with a straining of all her faculties. The blood seemed to drain away
from her body, leaving her ready to sink, and only the watchful and
threatening eye of a man nurse sustained her. He was sitting up in bed,
and she would never have recognized in him anything of Gerald except
for the shining Scandinavian quality of his hair. His eyes were not
bandaged, but their sockets were dry and bare like the beds of old
lakes long since drained. She had only seen the like in eyeless marble
busts. There were unsuspected cheek-bones, pitched now very high in his
face, and his neck, rising above the army nightshirt, seemed cruelly
long, possibly from thinness.
“Are you Hester?” whispered the man nurse.
She nodded, her tonsils squeezed together in an absolute knot.
“He called for you all through his delirium,” he said, and went out.
She stood at the bedside, trying to keep down the screams from her
speech when it should come. But he was too quick for her.
“Hester,” he said, feeling out.
And in their embrace, her agony melted to tears that choked and seared,
beat and scalded her, and all the time it was he who held her with
rigid arm, whispered to her, soothed down the sobs which tore through
her like the rip of silk, seeming to split her being.
“Now--now. Why, Hester! Now--now--now. Sh-h--it will be over in a
minute. You mustn’t feel badly. Come now; is this the way to greet a
fellow that’s so darn glad to see you that nothing matters? Sure I can
see you, Hester. Plain as day in your little crispy waist. Now, now;
you’ll get used to it in a minute. Now--now--”
“I can’t stand it, Gerald; I can’t! Can’t! Kill me, Gerald, but don’t
ask me to stand it!”
He stroked down the side of her, lingering at her cheek.
“Sh-h. Take your time, dear,” he said, with the first furry note in his
voice. “I know it’s hard, but take your time. You’ll get used to me.
It’s the shock, that’s all. Sh-h.”
She covered his neck with kisses and scalding tears, her compassion for
him racing through her in chills.
“I could tear out my eyes, Gerald, and give them to you. I could tear
out my heart and give it to you. I’m bursting of pain. Gerald! Gerald!”
There was no sense of proportion left her. She could think only of
what her own physical suffering might do in penance. She would
willingly have opened the arteries of her heart and bled for him on the
moment. Her compassion wanted to scream. She, who had never sacrificed
anything, wanted suddenly to bleed at his feet, and prayed to do so on
the agonized crest of the moment.
“There’s a girl! Why, I’m going to get well, Hester, and do what
thousands of others of the blinded are doing. Build up a new, a useful,
and a busy life.”
“It’s not fair! It’s not fair!”
“I’m ready now, except for this old left lung. It’s burned a bit, you
see. Gas.”
“God! God!”
“It’s pretty bad, I admit. But there’s another way of looking at it.
There’s a glory in being chosen to bear your country’s wounds.”
“Your beautiful eyes! Your blue, beautiful eyes! O God, what does it
all mean? Living! Dying! All the rotters, all the rat-eyed ones I know,
scot-free and Gerald chosen. God, God, where are you?”
“He was never so close to me as now, Hester. And with you here, dear,
he is closer than ever.”
“I’ll never leave you, Gerald,” she said, crying down into his sleeve
again. “Don’t be afraid of the dark, dear! I’ll never leave you.”
“Nonsense,” he said, smoothing her hair that the hat had fallen away
from.
“Never! Never! I wish I were a mat for you to walk on. I want to crawl
on my hands and knees for you. I’ll never leave you, Gerald--never!”
“My beautiful Hester!” he said unsteadily, and then again, “Nonsense.”
But, almost on the moment, the man nurse returned, and she was obliged
to leave him, but not without throbbing promises of the morrow’s
return, and then there took place, down-stairs in an ante-room, a long,
a closeted, and very private interview with a surgeon and more red tape
and filing of applications. She was so weak from crying that a nurse
was called finally to help her through the corridors to her car.
Gerald’s left lung was burnt out, and he had three, possibly four,
weeks to live.
All the way home, in her tan limousine with the little yellow curtains,
she sat quite upright, away from the upholstery, crying down her
uncovered face, but a sudden, an exultant determination hardening in
her mind.
That night, a strange conversation took place in the Riverside Drive
apartment. She sat on Wheeler’s left knee, toying with his platinum
chain, a strained, a rather terrible pallor out in her face, but the
sobs well under her voice, and its modulation about normal. She had
been talking for over two hours, silencing his every interruption until
he had fallen quite still.
“And--and that’s all, Wheeler,” she ended up. “I’ve told you
everything. We were never more than just--friends--Gerald and me. You
must take my word for it, because I swear it before God.”
“I take your word, Hester,” he said huskily.
