When Molly Stillwater heard that Margaret and her "wild man" had gone into the woods for their honeymoon she said: "Rita's got to tame him and train him for human society. So she's taken him where there are no neighbors to hear him scream as—as—" Molly cast about in her stock of slang for a phrase that was vigorous enough—"as she 'puts the boots' to him."
It was a shrewd guess; Margaret had decided that she could do more toward "civilizing" him in those few first weeks and in solitude than in years of teaching at odd times. In China, at the marriage feast, the bride and the groom each struggle to be first to sit on the robe of the other; the idea is that the winner will thenceforth rule. As the Chinese have been many ages at the business of living, the custom should not be dismissed too summarily as mere vain and heathenish superstition. At any rate, Margaret had reasoned it out that she must get the advantage in the impending initial grapple and tussle of their individualities, or choose between slavery and divorce. With him handicapped by awe of her, by almost groveling respect for her ideas and feelings in all man and woman matters, domestic and social, it seemed to her that she could be worsted only by a miracle of stupidity on her part.
Never had he been so nearly "like an ordinary man—like a gentleman"—as when they set out for the Adirondacks. She could scarcely believe her own eyes, and she warmed to him and felt that she had been greatly overestimating her task. He had on one of the suits he had bought ready made that morning. It was of rough blue cloth—dark blue—most becoming and well draped to show to advantage his lithe, powerful frame, its sinews so much more manly-looking than the muscularity of artificially got protuberances usually seen in the prosperous classes in our Eastern cities. Grant had selected the suit, had selected all the suits, and had superintended the fittings. Grant had also selected the negligee shirt and the fashionable collar, and the bright, yet not gaudy, tie, and Grant had selected the shoes that made his feet look like feet; and Grant had conducted him to a proper barber, who had reduced the mop of hair to proportion and order, and had restored its natural color and look of vitality by a thorough shampooing. In brief, Grant had taken a gloomy pleasure in putting his successful rival through the machine of civilization and bringing him out a city man, agreeable to sight, smell and touch.
"Now," said he, when the process was finished, "for Heaven's sake try to keep yourself up to the mark. Take a cold bath every morning and a warm bath before dinner."
"I have been taking a cold bath every day since I got my private bathroom," said Joshua, with honest pride.
"Then you're just as dirty as the average Englishman. He takes a cold bath and fancies he's clean, when in fact he's only clean-looking. Cold water merely stimulates. It takes warm water and soap to keep a man clean."
"I'll bear that in mind," said Craig, with a docility that flattered Grant as kindly attentions from a fierce-looking dog flatter the timid stranger.
"And you must take care of your clothes, too," proceeded the arbiter elegantiarum. "Fold your trousers when you take them off, and have them pressed. Get your hair cut once a week—have a regular day for it. Trim your nails twice a week. I've got you a safety razor. Shave at least once a day—first thing after you get out of bed is the best time. And change your linen every day. Don't think because a shirt isn't downright dirty that you can pass it off for fresh."
"Just write those things down," said Josh. "And any others of the same kind you happen to think of. I hate to think what a state I'd be in if I hadn't you. Don't imagine I'm not appreciating the self-sacrifice."
Grant looked sheepish. But he felt that his shame was unwarranted, that he really deserved Craig's tactless praise. So he observed virtuously: "That's where we men are beyond the women. Now, if it were one woman fixing up another, the chances are a thousand to one she'd play the cat, and get clothes and give suggestions that'd mean ruin."
It may not speak well for Arkwright's capacity for emotion, but it certainly speaks well for his amiability and philanthropy that doing these things for Craig had so far enlisted him that he was almost as anxious as the fluttered and flustered bridegroom himself for the success of the adventure. He wished he could go along, in disguise, as a sort of valet and prime minister—to be ever near Josh to coach and advise and guide him. For it seemed to him that success or failure in this honeymooning hung upon the success or failure of Craig in practising the precepts that for Grant and his kind take precedence of the moral code. He spent an earnest and exhausting hour in neatly and carefully writing out the instructions, as Craig had requested. He performed this service with a gravity that would move some people to the same sort of laughter and wonder that is excited by the human doings of a trained chimpanzee. But Craig—the wild man, the arch foe of effeteness, the apostle of the simple life of yarn sock and tallowed boot and homespun pants and hairy jaw—Craig accepted the service with heartfelt thanks in his shaking voice and moist eye.
Thus the opening of the honeymoon was most auspicious. Craig, too much in awe of Margaret to bother her, and busy about matters that concerned himself alone, was a model of caution, restraint and civility. Margaret, apparently calm, aloof and ladylike, was really watching his discreet conduct as a hawk watches a sheltered hen; she began to indulge in pleasant hopes that Joshua's wild days had come to an abrupt end. Why, he was even restrained in conversation; he did not interrupt her often, instantly apologized and forebore when he did; he poured out none of his wonted sophomoric diatribes, sometimes sensible, more often inane, as the prattle of a great man in his hour of relaxation is apt to be. She had to do most of the talking—and you may be sure that she directed her conversation to conveying under an appearance of lightness many valuable lessons in the true wisdom of life as it is revealed only to the fashionable idle. She was careful not to overdo, not to provoke, above all not to put him at his ease.
Her fiction of ill health, of threatened nervous prostration, also served to free her from an overdose of his society during the long and difficult days in that eventless solitude. He was all for arduous tramps through the woods, for excursions in canoe under the fierce sun. She insisted on his enjoying himself—"but I don't feel equal to any such exertion. I simply must rest and take care of myself." She was somewhat surprised at his simplicity in believing her health was anything but robust, when her appearance gave the lie direct to her hints and regrets. While he was off with one of the guides she stayed at camp, reading, working at herself with the aid of Selina, revolving and maturing her plans.
When she saw him she saw him at his best. He showed up especially well at swimming. She was a notable figure herself in bathing suit, and could swim in a nice, ladylike way; but he was a water creature—indeed, seemed more at home in the water than on land. She liked to watch his long, strong, narrow body cut the surface of the transparent lake with no loss of energy in splashing or display—as easy and swift as a fish. She began to fear she had made a mistake in selecting a place for her school for a husband, "He's in his element—this wilderness," thought she, "not mine. I'll take him back with everything still to be done."
And, worst of all, she found herself losing her sense of proportion, her respect for her fashionable idols. Those vast woods, that infinite summer sky—they were giving her a new and far from practical point of view—especially upon the petty trickeries and posturings of the ludicrously self-important human specks that crawl about upon the earth and hastily begin to act queer and absurd as soon as they come in sight of each other. She found herself rapidly developing that latent "sentimentality" which her grandmother had so often rebuked and warned her against—which Lucia had insisted was her real self. Her imagination beat the bars of the cage of convention in which she had imprisoned it, and cried out for free, large, natural emotions—those that make the blood leap and the flesh tingle, that put music in the voice and softness in the glance and the intense joy of life in the heart. And she began to revolve him before eyes that searched hopefully for possibilities of his giving her precisely what her nerves craved.
