134CHAPTER VII
The intended victim of Lady Clifton-Wyatt’s little lynching-bee walked away, holding her head high. But she felt the noose still about her neck and wondered when the rope would draw her back and up.
Marie Louise marched through Mrs. Prothero’s hall in excellent form, with just the right amount of dizziness to justify her escape on the plea of sudden illness. The butler, like a benign destiny, opened the door silently and let her out into the open as once before in London a butler had opened a door and let her into the welcome refuge of walls.
She gulped the cool night air thirstily, and it gave her courage. But it gave her no wisdom. She had indeed got away from Lady Clifton-Wyatt’s direct accusation of being a spy and she had brought with her unscathed the only man whose good opinion was important to her. But she did not know what she wanted to do with him, except that she did not want him to fall into Lady Clifton-Wyatt’s hands––in which she had left her reputation.
Polly Widdicombe would have gone after Marie Louise forthwith, but Polly did not intend to leave her pet foewoman in possession of the field––not that she loved Marie Louise more, but that she loved Lady Clifton-Wyatt less. Polly was dazed and bewildered by Marie Louise’s defection, but she would not accept Lady Clifton-Wyatt’s version of this story or of any other.
Besides, Polly gleaned that Marie Louise wanted to be alone, and she knew that the best gift friendship can bestow at times is solitude. The next best gift is defense in absence. Polly announced that she would not permit her friend to be traduced; and Lady Clifton-Wyatt, seeing that the men had flocked in from the dining-room and knowing that men always discount one woman’s attack on135another as mere cattiness, assumed her most angelic mien and changed the subject.
As usual in retreats, the first problem was transportation. Marie Louise found herself and Davidge outside Mrs. Prothero’s door, with no means of getting to Rosslyn. She had come in the Widdicombe car; Davidge had come in a hotel cab and sent it away. Luckily at last a taxi returning to the railroad terminal whizzed by. Davidge yelled in vain. Then he put his two fingers to his mouth and let out a short blast that brought the taxi-driver round. In accordance with the traffic rules, he had to make the circuit of the big statue-crowned circle in front of Mrs. Prothero’s home, one of those numerous hubs that give Washington the effect of what some one called “revolving streets.”
When he drew up at the curb Davidge’s first question was:
“How’s your gasolene supply?”
“Full up, boss.”
Marie Louise laughed. “You don’t want to spend another night in a taxi with me, I see.”
Davidge writhed at this deduction. He started to say, “I’d be glad to spend the rest of my life in a taxi with you.” That sounded a little too flamboyant, especially with a driver listening in. So he said nothing but “Huh!”
He explained to the driver the route to Grinden Hall, and they set forth.
Marie Louise had a dilemma of her own. Lady Clifton-Wyatt had had the last word, and it had been an invitation to Davidge to call on her. Worse yet, he had accepted it. Lady Clifton-Wyatt’s purpose was, of course, to rob Marie Louise of this last friend. Perhaps the wretch had a sentimental interest in Davidge, too. She was a widow and a man-grabber; she still had a tyrannic beauty and a greed of conquest. Marie Louise was determined that Davidge should not fall into her clutches, but she could hardly exact a promise from him to stay away.
The taxi was crossing the aqueduct bridge before she could brave the point. She was brazen enough to say, “You’ll accept Lady Clifton-Wyatt’s invitation to tea, of course?”
“Oh, I suppose so,” said Davidge. “No American woman136can resist a lord; so how could an American man resist a Lady?”
“Oh!”
This helpless syllable expressed another defeat for Marie Louise. When they reached the house she bade him good night without making any arrangement for a good morrow, though Davidge held her hand decidedly longer than ever before.
She stood on the portico and watched his cab drive off. She gazed toward Washington and did not see the dreamy constellation it made with the shaft of the Monument ghostly luminous as if with a phosphorescence of its own. She felt an outcast indeed. She imagined Polly hurrying back to ask questions that could not be dodged any longer. She had no right to defend herself offensively from the rightful demands of a friend and hostess. Besides, the laws of hospitality would not protect her from Polly’s temper. Polly would have a perfect right to order her from the house. And she would, too, when she knew everything. It would be best to decamp before being asked to.
Marie Louise whirled and sped into the house, rang for the maid, and said:
“My trunks! Please have them brought down––or up, from wherever they are, will you?”
“Your trunks, miss!”
“And a taxicab. I shall have to leave at once.”
“But––oh, I am sorry. Shall I help you pack?”
“Thank you, no––yes––no!”
The maid went out with eyes popping, wondering what earthquake had sent the guest home alone for such a headlong exit.
Things flew in the drowsy house, and Marie Louise’s chamber looked like the show-room of a commercial traveler for a linen-house when Polly appeared at the door and gasped:
“What in the name of––I didn’t know you were sick enough to be delirious!”