“And there he lies, Wheeler, without--without any eyes in his head.
Just as if they’d been burnt out by irons. And he--he smiles when he
talks. That’s the awful part. Smiles like--well, I guess like the angel
he--he almost is. You see, he says it’s a glory to carry the wounds of
his country. Just think, just think--that boy to feel that, the way he
lies there!”
“Poor boy! Poor, poor boy!”
“Gerald’s like that. So--so full of faith. And, Wheeler, he thinks he’s
going to get well and lead a useful life like they teach the blind to
do. He reminds me of one of those Greek statues down at the Athens
Café. You know--broken. That’s it; he’s a broken statue.”
“Poor fellow! Poor fellow! Do something for him. Buy the finest fruit
in the town for him. Send a case of wine. Two.”
“I--I think I must be torn to pieces inside, Wheeler, the way I’ve
cried.”
“Poor little girl!”
“Wheeler?”
“Now, now,” he said; “taking it so to heart won’t do no good. It’s
rotten, I know, but worrying won’t help. Got me right upset, too.
Come; get it off your mind. Let’s take a ride. Doll up; you look a bit
peaked. Come now, and to-morrow we’ll buy out the town for him.”
“Wheeler?” she said. “Wheeler?”
“What?”
“Don’t look, Wheeler; I’ve got something else to ask you--something
queer.”
“Now, now,” he said, his voice hardening but trying to maintain a
chiding note; “you know what you promised after the chinchilla--no more
this year until--”
“No, no; for God’s sake, not that! It’s still about Gerald.”
“Well?”
“Wheeler, he’s only got four weeks to live. Five at the outside.”
“Now, now, girl; we’ve been all over that.”
“He loves me, Wheeler, Gerald does.”
“Yes?”--dryly.
“It would be like doing something decent--the only decent thing I’ve
done in all my life, Wheeler, almost like doing something for the war,
the way these women in the pretty white caps have done, and you know
we--we haven’t turned a finger for it except to--to gain--if I was
to--to marry Gerald for those few weeks, Wheeler. I know it’s a--rotten
sacrifice, but I guess that’s the only kind I’m capable of making.”
He sat squat, with his knees spread.
“You crazy?” he said.
“It would mean, Wheeler, his dying happy. He doesn’t know it’s all up
with him. He’d be made happy for the poor little rest of his life. He
loves me. You see, Wheeler, I was his first--his only sweetheart. I’m
on a pedestal, he says, in his dreams. I never told you--but that boy
was willing to marry me, Wheeler, knowing--some--of the things I am.
He’s always carried round a dream of me, you see--no; you wouldn’t see,
but I’ve been--well, I guess sort of a medallion that won’t tarnish in
his heart-- Wheeler, for the boy’s few weeks he has left? Wheeler?”
“Well, I’ll be hanged!”
“I’m not turning holy, Wheeler. I am what I am. But that boy lying
out there--I can’t bear it! It wouldn’t make any difference with
us--afterward. You know where you stand with me and for always, but it
would mean the dying happy of a boy who fought for us. Let me marry
that boy, Wheeler. Let his light go out in happiness. Wheeler? Please,
Wheeler?” He would not meet her eyes. “Wheeler?”
“Go to it, Hester,” he said, coughing about in his throat and rising to
walk away. “Bring him here and give him the fat of the land. You can
count on me to keep out of the way. Go to it,” he repeated.
And so they were married. Hester holding his hand beside the hospital
cot, the man nurse and doctor standing by, and the chaplain incanting
the immemorial words. A bar of sunshine lay across the bed, and Gerald
pronounced each “I will” in a lifted voice that carried to the four
corners of the little room. She was allowed to stay that night past
hospital-hours, and they talked with the dusk flowing over them.
“Hester, Hester,” he said, “I should have had the strength to hold out
against your making this terrible sacrifice.”
“It’s the happiest hour of my life,” she said, kissing him.
“I feel well enough to get up now, sweetheart.”
“Gerald, don’t force. You’ve weeks ahead before you are ready for that.”
“But to-morrow, dear, home! In whose car are you calling for me
to-morrow to take me _home_?”
“In a friend’s, dearest.”
“Won’t I be crowding up our little apartment? Describe it again to me,
dearest--our _home_.”
“It’s so little, Gerald. Three rooms and the littlest babiest kitchen.
When you’re once up, I’ll teach its every corner to you.”
Tears seeped through the line where his lids had been, and it was
almost more than she could bear.
“I’ll make it up to you though, Hester. I know I should have been
strong enough to hold out against your marrying me, but I’ll make it
up. I’ve a great scheme; a sort of braille system of accountancy--”
“Please, Gerald--not now!”
