THE PEACE BASIS
There were four in their party but it was only with Alfred Baldwin that
Mary Wollaston danced. The other man--Black his name was, and he came
from Iowa City or Dubuque or thereabouts--devoted all his attention to
Baldwin's wife. He was very rich, very much married--out in Iowa--and
whenever he made his annual business trip to New York, he liked to have a
real New York time. They had dined together at the Baldwins' apartment
with a vague idea of going afterward to see a play of Baldwin's then
drawing toward the close of a successful season's run. But dinner had
been late and they had lingered too long over it to make this excursion
worth while. It had amused both Mary and Christabel to discover Black's
secret hope of being taken back-stage and introduced to the beautiful
young star who was playing in the piece and taking her out to supper with
them. He didn't know that Baldwin hated her with a perfect hatred and
never got within speaking distance of her if he could help it.
So, by way of making up to the western visitor for his disappointment
they taxied up-town about ten o'clock to the brightest, loudest and most
fantastically expensive of New York's dancing restaurants. Once there, he
took command of the party; confidently addressed the head waiter by his
first name and began "opening wine" with a lavish hand. He was flirting
in what he conceived to be quite a desperate and depraved manner with
Christabel, and what enhanced his pleasure in this entertainment was that
he did it all right under the nose of the husband, who obviously didn't
mind a bit. He would talk eloquently when he got home, with carefully
selected corroborative details, about the wickedness of New York.
Mary liked the Baldwins. Christabel was on the executive committee of
their Fund and one of the best and steadiest and most sensible supporters
it had. She was a real person. Baldwin, himself, whom she hadn't known so
long nor so well and had regarded from afar as a rather formidable
celebrity, proved on better acquaintance, though witty and sophisticated,
to be as comfortable as an old glove. Altogether they were the nearest
thing to friends that her long sojourn in New York had given her. She had
sometimes thought rather wildly of putting them to the test and seeing
whether they were real friends or not.
To-night, though, even they irritated her. She wished Christabel would
snub that appalling bounder, Black, as he deserved. How could she go on
playing up to him like that! As for Baldwin, she wished he would just
dance with her and not talk. She supposed that the amount of alcohol they
had consumed since seven o'clock had something to do with his verging
upon the vein, the Broadway sentimental vein, that he had got started on
and couldn't seem to let alone.
It wasn't new to Mary. Indeed it was a phenomenon familiarly associated
in her mind with Forty-second Street restaurants and late hours and
strong drink, particularly gin. The crocodile tear for the good woman who
stayed at home; who didn't know; who never, please God! should know. The
tribute to flower-like innocence--the paper flower-like innocence of the
stage _ingenue_!
Baldy wasn't as bad as that, couldn't ever conceivably be as bad as that,
no matter how much he had had to drink. Perhaps, if she had not been
hypersensitive to-night,--in an impossible mood for any sort of party
really--she might have failed to detect the familiar strain in his
sensible, rather fatherly talk. As it was, she thought she did detect it
and it made her want to scream--or swear!
There is one point to be urged in Baldy's defense that Mary never learned
to allow for. Gin or no gin, the effect of contrast she presented to her
surroundings in a place like this, her look of a seraphic visitor gone
astray, would have given any one the impulse, at least, to rush to the
rescue. To begin with, it was not possible to credit her with the
twenty-five years she truly claimed; nineteen, in a soft colored evening
frock like the one she had on to-night, was about what one would have
guessed. Then, you never would have believed, short of discovering the
fact yourself, how strong she was; her slenderness and the fine
articulation of her joints made her look fragile. Her coloring helped the
illusion along, the clear unsophisticated blue of her eyes, the pallor of
her hair that the petals of a tea-rose could have got lost in,--it was,
literally, just about the tint of unbleached linen--and the pearly
translucence of her skin. If you got the opportunity to look close enough
to see that there wasn't a grain of powder upon it, not even between the
shoulder blades, it made you think of flower petals again. What clenched
the effect was her healthy capacity for complete relaxation when no
effort was required of her. She drooped a little and people thought she
looked tired. She never could see herself like that and never made due
allowance for the effect she produced, invariably upon strangers and not
infrequently upon an old friend.
To-night, she lacked the name to label her mood by, rejecting rather
fiercely the one that kept offering itself. You couldn't be homesick when
home was the last place in the world you wanted to go back to--the place
you were desperately marshaling reasons for staying away from.
