FREDA felt that night that all her dreams, all her vague anticipations of doing were suddenly translated into activity and reality. In the strangest way in the world, it seemed to her, so naïve was she about the obscure ways of most things, she had a room of her own and a job in St. Pierre. Margaret Duffield had smiled a little at the news of her job but at Freda’s quick challenge as to whether she were really imposing on Mr. Flandon, Margaret insisted that she merely found Gage himself humorous. She did not say why that was so. Together she and Freda went to see the landlady about a room for Freda. There was one, it appeared, in an apartment on the third floor. Freda could have it, if she took it at once, and so it was arranged.
It was a plain little room with one window, long and thin like the shape of the room, furnished sparsely and without grace, but Freda stood in the midst of it with her head high and a look of wondering delight in her eyes, fingering her door key.
Later she went down to Margaret’s apartment to carry up her suitcase. She found Gregory there. He had not come for lunch as Margaret had warned her. Seeing him now more clearly than she had the night before, Freda saw how cadaverous his face was, how little color there was in his cheeks. She thought he looked almost ill.
They did not hear her come in. Gregory was sitting with his eyes on Margaret, telling her something andshe was listening in a protesting way. It occurred to Freda that of course they were in love. She had suspected it vaguely from their attitude. Now she was sure.
She coughed and they looked up.
“It’s my damsel in distress,” said Gregory, rising, “did everything clear up? Is the ogress destroyed?”
“If she is, poor Miss Duffield had to do it.”
“She wouldn’t mind. She likes cruelties. She’s the most cruel person—”
“Hush, Gregory, don’t reveal all my soul on the spot.”
“Cruel—and over modest. As if a soul isn’t always better revealed—”
“You can go as far as you like later. Just now you might carry Freda’s suitcase upstairs.”
He took the suitcase and followed them, entering Freda’s little room which he seemed to fill and crowd.
“So this is where you take refuge from the ogress?”
“It’s more than a refuge—it’s a tower of independence.”
He looked at her appreciatively.
“We’ll agree on many things.”
Margaret asked Freda to come down with them and she went, a little reluctantly wondering if she were not crowding their kindness. But Gregory insisted as well as Margaret.
Margaret sat beside a vase of roses on her table and Gregory and Freda faced her, sitting on the couch-bed. The roses were yellow, pink—delicate, aloof, like Margaret herself and she made a lovely picture. Gregory’s eyes rested on her a little wearily as if he had failed to find what he sought for in the picture. He was silent at first—then, deftly, Margaret drew him out little by little about the Irish Republic, and he became different, a man on fire with an idea. Fascinated, stirred, Freda watched him, broke into eager questioning here and there and wasanswered as eagerly. They were hot in discussion when Walter Carpenter came.
There was a moment of embarrassment as if each of the men studied the other to find out his purpose. Then Margaret spoke lightly.
“Do you want to hear about the Irish question from an expert, Walter?”
“Is Mr. Macmillan an expert?”
“He’s to lecture about it on Friday night.”
“It’s a dangerous subject for a lecture.”
“It’s a dangerous subject to live with,” answered Gregory a little defiantly.
“Are you a Sinn Feiner, Macmillan?”
“I’m an Irish Republican.”
There was a dignity in his tone which made Walter feel his half-bantering tone ill judged. He changed at once.
“We’re very ignorant of the whole question over here,” he said, “all we have to judge from is partisan literature. We never get both sides.”
“There is only one side fit to be heard.”
Freda gave a little gasp of joy at that statement. It brushed away all the conventions of polite discussion in its unequivocal clearness of conviction.
“I was sure of it,” she said.
Gregory turned and smiled at her. The four of them stood, as they had stood to greet Walter, Margaret by the side of her last guest, looking somehow fitting there, Gregory and Freda together as if in alliance against the others. Then conversation, civilities enveloped them all again. But the alliances remained. Freda made no secret of her admiration for Gregory. The openness of his mind, the way his convictions flashed through the talk seemed to her to demand an answer as fair. Her mind leapt to meet his.
Gregory Macmillan was Irish born, of a stock which was not pure Irish for his mother was an Englishwoman. It had been her people who were responsible for Gregory’s education, his public school and early Oxford life. But in his later years at Oxford his restlessness and discontents had become extreme. Ireland with its tangle of desires, its heating patriotism, heating on the old altars already holy with martyrs, had captured his imagination and ambition. He had gone to Ireland and interested himself entirely in the study of Celtic literature and the Celtic language, living in Connacht and helping edit a Gaelic Weekly. Then had come the war, and conflict for Gregory. The fight for Irish freedom, try as he did to make it his only end, had become smaller beside the great world confusion and, conquering his revulsion at fighting with English forces he had enlisted.
Before the war Gregory’s verse had had much favorable comment. He came out of the war to find himself notable among the younger poets, acclaimed even in the United States. It seemed preposterous to him. The machinations of the Irish Republican party absorbed him. Intrigue, plotting, all the melodrama, all the tragedy of the Sinn Fein policy was known to him, fostered by him. He had been in prison and after his release had fallen ill. They had sent him to convalesce in Wales. It was while he was there that there had come an offer from an American lecture bureau to go on tour in the States telling of Irish literature and reading his own verse. He laughed at the idea but others who heard the offer had not laughed. He was to come to the States, lecture on poetry and incidentally see and talk to various important Americans who might have Irish sympathies. The Republic needed friends.
He came reluctantly and yet, once in New York, he had found so many young literati to welcome him, to givehim sympathy and hearing if not counsel that his spirits had risen. And he had met Margaret Duffield and drawn by her mental beauty, her curious cold virginity, he had fallen in love with her and told her he loved her. For a few ardent weeks he wooed her, she explaining away his love, denying it. Then she had come West and he had sought his lecture bureau, making them include a lecture in this city which held her. He had come and found her colder, more aloof than ever, and now sitting in this room of hers he found a quiet, controlled, cultivated, middle-aged man who seemed to be on terms of easy and intimate friendship such as he had not attained.
