"You don't know how I've missed you," Steve told Mary upon her return.
"Don't I look it?" he added, wistfully.
Mary had appeared at the office late one September afternoon rather
than appear the following morning as a model of exact punctuality.
She had had to force herself to remain away until her leave of
absence expired. It was Luke who rejoiced in the freedom of the
woods and the green growing things in which his sister had tried to
take consolation, telling herself they would revive her common sense
and banish absurd notions concerning Steve O'Valley. It was Luke
who rejoiced at catching the largest trout of the season, who never
wearied of hayrack rides and corn roasts and bonfires with circles of
ghostlike figures enduring the smoke and the damp and the rapid-fire
gossiping and giggling. Luke had returned with a healthy coat of tan
and a large correspondence list, pledging himself to revisit the
spot every season.
But Mary felt defeated in the very purpose of her holiday. The
atmosphere of weary school-teachers trying to appear as golden-haired
flappers foot-loose for a romance; the white shoes always drying
outside tents or along window sills; the college professors eternally
talking about their one three-months' tour of Europe; the mosquitoes;
the professional invalid, the inevitable divorcee; the woman with
literary ambitions and a typewriter set in action on the greenest,
most secluded spot for miles about; the constant snapshotting of
everything from an angleworm to a group of arm-entwined bathers about
to play splash-me; the cheap talk and aping of such Gorgeous Girls as
Beatrice Constantine--all this on one side, and a great and eternal
loneliness for Steve on the other.
It was small wonder that defeat was the result. And yet in her heart
of hearts Mary was glad that it was so. There is something splendid
and breathless in trying to shut away a forbidden rapture, and being
unable to do so; in telling oneself one will never try repression
again but will shamelessly acknowledge the forbidden rapture and
register a desire to thrill to it whenever possible.
Besides the irritations of the summer camp Mary had been forced to
leave Hanover remembering Steve as ill, worried over business; of
Beatrice's hinting that she would usurp her place. There had been so
many womanly trifles she would have done for Steve had she been in
Beatrice's position--a linen cover for the water glass; a soft shade
on the window instead of the glaring white-and-gold-striped affair;
exile for that ubiquitous spaniel; home cooking, with old-fashioned
milk toast and real coffee of a forefather's day.
Strange how such homey trifles persist in the mind of a commercial nun
through two months of supposed enjoyment and liberty. In the same way
incongruous associations of ideas spring into the brain with no
apparent reason at all causing fossilized professors to write
essays-under-glass that elucidate matters not in the slightest.
So Mary returned to the office two days ahead of time, her heart
thumping so loudly that she thought Miss Lunk would surely detect the
sound. She deliberately dressed herself in a demure new suit and a
becoming black-winged hat which made her seem as if delightfully
arrayed for afternoon tea. And it was with a charming timidity that
she tiptoed into the office.
Before Steve had asked her opinion she had given one swift look about
the two offices, and she was glad that they looked as they did. It
would have been disappointing to have found them spick and span and
quite self-sufficient, without a hint that Mary Faithful was missed or
irreplaceable.
Evidences of Beatrice's brief sojourn in the business world still
remained--an elaborate easy-chair with rose pillows, a thermos bottle
and cut-glass tumbler, a curlicue French mirror slightly awry and, on
her desk, a gay-bordered silk handkerchief, a silver-mesh bag, and a
great amount of cluttered notations; all of which proved that the
understudy secretary had not yet mastered the law of efficiency.
It seemed amusing to Mary. She thought: "How stupid! How can she--when
the wicker basket is the one logical place for----"
Then she spied Steve's desk, bearing a suggestion of the same disorder
about it. When she spoke his name and he started up, holding out both
hands, she saw a queer, bright look in his eyes, as if he, too, were
trying to convince himself that everything was all right.
"So you really missed me?"
"Missed you! Heaven alone can record the unselfish struggle I endured
to let you play. I give you my word."
He wheeled up a chair for her, just as he used to wheel up a chair
for Beatrice, and sitting opposite him Mary heard an almost womanish
enumeration of petty troubles and disturbances, a pathetic threat as
to the avalanche of work which would await her in the morning.
"And now I will be polite enough to ask if you had a good time?"
"Very! And Mrs. O'Valley?"
