THE MOURNERS
Margaret came, calm and yet clearly distressed beyond measure. It was
pathetic to see her control, to see that she could not even break
through it to the relief of abandonment. She was very white during the
day of the funeral and the ones succeeding it and her eyes met other
eyes somewhat reluctantly. She came on Friday morning and Helen had not
been able to persuade her to stay with them. She had gone to a hotel and
from there, quite simply to the parlors of the undertakers.
“Don’t wait for me, Helen--and I’d sooner be alone. I’ll be here a long
while, probably.”
Perhaps after all Walter and Margaret found relief in each other when
the grim parlor door was shut. At least at the funeral Margaret sat very
quietly, though the well-bred curious eyes of the little group of people
strayed unceasingly toward her. She went through it as she went through
the following days. It was soon known, before the will was probated,
that she was Walter’s legatee. There was a great deal of business to be
done. Walter had decided no doubt that the brief embarrassment of
inheriting his fortune was better than the recurrent fear of cramping
poverty which had always pursued her and of which she had told him. She
saw the lawyers and his business associates and discussed with them the
best way of disposing of Walter’s interests, and word of her coldness
spread around rather quickly and was considered to justify Mr.
Robinson’s deductions.
Gage saw her at the funeral. He had not looked for her--had not felt
ready to see her. But in the semicircle of chairs facing the gray satin
coffin, he was so placed that his eyes met hers unexpectedly. When they
did, hostility glinted in his. “You got him,” they seemed to say--and
hers looked back steady, unrepentant, even though her mouth was drawn
with pain and sorrow.
It had hit Gage as it had Helen. The lightning had been drawn from him.
Walter’s death had roused in him an instinct of resistance which had
been dormant. He had no certain idea of what had passed between Walter
and Margaret but he knew what Carpenter’s point of view had been--how
far he had gone, how willing he had been to yield every concession to a
woman--to Margaret--in the belief that it would then be possible to
build love on a basis of comradeship. Walter had found failure, just how
or why no one knew except perhaps Margaret herself. Gage’s mind stumbled
along nervously, trying to analyze his and Walter’s failure. He
remembered how they had talked together about women, how Walter had said
he would be “willing to trust to their terms.” For some reason he lay
dead of their terms. And he himself--he had looked at himself in the
glass an hour ago with a kind of horror as if he saw himself for the
first time in weeks. There was a softening of his features it seemed to
him, a look of dissipation, of untrimmed thought, brooding. The memory
of his face haunted him. That was what came of being unwilling to trust
to the terms of women. Either way--
He looked across at Margaret again, quiet, firm, persistent through
tragedy, through all emotional upheaval, and a grim admiration shot
through his hostility. After all she was consistent. With all his
admiration for women, even at the height of his passion for Helen, he
had never connected her or any woman with ability to follow a line of
action with such consistency. He had some sense of what was going on in
Margaret’s mind--an apperception of her refusal to let this tragedy
break her down.
He became conscious of Helen’s sigh. She sat beside him, her hands
folded loosely in her lap. The minister talked on, performing with
decent civility and entanglement of phrase, the rites of last courtesy
for the dead. Gage wondered what he and Helen would do. He was glad that
the mess about Freda Thorstad was cleared up. Not that it made any grave
difference except in a certain clearness of atmosphere. If she got a
divorce she couldn’t get it on those grounds. He wondered how their
painfully sore minds could be explained in a divorce court which was
accustomed to dealing with brutal incidents. Perhaps a separation would
be better. He wondered how he was going to provide for her decently. It
was going to be a long job building up the new practice. Things were
breaking badly.
Some emphatic phrase of the minister, starting out of his droning talk,
brought Gage’s eyes back to the coffin. Strange how the sense of that
silent form within it gave him fresh energy. Life had got Walter. Women
had got him, in some obscure way. He felt his shoulders straighten with
stubborn impulse. They wouldn’t get him. Deftly and logically his
thought became practical. He would cut out all this thinking about
women. He would--perhaps he would get the Thornton business. It meant a
big retainer. He could have done it a few months ago. Now--he visualized
old Thornton’s tight mouth, keen eyes. He’d want value received. Have to
get in shape--cut out the booze--concentrate on business--men’s
business. The actual phrase took shape in his mind. Men’s business. By
God, that was how women got you. They got you thinking about them until
you became obsessed, obsessed with them and their business. It was so
and it had always been so. These new problems were not what people
thought they were. They were not sex stuff. Perhaps they altered the
grain of woman--changed her--but the adjustment of sex was as it always
had been, between each man and each woman. Let the women go on, be what
they wanted, do what they wanted. It made some of them better, some of
them worse--put new figures in the dance but it was the same dance. Even
if it wasn’t the minuet or the waltz there was still dancing. And there
was choosing of partners.
