shrugged her incompetence before Jean's superior influence, and as Myra
dashed away to intercept Gerte and Felix, she and Sidney moved after
them. "Put it over," she called back to Jean, "and you'll go down in
history with my thanks."
Jean looked at Jerome with understanding. Neither did she want to go to
the studio and eat unhealthy messes until weird hours. But she had no
good excuse.
"It really won't be a long affair, and you can leave when you want."
"Sorry. But I can't. To-morrow I leave early for that St. Louis
convention and have a dozen things yet to do."
Jean smiled. "I wish I had one half-as-good as that. But I guess I'll
have to go."
Jerome did not answer the smile. Jean thought he looked annoyed
for some reason and offered no further suggestion. With a short
"good-night" he left. When she turned she found only Catherine and
Philip waiting.
"What's the matter with your friend?" Catherine demanded.
"A good excuse. Twice as good as I'd need myself to escape."
Catherine stopped. "You don't have to go, if you don't want to."
"Please don't desert us," Philip said, with the genuine courtesy that
was his at unexpected moments. "It won't be the same, at all."
"Flattered, I yield." Jean swung to step beside him.
But at the corner of the street, Catherine brought them to a sudden
halt. "Excuse or no excuse, I'm dead tired and here _I_ quit."
She left them staring after her.
"I don't believe Catherine's well," Jean said, troubled, as they
started again. "Sometimes lately, she looks so terribly tired."
Philip did not answer.
* * * * *
Three times in the few hours remaining before dawn, Jerome awoke, each
time to full and instant realization of the thing that had happened. It
was incredible, ridiculous, disgusting. Each time Jerome reached this
conclusion, he turned over, thumped his pillow to momentary coolness
and forced sleep. But each time, before he quite succeeded, a small,
shamed relief crept over him, that he would not be seeing Jean again
before he left and that he was to be away three weeks.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
A week after the concert Catherine gave up hope for Poloff. Mrs. Dalton
did not like him. Some reason, connected with an absconding Russian
maid who had once stolen some jewelry, had cut all Russians from her
interest. She was very gracious about it and very obstinate.
"But Tony's another matter. She's sickening about Tony. If I didn't
really love him she would make me hate him. Then, why can't she come
out and say what she intends to do? How do I know she won't go off
to Europe or Asia or Africa for the summer, and every week makes a
difference to Tony."
"Why don't you ring her up?" Jean advised. "She's already spoken about
it you say, it wouldn't be like attacking her from the blue. It would
be easy to make a reasonable excuse."
"Would it?" Catherine asked in such a suddenly changed tone, that Nan
and Gerte as well as Jean stopped eating and stared. Jean flushed, but
Catherine had not been herself since the concert and now her sharp face
looked almost drawn and her lips were a tight line.
"I think so. I'll do it, if you like, drop the seed anyhow. I used to
have to do a lot of indirect managing of her in the old days."
"Thank you," Catherine said after a pause, "but this is my affair. You
don't love Tony and I do."
Catherine did not wait for dessert and left the table. As soon as the
door closed, Gerte burst out:
"What in the world is the matter with Catherine? She's been like a
loaded pistol ever since the concert and now she's just about ready to
go off."
"She's tired out," Nan said shortly and then began, in a most unusual
fashion for Nan, to talk about her work. Neither Jean nor Gerte paid
much attention, but it bridged the gap, and Jean felt, that for some
reason, this was all Nan wanted it to do.
But the next day, when Mrs. Dalton rang up and begged Jean to help her
manage the Rimaldis, Jean at first refused. It was not until she saw
that it was either a question of doing as Mrs. Dalton asked, or having
the whole matter dropped, that she at last reluctantly consented to see
Giuseppe Rimaldi and force him to reason.
"I'll see him this afternoon and let you know," Jean promised and Mrs.
Dalton hung up.
The arrangements took longer than Jean expected and the others were at
the table when she came in, a little excited and triumphant, as the
contest with another will always left Jean. Giuseppe Rimaldi had been
hard to handle, and it was only by threatening him with the law, which
would take away from him both Tony and the new violin presented by Mrs.
Dalton, that he had yielded and promised to let Tony give up selling
papers and have this time for practice. In her success. Jean forgot
Catherine's rudeness of the night before, and launched into a picture
of Giuseppe Rimaldi, surrounded by wife and children, all except Tony,
defending his poverty.
"Like a captain defending a fortress," Jean explained. "No wonder
Dalton couldn't handle him."
"It was a miracle that _you_ were on hand to do it," Catherine said in
a cold, detached tone, each word like the prick of a knife.
Jean's eyes flashed. "If there had been any other way, I should not
have interfered."
Catherine pushed back her chair. "You needn't apologize. But from now
on you can have Tony--as well."
Gerte made no comment this time on Catherine's going, but Jean saw
Nan's face flush scarlet. As soon as the meal was over, Jean went up to
her own room.
What had Catherine meant by that "as well"? What unfounded hurt to her
own vanity was she harboring? There was something more than temporary
fatigue, or nerves, the matter with Catherine, and whatever it was, Nan
knew.
The days passed, a sultry spring moved toward a scorching summer, and
Jean did not change her mind. Catherine was different, so different
that it was impossible to seek an explanation, even if Catherine had
allowed the opportunity. Her wit, always sharp, stabbed now with a
venom that penetrated even Gerte's imperviousness. She dipped her
slightest remark in a well of hatred, and sent it tipped with personal
animosity straight to its mark. Nan alone escaped. It seemed to Jean
sometimes that Nan was mentally tiptoeing through this tension, as a
nurse moves with a patient.
All the old charm of the winter was gone now. The meals were
disagreeable interludes of forced effort that grew more and more
difficult to make. The only nights in the least approaching the
pleasant dinners of the past, were the nights when Philip came. Then,
for some reason that Jean did not seek to analyze, they all united
to drag together the tattered shreds of the old gayety to cover this
ugliness. Catherine did not help, but neither did she hinder. On
these nights coffee was served on the tiny lawn under the full-leafed
ailanthus. The lights in the rear tenement shone through the leaves
like low-hung stars, the fountain was turned on to the full capacity of
its trickle, and there was a definite feeling of relief in the air. But
Philip did not come often. Not nearly so often as he had in the winter.
Jerome's three weeks lengthened to four, then five. Jean did not hear
from him. The original date of Alice's wedding passed with a hurried
note from Alice that her father's return had been delayed, she herself
was going to the mountains, and the wedding would take place whenever
he got back. Then she, too, dropped into the silence.
Gerte went to the Berkshires. Nan took a cottage with a co-worker
at Rockaway; Beth went to Maine. Catherine and Jean were alone.
Catherine made no explanation of why she was staying beyond her usual
time in town and Jean did not ask her. There was little talk between
them. Jean's efforts at meals rebounded from the wall of Catherine's
mechanical replies like rubber balls.
At last in mid-June Jean reached the snapping point of her endurance.
Either Catherine would have to force a pleasantness she did not feel,
or else Jean would take her meals out. She could not eat another dinner
sitting opposite Catherine's bitter, cynical eyes and tight lips.
It was a suffocating evening, threatening thunder, and the air, like
hot wool soaked in glue, crushed Jean's last scrap of strength to keep
up this senseless and annoying pretense. They had finished dinner, and
Jean was standing by the French window opening to the garden, while
Catherine still sat at the table.
"Suppose we eat out here after this." At least the sky would give a
feeling of space and freedom, and the trickle of the fountain and
noises from the tenements fill the strained silence. Jean passed into
the tiny garden and took the steamer chair by the fountain. Catherine
came as far as the window and stood looking at her curiously.
"Why? Do you object to the dining-room?"
"It seems empty for just two--as if the others had died."
Catherine shrugged. "Rather sentimental, mourning three able-bodied
women gone on their summer vacations."
"You know very well it's not that." Jean looked at Catherine framed in
the window. She was dressed in white and now, in the twilight of the
unlit room, her thin face was strained and gray. Jean broke off and
turned on the fountain. The little tinkle rested her when she was very
tired.
"It's so stupid to care--about anything," Catherine murmured, as if she
were not talking directly to Jean. "If you never let any one in--you
don't have to drag them out."
"But that's too high a price to pay for anything," Jean said more
gently. "It would take such a lot of happiness to pay for such little
escapes."
Catherine laughed harshly. "You don't pay for it all at once. You
string it out over the years--all through your life--like buying peace
on the installment."
The last words she seemed to hurl at Jean and went. Jean watched her
disappear through the farther door; heard her go up the stairs and
close the door of her room.
Jean sat on alone. The misunderstanding of the last few weeks spread
through the heat. Catherine's bitterness saturated the heavy air and it
seemed to Jean that mystery and bitterness were pressing down upon her
physically. Nothing was the same as it had been. The clean precision
of the winter was gone. Motives were no longer clear. Every one and
everything was confused and blurred in the water-sogged air. Jerome
stayed away, long after the supposed date of his return, without an
explanation. Things were piling up in his office and every day his
secretary wanted to know if Jean knew when he would return. Catherine
was almost ill with bitterness and hatred of something concealed.
Philip came rarely and then he, too, was different. And since the
others had gone, he had not come at all. Everything was shrouded in a
thick mist of misunderstanding, and Jean felt that it was, somehow, all
meshed together, Jerome's unexplained delay with Catherine's bitterness
and Philip's strangeness with Alice's postponed wedding.
The leaves hung motionless in the breathless night. Jean felt that if
she did not get up and out into a wider space, she would be walled
forever in that ridiculous garden. As she passed Catherine's room on
the way to get her things, she saw that there was no light. The silence
reached through the paneling and Catherine's bitterness was a living
thing, with which she was closed in alone in the darkness.
Jean passed quickly on her way down again, and opened the front door
quietly.
As she stepped out she almost collided with Philip, his hand stretched
toward the bell button.
"Why the get-away? Will you divide the loot?"
"Did it really look as stealthy as that? It's this weather, all messy
and heavy and silent, a thunderstorm gum-shoeing about, afraid to come
out into the open."
Jean stood aside and waited for him to pass. "Catherine's upstairs, but
I don't think she's going out."
Philip paid no attention and closed the door behind Jean. At the click,
Jean thought she heard a noise at Catherine's window, but when she
looked up there was only the white curtain, limp in the heat.