She came forward through an archipelago of clothes to where Marie Louise was bending over a trunk. Polly took an armload of things away from her and put them back in the highboy. As she set her arms akimbo and stood staring at Marie Louise with a lovable and loving insolence, she heard137the sound of a car rattling round the driveway, and her first words were:
“Who’s coming here at this hour?”
“That’s the taxi for me,” Marie Louise explained.
Polly turned to the maid, “Go down and send it away––no, tell the driver to go to the asylum for a strait-jacket.”
The maid smiled and left. Marie Louise was afraid to believe her own hopes.
“You don’t mean you want me to stay, do you––not after what that woman said?”
“Do you imagine for a moment,” returned Polly, “that I’d ever believe a word that cat could utter? Good Lord! if Lady Clifton-Wyatt told me it was raining and I could see it was, I’d know it wasn’t and put down my umbrella.”
Marie Louise rejoiced at the trust implied, but she could not make a fool of so loyal a friend. She spoke with difficulty:
“What if what she said was the truth, or, anyway, a kind of burlesque of it?”
“Marie Louise!” Polly gasped, and plounced into a chair. “Tell me the truth this minute, the true truth.”
Marie Louise was perishing for a confidante. She had gone about as far without one as a normal woman can. She sat wondering how to begin, twirling her rings on her fingers. “Well, you see––you see––it is true that I’m not Sir Joseph’s daughter. I was born in a little village––in America––Wakefield––out there in the Middle West. I ran away from home, and––”
She hesitated, blanched, blushed, skipped over the years she tried not to think of and managed never to speak of. She came down to:
“Well, anyway, at last I was in Berlin––on the stage––”
“You were an actress?” Polly gasped.
Marie Louise confessed, “Well, I’d hardly say that.”
She told Polly what she had told Mr. Verrinder of the appearance of Sir Joseph and Lady Webling, of their thrill at her resemblance to their dead daughter, of their plea that she leave the stage and enter their family, of her new life, and the outbreak of the war.
Major Widdicombe pounded on the door and said: “Are you girls going to talk all night? I’ve got to get up at seven and save the country.”
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Polly cried to him, “Go away,” and to Marie Louise, “Go on.”
Marie Louise began again, but just as she reached the first suspicions of Sir Joseph’s loyalty she remembered the oath she had plighted to Verrinder and stopped short.
“I forgot! I can’t!”
Polly groaned: “Oh, my God! You’re not going to stop there! I loathe serials.”
Marie Louise shook her head. “If only I could tell you; but I just can’t! That’s all; I can’t!”
Polly turned her eyes up in despair. “Well, I might as well go to bed, I suppose. But I sha’n’t sleep a wink. Tell me one thing, though. You weren’t really a German spy, were you?”
“No, no! Of course not! I loathe everything German.”
“Well, let the rest rest, then. So long as Lady Clifton-Wyatt is a liar I can stand the strain. If you had been a spy, I suppose I’d have to shoot you or something; but so long as you’re not, you don’t budge out of this house. Is that understood?”
Marie Louise nodded with a pathetic gratitude, and Polly stamped a kiss on her brow like a notarial seal.
139CHAPTER VIII
The next morning’s paper announced that spring had officially arrived and been recognized at the Capitol––a certain Senator had taken off his wig. Washington accepted this as the sure sign that the weather was warm. It would not be officially autumn till that wig fell back into place.
There were less formal indications: for instance, the annual flower-duel between the two terraces on Massachusetts Avenue. The famous Embassy Terrace forsythias began it, and flaunted little fringes of yellow glory. The slopes of the Louise Home replied by setting their magnolia-trees on fire with flowers like lamps, flowers that hurried out ahead of their own leaves and then broke and covered the ground with great petals of shattered porcelain. The Embassy Terrace put out lamps of its own closer to the ground, but more gorgeous––irises in a row of blue, blue footlights.
The Louise Home, where gentlewomen of better days, ambassadresses of an earlier régime, kept their state, had the last word, the word that could not be bettered, for it uttered wistaria, wistful lavender clusters weeping from the trellises in languorous grace.
Marie Louise, looking from her open window in Rosslyn, felt in the wind a sense of stroking fingers. The trees were brisk with hope. The river went its way in a more sparkling flow. The air blew from the very fountains of youth with a teasing blarney. She thought of Ross Davidge and smiled tenderly to remember his amiable earnestness. But she frowned to remember his engagement with Lady Clifton-Wyatt. She wondered what excuse she could invent to checkmate that woman.
Suddenly inspiration came to her. She remembered that she had forgotten to pay Davidge for the seat he surrendered her in the chair-car. She telephoned him at his hotel. He was out. She pursued him by wire travel till she found him in an office of the Shipping Board. He talked on the corner of140a busy man’s desk. She heard the busy man say with a taunting voice, “A lady for you, Davidge.”
She could hear the embarrassment in his voice. She was in for it now, and she felt silly when she explained why she bothered him. But she was stubborn, too. When he understood, he laughed with the constraint of a man bandying enforced gallantries on another man’s telephone.
“I’d hate to be as honest as all that.”
