She went on the trail of the black bill case and found it easily enough. It was, with Gregory’s few valuables, in the possession of the hospital office. In it were some papers, some letters and twenty-three dollars. Her heart fell with a thump.
“Is this all there was?”
“His watch too—we never leave valuables with sick patients who have no relatives about. They might get picked up and the hospital be considered responsible.”
“I mean all the money?”
The nurse in charge of the office wrinkled her forehead and looked at the note regarding Gregory on her record.
“Black bill case—letters—papers—twenty-three dollars in currency. That’s what he brought here. Is that correct? We’ve kept the bill case in our safe, of course.”
She looked questioningly at Freda.
“That’s what is here,” said Freda, “but you see my husband thought there was more—quite a lot more. I wonder was he sick in the hotel long?”
But the hotel was a blind trail and a suspicious one. The chambermaid who had called the doctor for Gregory had left the town—strangely enough two days after he was taken sick. She had never been a competent girl—The hotel courteously disclaimed all responsibility and hoped the loss was not great. There was a safe in the office—guests were requested and so forth—.
“Of course,” said Freda, “I quite understand.” She did. She understood that the money had vanished and that it was not coming back to her or to Gregory. She went back to her hotel room and counted what money she had. With Gregory’s present resources they had fifty dollars between them. And there was an unpaid nurse at five dollars a day—hospital bills, doctor bills, doubtless bills for all the medicines. All those things and no money to meet them, she pondered. Besides she must not tell Gregory. She must not worry him just now or disappoint him. The nurse wanted him kept calm and cheerful. But in the meantime, what was she to do?
It was hard going back to the hospital and facing the nurse. The nurse was so good to her and Freda felt miserably that to let her be so good when there was no money to pay her was deceiving. She herself was hot and troubled. Her clothes were an annoyance. She had only three blouses and one of those was torn at the neck irremediably. It was hard to keep cheerful when you needed fresh clothes so badly and had hardly enough money to pay the hotel bill mounting up against you. But she forgot all that in the presence of Gregory. He was feeling better this afternoon than he had up to that time, his convalescence taking one of those quick strides so encouraging to those who watch. The nurse had propped him up on his pillows and he wanted Freda beside him.
So she let the matter drift and when he asked if she had found the bill case she told him “yes.”
“Then that’s all right,” he said gaily, and saved her the lie she had ready. Nor did he waste more time on money. He wanted to talk of other things, to ask her questions and it was that afternoon that she dared to tell him that she expected their child, and to let herselfrelax a little in the companionship of his happiness and the comfort of his reverence.
But when she went back to the hotel she could not bring herself to order supper. The menu stared at her—with ducklings and roasts and table d’hotes. Figure as she would, she could not order a supper for less than a dollar. So she pleaded a headache to the waiter and left the table to go supperless to her room and then to bed, for the nurse had said Gregory must be quiet that evening.
MARGARET knew all about it now. From her point of view certain conventions of non-interference between husband and wife were so many links in the old chain. Undoubtedly it was not that she wanted to force Helen’s confidence. But to come upon Helen the Monday after that exhausting Sunday, come to her to say good-by and make plans for the future, and to find the splendid dignity and poise of the Helen she had been with in Chicago destroyed angered her. Helen had told her the facts. She had to tell some one, she told herself in a justification she felt bound to make in secret, and Margaret was at least a stranger in the city and moreover the only woman she knew who would not make the slightest impulse to carry her story to other ears.
Margaret, in immaculate white linen, looking as cool and competent as an operating surgeon, had listened. She heard the whole of the story, how Gage had changed—for that Helen insisted upon.
“He’s simply not himself. I suppose it’s the feeling he has towards the girl.”
“Don’t ‘the girl’ her, Helen. I’m not a bit sure of that part of the story. Somehow it’s too preposterous that Freda should be languishing somewhere waiting for Gage’s casual attention. I tell you that girl doesn’t languish. She’s not that kind. She’s the most magnificently unconscious modern you ever saw. She wouldn’t be any one’s mistress. She hasn’t that much dependence in her.Not for a minute. I simply don’t believe it.”
“She disappeared the day after he came back from the convention. And then he was away that week-end she was seen at the Roadside Inn.”
“I don’t believe she was ever seen there,” said Margaret.
Helen put her hand to her head.
“I don’t want to believe it, but if he won’t deny it—and isn’t it possible that the poor child’s run away even from him? If she should be going to have—oh, damn, I can’t say it even—” She broke off a little hysterically.
“No—I don’t believe that either.” But for all her stout words, Margaret sounded a little more dubious this time. “Let’s leave her out of it. What is there to do about you and Gage?”
“I despise my own incompetence of decision,” said Helen. “But I don’t know. I don’t know how to go through the business. It seems impossible that we’ve come to the edge of divorce but I can’t go on living with a man who acts as Gage does. I can’t, that is, with any measure of self-respect. And yet I look around and the very weight of detail—the tremendous business of unwinding a marriage—it seems then as if the quick flare-up of partings that you read about—the separations that never involve themselves with the machinery of complaints and retaining lawyers and distributing property and—moving vans—are quite fantastic. I wonder if it’s laziness which keeps me so fearful of the mass of detail, Margaret—”
“Of course you’re trivial on purpose, I suppose,” answered Margaret. “The things you speak of don’t really bother you.”
“Yes. Translated into more serious terms I suppose the thing that hurts is the terrible pain of cleavage between two people who have grown into each other for years.”
“More likely. Helen, I don’t want to probe, but do you want to live without Gage?”
Helen pondered.
“I don’t want to lose him. I feel dreadfully cheated—put upon. I didn’t want any of this. If I’d known that he was going to feel so outraged at the political venture I’d have stopped, I think, before I let it get to an impasse. But I’m afraid it’s that now. He and I were—well, there’s no use debauching myself with memories. No—I don’t think I want to lose him but even aside from this question of his disloyalty—this business with Freda Thorstad—he’s becoming impossible to live with. The children are noticing it. He doesn’t play with them as he used to. Goes off by himself. There’s no free and easy interchange between us at all. Of course he’s often flatly rude to me before the servants.”
