CHAPTER VIII

Mrs. Nuddle sneered: “If the hussies would do an honest day’s work it would be better for their figgers.” She was mercifully oblivious of the fact that her tub-calisthenics had made her no more exquisite than a cow in a kimono.

Mrs. Nuddle scorned the lily-fingered tulip-fleshed beauties. Their sentimental alarms had nothing in common with her problem, which was the riddle of a husband who was faithful only to the bottle, who was indifferent to the children he got so easily, and was poetical only in that he never worked save when the mood was on him.

Again Mrs. Nuddle made to cast aside the paper that had come into her home wrapped round a bundle of laundry. But now she was startled, and she would have startled anybody who might have been watching her, for she stared hard at a photographed beauty and gasped:

“Sister!”

She in her disordered garb, unkempt, uncorseted, and uncommonly common, greeted with the word “Sister!” the photograph of a very young, very beautiful, very gracile creature, in a mannish costume that emphasized her femininity, in a foreign garden, in a braw hat with curls cascading from under it, with a throat lilying out of a flaring collar, with hands pocketed in a smart jacket, and below that a pair of most fashionable legs in riding-breeches and puttees! She carried not a parasol nor a riding-crop, but a great reaping-hook swung across her shoulder, and she smiled as impudently, as immortally, as if she were Youth and had slain old Time and carried off his scythe.

The picture did not reply to Mrs. Nuddle’s cry, but Mrs. Nuddle’s eldest daughter, a precocious little adventuress of eleven or so, who was generally called “Sister,” turned from the young brother whose smutty face she was just smacking and snapped:

“Aw, whatcha want?”

Little Sister supposed that her irritating mother was going to tell her to stop doing something, or to start doing something––either of which behests she always hated and only obeyed because her mother was bigger than she was. She turned and saw her mother swaying and clutching at the air. Sister had a gorgeous hope that mother would fall into the tub and be interesting for once. But mother was a born65disappointer. She shook off the promising swoon, righted herself, and began fiercely to scan the paper to find out whose name the picture bore. The caption was torn off.

Being absolutely sure who it was, she wanted to find out who it really was.

In her frantic curiosity she remembered that her husband had stripped off a corner of the paper, dipped it in the stove, lighted his pipe with it, thrown it flaming on the floor, spat it out with practised accuracy, and trodden it as he went away. Mrs. Nuddle ran to pick it up.

On the charred remnant she read:

The Beautiful Miss.... One of London’s reigning beaut.... daughter of Sir Joseph W.... doing farm work on the estate in....

Mrs. Nuddle sniffed no more. She flopped to a backless chair and squatted in a curious burlesque of Rodin’s statue of “The Thinker.” One heavy hand pinched her dewlap. Her hair was damp with steam and raining about her face. Her old waist was half buttoned, and no one would have regretted if it had been all buttoned. She was as plebeian as an ash-can and as full of old embers.

She was still immobilized when her husband came in. Now he gasped. His wife was loafing! sitting down! in the middle of the day! Thinking was loafing with her. He was supposed to do the family thinking. It was doubly necessary that she should work now, because he was on a strike. He had been to a meeting of other thinkers––ground and lofty thinkers who believed that they had discovered the true evil of the world and its remedy.

The evil was the possession of money by those who had accumulated it. The remedy was to take it away from them. Then the poor would be rich, which was right, and the rich would be poor, which was righter still.

It was well known that the only way to end the bad habit of work was to quit working. And the way to insure universal prosperity was to burn down the factories and warehouses, destroy all machinery and beggar the beasts who invented, invested, built, and hired and tried to get rich by getting riches.

This program would take some little time to perfect, and meanwhile Jake was willing that his wife should work. Indeed, a sharp fear almost unmanned him––what if she should fall sick and have to loaf in the horsepital? What if she should die? O Gord! Her little children would be left motherless––and fatherless, for he would, of course, be too busy saving the world to save his children. He would lose, too, the prestige enjoyed only by those who have their money in their wife’s name. So he spoke to her with more than his wonted gentleness:

“Whatta hellsa matter wit choo?”

She felt the unusual concern in his voice, and smiled at him as best she could:

“I got a kind of a jolt. I seen this here pitcher, and I thought for a minute it was my sister.”

“Your sister? How’d she get her pitcher in the paper? Who did she shoot?”