After a little they divided their conversation. Margaret wanted to talk to Walter about some complication in local politics—something affecting Helen’s election. And Freda wanted to hear Gregory talk.
He told her about Ireland, of the men and women who plotted secretly and constantly to throw off every yoke of sovereignty. He told of the beauty of the Gaelic tongue, translating a phrase or two for her—talked of the Irish poets and his friends and she responded, finding use now for all the thoughts that had filled her mind, the poems she had read and loved. The light in his deep set eyes grew brighter as he looked at the face turned to his, meeting his own enthusiasm so unquestioningly. Once he looked at Margaret curiously. She was deep in her discussion and with a glimmer of a smile in his eyes he turned again to Freda.
At eleven he took her to her room. They went up the stairs to the door of her apartment.
“Shall I see you between now and Friday night?”
“I’m going to work to-morrow.” Freda came back to that thought with a jolt. “I don’t know.”
“To-morrow night? Just remember that I’m alone here—I don’t know any one but you and Miss Duffieldand I don’t want the people in charge of my lecture to lay hands on me until it’s necessary. You’ve no idea what they do to visiting lecturers in the provinces?”
“But hasn’t Miss Duffield plans for you?”
“I hoped she might have. But she’s busy, as you see.” His tone had many implications. “So I really am lonely and you made me feel warm and welcome to-night. You aren’t full of foolish ideas about friendships that progress like flights of stairs—step by step, are you?”
“Friendships are—or they aren’t,” said Freda.
“And this one is, I hope?”
They heard a sigh within the apartment as if a weary soul on the other side of the partition were at the end of its patience. Gregory held out his hand and turned to go.
But Freda could not let him go. She was swept by a sense of the cruel loneliness of this strange beautiful soul, in a country he did not know, pursuing a woman he did not win. She felt unbearably pent up.
Catching his hand in both of hers, she held it against her breast, lifted her face to his and suddenly surprisingly kissed him. And, turning, she marched into her room with her cheeks aflame and her head held high. Groping for the unfamiliar switch she turned on her light and began mechanically to undress. It seemed to her that she was walking in one of her own storied imaginings. So many things had happened in the last twenty-four hours which she had often dreamed would happen to her. Adventures, romantic moments, meetings of strange intimate congeniality like this with Gregory Macmillan. She thought of him as Gregory.
Gregory went down the stairs quickly, pausing at Margaret’s door to say good night. The other man was leaving too and they walked together as far as Gregory’s hotel. They were a little constrained and kept theirconversation on the most general of subjects. Gregory was absent minded in his comments but as he entered the hotel lobby he was smiling a little, the immensely cheered smile of the person who has found what he thought was lost.
Freda reported for work at the office of Sable and Flandon at half past eight the next morning. She had not been sure at what time a lawyer’s office began operations and thought it best to be early so she had to wait a full hour before Mr. Flandon came in. The offices were a large, well-furnished suite of rooms. There were three young lawyers in the office, associated with Mr. Sable and Mr. Flandon, and three stenographers, in addition to a young woman, with an air of attainment, who had a desk in Mr. Sable’s office and was known as Mr. Sable’s personal secretary. Freda got some idea of the organization, watching the girls come in and take up their work. She became a little dubious as to where she could fit into this extremely well-oiled machinery and wondering more and more as to the quixotic whim which had made Mr. Flandon employ her, was almost ready to get up and go out when Gage came in.
He saw her in a minute and showed no surprise. Instead he seemed to be anxious to cover up any ambiguity in the position by making it very clear what her duties were to be. He introduced her to the rest of the office force as my “personal secretary” at which the Miss Brewster who held a like position in Mr. Sable’s employ lifted her eyebrows a little. She was given a desk in a little ante-room outside of Gage’s own office and Gage, with a stenographer who had done most of his work, went over her duties. She was to relieve the stenographer of all the sorting of his correspondence, take all his telephone messages, familiarize herself with all of his affairs and interests in so far as she could do so by consultingcurrent files and be ready to relieve him of any routine business she could, correcting and signing his letters as soon as possible.
At five o’clock she hurried back to her little room to find a letter in her mail box. It was from her father and at the sight of it she was saddened by the sense of separation between them. Every word in it, counsel, affection, humor breathed his love and thought for her. She was still poring over it when Gregory came to take her to dinner, and forgot to be embarrassed about the night before.
Gregory had never intended to be embarrassed evidently. He considered that they were on a footing of delightful intimacy. His voice had more exuberance in it to-night than she had previously heard. As they went past Margaret’s door they looked up at her transom. It was dark.
“I hoped she was coming with us,” said Freda.
“She doesn’t want to come with me,” answered Gregory, “and that has hurt me for a long time, it seems to me, although perhaps it is only weeks. But it may be just as well. For I could never make her happy.”
“Would it be so hard?”
“I could never make any woman happy,” said Gregory with extraordinary violence. “Happiness is a state of sloth. But I could live through ecstasy and through pain with some one who was not afraid. For this serene stagnancy which seems to be the end-all of most people, I’m no good. I couldn’t do it, that’s all.”
His head was in the air and he looked, thought Freda, as if he would be extremely likely to forget about any woman or anything else and go sailing off in some fantasy of his own, at any time. She remembered him as he had been, despondent, when she had first met him, last night full of blazing enthusiasms, to-night blithelyindependent. It delighted her. She had never before met a person who adjusted to no routine.
“Let’s walk in peace and watch the clouds and I’ll tell you what an old Irish poet said of them.”
He could see her chin lift as she listened.
“To have in your mind such a wealth of beauty—what it must mean—to feel that things do not starve within you for lack of utterance—” Her voice was blurred into appreciations.
“Why let them starve?” asked Gregory.