“Suppose you gave up all the things he doesn’t like now, would that solve things?”
Helen shook her head.
“Not now. The thing has gone too far. We’ve been ugly to each other and we wouldn’t forget that. Besides I’m afraid I’d be resentful. There’s no reason why I should be completely subject to Gage’s slightest word. We can’t build on that basis.”
“What he wants,” said Margaret astutely, “is to have you subject to his dream.”
Helen smiled rather ruefully.
“He might wake up from his dream!”
“That’s the chance women have always taken—even the luckiest ones.”
“I don’t see that it’s any use for me to think over causes and rake up a justification here and a justification there anyway,” said Helen. “The only thing of vital importance is to decide whether I’m going to let eventscome as they will and be passive under them or whether I’m going to try to manage the events.”
“I shouldn’t think there’d be much choice there.”
“There is though. It’s so easy to sit back and say, ‘I’m trapped. I’ll just have to take whatever fate sends. There’s nothing I can do.’”
“But you won’t, for there are no ends of things you could do. It’s complicated of course. If you leave Gage, of course it puts a crimp in your political possibilities just now, not that the fact of separation would much matter but of course up to this point your political reputation has been partly builded on Gage’s name.”
“And I can’t trade on his name and not live with him. But then I can’t trade on his name anyway. I must define a position and take what is coming to me as an individual and give up the rest.”
“No. It’s complicated too by money. I haven’t any, you know, Margaret—and Gage has made a lot but we’ve lived rather up to the limit of it. I don’t believe he stands awfully well financially. If we are to separate things would go pretty much to pieces in every direction.”
“Very much,” said Gage. He had come in quietly and stood looking at them in a kind of derisive anger. “I’m sorry to break in on your conference, and on this delightful exhibition of my wife’s loyalty but since we are all here, let’s talk it over.”
He sat down elaborately, his eyes on Margaret, ignoring his wife fixedly.
“Have you made up your mind what we should do, Miss Duffield?”
“Don’t be insulting, Gage,” said Margaret, “it’s so unnecessary. I haven’t been interfering with your affairs any more than was necessary.”
“Than was necessary to release Helen from the chains of marriage?” Gage laughed. “Well, your work is done.As far as I’m concerned she’s released. You may tell her, since you are in charge of our affairs, that I will leave her as soon as possible—and that is very soon—and that whatever financial arrangement is possible shall be made for her and the children. She is correct in saying that my affairs are in a bad way. Mr. Sable, from whom I have just separated in business, can tell her more about that. She might care to engage him to represent her in any action you might see fit for her to take.”
Helen had risen to her feet, quite white.
“Stop!” she cried. “Don’t you dare keep on insulting me. You’re mad—abnormal—”
Gage bowed vaguely in her direction and continued speaking to Margaret.
“Tell her that she is right. I am mad and abnormal and that she has made me so, instigated by you. Excuse me now, won’t you?”
He went upstairs but he could hear through the floor the swift, staccato, shrieking sobs of Helen’s hysteria, hear the whisper of a maid to the nurse in the back hall, hear a murmur which must be the calming voice of Margaret. He paced viciously up and down—up and down.
Yet he had come home, driven by an invigorating impulse which had come to him inexplicably, perhaps born of pity and sudden insight into Helen’s mind, come home to ask her forgiveness, explain what Freda Thorstad had told him and ask her to go away with him for a little while until their minds both cleared. The impulse had risen in his throat—it had choked him with delight and fear lest she should not be home. And then through the sunroom doors he saw them, two calm women, talking together, making and receiving confidences, uncovering him, dissecting him, and as he stood still and let the blackness of rage sweep over him again he had heardHelen tell this stranger, this inimical stranger, of his financial condition. The sense of outrage overmastered him.
After a little it was quiet downstairs and he decided to go to the city again, going downstairs, looking straight ahead of him. He wanted to see the children, to have their reception of him ease this last sharp hurt. They were in the garden of course, and they greeted him with their usual shouts of delight.
“Well,” he thought, as he bent down to caress them, “I can’t stop now. I can’t stop now.”
He sat down on the garden bench and took the children on his knees, the boy and girl, so sturdy and happy, with fat brown knees and thick soft hair. They were full of comments and questions. Peggy was three and Bennett just eighteen months older. It was going to hurt terribly to break away from them. Sable had said, “You can’t act as though you didn’t have a family dependent on you.” He had shown Sable that he could act that way, that the family dependent on him was not going to force him to knuckle under. He stroked Peggy’s hair. How restful it was—if he could only stay here in this sheltered little garden with the children who had no tangles in their minds—if Helen would come out as she used to come out last summer and sit with him while they talked and planned of the beautiful things ahead for the children and their initiations into living.
Helen had deserted. She had gone off notoriety seeking. She preferred to sit in that room talking disloyalty to that woman to whose hard influence she had subjected herself—Helen was driving him out.
He kissed the children sternly and went back through the house. In the hall Helen met him. Her face was ravaged by hysterics, red hollows under her eyes, mouth pulled out of shape. It hurt to regard it.
“Where are you going, Gage?”
For a moment he was gentle.
“Downtown. I’ll not be back till late. There’s no use trying to talk. We are killing each other.” Then he thought of Margaret Duffield, listening perhaps and loosening his wife’s hands from his shoulders, where she had placed them, he went out.
But that was not the only crisis Margaret had to meet that day. She was eager to go back to New York. There was no possible work left for her to do and she wanted to get away from St. Pierre. She did not tell Helen that she was planning to go in a few days as she had told her landlady that morning. When she left the Flandon house Helen was quite calm. With her fine power of organization she had already decided that the best temporary thing to do was to accept Gage’s actions and see how far he would go, allowing her action to be modified by that later. Margaret looked rather pale. The reasonableness of her own mind was bound to be affected somehow by this drama through which she had passed and in which she had been forced to play so disagreeable a part. Perhaps it showed chiefly in the slight hardness of her attitude toward Walter Carpenter that night.
