WHAT WAS TO BE EXPECTED
I
Monday was busy in Sable and Flandon’s office. Conferences, a dinning of
telephones, a vast opening of mail. Every one was conscious of important
work in transaction. The Laidlaw case was having its first hearing
before the District Court and it was understood to be worrying, ticklish
business. The Judge was irascible and his point of view of the case
important from this first hearing. Both the partners were at the office
by half past nine and left together, one of the younger lawyers
accompanying them, much as young doctors are present at a skillful
operation, to learn and observe.
Freda, watching and hearing much of the office talk, discreet as it was,
wished she could have gone along too. She was feeling very fit, buoyed
up by the first strength of separation when it is a delight to feel
one’s capacity for cheerfulness and bravery in the midst of loneliness.
She wanted to plunge very hard into work, to do something important, to
get thoroughly absorbed in her work and not to dawdle into dreams. So
she told herself strongly. At night, when she was alone, she would live
with her memories and her dreams. It was youth’s swagger in the presence
of emotion. She was busy until Flandon left the office, making memoranda
of things to be done, getting papers for him, keeping him from telephone
interruptions. But after ten o’clock the office settled down and became
quiet. The clerks were hammering away endlessly at their typewriters,
the few clients who came in were quickly taken care of, and Freda found
herself harder to control. She was looking up a list of references that
Mr. Flandon wanted ready by noon and answering his telephone. It was not
absorbing work. Try as she would, her mind slipped away from her and
concentrated on amazing facts.
She was a married woman. A week ago she had been a girl visiting at the
home of the Brownleys’. Rapid enough the events which had led to her
working here--but this other secret whirlwind--how strange it all was.
She wondered if lives were like that. Going along placidly enough until
they struck the edge of the waterfall of circumstance and then--. All
lives must have secret strange places. She had loved, in Mohawk, to
reflect on those sometimes. Spoon River had never quite gone out of her
mind. She had always, since she had read it, seen people as other than
the reflection of their acts and seeming--speculating on the curious
contradictions of appearances and motives. Here she sat, working, Gage
Flandon’s clerk, Eric Thorstad’s daughter. And those two things mattered
not at all--gave no key to her. It mattered only that she was the wife,
the secret wife of a man whom she had known six days. Physically,
chemically, actually she was altered. That was life. When you found it,
you held it to you secretly. You never told. That was why you couldn’t
tell about people. Life might be caressing them, making itself known to
them, biting them. Over it all the vast illusion of action. It was
illusion.
The morning drifted by. At a little after twelve Mr. Sable and Mr.
Flandon came in together. It was easy to see that things had not gone
well. They were self-contained, sober, but the lines of Gage’s face were
ugly and those of his partner disapprovingly set. They went into Mr.
Sable’s office and closed the door. Freda, getting on her hat and coat,
heard the young lawyer who had accompanied them, speaking to a
colleague.
“Didn’t go well. Flandon got Judge Pratt mad. Something got under
Flandon’s skin and he didn’t play the old judge very well.”
That was all she heard.
At the moment Gage was hearing the same thing. Sable was walking about
the office in some irritation explaining it.
Gage had continued to handle his work badly at the office. Like many a
man with a hobby he took his hobby into business hours. But the
concession which might be made to a man on account of golf, on account
of curling, were not to be made for a man who had a boresome way of
bringing in the eternal question of whether women were progressing or
“actually retrogressing,” “whether all this woman movement weren’t a
mistake,”--and so on. Needing support, comfort, consolation,
encouragement and direction, Gage, as he felt about for them, only
became somewhat absurd.
Men are not tolerant of those who bore them, except sometimes in the
family, where such things are endured for practical reasons. They moved
away from Gage, so to speak, while he talked on.
Sable noticed it. He had his own irritation, growing more focused each
day. To begin with, they would lose the Laidlaw case and it was all,
Sable thought, due to that false start which Gage had made. He had
rather decisively taken the matter out of Gage’s hands towards the end
but the thing had been lost already--or he preferred to think so. Sable
could bear to lose cases but not a case which involved so much money. It
frightened off the right sort of clients.