He snatched the sheet from her and saw the young woman in the young-manly garb.

Jake gloated over the picture: “Some looker! What is she, a queen in burlecue?”

Mrs. Nuddle held out the burned sliver of paper.

He roared. “London’s ranging beaut? And you’re what thinks she’s your sister! The one that ran away? Was she a beaut like this?”

Mrs. Nuddle nodded. He whistled and said, with great tact:

“Cheese! but I have the rotten luck! Why didn’t I see her first? Whyn’t you tell me more about her? You never talk about her none. Why not?” No answer. “All I know is she went wrong and flew the coop.”

Mrs. Nuddle flared at this. “Who said she went wrong?”

“You did!” Jake retorted with vigor. “Usedn’t you to keep me awake praying for her––hollerin’ at God to forgive her? Didn’t you, or did you?” No answer. “And you think this is her!” The ridiculousness of the fantasy smote him. “Say, you must ’a’ went plumb nutty! Bendin’ over that tub must ’a’ gave you a rush of brains to the head.”

He laughed uproariously till she wanted to kill him. She tried to take back what she had said:

“Don’t you set there tellin’ me I ever told you nothin’ mean about my pore little sister. She was as good a girl as ever lived, Mamise was.”

“You’re changin’ your tune now, ain’tcha? Because you think she looks like a grand dam in pants! And where dya get that Mamise stuff? What was her honestogawd name? Maryer? You’re tryin’ to swell her up a little, huh?”

“No, I ain’t. She was named Marie Louise after her gran’-maw, on’y as a baby she couldn’t say it right. She said ‘Mamise.’ That’s what she called her poor little self––Mamise. Seems like I can see her now, settin’ on the floor like Sister. And where is she now? O Gawd! whatever become of her, runnin’ off thataway––a little sixteen-year-ol’ chile, runnin’ off with a cheap thattical troupe, because her aunt smacked her.

“She never had no maw and no bringin’ up, and she was so pirty. She had all the beauty of the fambly, folks all said.”

“And that ain’t no lie,” said Jake, with characteristic gallantry. “There’s nothin’ but monopoly everywheres in the world. She got all the looks and I got you. I wonder who got her!”

Jake sighed as he studied the paper, ransacked it noisily for an article about her, but, finding none, looked at the date and growled:

“Aw, this paper’s nearly a year old––May, 1916, it says.”

This quelled his curiosity a little, and he turned to his dinner, flinging it into his jaws like a stoker. His wife went slip-slopping from stove to table, ministering to him.

Jake Nuddle did not look so dangerous as he was. He was like an old tomato-can that an anarchist has filled with dynamite and provided with a trigger for the destruction of whosoever disturbs it. Explosives are useful in place. But Jake was of the sort that blow up regardless of the occasion.

His dynamite was discontent. He hated everybody who was richer or better paid, better clothed, better spoken of than he was. Yet he had nothing in him of that constructive envy which is called emulation and leads to progress, to days of toil, nights of thought. His idea of equality was not to climb to the peak, but to drag the climbers down. Prating always of the sufferings of the poor, he did nothing to soothe them or remove them. His only contribution to the improvement of wages was to call a strike and get none at all. His contribution to the war against oppressive capital was to denounce all successful men as brutes and tyrants, lumping the benefactors with the malefactors.

Men of his type made up the blood-spillers of the French Revolution, and the packs of the earlier Jacquerie, the thugs who burned châteaux and shops, and butchered women as well as men, growling their ominous refrain:

“Noo sum zum cum eel zaw” (“Nous sommes hommes comme ils sont”).

The Jake Nuddles were hate personified. They formed secret armies of enemies now inside the nation and threatened her success in the war. The thing that prevented their triumph was that their blunders were greater than their malice, their folly more certain than their villainy. As soon as America entered the lists against Germany, the Jake Nuddles would begin doing their stupid best to prevent enlistment, to persuade desertion, to stop war-production, to wreck factories and trains, to ruin sawmills and burn crops. In the name of freedom they would betray its most earnest defenders, compel the battle-line to face both ways. They were more subtle than the snaky spies of Germany, and more venomous.