She never seemed to attack that decision squarely. She seemed to try to deny it a right to confront her. And yet, definitely, constantly, with less impatience than a younger lover and vastly more skill than a less intellectual one, Carpenter made himself felt. Now and then in their discussions and in their arguments, he destroyed some reason against their marriage. Her defenses had been made very weak. She had no argument against the lack of liberty in marriage which he could not destroy. He would grant anything. Indeed he asked only for the simplest, most unadorned marriage bond—and companionship which she had admitted she enjoyed with him. She might retain her own name if she liked without any altercation—might leave him for months at a time—he let her frighten him with no such threats. He offered too, more leisure for thought than she had ever had in the pressure of earning her own living. She had told him a little of what it meant to always need all the money she had in the bank—to do many things and yet never have any feeling of ease, to fear dependency. “It would mean a charitable hospital or going to a remote little Pennsylvania town to an aunt who lived with my mother until she died and who lives on in the almost worthless little place where I was born.” When she told Walter that, he had almost won her, so absorbed were they both in the pity and dread of her loneliness. Then again there leapt between them some deep-rooted fear, some instinct, some dread pulling Margaret back to her little island of celibacy.
It was far from an unpleasant, bickering companionship that they had. Margaret, at thirty, past all the desires of adolescence, informed without experience, had given Gregory nothing and had only been disturbed and made nervous by him, even while she appreciated his fine fire and ardors. Carpenter satisfied, soothed her. They had the same shynesses, the same dread of absurdities in themselves. And Margaret was afraid that she might be lonely without him and that too worried her. She did not want to be lonely for any one. So she told him and he laughed and ventured to bring her hand to his lips and hold it there. She did not draw it away, perhaps because she was reasonable, perhaps because she was not.
To-night he talked of Gage, reflecting the gossip of the men of Gage’s acquaintance. With them the fact of the severing of the firm of Sable and Flandon was a subject of much speculation. Walter was worried about it, in his own quiet fashion. Gage and Helen were both his close friends.
“Talking won’t do any good,” advised Margaret.
“Talking never did do any good with a man. It drives him into himself, and that’s usually unhealthy. I mean the sort of talking which is full of advice, of course—or of prohibition.”
“Yet some of you ought to do something with Gage Flandon before he goes straight to pieces.” Margaret said nothing of what had happened that afternoon.
“Yes,” said Walter absently, “he’s been going to pieces obviously. But let’s not talk about him. Let’s talk about ourselves, Margaret.”
They were driving through the summer night, trying to get all the coolness possible. It was soft warm darkness but the swift car made a wind which blew back upon them, laden with clover smells, deeply sweet. All the elaborate mental approaches which Walter had made to the girl he wanted to marry were abandoned. He stopped the car and put his arm around her, not supplicating but as if the time had come for concession.
“About ourselves. We talk too much impersonal stuff, Margaret. It’s great fun but there’s more to be done than talk. We must begin on the other things. We know each other’s minds now. Let’s know each other’s feelings.”
It may have been the night, the darkness, the remoteness of the country road which made him so bold. He tipped her face up to his and kissed her eagerly, quite different now from the calm mannered man who had sat so calmly in discussion with her night after night, who had squired her so formally, who had made love to her mind and tried to capture her intellect but never more, except for those two easily restrained outbreaks.
She stiffened like an embarrassed school girl, her hands pressed against his chest—
“Please don’t, Walter—”
“Foolish girl,” he said gently, “you mustn’t tie yourself up so. Let your mind ride for a minute and just remember that we love each other, just as every one in the world wants to love and be loved.”
All the while he talked, urging her, demanding her, he held her against him, unrelaxed.
“I love you,” he told her. “And I want to be—oh, unspeakably commonplace about it. I want to indulge myself in a lot of emotions that are as old as the hills and as glorious. But I want you with me, darling.”
Still she did not speak. He let her go a little and held her shoulders, searching for her eyes in the dimness.
“You do love me, don’t you? Why, I’ve seen it for weeks. I’ve seen a look in your face when I’ve come in—it isn’t boasting, dear, it’s just a wonderful confidence I have to-night.”
She freed her hands and clasped them tightly in each other. They seemed the index of some passionate inhibition, some repression, which was charged with nervousness. Her easy freedom had deserted her, and every muscle seemed drawn taut.
“Oh, my dear,” he pressed her, “don’t be so afraid. I won’t take advantage of the fact you care for me. Is it that which holds you back—that worry about making concessions to a man? Everything I’ve ever said I’ve meant. I respect every militant inch of you. I love you just as you are and for it. But above all that—beyond it—there’s more and hasn’t the time come for the least bit of abandonment?”
“Why?” Her voice was low, not as firm in its tones as it was wont to be.
“Why?” Carpenter repeated her question, “Why? Because we love each other or we don’t. And we can’t love at arms’ length, dear. We’ve got to be close, trustful, together. You do like me, don’t you, Margaret?”
“You know I do.”
“And you know I love you. Won’t you come a little way to meet me? I’m so sure you can trust me. I’m so sure we could be happy. Just let your mind rest. Let yourself go a little.”
Her mood was chilling his. He tried to gather up the shreds of the impetuosity that had first driven him to embrace her.
“Let’s not talk,” he said again, almost plaintively, “Can’t we just—rest in each other?”
“But why are you afraid of talk?” she protested.
He dropped his hands from her shoulders.
“Have I been afraid? Haven’t we talked on every conceivable subject? Haven’t we said enough to understand each other perfectly?”
“Then—”
“Margaret, dear, we’re at it again. This is what I protest—dragging argument into every natural emotion. I don’t want to be mind to your mind to-night. I don’t want to reason or even think—I just want to be man to your woman and caress you without thought.”
But the verve had gone out of his words and as it went she seemed to regain her confidence. He made a last attempt to bring back his spirit. But his embrace seemed to stiffen her. He withdrew his arm and sat tapping on the steering wheel.
“When will you marry me, Margaret?”
No impetuousness in his voice now, no romance. It met hers in calmness.
“I don’t know.”
“You must know. I can’t stand it any longer. You must or you must drive me away. There’s no sense in further talk. You know I’ll exact nothing but the right to be near you. But I must have that. I must know. It isn’t as if I were younger and could rebound from one love into another. You’ve got me. I don’t think of anything else. You color every bit of work I do—every bit of thinking. I’ll trust to your terms. I’ve spent weeks building up my theory of marriage to suit your desires and visions. I don’t want to play upon your sympathies but I’ve got to have you, Margaret—or not.”