It was so horrid to have to pretend when each knew the other was
pretending; and as they pretended to the world in general, what a
relief and blessed lightening of tension it would have been to have
said merely an honest: "We don't care about Mrs. Gorgeous Girl or any
one else. We are quite content with each other. True, this is still
platonic friendship--with one of us--but all tropical twilight is of
short duration. It won't be platonic much longer. So let's talk about
ourselves all we like!"
But being thoroughbred young persons they felt it was not the thing
even to think frankly.
"She is well," Steve said, briefly.
"She came down here, she wrote me, when she wanted to find out about
something or other. I've forgotten just what."
Steve smiled. "Yes, for nearly a week Mrs. O'Valley managed to create
a furore among her own set. Before she came here she ordered an entire
new outfit of clothes--business togs. There were queer hats and shirt
waists and things." He laughed at the remembrance. "Then she had to
practise getting up early; that took a lot of time. Meanwhile, Miss
Sartwell did your work just as we planned. It was found necessary to
postpone her business career still further because of an out-of-door
pageant that required her services as a nymph. She caught cold at
rehearsal and enjoyed a week of indoors.
"Then Gay turned up with a whole flock of new decorators for the
d----for the villa thing, and I was left without aid from the
_ennuied_ for another ten days. Jill Briggs had a wedding anniversary
and relied on Beatrice's aid. Of course she could not refuse, and
Trudy, who, by the way, has come on very rapidly, persuaded Beatrice
to take a booth at a charity kettledrum.
"So after several weeks my wife appeared on my business horizon and
hung that mirror up and had those other things moved in and then she
discovered that the impudent girls were all copying her coats and hats
and stuff and even used her sort of perfume, and she decided that her
duty lay not in making me a competent secretary but in reforming these
extravagant young persons so that she could wear a model gown in
comfort and not see it copied within a month. It was quite an
experience for her; she was here about five days. Miss Sartwell just
moved her desk out there and we managed nicely. Beatrice also had a
private teacher for typewriting and so on, but she gave it all up
because she felt the confinement and long hours made her head ache and
she gained weight. She fled in haste. Sorry she had to do so, but
under the circumstances it was better to jeopardize my business career
than her own figure!"
"Aren't you a little unfair?" Mary said, seriously.
"Am I? I never thought so. Wait--I must finish the tale. For a whole
week after being my business partner she tried what she called
holiness as a cosmetic, and became high-church and quite trying. At
the end of that time she felt a veritable dynamo of nerves and
scandal and proceeded to become a liberated and advanced woman. You'll
soon enough see what I mean. She doesn't run to short-haired ladies
with theories so much as to hollow-eyed gentlemen embroidering cantos
in the drawing room and trying to make the world safe for poetry.
De-luxe adventuresses strike her as harmonious just now. You'll hear
about one Sezanne del Monte who is staying in town and living off of
Bea and her set."
"The woman who is divorced every season--and stars in musical
comedy?"
"The same. Sezanne is now writing the intimate story of her life; sort
of heart throbs instead of punctuation marks--lots of asterisks, you
know, separating the paragraphs. Beatrice is going to finance the
publication of it and Gay is going to be the sales manager. Yes, it's
funny, but a blamed nuisance when you come home and you find yourself
wandering through a crowd of Sezanne del Montes and Gays and Trudys,
all bent on playing parlour steeplechase, and you can't find a plain
chair to sit down or eat a plain meal or read a newspaper. It's more
than a blamed nuisance--it's cause for a trial by jury," he added,
whimsically. "Now what's wrong?"--watching Mary's face.
"It isn't cricket to tell all this."
Somehow the old struggle began with renewed energy in Mary's heart,
the puritanical part saying: "Forget you ever thought twice of this
man"; and the dreamer part urging: "You have earned the right to love
him. She has not. Just be fair--merely fair. You have the right; don't
let your opportunity slip by."
[Illustration: "It was with a charming timidity that she tip-toed into
the office"]
"Why can't I tell you? I have no one else to whom I can tell
things--and I'm so everlastingly tired. Goat tending and living off
dried buffalo meat never fagged me like trying to dance with Trudy and
living on truffles and champagne. First you are mentally bewildered
and physically fagged, then you become defiant; then you realize that
that is no use, you've brought this on your own self--it is quite the
common fate of men like myself--and so you keep on with the steady
grind; and by and by you find yourself longing to play in your own way
with your own sort. The other sort have no use for you so long as you
pay their bills; you are hardly missed, if the truth were told.
