We found every place splendid in those weeks as we let the wanderlust
carry us on. And as though emerging from some vivid dream, various
places and faces of people stand out in my memory now, as then they
loomed in upon our absorption.
I remember the little old harbor of Cherbourg, gleaming in the
moonlight, where when we landed Eleanore said, "Let's stay here awhile."
So of course we did, and then went on to Paris. We took an apartment,
very French and absurdly small, from a former Beaux Arts friend of mine.
I remember the kindly face of the maid who took such beaming care of us,
the cafe in front of which late at night we sat and watched the huge
shadowy carts go by on their way to the market halls, the sunrise flower
market, where we filled our cab with moss roses and plants, Polin's
songs in the "Ambassadeurs," delicious petites allees in the Bois, our
favorite rides on the tops of the 'buses, that old religious place of
mine down under the bridge by Notre Dame.
All these and more we saw in fragments, now and then, looking out with
vivid interest on all the life around us, only to return to each other,
_into_ each other I should say, for the exploring was quite different
now, there had been such hours between us that nothing intimate could be
held back. Nothing? Well, nothing that I thought of then. For somehow or
other, in those glad, eager afternoons and evenings, in those nights,
nothing disturbingly ugly in me so much as thought of showing its head.
Three years before in this stirring town I had felt guilty at being a
monk. But now I felt no guilt at all. For down the Champs Elysees our
cab rolled serenely now, and even our driver's white hat wore an air as
though it had a place in life.
From Paris we started for Munich, but we did not stop there, we happened
to feel like going on. So we went through to Constantinople, whence we
took a boat to Batoum and went up into the Caucasus, which Eleanore had
heard about once from an engineer friend of her father's. I remember
Koutais, a little town by a mountain torrent with gray vine-covered
walls around it. Shops opened into the walls like stalls. There we would
buy things for our supper and then in a crazy vehicle we would drive
miles out on the broad mountainside to an orchard pink with blossoms,
where we would build a fire and cook, and an old man in a long yellow
robe and with a turban on his head would come out of his cabin and bring
us wine. And the stars would appear and the frogs tune up in the marshes
far down in the valley below, and the filmy mists would rise and the
mountains would tower overhead. And the effect of this place upon us was
to make us feel it was only one of innumerable such vacation places that
lay ahead, festival spots in long, radiant lives. We felt this vaguely,
silently. So often we talked silently.
Then there would come the most serious times, when with the deepest
thoughtfulness we would survey the years ahead and very solemnly place
ourselves, our views and beliefs. Miraculous how agreed we were! We
believed, we found, in good workmanship, in honest building, in getting
things done. We believed in Eleanore's father and all those around and
above him that could help his kind of work. We were impatient of
soft-headedness in rich people who had nothing to do, and of heavy
muddle-headedness in the millions who had too much to do, and of
muckraking of every kind which only got in the way of the builders. For
the building of a new, clean vigorous world was our religion. And it did
not seem cold to us, because our lives were in it and because we were
in love.
There was no end to the plans for ourselves, for my writing, our home,
the friends we wanted, the trips, the books and the music. And through
it all and from under it all there kept bursting up that feeling which
we knew was the most important of all, the exultant realization that we
two were just starting out.
* * * * *
When at last we came back home this feeling took a deeper turn. I
noticed a change in Eleanore. She had far less thought and time for me
now, she seemed to be strangely absorbed in herself. Nearly all her time
and strength were given to our small apartment, in the same building as
that of her father. By countless feminine touches she was making it look
like the home she had planned. She was getting all in order. And then
one night she told me why. Her arms were close around me and her voice
was so low I could barely hear:
"There's going to be another soon--another one _of us_--do you hear?--a
very tiny blessed one."
I held her slowly tighter.
"Oh, my darling girl," I whispered.
Suddenly I relaxed my hold, for I was afraid of hurting her now. In a
moment all was so utterly changed. And as in that brave, quiet way of
hers she looked smiling steadily into my eyes, my throat contracted
sharply. For into my mind leaped the memory of what the harbor had shown
to me on that sultry hideous summer night in the tenement over in
Brooklyn. And _that_ must happen to _my wife_!
"Oh, my dear," she whispered, "if you only knew how much strength I
stored up way over there in the mountains."
So she had been thinking of this even then, and yet had told me nothing!
Here was the beginning of a long anxious period. Month after month I
watched her quietly preparing. Slowly we drew into ourselves, while her
father and mine and Sue and our friends came and went, but mattered
little. I wondered if Dillon ever felt this. As he came down to us in
the evenings from the apartment upstairs, where he and Eleanore had
meant so much to each other only a year before, he gave no sign that he
saw any change. But one night after he had gone, Eleanore happened to
pick up the evening paper which had dropped from his bulging overcoat
pocket.
"Billy, come here," she said presently.
"What is it?"
"Look at this."
The President of the United States had gone with Eleanore's father that
day in a revenue cutter over the harbor and had spoken of Dillon's great
dream in vigorous terms of approval.
"And father was here this evening," said Eleanore very slowly, "and yet
he never told me a word. He saw that I'd heard nothing and he thought I
didn't care. Oh, Billy, I feel so ashamed."
But she soon forgot the incident.
My suspense grew sharp as the time drew near. I had a good doctor, I was
sure of that, and he told me he had an excellent nurse. But what good
were all these puny precautions? The tenement room in Brooklyn kept
rising in my mind.
She sat by the window that last night, and looking down on the far-away
lights of the river we planned another trip abroad.
A few hours later I stood over her, holding her hand, and with her white
lips pressed close together and her eyes shut, she went through one of
those terrible spasms. Then she looked up in the moment's relief. And
suddenly here was that smile of hers. And she said low, between clenched
teeth,
"Well, dearie, another starting out----"