CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Spring was late, but when it came, it came with a rush. In a day, the trees swelled in buds and blades of grass pricked the frozen earth. Jean woke one morning, late in April, to the feeling of a new force in the world and in herself. It was as if she had been walking through a tunnel, and now, unexpectedly, stepped into the light. Time had somehow slipped its leash; it no longer strained behind but ran forward. Jean jumped out of bed and went through the morning exercises that she had neglected for weeks. Raising and lowering herself on her toes, she drew in deep breaths of the spring air and with every breath the last two months receded, the future brightened, until, her whole body glowing, Jean came to a final halt, planted firmly on both feet.
She entered the dining-room humming, so that Martha, who was shirring eggs in the kitchen, poked her head through the swing door, as if she expected to see a stranger.
"Why, Jean!"
"Why, mummy!"
Martha smiled. "All the problems in the universe must be solved this morning."
"Not exactly. But I confess they don't seem quite so hopeless. I guess it's the spring. Who could be altogether miserable on a morning like this? In the spring tra la!"
Martha went back to the eggs. Such a sudden change of mood was beyond her, for it was weeks since Jean had come humming to breakfast and, although Martha had said nothing, she had worried. But there had been nothing to worry about, since Jean could hum because the sun shone and the earth-smell came through the open windows. Martha wondered why intelligent people gave way to moods, when they must know what a little thing in the end would dispel them.
At the office Jean found a letter from Gregory. It was the longest she had had and the writing of it had stretched over a week.
"It's the only way to do," Gregory wrote, "because if I don't, things pile up to tell you until there are so many I can't tackle them all. Sometimes I want to get right on the train and come over, when something very good happens. And it's just the same when something bad happens, so you see I want you pretty much all the time."
At this point, Jean rang for Josephine Grimes and told her there would be no dictation ready until eleven. When Josephine had gone, Jean locked the door.
"I don't care if it is silly. I have to be sensible enough the rest of the time."
Jean came back to the desk and read and re-read Gregory's letter until she felt that they had been together through the days of its writing. They were interesting days, filled from morning until night with new impressions and new people.
"At first it felt queer and unreal, to have millionaire pork packers and mayors and things like that consulting my convenience. I felt about the way Puck does, just before Galatea comes to life. Not that I want to convey that a pork packer is like a Greek statue. It felt like this——"
Here followed a marginal drawing of himself standing before a group of pedestals at various angles of motion, but the flagstone on which he stood was anchored at the four corners with the words,I did win the contest.
"I'm afraid I'm getting too cocky about winning, as if I had done it all by myself, when it was you, more than half. Yes, it was, and you needn't smile as I am positive you are doing, and insist it was all my great ability. Of course I have ability, tons of it. Does that satisfy you? But when I look back now on the hopeless, dreamless creature you rescued, I want—well, I never claimed to be any good at words, and even drawing fails me here. I want you close. I want your arms round me and that glorious cool hair hiding all but your eyes. Why do you come so often, dear, just at dawn, and wake me that way, as you did that first morning at Morrison's? It was just about a year ago, wasn't it? Maybe that's why I've been thinking of them lately, or maybe it's because you came every morning last week. You shameless, brazen——" Here was the figure that he usually drew instead of writing her name, the Roman tower with the shaft of sunlight across the top.
The division for that day stopped here and the next was about some changes in the plans that he had decided to make. The description was brief and technical but Jean knew the old design so well that she could reconstruct it without an effort. Evidently he had been interrupted, for he broke off short and when he began again it was about Puck. Puck was delighted with Chicago and as far as he could judge it was because she would never again have to be nice to Squdgy.
"I believe Squdgy was your Dr. Fenninger and my Amos Palmer to her. I hadn't any idea that she really disliked him so much. Funny little entities children are, changing right under your eyes every minute. Sometimes she looks like this and the next day she's this."
Jean's lips quivered. How closely he must observe Puck! It hurt in a way and yet it made her very tender, too.
There was no direct mention of Margaret but in the last division, written the day before, Gregory said that she need not think New York was doing everything. Chicago had an institution, a group rather, whose motto was The Ultimate End.
"So what's the good of fiddling with any little by-products of social uplift or religion? Fascinatingly logical, isn't it? You dive straight at The End. It's the weirdest yet, a lot more simple than garbage or the Divine Mind."
And Jean could see Margaret, slim and blonde and graceful, diving to The Ultimate End.
There was only one sentence more.
"From the way things look now, I believe I can make it before the fifteenth. So 'put your house in order.'"
Jean folded the letter and laid it in the drawer with the others. Then she called Miss Grimes and dictated steadily for two hours.
Ten days later, Jean took down the receiver to hear Gregory's familiar: "Hello! You see I made it."
"So I see. But where are you?"
"At the Grand Central, where you will be in about ten minutes—unless you want me to come over."
"No. I'll come down."
Afterwards they laughed, but at the time there had seemed nothing else to say.
Gregory stayed three days. Two of his business appointments and one of Jean's took part of their time, and made it impossible for them to go to Morrison's as Jean had hoped they would be able to do. But she tried not to think of it, and held firmly to what they had.
During these two days the feeling Jean had so often experienced in the past, of having to beat through an outer covering to get at the real Gregory underneath, was gone. At moments, Jean felt as if some subtle atomic process had taken place, regrouping the elements of the man, without changing them in their nature, but re-combining them in such a way that the effect produced was quite different. But it was not a permanent feeling, or rather, it was true only at times. In the close hours of the second afternoon, which they spent at Madam Cateau's, there was no room for analysis in the content that held them, and Jean felt that Gregory had never been away at all. But coming back, he told her of a possible commission, the first that had come through his new connection, and Jean felt the difference again sharply. And simply because it was a change, Jean resented it until her sense of justice and humor conquered. She had always known and believed Gregory had it in him to do big things and now that he was proving it she had a queer feeling of hollowness inside.