As he wolfed his food now, Jake studied the picture of Marie Louise. The gentlest influence her beauty exerted upon him was a beastly desire. He praised her grace because it tortured his wife. But even fiercer than his animal impulse was his rage of hatred at the look of cleanliness and comeliness, the environment of luxury only emphasized by her peasant disguise.

When he had mopped his plate with his bread, he took up the paper again and glared at it with hostile envy.

“Dammer and her arristocratic ways! Daughter of a Sir and a Lady, eh? Just wait till we get through with them Sirs and Ladies. We’ll mow ’em down. You’ll see. Robbin’ us poor toilers that does all the work! We’ll put an end to their peerages and their deer-parks. What Germany leaves of these birds we’ll finish up. And then we’ll take this rotten United States, the rottenest tyranny of all. Gawdammit! You just wait!”

His wife just waited till he had smashed the picture in the face, knocked the pretty lady’s portrait to the floor and walked on it as he strode out to his revolution. Incidentally he trod on little Sister’s hand, and she sent up a caterwaul. Her little brother howled in duet. Then father turned on them.

“Aw, shut up or I’ll––”

He did not finish his sentence. He rarely finished69anything––except his meals. He left his children crying and his wife in a new distress; but then, revolutions cannot pause for women and children.

When he had gone, and Sister’s tears had dried on her smutty face, Mrs. Nuddle picked up the smitten and trampled picture of England’s reigning beauty and thought how lucky Miss W. was to be in England, blissful on Sir and Lady Somebody-or-other’s estate.

70CHAPTER VIII

When Mr. Verrinder left Marie Louise he took from her even the props of hostility. She had nothing to lean on now, nobody to fight with for life and reputation. She had only suspense and confusion. Agitated thoughts followed one another in waves across her soul––grief for her foster-father and mother, memory of their tendernesses, remorse for seeming to have deserted them in their last hours, remorse for having been the dupe of their schemes, and remorse for that remorse, grief at losing the lovable, troublesome children, creature distress at giving up the creature comforts of the luxurious home, the revulsion of her unfettered mind and her restless young body at the prospect of exchanging liberty and occupation for the half-death of an idle cell––a kind of coffin residence––fear of being executed as a spy, and fear of being released to drag herself through life with the ball and chain of guilt forever rolling and clanking at her feet.

Verrinder’s mind was hardly more at rest when he left her and walked to his rooms. He carried the regret of a protector of England who had bungled his task and let the wards of his suspicion break loose. The fault was not his, but he would never escape the reproach. He had no taste for taking revenge on the young woman. It would not salve his pride to visit on her pretty head the thwarted punishments due Sir Joseph and his consort in guilt. Besides, in spite of his cynicism, he had been touched by Marie Louise’s sincerities. She proved them by the very contradictions of her testimony, with its history of keen intelligence alternating with curious blindness. He knew how people get themselves all tangled up in conflicting duties, how they let evils slide along, putting off till to-morrow the severing of the cords and the stepping forth with freedom from obligation. He knew that the very best people, being those who are most sensitive to gratitude and71to other people’s pains, are incessantly let in for complications that never involve selfish or self-righteous persons.

As an executive of the law, he knew how many laws there are unwritten and implied that make obedience to the law an experiment in caddishness and ingratitude. There were reasons enough then to believe that Marie Louise had meant no harm and had not understood the evil in which she was so useful an accomplice. Even if she were guilty and her bewilderment feigned, her punishment would be untimely at this moment when the Americans who abhorred and distrusted Germany had just about persuaded the majority of their countrymen that the world would be intolerable if Germany triumphed, and that the only hope of defeating her tyranny lay in joining hands with England, France, and Italy.

The enemies of England would be only too glad to make a martyr out of Miss Webling if she were disciplined by England. She would be advertised, as a counterweight to the hideous mistake the Germans made in immortalizing with their bullets the poor little nurse, “dieCavell.”

Verrinder was not himself at all till he had bathed, shaved, and clothed his person in clean linen and given his inner man its tea and toast. Once this restoration was made, his tea deferred helped him to the conclusion that the one wise thing was to restore Marie Louise quietly to her own country. He went with freshened step and determined mind to a conference with the eminent men concerned. He made his own confession of failure and took more blame than he need have accepted. Then he told his plans for Marie Louise and made the council agree with him.