“It’s not honesty,” she persisted. “It’s selfishness. I can’t rest while the debt is on my mind.”
He was perplexed. “I’ve got to see several men on the Shipping Board. There’s a big fight on between the wooden-ship fellows and the steel-ship men, and I’m betwixt and between ’em. I won’t have time to run out to see you.”
“I shouldn’t dream of asking you. I was coming in to town, anyway.”
“Oh! Well, then––well––er––when can I meet you?”
“Whenever you say! The Willard at––When shall you be free?”
“Not before four and then only for half an hour.”
“Four it is.”
“Fine! Thank you ever so much. I’ll buy me a lot of steel with all that money you owe me.”
Marie Louise put up the receiver. People have got so used to the telephone that they can see by it. Marie Louise could visualize Davidge angry with embarrassment, confronting the important man whose office he had desecrated with this silly hammockese. She felt that she had made herself a nuisance and lost a trick. She had taken a deuce with her highest trump and had not captured the king.
Furthermore, to keep Davidge from meeting Lady Clifton-Wyatt would be only to-day’s battle. There would still be to-morrows and the day-afters. Lady Clifton-Wyatt had declared herself openly hostile to Marie Louise, and would get her sooner or later. Flight from Washington would be the only safety.
But Marie Louise did not want to leave Washington. She loved Washington and the opportunities it offered a woman to do important work in the cosmopolitan whirl of its populace. But she could not live on at Polly Widdicombe’s forever.
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Marie Louise decided that her hour had struck. She must find a nook of her own. And she would have to live in it all by herself. Who was there to live with? She felt horribly deserted in life. She had looked at numerous houses and apartments from time to time. Apartments were costlier and fewer than houses. Since she was doomed to live alone, anyway, she might as well have a house. Her neighbors would more easily be kept aloof.
She sought a real-estate agent, Mr. Hailstorks, of the sort known as affable. But the dwellings he had to show were not even that. Places she had found not altogether odious before were rented now. Places that her heart went out to to-day proved to have been rented yesterday.
Finally she ran across a residence of a sort. She sighed to Mr. Hailstorks:
“Well, a carpenter made it––so let it pass for a house. I’ll take it if it has a floor. I’m like Gelett Burgess: ‘I don’t so much care for a door, but this crawling around without touching the ground is getting to be quite a bore.’”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Mr. Hailstorks, bewilderedly.
He unlocked the door of somebody’s tenantless ex-home with its lonely furniture, and Marie Louise intruded, as one does, on the chairs, rugs, pictures, and vases that other people have been born with, have achieved, or have had thrust upon them. She wondered, as one does, what sort of beings they could have been that had selected such things to live among, and what excuse they had had for them.
Mr. Hailstorks had a surprise in store for her. He led her to the rear of the house and raised a shade. Instead of the expectable back yard, Marie Louise was startled to see a noble landscape leap into view. The house loomed over a precipitous descent into a great valley. A stream ran far below, and then the cliffs rose again opposite in a succession of uplifting terraces that reminded her somehow of Richmond Hill superbly built up above the silver Thames.
“Whatever is all that?” she cried.
“Rock Creek Park, ma’am,” said Mr. Hailstorks, who had a sincere real-estately affection for parks, since they raised the price of adjoining property and made renting easier.
“And what’s the price of all this grandeur?”
“Only three hundred a month,” said Mr. Hailstorks.
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“Only!” gasped Marie Louise.
“It will be four hundred in a week or two––yes ma’am,” said Mr. Hailstorks.
So Marie Louise seized it before its price rose any farther.
She took a last look at Rock Creek Park, henceforth her private game-preserve. As she stared, an idea came to her. She needed one. The park, it occurred to her, was an excellent wilderness to get lost in––with Ross Davidge.
She was late to her meeting with Davidge––not unintentionally. He was waiting on the steps of the hotel, smoking, when she drove up in the car she had bought for her Motor Corps work.
He said what she hoped he would say:
“I didn’t know you drove so well.”
She quoted a popular phrase: “‘You don’t know the half of it, dearie.’ Hop in, and I’ll show you.”
He thought of Lady Clifton-Wyatt, and Marie Louise knew he thought of her. But he was not hero or coward enough to tell a woman that he had an engagement with another woman. She pretended to have forgotten that he had told her, though she could think of little else. She whisked round the corner of I Street, or Eye Street, and thence up Sixteenth Street, fast and far.
She was amazed at her own audacity, and Davidge could not make her out. She had a scared look that puzzled him. She was really thinking that she was the most unconscionable kidnapper that ever ran off with some other body’s child. He could hardly dun her for the money, and she had apparently forgotten it again.
They were well to the north when she said:
“Do you know Rock Creek Park?”
“No, I’ve never been in it.”
“Would you like a glimpse? I think it’s the prettiest park in the world.”
She looked at her watch with that twist of the wrist now becoming almost universal and gasped:
“Oh, dear! I must turn back. But it’s just about as short to go through the park. I mustn’t make you late to Lady Clifton-Wyatt’s tea.”
