"Well, my dear," said my mother, "we shall miss you."
"Oh," I said, "I've given it up. I'm not going."
As she had said that she would miss me, this answer ought to have given my mother unmixed pleasure. It didn't seem to. She smiled upon me with the greatest affection, and at the same time looked troubled.
"When you came into my room this morning your mind was definitely made up. Has anything happened?"
"Only that I've changed my mind. Aiken is too nice to leave."
"I sometimes think," said my mother, "that the life you lead is narrowing. At your age, how I should have jumped at the chance to see California in spring! But I shan't ask you why you don't jump. I know very well you'd not tell me."
"Must I have a reason? They say women don't have reasons for doing things. Why should men?"
"A woman," said my mother, "does nothing without a reason. But often she has to be ashamed of her reasons, and so she pretends she hasn't any. Men are stronger. They don't have to give their reasons, and so they don't pretend."
"Maybe," I said, "I'm fond of my family and don't want to be away from them."
My mother blushed a little, and laughed.
"I shall pretend to myself," she said, "that that is why you have given up your trip. But I'm afraid it isn't your father and me that you've suddenly grown so fond of."
"Now look here, mamma," I said, "we thrashed that all out the other day."
"Thrashed all what out?—Oh, I remember—your attentions to Lucy Fulton, or hers to you, which was it?"
"It wasn't our attentions to each other, as I remember. It was the attention which Aiken is or was paying to us."
"So it was," said my mother.
She gave me, then, a second cup of tea, and talked cheerfully of other things. Some people came in, and I managed presently to escape from them.
It hadn't been easy to tell my mother that I had given up the California trip. I knew that her triple intuition would connect the change of plan with Lucy Fulton, and I was not in the mood to meet such an accusation with the banter and levity which it no longer deserved.
Like it or not, I was staying on in Aiken because Lucy had asked me to. That we had been gossiped about had angered me; but it could do so no longer. That we were good friends, and enjoyed riding and being together, was no longer the whole truth. There was in addition this: that Lucy no longer loved her husband, and that she had made me her confidant.
From the first to the last of my dressing for dinner that night, everything went wrong. I stepped into a cold tub, under the impression that I had told my man to run a hot one. He had laid out for me an undershirt that had lost all its buttons, and a pair of socks that I hated. I broke the buckle of the belt that I always wear with my dinner trousers; I dropped my watch face downward on the brick hearth, and I spilled a cocktail all over my dress shirt,afterI had got my collar on and tied my tie!
Usually such a succession of misadventures would have given rise to one rage after another. But I was too busy thinking about Lucy. I could no longer deny that she attracted me immensely. Perhaps she had from the beginning. I can't be sure. But I should never have confessed this to myself, or so I think, if I had not learned that she had suddenly fallen out of love with her husband. In that ideal state of matrimony, in which I had first gotten to know her, she had seemed a holy thing upon a plane far above this covetous world. But now the angel had fallen out of that which had been her heaven, and come down to earth. That I had had anything to do with this, I should even now have denied to God or man with complete conviction. I had no interest in the causes of her descent, only in the fact of it. And all that time of bungling dressing for dinner I kept thinking, not that I should help her look for a new heaven, but that I must try, as her true friend, to get her back into her old one. At that time John Fulton had no better friend than I. It seemed to me really terrible that things should have gone wrong with these two.
My father came in while I was still dressing.
"Hear you've given up California," he said bluntly; "do you think that's wise?… Where do you keep your bell?"
I showed him.
"How many times do you ring if you want a cocktail?"
"Twice. If you'll ring four times I'll have one with you. I spilt mine."
So my father pushed the bell four times and complimented me on my love of system and order, and then he returned to his first question.
"Do you think it wise?"
"Well, father," I said, "we've always been pretty good friends. Will you tell me why you think it isn't wise?"
"Yes, I will," he said; "I think it's foolish for a man to run after women in his own class for any other purpose than matrimony."
"So do I!" said I.
