His gleaming smile was saved from ferocity only by being inane.
"Went dotty?"
"If you like."
"Great Scott! But why--why didn't some one let us know?"
"They couldn't. I--I seem to have taken care of that. Perhaps I'd
better--better tell you all about it, that is, as far as I know."
He nodded, taking out his cigar-case and offering me a cigar. When I
declined it he took one himself, bit off the end, lighted it, and in
general carried himself as if my approaching confidences wouldn't matter
much. I resented this the less, knowing it to be his attitude toward
every one and everything. All that I cared for was that he should be in
a position to give a correct account to Violet, in case she insisted on
hearing his report before seeing me.
"You remember how I came to go over and join the American Ambulance
Corps in France?"
He said he did not remember it.
"Well, I didn't do it of my own accord. I--I loathed the idea. If we'd
been in the war at the time of course I should have done anything I
could; but we were not in the war. As a matter of fact, if Vio had only
let me wait I could have been of more use in my own particular line."
"You mean what we used to call the old-woman line."
"If you choose to put it that way."
"Didn't you put it in that way yourself?"
"As a feeble joke, yes. But we'll let that pass. All I mean is that as
head of the Department of Textiles in the Museum of Fine Arts I knew a
lot of a subject that became of great importance when we went into the
war; so that, if Vio had waited--"
"Vio," he grinned, "was like a bunch of other women who'd caught the
fever of sacrifice, what? When all their swell lady friends in England
and France were giving up their dear ones, they didn't want not to be in
the swim. Don't think I didn't go through it, old chap. Vio was simply
crazy to give up a dear one. Before she'd got you she'd been after me.
When Hilda Swain drove her two sons into being stokers in the navy, and
killed one of them with the unaccustomed work, I thought Vio would go
off her chump with a sense of her uselessness to a great cause. Those
were days when to be Vio's dear one meant to go in danger of your life."
A hundred memories crowded in on me.
"Do you think that was it? It wasn't that--that she wanted to get rid
of me?"
His answer struck me oddly.
"Not a bit of it, not then. Lord, no!"
I repressed the questions these words called up, taking a minute to
think the situation over.
"At any rate, I went," I continued, with outward calm. "It was after a
rather stormy scene with Vio, in which she said she thought she had
married a man and not a nervous old lady."
"Oh, she said worse than that to me, lots cf times, what?"
"Yes, but you weren't her husband; and you were not desperately in love
with her."
"Often thought Vio was like one of those queer-mixed cocktails that 'll
set chaps off their nuts who'll take a tumbler of whisky neat and never
turn a hair."
"There's something in that," I agreed; "but it makes the kind of woman
whose contempt is the harder to put up with. When she began handing it
out to me--well, I went. That's all there is to be said about it. You
tell me that Vio wanted to sacrifice a dear one; and she did. I was no
more fit for the job I undertook than--than little Bobby would have been
if he'd lived till then."
"That's another thing. Vio should have had more children, what?"
"Ah, well! She didn't want them. When little Bobby went she said she
couldn't go through it all a second time, and so-- But I'm trying to
tell you what happened."
"Well, go on."
I narrated my experiences in the Ambulance Corps in words that have been
so often given in print that it is not worth while to repeat them. What
has not so frequently been recorded, because not every one has felt it
to the same degree, is the racking of spirit, soul, and body by the
unrelieved horror of the days and nights. I suppose I must own to being
in regard to all this more delicately constituted than the majority of
men. There were others like me, but they were relatively not numerous.
Of them, too, we hear little, partly because not all of those who
survived like to confess the weakness, and few survived. If it were
possible to get at the facts I think it would be found that among those
who sickened and died a large proportion were predisposed by sheer
inability to go on living any longer in this world of men. I could give
you the names of not a few in whom the soul was stricken before the body
was. They were for the most part sensitively organized fellows, lovers
of the beautiful, and they simply couldn't live. Officially their
deaths are ascribed to pneumonia or to something else; but the real
cause, while right on the surface, was beyond the doctor's diagnosis.
I didn't sicken; and I didn't die; I wasn't even wounded. What happened
was that at Bourg-la-Comtesse a shell came down in the midst of a bunch
of us who were stretching our limbs and washing up after a night in a
stifling dugout ... and some time during the following twenty-four hours
I recovered consciousness, lying on my belly in the darkness, with my
face buried in the damp grass of a meadow, like a dead man.
I lay for ten or fifteen minutes trying to reconstruct the happenings
that had put me there, and to convince myself that I was unhurt. Except
for a beast munching not far away, no living thing seemed to be near me.
On the left the ruined walls of Bourg-la-Comtesse were barely visible
through the starlight, while to my right a jagged row of tree-tops
fringed the sky-line. In the velvety blackness in front of me the stars
were dimmed by shells hanging over No Man's Land, Verey lights, darting
upward, and radiant bursts of shrapnel. I remembered that our section
had halted at an _abri_ a little to the west of the village, and
dragging myself from the ground forced my chilled limbs to carry me
toward the spot where some of my comrades might be left alive.
