The kerchief was all screwed up now, so tightly that it could stiffly unwind of itself.
"She's not well, Leo. That terrible neuralgia—that's why she needs me so."
"Nonsense! She hasn't had a spell for weeks. That's Louis' great brag, that he's curing her. Oh, Alma, Alma, that's not a reason; that's an excuse!"
"Leo—you don't understand."
"I'm afraid I—don't," he said, looking at her with a sudden intensity that startled her with a quick suspicion of his suspicions, but then he smiled.
"Alma!" he said, "Alma!"
Misery made her dumb.
"Why, don't you know, dear, that your mother is better able to take care of herself than you are? She's bigger and stronger. You—you're a little white flower, that I want to wear on my heart."
"Leo—give me time. Let me think."
"A thousand thinks, Alma, but I love you. I love you and want so terribly for you to love me back."
"I—do."
"Then tell me with kisses."
Again she pressed him to arm's length.
"Please, Leo! Not yet. Let me think. Just one day. To-morrow."
"No, no! Now!"
"To-morrow."
"When?"
"Evening."
"No, morning."
"All right, Leo—to-morrow morning—"
"I'll sit up all night and count every second in every minute and every minute in every hour."
She put up her soft little fingers to his lips.
"Dear boy," she said.
And then they kissed, and after a little swoon to his nearness she struggled like a caught bird and a guilty one.
"Please go, Leo," she said. "Leave me alone—"
"Little mamma-baby sweetheart," he said. "I'll build you a nest right next to hers. Good night, little white flower. I'll be waiting, and remember, counting every second of every minute and every minute of every hour."
For a long time she remained where he had left her, forward on the pink divan, her head with a listening look to it, as if waiting an answer for the prayers that she sent up.
* * * * *
At two o'clock that morning, by what intuition she would never know, and with such leverage that she landed out of bed plump on her two feet, Alma, with all her faculties into trace like fire horses, sprang out of sleep.
It was a matter of twenty steps across the hall. In the white-tiled Roman bathroom, the muddy circles suddenly out and angry beneath her eyes, her mother was standing before one of the full-length mirrors—snickering.
There was a fresh little grave on the inside of her right forearm.
* * * * *
Sometimes in the weeks that followed a sense of the miracle of what was happening would clutch at Alma's throat like a fear.
Louis did not know.
That the old neuralgic recurrences were more frequent again, yes. Already plans for a summer trip abroad, on a curative mission bent, were taking shape. There was a famous nerve specialist, the one who had worked such wonders on his mother's cruelly rheumatic limbs, reassuringly foremost in his mind.
But except that there were not infrequent and sometimes twenty-four-hour sieges when he was denied the sight of his wife, he had learned, with a male's acquiescence to the frailties of the other sex, to submit, and, with no great understanding of pain, to condone.
And as if to atone for these more or less frequent lapses, there was something pathetic, even a little heartbreaking, in Carrie's zeal for his well-being. No duty too small. One night she wanted to unlace his shoes and even shine them—would have, in fact, except for his fierce catching of her into his arms and for some reason his tonsils aching as he kissed her.
Once after a "spell" she took out every garment from his wardrobe and, kissing them piece by piece, put them back again, and he found her so, and they cried together, he of happiness.
In his utter beatitude, even his resentment of Alma continued to grow but slowly. Once, when after forty-eight hours she forbade him rather fiercely an entrance into his wife's room, he shoved her aside almost rudely, but, at Carrie's little shriek of remonstrance from the darkened room, backed out shamefacedly, and apologized next day in the conciliatory language of a tiny wrist watch.
But a break came, as she knew and feared it must.
One evening during one of these attacks, when for two days Carrie had not appeared at the dinner table, Alma, entering when the meal was almost over, seated herself rather exhaustedly at her mother's place opposite her stepfather.
He had reached the stage when that little unconscious usurpation in itself could annoy him.
"How's your mother?" he asked, dourly for him.
"She's asleep."
"Funny. This is the third attack this month, and each time it lasts longer. Confound that neuralgia!"
"She's easier now."
He pushed back his plate.
"Then I'll go in and sit with her while she sleeps."
She, who was so fastidiously dainty of manner, half rose, spilling her soup.
"No," she said, "you mustn't! Not now!" And sat down again hurriedly, wanting not to appear perturbed.
A curious thing happened then to Louis. His lower lip came pursing out like a little shelf and a hitherto unsuspected look of pigginess fattened over his rather plump face.
"You quit butting into me and my wife's affairs, you, or get the hell out of here," he said, without raising his voice or his manner.
She placed her hand to the almost unbearable flutter of her heart.
"Louis! You mustn't talk like that to—me!"
"Don't make me say something I'll regret. You! Only take this tip, you! There's one of two things you better do. Quit trying to come between me and her or—get out."
"I—She's sick."
"Naw, she ain't. Not as sick as you make out. You're trying, God knows why, to keep us apart. I've watched you. I know your sneaking kind. Still water runs deep. You've never missed a chance since we're married to keep us apart. Shame!"
"I—She—"
"Now mark my word, if it wasn't to spare her I'd have invited you out long ago. Haven't you got any pride?"
"I have. I have," she almost moaned, and could have crumpled up there and swooned her humiliation.
"You're not a regular girl. You're a she-devil. That's what you are! Trying to come between your mother and me. Ain't you ashamed? What is it you want?"
"Louis—I don't—"
"First you turn down a fine fellow like Leo Friedlander, so he don't come to the house any more, and then you take out on us whatever is eating you, by trying to come between me and the finest woman that ever lived. Shame! Shame!"
"Louis!" she said, "Louis!" wringing her hands in a dry wash of agony, "can't you understand? She'd rather have me. It makes her nervous trying to pretend to you that she's not suffering when she is. That's all, Louis. You see, she's not ashamed to suffer before me. Why, Louis—that's all! Why should I want to come between you and her? Isn't she dearer to me than anything in the world, and haven't you been the best friend to me a girl could have? That's all—Louis."
He was placated and a little sorry and did not insist further upon going into the room.
"Funny," he said. "Funny," and, adjusting his spectacles, snapped open his newspaper for a lonely evening.
The one thing that perturbed Alma almost more than anything else, as the dreaded cravings grew, with each siege her mother becoming more brutish and more given to profanity, was where she obtained the soluble tablets.
The well-thumbed old doctor's prescription she had purloined even back in the hotel days, and embargo and legislation were daily making more and more furtive and prohibitive the traffic in drugs.