"It would be queer, wouldn't it," she mused—she was watching him swim—"if it should turn out that I had come up here to learn, instead of to teach?"
And he—In large presences he was always at his best—in the large situations of affairs, in these large, tranquillizing horizons of nature. He, too, began to forget that she was a refined, delicate, sensitive lady, with nerves that writhed under breaks in manners and could in no wise endure a slip in grammar, unless, of course, it was one of those indorsed by fashionable usage. His health came flooding and roaring back in its fullness; and day by day the difficulty of restraining himself from loud laughter and strong, plebeian action became more appalling to him. He would leave the camp, set off at a run as soon as he got safely out of sight; and, when he was sure of seclusion in distance, he would "cut loose"—yell and laugh and caper like a true madman; tear off his superfluous clothes, splash and thresh in some lonely lake like a baby whale that has not yet had the primary lessons in how to behave. When he returned to camp, subdued in manner, like a bad boy after recess, he was, in fact, not one bit subdued beneath the surface, but the more fractious for his outburst. Each day his animal spirits surged higher; each day her sway of awe and respect grew more precarious. She thought his increasing silence, his really ridiculous formality of politeness, his stammering and red-cheeked dread of intrusion meant a deepening of the sense of the social gulf that rolled between them. She recalled their conversation about his relatives. "Poor fellow!" thought she. "I suppose it's quite impossible for people of my sort to realize what a man of his birth and bringing up feels in circumstances like these." Little did she dream, in her exaltation of self-complacence and superiority, that the "poor fellow's" clumsy formalities were the thin cover for a tempest of wild-man's wild emotion.
Curiously, she "got on" his nerves before he on hers. It was through her habit of rising late and taking hours to dress. Part of his code of conduct—an interpolation of his own into the Arkwright manual for a honeymooning gentleman—was that he ought to wait until she was ready to breakfast, before breakfasting himself. Several mornings she heard tempestuous sounds round the camp for two hours before she emerged from her room. She knew these sounds came from him, though all was quiet as soon as she appeared; and she very soon thought out the reason for his uproar. Next, his anger could not subdue itself beyond surliness on her appearing, and the surliness lasted through the first part of breakfast. Finally, one morning she heard him calling her when she was about half-way through her leisurely toilette: "Margaret! MARGARET!"
"Yes—what is it?"
"Do come out. You're missing the best part of the day."
"All right—in a minute."
She continued with, if anything, a slackening of her exertions; she appeared about an hour after she had said "in a minute." He was ready to speak, and speak sharply. But one glance at her, at the exquisite toilette—of the woods, yet of the civilization that dwells in palaces and reposes languidly upon the exertions of menials—at her cooling, subduing eyes, so graciously haughty—and he shut his lips together and subsided.
The next morning it was a knock at her door just as she was waking—or had it waked her? "Yes—what is it?"
"Do come out! I'm half starved."
The voice was pleading, not at all commanding, not at all the aggressive, dictatorial voice of the Josh Craig of less than a month before. But it was distinctly reminiscent of that Craig; it was plainly the first faint murmur, not of rebellion, but of the spirit of rebellion. Margaret retorted with an icily polite, "Please don't wait for me."
"Yes, I'll wait. But be as quick as you can."
Margaret neither hastened nor dallied. She came forth at the end of an hour and a half. Josh, to her surprise, greeted her as if she had not kept him waiting an instant; not a glance of sullenness, no suppressed irritation in his voice. Next morning the knock was a summons.
"Margaret! I say, Margaret!" came in tones made bold and fierce by hunger. "I've been waiting nearly two hours."
"For what?" inquired she frigidly from the other side of the door.
"For breakfast."
"Oh! Go ahead with it. I'm not even up yet."
"You've been shut in there ten hours."
"What of it?" retorted she sharply. "Go away, and don't bother me."
He had put her into such an ill humor that when she came out, two hours later, her stormy brow, her gleaming hazel eyes showed she was "looking for trouble." He was still breakfastless—he well knew how to manipulate his weaknesses so that his purposes could cow them, could even use them. He answered her lowering glance with a flash of his blue-green eyes like lightning from the dark head of a thunder-cloud. "Do you know it is nine o'clock?" demanded he.
"So early? I try to get up late so that the days won't seem so long."
He abandoned the field to her, and she thought him permanently beaten. She had yet to learn the depths of his sagacity that never gave battle until the time was auspicious.
Two mornings later he returned to the attack.
"I see your light burning every night until midnight," said he—at breakfast with her, after the usual wait.
"I read myself to sleep," explained she.
"Do you think that's good for you?"
"I don't notice any ill effects."
"You say your health doesn't improve as rapidly as you hoped."
Check! She reddened with guilt and exasperation. "What a sly trick!" thought she. She answered him with a cold: "I always have read myself to sleep, and I fancy I always shall."
"If you went to sleep earlier," observed he, his air unmistakably that of the victor conscious of victory, "you'd not keep me raging round two or three hours for breakfast."
"How often I've asked you not to wait for me! I prefer to breakfast alone, anyhow. It's the dreadful habit of breakfasting together that causes people to get on together so badly."
"I'd not feel right," said he, moderately, but firmly, "if I didn't see you at breakfast."
She sat silent—thinking. He felt what she was thinking—how common this was, how "middle class," how "bourgeois," she was calling it. "Bourgeois" was her favorite word for all that she objected to in him, for all she was trying to train out of him by what she regarded as most artistically indirect lessons. He felt that their talk about his family, what he had said, had shown he felt, was recurring to her. He grew red, burned with shame from head to foot.
"What a fool, what a pup I was!" he said to himself. "If she had been a real lady—no, by gad—a real WOMAN—she'd have shown that she despised me."
Again and again that incident had come back to him. It had been, perhaps, the most powerful factor in his patience with her airs and condescensions. He felt that it, the lowest dip of his degradation in snobism, had given her the right to keep him in his place. It seemed to him one of those frightful crimes against self-respect which can never be atoned, and, bad as he thought it from the standpoint of good sense as to the way to get on with her, he suffered far more because it was such a stinging, scoffing denial of all his pretenses of personal pride. "Her sensibilities have been too blunted by association with those Washington vulgarians," he reasoned, "for her to realize the enormity of my offense, but she realizes enough to look down at me more contemptuously every time she recalls it." However, the greater the blunder the greater the necessity of repairing. He resolutely thrust his self-abasing thoughts to the background of his mind, and began afresh.
"I'm sure," said he, "you'd not mind, once you got used to it."
She was startled out of her abstraction. "Used to—what?" she inquired.
"To getting up early."
"Oh!" She gave a relieved laugh. "Still harping on that. How persistent you are!"
"You could accomplish twice as much if you got up early and made a right start."
She frowned slightly. "Couldn't think of it," said she, in the tone of one whose forbearance is about at an end. "I hate the early morning."
"We usually hate what's best for us. But, if we're sensible, we do it until it becomes a habit that we don't mind—or positively like."
This philosophy of the indisputable and the sensible brimmed the measure. "What would you think of me," said she, in her pleasantest, most deliberately irritating way in the world, "if I were to insist that you get up late and breakfast late? You should learn to let live as well as to live. You are too fond of trying to compel everybody to do as you wish."