He sounded very discouraged, very humble, very desperate.
“I think I’d disappoint you, Walter.”
The pity in her voice and her own discouragement made him turn to her again but she held out a hand to meet his and he stayed, letting her clasp his hand loosely.
“I’d be just like this all the time. You think I’d change—under emotion—when we were married. I don’t think I would. You don’t know how all the things I’ve thought and seen have influenced me. I couldn’t go into marriage believing in it much. I couldn’t—go through it—trusting it much. And when I was cold and I’d nearly always be that way, you’d be disappointed if not angry. And if I did do as you say—relax—I’d be spoiling it by not trusting my own feeling. Don’t you think I know? Don’t you think I almost give in and then some devil of analysis comes and prods me into a watch on myself? I haven’t anything to give, Walter—except just what you’ve had. And the reason I can’t marry you is because while you say and I say that companionship is enough we both know it isn’t all you’d want. And it’s all you’d find. It’s all I can give to any man.”
“But, my God, Margaret, women and men have to marry—.”
“I know. It’s all right for other women—most other women. I’m not speaking for them now. They can keep reasonable and still have enough feeling to transcend reason now and then—carry them through it.” She still held his hand in a kind of cold comfort and he could feel her fingers tighten. “I’ve tried to have feeling lately, Walter—tried to see if I could find enough—and that kind of feeling isn’t there. I can’t—I can’t—don’t ask me.”
She withdrew her hand now and sat looking straight ahead of her. A cloud slipped past the moon and as the earth brightened in the cold white light Walter, turning to look at her saw her quiet and rigid, tears in her open eyes, a slim statue of what she claimed to be, sterility of feeling for him or any man.
“I’m afraid that it’s true,” he said. “Perhaps you can’t.”
At that, coming as a terribly dreary acceptance, she let the sobs come and for a long while she wept, her head in her own hands. Perhaps she wept for him, perhaps for herself. He did not offer to touch her again—as if her dearth of feeling had spread to him in those few minutes. When at last she straightened herself again, he started the car and they sped silently back through the country towards St. Pierre.
“Good-by, then,” he said, as they reached her door and he unlocked it.
“Good-by.”
She saw his face, heavy and lined and stern and it seemed to hurt her cruelly.
“I’ve cheated you,” she said pitifully, “but it’s been myself too. It is myself.”
He hesitated. For a moment he seemed ready to tryagain and then he saw the pity in her face stiffen into resistance. Bending, he kissed her lightly.
“Nothing I can do for you?”
“Nothing, thank you.”
She heard his car back away from the door. As long as she could hear it she stood listening. Then with swift definiteness she went to her closet and pulled out the trunk standing there.
AGLAZE settled over the surface of events for the next few weeks in the Flandon household. Both Gage and Helen were torn away from too much indulgence in their own thoughts by the implacability of the things which they must do. Having broken up his legal connections with his own hands, Gage was confronted with the necessity of in some way making his next steps justify his past action and an unholy pride made him determined to show a doubting business world that he had been actuated by deep and skillful motives. There was the alternative of leaving St. Pierre and that he was disinclined to do. He wanted to start an office of his own and demonstrate with the greatest possible rapidity that nothing but benefit had accrued to him from his break with Sable. He guessed what he did not hear of the doubts about his move, and he wanted to put the world in the wrong if possible.
It was true, while he had found Sable’s intervention in the matter of Freda the unbearable breaking point, that he had a kind of long deferred zest in contemplating his new business freedom. Sable’s offer had been, in the beginning, far too lucrative and too flattering to lose but there was a cautiousness, a lack of independence in many of their mutual actions which had galled Gage. He was tired of the connection. He was at odds with the political clique to which his close connection with the Congressman held him. He was disgusted with the result of the convention—not that he had hoped for much butthe flatness of the political outlook, the beating of the old drums irritated him. There were times when the exhilaration of the chance he was taking lifted him up and if he had been drinking less steadily he might have turned the exhilaration to much advantage. But his mind was too nervous to plan steadily or well. It shot restlessly past immediacies into dreams of a future when he would have justified every action to himself and the world and particularly to Helen.
He ignored and avoided Helen’s several attempts to come to an understanding on the question of money. She knew enough about their affairs to feel that this change of Gage must make a great difference in their income temporarily, even if he should ultimately succeed. It worried her greatly. She had made up her mind to a separation from Gage but mere independence did not solve the money question for them all. She wanted very much to know exactly where they stood and she was convinced that the spendthrift, financial optimism of Gage, characteristic always, but most marked now, was getting them into deeper waters constantly. Temporarily she and Gage had dropped their personal problem. In one brief, cold conversation Gage had suggested that, pending a settlement of his affairs and his new ventures, they waive the personal matters and Helen had very gladly agreed.
So the days adjusted themselves to a routine so smooth and orderly that sometimes even to Helen it seemed unbelievable that it was not the expression of ease and happiness. Only at times, however, for as she looked at Gage it was impossible not to be conscious of the strain under which he was laboring. He was often out nights, working or not—she did not know. She knew that the supply of whisky in the sideboard was replenished far too often to serve moderate drinking and she knew that Gageslept badly, for she could often see the light reflected from his windows in the early hours of the morning.
He never molested her now but left her to her own activities with hardly a jeer at them. Now and then some scathing remark escaped him and fell blunted from the armor of her indifference. But for the most part his early chafing under her prominence was gone. The flood of letters which came for her in every mail aroused no comment from him. He saw her at work on the organization of her section of the country and hardly seemed to notice what she did. Intent as she was on learning what she could do, how she could do it, always with the thought in the back of her mind that she needed to find a kind of work that would earn her independence as well as notoriety she put an entirely new seriousness into the work she was doing. The old dilettantism was gone and with the death of that half-mocking dilettante spirit came an entirely new zest for the work she did.