"Well, you must keep on with the grind. And you want your sort of
playmates and fun, and it's such decent, upright fun in comparison--oh,
pshaw!" He stood up, kicking the edge of the rug with his foot in
almost boyish, shamed fashion.
"Business isn't quite so good," he began anew in an impersonal, even
voice. "Mr. Constantine thinks that the abnormal prosperity is on the
wane for keeps--we must prepare for it--but Mr. Constantine has
practically retired since you have been away. He's not well. To-morrow
morning, if you don't mind, I'll take you over there and we can
straighten out some things for him. He is selling the greater share of
stock to men from the West. And he's saved out some pretty nice sugar
plums to hand over to me. I haven't been asked whether or not I want
them."
"I'm sorry."
"I knew you would be, Miss Iconoclast."
"Why do you accept them?"
"How can I refuse?"
"By saying you are not prepared to be a mental wreck at forty--which
you will be if you try such a gigantic scheme with so little
preparation. I've an idea that when Mr. Constantine is known to have
withdrawn from the business world there will be a change in many
things. And when you are known to be alone in the fort--" She paused.
"Go on," he demanded, irritably. "Can I never make you understand how
much I want your advice, your opinions, your scoldings?"
"I think you will have new enemies with whom to deal--enemies you
never thought existed. I don't believe you can deal with them because
you have always been so cotton-woolled, so to speak, by being
Constantine's special project----"
"I've done what I've done myself," he interrupted, "and I'm afraid of
no one."
"You think you have," she corrected. "You have done what you have
because Constantine was back of you--and now he is an old, tired man,
and very soon he will think more of his days with Hannah than of the
present. Which is perfectly safe for him to do. Because Mr.
Constantine reckoned on his enemies he knew to a man who hated him and
who was afraid of him, who admired him and who would be indifferent;
and that is just as essential to success as to reckon on your friends.
You never did that--you hadn't the time--it was all so dazzling and
sudden with the war helping things along at breakneck speed. You will
find that if you have an Achilles' heel it will be because you did not
reckon on your enemies and are somewhat like a blindfolded man with
money in your purse set down in a strange locality.... There. How does
that sound for a welcome?"
Steve was pacing up and down the floor. "I'd like enemies," he said.
"I'd like to see them try jumping at my throat. I'd make them cry
quits. You don't frighten me; you stimulate me."
"That was my intention"--picking up her purse.
"Don't go--or let me come to supper," he begged.
She shook her head. Someone came in just then to whom she spoke of the
pleasure it was to be back at the office; the word spread that Miss
Faithful was back and girls came in groups to smile and say some
pretty thing, and the men nodded with a pleased expression. Watching
the procedure Steve realized that Mary was as dominant a personality
in his office as he was himself, and instead of feeling a vague
disapproval of the fact he was genuinely elated that it was so.
After the last of the visitors had gone and the clock pointed to five
he said: "Of course I'm going to be dragged some place this evening,
so I wouldn't have much time--but may I come to supper? I'm going out
of town next week. There, isn't that a good reason to come to-night?"
"Suppose the world knew this--our little business world?"
"Hang the world!"
"You never did. You flattered it, and were delighted when the world
patted you on the head and said, 'Nice Stevens, come in and bring your
bags of gold--the living's fine.'"
"Are you starting in to tell me that people would misunderstand my
motives? Sezanne del Monte has chapters along those lines. And
Beatrice has quite a fad of slumming and taking a notebook along to
write down new slang phrases or oaths or bits of heart-broken
philosophy spilled in a drunken moment.... I've grown careless to
everything presumably orderly and conventional. I'm ready to walk the
plank for my indifference if need be--but I do want to come home with
you for supper!"
Mary did not answer for a moment. Then she said, in a quick breathless
tone, as if she did not want to hear her own words: "I wonder if it
would do any good to try explaining--really explaining and not fibbing
or pretending----"
"It has always done me good when you have explained--and I can't
imagine you telling cheap untruths."