Once Alma, mistakenly, too, she thought later, had suspected a chauffeur of collusion with her mother and abruptly dismissed him, to Louis' rage.
"What's the idea?" he said, out of Carrie's hearing, of course. "Who's running this shebang, anyway?"
Again, after Alma had guarded her well for days, scarcely leaving her side, Carrie laughed sardonically up into her daughter's face, her eyes as glassy and without swimming fluid as a doll's.
"I get it! But wouldn't you like to know where? Yah!" And to Alma's horror slapped her quite roundly across the cheek so that for an hour the sting, the shape of the red print of fingers, lay on her face.
One night in what had become the horrible sanctity of that bedchamber—But let this sum it up. When Alma was nineteen years old a little colony of gray hairs was creeping in on each temple.
And then one day, after a long period of quiet, when Carrie had lavished her really great wealth of contrite love upon her daughter and husband, spending on Alma and loading her with gifts of jewelry and finery, somehow to express her grateful adoration of her, paying her husband the secret penance of twofold fidelity to his well-being and every whim, Alma, returning from a trip taken reluctantly and at her mother's bidding down to the basement trunk room, found her gone, a modish black-lace hat and the sable coat missing from the closet.
It was early afternoon, sunlit and pleasantly cold.
The first rush of panic and the impulse to dash after stayed, she forced herself down into a chair, striving with the utmost difficulty for coherence of procedure.
Where in the half hour of her absence had her mother gone? Matinée? Impossible! Walking? Hardly possible. Upon inquiry in the kitchen, neither of the maids had seen nor heard her depart. Motoring? With a hand that trembled in spite of itself Alma telephoned the garage. Car and chauffeur were there. Incredible as it seemed, Alma, upon more than one occasion, had lately been obliged to remind her mother that she was becoming careless of the old pointedly rosy hands. Manicurist? She telephoned the Bon Ton Beauty Parlors. No. Where? O God! Where? Which way to begin? That was what troubled her most. To start right so as not to lose a precious second.
Suddenly, and for no particular reason, Alma began a hurried search through her mother's dresser drawers of lovely personal appointments. Turning over whole mounds of fresh white gloves, delving into nests of sheer handkerchiefs and stacks of webby lingerie. Then for a while she stood quite helplessly, looking into the mirror, her hands closed about her throat.
"Please, God, where?"
A one-inch square of newspaper clipping, apparently gouged from the sheet with a hairpin, caught her eye from the top of one of the gold-backed hairbrushes. Dawningly, Alma read.
It described in brief detail the innovation of a newly equipped narcotic clinic on the Bowery below Canal Street, provided to medically administer to the pathological cravings of addicts.
Fifteen minutes later Alma emerged from the Subway at Canal Street, and, with three blocks toward her destination ahead, started to run.
At the end of the first block she saw her mother, in the sable coat and the black-lace hat, coming toward her.
Her first impulse was to run faster and yoo-hoo, but she thought better of it and, by biting her lips and digging her finger nails, was able to slow down to a casual walk.
Carrie's fur coat was flaring open and, because of the quality of her attire down there where the bilge waters of the city tide flow and eddy, stares followed her.
Once, to the stoppage of Alma's heart, she saw Carrie halt and say a brief word to a truckman as he crossed the sidewalk with a bill of lading. He hesitated, laughed, and went on.
Then she quickened her pace and went on, but as if with a sense of being followed, because constantly as she walked she jerked a step, to look back, and then again, over her shoulder.
A second time she stopped, this time to address a little nub of a woman without a hat and lugging one-sidedly a stack of men's basted waistcoats, evidently for home work in some tenement. She looked and muttered her un-understanding at whatever Carrie had to say, and shambled on.
Then Mrs. Latz spied her daughter, greeting her without surprise or any particular recognition.
"Thought you could fool me! Heh, Louis? I mean Alma."
"Mamma, it's Alma. It's all right. Don't you remember, we had this appointment? Come, dear."
"No, you don't! That's a man following. Shh-h-h-h, Louis! I was fooling. I went up to him in the clinic" (snicker) "and I said to him, 'Give you five dollars for a doctor's certificate.' That's all I said to him, or any of them. He's in a white carnation, Louis. You can find him by the—it on his coat lapel. He's coming! Quick—"
"Mamma, there's no one following. Wait, I'll call a taxi!"
"No, you don't! He tried to put me in a taxi, too. No, you don't!"
"Then the Subway, dearest. You'll sit quietly beside Alma in the Subway, won't you, Carrie? Alma's so tired."
Suddenly Carrie began to whimper.
"My baby! Don't let her see me. My baby! What am I good for? I've ruined her life. My precious sweetheart's life. I hit her once—Louis—in the mouth. It bled. God won't forgive me for that."
"Yes, He will, dear, if you come."
"It bled. Alma, tell him in the white carnation that mamma lost her doctor's certificate. That's all I said to him. Saw him in the clinic—new clinic—'give you five dollars for a doctor's certificate.' He had a white carnation—right lapel. Stingy. Quick!—following!"
"Sweetheart, please, there's no one coming."
"Don't tell! Oh, Alma darling—mamma's ruined your life! Her sweetheart baby's life."
"No, darling, you haven't. She loves you if you'll come home with her, dear, to bed, before Louis gets home and—"
"No. No. He mustn't see. Never this bad—was I, darling? Oh! Oh!"
"No, mamma—never—this bad. That's why we must hurry."
"Best man that ever lived. Best baby. Ruin. Ruin."
"Mamma, you—you're making Alma tremble so that she can scarcely walk if you drag her so. There's no one following, dear. I won't let anyone harm you. Please, sweetheart—a taxicab."
"No. I tell you he's following. He tried to put me into a taxicab.Followed me. Said he knew me."
"Then, mamma, listen. Do you hear? Alma wants you to listen. If you don't—she'll faint. People are looking. Now I want you to turn square around and look. No, look again. You see now, there's no one following. Now I want you to cross the street over there to the Subway. Just with Alma who loves you. There's nobody following. Just with Alma who loves you."
And then Carrie, whose lace hat was quite on the back of her head, relaxed enough so that through the enormous maze of the traffic of trucks and the heavier drags of the lower city, her daughter could wind their way.
"My baby! My poor Louis!" she kept saying. "The worst I've ever been.Oh—Alma—Louis—waiting—before we get there—Louis!"
It was in the tightest tangle of the crossing and apparently on this conjuring of her husband that Carrie jerked suddenly free of Alma's frailer hold.
"No—no—not home—now. Him. Alma!" And darted back against the breast of the down side of the traffic.