"A man," he persisted, "doesn't always know that he is running after a woman. Nature will fool him. Look at young lovers! Why, they actually believe in the beautiful fabric of spiritual poetry that they weave about each other. And nature lets 'em. But men who have seen life, and have lived, as I shouldn't be at all surprised if you had, for instance, are able to see the ugly mundane facts through the rosy mist. My boy, you and Lucy Fulton are being talked about. You don't have to tell me it's none of my business, I know that. But I can't help wanting you to steer clear of rows, and I don't want to see any woman get mud thrown on her because of you. For a man of course, unfortunately, consequences never amount to much. It's for the woman that I should plead if I had any eloquence or persuasiveness. I'd say to you, don't run away for your own sake, that's not worth while; but run away for hers. Now you will forgive me, my dear fellow, won't you, for butting in like this.…"
The cocktails came, and when the man who brought them had gone, I said:
"It's for her sake that I'm staying, father; will you listen a little? You're the only man in the world that I can talk to without fear of being repeated. As far as going to California is concerned Iwasgoing—until a late hour this afternoon. I felt more concern at leaving my mother than anyone else. You believe that?"
He nodded to what was left of his cocktail.
"Lucy and I may have been talked about, but there was absolutely no reason why we should have been. We rode together this afternoon and out of a clear sky she told me that she had fallen out of love with her husband—for noreasonat all, that's the worst of it—and she doesn't know what to do, and has no friend she feels like talking to about it, except me. That's why I'm staying. Sheaskedme not to go. And of course I said I wouldn't."
My father finished his cocktail, and blew his nose.
"Oh," I said, "I'm not infatuated with the situation either."
"Women certainly do beat the Dutch!" said my father. "I suppose she wants advice, and backing when she doesn't follow it."
"If I can keep her in the path of her duty, father, be sure I will."
"And if you can't?"
"It's a real tragedy," I said. "They were the happiest and most loving couple in the world, except you and mother, and only a short time ago."
"What time is it?" asked my father.
"I've broken my watch."
"Well, it doesn't matter if we are a little late for dinner."
He cleared his throat, and turned a fine turkey-cock red, and looked very old-fashioned and handsome.
"I never thought to tell you this," he said; "it's like throwing mud on a saint. Once your mother came to me and said she didn't love me any more and that she loved another man and wanted to go away with him."
"I feel as if you'd kicked my feet out from under me."
"It doesn't seem to have come quite to that with Lucy, but it may, and in some ways the cases are parallel. I took counsel with your grandfather. He advised me to whip her. When I refused to do that, he gave less drastic advice, which I followed. I told your mother and the man that if after a year during which they should neither see each other nor communicate they still wanted each other, I would give your mother a divorce. I don't know when they stopped caring about each other. I think it took your mother less than three months to get over him. And if he lasted three weeks, why I'm the dog that—he was."
I detected a ring of passionate hatred in my father's voice.
"So she came back to me," he said presently, "in a little less than a year. Your little sister was your mother's offering of conciliation. And we have lived happily. But things have never been with us quite as they were. I have never known if your mother really got to loving me again, or if she has raised a great monument of simulation and devotion upon a pedestal of shame and remorse. Even now, if I drink a little more than is good for me, she never criticizes. She feels that she has forfeited that prerogative."
"What became of the man?"
"He died of heart failure," said my father, "in a disreputable place. They tried to hush it up, but the facts came out. When I heard of it, I plumped right down in a chair and laughed till I was almost sick. I knew what he was," he said with sudden savageness, "all along. But there is no making a woman believe what she doesn't want to believe. He was fascinating to women, and a cur. He kept his compact with me, not because of his given word, but because he was physically afraid of me."
"Thank you for telling me all this, father," I said; "I like you better and better. But in one way the cases aren't parallel. In Lucy's case there is no other man."
"Not yet," said my father; "but when a woman no longer loves her husband, look out for her. She has become a huntress—she is a lovely sloop-of-war that has cleared her decks for action.… Are you ready?"
I slipped my arm through my father's and we went downstairs together.
"I'm sorry you're mixed up in this," he said; "but you couldn't go when she made a point of your staying. I'm obliged to you for telling me."
