"That's just an expression that's been in my mind during the time when
I've been--been floundering about. Name I invented for--for a
principle."
In this, however, he was not interested.
"Yes, but your collapsing house--"
"It may not come down altogether. I'm neither a prophet nor a prophet's
son. All I can see is what I suppose everybody sees, that our
civilization has been rotten. It couldn't hold together. It hadn't the
cohesive strength. Perhaps I was wrong in saying that it was falling
down; it's more as if we were pulling it down, to build up something
better. It's our blind instinct toward perfection--"
But refusing to listen to any more, he got up to go. A brave man in the
presence of enemies of flesh and blood, intellectual foes frightened
him. At the first sound of their shells he rushed for his mental dugout
which he burrowed in the ground of denial. "I don't believe that" and
"All tommyrot" seemed to him shelters from any kind of danger.
But the main point to me was that I had in a measure not only held my
own but got on to superior ground. I had been able to talk; in doing so
I had got him at a slight disadvantage. The bit of self-respect inspired
by this achievement enabled me to play the host and accompany him to the
door with the kind of informal formality to which I had been so long
unaccustomed.
And in performing this small duty I made a discovery. As he preceded me
down-stairs I remembered seeing the back of his head once before. It
was the kind of head not easily forgotten. Moreover, I had seen it in
circumstances that had caused me to note it in particular. Where and
when and how were details that did not at once return to me; but I knew
that the association was sinister.
As I returned from my mission in showing him to the door I heard Vio
speaking.
"Come in here, Billy. There's something I want to say."
She was still behind the tea-table, pensive rather than subdued,
resolute rather than unhappy.
"I liked your talking like that," she began at once, without looking up
at me. "It's--it's the way we shall have to play the game."
A box of cigarettes stood on the tea-table. I took one and struck a
match, the usual stage-trick for gaining a little time.
"What game do you mean?" I asked, when I had carefully blown out the
match and deposited it in an ash-tray.
"What game can I mean but--but that of your coming back?"
"Oh, is that a game?"
"Only in the sense of giving us something to play. We can't just--just
live it."
"Why can't we?"
With a quick movement she was on her feet, flinging out her hands.
"For all the reasons that I should think you'd see." She came and stood
on the hearth-rug, confronting me. "Billy, I wonder if you have the
faintest idea of what I'm doing for your sake?"
"I've more than the faintest idea, Vio. Some day, when we're able to
talk more easily than we are as yet, I shall tell you how grateful I am.
Just now I'm--I'm rather dazed. I have to get my bearings--"
She, too, had taken a cigarette, lighting it nervously, carelessly,
puffing rapidly at the thing and moving about the room.
"And there's another thing," she began, taking no notice of what I was
trying to say; "I don't mind your talking as you did just now, so long
as it's--as it's through your hat; but if it isn't--"
"I can't say that it is."
"That's just what I was afraid of. In the places where you've been--I
don't want to know anything about them," she interjected, with a
passionate gesture of the hand that held the cigarette, "but in such
places men do pick up revolutionary ideas, just as they do in prisons!"
"I don't know that it's a question of getting revolutionary ideas, Vio,
so much as it's one of living in a revolutionary world."
"And that's what I want to warn you against. It won't go down, Billy,
not from you."
"Why not from me, in particular?"
"Oh, why do you make me explain things? Isn't it perfectly clear? If
you're coming back among your old friends you'll have to be, after
what's happened, more--how shall I put it?--more conservative, more like
everybody else--than any one. _You_ can't afford to have wild ideas,
because people will only say that you re trying to drag us along the way
you went yourself."
I renounced this discussion to ask the question that was chiefly on my
mind.
"Vio, who's that man that just went out?"
She threw me a look from the other side of the room.
"You heard. He's--where can you catch on? He's Emmy Fairborough's
brother."
"Wasn't there--wasn't there a divorce?"
"Emmy's? Yes; Lord Fairborough and she are divorced, but what
difference does that make?"
"I wasn't thinking of Lady Fairborough. I forgot she had been a Stroud.
I meant--I meant him."
"Oh, he? Yes, I think he was."
"Divorced?"
"Yes, divorced. What of it?"
"To whom had he been married?"
"How should I know? It was to--to some low creature, an actress or
something, the sort of thing men do when they're young and--and--"
"And wild?"