"I make 'em see that what I wish is what they ought. That's not compelling."
"It's even more unpopular."
"I'm not looking for popularity, but for success."
"Well, please don't annoy me in the mornings hereafter."
"You don't seem to realize you've renounced your foolish idlers and all their ways, and have joined the working classes." His good humor had come back with breakfast; he had finished two large trout, much bread and marmalade and coffee—and it had given her a pleasure that somehow seemed vulgar and forbidden to see him eat so vastly, with such obvious delight. As he made his jest about her entry into the working classes—she who suggested a queen bee, to employ the labors of a whole army of willing toilers, while she herself toiled not—he was tilted back at his ease, smoking a cigarette and watching the sunbeams sparkle in the waves of her black hair like jewels showered there. "You're surely quite well again," he went on, the trend of his thought so hidden that he did not see it himself.
"I don't feel especially well," said she, instantly on guard.
He laughed. "You'd not dare say that to yourself in the mirror. You have wonderful color. Your eyes—there never was anything so clear. You were always straight—that was one of the things I admired about you. But now, you seem to be straight without the slightest effort—the natural straightness of a sapling."
This was most agreeable, for she loved compliments, liked to discover that the charms which she herself saw in herself were really there. But encouraging such talk was not compatible with the course she had laid out for herself with him. She continued silent and cold.
"If you'd only go to sleep early, and get up early, and drop all that the railway train carried us away from, you'd be as happy as the birds and the deer and the fish."
"I shall not change my habits," said she tartly. "I hope you'll drop the subject."
He leaned across the table toward her, the same charm now in his face and in his voice that had drawn her when she first heard him in public speech. "Let's suppose I'm a woodchopper, and you are my wife. We've never been anywhere but just here. We're going to live here all our lives—just you and I—and no one else—and we don't want any one else. And we love each other—"
It was very alluring, but there was duty frowning upon her yielding senses. "Please don't let that smoke drift into my face," said she crossly. "It's choking me."
He flung away the cigarette. "Beg pardon," he muttered, between anger and humility. "Thought you didn't mind smoking."
She was ashamed of herself, and grew still angrier. "If you'd only think about some one beside yourself once in a while," said she. "You quite wear people out, with your everlasting thinking and talking about yourself."
"You'd better stop that midnight reading," flared he. "Your temper is going to the devil."
She rose with great dignity; with an expression that seemed to send him tumbling and her soaring she went into the house.
In some moods he would have lain where he fell for quite a while. But his mood of delight in her charms as a woman had completely eclipsed his deference for her charms as a lady. He hesitated only a second, then followed her, overtook her at the entrance to her room. She, hearing him coming, did not face about and put him back in his place with one haughty look. Instead, she in impulsive, most ill-timed panic, quickened her step. When the woman flees, the man, if there be any manhood in him, pursues. He caught her, held her fast.
"Let me go!" she cried, not with the compelling force of offended dignity, but with the hysterical ineffectiveness of terror. "You are rough. You hurt."
He laughed, turned her about in his arms until she was facing him. "The odor of those pines, out there," he said, "makes me drunk, and the odor of your hair makes me insane." And he was kissing her—those fierce, strong caresses that at once repelled and compelled her.
"I hate you!" she panted. "I hate you!"
"Oh, no, you don't," retorted he. "That isn't what's in your eyes." And he held her so tightly that she was almost crying out with pain.
"Please—please!" she gasped. And she wrenched to free herself. One of his hands slipped, his nail tore a long gash in her neck; the blood spurted out, she gave a loud cry, an exaggerated cry—for the pain, somehow, had a certain pleasure in it. He released her, stared vacantly at the wound he had made. She rushed into her room, slammed the door and locked it.
"Margaret!" he implored.
She did not answer; he knew she would not. He sat miserably at her door for an hour, then wandered out into the woods, and stayed there until dinner-time.
When he came in she was sitting by the lake, reading a French novel. To him, who knew only his own language, there was something peculiarly refined and elegant about her ability at French; he thought, as did she, that she spoke French like a native, though, in fact, her accent was almost British, and her understanding of it was just about what can be expected in a person who has never made a thorough study of any language. As he advanced toward her she seemed unconscious of his presence. But she was seeing him distinctly, and so ludicrous a figure of shy and sheepish contrition was he making that she with difficulty restrained her laughter. He glanced guiltily at the long, red scratch on the pallid whiteness of her throat.
"I'm ashamed of myself," said he humbly. "I'm not fit to touch a person like you. I—I—"
She was not so mean as she had thought she would be. "It was nothing," said she pleasantly, if distantly. "Is dinner ready?"
Once more she had him where she wished—abject, apologetic, conscious of the high honor of merely being permitted to associate with her. She could relax and unbend again; she was safe from his cyclones.
Her opportunity definitely to begin her campaign to lift him up out of politics finally came. She had been doing something in that direction almost every day. She must be careful not to alarm his vanity of being absolute master of his own destiny. The idea of leaving politics and practising law in New York, must seem to originate and to grow in his own brain; she would seem to be merely assenting. Also, it was a delicate matter because the basic reason for the change was money; and it was her cue as a lady, refined and sensitive and wholly free from sordidness, so to act that he would think her loftily indifferent to money. She had learned from dealing with her grandmother that the way to get the most money was by seeming ignorant of money values, a cover behind which she could shame Madam Bowker into giving a great deal more than she would have given on direct and specific demand. For instance, she could get more from the old lady than could her mother, who explained just what she wanted the money for and acted as if the giving were a great favor. No, she must never get with him on a footing where he could discuss money matters frankly with her; she must simply make him realize how attractive luxury was, how necessary it was to her, how confidently she looked to him to provide it, how blindly, in her ignorance of money and all sordid matters, she trusted to him to maintain her as a wife such as she must be maintained. She knew she did not understand him thoroughly—"we've been so differently brought up." But she felt that the kind of life that pleased her and dazzled him must be the kind he really wished to lead—and would see he wished to lead, once he extricated himself, with her adroit assistance, from the kind of life to which his vociferous pretenses had committed him.
Whether her subtleties in furtherance of creating a sane state of mind in him had penetrated to him, she could not tell. In the earliest step of their acquaintance she had studied him as a matrimonial possibility, after the habit of young women with each unattached man they add to their list of acquaintances. And she had then discovered that whenever he was seriously revolving any matter he never spoke of it; he would be voluble about everything and anything else under the sun, would seem to be unbosoming himself of his bottommost secret of thought and action, but would not let escape so much as the smallest hint of what was really engaging his whole mind. It was this discovery that had set her to disregarding his seeming of colossal, of fatuous egotism, and had started her toward an estimate of him wholly different from the current estimate. Now, was he thinking of their future, or was it some other matter that occupied his real mind while he talked on and on, usually of himself? She could not tell; she hoped it was, but she dared not try to find out.