When Gage was a cub lawyer, arguing cases with flaring energy in the
local courts, Sable had picked him out as a bright young man. He had
kept his eye on him and his progress, with sheer admiration for the
practical genius with which he picked up important clients and gained
and held their confidence. He edged in on politics after a little--and
in Mr. Sable’s own party. Then King and Sable had made a proposition to
young Flandon--that he join them, bringing his clients, of course, and
coming in, not as an ordinary apprentice lawyer but as the colleague of
Mr. Sable. It was an amazing offer to be made to so young a man. Gage
accepted it. Two years later King, rather elderly now and ready to
retire, went to Congress and the firm name changed from King and Sable
to Sable and Flandon. Flandon made good. He made important alliances for
Mr. Sable, he played the political end for Mr. King, he made money for
himself.
These things were not to be passed lightly over and Mr. Sable had them
all docketed somewhere in his mind. He was fond of Gage too, in his own
restrained way. But Sable was fifty-eight. He had seen many a brilliant
start end in disaster, many a man with ability fail. He knew most of the
signs of failure in men. He knew further exactly what steps Gage should
take to achieve eminence. They were broad and fair before him. Instead
it was increasingly clear that Gage was not keeping his mind on his
work--that he was letting his nerves get the better of his judgment. For
some reason or other he was making a fool of himself. When a man made a
fool of himself, there were, in Sable’s experience, one of three things
back of it--a woman, liquor or speculation. He was watching Gage to see
which of these things it might be in his case.
All this talk which Flandon was always getting off about women
now--thought the senior partner--that was camouflage. He felt fairly
convinced that Gage must be playing the fool with some woman. Irregular
and disappointing, with a lovely, fine looking, distinguished wife like
Mrs. Flandon. Rotten streak in Flandon probably. Sable chose the woman
solution rather definitely. Gage drank when he could get it of course.
And he nearly always had a supply on hand. But he used his head about it
pretty well. It didn’t seem like liquor trouble. As for
speculation--surely he wouldn’t play the fool there. There was plenty of
money coming to Gage, and he always could get more.
It must be a woman. Probably Flandon was trying to keep it from his wife
and that was what was on his nerves. Some little--Sable characterized
Gage’s visionary lady impolitely. He thought on, his mind lighting, for
no apparent reason, on Freda. And there it stopped. Queer, Flandon’s
bringing that girl into the office. Bright enough but no experience.
Unlike him too, considering his usual impatience with inexpert
assistance. He wondered--
So while the Brownley girls gossiped in ugly, furtive, rather lustful
conversations and Ted Smillie told his little discovery on occasion as
being an instance of what those “smooth touch-me-not girls were usually
up to”--while Mr. Sable, his mouth tight in repression and his eyes
keen, watched and noted Freda. Freda went on her serene way. She was
serene and she was happy. At times her happiness seemed to shut her
completely off from every one--even in her thoughts from her father. She
never tired of exploring her memory for the sound of Gregory’s voice,
the touch of his hands, the mystery of love. More and more as the days
went by she hugged her secret to herself. She could not have shared a
vestige of it. Its exquisite privacy was part of its quality. She had
the vaguest notions of what might be waiting her as Gregory’s wife.
Certainly she might have a baby--normally that probably would happen to
her in the next nine months. Gregory was poor. They’d have to work. And
there might be hard things. She thought once or twice that it might be
an ugly sort of proposition if she did not have the particular feeling
she did for Gregory. But there it was. It wasn’t a matter of the
mind--nor of physiology either. She didn’t believe it was physiology
which made her deliciously faint and weak as she read Gregory’s strange
letters--letters so frequent, so irregular, so curiously timed and
written--on the back of a menu, on a scrap of envelope, on a dozen
sheets of hotel paper. Each message, beating, alive, forcing its
entrance. This was the love that according to Margaret was the undoing
of her sex. She knew she would go anywhere Gregory wanted her to go, to
be with him. That she knew her life with him would have its independence
completely in so far as her own love allowed it, did not make it less
clear to her that even if the independence had been less, if she had
found him a man of convention she would none the less--but would she?