Philip did not ask whether she objected to his coming but strolled
along beside her in one of his quiet moods, so that, after a few
blocks, she did not mind his being there. From time to time he made
some quiet comment, surprising in its keen appreciation of the color
and drama about them. He saw none of the squalor and dirt and tragedy
in the swarming streets, but like Herrick, long ago on that first
walk through Barbary Coast, a beauty, that Jean, too, saw when it was
pointed out.
Suddenly, as if they had risen from the litter, a gnarled old man and
a woman with an orange handkerchief about her withered brown face came
dragging a hurdy-gurdy. The man dropped the shafts and began to turn
the handle. "Back To Our Mountains" wailed to the night. As the old
woman fawned forward with her tambourine, Philip dropped in a dollar.
"Do you always do things as rash as that?"
"Sometimes," Philip answered quietly, and Jean was ashamed. Perhaps
there was some memory connected with this melody for which Philip would
pay any price. The man had hidden spots of sensitiveness like this
love of music, especially thin, tuneful music, for pictures of simple
scenes, and poetry, the lyric poetry of emotion and beautiful sound.
Jean surprised Philip by sitting down on the nearest step. He took a
place on the step below; children gathered about them, dirty, dark-eyed
children of another race. Philip and Jean were far away in another
land. He scarcely heard the tunes wheezed out, one after another, twice
around the repertoire. It was a mist through which he moved with Jean.
He wanted Jean as he had never wanted anything in all his life, and his
hour was come. It frightened him a little.
At last the old man got between the shafts of his cart, the old woman
pulling feebly on one. Smiling and nodding to the two on the steps they
stumbled away. The children plunged again into their games.
Half an hour later, Jean found herself sitting opposite Philip in an
East Side tea-house. The table was covered with dirty oilcloth and the
sawdust on the floor reeked with sour dampness. Shabby men with broad
Slavic faces drank Russian tea from tall glasses and argued of life and
death and government. In one corner a black bearded Russian in peasant
clothes strummed a balalaika, and a small boy in flaming red and with a
tinsel cap, stamped and writhed in a Cossack dance.
"It's great, isn't it?"
Jean nodded. "I often used to wish that I could draw or paint when I
first came to New York." And although she knew that she would have
striven to get on canvas the battle in the souls of these aliens and
that Philip would have painted the picturesque clothes of the balalaika
player, and the tinsel cap of the dancer, she felt nearer to him than
she ever had.
"I used to try it, but I could never get it. I'll show you the sketches
if you like." Jean knew that Philip was proud of these things and glad
to show them. "I should like to see them."
It was after eleven when Philip paid the check and they turned
homeward. The air was broken now with little puffs of hot wind. Philip
took off his hat, so that the puffs of air stirred his hair, and made
him look like a contented baby in a draught. But the evening had been
pleasant and Jean was ashamed of noticing how his fine hair, leaping
suddenly erect, made him look foolish. As they turned into Grove
Street, the first heavy drops splashed, and before they could reach the
door, were coming in a steady patter.
Philip followed Jean into the dark living-room, now filled with a
mysterious cooling breeze like a presence. In a rush the storm broke,
lashing the ailanthus in the garden, beating out the breeze, and the
air stung with the smell of rain and the little square of earth.
Somewhere above, a window slammed. "Catherine," she whispered, and
Philip felt that he and Jean were alone against the world, with all
its silly notions, like shutting windows in a thunderstorm.
Jean moved toward the garden and Philip stood beside her. The rain beat
like shot poured through the opening between the tenements. A little
strip of earth held fast between bricks; thunder, crashing against
tenements; a jumble of majesty and squalor.
"I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone
And the moon's with a girdle of pearl.
The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim
When the whirlwinds my banners unfurl."
The lines slipped in between the crashes and Jean felt the clouds
racing across mountain peaks.
"It would be wonderful," she said in the same low key, as if they alone
were articulate in a world lashed to silence. "I have never been in the
real outdoors in a big storm and I have always wanted it. It would be
glorious----"
"With you," Philip whispered. His face was white, as if the lightning
had touched it, and his eyes blazed. Jean stood silent before them.
And while she stood looking at him, the thunder broke in a deafening
roar that rocked the earth and smashed all subterfuge, all petty social
pretense at misunderstanding; so that when the last reverberation died
away and Philip said softly: "You know, don't you?" Jean nodded.
"Well?" he said with an effort. The sternness of his lips weakened
in nervous twitching, a pitiful betrayal of the thin veneer of his
composure. Jean turned to the garden and leaned her forehead against
the frame of the window. Weariness weighted her, weariness too heavy to
struggle with explanation, too deep to resent this demand so unexpected
and unwelcome. Philip did not move. Jean's bowed head was more eloquent
than words, the dejection and weakness of her strong body more cruel.
In mockery of his momentary hope, a faint echo of the thunder rolled
out to sea.
"Never?"
Jean shook her head.
Philip stared at the thick knot of hair, the broad shoulders, the long,
strong lines of Jean's body, and the blood rushed into his eyes. His
hands clenched on her shoulders and he swung her round, gripping her
beyond the power to move.
"You think I'm weak and silly, and you try not to laugh at me. Laugh
if you like, you couldn't hurt me, neither you nor any woman like you.
You think you're terribly honest and straight, don't you, and you
never tell the truth, not even to yourself. You know how I feel when
you are near me; you must know it. You've got it in you, the call of a
woman to a man and you pretend, you smother it all up under a sham of
companionship and interest, and it's a lie."
Jean tried to release herself, but the fingers dug deeper into the
muscles of her shoulders.
"I think you'd better go."
"I'll go when I'm ready, not before. Nobody has ever told you the truth
about yourself."
"Don't say any more, please," Jean begged.
But the pity in her voice fanned the rage in Philip.
"You're successful in your little fiddling two-by-four job, but if you
died to-night, the silly interfering would go on. You haven't got a
spot in the whole world that really belongs to you. You've got nothing.
Nothing at all----"
Jean shivered. "Don't," she whispered pitifully, "oh don't, please
don't!"
Suddenly tears filled Philip's eyes. "I want you so; I want you so. It
isn't enough, is it? It's only outside, isn't it, sometimes, now when
it thunders, and the earth smells? I'm not worthy of you, Jean. You're
the most wonderful thing God ever made. You want it too, don't you,
something near and close, the thing in the thunder and the sweet earth,
and I can give you that, Jean, even if you can't--give so much to me.
But just tolerate me, Jean, I will ask so little, just be kind and----"
The tears ran in tiny globules down Philip's cheeks.
Jean shivered with nausea, and stepped back. Philip's hand clenched and
his face became evil in its baffled longing.
"You----" His voice broke in a squeak.
Jean raised her head and looked with white, set face at him. Then
she made a motion as if to pass and leave him standing there, but he
stepped before her.
"You fool, you poor blind fool. You can draw men now," in his pain his
eyes clung to her body, "but in a few years you won't. I'm coarse. I
know it. You're so damned honest, but you don't like the truth any
better than any one else. For a few years you'll be a woman yet and
then--you'll be hungry and furtive like--like--Catherine."
With a quick motion Jean passed him, and without looking back walked
out of the room. Philip heard her go quickly up the stairs and then the
house was absolutely still. The rain dripped from the ailanthus, and
a single light high up on the fifth floor of the tenement went out.
Philip took his hat and went slowly, like an old person, from the house.
Staring down from her attic Jean saw him turn the corner and his bent
head and sagging, unexercised body made her feel ill.
It was a long time after that when she heard Catherine pad away from
her window to her bed.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
A little before dawn Jean got up. The narrowness of the couch, the
heat of the sheets, the motionless air of a scorching day cramped her.
She tried to hold her mind with unaccustomed attention to the details
of dressing, but everything was different, the walls, the feel of the
room, the furniture, even the toilet articles that she had had for
years. They no longer formed part of an unnoticed background, but stood
out as distinct points, drawing her attention. They thrust themselves
into her consciousness, as familiar things do when seen again after
a long absence or a serious illness. Between yesterday and to-day
something had happened so that the person who was handling the comb and
brush, moving the clothes from one chair to another, turning on the
bath water, was different from the person who had done these things
yesterday.
When Jean thought of Philip gripping her shoulders, disgust rushed over
her in scorching waves that left her cold and quivering with anger.
All night she had grown hot and cold at the memory. She had gotten up
to escape it but now as she dressed she felt it stronger even than she
had during the night. The thing was not a grotesque exaggeration of
the darkness, but a reality persisting into the light. And as she put
on her clothes she tried not to know that she was doing it hurriedly,
covering from some need to her own peace, the white arms and neck.
She never wanted to speak to Philip again, nor see him, nor hear of
him. The thought of Catherine creeping back to bed, her gray hair
in two plaits down her back, sickened her. Catherine, stealing about
catlike in the night, and Philip weak and angry in his baffled desire,
and she, Jean, so far from desire and jealousy and need like this, all
mixed up in this unclean situation. Jean felt that she would never be
able wholly to free her shoulders from Philip's clutching fingers,
or forget the things he had said. She would never again be exactly
the same person who had opened the front door and found Philip on the
landing, Philip, with his flat jokes, his heavy, flabby body, his
grotesque caperings.
"For a few years you will be a woman yet."
Jean's face flamed. She wanted to go downstairs and out of the house
and never come back. She did not want to see Catherine, and yet, if
she went out at this extraordinary hour of the morning, the need of
an explanation, or some reference to it, would bulk between her and
Catherine when next they met. And for her own sake and Catherine's
they must pretend. They would drag through breakfast together. Perhaps
Catherine would even refer in some way to Philip, as if their coming
in late at night had disturbed her. She would do it casually and well,
better than Jean could meet it.
The sun touched the tips of the flagpoles on tall buildings, and
another day crept out from night.... It was not true. None of it was
true. And yet, the words sounded as clearly in her ears now as they had
when Philip had hurled them at her. "You've got it in you, the call of
a woman to a man."
Nothing personal, nothing her own, part of her conscious choice. But
something hidden, impersonal, something that she shared with all the
pitifully weak victims of lust and their own senses.
The breakfast bell sounded. Jean went slowly across the room and opened
the door. She stepped into the hall and heard Catherine come out from
her room below. She stepped back and closed the door quietly.
When she was sure that Catherine had gone, she went downstairs. The
stairs and the hall had the same quality of strangeness as the familiar
toilet articles and her own attic. As Jean took her usual seat at the
table, the quiet dining-room seemed to retreat and Jean felt physically
smaller in it. And as she closed the front door, the whole house seemed
to be whispering about her. She turned and looked up at the mellow red
bricks with cool spots of ivy grown window boxes, the white curtains of
Catherine's windows, up to her own attic. The whole house was strange,
inimical, self-righteous in its aloofness, as if she had betrayed its
trust.