There was scarcely more than the quick rotation of her arm around with the spoke of a truck wheel, so quickly she went down.
It was almost a miracle, her kind of death, because out of all that jam of tonnage she carried only one bruise, a faint one, near the brow.
And the wonder was that Louis Latz, in his grief, was so proud.
"To think," he kept saying over and over again and unabashed at the way his face twisted—"to think they should have happened to me. Two such women in one lifetime as my little mother—and her. Fat little old Louis to have had those two. Why, just the memory of my Carrie—is almost enough. To think old me should have a memory like that—it is almost enough—isn't it, Alma?"
She kissed his hand.
That very same, that dreadful night, almost without her knowing it, her throat-tearing sobs broke loose, her face to the waistcoat of Leo Friedlander.
He held her close—very, very close. "Why, sweetheart," he said, "I could cut out my heart to help you! Why, sweetheart! Shh-h-h! Remember what Louis says. Just the beautiful memory—of—her—is—wonderful—"
"Just—the b-beautiful—memory—you'll always have it, too—of her—my mamma—won't you, Leo? Won't you?"
"Always," he said when the tight grip in his throat had eased enough.
"Say—it again—Leo."
"Always."
She could not know how dear she became to him then, because not ten minutes before, from the very lapel against which her cheek lay pressed, he had unpinned a white carnation.
I set out to write a love story, and for the purpose sharpened a bright-pink pencil with a glass ruby frivolously at the eraser end.
Something sweet. Something dainty. A candied rose leaf after all the bitter war lozenges. A miss. A kiss. A golf stick. A motor car. Or, if need be, a bit of khaki, but without one single spot of blood or mud, and nicely pressed as to those fetching peg-top trouser effects where they wing out just below the skirt-coat. The oldest story in the world told newly. No wear out to it. Editors know. It's as staple as eggs or printed lawn or ipecac. The good old-fashioned love story with the above-mentioned miss, kiss, and, if need be for the sake of timeliness, the bit of khaki, pressed.
Just my luck that, with one of these modish tales at the tip of my pink pencil, Hester Bevins should come pounding and clamoring at the door of my mental reservation, quite drowning out the rather high, the lipsy, and, if I do say it myself, distinctly musical patter of Arline. That was to have been her name. Arline Kildane. Sweet, don't you think, and with just a bit of wild Irish rose in it?
But Hester Bevins would not let herself be gainsaid, sobbing a little, elbowing her way through the group of mental unborns, and leaving me to blow my pitch pipe for a minor key.
Not that Hester's isn't one of the oldest stories in the world, too. No matter how newly told, she is as old as sin, and sin is but a few weeks younger than love—and how often the two are interchangeable!
If it be a fact that the true lady is, in theory, either a virgin or a lawful wife, then Hester Bevins stands immediately convicted on two charges.
She was neither. The most that can be said for her is that she was honestly what she was.
"If the wages of sin is death," she said to a roadhouse party of roysterers one dawn, "then I've quite a bit of back pay coming to me." And joined in the shout that rose off the table.
I can sketch her in for you rather simply because of the hackneyed lines of her very, very old story. Whose pasts so quickly mold and disintegrate as those of women of Hester's stripe? Their yesterdays are entirely soluble in the easy waters of their to-days.
For the first seventeen years of her life she lived in what we might call Any American Town of, say, fifteen or twenty thousand inhabitants. Her particular one was in Ohio. Demopolis, I think. One of those change-engine-and-take-on-water stops with a stucco art-nouveau station, a roof drooping all round it, as if it needed to be shaved off like edges of a pie, and the name of the town writ in conch shells on a green slant of terrace. You know—the kind that first establishes a ten-o'clock curfew for its young, its dance halls and motion-picture theaters, and then sends in a hurry call for a social-service expert from one of the large Eastern cities to come and diagnose its malignant vice undergrowth.
Hester Bevins, of a mother who died bearing her and one of those disappearing fathers who can speed away after the accident without even stopping to pick up the child or leave a license number, was reared—no, grew up, is better—in the home of an aunt. A blond aunt with many gold teeth and many pink and blue wrappers.
Whatever Hester knew of the kind of home that fostered her, it left apparently no welt across her sensibilities. It was a rather poor house, an unpainted frame in a poor street, but there was never a lack of gayety or, for that matter, any pinching lack of funds. It was an actual fact that, at thirteen, cotton or lisle stockings brought out a little irritated rash on Hester's slim young legs, and she wore silk. Abominations, it is true, at three pair for a dollar, that sprang runs and would not hold a darn, but, just the same, they were silk. There was an air of easycamaraderieand easy money about that house. It was not unusual for her to come home from school at high noon and find a front-room group of one, two, three, or four guests, almost invariably men. Frequently these guests handed her out as much as half a dollar for candy money, and not another child in school reckoned in more than pennies.
Once a guest, for reasons of odd change, I suppose, handed her out thirteen cents. Outraged, at the meanness of the sum, and with an early and deep-dyed superstition of thirteen, she dashed the coins out of his hand and to the four corners of the room, escaping in the guffaw of laughter that went up.
Often her childish sleep in a small top room with slanting sides would be broken upon by loud ribaldry that lasted into dawn, but never by word, and certainly not by deed, was she to know from her aunt any of its sordid significance.
Literally, Hester Bevins was left to feather her own nest. There were no demands made upon her. Once, in the little atrocious front parlor of horsehair and chromo, one of the guests, the town baggage-master, to be exact, made to embrace her, receiving from the left rear a sounding smack across cheek and ear from the aunt.
"Cut that! Hester, go out and play! Whatever she's got to learn from life, she can't say she learned it in my house."
There were even two years of high school, and at sixteen, when she went, at her own volition, to clerk in Finley's two-story department store on High Street, she was still innocent, although she and Gerald Fishback were openly sweethearts.
Gerald was a Thor. Of course, you are not to take that literally; but if ever there was a carnification of the great god himself, then Gerald was in his image. A wide streak of the Scandinavian ran through his make-up, although he had been born in Middletown, and from there had come recently to the Finley Dry Goods Company as an accountant.
He was so the viking in his bigness that once, on a picnic, he had carried two girls, screaming their fun, across twenty feet of stream. Hester was one of them.
It was at this picnic, the Finley annual, that he asked Hester, then seventeen, to marry him. She was darkly, wildly pretty, as a rambler rose tugging at its stem is restlessly pretty, as a pointed little gazelle smelling up at the moon is whimsically pretty, as a runaway stream from off the flank of a river is naughtily pretty, and she wore a crisp percale shirt waist with a saucy bow at the collar, fifty-cent silk stockings, and already she had almond incarnadine nails with points to them.