Early in the afternoon he called on Miss Webling and found the house a flurry of undertakers, curious relatives, and thwarted reporters. The relatives and the reporters he satisfied with a few well-chosen lies. Then he sent his name up to Marie Louise. The butler thrust the card-tray through the door as if he were tossing a bit of meat to some wild animal.

“I’ll be down,” said Marie Louise, and she primped herself like another Mary Queen of Scots receiving a call from the executioner. She was calmed by the hope that she would learn her fate, at least, and she cared little what it was, so long as it was not unknown.

Verrinder did not delay to spread his cards on the table.

“Miss Webling, I begin again with a question: If we should offer you freedom and silence, would you go back to America and tell no one of what has happened here?”

The mere hint was like flinging a door open and letting the sunlight into a dungeon. The very word “America” was itself a rush of fresh air. The long-forgotten love of country came back into her heart on a cry of hope.

“Oh, you don’t mean that you might?”

“We might. In fact, we will, if you will promise––”

She could not wait for his formal conclusion. She broke in: “I’ll promise anything––anything! Oh I don’t want to be free just for the sake of escaping punishment! No, no. I just want a chance to––to expiate the evil I have done. I want to do some good to undo all the bad I’ve brought about. I won’t try to shift any blame. I want to confess. It will take this awful load off my heart to tell people what a wicked fool I’ve been.”

Verrinder checked her: “But that is just what you must not do. Unless you can assure us that you will carry this burden about with you and keep it secret at no matter what cost, then we shall have to proceed with the case––legally. We shall have to exhume Sir Joseph and Lady Webling, as it were, and drag the whole thing through the courts. We’d really rather not, but if you insist––”

“Oh, I’ll promise. I’ll keep the secret. Let them rest.”

She was driven less by the thought of her own liberty than the terror of exposing the dead. The mere thought brought back pictures of hideous days when the grave was not refuge enough from vengeance, when bodies were dug up, gibbeted, haled by a chain along the unwashed cobblestones, quartered with a sword in the market-place and then flung back to the dark.

Verrinder may have feared that Marie Louise yielded under duress, and that when she was out of reach of the law she would forget, so he said

“Would you swear to keep this inviolate?”

“Yes!”

“Have you a Bible?”

She thought there must be one, and she searched for it among the bookshelves. But first she came across one in the German tongue. It fell open easily, as if it had been a73familiar companion of Sir Joseph’s. She abhorred the sight of the words that youthful Sunday-school lessons had given an unearthly sanctity as she recognized them twisted into the German paraphrase and printed in the twisted German type. But she said:

“Will this do?”

Verrinder shook his head. “I don’t know that an oath on a German Bible would really count. It might be considered a mere heap of paper.”

Marie Louise put it aside and brushed its dust off her fingers. She found an English Bible after a further search. Its pages had seen the light but seldom. It slipped from her hand and fell open. She knelt to pick it up with a tremor of fear.

She rose, and before she closed it glanced at the page before her. These words caught her eye:

For thus saith the Lord God of Israel unto me. Take the winecup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send thee, to drink it. And they shall drink, and be moved, and be mad because of the sword that I will send among them.

She showed them to Verrinder. He nodded solemnly, took the book from her hand, closed it, and held it before her. She put the slim tips of her young fingers near the talon of his old thumb and echoed in a timid, silvern voice the broken phrases he spoke in a tone of bronze:

“I solemnly swear––that so long as I live––I will tell no one––what I know––of the crimes and death––of Sir Joseph and Lady Webling––unless called upon––in a court of law. This oath is made––with no mental reservations––and is binding––under all circumstances whatsoever––so help me God!”

When she had whispered the last invocation he put the book away and gripped her hand in his.

“I must remind you that releasing you is highly illegal––and perhaps immoral. Our action might be overruled and the whole case opened. But I think you are safe, especially if you get to America––the sooner the better.”

“Thank you!” she said.

He laughed, somewhat pathetically.

“Good luck!”

He did not tell her that England would still be watching over her, that her name and her history were already cabled to America, that she would be shadowed to the steamer, observed aboard the boat, and picked up at the dock by the first of a long series of detectives constituting a sort of serial guardian angel.

BOOK II

IN NEW YORK

“This is the life for me. I’ve been a heroine and a war-worker about as long as I can.”