"You're going to be disgustingly successful, Gregory. You ooze it already."
"Do you mean that I really act conceited?" He asked it with such desire to be answered honestly that Jean laughed.
"I didn't say that. Of course you don't. But you—let me see how to put it. Here, give me a pencil, maybe I can draw it."
Gregory watched with a grin while Jean constructed figures unknown to geometry.
"Words are clumsy, I grant, but those things! Which is the 'is' and which the 'was'?"
"That's the 'was.' It's one of the Egyptian pyramids, with curlycues. Those are the moods when the spirit inside got away from you."
"And the 'is'?"
"That's a geometric eagle."
"With the curlycues become audible in one horrible screech."
"That isn't his mouth open. It's his under-beak where the pencil slipped."
"That's better. You had me quite scared." Gregory took back the paper and pencil and Jean's hands with them. "For which I am going to punish you."
Again and again, in the soft dusk, under the budding elm, he kissed her, and then he held her close and they did not speak at all.
When they began walking again they were serious.
"You see, Jean, you don't really know how it feels, because you never quit on the game as I did. I did honestly believe that it was all over for me and that I was never going to get anywhere. I felt like a little cog in a huge machine, whose place could be taken by any other little cog just as well. That's a damnable feeling. I felt at the mercy of whatever power kept the machine going."
"But we are all cogs, in a way."
"Look out. You'll be an Ultimate Ender yet."
"Is being a cog the ultimate end of everything?"
"Something like it. We are all specks in a cosmos that's more complicated than a Chinese puzzle. You reincarnate and reincarnate for millions of cycles, and when you get through you're only a sphere with a face in the middle. Did you know that? Your spiritual you, when it's been perfected through a billion æons is going to be a kind of gas bag with features in the center. The latest discoveries in all occultism prove it."
Jean laughed. "I believe I'll stop off half way. The Ultimate End doesn't appeal to me."
"I'll stop off in that place, too,——" Gregory did not finish, and Jean did not ask him what he had been going to say. Hand in hand they walked along, until they came in sight of the brightly lit station.
"It's been a glorious afternoon, hasn't it?"
Jean nodded.
On the next night, which was the last of Gregory's stay, they had dinner at The Fiesole. Jean did not want to go there, but when Gregory proposed it, she could think of no good reason and so they went. Gregory filled their glasses, and across the raised rim of his, smiled to Jean.
"Amos Palmer!"
"To the Turkish lanterns and Japanese wind-bells!"
And Rachael. Should she say it? It was such a long, long time ago. Jean did not know whether Gregory remembered that the night he had told her of Amos and the pergola, was the night they had gone to Rachael's. What a big thing it had seemed at the time and now it was so little. Was the course of all human relationships just that—a series of steps, from one desperate need, to a temporary peace, and then on to another need? Did one never come to a lasting peace, a flat, restful spot with no more steps? Or did one just step off at last into nothingness?
"What is it? Are you yearning for Japanese wind-bells and an electric pergola?"
"Was I looking like that?"
"Rather abstracted, Jeany. And——" Gregory was on the point of adding—"and this is our last night," but changed it. They both knew that well enough. So he said: "And besides it's rude."
"I was just wondering whether she has outgrown the pergola yet or whether Amos is still happy."
"I don't know. I saw in some paper not long ago that an English Duke was one of the guests on a yachting trip with Mr. and Mrs. Amos Palmer. From what I know of the Duke's reputation—Good-by wind-bells and maybe Amos."
They kept the talk at this level until they had almost finished dinner. Then, in spite of their efforts to hold the mood, it slipped from them. Brief silences fell, which were hastily dispelled as soon as either one could think of something to say, sufficiently unimportant. But they came again, until at last Jean made no effort to escape them, and Gregory sat rolling breadcrumbs in the old way and frowning into the tablecloth.
He did not know when he could come again. The months ahead were going to be busy ones and he would have to snatch an interlude when he could. And yet, going without the definite point of a return, left these days unfinished. He wished Jean would ask him.
But Jean said nothing. If Gregory knew he would tell her and if he did not know she did not want to be told that this, for which she would wait alone, week after week, as she had waited, was to be left to chance, thrust into an unfilled moment.
"Let's walk to the station, up Second Avenue and across, I haven't been down this way for ages." There was an hour yet before train time and Jean knew that she could not sit here, filling the lessening hour with nonsense and silences.
"All right." Gregory signaled the waiter and paid the bill. He was disappointed, but what had he expected? He did not know. He only knew that he had not thought of spending their last hour sauntering among pushcarts. But if that was enough for Jean——And he succeeded so well that Jean's heart grew heavier and heavier and she kept back the tears only by a desperate effort.
But when the reality of separation detached itself in a concrete crowd, in long lines waiting before the ticket windows, the starter booming the trains through a megaphone, and the red-cap who hurried up for Gregory's grip, Jean's pride slipped beyond her hold. She stared ahead and her lips trembled. His arm slipped under hers and drew her closer.
"Jean," he whispered. "Jean, dear." His fingers closed about her bare wrist above the glove.
The hand of the huge clock jerked itself forward another minute. And there was nothing to say. Less than if they had been strangers. With another jerk, the hand touched ten. Gregory dropped Jean's arm. Without a word he hurried through the gate and it closed behind him.