“Perhaps because practical meat-and-drink body needs always claim the nourishment the things of your mind need—and you let the mind go hungry.”
“That’s it—that’s what people do—but you won’t. I hear it in your voice—see it in your face. The things in you are too vital to be starved. You can cripple them but you can’t kill them.”
“I do not know.”
“You must set yourself free.”
Freda smiled ruefully.
“That’s what women are always talking about and what they mean is a washing machine.”
“That’s no freedom—that’s just being given the run of the prison. Don’t you see that what I mean is to keep yourself free from all the petty desires—the little peeping conventions—free for the great desires and pains that will rush through you some day? You have to be strong to do that. You can put up wind breaks for emotion so easily. And you don’t want them.”
“It means being very fearless.”
“I have never yet met anything worth fearing except cowardice.”
He stopped. They were in the middle of some sidewalk, neither of them noticed where.
“Why did you kiss me last night?”
“I wanted to. I’ve not been sorry,” answered Freda. “By all the rules I’ve learned I ought to be abashed, but you don’t live by rules, so why waste them on you?”
Her smile was faintly tremulous. His strange, unfamiliar eyes looked into hers and rested there.
“And we won’t have to spend time talking about love,” he said, half to himself, “we shan’t wear it threadbare with trying to test its fabric. It comes like the wind—like God.”
Again they breasted the wind and her hand was fast in his. It was a clean, cool clasp. Freda felt oddly that she had saved her soul, that she had met an ultimate.
THE State Convention was imminent. In the vast barrenness of the Auditorium rows upon rows of ticketed chairs were filling up with delegates, sectional banners waved in the various parts of the big hall, flags made the background for the speakers, chairs and table.
“The machinery for creating a government is in progress,” said Margaret, “what do you think of it?”
Helen shook her head.
“Inadequate. When you think why they have come, how they have come, what destinies they hold in their hands. Would women do it better I wonder, Margaret?”
“Women are more serious. Perhaps. Anyway we must try it. If we don’t like that machinery we’ll have to invent another kind.”
“Funny male gathering. Think they all have their women—and their feeling towards their own women must influence their feeling towards all of us. Their own women to treat cruelly or kindly—or possessively.”
“They’re on the last lap of their possession,” answered Margaret.
The gallery was filling with women, reporters, spectators with one interest or another. The men were taking their places, formality settling on the assembly. The temporary chairman was on the platform, welcoming them, bowing grandiloquently with a compliment that was inevitable to the ladies in the gallery. Nominations fora chairman were in order. The temporary chairman retained his place as he had expected. The committees on credentials, resolutions, organization, retired and the delegation heard with some restlessness further exhortation as to the duties which lay before them and the splendor of opportunity awaiting the party in the immediate future.
The platform was read. Cheers, a little too well organized and not too freely spontaneous, punctuated it. The women listened to it attentively, Margaret frowning now and then at some of its clauses.
It was a long task. On its consummation the convention adjourned for lunch.
It was mid-afternoon before the business of electing the delegates at large to the National Convention had been reached. Helen felt her face grow hot and her heart go a little faster even while she mocked at herself for those signs of nervousness. Margaret watched as if her finger was on the pulse of a patient.
Hedley’s name went through nomination as every one had expected. Then Jensen was on his feet.
He was good. The women admitted that after his first words. He dwelt upon the fact of suffrage, on the practical differences it made in the electorate. He spoke of the recognition of women as a privilege. Then with a reference which Helen had feared must come he spoke of the one woman whose name is “familiar to us through the fine party loyalty of her husband” and who is herself “the unspoken choice of hundreds and thousands of women of this State” as their delegate. Helen heard her name come forth unfamiliarly, heard the burst of clapping, faced the barricade of glances with a smile.
There was little doubt about it from the start. What opposition there was must have decided it unsafe to show its teeth. An hour later a discomfited man, pushed offthe party slate by a woman, edged his way out of the back of the gallery and the woman was surrounded by a group of men and women, all anxious to be early in their congratulations, some from sheer enthusiasm, others from motives more questionable.
“And where is Gage passing the cigars?” asked one man jocularly.
Helen looked around as if in surprise that he was not there.
“He isn’t here, is he?”
She knew he wasn’t. She had known he wouldn’t come, even while she could not quite kill the hope that he would.
At the door were photographers, even a moving picture man waiting for the new woman delegates. Margaret dropped Helen’s hand and Helen, on Mrs. Brownley’s arm, moved past the range of picture-takers with an air of complete composure. In a moment she was in her car and moving out of sight. Margaret turned to walk back to her own apartment, complete satisfaction on her face.
Helen entered the house quietly and leaving her gloves and wrap on the hall bench, went into the kitchen to see how things were going there. There was a pleasant air of competence about it. The maids were busy and the dinner in active preparation. Upstairs the nurse had the children. She played with them a little, a warm sense of satisfaction at her heart. It was so absurd to choose—to fake a choice. This other work, this other business could be done without sacrificing anything. Gage was absurd. She was no less a mother, not a bit less good a housewife because she was a delegate to the Republican Convention. It took a bit of management, that was all. If she was treating Gage badly she would feel different.
But there was a guilty feeling which she could not control. He was unhappy and she the cause. They had been too close for that not to hurt.
At seven o’clock, a little late for dinner, came Gage, a guarded courtesy in his manner. He asked her pardon for not dressing and handed her a sheaf of evening papers. She was thankful that they had been issued too early to contain the news of her triumph. It postponed certain altercations. She thought suddenly of her barrage of photographers and of what she had completely forgotten, Gage’s tremendous dislike of having her picture in the papers.
“I can’t bear the thought of your picture tossed about the country—looked at casually for an hour and then used as old newspapers are used—to wrap a package—line a stair-rug—heaven knows what!”
