(From _Harper’s Magazine_)
Lewis Hunting, like thousands of other young Americans, was a bond
salesman. He had a kind of wayward handsomeness that endeared him to
women, together with a deep voice and a gravely pleasant manner--both
purely physical attributes--which prevented his good looks getting
on the nerves of the men he dealt with. He was moderately successful
in business, was always well dressed and provided with the comforts
of life. A good many of those comforts, naturally, went into his
expense account; but when he was not traveling, he lived with his
widowed mother, whom he partly supported, in a commonplace but not
uncomfortable suburban house. His mother, who adored him, accepted
everything he would give her as the reward of her adoration. His father
had hoped to send Lewis to a good technical school, but he died at an
unlucky moment for Lewis--at the precise time, that is, when Lewis had
finished his high school course and could be considered old enough to
earn his living. College would have meant sacrifices on his mother’s
part which she would have thought unnatural when she had a son who
was six feet tall. Lewis also would have thought them unnatural--for
_his_ mother; though he saw the mothers of other young men moving into
apartments and doing their own work without thereby disfiguring the
noble countenance of Nature.
Lewis Hunting was no moralist. He had to work, and he did work. He
was much away from home, and he fell into a few casual adventures
that would have shocked his mother hopelessly. These adventures were
very few, however; not because Lewis minded doing things that would
have shocked his mother, had she known about them, but because even
near-dissipation costs money; and he never forget that his financial
margin was hers, not his own. The adventures were fairly sordid, as the
limited contacts offered to a young man in strange cities are apt to
make them, and his cynicism was deepened by them. In his later twenties
Lewis was living about as lonely an existence as a young bond salesman
can. When he was at the home office, he spent most of his evenings
with his mother (she complained a great deal of loneliness)--reading,
talking or listening to her phonograph. When he was abroad in the
land--which was most of the year--he mitigated the solitude of hotel
rooms with visits to movie theaters or pool rooms. Mild flirtations he
could find anywhere, owing to his good looks and engaging smile; but
he was very wary of anything more intimate or dramatic. He knew very
little about women, though he considered that he had plumbed female
psychology with an unerring lead line. Most women, he decided, were on
the make and no good. Girls he had known at school, who had married his
more prosperous comrades, seemed--unless they were sunk invisibly into
nurseries--as shameless as the others. One or two of them, indeed, made
love to him; and that shocked Lewis almost as much as it would have
shocked Mrs. Hunting.
You see him, then--young, bewildered, faintly unhappy and vaguely
aspiring beneath the cynicism that kept its visible smoothness in the
face of the smuttiest story or the most shameless of feminine advances.
The fact was that Lewis would have expanded most naturally in the
society of the nicest people, and he never met them. Mrs. Hunting made
it a virtue to be too delicate and too sorrowful for social contacts,
and he had no relations that would have knit him up, in this or that
city, with the local aristocracy. He was diffident with men who had
been through college--probably no one ever knew how he had grieved over
the frustration of his and his father’s hopes--and his diffidence took
the form of refusing, with such, to mix business and pleasure. So even
old customers, once rebuffed, did not ask him to their homes. Being,
on the whole, irreligious, he eschewed all sociabilities that had a
sectarian tinge.
Not a very strong person to stand up against circumstances or events
or other people’s desires. That cynicism of his, after all, was only
skin-deep, and the boy beneath was soft. When Netta Jacobs decided to
marry him, he was virtually helpless, for Netta was not only supple and
alluring--she was clever. When I say clever, I do not mean to praise
her understanding or her wit. She was clever like a very clever animal:
she had the instinct of self-preservation so strongly developed that
she selected without difficulty the tone, the gesture, the look that
would serve her purpose. She was a finished egotist, if you like,
though “egotist” seems too big a word for her. It implies cerebration,
and Netta had no cerebration. She had the protective coloring of the
white ermine, the adaptability of the giraffe that can lengthen its
neck to crop the topmost leaves, of the creature that has developed
a lung fit to breathe both air and water. Only, unluckily, she was
neither giraffe nor fish; she was human and capable of passion--of that
complicated emotion which does not afflict the lower mammals. The lion
stalking his prey is far less terrible than the person who wants to
possess another human being, not only physically and financially but
socially, mentally, and morally. Netta never put it to herself in that
way, but it was so. She fell in love with Lewis Hunting, and her whole
organism set itself automatically to the task of acquiring him. It is
not often that one person desires another with the totality of his
being. Thus Netta desired Lewis. She had no moral sense; but if she had
had one, that too would have clung to him. Lewis, of course, had not
the faintest chance against her; and between the hour when he first saw
her in Jere Wheaton’s office, and the hour of the wedding among dusty
palms and withering blossoms in the living room of her married sister’s
apartment, only four months elapsed.
They lived with Lewis’s mother in the not uncomfortable suburban
house. Netta intended to change all that; but the best equipped
organism recognizes impossibilities--temporary ones. In order to get
his mother to consent to the marriage at all, Lewis had had to make
absurd and vast concessions. She made it clear to him that if he
chucked her and married without her consent, he would literally end
her life. Besides, there was the question of money. Either Netta would
have to live with Mrs. Hunting, or Mrs. Hunting would have to go to
a cheap boarding-house. Netta, who would not have cared in the least
if Mrs. Hunting had had to live in a Salvation Army Home or the State
penitentiary, realized that she would have to give in. For the time
being, Lewis was not yet completely her creature, and you might as
well ask him to break a blood vessel as to turn his mother by force
out of her house. Nothing would be easier for her than to make--after
marriage--the situation impossible.
That, of course, she proceeded to do, though it took a fairly long
time on account of Lewis’s protracted absences from home. Given Mrs.
