CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The summer passed. Once in September Gregory came on a flying business trip and left the next day.
Winter closed early with a jealous grip, and Jean worked as even she had never worked before. She managed committees, lobbied bills, spoke at meetings and drove her plans through all opposition.
Dr. Mary was busy with her final thesis. Evening after evening Jean and Martha sat reading quietly as they had done in the old days, and Martha was happy.
Just before Christmas Gregory came unexpectedly, solely to see Jean. They went out to the French roadhouse where he had ordered dinner by a wire to Madam Cateau.
It was a Christmas dinner. The table was already laid in their old room, when he threw open the door and ushered Jean in with a flourish.
"Merry Christmas."
He closed the door and would have taken Jean in his arms, but the look in her eyes stopped him.
"Why, Jean, what is it?"
For Jean stood staring at the table and fighting desperately not to cry.
"I—thought——"
Jean turned and buried her face on his shoulder.
"What is it, dear? Can't you tell me?"
Jean fought fiercely to stop, but she wanted to shriek, to laugh, to let down utterly, to sob out all the hurt, the suppression of the last ten months, close in Gregory's arms. And all the time, at the back of her brain, her burning eyes pressed into Gregory's coat, she saw the gay little table with the wine glasses and the white chrysanthemums and the ridiculous turkey, with the foolish paper frills about its brown legs.
Gregory held her gently, stroking her hair and wondering what had happened. For he had expected Jean to be as surprised and delighted as he had been when the idea occurred to him.
Slowly Jean's nerves relaxed and the sobs lessened. She must be happy now, while they were together. In a few hours Gregory would be gone and if she spoiled these hours there would be nothing, not even the memory, in the months ahead.
Jean raised her head and smiled. Gregory smiled too with a warm little feeling deep inside for this sudden, unexpected weakness.
"Whatever was the matter, Jean girl?"
"Nothing—only—I was wishing—we could have—Christmas and—we've got it."
Gregory laughed so that down in the kitchen Madam Cateau heard and laughed, too.
"Of all things to cry about! Because you get something you want. I'm glad it doesn't affect me that way." He punctuated the words with kisses and then, lifting her bodily, carried her across the room and put her down at the table, a little out of breath with the effort.
"You're no feather-weight, Lady of My Dreams. Or maybe I am hungry."
It was a good dinner and Gregory enjoyed it, although they had to hurry at the end to get back to the city in time for him to catch his train.
Jean waited behind the iron grill until the train pulled out and she could no longer distinguish Gregory waving his hand from the Observation. Alone she turned into the months ahead.
Weeks of waiting, snatching, losing, waiting again. Years broken by flying visits, some longer, some shorter. No calm, no peace, no sureness. Their lives would touch, run close for a few hours, a few days at most, and part. No foothold, no smallest spot their own, no door they could close against every one but each other. And it would always be like this. The happiness of the moment must be clutched, until the force of the holding almost strangled it to death, just as to-day's dinner had done.
It would go on and on. Their meetings would grow more and more the result of circumstances, be wedged in the unfilled places between the world's demands.
She would fill her days, fuller and fuller, to keep the thought of Gregory away. She would do bigger and bigger things, and people would speak more and more admiringly of her. While she struggled not to wonder when Gregory was coming again!
Or he might never come again. An accident in the lives of either might separate them forever. Gregory might be called to the ends of the earth and she could not follow. He would go with Margaret and Puck and she would remain behind.
They would grow older. They would hold to the small, common interests of each other's lives by an effort. A little while, and they would no longer talk of this person and that without elaborate explanations. Gregory's little sketches of people she did not know would grow meaningless. Their lives would run two paralleled streams, mingling only in the moments snatched together. And what would these moments hold? No shared interests, no mingled hopes. Their hands and lips would cling, on to the very end, because something in Gregory would always call and something, beyond her brain or will, would always answer.
The white face of a clock peered at Jean through the snow. It was almost twelve. After all, she would have to go home some time.
The holidays passed and a new year began. Jean took long walks through the snow and believed, sometimes, when she came back tired and hungry, that she had left the tangle behind. There were moments when, whipped by the cold to an almost drunken ecstasy of health, the old sureness returned. Her love and Gregory's was clean and big, like the open, eternal as the earth.
But the snow went.
It grew warm again on the upland, cool in the hollows, as on the days she and Gregory had stolen two springs before. Jean battled to hold her peace but it slipped from her as the grass pricked the earth again and buds swelled on the branches.
She proposed a national campaign to awaken interest in other states, and link the women of the country in a common bond. But, while she listened to the applause that greeted her first suggestion, she heard beyond it the wailing gramophone wrapping the rebellious Mattie and her mother in sensuous peace. She worked until far into the night on this new project, but the old apple trees rustled in the orchard and dogs barked from farm to farm across the fields. She went to special luncheons to meet important people, but Uncle John was always there, eating his porridge in the blue willow bowl. And at night, when she lay alone in the dark, too weary with the crowded days to sleep, there was always a baby's dark, fuzzy head and wet, groping lips. Jean tried to push it away, but it would not go. In the morning, when the coffee-grinders set the world in motion, it was always there, smiling and pummeling with its fists.
And in the end, Jean let it have its way.
It came and went with her, at home, in the office and to Mary's.
Jean thought of Amelia Gorman and the gray house on the windy hills. If she had a child, nothing ever again could shut her off from the current of life. It was the only real thing in all the world. It was the past and the future down to the end of time.
Jean weighed the price. A child of hers and Gregory's against a national congress of strangers. Any one of a dozen other women could manage that, but her job, her very own job, no one else could do. Before the miracle of her own power Jean was humble.
