CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
"What are you doing, daddy?"
Gregory started, for Puck had come so lightly in her little rubber-soled sandals that he had not heard her.
"Making a house, Pucklets."
"Let me see." Puck spoke with Gregory's quiet determination, as if she always expected to have to hold out against some opposition. It sat oddly with her golden hair and the delicate oval of her face which were Margaret's.
"Well, look at it. See, that's the floor and these are the walls." Gregory moved so that Puck could come closer, but went on with his work.
"What's that?" A ridiculous duplicate of Margaret's forefinger pointed to a square separated from the main plan.
"That's a room."
"A room?"
"Surely. Look; there are the two windows and there's the door."
She made no comment and after a moment Gregory forgot her, standing so still, her chin just touching his shoulder.
"There isn't any top on that house," she announced suddenly. "It's a funny house. I don't like it."
At the same moment Margaret Allen appeared in the doorway.
"Why, Gregory, aren't you going to take her? It's after eleven now."
"Um." Gregory was making lines on a separate sheet and heard only the modulated run of the words. He rarely paid any conscious attention to Margaret's remarks in the making, because he could always come in on time at the end.
Puck looked from her father to her mother. Her under lip drew in as her mother's did when she was hurt, but it was with the man's straight look of facing a difficulty that she turned away.
"I guess daddy's too busy to play with Puck. The house hasn't got its roof on yet."
"Gregory! She's been looking forward to it so all week. Why, you're working!"
"What did you think I was doing?" Gregory looked up curiously; he so often felt as if she were the child and Puck the woman.
"I thought it was one of those water color things."
Gregory sometimes rested his eyes during these week-ends through the summer, sketching the woods and soft green fields. They were not bad sketches, but Margaret had no respect for them. Subconsciously she was jealous of them. They stood for something in Gregory that had escaped her. With more courage than any one gave her credit for, Margaret Allen had long ago buried her early belief in her husband's ability. She had been very sure when she married him, a year after his graduation from the Beaux Arts with honors, that he was going to be a rich and famous architect. Neither the fame nor the riches had come in spite of her early efforts to connect with people who could be of service. Nor later, when she had recognized the uselessness of trying to force Gregory along these paths, and turned her influence to taking a personal interest, which meant asking questions about technical details which she could not understand. The little water color sketches were like relics that Gregory had kept from the years before he knew her, and when he had gone back to the office on Monday mornings, and she came on a sketch among the scattered sheets of the Sunday paper, she felt almost as if it were the possession of some woman who had an illicit place in her husband's life.
Margaret bent over the plan.
"Greggy, did you get the Stevens house?"
Gregory watched her with a faint smile. She was very near, so that the same clean, sweet odor drifted to him as when he slipped his arm about Puck. The same little tendril, too slight to be a curl; brushed Margaret's neck just below her ear.
"But what on earth is that? Surely the Stevens aren't going to have a front like that?"
"Hardly. What's the good of making a fortune in five years if you don't write it all over the place?"
"What is it then?"
"Tubercular tenements."
"What?"
"It's a building where the poor, who either have or are going to have tuberculosis, can get as much air and light as the rich will let them."
"It sounds terribly socialistic."
"It's terribly individual."
Margaret straightened and locked down with a glance that reached him from the far citadel of pride to which she retreated when she was not sure whether he was making fun of her.
"Who's putting up the money? It's not just building itself, I suppose."
Gregory laughed outright, for he saw Dr. Mary and Jean and himself standing at the table, that first night six weeks ago.
"It's got to be raised yet."
"I don't see anything so amusing about that. It means that you're not sure of your fee, as far as I can see."
"Oh, I'm quite sure about that. There is no fee. I'm doing it for nothing."
"Well, I must say——" Margaret broke off. It was the one fixed principle of her relations with Gregory that they never had an open difference of opinion, especially before Puck. Above all things Margaret Allen was well bred and she could no more have cleared the atmosphere in a burst of anger than she could have struck some one. She never dynamited an obstacle with outspoken objection. She returned again and again and scratched at it.
"Is the contractor giving his time, and the laborers?"
Gregory was still looking off to the line of trees and smiling.
"It isn't started yet. But they may."
Margaret moved to the piazza rail and sat down. She was slight and so fair that she seemed part of the sunlight sifting through the thick green of the wistaria.
"Who's backing it? Somebody must be behind it all."
"Oh yes. There's some one very much behind it; in fact, two people."