She was immensely interested in possibly having a baby, and anxious to
know about it. She wanted to tell Gregory. She wrote him letters in
which she spent the deepest of her thought. She said things in her
letters which would have astounded her if she had read them over. But
she never did read them after she had written them. It would have seemed
almost like cheating to read them as if for criticism.
But to-day she had not had a letter from Gregory and several unpleasant
things broke in upon her absorbed happiness. She missed his letter which
she usually went home at noon to get. In the afternoon as she sat at her
desk working and trying to feel that she could fill up the time until
she went home that night to see if there was a letter, Bob and Allison
Brownley came in with another young girl. They were as resplendent as
usual and Freda judged that they were collecting for some fashionable
charity, from their intrusion with pencils and notebooks. She had seen
women invade these offices almost every day for some such reason but it
was her first encounter with Bob since that night on which she had left
her house. To her horror she found herself flushing, and hoping that
Barbara would not notice her and that thought enraged her so that she
raised her head and looked full at the girls coming towards Mr.
Flandon’s office, evidently referred to her.
She expected some embarrassment in Barbara and instead met a glance of
insolence and surprise. She looked at Allie but Allie looked away and
left it to Barbara.
“Can I take your message?” asked Freda with a little hauteur.
“We prefer to see Mr. Flandon personally,” said Barbara, and went by. It
was in Freda’s mind to stop them but Barbara was swift. Freda could hear
Mr. Flandon’s voice greeting her and judged it was too late to do
anything. She sat down at her desk frowningly and was further surprised
when the door opened very shortly and the girls went out. They,
especially Barbara, had heads unpleasantly held, angrily tilted. The
buzzer sounded for Freda.
She found her employer sitting at his desk looking as angry as his
departing guests.
“Sit down a moment, Miss Thorstad, will you?”
She did as he told her. It was evident that he had something important
and difficult to say. She watched him. He looked nervous, tired too, she
thought.
“That young lady made some unpleasant remarks about you and I asked her
to leave the office,” he said.
“Oh--I’m sorry,” answered Freda. “She’s been abominable, Mr. Flandon.
But it’s too bad you should have been involved.”
“Don’t let that bother you,” said Gage grimly; “it’s of no consequence.
But I wonder if you ought to let her be quite so broadcast in her
remarks. It could be stopped.”
“It doesn’t matter--truly it doesn’t. Let her say what she pleases. If
any one wants to know the truth of the matter I always can tell it, you
see.”
“Would you think it infernal impudence if I asked you what the truth
was?”
She hesitated and then laughed a little.
“You know the funny thing is that I had almost completely forgotten the
whole business. It seemed important at the time but it was really
trivial. Except for the fact that it opened up other things to me. Of
course I’ll tell you, if you want to know.”
She did tell him in outline, stressing the fact of the misunderstanding
all around, on the whole, dealing rather gently with Barbara, now that
anger had gone out of her.
“I had made rather a fool of myself you see,” she finished.
He looked at her as if waiting for her to go on.
“That’s all.”
“I see. She--well--.” He let that pass. “Now ordinarily it is easy to
say that gossip and slander don’t make any difference to a high minded
person. I think you are high minded. I do feel however that she has made
this incident a basis for a kind of slander that is dangerous. Her
accusations against you are, from what I hear, absolutely libelous. It
wouldn’t take ten minutes to shut her mouth if I could talk to her. But
I want you to fully refute her specific attacks.”
“I know. I imagine she might say almost anything.”
“Well, then, you have never stayed at the Roadside Inn, have you?”
To his amazement the face of the girl in front of him changed. She had
been calm and half smiling. Now astonishment, consciousness, and
something like panic showed in her eyes, her suddenly taut body.
