87
He broke in: “They say nobody is perfect, and I’m not a perfect stranger. I’ve met you before, Miss Webling.”
“Not rilly! Wherever was it? I’m so stupid not to remember––even your name.”
He rather liked her for not bluffing it through. He could understand her haziness the better from the fact that when he first saw her in the chair-car and leaped to his feet it was because he had identified her once more with the long-lost, long-sought beauty of years long gone––the girl he had seen in the cheap vaudeville theater. This slip of memory had uncovered another memory. He had corrected the palimpsest and recalled her as the Miss Webling whom he had met in London. She had given him the same start then as now, and, as he recalled it, she had snubbed him rather vigorously. So he had kept his distance. But the proffer of the money for the chair-car chair broke the ice a little. He said at last:
“My name is Ross Davidge. I met you at your father’s house in London.”
This seemed to agitate her peculiarly. She trembled and gasped:
“You don’t mean it. I–– Oh yes, of course I remember––”
“Please don’t lie about it,” he pleaded, bluntly, “for of course you don’t.”
She laughed, but very nervously.
“Well, we did give very large dinners.”
“It was a very large one the night I was there. I was a mile down the street from you, and I said nothing immortal. I was only a business acquaintance of Sir Joseph’s, anyway. It was about ships, of course.”
He saw that her mind was far away and under strange excitation. But she murmured, distantly:
“Oh, so you are––interested in ships?”
“I make ’em for a living.”
“Rilly! How interesting!”
This constraint was irksome. He ventured:
“How is the old boy? Sir Joseph, I mean. He’s well, I hope.”
Her eyes widened. “Didn’t you know? Didn’t you read in the papers––about their death together?”
“Theirs? His wife and he died together?”
“Yes.”
88
“In a submarine attack?”
“No, at home. It was in all the papers––about their dying on the same night, from––from ptomaine poisoning.”
“No!”
He put a vast amount of shock and regret in the mumbled word. He explained: “I must have been out in the forest or in the mines at the time. Forgive me for opening the old wound. How long ago was it? I see you’re out of mourning.”
“Sir Joseph abominated black; and besides, few people wear mourning in England during the war.”
“That’s so. Poor old England! You poor Englishwomen––mothers and daughters! My God! what you’ve gone through! And such pluck!”
Before he realized what he was doing his hand went across and touched hers, and he clenched it for just a moment of fierce sympathy. She did not resent the message. Then he muttered:
“I know what it means. I lost my father and mother––not at once, of course––years apart. But to lose them both in one night!”
She made a sharp attempt at self-control:
“Please! I beg you––please don’t speak of it.”
He was so sorry that he said nothing more. Marie Louise was doubly fascinating to him because she was in sorrow and afraid of something or somebody. Besides, she was inaccessible, and Ross Davidge always felt a challenge from the impossible and the inaccessible.
She called for her check and paid it, and tipped the waiter and rose. She smiled wretchedly at him as he rose with her. She left the dining-car, and he sat down and cursed himself for a brute and a blunderer.
He kept in the offing, so that if she wanted him she could call him, but he thought it the politer politeness not to italicize his chivalry. He was so distressed that he forgot that she had forgotten to pay him for the chair.
It was good and dark when the train pulled into Washington at last. The dark gave Marie Louise another reason for dismay. The appearance of a man who had dined at Sir Joseph’s, and the necessity for telling him the lie about that death, had brought on a crisis of nerves. She was afraid of the dark,89but more afraid of the man who might ask still more questions. She avoided him purposely when she left the train.
A porter took her hand-baggage and led her to the taxi-stand. Polly Widdicombe’s car was not waiting. Marie Louise went to the front of the building to see if she might be there. She was appalled at the thought of Polly’s not meeting her. She needed her blessed giggle as never before.
It was a very majestic station. Marie Louise had heard people say that it was much too majestic for a railroad station. As if America did not owe more to the iron god of the rails than to any of her other deities!
Before her was the Capitol, lighted from below, its dome floating cloudily above the white parapets as if mystically sustained. The superb beauty of it clutched her throat. She wanted to do something for it and all the holy ideals it symbolized.
Evidently Polly was not coming. The telegram had probably never reached her. The porter asked her, “Was you thinkin’ of a taxi?” and she said, “Yes,” only to realize that she had no address to give the driver.90
BOOK III
IN WASHINGTON
91“‘It’s beautiful overhead if you’re going that way,’” Davidge quoted. He set out briskly, but Marie Louise hung back. “Aren’t you afraid to push on when you can’t see where you’re going?” she demanded.
“‘It’s beautiful overhead if you’re going that way,’” Davidge quoted. He set out briskly, but Marie Louise hung back. “Aren’t you afraid to push on when you can’t see where you’re going?” she demanded.
92CHAPTER I
She went through her hand-bag again, while the porter computed how many tips he was missing and the cab-starter looked insufferable things about womankind.
She asked if any of them knew where Grinden Hall might be, but they shook their heads. She had a sudden happy idea. She would ask the telephone Information for the number. She hurried to a booth, followed by the despondent porter. She asked for Information and got her, but that was all.