Hunting, it was quite easy. Lewis’s mother, deprived of her dominance,
was acutely uncomfortable. She hated Netta, she thought Lewis deluded
and doomed, and she kept herself within bounds only because she knew
she was playing a losing game. If Netta had been a gentle soul, Mrs.
Hunting would probably have made her supremely unhappy. Netta was not
a gentle soul, and she made Mrs. Hunting unhappy instead. When Lewis
was at home, both women made him feel them pathetic--suffering untold
things for love of him. Netta managed that, too, better than her
mother-in-law.
A year, two years wore away, and Lewis began to know despair. Netta
was all his, and her kisses made it clear. But she hated his mother,
she hated their mode of existence; she was moving slowly but surely
to the total elimination of Mrs. Hunting from their lives. So much,
for a time, was he Netta’s that if she had asked anything less, she
might have had it. But what she asked of him, he felt, was to kill his
mother. Even for Netta he could not slay. And there came, inevitably, a
time when he criticized her for asking him to.
They had it out at last, one evening in their own room, when he was
just back from a month’s trip in the South. Lewis, who had been
listening to mocking-birds and smelling cape-jessamine--his sojourns
were seldom in such romantic lands--came back with reawakened
yearnings, the old hope of beauty revivified in his foolish heart, to
find his home uglier than ever. His mother was querulous and plain,
and his wife--though as she caught him to her breast in greeting
and let her bright eyes and hair shimmer above him, he was ravished
again--seemed hard, for all the cheaply perfumed softness of her
body. He felt that there was no kindness in her and wondered, for the
first time, if Netta would ever develop that tenderness which is the
loveliest by-product of passion.
Lewis bent over his suitcase, unpacking things and flinging them
about; while Netta, standing between the twin beds, removed and folded
counterpanes and pillow covers and wound the clock on the bed-table.
Little, intimate, beloved gestures ... but somehow tonight he did not
love them. If he closed his tired eyes, he could smell the jessamine.
Netta’s rustlings forbade him to hear the mockingbird.
He straightened himself finally and snapped the suitcase shut. Netta
came towards him in all the luxury of orchid négligée and cap.
“Tired, honey?” She stretched her arms and yawned a little.
The answer to that was “No.” If he said “Yes,” she would be close to
him, enfolding him, comforting him, making him forget everything but
the physical fact of her. That, he did not wish. “I’ve got a beastly
headache,” he said quietly.
The barrier was now built between them, and she walked away to her
dressing-table. “Want some aspirin?” she asked over her shoulder.
“No, thanks.” Lewis often made these little mistakes. By his refusal of
aspirin he revealed to her that he had no headache.
“Oh--just cross.”
“Isn’t it enough to make anybody cross--the kind of thing I come back
to?”
“I’m very sorry you have to come back to it, Lewis. But you would have
it that way, you know.”
“You certainly don’t try to make it any better.”
“You’d better drop that right now,” she warned him. “It doesn’t seem
to occur to you that, at least, when you come back to it, I’m here. I
live with it, weeks on end, when you aren’t here.”
“If you mean, Net, that it’s all mother’s fault, you’re wrong. She
wasn’t like this until you came and made her so. What makes the house
so deadly is that you quarrel with her all the time. I’m always having
to apologize to one of you for the other. I’m about fed up with it.”
“Oh, you are, are you? And what about me? I’ve been pretty patient, I
think, but if you’re going to crab things, I think I’ll have my say.
I tell you I live with it all the time. It’s a good deal worse when
you’re not there, because she’s afraid of you. And I don’t intend to
live with it much longer.”
He didn’t want to quarrel, he reflected wearily. Why did he have to?
But his exacerbated nerves spoke for him. “I honestly believe it’s more
your fault than hers, because you’re young and strong and she’s old and
weak. She’s a sick woman, half the time--has been for years. It won’t
be for long, Netta.”
“You can bet it won’t be for long,” she murmured intensely. She, too,
was irritated; irritated because, as always, his figure there before
her set her heart to beating. She did not want to quarrel, either;
she wanted him to make love to her. He wouldn’t; and therefore they
quarrelled. But Lewis surprised her. Standing there with folded arms,
looking gravely across at her, he went on, “If you’d have a kid, Netta,
I believe everything would come straight. Mother would forget all about
both of us if she had a grandchild to fuss over. And you’d be too busy
and happy to mind little things.”
She did not recover at once from her astonishment. “You honestly mean
that, Lewis? You’d like me to have a baby?”
“I’d like us to have a baby, of course,” he answered quietly. “What did
you suppose?”
“Well, if you want a child, Lewis”--she too spoke very quietly--“you’ll
have to marry somebody else. I’ll never have one if I can help it--and
I guess I _can_ help it.”
“I don’t doubt it.” He turned away.
Netta, however, was not through. She had waited long enough for this
issue to define itself. As well now as any other time. He had given her
the cue with his reproaches.
“And I’ve got something else to say,” she proceeded. “I love you,
Lewis, and you know it. I’ve tried out this idea of yours about living
with your mother. You can’t say I haven’t given it a chance--for more
than two years. Now, either it gets broken up and you and I take an
apartment by ourselves, or I take a job and have a room of my own in
town, and you stick with her if you want to. But you can’t have us both
any longer. And I wouldn’t live in this house even if she went away. I
don’t want a house, anyway, unless I’m a millionaire. It’s up to you.”
His face crimsoned. “You know as well as anything that I can’t run an
apartment and this house both.”
“I’m willing to take a job, anyhow,” Netta returned triumphantly.
“It would take all you made in any job to dress you. The kind of thing
you put on your back costs money.”
“How about your own clothes?”