But whether I mistook the way, or whether they had gone off leaving me
for dead, I was unable to explain to Wolf. I only know that I walked
and walked, and found no one. The world had been suddenly deserted.
Except for an occasional horse or cow, that paused in its grazing to
watch me pass, or the scurrying of some small wild thing through a
hedge, I seemed the only creature astir. Dead villages, dead chateaux,
dead farms, dead gardens, dead forests, dead lorries, dead tanks, dead
horses, dead men, and a dead self, or a self that had only partially
come back to life, were the features of that lonely tramp through the
darkness.
With no other aim than a vague hope of joining up again with my section
I plodded on till dawn. Though my watch had run down, and there was no
change as yet in the light, I knew when dawn was approaching by a sleepy
twitter in a hedge. Another twitter awoke a few yards farther on, and
then another and another. Presently the whole countryside was alive, not
with song, but with that chirrupy hymn to Light which always precedes
the sunrise, and ceases before the sun has risen. Wandering away from
the front, by instinct, not on purpose, I was now in a region relatively
untouched by calamity, with grapes hard and green in the vineyards and
poppies in the ripening wheat-fields.
Between eight and nine I reached a village, where I breakfasted at a
wine-shop, explaining myself as an American charged with a mission that
was taking me across country. Stray soldiers being common, I had no
harder task than to profit by the sympathy accorded to my
British-seeming uniform. So I tramped on again, and on, always with a
stupefied half-idea of finding my section, but with no real motive in my
mind. If I had a real motive it was in a dull, blind, animal instinct
to get away from the brutality in which I had been living for the past
six months, even though I knew I should be headed off and turned back
again.
But I wasn't. In that land of agony I went my way unheeded. I also
went my way unheeding. It was the beginning of the more or less
pointless pilgrimages I made later in New York. To my anguished nervous
system there was a soothing quality in being on the move. So on the
move I kept, hardly knowing why, except that it was to get away from
what was right behind me.
And yet I had clearly the impression that I was merely enjoying a
breathing spell. I didn't mean to run away. I knew I was Billy
Harrowby, and that for my very name's sake I must return to my task at
the first minute possible. It was only not possible, because as I
continued my aimless drifting along the roads I got farther away from my
starting-point.
Absolute mental confusion must have come by such gradual transitions
that I have no memory of the stages of the change. I do recall that at
a certain time and place I came to an understanding with myself that
Billy Harrowby had been blown to bits by a shell near Bourg-la-Comtesse,
and that I, who wore his uniform and carried his letter of credit in my
pocket, was no more than his astral shape stalking through a world from
which he had departed. To get rid of this astral shape, to get rid of
everything that pertained to the man who had passed through horrors that
would turn all future living into nightmare, began to seem to me a
necessary task. Only by doing this could Billy Harrowby's ghost be
laid, and the phantasms that walked with it dispelled. By the time I
reached Tours the hallucination had assumed the form of a consecrated
duty, and to it I applied myself as to some holy ceremonial rite.
In narrating this to Wolf some of the old vividness came back to me. I
saw myself again inspecting all the environs of
Tours--Plessis-les-Tours, Marmoutiers, Laroche-sur-Loire, and as far
away as the junction at St.-Pierre--for suitable spots in which to lay
Billy Harrowby down and become my real self. In the end I selected a
small stream, the Padrille I think it is called, which flows into the
Loire a mile or two beyond Plessis. There is a spot there where the
stream flows through a wood, and there is a spot on the stream's bank
where wood is denser than it is elsewhere.
Having selected this as the scene of Billy Harrowby's exit, the rest of
my plans became easy. For two or three days I busied myself with
discreetly purchasing a new outfit. I remember that it was a point of
honor with me not to be too spendthrift with Billy Harrowby's cash,
seeing that for the man who was to survive, anything, however modest,
would be enough. Further than separating myself from the unhappy
ambulance-driver who had seen such dreadful things since arriving in
France I had no ambitions.
The purchases made, it was a simple matter to carry them to the bank of
the Padrille and change completely. A soldier entered on one side of
the Bois de Guenes, a civilian came out on the other. Neither soldier
nor civilian was of interest to a people rejoicing in the news that the
French had captured that morning the whole line of the Dent de la
Ponselle.
From the Bois de Guenes I walked to the junction with the main line at
St.-Pierre, and there the trail of my memories is lost. I have no
recollection of taking the name of Jasper Soames, though I can see
easily enough why I should have done it. When it became necessary to
call myself something I seized the first bit of wreckage from the past
that my mind could catch hold of. The name was there as a name, even
when all its associations had disappeared beneath the waves that had
swept over me.
Of the interval between taking the train at St.-Pierre, probably to go
southward toward Bordeaux, and my waking on board the _Auvergne_ I have
as yet only such fragments of memory as one retains of dreams. Even
that which stands out is shadowy, uncertain, evanescent. It is without
context. No one fragment is substantial enough for me to be sure of it
as pertaining to a fact.
Facts began for me anew at the instant when I opened my eyes in the
cabin and saw Drinkwater shaving.
"Funny, isn't it?"
Wolf did not make this observation till some minutes after I had ceased.