"Then I will try it." The gray eyes grew stormy. "For if we are to
continue as employer and secretary--and you must have such a person
and I must earn my living--it would be much easier if you really
understood and it was all settled. You've talked about early
hardships, misunderstood childhood, goat tending, and what not; and
the world gives you credit for your achievements. Then surely you must
understand the woman's end of the game--the American woman's part in
business, for it's not easy to be errand girl or to fill endless
underpaid clerical positions. It's not easy to pile out every morning
at such and such an hour and stand at a desk and work as if you had
neither heart nor eye for the other things in life until gradually the
woman part of yourself is changed and it is often too late to enjoy
anything but desk drudgery--and a bonus!
"Now the man in the business game forgoes nothing; he has the world's
applause if he succeeds and the kisses of the woman he loves for his
recreation, and all is complete and as it should be. But we commercial
women of to-day do a man's work and earn a man's wage. We do stay
starved women, even if that fact doesn't appear on the surface. We
cannot have the things of romance as well as our livelihood. And by
the very nature of the average business woman's life she is often in
love with someone in her office--from propinquity if for no other
reason. She must. Don't you see? They're practically the only men she
really comes to know or who come to know her, and she just can't stab
her heart into sudden death.
"So she wears her prettiest frock for this man--a wooden-faced
bookkeeper perhaps; or a preoccupied president--and she dreams of him
and is jealous of him and very likely gossips about him. And the years
pass and she stays just as shut away and misunderstood and starved.
And sometimes a woman, originally the most honest in the world, under
these circumstances will deliberately steal another woman's husband if
she has the chance. Yes, she will--she does."
"What do you mean, Mary?" He was almost unconscious of using the
name.
"That I am no different from the others. I came here with the same
starved heart and woman's hopes, and I put into your career the
devotion and service and very prayers that I should have put into a
home and a family--your joys were my joys, your problems mine. It has
not been my clever brain that has made me worth so much to you. That
is what the superficial public says, but I know better. It's been the
love--yes, the love for you that has made me indispensable! The
unreturned and unsuspected and I presume wicked love I felt for you.
And now I've told you--broken precedent and told the truth. And as
you don't love me you'll feel very uncomfortable with me about. And
you won't want to play off pal; you'll fight shy of me except for
everyday work. So it has been the only square thing to do--humiliate
myself into telling.
"I love you, I always have, and I always will--but I'm no home-wrecking,
emotional being and I expect that you will resume our old relationships
and I shall go on serving you and knowing my recompense will be a
handsome farewell gift and a pension.
"Oh, the business woman's life isn't all beer and skittles. We're
expected to lie about our hearts, yet be as reliable as an adding
machine about our columns of figures; to be shut away from the social
world, thrown with men more hours a day than their wives see them and
yet remain immovable, aloof, disinterested! Just good fellows, you
know. Isn't it hideous to think I've really told the truth?"
At this identical moment their platonic friendship, alias tropical
twilight, ended, and Mary's evening star of romance rose to stay. But
such being the case Steve was the last person in the world to try to
convince her that it was so.
All he said was: "I never appreciated you before. Please don't feel
that telling me this will make any difference save that I'll stay
aloof--as you suggest. I can forget it, somewhat, if that will make
you feel any better about it. It is all quite true and equally
hopeless--true things usually are--and if you like I'll send you home
in the car, because you must be a trifle tired."
"Thank you," she remembered answering as she told Steve's chauffeur
where to drive.
"You look as tired as before we went away," Luke complained that same
night when Mary sat at her desk adding up expenses and making out
checks.
"Oh, no. This shade makes everyone look ghastly," she said.
"I'll have to get a hump on and make my pile," he consoled. "I don't
want my sister being all tired out before she's too old to have a good
time."
"A good time?" Mary repeated. "Are you inoculated, too?"
"What's wrong with a good time? I guess Steve O'Valley plays all he
likes!"
"Yes, dear, I guess he does," Mary forced herself to answer.
When Steve returned home that evening he found one of those impromptu
dinner parties on hand instead of a formal engagement. They had become
quite the fad in Bea's set. The idea was this--young matrons convened
in the afternoon at one of their homes for cocktails and confidences;
very likely Sezanne del Monte would drop in to read her last chapter
or Gay Vondeplosshe would arrive brandishing his cane and telling
everyone how beautiful the Italian villa was to be; and by and by they
would gather round the piano to sing the latest songs; then when the
clock struck six there would be a wild flutter and a suggestion:
"Let's phone cook to bring over our dinner. Then our husbands can come
along or not just as they like. We'll have a parlour picnic; and no
one will bother about being dressed. And we'll go to the nickel dance
hall later."