It grew very warm during the evening and windy. By bedtime there was a hot, lifeless gale blowing from the southeast. Now and then the moon shone out brightly through the smother of tearing clouds, and was visible for a moment in all her glory, only to be submerged the next moment and blotted out. About two o'clock single raindrops began to splash so loudly on the veranda roof just outside my window that the noise waked me; after that I only slept fitfully, and my ears were never free from the loud roaring of the tropic rain that began presently to fall upon Aiken. I dreamed that somebody had stolen the Great Lakes and while being hotly pursued had dropped them. All day it rained like that, and all the following night, and only let up a little the afternoon of the second day. I got into an oilskin then and walked out to the Fultons'.
Theirs was a nervous household. Jock and Hurry confined indoors for nearly two days had had too little exercise and too many good things to eat. They were quite cross and irrepressible. John had the fidgets. He couldn't even stay in the same room for more than a minute, and he wouldn't even try sitting down for a change. Lucy had had to give up at least a dozen things that required dry weather and sunshine. She seemed to take the rain as something directed particularly against herself by malicious persons. Evelyn, also cross and nervous, was on the point of retiring to her own room to write letters. Just then Dawson Cooper telephoned to know if she cared to take a little walk in the rain and she accepted with alacrity.
"It's gotten so that he only has to whistle," said Lucy petulantly, when Evelyn had gone. "I think she's made up her mind to be landed."
Fulton came and went. Every now and then he dropped on the piano-stool for a few moments and made the instrument roar and thunder; once he played something peaceful and sad and even, in which one voice with tears in it ran away from another.
The piano was in the next room, and whenever it began to sound, Lucy dropped her work into her lap and listened. At such time she had an alert, startled look. She resembled a fawn when it hears a stick snap in the forest.
We heard him leave the piano, cross the hall and go into the dining-room.
"He's hardly touched his piano in years," said Lucy. "But now he's at it in fits and starts from morning till night. Night before last when the rain began he got up and went down in his bare feet and played for hours. I had to fetch him and make him come back to bed."
Then she seemed to feel that an explanation was necessary. She bent rosily over the work, and said: "We don't want the servants to know."
Again the piano began to ripple and thunder. Again we heard John go into the dining-room.
I must have lifted an eyebrow, for Lucy said:
"Yes. I'm afraid so, but it doesn't seem to go to his head. Oh," she said, "it wrings my heart, but I haven't the right to say anything."
"Lucy," I said, "have you thought out anything since I saw you last?"
"I think in circles," she said; "one minute I'm for doing my duty to him, the next minute I can only think of myself. Itcan'tbe right for me to be his wife when I've stopped being—Oh, anything but awfully fond of him."
"Youarethat?"
"Of course I am."
"It's just about the saddest thing that ever came to my knowledge," I said; "and you won't be angry if I say that I think you ought to stick to him and make the best of it?"
"You're not a woman. No man understands a woman's feeling of degradation at belonging to a man she doesn't love. Oh, it's an impossible situation. And I can't see any way out. Icouldn'ttake money from John, if I left him; I haven't got a penny of my own. And I think it would kill me to go away from Jock and Hurry for long. And the other thing would just kill me."
"That," I said, "Lucy, I don't believe."
"You don't know. Not being a woman, youcan'tknow."
"Men," I said, "and women too survive all sorts of things, mental and physical, that they thinkcan't besurvived. I read up the Spanish Inquisition once for a college essay, and the things they did to people were so bad that I was ashamed to put them in, and yet lots of those people survived and lived usefully to ripe old ages."
"Who did?"
Unheard by us, John had finished in the dining-room and had come to pay us a flying visit.
"People that were tortured by the Spanish Inquisition," I said.
"A lot they know about torture," said he. "They only did things to people that the same people could imagine doing back to them. Nothing is real torture if you can see your way to revenge it—if only in imagination. Torture is what you get through no fault of your own from somebody you'd not torture back for anything in the world. It's what sons do to mothers, husbands to wives, wives to husbands. Isn't that so, Lucy?"
"I suppose so," she said very quietly, her head bent close to her work.
"But what," exclaimed John, "has all this to do with the high cost of living?"
He would neither sit down nor stand still. He moved here and there, changing the positions of framed photographs and ash trays, lighting cigarettes, and throwing them into the fire. He had the pinched, hungry look of a man who is not sleeping well, and whose temperature is a little higher than normal.
