CHAPTER SIX
"You didn't hurt your foot after all?"
"No. I didn't hurt it. I didn't want you to come and it was the first thing I thought of."
Roger crumbled his bread on the cloth and waited. Anne tried to go on calmly with her lunch, but she felt her face flushing and she knew Roger was watching her, his eyes growing sterner, his mouth settling in that straight line. She felt like a trapped animal, caught between a quixotic pity of her people, a pity seen most clearly in moments when Anne detested it most, and her longing to have Roger confess, unaided by an explanation, the understanding she was sure he had. But Roger sat on silent, waiting.
Before the strong, free youth of Roger, her father and mother shrank, small, aging, pitiful. Little gray things, scuttling over the surface of their flat, uninteresting world, never looking up, their worried little eyes fastened on their own food and shelter. Units, among incalculable millions of others, all frightened, worried, and avid of personal comfort. To explain was to strip them bare, tear off the meager covering of their self-respect, expose their one pride in all its narrow rigidity.
At last Anne put down her knife and fork and looked at Roger.
"Roger, you asked me to trust you, yesterday. Won't you trust me? You're right, I was not ill. Something did happen and I couldn't have you come."
But no generous yielding softened Roger's eyes.
"It's different, Anne. Yesterday, when I asked you to have faith in me, it was a question between ourselves. But this—there are others. I feel surrounded by enemies. I don't even know which side——"
He bit the sentence, but Anne finished it for him.
"——I am on."
"Because you're not being open with me."
"Neither are you being honest. You do know, but you want to force me to say."
Anne's lip trembled and Roger looked quickly away. In this, their first misunderstanding, Roger wanted no emotional element to enter.
"Yes, I think I do. Your people don't approve of me. You've always known it and that's why you didn't tell them. Why did you pretend it was any other? I wouldn't have minded the truth."
"No, because you would scarcely recognize their existence as human beings. They are of the 'spiritual bourgeoisie.' They are of the great, spiritual middle class you despise so much."
Roger flushed. Anne went on:
"But they are my people. I live with them. I don't share their standards. My brain despises their outlook on life. I can't help knowing what their reactions will be. My father is bigoted and selfish and, on the whole, rather mean. Sometimes, he is jolly and kind and a little more tolerant, usually when a bet goes well. He is a clerk, a corporation clerk, in body and soul. But he is a victim, too, of the smallness of his own soul, just as much as the men who can't get work are victims of 'the system.' And mamma——" Anne held her voice steady by an effort, "I wouldn't hurt mamma for the world, or make things more uncomfortable for her. In time——" but the tears welled over and ran down Anne's cheeks.
Roger gripped her hand. "Don't, Princess, please don't. I was a brute. I do understand, better than you think. But I hate meeting you round in parks and public places, sneaking as if there were something to be ashamed of. Last night, I wanted to sit close to you, in some warm, comfortable room, like a human being."
Anne's lips moved in a warped smile. "You wouldn't have sat in a comfortable room. It's one of the ugliest rooms I have ever seen. There's a crayon portrait of a brother papa always hated and won't have removed, and they would have watched us through hideous chenille portières. That is, mamma would; papa would have pretended to read, in a chair fixed so he could see us in the mantel glass. It would have been ghastly."
Roger smiled, but his fingers held Anne's more firmly. "My high-strung, beauty-loving Princess. We'll never have an ugly thing in the house, will we?"
Anne shook her head. "No. We'll have nothing in it at all, rather than that."
"Oh, it won't be as bad as that," Roger laughed.
"I don't care, Roger. Really I——"
Two people took the vacant places at the same table, so, in a few moments, Anne and Roger finished and went. It was another day of sunshine and dusty wind.
"I don't feel parky, to-day, do you? Then let's walk." Anne turned north and Roger walked close beside her.
They walked slowly, Anne tingling with consciousness of Roger's nearness, and of their isolation from others, in a new understanding that had come to them. All these hurrying strangers were the world, flowing around the little island on which she and Roger stood alone.
Block after block they walked in a silence rhythmic with shared dreams and hopes that seemed to throb in unison with the perfect harmony of their step.
Roger spoke first: "There was another call from Wainwright this morning while I was out and he left word for me to see him this afternoon."
"I guess he wants a decision," Anne said casually.
"Yes. Yes, that's it, no doubt."