“Does she say that? How did she know?” There was a little moan of dismay
in Freda’s answer.
Gage’s face grew stern. He sat looking at the girl across from him,
whose eyes were closed as if in pain.
“To lay her hands on that,” said Freda, under her breath.
“I don’t understand you,” said Gage rather curtly.
She lifted her face.
“It hurts to have any one know that--but for her to know it most of
all.”
“Such things are usually public knowledge sooner or later, my dear young
lady. Clandestine--”
“Don’t say that,” cried Freda, her voice rising, “don’t use that word.”
And then as if some gate had been opened her words poured out. “Can’t
you understand something being too beautiful to be anything except
secret? It was something I couldn’t have let even those who love me know
about. And to have her ugly devastating hands on it! It soils it. I feel
her finger marks all over me. It was mine and she’s stolen it.”
Her head went down on her arms on the desk in front of her. Gage watched
her with curiosity, embarrassment and pity. To his mind this love affair
was a shady business but she didn’t see it so. That was evident. Her
abandonment touched a chord of sympathy in him. He knew how she was
being rent by pain.
“My dear girl,” he told her, more gently, “I’m afraid you’ve been very
unwise.”
“No--not unwise.” She raised her head and smiled unsteadily. “I’ve been
quite wise. It’s just bad luck--that’s all.”
“Could you tell me about it?”
She got up and walked to the window, evidently trying to compose
herself. “It’s nothing that matters to any one but me. And I suppose you
are thinking things that, even if they don’t matter, had better be set
straight. For perhaps you think they matter. There’s nothing that I’ve
done that I shouldn’t have done. I was there at that Inn--with--with my
husband. It was just that we wanted--he even more than I at first until
I learned why--to keep that little bit of life for ourselves. We didn’t
want people to know--we didn’t want to share with any one except each
other. I know you won’t understand but there’s nothing to condemn except
that we had our own way of--caring.”
“But I do understand,” answered Gage, “and I’m glad you told me. I do
most entirely understand. Because I’ve felt that way. Is your husband
here?”
“He’s gone,” said Freda, “but he’ll come back. You see I married Gregory
Macmillan.”
A memory of that slim, gaunt young poet came to Gage. Yes, this was how
he would do it. And how perfect they were--how beautiful it all was.
“Mr. Flandon,” said Freda, “let them say what they please about me. Let
them talk--they don’t know about Gregory--or do they?”
“No--they don’t.”
“Then don’t tell them, will you? Don’t tell any one. I don’t care what
they say now if they don’t lay their hands on the truth. I can’t bear to
have the truth in their mouths. Please--what do I care what any one
says? I don’t know any one. I never see those people. He will be back
and we’ll go away and they’ll forget me.”
She was very beautiful as she pleaded with him, eyes fresh from their
tears, her face full of resolution.
“It’s all right, my dear,” said Gage, “no one shall know. You are right.
Keep your memories to yourself. What they say doesn’t matter.”
He was standing by her at the window now, looking down at her with a
tenderness that was unmistakable. It was unfortunate that at that moment
Mr. Sable entered without notice.
II
There was an argument that night. Sable had forced it. He had said that
Gage had to “cut it out in his own office.”
Gage had asked him what he meant by cutting it out and his partner said
that he definitely meant getting that girl out of the office at once.
“And my advice to you is to keep away from her after she is out.”
The upshot was that Gage had refused. He had simply said that there was
no reason why he should turn out a useful employee simply because any
one disliked her or thought evilly of her. Miss Thorstad was extremely
useful to him and there was nothing further to say. At which Sable had
snorted in disdain.
But, seeing Gage’s stubbornness he had possibly guessed at what might be
the depth of it and grown milder.
“It’s a difficult business for me, Gage,” he said, “but I’ve got to go
through with it. She must leave the office. We can’t afford scandal.”
“Suppose I won’t discharge her?”
“I’m not supposing any such nonsense. You aren’t going to act that way
unless you’re crazy.”
“But if I did?”
Sable looked at him.