They were in the very heart of Wallach's Grove, under a natural cathedral of trees, the noises of the revelers and the small explosions of soda-water and beer bottles almost remote enough for perfect quiet. He was stretched his full and splendid length at the picknickers' immemorial business of plucking and sucking grass blades, and she seated very trimly, her little blue-serge skirt crawling up ever so slightly to reveal the silken ankle, on a rock beside him.
"Tickle-tickle!" she cried, with some of that irrepressible animal spirit of hers, and leaning to brush his ear with a twig.
He caught at her hand.
"Hester," he said, "marry me."
She felt a foaming through her until her finger tips sang.
"Well, I like that!" was what she said, though, and flung up a pointed profile that was like that same gazelle's smelling the moon.
He was very darkly red, and rose to his knees to clasp her about the waist. She felt like relaxing back against his blondness and feeling her fingers plow through the great double wave of his hair. But she did not.
"You're too poor," she said.
He sat back without speaking for a long minute.
"Money isn't everything," he said, finally, and with something gone from his voice.
"I know," she said, looking off; "but it's a great deal if you happen to want it more than anything else in the world."
"Then, if that's how you feel about it, Hester, next to wanting you, I want it, too, more than anything else in the world."
"There's no future in bookkeeping."
"I know a fellow in Cincinnati who's a hundred-and-fifty-dollar man.Hester? Dear?"
"A week?"
"Why, of course not, dear—a month!"
"Faugh!" she said, still looking off.
He felt out for her hand, at the touch of her reddening up again.
"Hester," he said, "you're the most beautiful, the most exciting, the most maddening, the most—the most everything girl in the world! You're not going to have an easy time of it, Hester, with your—your environment and your dangerousness, if you don't settle down—quick, with some strong fellow to take care of you. A fellow who loves you. That's me, Hester. I want to make a little home for you and protect you. I can't promise you the money—right off, but I can promise you the bigger something from the very start, Hester. Dear?"
She would not let her hand relax to his.
"I hate this town," she said.
"There's Cincinnati. Maybe my friend could find an opening there."
"Faugh!"
"Cincinnati, dear, is a metropolis."
"No, no! You don't understand. I hate littleness. Even little metropolises. Cheapness. I hate little towns and little spenders and mercerized stockings and cotton lisle next to my skin, and machine-stitched nightgowns. Ugh! it scratches!"
"And I—I just love you in those starchy white shirt waists, Hester.You're beautiful."
"That's just the trouble. It satisfies you, but it suffocates me. I've got a pink-crêpe-de-Chine soul. Pink crêpe de Chine—you hear?"
He sat back on his heels.
"It—Is it true, then, Hester that—that you're making up with that salesman from New York?"
"Why," she said, coloring—"why, I've only met him twice walking up HighStreet, evenings!"
"But itistrue, isn't it, Hester?"
"Say, who was answering your questions this time last year?"
"But itistrue, isn't it, Hester? Isn't it?"
"Well, of all the nerve!"
But it was.
* * * * *
The rest tells glibly. The salesman, who wore blue-and-white-striped soft collars with a bar pin across the front, does not even enter the story. He was only a stepping-stone. From him the ascent or descent, or whatever you choose to call it, was quick and sheer.
Five years later Hester was the very private, the very exotic, manicured, coiffured, scented, svelted, and strictlyde-luxechattel of one Charles G. Wheeler, of New York City and Rosencranz, Long Island, vice-president of the Standard Tractor Company, a member of no clubs but of the Rosencranz church, three lodges, and several corporations.
You see, there is no obvious detail lacking. Yes, there was an apartment. "Flat" it becomes under their kind of tenancy, situated on the windiest bend of Riverside Drive and minutely true to type from the pale-blue and brocade vernis-Martin parlor of talking-machine, mechanical piano, and cellarette built to simulate a music cabinet, to the pink-brocaded bedroom with achaise-longuepiled high with a small mountain of lace pillowettes that were liberally interlarded with paper-bound novels, and a spacious, white-marble adjoining bathroom with a sunken tub, rubber-sheeted shower, white-enamel weighing scales, and overloaded medicine chest of cosmetic array in frosted bottles, sleeping-, headache-, sedative powders,et al. There were also a negro maid, two Pomeranian dogs, and last, but by no means least, a private telephone inclosed in a hall closet and lighted by an electric bulb that turned on automatically to the opening of the door.
There was nothing sinister about Wheeler. He was a rather fair exponent of that amazing genus known as "typical New-Yorker," a roll of money in his pocket, and a roll of fat at the back of his neck. He went in for light checked suits, wore a platinum-and-Oriental-pearl chain across his waistcoat, and slept at a Turkish bath once a week; was once named in a large corporation scandal, escaping indictment only after violent and expensive skirmishes; could be either savage or familiar with waiters; wore highly manicured nails, which he regarded frequently in public, white-silk socks only; and maintained, on a twenty-thousand-a-year scale in the decorous suburb of Rosencranz, a decorous wife and three children, and, like all men of his code, his ethics were strictly double decked. He would not permit his nineteen-year-old daughter Marion so much as a shopping tour to the city without the chaperonage of her mother or a friend, forbade in his wife, a comely enough woman with a white unmarcelled coiffure and upper arms a bit baggy with withering flesh, even the slightest of shirtwaist V's unless filled in with net, and kept up, at an expense of no less than fifteen thousand a year—thirty the war year that tractors jumped into the war-industry class—the very high-priced, -tempered, -handed, and -stepping Hester of wild-gazelle charm.
Not that Hester stepped much. There were a long underslung roadster and a great tan limousine with yellow-silk curtains at the call of her private telephone.
The Wheeler family used, not without complaint, a large open car of very early vintage, which in winter was shut in with flapping curtains with isinglass peepers, and leaked cold air badly.
On more than one occasion they passed on the road—these cars. The long tan limousine with the shock absorbers, foot warmers, two brown Pomeranian dogs, little case of enamel-top bottles, fresh flowers, and outside this little jewel-case interior, smartly exposed, so that the blast hit him from all sides, a chauffeur in uniform that harmonized nicely with the tans and yellows. And then the grotesque caravan of the Azoic motor age, with its flapping curtains and ununiformed youth in visored cap at the wheel.