During the interval of silence, as during the half-hour of my narrative,
his grin played on me like a searchlight. As I have already said, I
didn't resent this because of knowing his smile to be a kind of nervous
rictus of the lips which he was no longer able to control; and yet the
silly comment nettled me.
"What's funny about it?" I asked, coldly.
"Oh, nothing! Just--just the whole thing."
"If you think the whole thing's funny--"
"Oh no, not in that sense, not comic."
"What is it then?"
"Nothing--nothing! I was only wondering--"
But I didn't find out what Wolf was wondering till later. In the mean
while I gave him a brief account of my doings in New York, leading up to
the day when Alice Mountney had "discovered" me. When I came to that he
rose, eying me all over as he had done at first.
"That's a queer kind of rig--" he began, with his everlasting
jocularity.
"It's the kind of rig I've been wearing," I replied, sharply. "Good
enough for its purpose. I shall get something else as soon as I've had
time to go to the tailor."
"I'd go soon," was his only remark, as he left me to repeat to Vio what
he could remember of my tale.
*CHAPTER VIII*
It was after lunch before I was summoned to the telephone, to hear
Wolf's voice at the other end. Vio would see me at three. I was to
understand that my being alive had been a shock to her, and therefore
all this ceremonial!
At a quarter to three I started to walk across the Common to the old
Soames house on Beacon Hill. It occurred to me then that if for the
living it is a strange sensation when the dead come back, for the dead
it is a stranger sensation still. Not till I set out on this errand had
I understood how dead I had been. I had been dead and buried; I had
been mourned for and forgotten; Vio had finished her grieving and
returned to every-day life. For anything I knew, she might be
contemplating remarriage. Alice Mountney had said that when people were
dead it was better for them to stay dead; and I began to fear it was.
Beacon Hill, as I drew near it, struck me as an illustration of that
changing of the old order of which all the inner springs seemed to be
within myself. It was no longer the Beacon Hill of my boyhood. It was
not even the Beacon Hill of the year when I went away. To those who had
stayed on the spot and watched the transformation taking place little
difference might be apparent; but to me, with my newly awakened
faculties, it was like coming back in autumn to a garden visited in
spring. The historic State House had deployed a pair of huge white
wings, to make room for which familiar landmarks round about it had for
the most part disappeared. All down the slope toward the level land the
Georgian and Early Victorian mansions were turning into shops and clubs.
The old Soames house, with occasional panes of purple glass in otherwise
normal windows, was flanked on one side by a bachelors' chambers and on
the other by an antique-shop. One of the few old houses in Boston still
in the hands of people connected with the original owners, it had been
purchased by Vio's father from the heirs of his mother's family, while
Vio's trustees had in their turn bought out Wolf's share in it.
Four-square, red, with a fine white Doric portico over which a luxuriant
wistaria trained, it suggested, as I approached it now, old furniture,
old books, old pictures, old wines, old friendships, and all the easy,
well-ordered life out of which we were called by the pistol-shot of
Sarajevo.
My nervousness in crossing the street and ringing the door-bell was
augmented by that sense, from which I was never free, of being guilty of
a stupidity so glaring as almost to amount to crime. No ex-convict
returning from the penitentiary could have had a more hangdog conviction
of coming back to where he was no longer wanted than I in wiping my
cheap boots on Vio's handsome door-mat. If I found any solace in the
moments of waiting for an answer to my ring it was in noticing that the
doorway needed paint and that nothing in the approach to the house was
quite so spick and span as formerly. I call this a solace only because
it helped to bring Vio nearer me by making her less supremely mistress
than she used to be of everything best in the world. I noticed the same
thing when the door was opened by a cheery English man-servant of
sixty-odd, who was too gaily captain of his soul to be the perfect
butler of the old regime.
"Couldn't see you," was his offhand response, when I had asked for Mrs.
Harrowby.
"I think she'll see _me_."
"No, myte, and I'll tell you why. She's kind o' expectin' of 'er
'usband like. Excuse me."
The politeness was called forth by his shutting the door in my face,
compelling me to speak plainly.
"I'm Mrs. Harrowby's husband."
The absurdities in my situation were dramatized in the expressions that
ran successively over the man's face. Amazement having followed on
incredulity, apology followed on amazement. As I was still too near to
Pelly, Bridget, and the Finn to separate myself from the servants hall,
my sympathy was with him.
"That's all right, old chap," I found myself saying, with a hand on the
astonished henchman's shoulder. "Just tell Mrs. Harrowby I'm here.
She'll find me in the library."
It was purely to convince Boosey, that was his name, of my right to
enter that I tossed my hat on the hat-rack peg and walked to the
coat-closet with my overcoat. With the same air of authority I marched
into the long, dim library, where my legs began to tremble under me and
my head to swim.
Perhaps because I had not yet had time to think of this room in
particular, I experienced my first sensation of difficulty or unreality
in getting back the old conceptions. It was not alone my head that
swam, but the room. If you imagine yourself sailing through a fog and
drawing an approaching ship out of the bank by sheer mental effort of
your own, you will understand what I mean. In ordinary conditions you
have only to watch the ship making itself more and more distinct; in my
case the ship did nothing. It was as if I had to build it plank by
plank and sail by sail in order to see it at all.
