Thorpe returned to New York about the middle of May, in the tenth month of
the war. The true facts concerning the abrupt severance of his connections
with the hospital corps in France were never divulged. His confrères and
his superiors maintained a discreet and loyal silence. It was to Simmy
that he explained the cause of his retirement. Word had gone out among the
troops that he was the American doctor whose practices were infinitely
more to be feared than the bullets from an enemy's guns.... It was
announced from headquarters that he was returning to the United States on
account of ill-health. He had worked hard and unceasingly and had exposed
himself to grave physical hardships. He came home with a medal for
conspicuous and unexampled valour while actually under fire. One report
had it that on more than one occasion he appeared not only to scorn death
but to invite it, so reckless were his deeds.
* * * * *
Meanwhile James Marraville died in great agony. Those nearest to him said,
in so many words, that it was a great pity he did not die at the time of
the operation.
* * * * *
"But," began one of the reporters at the dock, "you are said to have
risked your own life, Dr. Thorpe, on at least half a dozen occasions when
you exposed yourself to the fire of the enemy by going out in front after
men who had fallen and were as good as dead when you got to them. In every
case, we are told the men died on the stretchers while they were being
carried to the rear. Do you mind telling us why you brought those men back
when you knew that they were bound to die—"
"You have been misinformed," interrupted Thorpe. "One of those men did not
die. I did all that was possible to save the lives as well as the bodies
of those wretched fellows. Not one of them appeared to have a chance. The
one who survived was in the most hopeless condition of them all. He is
alive to-day, but without legs or arms. He is only twenty-two. He may live
to be seventy. The others died. Will you say that they are not better off
than he? And yet we tried to save them all. That is what we were there
for. I saw a man run a bayonet through the heart of his own brother one
day. We were working over him at the time and we knew that our efforts
would be useless. The brother knew it also. He merely did the thing we
refused to do. You want to know why I deliberately picked out of all the
wounded the men who seemed to have the least chance for recovery, and
brought them back to a place of safety. Well, I will tell you quite
frankly, why I chose those men from among all the others. They were being
left behind. They were as good as dead, as you say. I wanted to treat the
most hopeless cases that could be found. I wanted to satisfy myself. I
went about it quite cold-bloodedly,—not bravely, as the papers would have
it,—and I confess that I passed by men lying out there who might have had
a chance, looking for those who apparently had none. Seven of them died,
as you say,—seven of the 'hopelessly afflicted.' One of them lived. You
will now say that having proved to my own satisfaction that no man can be
'hopelessly afflicted,' I should be ready to admit the fallacy of my
preachings. But you are wrong. I am more firmly intrenched in my position
than ever before. That man's life should not have been saved. We did him a
cruel wrong in saving it for him. He wanted to die, he still wants to die.
He will curse God to the end of his days because he was allowed to live.
Some day his relatives will exhibit him in public, as one of the greatest
of freaks, and people will pay to enter the side shows to see him. They
will carry him about in shawl straps. He will never be able to protest,
for he has lost the power of speech. He can only _see_ and _hear_. Will
you be able to look into the agonised eyes of that man as he lies propped
up in a chair, a mere trunk, and believe that he is glad to be alive? Will
you then rejoice over the fact that we saved him from a much nobler grave
than the one he occupies in the side-show, where all the world may stare
at him at so much per head? An inglorious reward, gentlemen, for a brave
soldier of the Republic."
"We may quote you as saying, Dr. Thorpe, that you have not abandoned your
theories?"
"Certainly. I shall go on preaching, as you are pleased to call my
advocacy. A great many years from to-day—centuries, no doubt,—the world
will think as I do now. Thank you, gentlemen, for your courtesy in—"
"Have you heard that James Marraville died last week, Dr. Thorpe?" broke
in one of the reporters.
"No," said he, quite unmoved. "I am not surprised, however. I gave him
five or six months."
"Didn't you expect him to get entirely well?" demanded the man, surprised.
Braden shook his head, smiling. "No one expected that, gentlemen,—not even
Mr. Marraville."