They were at their mail, which one of the guides had just brought. He interrupted his reading to burst out: "How they do tempt a man! Now, there's"—and he struck the open letter in his hand with a flourishing, egotistic gesture—"an offer from the General Steel Company. They want me as their chief counsel at fifty thousand a year and the privilege of doing other work that doesn't conflict."
Fifty thousand a year! Margaret discreetly veiled her glistening eyes.
"It's the fourth offer of the same sort," he went on, "since we've been up here—since it was given out that I'd be Attorney-General as soon as old Stillwater retires. The people pay me seventy-five hundred a year. They take all my time. They make it impossible for me to do anything outside. They watch and suspect and grumble. And I could be making my two hundred thousand a year or more."
He was rattling on complacently, patting himself on the back, and, in his effort to pose as a marvel of patriotic self-sacrifice, carefully avoiding any suggestion that mere money seemed to him a very poor thing beside the honor of high office, the direction of great affairs, the flattering columns of newspaper praise and censure, the general agitation of eighty millions over him. "Sometimes I'm almost tempted to drop politics," he went on, "and go in for the spoils. What do you think?"
She was taken completely off guard. She hadn't the faintest notion that this was his way of getting at her real mind. But she was too feminine to walk straight into the trap. "I don't know," said she, with well-simulated indifference, as if her mind were more than half on her own letter. "I haven't given the matter any thought." Carelessly: "Where would we live if you accepted this offer?"
"New York, of course. You prefer Washington, don't you?"
"No, I believe I'd like New York better. I've a great many friends there. While there isn't such a variety of people, the really nice New Yorkers are the most attractive people in America. And one can live so well in New York."
"I'd sink into a forgotten obscurity," pursued the crafty Joshua. "I'd be nothing but a corporation lawyer, a well-paid fetch-and-carry for the rich thieves that huddle together there."
"Oh, you'd be famous wherever you are, I'm sure," replied she with judicious enthusiasm. "Besides, you'd have fame with the real people."
His head reared significantly. But, to draw her on, he said: "That's true. That's true," as if reflecting favorably.
"Yes, I think I'd like New York," continued she, all unsuspicious. "I don't care much for politics. I hate to think of a man of your abilities at the mercy of the mob. In New York you could make a really great career."
"Get rich—be right in the social swim—and you too," suggested he.
"It certainly is very satisfactory to feel one is of the best people. And I'm sure you'd not care to have me mix up with all sorts, as politicians' wives have to do."
He laughed at her—the loud, coarse Josh Craig outburst. "You're stark mad on the subject of class distinctions, aren't you?" said he. "You'll learn some day to look on that sort of thing as you would on an attempt to shovel highways and set up sign-posts in the open sea. Your kind of people are like the children that build forts out of sand at the seashore. Along comes a wave and washes it all away.... You'd be willing for me to abandon my career and become a rich nonentity in New York?"
His tone was distinctly offensive. "I don't look at it in that way," said she coldly. "Really, I care nothing about it." And she resumed the reading of her letter.
"Do you expect me to believe," demanded he, excited and angry—"do you expect me to believe you've not given the subject of our future a thought?"
She continued reading. Such a question in such a tone called for the rebuke of an ignoring silence. Also, deep down in her nature, down where the rock foundations of courage should have been but were not, there had begun an ominous trembling.
"You know what my salary is?"
"You just mentioned it."
"You know it's to be only five hundred dollars a year more after January?"
"I knew the Cabinet people got eight thousand." She was gazing dreamily out toward the purple horizon, seemed as far as its mountains from worldliness.
"Hadn't you thought out how we were to live on that sum? You are aware I've practically nothing but my salary."
"I suppose I ought to think of those things—ought to have thought of them," replied she with a vague, faint smile. "But really—well, we've been brought up rather carelessly—I suppose some people would call it badly—and—"
"You take me for a fool, don't you?" he interrupted roughly.
She elevated her eyebrows.
"I wish I had a quarter for every row between your people and your grandmother on the subject of money. I wish I had a dollar for every row you and she have had about it."
He again vented his boisterous laugh; her nerves had not been so rasped since her wedding day. "Come, Margaret," he went on, "I know you've been brought up differently from me. I know I seem vulgar to you in many ways. But because I show you I appreciate those differences, don't imagine I'm an utter ass. And I certainly should be if I didn't know that your people are human beings."
She looked guilty as well as angry now. She felt she had gone just the one short step too far in her aristocratic assumptions.
He went on in the tone of one who confidently expects that there will be no more nonsense: "When you married me you had some sort of idea how we'd live."
"I assumed you had thought out those things or you'd not have married me," cried she hotly. In spite of her warnings to herself she couldn't keep cool. His manner, his words were so inflammatory that she could not hold herself from jumping into the mud to do battle with him. She abandoned her one advantage—high ground; she descended to his level. "You knew the sort of woman I was," she pursued. "You undertook the responsibility. I assume you are man enough to fulfill it."
He felt quite at home with her now. "And you?" rasped he. "What responsibility did YOU undertake?"
She caught her breath, flamed scarlet.
"Now let us hear what wife means in the dictionary of a lady. Come, let's hear it!"
She was silent.
"I'm not criticising," he went on; "I'm simply inquiring. What do you think it means to be a wife?"
Still she could think of no answer.
"It must mean something," urged he. "Tell me. I've got to learn some time, haven't I?"
"I think," said she, with a tranquil haughtiness which she hoped would carry off the weakness of the only reply she could get together on such short notice, "among our sort of people the wife is expected to attend to the social part of the life."
He waited for more—waited with an expression that suggested thirst. But no more came. "Is that all?" he inquired, and waited again—in vain. "Yes?... Well, tell me, where in thunder does the husband come in? He puts up the cash for the wife to spend in dressing and amusing herself—is that all?"
"It is generally assumed," said she, since she had to say something or let the case go against her by default, "that the social side of life can be very useful in furthering a man."
He vented a scornful sound that was like a hoot. "In furthering a lick-spittle—yes. But not a MAN!"
"Our ideas on some subjects are hopelessly apart."
She suddenly realized that this whole conversation had been deliberately planned by him; that he had, indeed, been debating within himself their future life, and that he had decided that the time was ripe for a frank talk with her. It angered her that she had not realized this sooner, that she had been drawn from her position, had been forced to discuss with him on his own terms and at his own time and in his own manner. She felt all the fiery indignation of the schemer who has been outwitted.
"Your tone," said she, all ice, "makes it impossible for a well-bred person to discuss with you. Let us talk of something else, or of nothing at all."
"No. Let's thresh it out now that we've begun. And do try to keep your temper. There's no reason for anger. We've got to go back to civilization. We've got to live after we get there. We want to live comfortably, as satisfactorily for both as our income permits. Now, what shall we do? How shall we invest our eight thousand a year—and whatever your grandmother allows you? I don't need much. I'll turn the salary over to you. You're entirely welcome to all there is above my board and clothes."
This sounded generous and, so, irritated Margaret the more. "You know very well we can't live like decent people on twelve or fifteen thousand a year in Washington."
"You knew that before you married me. What did you have in mind?"
Silence.
"Why do you find it difficult to be frank with me?"