Every one stood up. Gage was standing too, with the rest, his vagrant
thoughts brought back from their wanderings to the ever shocking
realization that he was helping in the laying away of this friend of his
and the inevitable feeling that life was a short business for him and
every one. He fell back into triteness. You must play the game.
After it was all over he was standing beside Helen.
“I want to go to see Margaret,” said Helen. “I’ll go to her hotel now,
Gage.”
“Bring her home if you like,” answered Gage.
The ease of his tone startled Helen. She looked at him in quick
surprise, meeting his unexpected smile.
“I merely meant I thought I could be reasonably civil,” he said--and
with impulse, “I feel rather cleaned out, Helen. I’ll run down town now
and see what I can do before dinner.”
She thought, “He hasn’t had anything to drink for two days,” placing the
responsibility for his unwonted pleasantness on a practical basis. It
cheered her. She went to Margaret’s hotel and found her in her room,
lying on her bed and her head buried in the counterpane. It was the
nearest to abandonment that Helen had ever seen in her friend so she
ventured to try to comfort.
“It’s the awful blackness of his mind that I can’t bear,” said
Margaret, “the feeling he must have had that there was no way out.” She
sat up and looked at Helen somewhat wildly. “It frightens me too. For he
had such a good mind. He saw things straight. Perhaps there isn’t any
way out. Perhaps we are battering our heads against life and each other
like helpless fools.”
“Did you love him?” asked Helen. It seemed to her the only vital point
just then.
Margaret threw her hands out futilely.
“I don’t know. I was afraid of what might happen if we married. Either
way it looked too dangerous. I was afraid of softening too much--of
lapsing into too much caring--or of not being able to care at all. He
wasn’t afraid--but I was. And--the rotten part is, Helen, that I wasn’t
afraid for him but for myself.”
She was hushed for a moment and then broke out again.
“It wasn’t for myself as myself. It was just that if our marriage hadn’t
been a miracle of success, it would have proved the case against women
again.”
“You mustn’t think any more than you can help,” said Helen. “It wasn’t
like Walter to want to cause you pain and I know he wouldn’t want you to
suffer now.”
“No, he was willing to do all the suffering,” said Margaret in bitter
self-mockery. “He did it too.”
She got hold of herself by one swift motion of her well-controlled mind
and stood up, brushing her hair back with the gesture Walter loved.
“It’s not your burden, poor girl. You have enough.”
“Not so many,” said Helen. “By the way, Margaret, you haven’t heard
about Freda Thorstad, have you?”
“Did she come back?”
“No--she wrote. She had married Gregory Macmillan secretly when he was
here. They sent her word that he had typhoid out West and she went to
him. Why she didn’t tell people is still a mystery.”
“Married him--Gregory? But she’d only known him four days.”
Helen nodded. “That’s just it. Isn’t it--” she stopped, fearing to
wound.
“Magnificent--brave--foolish--” finished Margaret. Her voice broke
unaccustomedly. “It’s wonderful. Gregory will be a strange husband but
if she shares him with Ireland and--oh, it’s rather perfect. And so all
that nonsense about Gage being involved--”
“Was nonsense.”
Margaret did not ask further about Gage. She reverted to Freda and
Gregory. The news left her marveling, an envy that was wonder in her
remarks. She made no comparisons between Freda and herself and yet it
was clear that Freda wrought herself to another phase--a step on towards
some solution of thought.
Helen urged her to come to dinner.
“I’d rather not, I think. I’ll have a rest perhaps.”
“Then you’ll go out with us for a ride to-night?”
“Gage wouldn’t like it, would he?”
“He suggested your coming to dinner, my dear.”
They smiled at each other.
“Then I’ll go.” She turned swiftly to Helen. “Oh, work it out if you
can, Helen. Not working it out--is horrible.”