“It means a smash probably. Don’t let’s talk foolishness. You know
you’ve got too much tied up in this business to let it go. You couldn’t
afford to say you smashed up your business for a woman. That’s not the
way things are done. I can’t insist on your giving up the girl but I can
ask you to remove the scandal from an office in which not alone your
name is involved.”
“Such rotten minds,” thought Gage, almost without anger. He was feeling
curiously clear and light and deft. He had felt that way ever since he
had found how Freda felt. Something had been strengthened in his own
philosophy by her simple refusal to share her secret with every one. She
put other things higher than the opinion of gossip. So must he.
They let the thing ride for a few days. Gage thought of nothing else and
found himself dreaming a great deal when he should have been working,
according to Sable. He also found that Helen was becoming almost
anti-pathetic to him. She was to make the seconding speech for one of
the candidates at Chicago and was busy with its preparation. There were
conferences constantly, and she had allowed a picture of herself with
her children to be syndicated. Gage found it before him everywhere and
it enraged him. He felt it on his raw mind as an advertisement of the
result of their love, as a dragging into publicity of the last bond
between them.
“I feel like the husband of a moving picture actress,” he told her,
viciously, one day.
She said what she had never meant to say. She was tired and full of
worrying and important matters. Gage and his brooding seemed childish
and morbid. And she had her own secret grievance.
“From what I hear of your escapades at the Roadside Inn you act like the
husband of one,” she retorted.
She had not meant to say that. But when the gossip about Freda had
reached her there had come an ugly coupling in her mind of that gossip
and Gage’s interest in the girl. During that very week-end Gage had been
absent from the city--on political business--he had said vaguely. Yet
she had tried to control her suspicions, convince herself that there was
no cause for investigation or accusation. This flare of hers was
unexpected and unguarded--dangerous too.
A shudder of misery shot through both of them at their own coarseness.
But they were launched. And it was clear to Gage that in some way or
other not only Sable but Helen had thought him involved with Freda. It
did not make him particularly angry. He rather courted the injustice of
the suspicion because it justified him in his own position. This was
where this business of Helen’s had landed them then. Alienated,
loveless, suspicious--this was the natural outcome of the whole thing.
Minds running on sex all the time--that was what happened to these
women--yet without delicacy, without reserve. So she thought he was like
that, did she? She was thinking that sort of viciousness while he’d been
trying to protect her even from himself. What was the use of it all?
“I don’t know what you hear of my escapades as you call them,” he
answered. “Possibly you might inform me?”
She was sick with shame at her own impulse but perhaps it had been at
the bottom of her mind corroding it more than she knew.
“I didn’t mean to say that, Gage.”
“You must have meant something.”
He was insistent, brutal. He would have the truth out of her. He wanted
the inside of her mind, to torture himself with it if he could. He
wanted it over with.
“Not to-night, Gage. I’m tired. Let’s talk over some of these things
when we are both fresh. I--I apologize.”
She moved towards the door of the living-room on her way upstairs. But
Gage caught her hand. He stood looking down at her and as she met his
eyes she saw that his face was almost strange. His eyes looked queer.
They were brutal, excited, strange glints. His mouth seemed to hang
loose and heavy.
“Not to-night, Gage,” she repeated. In her voice was a droop of
weariness that was unmistakable.
“Why not to-night? Because you want to save yourself fresh for your
public to-morrow? You don’t want to be bothered with a husband and his
annoyances?”
“Not to-night because you aren’t in the right mood.”
He still held her hand.
“But suppose I want to go into it to-night. There’ll be no better time.
Day after to-morrow my wife goes to the National Convention to dazzle
the American public. Suppose she sets her house in order first. Every
good politician does that, Helen.”
“There’s a devil in you, Gage, isn’t there?”
“A hundred, and every one bred by you. Tell me, what you were referring
to as my escapades? Tell me.”
He shook her a little. She felt a hairpin loosened and the indignity
suddenly made her furious.
“Let me go.”