Of course it had appeared occasionally for all of that but Helen had made the occasions infrequent. She had always liked that prejudice of his. As she looked at him to-night she thought he looked tired. There were strained lines around his eyes, and he was very silent.
She said several little things and then, because avoidance of the big topic seemed impossible, joined him in his silence. He looked at her at last, smiling a little. It was not the smile of a rancorous man but rather a hurt smile, a forced smile of one who is going to go through pain wearing it.
“I have been congratulated all the way home on your account, Helen. It seems to have been a landslide for you.”
“There was hardly any opposition.” It was meager but she could not go on without seeming to run into a forbidden or aching subject.
There they had to stop. Helen had a vision of the closed topics between them, a sudden horror of thiscleavage. Suppose he didn’t see that he was foolish, that she was not treating him badly, that she must lay up something for herself as a person against the day when he himself might weary of her as a woman. Fiercely she recast her arguments in her own mind. Yet there was that tired look in his eyes. You can fight rancor but not weariness.
“How is Miss Thorstad getting on?”
“Fine. It was a great hunch. You know she actually saves me a lot of thinking. It shows that a girl with wits is worth half a dozen expert stenographers. She has an air about her that is dignified and calm and yet she’s not a stick.”
“I imagine there’s a volcanic soul under that rather calm exterior.”
“Perhaps.”
“Gage, you look tired.”
He made a visible effort to rouse himself.
“Tired? Why, no, dear. Not especially.”
“What are we to do to-night?”
“I have some work to-night.”
She looked somewhat baffled as the door closed after him a half hour later. Then going to the telephone she called Margaret. Margaret was not at home. Helen read for an hour and went to bed early.
Gage had meant to work. But he was not working. He was fighting on through a cloud of bitterness and of thoughts which he knew were not wholly unreasonable. He was sitting at his littered desk, all the paraphernalia of work strewn about him and a picture of Helen on his desk confronting him, accenting his trouble. There she was. He had only to close his eyes and he saw her even more clearly, breaking through the clouded doubts of his mind as she had done in the first days of his marriage—clearness, peace, the one real beauty in the world, the onereal truth in the world—Helen—love. And she had said she wanted to be “clean of sex!” He scowled at the thought but it danced before him defiling his memories. It would not go! From those early days, those days of the “hardening process” there had persisted always in Gage secret faith, fading now to a hope, flaring now to a conviction that sex was clean, was beautiful until some other agency defiled it. He remembered still his tortured adolescent mind revolving around the problems of the mysteries of birth, stirring him to wonder and the leering clandestine ugly talk which seemed an ugly wrapping around the wonder. He had always thought that his son would have no such tortures. His own proven conviction would carry the boy through all doubts. Now he seemed cast back in the mire of his own old doubts. Had Helen always felt defiled? Had all their life been a hideous mixture of shame and complacencies and hidden revulsions? Had they really conquered nothing? Or was there nothing to conquer? Was he over-fastidious, unmanly? Was the necessary thing to blunt once more, this time permanently, these illusions of his—to go home to Helen and play the part of the demanding husband, demanding concession in return for concession? Laugh at her whims, her fads, quarrel with her if necessary. If she must run to her conventions, let her go. And let him coarsen his feeling so it was willing to take what was left of her.
He wiped his forehead impatiently. It was damp and that sign of his intensity shamed him. He had learned that the revealing of emotion was man’s shame, to be hidden at all costs. Helen had given him a final lesson in that. Angrily he flung himself into his work, concentrating actually with his will for hours, mastering the intricacies of the question on which he must give an opinion in the morning. When he had done his notes layready. He cleaned up the litter of papers, a little frown on his face and looked at his watch. Nearly midnight. He must go home.
All the practical machinery of locking up, starting the car, steering, driving into the garage, locking the garage, turning out the lights in the library. Nothing was different from other nights. He was a man in his own house. But over the formalism of his actions and his deliberate definiteness of conscious thought his mind was in battle. He was trying to kill the part of him that cried out against going to his wife in such a mood. He was trying deliberately to kill it with a blunt edged thought which read “Be a man—not a neurasthenic.” He cursed himself under his breath. He was no damned temperamental actor to carry on like this (Always, always, that choking necessity for repressing these feelings, concealing the fact of feeling). A married man—seven years—rights—duties—nature—foolish whims—but above that persisted the almost tortured cry of his spirit, struggling with the hotness of desire, begging, for its life—“Don’t go home like a beast to her!”
In the morning Helen was again worried by his appearance.
“What time did you come in, Gage?”
“About midnight.”
“You look as if you’d slept wretchedly. Did you?”
“Well, enough.” His tone was surly. He could not bear to look at her, shining haired, head held high, confidence, strength, balance of mind, justice, radiating from her. He knew what a contrast he made—she did not need to tell him of his heavy, encircled eyes, his depressed mouth.
She pushed his hair back from his forehead, standing beside his chair. It was a familiar gesture between them.
“Gage, you mean more than anything else to me. You know that?”
He mumbled an answer.
“But don’t resent it so awfully because I can’t believe that loving is a woman’s only job. We mustn’t absorb each other.”
Quoted, he thought bitterly, from Margaret Duffield. Quite reasonable too. Very reasonable. He suddenly hated her for her reasoning which was denied to his struggling instincts. All desire, all love in his heart had curdled to a sodden lump of resentment.
He picked up the paper. There was Helen, marching across the page, smiling into the camera’s eyes. Curious men with hats and crowding women showed in the blurred background. He looked from the picture to the real Helen.
“Very good picture.”
His tone was disagreeable. And he had not answered her appeal.
“Be fair, Gage.”
Very well, he would be fair.
“I haven’t the smallest sympathy with all this, Helen. I know you regard that as unreasonable. It may be that I am. But I don’t believe you’re bigger or better because of all this. You’ve done it from no spirit of conviction but because you were flattered into doing it. The Duffield girl is simply using you for her own convictions. With her they at least are convictions. But with you they’re not.”