“Please give me the numba of Mrs. Widdicombe’s, in Rosslyn.”
A Washington dialect eventually told her that the number was a private wire and could not be given.
Marie Louise implored a special dispensation, but it was against the rules.
She asked for the supervisor––who was equally sorry and adamant. Marie Louise left the booth in utter defeat. There was nothing to do but go to a hotel till the morrow.
She recalled the stories of the hopelessness of getting a room. Yet she had no choice but to make the try. She had got a seat on the train where there were none. Perhaps she could trust her luck to provide her with a lodging, too.
“We’ll go back to the taxi-stand,” she told the porter.
He did not conceal his joy at being rid of her.
She tried the Shoreham first, and when the taxicab deposited her under the umbrellas of the big trees and she climbed the homelike steps to a lobby with the air of a living-room she felt welcome and secure. Brilliant clusters were drifting to dinner, and the men were more picturesque than the women, for many of them were in uniform. Officers of the army and navy of the United States and of Great Britain and of France gave the throng the look of a costume-party.
93
There was a less interesting crowd at the desk, and now nobody offered her his place at the head of the line. It would have done no good, for the room-clerk was shaking his head to all the suppliants. Marie Louise saw women turned away, married couples, men alone. But new-comers pressed forward and kept trying to convince the deskman that he had rooms somewhere, rooms that he had forgotten, or was saving for people who would never arrive.
He stood there shaking his head like a toy in a window. People tried to get past him in all the ways people try to get through life, in the ways that Saint Peter must grow very tired of at the gate of heaven––bluff, whine, bribery, intimidation, flirtation.
Some demanded their rights with full confidence and would not take no for answer. Some pleaded with hopelessness in advance; they were used to rebuffs. They appealed to his pity. Some tried corruption; they whispered that they would “make it all right,” or they managed a sly display of money––one a one-dollar bill with the “1” folded in, another a fifty-dollar bill with the “50” well to the fore. Some grew ugly and implied favoritism; they were the born strikers and anarchists. Even though they looked rich, they had that habit of finding oppression and conspiracy everywhere. A few women appealed to his philanthropy, and a few others tried to play the siren. But his head oscillated from side to side, and nobody could swing it up and down.
Marie Louise watched the procession anxiously. There seemed to be no end to it. The people who had come here first had been turned away into outer darkness long ago and had gone to other hotels. The present wretches were those who had gone to the other hotels first and made this their second, third, or sixth choice.
Marie Louise did not go to the desk. She could take a hint at second hand. She would have been glad of a place to sit down, but all the divans were filled with gossipers very much at home and somewhat contemptuous of the vulgar herd trying to break into their select and long-established circle. She heard a man saying, with amiable anger: “Ah’m mahty sah’y Ah can’t put you up at ouah haouse, but we’ve got ’em hangin’ on the hat-rack94in the hall. You infunnal patriots have simply ruined this little old taown.”
She heard a pleasant laugh. “Don’t worry. I’ll get along somehow.”
She glanced aside and saw That Man again. She had forgotten his name again; yet she felt curiously less lonely, not nearly so hopeless. The other man said:
“Say, Davidge, are you daown heah looking for one of these dollah-a-yeah jobs? Can you earn it?”
“I’m not looking for a job. I’m looking for a bed.”
“Not a chance. The government’s taken ovah half the hotels for office-buildings.”
“I’ll go to a Turkish bath, then.”
“Good Lawd! man, I hud a man propose that, and the hotel clerk said he had telephoned the Tukkish bath, and a man theah said: ‘For God’s sake don’t send anybody else heah! We’ve got five hundred cots full naow.’”
“There’s Baltimore.”
“Baltimer’s full up. So’s Alexandra. Go on back home and write a letta.”
“I’ll try a few more hotels first.”
“No use––not an openin’.”
“Well, I’ve usually found that the best place to look for things is where people say they don’t grow.”
Marie Louise thought that this was most excellent advice. She decided to follow it and keep on trying.
As she was about to move toward the door the elevator, like a great cornucopia, spilled a bevy of men and women into the lobby. Leading them all came a woman of charm, of distinction, of self-possession. She was smiling over one handsome shoulder at a British officer.
The forlorn Marie Louise saw her, and her eyes rejoiced; her face was kindled with haven-beacons. She pressed forward with her hand out, and though she only murmured the words, a cry of relief thrilled them.
“Lady Clifton-Wyatt! What luck to find you!”
Lady Clifton-Wyatt turned with a smile of welcome in advance. Her hand went forward. Her smile ended suddenly. Blank amazement passed into contemptuous wrath. Her hand went back. With the disgust of a sick eagle in a zoo, she drew a film over her eyes.
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The smile on Marie Louise’s face also hung unsupported for a moment. It faded, then rallied. She spoke with patience, underlining the words with an affectionate reproof:
“My dear Lady Clifton-Wyatt, I am Miss Webling––Marie Louise. Don’t you know me?”
Lady Clifton-Wyatt answered: “I did. But I don’t!”
Then she turned and moved toward the dining-room door.
The head waiter bowed with deference and command and beckoned Lady Clifton-Wyatt. She obeyed him with meek hauteur.