It was the non-appearance of her brother, Rush, that had brought a lot of
dispersed feelings to a focus. She had heard nothing later from him than
the letter she referred to when she last wrote to her father. She had
expected a cable and it hadn't come. She had this morning gone over to
Hoboken to meet the transport he had said he expected to sail on, but
having got down to the pier a little late, after the debarkation had
begun, she could not be sure that she hadn't missed him. So she had gone
back to her tiny flat in Waverly Place and had spent the rest of the day
there, vainly hoping that he would turn up or at least that she should
get some word of him. And sitting around like that for hours and hours
she had, which was a silly thing to do, let her thoughts run wild over
things--a thing--that there was simply no sense in thinking about at all.
It was an odd fact, which she had noted long before today, that anything
connected with home, a letter from her father or her aunt, news of the
doings of any of her Chicago friends (the birth of Olive Corbett's second
baby, for example), any vivid projection of a bit of the pattern of the
life into which she had once been woven, roused that nightmare memory. Or
gave, rather, to a memory which normally did not trouble her much, the
quality of a nightmare; a moment of paralyzed incredulity that it could
have happened to her; a pang of clear horror that it really and truly had
happened to her very self; to this Mary Wollaston who still lived in the
very place where it had happened.
This afternoon, while she had sat awaiting from moment to moment the
appearance of her brother, or at least the sound of his voice over the
telephone, the pang had been prolonged into an agony. She had let herself
drift into a fantastic speculation of a sort that was perfectly new. What
if the boy who had shared that crazy adventure with her, himself an
officer bound overseas, had fallen in with Rush, made friends with him,
told him the story!
This was pure melodrama, she knew. There was, in any external sense,
nothing to be feared. The thing had happened almost a year ago. It had
had no consequences--except this inexplicable one that her brother's
approach brought back the buried memory of it. Why should it cling like
that? Like an acid that wouldn't wash off! She was not, as far as her
mind went, ashamed of it. Never had been. But, waiving all the
extenuating circumstances--which had really surrounded the act--admitting
that it was a sin (this thing that she had done once and had, later,
learned the impossibility of ever doing again), was it any worse than
what her brother had probably done a score of times?
What was this brother of hers going to be like? It wasn't possible, of
course, that she would find him the boy he had been five years ago,
before he went to France--though from some of his letters one might have
thought he hadn't changed a bit. Wasn't it likely that he'd turn out to
be some one she could cling to a little; confide her perplexities
to--some of them? Was there a chance that ripened, disillusioned, made
gentle and wise by the alchemy of the furnace he had come through, he
might prove to be the one person in the world to whom she could confide
everything? That would make an end to her nightmare, she felt sure.
The question whether he was or was not going to turn out like that was
one presently to be answered. Until she knew the answer she didn't want
to think at all, least of all about those things which Baldy's talk
to-night kept rousing echoes of.
"Oh, they all look good when they're far away," she said, picking that
bit of comic supplement slang deliberately to annoy him. "I don't believe
our grandfathers and grandmothers were always such models of decorum as
they tried, when they had grown old, to make us think. And the simple
primitive joys ... I believe an old-fashioned husking bee, if they had
plenty of hard cider to go with it, was just as bad as this--coarser if
not so vulgar. After all, most of these people will go virtuously home
to bed pretty soon and you'd find them back at work to-morrow morning not
any the worse, really, for this. It may be a rather poor sort of home
they go to, but how do you know that the vine-covered cottage you have
been talking about was any better?"
"Not to mention," he added, in humorous concurrence, "that there was
probably typhoid in the well the old oaken bucket hung in. It seems odd
to be convicted of sentimentality by an innocent babe like you. But if
you had been looking at the party down at the end table behind you that
I've had under my eye for ten minutes, perhaps you'd feel more as I do.
No! don't turn around; they have been looking at us."
"Moralizing over us, perhaps," she suggested. "Thinking how wicked we
probably were."
"No," he said, "I happen to know the girls. They live down in our part of
town, just over in the Village, that is. They have been here six or eight
years. One of them was quite a promising young illustrator once. And
they're both well-bred--came obviously from good homes. And they've both
gone, well--clean over the edge."
Somehow his innocent euphemism annoyed her. "You mean they are
prostitutes?" she asked.