There is undoubtedly an unsavory aspect to this story. For purpose of fiction, it is neither fragrant nor easily digested. But it is not so unsavory as the social scheme which made it possible for those two cars to pass thus on the road, and, at the same time, Charles G. Wheeler to remain the unchallenged member of the three lodges, the corporations, and the Rosencranz church, with a memorial window in his name on the left side as you enter, and again his name spelled out on a brass plate at the end of a front pew.
No one but God and Mrs. Wheeler knew what was in her heart. It is possible that she did not know what the world knew, but hardly. That she endured it is not admirable, but then there were the three children, and, besides, she lived in a world that let it go at that. And so she continued to hold up her head in her rather poor, mute way, rode beside her husband to funerals, weddings, and to the college Commencement of their son at Yale. Scrimped a little, cried a little, prayed a little in private, but outwardly lived the life of the smug in body and soul.
But the Wheelers' is another story, also a running social sore; but it was Hester, you remember, who came sobbing and clamoring to be told.
As Wheeler once said of her, she was a darn fine clothes horse. There was no pushed-up line of flesh across the middle of her back, as the corsets did it to Mrs. Wheeler. She was honed to the ounce. The white-enameled weighing scales, the sweet oils, the flexible fingers of her masseur, the dumb-bells, the cabinet, salt-water, needle-spray, and vapor baths saw to that. Her skin, unlike Marion Wheeler's, was unfreckled, and as heavily and tropically white as a magnolia leaf, and, of course, she reddened her lips, and the moonlike pallor came out more than ever.
As I said, she was frankly what she was. No man looked at her more than once without knowing it. To use an awkward metaphor, it was before her face like an overtone; it was an invisible caul. The wells of her eyes were muddy with it.
But withal, she commanded something of a manner, even from Wheeler. He had no key to the apartment. He never entered her room without knocking. There were certain of his friends she would not tolerate, from one or another aversion, to be party to their not infrequent carousals. Men did not always rise from their chairs when she entered a room, but she suffered few liberties from them. She was absolutely indomitable in her demands.
"Lord!" ventured Wheeler, upon occasion, across a Sunday-noon, lace-spread breakfast table, when she was slim and cool fingered in orchid-colored draperies, and his newest gift of a six-carat, pear-shaped diamond blazing away on her right hand. "Say, aren't these Yvette bills pretty steep?
"One midnight-blue-and-silver gown . . . . . . . . . $485.00One blue-and-silver head bandeau . . . . . . . . . . 50.00One serge-and-satin trotteur gown . . . . . . . . . 275.00One ciel-blue tea gown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280.00
"Is that the cheapest you can drink tea? Whew!"
She put down her coffee cup, which she usually held with one little finger poised elegantly outward as if for flight.
"You've got a nerve!" she said, rising and pushing back her chair. "Over whose ticker are you getting quotations that I come cheap?"
He was immediately conciliatory, rising also to enfold her in an embrace that easily held her slightness.
"Go on," he said. "You could work me for the Woolworth Building in diamonds if you wanted it badly enough."
"Funny way of showing it! I may be a lot of things, Wheeler, but I'm not cheap. You're darn lucky that the war is on and I'm not asking for a French car."
He crushed his lips to hers.
"You devil!" he said.
There were frequent parties. Dancing at Broadway cabarets, all-night joy rides, punctuated with road-house stop-overs, and not infrequently, in groups of three or four couples, ten-day pilgrimages to showy American spas.
"Getting boiled out," they called it. It was part of Hester's scheme for keeping her sveltness.
Her friendships were necessarily rather confined to a definite circle—within her own apartment house, in fact. On the floor above, also in large, bright rooms of high rental, and so that they were exchanging visits frequently during the day, oftenen déshabillé, using the stairway that wound up round the elevator shaft, lived a certain Mrs. Kitty Drew, I believe she called herself. She was plump and blond, and so very scented that her aroma lay on a hallway for an hour after she had scurried through it. She was well known and chiefly distinguished by a large court-plaster crescent which she wore on her left shoulder blade. She enjoyed the bounty of a Wall Street broker who for one day had attained the conspicuousness of cornering the egg market.
There were two or three others within this group. A Mrs. Denison, half French, and a younger girl called Babe. But Mrs. Drew and Hester were intimates. They dwaddled daily in one or the other's apartment, usually lazy and lacy with negligée, lounging about on the mounds of lingerie pillows over chocolates, cigarettes, novels, Pomeranians, and always the headache powders, nerve sedatives, or smelling salts, a running line of: "Lord! I've a head!" "I need a good cry for the blues!" "Talk about a dark-brown taste!" or, "There was some kick to those cocktails last night," through their conversation.
KITTY: "Br-r-r! I'm as nervous as a cat to-day."
HESTER: "Naughty, naughty bad doggie to bite muvver's diamond ring."
KITTY: "Leave it to you to land a pear-shaped diamond on your hooks."
HESTER: "He fell for it, just like that!"
KITTY: "You could milk a billiard ball."
HESTER: "I don't see any 'quality of mercy' to spare around your flat."
There were the two years of high school, you see.
"Ed's going out to Geyser Springs next month for the cure. I told him he could not go without me unless over my dead body, he could not."
"Geyser Springs. That's thirty miles from my home town."
"Your home town? Nighty-night! I thought you was born on the corner ofForty-second Street and Broadway with a lobster claw in your mouth."
"Demopolis, Ohio."
"What is that—a skin disease?"
"My last relation in the world died out there two years ago. An aunt. Wouldn't mind some Geyser Springs myself if I could get some of this stiffness out of my joints."
"Come on! I dare you! May Denison and Chris will come in on it, and Babe can always find somebody. Make it three or four cars full and let's motor out. We all need a good boiling, anyways. Wheeler looks about ready for spontaneous combustion, and I got a twinge in my left little toe. You on?"
"I am, if he is."
"If he is!' He'd fall for life in an Igorrote village with a ring in his nose if you wanted it."
And truly enough, it did come about that on a height-of-the-season evening a highly cosmopolitan party of four couples trooped into the solid-marble foyer of the Geyser Springs Hotel, motor coated, goggled, veiled; a whole litter of pigskin and patent-leather bags, hampers, and hat boxes, two golf bags, two Pomeranians, a bull in spiked collar, furs, leather coats, monogrammed rugs, thermos bottles, air pillows, robes, and anensembleof fourteen wardrobe trunks sent by express.