“I will not let you go. I want you to tell me.”
“I’ll tell you,” she said bitterly, her words coming as if anger pushed
them out. “Heaven knows I’ve tried to conceal it even from myself. But
your viciousness shows you’ve got a rotten conscience. When you took
that Thorstad girl into your office I wondered why--and then after I
told you she’d been seen at that place with a man, your silly defence of
her might have told me what was the situation. You talk of her--all the
time--all the time. You were away that week-end. Where were you if you
weren’t with her?”
He let her go then. She had said it. It was said, as he had wanted it
said. He felt triumphant. And he would give her no satisfaction. He
would hurt her--and hurt her.
She went on in a tumbled burst of words.
“I don’t blame the girl, though she’s a little fool. But I won’t stand
having her let in for that sort of thing.”
“Why not?” asked Gage, lighting a cigarette. “Isn’t it a perfectly
proper thing for a modern woman to choose her lovers where she will?”
Helen felt herself grow dizzy, not at his question but at the admission
it made. She drew herself up and Gage wondered at her beauty with a hot
surge of desire even while he wanted to torture her more. It was such a
relief to have found a weapon.
“Come,” he went on, “we won’t discuss that young lady. There’s not a
thing in the world against her. If you have been bending your ear to the
ground and heard a lot of rotten gossip I’m not responsible. If the
people who talk about her had half her quality--”
“I warn you, Gage, you’re going to pieces,” interrupted Helen. “I can’t
stop you if you’re determined to ruin yourself. But you’ve acted like a
pettish child for months about the fact that I wanted to do some work
you didn’t approve of, apparently you’ve run off and got mixed up with
this girl, you’ve been drinking far too much--you had whisky before
breakfast this morning--it’s beginning to tell on you.”
“I miss you, Helen,” said Gage with a kind of sinister sarcasm.
She shivered.
“I’m going upstairs.”
“We’re not through.”
“Yes, we are.”
“Aren’t you going to divorce me--or would that hurt your career?”
“You’re not yourself, Gage,” said Helen. She had regained a loose hold
on herself. “I’d sooner not talk to you any more to-night.”
He flattened the end of his lighted cigarette and pulled the chain of
the table light.
“Then we’ll talk upstairs.”
“Not to-night.”
“Yes, we will, Helen. I’m lonely for you.” He came to where she stood.
“Come along, my dear.”
There was not a tone in his voice that Helen could recognize. A kind of
ugly caress--she shuddered.
He put his arm around her shoulders.
“Gage--you mustn’t touch me like this.”
He laughed at her.
“It’s quite the new way, as I understand it, my dear, isn’t it?
Nature--openness--no false modesties, no false sentiments. After all we
are married--or to be more modern, we’re openly living together. The
pictures in the paper prove it. There’s no use being silly. You’ve had
your way a lot lately--now how about mine?”
He pulled her close to him and pushing back her head sought her lips
roughly, as if he were dying of thirst and cared little what healthy or
unhealthy drink he had found.
III
“You know,” said Cele Nesbitt to Freda, “I think Mr. Flandon acts kind
of queer, don’t you?”
“He’s tired, probably,” she told Cele.
“Doesn’t look tired. He seems so excited. I thought he and old Sable
must be having a row. I went into Sable’s office with some papers to-day
and there they were glowering at each other and mum as oysters all the
time I was in the room. They don’t stop talking business when I’m
around.”
“Well, don’t worry about them,” answered Freda, “Mr. Flandon is the
kindest person I know and there’s something wrong with people who can’t
agree with him.”
“Hate him, don’t you?” Cele teased her. “Isn’t it a pity he’s married.
And such a stunning wife and children. Did you see her picture on
Sunday? She ought to be in the movies instead of politics with that
hair.”
Except for Margaret Freda saw only one other person at very close range.
That was Gage’s stenographer, Cecilla Nesbitt, commonly known as Cele.