"Were you in the Spanish War?" he asked me suddenly.
(At the moment I was thinking: "If you go on like this you'll never win her back, you'll only make matters worse!") I said: "In a way, but I didn't see any fighting. I got mixed up in the Porto Rico campaign."
"I was with the Rough Riders," he said; "I've just been remembering what fun it all was. I wish you could go to a war whenever you wanted to, the way you can to a ball game."
Then as quickly as he had introduced war, he switched to a new subject.
"I want you to try some old Bourbon a man sent me."
He had crossed the room, quick as thought, and pushed a bell; when the waitress came he told her to bring a tray.
"Isn't whiskey bad for you when you're so nervous?" said Lucy quietly, and without looking up.
"I don't know," said John, with a certain frolicking quality in his voice; "I'm trying to find out."
"What was that you were playing a while ago?" I asked. "The slow, peaceful, sad sort of thing."
"This?" And he whistled a few bars.
I nodded.
"I made it up as I went along," he said; "music's like a language. When a man's heard a lot of the words and the idioms he can make a bluff at talking it; but I can only speak a few words. I've only got a child's vocabulary. I can only say, 'I'm hungry,' or 'I'm sleepy,' or 'I want a set of carpenter's tools,' or 'Brown swiped my tennis bat and I'm going to punch his head,' or 'The little girl over the fence has bright blue eyes and throws a ball like a boy and climbs trees.'"
He had to laugh himself at the idea of being able to express such things in musical terms, but when he had sponged up a long glass of very darkly mixed Bourbon and Apollinaris, the picture of the little girl over the fence must have been still in his mind, for having left us abruptly for the piano, he preluded and then began to improvise upon that theme. He talked rather than sang, but always in tune and with the clearest enunciation, and any amount of experience.
He began merrily, and in no time had us both laughing; I think the first air which he tortured to fit his unrhymed and unrhythmical words belonged once to Mozart, but I am not sure. It was made out of merriness, sunshine, and dew.
"The little girl over the fence, the fenceHas bri-i-i-ight blue-ooo eyesAnd throws a ball like a boy, a boy,And cli-i-i-i-i-i-imbs trees."
He repeated in the minor, modulated into a more solemn key, and once more talked off the words. He left you with a slight feeling of anxiety. You began to be afraid that the little girl would fall out of the trees and hurt herself. But no, instead he grabbed something by the hair right out of a Beethoven adagio, and began to want that little girl with the blue eyes as a little girl with blue eyes has seldom been wanted before; she became Psyche, Trojan Helen, a lover's dream; all that is most exquisite and to be desired in the world—and then suddenly he lost all hope of her and borrowed from Palestrina to tell about it, and the last time she climbed trees it was plump on up into Heaven that she climbed, and from hell below, or pretty close to it, there arose the words "And climb trees" like a solemn ecclesiastical amen.
It was an astounding performance, almost demoniac in its cleverness and in its power to move the hearer.
Lucy's eyes were filled with tears.
"I wish he wouldn't," she said.
There was quite a long silence, but as we did not hear him moving about, he probably sat on at the piano, for presently, in a whisper, you may say, more to himself than to us, he sang that Scotch song, "Turn ye to me," which to my ear at least stands a head and shoulders taller and lovelier than any folk song in all the world, unless it's that Norman sailor song that Chopin used in one of the Nocturnes.
"The waves are dancing merrily, merrily,Ho-ro, Whairidher, turn ye to me:The sea-birds are wailing, wearily, wearily,Horo Whairidher, turn ye to me.
"Hushed be thy moaning, love bird of the sea,Thy home on the rocks is a shelter to thee;Thy home is the angry wave, mine but the lonely grave,Horo Whairidher, turn ye to me."
Lucy rose abruptly and left the room. I could hear her whispering to him, pleading.
Surely he must have sung that song to her when she was only the little girl with blue eyes over the fence, and it must have had something to do with making her love him. But the qualities of his voice that could once make her heart beat and fire her with love for him could do so no more. He had left, poor fellow, only the power to torture her with remorse and make her cry.