"Don't do anything you don't want to do." Anne's voice was even, indifferent to the issue. Roger pressed her arm.
"Anne, you're a trump. The grandest little chum a fellow ever had."
Anne nodded valiantly. "And some hiker. Look where we've walked to. Clear out to the City Hall."
"So we have! It didn't seem but a few blocks, did it?" Roger looked so bewildered at the sight of the City Hall just before him, that Anne laughed.
"Seeming is not being. There it is and I'll have to take a car right straight back."
She moved, but suddenly Roger's hand held her arm and, at the strange look on his face, Anne's eyes grew serious.
"Princess, let's go over and get the license now. It doesn't mean much—but I would like to feel we'd gotten that far."
"Why! Roger! Now, this minute?"
Roger nodded. "Will you, dear?"
Under his look, Anne colored. She tried to say something flippant but could not.
"All right," she whispered finally.
They crossed the street and went up the steps into the rather dirty corridor, along which fat, red-faced politicians and young clerks hurried. In the license office, a bored clerk, just about to leave for his delayed lunch, rushed them through the questions. Anne held up her right hand and swore. Then Roger. The clerk scribbled in the answers. Roger paid the fee. They turned away, as legally two as when they had entered.
But to Anne, something had happened, so that never again would she be the Anne Mitchell who had come up the steps only a few moments before. All the weeks of her hidden secret had not made her feel so irrevocably Roger's as this: a few stereotyped questions gabbled by a bored clerk, the unimportant fact of her age sworn to with ridiculous solemnity. The personal quality of her secret had been hers, even through the ordeal with her parents, but now, it was not hers any longer. It had been given to the world. This bored, gum-chewing clerk had placarded her name and Roger's for the world to see. She and Roger were now tagged and listed, in orthodox fashion, for the great event of matrimony. She began to tremble.
"Let's—do the—rest—now."
"Anne!" A lump rushed to Roger's throat and he could say no more. Then, hand in hand, like two children, they crossed the corridor to the judge's chambers.
In ten minutes it was over, witnessed by a stenographer and the janitor called in from the hall. The judge made his mechanical speech of congratulation, which neither heard nor waited for him to finish. Silent, they walked down the stairs and out into the sunny, dust-filled wind.
"What—what would you like to do?" Roger felt as if he had suddenly been left alone in a strange situation with a strange woman.
Anne wanted to cry. "Are—are—you sorry?" she demanded almost angrily.
"Why, sweetheart!" But the thing he had just done was touching Roger to a seriousness beyond his power to treat gayly.
"Only, we can't go away very well till to-morrow and——"
Anne tried to catch the words fluttering about her like bits of paper in the wind, but the realization that she was now married, that all the rest of her life she would come and go, eat and sleep, share the thoughts of the man beside her, paralyzed her power to think or move. She could not even look at Roger.
"I'm—going—back to work," she managed at last.
"You are not. Not for a single minute."
The tone left no alternative. Anne thrilled.
"But I can't leave them like this—without notice."
"You're going to do just that. I'll phone Wilmot. It'll be all right."
Anne looked at him with a shy smile. Roger pressed her arm.
"You're mine now, Princess," he whispered. "And to-morrow we'll go away into the mountains."
Anne nodded, and then there was nothing small and unimportant to say. They stood in a self-conscious silence that had the separating quality of space, until Anne broke it:
"I—think—I'll go home now."
"Just as you like, sweetheart." The relief in Roger's tone disappointed, although Anne did not know what she had expected. An unending stream of cars all going in the wrong direction passed. They were both glad of the clanging noise and the wind which made speech difficult and filled the silence between them.
At last the right car came and they hurried out into the roadway. As Roger helped her in, he whispered:
"Till to-morrow—little wife."
The crowd on the step jostled her forward, the conductor, like a specialized machine, bellowed his—"Step forward. Fare please. Step forward. Plenty of room in the front of the car."
Through the jam on the back platform Anne looked back and glimpsed Roger, already hurrying away, holding to his hat. A strange mingling of fear and exultation rushed over her.
"Mrs. Roger Barton."
She tried to think of it calmly, as indifferently as any one of the strangers in the car would have thought of it, but the realization danced like electricity along her nerves.
Three-quarters of an hour later, Roger accepted the position of private secretary to Hilary Wainwright, at fifty a week, the work to begin in two weeks.