96CHAPTER II
As she came out of the first hotel of her selection and rejection Marie Louise asked the car-starter the name of another. He mentioned the New Willard.
It was not far, and she was there before she had time to recover from the staggering effect of Lady Clifton-Wyatt’s bludgeon-like snub. As timidly as the waif and estray that she was, she ventured into the crowded, gorgeous lobby with its lofty and ornate ceiling on its big columns. At one side a long corridor ran brokenly up a steep hill. It was populous with loungers who had just finished their dinners or were waiting for a chance to get into the dining-rooms. Orchestra music was lilting down the aisle.
When Marie Louise had threaded the crowd and reached the desk a very polite and eager clerk asked her if she had a reservation. He seemed to be as regretful as she when she said no. He sighed, “We’ve turned away a hundred people in the last two hours.”
She accepted her dismissal dumbly, then paused to ask, “I say, do you by any chance know where Grinden Hall is?”
He shook his head and turned to another clerk to ask, “Do you know of a hotel here named Grinden Hall?”
The other shook his head, too. There was a vast amount of head-shaking going on everywhere in Washington. He added, “I’m new here.” Nearly everybody seemed to be new here. It seemed as if the entire populace had moved into a ready-made town.
Marie Louise had barely the strength to explain, “Grinden Hall is not an hotel; it is a home, in Rosslyn, wherever that is.”
“Oh, Rosslyn––that’s across the river in Virginia.”
“Do you know, by any chance, Major Thomas Widdicombe?”
He shook his head. Major Widdicombe was a big man, but the town was fairly swarming with men bigger than he.97There were shoals of magnates, but giants in their own communities were petty nuisances here pleading with room-clerks for cots and with head waiters for bread. The lobby was a thicket of prominent men set about like trees. Several of them had the Congressional look. Later history would record them as the historic statesmen of titanic debates, men by whose eloquence and leadership and committee-room toil the Republic would be revolutionized in nearly every detail, and billions made to flow like water.
As Marie Louise collected her porter and her hand-luggage for her next exit she saw Ross Davidge just coming in. She stepped behind a large politician or something. She forgot that she owed Davidge money, and she felt a rather pleasurable agitation in this game of hide-and-seek, but something made her shy of Davidge. For one thing, it was ludicrous to be caught being turned out of a second hotel.
The politician walked away, and Davidge would have seen Marie Louise if he had not stopped short and turned a cold shoulder on her, just as the distant orchestra, which had been crooning one of Jerome Kern’s most insidiously ingratiating melodies, began to blare with all its might the sonorities of “The Star-spangled Banner.”
Miss Webling saw the people in the alley getting to their feet slowly, awkwardly. A number of army and navy officers faced the music and stood rigid at attention. The civilians in the lobby who were already standing began to pull their hats off sheepishly like embarrassed peasants. People were still as self-conscious as if the song had just been written. They would soon learn to feel the tremendous importance of that eternal query, the only national anthem, perhaps, that ever began with a question and ended with a prayer. Americans would soon learn to salute it with eagerness and to deal ferociously with men––and women, too––who were slow to rise.
Marie Louise watched Davidge curiously. He was manifestly on fire with patriotism, but he was ashamed to show it, ashamed to stand erect and click his heels. He fumbled his hat and slouched, and looked as if he had been caught in some guilt. He was indeed guilty of a childish fervor. He wanted to shout, he wanted to weep, he wanted to fight somebody; but he did not know how to express himself without98striking an attitude, and he was incapable of being aposeur––except as an American posily affects poselessness.
When the anthem ended, people sank into their chairs with sighs of relief; the officers sharply relaxed; the civilians straightened up and felt at home again. Ross Davidge marched to the desk, not noticing Marie Louise, who motioned to her porter to come along with her luggage and went to hunt shelter at the Raleigh Hotel. She kept her taxi now and left her hand-baggage in it while she received the inevitable rebuff. From there she traveled to hotel after hotel, marching in with the dismal assurance that she would march right out again.
The taxi-driver was willing to take her to hotels as long as they and her money lasted. Her strength and her patience gave out first. At the Lafayette she advanced wearily, disconsolately to the desk. She saw Ross Davidge stretched out in a big chair. He did not see her. His hat was pulled over his eyes, and he had the air of angry failure. If he despaired, what chance had she?
She received the usual regrets from the clerk. As she left the desk the floor began to wabble. She hurried to an inviting divan and dropped down, beaten and distraught. She heard some one approach, and her downcast eyes saw a pair of feet move up and halt before her.
Since Lady Clifton-Wyatt’s searing glance and words Marie Louise had felt branded visibly, and unworthy of human kindness and shelter. She was piteously grateful to this man for his condescension in saying:
“You’ll have to excuse me for bothering you again. But I’m afraid you’re in worse trouble than I am. Nobody seems to be willing to take you in.”
He meant this as a light jocularity, but it gave her a moment’s serious fear that he had overheard Lady Clifton-Wyatt’s slashing remark. But he went on:
“Won’t you allow me to try to find you a place? Don’t you know anybody here?”
“I know numbers of people, but I don’t know where any of them are.”
