CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
"What on earth is the matter with you to-night? You look as if you had lost your last friend and been evicted for non-payment of rent." Jean was leaning back in her usual chair to the right of the window, drawn just far enough to keep in view the tops of the trees, beyond sight of the dry, trodden grass. Her chin tilted, she looked at him sidewise, laughing.
All day, at every interval not crowded with work, Gregory had been pushing the thought of Herrick away. The need to do this had filled him with a vague anger at Jean, and he had not intended coming to-night. But the evening had stretched so empty before him that he had come, and now he was angry that he had.
"Cheer up, it can't be as bad as all that," Jean bantered.
The words jarred and the tone annoyed him. "I beg your pardon. I didn't realize that I was so terribly glum."
He spoke with a stilted conventionality that made Jean glance at him quickly. The smile went out of her eyes. She wished she had not spoken.
A silence fell between them, unusual in its artificiality. Jean tried to think of something impersonal to say, but there had never been anything effortful in these hours with Gregory and the present need made her uncomfortable. After all, a thousand incidents of which she knew nothing might have happened to depress him. He had spent the week-end with his family. The hinterland of Gregory's life came close, and Jean felt that she had intruded.
The silence deepened. Jean wished that Mary would come. She thought of getting a book, of finishing a report that she had begun, of going into the kitchen. But she never picked up a book when she and Gregory were together, nor finished office details, nor looked after Mamie in the kitchen. And this feeling that she must move, get away from Gregory, break the silence, filled her with an almost physical uneasiness. This sudden need to move beyond the reach of some tangible element in the silence, frightened her. So that Gregory, turning unexpectedly, surprised a strange, unusual look on Jean's face, that made the conventional remark he had finally succeeded in capturing unnecessary. Jean, too, was in a new mood to-night.
The silence tingled with something that Gregory felt must always have been in it. Something was pushing into the foreground, from its seclusion in the carefree weeks behind. The need to know definitely about Herrick was there before him at last. He could admit Herrick or exclude him. For a moment he had the choice, and then Jean said:
"I am afraid Rachael is going to be ill. She looked like a ghost to-day."
"What?" Gregory leaned forward, peering through the words to Jean's purpose in uttering them.
"They are getting dissatisfied. Things are not moving fast enough. And Rachael is very tired."
Jean seized Rachael and dragged her forward, held her there between herself and Gregory.
Gregory slouched back in his chair.
"That's too bad. I suppose it's the heat."
"No, it's more than that. Tom is pestering her. If she gives up, the whole thing will go under."
There was a silence.
"Do you think it very much matters after all? It's a pretty big price you want her to pay."
The words brought a picture of Herrick on the night he had kissed her and she had locked the door of their room. Jean moved as if to get up, but her own motion drove back the memory, cleared her brain and forced Herrick's hot eyes into the past.
"When personal need reaches the depths it has in Rachael," Gregory said slowly, "it becomes cosmic."
"That sounds like fatalism."
Gregory looked at her quietly. What had been her own need, when she had married Herrick? What had been his, when he had married Margaret?
"It's all so unreal when it's over, but——"
And then Mary was in the doorway laughing.
"Well, of all the gloomy-looking objects!"
The words exploded in the narrowing space between them. Smiling, Jean dragged herself up from her chair. "We're so hungry we're perishing."
Why did she say that?
But Gregory too was glad Mary had come.
"We weren't gloomy. We were thinking—a process quite unknown to you, Doctor."
"Absolutely. Mine's action." Mary threw her things on the couch but did not sit down. Her eyes twinkled. Her whole plump person emanated mystery.
"Mary, what have you got up your sleeve? You're just about ready to burst with it."
"Well, it's not so bad, but it needs the accompaniment of food. Mamie!"
"Dinner's ready."
"Come on. I'll tell you when we reach the demitasses."
Nor could she be persuaded or trapped into a statement until the table was cleared for coffee and cigarettes. Then she said:
"Dr. Fenninger is in town."
"Mary! Not really!"
"Yes, he is. I met him to-night in the Subway."
"Who is Fenninger? The Great Poohbah?"
"Just about, as far as we are concerned. He prescribes bread pills for every exhausted society woman in town and diagnoses the indigestions of millionaires at a thousand per. Jean, do you think mummy would get up a dinner for him? He's going to be in town a week. We won't tell her how important he is, just that he is alone in town, family away, 'simple little home dinner, you know,' 'just ourselves in summer,' 'impromptu,' 'home atmosphere,' and so forth."
"I think she would. I'll ask her."
"But why does this man get asked to dinner because he prescribes bread pills for society women?"
"Have you forgotten that we have to raise funds for the T.B.'s? Now, does light glimmer?"
"Not a glimmer."
"It's this way," Jean explained. "We invite him to dinner, very expensive and elaborate and described as a simple little home affair. We make him very comfortable and mention the tenements. We go on eating and mentioning gradually. By the time we get to the black coffee he believes he thought up the whole thing; gives us a check—but that doesn't matter so much—is pledged by his own masculine conceit to prescribe an interest in raising funds to every bored patient he has. By the time The Tea comes off, there you are."