He could find absolutely nothing to say to that except,143“It’s mighty pretty along here.” She turned into Blagdon Road and coasted down the long, many-turning dark glade. At the end she failed to steer to the south. The creek itself crossed the road. She drove the car straight through its lilting waters. There was exhilaration in the splashing charge across the ford. Then the road wound along the bank, curling and writhing with it gracefully through thick forests, over bridges and once more right through the bright flood. The creek scrambling among its piled-up boulders was too gay to suggest any amorous mood, and Marie Louise did not quite dare to drive the car down to the water’s edge at any of the little green plateaus where picnics were being celebrated on the grass.
“I always lose my way in this park,” she said. “I expect I’m lost now.”
She began to regret Davidge’s approaching absence, with a strange loneliness. He was becoming tenderly necessary to her. She sighed, hardly meaning to speak aloud, “Too bad you’re going away so soon.”
He was startled to find that his departure meant something to her. He spoke with an affectionate reassurance.
She stopped the car on a lofty plateau where several ladies and gentlemen were exercising their horses at hurdle-jumping. The élan of rush, plunge and recovery could not excite Mamise now.
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do. The next time I come to Washington you drive me over to my shipyard and I’ll show you the new boat and the new yard for the rest of the flock.”
“That would be glorious. I should like to know something about ships.”
“I can teach you all I know in a little while.”
“You know all there is to know, don’t you?”
“Lord help us, I should say not! I knew a little about the old methods, but they’re all done away with. The fabricated ship is an absolute novelty. The old lines are gone, and the old methods. What few ship-builders we had are trying to forget what they know. Everybody is green. We had to find out for ourselves and pass it along to the foremen, and they hand it out to the laborers.
“The whole art is in a confusion. There is going to be a ghastly lot of mistakes and waste and scandal, but if we win144out there’ll be such a cloudburst that the Germans will think it’s raining ships. Niagara Falls will be nothing to the cascade of iron hulls going overboard. Von Tirpitz with his ruthless policy will be like the old woman who tried to sweep the tide back with a broom.”
He grew so fervent in his vision of the new creation that he hardly saw the riders as they stormed the hurdles. Marie Louise took fire from his glow and forgot the petty motive that had impelled her to bring him to this place. Suddenly he realized how shamelessly eloquent he had been, and subsided with a slump.
“What a bore I am to tell all this to a woman!”
She rose at that. “The day has passed when a man can apologize for talking business to a woman. I’ve been in England for years, you know, and the women over there are doing all the men’s work and getting better wages at it than the men ever did. After the war they’ll never go back to their tatting and prattle. I’m going to your shipyard and have a look-in, but not the way a pink debutante follows a naval officer over a battle-ship, staring at him and not at the works. I’m going on business, and if I like ship-building, I may take it up.”
“Great!” he laughed, and slapped her hand where it lay on the wheel. He apologized again for his roughness.
“I’ll forgive anything except an apology,” she said.
As she looked proudly down at the hand he had honored with a blow as with an accolade she saw by her watch that it was after six.
“Great Heavens! it’s six and more!” she cried. “Lady Clifton-Wyatt will never forgive you––or me. I’ll take you to her at once.”
“Never mind Lady Clifton-Wyatt,” he said. “But I’ve got another engagement for dinner––with a man, at half past six. I wish I hadn’t.”
They were drifting with the twilight into an elegiac mood, suffering the sweet sorrow of parting.
The gloaming steeped the dense woods, and the romance of sunset and gathering night saddened the business man’s soul, but wakened a new and unsuspected woman in Marie Louise.
Her fierce imaginations were suddenly concerned with conquests of ambition, not of love. So fresh a realm was opened to her that she was herself renewed and restored to that boyish-girlish145estate of young womanhood before love has educated it to desire and the slaveries of desire. The Aphrodite that lurks in every woman had been put to flight by the Diana that is also there.
Davidge on the other hand had warmed toward Marie Louise suddenly, as he saw how ardent she could be. He had known her till now only in her dejected and terrified, distracted humors. Now he saw her on fire, and love began to blaze within him.
He felt his first impulse to throw an arm about her and draw her to his breast, but though the solitude was complete and the opportunity perfect, he saw that she was in no spirit for dalliance. There is no colder chaperon for a woman than a new ambition to accomplish something worth while.
As they drew up at the New Willard she was saying:
“Telephone the minute you come to town again. Good-by. I’m late to dinner.”
She meant that she was late to life, late to a career.
Davidge stared at her in wonderment as she bent to throw the lever into first speed. She roughed it in her impatience, and the growl of the gear drowned the sound of another man’s voice calling her name. This man ran toward her, but she did not notice him and got away before he could overtake her.
Davidge was jostled by him as he ran, and noted that he called Miss Webling “Mees Vapelink.” The Teutonic intonation did not fall pleasantly on the American ear at that time. Washington was a forbidden city to Germanic men and soon would banish the enemy women, too.