76CHAPTER I

Leaving England quickly was not easy in those days. Passenger-steamers were few, irregular, and secret. The passport regulations were exceedingly rigorous, and even Mr. Verrinder’s influence could not speed the matter greatly.

There was the Webling estate to settle up, also. At Verrinder’s suggestion Marie Louise put her affairs into the hands of counsel, and he arranged her surrender of all claims on the Webling estate. But he insisted that she should keep the twenty thousand pounds that had been given to her absolutely. He may have been influenced in this by his inability to see from what other funds he could collect his fee.

Eventually he placed her aboard a liner, and her bonds in the purser’s safe; and eventually the liner stole out into the ocean, through such a gantlet of lurking demons as old superstitions peopled it with.

She had not told the children good-by, but had delivered them to the Oakbys and run away. The Oakbys had received her with a coldness that startled her. They used the expression, “Under the circumstances,” with a freezing implication that made her wonder if the secret had already trickled through to them.

On the steamer there was nobody she knew. At the dock no friends greeted her. She did not notice that her arrival was noted by a certain Mr. Larrey, who had been detailed to watch her and saw with some pride how pretty she was. “It’ll be a pleasure to keep an eye on her,” he told a luckless colleague who had a long-haired pacifist professor allotted to him. But Marie Louise’s mystic squire had not counted on her stopping in New York for only a day and then setting forth on a long, hot, stupid train-ride of two days to the little town of her birth, Wakefield.

Larrey found it appalling. Marie Louise found it far smaller77and shabbier than she had imagined. Yet it had grown some, too, since her time.

At least, most of the people she had known had moved away to the cities or the cemeteries, and new people had taken their place. She had not known many of the better people. Her mother had been too humble to sew for them.

Coming from London and the country life of England, she found the town intolerably ugly. It held no associations for her. She had been unhappy there, and she said: “Poor me! No wonder I ran away.” She justified her earlier self with a kind of mothering sympathy. She longed for some one to mother her present self.

But her sister was not to be found. The old house where they had lived was replaced by a factory that had made suspenders and now was turning out cartridge-belts. She found no one who knew her sister at all. She did not give her own name, for many reasons, and her face was not remembered. A few people recalled the family. The town marshal vaguely placed her father as a frequent boarder at the jail.

One sweet old lady, for whom Marie Louise’s mother had done sewing, had a kind of notion that one of the sisters had run away and that the other sister had left town with somebody for somewhere sometime after. But that was all that the cupboard of her recollection disclosed.

Anatole France has a short story of Pilate in his old age meeting his predecessor as Proconsul in Jerusalem. During their senile gossip the elder asks if Pilate had known a certain beauty named Mary of Magdala. Pilate shakes his head. The other has heard that she took up with a street-preacher called Jesus from the town of Nazareth. Pilate ponders, shakes his head again, and confesses, “I don’t remember him.”

It was not strange, then, that Marie Louise’s people, who had made almost no impression on the life of the town, should have lapsed from its memory. But it was discouraging. Marie Louise felt as much of an anachronism as old Rip Van Winkle, though she looked no more like him than an exquisite, fashionable young woman could look like a gray-bearded sot who has slept in his clothes for twenty years.

Her private detective, Larrey, homesick for New York,78was overjoyed when she went back, but she was disconsolate and utterly detached from life. The prodigal had come home, but the family had moved away.

She took a comfortable little nook in an apartment hotel and settled down to meditate. The shops interested her, and she browsed away among them for furniture and clothes and books.

Marie Louise had not been in her homeless home long when the President visited Congress and asked it to declare a state of war against Germany. She was exultant over the great step, but the wilful few who held Congress back from answering the summons revealed to her why the nation had been so slow in responding to the crisis. Even now, after so much insult and outrage, vast numbers of Americans denied that there was any cause for war.

But the patience of the majority had been worn thin. The opposition was swept away, and America declared herself in the arena––in spirit at least. Impatient souls who had prophesied how the millions would spring to arms overnight wondered at the failure to commit a miracle. The Germans, who had prepared for forty years, laughed at the new enemy and felt guaranteed by five impossibilities: that America should raise a real army, or equip it, or know how to train it, or be able to get it past the submarine barrier, or feed the few that might sneak through.

America’s vast resources were unready, unwieldy, unknown. The first embarrassment was the panic of volunteers.