"But every one thought that the operation was a success, and—"
"And so it was, gentlemen," said Thorpe unsmilingly; "a very terrible
success."
"Gee, if we print that as coming from you, Dr. Thorpe, it will create the
biggest sensation in years."
"Then I haven't the least doubt that you will print it," said Thorpe.
There was a short silence. Then the spokesman said: "I think I speak for
every man here when I say that we will not print it, Dr. Thorpe. We
understand, but the people wouldn't." He deliberately altered the
character of the interview and inquired if German submarines had been
sighted after the steamship left Liverpool. The whole world was still
shuddering over the disaster to the _Lusitania_, torpedoed the week
before, with the loss of over a thousand souls.
Thorpe drove uptown with Simmy Dodge, who would not hear of his going to
an hotel, but conducted him to his own apartment where he was to remain as
long as he pleased.
"Get yourself pulled together, old chap, before you take up any work,"
advised Simmy. "You look pretty seedy. We're going to have a hot summer,
they say. Don't try to do too much until you pick up a bit. Too bad
they're fighting all over the continent of Europe. If they weren't, hang
me if I wouldn't pack you onto a boat and take you over there for a good
long rest, in spite of what happened to the _Lusitania_. We'll go up into
the mountains in June, Brady,—or what do you say to skipping out to the
San Francisco fair for a few—"
"You're looking thin and sort of pegged out, old boy," began Simmy
soothingly.
"I'm all right, Simmy. Sound as anything. I don't mind telling you that it
wasn't my health that drove me out of the service,—and that's what hurts.
They—they didn't want me. They thought it was best for me to get out."
"Good Lord!" gasped Simmy, struggling between amazement and indignation.
"What kind of blithering fools have they got over—"
"They are not blithering fools," said Thorpe soberly. "The staff would not
have turned me out, I'm sure of that. I was doing good work, Simmy," he
went on rapidly, eagerly, "even though I do say it myself. Everybody was
satisfied, I'm sure. Night and day,—all the time,—mind you, and I was
standing up under it better than any of them. But, you see, it wasn't the
staff that did it. It was the poor devil of a soldier out there in the
trenches. They found out who I was. Newspapers, of course. Well, that
tells the story. They were afraid of me. But I am not complaining. I do
not blame them. God knows it was hard enough for them to face death out
there at the front without having to think of—well, getting it anyhow if
they fell into my hands. I—But there's no use speaking of it, Simmy. I
wanted you to know why I got out, and I want Anne to know. As for the
rest, let them think I was sick or—cowardly if they like."
Simmy was silent for a long time. He said afterwards that it was all he
could do to keep from crying as he looked at the pale, gaunt face of his
friend and listened to the verdict of the French soldiers.
"I don't see the necessity for telling Anne," he said, at last, pulling
rather roughly at his little moustache. They were seated at one of the
broad windows in Simmy's living-room, drinking in the cool air that came
up from the west in advance of an impending thunderstorm. The day had been
hot and stifling. "No sense in letting her know, old man. Secret between
you and me, if you don't—"
"I'd rather she knew," said Thorpe briefly. "In fact, she will have to
know."
"What do you mean?"
Thorpe was staring out over the Park, and did not answer. Simmy found
another cigarette and lighted it, scorching his fingers while furtively
watching his companion's face.
"How is Anne, Simmy?" demanded Thorpe abruptly. There was a fierce, eager
light in his eyes, but his manner was strangely repressed. "Where is she?"
Simmy took a deep breath. "She's well and she's at home."
"You mean,—down there in the old—"
"The old Thorpe house. I don't know what's got into the girl, Brady. First
she swears she won't live in the house, and then she turns around,—just
like that,—and moves in. Workmen all over the place, working overtime and
all that sort of thing,—with Anne standing around punchin' 'em with a
sharp stick if they don't keep right on the job. Top to bottom,—renovated,
redecorated, brightened up,—wouldn't recognise the place as—"
"Is she living there—alone?"
"Yes. New lot of servants and—By the way, old Wade has—what do you think
he has done?"