The next day I kept a riding engagement with Lucy, but she didn't.
"She's gone for a walk with John," said Evelyn, who had come out of the house to give me Lucy's messages of regret and apology.
"Lucy gone walking!" I exclaimed. "Have the heavens fallen?"
"Sometimes I think they have," said Evelyn. "But you know more about that than I do."
"Know more about what?"
"Haven't you noticed?"
I shook my head.
"Why, John is all up in the air about something or other, and Lucy is worried sick about him. I thought probably she'd told you what the trouble was. I've asked. She said probably money had something to do with it; and that was all I could get out of her. Come down off that high horse and talk to me. I'm not riding till four."
So I left my pony standing at the front gate and Evelyn and I strolled about the grounds.
"Money isn't the whole trouble," said Evelyn presently. "I know that. Something even more serious has gone terribly wrong. And I want to help."
"Won't they work it out best by themselves?" I suggested.
"Sometimes," she said, "it seems almost as if they had quarreled. Sometimes John looks at her—Oh, as if he was going to die and was looking at her for the last time. Could he have something serious the matter with him?"
"He could, of course, but it doesn't seem likely."
"He doesn'tlookwell."
"True."
"Look here, Archie, don't you know what's wrong?"
"I wish I did," said I. "If I could right it."
As a matter of fact I didn't know what was wrong. I knew only that Lucy no longer loved her husband. But why she no longer loved him was the real trouble, and she had not told me that, even if she knew It herself. But wishing to strengthen my answer, I said: "You're the one who ought to know what's wrong. You're on the spot. And besides, you're a woman and a woman is supposed to have three intuitions to a man's one."
Evelyn ignored this.
"Sometimes," she said, "John's so gentle and pathetic that I want to cry. Sometimes he is cantankerous and flies into rages about trifles. It's getting on my nerves."
"Why not pack up your duds and move on?"
"Oh, because——"
I laughed maliciously. "We might move on together," I suggested.
"Youwere going to move on," she said, "but you have stayed. I wonder why?"
I did not enlighten her.
"If," she said presently, "people find out that things in this house are at sixes and sevens I wonder if they won't find fault with you and Lucy? Has that occurred to you?"
"It has occurred to you," I said, "to my own mamma and doubtless to other connections. But it hasn't occurred to me. We see too much of each other?"
"Altogether."
"You really think that?"
Evelyn shrugged her shoulders. "For appearance' sake, yes," she said. "Of course you do. But it's my opinion that if you'd been going to get sentimental about each other you'd have done it long ago."
"Evelyn," I said, "I've never made trouble in a family."
"Is that because of your natural virtue or because you have never wanted to?"
"A little of both, I think. People fall in love at first sight. That can't be helped. Or they fall in love very quickly, and that's hard to help. But people who fall in love gradually through long association have no good excuse for doing so, if they oughtn't. They should see it coming and quit seeing each other before it's too late."
"But I don't agree," said Evelyn. "I think love is always a first-sight affair. I don't mean necessarily the first time two people see each other, but that suddenly after years of association even, they will see each other in a new light."
"A light that was never on sea or land?"
"A light that is always where people are, just waiting to be turned on."
At that moment we heard Dawson Cooper's voice calling: "Hallo there! Where are you?"
Presently he hove into sight, and did not seem altogether pleased at finding Evelyn and me together.
"Archie thought he was going to ride with Lucy," Evelyn explained, "but she threw him down, and I suppose we have got to ask him to ride with us!"
"Yes," I said, "I think you have, but I don't have to accept, do I? You're just doing it so's not to hurt my feelings, aren't you? Of course if you really want me——"
"Come along, Coops," said Evelyn. "He's trying to tease us. He wouldn't ride with us for a farm."
We separated at the mounting-block, and I watched them a little way down the road. And felt a little touch of envy. Evelyn was looking very alluring that afternoon.
I rode in the opposite direction until I came to the big open flat north of the racetrack; there, a long way off, I saw John Fulton and Lucy walking slowly side by side. John was sabering dead weed stalks with his stick. So I turned east to avoid them, then north, until I had passed the forlorn yellow pesthouse with its high, deer-park fence, and was well out in the country.