She told him of her efforts to get to Rosslyn by telephone, by telegraph, by train or taxicab. Little tears added a sparkle to laughter, but threatened rain. She ended with, “And99now that I’ve unloaded my riddles on you, aren’t you sorry you spoke?”
“Not yet,” he said, with a subtle compliment pleasantly implying that she was perilous. Everybody likes to be thought perilous. He went on: “I don’t know Rosslyn, but it can’t be much of a place for size. If you have a friend there, we’ll find her if we have to go to every house in Rosslyn.”
“But it’s getting rather late, isn’t it, to be knocking at all the doors all by myself?”
She had not meant to hint, and it was a mere coincidence that he thought to say:
“Couldn’t I go along?”
“Thank you, but it’s out in the country rather far, I’m afraid.”
“Then I must go along.”
“I couldn’t think of troubling you.”
The end of it was that he had his way, or she hers, or both theirs. He made no nonsense of adventure or escapade about it, and she was too well used to traveling alone to feel ashamed or alarmed. He led her to the taxi, told the driver that Grinden Hall was their objective and must be found. Then he climbed in with her, and they rode in a dark broken with the fitful lightnings of street-lamps and motors.
The taxi glided out M Street. The little shops of Georgetown went sidelong by. The cab turned abruptly to the left and clattered across the old aqueduct bridge. On a broad reach of the Potomac the new-risen moon spread a vast sheet of tin-foil of a crinkled sheen. This was all that was beautiful about the sordid neighborhood, but it was very beautiful, and tender to a strange degree.
Once across, the driver stopped and leaned round to call in at the door:
“This is Rosslyn. Where do yew-all want to go next?”
“Grinden Hall. Ask somebody.”
“Ask who? They ain’t a soul tew be saw.”
They waited in the dark awhile; then Davidge got out and, seeing a street-car coming down through the hills like a dragon in fiery scales, he stopped it to ask the motorman of Grinden Hall. He knew nothing, but a sleepy passenger said that he reckoned that that was the fancy name of Mr. Sawtell’s place, and he shouted the directions:
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“Yew go raht along this road ovah the caw tracks, and unda a bridge and keep a-goin’ up a ridge and ova till yew come to a shawp tu’n to the raht. Big whaht mansion, ain’t it?”
“I don’t know,” said Davidge. “I never saw it.”
“Well, I reckon that’s the place. Only ‘Hall’ I knaow about up heah.”
The motorman kicked his bell and started off.
“Nothing like trying,” said Davidge, and clambered in. The taxicab went veering and yawing over an unusually Virginian bad road. After a little they entered a forest. The driver threw on his search-light, and it tore from the darkness pictures of forest eerily green in the glare––old trees slanting out, deep channels blackening into mysterious glades. The car swung sharply to the right and growled up a hill, curving and swirling and threatening to capsize at every moment. The sense of being lost was irresistible.
Marie Louise fell to pondering; suddenly she grew afraid to find Grinden Hall. She knew that Polly knew Lady Clifton-Wyatt. They might have met since Polly wrote that letter. Lady Clifton-Wyatt had perhaps––had doubtless––told Polly all about Marie Louise. Polly would probably refuse her shelter. She knew Polly: there was no middle ground between her likes and dislikes; she doted or she hated. She was capable of smothering her friends with affection and of making them ancient enemies in an instant. For her enemies she had no use or tolerance. She let them know her wrath.
The car stopped. The driver got down and went forward to a narrow lane opening from the narrow road. There was a sign-board there. He read it by the light of the moon and a few matches. He came back and said:
“Here she is. Grinden Hall is what she says on that theah sign-bode.”
Marie Louise was in a flutter. “What time is it?” she asked.
Davidge held his watch up and lighted a match.
“A little after one.”
“It’s awfully late,” she said.
The car was turning at right angles now, and following a narrow track curling through a lawn studded with shrubbery. There was a moment’s view of all Washington beyond the101valley of the moon-illumined river. Its lights gleamed in a patient vigilance. It had the look of the holy city that it is. The Capitol was like a mosque in Mecca, the Mecca of the faithful who believe in freedom and equality. The Washington Monument, picked out from the dark by a search-light, was a lofty steeple in a dream-world.
Davidge caught a quick breath of piety and reverence. Marie Louise was too frightened by her own destiny to think of the world’s anxieties.
The car raced round the circular road. Her eyes were snatched from the drowsy town, small with distance, to the imminent majesty of a great Colonial portico with columns tall and stately and white, a temple of Parthenonian dignity in the radiance of the priestly moon. There was not a light in any window, no sign of life.
The car stopped. But–– Marie Louise simply dared not face Polly and risk a scene in the presence of Davidge. She tapped on the glass and motioned the driver to go on. He could not believe her gestures. She leaned out and whispered:
“Go on––go on! I’ll not stop!”
Davidge was puzzled, but he said nothing; and Marie Louise made no explanation till they were outside again, and then she said:
“Do you think I’m insane?”
“This is not my party,” he said.
She tried to explain: “There wasn’t a light to be seen. They couldn’t have got my telegram. They weren’t expecting me. They may not have been at home. I hadn’t the courage to stop and wake the house.”