Marie Louise was only one of the hundred million who sprang madly in all directions and landed nowhere. She wanted to volunteer, too, but for what? What could she do? Where could she get it to do? In the chaos of her impatience she did nothing.

Supping alone at the Biltmore one night, she was seen, hailed, and seized by Polly Widdicombe. Marie Louise’s detective knew who Polly was. He groaned to note that she was the first friend his client had found.

Polly, giggling adorably, embraced her and kissed her before everybody in the big Tudor Room. And Polly’s husband greeted her with warmth of hand and voice.

Marie Louise almost wept, almost cried aloud with joy. The prodigal was home, had been welcomed with a kiss.79Evidently her secret had not crossed the ocean. She could take up life again. Some day the past would confront and denounce her, perhaps; but for the moment she was enfranchised anew of human society.

Polly said that she had read of Sir Joseph’s death and his wife’s, and what a shock it must have been to poor Marie Louise, but how well she bore up under it, and how perfectly darn beautiful she was, and what a shame that it was almost midnight! She and her hub were going to Washington. Everybody was, of course. Why wasn’t Marie Louise there? And Polly’s husband was to be a major––think of it! He was going to be all dolled up in olive drab and things and–– “Damn the clock, anyway; if we miss that train we can’t get on another for days. And what’s your address? Write it on the edge of that bill of fare and tear it off, and I’ll write you the minute I get settled, for you must come to us and nowhere else and–– Good-by, darling child, and–– All right, Tom, I’m coming!”

And she was gone.

Marie Louise went back to her seclusion much happier and yet much lonelier. She had found a friend who had not heard of her disgrace. She had lost a friend who still rejoiced to see her.

But her faithful watchman was completely discouraged. When he turned in his report he threatened to turn in his resignation unless he were relieved of the futile task of recording Marie Louise’s blameless and eventless life.

And then the agent’s night was turned to day––at least his high noon was turned to higher. For a few days later Marie Louise was abruptly addressed by Nicky Easton.

She had been working in the big Red Cross shop on Fifth Avenue, rolling bandages and making dressings with a crowd of other white-fingered women. A cable had come that there was a sudden need for at least ten thousand bandages. These were not yet for American soldiers in France, though their turn would come, and their wholesale need. But as Marie Louise wrought she could imagine the shattered flesh, the crying nerves of some poor patriot whose gaping wound this linen pack would smother. And her own nerves cried out in vicarious crucifixion. At noon she left the factory for a little air and a bite of lunch.

Nicky Easton appeared out of her list of the buried. She gasped at sight of him.

“I thought you were dead.”

He laughed: “If I am it, thees is myDoppelgänger.” And he began to hum with a grisly smile Schubert’s setting to Heine’s poem of the man who met his own ghost and double, aping his love-sorrow outside the home of his dead sweetheart:

“Der Mond zeigt mir meine eig’ne Gestalt.Du Doppelgänger, du bleicher Geselle!Was äffst du nach mein Liebesleid,Das mich gequält auf dieser StelleSo manche Nacht in alter Zeit.”

Marie Louise was terrified by the harrowing emotions the song always roused in her, but more by the dreadful sensation of walking that crowded Avenue with a man humming German at her side.

“Hush! Hush, in Heaven’s name!” she pleaded.

He laughed Teutonically, and asked her to lunch with him.

“I have another engagement, and I am late,” she said.

“Where are you living?”

She felt inspired to give him a false address. He insisted on walking with her to the Waldorf, where she said her engagement was.

“You don’t ask me where I have been?”

“I was just going to. The last I heard you were in the London Tower or somewhere. However did you get out?”

“The same way like you ditt. I thought you should choin me therein, but you also told all you knew and some more yet, yes?”

She saw then that he had turned state’s evidence. Perhaps he had betrayed Sir Joseph. Somehow she found it possible to loathe him extra. She lacked the strength to deny his odious insinuation about herself. He went on:

“Now I am in America. I could not dare go to Germany now. But here I try to gain back my place inDeutschland. These English think they use me for a stool-pitcheon. But they will find out, and whenDeutschland ist über alles––ach, Gott! You shall help me. We do some work togedder. I come soon by your house.Auf––Goot-py.”

He left her at the hotel door and lifted his hat. She went into the labyrinth and lost herself. When her heart had ceased fluttering and she grew calm from very fatigue of alarm she resolved to steal out of New York.