Mrs. Brownley was full of a glorious naïveté. She wanted to organize everybody. Politics fairly dripped from her impressive, deliberately moulded lips. She wanted to pin a small white elephant badge on every one she met. She had a practical eye that liked to translate enthusiasm into badges, buttons and costumes. Jerrold Haynes, rather indispensable now and then to Helen, said that he was sure that the end of the campaign would see Mrs. Brownley in full elephant’s costume. Jerrold laughed at Helen too. He told her frankly that she was ruining herself for an observer.
“A year ago you were in a fair way to become the most beautiful philosopher of the twentieth century. Now you’re like all the rest of the women—a good looking hustler. You’ve become ordinary in appealing to your big audience. You should have been content to charm Gage and me.”
“I was. But I wasn’t allowed to remain in my sloth.”
“No—that serpent of a Duffield girl. I seem to remember Gage didn’t like her either. I didn’t, but undoubtedly Gage and I wouldn’t agree on reasons, would we? Well, where is she now?”
“Down on Long Island somewhere with Harriet Thompson, resting. She was pretty well fagged out with the months here.”
“Didn’t marry Carpenter, did she?”
“No. Apparently she didn’t or we might have heard of it.”
“Carpenter saved himself from the yoke of feminism just in time, perhaps.”
“I haven’t seen him lately.”
“He sits around the club all day and cools himself in case he should decide to keep an evening engagement and need to look fresh. I see him off and on. Doesn’t look happy, for a fact.”
“Anyway it’s none of our business, is it?”
Jerrold laughed.
“Not a whit and therefore interesting. I hate talking about what is my business.”
“That’s a common failing,” said Helen a little bitterly. “I never realized how epidemic until lately, since Gage has decided to go in for himself. People ask me about everything except my bank balance.”
“The penalty of being in the limelight, Helen.”
She shrugged lightly, a tinge of weariness in her manner.
“Don’t you like the limelight then?” he urged teasingly.
Impatiently she turned on him.
“Oh, more or less, I suppose. But I shan’t like it six months from now. I’ll be tired to death of it if it still keeps coming. You get fed up on it pretty quickly.”
“So skeptical—”
“You needn’t mock at me, Jerrold. You ought to admire me because I’m honest enough not to say that I weep every time my picture is in the paper. I go further. I am quite miserable when I realize that my limelight is directed mostly not at the inner workings of my mind but at my dress and my name and the fact that I take a marcel well.”
“So you know that too, do you?”
“I know everything about it,” Helen boasted mockingly. “I even admit the necessity for keeping my clothes pretty well pressed and clean. I may scoff with the rest of you at Mrs. Brownley’s methods of organizing a Junior Republican Club but I know that she’s the finest realist of us all. She is willing to admit that women love white elephant badges, and appeals to them as the virtuous sex, and fashionable Junior Republican Clubs, which are Junior Leagues in action. I can see myself developing a philosophy just like Mrs. Brownley and learning to speak of democracy and the home with her impressiveness and Mrs. Thorstad’s italics and bending my energies to making the Republican party sought after by women because after all it includes all the best people.”
“You’re a great woman. I think I’ll write a book about you.”
She looked at him out of the corner of her eyes. “You’ll never write a book about anything, Jerrold. You’re too dilettante to ever get started. I know. I was the same way until Margaret hurled me into all this action. Now I am, as you say, spoiled for a good dilettante. I’m spoiled for a lot of things, in fact. For being an easy going comfortable wife. I’m a poor wreck of a woman politician.” She laughed at him and looked so mockingly pretty under the big gray chiffon hat she wore that Jerrold’s eyes were lit with enthusiasm. Jerrold had motored Helen down to the Brownleys’ summer home for a conference with Mrs. Brownley, who had the Junior Republican Club on her hands at the moment and wanted to talk it over with Helen. Mrs. Brownley had done a great deal of organizing and much of it was extremely effective along the lines suggested by Margaret and Mrs. Thorstad. But Mrs. Brownley knew that the lure of the social column was great and she had pressed Bob and Allie into action. The Junior Republican Club, composed of girls just preparing for the vote, was to be one of the educational features of the campaign. They would be useful, she pointed out, in helping when the Republican women had headquarters, later—and useful or not they ought to be interested.
So the Junior Republican Club was formed amid much enthusiasm on the piazza of the Redding Hotel at Lake Nokomis where St. Pierre sent its fashionable colony during the summer months. They had a president, and several news agencies had already taken pictures of them “reading from left to right and from right to left—standing in the back row, etc.” One of the agencies had been acting for a New York paper and the girls were somewhat stirred over the novelty. As Allie said, “It was time some one did something. Look what happened to Russia where the Bolsheviks drove you out of your homes and took everything you’d got. If they’d been organized it might have been different.” Besides her father said he thought women, especially educated women, (Allie spoke with personal feeling, having spent four thousand a year at the Elm Grove School) were to be the salvation of the country.
She had plenty of support and enthusiasm. Even in these spoiled and under nourished little minds a tiny flame of enthusiasm for the new possibilities of women’s lives were burning. They interpreted the new freedomto suit themselves as did most other women. To them it meant a good deal of license, a cool impudence and camaraderie towards men, a definite claiming of all the rights of men in so far as they contributed to the fun of existence. “Women aren’t as they used to be” was a handy peg for them to hang escapades upon, a blanket reason for refusing to accept any discipline. That was the substance of their feminism.
As for their politics they were hewed from the politics of their fathers and their class. They were defensive for the most part. They had heard of the exigent demands of labor, they had seen their fathers irritant under “Bolshevik legislation”—in their own shrewd minds (and many of them had the shrewdness common to smallness) they knew that all their luxury and their personal license, their expensive clothes and schools and motors and unlimited charge accounts were based on an order whose right to exist was being challenged. They roused to its defense, boisterously, giggling, and yet class conscious.
Helen did what she could to palliate any trouble the club might cause.
She pressed on Mrs. Brownley the need of not antagonizing possible and prospective members of the party by anything that appeared as snobbishness. Mrs. Brownley agreed astutely, starting post haste on a scheme for organizing the stenographers of the city and mapping out a scheme whereby the employees of the large department stores might be drawn into Republican groups. She urged Helen to talk to the Junior Republicans and Helen did it.