"Wild, if you like. Why are you asking?"
But I was not sure of being ready to tell her, so many things had to be
formulated first. To gain more time I lighted another cigarette, and
she spoke while I was doing it. Holding her own cigarette delicately,
as if examining its spark, she said, with a staccato intonation that
emphasized each word:
"Billy, you remember what I said earlier this afternoon? I can go back
to our past and try to pick it up. I can't go back to anything that
comes after that past and--and before to-day. Do you understand? It's
more than three years since they told me your section was blown to
pieces at Bourg-la-Comtesse. Most of your comrades were found---and
buried. You were missing; but missing with very little hope. As the
weeks went by that little hope dwindled till there was none. Then came
the news that--that all that time you had been--alive."
"And I suppose that Wolf told you..."
"He told me a story, or as much of it as I could listen to. But that's
not what I meant to speak about now. I want to say that--that I bury
all that, deep, deep; only that I can't do it unless you consent to
bury--"
"Everything there's been on your side. Is that it, Vio?"
"I shall ask no questions."
"Not even if I'm ready to answer them?"
"Not even if you're ready to answer them; but I shall expect you not to
ask questions of me."
"So that between us there will be a gulf of silence."
She inclined her head without speaking.
"But why, Vio? Why?"
She swept up to me, throwing away her cigarette, and laying both her
hands on my shoulders.
"Because, old boy, I'm your wife, and I'm trying to help you. I'm
trying to help you because--because--"
Her nearness, the scent of her person, the black-opal mystery and fire
were like hypnotic enchantment.
"Because you used to--to care for me a little, Vio? Is it possible
that--that I can think that?"
She nodded.
"That's part of it, of course. I don't forget it. But what I remember
more is what I've told you already, that, whatever you did, I sent you
to do it. Now, if there's expiation to be made, I come in for that as
well as you."
"So that we make it together?"
"So that we make it together."
Having already been bold I grew bolder. Lifting my hands to my shoulders
I laid them on hers.
"And will you--will you let me kiss you on that, Vio?"
"Once," she consented; "but--but don't--don't touch me."
*PART III*
*CHAPTER I*
So we began what Vio called the expiation, and what to me was no more
than the attempt to persuade our friends that they didn't know what they
knew. This, according to Vio's calculations, could be best achieved by
never for an instant showing the white feather of an uncomfortable
conscience. Our assurance was to be something like the Stroud aplomb on
emerging from the courts of bankruptcy or divorce. To be unaware of
anything odd in one's conduct helped others to be unaware of it, too. A
high spirit, a high head, a high hand carried one through difficult
situations regardless of the strife of tongues.
I didn't think it necessary to remind Vio that the strife of tongues
could go on even if we didn't hear it. Nothing else was possible when
Wolf's fatuity blew the trumpet and beat the drum if the clamor showed
signs of dying down. It wasn't that he told the truth, but that he told
lies so easy of detection. Alice Mountney did tell the truth as far as
she knew it; but where she didn't know it she supplied the deficiency by
invention. That those so near us should be in conflict naturally called
for comment, especially when Vio refused to let me speak.
For the first few weeks I was too busily occupied to think of what any
one was saying, seeing that the details I had to arrange were so
unusual. Of the steps taken to become a living citizen again, and get
back my property from my heirs, I give no account further than to say
that they absorbed my attention. My standing in the community I was
thus unable to compute till we were into the new year.
By this time I had taken part in a number of family events on which I
shall touch briefly. At Christmas we had gone to Washington to spend
the festival with Minna and Tom Cantley. There we had met Ernestine, in
one of the intervals of her flag-raising, and on the way back to Boston
my brother Dan's ship had unexpectedly arrived in New York. A series of
domestic gatherings had therefore taken place, at all of which Vio had
worked heroically. As she had generally hitherto ignored my family's
existence this graciousness was not without its effect. Where she did so
much for my rehabilitation, those close to me in blood could hardly do
less than follow her example.
They followed it almost to the letter. That is to say, none of them
asked me any questions, presumably wishing to spare both themselves and
me embarrassment. Once or twice, when I attempted to speak of my
experiences, the readiest plunged in with some topic that would lead us
away from dangerous ground. If I yielded to this it was because
speaking of myself at all was the deliberate exposure of nerves still
raw and quivering. I could do it, but I couldn't do it willingly.