He frowned in protest at her employment of the word but assented
unequivocally. He was used--as who is not--to hearing young women discuss
outspokenly such topics but he couldn't forgive it from one who looked
like Mary Wollaston.
"I have a hunch," he said, "that the two boys who are with them are
officers out of uniform. I noticed that they looked the other way
pretty carefully when that major who is sitting at the next table to
ours came in."
"Let's dance again," she said. "I love this Hawaiian Moonlight thing."
He saw her take the opportunity that rising from the table gave her for
a good square look at the party he had been talking about and some change
in her manner made him say with quick concern, "What is it?"
But she ignored the question and stepped out upon the floor with him.
They had danced half-way round the room when she said quietly, "One of
the boys at that table is my brother Rush."
Baldwin said, "He has seen you, I think." He felt her give a sort of gasp
before she replied but the words came steadily enough.
"Oh, yes, we saw each other at the same time."
He said nothing more, just went on dancing around the room with her in
silence, taking care, without appearing to do so, to cut the corner where
Rush was sitting, rather broadly. After two or three rounds of the floor,
she flagged a little and without asking any questions, he led her back to
their table. Luckily, Christabel and her Iowan had disappeared.
As soon as she was seated she asked him for a pencil and something she
could write on--a card of his, the back of an old letter, anything. She
wrote, "Won't you please come and ask me to dance?" and she slid it over
to him. He read it and understood, picked up a busboy with his eye and
despatched him with the folded scrap for delivery to Captain Wollaston at
the end table.
Mary meanwhile had cradled her chin in her palms and closed her eyes.
She had experienced so clear a premonition before she turned round to
look at the party at the end table that one of those officers out of
uniform would turn out to be Rush that the verification of it had the
quality of something that happens in a dream. She felt a sharp
incredulity that it could really be they, staring at each other across
that restaurant. More than that, the brother she saw was not--in that
first glance--the man she had been trying all day to make up her mind he
would be. Not the new Rush with two palms to his _Croix de Guerre_ and
his American D.S.C.; and the scars in his soul from the experiences
those decorations must represent; but the Rush she had said good-by to
in the autumn of 1914 when he set out to be a freshman at Harvard, the
kid brother she had counciled and occasionally admonished, in the
vicarious exercise of her father's authority. And in his panic-stricken
gaze at her, she had recognized his instinctive acceptance of that
position. Exactly so would he have looked five interminable years ago if
she had caught him in mischief.
Then, like the undertow of a big wave, the reaction caught her. It was
intolerable that he should look at her like that. He who had earned his
manhood and its privileges in the long death grapple with the grimmest of
realities. Certainly she was not the one to cast the first stone at him.
She must contrive somehow, at once, to make that clear to him. The
urgency of the thing lay in her belief that the whole of their future
relationship depended upon the removing of his misapprehension
now--to-night.
She could not go to that table where he sat without seeming more than
ever the school mistress in pursuit of a truant, but perhaps he would
come to her if she put her request right. They had danced together quite
a lot in the old days. She danced so well that not even her status of
elder sister had prevented his enjoying the exercise of their combined
accomplishment.
A horrible misgiving had attacked her when she had scribbled the note and
closed her eyes, that the cocktails and the champagne she herself had
consumed since seven o'clock might have clouded her judgment--if, indeed,
they were not responsible for the whole nightmare. Would she be equal to
following out the line she had set for herself?
But no trace of that misgiving was apparent to her when Rush, after a
wait of only two or three minutes, appeared at her table. She greeted him
with a smile and a Hello, nodded a fleeting farewell to Baldwin and
slipped comfortably into her brother's arms out on the floor. They danced
away without a word. There was the same quite beautiful accord between
them that there had been in the old days, and the sense of this steadied
her. They had gone all the way around the floor before she spoke.
"It is like old times, isn't it?" she said. "And it does seem good. You
don't mind, do you,--for ten minutes?"
"Ten minutes?" he echoed dully.
She knew then, as she had indeed been aware from the first, that he was
drunk and that only by the most painful effort, could he command his
scattered wits at all. It made her want to cry that he should be trying
so hard. She must not cry. That would be the final outrage. She must be
very simple and clear. She must--_must_ contrive to make him understand.
"Will you listen to me, dear, and do exactly what I ask you to? I want
you to go back to your people and forget that you have seen me at all."
"I am going to take you home--out of this," he said laboriously.