“That’s quite enough, thanks, Gage.”
He was cruelly glad he had hurt her. How it helped the ache in his own heart!
Helen thought: “He’s jealous of Margaret. Terriblyjealous. It’s abnormal and disgusting. What has happened to him?” She let him leave the house with what was almost a little life of spirits when he had gone. She had not time to sift these feelings of Gage now. Later, if they persisted. She wondered if he should see a doctor, thought for a moment of psycho-analysis, speculating as to whether that might set him straight. But the telephone began ringing frantically.
THE committee on entertainment of visiting lecturers had called upon Gregory at his hotel and been pleased. He had the ear-marks of eccentricity, to be sure, but in their capacity of hostesses they were used to that. Geniuses might not live in St. Pierre but they were frequently imported thither and as a matter of fact several had grown there, though their wings had been only budding when they had taken themselves to the denser air of the great cities.
They had met him now and he pleased them. His fine courtesy, the slight exaggeration of his manner, his deference to their arrangements and his lack of pompousness charmed them. They withdrew after he had politely but firmly refused invitations for either lunch or dinner saying that he must concentrate before his talk. He neglected to mention that he was concentrating on Freda and was planning to meet her at a lunch room outside her office where she had said they would have a chance to talk.
A clean, white table needing no cloths to cover its shining metal surface with two bowls of oyster stew, steaming very hot, furnished him and Freda their occasion.
She told him Margaret had asked for him.
“And you told her?”
“That I was having dinner with you to-night. I didn’t mention lunch. Wasn’t that ridiculously secretive?”
“It was deliciously secret.”
“I don’t think I should monopolize all your time, though,” she demurred.
“Freda!” He was frowning now. “You aren’t going to waste time like that, are you? You aren’t going to hint at cheapness and little crippled conventions, are you?”
“No, I’m not. I was just saying—words. I wasn’t thinking. I suppose I was trying to hold you off for a minute for some obscure reason.”
He glanced at her very tenderly.
“You needn’t hold me off, darling. But it’s such a short time. And there’s nothing in the world as wise as to seize the cup of joy when it’s full. There’s an undiscoverable leak in that cup and it empties if you dawdle over it. It may be accident—death—or human perversity—almost anything. I’m so sure our cup is full now that I want to drink it with you quickly. Listen—there’s nothing in the world against it except that some person whom neither of us cares about at all might say we weren’t considered—were too hasty. For the sake of that obscure person whom we don’t know, you aren’t going to send me away, are you?”
She was hesitant.
“It doesn’t trouble you longer that I came out here to see Margaret Duffield, does it?”
“A little,” she answered honestly.
“It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t and it mustn’t. With her it was all argument and all tangle—with you it was like a flash of light.”
“I don’t want her to matter,” said Freda, “I always have wanted my love to come like this. Without question. Fearlessly.”
“Then you will, darling?”
“I don’t care about the rest, but there’s father. I hate to not tell him.”
“Will he hate it when you’re happy?”
“He’ll love it.”
“Then—listen. I shall tell him—later. I’ll tell him that I always prayed that when I married I wouldn’t have to have the eyes of the world on the coming of my bride. That my wedding should be secret and holy. If we could tell him without the rest knowing—but he would tell your mother, wouldn’t he?”
“And mother would want a wedding,” said Freda, a little drearily.
He leaned across to touch her hand.
“You don’t think it’s furtive—clandestine?”
“Oh, no!”
“Do you want me to go?”
“No—”
“I must go on, you see—those damned lectures. I must have the money. And I must go through to Spokane. I could ask you to wait until I got back but, darling—what’s the use of waiting? What’s the use of waiting? We could be married to-morrow—and have Sunday together. Then—then—we could wait for each other. Or you could come with me—”
“No, we couldn’t, Gregory. It’s too expensive. You know we couldn’t.”
She was so definite that his face fell. At the sight of it she smiled and reassured him.
“I shan’t mind a bit not having any money.”
“Money’s a nuisance. But I want enough of it—I’ll earn enough of it to take you to Ireland with me, when I come back in six weeks.”
Her forehead was a little knit. He went on eagerly.
“I’ve never been so practical. You wouldn’t believe what a man of affairs—American affairs—I’ve been. I looked up the name of a little hamlet where we could go to-morrow afternoon and be married by sundown. Andthen, sweetheart, an eternity of a day before us—and immortality to look forward to.”
“And no one to know.”
“Unless you wish it—no one.”
“I don’t wish it. It sounds dangerous and mad—but if I don’t, Gregory, I know I’ll regret it all the rest of my life. It’s my chance to prove life. It’s not as if I had the faintest doubt of you—”
“Never have I been married,” he laughed, “I’m poor and that’s the worst of me. You can read all about me in the papers to-day. They tell the worst.”
“Freda, darling, I’ve always wanted to steal the secret of life. Come with me—and we can do it.”
There was a flame in her eyes—a response as urgent as his call.
“That’s what I’ve wanted too—all my life.”
The waitress at their table glanced at them impatiently. They dallied too long—this gawky, skinny, black haired young fellow and the girl in the dark blue cape. Making love, all right. She was a pretty girl too, but no style. All that heavy, yellow hair half slipping down her neck. She’d do with a bob.
She had a still greater impatience as she searched the table in vain for the tip they had forgotten.
The committee in the ante-room glanced cheerfully in at the crowd gathering for Gregory’s lecture. They had hoped for a big audience but it was a bad week. The town was full of the Convention delegates and in little mood for lectures, they had feared. But people came. Fully a thousand people had gathered to hear the lecture on Ireland and its Poetry.