That was not her real reason, but Davidge asked for no other. If he noted that she was strangely excited over a trifle like getting a few servants and a hostess out of bed, he made no comment.
When she pleaded, “Do you mind if I go back to Washington with you?” he chuckled: “It’s certainly better than going alone. But what will you do when you get there?”
“I’ll go to the railroad station and sit up,” Marie Louise announced. “I’m no end sorry to have been such a nuisance.”
“Nuisance!” he protested, and left his intonation to convey all the compliments he dared not utter.
The cab dived into another woods and ran clattering down102a roving hill road. Up the opposite steep it went with a weary gait. It crawled to the top with turtle-like labor. Davidge knew the symptoms, and he frowned in the shadow, yet smiled a little.
The car went banging down, held by a squealing brake. The light grew faint, and in the glimmer there was a close shave at the edge of a hazardous bridge over a deep, deep ravine. The cab rolled forward on the rough planks under its impetus, but it picked up no speed. Half-way across, it stopped.
“Whatever is the matter?” Marie Louise exclaimed.
Davidge leaned out and called to the driver, “What’s the matter now?” though he knew full well.
“Gas is gone, I reckon,” the fellow snarled, as he got down. After a moment’s examination he confirmed his diagnosis. “Yep, gas is all gone. I been on the go too long on this one call.”
“In Heaven’s name, where can you get some more gasolene?” said Marie Louise.
“Nearest garodge is at Rosslyn, I reckon, lady.”
“How far is that?”
“I’d hate to say, lady. Three, fo’ mahls, most lahkly, and prob’ly closed naow.”
“Go wake it up at once.”
“No thanky, lady. I got mahty po’ feet for them hills.”
“What do you propose to do?”
“Ain’t nothin’ tew dew but wait fo’ somebody to come along.”
“When will that be?”
“Along todes mawnin’ they ought to be somebody along, milkman or somethin’.”
“Cheerful!” said Marie Louise.
“Batt’ries kind o’ sick, tew, looks lahk. I was engaged by the houah, remember,” the driver reminded them as he clambered back to his place, put his feet up on the dashboard and let his head roll into a position of ease.
The dimming lights waned and did not wax. By and by they went where lights go when they go out. There was no light now except the moonset, shimmering mistily across the tree-tops of the rotunda of the forest, just enough to emphasize the black of the well they were in.
103CHAPTER III
How would she take it?
That was what interested Davidge most. What was she really like? And what would she do with this intractable situation? What would the situation do with her? For situations make people as well as people situations.
Now was the time for an acquaintance of souls. An almost absolute dark erased them from each other’s sight. Their eyes were as useless as the useless eyes of fish in subterrene caverns. Miss Webling could have told Davidge the color of his eyes, of course, being a woman. But being a man, he could not remember the color of hers, because he had noted nothing about her eyes except that they were very eye-ish.
He would have blundered ridiculously in describing her appearance. His information of her character was all to gain. He had seen her wandering about Washington homeless among the crowds and turned from every door. She had borne the ordeal as well as could be asked. She had accepted his proffer of protection with neither terror nor assurance.
He supposed that in a similar plight the old-fashioned woman––or at least the ubiquitous woman of the special eternal type that fictionists call “old-fashioned”––would have been either a bleating, tremulous gazelle or a brazen siren. But Miss Webling behaved like neither of these. She took his gallantry with a matter-of-fact reasonableness, much as a man would accept the offer of another man’s companionship on a tiresome journey. She gave none of those multitudinous little signals by which a woman indicates that she is either afraid that a man will try to hug her or afraid that he will not. She was apparently planning neither to flirt nor to faint.
Davidge asked in a matter-of-fact tone: “Do you think you could walk to town? The driver says it’s only three-fo’ miles.”
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She sighed: “My feet would never make it. And I have on high-heeled boots.”
His “Too bad!” conveyed more sympathy than she expected. He had another suggestion.
“You could probably get back to the home of Mrs. Widdicombe. That isn’t so far away.”
She answered, bluntly, “I shouldn’t think of it!”
He made another proposal without much enthusiasm.
“Then I’d better walk in to Washington and get a cab and come back for you.”
She was even blunter about this: “I shouldn’t dream of that. You’re a wreck, too.”
He lied pluckily, “Oh, I shouldn’t mind.”
“Well, I should! And I don’t fancy the thought of staying here alone with that driver.”
He smiled in the dark at the double-edged compliment of implying that she was safer with him than with the driver. But she did not hear his smile.
She apologized, meekly: “I’ve got you into an awful mess, haven’t I? I usually do make a mess of everything I undertake. You’d better beware of me after this.”
His “I’ll risk it” was a whole cyclopedia of condensed gallantry.
They sat inept for a time, thinking aimlessly, seeing nothing, hearing only the bated breath of the night wind groping stealthily through the tree-tops, and from far beneath, the still, small voice of a brook feeling its way down its unlighted stairs.
At last her voice murmured, “Are you quite too horribly uncomfortable for words?”
His voice was a deep-toned bell somehow articulate: “I couldn’t be more comfortable except for one thing. I’m all out of cigars.”
