CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
And the next morning, when Jerome came into the office, Jean stood waiting for him.
"Well, when are we going to begin the piers?"
Jerome hung up his hat and sat down at the desk. He knew that Jean had asked him something and was waiting for an answer. While he shuffled his mail, he knew that the welcoming smile in her eyes was quickly hardening to surprise. He did not care. His relation with Jean Herrick was no longer the untangled thing it had been. For eight days he had thought of scarcely anything but this annoying, self-centered woman. He had destroyed a perfectly good garden and acted like a school-boy. And there she stood wanting to know whenhewas going to begin the piers.
"I thought you had forgotten them," he said at length, still fumbling the mail as if Jean were detaining him from far more important matters.
"I don't see how you could have thought that."
"It didn't take such a stretch of imagination. We had the first scheduled for the day after the wedding—you may remember."
"Didn't you get my message?" She might have been speaking to a peevish child, so forced was the restraint of her patience.
"No. Did you leave one?"
"I told Minnie to tell you, but I suppose she forgot. Those up-state towns suddenly changed about waiting till fall to organize Consumers' Leagues. It took longer than I thought."
Jerome did not look up. Jean added no personal regret for the inconvenience she might have caused, but moved away toward the door.
"You still wish to do them then?"
"Of course. Don'tyou?" Jean wanted to add that if he were going to continue in this mood she hoped he didn't.
"Certainly, I do. How about to-night?"
"All right for me. I kept it free on purpose."
There it was, the high-handed assurance that her plans would suit others. But he himself had suggested to-night and he would have to comply.
"It won't be any use starting before nine, do you think?"
"No. Not unless we cover two in the same evening."
"I don't believe I feel strenuous enough for that. One will do. I'll call for you then, about half past eight?"
He swung round in his chair and Jean suddenly noticed that he looked tired, not so much physically, but as if something had gone from within. He was desperately lonely and his loneliness had escaped in irritation toward herself, because she happened to be the only outlet at hand. It was what Martha had called "a man's nature cropping out." It made Jean feel unaccountably tender. And besides she had promised Alice to look out for Jerome.
"I tell you, suppose you come and have supper with me. I've moved, and am keeping house now over in Old Chelsea. Cooking is not my forte and I won't promise anything but delicatessen. Will you be my first guest?"
Jerome did not answer instantly and when he did, said, with no perceptible change of tone:
"Thank you. I should like to very much."
"We'll quit punctually and gather up the food as we go. Till six, then."
Jerome continued to look at the closed door several moments after he heard Jean's shut. Then he crossed to the filing cabinet, realized after he had searched through three drawers, that what he wanted was at home, came back to the desk and sat down.
Suddenly he laughed out loud and began to work.
At six he locked the desk, thoroughly satisfied with the day's accomplishment. He found Jean just closing hers, and a few moments later they were going from shop to shop, collecting supper, with much happy, foolish comment on each other's preferences in cold meats and pickles.
Jean remembered the many times she had done this with Gregory, and now, that memory no longer stung, it brought Jerome near, extended their friendship far beyond the year she had known him, linked him closely with the past. So that it seemed to Jean that each little separate interlude of happiness in life was not really separate, but, by some hidden spiritual chemistry, was only an element in the larger, complex solution of all possible happiness.
And when, half an hour later, they stood together silent on the farthest edge of the roof, and watched the sun slipping over the rim of the West, Jean felt nearer to the man beside her than she had ever thought to feel to any one again. Nearer, in some ways, than she had felt to Gregory, for never, with him, had she for a moment been unconscious of her love. She had never for an instant been unaware of Gregory as the man she loved. He had always been stronger than any moment or any place. The deepest peace had held always, within itself, the power of its own destruction. But there was no personal claim in this silence with Jerome. In their mutual understanding of life's lonely hours, they shared the peace of the roof.
"It's another world—absolutely another world," Jerome said quietly.
Jean nodded. "Nothing's the same up here. Stillness is not empty and color's really sound. Sunrise and sunset are like tremendous chords on a great organ. Sometimes I feel that some day I am going to hear it, actually hear the old music of the spheres."