“I have to be decent to do business. But I don’t buy myself fur coats
and mesh bags--or the sort of thing you’ve got on at the present
minute. I’m not blaming you for wanting clothes, Net--I guess every
woman does--but unless we live right here I can’t swing it. Even if you
earned money yourself, I couldn’t afford to keep mother in this house,
with a maid, while we were somewhere else. I’ll be making more money
next year. We’ll see. It would be pretty hard on mother to leave her;
but maybe if I can afford to keep her here, the way she is....”
“All right,” Netta’s voice trembled. “I’ll look for that job--_and_
that room. It isn’t of any importance to me that your mother should
live in this house--or any house or whether she has anybody to work for
her or not. I’ve lived with her for two years, and you can take it from
me, she’s the limit. You can live with her if you want to. I won’t--not
another week! This family stuff doesn’t go down with me--any of it.”
She laughed unpleasantly. “If you come to your senses any time and want
to treat your wife properly, you’ll know where to find me. I’ve never
looked at another man and don’t expect to. There’s nothing gay about
me.”
Curiously enough, it was just at the moment when Netta declared herself
innocent of intent to wrong him that the idea of divorce first entered,
explicitly, Lewis Hunting’s mind. In that tired nervous hour he did not
care whether she flirted--or more--with a dozen men. He had come to
her that evening after a journey that had reawakened old desires--for
peace, for sweetness, for calm domesticity, for affections normally
diffused, for passion expressed in ways that were not wholly of the
flesh. Netta knew as well as he what he could do and what he could not.
She asked of him to forsake all duties and take her to some perfumed
lair where they could lie as beasts at ease. He no longer cared much
for his mother--Netta had finished off that job very neatly--but her
hold on him was immemorial. He had no desire to live with her, but
he would never fling her out of doors to die. If Netta would only
wait another year--but she wouldn’t wait, she said; and after all (he
asked himself) what would they be waiting for? Netta would not have a
child, she would not have a home, she would not have anything--except
love-making, which must some day cease. In that hour he knew that he
could not endure forever the life Netta offered him, and from that
moment, really, began his wary plotting for freedom. Standing there
delicately clad, flushed and tempting, she was desirable in his eyes
... but, inevitably, after two years she had ceased to be a miracle.
She, so prodigal of lures, had neglected every lure she might have
spread for his incorporeal imagination. Even passion must be bolstered
up, quickened, preserved by something besides itself. Netta, he thought
coldly, had counted too much on passion. Oh, yes, he could kiss her
and draw her bright head to his shoulder--and like it; but her perfume
would destroy the memory of jessamine, her voice the echo of the
mocking-bird. Tired, tired he was....
“All right, Netta. Take your job and hire your room. Perhaps you’ll
come to feel differently about it.” And already he was hoping that she
wouldn’t.
She breathed hard. “You mean it? You’d rather have your mother than me?”
“No, I wouldn’t. I don’t like the way we live. But I’m not willing to
kill her to please you. So if you can’t stand it any longer, you’ll
have to do as you like. As I say, you may change your mind.”
She wept softly. “I love you so, Lewis. It isn’t fair.”
His lips tightened. “And I love you, Netta. But it doesn’t seem to be
enough, does it?” He kept the width of the room between them. He did
not wish to be drawn into the quick charm of her proximity. “I shall
have to be away a good deal the next months. They’re thinking about a
Western branch, and I may have to talk it up out there, more or less.
It would be worse than ever for you here, I suppose.”
“And when you come back, Lewis, are you coming to your mother or to me?”
He hadn’t thought of that. But of course he couldn’t plan anything yet.
“We could both come here, at those times, couldn’t we?” he temporized.
Her anger flared up. “No! When I’m once out of this house, I’ll never
set foot in it again--except for a funeral.”
That was the end, he thought. Funny that she shouldn’t know it was the
end--which was not reasonable of Lewis, for cruel things had been said
before and ignored if not truly forgotten.
“We’ll talk tomorrow. I’m awfully tired now. Good-night.” He slipped
into his bed, leaving her to put out the lamp and raise the windows.
His tone was utterly spent, and beyond “Good-night” she did not speak
to him again.
That was the most explicit talk they had. Earlier there had
been bickerings, but all the quarrels were intended to be--and
were--smoothed out and composed. These particular statements and
retorts were never cancelled.
Netta, who really wanted Lewis more than anything else, had made the
mistake of permitting herself, temporarily, to want something else
more: freedom, frank expression of her hatred and weariness, the
luxury of a defiant gesture. Lewis, at the same moment, came to the
belief that what he wanted was peace--and love only if it brought
peace in its train. Alas! he wanted even more than peace: seemliness
in the ordering of his life, beauty in its texture--intimations of
immortality, perhaps. But peace was what he called it. “A man has a
right to some peace”--thus he cloaked, or approximated, his yearning.
Destiny then made, in his direction, a few positively affectionate
gestures. He wanted to get away, and it became his professional duty to
get away. His firm decided to establish a connection on the Coast and
kept Lewis for some months traveling between Far Western cities. Twice,
in the interval, he came East for hasty visits to the home office. He
worked hard on this job; put his very best into it; for he intended to
demand, when arrangements were completed, a Western post. Out there, it
seemed to him, he could create life anew. Time enough to make domestic
plans when he got his business completed.
Netta had found her job--she made not at all a bad secretary--and
had duly given Lewis the address of her office. On his first arrival
in the East he telephoned to her. Over the telephone she spoke
eagerly--caressed him, as it were; and Lewis, exhilarated by Western
air, soothed by long absence of domestic fret, found tenderness
creeping back into his own voice--almost, indeed, into his heart. He
could see her vivid figure across the channeled space between them. He
told her he must go to his mother’s for the night, asked her to join
him. It was good tactics, though at the moment he was not thinking of
tactics; he merely wanted every one to be happy. Perhaps, once out
there in another atmosphere, all three of them.... But Netta’s voice
slid sharply into reproach, and he felt again all the menace that lay
in her vividness.