She noted Barbara among the rest, handsome in yellow linen and yet looking tired and worn. The artificial penciling under her eyes was circled by deeper yellow brown hollows, and her restlessness and lack of interest in the whole proceeding were conspicuous.
“What a world weary face that child has!” thought Helen.
She remembered one of Mrs. Brownley’s confidences about Barbara’s engagement and idly asked Allie about it.
“Is Bob engaged to Ted?”
“Oh, Lord, who knows!” said Allie. “She’s had an awful row with him, but she’s got his ring. I don’t know what they fought about. And she’s such a fool, for she really is crazy about him and he knows it so he doesn’t pay much attention when she rows.”
She stopped as Barbara came towards them.
“I’m going up to town over night. I wonder if you and Mr. Haynes would take me up? Have you an extra seat? I’ll be a fine chaperon.”
Helen frowned a little. She disliked the insinuation, just as she disliked Barbara, but the girl’s request could not be refused gracefully.
“I’m sure Jerrold will be glad,” she said rather coldly.
“When’d you decide to go to town, Bob?” asked Allie.
Another girl joined the group, overhearing the last remark.
“I think she’s going up to keep a watch on Ted. One of the girls saw him with that pretty Thorstad girl one day at a hotel—the girl there’s been such a lot of talk about.”
Helen felt herself change color and as she tried to get quick control caught sight of Barbara’s face. It was almost white, but not as if white from shock or pain—rather an ugly white, lips compressed, eyes lifted angrily.
“I don’t consider myself in the least responsible for Ted’s company, Mildred,” she said sharply.
“Aren’t you afraid to stay alone in the house with just Mathilda?” went on Allie.
Barbara looked her contempt.
“If you are there,” Allie went on, “call up Mrs. Wilkins and tell her I’ve got to have those new white skirts by noon Wednesday. If she doesn’t get them here I won’t pay for them.”
“Write her your grouch,” said Bob, graciously, “I’ve got my own errands.”
They left Barbara at the portico of the big stone house where the shades were drawn down and the windows closed.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right here?” asked Helen.
“Oh, yes,” said Bob, “the housekeeper’s here and father’s going to take me back to-morrow night after I get my shopping done. Thanks so much for taking me up. And I do feel so guilty—”
But Jerrold speeded the motor and the sound of her voice was lost.
“What a lascivious little mind she has,” he remarked as they drove on to Helen’s house.
“And malicious, I think. It’s odd. Her parents are really kindly on the whole. And Allie’s just a nice clumsy child.”
“Whatever hereditary influences might have made this girl, they’ve been completely choked,” said Jerrold. “She’s pure and simple environment—rotted by it just as she might have rotted in a slum somewhere. The only thing that has survived her complete subordination to money and luxury is old Brownley’s acquisitive instinct—and God help the person who thwarts that!”
It was a considerate invocation if it had done any good, for at that moment Barbara was preparing to destroy any obstacles which lay in the path of her acquiring Ted.
She went to the telephone in her mother’s room and called Ted Smillie’s house. He was not in. She tried two clubs and finally located him.
“Yes, it is Bob. I came up—oh, to see a dressmaker.No—just to-night. No—I’m tired and hot. I don’t want to dance. You come over here. Why, of course it’s all right. Do come. Well, I’ll make you some lemonade and we’ll have a talk. Of course. Eight—that’s fine.”
But it was nearly nine before he came. Barbara had found a black dinner dress which became her, and she had thrown open the windows of the second floor library to the cooling evening air. She had found some supper for herself, a casual, icebox supper but for her guest she had made sandwiches. Also she had hunted long and wearily for some key which would open the wine cellar and failed to find any. But there were lemons fortunately and she had, as she promised, made the lemonade. By eight she was all ready for him—waiting, in repose. By nine she was tense. In that empty hour she had much time for thinking and her thoughts did not rest her. They roused her to a nervous tension which was manifest in the quick gestures so unlike her usual pose of lazy indifference.
He rang at last and she slipped down the stairs to let him in. A single light burned in the hall cluster.
He looked down at her from his admired height, smiling without eagerness.
“Where did you drop from? Nowhere? I was going to go down to see you next week.”
“I had to come up to town to see about some clothes.”
He laid down his hat and turned to her.
“All alone?”
“All alone,” answered Bob coolly. “Even the housekeeper’s gone to see a sick sister and won’t be back until morning. I guess the caretaker’s in the basement—at least I told him to stay there.”
“You going to stay here alone all night?”
“Why not? It’s safe as a clock. Bars on mother’s windows and all the front of the house. Safety locks on the doors. Nothing stealable in the house and a telephone and house phone in my room.”
“All the same it’s—”
“Unconventional? By this time you ought to know I’m the most unconventional person on earth. Women don’t bother about conventions as they used to. We don’t need chaperons at our elbows, thank goodness!”
He smiled appreciatively.
“Let’s go upstairs to the library,” said Bob, “and tell me what you’ve been doing.”
He followed her obediently and they settled themselves in two great soft leather chairs drawn up to a little table, the tray of sandwiches and lemonade between them.
“What’s new?” said Bob.
“It’s dull as can be. Nothing stirring.”
“Who’ve you been seeing?”
“Pretty much of nobody. A few stalemates around the club. That’s all.”
“Then why stay in town? Why don’t you come down to join your mother? It’s really not bad at Nokomis this year. Dot Lodge has two girls from New York visiting her that are pretty snappy. And we’ve gone in for politics. Formed a Republican club.”
“Oh, Lord!” exclaimed Ted. “Torchlight processions and all that? Going to purify politics?”
“Maybe—can’t tell.”
“Maybe not, probably.”
They scuffed around in tawdry repartee, going swiftly through a few motions of convention that seemed to cling to them. But shortly he was sitting on the arm of her chair and then he had her held more closely. For a while she let him fondle her, her cheeks growing hot. Then she returned to her line of attack.
“If it’s as dull as you say here you ought to be in the country where we can make it less dull.”
“Can’t. Lose my job if I do. The old man said that he’d make no distinction in the office this summer. Me and the hallroom boys—we’ve got to do our eight hours.”
