It was William Sweetapple, the gardener's boy, who informed Lois that
Claude had come back, throwing the information casually over his
shoulder as he watered the lawn.
"Seen Mr. Claude to-day, 'm."
"Oh no, you didn't, Sweetapple," Lois contradicted. "Mr. Claude is in
the West."
"He may be in the West now, 'm, but he wasn't at twenty-five minutes
past two this afternoon."
Sudden fear brought Lois down a step or two of the portico, over the
Corinthian pillars of which roses clambered in early July profusion. In
white, with a broad-brimmed Winterhalter hat from which a floating green
veil hung over her shoulders and down her back, her strong, slim figure
seemed to have gained in fulfilment of herself even in the weeks that
Thor had been away.
"Where did you see him, Sweetapple?--or think you saw him?"
Sweetapple turned the nozzle of the hose so as to develop a crown of
spray with which he bedewed the roses of all colors grouped in a great
central bed. "I didn't think, 'm. It was him."
"Well, where?"
"See him first going into the woods leading up to Duck Rock. That was
when I was on my way to Lawyer Petley's."
"Did you see him twice?"
"See him again as I come back. He was down in the road by that
time--looking up toward old man Fay's--Hadley B. Hobson's place that is
to be. Old man Fay's got to quit. Family moved already. You knew that,
didn't you, 'm?"
It was because Lois was really alarmed by this time that she said, "Oh,
you must have been mistaken, Sweetapple!"
"Just as you say, 'm," Sweetapple agreed; "but I see him; it was him."
She withdrew again, reseating herself in the shade of the semicircular
open porch protecting the side-door, where she had been writing on a
pad. Though so near the roadway, a high growth of shrubs screened her
from all but the passers up and down Willoughby's Lane. At this time of
year they were relatively few, many of the residents of County Street
having already gone to the seaside or the mountains. Lois enjoyed the
seclusion thus afforded her, and the tranquillity. The garden and her
poorer neighbors gave an outlet to her need for physical activity, while
in the solitude of the house and in that wider solitude created by the
absence of all the Willoughbys and Mastermans something within her was
being healed. It was being healed--but healed in a way that left her
changed. The change was manifest in what she said when, with the pad on
her knee again, she began to write.
"I am deeply moved, dear Thor, by your last letter from Colorado
Springs, and would gladly say something adequate in response to it. When
I can I will--if I ever can. As to that the decisive word must be with
time. I cannot hurry it. I can give you no assurance now. Now I
feel--but why should I repeat it? An illusion once dispelled can rarely
be brought back. Still less can you replace it by reality. What we are
looking for is a substitute for love. You may have found it--but I have
not. I can accept your definition of love as a giving out, a pouring
forth, a desire to do and to contribute; but it is precisely here that I
fail to respond to the test. There is something in me stagnated or
dammed up. My heart feels like a well that has gone dry. I have nothing
to yield. I understand what Rosie Fay said to me the day when I talked
to her on Duck Rock: 'I'm empty; I've given all I had to give.' It was
less blameworthy on her part than on mine, because she, poor little
thing, had given so much and I so little. And yet my supply seems to be
exhausted. It must have been thin and shallow to begin with. As I feel
at present it would take a new creation to replenish it.
"With regard to my calling forth what is best in you, dear Thor--well,
any one would do that or anything. You're one of those who have nothing
but the best to offer. Do you know what Uncle Sim said of you last
night?--'Thor is always on the side of the angels--and, though he makes
mistakes, they'll rescue him.' They will, dear Thor; I'm sure of it.
They may rescue us both--even if at present I don't see how."
Having written this much, she paused to ask what she should say further.
Should she speak of his coming home? No. Since the address he had given
her indicated that he was on his way, it was best that he should take
the responsibility of his own return. Should she tell him that
Sweetapple thought he had seen Claude? No. It would alarm him without
doing any good. If Claude was back, he was back--besides which,
Sweetapple might be wrong. So she signed her name with her usual
significant abruptness, sealing the envelope and addressing it.
Her hesitation came in putting on the stamp. Somehow the letter seemed
too cold to send. She didn't want to be cold--only to be sincere.
Sincerity during these weeks of solitude had become a sort of obsession.