Between Minna and myself there had never been much sympathy, largely
because I was of the dreamy temperament and she of the sharp and
practical. That I should make beauty a career in life, and take
advantage of the fact that our father had left me a modest sufficiency
to give my services to a museum of fine arts, shocked her to the heart.
A man should do a man's work, she said, not that of an old Miss Nancy.
When I pointed out that many of the manufacturers in New England, whose
work had to do with textiles, came to me for advice, she replied that
she didn't believe it. Her attitude now was that I had done no worse
than she had always foretold and any one might have expected.
Ernestine, to do her justice, was as tolerant of me as she was of any
one who wasn't a flag. The Flag having become her idol and she its
high-priestess, she could talk of nothing else. The nation had
apparently gone to war in order that the cult of the Flag should be the
more firmly established; and all other matters passed outside the circle
of her consideration. She knew I had been dead and had somehow become
alive again; but as the detail didn't call for the raising of a flag she
couldn't give her mind to it. As she could give her mind in no greater
measure to Minna's canteen-work or Vio's clothes, I profited by the
generous nature of her exclusions.
For Dan, when I met him, I hardly existed, but that might have been so
in any case, as we had never been really intimate. Recently he had been
working with English naval officers and had taken on their manners and
form of speech.
"Hello, old dear. Top-hole to see you looking so fit. I say, where can
I find a barber? Got a mane on me like a lion."
That was our greeting, and the extent to which our confidences went. He
sailed for Hampton Roads without a word as to my adventures.
This he did, I am sure, in a spirit of kindness. They were all moved by
the spirit of kindness, and the axiom of the less said the better. I
confess that I was mystified by this forbearance, and a little hurt.
Though I had been a fool, I had not been a traitor; yet every one
treated me as one. I should never have spoken of my two years of
aberration of my own accord; yet when all avoided the subject, as if it
opened the cupboard of the family dishonor, I resented the implication.
It was Tom Cantley with whom I was most at ease, perhaps because he was
not a blood relation. A big, genial, boresome fellow, he found me useful
as a listener. His rambling accounts of the doings and shortcomings of
the War Trade Board, and what he would have accomplished there if given
a free hand, I pretended to follow, because it left me free to pursue my
own thoughts. As he never asked for comments on my part, being content
when he could dribble out his own, the plan worked well.
And yet it was Tom who awakened me to the true meaning of my situation.
That was on the day we left Washington, in the station, as Vio and I
were about to take our train. Vio was ahead with Minna, when Tom
suddenly clutched me by the arm.
"Say, old sport; what about clubs? Boston clubs I mean. I suppose
you're a member of the Shawmut and the Beacon Hill just as before you
went away. No action has ever been taken in the matter as far as I've
heard. But I wouldn't press the point, if I were you, not for a while
yet. Later ... when everything blows over ... we can ... we can see."
I nodded speechlessly. It was the most significant thing that had been
said to me yet.
"Yes," I assented, weakly. "When everything blows over we can see."
What I saw at the minute was that if I attempted to resume my membership
in either of my clubs there would be opposition. My case was as grave
as that; though why it should be I hadn't an adequate idea. Annoyed
hitherto, I became deeply troubled and perplexed.
Nevertheless, when we arrived in Boston again it was to experience
nothing but the same widespread kindness. True, it was largely from
relatives or from friends of Vio's as admired her pluck. The tragedy of
her life being plain, those who appreciated it were eager to stand by
her; and to stand by her meant courtesy to me. I could be invited to a
dinner to which I went under my wife's banner; but I couldn't be
admitted to a club where I should stand on my merit as a man. The
distinction was galling.
Equally so I found my position with regard to Colonel Stroud. He made
himself our social protector, filling in what might be considered
unoccupied ground and defending anything open to attack. He did this
even in our house. Without usurping my place as host, he fulfilled those
duties which a companion performs for an invalid lady, passing the
cigars and cigarettes after dinner, and seeing that our guests had their
favorite liqueurs. Though our friends came nominally to lunch or dine
with Vio and me, it seemed in effect to be with Vio and him. Every one
knew, apparently, that he and she had been on the eve of a romantic act,
which my coming back had frustrated. Something was due them, therefore,
in the way of compensation; and considering what I had done they had the
public sympathy.