It was impossible for Gregory to think of the plan without Dr. Mary—Dr. Mary and Jean and himself in Gramercy Park.
"There's Dr. Mary MacLean and Jean Herrick."
"What! Jean Herrick! The Charity Organization woman?"
"She works with the Charities. It's her scheme."
"Well!"
Words failed Margaret.
"Well what?"
"How long have you been working on them?"
"About six weeks. Yes, just about six weeks," he repeated, and went on with a detail of the entrance hall.
"Sometimes it seems to me that you do things to be deliberately annoying. Why didn't you say anything about it? You know I'm interested in public things like that, and besides The Fortnightly is going to take up housing and public dependents this winter. Mabel Dawson is down to get the first speaker, and we've talked over Jean Herrick a good deal."
"You have?" Gregory suddenly stopped working on the detail.
"She's becoming terribly popular, in the front line of everything, the last word in feminism and all that, you know. A lot of the most progressive clubs have her down for winter talks. But The Fortnightly has to be careful. We have a good many of the old families and we have to go slowly. Mrs. Herrick is extremely radical and speaks at labor meetings and strikes and all that kind of thing, you know. Besides, she's divorced."
Gregory's pencil jabbed a hole in the blue-print. "Is she?"
"Yes, one of the horrid kind." Margaret's tone separated divorces, tolerated some and excluded others. "Mabel wrote to a cousin in California to find out before we asked her. Goodness knows we're not straight-laced, but there are things one can't stand for officially. This Herrick was an artist, Mabel says, did futurist things before any one else heard of them and drank like a fish. He abused her shamefully, but she stood it as long as she could."
Gregory got up and pushed back his chair.
"But when he began to bring women right into the house, she left him. So of course it wasn't her fault. Mabel says she's a wonderful speaker, just a little masculine in her manner, but then such a life wouldn't make her specially clinging or gentle. We've about decided to have her."
Gregory closed the drawing board and Puck came hopefully to his side.
"You mustn't tease daddy, dear; he's busy."
Margaret moved toward the door and beckoned Puck. "Can you take her for just a little walk this afternoon, before the Dawsons come? They're going to bring Squdgy, you know." By raised eyebrows Margaret indicated the need of Puck's being perfectly happy before the arrival of Squdgy, whom she disliked and was apt to ignore completely.
Puck slipped her hand into her father's. The motion drew his notice.
"It's all right, Puckie, go and dress Lady Jane and I'll take you now."
"Do youreallywant us to take Lady Jane, daddy? I ought to take Matilda; Lady Jane went last week."
"Well, I'd rather have Lady Jane, because she knows the first half of the story already and I'd have to go all over it from the beginning for Matilda."
Puck sighed her relief and scampered off.
"Greg, don't tell her any of those terribly exciting things. You never seem to understand how highly strung she is. All last week she kept on giving the most terrible versions of that bear story to Lady Jane. You don't realize what an imagination she's got."
"Thank God," Gregory snapped, and wished that Margaret would sometimes give him an excuse to be as rude as he felt.
Out in the woods, with Puck trotting by his side, Gregory tried to push the picture Margaret had brought before him into the cool shade of the trees. But, in the shortest interludes of Puck's silence, it was there before him again, hot and glaring and tawdry: Jean Herrick, married to a libertine. A man who, in sottish sensuality, turned from one woman to another. And she had "stood it,"—that ghastly compromise of weak women—until it had passed beyond bounds.
It was impossible. And yet what did he know of women?
There had been that one grisette in Paris, who had embarrassed him so by calling his smile "un petit oiseau." A single month's mildest flirtation with a pretty stenographer, who was more like a mischievous boy than a girl. And Margaret. He had married Margaret because she was so different from the grisette and, yet, when he had put his arms round Margaret for the first time, and she turned her sweet, unresponsive lips to his, he had wanted to crush her, hurt her in some way, just as he had once wanted to choke the grisette. As Margaret wasn't a grisette, Gregory had believed the big love of his life had come. Afterwards the need of making his place in the world had claimed him. And, now, occasional moods he dispelled with extra work and Puck.
Margaret had always told him he was interested in nothing that he could not draw, and did not know what was going on in the world. Perhaps women were part of the "things going on." Perhaps he was old-fashioned. Perhaps it was a puritanical streak, this intense repulsion to thinking of Jean married to a drunken libertine. It would not have been a happy memory, but Gregory could imagine a dozen men he knew, himself even, living down such a memory, doing useful work in spite of an unfaithful, drunken wife put out of their lives. How did he know but that——
"Dad-dy,didthe bears get the children?"