A strange new softness came over her, so that Martha wondered, but Mary referred to it outright, one night during her last week in New York when they sat talking before the open window as they had not done for months, with Madame la Marquise budding to youth before them.
"Jean Herrick, I wish to goodness you'd stop looking like a large blonde angel, just about to fly beyond mortal ken. It makes me feel a hundred years old, and as if I hadn't accomplished a single thing the whole time I've been here."
Jean laughed. "I'm sorry that I look like such a foolish thing as a large, blonde angel, but I'd rather you felt a hundred than I, Mary."
"But I'm not stuck on it myself, Jean."
"Then don't. It's all in the mind, anyhow. No one needs to grow old."
"Piffle. There's a lot of rubbish talked like that these days. There's no need to grow grumpy and useless, but, after all, we can't turn back the hands of the clock. We do grow out of one possibility into another—and they don't come back either."
Jean shrank a little, as if Mary had touched the glowing spot inside.
"Then—live every possibility up to the hilt and take the next."
"Logical and doubtless true. But I wish you wouldn't look so much as if your next was an ascent straight into Heaven. It makes me feel old—and a little lonely, Jean."
"Don't, Mary; please don't, I don't want you to feel like that."
"Oh, it's not as bad as all that. But, really, Jean, I never did think of the difference in our ages until lately. We always seemed to be walking along at the same gait, but these last few weeks you look as if you had been doing it out of politeness, and if you really wanted to you could pick up your skirts—and run forever."
"I do feel like that, Mary; exactly as if I had wings."
Dr. Mary looked up, but the joke on her lips did not come. There was a short pause and then Jean said:
"Mary, I'm going to tell you something that I believe I've wanted to tell you for a long time."
And she did, looking out over the Park while Dr. Mary sat silent.
Jean went back to the beginning, to the sense of a fuller world because Gregory was in it. Calm and unashamed, she spared nothing.
"I was glad when you went away, Mary. It was wonderful having this place, like a home all our own. And then you came back." Jean smiled, thinking of the tragedy of the discovered vegetables, and how miserable she had been.
She told of sending Martha away, of Gregory's going to Maine, and of her own readjustment toward Margaret and Puck; of Gregory's winning the contest, his removal to Chicago and of the long months since, trying to hold intact the beauty of their love, through hurried meetings, flying trips, moods of forced gayety clutched tight against the force of circumstance always tearing them apart. And the terrible white light of logic illuminating the end.
"It will come, Mary; it must. I can see it like a wall, standing there at the end of—one year, two, five perhaps. But—it will end."
For the first time Jean's voice shook. Nor was Mary's steady as she said, after a long pause:
"But you'vehadit, Jean. Nothing can take it away."
Jean shook her head. "I know, Mary. But that's like the rubbish that's talked about not growing old. It's the theory of those who have never had a thing—that the memory of it can be enough."
Dr. Mary winced and lit a cigarette. "Maybe it is."
"When you've had a thing and—it goes—you have two pains, because the memory and the happiness hurts as much as not having it any more. And then—there's a third—the nothingness of everything else. That's the worst, that awful, dead emptiness, where nothing counts and you just go on because there's not even the will to stop. And the terrible, empty future."
"But he isn't dead, Jean. And you have your work. You can write, and even if you can't be always together, there——"
"I know. Those things are a lot when they're a part, but they're nothing at all when they're all. I have less even than Margaret has. Yes, less even than that. She has the shell and I have the kernel, but the kernel has to have its own shell or it dies. No marriage certificate in the world could make her really his wife, but no blindness in the world can keep our love what it is really—like this. I don't believe that society invented marriage because a man wanted to keep one woman as his property or because women wanted to be supported. They were just groping blindly to keep love alive, to bind it fast, that biggest, freest thing in all the world, and keep it safe for itself."
"Well, they've made a sad mess of it."
"I know. They didn't mean to build a prison, but they have. Some day there will be no state or church locking people in—but there will always be walls around real love—like ours. It makes its own and grows stronger and stronger behind them. And when it can't, it just withers and dies and—there's nothing left. I can't have it that way, Mary, I can't. I can't watch it grow less, and I know it will—and I can't shut it out forever. There is only one way, Mary—I want a child—terribly."
Dr. Mary dropped her cigarette so that it smoldered into the rug and burned a small, black hole.
"But, Jean——"
"I know, Mary. I've thought it out—everything, every single thing. I won't lose my job, because, of course, I shall give it up. I'll go away. I shall have to lie, right and left and all the time. I shall lie to the world and I shall lie to mummy. That will be the hardest, lying to mummy. But it would kill her, and I don't want to hurt mummy, but I am not going to let her stop my life, withhold the biggest thing in it. No one has a right to do that. It ismylife andmyjob, Mary; the job of every woman when she really loves a man. And nothing else matters."
The little doctor gulped twice, and rapped out:
"Then go ahead and have it."
Jean slipped to the floor and laid her head on the other's knees.
"Mary, do you think—I'm—very——"
"No, Jean, I don't. I'm—I'm green with envy."
The tears ran down the doctor's cheeks and she made no effort to wipe them away.
After a while Jean looked up.
"I'm going to write to Gregory and tell him. I don't want to see him—till he knows."
Dr. Mary snuffled. "Here endeth the Congress."
Jean smiled. "Mary, a dozen other women can run the Congress and I don't give a whoop who goes on with it. Josephine Grimes can take it over if she likes."
Through the tears the blue eyes twinkled.
"Jean, you're the—most glorious—fool in the world—and I'd like to shake you."