Then I left the main road, and followed one tortuous sandy track after another. Suddenly Heroine shied. I looked up from a deep, aimless reverie, and saw sitting at the side of a trail a withered old negress. She looked like a monkey buried in a mound of rags.
"Evening, Auntie," I said.
"Evening, boss."
Heroine had broken into a sweat, and was trembling. She kept her eyes on the old negress and her ears pointed at her, her nostrils widely dilated.
"My horse thinks you're a witch, Auntie," I said. "Hope you'll excuse her."
"I allows I got ter, boss, caze that's jes what I is."
"Honest to Gospel?" I laughed.
"You got fifty cents, boss?"
I found such a coin in my pocket and tossed it to her.
"I used to have," I said.
She rose to her feet and Heroine drew away from her, firmly and rudely.
"Don' min' me, honey," said the old woman, and she held out a hand like a monkey's paw. To my astonishment Heroine began to crane her head toward the hand, sniffed at it presently, gave a long sigh of relief and stood at ease, muscles relaxed, and eyelids drooping.
"Now I believe you," I said. "What else can you do?"
She turned her bright, beady eyes this way and that, searching perhaps for anyone who might be watching and listening. Then she said, "I kin tell fo'tunes, boss."
"Just tell me my name."
"You is Mista Mannering, boss."
"Hum, that's too easy," I said. "I've been coming to Aiken a great many years. What is my horse's name?"
"Her name is He'win, boss."
"Hum," I said and felt a little creepy feeling of wonder.
"Does you want to know any mo'?"
I nodded.
"You's flighty, boss, but you ain't bad. You is goin' ter be lucky in love, 'n then you is goin' ter be unlucky. You is goin' ter risk gettin' shot, but dere ain't goin' ter be no shootin'. When summer come around you is goin' ter have sorrer in you' breas', and when winter comes around dere'll be de same ole sorrer, a twistin' and a gnawin'."
"What sort of a sorrow, Auntie?"
"Sorrer like when you strikes a lil chile what ain't done no harm, only seem like he done harm, sorrer like you feels w'en you baby dies, 'case you is too close-fisted ter sen' fer de doctor, sorrer like——"
She broke off short, looking a little dazed and foolish.
"You've had your share of sorrow, Auntie, I can see that."
"Is I a beas' o' de fiel'?" she exclaimed indignantly, "or is I a humanous bein'?"
"Must all human beings have sorrows?"
"Yes, boss, but each has he own kin'! Big man has big sorrer, little man have little sorrer, and dem as is middlin' men dey has middlin' sorrers."
"It's all one," I said, "each gets what he can stand and no more. Put a big sorrow on a little man and he'd break under it; put a little sorrow on a big man and he wouldn't know that he was carrying it. What else can you tell me, Auntie?"
"I ain't goin' ter tell yo' no mo'."
"Not for another half-dollar?"
"No, boss."
"Well, there it is anyway. Good evening."
I was surprised to find John Fulton in the Club. As a home-loving man he was not a frequent visitor. He had dropped in, he said, to get a game of bridge, had tired of waiting for somebody to cut out, and had been reading the newspapers to find out how the world was getting along.
"I haven't more than glanced at them in a week," he said, "but there's nothing new, is there? Just new variations of public animosity and domestic misfortunes. Have you read this Overman business?"
"I haven't."
"It's a case or a hard-working, thoroughly respectable man who, for no reason that is known, suddenly shoots down his wife and children in cold blood, and then blows his own head to smithereens."
"But of course there was a reason," I said; "he must have felt that he was justified."
"He seems to have had enough money and good health. And he passed for a sane, matter-of-fact sort of fellow."
"If it was the regular reason," I said, "jealousy, he wouldn't have hurt the children."
"Only a very unhappy man could kill his children," said Fulton. "His idea would be to save them from such unhappiness as he himself had experienced. But in nine cases out of ten it would be a mistaken kindness. Causes similar to those which drove the father into a despair of unhappiness would in all probability affect the children less. No two persons enjoy to the same degree, suffer to the same degree or are tempted alike. How many wronged husbands are there who swallow their trouble and endure to one who shoots?"