She couldn't tell him that she had forgiven him as long as resentment
lingered in her heart, and yet she was anxious not to wound him more
than she could help. Wounding him she wounded herself more deeply, for
in spite of everything his pain was hers.
Slowly she tore the letter open again, to a sunset chorus of birds of
whose song she had just become conscious. From tree to tree they fluted
to one another and answered back, now with a reckless, passionate
warble, now with a long, liquid love-note. It was the voice of the rich
world that lay around her--a world of flowers and lawns, and meadows and
upland woods, and cool, deep shades and mellowing light. But it was also
the voice that had accompanied her into the enchanted land on that
winter's day when Thor had kissed her wrist. The day seemed now
immeasurably far away in time, and the enchanted land had been left
behind her; but the voice was still there, fluting, calling, reminding,
entreating, with an insistence that almost made her weep.
She wrote hurriedly in postscript: "If there was ever anything I could
do for you, dear Thor, perhaps what I used to feel would come back to
me. If it only would! If I could only be great and generous and
inexacting as you would be! I want to be, Thor darling; I long to be;
but I am like a person paralyzed, whose limbs no longer answer to his
will. I pray for recovery and restoration--but will it ever come?"
As encouragement to Thor she was no more satisfied with this than with
what she had said earlier, but it expressed all she could allow herself
to say. Anything more would have permitted him to infer such things as
he had permitted her to infer, an accident that must have no repetition.
She ended the note definitely, getting it ready for the post.
She was still engaged in doing so when, the crunching of footsteps
causing her to lift her head, she saw Claude. Having come round to the
side portico on a hint from William Sweetapple, he stood at a little
distance, smiling. He was smiling, but as a dead man might smile. Lois
could neither rise nor speak, from awe. Claude himself could neither
speak nor advance. He stood like a specter--but a specter who has been
in hell. The very smile was that of the specter who has no right to come
out of hell, and yet has come.
Lois was not precisely troubled; she was terrified. If Claude had only
spoken a word or taken a step forward it would have broken the spell
that held her dazed and dumb. But he did nothing. He only stood and
smiled--that awful smile which expressed more anguish than any rictus of
pain. He stood just as he came into sight, on turning the corner of the
house, with the many colors of the rose-bed at his left hand. It was
exactly like this, she had always imagined, that disembodied spirits or
astral forms made their appearances to portend death.
She got possession of her faculties at last. "Claude!" She could just
whisper it.
He continued to smile as he advanced and came up the steps; but it was
not till he was actually beside her that he said, in a voice which might
also have been that of a dead man, "You didn't expect me, did you?"
She remembered afterward that they neither shook hands nor exchanged any
of the usual forms of greeting, but at the minute it didn't seem natural
that they should. Her own tone was as strained as his as she answered,
awesomely: "No. Sit down, Claude. When did you come?"
Throwing his hat on the floor, he dropped wearily into a deck-chair and
closed his eyes. With the sharp profile grown extraordinarily white and
thin, the dead-man expression terrified her again. She wished he would
raise his head and look at her--look more like life. All he did was to
open his eyes heavily, as he replied, "Got back yesterday."
It was less from interest than from the desire to get on the plane of
actual things that she asked, "Where are you staying?"
"Slept at the house last night. Old Maggs, the caretaker, has the key,
so I made him let me in."
"But are you going to stay any time?"
"Might as well. Don't see why not."
There was so much to say and so much she was afraid to say that she
hardly knew with what to begin. "Weren't you," she ventured,
timidly--"weren't you having a good time?"
His answer as he lay back with eyes closed again was another of his
smiles, only dimmer now with a faint bitter-sweetness. She knew it was
like asking a man if his pain is better when it is killing him.
Nevertheless, the ground of common, practical things was the only one to
keep to, so she went on: "But you won't like sleeping at the house every
night--with no one in it. Don't you want to come here?"
He shook his head. "No, thanks. Mrs. Maggs will make my bed and give me
breakfast. That's all I need. Get the rest of my meals in town."
"But you'll stay to dinner now, won't you?"
He lifted himself up in his chair at last, his face taking on its first
look of life. "Thor be there?"
"Why, no. Thor's away--in the West. Didn't you know?"
He started nervously. "Away in the West? Not looking for me?"
She tried to smile. "Of course not. He went to attend the medical
congress in Minneapolis. He's on his way home now."
"When do you expect him?"