I could do this, even if I did it painfully. The room came into being,
mistily, tremblingly, while my head ached with the effort. Taking a few
steps here, there, gazing about me at haphazard, the remembered objects
appeared one by one--the desks, the arm-chairs, the rows of books, the
portraits, the fireplace, in which there was a slumbering fire. Over
the mantelpiece hung Zuloaga's portrait of Vio, which always raised
discussion wherever it was exhibited.
I had reached this point at the end of the room when a low stifled cry
came from the corner by the fire.
"Oh, Billy, is this you?"
[Illustration: All these minutes she had been observing me, with that
queer, half-choked cry as the result: "Oh, Billy, is this you?"]
Vio had been sitting there watching me. Had I been able instantly to
reconstruct the room I should have seen her instantly; but all these
minutes she had been observing me, with that queer, half-choked cry as
the result.
I cannot tell you now how long we stared at each other, she in the
arm-chair, I on the hearth-rug; but once more the new brain-cells acted
sluggishly I knew that this slender, picturesque creature, swathed in
soft black satin, with a little white about the open throat line, was
Vio, and that Vio was my wife. But I knew it as something remembered,
not as an existing fact. I knew it as a ghost might know that another
ghost had married him, and that they had once lived intimately side by
side.
You must not think from this that there was no emotion. There was
tremendous emotion, only it was not the emotion of love after long
separation. If it was that there were too many elements in it to allow
pent-up passion the immediate right of way. Pent-up passion was stemmed
by the realization of what my coming back must mean to the woman before
me. For her I had been three years in my grave. As Alice Mountney had
put it, she had been in mourning for me--and out again. It was the out
again that created this thickened atmosphere between her and me. What
had been all over, finished and done with she had to begin again.
And I had not come back to her as I had gone away. I had come
back--entirely to the outward eye and somewhat in my heart--not as the
smart young fellow of Lydia Blair's recollection, but as a working-man.
The metamorphosis rendered me in some ways more akin to Boosey the
butler than to my former self. I had acquired an art that made it
possible for me to go into the servants' sitting-room and be at home in
the company I should find there. The people in the front of the house
had to some extent become to me as the Olympian gods at Creed & Creed's,
exalted beings with whom I had little to do outside the necessities of
work and pay. This change in me was more than superficial; and whatever
it was Vio saw it. For her the meeting was harder than for me; and for
me it was like a backward revolution of the years.
But after she had clung to me and cried a little, the tensity was
broken. As I analyze now, I see the impulse that urged us into each
other's arms as one of memory. For her, I was the man who had been, as
she was the woman who had been, for me. She, however, had the help of
pity, while I was humble and overawed.
It was one of those moments when so many things begin again that it is
hard to seize on any. The simplest being the easiest, she said, after
having detached herself from me and got back some measure of her
self-control:
"What about your things? Have you brought them?"
"The little I have is at the hotel."
Both question and answer came out absently while we looked at each other
with a new kind of inspection. The first had been of the self within;
now it was of the outer self. I should have shrunk from the way in
which her eyes traveled over me had not my whole mind gone into the
examination I was making.
Yes; she had changed, though I cannot say that it was in the way of
looking older. Rather she had grown to resemble Zuloaga's portrait of
her, which we had always considered too theatrical. Zuloaga had
emphasized all her most startling traits--her slenderness, sinuousity,
and fantastic grace--her immense black eyes, of which he alone of all
the men who had painted her had caught the fire that had been compared
to that of the black opal--the long, narrow face that was like Wolf's,
except for being mysterious and baffling--the mouth, haunted by memories
that might have survived from another incarnation, since there had been
nothing in her present life to correspond to them. You could speak of
her as being beautiful only in the sense of being strange, with an
appeal less to the eye than to the imagination. More akin to fire than
to flesh, she was closer to spirit than to fire. It might have been a
perverse, tortured spirit, but it was far from the merely animal.
Discriminating people called it her salvation to have married a humdrum
chap like me, since, with a man of more temperament, she would have
clashed too outrageously. High-handed and intense, she needed some one
seemingly to yield to her caprices, correcting them under the guise of
giving in.
Like others of tempestuous nature, when she was gentle her gentleness
was heavenly. She was gentle in that way now.
"Sit down, Billy, and let me look at you. Why didn't you bring your
things?"
"I didn't know that you wanted me to do that, or that--that we were
to--to begin again."
"Of course we shall begin again. What made you think we shouldn't?"
"I didn't think so. I simply didn't know."
"Did Alice Mountney, or Wolf, tell you anything?"
There was a curious significance in the tone, but I let it pass.
"Only that you'd--you'd given me up."
"What else could I do?"
We were sitting half turned toward each other on one of the library
sofas, and I seized both her hands.
"But now that I'm back, Vio, are you--are you--glad?"
Though she allowed her hands to remain in mine there was a flash of the
black-opal fire.
"It's not so simple as being glad, Billy. The word isn't relevant."
"Relevant to what?"