They wondered a little at some of the people who boughttickets at the door—men whom they were sure never had attended any lecture under their auspices before. That was because they did not know that Gregory Macmillan’s name was one familiar to other circles than the literary poetic ones—that his vigor in the Irish Republican cause had been told even on this side of the Atlantic. There were those who would have come to hear a lecture of no other subject—Irishmen who had heard his name and subject announced at their meeting of the Knights of Columbus. The literary-minded, the students, the people who patronized the lectures of the Collegiate Alumnae as they did all semi-social affairs, sat side by side in the hall and watched Gregory as he came out from the faded wings at one side of the amateur stage.
Margaret Duffield, Carpenter, Helen and a rather unwilling Gage had adjoining seats. Gage had been extremely disrespectful in his characterization of the lecture, the society which gave it and the presumable character of the man who was to give it, especially as he learned that he was a friend of Margaret’s.
Yet it was Gage who enjoyed the lecture most. From the opening sentence it was clear that the discussion of Irish Poetry was to Gregory merely a discussion of Ireland. In Ireland to be a poet meant that one thought deeply enough to be a patriot. All his poets were patriots.
He made no specific indictment of England except as he read with passionate fervor the translation of Padraic Pearse from the old Irish—
“The world hath conquered, the wind hath scattered like dustAlexander, Cæsar, and all that shared their sway.Tara is grass, and behold how Troy lieth low,And even the English, perchance their hour will come!”
“The world hath conquered, the wind hath scattered like dustAlexander, Cæsar, and all that shared their sway.Tara is grass, and behold how Troy lieth low,And even the English, perchance their hour will come!”
It was a quotation and he did not comment on its content. But he sketched the lives of some of his poets—his friends—his leaders. He made their dream clear—their simple idealism—their ignoring of the politics of expediency—their lives so chaste and beautiful. He told of their homes, their schools,—and sometimes when he ended simply, “He was killed in the attack of ——, shot by the military”—or more briefly, “He was executed on ——,” a shudder ran through his audience.
He would show the gayety of Ireland, the joy of the people, their exuberance—and end with a simple “Of course it is not like that now. There is much grief and mourning.”
It was not politics. It was a prose poem composed by a poet. One could not take exception to it as political but the hearers would forever have their standpoints colored by what he said. It was like a picture which, once seen, could never be forgotten.
Margaret listened, her ready mind taking exception to some of the things he said, seeing how he played upon his audience—Walter and Helen listened with intellectual appreciation. But Gage, slouched down in his seat felt envy grow in him. There was before him what he had always wanted. A man who had something indestructible, something immortal to care for. A conviction—and an ideal—an outlet for his soul. He felt himself cheated.
He liked too to listen to the poems about women. No controversial tirades these poems—but verses soft and sweet and pliable as the essence of women—once had been. He checked his running thoughts and looked at his wife, sitting beside him with her head high, “conscious of herself, every minute now,” he thought bitterly.
FREDA worked until noon the next day. Saturday was a half holiday with the employees of the firm so there was no question of her remaining in the office longer. All morning she worked steadily, almost absorbedly. It was as if she held her ecstasy off from her, unwilling to even think about it yet.
She had spent the night before, after the lecture to which she went alone, in writing a letter to her father. It was a long intimate letter, telling of the kind of work she was doing, the way she was living and of what she was thinking. She wrote as if she were talking to him, on and on, and her ending was like the conclusion of a talk, as if she asked for his blessing. “So you see, father dear, I’m all right. And I want you to know that I never forget what you’ve said to me—that I must live so that I’ll never be ashamed of having had life entrusted to me.”
She was really not afraid at all. Her demurring had been only the mechanical reactions of conventions which sat lightly on her. In her heart she knew that she was at home with Gregory and that the completeness of their mutual understanding could mean only that they belonged together. Gregory, like her father, reassured her. In the midst of his impetuousness, his driving thinking, she felt the purity without which he could not have been quite so free. She felt his kindness too, and the gentleness of his hands. He was like her father, she thought.Her father had perhaps had the glory of adventure in him too once, but it had been made submissive to circumstance. It had left its residue of understanding. She felt very sure that when he knew he would be glad.
Physically her fine fearlessness and eager nerves kept her from any reaction, or from any of the terrors, real or assumed, which women have come to believe right and modest at the approach of marriage. And minor faults of Gregory she never paused to consider. It would not have occurred to her that it was a fitting time to look for them. Little problems, living difficulties troubled her serene health not at all. She would have been ashamed to measure them up against her love. The latent spirit of adventure in her, her fine romantic training, taken from books and preserved because of her limited knowledge of people, were like winds blowing her on to the heart of her romance.
With all this strength and surety, this Ali Baba’s cave of beauty to explore, it was yet characteristic of her that she could work. She had been in the office four days and already her place was made. It was easy to see that she was intelligently competent and to know that her efficiency was not a matter of making a first impression. They all liked her and she already was beginning to lighten work for various people.
Flandon was not at the office at all on Saturday. He called up in the course of the morning and speaking briefly to Freda told her to tell Mr. Sable that he was going out of town over the week-end and would be back for the hearing of the Kraker case on Monday morning. That made it easier for Freda. She had a little fear that there might have been some extra duty for her on this Saturday afternoon which would wreck the golden plans. So at noon she put her desk in order—she was beginning to feelher proprietorship in a desk now—and went back to her room to get her bag, packed the night before.
She had meant to leave a note for Miss Duffield, but by chance she met her on the stairs. Margaret looked at the bag and made her own quick deduction.
“Going home for the week-end?”
“I’ll be back Monday,” said Freda, feeling rather rotten as she let Margaret’s misunderstanding pass.
But she forgot about that. She forgot everything as she went out in the street full of May sunshine and ran for the street-car which would take her to the railway station. There, in the noon crowd, she put her bag between her feet and hung on to the strap above her head, unable to keep the smile from her face any longer.
Gregory was there waiting for her. And at the first word he spoke, his spirit of exalted happiness carried Freda up into the heights. He had a word of endearment for her and then with her bag and his held in one hand, he managed with the other to hold her close to his side and they went to find their train.