It would be impossible to go on living there. She could not stand
living under pretense to Catherine and, besides, Philip would no longer
come. It was the nearest thing he had to a home and it had been his
long before she came. And if Philip stayed away, something would go out
of the days for Nan, and Nan had so little. Nan's life seemed emptier
than ever now, when Jean thought of it in relation to Philip, all
possibility of love and warmth centered on the fat body slouching away
into the night.
Jean stayed at the office only long enough to attend to the most
important matters and left before noon. The rest of the day she spent
looking for a place to live. But it was difficult to find. She walked
all that day and all the next and the next, going home long after the
dinner hour, when she was sure she would not meet Catherine. And then,
on the fourth day, she found it, a four-room apartment, a penthouse
on the roof of a quiet, middle-class apartment house in Old Chelsea.
High above the street, it perched on a secluded corner of the roof, and
faced the Jersey shore.
Jean scarcely looked at the rooms as she followed the caretaker and
even while the latter was still pointing out the usefulness of a
drop-table in the kitchen, Jean was back in the little living-room,
facing west, just where the widest space between distant factory
chimneys opened to the Jersey shore. The roar of the city below rose
in a pleasant murmur that gave an added feeling of peace and a deep
security, as if nothing dangerous or violent, no matter how it tried,
could ever reach up to this sun-drenched peace. For the first time in
five days Philip's hold loosened and he slipped back into a roaring
vortex that could not reach her.
That night Jean went home to dinner. She had determined to wait up
in case Catherine was not there, but Catherine was, and they had an
uncomfortable meal during which Jean made repeated efforts to introduce
the subject of her moving and could not. At last she said abruptly,
just as they both rose and Catherine moved toward the living-room as if
afraid Jean was going to suggest the lawn,
"I've taken an apartment, Catherine."
She waited a moment for some comment, but none came. She could scarcely
throw the statement at Catherine and walk out of the room, so she began
to describe her wonderful new home upon a roof. But Catherine's silence
made her uncomfortable, and she stopped as suddenly as she had begun.
As if she had been waiting for Jean to clear away this ornamentation of
enthusiasm, Catherine said:
"When are you going?"
"This week, I think."
"I suppose that means we will not see you again."
"Not if it rests with me." Jean fancied that Catherine smiled, but it
was too dark to see. If Catherine was going to be nasty, there was
really no obligation to consider her any longer. Jean went on toward
the hall, but Catherine's next statement stopped her.
"I suppose Nan will be the next. She's getting the home-bug, too--and
she has a tremendous respect for you."
"I don't see how even Nan's energy could keep house and work with the
hours she has."
"Nan might give up her job--if the home-bug gets bad enough. Philip
is always suggesting that she keep house for him and Nan only needs a
starter. Funny, isn't, how fashionable it's getting--to want a home? Do
you remember those old teas at your place that winter? Perhaps we've
all gone as far as we can."
Jean resisted the longing to switch on the lights and say, "I'm sorry,
Catherine. It was the last thing that would have entered my mind. I've
been happy here with you, but it's best for me to go." Instead she
moved away across the living-room, for she felt that Catherine's eyes
were actually touching her in the murky light.
"Perhaps we've gone so far we're coming clear round on the other side
again--if you're right about it's being fashionable to want a home."
There was a faint noise as if Catherine were laughing. "I'm not
accusing _you_ of any such weakness, but Nan would like it. There have
been times when Nan has been perfectly frank about it, and I recognize
the symptoms coming on. Besides--Philip wants one--and Nan would do
anything for--'Philly.'"
"I don't believe that Philip really wants a home."
"Don't you? Perhaps you're right. It would be tragic, wouldn't
it--if he meant all he says about a home--because there's something
undeveloped and silly about Philip that would keep--any woman whom he
might care about from caring for him."
"I don't think that Philip is silly," Jean said quietly.
"Perhaps not. But he makes a good bluff at it then."
In spite of the darkness, Jean felt something moving between them,
just as she had felt it, without understanding, on the night she had
hooked Catherine before the concert.
"Perhaps he does. But then, I think that men, as often as women, make
pretenses and--hide behind them."
"I don't doubt that, but they don't put it over--any better than most
women do."
As Catherine passed and went quickly out of the room, Jean wished that
she had not forced her to that last. Catherine's voice had trembled so.
The next morning when Jean came down, the maid said that Miss Lee had
gone on her vacation.
On Friday Jean had her things taken from storage and by Saturday night,
her new home was in order. Jean cooked her own dinner and ate it on a
small table in the shadow of the house, where she could watch the sun
sink over the Jersey hills.
CHAPTER FIFTY
The evenings from early dusk until late, Jean spent upon the roof, and
her first feeling, of being high and safe from all turmoil, deepened.
Its peace was tangible. Something within herself reached out to meet
it, as something within had reached toward the spirit of the hills and
sea in the blue days with Herrick. Something within herself was part of
a universal spirit, and here upon her roof, the spirit was one of peace.
On Friday a note was forwarded from Alice. The wedding was to be on
Saturday afternoon at four o'clock. "Don't forget, four means four
because we have to catch the seven boat," Alice wrote, as if she were
inviting Jean to a tennis match and four o'clock marked the limit of
the entries.
Jerome must have returned. The wedding was to take place. Things were
going to be as they had been, untangled and proceeding logically.
Jean was happy. The last miserable days on Grove Street, dimmed by
this wonderful week, high on her quiet roof, faded to sincere pity
for Catherine, bitter, caustic, and slyly watching from windows; and
Philip, weak, servile, lonely Philip.
On Saturday, a little before four, Jean entered the Stuart living-room,
and then stood wondering whether, after all, she had not mistaken the
hour and the ceremony was not over. Alice, in a pale yellow dress, a
favorite of Jerome's, was laughing with the minister, a venerable,
white haired person with twinkling, merry eyes. Sidney and two friends
were moving a victrola and Jean caught Jerome's voice arguing with
Malone about the supper seating. The next moment, Alice caught sight
of her and hurried over.
"Awfully glad you made it. We're just about to begin."
"I'm glad it's not over."
"It would have been only Sid forgot to tell the minister and so we had
to scratch round and get old Dr. Gillet. Isn't he a dream?"
"Made for the part."
"Looks like one of the Prophets after a good dinner, doesn't he? The
old duck!"
Just then Sidney joined them.
"Ready, dear?"
"Yes. If dad's through. Oh, there he is. All right, come on."
Passing through the French window Jerome saw Jean standing a little
apart, the smile at Alice's flippancy touched with sadness at the
thought of what Martha would have felt at having to "scratch round"
for another minister who looked "like one of the Prophets after a good
dinner."
In the six weeks of absence, Jerome had settled the matter of the
concert night to his own satisfaction. Away from Jean, he had analyzed
it thoroughly and was glad, by the time he had put a few hundred miles
between them, that it had happened as it had. It would never happen
again and it had taught him much. Now, as he saw her standing, a
little lonely it seemed to him, with that look of mingled amusement
and sadness on her face, he felt a deep tenderness, almost as if she
were Alice, a tenderness which had in it no room for passion. He was
crossing the room to stand beside her--Alice absolutely forbade being
given away--when the minister opened his book and the short service
of the Episcopal Church began. Jerome stood where he was, and after a
moment forgot Jean.
Standing aside from the group of young people, all strangers, Jean
listened and, as she listened, the room faded into the walls of the
little western church at the foot of the Berkeley Hills. In the pew
behind, Martha stifled her sobs and Elsie dabbed with surreptitious
slaps at the fidgeting Tommykins.
What a dreary affair it had been. Jean felt again her rebellion and
shame at the sordid ugliness of Martha's sobs and Elsie's whispered
rebukes.
"Do you, Alice, take this man, to be your wedded husband ... to love,
honor and obey, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?"
"I do."
She, too, had promised, firm in belief of herself, of Herrick, of any
test the future might hold. And she had understood nothing, nothing at
all. It was a terrible promise to make in one's youth, untried.
"Do you, Sidney, take this woman, to be your wedded wife ... succor and
cherish in sickness and in health, until death do you part?"
Franklin had promised, just as clearly, and she had thrilled with the
safety of his protection. How awed she had been, almost grateful, for
this opportunity to build a life together, not a life with all beauty
drugged to nagging duty, but a free life, brimming with opportunity,
overflowing with beauty. And even while he promised--she knew now what
had been Franklin's mood as he stood beside her--desire, throttled to
control until the effort whitened and sharpened his face to the Galahad
look.
Jean's head drooped.
And with Gregory, no open honesty like this, but smothering secrecy
that she had tried to glorify.
To love, honor and obey, till Death do you part.
To seal the truth openly before all, as Alice was doing. In all her
life she would never have a memory as this would be to Alice.
"In the name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, I
pronounce you man and wife."
There was a moment of deep silence, in which it seemed to Jean that
these two people as individuals, were effaced in this Thing they had
just done, and that, never till the end of time could they again be two.
Then every one was crowding about, laughing and talking and trying to
kiss the bride. But Alice fended them all off and Jerome took her in
his arms. Jean saw his face twitch as he let her go.
"How he is going to miss her," Jean thought and then Jerome was
crossing the room to her.
"Well, I thought you had decided to live in St. Louis. How did the
conference go? I'm dying to hear."
With this flippant greeting, Jean pushed memory from her.
"Great. And I'm dying to tell about it. I tried to get over to the
office this morning, but Alice discovered me. You haven't any idea what
a lot of people and how much effort it takes to keep a wedding simple.
I saw only the tag end of proceedings but if I had another daughter she
should have everything from organ march to flower girls. It's a lot
easier."
While he spoke he looked about for a quiet spot in which to tell Jean
of the conference. The garden offered the only chance and he was just
going to suggest it when Alice swooped down upon him.
"No, you don't, Dad Stuart. This is _my_ party. Look over there at Mrs.
Cather. Belle said she couldn't vouch for her mother not crying and
she's just about ready to begin. Beat it. I will not have a single weep
at this wedding."
"Can't I wait till she begins? I haven't seen--I want to tell Mrs.
Herrick----"
"Run along. She _is_ beginning."