This was followed by a procession of cooks arriving in state in
various motor cars and carrying covered trays and vacuum bottles and
departing in high spirits at the early close of their day's work.
Then the procession of subdued husbands would follow, and conglomerate
menus would be spread on a series of tea tables throughout the rooms,
with Sezanne smoking her small amber-stemmed pipe and describing her
sojourn in a Turkish harem while Gay picked minor chords on his
ukulele. After a later diversion of nickel dance halls and slumming
the young matrons would say good-bye, preparing to sleep until noon,
quite convinced that any one would have called it a day.
Such a party greeted Steve, with Gay showing plans for Beatrice's
secret room with a sliding panel--clever idea, splendid when they
would be playing hide and seek--and the cooks en route with the
kettles and bottles of wine and the husbands meekly arriving in sulky
silence.
A little before two in the morning Steve escorted Aunt Belle back to
the Constantine house.
Beatrice had started to go to bed, but thinking of something she
wished to ask Steve she stationed herself in his room, some candy near
at hand and Sezanne's manuscript as solace until he should arrive.
"I wanted to ask you if Mary Faithful has returned," she said,
throwing down the manuscript as he came in. "Heavens, don't look like
a thundercloud! You used to complain about getting into evening dress
for dinner; and now when they are as informal as a church supper you
row even more. How was papa? Did you go in to see him? Does the house
look terrible?"
"Of course I didn't see your father at two in the morning; he was
asleep. Your aunt fell into a bucket of plaster."
"Plaster! Why did the men leave it where she could fall into it? Did
it hurt her dress?"
"No, just her bones." Steve laughed in spite of himself. "The dress
hadn't started to begin where the bones hit the bucket."
Beatrice giggled. "Aunt Belle will try to look like a Kate Greenaway
creation. And isn't Jill stout? I'd eat stones before I'd get like
her. Well, what about the Faithful woman?"
"Why such a title? It was always Mary Faithful, and even Mary."
"I don't know--but ever since I worked with you this summer I've
realized what an easy time she has. She isn't burdened with friends
and social duties. It's all so clearcut and straight-ahead sailing for
her. I suppose she laughs at her day's work."
"She has returned."
"Then we can go to the Berkshires. Sezanne knows an artist and some
people from Chicago who are ripping company and they are going to
visit her cousin at Great Barrington and we are all invited
there----"
"Once and for all," Steve said, shortly, to his own surprise, "I am
not in on this! Just count yourself a fair young widow for the time
being. I cannot run my business, help close up your father's affairs,
be a social puppet, and go chasing off with bob-haired freaks to the
Berkshires, and expect to survive. I'm going to work and keep on the
job--it will be bad enough when I have to live in an Italian villa.
Who knows what new tortures that will bring? But for a few months I am
certain of my whereabouts, so plan on going alone."
"So you won't come with me! Oh, Steve, sometimes I can just see the
whole mistake--you should never have made a fortune. Rather you should
have been a nice foreman with a meek little wife in four-dollar hats
and a large portion of offspring. You should have lived in a model
bungalow with even a broom closet in the kitchen and leaded windows at
one side. You would have been a socialist and headed labour-union
picnics. But as my husband and my father's assistant and all that--you
are as impossible as that Faithful woman would be if she tried to be a
lady!"
For a moment Steve hesitated. But the average day does not include
losing ten thousand on the stock exchange from sheer folly, finding
out that your blood pressure is too high, that your faithful secretary
loves you and is truer blue than ever, and discovering at the same
moment that you love her yet may not tell her so. Nor is a day so
hectic usually concluded by finding an impromptu parlour picnic in
full swing at home where rest was sought--finding, too, the full
realization that you not only do not love your wife but you do not
even approve of her.
So he said, quietly: "If you wish to make some radical change
regarding your husband would you mind waiting until he has had a
chance at a shower bath and some breakfast?"
For the first time in her life the Gorgeous Girl found herself
gathering up Monster, the candy, and the novel manuscript in her
lace-draped arms and standing outside her husband's firmly closed
door.
The shock was so great that she could not squeeze out a single tear.