"Oh, not at once. I don't know when. He's taking his time."
He studied her awhile, with eyes that seemed to read her secret. "What
for?"
"To see the country, I suppose. My last letter was from Colorado
Springs."
He dropped back into the chair with a tired sigh of relief. "All right.
I'll stay to dinner. Thanks."
She allowed him to rest, asking no more questions than she could help
till dinner was over and they had come out again on the portico, so that
he might have his cigar in the cool, scented evening air. She was more
at ease with him, too, now that she could no longer see the suffering in
his pinched, emaciated face.
"Claude, why did you come home?"
He withdrew the cigar from his lips just long enough to say, "Because I
couldn't stay away."
"Why couldn't you?"
"Because I couldn't."
"Don't you think it would have been well to make the effort?"
"What was the good of making the effort when I couldn't keep it up?"
"But you kept it up for a while."
"Not after--after I heard."
"Heard about Rosie?"
He made an inarticulate sound of assent.
"What did you hear?"
"I heard--what she did."
"How? Who told you?"
"That chump Billy Cheever. Wrote me."
"How did he know it had anything to do with you?"
"Oh, I was fool enough to tell him about her once--and so he caught on
to it. Put two and two together, I suppose, when he heard that--that--"
She seized the opportunity to make the first incision toward getting in
her point. "That she threw herself into the pond? Did he say that Jim
Breen dived after her and brought her up?"
He answered indifferently. "He said some one did. He didn't say who."
"It was Jim. He saved her." As the statement evoked no response, she
continued, "Claude, what did you come home _for_?"
Again he withdrew his cigar from his mouth, looking at her obliquely.
"To marry her."
She allowed some time to elapse before saying, "Claude, I don't think
you will."
"Oh yes, I shall."
"What makes you so sure?"
"Because I am."
"I'm not. Or, rather, if I _am_ sure--it's the other way."
He sprang up, seizing her by the arm over which there was nothing but a
gauze scarf by way of covering. "Lois, for God's sake! What do you mean?
You know something. Tell me. She hasn't gone away with Thor, has she?"
She, too, sprang up, shaking off his hand as if it had been a serpent.
"You fool! Don't touch me! She'll marry Jim Breen. She'll be in love
with him in a week or two."
It was all over in an instant, but the blaze in her eyes seemed
literally to knock him down. He fell back into the deck-chair again,
though he sat astride on it with his feet on the floor, covering his
face with his hands.
"I beg your pardon, Lois," he muttered, humbly. "I don't know what I'm
saying."
"No, you don't," she agreed, speaking breathlessly because the leaping
of her heart was so wild; "but that's hardly an excuse for taking leave
altogether of your senses."
He continued to mutter into his hands. "I'm crazy! I'm drunk! I'm stark
mad! But, oh, Lois, if you knew what I've been through you wouldn't
mind."
The hot anger that had rolled over her with a wrath such as she had
never felt before began to roll away again, leaving her sick and
shivering. It was an excuse for going into the house to find a cloak and
for getting the minute's respite necessary to self-control. To regain
it--to overcome that throb of her being of which the after effect was a
faintness unto death--she was obliged to walk steadily, holding her head
high. She was obliged, too, to repent of the tigress impulse with which
she had turned on Claude, flinging in his face that for which she had
meant to prepare him by degrees. The fact that it had seemingly passed
over his head was no palliation to the outrage. As she mounted the
stairs and went to her room she repeated her own formula: "_Nothing that
isn't kind and well thought out beforehand._" What she had said had been
neither well thought out nor kind, but the temptation had been
overwhelming. For the instant it had seemed secondary that Thor hadn't
taken Rosie to the West, since Claude, who knew so much more of the
inner history of the episode than she did herself, had thought such an
action possible. More clearly than ever before she saw that some
appalling struggle for the possession of the little creature must have
taken place, and that it had been going on during those months when life
was apparently so peaceful and she had been living in her fool's
paradise. It was not till he had lost the fight that Thor had come to
her in the snow-bound woods with the twitter of birds and the deep music
of the tree-tops accompanying those half-truths she had been eager to
believe. She herself had been fatuous and vain in assuming that he could
love her; but if there was little to say for her, there was nothing at
all to be said for him. He had been the more false for the reason that,
as far as he went, he had been sincere. It was his very sincerity that
had tricked her. Less than at any time since the day when he had
stammered out his futile explanations did she feel it possible to pardon
him.
