EAST IS WEST
I
That journey homeward!
The backlash of a typhoon blown up from the China Sea made rough sailing
the first two days of the voyage. Passengers kept to their staterooms.
But the third evening Madelaine dressed for dinner.
She had a dinner gown in her trunk which had reposed in the Tokio Y. W.
C. A. during her absence in Siberia. When she joined Nathan in the
passageway after her toilet was complete, the man failed to recognize
her for an instant. She actually had to speak to him as she approached.
Then a thrill shot through him at sight of her loveliness that burned to
the roots of his hair.
She was a sensation as she preceded her lover through the crowded saloon
a moment later.
“_’Sst!_ Get onto the peach!” Nathan overheard a little undersized
Hebrew whisper swiftly to a fellow diner as he and Madelaine passed one
of the door tables.
They walked afterward on the upper deck in the mellow starlit darkness,
a light scarf about the girl’s bare shoulders. Those stars hung very
luminous and close again. But now they were merely watchwords, hung over
the sea.
Off by the tarpaulined lifeboats in the shadows cast by the massive
ventilators, the two finally leaned over the rail. The moon was coming
up. It came up while they stayed there.
The man’s arm stole around the girl’s waist. He drew her close. And she
sighed contentedly in that embrace and relaxed against him.
“Happy, dear?” she whispered.
“Happy? Madelaine, there’s a dull, poignant ache way down inside—that
I’m going to awaken soon and find it all a dream. I can’t explain it.
The world is changed. To-night—this moment—I’m the happiest man in it
and I’d go through it all again if I thought that in the end I’d reach
the luxury of this moment.”
“We’re going to have a big church wedding, laddie, dear—if you’ll agree.
There must be lights and flowers and laughter and music—a surfeit of it,
because we’ve wanted it so long, both of us. Besides, it’s the last
thing mother’ll be able to do for me. It would break her heart if she
couldn’t.”
“You’ve written to her about—me?” Nathan asked thickly.
“Do you think I could keep it to myself, you foolish boy? And she’s
going to meet us at the Springfield station and you’re to stay with us a
few days before you go up to Vermont and close your position with your
mill people.”
“When will it happen, dear—the lights and the laughter, the flowers and
the music?”
“I’d like it to be the first of October, laddie. Mother will certainly
want that much time to prepare. But never mind. The weeks will go
quickly. And you’ll be right near-by in New York. You must come up every
week-end. And I’ll be in New York to do my wedding shopping too, laddie.
Also there’s the question of our house. We’ll want to settle that in the
meantime.”
The man was silent. The moon came up out of a tropical sea and made a
pathway of silver straight to their feet. His voice shaking with
emotion, he finally said:
“Madelaine dear, there’s something I’ve been wanting to speak about for
a long, long time. It’s about myself. In a way I’m glad you saw father.
Maybe you can understand why I’ve wanted to be a little bigger and
better than he has shown himself. But I haven’t had any one to coach me,
dear. I’ve grown rather hit-or-miss and had to get the corners removed
in a hard, rough way. And I’m afraid they’re not all removed—far from
it.”
“Coach you?”
“I know I’m rough and crude. In a lot of ways Bernie was right. I know
there are times when perhaps I shock you with those crudities. But it
isn’t because I haven’t the desire to learn. If you’ll only be patient,
I’ll try my best——”
“Let’s not talk about it, laddie. Of course I know you’ll try your best.
I’ve seen you eager to do your best so many times it’s often brought
tears to my eyes. You never knew. Of course there are old habits you’ve
been almost thirty years forming that can’t be broken in a moment.
They’re deeper than your conscious mind. Yes—I know all that! I guess
it’s because you’re trying so hard that I’ve gone on loving you more and
more. No man need despair of becoming a polished, courtly gentleman who
has a basic love of beauty in his heart. All else is a matter of
practice and contact. Anyway, you suit me, and if you keep on the way
you’ve been going the past six months, at forty I’m going to drop right
down on my bony old knees and worship you—the little tin god that I’ve
made!”
“No woman ever talked to me as you do, Madelaine. It would be a pretty
cheap fellow who couldn’t respond to your ‘handling.’ You don’t scold or
preach, like all the rest, and make me more self-conscious than ever.
There’s something you radiate that simply won’t let a fellow be a boor
while you’re around. And I love you! Dear God, how I love you! What can
I ever do to show it? I wonder what?”
“Well, dear, just now you might kiss me,” Madelaine responded, pinching
his hard ruddy hand. “For the present that will be quite sufficient.”
Music started somewhere on the decks below.