Alice watched until he was safely landed by Mrs. Cather. When she
turned back, Jean saw with surprise that the blue eyes were misty.
"Do you know, Mrs. Herrick, that's the only spot that hurts in the
whole business, having to leave Dad. He's going to be lonesome, whether
he knows it or not."
"I'm afraid he is."
"He'll just stay over here by himself and putter with bulbs and things
and get into a rut. I know he'll never go to a place except to the
office when I'm not here to prod him."
"Well, the office is a pretty absorbing thing."
"Yes, I know it, but--don't you think that as people get older their
work just kind of goes along without all of them that there is, and the
rest gets into a groove?"
"Good gracious, what an uncomfortable thought!"
"He's gotten used to me in a whole lot of little ways he doesn't know
anything about, and I'm afraid," she hesitated, took a quick summary
of Jean and added hastily as she saw Sidney coming to her, "Would you
mind, sometimes, just prodding him along a bit, Mrs. Herrick, till it
all settles down again?"
"I'll prod to the best of my ability, but I'm afraid it isn't promising
much."
"Oh, it's only for a little while. I'll be back in October to tend to
the matter myself."
"Till then, perhaps I can manage it." Jean laughed, too, but she had a
tenderness for this big girl who was afraid that Jerome Stuart would
get into a rut.
In spite of the pleasant informality of the supper, it seemed a
long-drawn-out affair to Jean, and try as she would, she could not
share the gayety. With the exception of Mrs. Cather and Sidney's aunt,
the rest were Alice's age, and there was a feeling of perfect assurance
and untried strength in the air, that made Jean feel old. Seated
between a young man interested in subnormal children and a girl cubist,
who was advancing an intricate argument from which Jean could not
gather whether Cubism was subnormal, or subnormality was misunderstood
Cubism, Jean struggled to give her attention, but her thoughts drifted
farther and farther away, and at last withdrew from the discussion
altogether.
From his end of the table, Jerome snatched glances at Jean, and it was
only the necessity of keeping Mrs. Cather amused that prevented Jerome,
too, from sinking into a like silence, but he felt the mood, a strong
wire, binding them together. He was as relieved as Jean when supper
was over, and while the girls struggled with Alice to let them "do the
thing as it ought to be done" and the young men began clearing the room
and the veranda for a dance, he sought Jean again. As he reached her,
Alice's clear voice rose above the laughter.
"Now quit it, Belle. I wasn't decorated for the sacrifice, and I'm
_not_ going to be 'started on life's journey.' I'm going to wear that
tan raw-silk you've all seen a dozen times, and it would be idiotic to
help me get into that. Besides, the snappers are almost all off, and
nobody but myself knows the trick of pretending they're not."
Jerome smiled. "This generation's a scream, isn't it?"
"I was just thinking--do you suppose it is or that we're just older?"
"No. It _is_ different."
"Yes, I suppose it is." Jean looked about at the young men clearing
the furniture to the veranda and the girls grouped about the victrola,
choosing records. "But I don't think I ever realized before, quite so
clearly, anyhow, that there is a 'this generation.' I always feel as if
_I_ am this generation, and children like Tony are the future."
"Delusion, terrible delusion. But, then, you haven't a daughter
Alice's age, who discusses her own children even before her marriage."
"Frightful," Jean agreed, pushing away a strange, new wish that she
did have a daughter like Alice. "To be menaced with two generations at
once--that would take the pep out of me."
Alice was back now, ready to leave. She sent Sidney on an errand, and
joined the girls round the victrola.
"They're so terribly afraid of not being reasonable, or being
sentimental, and they go to such lengths to prove their independence.
Why, Alice would rather die than blush, even if she could accomplish
that feat. She would think it was indecent."
"Maybe it is," Jean said lightly, hoping to keep the talk from dropping
altogether to the depth of her own seriousness. For this wedding was
full of intruding revelations that wearied and saddened her.
A daughter like Alice. If she had had a child. A child of Herrick's.
It might have been ten or eleven years old, now. It was very strange
to think of a child of Herrick's. She had never wanted a child of his,
never for an instant. She remembered, vividly, the Sunday she had lain
under the trees and thought of the possibility of a child that would
have Herrick's high laugh. How queer it had made her feel! That was the
same day she had asked her mother about the scene in the old Webster
Street house, and Martha had let the match burn her fingers.
And Gregory's child. It would have been a little thing, scarcely more
than a baby yet, not nearly as old as Puck the day she had told Puck
stories and waited for Margaret to come home.
Franklin's child. Gregory's child.
For the first time Jean linked the two in the possibility of their
fatherhood of her child. And for the first time, a child stood out as
a separate entity, a distinct individual, owning its own existence.
Her child. A part of herself, yet more its own self. A unit of "this
generation," the generation in which she had felt, until this moment,
that she herself belonged.
But she did not belong. She had no part in it. There was a chasm
between it and herself. Forward across the chasm there was nothing.
Back, there was Martha's grave.
"What do you think Alice told me?" The intonation caught Jean's
attention and brought it to the man beside her. "I suggested that if
she wanted to be really logical, she should have no ceremony at all.
She said it was so inconvenient when you went to hotels, or among
people who didn't understand. Imagine! Advancing that as a reason. I
suggested that, under such pressure, she might lie about it, and she
said, 'Lying always smothers things up. It isn't clean.'"
"She's right."
"Of course she's right. But how modern it is! She doesn't logically
believe in a ceremony. She doesn't believe that marriage has anything
to do with religion and she thinks, or thinks she thinks, that in time
even the civil ceremony will vanish."
"It will."
"Of course it will. But nothing would induce Alice, or any of the
young people here, to say honestly that they are afraid. Fear is a
terrible bugaboo. They're too young to know that it is the deepest
rooted instinct in the race. And so they wiggle out of the dilemma by
an exaltation of--cleanliness. Terribly modern, like cold baths and
exposed plumbing."
"I don't know that that's it," Jean said thoughtfully. "I feel, at the
present moment, as if I could put up a perfectly sound argument on
either side. That's the trouble with analyzing too hard, you always
come clear round the circle and end in conservatism again. When they
stood there, before the God in whom they do not believe, and promised
in the old, narrow way, in the form for which they have no respect, to
love, honor, and obey, till death does them part, it _did_ seem to be
more than a ceremony. For a moment it did seem to reach down below any
passing desire, down into an eternal reality. I suppose it's because
we have no substitute yet for the old-fashioned God, and so, in big
moments, we still stand up and promise things out loud, as we used to
do, when we were children, to our parents." She turned suddenly to
Jerome. "Would you have liked Alice to go away without _any_ ceremony,
the useless ceremony that some day will be done away with?"
"No," Jerome answered slowly, "I don't believe that I would. No, to
be honest, I would not. We haven't eliminated it yet and till then
it's--safe."
"Safety--and weakness--and a fear-filled age."
"Don't! You make me feel like Methuselah in his last illness."
Jean laughed, but she was glad that Alice appeared just then. As she
took the girl's hand in hers, she answered the signal that Alice sent,
and her lips motioned, "Don't worry about that. I'll prod."
Then Alice put both arms about her father's neck and toned down the
strain of the moment by instructions concerning the management of
Malone.
"If it's any comfort, remember that I managed several housekeepers
while you were in pinafores."
"I suppose you did. But maybe you've gotten out of practice." Alice
gave him a last swift kiss, Sidney shook hands without saying anything,
and, with a general good-by thrown among the guests as if they were
going on an errand next door, Alice and Sidney were gone.
In the confusion of starting the dance that followed, Jean slipped
away and got her things. She had intended to go unnoticed, but Jerome
was waiting and walked to the gate. He looked grave now, as if the
forced gayety of parting had taxed his pretense. Nor could Jean throw
aside the seriousness of her own mood. The wedding had saddened her;
against all the logic of her beliefs, against what she knew were her
fixed deductions, something persisted, a fine, thin thread of regret, a
sense of waste, of loss. A terrible clarity seemed to possess her, as
if she could see the indestructible skeleton of all human dependence
and weakness, under the conventions and forms with which society had
clothed it. And Jean wanted the healing solitude of her roof.
They stood looking out over the empty field before them, each full of
suppressed thoughts, each conscious of the other's absorption, very
near in their understanding.
"Good-night." Jean opened the gate before he could do it for her and
passed out.
"Good-night." Jerome watched her swing away, fainter and fainter
through the dusk.
He did not go back again to the house, but to the farthest corner of
the garden, beyond reach of the noise and lights. Here it was still
and peaceful among the growing things, so still, that he seemed to be
the only thing in motion on the earth, poised in ether. Time took on a
quality of space, and incidents, some quite forgotten, rose near, like
objects close to hand. He could see through time, all about him, back
down the years, to his own wedding night. And, as he had not been since
then, he was alone again with Helen.
How adorably clinging and frightened she had been, trusting in his
wisdom, so little more than her own. What wild emotions had gripped
him, almost as frightened as she, what longing and what desire and
what denial all bound into a wonderful exaltation to make Helen happy
always, to keep her trust! To hold her safe in the great love that
throbbed and beat in him almost beyond his power to calm to the degree
of Helen's white shyness.
He had done his best, even when the exaltation had gone, and only deep
affection and tender loyalty were left for the clinging little thing
who had remained to the end, the least reluctant and fearful.
The day when Alice had been laid in his arms. He had scarcely noticed
her, because Helen was slipping so quietly away. And the months
afterwards, stabbing remorse as if he had killed Helen, and long
periods when he had forgotten her altogether, been quite absorbed in
his work, Alice, and the wonderful fact of living.
Years since then. Happy years full of work and Alice.... Now Alice
had gone and Sidney was only another man like himself, with all the
weakness and hidden places in every man.
Then he thought of Jean, as she had looked at supper. She, too, was
full of hidden places and contradictions. There was nothing simple, no
absolute unity anywhere. Suddenly Jerome felt chilly. He looked at his
watch. It was a quarter past one. He stopped and listened. The house
was silent. They had all gone, then, while he walked in the garden.
Jerome went back. The victrola was in the middle of the floor, the
records scattered about on top of the piano. The room was littered with
scraps of bonbons and crushed flowers; dirty saucers, half filled with
sherbet, marked a second supper.
Jerome turned out the lights and closed the door. Life was a little
like the room, he felt, filled with the tag ends of others' leavings.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
On the Monday morning following the wedding, Jerome was at the office
earlier than usual. After the lonely Sunday behind him, the day ahead
was filled with expectation. First, he would tell Jean about the trip.