But there was something else. Now, if she chose, she could _know_. In
his present state of mind Claude would betray anything. She had only to
question him, to throw the emphasis adroitly here or there, and the
whole story would come out. It was like having a key come into her
hands--a key that would unlock all those mysteries which were her
terror. She was still irresolute, however, as to using it after she had
taken an old opera-cloak from a wardrobe, thrown it over her shoulders,
and gone down=stairs again.
She found Claude as she had left him--astride on the deck-chair, his
face in his hands, the burning end of the cigar that protruded between
his fingers making a point of light. The abject attitude moved her to
pity in spite of everything. She herself remained standing, her tall
figure thrown into dim relief between two of the white Corinthian
pillars of the portico. By standing, it seemed to her obscurely, she
could more easily escape if any such awful revelation as she was afraid
of were to spring on her against her will. She could almost feel it
waiting for her in the depths of the heavy-scented darkness.
For the minute, however, the folly of Claude's return was the matter
immediately to be dealt with; to get him to go away again was the end to
be attained. It was with this in view, as well as with a measure of
compassion, that she said:
"You poor Claude! You _have_ been through things, haven't you?"
The answer came laconically: "Been in hell."
"Yes, that's what I thought," she agreed, simply. "I thought it the
instant you came round the corner this afternoon. But why? For what
reason--exactly?"
He lifted his haunted face, stammering out his recital in a way that
reminded her of Thor. She could see that he had profited by his mistake
of a few minutes earlier, and that just as Thor had tried to tell
Claude's story without involving his own, so Claude was endeavoring to
spare her by doing the same thing. Being able to supply the blanks more
accurately now than on the former occasion, she found a kind of
poignant, torturing amusement in fitting her knowledge in.
He began with his first meeting with Rosie, describing the scene. He had
not taken the adventure seriously, not any more than he had taken a
dozen similar. Girls like that could generally be thrown off as easily
as they were taken on, and they bore you no ill-will for the change. As
a matter of fact, a new flirtation generally began where the old one
ended, which made part of the fun for the girl as for the man. He was
speaking of respectable girls, Lois was to understand--village girls,
shop girls, and others of the higher wage-earning variety, who didn't
mind showing a spice of devil before they married and settled down. Lots
of them didn't, and were no worse for it in the end. It had not occurred
to him that Rosie would be different from others of the class, or that
she would take in deadly earnest what was no more than play for him.
When he had made this discovery he had tried to withdraw, but only with
the result of becoming involved more deeply. Over the processes by which
he was led finally to pledge himself he grew incoherent, as also over
the signs which caused him to suspect that Rosie was playing fast and
loose with him. His mutterings as to "somebody else who was in love with
her" and who was "ready to put up money" threw her back on memories of
his uneasy questions concerning Thor on the evenings after the return
from the honeymoon. It was with a sense of the key slipping into the
lock that she said:
"And that made you jealous?"
"As the devil. It was because it did that I knew I couldn't give her
up--that I'd never let her go."
There was sincere curiosity in her tone as she asked the question, "But,
Claude, why did you?"
"Because she lied to me."
"Oh! And had you never lied to her?"
He mumbled something about that not being the same thing. "She swore to
me that there'd never been any put-up job between her and--and--"
She helped him out. "The--the other person." She could hear the key
grating as it turned. "And was there?"
He made the impatient, circular movement of his head, as though his
collar chafed him, with which she was familiar. He was gaining time in
order to use tact. "Oh, I don't know. There was--there was something.
Whatever it was, she denied it, when all the while they were--"
She felt obliged fully to turn the key. She knew how perilous the
question might be, but it was beyond her to keep it back. "They were
what, Claude?"
"They were trying to catch me in a trap."
It was like the door into the hall of mysteries opening, but only to
make disclosures dimmer and more mystifying still. The postponement of
dreadful certainties enabled her, however, to say with some slight
relief, "But this--this other person couldn't have been very fond of her
himself if he--if he gave her up to you."
He bowed his head still lower into his hands, muttering toward the
floor: "Oh, I don't know. I don't care--now. Anyhow, she lied to me,
and"--he lifted his haggard eyes again--"and I jumped at it. I saw the
way out--and I jumped at it. I told her--I told her--I'd go and marry
some one else."