“A waltz!” cried the girl. “Come on, Natie, let’s dance.”
“I can’t dance,” confessed Nathan bitterly.
“Well, what the stuff-and-nonsense difference does that make? I’m here
to teach you, am I not? Come on, you horrible troglodyte! You’re going
to get your first lesson in waltzing under the absolutely impersonal
instruction of your Girl-Without-a-Name!”
And he did.
II
A dream, a dream—all a dream!
The lights of Telegraph Hill showed nebulous through the evening
coast-mist on the night of the twenty-fifth. The following day they were
on their way through Nevada. They reached Chicago on the twenty-ninth
and Albany eighteen hours later. Thence they traveled in a chair-car to
Springfield.
Madelaine had time to call her mother on the long-distance telephone in
Albany. Mrs. Theddon was meeting them with the motor at the Union
station in Springfield. And as all journeys must have an end some time,
even a Dream Journey, the steel girders of the railroad bridge across
the Connecticut finally vibrated to the dull roar of their incoming
train. A moment later they had crossed over the stone arch with the
brilliant illumination of Main Street, Springfield, stretching north and
south. The train came to a stop. Gracia Theddon espied them through the
Pullman windows.
Nathan turned to help Madelaine down the steps. Never was there such a
reunion.
“And this is Nathan!” cried Mrs. Theddon. She did everything but kiss
him. “It makes me happy to greet you because I can see you have made my
Madelaine so happy! Come, the car is waiting. We will go up at once.”
A chauffeur seemed to materialize out of atmosphere and appropriate the
suit cases. They passed through the big waiting room to the portico
steps on the south, where a limousine throbbed softly.... And as Nathan
followed into that car and the driver closed the door, the man who had
always known crude and sordid things, even though he rebelled against
them, had an overwhelming sense of peace. He was finding his own. A
world of beautiful things awaited him, beauty and richness,—not for
cheap, provincial show, not because they had to do with The Best People,
but beauty for beauty’s sake because at heart he had ever been the
artist. It was not the awed provincial finding himself suddenly amid
patrician environment. It was fine, rare, delicate atonement at last
with all the best things which deepen life and enrich it, the delectable
attributes toward which mankind has aspired on all the long climb from
mumbling over bones in the river bottoms of the Neanderthal age to the
twentieth century and as Nathan had once expressed it—“art drawing-rooms
softly shaded at midnight.” The worship of beauty had become a religion
with Nathan. It stood for God. And what is there irreverent in that?
It had never occurred to Nathan that he was “marrying money.” He knew in
a general way that Madelaine’s foster-mother was wealthy. But when the
limousine rolled under the Long Hill porte-cochère and old Murfins,
gray-haired now—what hair remained—was waiting for them in the opened
doorway, the home into which the young Vermonter passed brought the
realization to him with perturbing force. He felt immediately chagrined.
He was impatient to start his work and show these people who were
accepting him for their own that he was worthy of their confidence.
Dinner was served almost as soon as Nathan could groom himself. And
after it was over—though they sat for a long time over their coffee
while Madelaine tried to convey to her mother a faint idea of what the
two had experienced—they went out upon the wide veranda at the back of
the house. The place was softly lighted and awning shaded. The broad
sweep of the Connecticut was calm as a mill pond at their feet, the
serried lights of the South End bridge prinkling in the water as the
afterglow died upon the distant Berkshires.
III
Their trunks had arrived and been carried to their rooms during dinner.
It was shortly after eight-thirty when Madelaine exclaimed to Nathan:
“I know what let’s do! Suppose we slip upstairs and dress in our army
clothes to show mother how we looked in the field! I think it would be
jolly!”
Nathan complied. It took him a quarter-hour to make the change.
“It’s not exactly what I’d wear on parade,” he apologized grimly on his
return.
“I imagine Siberia was no tea party!” returned Mrs. Theddon. She was as
happy as a young girl herself this night, though she had faded much
through worry over her daughter. Her hair was almost iron gray now with
that anxiety.
Madelaine was in the center of the veranda, turning about to show her
mother a rent in her cape where a stray Bolshevik bullet had penetrated
one night beyond Omsk, when old Murfins appeared in the doorway.
“Mr. Ruggles is calling, Miss Madelaine,” he announced. “Mr. Gordon
Ruggles!”
Gordon!
From the Great High Noon the one slender shadow cast upon Madelaine’s
happiness had been the thought of Gordon. She stood for a moment
irresolute now. Then to the servant she said evenly:
“Please show him upstairs—the library. I’ll be up directly.” Madelaine
turned to Nathan. “I want him to meet you. But not just yet. I must talk
to him first.”