They took the "cure." Rode horseback, motored, played roulette at the casino for big stakes, and scorned the American plan of service for the smarter European idea, with a specialà la cartemenu for each meal. Extraordinary-looking mixed drinks, strictly against the mandates of the "cure," appeared at their table. Strange midnight goings-on were reported by the more conservative hotel guests, and the privacy of their circle was allowed full integrity by the little veranda groups of gouty ladies or middle-aged husbands with liver spots on their faces. The bath attendants reveled in the largest tips of the season. When Hester walked down the large dining room evenings, she was a signal for the craning of necks for the newest shock of her newest extreme toilette. The kinds of toilettes that shocked the women into envy and mental notes of how the underarm was cut, and the men into covert delight. Wheeler liked to sit back and put her through her paces like a high-strung filly.
"Make 'em sit up, girl! You got them all looking like dimes around here."
One night she descended to the dining room in a black evening gown so daringly lacking in back, and yet, withal, so slimly perfect an elegant thing, that an actual breathlessness hung over the hall, the clatter of dishes pausing.
There was a gold bird of paradise dipped down her hair over one shoulder, trailing its smoothness like fingers of lace. She defied with it as she walked.
"Take it from me," said Kitty, who felt fat in lavender that night, "she's going it one too strong."
Another evening she descended, always last, in a cloth of silver with a tiny, an absurd, an impeccably tight silver turban dipped down over one eye, and absolutely devoid of jewels except the pear-shaped diamond on her left forefinger.
They were a noisy, a spending, a cosmopolitan crowd of too-well-fed men and too-well-groomed women, ignored by the veranda groups of wives and mothers, openly dazzling and arousing a tremendous curiosity in the younger set, and quite obviously sought after by their own kind.
But Hester's world, too, is all run through with sharply defined social schisms.
"I wish that Irwin woman wouldn't always hang round our crowd," she said, one morning, as she and Kitty lay side by side in the cooling room after their baths, massages, manicures, and shampoos. "I don't want to be seen running with her."
"Did you see the square emerald she wore last night?"
"Fake. I know the clerk at the Synthetic Jewelry Company had it made up for her. She's cheap, I tell you. Promiscuous. Who ever heard of anybody standing back of her? She knocks around. She sells her old clothes to Tessie, my manicurist. I've got a line on her. She's cheap."
Kitty, who lay with her face under a white mud of cold cream and her little mouth merely a hole, turned on her elbow.
"We can't all be top-notchers, Hester," she said. "You're hard as nails."
"I guess I am, but you've got to be to play this game. The ones who aren't end up by stuffing the keyhole and turning on the gas. You've got to play it hard or not at all. If you've got the name, you might as well have the game."
"If I had it to do over again—well, there would be one more wife-and-mother role being played in this little old world, even if I had to play it on a South Dakota farm."
"'Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well,' I used to write in a copy book. Well, that's the way I feel about this. To me, anything is worth doing to escape the cotton stockings and lisle next to your skin. I admit I never sit down andthink. You know, sit down and take stock of myself. What's the use thinking? Live! Yes," mused Hester, her arms in a wreath over her head, "I think I'd do it all over again. There's not been so many, at that. Three. The first was a salesman. He'd have married me, but I couldn't see it on six thousand a year. Nice fellow, too—an easy spender in a small way, but I couldn't see a future to ladies' neckwear. I hear he made good later in munitions. Al was a pretty good sort, too, but tight. How I hate tightness! I've been pretty lucky in the long run, I guess."
"Did I say 'hard as nails'?" said Kitty, grotesquely fitting a cigarette in the aperture of her mouth. "I apologize. Why, alongside of you a piece of flint is morning cereal. Haven't you ever had a love affair? I've been married twice—that's how chicken hearted I can be. Haven't you ever pumped a little faster just because a certain some one walked into the room?"
"Once."
"Once what?"
"I liked a fellow. Pretty much. A blond. Say, he was blond! I always think to myself, Kit, next to Gerald, you've got the bluest eyes under heaven. Only, his didn't have any dregs."
"Thanks, dearie."
"I sometimes wonder about Gerald. I ought to drive over while we're out here. Poor old Gerald Fishback!"
"Sweet name—'Fishback.' No wonder you went wrong, dearie."
"Oh, I'm not getting soft. I saw my bed and made it, nice and soft and comfy, and I'm lying on it without a whimper."
"You just bet your life you made it up nice and comfy! You've the right idea; I have to hand that to you. You command respect from them. Lord! Ed would as soon fire a teacup at me as not. But, with me, it pays. The last one he broke he made up to me with my opal-and-diamond beetle."
"Wouldn't wear an opal if it was set next to the Hope diamond."
"Superstitious, dearie?"
"Unlucky. Never knew it to fail."
"Not a superstition in my bones. I don't believe in walking under ladders or opening an umbrella in the house or sitting down with thirteen, but, Lordy! never saw the like with you! Thought you'd have the hysterics over that little old vanity mirror you broke that day out at the races."
"Br-r-r! I hated it."
"Lay easy, dearie. Nothing can touch you the way he's raking in the war contracts."
"Great—isn't it?"
"Play for a country home, dearie. I always say real estate and jewelry are something in the hand. Look ahead in this game, I always say."
"You just bet I've looked ahead."
"So have I, but not enough."
"Somehow, I never feel afraid. I could get a job to-morrow if I had to."
"Say, dearie, if it comes to that, with twenty pounds off me, there's not a chorus I couldn't land back in."
"I worked once, you know, in Lichtig's import shop."
"Fifth Avenue?"
"Yes. It was in between the salesman and Al. I sold two thousand five hundred dollars' worth of gowns the first week."
"Sure enough?"
"'Girl,' old man Lichtig said to me the day I quit—'girl,' he said, 'if ever you need this job again, comeback; it's waiting.'"
"Fine chance!"
"I've got the last twenty-five dollars I earned pinned away this minute in the pocket of the little dark-blue suit I wore to work. I paid for that suit with my first month's savings. A little dark-blue Norfolk, Lichtig let me have out of stock for twenty-seven fifty."
"Were they giving them away with a pound of tea?"
"Honest, Kitty, it was neat. Little white shirt waist, tan shoes, and one of those slick little five-dollar sailors, and every cent paid out of my salary. I could step into that outfit to-morrow, look the part, and land back that job or any other. I had a way with the trade, even back at Finley's."
"Here, hold my jewel bag, honey; I'm going to die of cold-cream suffocation if she don't soon come back and unsmear me."
"Opal beetle in it?"
"Yes, dearie; but it won't bite. It's muzzled with my diamond horseshoe."
"Nothing doing, Kit. Put it under your pillow."
"You better watch out. There's a thirteenth letter in the alphabet; you might accidentally use it some day. You're going to have a sweet time to-night, you are!"
"Why?"
"The boys have engaged De Butera to come up to the rooms."