The stranger took refuge on the sidewalk, and his curses were snarly with the Teutonicr. Davidge studied him and began to remember him. He had seen him with Marie Louise somewhere. Suddenly his mind, ransacking the filing-cabinet of his memory, turned up a picture of Nicky Easton at the side of Marie Louise at the dinner in Sir Joseph’s home. He could not remember the name, but a man has a ready label for anybody he hates.
He began to worry now. Who was this spick foreigner who ran hooting after her? It was not like Davidge to be either curious or suspicious. But love was beginning its usual hocus-pocus with character and turning a tired business man into a restless swain.
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Davidge resented Easton’s claim on Marie Louise, whatever it was, as an invasion of some imagined property right of his own, or at least of some option he had secured somehow. He was alarmed at the Teutonic accent of the interloper. He began to take heed of how little he knew of Marie Louise, after all. He recalled Sir Joseph Webling’s German accent. An icy fear chilled him.
His important business parley was conducted with an absent-mindedness that puzzled his host, the eminent iron-master, Jacob Cruit, who had exchanged an income of a million a year and dictatorial powers for a governmental wage of one dollar per annum, no authority, no gratitude, and endless trouble.
Davidge’s head was buzzing with thoughts in which Cruit had no part:
“Can she be one of those horrible women who have many lovers? Is she a woman of affairs? What is all this mystery about her? What was she so afraid of the night she would not stop at Mrs. Widdicombe’s? Why was she so upset by the appearance of Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Why was she in such a hurry to get me away from Mrs. Prothero’s dinner, and to keep me from keeping my engagement with Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Why so much German association?”
He thought of dozens of explanations, most of them wild, but none of them so wild as the truth––that Marie Louise was cowering under the accusation of being a German agent.
He resolved that he would forget Marie Louise, discharge her from the employment of his thoughts. Yet that night as he lay cooking in his hot berth he thought of Marie Louise instead of ships. None of his riot of thoughts was so fantastic as the fact that she was even then thinking of ships and not of him.
That night Marie Louise ransacked the library that the owner of Grinden Hall had left with the other furniture. Some member of the family had been a cadet at Annapolis, and his old text-books littered the shelves. Marie Louise selected and bore away an armload, not of novels, but of books whose very backs had repelled her before. They were the very latest romance to her now.
The authors ofAn Elementary Manual for the Deviation of the Compass in Iron Ships,The Marine Steam-engine, and147An Outline of Ship-building,Theoretical and Practical, could hardly have dreamed that their works would one night go up-stairs in the embrace of a young woman’s arms. The books would have struck a naval architect as quaintly old-fashioned, but to Marie Louise they were as full of news as the latest evening extra. The only one she could understand with ease was Captain Samuels’sFrom the Forecastle to the Cabin, and she was thrilled by his account of the struggles of his youth, his mutinies, his champion of the Atlantic, the semi-clipperDreadnaught, but most of all, by his glowing picture of the decay of American marine glory.
She read till she could sit up no longer. Then she undressed and dressed for sleep, snapped on the reading-lamp, and took up another book, Bowditch’sAmerican Navigation. It was the “Revised Edition of 1883,” but it was fresh sensation to her. She lay prone like the reading Magdalen in the picture, her hair pouring down over her shoulders, her bosom pillowed on the volume beneath her eyes.
148CHAPTER IX
Passengers arriving at Washington in the early morning may keep their cubbyholes until seven, no later. By half past seven they must be off the car. Jake Nuddle was an ugly riser. He had always regarded the alarm-clock as the most hateful of all the inventions of capitalists to enslave the poor. Jake had strange ideas of capitalists, none stranger than that they are luxurious persons who sleep late and knock off work early.
Waking Jake was one of the most dangerous of his wife’s prerogatives. On this morning, if he had been awaker he would have bitten off the black hand that reached into his berth and twitched the sheet at seven of a non-working day. The voice that murmured appealingly through the curtains, “S’em o’clock, please!” did not please Jake at all.
He cursed his annoying and nudging wife a few times heartily, then began to make his acutely unbeautiful toilet. In the same small wheeled hotel capitalists, statesmen, matrons, and misses were dressing in quarters just as strait. Jake and his wife had always got in each other’s way, but never more cumbersomely than now. Jake found his wife’s stockings when he sought his socks. Her corset-strings seemed to be everywhere. Whatever he laid hold of brought along her corset. He thrust his head and arms into something white and came out of it sputtering:
“That’s your damned shimmy. Where’s my damned shirt?”
Somehow they made it at last, got dressed and washed somehow and left the caravansary. Mrs. Nuddle carried the heavier baggage. They had breakfast at the lunch-counter; then they went out and looked at the Capitol. It inspired in Jake’s heart no national reverence. He said to his awestruck wife:
“There’s where that gang of robbers, the Congersmen, meet149and agree on their hold-ups. They’re all the hirelings of the capitalists.