“Indeed I will not, Lewis. You can go and see her, of course, but I’m
not going to. I should think you’d want to see me first, but if you
don’t, you can go and have dinner with her and then come back and meet
me. I can’t spring you on my landlady very well, since she’s never seen
you, but we can live at a hotel while you’re here.”
His voice changed too. “We can talk about that later. There’s no reason
why you shouldn’t be decent and go out with me, just for tonight.”
She did not know that it was an ultimatum; she misread his annoyance,
taking it for impatience, and laughed harshly. “Not much, Lewis! When
you want me, you’ll come to me. I’m a good wife, but I’m a darned poor
daughter-in-law.... Where do I meet you tonight?”
“You don’t meet me anywhere--tonight.”
He hung up the receiver, and she heard its sharp click. Even then she
did not suspect. She was still gloating over the first warmth of his
voice and could not know that the warmth had meant very little--that
her chance had been very small and that she had thrown that chance
away. Lewis did not so much blame Netta for her attitude to his mother
as accuse her, in his heart, of being a person who would make no
sacrifices to any situation that might arise. Mrs. Hunting was not so
much a special case as the sort of thing that, in a hundred forms,
might happen to any one. Netta was hard and always would be. Even
suppose his mother were dead: there would always be this or that thing
to strike Netta as intolerable. It was the principle of the thing. No;
they would never find that peace which, more than ever in an unfamiliar
and beautiful landscape, had seemed every man’s right. Netta waited in
vain for a sign from him. She got none.
Netta, unaware that Hunting was expecting to be definitely settled in
the West, thought a waiting game the wisest. If he once came back to
living in his mother’s house, he wouldn’t be able to bear her absence.
He’d come running, she believed. But he never did live there without
her, and the place never had a chance to stir old memories. He was
continuously away and, except in connection with divorce, Netta did not
enter his mind. Her clutch was finally off him. He seemed to himself
to know her wholly, to be completely aware of her character and to
spurn it with reason. He did not know Netta wholly, as he was later to
discover; but at this time he felt supremely capable of judging her.
Lewis, whom marriage and discontent had greatly matured, did good work
for his firm. When he demanded his promotion and his transfer, he
got them both. He had worked overtime for many months, giving to his
business not only all his mind but all his secret stores of energy.
He was not working for a woman this time, but to get rid of one. The
spur was equally effective. When the “flu” hit him in San Francisco, it
found him ready prey. Later, facing a limp and helpless convalescence,
he asked for a long leave of absence, and it was granted. The length of
the holiday he asked was the period needed for a divorce under Nevada
laws.
In spite of increases and promotions, in spite of the absence of
Netta’s bills, Lewis had not a large store of money with which to buy
his freedom. He would have, he realized, to send less money to his
mother, and he wrote her frankly to that effect. He rather dreaded her
answer, though he was grim enough about his own intentions. He need
not have been afraid. Mrs. Hunting, who could not have lived in an
apartment and fended for herself in order to give his youth more scope
or his career more chance, could find both strength and money when it
came to getting rid of the daughter-in-law she detested. She could
even find the old adoration for Lewis, which had been much obscured by
jealous resentment. She saw herself once more--with Netta out of the
way--playing a winning game with her son; and her heart overflowed with
kindness to him. When these troubles were over, she and her darling boy
were going to be happy once more as they used to be. There is no doubt
that she meant what she said. She really believed that they had been
happy before his marriage; she thought of him as her darling boy. When
she dismissed her expensive maid, got an ancient cousin in to keep her
dismal company, bade Lewis send her no money until he was free and, in
addition, sent him a handsome check, she felt these actions right and
natural, a duty and a pleasure. Mrs. Hunting had despaired, and now she
had hope. Lewis would now be bound forever to his self-sacrificing,
generous, devoted mother.
Most people’s emotions are even more muddled than their minds; and
there can be no question that Mrs. Hunting, playing her unanswerable
trumps, loved Lewis more than she had ever loved him. His emotional
rejection of Netta she took for an emotional acceptance of herself. She
saw herself preferred: and it warmed her confused heart. Lewis was
misread by his mother as he had been by his wife. He knew perfectly
that they had not been happy before Netta came, and he thought his
mother’s sacrifices belated. Though he was grateful for her assistance,
the past could not be undone, and no new relation could be built up. He
was grateful that she helped instead of hindering, as he was grateful
for fine weather in place of storm. His loyalty was perhaps increased
by gratitude, but the quantity of his affection for her had long since
been fixed. He wrote to her regularly and with the utmost kindness; but
it was too late for her to push any further into his heart.
Perhaps he was the happier that no intimate relation needed
readjusting. For the first three months of Lewis Hunting’s sojourn
in the little Nevada town were by all odds the happiest of his life.
He saw his future clear, and for once he saw it bright. He had been
afraid--though reassured by his lawyer--that Netta would put up a
fight; but the fact was that Netta could not. She had no money with
which to fight the case; and she discovered very soon that, though New
York would have held her a virtuous wife, from the point of view of the
more sensitive state of Nevada she had sinned. She had refused to live
under what was legally her husband’s roof; she had explicitly refused
to give him children or a home, even to speak to his aged mother; she
had indulged, indeed, in an absolute orgy of mental cruelty. These
things were easily proved. It would have taken money to deprive Lewis
of his decree, and money she had not. Nor did Lewis have enough to
tempt any lawyer to take her case “on spec.” Netta knew that she was
beaten. Yet--had she but known it--she had allies dimly mustering on
her side. Netta was all instinct, and fate looks on instinct with a
kindly eye.