"Legions," I said. "Fortunately. Otherwise one could hardly sleep for the popping of pistols."
"Do you believe that or do you say it to be amusing?"
"I think that the number of husbands who find out that they have been wronged is only exceeded by the number who never even suspect it. But they are not the husbands we know, the modern novelist to the contrary notwithstanding. In our class it is the wives who are wronged as a rule; in the lower classes, the husbands. I've known hundreds of what the newspapers call society people; the women are good, with just enough exceptions to prove the rule: the men aren't."
"When you say that the women are good, you mean they are technically good?"
"Who is technically good?"
"Hallo, Harry!"
Colemain, having pushed a bell, pulled up a big chair and joined us.
"We were saying that the average woman we know is technically good."
"You bet she is!" said Colemain. "She has to be! If she wasn't how could she ever put over the things she does put over? And as a rule her husband isn't technically good and so she has power over him. She says nothing, but he knows that she knows, and so when she does something peculiarly extravagant and outrageous, he reaches meekly for his checkbook. For one man who is ruined by drink there are ten ruined by women; and not by the kind of women who are supposed to ruin men either; not by the street-walker, the chorus girl or the demi-mondaine. American men are ruined by their wives and daughters who are technically good. Don't we know dozens of cases? When there is a crash in Wall Street how many well-to-do married men go to smash to one well-to-do bachelor? A marriage isn't a partnership. It's the opposite except in name. It's a partnership in which the junior partner gives her whole mind to extracting from the business sums of money which ought to go back into it. And she spends those sums almost invariably on things which diminish in value the moment they are bought. It isn't the serpent that is the arch enemy of mankind. It's the pool in which Eve first saw that she was beautiful, or would be if she could only get her fig-leaf skirt to hang right."
"But I think," said Fulton gently, "that women ought to have pretty clothes, and bright jewels and luxuries. If a girl loves a man, and proves it and keeps on loving him, how is it possible for him to pay her back short of ruining himself? Haven't you ever felt that if the whole world was yours to give you'd give it gladly? Why complain then when afterwards you are only asked to give that infinitesimal portion of the world that happens at the moment to be yours? If a man is ruined for his wife, if cares shorten his life, even then he has done far, far less than he once said he was willing and eager to do."
He looked at the big clock over the mantelpiece, sat silent for a moment, then rose, wished us good-night and went out.
"You wouldn't think," said Harry, "to hear him talk that a woman was playing chuck-cherry with that infinitesimal portion of the world that happens to be his. I was in the bank this morning and I saw him come out of the President's room. He looked a little as if he'd just identified the body of a missing dear one in the morgue."
"I'm afraid he is frightfully hard up," I said, "but he hasn't said anything to me about it, and I don't like to volunteer."
"He's a good man," said Harry, "one of the few really good men I know, and it's a blamed shame."
"Oh, it will all come out in the wash."
"It depends on how dirty the linen is!"
"American men," I said, "never seem to have the courage to retrench. Why not take your family to a cheap boarding-house for a year or two? Cut the Gordian knot and get right down to bed rock? Boarding-house food may be bad for the spirit, but it's good for the body. My father had dyspepsia one spring, and his doctor told him to spend six weeks in a summer hotel—anysummer hotel—and takeallhis meals in it."
Just then one of the bell-boys interrupted us. He said that Mrs. Fulton wished to speak with me. He followed me into the coat room, where the telephone is, in a persistent sort of way, so that I turned on him rather sharply and asked what he wanted.
His eyes were bulging with a look of importance and his black face had an expression of mystery. "She ain't on de telephone," he said, "she's outside."
"Well, why couldn't you say so?"
I went out bareheaded into the dusk and walked quickly between the bedded hyacinths and the evergreen hedges of Carolina cherry to the sidewalk. But she wasn't there. Far up the street I saw a familiar horse and buggy, and a whip that signaled to me.
She was all alone. Even Cornelius Twombley, as much a part of the buggy as one of the wheels, had been dropped off somewhere.
"I haven't seen you all day," she said. "I thought maybe you'd like to go for a little drive."
I simply climbed into the buggy and sat down beside her.