That my mind was chiefly on this situation, however, I cannot truthfully
say. I thought of it more than incidentally, and yet not so much as to
make it a sole preoccupation. More engrossing than anything personal to
myself was the plight of the world and the future immediately before us.
With the gathering of the Conference round the table of the Quai
d'Orsay, the new world, of which one of the phases had been war, was
entering on still another phase even more momentous. To the mere
onlooker, supposing oneself to be an onlooker and no more, it would be
an exhibition of the grandeur and impotence of man on a scale of
spectacular magnificence. The January of the armistice will be
remembered as a month of dramatic occurrences illustrating the
yearnings, passions, and fatalities of the human race with an almost
theatrical vividness. In its very first days the old era sighed itself
out in the death of Theodore Roosevelt, while on the soil over which the
Caesars had ridden in their Triumphs, a New World citizen and President
was hailed as the herald of an epoch altogether new. Almost at the same
moment, blood was flowing in the streets of Berlin, working up about the
middle of the month to the assassination of Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxembourg. The Americans in Paris, having secured on one day the right
of way for their League of Nations, the antiphon of opposition burst
forth from Washington on the next.
Events like these, and they were many, were as geysers springing from a
caldron in which the passions and ideals of mankind were seething
incoherently. The geysers naturally caught the eye, but if there had
been no boiling sea they would not have spouted up. More than the
geysers I watched the boiling sea, and that I saw all around me.
That others didn't see it, or saw it as less ebullient, made no
difference to me, for the reason that I had been in its depths. Vio
didn't see it; Wolf didn't see it; Stroud didn't see it. Of my family,
only Tom Cantley had vague apprehensions of what he called "labor
unrest"; but this he regarded as no more than a whirlpool in an ocean
relatively smooth. In Boston generally, as probably throughout the
Union, the issue was definite and concrete, expressing itself in the
question as to whether America would back a league of nations or would
not. That was the burning topic of debate; but to me it seemed like
concentrating on the relative merits of a raft or a lifeboat when the
ship is drifting on the rocks. That our whole system of labor, pleasure,
religion, finance, and government was in process of transformation I had
many reasons for believing; but I couldn't speak of that without being
scouted as a Bolshevist, or laughed down as pessimistic.
I mention these circumstances in order that you may see that nothing
personal could be wholly absorbing. His exact social status means
little to a man on the deck of a ship that any minute may go down. His
chief concern is to save himself and his fellow-passengers, with natural
speculation as to the haven they will find when the rescued have
scrambled to the shore.
Thus, during that month of January, I saw myself as the victim of
circumstances that mattered less than they might have done had we not
been on the eve of well-nigh universal change. The life I was leading
with Vio was not satisfactory, but even that was not permanent. The
thread of flame, I was convinced, had not led thus far without meaning
to lead me farther still, and I counted on that to show me the way. I
counted on that not merely in my own affairs, but in those of our
disintegrating world. We should not be impelled to pull down our
present house till the materials were at hand for building up a better
one. Vio, Wolf, Stroud, and the bulk of the American people were right
in not fearing disaster, though wrong in not anticipating a radical
shifting of bases. Their desperate clinging to worn-out phases of
existence might be futile; but the futility would become apparent in the
ripeness of time. It was not an aspect of the case that troubled me.
What did trouble me was Vio's relation to Stroud. It troubled me the
more for the reason that in proportion as the vapors cleared from my
intelligence I saw myself with my old rights as her husband. The old
passion was back with me, with the old longings and claims, even though
she disregarded them. According to the judgment I was beginning to
form, she disregarded them the more for seeing that her efforts to
re-establish me in Boston hadn't been successful. As far as she could
positively carry me, I went; but I could cover no ground by myself. The
minute I was alone, I was let alone, simply, courteously, but
unanimously dropped. It was the sort of general action it is useless to
reason with or fight against; and Vio saw it. There came a day when I
drew the conclusion that she was giving up the struggle, and that the
offer I had meant to make on the first afternoon of my return would be
accepted if renewed. I was not sure; she was not communicative, and the
signs were all too obscure to give me more than a vacillating sense of
guidance. My general impression was that she didn't know the way she
was taking, while Stroud was sure of it. As an adroit player of a game
of which she didn't know the elementary principles, he was leading her
on to a point at which she would have to acknowledge herself beaten.
