted to move up ultimately into that office.
For a long time after this he was haunted by the recollection of that scene, and especially by the sound of those strange, shocking sobs. Sometimes they woke him up at night, as though it were a sound in the room. They recurred to him at the most inopportune moments, in a train, at table, as he undressed for the night in a bedroom of a country hotel.
He would have given anything not to have heard them. He tried everything to drown them out.
He turned again at this time to books, and took down fromthe shelves, volumes he had not looked at since college, books of speculation, abstract thought, history. He found Gregg's marks in one or two and wondered how Gregg was liking it being a professor out in California. That was far away, and so was Gregg. And so were the books. They looked different in his hand; remembered pages had not the same message. He could not seem to put his mind on them as he had. It wandered to other things. A long time since he had tried to use his mind in that way. He had had mighty little time for reading abstract stuff.
Once, starting off on a trip sure to be tiresome, with a long wait in the late evening at Hoosick Junction, he chanced to put into his valise a volume of Emerson. He read the newspaper on the train up, the news, the financial page, and what was going on in the world of sports. But he left the paper in the train, and as he settled himself for the dreary wait in the dreary, dusty, empty station he opened the Emerson. What were some of those places he used to think so fine?... "Society is a joint-stock company in which the members agree, for the better securing of the bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist....
"The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word.... But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom ... to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. Leave your theory as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee!"
He slammed the book shut again. It made him feel as that confounded music had, stirred up, restless, unhappy, ashamed. It was a voice from another sort of world, a voice that he would rather not hear, because there was nothing to bemade of what it said. What could youdoabout it? Neale detested stirring up ideas about which there was nothing to be done. And he knew a great deal more now than he once had about the many, many things that could not be done.
But shutting the book, even slamming it shut, did not silence the voice. He sat alone under the one smoky kerosene lamp, staring into the dusty, dreary, empty waiting-room and heard it clear and calm and summoning, "Leave your theory as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee!" He looked about him desperately, but there was not a soul in the station save himself, nor a house near the tracks. There was not a sound to drown out the deep humanity of that summoning, challenging voice.
He made an impatient rebellious gesture. Summoning? That was all very well. But to what? To something better than he had, more worth while than he was? Well, what was there? Where could it be found? Those vague high-sounding phrases were easy enough to write, but what could youdoabout it in real life? What was the matter with what he had?
The matter with it was that it was bare and dingy and empty, like the room in which he sat. But what was not? Everything was like that, if you didn't believe the nonsense written about it, if you looked at it and saw it. It wasn't to be supposed that he, Neale Crittenden, would go and be a missionary, was it, or any of those pious priggish make-shift devices to pretend that you were doing something worth while? Or join the Salvation Army and beat a drum? He was an American business-man. What in hell did Emerson think youcoulddo?
He got up and walked restlessly around the dreadful little room, helpless before its bareness. Nothing to read in the place, not even a time-table. Nothing but the Emerson. He went over to where it lay on the bench, opened his valise, put the book back in, down among his shirts, and snapped the valise shut on it. A whistle sounded down the track. He looked at his watch. No, his train was not due for half an hour yet. He went to the door and watched a through freight roll past, noting the names on the cars as they flashed into thelight from the station-agent's window,—N. Y. Central, Père Marquette, Wabash, Erie, Boston and Maine,—shoes and groceries and hardware, structural-steel, cement—all the thousand things needed every day to keep the wheels of daily material life moving, all made, bought and sold, shipped and handled by men like him. All necessary honest goods, all necessary honest work ... but that couldn't beallof life! The train pounded off, the silence of the night closed in on him, and in that silence he heard the echo of those appalling sobs, and the slam of the door. Queer thing, human life was, wasn't it? Think of poor Mr. Gates paying that price, and very likely for something he didn't care so much about when he got it. It wasn't the price you paid, that bothered Neale. If it were something worth your while, you were willing to pay all you had. But to pay so much, just to make money for Neale Crittenden ... he couldn't see it that way. He'd have a smoke on it anyhow.