Until strength flowed back into him Lewis was content to lie on
the tiny porch of his tiny apartment, staring at the Sierras; and
the exertion of going out to his meals and seeing his lawyer, when
necessary, was sufficient to his weakened body. After some weeks,
however, he tired of watching, in solitude and silence, the dwindling
snow patches. Energy returned, subtly heightened by the hope that
was his. As the months counted themselves off, he felt Netta a lesser
and lesser burden--slipping, slipping from his back. His shoulders
ached less with the weight of her. Cheerfulness returned, and he
began to welcome the ordinary human contacts. He was not looking for
excitement, of which he well knew there was plenty. Neither poker,
roulette, bad whiskey, nor rash divorcées appealed to him. Though not
over-fastidious, he did not care to seize the day. He hoped, instead
to seize the whole of life. Certainly he intended sometime to marry
again--some girl opposed at every point to Netta; intended to have a
home, and kids, and a car, and a radio set, and (so far had he become
infected with the West) a view. He didn’t know just what she would be
like, but he would not find her here.
The doctor whom he felt obliged to consult suggested a car and long
drives in the open. He finally bought a small one out of his mother’s
check, knowing that he could sell it again. But to face the inhuman
beauty of that landscape one needs a human companion; some one who is
equally dwarfed and conquered by the uncaring peaks and the hostile
desert. Rather diffidently--you must remember that Lewis was not
vain; he undervalued his charm, indeed, since it had brought him only
Netta--he asked Mona Jeffers to drive with him; once, and then again
and again.
The girl--a poor relation--was companioning a cousin who soon found
that she need not depend on Mona for excitement. Indeed, Mona was a
mere hindrance to Mrs. Tilton on most occasions. She needed the girl
there on general principles and would not send her home; but she wanted
her out of the flat a large part of the time. Mona’s insipidity, to
Mrs. Tilton’s mind, was complete. She used her as she needed her, but
she used her less and less--especially after she discovered roulette
and acquired a rather shady lover. So the colorless Mona was free to
sit beside Lewis while they drove afar. Her quietness, her decency,
her very lack of good looks soothed him who was tired alike of Venus
and the Furies. Love never entered his head. He expected that shadowy
future bride to be handsomer than Mona--for men demand everything and
are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got
it. They were blithe days for Lewis: health recovered, hope enlarging
itself on his horizon, the weeks passing swiftly by, the little car for
magic carpet, and Mona to exorcise the demons of the hills. Every one
was civil to him, and he rejected far more advances than he accepted.
All pointed to his being, through a long life, a happy and useful
citizen. Lewis, who was an unimaginative creature, found sanctions all
about him for his content. He called them omens or “hunches.”
Without being superstitious or sentimental one may suspect that Nature
lays traps for mortals, and that the trap is no less a trap for being
seldom sprung. No doubt, for that matter, a man often comes through
unscathed. There is a spot--a sharp turn of the precipitous road, where
a man is uplifted for an instant, defenseless and naked to his stalkers
above him on all sides--which goes (not without reason) by the name
of Dead Man’s Point. The term inherits from the days when those who
fetched gold from Virginia City were apt to lose it--and necessarily
their lives--at this place. For a few moments as he toiled past a man
became, in the nature of things, a target; his best friend would have
taken imaginary sight and aim. When you had finished him--in the old
days--the disposal of the body offered no difficulties. You rolled him
over the precipice into the trackless gorge, and sheriffs were thereby
confounded. Booty on that road is now as rare as bandits. Nature,
however, pays little attention to the infinitesimal changes of human
history: her traps remain traps. Some spots are forever sinister,
and this is one of them. The gold may have gone, but, for a softer
generation, the view remains; and a foolish youth with bad liquor
inside him, driving a car too fast, is as perilous as two guns and a
total lack of morals ever were.
There was nothing in Lewis Hunting’s heart to cope with that view,
which is desolate and terrifying--and beautiful--beyond most. He
was not in its class; nor was Mona. But the mere size and scale and
arrangement of it impose themselves. You _must_ turn back to look,
at Dead Man’s Point, before you forsake that range for others. Lewis
and Mona turned to look--and Johnny Stevens, innocent of everything
but that foolish drink, crashed into them at a curious tangent. Mona
was flung free, falling, with infinite bruising of her tender flesh,
upon rock; but the tilt of the car was such that Lewis was half caught
beneath it. It rocked horridly like a hanging stone--one of those
natural wonders that attract tourists--and then, rolling over, slid
down the path of the corpses. Lewis, whose hands had stretched out
instinctively and caught themselves with desperation in a stiff clump
of sage, was left--though precariously--behind buttressed for the
moment by a few stones of which the car in its final plunge had made
nothing. They could not deter the machine, but they sufficed to deter
him until Johnny Stevens, sobered by the shock, had dragged him to
what is known as safety. Mona came later--half fainting, half crying,
but not badly injured. By the time a fresh car came over the pass and
picked them up, Lewis was luckily unconscious. They wound slowly home,
and Nature--a beast, first, last, and all the time except when she is
broke to the service of God--resumed her wise, incomparable smile. A
little thing like loose wreckage cannot mar a view like that.
Science, which loves the part more than the whole, took hold of Lewis
Hunting and made him one of her choicest fragments. No one could have
blamed those able surgeons for being proud of themselves; but, true
to type, they were not that: they were proud of Lewis. Half a healthy
man is better than a whole man with a trace of sepsis; and Lewis--both
legs neatly shorn off between knee and hip--was Exhibit A, a victory,
an exultation. His blood was pure, his heart strong, his constitution
magnificent, his recovery just what the recovery of the normal man
should be. He had not hampered either Nature or Science in any way.
The doctors felt affection for him because of his strong heart and
untainted blood, and assured him earnestly that there was no reason why
he should not live for fifty years. Lewis heard the words but did not
measure their full significance until later.