“Sure it’s that? Sure it’s not some girl holding you up here?”
That pleased him.
“So you came up to see me because you’re jealous, did you? Little cat!”
He caressed her as he spoke and she did not seem to mind what he said.
“No—I’m not jealous. But perhaps I’m lonesome.”
“Not this minute you aren’t.”
She seemed to purr.
“Well, this is nice,” he repeated.
“I wish we could stay this way forever. Isn’t it fun to be away from every one?”
For answer he kissed her.
“I suppose you’re dreadfully shocked by my unconventionality,” said Bob, “but I don’t care. I despise conventions. I think women have a right to do as they please. Anything they please. Women aren’t slaves as they used to be.”
She lay back, invoking her vulgar license in the name of the hard won liberties of women, corrupting the words she spoke.
“Look out what you say,” said Ted. “Look out, young woman and don’t get me to take you at your word.”
She shivered ecstatically.
“Ted,”—the time seemed ripe, no doubt—“do you care for that Thorstad girl?”
“Who—Freda Thorstad?”
“All the girls are talking because you were seen at some hotel with her.”
“Let them talk, the silly fools.”
She released herself a little.
“Where is she, Ted?”
“Why?” He began to tease her, and her lack of control showed instantly.
“You know she’s disappeared. Why did she go and where did she go?”
“Why should I know?”
“You do know,” she countered.
“I said nothing of the sort.”
Pulling herself loose, she confronted him. Every thwarted undisciplined desire in her raged at the frail control maintained by habit. Her eyes, no longer sleepy, blazed at him.
“You know where she is. The creature has gone off somewhere to hide herself and her shame, I suppose. The abandoned hussy. I know all about it, Ted. I found out all about it.”
He became a little surly and yet curiosity seemed to pique him.
“You know all about what, Bob?”
She was losing control completely now. The confession, abasement, she had worked up to was not forthcoming.
“Where is she?” she stormed. “Where are you keeping that girl?”
Her face had changed from that of a pretty girl to that of a furious, uncontrolled shrew. Her shrill voice tore through the empty room, struck against the silence.
“Hush,” he said sharply, “don’t yell like that, Bob. Don’t be a fool.”
“I won’t have it. I won’t have you making a laughing stock out of me. Before everybody—everybody’s talking, laughing at you—at me. You’ve got to give that girl up. You’ve got to! Pay her off and let her go away and hide till it’s over.”
The vein of caddishness was rich in Ted. He looked at her coolly—calculated her hysteria, made her maddeningly conscious of his imperturbability. Turning away, he lit a cigarette.
“So you won’t answer me!”
“I really don’t know what you mean, Bob. You hurl a lot of accusations at me and in the same breath you want a lot of promises. I don’t know what you’re driving at, my dear.”
“Then I’m through with you,” she said, viciously.
An impolite smile glimmered at the corners of his mouth.
“Oh, in that case—” He turned to the door.
But she did not have strength enough to let him go. She followed him, distressing now in her abandonment which was not even held together by anger.
“Ted—you know I care—how can you—how can you?”
He turned and appraised her. It was obvious now how much of her charm was in that thrown aside pose of indifference, lazy mockery.
“You told me you were through with me.”
His voice was quite cold, stiff. It brought her to him with a rush, her arms thrown about his neck, cheek against his, hot, panting.
“I didn’t mean it, Ted. Really, I was just about crazy. I won’t talk about that girl—about anything. Let’s just be as we were when you first came in.”
“I didn’t start all this,” he answered sullenly.
She urged him back to his chair, pulled things into some semblance of order.
“There, let’s be comfortable after all the melodrama.Here you must eat some of these sandwiches. I made them myself.”
She poised herself on the arm of his chair and played with him.
“You can’t understand how a girl feels,” she told him, “under a lot of foolish teasing. They all know I’m fond of you—a little anyway” (that fell cold)—“and they take it out of me because I’m honest and not a flirt.”
Ted chuckled. “Not a flirt.”
“You know what I mean. A girl who has been brought up as I have—can’t let herself go the way other girls of a different class can. I can see that those girls have an advantage. We’re just as—we’re just like they are only they’ve been brought up differently.”
She paused for a moment in her fumbling, in the pleading to be admitted to the class of women of easy virtue whom she fancied held her lover in their toils, trying to convince him that she was ripe for abandonment. But he would not help her. He looked at her rather curiously—that was all.
Sighing she rested her head on his shoulder.
“It’s so nice to have you here.”
“But it’s getting late, Bob. I’ll really have to go.”
She threw a restraining arm across his chest.
“Go where?”
“I have to get back—” he said vaguely.
It was time for her last card. Actuated by that vivid fear of his possible destination, perhaps, she relaxed completely in his rather unwilling arms.
“Don’t go—don’t go at all to-night. Let’s just stay here—together.”
She could feel him stiffen and looked up slowly, languorously, slyly at him. But she should have known what she would see—should have known that so easily played a game would not be worth the candle of compromise which would bind him so much more to her. He was too sophisticated to be attracted by unsought abandonment.
“Look here, Bob,” he almost shook himself to be free of her, “you’re not quite yourself to-night. You’re a bit tired and you’ll be better for a night’s sleep. I’ll have to run along now. Don’t come down. Good night.”
She made a swift movement—then seemed checked by a vision of its futility. The other door closed quietly and heavily. Stripped of the pose that served her for strength, the vanity which served her for modesty, Barbara sat in the leather chair which Ted had abandoned and let her ugly imaginings consume her.
THE Thorstads had not gone back to Mohawk. Mrs. Thorstad had said that she would stay in St. Pierre until they heard further from Freda and since it was the school vacation her husband had agreed. After the first shock of disappearance they had accepted Freda’s letter at its face value and decided to wait for news from her. It was all they could do, in fact. One alternative, publicity, advertising her disappearance, would have done only harm and have looked cruelly unnecessary in view of her farewell letter to her father. The other alternative, setting private detectives to work, would have been too expensive and again her letters did not justify that. They must wait. Mrs. Thorstad, after a bit, did not brood, nor indeed appear to worry greatly. She was quickly allied with clubdom and petty politics and was busy. Her husband, trying to interest himself in stray free lectures at the University and in the second hand bookstores, grew rather pallid and thin.