"It's like a garden, in that still space before the dawn."
"Sometimes it's almost terrible up here, then. As if the night were some indescribable vengeance that had blotted all life from the world, and as if everything were being created anew without any memory of death or pain. I have never seen anything, except the sea, wake like the city does to a new life. A new life, every twenty-four hours. And no matter how many you spoil, there's another waiting, and you can drop the spoiled one into the night."
The gold and scarlet were fading to saffron and silver. A star peeped from the edge of a pale green pool.
"It would do that—or else make you feel there was no use in anything."
"I don't think it would ever make you feel like that really, not for long anyhow. The rhythm in it is so evidently a law—you'vegotto be a part. There's nothing else for you to be."
"An absolutely materialistic logic doesn't seem to fit, exactly, does it?"
"No, it doesn't. A few dawns and sunsets shake it terribly. They make you feel like a child, listening to a fairy story, that youknowis true, no matter how much the grown-ups scoff."
"May I come sometimes and listen to the fairy story, too?" Jerome asked so simply, so like a child, that Jean felt her threat tighten.
"Whenever you want to. Don't bother to let me know. Just come—whenever you're blue or lonely—or just logical and materialistic."
Jerome laughed and, on the lighter note, they began to get supper. When it was ready, Jean spread the small table outside, where space opened most widely to the Jersey shore. As they ate, and Jean told of the "kind ladies" to whom a Consumers' League was still a form of charity to the workers, the last shreds of color faded from the sky. Shy stars ventured boldly out and the gray deepened to night-blue.
Gradually they fell silent. Jerome felt the peace close about him, the tangible, unfathomable peace that Jean felt. They smoked and forgot each other, looking into the night.
At last Jerome spoke, softly, as if he were interpreting something whispered to him in the stillness.
"What a lot of useless pain there is in the world. One feels it in a place like this, almost as if we chose needlessly to be unhappy."
"Do you feel that, too? Sometimes I'm afraid all my standards are going to be upset here. Sometimes I feel as if I had gotten everything twisted a long way back and that it was struggling to get right again."
"And that process itself can hurt terribly."
Jean smiled, a little wistfully. "I am beginning to suspect that it can. It used to make me furious when I was growing up to be told that all pain was 'for the best.' But, now, I believe it was only the wording of it, the tight, prim smugness of the assurance that rasped. It's not that pain is for the best, but it's simply that it doesn't matter. It's part of a whole, and, unless we can make a new whole, with no so-called pain in it, there's no credit to a deeper insight in just kicking."
"I suppose it's because action of any kind always seems the stronger part. Rebellion, in some way, seems bigger than acceptance."
"Perhaps it is. The way an agnostic always seems to be a more independent thinker than the believer in a higher power, a God, or a Spirit, or any Force, you can't prove by logic. It seems as if a believer must have inherited his beliefs ready-made, as if he could not possibly have come to them by any real intellectual effort of his own."
"But the world is swinging back, it seems to me. Perhaps æons and æons ago we thought ourselves out of simplicity and now we're thinking ourselves back. Physicists are beginning to reduce all force to one energy and philosophers seem to be working round to the one spiritual impulse, love. I wonder whether after all we've left Christ and Confucius and Buddha far behind, or whether we haven't caught up."
"I wonder," Jean said thoughtfully. "And I suppose, till the end of time, we'll go on struggling to find out whether it's an impulse pushing up from within or whether it's a condition imposed from without; whether brotherly love is an ideal we can't quite attain or whether it's a law we can't escape."
"And then, perhaps, we'll begin all over again."
"No doubt we will." Jean pushed back her chair, and leaning for a moment with both palms spread on the table edge, smiled down at Jerome. "In the meantime, there are the piers."
Jerome did not move. "Let's not do them to-night. It's wonderful up here and 'a long, long time' the piers shall last."
"But I haven't another evening this week. And you go on your vacation the fifteenth, don't you? It would be great to cover them all by then."
Jerome frowned. "I suppose it would."
The mood was gone now, anyhow.