"Evelyn and Dawson," she explained, "were crowding the living-room, so I thought of this. Is John in the Club?"
"He was, but he said good-night to Harry Colemain and me, and I think he went home.… How is everything? I saw you and John from afar, walking together. I knew you could run because I've seen you play tennis, but I didn't suppose you'd ever learned to walk. You're always either on a horse or behind one."
"Was it very bold of me to come to the Club for you? I suppose I ought to have telephoned." Then she laughed. "I ought to have had more consideration of your reputation," she said.
"My reputation will survive," I said. "But look here, Lucy——"
"I'm looking!"
"I meant look with your mind. I don't know if I ought to bring it up; it's just gossip. Harry saw John coming out of the President's room in the bank. He said it looked to him as if John had been trying to make a touch and hadn't gotten away with it. You know I hate to see him distressed for money, especially now when other things are distressing him, and I wonder if there isn't some tactful arrangement by which I could let him have some money without his knowing that it came from me."
"Aren'tyou good!" she exclaimed. "Oh, I suppose he makes things out as bad as he can so as to influence me as much as possible; but he says we are in a terrible hole, that we oughtn't to have come here at all, that if he'd had any idea how much money I'd been spending in New York before we came he wouldn't have considered coming, that everybody is hounding him for money, and that he doesn't see how he can possibly pay his bills at the end of the season. Of course it's mostly my fault; but I can't help it if the Democrats are in power and business is bad, can I?"
"Well," I said, "I'm flush just now and I'll think up a scheme. Meanwhile let's forget about everything that isn't pleasant. Where are you going to drive me?"
"I don't care. Let's get away from the lights. What time is it? John doesn't like me to be late; and besides I haven't kissed the kiddies good-night. Let's just take a little dip in the woods. On a hot night it's almost like going for a swim. Oughtn't you to have a hat or something? If you get cold you can put the cooler on like a shawl."
Her manner affected me as it had never affected me before.
The dip from the hot dusk of the dusty road into the cool midnight of the pine woods had all the exhilaration of an adventure. The fact that she had sent into the Club for me flattered my vanity. She wanted me and not another to be with her. I felt a tenderness for her that I had never felt before. I wanted a chance to show that I understood her and was her friend without qualification. Shoulder touched shoulder now and then and it seemed to me as if I was being appealed to by that contact for support, countenance, and protection.
We chattered about the night and the pale stars, and the smells of flowers. We wished that there was no such thing as dinner, that the woods lasted forever, and that we might drive on through the soft perfumed air until we came to the end of them.
Then there was quite a long silence, and for the first time in my life I experienced the wish, well, not to kiss her, but to lay my cheek against hers. It was a wish singularly hard to resist.
"I suppose we ought to turn back."
"You know best," I said.
"Do you want to?"
"No, do you?"
"No."
But we turned back and came up out of the woods into the lights of the town.
"Where shall I drop you—at the Club?"
"Let me drop you," I said, "and borrow your buggy afterward to take me home. You ought not to drive alone at night."
"Maybe it would be better if I did," she said.
We said good-night at the door of her house, but not easily. For once it seemed hard to say anything final.
"Was I very brazen," she said, "to ask you to go with me, when I didn't want to be alone?"
"You were not," I said, "it was sweet of you. I loved it."
Cornelius Twombly lunged from the black shadow of a cedar tree and went to the horse's head.
"Good-night, Lucy. Good luck!"
Just then we heard John calling.
"That you, Lucy? You're late. I was getting anxious."
We could see him coming down the path, a vague shadow among the shadows, his cigarette burning brightly.
"Hallo, who is it? I can't see."
"It's Archie Mannering," said Lucy.
"Oh, is it? Won't you come in?"
"Can't, thanks. Got to dress. Lovely night, isn't it? Good-night. Good-night, Lucy."
When I had driven a little way I turned and looked over my shoulder, but though I could only see the fire of John's cigarette, I imagined that I could see his face—a little puzzled, a little anxious, and very sad.
It was on that same night that he said to Lucy: "Aren't you seeing a good deal of Archie Mannering?"
And she answered:
"Am I? I suppose I am. I like him awfully."