There were many things he wanted to tell her, things that no one else
would quite get. And then they would lay out the program for the piers.
The morning passed quickly, with only a few lulls in which Jerome
leaned back in his chair, smoked a cigar, made notes and tried not to
listen too closely for sounds across the hall. As soon as she was free
she would probably come in.
But by mid-afternoon it was not so easy to keep from listening. For one
thing, it was suffocatingly hot, and for another, he was not sure that
Jean had been in all day. He had not heard her come or leave for lunch,
and usually her hours were punctual. At three o'clock Jerome closed the
transom. It made him nervous to sit listening for sounds from Jean's
office. As soon as she was free she would come in. It was the kind of
thing Jean did.
But Jean did not come.
Neither on Tuesday nor on Wednesday. Thursday morning, Jerome crossed
the hall almost to Jean's door, and came back. If Jean were so busy
that she had not a moment for him he did not wish to intrude. And if
Jean had lost her interest in the conference, or had only pretended
one, still less did he wish to force her. Besides there were the piers.
Jean had been as eager as he and it had been understood that they
would begin as soon as the wedding was over.
On Friday afternoon, Jerome opened the transom. Jean Herrick could come
or not, exactly as she liked. He would not mention the conference and
if she felt obliged to inquire he would cut her short as gracefully as
he could. As for the piers, if it suited his convenience by the time
she strolled round, he would do them, and if it did not, she could do
them alone.
On Saturday he did not go to the office at all, but stayed home and
worked in the garden. He pulled down a summer house that had really
been a charming place to sit, and finished pruning and clipping every
shrub that had escaped in the long, empty evenings of the past week.
On Sunday he took Pips, and set out for a long tramp right after lunch.
But he had lost the habit of tramping alone ever since Alice had been
old enough to go with him; so, although he had intended to stay out
until evening, at three he turned back. The heat was at its apex, but
under pretense that it was really getting cooler, Jerome increased his
pace, until Pips suddenly dropped panting under a tree and refused to
budge.
"All right, old man, have it your own way."
Jerome stretched beside him. Pips snapped languidly at a few gnats and
went to sleep. But Jerome could not sleep. His head felt hot and empty,
and although he had accomplished nothing all day, he was exhausted with
the effort of getting rid of the hours. He tried to find something
interesting to think about, but there seemed to be nothing worth
wasting a thought upon. The week ahead stretched as flat and monotonous
before him as the week behind. There was nothing, except the problem of
Jean's inexplicable behavior.
She had not gone on a vacation because she had told him half a dozen
times she did not intend to take one. Summer, everywhere, was dull and
he could imagine no work that would call her out of town. No. Jean was
following some whim of her own, with no consideration of upsetting him.
That was the trouble with women who had brains, especially after they
had passed their first youth; they got so set in their habits, that
consideration for others never occurred to them. No doubt, Jean was
quite unconscious of causing him any inconvenience.
And there he was wondering about Jean when he had definitely put her
out of his thoughts a dozen times that week.
Queer how a thought persisted against one's wish.
A thought ought to be the easiest thing in the world to keep where you
wanted it. A person could intrude, or an extraneous body inject itself
into your cosmos, but a thought didn't exist apart from yourself, and
if you didn't want it there, why did it come?
Interesting business, Thought, like a demon, dwelling inside and
ordering you about at its will. Fascinating, if you got to really
thinking about Thought. Jerome gripped the idea of Thought, dragged
it along with him like a companion over the field of the Will and the
Subconscious, until he brought up in a conversation he had had a few
days before with the psycho-analyst he had corralled for Tony's tea.
But now, as soon as he thought of him in relation to the tea, Jean rose
from nowhere, drove out the psycho-analyst and usurped his place. Jean
as she had looked when he came in through the glass door, amused and a
little sad; Jean at the gate: dimming in the dusk; as she had looked
when they first talked of the piers, eager and alive in every nerve;
standing close while Tony played, in the candle lighted room, with the
thick, heavy odor of hothouse plants; as merry and teasing as Alice, at
supper afterwards, in "the little joint"; at the concert--
Jerome jumped up. "Here, boy. It must be almost six."
He took a short cut back across the fields and entered the kitchen
just as the clock struck five. On a table, covered by a white cloth,
mysterious humps disclosed Malone's provision for his supper. It made
him think of a country undertaker's, with grewsome appurtenances of
death concealed under the cloth. Jerome lifted the edge and discovered
cold meat and Malone's tragic efforts at a cake.
Now that he saw his unappetizing meal, he realized that he was hungry.
But he certainly couldn't eat there in the kitchen, although it was
arranged exactly as he had instructed Malone. In the living-room it
might be better, but by the time he had partly cleared the litter of
books and papers from the table the dimensions of the effort annoyed
him and he threw them back in a worse jumble than before. There was a
card table somewhere; that would be just the thing to set on the porch
under the honeysuckle. Jerome went all over the house looking for the
card table until he remembered that it was in the cellar. The cellar
was unlit and he had another hunt for a lamp. He found it at last on
the top shelf of the pantry, with just enough oil to make a feeble
splutter and a very decided and unpleasant odor. The cellar steps led
down from the kitchen, and if the kitchen was cheerless, the cellar was
a vault. Clammy damp enveloped him, and the mystery and loneliness of
unused places stored with unused things. It was like a deserted house
from which the inhabitants had fled at a plague. Jerome located the
table under the slats of what had been Alice's baby bed and a broken
pedestal. He got it out with difficulty, covered himself with dust and
found that the hinge had been broken and it wouldn't stand.
Jerome threw the table down and went back into the kitchen. He jerked
the shroud from the humps and ate an unappetizing sandwich of cold
beef cut too thick and bread too thin. The cake he had just mashed
into Pips' food when he remembered some jam of Alice's. He found a
single glass and spread it thick on the remaining crumbs. The cake was
possible this way, but now it was all gone in the mash for Pips. While
he watched Pips gobbling it up, the clock struck six. And there were
four hours yet until the earliest possible bed-time.
Jerome lit a cigar and went out into the garden, but the seclusion
and privacy were gone. Through what had been a luxuriant privet hedge
he could see the lights of the next house half a block away. At the
other end of the garden it was worse. Here he had cut back a wall of
hollyhocks, to give more sun to the pansies below and then left the
hose running full force until it had washed out the pansy plants, and
now a mournful row of bare stems guarded the empty plot.
After all, a garden was an unsatisfactory thing. It was only in the
making that the thing had any power of absorption. Once it was made you
never knew how much of it you would see. Last year bugs had eaten the
roses, and the year before scale had destroyed the apple trees. If the
shrubs got along well, then something happened to the flowers, and if
the flowers acted on schedule, then the trees didn't.
Spring hit you before you had made up your mind what bulbs you wanted
in; or hung back so late that you had no time to plant anything before
summer scorched what little you did have. And if spring and summer
acted rationally, just about the time you began to get some comfort
out of the shaded spots and the smell of things, along came autumn
and stripped it bare. There was always a senseless rush and change,
nothing permanent accomplished, just stupid repetition over and over,
rubbing in the analogy to the impermanent accomplishment of one's own
effort. After forty, a man ought to live in a climate the same all the
year round, where the futility of accomplishment wasn't always being
preached by this eternal leafing and blossoming and dying, round and
round in a purposeless circle.
Jerome stopped under a great lilac, primed to nakedness, and glared at
its hideous tidiness.
"What do you think you get out of it, anyhow? A few weeks ago you were
as bare as you will be again in another few weeks. And you've been
doing it to my knowledge for the last fifteen years. You've never
really been young or old. You just go on and on. And the little you
do do, you can't help, although every spring you look as if you had
chosen to be a lilac and had it all your own way. You can't help being
a lilac. It was settled for you ages ago in a little brown seed. You
can't even prolong your blooming a week beyond the law. You're...."
Suddenly the lilac reminded him of Jean. It was so strong, untrimmed,
and indifferent to his tirade. Jerome shrugged and went back into the
house. The silence was oppressive. Malone had not returned. There was
no reason that she should be in, but it annoyed him that she was out.
At nine o'clock he went to bed.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
And the next morning, when Jerome came into the office, Jean stood
waiting for him.
"Well, when are we going to begin the piers?"
Jerome hung up his hat and sat down at the desk. He knew that Jean had
asked him something and was waiting for an answer. While he shuffled
his mail, he knew that the welcoming smile in her eyes was quickly
hardening to surprise. He did not care. His relation with Jean Herrick
was no longer the untangled thing it had been. For eight days he had
thought of scarcely anything but this annoying, self-centered woman. He
had destroyed a perfectly good garden and acted like a school-boy. And
there she stood wanting to know when _he_ was going to begin the piers.
"I thought you had forgotten them," he said at length, still fumbling
the mail as if Jean were detaining him from far more important matters.
"I don't see how you could have thought that."
"It didn't take such a stretch of imagination. We had the first
scheduled for the day after the wedding--you may remember."
"Didn't you get my message?" She might have been speaking to a peevish
child, so forced was the restraint of her patience.
"No. Did you leave one?"
"I told Minnie to tell you, but I suppose she forgot. Those up-state
towns suddenly changed about waiting till fall to organize Consumers'
Leagues. It took longer than I thought."
Jerome did not look up. Jean added no personal regret for the
inconvenience she might have caused, but moved away toward the door.
"You still wish to do them then?"
"Of course. Don't _you_?" Jean wanted to add that if he were going to
continue in this mood she hoped he didn't.
"Certainly, I do. How about to-night?"
"All right for me. I kept it free on purpose."
There it was, the high-handed assurance that her plans would suit
others. But he himself had suggested to-night and he would have to
comply.
"It won't be any use starting before nine, do you think?"
"No. Not unless we cover two in the same evening."
"I don't believe I feel strenuous enough for that. One will do. I'll
call for you then, about half past eight?"
He swung round in his chair and Jean suddenly noticed that he looked
tired, not so much physically, but as if something had gone from
within. He was desperately lonely and his loneliness had escaped in
irritation toward herself, because she happened to be the only outlet
at hand. It was what Martha had called "a man's nature cropping out."
It made Jean feel unaccountably tender. And besides she had promised
Alice to look out for Jerome.
"I tell you, suppose you come and have supper with me. I've moved, and
am keeping house now over in Old Chelsea. Cooking is not my forte and I
won't promise anything but delicatessen. Will you be my first guest?"