Numbers of people came to see him in the hospital; flowers and fruits
stood about until his eyes wearied of them. He was setting his teeth
harder than he had ever done in his life, and he could not unclasp his
jaws to breathe the sweetness of roses or taste the pulp of figs. His
lawyer had, at his request, written--not telegraphed--to his mother;
and in the letter lay a plain request that the news should be kept, by
hook or crook, from Netta. The lawyer humored him, writing precisely
what Lewis wished; but as that miraculous convalescence progressed,
he wondered. No one, of course, would be such a brute as to suggest
to Lewis that he change his plans to match his prospects. But--well,
_but_.... They moved him to the hotel when he left the hospital, and
guests and employees vied with each other for the task of pushing his
wheelchair in and out of the elevator and dining room. A visiting nurse
did the necessary things for a time, but the wounds healed as by a
miracle. Six weeks after the accident Lewis was tensely calm: adjusting
himself; writing to his firm; trying to apprehend, little by little,
what a man with no legs would be able to do for fifty years. His mental
mood had not yet relaxed to despair, and his body inflicted no fevers,
no relapses upon him. But as he had not reckoned with Nature, so he had
not reckoned with Netta, who was Nature’s protégée.
Mrs. Hunting--distraught, half maddened--had for a time kept Lewis’s
command not to let Netta know. But though Netta never read newspapers
and had few intimate friends, the news eventually came to her. Some
one had noticed the identity of names. The moment Netta heard of it,
she asked permission to absent herself, and rushed to Mrs. Hunting’s
suburban home. She made no mistakes this time: her instincts served
her well. Lewis’s mother had become, by this stroke, her chief ally,
and from the first moment Netta treated her as such. Within an hour
she had got from Mrs. Hunting precisely what she wanted. Nor is Mrs.
Hunting to be too much blamed for playing into Netta’s hands. She had
cried over the maiming of her boy, her heart had indeed been well-nigh
broken. Yet, confusedly, she saw him as wreckage--beloved wreckage, no
doubt; but there was no triumph in possessing him. She had wanted him
all to herself, and now, inevitably, she had him thus; and her weak
old shoulders trembled under the burden. Being everything to him,
as he had hitherto defined it, was being the chief recipient of his
favors. The poor woman was discouraged to the marrow; she had no gift
for meeting new and shattering situations. Her grievance against Netta
had always been on her own behalf--not really on her son’s. She was,
of course, leagues away from understanding Lewis, who had indeed never
done her the honor of explaining himself to her.
Netta cooed over her, Netta wrapped her in pity and compliments, Netta
expressed remorse as inclusive as it was vague. Only the last of their
talk need be recorded; and much had been decided between them earlier.
“But, Netta, how can I let you go when he told me not to let you know?”
“You can’t keep me from him. My boss will lend me the money to go, if I
ask him.”
“No, no. I’ll give you the money. But do you realize what it means,
Netta?”
“Do I realize? What do you take me for? I realize that Lewis is down
and out, forever.”
The feeble tears stood in Mrs. Hunting’s eyes. “Yes, that’s true. He
is. What are you going to do when you get there?”
“Take care of him, of course. He’s still my husband.”
“You forgive him for wanting to divorce you?”
Netta’s mouth twisted. Forgiveness was something she had never in the
least understood. “It has all been a horrible mistake. And now Lewis
will realize it. He’ll find that his wife is going to stand by him, no
matter what has happened. Bygones are bygones.”
“Netta”--the older woman’s voice shook--“I didn’t know you had it in
you. I guess I never understood you before.” She had never been further
from understanding Netta than she was at that moment, but she spoke
in the utmost honesty. To stick to a broken man who could give her
nothing, who had cast her off with insult ... why, Netta was wonderful.
“You’re going to take him back,” she marveled humbly.
“Sure I am.”
“He ought to worship you, Netta.”
Even Netta was a little at loss to answer that. “Lewis doesn’t worship
people, I guess. But we’ll be all right.”
“I never did believe in divorce,” sighed Mrs. Hunting. It was quite
true, and she felt reminiscently ashamed of having so welcomed her
son’s.
The two women kissed, and Netta, with Mrs. Hunting’s check in her bag,
departed to pack and make reservations. Lewis’s mother watched her go,
and pure admiration filled her heart. She wouldn’t have expected it
of Netta who could so easily, after the divorce, have married again.
If only the dear Lord would help her to carry it through! A little
toneless prayer went up that night from Mrs. Hunting’s lips that Netta
might find her strength and her reward. Netta, meanwhile, alert and
flushed, was moving about her room, packing her trunk and humming.
Never had she felt less need of pity. _She_ was again for Cydnus, to
meet Mark Antony.
Her train, she found, would arrive at a hideously inconvenient hour;
so she stopped short of her goal, had a night’s rest in another town,
and motored over in the happy morning light. Her heart was beating hard
as she faced the hotel clerk and registered. His quick, excited glance
of sympathy and admiration encouraged her. She realized afresh the
tremendous handicap in her favor. She was, after all, still a wife.
“I’ll telephone up,” stammered the clerk.
Netta bent across the counter and smiled at him gently. The result was
to make him feel that some men had all the luck. For a hopeless cripple
to get any woman back after trying to get rid of her--and such a good
looking one....
“No,” she said. “I’ve got to see him. And I think it will be easier
for both of us if I just walk in. I came as soon as I heard. Does he
suffer?” She dropped her voice sympathetically.
“Not now. He’s made a wonderful recovery, they say.”
She nodded. “I’ll just go up and knock at his door. What is the number?”
He told her. “Shall I give you a room?”
Netta flushed a little. “Suppose you wait until I come down. Here is my
trunk check.”