As he filled his pipe it came to him that once before he had felt the same aching restlessness, so intense that it was pain. That was the time when he had gone stale. He'd been put out of the game, and had sat on the side-lines eating his heart out. He was there again, gone stale, out of the game. He had the strength, he had the speed, now as then. Why was it he stood outside the game? Other men were giving their souls to it. Maybe hewasa quitter, after all. There had certainly been quitting orsomethingthe matter in his relations with Martha ... how empty life was without Martha.... But he was mighty glad he wasn't going to marry her.
He was a fine specimen anyhow!
"Well now, well now," he shook himself together, "let's consider all this. What's the best thing to do when you go stale and have a slump?" Atkins had showed him what to do that other time. He had actually profited by it in the end, profited immensely by being temporarily out of the game, so that he could consider and understand the real inwardness of what it was all about.
Why, perhaps that was what he needed to do now, pull outfor a while, get away from the whole thing, look at it from a distance, get a line on what it was all about.
He sucked on his pipe, cocking his head sidewise to look at the ceiling, his hands deep in his pockets. There was nothing to hinder his taking a year off. He had money enough. And not a tie on earth to prevent his doing as he pleased. He'd lose his job, of course. But he didn't seem to be just madly in love with his job anyhow. And there were other jobs.
"Well, by George, why not?"
Where should he go? Anywhere that wasn't the lumber business. There was the whole world, the round globe hurtling through the infinite. What in God's name was he doing in Hoosick Junction?
There was England; and France; and Italy; and after that, why, anywhere again! Wherever he pleased ... the East, China, and where there were Malays and jungles. When his money gave out, if he still wanted to stay on he could earn his living as well there as here. "There!" That meant anywhere else. Anywhere else must be less dusty and frowsy and empty than here.
Why under the sun had he not thought of this before? Their damned old labels do stick after all. But he would soak them off!
His heart unfolded from its painful tight compression. The way out? Why had he been so long in seeing it? The way out was to put on your hat and go.
I
Ashley, Vermont, May, 1904.
Horace Allen's cousin was astonished to the limit of astonishment by the news, and cried out accusingly, "Why, I thought the other time it was only because Flora wanted to go. I thought you thought it would put you on the shelf altogether. I thought you hated it."
Horace considered this, sitting heavily on a bench while cousin Hetty pruned a nearby rose-bush, rigorously. Although she did not break in on his silence with a, "Well?" or, "Did you hear what I said?" she made him quite aware that she was relentlessly waiting for his answer.
"Well, I did," he admitted finally, "and I do yet. And it did put me on the shelf. That's all I'm good for now. It's because of my experience in Bayonne they want me to take charge of the Paris office."
"You don't have to go if they do," she pointed out; and this as she expected, brought out the real reason.
"Those four years in France have spoiled me for living here," he said and awaited doggedly her inevitable cry of amazement.
"You!" She stood up from her shorn rose-bush, her huge shears in one clumsily-gloved hand, a large thorned spray in the other, "Well for goodness' sake,how?"
He was in no haste to answer this either, meditating silently, the spring sun pouring an incongruous flood of golden young light on the sagging heaviness of his middle-aged face. Cousin Hetty let him alone again, and went on with the ruthless snip! clash! of her great shears.
When he rose again to the surface, it was with a two-fold explanation.
"Everybody that's worth anything over there has learnedhow to do his job. No slap-dash business. And there's plenty of cheap slave-labor. You're waited on! You're made comfortable. You've heard people talk of the charm of European life. What they mean is cheap labor. There's nothing more charming for the employer."
"Well!" commented Cousin Hetty. After a time she remarked, resolutely gathering up the villainously prickly shoots she had been cutting off, "I should think you'd be sort of ashamed of the slave-labor part of it. An American!"
She was not one to hesitate, either to handle thorns herself, or to thrust them upon others.
"Oh, I am," admitted Marise's father casually, and then as though it gave him a faint amusement to shock her, "I forgot to mention their cooking and good wines."
She scorned to take any notice of this, going on, "And Ishouldthink," she stayed her steps for a moment, as she turned away to carry the pruned-off trash to the spot where the spring bon-fire with its exquisite coils of blue smoke faintly dimmed the exquisite clarity of the mountain air, "I should think that if you found good workmanship such a fine thing, you might try to do something towards getting more of it in your own country, instead of just going off where it grows already."