“If only, Hester, I felt easier about the finances. Will your savings
stand the strain? Your staying at home from your work this way--and
then me--”
“Gerald dear, I’ve told you so often--I’ve saved more than we need.”
“My girl!”
“My dear, my dear!” she said.
* * * * *
They moved him with hardly a jar in an army ambulance, and with the
yellow limousine riding alongside to be of possible aid, and she had
the bed stripped of its laces and cool with linen for him, and he
sighed out when they placed him on it and would not let go her hand.
“What a feeling of space for so little a room!”
“It’s the open windows, love.”
He lay back tiredly.
“What sweet linen!”
“I shopped it for you.”
“You, too--you’re in linen, Hester?”
“A percale shirt-waist. I shopped it for you, too.”
“Give me your hand,” he said, and pressed a string of close kisses into
its palm.
The simplicity of the outrageous subterfuge amazed even her. She held
hot-house grapes at two dollars a pound to his lips, and he ate them
through a smile.
“Naughty, extravagant girl!” he said.
“I saw them on a fruit-stand for thirty cents, and couldn’t resist.”
“Never mind; I’ll make it up to you.”
Later, he asked for braille books, turning his sightless face toward
her as he studied, trying to concentrate through the pain in his lung.
“If only you wouldn’t insist upon the books awhile yet, dear. The
doctor says it’s too soon.”
“I feel so strong, Hester, with you near, and, besides, I must start
the pot boiling.”
She kissed down into the high nap of his hair, softly.
Evenings, she read to him newspaper accounts of his fellow soldiers,
and the day of the peace, for which he had paid so terribly, she rolled
his bed, alone, with a great tugging and straining, to the open window,
where the wind from the river could blow in against him and steamboat
whistles shoot up like rockets.
She was so inexpressibly glad for the peace-day. Somehow, it seemed
easier and less blackly futile to give him up.
Of Wheeler, for three running weeks she had not a glimpse, and then,
one day, he sent up a hamper, not a box but an actual trunk of roses,
and she, in turn, sent them up the back way to Kitty’s flat, not
wanting even their fragrance released.
With Kitty, there were little hurried confabs each day outside the
apartment door in the hallway before the elevator-shaft. A veil of awe
seemed to wrap the Drew woman.
“I can’t get it out of my head, Hester. It’s like a fairy-story, and,
in another way, it’s a scream--Wheeler standing for this.”
“Sh-h, Kitty. His ears are so sensitive.”
“Quit shushing me every time I open my mouth. Poor kid! Let me have a
look at him. He wouldn’t know.”
“No! No!”
“God, if it wasn’t so sad, it would be a scream--Wheeler footing the
bills!”
“Oh--you! Oh--oh--you!”
“All right, all right; don’t take the measles over it. I’m going.
Here’s some chicken broth I brought down. Ed sent it up to me from
Sherry’s.”
But Hester poured it into the sink for some nameless reason, and brewed
some fresh from a fowl she tipped the hall-boy a dollar to go out and
purchase.
She slept on a cot at the foot of his bed, so sensitive to his waking
that almost before he came up to consciousness, she was at his side.
All day she wore the little white shirt-waists, a starchy one fresh
each morning, and at night scratchy little unlacy nightgowns with long
sleeves and high yokes. He liked to run his hand along the crispness of
the fabric.
“I love you in cool stuff, Hester. You’re so cool yourself, I always
think of you in the little white waist and blue skirt. You remember,
dear--Finley’s annual?”
“I--I’m going to dress like that for you always, Gerald.”
“I won’t let you be going back to work for long, sweetheart. I’ve some
plans up my sleeve, I have.”
“Yes! Yes!”
But when the end did come, it was with as much of a shock as if she had
not been for days expecting it. The doctor had just left, puncturing
his arm and squirting into his poor tired system a panacea for the
pain. But he would not react to it, fighting down the drowsiness.
“Hester,” he said suddenly, and a little weakly, “lean down,
sweetheart, and kiss me--long--long--”
She did, and it was with the pressure of her lips to his that he died.
* * * * *
It was about a week after the funeral that Wheeler came back. She was
on the _chaise longue_ that had been dragged out into the parlor, in
the webbiest of white negligées, a little large-eyed, a little subdued,
but sweetening the smile she turned toward him by a trick she had of
lifting the brows.
“Hel-lo Wheeler!” she said, raising her cheek to be kissed.
He trailed his lips, but did not seek her mouth, sitting down rather
awkwardly and in the spread-knee’d fashion he had.
“Well, girl--you all right?”
“You helped,” she said.