"How long has she been living down there?" demanded the other,
impatiently. His eyes were gleaming.
"Well, old Wade has gone and got married," went on Simmy, deliberately
ignoring the eager question. "Married a girl of twenty or something like
that. Chucked his job, bloomed out as a dandy,—spats and chamois gloves
and silk hats,—cleared out three weeks ago for a honeymoon,—rather pretty
girl, by the way,—"
Braden's attention had been caught at last and held. "Wade married? Good
Lord! Oh, I say, Simmy, you _can't_ expect me to believe—"
"You'll see. He has shaken the dust of Thorpe house from his person and is
gallivanting around in lavender perfumes and purple linen."
"My God! That old hulk and—twenty years, did you say? Why, the damned old
scoundrel! After all he has seen and—" His jaws closed suddenly with a
snap, and his eyes narrowed into ugly slits.
"Be careful, Brady, old top," said Simmy, shaking his head. "It won't do
to call Wade names, you know. Just stop and think for a second or two."
Thorpe relaxed with a gesture of despair. "You are right, Simmy. Why
should I blame Wade?"
He got up and began pacing the floor, his hands clenched behind his back.
Simmy smoked in silence, apparently absorbed in watching the angry clouds
that blackened the western sky.
Presently Thorpe resumed his seat in the window. His eyes did not meet
Simmy's as the latter turned toward him. He look straight out over the
tops of the great apartment houses on the far side of the Park.
"How long has she been living down there alone?" he asked again.
"Five or six weeks."
"When did you last see her?"
"Yesterday. She's been dreadfully nervous ever since the blowing up of the
_Lusitania_. I asked her to go to the pier with me. She refused. See here,
Brady," said Simmy, rising suddenly and laying his hand on the other's
shoulder, "what are you going to do about Anne?"
"Nothing. Anne can never be anything to me, nor I to her," said Thorpe,
white-faced and stern. His face was rigid.
"Nonsense! You love her, don't you?"
"Yes. That has nothing to do with it, however."
"And she loves you. I suppose that hasn't anything to do with it, either.
I suppose it is right and proper and natural that you both should go on
loving each other to the end of time without realising the joys of—"
"Don't try to argue the—"
"It's right that you should let that glorious, perfect young creature
wither and droop with time, grow old without—oh, Lordy, what a damn fool
you are, Brady! There isn't the slightest reason in this world why you
shouldn't get married and—"
"Stop that, Simmy!"
"Here you are, two absolutely sound, strong, enduring specimens of
humanity,—male and female,—loving each other, wanting each other,—and yet
you say you can never be anything to each other! Hasn't nature anything to
do with it? Are you going to sit there and tell me that for some
obstinate, mawkish reason you think you ought to deprive her of the one
man in all this world that she wants and must have? It doesn't matter what
she did a couple of years ago. It doesn't matter that she was,—and still
may be designing,—the fact remains that she is the woman you love and that
you are her man. She married old Mr. Thorpe deliberately, I grant you. She
doesn't deny it. She loved you when she did it. And you can't, to save
your soul, hate her for it. You ought to do so, I admit. But you don't,
and that solves the problem. You want her now even more than you did two
years ago. You can't defy nature, old chap. You may defy convention, and
honour, and even common decency, but you can't beat nature out of its due.
Now, look me in the eye! Why can't you marry Anne and—be everything to
her, instead of nothing, as you put it? Answer me!"
"It is impossible," groaned Thorpe. "You cannot understand, Simmy."