"Oh, heavens! you don't see me trying to 'make the world a better place to live in,' do you? What sort of Harold-the-Uplifter do you take me for?" he protested, with a yawn.
Cousin Hetty stepped off to the smoldering bon-fire, threw her armful of rejected life on the flames, and came back, her wasted elderly face looking stern.
"How about Marise? Will it be the best thing for her?"
"Oh, the best thing...." her father disavowed any pretentious claims to ideas on that subject.
"Horace, don't pretend you don't know what I mean. Right in the middle of her college course!"
"Shucks for her college course!" he said. "How much good does anybody's college course amount to? Her music is worth forty times that to her. Besides she can keep on going to school in Paris, can't she? What's to hinder?"
The reference to music seemed to give her a new idea as to his plans, an idea which she challenged with suspicion, "What do you expect she's going to do with her music, anyhow? What do youwanther to do?"
"What do I expect her to do with her music? Oh, what does anybody do with music? Use it to get what she wants. I expect her to succeed on the concert platform. And get a lot of applause. And marry one foreign monkey after another. And hate every other musically gifted woman, like poison. And get so dependent on flattery that she can't live twenty-four hours without a big swig of it from no matter whose flask. And die of wounded vanity because a younger woman is beginning to be applauded. That's what I expect, of course. What else is there to expect?"
At the end of this prophecy which he had brought out slowly and coldly, with long pauses between the sentences, he closed his eyes and relapsed into silence as though it were all a matter of no consequence.
His cousin made no comment but waited patiently for what he had not said. He turned his bulky body sideways on the bench, his shoulder to her, like a sulky boy, to indicate that he had no intention of adding anything.
But presently her persistent, silent demand for what was really in his mind brought out, "Marise's music-teacher in Bayonne was pretty near the only human being in the whole damn town that didn't make me tired. She was pretty nearly the only human being I ever saw anywhere who had enough sense to come in out of the rain. She was an old-maid school-teacher, ugly enough to stop a clock. But she was all right. She didn't want anything for herself. She was safe. Her music had put her where nothing could touch her."
Cousin Hetty was struck by the quality of this statement. She looked at him softly.
"That is what you want for Marise," she said, and continued to stand before him, looking down at him.
He was as much annoyed as though she had cried out emotionally, "Oh, youdolove her! Youdothink of how to be a good father to her!" and he cut short her sickly, sentimentaldisplay of feeling by affirming stolidly, "Well, I won't get it."
"But you don't see any other chance for her."
He felt that she was taking an unfair advantage of a chance lapse on his part and, dismayed and disgusted by the pious color of their talk, was pointedly silent, conveying the impression that he was trying to command his patience till she should consent to stop talking foolishly.
"Marise isn't a bit old," she pointed out, half to herself, half to him. "She's just seventeen to-day. And she's not plain, either."
"You bet your life she's not. That's why I know what her music is going to do toher."
"Well, for goodness' sakes, why take her out of college to go on with it?"
He evidently felt that he had more than explained this, for he made no answer. She said then, a very plain, human anxiety wrinkling her old face, "Do you honestly think, Horace, that you are the right person to bring up a pretty, seventeen-year-old girl?"
"As good as anybody else," he said drily, averring the complete incompetence of all the world for that task.
"But she is getting on so well at college—she stands so high—and the youngest in her class. She is so bright."
"Oh, that hasn't anything to do with her being bright. That comes from the schooling she's had in France. She learned to keep at whatever she was doing till she got it right.—Lord—the sloshy work in an American college—as easy as sliding down hill for her. She may or she may not have a good mind. She's learned to work, that's all."
"That's what you're going back for, because of good work," stated Cousin Hetty.
"Oh, I'm not expecting to do any of it myself," he enjoyed his usual satisfaction in making no pretense to virtue, "but I like being able to hire other folks for a nickel or two, to work like that. And I like being able to hire other folks to make it their business to keep me comfortable. And don't forget the cooking. And the wine. And the beds. There's not a decent bed in America."
She made him feel by a lift of the eyebrows that she considered this a rather self-conscious, sophomoric continuance of the pose of knowing sophistication. At this he looked nettled and cross.
A little later, as she stopped in front of him, with an armful of pruned-off shoots, on her way to the bon-fire, she asked, "But will Marise have a good time over there? Young folks here do have such good times."