Jerome did not answer instantly and when he did, said, with no
perceptible change of tone:
"Thank you. I should like to very much."
"We'll quit punctually and gather up the food as we go. Till six,
then."
Jerome continued to look at the closed door several moments after he
heard Jean's shut. Then he crossed to the filing cabinet, realized
after he had searched through three drawers, that what he wanted was at
home, came back to the desk and sat down.
Suddenly he laughed out loud and began to work.
At six he locked the desk, thoroughly satisfied with the day's
accomplishment. He found Jean just closing hers, and a few moments
later they were going from shop to shop, collecting supper, with much
happy, foolish comment on each other's preferences in cold meats and
pickles.
Jean remembered the many times she had done this with Gregory, and now,
that memory no longer stung, it brought Jerome near, extended their
friendship far beyond the year she had known him, linked him closely
with the past. So that it seemed to Jean that each little separate
interlude of happiness in life was not really separate, but, by some
hidden spiritual chemistry, was only an element in the larger, complex
solution of all possible happiness.
And when, half an hour later, they stood together silent on the
farthest edge of the roof, and watched the sun slipping over the rim
of the West, Jean felt nearer to the man beside her than she had ever
thought to feel to any one again. Nearer, in some ways, than she
had felt to Gregory, for never, with him, had she for a moment been
unconscious of her love. She had never for an instant been unaware of
Gregory as the man she loved. He had always been stronger than any
moment or any place. The deepest peace had held always, within itself,
the power of its own destruction. But there was no personal claim in
this silence with Jerome. In their mutual understanding of life's
lonely hours, they shared the peace of the roof.
"It's another world--absolutely another world," Jerome said quietly.
Jean nodded. "Nothing's the same up here. Stillness is not empty and
color's really sound. Sunrise and sunset are like tremendous chords on
a great organ. Sometimes I feel that some day I am going to hear it,
actually hear the old music of the spheres."
"It's like a garden, in that still space before the dawn."
"Sometimes it's almost terrible up here, then. As if the night were
some indescribable vengeance that had blotted all life from the world,
and as if everything were being created anew without any memory of
death or pain. I have never seen anything, except the sea, wake like
the city does to a new life. A new life, every twenty-four hours. And
no matter how many you spoil, there's another waiting, and you can drop
the spoiled one into the night."
The gold and scarlet were fading to saffron and silver. A star peeped
from the edge of a pale green pool.
"It would do that--or else make you feel there was no use in anything."
"I don't think it would ever make you feel like that really, not for
long anyhow. The rhythm in it is so evidently a law--you've _got_ to be
a part. There's nothing else for you to be."
"An absolutely materialistic logic doesn't seem to fit, exactly, does
it?"
"No, it doesn't. A few dawns and sunsets shake it terribly. They make
you feel like a child, listening to a fairy story, that you _know_ is
true, no matter how much the grown-ups scoff."
"May I come sometimes and listen to the fairy story, too?" Jerome asked
so simply, so like a child, that Jean felt her threat tighten.
"Whenever you want to. Don't bother to let me know. Just come--whenever
you're blue or lonely--or just logical and materialistic."
Jerome laughed and, on the lighter note, they began to get supper.
When it was ready, Jean spread the small table outside, where space
opened most widely to the Jersey shore. As they ate, and Jean told
of the "kind ladies" to whom a Consumers' League was still a form of
charity to the workers, the last shreds of color faded from the sky.
Shy stars ventured boldly out and the gray deepened to night-blue.
Gradually they fell silent. Jerome felt the peace close about him, the
tangible, unfathomable peace that Jean felt. They smoked and forgot
each other, looking into the night.
At last Jerome spoke, softly, as if he were interpreting something
whispered to him in the stillness.
"What a lot of useless pain there is in the world. One feels it in a
place like this, almost as if we chose needlessly to be unhappy."
"Do you feel that, too? Sometimes I'm afraid all my standards are
going to be upset here. Sometimes I feel as if I had gotten everything
twisted a long way back and that it was struggling to get right again."
"And that process itself can hurt terribly."
Jean smiled, a little wistfully. "I am beginning to suspect that it
can. It used to make me furious when I was growing up to be told that
all pain was 'for the best.' But, now, I believe it was only the
wording of it, the tight, prim smugness of the assurance that rasped.
It's not that pain is for the best, but it's simply that it doesn't
matter. It's part of a whole, and, unless we can make a new whole, with
no so-called pain in it, there's no credit to a deeper insight in just
kicking."
"I suppose it's because action of any kind always seems the stronger
part. Rebellion, in some way, seems bigger than acceptance."
"Perhaps it is. The way an agnostic always seems to be a more
independent thinker than the believer in a higher power, a God, or
a Spirit, or any Force, you can't prove by logic. It seems as if a
believer must have inherited his beliefs ready-made, as if he could not
possibly have come to them by any real intellectual effort of his own."
"But the world is swinging back, it seems to me. Perhaps æons and æons
ago we thought ourselves out of simplicity and now we're thinking
ourselves back. Physicists are beginning to reduce all force to one
energy and philosophers seem to be working round to the one spiritual
impulse, love. I wonder whether after all we've left Christ and
Confucius and Buddha far behind, or whether we haven't caught up."
"I wonder," Jean said thoughtfully. "And I suppose, till the end of
time, we'll go on struggling to find out whether it's an impulse
pushing up from within or whether it's a condition imposed from
without; whether brotherly love is an ideal we can't quite attain or
whether it's a law we can't escape."
"And then, perhaps, we'll begin all over again."
"No doubt we will." Jean pushed back her chair, and leaning for a
moment with both palms spread on the table edge, smiled down at Jerome.
"In the meantime, there are the piers."
Jerome did not move. "Let's not do them to-night. It's wonderful up
here and 'a long, long time' the piers shall last."
"But I haven't another evening this week. And you go on your vacation
the fifteenth, don't you? It would be great to cover them all by then."
Jerome frowned. "I suppose it would."
The mood was gone now, anyhow.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
As they went through the small side door, the band at the far end of
the pier was just tuning up. Two powerful arc lamps shed their hard
white light on the men, and the rows of already filled chairs about
the bandstand. The place smelled of rope and tar and dust, but the
lower end of the great shed was open and a faint coolness from the
water penetrated for a short distance. Through the opening, the red and
green lanterns of docked ships winked enticingly and at the next pier
a great steamer creaked on her hawsers, as the water, washing against
her sides, whispered of distant lands. Beyond the range of white light,
boys and girls sauntered hand in hand, while, in still darker corners,
couples stood whispering or silent.
"This--after ten hours a day with your eyes glued to your machine,
afraid to move in case the needle pins you to it forever! A blinding
web of machinery and then a few little hours for all your suppressed
youth and longing to bubble and boil, here in the darkness, a dark full
of lapping water and the breath of far-away lands. Is there anything
here about sticking to your job and repressing and repressing and
repressing, until you grow too dull to care?"
Jerome did not answer. His eyes followed Jean's to a thin, rouged girl
and a narrow-chested, ferret-eyed boy vanishing into the farthest
shadow. They stopped beside a tower of bales and the boy took both
the girl's hands in his. The great steamer strained impatiently like
a strong lover resenting the whimpering little waves, eager for the
billows beyond. Jerome suddenly felt the heat like hot fingers on his
body.
"A tenement room with people everywhere and crying babies, no spot not
filled with some human, crowding body. No coolness, no privacy, or
this--for a few scorching weeks when you're young--and all the weary
years afterwards to make up."
"Oh, please," Jerome begged with a quiver that would not stay under the
forced laugh with which he tried to cover it, "don't delve down into
the instincts of the whole race for this little job of ours. You make
me feel as if we had undertaken to save humanity."
Jean was still looking toward the thin, rouged girl, drawn deeper into
the shadow now. "But the instincts of the race _are_ what we're after."
"Well, please stay on the surface a bit more or--you'll make me want to
slip away to the Spice Islands too." He had not meant to say it, but
if Jean heard she took no notice. The girl's hands were gripped in the
boy's now as he drew her to him behind the bales. The next moment the
band started and the girl came from behind the bales, rearranging her
elaborately puffed hair and giggling as she passed.
The band crashed mechanically through its cheap selections, and was
applauded dully, until the director hung up the fourth placard,
announcing a waltz. Instantly a kind of shiver ran through the crowd.
Boys and girls jumped to their feet, crushing each other in their
haste, so that, before the band had played a dozen bars, a mass of
moving bodies was gliding and swaying in the rising dust. Round and
round they went, the dust rising thicker about them, the tapping of the
girls' high heels and the shuffle of men's thick shoes drowning the
ripple of the water on the piles beneath and the straining of the ship
at her hawsers. The waltz ended but the dancers stood linked, furiously
demanding an encore. The music began again. The settling dust rose in
a fresh cloud. The girls relaxed in their partners' arms, and the boys
held them hungrily as if, with the certainty of its short duration,
they must wrest from this bodily contact every thrill concealed in it.
Jerome shifted in his chair. He wanted to get up and go back to the
peace of the roof with Jean. He could not look at her and yet he wanted
to make some comment, say something that would drag these close-locked
bodies and gleaming eyes back to the level of a civic problem.
Again and again the band yielded in its indifference to what it played
so long as it filled the requisite hours. The partners rarely changed,
and again and again the thin girl and the ferret-eyed boy passed
near, dancing a little apart from the others. Suddenly the boy said
something, the girl tossed her head, jerked herself from his hold and
came to sit down a few seats away. The boy's eyes were evil in their
rage. He took a step toward the girl, stopped, shrugged his narrow
shoulders and came directly over to Jean.
"Say, don't yuh wanter dance?"
Instinctively Jerome moved to interpose, but Jean was smiling up into
the pimply face and bold eyes, defiant of inequality.
"But I can't dance, really, not a step."
"Say, yuh're kiddin'. Why anybody kin dance. It's as easy as rollin'
off a log."
"Not for me."
"Aw come on, git up anyhow. Yuh can't help dancin' wid me. Jes' listen
to de music. One, two, t'ree, tra la la, it gits yuh by itself. Come
on."
To Jerome's amazement Jean rose. The boy took a heavily scented and
soiled handkerchief from his pocket, adjusted it between Jean's
shoulderblades, clamped it fast with his grimy hand, and standing at a
distance that marked his knowledge of Jean's difference, swung her into
step. Jerome rose, shook his body as if freeing it from a net, and
walked to the space beyond the last row of chairs.
