He stared at her, unable for ever so long to grasp the staggering new
situation her words established.
Married! But how could she be? How _could_ she? Who was her husband?
Where was he? Questions that were the groping articulation of an ever
deepening incredulity. And she answered them as well as she could, the
answers, on her part, equally groping through the articulation of despair.
Well, she had married a man twice her age when she was seventeen. They
had lived together only about a year. Then she left him. That was really
about all. Her little story sounded so desperately hackneyed as she
poured it out, with increasing enthusiasm, to Jerome.
She was singing in a cabaret when they met. Why she had married him
could hardly be thought of as an essential question. Such marriages
occur constantly, without rhyme or reason, and nothing on earth can
prevent them or their often dismal consequences. She pleased him and he
married her. He was without money and drank and had a heavy tendency
toward sportiness. They tried to set up a little home in one bare room
of a boarding house. It wasn’t very authentic. Her naturally happy and
irresponsible nature drooped under a cloud of incompatibility. They
fought. Things went from bad to worse. She began slipping back to her old
life in the cabaret. Finally she disappeared entirely. She never saw her
husband again. That was all there was to it.
Lili might consistently have had a totally different story, but she
couldn’t possibly have a story that wasn’t reminiscent of thousands and
thousands of other stories, not Lili. There was nothing very definite
about it. She seemed always like some wayward, brazen child, with no
faculty for doing justice to the serious facts of life. One could not
listen without laughter, even though silent; nor could one listen quite
without the sudden tightening of tears.
Jerome’s gaze never left her face, and she seemed glad of his sincere,
almost passionate attention. It might be nothing could alter her present
plight, but there was refreshment, like the long refreshment of an
utterly spent emotion, in baring her heart completely to some one of
whose comradely sympathy she was sure.
When she had told Jerome the whole story, she sat with her hands in her
lap, leaning forward a little in a limp way.
“If it hadn’t been for this, Jerry, I’d have married you long ago. But I
couldn’t bear to tell you about it—I haven’t told anybody at all, because
I’ve wanted to be free. I’ve even tried to kid myself into forgetting.
Sometimes it all seems so long ago. I nearly did tell you once,
Jerry—that first night we sat out on the schooner and you were so sweet
to me. But I couldn’t seem to, and after that every time it got harder.
I used to think: maybe a letter will come saying he’s dead! It’s awful
queer how far you can kid yourself. The day you made love to me so hard
behind the scenes in Honolulu I almost told myself I’d just decide he’d
gotten a divorce from me long ago, and go ahead and marry you, Jerry. But
then I happened to remember about some people I used to know who were
arrested for bigamy, and I got cold feet.”
Jerome sat staring. Here were shallows and depths he had not glimpsed
before. He shuddered a little at the thought of the thin ice on which
he had been plunging in pursuit of his unhappy little romance. The word
bigamy, which fell so lightly from her lips, sent a vague shiver through
him. It was as though, suddenly and for the first time, he realized that
he and Lili moved on different planes....
He seemed dazed. “It doesn’t seem possible to think of you married,
Lili!” Then, as though stimulated by the very sense of chaos which was
just then so strong in his heart, Jerome asked her: “Why can’t you get a
divorce from him?”
“Can’t be done,” she returned listlessly. But she began eyeing Jerome
just a little shrewdly.
“Why not?”
“Well,” she rambled, rubbing her hands together in a dreamy, irrational
way, “I sometimes thought I’d find out how I could get one, but I never
seemed to have time, and I’ve always heard it’s not so easy. I don’t
know. I never knew how anybody went to work to get a divorce. And then,”
she continued with a far-away look in her wide eyes, “you see I don’t
know where he is, for another thing. Don’t you have to produce the
evidence in a case like that? I don’t know how it is in divorces. We
lived most of the time in two or three boarding houses in Chicago. I
don’t know where he came from. We just met.”
Jerome looked across at her forlornly. The shabby pathos of her wretched
little past gave him a feeling of stuffiness and depression. He seemed
to see before him a quite new and more than ever perplexing Lili—felt
himself almost a stranger in her life.