"You mean the fortune teller over at the Stag Hotel?"
"She's not a fortune teller, you poor nervous wreck. She's the highest-priced spiritualist in the world. Moving tables—spooks—woof!"
"Faugh!" said Hester, rising from her couch and feeling with her little bare feet for the daintiest of pink-silk mules. "I could make tables move, too, at forty dollars an hour. Where's my attendant? I want an alcohol rub."
They did hold séance that night in a fine spirit of lark, huddled together in thede-luxesitting room of one of their suites, and little half-hysterical shrieks and much promiscuous ribaldry under cover of darkness.
Madame de Butera was of a distinctly fat and earthy blondness, with a coarse-lace waist over pink, and short hands covered with turquoise rings of many shapes and blues.
Tables moved. A dead sister of Wheeler's spoke in thin, high voice. Why is it the dead are always so vocally thin and high?
A chair tilted itself on hind legs, eliciting squeals from the women. Babe spoke with a gentleman friend long since passed on, and Kitty with a deceased husband, and began to cry quite sobbily and took little sips of highball quite gulpily. May Denison, who was openly defiant, allowed herself to be hypnotized and lay rigid between two chairs, and Kitty went off into rampant hysteria until Wheeler finally placed a hundred-dollar bill over the closed eyes, and whether under it, or to the legerdemain of madam's manipulating hands, the tight eyes opened, May, amid riots of laughter, claiming for herself the hundred-dollar bill, and Kitty, quite resuscitated, jumping up for a table cancan, her yellow hair tumbling, and her china-blue eyes with the dregs in them inclined to water.
All but Hester. She sat off by herself in a peacock-colored gown that wrapped her body suavity as if the fabric were soaking wet, a band of smoky-blue about her forehead. Never intoxicated, a slight amount of alcohol had a tendency to make her morose.
"What's the matter, Cleo?" asked Wheeler, sitting down beside her and lifting her cool fingers one by one, and, by reason of some remote analogy that must have stirred within him, seeing in her a Nile queen. "What's the matter Cleo? Does the spook stuff get your goat?"
She turned on him eyes that were all troubled up, like waters suddenly wind-blown.
"God!" she said, her fingers, nails inward, closing about his arm."Wheeler—can—can the—dead—speak?"
But fleeting as the hours themselves were the moods of them all, and the following morning there they were, the eight of them, light with laughter and caparisoned again as to hampers, veils, coats, dogs, off for a day's motoring through the springtime countryside.
"Where to?" shouted Wheeler, twisting from where he and Hester sat in the first of the cars to call to the two motor-loads behind.
"I thought Crystal Cave was the spot"—from May Denison in the last of the cars, winding her head in a scarlet veil.
"Crystal Cave it is, then."
"Is that through Demopolis?"
Followed a scanning of maps.
"Sure! Here it is! See! Granite City. Mitchell. Demopolis. CrystalCave."
"Good Lord! Hester, you're not going to spend any time in that dump?"
"It's my home town," she replied, coldly. "The only relation I had is buried there. It's nothing out of your way to drop me on the court-house steps and pick me up as you drive back, I've been wanting to get there ever since we're down here. Wanting to stop by your home town you haven't seen in five years isn't unreasonable, is it?"
He admitted it wasn't, leaning to kiss her.
She turned to him a face soft, with one of the pouts he usually found irresistible.
"Honey," she said, "what do you think?"
"What?"
"Chris is buying May that chinchilla coat I showed you in Meyerbloom's window the day before we left."
"The deuce he is!" he said, letting go of her hand, but hers immediately covering his.
"She's wiring her sister in the 'Girlie Revue' to go in and buy it for her."
"Outrage—fifteen thousand dollars to cover a woman's back! Look at the beautiful scenery, honey! You're always prating about views. Look at those hills over there! Great—isn't it?"
"I wouldn't expect it, Wheeler, if it wasn't war year and you landing one big contract after another. I'd hate to see May show herself in that chinchilla coat when we could beat her to it by a wire. I could telegraph Meyerbloom himself. I bought the sable rug of him. I'd hate it, Wheeler, to see her and Chris beat us to it. So would you. What's fifteen thousand when one of your contracts alone runs into the hundred thousands? Honey?"
"Wire," he said, sourly, but not withdrawing his hand from hers.
* * * * *
They left her at the shady court-house steps in Demopolis, but with pleasantry and gibe.
"Give my love to the town pump."
"Rush the old oaken growler for me."
"So long!" she called, eager to be rid of them. "Pick me up at six sharp."
She walked slowly up High Street. Passers-by turned to stare, but otherwise she was unrecognized. There was a new five-and-ten-cent store, and Finley Brothers had added an ell. High Street was paved. She made a foray down into the little side street where she had spent those queerly remote first seventeen years of her life. How dim her aunt seemed! The little unpainted frame house was gone. There was a lumber yard on the site. Everything seemed to have shrunk. The street was narrower and dirtier than she recalled it.
She made one stop, at the house of Maggie Simms, a high-school chum. It was a frame house, too, and she remembered that the front door opened directly into the parlor and the side entrance was popularly used instead. But a strange sister-in-law opened the side door. Maggie was married and living in Cincinnati. Oh, fine—a master mechanic, and there were twins. She started back toward Finley's, thinking of Gerald, and halfway she changed her mind.
Maggie Simms married and living in Cincinnati. Twins! Heigh-ho! What a world! The visit was hardly a success. At half after five she was on her way back to the court-house steps. Stupid to have made it six!
And then, of course, and quite as you would have it, Gerald Fishback came along. She recognized his blondness long before he saw her. He was bigger and more tanned, and, as of old, carried his hat in his hand. She noticed that there were no creases down the front of his trousers, but the tweed was good and he gave off that intangible aroma of well-being.
She was surprised at the old thrill racing over her. Seeing him was like a stab of quick steel through the very pit of her being. She reached out, touching him, before he saw her.
"Gerald," she said, soft and teasingly.
It was actually as if he had been waiting for that touch, because before he could possibly have perceived her her name was on his lips.
"Hester!" he said, the blueness of his eyes flashing between blinks."Not Hester?"
"Yes, Hester," she said, smiling up at him.
He grasped both her hands, stammering for words that wanted to come quicker than he could articulate.
"Hester!" he kept repeating. "Hester!"
"To think you knew me, Gerald!"
"Know you! I'd know you blindfolded. And how—I—You're beautiful,Hester! I think you've grown five years younger."
"You've got on, Gerald. You look it."
"Yes; I'm general manager now at Finley's."