“They voted for this rotten war without consulting the people. They didn’t dare consult ’em. They knew the people wasn’t in favor of no such crime. But the Congersmen get their orders from Wall Street, and them brokers wanted the war because they owned so much stock that wouldn’t be worth the paper it was printed on unless the United States joined the Allies and collected for ’em off Germany.”
It was thus that Jake and his kind regarded the avalanche of horrific woe that German ambition spilled upon the world and kept rolling down from the mountain-tops of heaped-up munitions. It was thus that they contemplated the mangled villages of innocent Belgium, the slavery-drives in the French towns, the windrows of British dead, the increasing lust of conquest, which grew by what it fed on, till at last America, driven frantic by the endless carnage, took up belatedly the gigantic task of throwing back the avalanche across the mountain to the other side before it engulfed and ruined the world. While Europe agonized in torments unthinkable, immeasurable, and yet mysteriously endurable only because there was no escape visible, the Jake Nuddles, illiterate and literate, croaked their batrachian protest against capital, bewailed the lot of imaginary working-men, and belied the life of real working-men.
Staring at the Capitol, which means so much nobility to him who has the nobility to understand the dream that raised it, he burlesqued its ideals. Cruel, corrupt, lazy, and sloven of soul, he found there what he knew best because it was his own. Aping a sympathy he could not feel, he grew maudlin:
“So they drag our poor boys from their homes in droves and send ’em off to the slaughter-house in France––all for money! Anything to grind down the honest workman into the dust, no matter how many mothers’ hearts they break!”
Jake was one of those who never express sympathy for anybody except in the course of a tirade against somebody else. He had small use for wives, mothers, or children except as clubs to pound rich men with. His wife, who knew him all too well, was not impressed by his eloquence. Her typical answer to his typical tirade was, “I wonder how on earth we’re goin’ to find Mamise.”
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Jake groaned at the anticlimax to his lofty flight, but he realized that the main business before the house was what his wife propounded.
He remembered seeing an Information Bureau sign in the station. He had learned from the newspaper in which he had seen Mamise’s picture that she was visiting Major Widdicombe. He had written the name down on the tablets of his memory, and his first plan was to find Major Widdicombe. Jake had a sort of wolfish cunning in tracing people he wanted to meet. He could always find anybody who might lend him money. He had mysterious difficulties in tracing some one who could give him work.
He left his wife to simmer in the station while he set forth on a scouting expedition. After much travel he found at last the office of the Ordnance Department, in which Major Widdicombe toiled, and he appeared at length at Major Widdicombe’s desk.
Jake was cautious. He would not state his purpose. He hardly dared to claim relationship with Miss Webling until he was positive that she was his sister-in-law. Noting Jake’s evasiveness, the Major discreetly evaded the request for his guest’s address. He would say no more than:
“Miss Webling is coming down to lunch with me at the––that is with my wife. I’ll tell her you’re looking for her; if she wants to meet you, I’ll tell you, if you come back here.”
“All right, mucher bliged,” said Jake. Baffled and without further recourse, he left the Major’s presence, since there seemed to be nothing else to do. But once outside, he felt that there had been something highly unsatisfactory about the parley. He decided to imitate Mary’s little lamb and to hang about the building till the Major should appear. In an hour or two he was rewarded by seeing Widdicombe leave the door and step into an automobile. Jake heard him tell the driver, “The Shoreham.”
Jake walked to the hotel and saw Marie Louise seated at a table by a window. He recognized her by her picture and was duly triumphant. He was ready to advance and demand recognition. Then he realized that he could make no claim on her without his awful wife’s corroboration. He took a street-car back to the station and found his nominal helpmeet sitting just where he had left her.
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Abbie had bought no newspaper, book, or magazine to while away the time with. She was not impatient of idleness. It was luxury enough just not to be warshin’ clo’es, cookin’ vittles, or wrastlin’ dishes. She took a dreamy content in studying the majesty of the architecture, but her interest in it was about that of a lizard basking on a fallen column in a Greek peristyle. It was warm and spacious and nobody disturbed her drowsy beatitude.
When Jake came and summoned her she rose like a rheumatic old househound and obeyed her master’s voice.
Jake gave her such a vote of confidence as was implied in letting her lug the luggage. It was cheaper for her to carry it than for him to store it in the parcel-room. It caused the fellow-passengers in the street-car acute inconvenience, but Jake was superior to public opinion of his wife. In such a homely guise did the fates approach Miss Webling.
152CHAPTER X
The best place for a view is in one’s back yard; then it is one’s own. If it is in the front yard, then the house is only part of the public’s view.
In London Marie Louise had lived at Sir Joseph Webling’s home, its gray, fog-stained, smoked-begrimed front flush with the pavement. But back of the house was a high-walled garden with a fountain that never played. There was a great rug of English-green grass, very green all winter and still greener all summer. At an appropriate spot was a tree; a tea-table sat under it; in blossom-time it sprinkled pink petals on the garden hats of the women; and on the grass they fell, to twist Tennyson, softlier than tired eyelids on tired eyes.