Cele was a joyous soul who had taken a liking to Freda and shortly
invited her to come home for dinner. Freda had gone and been made happy
and intimate at once. There were all the traces of the cottage that the
Nesbitts had before they moved to St. Pierre--old rattan rocking chairs
and scroll topped beds. Over everything, invading everything was the
Church. There was a little holy water font inside the door, there were
pictures and holy cards framed and unframed everywhere, crucifixes over
the beds, holy pictures in the bureau frames and rosaries on the bed
posts. To Freda in her sparsely religious home, God had been a matter of
church on Sunday and not much more than that except a Bible for
reference and a general astronomical warder at the enormity of God’s
achievements. This difference--this delightful easy intimacy with God
was all fascinating. This was the comfort of religion, religion by your
bedside and at your table. She expanded under it. There was a plenitude
of Nesbitts, sleeping rather thickly in the four bedrooms--two brothers,
young men of twenty or thereabouts--there was Cele after them and then
two younger girls of ten and thirteen and stepping rapidly downward the
twins of nine, Mrs. Nesbitt having finished her family with a climax,
especially as the twins were boys and made up for being altar boys on
Sunday by being far from holy on all other occasions. Still their
serving of Mass endowed them in the eyes of Mrs. Nesbitt with peculiar
virtues. She had a gently conciliatory Irish way towards her sons rather
different from her tone to her daughters. Freda contrasted it with some
amusement with the cold classicism of Margaret’s attitude. To Mrs.
Nesbitt they were obviously slightly inferior in the sight of God and
man, being female, to be cherished indeed, frail perhaps, and yet not
made in the exact image of the Creator.
They were headed for the Nesbitt flat. Freda had no letter from Gregory,
had had none for two days and her heart felt as if it were thickening
and sinking. She would not let it be so. She set to work to make herself
interested. She would not mope. It was not in her to mope. But she did
not know where Gregory was, for his last letter had said he was waiting
advice from the bureau--one of his talks having been cancelled--and that
he didn’t know where he would go now. It did not make her worried or
nervous but she had been drugging her emotions with his letters and the
sudden deprivation hurt her cruelly. So she was going home with Cele to
forget it.
They got on the street car and hung from their straps with the
nonchalance of working girls who have no hopes or wishes that men will
give up their seats to them, their attitude strangely different from
that of some of the women, obviously middle class housewives, who
commandeered seats with searching, disapproving, nagging eyes. Freda
loved this time of day--the sense of being with people all going to
their places of living, fraught with mystery and possibility. Her
spirits rose. She was not thinking sadly of Gregory. She thought of how
her intimate thought and knowledge of him reached out, over her
unfamiliarity with these others, touching him wherever he was, in some
place unknown to her. The thought put new vigor into her loneliness.
It was an oppressively hot evening for June. They climbed the three
flights to the Nesbitt flat with diminishing energy and Cele sank on one
of the living-room chairs in exhaustion as she went in.
“Hot as hell,” she breathed. “Let’s sit down a minute before we wash,
Freda.”
Freda took off her hat and brushed her hair back with her hand.
“Pretty hot all right. Bad weather for dispositions.”
“My idea of this kind of weather is that it’s preparation for the
hereafter.”
Mrs. Nesbitt opened the door to the kitchen and hot heavy smells from
the cooking food came through to the girls. But Mrs. Nesbitt herself,
mopping great hanging drops of sweat from her forehead, was serene
enough. She shook hands with Freda with vast smiling cordiality.
“You’re as cool looking as the dawn,” she said to her. “Are you tired,
dear?”
“Not a bit.”
“There’s a little droop to your eyes, dear. I thought maybe it was bad
news now.”
Freda had a sudden impulse to confidence, a leap of the mind towards it.
But she drew back.
“No--not bad news at all.”
“Your mother and father’s well?”
“My mother is coming to see me for a few days, I think. She’s going to
Chicago for the Convention for the clubs and she’ll come back this way
to see me.”
“Now, isn’t that the blessing for you,” said Mrs. Nesbitt rejoicingly.