"I mean that you can't sum up such a situation as this by being either
glad or sorry. We've other things to consider."
"But surely that comes first.
"Neither first nor second. The only question we've got to ask for the
minute is what we're to do."
"But I thought that was settled--that you wanted me to come back."
"It's settled in the way that getting up in the morning is settled; but
that doesn't tell you the duties of the day."
"I suppose one can only meet the duties of the day by going on and
seeing what they are."
"Exactly; and isn't that our first consideration--the going on? It
doesn't matter whether we're glad or sorry, since we mean to go on, or
try to go on--anyhow."
Releasing her hands I dropped back into my own corner of the sofa,
scanning the refined features more at my ease, for the reason that her
face was slightly averted and her eyes turned to the floor.
"I don't want you to go on, Vio, if--"
"I've thought everything over," she declared in her imperious way, "and
made up my mind that it was the only thing for me to do."
"Then you had thought that--that perhaps you--you couldn't."
She nodded slowly, without looking up.
"You'd made other--plans."
"It wasn't that so much; it was--it was thinking of you."
"Thinking of me--from what point of view?"
"From the point of view of--of what you've done." She glanced at me
now, quickly, furtively, as if trying to spare me the pain of scrutiny.
"Oh, Billy, I'm so sorry for--for my share in it."
"And what do you take your share to be?"
"The share of responsibility. When I urged you to go--"
"As it happened, I should have gone anyhow. When this country had
entered the war I should have been under the same obligation as any
other man."
"That would have been different. When our men were taken there was
discrimination. Each was selected for what he was best fitted to do. A
great deal of pains was given to that, and I can't tell you how I
suffered when I saw that if I'd only left you alone you could have
contributed the thing you knew most about. That's why I feel so
strongly that, now you've come back--even in this sort of disguise--"
"I'm not in disguise, Vio. The way you see me--"
The motion of her long, slender hand was partly of appeal and partly of
dismissal.
"I don't want to hear about that, Billy. If we're to begin again there
are things we mustn't talk about. Since you've done this extraordinary
thing, and I may be said to have driven you into it, I want to stand by
you. Isn't that enough?"
There was so much in this little speech that I couldn't do it justice at
once. All I found myself able to say was:
"Tell me, Vio: Is the extraordinary thing my staying away--or my coming
back?"
Again there was that pleading, commanding gesture.
"Oh, Billy, don't. I'm willing to try to pick up the past; but it must
be the past, not what's happened in the mean time." She rose with that
supple grace which suggested the Zuloaga pose. "Go back to the hotel and
get your things. I--I can't bear to see you looking as you are. When
you're more like yourself--"
I tried to smile, but I know the effort was no more than a twisted
quivering.
"You'll have to see me looking as I am for a few days yet, Vio. My kit
doesn't offer me much variety."
"Oh, well--!"
She accepted this as part of the inevitable strangeness in which she had
become enveloped, making silent, desperate concessions. Because of this
mood I was tempted to ask for five minutes' grace in order to look over
the old house.
"You'll find things rather run down," she said, indifferently. "I've no
good servants any more. They said that when the war was over it would be
easier to get them; but it's a month now since the armistice was signed,
and it's just as bad as ever."
"From that point of view, it will probably be worse," I remarked, when
about to pass from the library into the hall. "The world isn't going
back to what it was before the war. You can't stop an avalanche once it
has begun to slide."
She watched me from where she stood before the fire, reproducing almost
exactly the attitude of the fascinating woman overhead.
"Does that mean that you've come back a revolutionist, Billy? as well as
everything else?"
"N-no; I haven't come back anything in particular. I'm just like you and
all the rest of the world, a snowflake in the avalanche. I suppose I
shall go tumbling with the mass."
A sense of something outlived came to me as I roamed through the house
which Vio allowed me to visit by myself. After two years spent in a
squint-eyed room of which the only decoration was three painted fungi
this mellow beauty stirred me to a vague irritation. It was not a real
dwelling for real people in the real world as the real world had become.
It was too rich and soft and long established in its place. Three or
four generations of Soameses and Torrances had stored its rooms with
tapestries, portraits, old porcelains, and mahoganies; and for America
that is much.
Over the landing where the stairway turned hung the famous Copley of
Jasper Soames. For a good two minutes he and I faced each other in
unspeakable communion. There was nothing between us but this stairway
acquaintance, formed during the three years Vio and I had lived
together; and yet somehow his being had stamped itself into mine.
On the floors above there was the same well-chosen abundance of
everything, sufficiently toned down by use and time to merit the word
shabby. That was the note that struck me first, and surprised me. Vio
had never been what is commonly known as a good housekeeper; but she had
commanded and been obeyed. What the house betrayed now was a diminution
of the power of command. Doubtless money didn't go as far as it used
to; and there was a new spirit in the world as to taking orders. I
thought again of the garden revisited in autumn. The old house might be
said to have fulfilled its long mission, and to be ready to pass away
with the age of which it was a type.