“Oh!” He had a vague sense of her mental struggle before she spoke again, timidly:
“I fancy you don’t smoke cigarettes?”
“When I can’t get cigars; any tobacco is better than none.”
Another blank of troubled silence, then, “I wonder if you’d say that of mine.”
Her voice was both defiant and trepidate. He laughed. “I’ll guarantee to.”
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A few years before he would have accepted a woman’s confession that she smoked cigarettes as a confession of complete abandonment to all the other vices. A few years farther back, indeed, and he would have said that any man who smoked cigarettes was worthless. Since then he had seen so many burly heroes and so many unimpeachable ladies smoke them that he had almost forgotten his old prejudice. In some of the United States it was then against the law for men (not to say women and children) to sell or give away or even to possess cigarettes. After the war crusades would start against all forms of tobacco, and at least one clergyman would call every man who smoked cigarettes a “drug-addict.” It is impossible for anybody to be moral enough not to be immoral to somebody.
But intolerances go out of style as suddenly as new creeds come in. He knew soldiers who held a lighted stub in one hand while they rolled a cigarette with the other. He knew Red Cross saints who could puff a forbidden cigarette like a prayer. He wondered how he or any one had ever made such a fierce taboo of a wisp of aromatic leaves kindled in a tiny parcel. Such strange things people choose for their tests of virtue––tests that have nothing whatever to do with the case, whether savage or civilized folk invent them.
He heard Miss Webling fumbling in a hand-bag. He heard the click of her rings against metal. He heard the little noise of the portals of a cigarette-case opening. His hands and hers stumbled together, and his fingers selected a little cylinder from the row.
He produced a match and held the flame before her. He filled his eyes with her vivid features as the glow detached her from the dark. Of her eyes he saw only the big lids, but he noted her lips, pursed a trifle with the kissing muscles, and he sighed as she blew a smoke about her like a goddess creating a cloud of vanishment. He lighted his own cigarette and threw the match away. They returned to a perfect gloom mitigated by the slight increase and decrease in the vividness of their tobacco-tips as they puffed.
She was the first to speak:
“I have a whole box of fags in my hand-bag. I usually have a good supply. When you want another–– Does it horrify you to see a woman smoke?”
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He was very superior to his old bigotry. “Quite the contrary!”
This was hardly honest enough, so he said:
“It did once, though. I remember how startled I was years ago when I was in England and I saw ladies smoking in hotel corridors; and on the steamer coming back, there was a countess or something who sat in the balcony and puffed away. Of course, at the big dinners in London they smoked, too. They did at Sir Joseph’s, I remember.”
He did not see her wince at this name.
“There were some odd fish surrounding old Sir Joseph. Some of them I couldn’t quite make out. He was just a little hard to get at, himself. I got very huffy at the old boy once or twice, I’m sorry to say. It was about ships. I’m a crank on ships. Everybody has at least one mania. That’s mine––ships. Sir Joseph and I quarreled about them. He wanted to buy all I could make, but he was in no hurry to have ’em finished. I told him he talked more like a German trying to stop production than like a Britisher trying to speed it up. That made him huffy. I’m sorry I did him such an injustice. When you insult a man, and he dies––What a terrible repartee dying is! He had offered me a big price, too, but it’s not money I want to make; it’s ships. And I want to see ’em at work. Did you ever see a ship launched?”
“No, I never did.”
“There’s nothing prettier. Come over to my shipyard and I’ll show you. We’re going to put one over before long. I’ll let you christen her.”
“That would be wonderful.”
“It’s better than that. The civilized world is starting out on the most poetic job it ever undertook.”
“Indeed?”
“Yep. The German sharks are gradually dragging all our shipping under water. The inventors don’t seem able to devise any cure for the submarines except to find ’em and fight ’em. They’re hard to find, and they won’t fight. But they keep popping up and stabbing our pretty ships to death. And now the great game is on, the greatest game that civilized men ever fought with hell.”
“What’s that?”
107
“We’re going to try to build ships faster than the Hun can sink ’em. Isn’t that a glorious job for you? Was there ever a––well, a nobler idea? We can’t kill the beast; so we’re going to choke him to death with food.” He laughed to hide his embarrassing exaltation.
She was not afraid of it: “It is rather a stupendous inspiration, isn’t it?”
“Who was it said he’d rather have written Gray’s ‘Elegy’ than taken Quebec? I’d rather have thought up this thought than written the Iliad. Nobody knows who invented the idea. He’s gone to oblivion already, but he has done more for the salvation of freedom than all the poets of time.”
This shocked her, yet thrilled her with its loftiness. She thrilled to him suddenly, too. She saw that she was within the aura of a fiery spirit––a business man aflame. And she saw in a white light that the builders of things, even of perishable things, are as great as the weavers of immortal words––not so well remembered, of course, for posterity has only the words. Poets and highbrows scorn them, but living women who can see the living men are not so foolish. They are apt to prefer the maker to the writer. They reward the poet with a smile and a compliment, but give their lives to the manufacturers, the machinists, the merchants. Then the neglected poets and their toadies the critics grow sarcastic about this and think that they have condemned women for materialism when they are themselves blind to its grandeur. They ignore the divinity that attends the mining and smelting and welding and selling of iron things, the hewing and sawing and planing of woods, the sowing and reaping and distribution of foods. They make a priestcraft and a ritual of artful language, and are ignorant of their own heresy. But since they deal in words, they have a fearful advantage and use it for their own glorification, as priests are wont to do.