"Nothing is impossible," said Simmy, the optimist. "If you are afraid of
what people will say about it, then all I have to say is that you are
worse than a coward: you are a stupid ass. People talked themselves black
in the face when she married your grandfather, and what good did it do
them? Not a particle of good. They roasted her to a fare-you-well, and
they called her a mean, avaricious, soulless woman, and still she
survives. Everybody expects her to marry you. When she does it, everybody
will smile and say 'I told you so,'—and sneer a little, perhaps,—but, hang
it all, what difference should that make? This is a big world. It is
busier than you think. It will barely take the time to sniff twice or
maybe three times at you and Anne and then it will hustle along on the
scent of something new. It's always smelling out things, but that's all it
amounts to. It overlooks divorces, liaisons, murders,—everything, in fact,
except disappointments. It never forgives the man or woman who disappoints
it. Now, I know something else that's on your mind. You think that because
you operated—fatally, we'll say,—on your grandfather, that that is an
obstacle in the way of your marriage with Anne. Tommy-rot! I've heard of a
hundred doctors who have married the widows of their patients, and their
friends usually congratulate 'em, which goes to prove something, doesn't
it? You are expected by ninety per cent. of the inhabitants of greater New
York to marry Anne Tresslyn. They may have forgotten everything else, but
that one thing they _do_ expect. They said it would happen and it must.
They said it when Anne married your grandfather, they said it when he died
and they say it now, even though their minds are filled with other
things."
Thorpe eyed him steadily throughout this earnest appeal. "Do you think
that Anne expects it, Simmy?" he inquired, a harsh note in his voice.
Simmy had to think quickly. "I think she does," he replied, and always was
to wonder whether he said the right thing. "She is in love with you. She
wants you, and anything that Anne wants she expects to get. I don't mean
that in a disparaging sense, either. If she doesn't marry you, she'll
never marry any one. She'll wait for you till the end of her days. Even if
you were to marry some one else, she'd—"
"I shall not marry any one else," said Thorpe, almost fiercely.
"—She'd go on waiting and wanting you just the same, and you would go on
wanting her," concluded Simmy. "You will never consider your life complete
until you have Anne Tresslyn as a part of it. She wants to make you happy.
That's what most women want when they're in love with a man."
"I tell you, Simmy, I cannot marry Anne. I love her,—God knows how
terribly I want her,—in spite of everything. It _is_ nature. You can't
kill love, no matter how hard you try. Some one else has to do the
killing. Anne is keeping it alive in me. She has tortured my love, beaten
it, outraged it, but all the time she has been secretly feeding it,
caressing it, never for an instant letting it out of her grasp. You cannot
understand, Simmy. You've never been in love with a woman like Anne. She
may have despaired at times, but she has never given up the fight, not
even when she must have thought that I despised her. She knew that my love
was mortally hurt, but do you think she would let it die? No! She will
keep it alive forever,—and she will suffer, too, in doing so. But what's
that to Anne? She—"
"Just a second, old chap," broke in Simmy. "You are forgetting that Anne
wants you to be happy."
"God, how happy I could have been with her!"
"See here, will you go down there and see her?" demanded Simmy.
"I can't do that,—I can't do it. Simmy—" he lowered his voice to almost a
whisper,—"I can't trust myself. I don't know what would happen if I were
to see her again,—be near her, alone with her. This longing for her has
become almost unbearable. I thought of her every minute of the time I was
out there at the front—Yes, I had to put the heaviest restraint upon
myself at times to keep from chucking the whole thing and dashing back
here to get her, to take her, to keep her,—maybe to kill her, I don't
know. Now I realise that I was wrong in coming back to America at all. I
should have gone—oh, anywhere else in the world. But here I am, and,
strangely enough, I feel stronger, more able to resist. It was the
distance between us that made it so terrible. I can resist her here, but,
by heaven, I couldn't over there. I could have come all the way back from
France to see her, but I can't go from here down to Washington Square,—so
that shows you how I stand in the matter."
"Now I know the real reason why you came back to little old New York,"
said Simmy sagely, and Thorpe was not offended.
"In the first place I cannot marry her while she still has in her
possession the money for which she sold herself and me," said Thorpe,
musing aloud. "You ought to at least be able to understand that, Simmy? No
matter how much I love her, I can't make her my wife with that accursed
money standing—But there's no use talking about _that_. There is an even
graver reason why I ought not to marry her, an insurmountable reason. I
cannot tell you what it is, but I fear that down in your heart you
suspect."