Gordon was standing before the west window, looking down on the
Connecticut with his back to the room when Madelaine finally entered. It
was the same apartment where she had bade him good-bye—offered him her
lips—which he had not taken. He was still in his uniform and she knew
when she beheld it, as well as the man inside, that he had not played at
war.
“Gordon!” she cried, coming swiftly forward. She held out both hands.
He did not speak. If he was surprised at beholding her in a nurse’s
outfit, he gave no sign.
War had taken its toll from Gordon. It seemed as though his fine
patrician mold had been cast into the Great Furnace and when the dross
had been melted away he was pure metal but hardened somehow. He was
thin; he looked as though he had suffered much.
“I’m sorry to intrude to-night, Madge. But I couldn’t help it. Forgive
me! Under the circumstances I had to come!”
“Oh, I’m _so_ glad to see you! And it’s perfectly all right!”
He grasped her outstretched hand and bent above it. It was very neatly
done, very much the appropriate thing—for Gordon.
It was not until he had been called to meet Nathan and Madelaine saw his
peculiar gait in crossing the room that she knew he had not returned as
he went away. Gordon had lost his left leg at the knee in the Argonne,
but aside from a stiffness in his stride, no one might suspect.
“I’ve intruded to-night because I’m going to Chicago and thence out to
Kansas at once, Madge. And I wanted to offer my best wishes. I’m glad,
Madge—glad—that you—are very happy!”
“Gordon! You know?”
“Aunt Gracia told me. I was discharged from the hospital in January.
Aunt Grace allowed me to read certain portions of your letters
about—_him_! It couldn’t be, Madge—you and I. And in fairness to us
both, I ought to add that I felt it the night I went away. At least I
felt I couldn’t take you—with clean hands.”
“Oh, Gord!”
“You had known me so long—I had grown up with you and showed myself such
a rotter before you straightened me out—that there would have been
little real romance in it, between you and me, if I had been the man. I
felt a little bitter over it when I first heard. But a fellow learns a
lot of things in such a Big Show as we’ve just ended. He learns not to
whimper if luck goes against him. But aside from that—there was yet
another reason.”
For a moment they surveyed one another. Of the two, Madelaine was the
most perturbed. Perturbed because after her half-year propinquity with
Nathan, everything which her fiancé possessed stood forth so sharply by
contrast with the man who faced her now.
Nathan had calm eyes. Gordon’s eyes were not calm. They were troubled.
Nathan had hard-muscled jaws and philosophical lips. Gordon had—well,
just a mouth, and it was a bit too harsh. Nathan carried himself
gravely, shoulders well back, feet on the ground. Gordon had a
proclivity toward a slight, slender, patrician slouch. Nathan had talon
hands, a man’s hands, made to grasp, create, build, deal sledge-hammer
blows. Gordon’s hands were lithe, pink, neatly manicured, made to handle
a cigarette gracefully.
Yet Gordon was no less a man than Nathan. He was simply a different type
of man.
Comparing the two now, however, Madelaine understood why she had never
been able to abandon herself to Gordon. Being very feminine, she had
hungered for the virility of Nathan’s jaws and hands and iron arms.
“You’re going to Chicago and Kansas, Gordon? Why?”
“I am going to be married, Madge.”
“_Married!_”
“I have told Aunt Gracia why. When I’m gone, she will explain. You think
it strange perhaps—after what happened here in this room when we parted.
But when I knew I had lost, with you—and then one night Over Across when
I got in a pinch where I had no assurance I would live until morning, I
did some vital thinking, Madge. I found there were many things in my
life which, if I had the chance, I would rectify. I was spared to
rectify them. I did a rotten thing by another girl once, Madge. And I
choose to think I lost you because I dared approach you without my debt
to another woman paid in full. At any rate, without trying to make a
hero of myself in this distressing explanation, I—well—I found the girl
loved me very dearly and had married another man whom she did not love
because he was willing to have her after—after—well, to speak the brutal
truth, in army slang—after I’d ‘made hamburg’ of her life. We’re to be
married, I say, and we’re going out to Kansas. I shall try to nurse the
girl back to—to—what she was when I met her. My treatment made her a
nervous wreck.”
Madelaine was very pale as Gordon made this confession. She backed
against the table and whetted her parted lips.
“Gordon,” she whispered huskily, “—is it Bernie Gridley?”
“Yes,” said the man simply. “And I want you to know that even if you had
not found Mr. Forge, and had returned willing to accept me, I should
still have pursued the course I’m taking now.”