The family streamed in, the boys from their work and the twins from
school. Last came Mr. Nesbitt, his tin lunch pail in his hand, his feet
dragging with weariness. They talked of the heat, all of them, making it
even more oppressive than it was by their inability to escape the
thought of it. And Mrs. Nesbitt who knew nothing of salads and iced tea,
or such hot weather reliefs stirred the flour for her gravy and set the
steaming pot roast before her husband. They ate heavily. Freda tried to
keep her mind on what she was doing. She talked to the boys and let Mrs.
Nesbitt press more food on her unwilling appetite. It was very
unwilling. She did not want to eat. She wanted to sit down and close her
eyes and forget food and heat and everything else--except Gregory.
Vaguely she was aware of Mr. Nesbitt talking.
“It was in the paper and no more stir made of it than if a stray dog was
run over by an automobile--shot down they were, martyrs to Ireland.” His
voice was oratorical, funereal, heavy with resentment.
“Who?” asked Freda.
“Fine young Irishmen with the grace of God in their hearts shot down by
the hired wastrels of the Tyrants. Gentlemen and patriots.”
“What an outrage it is,” she answered.
He burst into invective at her sympathy, rolling his mighty syllabled
words in denunciation, and his family sat around and listened in
agreement yet in amusement.
“Come now, pop, you’ll be going back, if you get as hot under your shirt
as all that,” said Mike.
“It’s too hot for excitement, pa,” Mrs. Nesbitt contributed equably.
“Pass him the mustard, do you, Cele.”
“I’ll show you a true account of it in _The Irish News_,” said Mr.
Nesbitt, to Freda, ignoring his family.
He wiped his mouth noisily and abandoned the table, coming back to
press into Freda’s hands his _Irish News_, a little out of fold with
much handling.
“The city papers tell you nothing but lies,” he said, “read this.”
To please him, Freda read. She read the account of the shooting of three
young men poets and patriots, whose names struck her as familiar. And
then she read:
“These young martyrs were part of the group who banded together for
restoration of the Gaelic tongue to Ireland. They with Seumas, McDermitt
and Gregory Macmillan now on tour in this country--”
She read it again. It gave her a sense of wonder to come on his name
here, his name so secretly dear, in this cold print. And then came more
than that. This was Gregory--her Gregory who might have been killed too
if he had been there--who might be killed when he returned to Ireland.
She didn’t know where he was. Perhaps--perhaps he had heard of this and
gone back. Perhaps he had forgotten, forgotten about her--about them.
This was so big--
She had to take her thought away from the presence of all these people.
She wanted to con it over--she must get away. Suddenly she stood up and
the heat and distaste for food--the accurate sight of a piece of brown
stringy meat, embedded in lifeless gravy, sickened her. She pressed her
hand before her eyes and swayed a little.
Mrs. Nesbitt jumped up with Cele.
“She’s sick--poor dear. The heat now has quite overcome her.”
They helped her into the least hot of the little bedrooms and she found
herself very sick--nauseated--chilled even while she was conscious of
the heat that oppressed while it did not warm her. The family was all
astir. Mr. Nesbitt underwent censure for having bothered her. But when
Freda, apologetic and recovered, went home on Mike’s arm, getting the
first breath of air which came as a relief to the hot city, Mrs. Nesbitt
came into the room where Cele hung half out of the window trying to
catch the breeze.
“Sick she was, poor thing.”
“Rotten heat got her. She’s not used to working, either, I think. She
felt a lot better. Her stomach got upset too.”
Mrs. Nesbitt pressed her lips together.
“It was a funny way she was taken. If she was a married woman I should
have said the cause was not the heat.”
“Huh?” said Cele, pulling herself in. “What’s that you mean?”
“I mean nothing,” said Mrs. Nesbitt. “Nothing at all. Only I would have
you always be sure to make sure your friends are good girls, my darlin’.
Mind ye, I say nothing against the young lady. But she’s a pretty and
dangerous face and she’s away from her home where by rights should every
girl be.”