His courteous, appealing tone and manner made it impossible to indulge in the lie direct or the lie evasive. She continued silent, raging inwardly against him for being so ungenerous, so ungentlemanly as to put her in such a pitiful posture, one vastly different from that she had prearranged for herself when "the proper time" came.
"You had something in mind," he persisted. "What is it?"
"Grandmother wishes us to live with her," she said with intent to flank.
"Would you like that?" he inquired; and her very heart seemed to stand still in horror at his tone. It was a tone that suggested that the idea was attractive!
She debated. He must be "bluffing"—he surely must. She rallied her courage and pushed on: "It's probably the best we can do in the circumstances. We'd have almost nothing left after we'd paid our rent if we set up for ourselves. Even if I were content to pinch and look a frump and never go out, you'd not tolerate it."
"Nothing could be more galling," said he, after reflecting, "than what people would say if we lived off your grandmother. No, going there is unthinkable. I like her, and we'd get on well together—"
Margaret laughed. "Like two cats drowning in a bag."
"Not at all," protested he sincerely. "Your grandmother and I understand each other—better than you and I—at least, better than you understand me. However, I'll not permit our being dependents of hers."
Margaret had a queer look. Was not her taking enough money from the old lady to pay all her personal expenses—was not that dependence?
"We'll return to that later," continued he, and she had an uncomfortable sense that he was answering her thought. "To go back to your idea in marrying me. You expected me to leave politics."
"Why do you think that?" exclaimed she.
"You told me."
"_I_!"
"You, yourself. Have you not said you could not live on what I get as a public man, and that if I were a gentleman I'd not expect you to?"
Margaret stared foolishly at this unescapable inference from her own statements and admissions during his cross-examination. She began to feel helpless in his hands—and began to respect him whom she could not fool.
"I know," he went on, "you're too intelligent not to have appreciated that either we must live on my salary or I must leave public life."
He laughed—a quiet, amused laugh, different from any she had ever heard from him. Evidently, Joshua Craig in intimacy was still another person from the several Joshua Craigs she already knew. "And," said he, in explanation of his laughter, "I thought you married me because I had political prospects. I fancied you had real ambition.... I might have known! According to the people of your set, to be in that set is to have achieved the summit of earthly ambition—to dress, to roll about in carriages, to go from one fussy house to another, from one showy entertainment to another, to eat stupid dinners, and caper or match picture cards afterward, to grin and chatter, to do nothing useful or even interesting—" He laughed again, one of his old-time, boisterous outbursts. But it seemed to her to fit in, to be the laughter of mountain and forest and infinity of space at her and her silly friends. "And you picture ME taking permanent part in that show, or toiling to find you the money to do it with. ME!... Merely because I've been, for a moment, somewhat bedazzled by its cheap glitter."
Margaret felt that he had torn off the mask and had revealed his true self. But greater than her interest in this new personality was her anger at having been deceived—self-deceived. "You asked me how I'd like to live," cried she, color high and eyes filled with tears of rage. "I answered your question, and you grow insulting."
"I'm doing the best I know how," said he.
After a moment she got herself under control. "Then," asked she, "what have you to propose?"
"I can't tell you just now," replied he, and his manner was most disquieting. "To-morrow—or next day."
"Don't you think I'm right about it being humiliating for us to go back to Washington and live poorly?"
"Undoubtedly. I've felt that from the beginning."
"Then you agree with me?"
"Not altogether," said he. And there was a quiet sternness in his smile, in his gentle tone, that increased her alarms. "I've been hoping, rather," continued he, "that you'd take an interest in my career."
"I do," cried she.
"Not in MY career," replied he, those powerful, hewn features of his sad and bitter. "In your own—in a career in which I'd become as contemptible as the rest of the men you know—a poor thing like Grant Arkwright. Worse, for I'd do very badly what he has learned to do well."
"To be a well-bred, well-mannered gentleman is no small achievement," said she with a sweetness that was designed to turn to gall after it reached him.
He surveyed her tranquilly. She remembered that look; it was the same he had had the morning he met her at the Waldorf elevator and took her away and married her. She knew that the crisis had come and that he was ready. And she? Never had she felt less capable, less resolute.
"I've been doing a good deal of thinking—thinking about us—these last few days—since I inflicted that scratch on you," said he. "Among other things, I've concluded you know as little about what constitutes a real gentleman as I do; also, that you have no idea what it is in you that makes you a lady—so far as you are one."
She glanced at him in fright, and that expression of hers betrayed the fundamental weakness in her—the weakness that underlies all character based upon the achievements of others, not upon one's own. Margaret was three generations away from self-reliance. Craig's speech sounded like a deliberate insult, deliberate attempt to precipitate a quarrel, an estrangement. There had been nothing in her training to prepare her for such a rude, courage-testing event as that.
"Do you remember—it was the day we married—the talk we had about my relatives?"
She colored, was painfully embarrassed, strove in vain to conceal it. "About your relatives?" she said inquiringly.
He made an impatient gesture. "I know you remember. Well, if I had been a gentleman, or had known what gentleman meant, I'd never have said—or, rather, looked what I did then. If you had known what a gentleman is, if you had been a lady, you'd have been unable to go on with a man who had shown himself such a blackguard."
"You are unjust to us both," she eagerly interrupted. "Joshua—you—"
"Don't try to excuse me—or yourself," said he peremptorily. "Now, you thought what I showed that day—my being ashamed of honester, straighter—more American—people than you or I will ever be—you thought that was the real me. Thank God, it wasn't. But"—he pointed a fascinating forefinger at her—"it was the me I'd be if you had your way."
She could not meet his eyes.
"I see you understand," said he earnestly. "That's a good sign."
"Yes, I do understand," said she. Her voice was low and her head was still hanging. "I'm glad you've said this. I—I respect you for it."
"Don't fret about me," said he curtly. "Fret about your own melancholy case. What do your impulses of decent feeling amount to, anyway? An inch below the surface you're all for the other sort of thing—the cheap and nasty. If you could choose this minute you'd take the poorest of those drawing-room marionettes before the finest real man, if he didn't know how to wear his clothes or had trouble with his grammar."
She felt that there was more than a grain of truth in this; at any rate, denial would be useless, as his tone was the tone of settled conviction.
"We've made a false start," proceeded he. He rose, lighted a cigarette. "We're going to start all over again. I'll tell you what I'm going to do about it in a day or two."
And he strolled away to the landing. She saw him presently enter a canoe; under his powerful, easy stroke it shot away, to disappear behind the headland. She felt horribly lonely and oppressed—as if she would never see him again. "He's quite capable of leaving me here to find my way back to Washington alone—quite capable!" And her lip curled.