"Well! Of all the round-about, feminine methods of procedure, that takes the cake. Just explain to Mrs. Norris that there will be two extra guests. I wouldn't miss it for anything."
"Yes you will. Because you're not asked. Nothing like that. Home atmosphere to a man means himself. We'll tell you about it, but that's as near as he'll get, isn't it, Jean?"
Jean laughed. "I'm afraid it is. We may be able to work Fenninger in on mummy, but she's heard about you and thinks you're a frightfully important person. It would scare her stiff to have you to dinner."
"Give her another name, anything. I've got to be in at the death."
"Besides," Mary interposed, "we'll have it on Sunday—best set for lonely man in city without his family, dismal Sunday, etc."
"Well?" Gregory's eyes met Jean's for a second.
"You couldn't come on Sunday. You—won't be here."
There was an imperceptible pause, and then Gregory said quietly:
"No, in that case, I can't."
In a few moments they left the table and went back to the living-room. But Gregory did not sit down again. He moved restlessly about the room, reading bits out of magazines which he picked up at random under pretense of trying to find an article he had seen the week before.
A little after nine he said he was tired, and had work to do at the office. When he had gone Mary turned to Jean.
"Well, of all the extraordinary manifestations! What on earth is the matter with the man?"
"How should I know? Nothing, probably."
"Rubbish. He got all fussed up and peevish about something. Do you suppose he was really hurt that we wouldn't let him in on the dinner?"
"No, of course not. Besides, how could he come? He always goes home over the week-end."
"I know. But there was something. I never saw him act like that before."
"Oh, men are likely to do anything. They're—they're so inconsequent."
Jean wondered what she meant, as she lit a cigarette and took the chair facing out to the tree tops.
But later in the evening, when they were not talking of Gregory at all, Mary said suddenly.
"Jean, do you suppose we'd better make it some other day? Sunday is the best, but I wouldn't like Gregory to be really hurt."
"Nonsense, Mary. Of course Sunday is the best day. No. Let's leave it that way."
But she too left earlier than usual.
As Gregory Allen walked slowly uptown in the hot night, he was aware that something decisive had happened. Some thread, carried over from the moments alone with Jean before dinner had snapped, when Jean said:
"You couldn't come on Sunday."
All through these summer weeks, he had felt alone with Jean. But the conditions of his life, his home, his wife, his child, his obligations, which had entered not at all into his consciousness, must have been present to her all the time. She did not think of him as a separate human unit, in the way he thought of her. He was married. He had obligations. He conformed to the conventional social usage. Married men went home over the week-ends. Therefore it was impossible for him to be present at the dinner. Jean had not for a moment seriously considered the possibility of his doing it. And he would have, gladly. He would have broken the habit of years. He would have stayed the two stifling days in town. He would have done this thing if Jean had not said:
"You won't be here."
Why would he have done it? Why did he want so much to go?
Again and again Gregory cut through the tangle of false explanations and reached this point. But beyond it he would not go.
"Oh, the devil!" Gregory turned at Forty-Second, passed the Subway station and continued on to his office.
The elevator had stopped running and he walked the three flights. The last mail lay on his desk as the office boy had stacked it. On the top, anchored by a paper weight so that he would be sure to see it instantly, was a telegram. Gregory tore it open. It was from Amos Palmer, asking him to come at once. The Palmers were hastening their departure for Europe and wanted some changes made in the plans.
For weeks the Palmer place had been a joke with him and Jean and Dr. Mary. They had taken turns in designing terrible ornamentations which would advertize for miles Palmer's success in the leather trade. Dr. Mary had insisted on a golden shoe for a weather-cock on the ten thousand dollar barn, and Jean had suggested carving cattle all over a turret. Gregory smiled as he recalled Jean's painful efforts with the cow.
It was the biggest job he had had for years. But—the remaining month of summer shut up with Amos and his wife and the ten-thousand-dollar barn.
"I'll be damned if I——"
Gregory stopped, sat down at his desk and lit his pipe. He smoked one pipe and lit another. Again and again he filled his pipe, lit, and smoked slowly.
It was very late when he took down the 'phone and sent an affirmative telegram to Amos Palmer.
Then he looked up trains. There was one at eight in the morning. Gregory wrote a note of explanation to Margaret and laid it on the mail to be sent out first in the morning. Then he took a sheet of paper, started a note to Jean, tore it and began one to Dr. Mary. When he read it over it sounded as if he were apologizing for going at all. He tore this and tried again. Now he seemed to be asking permission. This followed the others to the waste-basket and Gregory locked his desk. There was really no need to write at all. They would understand that he had been called away, and anyhow the plans were finished. When he returned, things would be different. Summer would be over. Gregory whistled as he packed the Palmer plans, and all the way down the three flights to the street.
It was after one, but the crowds still moved in four streams, two up, two down. Gregory wondered why so many people walked in the night, as if the city, like a nervous woman, must never be left alone.