There was an empty seat. That was the first piece of luck, when the train already looked impossibly full of men and women and families, setting out with baggage which overflowed from the seats to the aisles. But there was the seat, at the end of the coach, undiscovered yet, or perhaps miraculously set apart for them—made invisible to other searchers—its red plush surface cleanly brushed for the journey and a streak of sunlight like a benison across the back of it.
Freda slipped in beside the window and, placing their baggage in the little rack, with a touch that was almost reverent for Freda’s bag, Gregory sat down beside her.
“We have an hour and forty minutes,” he declared, “and look, my darling.” He took out of his pocket a tinywhite box, but, as she stretched her hand, he put it away again.
“You mustn’t see it. Not yet. But I wanted you to know I had it. It’s the most divine circlet of gold you ever saw. The halo of my wife.”
His voice was very soft and tender, the contact of his body against hers caressing.
A boy went by with sandwiches. They surprised each other by regarding him intently and then it occurred to Freda why they did so.
“Did you forget lunch too?” she cried.
So they lunched on ham sandwiches and Peters’ milk chocolate and water in sanitary paper cups and the train creaked into action, joltingly, as befitted a day coach in a local train.
Little stations twinkled by with sudden life and between them lay fields and valleys where life pushed quietly to the sun. They watched the villages with tenderness. Each one unexplored was a regret. There were so many things to be happy with. A child came running up to get a drink of water and leaned on the edge of their seat, staring at them curiously. They liked that. It seemed as if the child guessed their riot of joy and peace.
They had found that it was necessary for the haste of their marriage to go over the borderline of the state, a matter of forty miles. And they alighted in a little town of which they knew nothing. It was impressive as they looked about. Straight neat roads led away from the red roofed station.
“I’d like to walk into the country,” said Freda.
“So we shall. But first we must be married.”
He left her in the parlor of the little hotel while he went to find the justice of the peace. In half an hour he was back, exultant.
“Nothing dares to hamper us,” he declared. “Now, beloved.”
So they were married, in the little bare office of the justice of the peace, with a clerk from the court called in to witness that they were made man and wife by law. Gregory slipped the “circlet of gold” on the finger of his wife and as he made answers to the questions put to him, his eyes were on Freda as if he spoke to her alone, as if to her alone was he making this pledge of faith and loyalty and love. Freda did not look at him. For the moment she was fulfilling her pledge to life and Gregory was its instrument.
Then they were out again in the sunlight, choked with emotion, silent. Vaguely they walked back to the hotel. It was mid-afternoon.
“Shall we stay at the hotel?” asked Gregory.
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all. Only it would be nicer in the country, wouldn’t it?”
“There should be inns,” said Gregory, frowning for the first time that day as he looked at the square, ugly, frame building which was before them, a knot of curious loafers on the porch. “In Ireland we have inns. They’re somehow different.”
“I truly don’t care where we are,” smiled Freda and for that his eyes glanced down to hers with admiration.
None the less he went to inspect the little rooms of the hotel and came down depressed.
“I don’t want you to go up there, darling. Let’s see if there isn’t some other place.”
The hotel keeper, clerk and manager, reflected on the inquiry which Gregory tried to make polite.
“Of course there’s the Roadside Inn if you’re looking for style. Five miles out. Jitney take you there.”
“I know that place,” said Freda, “That’s lovely,Gregory. Oh, I think you’d like it. Only it may be noisy. They dance there at night.”
The proprietor misunderstood.
“So far as dancing goes here we dance here till midnight too,” he said, full of pride.
Gregory laughed.
“Well, sir, we think we’d like to be in the country to-day. We’ll try the inn you so kindly speak of.”
The jitney ride gave them further sense of adventure and when they stopped in front of the little inn with its quiet air and its stiff little flowerbeds aglow with red geraniums, they were enchanted. Their room pleased them too. A little low-ceilinged room with bright chintzes and painted furniture and a casement window that stood a little open. The colored man who played the fiddle at night, carried up their bags. When he had left them, Gregory kissed his wife.
Ten minutes later they went down the brown road where the dust lay soft under their feet. White birches and young elders all fresh and green with early summer foliage surrounded them. Then from the road a little trodden path slipped back into the woods.
“Shall we try it?”
The woods closed behind them. The little path led a faltering way between trees where long streams of sunlight fell. Under their feet grass rustled. Branches leaned to touch them. All the woods seemed to know that lovers were passing and whispered tremulously.
Gregory heard the whispers and turned to the girl at his side. Each heart heard the other as he stopped to hold her in his embrace until they grew faint with joy.
“I love you, Freda,” said the man, ever restless.
Freda smiled at him. It was all she could do. Demonstrations of love were new to her. She wasunbent, ready for caresses but not yet quite responsive except in the fine clarity of her mind. It was Gregory who must stop to bring her hand to his lips, to hold her against him for a silent moment.
The woods grew thinner.
“Ah, look,” cried Freda, “the enchanted woods end in a farmhouse yard!” She was standing on a little knoll and beneath them could be seen the farmhouse and its buildings, a group of children, perhaps the very ones who had trodden the path on their daily way to school.
“I like it,” said Gregory. “It’s love bending into life. Don’t you like to see it from here—like a pastoral picture? Children, kittens, the thin woman going to carry the scraps to the chickens. See, Freda—isn’t life beautiful?” Freda saw it through his poet’s vision for a moment. It was truly beautiful—the group held together by the common interest of procreation and maintenance—but she saw that more beautiful still were the eyes of Gregory. She had a sudden feeling that she must never dim his vision. Whatever might come she must protect that vision even though, as now, she might see that the farm below was full of signs of neglect and that the children quarreled.
They turned back and sat on the trunk of a fallen tree and he took off her hat and stroked her hair gently as she lay against his arm. They did not talk much. Incomplete little phrases in constant reiteration of their own happiness. Those were all.