In his turn he showed her by a lift of the eyebrows that he considered this too unimportant to answer. She stood looking down at her shears, cruel, steel-bright and keen, "Oh, well ... I don't suppose I let my roses have such a good time," she said to herself.
II
After supper they went out on the bench while he smoked his cigar. Cousin Hetty did not mind tobacco smoke inside the house, but her elderly hired girl did. They were both still under the impression of the tepid warmth of the afternoon sunshine, and were surprised to find the evening air so cold.
"Feels as though there were still snow on the mountains," he remarked, recognizing the peculiar, raw, penetrating chill.
"There is," she told him, drawing her shawl about her.
By his tone he had intimated that he had passed out of the prickly irritation of his afternoon mood. By hers, she had told him that she would, as usual, meet him half-way, in any mood he chose to feel.
They sat down together on the wooden bench; he began silently to smoke, and she to think.
"My visit's over. I must take the noon train to-morrow," he said, "and I've half a notion to ask your advice about something."
She refrained from any expression of the astonishment and skepticism she felt and said briefly with a friendly accent, "All right."
"About Marise," he said.
"Oh, yes, of course. What is it?" she asked in an altered tone of quickened interest.
But for a time he said nothing more. He waited, drawing on his cigar. He drew so hard that it began to gleam redly through the dusk. At this, he took it from his lips and held it down, his fingers out-curved at his side, where he did not see the raging coal at its tip. He had never thought consciously about this gesture, but it was an invariable one with him. There was something distasteful to him about the naked, raw hotness of a newly-lighted cigar-tip. He preferred it later on when all you could see was the ghost-form of the burned-out tobacco, the long, fine ash held together by nothing at all, ready to be shattered at a breath into floating particles of nothingness.
"About Flora, Flora's death," he added presently, knowing although she had given no sign, that she was listening intently, "I never told you. It wasn't just pneumonia...."
He was silent as if he did not know just how to get on with what he wanted to say, and finally said, irritably, "There's nothing to it—nothing! But I can't ask you what I want to, unless you know something about it."
She divined that he would not have told her if they had not come out where it was dark, where he could not see her.
She made herself small, cowering under her shawl, and listened forebodingly, as he went on, his intense distaste for every word coloring his rough, abrupt statements.
"I was up in Bordeaux on business and one morning didn't I see Flora's name in the headlines of the nasty little local paper from Bayonne! An accident at Saint Sauveur—that's a kind of Hot Springs where Flora went sometimes for sulphur-baths. A young man had fallen into the river, or had jumped in. It was in flood, with melting snow. And he was drowned. And because Flora happened to know him and be there, the reporter who'd written up the accident jumped to the conclusion that he and Flora ... to the conclusion they always jump to about everybody."
Cousin Hetty did not stir, allowed herself no inward comment lest she color the impersonal attention she was giving,which, she understood well enough was, with the darkness, the only condition on which he could go on speaking.
"Hell, wasn't it?" he said briefly before continuing. "I didn't know anything about French inquests, but I could make a guess they would take care to make this one as uncomfortable for Flora as they could. Sounded like a good chance for blackmail too. So I telegraphed back to the house that I'd be back on the next train. I found out afterwards that Marise had wired me, but I never got her telegram. Then before the train started, I beat it to the office of a French lawyer in Bordeaux, and found out all I wanted to about French inquests. I found out then, that there wasn't any real danger, that they couldn't do a thing except talk about it. But, Heavens! their talk was apt to be a-plenty. It was up to me to get back and look out for Flora. Poor Flora! You know she had no more harm in her than a kitten."
Cousin Hetty felt a long, rigorous tremor run through her, partly the cold of the mountain evening, partly an inner chill.
"PoorFlora!" she said now in a trembling voice. It was the only word she spoke, the only comment she made on what he had told her, on what he was to tell her.