Marie Louise had a vague insight into the truth, but was not aware of her own wisdom. She knew only that this Davidge who had made himself her gallant, her messenger and servant, was really a genius, a giant. She felt that the rôles should be reversed and she should be waiting upon him.
In Sir Joseph’s house there had been a bit of statuary108representing Hercules and Omphale. The mighty one was wearing the woman’s kirtle and carrying her distaff, and the girl was staggering under the lion-skin and leaning on the bludgeon. Marie Louise always hated the group. It seemed to her to represent just the way so many women tried to master the men they infatuated. But Marie Louise despised masterable men, and she had no wish to make a toy of one. Yet she had wondered if a man and a woman could not love each other more perfectly if neither were master or mistress, but both on a parity––a team, indeed.
Davidge enjoyed talking to her, at least. That comforted her. When she came back from her meditations he was saying:
“My company is reaching out. We’ve bought a big tract of swamp, and we’re filling it in and clearing it, and we’re going to lay out a shipyard there and turn out ships––standardized ships––as fast as we can. We’re steadying the ground first, sinking concrete piles in steel casing––if you put ’em end to end, they’d reach twenty-five miles. They’re just to hold the ground together. That’s what the whole country has got to do before it can really begin to begin––put some solid ground under its feet. When the ship is launched she mustn’t stick on the ways or in the mud.
“Of course, I’d rather go as a soldier, but I’ve got no right to. I can ride or walk all day, and shoot straight and stand all kinds of weather, and killing Germans would just about tickle me to death. But this is a time when every man has got to do what he can do better than he can do anything else. And I’ve spent my life in shipyards.
“I was a common laborer first––swinging a sledge; I had an arm then! That was before we had compressed-air riveters. I was a union man and went on strike and fought scabs and made the bosses eat crow. Now I’m one of the bosses. I’m what they call a capitalist and an oppressor of labor. Now I put down strikes and fight the unions––not that I don’t believe in ’em, not that I don’t know where labor was before they had unions and where it would be without ’em to-day and to-morrow, but because all these things have to be adjusted gradually, and because the main thing, after all, is building ships––just now, of course, especially.
“When I was a workman I took pride in my job, and I thought I was an artist at it. I wouldn’t take anybody’s109lip. Now that I’m a boss I have to take everybody’s lip, because I can’t strike. I can’t go to my boss and demand higher wages and easier hours, because my boss is the market. But I don’t suppose there’s anything on earth that interests you less than labor problems.”
“They might if I knew the first thing about them.”
“Well, the first thing is that they are the next war, the big war after this one’s over. The job is to keep it down till peace comes. Then hell will pop––if you’ll pardon my French. I’m all for labor getting its rights, but some of the men don’t want the right to work––they want the right to loaf. I say let the sky be the limit of any man’s opportunity––the sky and his own limitations and ambitions. But a lot of the workmen don’t want opportunity; they’ve got no ambition; they hate to build things. They talk about the terrible conditions their families live in, and how gorgeously the rich men live. But the rich men were poor once, and the poor can be rich––if they can and will.
“The war is going to be the fight between the makers and the breakers, the uplifters and the down-draggers, you might say. And it’s going to be some war!
“The men on the wrong side––what I call the wrong side, at least––are just as much our enemies as the Germans. We’ve got to watch ’em just as close. They’d just as soon burn an unfinished ship as the Germans would sink her when she’s on her way.
“That little ship I’m building now! Would you believe it? It has to be guarded every minute. Most of our men are all right. They’d work themselves to death for the ship, and they pour out their sweat like prayers. But sneaks get in among ’em, and it only takes a fellow with a bomb one minute to undo the six months’ work of a hundred.”
“Tell me about your ship,” she said.
A ship she could understand. It was personal and real; labor theories were as foreign to her as problems in metaphysics.
“Well, it’s my first-born, this ship,” he said. “Of course I’ve built a lot of other ships, but they were for other people––just jobs, for wages or commissions. This one is all my own––a freighter, ugly as sin and commodious as hell––I beg your pardon! But the world needs freighters––the110hungry mobs of Europe, they’ll be glad to see my little ship come in, if ever she does. If she doesn’t I’ll–– But she’ll last a few trips before they submarine her––I guess.”
He fell silent among his visions and left her to her own.
He saw himself wandering about a shipyard, a poor thing, but his own. His mind was like a mold-loft full of designs and detail-drawings to scale, blue-prints and models. On the way a ship was growing for him. As yet she was a ghastly thing all ribs, like the skeleton of some ancient sea-monster left ashore at high tide and perished eons back, leaving only the bones.
His fancy saw her transverses taking on their iron flesh. He saw the day of her nativity. He heard them knock out the blocks that lowered the sliding-ways to the groundways and sent her swirling into the sea.
He saw her ready for her cargo, saw a Niagara of wheat cascading into her hold. He saw her go forth into the sea.