But the scorn was all upon the surface. Beneath there was fear and respect—the fear and respect which those demoralized by unearned luxury and by the purposeless life always feel when faced by strength and self-reliance in the crises where externals avail no more than its paint and its bunting a warship in battle. She knew she had been treating him as no self-respecting man who knew the world would permit any woman to treat him. She knew her self-respect should have kept her from treating him thus, even if he, in his ignorance of her world and awe of it, would permit. But more than from shame at vain self-abasement her chagrin came from the sense of having played her game so confidently, so carelessly, so stupidly that he had seen it. She winced as she recalled how shrewdly and swiftly he had got to the very bottom of her, especially of her selfishness in planning to use him with no thought for his good. Yet so many women thus used their husbands; why not she? "I suppose I began too soon.... No, not too soon, but too frigidly." The word seemed to her to illuminate the whole situation. "That's it!" she cried. "How stupid of me!"
Physical condition is no doubt the dominant factor in human thought and action. State of soul is, as Doctor Schulze has observed, simply the egotistic human vanity for state of body. If the health of the human race were better, if sickness, the latent and the revealed together, were not all but universal, human relations would be wonderfully softened, sweetened and simplified. Indigestion, with its various ramifications, is alone responsible for most of the crimes, catastrophes and cruelties, public and private discord; for it tinges human thought and vision with pessimistic black or bloody red or envious green or degenerate yellow instead of the normal, serene and invigorating white. All the world's great public disturbers have been diseased. As for private life, its bad of all degrees could, as to its deep-lying, originating causes, be better diagnosed by physician than by psychologist.
Margaret, being in perfect physical condition, was deeply depressed for only a short time after the immediate cause of her mood ceased to be active. An hour after Joshua had revealed himself in thunder and lightning, and had gone, she was almost serene again, her hopefulness of healthy youth and her sense of humor in the ascendent. Their stay in the woods was drawing to an end. Soon they would be off for Lenox, for her Uncle Dan's, where there would be many people about and small, perhaps no, opportunity for direct and quick action and result. She reviewed her conduct and felt that she had no reason to reproach herself for not having made an earlier beginning in what she now saw should have been her tactics with her "wild man." How could she, inexpert, foresee what was mockingly obvious to hindsight? Only by experiment and failure is the art of success learned. Her original plan had been the best possible, taking into account her lack of knowledge of male nature and the very misleading indications of his real character she had got from him. In her position would not almost any one have decided that the right way to move him was by holding him at respectful distance and by indirect talk, with the inevitable drift of events doing the principal work—gradually awakening him to the responsibilities and privileges which his entry into a higher social station implied?
But no time must now be lost; the new way, which experience had revealed, must be taken forthwith and traveled by forced marches. Before they left the woods she must have led him through all the gradations of domestic climate between their present frosty if kindly winter, and summer, or, at least, a very balmy spring. From what she knew of his temperament she guessed that once she began to thaw he would forthwith whirl her into July. She must be prepared to accept that, however—repellent though the thought was—she assured herself it was most repellent. She prided herself on her skill at catching and checking herself in self-deception; but it somehow did not occur to her to contrast her rather listless previous planning with the energy and interest she at once put into this project for supreme martyrdom, as she regarded it.
When he came back that evening she was ready. But not he; he stalked in, sulking and blustering, tired, ignoring her, doing all the talking himself, and departing for bed as soon as dinner was over. She felt as if he had repulsed her, though, in fact, her overtures were wholly internal and could not, by any chance, have impressed him. Bitter against him and dreading the open humiliation she would have to endure before she could make one so self-absorbed see what she was about, she put out her light early, with intent to rise when he did and be at breakfast before he could finish. She lay awake until nearly dawn, then fell into a deep sleep. When she woke it was noon; she felt so greatly refreshed that her high good humor would not suffer her to be deeply resentful against him for this second failure. "No matter," reflected she. "He might have suspected me if I'd done anything so revolutionary as appear at breakfast. I'll make my beginning at lunch."
She was now striving, with some success, to think of him as a tyrant whom she, luckless martyr, must cajole. "I'm going the way of all the married women," thought she. "They soon find there's no honorable way to get their rights from their masters, find they simply have to degrade themselves." Yes, he was forcing her to degrade herself, to simulate affection when the reverse was in her heart. Well, she would make him pay dearly for it—some day. Meanwhile she must gain her point. "If I don't, I'd better not have married. To be Mrs. is something, but not much if I'm the creature of his whims."
She put off lunch nearly an hour; but he did not come, did not reappear until dinner was waiting. "I've been over to town," he explained, "doing a lot of telegraphing that was necessary." He was in vast spirits, delighted with himself, volubly boastful, so full of animal health and life and of joy in the prospect of food and sleep that mental worries were as foreign to him as to the wild geese flying overhead.
He snuffed the air in which the odor of cooking was mingled deliciously with the odor of the pines. "If they don't hurry up dinner," said he, "I'll rush in and eat off the stove. We used to at home sometimes. It's great fun."
She smiled tolerantly. "I've missed you," said she, and she was telling herself that this statement of a literal truth was the quintessence of hypocritical cajolery. "You might have taken me along."
He gave her a puzzled look. "Oh," said he finally, "you've been thinking over what I said."
This was disconcerting; but she contrived to smile with winning frankness. "Yes," replied she. "I've been very wrong, I see." She felt proud of the adroitness of this—an exact truth, yet wholly misleading.
His expression told her that he was congratulating himself on his wisdom and success in having given her a sharp talking to; that he was thinking it had brought her to her senses, had restored her respect for him, had opened the way for her love for him to begin to show itself—that love which he so firmly believed in, egotist that he was! Could anything be more infuriating? Yet—after all, what difference did it make, so long as he yielded? And once she had him enthralled, then—ah, yes—THEN! Meanwhile she must remember that the first principle of successful deception is self-deception, and must try to convince herself that she was what she was pretending to be.
Dinner was served, and he fell to like a harvest hand. As he had the habit, when he was very hungry, of stuffing his mouth far too full for speech, she was free to carry out her little program of encouraging talk and action. As she advanced from hesitating compliment to flattery, to admiring glances, to lingering look, she marveled at her facility. "I suppose ages and ages of dreadful necessity have made it second nature to every woman, even the best of us," reflected she. If he weren't a handsome, superior man she might be finding it more difficult; also, no doubt the surroundings, so romantic, so fitting as background for his ruggedness, were helping her to dexterity and even enthusiasm.
It was amusing, how she deceived herself—for the harmless self-deceptions of us chronic mummers are always amusing. The fact was, this melting and inviting mood had far more of nature and sincerity in it than there had been in her icy aloofness. Icy aloofness, except in the heroines of aristocratic novels, is a state of mind compatible only with extreme stupidity or with some one of those organic diseases that sour the disposition. Never had she been in such health as in that camp, never so buoyant, never had merely being alive been so deliciously intoxicating; the scratch he had made on her throat had healed in twenty-four hours, had all but disappeared in seventy-two. Never had she known to such a degree what a delight a body can be, the sense of its eagerness to bring to the mind all the glorious pleasures of the senses. Whatever disinclination she had toward him was altogether a prompting of class education; now that she had let down the bars and released feeling she was in heart glad he was there with her, glad he was "such a MAN of a man."