"Did you mean Elsie Darling?"
He nodded speechlessly.
It was to come back again to the point which her anger had caused her to
miss that she went forward and laid her hand on his shoulder kindly. "I
would, Claude, if I were you," she said, in a matter-of-fact voice.
"She'd make you a good wife."
"No one will make me a good wife now," he said, hoarsely. "I'm going to
marry Rosie. I'll marry her if it puts me in the gutter. I'll marry her
if I never have a cent."
She went back to her place between the pillars, leaning against one of
them. "But, Claude," she reasoned, "would that do any good? Would it
make either of you happy, after all that's been said and done?"
He seemed to writhe. "I don't care anything about that. I've got to do
it."
"You haven't got to do it if Rosie doesn't want it."
"It's got nothing to do with her."
She looked at him in astonishment. "Nothing to do with her? What do you
mean?"
He tried to explain further. He had not primarily come back to atone for
the suffering he had inflicted on Rosie, or because his love for her was
such that he couldn't live without her. He had come back to propitiate
the demon within himself--the demon or the god, he was not sure which it
was, for it possessed the attributes of both. He had come back to escape
the chastisement his soul inflicted on itself--because without coming
back he could no longer be a man. He had come back because the Furies
had driven him with their whip of knotted snakes, and he could do
nothing but yield to their hounding. If Lois thought that traveling in
the West was beer and skittles when hunted and scourged by yourself like
that--well, she had better try it and see.
What she must understand already was that Rosie and happiness had become
minor considerations. He would sacrifice both to regain a measure of his
self-respect. He had never supposed, and he didn't suppose now, that
Rosie would be happy in marrying him, but that was no longer to the
point. The demon or the god must be appeased, at no matter what cost to
the victim.
He made these explanations not straightforwardly or concisely, but with
rambling digressions that took him over half the Middle West. He
described, or hinted at, all sorts of scenes, peopled by gay young
business men and garnished by pretty girls, in which he could have
enjoyed himself had it not been for the enemy in his heart. It wasn't
merely that he had thrown over Rosie with a cruelty that made her try to
kill herself, and still less was it that he couldn't live down his love
when once he set about it. It was that the Claude who might have been
was strangled and slain, leaving him no inner fellowship but with the
Claude who was. Reviving the Claude who might have been was like
reviving a corpse, and yet there was nothing to do but make the attempt.
"I'm a gentlemen--what?" he asked, raising his white face pitifully. "I
must act like a gentlemen--what?"
"Yes, but if it's too late, Claude--for that particular thing?"
"Oh, but it isn't--it won't be--not when she sees me."
"It might be; and if she doesn't want it, Claude, I don't see why you--"
"You don't see why because you're not me. If you were, you would. A
woman hasn't a man's sense of honor, anyhow."
She let this pass with an inward smile in order to say, "But, Claude,
suppose you _can't_ do it?"
He twisted his neck, with his customary chafing, irritated movement.
"I'll do it--or croak."
"Oh, but that's nonsense!"
"To you--not to me. You haven't been through the mill that I've been
ground up in. You don't know what it is to have been born--born a
gentleman--and to have blasted yourself into human remains. That's what
I am now--not a man--to say nothing of a gentleman--just human
remains--too awful to look at."
She tried to reason with him. "But, Claude, you mustn't exaggerate
things or put the punishment out of proportion to the crime. Admitting
that what you did to Rosie was dishonorable--brutal, if you like--"
"Oh, it isn't that. It's what I did to myself. Can't you see?"
She saw, but not with the intensity of Claude himself. Sitting down at
last, she let him talk again. He had felt something shattered in him, so
he said, at the very minute when he had turned to leave the
cucumber-house on the day of the final rupture. He knew already that he
was a cad, and that he was doing what only a cad would have done; but he
had expected the remorse to pass. He had known himself for a cad on
other occasions, and yet had outlived the sense of shame. That he should
outlive it again he had taken for granted, though he knew that this time
he couldn't do it without suffering. He was willing to take the
suffering. He was not specially unwilling that Rosie should take it,
too. In her way she had been as much to blame as he was. Though he
didn't question the sincerity of her love for him, she had plotted and
schemed to catch him, because from her point of view he was a rich man's
son, and even so had had moments of disloyalty. He found it not
unreasonable to expect her to share the responsibility for what had
overtaken her. But she, too, would outlive the pain of it and follow his
example in marrying some one else.