Not to offer to marry her hadn’t even occurred to Jerome—not so much
because he was any sort of a moral giant as because it had become so
natural a thing to want to marry Lili that impetus carried him along over
the rough road of their new relationship. The facts in the case merely
made simple and inevitable what he had all along desired. However, here
was a new and startling complication. His mind was in a curiously mixed
condition, and he asked himself in bewilderment what steps remained to be
taken. He would willingly help some other way, if he could only decide
what would help. They sat together over the empty rum glasses. The world
had been so fair; now it seemed a very shabby and sordid place.
Lili dropped her head down onto her arms, folded before her on the table.
Her shoulders trembled a little, and he knew she was crying again.
Jerome’s heart was deeply touched. Surely, he thought, there must be
some way for him to put out his hand and help. He had forgotten all her
lightness, all the torments he had endured for the sake of love. In the
confusion of his heart there was something almost like exaltation. He
spoke to her gently.
When she raised her head and took up the sorry theme again, it was at
exactly the point where it had lapsed so miserably. “Divorce wouldn’t do
any good, anyhow, about what I’ve got into now.”
“No,” he agreed thoughtfully, “I guess it wouldn’t.” He felt desperately
remorseful.
But that vaguely cunning look in her eyes remained, behind the tears and
behind the hopelessness of her position. After a moment, squeezing his
hand a little, she murmured: “Jerry, there’s just one way out, if—if
you’d be willing to do it—for my sake.”
He brightened. “What is it?”
“Well,” she hesitated, “nobody knows I’m married but you—nobody in this
part of the world, anyhow, and I....” It was a little more difficult than
she had realized, for she knew that Jerome sometimes had queer ideas
about convention.
“Go on and tell me, Lili,” he encouraged.
“Well, then,” she continued, “what I thought of was why couldn’t we just
tell them we’d run off all of a sudden and got married?”
“I—I never thought of that!” he stammered, blushing.
“Oh, Jerry,” cried the girl bursting into a fresh flood of rather easy
tears, “I’m in such a fix I don’t know what to do, my Gawd, I don’t!”
“Well,” he soothed, “don’t cry any more. We’ll do that, then, Lili.” And
after a little pause he added, with a note of resigned whimsy: “There
won’t even be need of any license. It isn’t quite the way I always
pictured myself getting married, but you can’t always have _everything_
just the way you want it.”
Relief stole all the gloom out of eyes that were made for beaming. She
ignored, or failed to sense, the finer phase of what he would be missing
in the curious transaction.
“All you’ll need will be just a wedding ring, won’t it?”
“That’s all, Jerry.”
“Then I’ll buy that for you right away now, if they have any in Tahiti. I
guess I’ve enough saved up. I’ll see.”
“No, no, Jerry,” she said, reviving rapidly. “That won’t be necessary. I
still have my other wedding ring put away. I can use that one, and nobody
will ever know any difference—will they?” And she added quite cheerfully:
“It’s a lucky thing I kept it! I’d hate to have you going and spending
all that money.” Her tone was almost magnanimous.
“All right,” he replied dully. “I’d sort of like to buy the ring at
least, but of course it’s true no one would ever know the difference.”
He was tapping the ends of his fingers thoughtfully on the table. She
wiped her eyes and smiled: “You know we may have need of all our money
later on—when the time comes.”
She was actually beginning to beam on him again; and she asked, with a
tremor of almost happy excitement in her voice: “How shall we work it,
Jerry? Could we do it this afternoon, so I could flash my ring around
tonight?”
“There isn’t much to do, is there?”
“No,” she laughed. “There isn’t much any one can do for this kind of a
wedding!”
“You better get your ring and we’ll disappear for the rest of the
afternoon. And when we come back you can be wearing it. We’ll fix up a
story in the meantime.”
“Will you wait down here?” She was beaming extravagantly. Lili was
herself again.
“Yes, I’ll wait here,” he said.
“Oh,” she tittered, jumping up, “it will be such a grand joke on
everybody, if they only knew!” She laughed a little hysterically. Her
problem was solved. “I won’t be gone a minute, Jerry!”
V