To go into my own room and find it empty and swept of every trace of my
habitation would have been a stranger experience than it was if every
experience that day had not been strange. I looked into the wardrobes; I
pulled open the drawers. There was not a garment, not a scrap of paper
to indicate that I had ever been alive. Not till I saw this did I
realize the completeness with which Vio had buried me.
And not till I saw this did I realize that Vio herself was up against
the first big struggle of her life. She had never hitherto faced what
might be called a moral situation. Her history had been that of any
other well-off girl in a city like Boston, where money and position
entitled her to whatever was best in the small realm. American
civilization, like that of the Italy of the Middle Ages, being civic and
not national, the boundaries of Boston, with its suburbs and seaside
resorts, had formed the limits of Vio's horizon. True, she had spent a
good deal of time in Europe--but always as a Bostonian. She had made
periodical visits to Newport, Bar Harbor, Palm Beach, and White Sulphur
Springs--but always as a Bostonian. Once she had traveled as far on the
American continent as California--but still as a Bostonian.
Boston sufficed for Vio, seeing that it was big enough to give her
variety, and swell enough to permit her to shine with little
competition. Competition irked her, for the reason that she despised
taking trouble. With the exception of a toilet exact to the last detail
of refinement, her life was always at loose ends. She rarely answered
letters; she rarely returned calls; she never kept accounts; if she
began a book she didn't finish it. Adoring little Bobby during the
months of his brief life, she found the necessities of motherhood
unbearable. That she was as a rule picturesquely unhappy was due to the
fact of having nothing on which to whet her spiritual mettle. Like a
motor working while the motor-car stands still, she churned herself into
action that got nowhere as a result.
But now for the first time in her life she was face to face with a
great, big personal problem. How big and great the problem was I didn't
at the time understand. All I could see was that she was meeting her
baptism of fire, and that I was the means of the ministration.
Pushing open the door between her room and mine I received again the
impression of almost awesome privilege I had got on our return from our
honeymoon. I had never been at my ease in this room; it was Vio's
sanctuary, her fastness. It was a Soames and Torrance sanctuary and
fastness, and to it I had only been admitted, not given its freedom as a
right. Possibly the feeling that always came to me on crossing its
threshold, that I stepped out of my own domain, betokened the missing
strand in the tie that had bound Vio and me together.
It had been a trial to me that she should be so much better off than I.
Not only did it leave the less for me to do for her, but it created in
her a spirit of detachment against which I chafed in vain. Out of the
common fund of our marriage she made large reserves of herself, as she
might have made reserves--which she did not--of her income. Our beings
were allied, but they were not fused. For fusion she had too much that
she prized to give away. In such quantity as I could give she made
return to me; but having so much more than I to give, her reserves
became conspicuous. Of what she withheld this room was the symbol. It
was never my room. My comings and goings there had been made with a
kind of reverence, as if the place were a shrine.
The only abiding note of my personality had been my photograph at the
head of Vio's bed. There was a photograph there now, but I saw that the
frame was different. Mine had been in a silver frame; this was in
red-brown leather. If it was still mine...
But it was not mine. It was that of a colonel in an American uniform,
wearing British and French decorations. Big, portly, handsome, bluff,
with an empty left sleeve, he revealed himself as a hero. He was a
hero, while I ... It occurred to me that death was not the only means of
giving Vio her freedom, and that I ought to tell her so.
To do that I was making my way down-stairs with the words framing
themselves on my lips.
"Vio," I meant to say, "if you don't want me back, if anything has
happened to make it best for me to go away again forever, you've only to
say the word and I'll do it."
But while I was still descending she swept into the hall. Her movements
were always rapid, with a careless, commanding ease. She was once more
the Zuloaga woman all on fire within.
"How long do you think it will be, Billy, before your tailor can make
you look as you ought to?"
I paused where I was, some three steps above her. "It may hardly be
worth while to consider that, Vio--"
"Oh, but it is," she interrupted. "If we're going to put this thing
through we must do it with some dash. That's essential."
"Why--why the dash?"
"Because there's no other way of doing it. Don't you see? If you just
come in by the back door--" She left this sentiment to continue in her
own way. "Alice Mountney is going to give a big dinner and invite all
your old friends."
My heart sank.
"Is that necessary?"
"Of course it's necessary. It isn't a matter of preference. As far as
that goes it will be as hard for me as for you. If I took my own way I
should never--" Once more she left me to divine her thought while she
added, firmly: "It has simply got to be done. We must make people
think--"
"What?" I challenged, when she paused, not apparently from lack of words
but from fear of using them. A suspicion impelled me to say in
addition, "How much did Wolf repeat to you of the story I told him?"
Her answer was made with the storm in the eyes that was always my
warning of danger.
"As much as I'd let him. I didn't want to hear any more. I never
shall. That part of it is closed. I've told you already that I accept
the responsibility, and I do. You mayn't think it, but I have a
conscience of a kind; and I know that if it hadn't been for me you
wouldn't have done this thing; and so-- But there we are again. There
we shall always be if we allow ourselves to discuss it. You're my
husband, Billy; I'm your wife. We can't get away from that, whatever
has happened--"
"We could get away from it, if you preferred."