“It gave me a jolt, too. I made over twenty-five thousand to the Red
Cross on the strength of it.”
“Thank you, Wheeler.”
“Lord!” he said, rising and rubbing his hands together. “Give us a
couple of fingers to drink, honey; I’m cotton-mouthed.”
She reached languidly for a blue-enameled bell, lying back, with
her arms dangling and her smile out. Then, as if realizing that the
occasion must be lifted, turned her face to him.
“Old bummer!” she said, using one of her terms of endearment for him
and two-thirds closing her eyes. Then did he stoop and kiss her roundly
on the lips.
* * * * *
For the remainder of this tale, I could wish for a pen supernally
dipped, or for a metaphysician’s plating to my vernacular, or for the
linguistic patois of that land off somewhere to the west of Life. Or
maybe, just a neurologist’s chart of Hester’s nerve-history would help.
In any event, after an evening of musical comedy and of gelatinous
dancing, Hester awoke at four o’clock the next morning out of an hour
of sound sleep, leaping to her knees there in bed like a quick flame,
her gesture shooting straight up toward the jointure of wall and
ceiling.
“Gerald!” she called, her smoky black hair floating around her and her
arms cutting through the room’s blackness, “Gerald!” Suddenly the room
was not black. It was light with the Scandinavian blondness of Gerald,
the head of him nebulous there above the pink-satin canopy of her
dressing-table and, more than that, the drained lakes of his sockets
were deep with eyes. Yes; in all their amazing blueness, but queerly
sharpened to steel points that went through Hester and through her as
if bayonets were pushing into her breasts and her breathing.
“Gerald!” she shrieked, in one more cry that curdled the quiet, and
sat up in bed, trembling and hugging herself, and breathing in until
her lips were drawn shudderingly against her teeth like wind-sucked
window-shades.
“Gerald!” And then the picture did a sort of moving-picture fade-out,
and black Lottie came running with her hair grotesquely greased and
flattened to take out the kink, and gave her a drink of water with the
addition of two drops from a bottle, and turned on the night-light and
went back to bed.
The next morning, Hester carried about what she called “a head,”
and, since it was Wheeler’s day at Rosencranz, remained in bed until
three o’clock, Kitty curled at the foot of it the greater part of the
forenoon.
“It was the rotten night did me up. Dreams-- Ugh--dreams!”
“No wonder,” diagnosed Kitty sweetly. “Indigestion from having your
cake and eating it.”
At three, she dressed and called for her car, driving down to the Ivy
Funeral Rooms, a gothic Thanatopsis, set, with one of those laughs up
her sleeves New York so loves to indulge in, right in the heart of the
city, between an automobile-accessory shop and a quick-lunch room.
Gerald had been buried from there with simple-flag-draped service
in the Gothic chapel that was protected from the view and roar of
the elevated trains by suitably stained windows. There was a check
in Hester’s purse made out for an amount that corresponded to the
statement she had received from the Ivy Funeral Rooms. And right here
again, for the sake of your elucidation, I could wish at least for the
neurologist’s chart. At the very door to the establishment--with one
foot across the threshold, in fact--she paused, her face tilted toward
the corner where wall and ceiling met, and at whatever she saw there,
her eyes dilating widely, and her left hand springing to her bosom as
if against the incision of quick steel. Then, without even entering,
she rushed back to her car again, urging her chauffeur, at the risk of
every speed-regulation, homeward.
That was the beginning of purgatorial weeks that were soon to tell on
Hester. They actually brought out a streak of gray through her hair,
which Lottie promptly dyed and worked under into the lower part of her
coiffure. For herself, Hester would have let it remain.
Wheeler was frankly perplexed. God knows it was bad enough to be called
upon to endure streaks of unreasonableness at Rosencranz, but Hester
wasn’t there to show that side to him if she had it. To be pretty frank
about it, she was well paid not to. Well paid! He’d done his part. More
than nine out of ten would have done. Been made a jay of, if the truth
was known. She was a Christmas-tree bauble, and was expected to throw
off holiday iridescence. There were limits!
“You’re off your feed, girl. Go off by yourself and speed up.”
“It’s the nights, Gerald. Good God--I mean Wheeler! They kill me. I
can’t sleep. Can’t you get a doctor who will give me stronger drops?
He doesn’t know my case. Nerves, he calls it. It’s the head. If only I
could get rid of this head!”
“You women and your nerves and your heads! Are you all alike? Get out
and get some exercise. Keep down your gasoline bills and it will send
your spirits up. There’s such a thing as having it too good.”