"I'm so glad. Married?"
"Not while there's a Hester Bevins on earth."
She started at her own name.
"How do you know I'm not married?"
"I—I know—" he said, reddening up.
"Isn't there some place we can talk, Gerald? I've thirty minutes before my friends call for me."
"'Thirty minutes?'"
"Your rooms? Haven't you rooms or a room where we could go and sit down?"
"Why—why, no, Hester," he said, still red. "I'd rather you didn't go there. But here. Let's stop in at the St. James Hotel. There's a parlor."
To her surprise, she felt herself color up and was pleasantly conscious of her finger tips.
"You darling!" She smiled up at him.
They were seated presently in the unaired plush-and-cherry,Nottingham-and-Axminster parlor of a small-town hotel.
"Hester," he said, "you're like a vision come to earth."
"I'm a bad durl," she said, challenging his eyes for what he knew.
"You're a little saint walked down and leaving an empty pedestal in my dreams."
She placed her forefinger over his mouth.
"Sh-h!" she said. "I'm not a saint, Gerald; you know that."
"Yes," he said, with a great deal of boyishness in his defiance, "I do know it, Hester, but it is those who have been through the fire who can sometimes come out—new. It was your early environment."
"My aunt died on the town, Gerald, I heard. I could have saved her all that if I had only known. She was cheap, aunt was. Poor soul! She never looked ahead."
"It was your early environment, Hester. I've explained that often enough to them here. I'd bank on you, Hester—swear by you."
She patted him.
"I'm a pretty bad egg, Gerald. According to the standards of a town like this, I'm rotten, and they're about right. For five years, Gerald, I've—"
"The realyouis ahead of—and not behind you, Hester."
"How wonderful," she said, "for you to feel that way, but—"
"Hester," he said, more and more the big boy, and his big blond head nearing hers, "I don't care about anything that's past; I only know that, for me, you are the—"
"Gerald," she said, "for God's sake!"
"I'm a two hundred-a-month man now, Hester. I want to build you the prettiest, the whitest little house in this town. Out in the Briarwood section. I'll make them kowtow to you, Hester; I—"
"Why," she said, slowly, and looking at him with a certain sadness, "you couldn't keep me in stockings, Gerald! The aigrettes on this hat cost more than one month of your salary."
"Good God!" he said.
"You're a dear, sweet boy just the same; but you remember what I told you about my crêpe-de-Chine soul."
"Just the same, I love you best in those crispy white shirt waists you used to wear and the little blue suits and sailor hats. You remember that day at Finleys' picnic, Hester, that day, dear, that you—you—"
"You dear boy!"
"But it—your mistake—it—it's all over. You work now, don't you,Hester?"
Somehow, looking into the blueness of his eyes and their entreaty for her affirmative, she did what you or I might have done. She half lied, regretting it while the words still smoked on her lips.
"Why, yes, Gerald; I've held a fine position in Lichtig Brothers, New York importers. Those places sometimes pay as high as seventy-five a week. But I don't make any bones, Gerald; I've not been an angel."
"The—the salesman, Hester?"—his lips quivering with a nausea for the question.
"I haven't seen him in four years," she answered, truthfully.
He laid his cheek on her hand.
"I knew you'd come through. It was your environment. I'll marry you to-morrow—to-day, Hester. I love you."
"You darling boy!" she said, her lips back tight against her teeth. "You darling, darling boy!"
"Please, Hester! We'll forget what has been."
"Let me go," she said, rising and pinning on her hat; "let me go—or—orI'll cry, and—and I don't want to cry."
"Hester," he called, rushing after her and wanting to fold her back into his arms, "let me prove my trust—my love—"
"Don't! Let me go! Let me go!"
At slightly after six the ultra cavalcade drew up at the court-house steps. She was greeted with the pleasantries and the gibes.
"Have a good time, sweetness?" asked Wheeler, arranging her rugs.
"Yes," she said, lying back and letting her lids droop; "but tired—very, very tired."
At the hotel, she stopped a moment to write a telegram before going up for the vapor bath, nap, and massage that were to precede dinner.
"Meyerbloom & Co., Furriers. Fifth Avenue, New York," it was addressed.
* * * * *
This is not a war story except that it has to do with profiteering, parlor patriots, and the return of Gerald Fishback.
While Hester was living this tale, and the chinchilla coat was enveloping her like an ineffably tender caress, three hundred thousand of her country's youths were at strangle hold across three thousand miles of sea, and on a notorious night when Hester walked, fully dressed in a green gown of iridescent fish scales, into the electric fountain of a seaside cabaret, and Wheeler had to carry her to her car wrapped in a sable rug, Gerald Fishback was lying with his face in Flanders mud, and his eye sockets blackly deep and full of shrapnel, and a lung-eating gas cloud rolling at him across the vast bombarded dawn.
* * * * *
Hester read of him one morning, sitting up in bed against a mound of lace-over-pink pillows, a masseuse at the pink soles of her feet. It was as if his name catapulted at her from a column she never troubled to read. She remained quite still, looking at the name for a full five minutes after it had pierced her full consciousness. Then, suddenly, she swung out of bed, tilting over the masseuse.
"Tessie," she said, evenly enough, "that will do. I have to hurry to Long Island to a base hospital. Go to that little telephone in the hall—will you?—and call my car."
But the visit was not so easy of execution. It required two days of red tape and official dispensation before she finally reached the seaside hospital that, by unpleasant coincidence, only a year before had been the resort hotel of more than one dancing orgy.
She thought she would faint when she saw him, jerking herself back with a straining of all her faculties. The blood seemed to drain away from her body, leaving her ready to sink, and only the watchful and threatening eye of a man nurse sustained her. He was sitting up in bed, and she would never have recognized in him anything of Gerald except for the shining Scandinavian quality of his hair. His eyes were not bandaged, but their sockets were dry and bare like the beds of old lakes long since drained. She had only seen the like in eyeless marble busts. There were unsuspected cheek bones, pitched now very high in his face, and his neck, rising above the army nightshirt, seemed cruelly long, possibly from thinness.
"Are you Hester?" whispered the man nurse.
She nodded, her tonsils squeezed together in an absolute knot.
"He called for you all through his delirium," he said, and went out. She stood at the bedside, trying to keep down the screams from her speech when it should come. But he was too quick for her.
"Hester," he said, feeling out.
And in their embrace, her agony melted to tears that choked and seared, beat and scalded her, and all the time it was he who held her with rigid arm, whispered to her, soothed down the sobs which tore through her like the rip of silk, seeming to split her being.