The elevator girl stared at Netta when she revealed her name and her
errand. As soon as Netta was well down the corridor, the girl shot the
car to the basement where her favorite bell boy would be haunting the
pool-room entrance. She crooked a finger at him. “Say, Ted, who’d you
s’pose I just took up to Mr. Hunting’s room? His wife! Gosh, she’s a
wonder--and some looker. Goin’ to take him back, I guess. Don’t you
ever talk to me about women again. There’s some of ’em that’s worth all
the men in creation.” The elevator rose, preventing retort.
Netta already had laid her finger on the pulse of Nevada. She had been
a little afraid of this special atmosphere which, she thought, might
be like nothing else in our great country. But apparently, even in the
stronghold of divorce, fidelity was valued. The mere glances of the
clerk and the elevator girl had made that clear. Nevada itself would
back her, she now suspected, just as Mrs. Hunting had done. She knocked
at Lewis’s door and entered.
Lewis sat by the window, a rug spread over him from the waist down. He
turned, expecting a bell boy. He saw Netta instead, and so profound
was the shock that it seemed instantly inevitable. The fact was too
monstrous for doubt. There was hopelessness beneath his hot flush,
though his voice was cold and stern.
“Netta! Why are you here?”
Netta took off her gloves, went into the bathroom and washed her hands.
She came back, drew up a chair near (but not too near) him and sat
down. Only then did she speak.
“I’m here to talk to you, first of all, Lewis. And then to see what I
can do for you.”
“How did you hear about this?” He pointed at the rug.
“It must have been in the papers. Some one spoke to me about it,
finally. So I went to see Mother Hunting, and she told me everything.”
“Did she know you were coming out here?”
“Why, of course she knew, Lewis. She helped me to come and gave me her
blessing.”
More virtue went out of him as he heard these words.
“My mother doesn’t understand anything about my position,” he said
harshly. “There’s nothing you can do for me. Sorry you had the trip.
And now you had better get out as soon as possible. How did they happen
to let you up here?”
Netta made no show of temper--which was ominous, Lewis thought. A row,
he considered, would be the very best thing that could happen.
“Well, you see, Lewis dear, I am still your wife. And I think,” she
spoke gently to veil the brutality of what was to come--“most people
would feel that a man in your position couldn’t refuse to see his wife,
if she were willing to see him. It isn’t as if you ever had any real
grounds against me, you know. I suppose you thought you’d marry again.
Well, I don’t see how you ever can, do you?”
“Of course I shall never marry again,” he said shortly. She had got
beneath his skin--Netta always did--and he felt weak tears starting.
“Somebody’s got to take care of you, Lewis, you know. And if your
mother and I are willing to do it, between us, I guess you can only be
thankful to us. I shall keep on working, of course.”
“I’d rather starve,” Lewis answered simply.
“That’s foolish,” his wife replied mildly “--dead silly. Where would
you starve? And how? You can be very sure of one thing, Lewis. Your
friends aren’t going to look after you while your own family stand
ready to do it.”
“Why do you come and badger me like this?” It was weak, and he knew it;
but he could not tell her in plain words that he hated her. The loss of
his physical integrity somehow made it impossible to utter so complete
and violent a truth.
Netta rose. “I suppose if I told you I loved you, Lewis, you wouldn’t
understand. But I’ve always loved you. You knew when you left me, when
you tried to divorce me, that I loved you. Do you suppose a woman
who didn’t love you would come back to you, after the way I’ve been
treated, and after what has happened to you? You can put it up to
your precious lawyer if you want to. I guess you’ll find that even in
the state of Nevada people will consider that a wife who’s ready to
forgive what I’m ready to forgive, and to take care of you the rest of
your life, is worth paying some attention to.”
“It’s no use talking, Netta. I don’t love you--not a damn bit. What do
you want me for?”
She bent over him, not touching him. “Darned if I know, Lewis. But I
do want you--and I intend to have you. I don’t see how you’re going
to stop it. No, you needn’t worry--I’m not going to kiss you. Some
day”--she looked at him strangely, scrutinizingly--“you’ll be asking
for it. I’ll wait for that, thanks.”
A bell boy knocked and entered just then to take Lewis down to the
dining room. If he was half an hour earlier than usual, he can
hardly be blamed. The hotel was buzzing from lobby to kitchen. Word
had already gone forth upon the streets of the town concerning the
beautiful forgiving wife who had appeared like an angel in the desert.
It must be remembered that in Nevada the presumption against the
forsaken spouse is not very strong.
“You had better go down alone today, Lewis,” Netta said. “I’ll go out
and do an errand or two, and lunch later.”
She left them in the lobby. There were two people she wanted to see
before she talked with Lewis again. Thanks to Mrs. Hunting, she knew
the names of both, and a telephone book did the rest.
The interview with Lewis’s lawyer came first. Netta did not attempt
to commit him to anything. She merely announced her presence and her
intentions; and she did not fail to refer obliquely to the fact that,
however the situation broke, there could be no money in it for any one.
“Of course I know you’ll have to talk with my husband,” she said
finally, as she rose. “But the fact is that he’s down and out, and
I’m willing to forget everything and work for the rest of my life to
support him. I’m afraid I am his only chance.” She shook her tawny head
a little pathetically and departed.
Netta permitted herself a sandwich and a cup of coffee before the
second encounter. It was possible, she realized, that Lewis had fallen
in love; and in spite of Netta’s brave sarcasms she knew it also to
be possible that another woman had fallen in love with him. If she,
Netta, could keep on loving him, another woman might. And if the other
woman were rich, she might even allow herself the luxury of a crippled
husband. Her hand trembled a little as she rang the bell of Mrs.
Tilton’s apartment.
She could have shouted for joy, once face to face with Mona Jeffers.
If she couldn’t cut out that pale creature, she wasn’t much good, she
opined. She prepared to do battle, rather contemptuously. But Mona
surprised her at once.