"Well, when my train pulled into Bayonne the next morning, there was Marise to meet me, and great Scott! she almost scared the life out of me, crying and hanging on to me. I didn't know whathadhappened, besides what was in the paper, what she had heard! But in a minute, she got over that enough to tell me whatshethought the matter was ... her mother all shaken up from the nervous shock of seeing somebody killed, all upset, gone to a convent for a rest-cure. Lots of folks do that in France, instead of going to a hospital or sanitarium, as they do here. I didn't think from the way she spoke she even knew who it was who had been killed. You'd better believeIdidn't say anything about who it was, either! I wanted to go easy and find out how things were. I kept my ears and eyes open: but I didn't get anything that would give me a lead from Marise, except that I found that her music-teacher had piled right in and stayed by her till I got there. And I was pretty sure shewouldn't have told Marise anything, and would have kept anybody's else mouth shut. It came out casually, for one thing, that she had sequestered that newspaper I saw, before Marise had a chance to look at it. Well, it looked as though the first thing was to get Flora home where I could stand guard over her, till the thing blew over." He burst out savagely, "Good God! How was I to dream that she was so sick!" He made some violent gesture which his old kinswoman felt, but could not see in the darkness.
"But she was. When we went to see her that afternoon, the doctor was there with her, and told me there wasn't a chance in a thousand for her. Double pneumonia. We saw her for a moment that afternoon, and the minute Marise went to bed that evening, I went back. But I was too late. Hetty, you never saw anything like how young she looked ... like a little girl, as if she'd died without having lived. The nice old Sister who had taken care of her had put flowers around her, white roses. And she was crying. She was about the only friend Flora had, the only one of them who didn't want something out of her."
Cousin Hetty's face was wet with tears, but she let them fall silently, not stirring a hand to wipe them away.
Her cousin stirred a great deal, moving restlessly on the bench, folding and refolding his arms impatiently.
"The next three days—I never went through such a crazy performance—enough to drive a man out of his mind. The music-teacher I told you about took Marise off with her, up to the mountains somewhere where her old home was, until the day of the funeral. I don't know how I could have managed without that. Icouldn'thave had Marise around, while I was trying to hush up the coroner's men, or whoever they were.
"As soon as I got in touch with the dead boy's family, I found out where a lot of the trouble came from. The police had come down from Saint Sauveur, just as a matter of routine, to go through the motions of an investigation and had gone to where we lived, because they thought Flora was there. But she'd gone to the convent, so they saw our old cook andasked her a lot of questions. And Jeanne, instead of telling the truth, which was that she didn't know a thing about it, saw a chance for some tall and fancy lying such as she made a specialty of. She got off a long story about how she'd met the boy on his way to the train, and he'd told her he was going on business, and Marise had asked him to take a message to her mother, and he'd said her mother didn't know him by sight—oh, God knows what! I take it she thought she was safe-guarding the family honor, by making out that Flora didn't know the young man, but she certainly got everything tied up into knots. She'd beat it off to tell the dead boy's family what she'd told the police, so their lies would be of the same color as hers. Oh, it was the damnedest mix-up! Of course they were all set to do their share of lying. They wanted as much as I did to keep the police out of it. Jeanne had beat them to it, and so they repeated her version rather than start something new. But naturally, rattled as they were with the suddenness of it, they didn't get it exactly straight, and that started the police off on an idea they hadn't had before, that maybe there was something more in it than met the eye. They asked some other questions around in Bayonne, and then it was all up.
"Of course Jeanne's story couldn't hold water for a minute. They found out first that he hadn't any business that could possibly have taken him up to the mountains. And the old hag that kept a flower-stand on our street said he had sat all the evening before Flora went away, on the bench across the street from our house, that she'd sold him some flowers at eight when she shut her stall, and when she came back at six the next morning he was there again. And our concierge said—oh, hell, you don't need to know all the details. Everybody was lying and everybody sure that everybody else was, and those fool police inspectors were sure they'd unearth something if they only kept on. Inside twenty-four hours, I saw there was no sort of chance of getting anything straightened out by getting down to the facts, which didn't amount to a whoop anyhow. So we did what you always do in France when you want to get anything done. We used apull. Garnier, this boy's father, was a business acquaintance of mine, and quite a level-headed man. We got together, away from his wife. She was just crazy over her son's death. From one day to the next she looked twenty years older. And the way she cursed us all for ever coming to Bayonne—not that I cared. She was out of her mind, anyhow. All the same, the things she said ... and poor Flora in her coffin...."