She tried to meet him in lighter vein after that, dressing her most
bizarrely, and greeting him one night in a batik gown, a new process of
dyeing that could be flamboyant and narrative in design. This one, a
long, sinuous robe that enveloped her slimness like a flame, beginning
down around the train in a sullen smoke and rushing up to her face in a
burst of crimson.
He thought her so exquisitely rare that he was not above the poor,
soggy device of drinking his dinner-wine from the cup of her small
crimson slipper, and she dangled on his knee like the dangerous little
flame she none too subtly purported to be, and he spanked her quickly
and softly across the wrists because she was too nervous to hold the
match steadily enough for his cigar to take light, and then kissed away
all the mock sting.
But the next morning, at the fateful hour four o’clock, and in spite
of four sleeping-drops, Lottie on the cot at the foot of her bed and
the night-light burning, she awoke on the crest of such a shriek that
a stiletto might have slit the silence, the end of the sheet crammed
up and into her mouth, and, ignoring all of Lottie’s calming, sat up
on her knees, her streaming eyes on the jointure of wall and ceiling,
where the open accusing ones of Gerald looked down at her. It was not
that they were terrible eyes. They were full of the sweet blue, and
clear as lakes. It was only that they knew. Those eyes _knew_. _They
knew!_ She tried the device there at four o’clock in the morning of
tearing up the still unpaid check to the Ivy Funeral Rooms, and then
she curled up in bed with her hand in the negro maid’s, and her face
half buried in the pillow.
“Help me, Lottie,” she begged; “help me!”
“Law, pore child! Gettin’ the horrors every night this away! I’ve been
through it before with other ladies. But I never saw a case of the
sober horrors befoh. Looks like they’s the worst of all. Go to sleep,
child. I’se holdin’.”
You see, Lottie had looked in on life where you and I might not. A
bird’s-eye view may be very, very comprehensive, but a domestic-eye
view can sometimes be very, very close.
And then, one night, after Hester had beat her hands down into the
mattress and implored Gerald to close his accusing eyes and she had
screamed and sobbed up against the jointure, she sat up in bed, waiting
for the first streak of dawn to show itself, railing at the pain in her
head.
“God, my head! Rub it, Lottie. My head! My eyes! The back of my neck!”
The next morning, she did what you probably have been expecting she
would do. She up and dressed, sending Lottie to bed for a needed
rest. Dressed herself in the little old blue-serge suit that had been
hanging in the very back of a closet for four years, with a five- and
two ten-dollar bills pinned into its pocket, and pressed the little
five-dollar sailor down on the smooth winglike quality of her hair. She
looked smaller, peculiarly indescribably younger. She wrote Wheeler a
note, dropping it down the mail chute in the hall, and then came back,
looking about rather aimlessly for something she might want to pack.
There was nothing; so she went out quite bare and simply, with all her
lovely jewels in the leather case on the upper shelf of the bedroom
closet, as she had explained to Wheeler in the note.
That afternoon, she presented herself to Lichtig. He was again as you
would expect--round-bellied, and wore his cigar up obliquely from one
corner of his mouth. He engaged her immediately at an increase of five
dollars a week, and as she was leaving with the promise to report at
eight-thirty the next morning, he pinched her cheek, she pulling away
angrily.
“None of that!”
“My mistake,” he apologized.
She considered it promiscuous and cheap, and you know her aversion for
cheapness.
Then she obtained, after a few forays in and out of brownstone houses
in West Forty-fifth Street, one of those hall bed-rooms so familiar to
human-interest stories--the iron-bed, wash-stand, and slop-jar kind.
There was a five-dollar advance required. That left her twenty dollars.
She shopped a bit then in an Eighth Avenue department store, and, with
the day well on the wane, took a street-car up to the Ivy Funeral
Rooms. This time, she entered, but the proprietor did not recognize her
until she explained. As you know, she looked smaller and younger, and
there was no tan car at the curb.
“I want to pay this off by the week,” she said, handing him out
the statement and a much folded ten-dollar bill. He looked at her,
surprised. “Yes,” she said, her teeth biting off the word in a click.
“Certainly,” he replied, handing her out a receipt for the ten.
“I will pay five dollars a week hereafter.”
“That will stretch it out to twenty-eight weeks,” he said, still
doubtfully.
“I can’t help it; I must.”
“Certainly,” he said, “that will be all right,” but looking puzzled.
That night, she slept in the hall bedroom in the Eighth Avenue,
machine-stitched nightgown. She dropped off about midnight, praying not
to awaken at four. But she did--with a slight start, sitting up in bed,
her eyes on the jointure.
Gerald’s face was there, and his blue eyes were open, but the steel
points were gone. They were smiling eyes. They seemed to embrace her,
to wash her in their fluid.