“We heard that you had come on, Mrs. Hunting. My cousin just came in
from shopping. Things get round pretty quickly in this place.” The girl
was panting slightly, and Netta watched her, catlike, to see what would
come. “Oh, I do hope it’s true, Mrs. Hunting, that you’re ready to make
it up and take him back!”
So, even if Lewis wanted this chit, she didn’t want him. She had only
Lewis to fight, after all.
“I certainly am, Miss Jeffers. I only want to stand by him and take
care of him, if he’ll let me.”
“Oh, how glad I am, Mrs. Hunting. Why”--the girl spoke softly--“it is
almost worth while it should have happened if it brings you together
again.”
Precisely what Netta had thought; but she had not expected any one else
to say it. Suspicion attacked her again.
“I wouldn’t say that, Miss Jeffers. It’s a pretty awful thing that’s
happened. But he’s my husband, and I feel we belong to each other. The
real reason I came to see you”--she went on very gravely--“was that I
knew you were together at the time of the accident. I didn’t know but
you and he had fallen in love with each other--meant to get married
when he got his decree.”
The pale girl flushed. “Oh, no, Mrs. Hunting. There wasn’t a
thing--ever!” She gave a little involuntary shiver.
Netta noted the shiver and could have laughed aloud. Whatever Lewis
might have wanted, this girl didn’t want him. Poor old Lewis! His day
of charm was over--excepting always for her. Funny: somehow he had
“got” her for all time, but it looked as if he would never “get” any
one else.
She smiled as she rose to go. “You must remember, Miss Jeffers, that
Mr. Hunting has been trying to divorce me. I don’t know yet what he
will do.”
“Do?” the girl exclaimed. “Why, of course he’ll worship you. Not many
women would do what you are doing.”
Wouldn’t they? Netta wondered silently as she went out upon the street.
Well, perhaps other people didn’t know what they wanted. She had never
been troubled that way. But it was clear to her that no one was going
to interfere with her taking on the whole burden of Lewis Hunting.
Relief was in all their voices. Netta took a room at the hotel, but
she did not try to see Lewis again. She dined outside the hotel and
filled in the evening at a movie. In the theater she was aware of being
covertly pointed out. Before retiring she sent a note to Lewis, saying
that she should not see him until he sent for her.
Lewis, however, did not take long to capitulate. After talking
with a few people he saw that, in the eyes of public opinion, he
had no case. It was cold fact that Netta was behaving with great
magnanimity. He was helpless, done for, and she was willing to take
him on. The fact that he didn’t want to live with her seemed very
small in comparison--everybody blew it away, and indeed the mere hint
of it seemed to shock. Half a man has no right to the prejudices and
preferences of the whole man. How could he fight against the heroine of
the hour? He sent for his wife on the second day, and she came at once.
“Well, Lewis?”
“Well, Netta.”
That seemed to be all. Then he said haltingly, “I am very grateful to
you, Netta.”
“You’ve got reason to be,” she answered briskly. “I’ll move next door
tomorrow, and you won’t have to hire other people to wait on you.
Perhaps I had better begin by taking you down to dinner tonight.” She
moved about the room, tidying it. Her presence seemed to flow into the
farthest crannies of the chamber, and his nerves began the old gestures
of revolt. There was never to be peace.
“Let’s go down early,” he said roughly.
“All right.” She wheeled him into the elevator and wheeled him out and
into the dining room. As they moved through the palm room, she heard
an unattractive citizen remark aside, “I’ve got pretty cynical, living
in this place; but by heck, a woman like that almost gives me back
my faith in human nature.” Evidently Lewis had heard it too, for he
flushed.
At the table he ordered, but ate little. Instead, he stared ahead of
him--still flushed and curiously, stonily handsome. They talked very
little. Netta too was flushed and shaken--with victory. She had got
Lewis back forever, and food was unimportant. Money was the thing that
was going to trouble her next.
Lewis was dealing with the future, as well as she. He was beginning to
realize--the overheard words had thrust it on him--that not only must
he live with Netta, endure her unmodulated hardness, perhaps even her
strong caresses, but must always be humble with gratitude. He would
have died rather than kneel to her, three months ago, when he had knees
to kneel with; but, symbolically, he must do just that--forever.
“Let’s stick round the lobby awhile,” he proposed.
“All right, if you want to.”
But suddenly he clutched the chair-arm. “No--upstairs!” He had wanted
to put off being alone with her, but he had been wrong. It was more
terrible to sit there with her, hero and heroine, under those cynical
eyes made soft again by the spectacle of them.
“All right,” said Netta again. “Just wait until I go to the newsstand
and get some magazines.” She left him, and he closed his eyes.
A voice in his ear made him open them. “It’s terrible for you--her
coming like this. But be brave. Nothing lasts forever. Be brave.” The
speaker passed on--a woman he had never known but whom, like all the
other hotel guests, he had noted for her distinction of bearing and
garb. She was not in the least of Lewis’s--or of the others’--world,
and she would never have employed a young woman so aggressive and sharp
as Netta.
“Who is your friend?” he heard his wife ask. Strolling back with her
magazines, she had noted the clothes, the air, the aspect of the older
woman who had paused--though barely--by her husband’s chair.
“I never spoke to her before, and I haven’t any idea,” he replied.
“There are all sorts of people round this place.”
He spoke very quietly. It was suddenly easier to be patient. Somehow
that woman, with her mere passing murmur of sympathy, had picked his
dignity out of the dust and handed it back to him. They had to wait for
the elevator, and a cold draft assailed them, blowing directly through
the little lobby from the street. Netta took off her scarf and folded
it round his shoulders with a solicitous, possessive smile. The world
looked on, with moist eyes.... Lewis set his teeth, squared his fine
shoulders, and looked straight ahead of him with pride.