Simmy leaned forward in his chair. "I think I know, old man," he said
simply. "But even that shouldn't stand in the way. I don't see why you
should have been kind and gentle and merciful to Mr. Thorpe, and refuse to
be the same, in a different way, to her." His face broke into a whimsical
smile. "Anne is what you might call hopelessly afflicted. Dammit all, put
her out of her misery!"
Thorpe stared at him aghast. The utter banality of the remark left him
speechless. For the first time in their acquaintance, he misjudged Simmy
Dodge. He drew back from him, scowling.
"That's a pretty rotten thing to say, Simmy," he said, after a moment.
"Pretty poor sort of wit."
"It wasn't meant for wit, my friend," said Simmy seriously. "I meant every
word of it, no matter how rotten it may have sounded. If you are going to
preach mercy and all that sort of silly rot, practise it whenever it is
possible. There's no law against your being kind to Anne Tresslyn. You
don't have to be governed by a commission or anything like that. She's
just as deserving as any one, you know."
"Which is another way of saying that she _deserves_ my love?" cried Thorpe
angrily.
"She's got it, so it really doesn't matter whether she deserves it or not.
You can't take it away from her. You've tried it and—well, she's still got
it, so there's no use arguing."
"Do you think it gives me any happiness to love her as I do?" cried the
other. "Do you think I am finding joy in the prospect of never having her
for my own—all for my own? Do you—"
"Well, my boy, do you think she is finding much happiness living down
there in that old house all alone? Do you think she is getting much real
joy out of her little old two millions? By the way, why is she living down
there at all? I can tell you. She's doing it because she's got nerve
enough to play the game out as she began it. She's doing it because she
believes it will cause you to think better of her. This is a guess on my
part, but I know darned well she wouldn't be doing it if there wasn't some
good and sufficient reason."
Thorpe nodded his head slowly, an ironic smile on his lips. "Yes, she _is_
playing the game, but not as she began it. I am not so sure that I think
better of her for doing it."
"Brady, I hope you'll forgive me for saying something harsh and
disrespectful about your grandfather, but here goes. He played you a
shabby trick in taking Anne away from you in the first place. No matter
how shabbily Anne behaved toward you, he was worse than she. Then he
virtually compelled you to perform an operation that—well, I'll not say
it. We can forgive him for that. He was suffering. And then he went out of
his way to leave that old house down there to Anne, knowing full well that
if she continued to live in it, it would be a sort of prison to her. She
can't sell it, she can't rent it. She's got to live in it, or abandon it
altogether. I call it a pretty mean sort of trick to play on her, if
you'll forgive my—"
"She doesn't have to live in it," said Thorpe doggedly.
"She is going to live there until you take her out of it, bodily if you
please, and you are going to become so all-fired sorry for her that
you'll—"
"Good Lord, Simmy," shouted Thorpe, springing to his feet with a bitter
imprecation, "don't go on like this. I can't stand it. I know how she
hates it. I know how frightened, how miserable she is down there. It _is_
a prison,—no, worse than that, it is haunted by something that you cannot
possibly—My God, it must be awful for her, all alone,—shivering,
listening,—something crawly—something sinister and accusing—Why, she—"
"Here, here, old fellow!" cried Simmy in alarm. "Don't go off your nut.
You're talking like a crazy man,—and, hang it all, I don't like the look
in your eye. Gosh, if it gives you the creeps—who don't have to be down
there of nights,—what must it be for that shrinking, sensitive—Hey! Where
are you going?"
"I'm going down there to see her. I'm going to tell her that I was a cur
to write what I did to her the day I sailed. I—" He stopped short near the
door, and faced his friend. His hands were clenched.
"I shall see her just this once,—never again if I can avoid it," he said.
"Just to tell her that I don't want her to live in that house. She's got
to get out. I'll not know a moment's peace until she is out of that
house."
Simmy heard the door slam and a few minutes later the opening and closing
of the elevator cage. He sat quite still, looking out over the trees. He
was a rather pathetic figure.
"I wonder if I'd be so loyal to him if I had a chance myself," he mused.
"Oh, Lordy, Lordy!" He closed his eyes as if in pain.