"What I prefer," she declared, with her old-time hauteur, "is what I'm
asking you to do. If I didn't prefer it I shouldn't ask for it. Go back
to the hotel and get your things. Go to the tailor and get more. Your
room is waiting for you. It will be the next room to mine, just as
before with only the door--"
"The closed door, Vio?"
"Between us," she finished, ignoring my question. "If other things
arrange themselves we can--we can reopen it--in time."
So we left it, since it was useless to go on. That she should consider
my mental lapse so terrible a disgrace was a surprise to me; but as I so
considered it myself I could not blame another for taking the same point
of view. After all, a man should show a man's nerve. Thousands,
millions of men, had shown it to the limit and beyond. I hadn't; that
was all that could be said about it. How could Vio, how could any one
else, regard me as other than abnormal?
As she was making so brave an attempt to put all this behind her, it
became my duty to help her. This I could do most easily by deflecting
the conversation to the large family connection, as to which I was
without news. She gave me this news as we stood at the foot of the
stairway, or while I got ready to go out again.
It was a relief to learn that none of my brothers or sisters was in
Boston. George, who was older than myself, was on General Pershing's
staff, and had just been heard of from Luxembourg. Dan, my junior, had
the rank of lieutenant-commander and was somewhere in European waters.
Tom Cantley, who had married my sister Minna, was working on the War
Trade Board in Washington, and he and Minna had a house there. Their
eldest boy, Harrowby, had been killed at Chateau-Thierry, but as far as
any one ever saw Minna hadn't shed a tear. Ernestine, my unmarried
sister, being one of the founders of the Flag Raising League, had
patriotic duties which took her all over the United States. Her last
letter had been from Oklahoma or Spokane, Vio was not sure which, but it
was "one of those places out there." At any rate, they were all a
credit to a name the traditions of which I alone hadn't had the spirit
to live up to. Vio didn't say this, of course; but it was the
inference.
It was the inference, too, with regard to a host of cousins of the
first, second, and third degrees, by blood and by marriage, who would
have made a small army in themselves. Some were Vio's kin, and some
were mine; some by the chances of Boston intermarriage were related to
us both. Not one of them but had been modestly heroic, the women not
less than the men. Some had given their lives, some their limbs or
eyesight; all, their time and money. Even Wolf and Vio had subscribed
to funds till reduced to what they considered indigence. It was a
distinguished clan; and I its one pitiable member.
*CHAPTER IX*
Going back to the hotel, I had my first pang of regret for having waked
up on that midnight at Bourg-la-Comtesse. It was the same reflection;
the dead were so much wiser in staying dead. I guessed that during the
weeks when I was missing Vio had mourned for me with a grief into which
a new element had come when my clothes were found on the bank of the
Padrille. That was a mistake, that my clothes should be found there. A
missing man should be traced to a prison or a hospital, or remain
gloriously missing. He should have no interval of safety in which to go
in bathing, a hundred miles from the spot on which he had last been seen
alive, not even to be drowned. There was a mystery in that which might
easily become a flaw in a soldier's record, and which to a woman as
proud as Vio would be equivalent to dishonor. That there should be a
question of the kind with regard to her own husband...
So I began to do justice to the courage she displayed. Rising to the
occasion in a way I could only call magnificent, she sank herself, her
opinions, and her plans--I called them plans to avoid a more definite
word--to meet the imperative in the situation. What lay in the back of
her mind I didn't dare inquire, notwithstanding the signs that betrayed
her.
And yet the more splendid her gesture the deeper my humility at having
to call it forth. It made me like a man, once strong and active,
reduced to living on the doles of the compassionate. I could never be
independent again; I could never again have the mental freedom of one as
to whom there is nothing unexplained. By a process of bluff I might
carry the thing off; but to that I felt an unspeakable aversion. It was
not that I was unwilling to second Vio; it was incapacity. Having been
guilty of the indiscretion of waking at Bourg-la-Comtesse, I began to
regret the long, dull, peaceful routine of Creed & Creed's.
I do not assert that these things were as clear in my mind on that day
as they are on this; but they were there confusedly. Every impression I
received that afternoon was either confused and painful or strikingly
vivid, as to one waking from an anesthetic.
Of those more vivid one in particular stands out in my recollection.
Returning from the hotel with my suit-case and bag--the same with which
I had landed from the _Auvergne_--I heard a man's voice in the
drawing-room up-stairs. The deep, soft tones told me it was not Wolf's.
"Mrs. 'Arrowby said as you was to go right up, sir," Boosey informed me,
relieving me of my bags. "I 'ear as you was a prisoner in Germany,
sir," he continued, while making his way to the coat-closet with my
coat. "That's why I didn't know as it 'd be you when you come this
afternoon. Might I ask, sir, if they throwed beer in your face, or
anything like that?"
With one foot on the stairs I looked after the waddling figure
retreating down the hall.
"Who told you that I was a prisoner?"
"Mr. Wolf's man, sir; but"--I am sure there was a veiled taunt in what
followed---"but if you wasn't, sir, or if it's a secret--"
I lost the rest as he became engulfed in the closet, but I had heard
enough. Wolf had taken his own way to protect the honor of the family.