She spent an afternoon and an evening of indecision. Night brought counsel. Polly Widdicombe had offered her a haven, and in the country. It would be an ideal hiding-place. She set to work at midnight packing her trunk.

82CHAPTER II

Marie Louise tried all the next morning to telephone from New York to Washington, but it seemed that everybody on earth was making the same effort. It was a wire Babel.

Washington was suddenly America in the same way that London had long been England; and Paris France. The entire population was apparently trying to get into Washington in order to get out again. People wrote, telegraphed, radiographed, telephoned, and traveled thither by all the rail- and motor-roads. Washington was the narrow neck of the funnel leading to the war, and the sleepy old home of debate and administration was suddenly dumfounded to find itself treated to all the horrors of a boom-town––it was like San Francisco in ’49.

Marie Louise, who had not yet recovered her American dialect, kept pleading with Long Distance:

“Oh, I say, cahn’t you put me through to Washington? It’s no end important, really! Rosslyn, seven three one two. I want to speak to Mrs. Widdicombe. I am Miss Webling. Thank you.”

The obliging central asked her telephone number and promised to call her in a moment. Eternity is but a moment––to some centrals. Marie Louise, being finite and ephemeral, never heard from that central again. Later she took up the receiver and got another central, who had never heard her tale of woe and had to have it all over again. This central also asked her name and number and promised to report, then vanished into the interstellar limbo where busy centrals go.

Again and again Marie Louise waited and called, and told and retold her prayer till it turned to gibberish and she began to doubt her own name and to mix the telephone number hopelessly. Then she went into her hand-bag and pawed about in the little pocket edition of confusion till she found83the note that Polly had sent her at once from Washington with the address, Grinden Hall, Rosslyn, and the telephone number and the message.

So glad you’re on this side of the water, dear. Do run over and see us. Perfect barn of a house, and lost in the country, but there’s always room––especially for you, dear. You’ll never get in at a hotel.

Marie Louise propped this against the telephone and tried again.

The seventh central dazed her with, “We can take nothing but gov’ment business till twoP.M.”

Marie Louise rose in despair, searched in her bag for her watch, gasped, put the watch and the note back in her bag, snapped it, and rose to go.

She decided to send Polly a telegram. She took out the note for the address and telephoned a telegram, saying that she would arrive at five o’clock. The telegraph-operator told her that the company could not guarantee delivery, as traffic over the wires was very heavy. Marie Louise sighed and rose, worn out with telephone-fag.

She told the maid to ask the hall-boy to get her a taxi, and hastily made ready to leave. Her trunks had gone to the station an hour ago, and they had been checked through from the house.

Her final pick-up glance about the room did not pick up the note she had propped on the telephone-table. She left it there and closed the door on another chapter of her life.

She rode to the station, and, after standing in line for a weary while, learned that not a seat was to be had in a parlor-car to-day, to-morrow, or any day for two weeks. Berths at night were still more unobtainable.

She decided that she might as well go in a day-coach. Scores of people had had the same idea before her. The day-coaches were filled. She sidled through the crowded aisles and found no seat. She invaded the chair-cars in desperation.

In one of these she saw a porter bestowing hand-luggage. She appealed to him. “You must have one chair left.”

He was hardly polite in his answer. “No, ma’am, I ain’t. I ain’t a single chair.”

“But I’ve got to sit somewhere,” she said.

The porter did not comment on such a patent fallacy. He moved back to the front to repel boarders. Several men stared from the depths of their dentist’s chairs, but made no proffer of their seats. They believed that woman’s newfangled equality included the privilege of standing up.

One man, however, gave a start as of recognition, real or pretended. Marie Louise did not know him, and said so with her eyes. His smile of recognition changed to a smile of courtesy. He proffered her his seat with an old-fashioned gesture. She declined with a shake of the head and a coldly correct smile.

He insisted academically, as much as to say: “I can see that you are a gentlewoman. Please accept me as a gentleman and permit me to do my duty.” There was a brief, silent tug-of-war between his unselfishness and hers. He won. Before she realized it, she had dropped wearily into his place.

“But where will you sit?” she said.

“Oh, I’ll get along.”

He smiled and moved off, lugging his suit-case. He had the air of one who would get along. He had shown himself masterful in two combats, and compelled her to take the chair he had doubtless engaged with futile providence days before.