So Marie Louise adored her new home with its unpromising entrance and its superb surprise from the rear windows. When she broke the news to Polly Widdicombe, that she was leaving her, they had a good fight over it. Yet Polly could hardly insist that Marie Louise stay with her forever, especially when Marie Louise had a perfectly good home of her own.
Polly went along for a morning of reconstruction work. There were pictures, chairs, cushions, and knickknacks that simply had to be hidden away. The original tenants evidently had the theory that a bare space on a wall or a table was as indecent as on a person’s person.
They had taken crude little chromos and boxed them in gaudy frames, many of whose atrocities were aggravated by panels of plush of a color that could hardly be described by any other name than fermented prune. Over the corner of these they had thrown “throws” or drapes of malicious magenta horribly figured in ruthless incompatibilities.
Chairs of unexplainable framework were upholstered with fabrics of studied delirium. Every mantel was an exhibit of models of what not to do. When Henry James said that Americans had no end of taste, but most of it was bad, he153must have based his conclusions on such a conglomerate as this.
Polly and Marie Louise found some of the furniture bad enough to be amusing. But they toted a vanload of it into closets and storerooms. Where the pictures came away they left staring spaces of unfaded wall-paper. Still, they were preferable to the pictures.
By noon the women were exhausted. They washed their dust-smutted hands and faces and exclaimed upon the black water they left. But the exercise had given them appetite, and when Marie Louise locked the front door she felt all the comfort of a householder. She had a home of her very own to lock up, and though she had roamed through pleasures and palaces, she agreed that, be it ever so horrible, there’s no place like home.
She and Polly were early to their luncheon engagement with Major Widdicombe. Their appetites disputed the clock. Polly decided to telephone her husband for Heaven’s sake to come at once to her rescue.
While Polly was telephoning Marie Louise sat waiting on a divan. Her muscles were so tired that she grew nearly as placidly animal as her sister in the Pennsylvania Station. She was as different in every other way as possible. Her life, her environment, her ambitions, had been completely alien to anything Mrs. Nuddle had known. She had been educated and evolved by entirely different joys and sorrows, fears and successes.
Mrs. Nuddle had been afraid that her husband would beat her again, or kill one of the children in his rage, or get himself sent to prison or to the chair; Mrs. Nuddle had been afraid that the children would be run over in the street, would pull a boilerful of boiling water over onto them, or steal, or go wrong in any of the myriad ways that children have of going wrong. Mrs. Nuddle’s ecstasies were a job well done, a word of praise from a customer, a chance to sit down, an interval without pain or worry when her children were asleep, or when her husband was working and treating her as well as one treats an old horse.
Of such was the kingdom of Mrs. Nuddle.
Marie Louise had dwelt in a world no more and no less harrowing, but infinitely unlike. The two sisters were no154longer related to each other by any ties except blood kinship. Mrs. Nuddle was a good woman gone wrong, Marie Louise a goodish woman gone variously; Mrs. Nuddle a poor advertisement of a life spent in honest toil, early rising, early bedding, churchgoing, and rigid economy; Marie Louise a most attractive evidence of how much depends on a careful carriage, a cultivated taste in clothes, and an elegant acquaintance.
At last, after years of groping toward each other, the sisters were to be brought together. But there was to be an intervention. Even while Marie Louise sat relaxed in a fatigue that she would have called contentment trouble was stealing toward her.
The spider who came and sat beside this Miss Muffet was Nicky Easton. He frightened her, but he would not let her run away.
As he dropped to her side she rose with a gasp, but he pressed her back with a hasty grip on her arm and a mandatory prayer:
“Wait once, pleass.”
The men who had shadowed Marie Louise had months before given her up as hopelessly correct. But guardian angels were still provided for Nicky Easton; and one of them, seeing this meeting, took Marie Louise back into the select coterie of the suspects.
There’s no cure for your bodily aches and pains like terror. It lifts the paralytic from his bed, makes the lame scurry, and gives the blind eyes enough for running. Marie Louise’s fatigue fell from her like a burden whose straps are slit.
When Nicky said: “I could not find you in New York. Now we are here we can have a little talkink,” she stammered: “Not here! Not now!”
“Why not, pleass?”
“I have an engagement––a friend––she has just gone to telephone a moment.”
“You are ashamed of me, then?”
She let him have it. “Yes!”
He winced at the slap in the face.
She went on: “Besides, she knows you. Her husband is an officer in the army. I can’t talk to you here.”
“Where, then, and when?”
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“Any time––any place––but here.”
“Any time is no time. You tell me, or I stay now.”
“Come to––to my house.”
“You have a howiss, then?”
“Yes. I just took it to-day. I shall be there this afternoon––at three, if you will go.”
“Very goot. The address is––”
She gave it; he repeated it, mumbled, “At sree o’clock I am there,” and glided away just as Polly returned.