For a moment Madelaine surveyed him. And then she saw the clean-cut
character in the thing he was doing. With her intuitive understanding of
psychology, she realized that the very best side of her cousin was
disclosing itself now.
“Gordon—was that—why you would not kiss me on the lips—the last time we
faced each other in this room?”
“Something of the sort, Madge. Yes.”
“Gordon, this is a very manly thing you’re doing. A big thing!”
“Please don’t make it any more distressing. I’m not doing it from any
hope of praise or sense of duty. I’m doing it because I found a new
thrill in shooting straight, after you gave me the incentive to stop
sloughing, Madge. And—I’ve learned more—in France. Miss Gridley can
never be to me what you have been, Madge. But then, I don’t deserve you,
and never did. I can make Miss Gridley very happy. I can nurse her back
to normality and health. She has very great confidence in me. She loves
me greatly. She was very tender when she heard I had returned and was
confined in the hospital. She visited me every day. It will not be at
all difficult to love her for that tenderness. All of us have the
capacity to love, I find, Madge, when the basis of love is service. And
there is usually a Great Circumstance where we eventually find we can
serve—very beautifully. Please don’t weep, Madelaine. Your mother—my
aunt——”
“Mother doesn’t need to tell me anything, Gordon. I understand. I cared
for Bernie in her dilemma. And I know now why she would not tell me her
lover’s name. You were a relative. There is much that is fine in Bernie.
But, Gordon, it hasn’t had a chance. Oh, I’m so overwhelmed with
everything turning out this way that I don’t know what to do or say.”
“I bothered you to-night, Madge, because I delayed my departure almost
ten days now, awaiting your return. I had to see you and say this
personally. I felt it would be yellow to leave it to a letter. I am
leaving for Chicago at midnight. Bernice and I are going to Pittsfield,
Kansas, as soon as we are married. I am going out to manage an iron
works out there. If we’re unable to return east for your wedding, I want
you to let me offer you all my good wishes, now—to-night. Forge is a
lucky dog, with your life in his keeping. I feel sure he appreciates it.
You would not love him enough to marry him if he lacked the capacity for
such appreciation.”
Madelaine moved across to Gordon then. She lifted her hands to his
shoulders and stood looking up into his war-hardened face.
“Gordon,” she said softly, “you’re doing a big thing. You’ll be happy
because you are doing it. I can see it in your eyes already. I know you
will make Bernie’s hard life very rich. But I want to say more than
that. I want to tell you that I have loved you—loved you from the night
you came to my room down in Boston and showed me you had taken stock of
yourself and your birthright and were going to play the man. It wasn’t a
romantic love, Gordon. It was the love of a sister for a very dear
brother. And that love is still yours, Gordon. You may carry it away
with you and retain it always. God has been very good to the homeless
waif that is myself. He has given me a very dear foster-mother. More
than that, he has sent two fine, virile men into my life. And they hold
my heart in their powerful hands between them. What more could a girl
ask?”
Gordon took both hands and kissed them again. And Madelaine, placed one
arm around Gordon’s neck—drew him down—kissed him on the forehead.
The man blindly fumbled in his pocket. He pulled from it a little
wine-colored box of plush.
“I want you to keep it, Madelaine. To remember me by, in the years
ahead. Aunt Gracia let me have it, and I had the stone put in a slightly
different setting. Please wear it—on your right hand—as a sort of
personal wedding gift.”
She let him slip the ring on her right third finger.
“I want _him_ to meet you, Gordon,” she said.
They went downstairs and across to the porch door. As she came through,
she heard her mother’s voice explaining something to Nathan, who sat
with his elbows on his knees, leaned forward, face thoughtful. “—and the
war sent their value up scandalously and Madelaine will get almost a
million that will require a good business man’s oversight——” Mrs.
Theddon stopped abruptly and raised her eyes to her daughter’s crimson
face. “Well, dear?” she stammered, as though she had been caught in a
misdemeanor.
“I want Nathan and Gordon to meet. He’s here in the drawing-room.”
“Have him out, by all means,” declared Mrs. Theddon, arising.
Gordon’s tall figure stood outlined for a moment in the veranda door. It
was Mrs. Theddon who introduced them.
Two weather-bronzed men in khaki, fresh from the wars, looked in each
other’s eyes,—level and straight. Then their hands came together.
“... and there shall be neither east nor west,
Nor pride nor pain nor birth,
When two strong men meet face to face,
Tho’ they come from the ends of the earth.”
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