In the moving mass he caught Jean's face. She stood a head above the
pimply face smiling up to her. She was smiling, too. Jerome drew deeper
into the shadow. He lost Jean in the crowd, then she glided again into
his line of sight. She was still smiling, apparently unconscious of
that disgusting hand on her back, and the red, pimply face below her
own. The thin, rouged girl was crying now. Jerome stepped further into
the shadow to escape the circle closing about Jean, the ferret-eyed boy
and sobbing girl.
He tried to drag himself back to the first moments of the evening,
alone on the roof with Jean, but he could not do it. Something within
was pushing to the surface, dragging up from the years memories of his
own youth, hours that did not concern Jean at all, moments of need
baffled by Helen's fragile strength, her misunderstanding and colorless
desire. And then, of Jean's white neck and arms and the thick, soft
whiteness of her flesh.
The music stopped. Jean was on the edge of the dancers looking for him.
He went slowly forward. When the boy saw Jerome coming, he sidled away
with a grin.
"Why did you do that?"
"Why did I do it?"
"Yes. Why?" Jerome saw the surprise in Jean's eyes but his need to know
drove him on. "Yes. Why?"
"Because I wanted to feel for myself what there is in it. I wanted to
see what there is in sheer motion that makes it worth while to add to
ten hours a day, three more of real, physical effort."
"Do you know, now?" Why didn't she move farther away? Jerome felt as
if she were touching him, and, at the same time, as if his body were
formed of the hot dust. "Do you?"
"You would have to try it for yourself," Jean answered coldly,
annoyed at this fastidity of objection. "It _does_ get you. There's
something----"
"So it seems. Does the success of the experiment demand further
investigation?"
"Let's go."
Without another word, they walked the length of the pier and out
again through the small door. As they walked in silence back to the
apartment, through the chaos in Jerome, a little thread of shame and
regret drew him almost to the point of speech. What must Jean be
thinking? He could not part from her like this? And yet, when he tried
to grasp and hold a thought in words, it burst like a rocket from his
control, in a shower of scorching sparks, looks, the feel of Jean's
cool fingers, the maddening composure of her clear, gray eyes.
They reached the door with the silence unbroken.
"Good-night." Jean made no conciliatory reference to the next
appointment, as she turned to the vestibule with an impersonal smile
that did not touch her eyes.
In another second she would be up there alone in the inhuman detachment
of her roof.
"Good-night." He held out his hand and, for a moment, hers lay in it,
strong, cool, and burning the whole surface of his palm. He almost
flung it from him. "Good-night," he repeated thickly and was gone.
After a few moments, Jean began to move slowly along through the lower
hall and up the stairs. She walked with strange deliberation, holding
her mind to the physical motions of her body by force. At the roof door
she stopped, as if afraid of what lay beyond it. And when at last she
turned the handle and stepped into the full moonlight of the graveled
roof, her whole body was trembling. She went and sat down on the corner
of the coping farthest from the spot where she and Jerome had stood to
watch the death of the day.
She understood. And the past, by which she understood, rushed down upon
her: the night in the studio when Herrick had asked her to marry him:
the night she had stood on the dark street with Gregory, and then, so
quietly and inevitably gotten into the taxi: and the night when Philip
Fletcher had cried and squeaked in his angry pain.
Jean covered her face with her hands. She seemed to be on the edge of
a dark and dangerous place. Suddenly the blackness was pricked with
points of light. They forced themselves between her locked fingers,
until her hands dropped into her lap, and she sat very still looking
into the future.
Years of companionship and shared interests. Work and understanding and
tenderness. The need of being needed. The future opened about her, and
Jean cried.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
"IT'S impossible. I'm almost fifty--and there is Alice."
Whenever Jerome could grasp the fact of Alice, the night's madness
dulled to acceptance of conditions. Alice was married. She would
have children of her own. He would be a grandfather. Only ten or
fifteen years of real usefulness lay ahead. A quarter of a century of
comfortable security, uncomplicated by emotion, stretched backward.
Three o'clock. Half past. A dog barked. A distant rooster crowed.
Jerome was glad of the sounds. Soon the "terrific stillness" before
the dawn would be all shot through with these safe, pleasant sounds of
every day. The sun would come up. Milk wagons would rattle down the
lanes. Malone would clump about in the kitchen. She would call him to
breakfast and he would eat it while he read the morning paper, propped
against the sugar-bowl. Then he would take the eight o'clock boat, as
he had for fifteen years, and go to the office.
And there he would sit waiting and listening for sounds across the
hall, inventing reasons to consult with Jean. He had done it for
months, incredibly ignorant of his own reactions. But now he was not
ignorant. That moment on the sidewalk, had flared into the deepest
corners, burned away the ridiculous tangle of logic by which he had
convinced himself, the night of the concert, that his emotion had been
"biological." Good God, he had called it that, a momentary spark,
struck from the cold past, by the unexpected beauty of Jean's flesh!
It was no momentary spark. He did not want to take Jean in his arms and
kiss her once, as he had wanted to do that night. He wanted her for
always, day and night, to share with her the years before them.
And he was almost fifty. A thousand little habits, acquired through
years, locked him fast. Alice and he had walked happily side by
side. Jean's path would not run parallel to his. It would cross and
crisscross.
She was strong. She pulsed with life. She might want a child. He and
Jean and their child. And Alice and Sidney and Sidney, Junior. Like
an immigrant family with the generations overlapping. Sidney Junior
grinned and gurgled at him.
The sun rose. The night dew melted. The earth awoke refreshed and
younger than the youngest human thing upon it. Jerome went wearily back
into the house. He felt old and confused with the night's thinking,
hours of balancing between--fifty and thirty. Aching with a body-hunger
his brain could not appease, blind in this storm of desire, lit with
lightning flashes of self-ridicule, with amazement of the thing, with
disbelief in its possibility, with the gurgling of Sidney, Junior, with
strange reluctance and anger.
Milk wagons rattled down the lane. The sun rose full over the hilltops.
A new day was begun, one of those new days, one of those "twenty-four
hours to make into what you will." Jerome smiled feebly.
"Another twenty-four hours like this and there'll be nothing left of me
to do anything with."
Malone banged about in the kitchen. At last she called him to
breakfast. He sugared the cereal she set before him, arranged the paper
against the sugar-bowl, and stared at the headlines.
When she thought he was ready she brought the first helping of hot
waffles. He saw her look at the untouched bowl and with difficulty
made her understand that he did not want it. He buttered the waffles
and poured the honey on them, stacking the crisp quarters one upon the
other as he always did. And there they were when Malone came with the
second plate. She stood holding the covered plate until Jerome told
her impatiently to stop baking them. He felt that in this unreasonable
world, Malone might go on baking waffles all day.
At a quarter to eight as always, Jerome pushed back his chair. He
looked at the paper still folded to the front page and the crust of the
single slice of toast he had attempted to eat.
"It's fifty all right--or I would have eaten it--and not known what it
was."
Then he went into the living-room. He wrote two notes, one to the
office and one to Jean. He was called out of town most unexpectedly.
The business would take several days, and as he would be in the
northern part of the State, he had decided to go on for his vacation,
without returning. The notes were brief and almost duplicates, except
that he added to Jean's a regret that they would not be able to finish
the piers together. He sent the notes by messenger and packed his trunk.
* * * * *
Jean took the note from the boy and laid it unopened on the desk.
Twice she picked it up and put it down again uncut. It was a scorching
morning but her hands were cold and although all the windows were open,
she felt that the room was airless. She crossed to the window and
leaned out a little way. Below, the city, like the sea beating against
a cliff, washed the base of the building, where, in a high, safe niche,
she stood alone with the note from Jerome Stuart. In a moment she
would open it and make a decision, although she knew that when she did
open, the decision would have been already made.
Jean went back to the desk and opened the envelope. She read the half
sheet and tore it slowly into bits. Her body scorched, but her fingers
were icy to her own touch.
Jerome Stuart had run away. There was no love in his desire. He did not
want to want her. She had disturbed his peace against his will and he
had gone as he might have gone to escape the contagion of an illness.
And last night she had sat for hours on the roof, almost afraid to
think, because of the small, eager fear that had come upon her!
When Minnie came for the morning's dictation, Jean felt that she
had been sitting at her desk for weeks. Only years of habit made it
possible to pick up the day's routine, but early in the afternoon, Jean
left the office and went home.
The sun beat fiercely upon the asphalted gravel. Jersey was hidden
under its pall of smoke. Nearer at hand, huge chimneys belched their
blackness into the quivering heat. The day was still roaring at its
task.
Jean went into the little living-room and lowered the blinds to a
kindly softness. Then, as in the old days, before a problem, she began
to walk up and down.
But the day roared to its completion, the huge chimneys ceased to send
forth their black columns, the lowering sun thinned the black pall to
gold-shot gray, and still Jean walked up and down.
The thing that Philip Fletcher had found, "the call of a woman to a
man," Jerome Stuart had felt. That quiet man who understood so many
things. He understood himself and he had gone away.
And she had not wanted him to go. She had no passion for Jerome Stuart.
His nearness left her cold. She did not long to help him as she had
longed to help Franklin. But she had not wanted him to go.
What tangled threads of instinct and of need bound her? The age-old
woman's need of being needed? But Jerome did not need her. He had run
away.
It was her own need, not Jerome's. Her need of what? Something nearer
than lives she never touched? Something of her own?
It was cool now and Jean went out to the roof. Far down in the street
dwarfed figures hurried by. They had finished the day's work. They were
going home.
Long after the dwarfed black figures were gone, Jean sat, staring down.
As the days passed, Jean came to wish, more and more deeply, that she
had never seen Jerome Stuart. The thought of him filled her waking
hours, and at night she often dreamed of the moment on the sidewalk,
only, in the dreams, Jerome always came up to the roof again. And
in the evenings when she tried to read, in the once peace-filled
stillness, he was there across the room, his shoulders, with their
student stoop, bent over a book. He stopped and read her bits and
they laughed together, or she saw his anger against social injustice
crackling like a fire in his gray eyes.
Three times in her life, Jean had felt the old landmarks slip away.
Three times in her life she had felt the old Jean die and another
woman take the place: when she had left Herrick, when she had received
Gregory's letter, and when she had come home to find Martha dead.