Then he saw the ship stagger, a wound opened in her side, from the bullet of a submarine.
It was all so vivid that he spoke aloud in a frenzy of ire:
“If the Germans kill my ship I’ll kill a German! By God, I will!”
He was startled by the sound of his own voice, and he begged her pardon humbly.
She had been away in reverie, too. The word “submarine” had sent her back into her haunting remembrances of theLusitaniaand of her own helpless entanglement in the fate of other ships––their names as unknown to her as the names and faces of the men that died with them, or perished of starvation and thirst in the lifeboats sent adrift. The thought of these poor anonymities frightened her. She shuddered with such violence that Davidge was startled from his own wrath.
“You’re having a chill,” he said. “I wish you would take my coat. You don’t want to get sick.”
She shook her head and chattered, “No, no.”
“Then you’d better get out and walk up and down this bridge awhile. There’s not even a lap-robe here.”
“I should like to walk, I think.”
She stepped out, aided by his hand, a strong hand, and warm about her icy fingers. Her knees were weak, and he111set her elbow in the hollow of his arm and guided her. They walked like the blind leading the blind through a sea of pitch. The only glimmer was the little scratches of light pinked in the dead sky by a few stars.
“‘It’s beautiful overhead, if you’re going that way,’” Davidge quoted.
He set out briskly, but Marie Louise hung back timidly.
“Not so fast! I can’t see a thing.”
“That’s the best time to keep moving.”
“But aren’t you afraid to push on when you can’t see where you’re going?” she demanded.
“Who can ever tell where he’s going? The sunlight is no guaranty. We’re all bats in the daytime and not cats at night. The main thing is to sail on and on and on.”
She caught a little of his recklessness––suffered him to hurry her to and fro through the inky air till she was panting for breath and tired. Then they groped to the rail and peered vainly down at the brook, which, like an unbroken child, was heard and not seen. They leaned their elbows on the rail and stared into the muffling gloom.
“I think I’ll have another of your cigarettes,” he said.
“So will I,” said she.
There was a cozy fireside moment as they took their lights from the same match. When he threw the match overboard he said:
“Like a human life, eh? A little spark between dark and dark.”
He was surprised at stumbling into rhyme, and apologized. But she said:
“Do you know, I rather like that. It reminds me of a poem about a rain-storm––Russell Lowell’s, I fancy; it told of a flock of sheep scampering down a dusty road and clattering across a bridge and back to the dust again. He said it was like human life, ‘a little noise between two silences.’”
“H’m!” was the best Davidge could do. But the agony of the brevity of existence seized them both by the hearts, and their hearts throbbed and bled like birds crushed in the claws of hawks. Their hearts had such capabilities of joy, such songs in them, such love and longing, such delight in beauty––and beauty was so beautiful, so frequent, so thrilling! Yet they could spend but a glance, a sigh, a regret, a gratitude,112and then their eyes were out, their ears still, their lips cold, their hearts dust. The ache of it was beyond bearing.
“Let’s walk. I’m cold again,” she whispered.
He felt that she needed the sense of hurry, and he went so fast that she had to run to keep up with him. There seemed to be some comfort in the privilege of motion for its own sake; motion was life; motion was godhood; motion was escape from the run-down clock of death.
Back and forth they kept their promenade, till her body refused to answer the whips of restlessness. Her brain began to shut up shop. It would do no more thinking this night.
She stumbled toward the taxicab. Davidge lifted her in, and she sank down, completely done. She fell asleep.
Davidge took his place in the cab and wondered lazily at the quaint adventure. He was only slightly concerned with wondering at the cause of her uneasiness. He was used to minding his own business.
She slept so well that when the groping search-light of a coming automobile began to slash the night and the rubber wheels boomed across the bridge she did not waken. If the taxi-driver heard its sound, he preferred to pretend not to. The passengers in the passing car must have been surprised, but they took their wonderment with them. We so often imagine mischief when there is innocence andvice versa; for opportunity is just as likely to create distaste as interest and the lack of it to instigate enterprise.
Davidge drowsed and smiled contentedly in the dark and did not know that he was not awake until at some later time he was half aroused by the meteoric glow and whiz of another automobile. It had gone before he was quite awake, and he sank back into sleep.
Before he knew it, many black hours had slid by and daylight was come; the rosy fingers of light were moving about, recreating the world to vision, sketching a landscape hazily on a black canvas, then stippling in the colors, and finishing, swiftly but gradually, the details to an inconceivable minuteness of definition, giving each leaf its own sharp contour and every rock its every facet. From the brook below a mistlike cigarette smoke exhaled. The sky was crimson, then pink, then amber, then blue.
Birds began to twitter, to fashion little crystal stanzas,113and to hurl themselves about the valley as if catapults propelled them. One songster perched on the iron rail of the bridge and practised a vocal lesson, cocking his head from side to side and seeming to approve his own skill.
A furred caterpillar resumed his march across the Appian Way, making of each crack between boards a great abyss to be bridged cautiously with his own body. The day’s work was begun, while Davidge drowsed and smiled contentedly at the side of the strange, sleeping woman as if they had been married for years.