The dusk came early and damply in the woods. They went back to the Inn, a little chilled, and Freda brushed her hair into neatness and went down to meet her husband in the dining-room. It was a strange and familiar feeling to see him standing by the door waiting for her. They were very hungry and talkative now. With the darknessoutside, intimacy pressed closer upon them and they were shy of it, deliciously shy, enticing it closer to them by their evasion of it.
So after their dinner they sat in the little guest parlor of the Inn and watched each other, talking about irrelevancies until the whiz of a motor outside made Freda start.
“You know, Gregory, I’d sooner go upstairs. I know some of the people who sometimes come here. I’d rather not see them to-night.”
“Yes, darling.”
In their bed-room the muslin curtains were tugging at their sashes, trying to pull themselves free. A breeze of thick soft coolness came through the room. Freda felt as if her heart would burst with very wonder. Life to be known so deeply—so soon. And, as was strange and frequent with her she lost the sense of everything except Life, a strange mystery, a strange progress, of which she was an inevitable part, spreading about her, caressing her, absorbing her. She was not thinking of Gregory, until he came, knocking so absurdly, so humbly on the fragile door that her mind leapt into sudden pity, and personal love.
“You are like a white taper before the altar of love,” breathed Gregory.
Around them in the soft darkness the breeze played lightly. Beneath was the sound of dance music, of occasional laughter. They heard nothing to distress them in their complete isolation. Only when the music became tender, falling into the languorous delicacy of a waltz it added witchery to their rapture.
In the morning it was Gregory who was the practical one—Freda the mystic. Her mind was filled withmystery and dulled with the pervading sense of her husband. He was inconceivably more to her than he had been. She was infinitely rich with thought and revelation and too languorous to think. Gregory overwhelmed her. In his spirited tenderness, declaring her the miracle bride of the world, talking an unending poem of love to her, he was active now—she dreamy and spent. He brought her breakfast and sat beside her while she ate it. And suddenly it became clear to them that their time was slipping quickly by.
It had been the plan to return to the city that night but they found it impossible to leave each other.
“If we rose with the dawn, we could motor back,” said Gregory, “and I could take the train of abomination that is bearing me somewhere or other into a barren country and you could be rid of me for a little. Oh, my darling, the eternity of the next weeks!”
“The eternity that will come after!” she said smiling.
So they decided to spend another night in the little inn. There were several other guests there but they had a feeling of owning the place. The lean, colored waiter in the dining-room smiled at them and their absorption, and gave them the attention he usually reserved for those too drunk to tip wisely. The chambermaid found pins for a forgetful Freda and smirked at her as she gave them, with full knowledge of the honeymoon. Even the manager on being told they would stay another night, smiled.
Every one smiled. They went for a long walk in the evening and a carter gave them a ride back to the inn. What was that but the charm of luck which was upon them?
It was Sunday night but though there was no dancing, people dropped in on motoring parties, ready to be warmed by hot suppers before they took the last stretch of the rideback to the city. And it was as Freda was going upstairs, still in that rapt absorption which had held her day that one of the incomers saw her and stopped still in amazement. She was in profile before him, her head held high and she was turning the curve of the stairs, walking slowly.
The observer walked up to the desk and spoke to the manager who sat making out bills behind it. There was no visible register, though his eyes cast about for one.
“Who was the lady who was going upstairs?” he asked unwisely.
His manner did not recommend him.
“A lady who is stopping here,” said the Swedish lady with some hostility, affronted by the casual question of this young gay fellow. She had observed Freda and was unlikely to give out information to young loafers.
“I thought I knew her.” Ted Smillie tried to get on firmer ground.
His interlocutor seemed to grunt in dubiousness.
He gave it up and went into the dining-room, trying to find out more from the waiter. But the waiter was not too free. He had not been in a roadhouse inn three years without learning a kind of discretion.
“Lady and her husbun’, suh. Several couples here. Couldn’t make sure, suh.”
But Ted knew whom he had seen. He knew there had been no mistake. After all, except for a flare of jealousy, even that not too keen in his increasingly tasteless emotions, he would have felt that the man did not matter. But if she was that kind, why on earth had she turned him down? That would be his reasoning. And, flavoring the whole, that vitiated detective instinct which makes gossips of little minded men, was interested, and he was anxious to tell his story. He did not choose the two men with whom he was supping for confidants. Hemanaged to get one of them to ask to see the register, just on the chance that it might throw light on Freda’s companion. But it did not help him. A party of young men and women had sprawled twenty or thirty names on the register last night. Ted did not know them and where that party began or ended he could not tell. There was not a recorded name familiar to him for the last three days. He went back to the city with his friends and the Roadside Inn grew quiet.
Freda and Gregory could not sleep. There seemed a million new thoughts in the mind of each of them, contending with the few hours they were to be together.
“I can’t bear to have morning come—and the end—” said Freda softly. She was more dependent now.
“Say the word and I’ll cancel the contracts.”
“You couldn’t. You know you said there’d be a forfeit. We’d be paying your bureau the rest of our lives. No—you must go. And I’ll be happy. But when you come back you’ll never go again. I’ll be no modern woman, I feel. I’ll be the sort of woman who cries when her husband goes to work.”
It was delightful nonsense.
“I don’t understand modern woman,” said Gregory, “you’re not modern. Modern is fashionable—that’s the most of it. You are eternal, darling. You only happen once in a thousand years and then only in the dream of a poet. I hate your modern woman, living by her little codebook of what she shall give and what she shall not give—what children she will bear, what income she must have—who shall earn it. One can’t measure life that way. It’s got to be measured by freedom or slavery. Either you’re free and brave, ready to sound depths of life if they’re worth sounding or you’re a slave and too cowardly to do anything but obey the rules.”
She did not answer. She was in no mood for discussion.