Each time she had felt as if no future experience could ever reveal
unguessed depths in herself. And now, at thirty-nine, because a man
whom she did not love, had desired her for a moment against his own
will, she felt.... What was it that she felt? Not the ending of all
things, as she had felt at Gregory's going. Not the loneliness that
followed Martha's. These had been like sudden death in the midst of
life. Now she was not dead. She was outside life, watching it go by.
And, like the old people, whom she had watched with Gregory, following
the sun about the Almshouse walls, she did not want it to go.
"For a few years yet you will be a woman."
Jean went slowly across the roof, through the living-room, to the small
blue and white bedroom. She turned on the light above the mirror and
looked calmly into it. In the last two years the band of gray above
her ears had thickened. There were faint lines, very faint, at the
corners of her eyes. The eyes themselves were clear and young, but now
that Jean looked steadily into their frank depths, something rose from
beneath the surface, an intangible record of the years.
Jean turned, getting almost the full view of her body in the mirror. It
was wonderfully strong and straight. The throat and breasts were firm
and the flesh soft. Jean remembered how soft and white her mother's
body had been when she had covered it against the draught.
Her own, perhaps, would keep its youth, too, a mockery of the lessening
power within. In spite of all her efforts, her enthusiasm would decay,
more quickly now that she had recognized her need to keep it. Her
body more quickly, her brain more slowly, would obey the law. She
would sink, with tragic unconsciousness of the process, into benumbed
indifference. No more stress, no more impatience, no longing, no
regret. Patient acceptance.
Jean snapped off the light and went out to the roof again.
Jerome Stuart had gone away. But he would come back.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Jerome Stuart grinned at the red-cap who rushed forward for his bag, at
the transfer man to whom he gave his checks, to the taxi driver whom he
beckoned, and finally, when he found himself sitting on the very edge
of the seat as if, by so doing, he could force the vehicle more quickly
through the traffic, at himself.
For a little over two weeks he had managed to stay away. And, although
from the moment he had entered the train to return, he could not have
told why he ever went, still less why he had stayed, he was proud of
the achievement. He felt that he had acquired a power of self-control
that no emergency of life could ever shake. He had fished and tramped
and played tennis and, one evening, alone in his room, he had even
tried to do some serious reading. At the memory of that evening, Jerome
leaned against the cushions and laughed aloud.
"You poor, besotted idiot."
He might be fifty, sixty, a hundred. He might have a dozen daughters
and a score of grandchildren. None of it had anything to do with his
love for Jean Herrick. He had run away in a kind of perverted modesty,
just as a child might refuse a longed-for present beyond its just
expectations,
"It would serve you right if she had gone away and you couldn't find
her."
But at the thought, Jerome perched on the edge of the seat again.
"Steady, old top, steady. If you go at things like this, you'll bungle
the whole business. And then you will be in a fix. Besides, you know,
you can't dash in and ask a lady to marry you, when she hasn't even the
least idea you're in love. Cool down, grandpa, cool down."
Nevertheless when the elevator did not instantly answer his summons,
Jerome ran up the four flights to his office.
In the middle of her dictation to Minnie, Jean heard his step and
stopped. She sat, arrested, for what seemed an endless time, while
Minnie chewed her pencil and stared at her own new patent leather pumps.
"The usual ending--to those three last--and that will be all for the
present."
"Yes'm." Still chewing, Minnie went.
Jerome Stuart was back. In a few moments perhaps he would come in. He
would come in with no memory of that last moment on the sidewalk in
his manner, because that was the only way the old relations could go
on. And she would meet him, with careless surprise at this return, two
weeks sooner than he had expected. He would tell her of his vacation
and she would report the lack of any exciting developments while he had
been away. Perhaps he would suggest finishing the piers.
He would sit in that chair where she would have to face him, unless
she deliberately turned her back. She would listen while he talked.
Outwardly they would be the good comrades they had always been. But the
man who had desired her would be there, too, and the woman who had sat
on the roof and cried, who had appraised her flesh and estimated her
power to rouse again his desire, would be there, too. Jean shuddered.
She wished he would come now, instantly, and then decided to go before
he could.
She had changed her mind for the tenth time, when Jerome's door opened,
and her choice was gone. He was in the outer office, saying good
morning to Minnie. He knocked and Jean rose, forced by some inner need,
to meet him standing. "Come in."
"Back on the job, you see. How's the world got along in my absence?"
He was coming towards her, the outer man and the other, shifting places
dizzily, coming straight towards her, lit by the glare of those moments
when she had considered living with him in closest intimacy.
"You certainly do look like all outdoors." She had managed to say it.
"I feel like it. I'm afraid to breathe in case I use up all the air in
poor old Manhattan at one swoop."
He took his usual place without offering to shake hands. Jean continued
to stand. If she relaxed her muscles, the poise she had summoned would
relax too, and Jerome Stuart would know that she had weighed her power
to waken again his momentary passion.
Jerome wished that Jean would sit down. It made him feel that he had
interrupted her in an important piece of work and that she was waiting
for him to go. Besides, standing so, the strong sweep of body disturbed
him, and his resolve to proceed slowly and carefully was shaken almost
beyond control.
"So you haven't taken a vacation at all. Don't you intend to?"
"I don't know. I may." Jean looked away to her desk, covered with
papers.
The first impression that she had given of pleasure at his return was
gone. She was frowning slightly as if she found it a little difficult
to accept this interruption.
She was so strong and self-reliant. She needed no one. The thing he had
felt in her had been of his own imagining, it was a projection from
within. This big woman, impatient to get at her work, had no need
within her. The white softness of her flesh was a lie. She was alive in
her brain only.
And he, in two short weeks had lived a lifetime.
For twenty-three years he had thought of himself as Alice's father.
He had touched emotion only in relation to his child and her life. He
had lived in the reflected glow of others' more intense emotions. And
this woman, with her ill-concealed impatience for him to be gone, had
dragged him down, in two weeks, in less, in one night, down into the
rushing current, back to the very Purpose of Life. There she stood,
waiting for him to go.
Jerome rose. If he stayed another minute he would tell her that he
loved her. Or strike her. He did not know which.
"I'm afraid you're busy and I'm keeping you."
"No. I'm not busy--not specially. You're not keeping me."
If Jerome Stuart went before she had mastered the situation, it would
forever hold its whip over her.
Jean sat down but Jerome stood where he was. This reversal of position
brought him nearer, so that now he was close, looking down upon her.
"The Adirondacks must be lovely now."
"They are."
"You're back earlier than you intended, aren't you?"
"Yes."
Jean was smiling up at him.
Had Jerome Stuart always looked like that, or was it some quality the
had brought back from the open? His gray eyes glowed with the same
light that heralded dawn. His body radiated a spiritual fire which,
Jean felt, would consume any obstruction upon which he chose to direct
it. It was the Galahad quality she had imagined in Herrick, made
manifest; the courage she had overestimated in Gregory, raised to the
limit of human possibility. Jean began to tremble.
"I--I _am_ rather busy this morning--only it didn't seem exactly
courteous to say so."
"Please don't be insincere--ever--with me, even in things that don't
matter at all."
Jean rose. "Well then--I won't. Will you please--go?"
But Jean was too near. He could feel her in his arms as he had felt her
every night, alone in the mountains.
"You're so hard--so terribly un-needing--and I need you so."
Jean's hands gripped the desk-edge, but she still managed to keep the
smile in her eyes. She could hear Minnie typing in the next room and
out in the hall the elevator clanked. It had been so still in the
studio the night Herrick asked her to marry him. And the night that she
and Gregory had stood silent, the air had been touched with frost and
the stars had been so bright. It was hot now and the glaring August sun
beat in under the awnings. The city roared away to vast distances, and
even the small spot where she stood was filled with little clickings
and bangings.
"Don't look like that, please. Forgive me. I won't offend again."
The words drew Jean back to the moment.
"Don't you mean--that you love me? That--you want--to marry me?"
"Mean it! Of course I mean it. More than I ever meant anything in all
my life. Jean! Do you? Do you care too?"
His hands were on her now, holding her with assured possession. And
suddenly Jean's eyes filled with tears.
"I don't know. I don't know what I feel. I want to care. I want
you to love me. When you went away like that I was angry--and
disappointed--and I thought of how I could _make_ you care enough but
something inside----"
Jerome's hands dropped. "What do you mean? What are you talking about?"
The tears ran down Jean's cheeks. "Something inside is dead. I do
care--every way--but that."
"Then you don't care at all. You're not a child. Don't you know what
love means?"
Jean's head dropped until he could see only her quivering lips.
"Yes--I know."
After a long silence, Jerome said quietly: "Then, there's nothing else
to say." He turned away.
He was going. In another moment there would be no bridge to the empty
years ahead.
"Wouldn't it be enough--the rest, everything, friendship--interest----"
Jerome swung round. "Would those have been enough before--when you
cared?" he demanded.
She stopped, almost touching him. "No, they wouldn't have been enough,
then. I didn't know their value."
Her eyes were very gentle. Jerome turned away again and walked slowly
over to the window. Jean stood where she was, waiting.
Could he take less? Could he? Know that there had been more, sense
it in a thousand small, intimate ways that made his blood run hot at
the thought. To feel it and never to share it. Or worse, to know it
corpse-like, forever beyond his reach. That, or nothing of Jean at all.
He spoke without turning. "I don't know. Truly, I don't know. It
doesn't seem as if I could. And yet--when I try to think of going on
without you----"
He did not speak again or move, but stood with his shoulders hunched,
his hands in his pockets. At last Jean went to him. At her touch on his
arm, he looked up. His face was so white and fixed that Jean's hand
dropped. It would have to be all or nothing to him.
"I--I hoped it would be enough."
"Why? You don't love me."
"I don't know why--only that I did hope."
Jerome's face quivered. "Why did you tell me, Jean, that you know what
love is? If you hadn't--but now I will always know that you know. Why
did I have to know?"
"Because," Jean said slowly, "I do care and I want your love, very,
very much."
It was a long time before Jerome turned from the window again.
They stood so, looking quietly at each other and then Jean said, with a
wistful smile:
"Shall we try it?"
After a moment an answering smile flickered in Jerome's eyes.
"I suppose this terrible knowledge of values is the price we have to
pay for feeling at all--at our age."
"Perhaps it is worth it. I feel somehow--that it is."
"Do you, Jean? Do you really?"
Jean nodded. "I almost know it is," she whispered as Jerome drew her
gently to him.
THE END.