This, in the main, I could only stand by and watch, because I was under
a cloud. It was a cloud that settled on me heavier and blacker as
January passed and February came in. The world-seething had its
counterpart in the seething within myself. There were days when my
inner anguish was not less frenzied than that of Germany or Russia, in
spite of my outward calm. I was still following Vio from house to house,
with Stroud as our guide or showman; but the conviction was growing that
I must soon have done with it. Not a day nor an hour but seared my
consciousness with the fact that he was the man whom Vio loved.
"This is not a life," I began to tell myself, bitterly. It became my
favorite comment. I made it when I got up in the morning, and when I
went to bed at night. I made it when Vio and I engaged in polite
conversation, and when she informed me of our engagements for the day.
I made it when I entered other people's drawing-rooms, and when other
people entered ours. A life was a reality; a life was work; a life
involved above all what Mildred Averill called production. When one
didn't produce there was no place for one. There was no place for me
here. With Pelly, Bridget, and the Finn I had touched the genuine, the
foundational; in lugging carpets I had done work of which the usefulness
was in no wise diminished by the fact that any other man could have done
it just as well. In my room with the fungi, on my eighteen dollars a
week, I had slept soundly and lived complacently, in harmony with
whatever was basic and elemental. It began to dawn in me as a hope that
perhaps the windings of the thread of flame would lead me back to what
was a life, with a new appreciation of its value.
And then one day, when I was on the stairs of our own house, coming down
from the third to the second story, I saw Lydia Blair standing on the
landing, outside of Vio's door. Boosey was beside her, and she was
taking a parcel from his hands.
"Hello, kid," she said, nodding in my direction. "Thought I should see
you round here some day. Wonder I didn't do it before." She addressed
Boosey, with another nod toward me. "He and me were at school together.
Weren't we?" she continued, with her enchanting smile, as I reached the
lowest step.
"Yes," I managed to gasp, "the school of adversity."
"And a mighty good school, too, for a sport. Do you know it?"
"But, Lydia," I began, "what in the name of--?"
"Sh-h! Don't swear," was all she said, as taking Boosey's parcel she
opened Vio's door. Going in softly she closed it behind her.
Once more Boosey's expression dramatized my situation. That the master
of the house in which he exercised his functions--even such a master as
I--should be called "kid" by a girl like Lydia created a social
topsyturvydom defying all his principles. For perceptible seconds he
stared in an astonishment mingled with disdain, after which he turned on
his heel to tell the news in the kitchen.
But I was too puzzled by Lydia's reappearance to tear myself away. What
had she to do with Vio? How did she get the right to go in and out of
Vio's room with this matter-of-course authority?
In a corner of the hall, beside the window looking over the Common, was
an armchair in which Vio often sat when taking her breakfast up-stairs
and glancing over her correspondence. I sank into it now, and waited.
Sooner or later Lydia must come out again.
This she did, some twenty minutes later, dainty and nonchalant.
"Lydia," I cried, springing to my feet, "what in the name of Heaven are
you doing here?"
"You see."
The parcel she had taken from Boosey was now undone, revealing some
three or four pairs of corsets. Laying the bundle on the table Vio used
for her breakfast-tray the girl began to roll the corsets neatly.
There were so many questions I wanted to ask that I hardly knew where to
begin.
"How long have you been coming to--to see my wife?"
"Oh, not so very long, a month perhaps."
"Did you know I was here?"
"Why, sure."
"Is that what brought you?"
She glanced up sidewise from her work, with one of those glances she
alone could fling.
"Well, you _have_ got a nerve. Suppose I said yes?"
"Who--who told you where to find me?"
"Who do you think?"
"Miss Averill?"
"No; it wasn't Miss Averill. As far as I can make out little old Milly
doesn't give you a second thought, now that she knows you're in the
bosom of your family."
"Is that true?"
"Why, of course it's true. Did you want to think she was pining away?"
"Well, who did tell you?"
"Why should I want any one to tell me? Ever since I've been with
Clotilde I'm always on the lookout for new customers. I get a
commission on every pair."
"But it wasn't for the commission you came to see Mrs. Harrowby."
"Well, what was it for then?"
"That's what I want you to tell me."
"How much did you tell me when you disappeared from the Barcelona over
two years ago?"
"I told you as much as I could tell any one."
"You didn't tell me your name was Harrowby."
"I didn't know it."