CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There were times in the next month when Roger seriously considered going back into the law. He even went so far as looking up Walter Marsh, an old college chum with whom he had rather grown out of touch, now a very successful corporation lawyer. But at Marsh's hints that there was an opening with him if Roger cared to consider it, Roger always hurried away from further discussion. Nor did he tell Anne of these visits.
Anne never referred to his leaving Wainwright, nor did she ever again serve pot-roast. Apparently their method of life was unchanged. Roger could not put his finger on any one incident, recall a single allusion of Anne's, but he now felt encased in an atmosphere of watching, of tight guardedness, and of economical maneuverings. Outwardly Anne seemed as cheerful as ever, but Roger could feel unexpressed criticism moving shadow-like about him, and his nerves tightened. He often grew irritable and then desperately contrite. Irritation at this time was brutal, but Roger could not shake off the feeling of breathing imperceptible particles of objection. Sometimes he started to talk out their situation frankly, but it always ended in a fog. He felt as if he were beating with exaggerated violence in a cloud of dust. The air was full of minute, subtle differences, sudden closings of Anne's lips, sentences caught and deftly turned from their first intention; and of Anne's patience. This patience was the hardest to stand without reference.
Again and again Roger tried to explain this growing tensity between them by Anne's nervous condition. But Anne had never felt better in her life. Always pretty in a cool, silvery way, there were moments now when Anne seemed to send from within a living, golden flame. Often, in the evenings, when Anne sat, her head bent above the small, white sewing in her lap, Roger trembled, awed and a little frightened before the marvel of this thing that was happening to Anne.
It was after a sudden, stabbing vision of Anne like this, that Roger went to Walter Marsh's office for the second time in one week.
"Hello." Walter Marsh put away some important work to greet Roger. "Well, what's the decision?"
Up to the very door, Roger had intended to accept the good opening Marsh had definitely offered him at the last visit, but, now, as he looked about the beautifully furnished office, the hard processes of the law softened by the tinted walls, the thick rugs, the great bunch of chrysanthemums in the old-blue, China vase, he sparred for time.
"Haven't made one yet."
Marsh frowned. His genuine admiration for Roger's ability was scarcely proof against a certain quality in Roger that he had always felt might, and now feared had already, swamped Roger's sense of proportion. As he put it to his wife, Helen: "Roger's got that dog-goned idealist sophistry in his bean, that nothing can be right or just or fine—if you make a decent living at it. And the joke of it, or the tragedy for men like Roger, is that it's only outsiders like him who feel that way. You can't get a real radical to do a thing without paying him up to the hilt. I'll wager that Labor god, O'Connell himself, has a pile salted down safely." For, like all financially successful men, Walter Marsh had a fixed belief that no able, sane person worked long for an ideal alone.
"Well, it's up to you," he said shortly.
For, although he was willing to talk the matter over with Roger for the rest of the afternoon if it would lead anywhere, he was not willing to waste more time even on Roger, who, after seven days' consideration of a decidedly advantageous opening, still announced that he had reached no decision. He picked up his pen, not quite indicating the interview over, but very clearly expressing his feeling toward Roger. Years after, Roger used to wonder what he would have done, if Walter Marsh had not picked up his pen in just that way, at just that moment. He looked quietly at Marsh, only a few years older than himself, but already with the fine lines of nervous concentration about his eyes, blue eyes glazed in assurance of their owner's mental processes; the eyes of a very successful man who realizes the uselessness of fretting his conscience over conditions beyond his personal power to change.
"But I don't think I'll take you up," Roger went on as if no interval had intervened. "I've grown too far away from the law. I can't go back."
"Or ahead," Walter almost snapped in his honest disappointment.
"Perhaps not." For a moment Roger felt very much alone.
"Well, I can't change you and I won't try. I hope you'll make a go of anything you settle to." Unconsciously Marsh intimated his doubt of Roger's ever settling to anything worth while.
Roger smiled, his momentary sadness dissolved in Marsh's solicitude. Walter Marsh might have been an elderly uncle, washing his hands of a wild nephew.
"Thanks, just the same, old chap. Your offer was certainly generous."
For a moment the other felt inclined to tell him that it would remain open, changed his mind, and took Roger's out-stretched hand.
"When you get settled, let me know. And come over to dinner some night, you and Anne. Helen's always asking me why I don't make you."
"We will."
Roger left the office, glad that he had not told Anne where he was going.
Dinner was ready when he reached home and they sat down at the daintily set table on the porch. Now that spring was come they had gone back to the pleasant custom. To-night, in his relief at having put the possibility of Walter Marsh behind him, Roger was gayer than he had been for weeks. Anne noticed and wondered and tried to edge the talk around to discovery, and finally, to Roger's astonishment, mentioned Marsh.
"I see Walter Marsh's been engaged for that big Southern Pacific case."
"Yes, he's getting ahead wonderfully. He'll end way up yet."
"Do you think he's honest?" Anne asked after a moment filled with pouring the black coffee into the small cups.
"Y-e-s, in a way. Personally, he's as straight as a die. But he's divided his life into sections, private and public. He'll do as corporation lawyer for the Southern Pacific what he would never dream of doing for himself."
Anne drank her coffee slowly. "I suppose he compromises by being 'a mild progressive' and making things better 'along the line they are.'"
Roger leaned back in his chair and laughed until Anne joined him.
"Princess, you'd make a first class lawyer yourself. Walter calls himself a liberal already."
"And you're—a Socialist, I suppose?"
Roger stopped laughing. "I suppose I am. Are you?"
"I—don't know. I don't know enough about it."
"I don't know much myself, not the technical details. But it seems to me it's the only thing that isn't trying to patch a rotten piece of cloth. It wants to weave a new one, from what I understand."
"Some job," Anne said and lit the single cigarette she ever smoked, the after-dinner cigarette that Roger had taught her to take soon after their marriage, when they had done all things together.
"It certainly is. But a worth-while one. Anne, suppose we frankly join some radical group and begin weaving, too."
Anne puffed, flicked the ash into the tiny lacquer tray, and said with more calmness than she felt:
"I don't think I will, Roger. Not till I know more about it. I don't believe in jumping in and out of things."
Roger looked away. He felt that he had again been caught in the cloud of dust. Anne smoked her cigarette and lit a second. Only by this extraordinary act could she bring herself to the point she had decided upon that afternoon. When it was smoked quite through, she said calmly:
"Why don't you go and see Tom O'Connell?"
"What?" he echoed stupidly.
"Why not? Your sympathies are with him."
Now that Anne had worded it, Roger recognized the longing he had been stifling for weeks. To do something he believed in with his whole soul. His eyes softened and coming quickly about the table he knelt beside her.
"Princess," he whispered, "you're the most wonderful thing in the world."
Anne looked down into Roger's eyes and wondered. Why did he think it wonderful for her to suggest this thing that she had felt in him for weeks? Had he been waiting for her to do so? Why? What would he have done if she had not?
Before her quiet, searching look, Roger's eyes fell.
"Forgive me, honey," he whispered.
Roger had mistrusted. His plea for forgiveness proved it. Something deep in Anne hardened, but she patted his cheek and said cheerfully:
"Why don't you look him up to-night? It's early yet."
"Do you want to get rid of me?" Roger teased with a look in his eyes that had not been there for a long time.
"No—of course I don't," Anne said, and he kissed her.