“Rahthah a decentish chap, with a will of his own,” she thought.

The train started, left the station twilight, plunged into the tunnel of gloom and made the dip under the Hudson River. People felt their ears buzz and smother. Wise ones swallowed hard. The train came back to the surface and the sunlight, and ran across New Jersey.

Marie Louise decided to take her luncheon early, to make sure of it. Nearly everybody else had decided to do the same thing. At this time all the people in America seemed to be thinkingen masse. When she reached the dining-car every seat was taken and there was a long bread-line in the narrow corridor.

The wilful man was at the head. He fished for her eye, caught it, and motioned to her to take his place. She shook her head. But it seemed to do no good to shake heads at him; he came down the corridor and lifted his hat. His voice and words were pleading, but his tone was imperative.

“Please take my place.”

She shook her head, but he still held his hand out, pointing. She was angry at being bossed even for her own benefit. Worse yet, by the time she got to the head of the line the second man had moved up to first. He stared at her as if he wondered what she was doing there. She fell back, doubly vexed, but That Man advanced and gave the interloper a look like a policeman’s shove. The fellow backed up on the next man’s toes. Then the cavalier smiled Miss Webling to her place and went back to the foot of the class without waiting for her furious thanks.

She wanted to stamp her foot. She had always hated to be cowed or compelled to take chairs or money. People who had tried to move her soul or lend her their experience or their advantages had always aroused resentment.

Before long she had a seat. The man opposite her was just thumbing his last morsel of pie. She supposed that when he left That Man would take the chair and order her luncheon for her. But it was not so to be. She passed him still well down the line. He had probably given his place to other women in succession. She did not like that. It seemed a trifle unfaithful or promiscuous or something. The rescuer owes the rescuee a certain fidelity. He did not look at her. He did not claim even a glance of gratitude.

It was so American a gallantry that she resented it. If he had seemed to ask for the alms of a smile, she would have insulted him. Yet it was not altogether satisfactory to be denied the privilege. She fumed. Everything was wrong. She sat in her cuckoo’s nest and glared at the reeling landscape.

Suddenly she began pawing through that private chaos, looking for Polly Widdicombe’s letter. She could not find it. She found the checks for her trunks, a handkerchief, a pair of gloves, and various other things, but not the letter. This gave her a new fright.

She remembered now that she had left it on the telephone-table. She could see it plainly as her remembered glance took its last survey of the room. The brain has a way of developing occasional photographs very slowly. Something strikes our eyes, and we do not really see it till long after. We hear words and say, “How’s that?” or, “I beg your pardon!” and hear them again before they can be repeated.

This belated feat of memory encouraged Miss Webling to86hope that she could remember a little farther back to the contents of the letter and the telephone number written there. But her memory would not respond. The effort to cudgel it seemed to confuse it. She kept on forgetting more and more completely.

All she could remember was what Polly Widdicombe had said about there being no chance to get into a hotel––“an hôtel,” Marie Louise still thought it.

It grew more and more evident that the train would be hours late. People began to worry audibly about the hotels that would probably refuse them admission. At length they began to stroll toward the dining-car for an early dinner.

Marie Louise, to make sure of the meal and for lack of other employment, went along. There was no queue in the corridor now. She did not have to take That Man’s place. She found one at a little empty table. But by and by he appeared, and, though there were other vacant seats, he sat down opposite her.

She could hardly order the conductor to eject him. In fact, seeing that she owed him for her seat–– It suddenly smote her that he must have paid for it. She owed him money! This was unendurable!

He made no attempt to speak to her, but at length she found courage to speak to him.

“I beg your pardon––”

He looked up and about for the salt or something to pass, but she went on:

“May I ask you how much you paid for the seat you gave me?”

He laughed outright at this unexpected demand:

“Why, I don’t remember, I’m sure.”

“Oh, but you must, and you must let me repay it. It just occurred to me that I had cheated you out of your chair, and your money, too.”

“That’s mighty kind of you,” he said.

He laughed again, but rather tenderly, and she was grateful to him for having the tact not to be flamboyant about it and not insisting on forgetting it.

“I’ll remember just how much it was in a minute, and if you will feel easier about it, I’ll ask you for it.”

“I could hardly rob a perfect stranger,” she began.

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