They were eating a consommé madrilène when the Major arrived. He dutifully ate what his wife had selected for him, and listened amiably to what she had to tell him about her morning, though he was bursting to tell her about his. Polly made a vivid picture of Marie Louise’s new home, ending with:
“Everything on God’s earth in it except a piano and a book.”
This reminded Marie Louise of the books she had read on ship-building, and she asked if she might borrow them. Polly made a woeful face at this.
“My dear! When a woman starts to reading up on a subject a man is interested in, she’s lost––and so is he. Beware of it, my dear.”
Tom demurred: “Go right on, Marie Louise, so that you can take an intelligent interest in what your husband is working on.”
“My husband!” said Marie Louise. “Aren’t you both a trifle premature?”
Polly went glibly on: “Don’t listen to Tom, my dear. What does he know about what a man wants his wife to take an intelligent interest in? Once a woman knows about her husband’s business, he’s finished with her and ready for the next. Tom’s been trying to tell me for ten years what he’s working at, and I haven’t the faintest idea yet. It always gives him something to hope for. When he comes home of evenings he can always say, ‘Perhaps to-night’s the night when she’ll listen.’ But once you listen intelligently and really understand, he’s through with you, and he’ll quit you for some pink-cheeked ignoramus who hasn’t heard about it yet.”
Marie Louise, being a woman, knew how to get her message156to another woman; the way seems to be to talk right through her talk. The acute creatures have ears to hear with and mouths to talk with, and they apparently find no difficulty in using both at the same time. Somewhere along about the middle of Polly’s discourse Marie Louise began to answer it before it was finished. Why should she wait when she knew what was coming? So she said contemporaneously and covocally:
“But I’m not going to marry a ship-builder, my dear. Don’t be absurd! I’m not planning to take an intelligent interest in Mr. Davidge’s business. I’m planning to take an intelligent interest in my own. I’m going to be a ship-builder myself, and I want to learn the A B C’s.”
They finished that argument at the same time and went on together down the next stretch in a perfect team:
"Oh, well of course, if that’s the case," asserted Polly, "then you’re quite crazy––unless you’re simply hunting for a new sensation. And on that score I’ll admit that it sounds rather interesting. I may take a whack at it myself. I’m quite fed up on bandages and that sort of thing. Get me a job in the same factory or whatever they call it. Will you?"
“Mr. Davidge tells me,” Marie Louise explained, “that women are needed in ship-building, and that anybody can learn. In fact, everybody has to, anyway; so I’ve got as good a chance as a man. I’m as strong as a horse. Fine! Come along, and we’ll build a U-boat chaser together. Mr. Davidge would be delighted to have you, I’m sure.”
This was arrant hubbub to the mere man who was not capable of carrying on a conversation except by the slow, primitive methods of Greek drama, strophe and antistrophe, one talking while the other listened, thenvice versa.
So he had time to remember that he had something to remember, and to dig it up. He broke in on the dialogue:
“By the way, that reminds me, Marie Louise. There’s a man in town looking for you.”
“Looking for me!” Marie Louise gasped, alert as an antelope at once. “What was his name?”
“I can’t seem to recall it. I’ll have it in a minute. He157didn’t impress me very favorably, so I didn’t tell him you were living with us.”
Polly turned on Tom: “Come along, you poor nut! I hate riddles, and so does Marie Louise.”
“That’s it!” Tom cried. “Riddle––Nuddle. His name is Nuddle. Do you know a man named Nuddle?”
The name conveyed nothing to Marie Louise except a suspicion that Mr. Verrinder had chosen some pseudonym.
“What was his nationality?” she asked. “English?”
“I should say not! He was as Amurrican as a piece of pungkin pie.”
Marie Louise felt a little relieved, but still at sea. When Widdicombe asked what message he should take back her curiosity led her to brave her fate and know the worst:
“Tell him to come to my house at any time this afternoon––no, not before five. I have some shopping to do, and the servants to engage.”
She did not ask Polly to go with her, and Polly took the hint conveyed in Marie Louise’s remark as they left the dining-room, “I’ve a little telephoning to do.”
Polly went her way, and Marie Louise made a pretext of telephoning.
Major Widdicombe did not see Jake Nuddle as he went down the steps, for the reason that Jake saw him first and drew his wife aside. He wondered what had become of Marie Louise.
Jake and his wife hung about nonplussed for a few minutes, till Marie Louise came out. She had waited only to make sure that Tom and Polly got away. When she came down the steps she cast a casual glance at Jake and her sister, who came toward her eagerly. But she assumed that they were looking at some one else, for they meant nothing to her eyes.
She had indeed never seen this sister before. The sister who waddled toward her was not the sister she had left in Wakefield years before. That sister was young and lean and a maid. Marriage and hard work and children had swaddled this sister in bundles of strange flesh and drawn the face in new lines.
Marie Louise turned her back on her, but heard across her shoulder the poignant call:
“Mamise!”