The guides made a huge fire down by the shore, and left them alone. They sat by it until nearly ten o'clock, he talking incessantly; her overtures had roused in him the desire to please, and, instead of the usual monologue of egotism and rant, he poured out poetry, eloquence, sense and humorous shrewdness. Had he been far less the unusual, the great man, she would still have listened with a sense of delight, for in her mood that night his penetrating voice, which, in other moods, she found as insupportable as a needle-pointed goad, harmonized with the great, starry sky and the mysterious, eerie shadows of forest and mountain and lake close round their huge, bright fire. As they rose to go in, up came the moon. A broad, benevolent, encouraging face, the face of a matchmaker. Craig put his arm round Margaret. She trembled and thrilled.
"Do you know what that moon's saying?" asked he. In his voice was that exquisite tone that enabled him to make even commonplaces lift great audiences to their feet to cheer him wildly.
She lifted soft, shining eyes to his. "What?" she inquired under her breath. She had forgotten her schemes, her resentments, her make-believe of every kind. "What—Joshua?" she repeated.
"It's saying: 'Hurry up, you silly children, down there! Don't you know that life is a minute and youth a second?'" And now both his arms were round her and one of her hands lay upon his shoulder.
"Life a minute—youth a second," she murmured.
"Do you think I'd scratch you horribly if I kissed you—Rita?"
She lowered her eyes but not her face. "You might try—Josh."
Next morning she was up and in her dressing-room and had almost finished her toilette before he awakened. For the first time in years—perhaps the first time since the end of her happy girlhood and the beginning of her first season in Washington society—she felt like singing. Was there ever such a dawn? Did ever song of birds sound so like the voice of eternal youth? Whence had come this air like the fumes from the winepresses of the gods? And the light! What colors, what tints, upon mountain and valley and halcyon lake! And the man asleep in the next room—yes, there WAS a Joshua Craig whom she found extremely trying at times; but that Joshua Craig had somehow resigned the tenancy of the strong, straight form there, had resigned it to a man who was the living expression of all that bewitched her in these wilds.
She laughed softly at her own ecstasy of exaggeration. "The other Josh will come back," she reminded herself, "and I must not forget to be practical. THIS is episodic." These happy, superhuman episodes would come, would pass, would recur at intervals; but the routine of her life must be lived. And if these episodes were to recur the practical must not be neglected. "It's by neglecting the practical that so many wives come to grief," reflected she. And the first mandate of the practical was that he must be rescued from that vulgar political game, which meant poverty and low associations and tormenting uncertainties. He must be got where his talents would have their due, their reward. But subtly guiding him into the way that would be best for him was a far different matter from what she had been planning up to last night's moonrise—was as abysmally separated from its selfish hypocrisy as love from hate. She would persist in her purpose, but how changed the motive!
She heard him stirring in her—no, THEIR room. Her face lighted up, her eyes sparkled. She ran to the mirror for a final primp before he should see her. She was more than pleased with the image she saw reflected there. "I never looked better in my life—never so well. I'm glad I kept back this particular dress. He's sure to like it, and it certainly is becoming to me—the best-fitting skirt I ever had—what good lines it has about the hips." She startled at a knock upon the door. She rushed away from the mirror. He had small physical vanity himself—she had never known any one with so little. He had shown that he thought she had no vanity of that kind, either, and he would doubtless misunderstand her solicitude about her personal appearance. Anyhow, of all mornings this would be the worst for him to catch her at the glass.
"Yes?" she called.
"Margaret," came in his voice. And, oh, the difference in it!—the note of tenderness—no, it was not imagination, it was really there! Her eyes filled and her bosom heaved.
"Are you joining me at breakfast?"
"Come in," cried she.
When the door did not open she went and opened it. There stood HE! If he had greeted her with a triumphant, proprietorial expression she would have been—well, it would have given her a lowered opinion of his sensibility. But his look was just right—dazzled, shy, happy. Nor did he make one of his impetuous rushes. He almost timidly took her hand, kissed it; and it was she who sought his shoulder—gladly, eagerly, with a sudden, real shyness. "Margaret," he said. "Mine—aren't you?"
Here was the Joshua she was to know thenceforth, she felt. This Joshua would enable her to understand, or, rather, to disregard, so far as she personally was concerned, the Josh, tempestuous, abrupt, often absurd, whom the world knew. But—As soon as they went where the guides were, the familiar Josh returned—boyish, boisterous, rather foolish in trying to be frivolous and light. Still—what did it matter? As soon as they should be alone again—
When they set out after breakfast her Joshua still did not return, as she had confidently expected. The obstreperous one remained, the one that was the shrewdly-developed cover for his everlasting scheming mind. "What an unending ass I've been making of myself," he burst out, "with my silly notions." He drew a paper from his pocket and handed it to her. "And this infernal thing of Grant's has been encouraging me in idiocy."
She read the Arkwright gentleman's gazette and complete guide to dress and conduct in the society of a refined gentlewoman. Her impulse was to laugh, an impulse hard indeed to restrain when she came to the last line of the document and read in Grant's neat, careful-man's handwriting with heavy underscorings: "Above all, never forget that you are a mighty stiff dose for anybody, and could easily become an overdose for a refined, sensitive lady." But prudent foresight made her keep her countenance. "This is all very sensible," said she.
"Sensible enough," assented he. "I've learned a lot from it.... Did you read that last sentence?"
She turned her face away. "Yes," she said.
"That, taken with everything else, all but got me down," said he somberly. "God, what I've been through! It came near preventing us from discovering that you're not a grand lady but a human being." His mood veered, and it was he that was gay and she glum; for he suddenly seized her and subjected her to one of those tumultuous ordeals so disastrous to toilette and to dignity and to her sense of personal rights. Not that she altogether disliked; she never had altogether disliked, had found a certain thrill in his rude riotousness. Still, she preferred the other Joshua Craig, HER Joshua, who wished to receive as well as to give. And she wished that Joshua, her Joshua, would return. She herself had thought that, so far as she was concerned, those periods of tender and gentle sentiment would be episodic; but it was another thing for him to think so—and to show it frankly. "I feel as if I'd had an adventure with a bear," said she, half-laughing, half-resentful.
"So you did," declared he; "I'm a bear—and every other sort of animal—except rabbit. There's no rabbit in me. Now, your men—the Grant Arkwrights—are all rabbit."
"At least," said she, "do refrain from tearing my hair down. A woman who does her hair well hates to have it mussed."
"I'll try to remember," was his careless answer. "As I was about to say, our discovery that you are not a lady out of a story-book, but a human being and a very sweet one—it came just in the nick of time. We're leaving here to-night."
Now she saw the reason for the persistence of the Craig of noise and bluster—and craft. "To-night?" she exclaimed. "It's impossible."
"Yes—we go at five o'clock. Tickets are bought—sleeper section engaged—everything arranged."
"But Uncle Dan doesn't expect us for four days yet."
"I've sent him a telegram."
"But I can't pack."
"Selina can."
"Impossible in such a little time."
"Then I'll do it," said Craig jovially. "I can pack a trunk twice as quick as any man you ever saw. I pack with my feet as well as with my hands."
"It's impossible," repeated she angrily. "I detest being hurried."
"Hurried? Why, you've got nine hours to get used to the idea. Nine hours' warning for anything isn't haste."