Gregory came back to a realization that Puck had been asking this for some time.
"No, the bears did not get them, Puck; not in the end, but they had a hard time of it."
Puck's eyes blackened with suppressed excitement. It had a startling effect, had excitement on Puck. It was like an acid that ate out all her resemblance to Margaret, obliterated the softness of outline, seemed to devour even the delicate tints of her coloring. Excitement brought Puck up the years to meet him, sent him racing backward to her.
"Oh, I wassofrightened they'd get all eaten up and left out there without their mothers and daddies knowing where they was."
Her hand clutched Gregory's, and her other arm protected the beloved Lady Jane.
"Lady Jane's been terrible frightened, too. I couldn't get her to sleep last night, not for a long, long time."
"Dear me, that's too bad. I guess we'll have to settle the matter right now."
Gregory sat on the ground under a huge chestnut and filled his pipe. Puck curled close, cautioning Lady Jane to be "very, most perticular still," and Gregory began a rambling sequel to the tale of the Three Bears. Behind the Three Bears—Jean stood with Herrick.
They were late for luncheon, but Margaret made no comment. Puck did not look over-excited and Gregory was in one of his silent moods. Margaret wanted to ask him details about the Tubercular Tenements, and Gregory knew, by her mole-like burrowings about the subject, that she was pleased with his connection. In a way he could not unravel, it was connected with a new wing some millionaire friend of Mabel Dawson's had just donated to St. Luke's hospital in memory of a dead baby.
As soon as lunch was over, Margaret and Puck went to take a nap before the coming of the Dawsons, and Gregory took the detail his walk with Puck had interrupted, out to the hammock under the maple. But the lines grouped themselves to pictures of the last six weeks and he did nothing. Six weeks! For the first time, Gregory blocked the period out of the past and the incredible richness of it startled him.
Six weeks, forty-two days since he had come two hours late to his appointment with Mrs. Herrick of the C.O.S. and wondered whether she did not sometimes pose. Six weeks since he had gone with her to the meeting and heard the rumbling of the world below the safety of his own conventional social strata. Only six weeks since he had again begun to feel the stirring of the old dreams that he had believed dead. So that now, after he left Jean in the evenings, it was hard sometimes to remember that the plans they discussed were not things he was actually doing, instead of the things he had forgotten he had ever hoped to do.
At five the Dawsons came. Mabel and Margaret retired to the end of the piazza, Squdgy was unloaded upon Puck, who obediently took him off to the play-house, and Bill Dawson, fat, moist, as bored by Gregory as Gregory was by him, did his best to start a conversation. Gregory wished he could follow Puck's example with Squdgy and give Bill a picture book. He listened, however, as well as he could, to the perspiring stockbroker's denunciation of Socialism and all "this fashionable parlor radicalism," politely assisted him to a plank of personal reminiscence and prophecy, and, with a breath of relief, saw him presently fall off the plank into the stock exchange, where he let him wallow happily in his native medium.
He was still in it, when the maid wheeled out the tea-wagon and Margaret and Mabel came to join them. Gregory knew by the look in Mabel's eyes that this was the first time Margaret had ever come in under the wire first, and, by the new respect with which she treated him, that the tenements linked him favorably with the great civic achievements of The Fortnightly, Puck brought Squdgy, delivered him to his mother as if he were a sacrifice and climbed into Gregory's lap. Nor could any frowns or suggestions that "big girls sit in chairs" dislodge her.
At last tea was over and the Dawsons went, Bill leading with the now sleeping Squdgy in his arms, Mabel and Margaret sauntering behind. They passed down the lane and disappeared. The gold in the sky dissolved to palest yellow and faint green. Crickets chirped. The earth, freshened by the coming coolness, threw back to the world, in spicy sweetness, the garnered heat of the day. Puck slept in his arms.
In the kitchen the maid finished the dishes and went across the creeping dusk to the next house. Snatches of laughter came to him and he saw the two girls come out and sit on the back steps. In a few moments the chauffeur from the big house up the road joined them, and they all went off together.
Gregory carried Puck in and laid her on her bed. Then he went into the library and switched on the light. He spread the blue-print and began again on the delayed detail. It was the last touch to the plans, and he had promised to bring it with him to-morrow night. But the weight of the day just passed pressed down upon him, and ideas came slowly. Margaret had been long in bed, when he finally drew the last line and turned out the light.