They stopped at an inexpensive boarding house on the West Side. It was a place of adequate food, adequate cleanliness and no grace. Mrs. Thorstad’s reputation as a prominent club woman stood her in good stead in these rather constricted surroundings where most of the guests were men of sapped masculinity, high busted women dividing their time between small shopping and moving pictures. The men were persons of petty importance and men of small independence, but there was one strangely incongruous person in the company. He was the editor ofthe scandal paper of the city, a thin, elderly, eye-glassed person of fifty, who had maintained, in spite of his scavenging for scandals, some strange insistence on and delight in his own respectability. He was personally so polite, so gentlemanly, so apparently innocuous that it was almost incredible to think of him as the editor of the sheet which sold itself so completely on the strength of its scandal that it needed no advertising to float its circulation.
There was a natural attraction between him and Adeline Thorstad. They had mutually a flare for politics and intense personal prejudices complicating that instinctive liking. They often ran upon the same moral catch words in their conversation. Robinson began to be a “booster” for Mrs. Thorstad. He saw her political possibilities and commenced to call attention to her here and there in his columns.
It was one of Mr. Thorstad’s few occasions of protest.
“Shall you tell him to keep your name out of his paper or shall I?”
“But he’s said nothing that isn’t awfully friendly, Eric. I hate to hurt his feelings. I’m sure he meant to be kind.”
“You don’t want to be featured in ‘The Town Reporter,’ Adeline. It doesn’t—it isn’t right.”
She let the stubborn lines settle over her face.
“I don’t think the ‘Town Reporter’ is as corrupt as almost any of the others.”
“Look at the stuff it prints!”
“But, my dear, if it’s true, isn’t there a kind of courage in printing it?”
He looked at her in exasperation, measuring her and his own futility.
“So you want to let that go?”
“I think it’s better not to hurt him, Eric.”
He shut the door of their room sharply and yet whenshe saw him again he had regained his quiet indifference to her doings. The friendship between her and the editor continued to flourish.
They were in the dining-room on Tuesday, the third of August, when the morning papers were brought in. It was a sticky, hot, lifeless morning. Halves of grapefruit tipped wearily on the warmish plates. No one spoke much. The head of the silk department in Green’s was hurrying through his breakfast in order to get down to inspect the window trim. The stenographer at Bailey and Marshall’s had slipped into her place. Mrs. Thorstad was alert determinedly, Mr. Thorstad sagging a little beside her. Robinson picked up his paper first, casually, and uttered a low whistle.
“That’s a bit of news,” he said.
Several people craned and reached for the papers they had been too indolent to open. A headline ran across the page.
PROMINENT CLUBMAN KILLS HIMSELF INFASHIONABLE CLUBWALTER GRANGE CARPENTER, CAPITALIST, SHOOTS SELFFATALLY IN EARLY MORNING HOURS. CAUSEOF SUICIDE MYSTERY.
They gathered around the news without a particle of sympathy. No one cared. He was a mystery and sensation—that was all.
“Funny thing,” said Robinson. “I wonder what was at the bottom of that.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised if it was the Duffield girl,” Mrs. Thorstad said rather casually.
“Who was that?”
“You know—the political organizer who was sent here for the Republican women.”
“Was Carpenter in love with her?”
“I think so. I saw him—well, perhaps I shouldn’t say—”
Robinson gave her a keen glance and let the matter drop. But that night after dinner he sought her out again, segregating her from the rest of the people. Mr. Thorstad was not there.
“What was it you were saying about that Miss Duffield?”
She hedged a little.
“Oh, I don’t like to talk scandal, Mr. Robinson. I’m no gossip. I never liked the woman. I always believed she made a great deal of trouble and I know she was not a good influence on my daughter. But I have no wish to malign her. If she is responsible for this tragedy, she and her free love doctrines have indeed wrought havoc—”
She paused abruptly.
“I wish you’d tell me what you know,” said Robinson. “I’ll confide in you, Mrs. Thorstad. I heard from a certain source to-day that Carpenter left this Duffield women everything he possessed. Every one seems to know they were seen around town constantly until she went away. There seems to have been considerable expectation that they would marry—surprise that they did not. Well—you can see that any information added—”
“But what good would it do?” She pressed him, her utilitarian little mind anxious for results.
“I’d rather like to know why Carpenter shot himself. So would other people. If this woman is a menace she should be exposed.”
“She should indeed. An interloper, making trouble, trying to run politics—”
He surveyed her amusedly, familiar with outbreaks of spite, waiting for his point to win itself.
“You knew her well.”
“I worked with her closely. A brilliant person—clever, modern. Modern in the way that these Eastern young women are modern. I did not approve of many things she did. I did not approve of some of the things she said. Then there was an incident which convinced me.”
She went on, a little deft prodding keeping her in motion, telling the story of having seen Walter Carpenter come to Margaret’s room and of having seen the letter from Gregory with its protestation that he must see her, that he wanted “to unloose her emotions—not fetter her in marriage.” How those words had imprinted themselves on Mrs. Thorstad’s mind! There was great satisfaction in Robinson’s face.
“And this Gregory?”
She had thought that out too.
“Why it must have been that Gregory Macmillan. He came here later and she talked of knowing him. I heard Mrs. Flandon speak of it.”
“Ah, the Sinn Feiner! Why, it’s perfect.”
She had a moment of fearful doubt.
“You wouldn’t quote me? There’d be no libel—?”
“My dear lady, I’ve no money to spend on libel suits. I’ll never get mixed up in one. Every bit of my stuff is looked over by a lawyer before it sees the light of print. Don’t you worry. I’d never implicate a lady. Scourging a vampire”—he fell into his grandiloquent press language again—“is an entirely different matter.”
“There’s such a thing as justice,” said Mrs. Thorstad bridling.
He nodded with gravity. They might have been, from their appearance, two kindly middle-aged persons discussing a kindly principle, so well did their faces deceive their minds.
So it happened that the next issue of the ‘Town Reporter’ carried in its headlines on the following day—