Lois felt her opportunity to have fully come. "I think she will. She'll
marry Jim Breen--if you'll only leave her alone."
"Oh, rot!"
The tone expressed the degree of importance he attached to this
possibility. He went on again, discursively, incoherently, covering much
of the same ground, but with new and illuminating details, details of
which the background was still a jumble of suppers and dances and
journeys, but in which the god or the demon gave him no rest. His
distaste for diversion having declared itself from the day of his
starting for Chicago, he had whipped up an appetite to counteract it.
Availing himself of the freedom of a young man plentifully supplied with
money for the first time in his life, he had made use of all the
resources with which strange and exciting cities could furnish him to
get back his zest in light-heartedness. The result was not in pleasure,
but in disgust, and a horror of himself that grew. It grew from the
beginning, like some giant poisonous weed. It grew while he was in
Chicago; it grew with each further stage of his journey--in St. Louis,
in Cincinnati, in Los Angeles. It was in Los Angeles that he had
received Billy Cheever's letter with the news of Rosie's mad leap, and
he knew for a certainty that the only thing to be done was to turn his
face eastward. Whatever happened, and whoever suffered, he must redeem
himself. Redemption had become for him a need more urgent than food,
more vital than life. Though he didn't use the word, though his terms
were simple and boyish and slangy, Lois could see that his stress was
that which sent pilgrims to the Holy Sepulcher, and drove Judas to go
and hang himself. Redemption lay in marrying Rosie, and restoring his
honor, and bringing the Claude who might have been back to life. Indeed,
it was difficult to tell at times which of the two was slain--whether
the Claude who might have been, or the other Claude--so distraught and
involved were his appeals. But beyond marrying Rosie and keeping his
word--being a gentleman, as he expressed it--his outlook didn't extend.
"Any damn thing that liked could happen" when that atoning act had been
accomplished.
* * * * *
There were so many repetitions in his turns of thought that Lois ended
by following them no more than listlessly. Not that she had ceased to be
interested, but her mind was occupied with other phases of the drama.
She remembered, what she had so often heard, that in the Mastermans
there was this extraordinary strain of idealism of which no one could
foresee the turn it would take. She knew the traditions of the
great-grandfather whose heart had broken on finding that America was not
the regenerated land he hoped for. Tales were still current in the
village of old Dr. Masterman, his son, who through sheer confidence in
his fellow-men never paid any one he owed and never collected money from
any one who owed it to him. Archie Masterman, in the next generation,
was supposed to have taken the altruistic tendency by the throat in
himself and choked it down; but Uncle Sim was a byword of eccentric
goodness throughout the countryside. Now the impulse was manifest in
Claude, in this revulsion against his own failure, in this marred and
broken vision of a Something to which he had not been true. And as for
Thor....
But here she was tortured and frightened. Who knew what this strange
inheritance might be working in him? Who could tell how big and tender
and transcending it might become? That it would be transcending and
tender and big was certain. If poor, frivolous, futile Claude could feel
like this, could feel that he must redeem his soul though "any damn
thing that liked" should happen as the price of his redemption, in Thor
the yearning would outflank her range. Might not the secret of secrets
be in that? Might not that which she had been seeing as treachery to
herself be no more than a conflict of aspirations? If Claude, with his
blurred distortion of the divine in him, served no other purpose, he at
least threw a light on Thor. Thor, too, was a Masterman. Thor, too, was
born to the vision--to the longing after the nationally perfect that had
become legendary since the time of the great-grandfather--to the sweet,
neighborly affection that ran through all the tales of that man's
son--to the sturdy righteousness of Uncle Sim--to the standards of honor
from which poor Claude had fallen as angels fall--and to God only knew
what high promptings strangled and vitiated in his father. Thor was heir
to it all, with something of his own to boot, something strong,
something patient, something laborious and loyal, something
long-suffering and winning and meek, that might have marked the leader
of a rebellious people or a pagan, skeptic Christ.
Her mind was so full of this ideal of the man against whom--and also for
whom--her heart was hot that she made no effort to detain Claude when,
after long silence, he picked up his hat and slipped away into the
darkness.