"Why didn't you tell me this yesterday?" demanded she, coming to a full stop and expecting thus to compel him to face her. But he marched on.
"It has been my lifelong habit," declared he over his shoulder, "to arrange everything before disclosing my plans. You'll find, as we get on, that it will save you a lot of fretting and debating."
Reluctantly and with the humiliating sense of helpless second fiddle she followed him along the rough path. "I loathe surprises," she said.
"Then adjust your mind to not being surprised at anything from me."
He laughed noisily at his own humor. She was almost hating him again. He seemed to have eyes in the back of his head; for as she shot a fiery glance at him he whirled round, shook his forefinger maddeningly at her: "Now listen to me, my dear," said he, in his very worst manner, most aggressive, most dictatorial; "if you had wanted an ordinary sort of man you should have married one and not me."
"Don't you think common courtesy required you at least to consult me about such a matter?"
"I do not. If I had I should have done so. I found it was necessary that we go. I went ahead and arranged it. If you saw the house on fire would you wait till you had consulted me before putting it out?"
"But this is entirely different."
"Not at all. Entirely the same, on the contrary. The talk we had day before yesterday convinced me that our house is afire. I'm going to put it out." He shut his teeth together with a snap, compressed his lips, gave her one of those quick, positive nods of his Viking head. Then he caught her by the arm. "Now," said he jocosely, "let's go back to camp. You want to do your packing. I've got to go over to the station and telegraph some more."
She wrenched her arm away pettishly and, with sullen face, accompanied him to the camp. It was all she could do to hide her anger when, in full sight of the guides, he swept her up into his arms and kissed her several times. Possibly she would have been really angered, deeply angered, had she realized that these cyclones were due, as a rule, not so much to appreciation of her as to the necessity of a strong counter-irritant to a sudden attack of awe of her as a fine lady and doubt of his own ability to cope with her. "Good-by, Rita," cried he, releasing her as suddenly as he had seized her and rushing toward the landing. "If I don't get back till the last minute be sure you're ready. Anything that isn't ready will be left behind—anything or anybody!"
The idea of revolt, of refusing to go, appealed to her first anger strongly. But, on consideration, she saw that merely asserting her rights would not be enough—that she must train him to respect them. If she refused to go he would simply leave her; yes, he was just the man, the wild man, to do precisely that disgraceful thing. And she would be horribly afraid to spend the night alone in those woods with only the guides and Selina, not to speak of facing the morrow—for he might refuse to take her back! Where would she turn in that case? What would her grandmother say? Who would support her in making such a scandal and giving up a husband for reasons that could not be made impressive in words though they were the best of all reasons in terms of feeling? No, if she gave him up she would be absolutely alone, condemned on every hand, in the worst possible position. Then, too, the break was unattractive for another reason. Though she despised herself for her weakness, she did not wish to give up the man who had given her that brief glimpse of happiness she had dreamed as one dreams an impossibility. Did not wish? Could not—would not—give him up. "I belong to him!" she thought with a thrill of ecstasy and of despair.
"But he'd better be careful!" she grumbled. "If I should begin to dislike him there'd be no going back." And then it recurred to her that this would be as great a calamity of loss for her as for him—and she went at her packing in a better humor. "I'll explain to him that I yield this once, but—" There she stopped herself with a laugh. Of what use to explain to him?—him who never listened to explanations, who did not care a fig why people did as he wished, but was content that they did. As for warning him about "next time"—how ridiculous! She could hear his penetrating, rousing voice saying: "We'll deal with 'next time' when it comes."
"We change at Albany," said he when they were on the train, after a last hour of mad scramble, due in part to her tardiness, in the main to the atmosphere of hysteric hustle and bustle he created as a precaution.
"At Albany!" she exclaimed. "Why, when do we get there?"
"At midnight."
"At midnight!" It was the last drop in the cup of gall, she thought. "Why, we'd get to Lenox, or to some place where we'd have to change again, long before morning! Josh, you must be out of your senses. It's a perfect outrage!"
"Best I could do," said he, laughing uproariously and patting her on the back. "Cheer up. You can sleep on my shoulder until we get to Albany."
"We will go on to New York," said she stiffly, "and leave from there in the morning."
"Can't do it," said he. "Must change at Albany. You ought to learn to control your temper over these little inconveniences of life. I've brought a volume of Emerson's essays along and I'll read to you if you don't want to sleep."
"I hate to be read aloud to. Joshua, let's go on to New York. Such a night of horror as you've planned will wear me out."
"I tell you it's impossible. I've done the best thing in the circumstances. You'll see."
Suddenly she sprang up, looked wildly round. "Where's Selina?" she gasped.
"Coming to-morrow or next day," replied he. "I sent her to the camp for some things I forgot."
She sank back and said no more. Again she was tempted to revolt against such imbecile tyranny; and again, as she debated the situation, the wisdom, the necessity of submitting became apparent. How would it sound to have to explain to her grandmother that she had left him because he took an inconvenient train? "I'd like to see him try this sort of thing if we'd been married six months instead of six weeks," she muttered.
She refused to talk with him, answered him in cold monosyllables. And after dinner, when he produced the volume of Emerson and began to read aloud, she curtly asked him to be quiet. "I wish to sleep!" snapped she.
"Do, dear," urged he. And he put his arm around her.
"That's very uncomfortable," said she, trying to draw away.
He drew her back, held her—and she knew she must either submit or make a scene. There was small attraction to scene-making with such a master of disgraceful and humiliating scenes as he. "He wouldn't care a rap," she muttered. "He simply revels in scenes, knowing he's sure to win out at them as a mongrel in a fight with a"—even in that trying moment her sense of humor did not leave her—"with a lapdog."
She found herself comfortable and amazingly content, leaning against his shoulder; and presently she went to sleep, he holding the book in his free hand and reading calmly. The next thing she knew he was shaking her gently. "Albany," he said. "We've got to change here."
She rose sleepily and followed him from the car, adjusting her hat as she went. She had thought she would be wretched; instead, she felt fine as the sharp, night air roused her nerves and freshened her skin. He led the way into the empty waiting-room; the porter piled the bags on the bench; she seated herself. "I must send a telegram," said he, and he went over to the window marked "Telegraph Office." It was closed. He knocked and rattled, and finally pounded on the glass with his umbrella handle.
Her nerves went all to pieces. "Can't you see," she called impatiently, "that there's no one there?"
"There will be some one!" he shouted in reply, and fell to pounding so vigorously that she thought the glass would surely break. But it did not; after a while the window flew up and an angry face just escaped a blow from the vibrating umbrella handle. A violent altercation followed, the operator raging, but Craig more uproarious than he and having the further advantage of a more extensive and more picturesque vocabulary. Finally the operator said: "I should think you'd be ashamed of yourself. Don't you see there's a lady present?"
"It's my wife," said Craig. "Now take this message and get it off at once. You should thank me for not having you dismissed."
The operator read the message. His face changed and he said in a surlily apologetic manner: "I'll send it off right away, Mr. Craig. Anything else?"