It was not easy to enter the drawing-room and face one of Vio's friends;
but it was the sort of thing to which I must learn to steel myself.
Moreover, it might be one of my own friends come to welcome me back.
Vio had informed me that Wolf had taken steps to keep any mention of my
"discovery" and return out of the papers; but we were too well known in
Boston not to have the word passed privately. To any friend's welcome
there would be unspoken reserves; but that I must take for granted and
become accustomed to.
But, as it happened, it was not a friend of mine; it was the colonel of
the photograph, who had apparently dropped in for a cup of tea--and
something more. What that something more might be I could only surmise
from Vio's way of saying, "Here's Mr. Harrowby now." They had seemingly
discussed me, it had seemingly been necessary for them to discuss me,
and taken a definite attitude toward me. That my wife should do this
with a man who was a stranger to me, that the circumstances should be
such that it was a duty for them to do it, was the extraordinary cup of
gall given me to drain. I drained it while Vio went on, with that ease
which no one knew better than I to be sustained on nerve:
"Billy, I want you to know Colonel Stroud. He's just got back from
France, and has been explaining to me how the Allies are to occupy the
Rhineland. Our men are already reaching Mayence and Coblenz, and he has
heard, too, that the President arrived this morning at Brest. I suppose
it will be in the evening papers."
So we were launched in talk that couldn't hurt any one; and if my
feelings were wounded it was only by drawing conclusions. They were the
easier to draw from the fact, as I guessed, that Vio directed the talk
in such a way that I could read between the lines.
What I gleaned from the give and take of banalities that dealt on the
surface with the current gossip of the armistice was that Vio and her
colonel had been intimate before he went to France, and now that he was
back with medals and only a right arm, the friendship had taken the turn
to which such friendships are liable. That he was one of the Strouds of
the famous Stroud Valley in northern New York put him into the class
with which people like ourselves made social alliances. When Vio, in
the early days of her supposed widowhood, had met him at Palm Beach
there was nothing to prevent their being sympathetic to each other. How
far that sympathy had gone I could only conjecture; but it was easy to
see it had gone pretty far.
As to what did not come so directly to the surface, vague recollections
began to form themselves in my mind. I seemed to remember the Stroud
Valley Strouds as a family with a record. Of the type which in America
most nearly resembles the English or Irish country gentleman, they made
the marrying of heiresses and the spending of the money thus acquired
almost a profession. Horsy, convivial, and good-looking, they carried
themselves with the cheery liveliness that acknowledges no account to be
given to any one; and when they got into the divorce court, as they did
somewhat often, women as well as men, they came out of it with aplomb.
I seemed to recall a scandal that a few years before had diverted all
the clubs....
But I couldn't be sure that this was the man, or of anything beyond the
fact that the central figure of that romance had been a Stroud Valley
Stroud. That this particular instance of the race had had a history was
stamped all over him; but it was the kind of history which to a man of
the world imparts fascination. It was easy to see that he had "done
things" in many lines of life. A little the _beau male_ of the French
lady novelist, and a little the Irish sporting squire, he was possibly
too conscious of his looks and his power of killing ladies. A bronzed
floridness, due partly to the open air and partly to good living, was
thrown into striking relief by the silver hair and mustache not
incompatible with relative youth. He couldn't have been much over
forty.
His reception to me was as perfect as if regulated by a protocol and
rehearsed to the last shade. There was nothing in it I could complain
of--and yet there was everything. A gentleman ignoring a disgraceful
situation of which every one is conscious would have carried himself
with just this air of bland and courteous contempt.
Perhaps it was to react against this and to assert myself a little that
I ventured once to cross swords with him. We had exhausted the
movements of troops on the Rhine, the possible reception of the
President in Pans, and he had given the Peace Conference six months in
which to prepare the treaty for signature.
"Then we shall see," he laughed, in his rich, velvety bass.
He brought out the statement so emphatically that I was moved to ask:
"What shall we see?"
"What Mrs. Harrowby and I have been talking about, the end of all this
rot as to the war having created a new world."
"That's putting the cart before the horse, isn't it?" I asked,
maliciously. "The war didn't create the new world; the new world
created the war."
Vio's exquisite eyebrows went up a shade.
"Does that mean anything?"
"Only that the volcano creates the explosion; not the explosion the
volcano. Given all the repressions and suppressions and injustices, the
eruption had to come."
"The eruption had to come," the colonel declared, hotly, "because the
Germans planned it."
"Oh, that was only a detail."
"You might call the whole war only a detail--"
"I do."
"I don't get you," he said, stiffly, leaning forward to place an empty
cup on the table in front of Vio.
In her I read something surprised that didn't, however, disapprove of
me. Thus encouraged, I went on. If I hadn't thought these things out
in the monotonous, unoccupied hours at Creed & Creed's, my stunned brain
would not have been master of them now.
"I only meant that the war was but one of the forces, one of the
innumerable forces, which the new world in the making--it isn't made yet
by any means--has put into operation. If a house collapses it shatters
all the windows; but you can't say that the shattering of the windows
made the house collapse."