"I'm going home soon, but not with you. I want you to go back to--to the
girl you brought here. No, dear, listen. This is the only reason I sent
for you. To tell you that I wasn't going to try to scold you. I don't
mind a bit. I want to tell you that, so that when you come back to me
to-morrow or next day or whenever your party is quite over, you won't
feel that you have anything to try to explain or apologize for. Now take
me back to my place and then go on to yours."
"I won't take you back to him," he said doggedly. "What do you think I
am? I'm drunk, but not enough for that. I am going to take you home."
She tried to laugh but in spite of herself it was more like a sob.
"Rush, dear, don't be silly. I am perfectly all right--or would be if I
hadn't drunk quite so much champagne. They'll take me home. His wife's
here with him and they're old friends of mine. They know a lot of our
friends in Chicago. Please, Rush...."
"Do you think I'd go back to that--" he managed to pull up on the edge
of an ugly word--"back to those people, and leave you here? Is it your
wrap on that chair? We'll stop and get it and then we'll go."
She could have wept with vexation over the way her scheme had gone awry
but there was clearly nothing else to do. She retrieved her cloak, simply
said good night to Christabel and the man named Black, leaving Baldy to
explain things as he chose.
Five minutes later she gave a taxi driver the address of her flat and
dropped back against the cushions beside her brother. Neither of them
spoke a word during that fifteen-minute drive. Mary wept quietly most of
the way--it didn't matter there in the dark. The thought of this splendid
glorious brother of hers painfully endeavoring to drag himself back into
a state of sobriety from his first wild caper after long wearing of the
harness of discipline--an escapade she supposed that he must have been
looking forward to for days--dragging himself back to protect her--oh, it
was too hopeless! Should she ever be able to explain to him why she had
sent for him, and that her intentions had been the opposite of those of
the moralizing meddler he would take her for? If only she could make it
up to him somehow. She would have liked to reach over and pull him down
into her arms, mother him and tell him not to mind--there was something
so intolerably pathetic about his effort to sit soberly straight--but she
resisted this impulse savagely. The alcohol in her own veins was
responsible for this. She could not quite trust herself not to go
maudlin. So she froze herself tight and huddled away from him into her
own corner.
She did not think beyond the address she had given to the chauffeur until
they pulled up at her door. Then she turned to Rush and asked, "Where
shall he take you? Are you staying at a hotel?"
"I am going to take you home," he said precisely.
She saw she did not dare to let him go. There was no telling what serious
trouble he might get into, in his illicit civilian dress, if she turned
him adrift now. So she said, simply, "Well, here we are. Come in."
She opened the street door with her latch-key, and punched on the hall
lights. She dreaded the two flights of stairs, but with the help of the
banister rail he negotiated them successfully enough. And then he was
safely brought to anchor in her sitting-room. It was plain he had not the
vaguest idea where he was.
"I'll make some coffee," she said. "That will--pull us both together. And
it won't take a minute because it's all ready to make for breakfast."
She was not gone, indeed, much longer than that, but when she came back
from her kitchenette he had dropped like a log upon her divan, submerged
beyond all soundings. So she tugged him around into a more comfortable
position, managed to divest him of his dinner-jacket and his waistcoat,
unbuttoned his collar and shirt-band, took off his shoes, and covered him
up with an eiderdown quilt. Then she kissed him--it was five years since
she had done that--and went, herself, to bed.
At ten o'clock the next morning she sat behind her little breakfast
table--it was daintily munitioned with a glass coffee machine, a
grapefruit and a plate of toast--waiting, over _The Times_, for Rush to
wake up. She looked more seraphic than ever, enveloped in a white turkish
toweling bathrobe and with her hair in a braid. Her brother lay on the
divan just as she had left him the night before. Presently the change in
his breathing told her that he was struggling up out of the depths of
sleep. She looked over at him and saw him blinking at the ceiling. When
his gaze started round her way, she turned her attention to the busy
little coffee machine which opportunely needed it.
It was a minute or two before he spoke. "Is that really you, Mary?"
She smiled affectionately at him and said, "Hello," adding with just an
edge of good-humored mischief, "How do you feel?"
He turned abruptly away from her. "I feel loathsome," he said.
"Poor dear, of course you do. I'll tell you what to do. I've got a nice
big bathroom in there. Go in and take a cold one." Then--"You've grown
inches, Rush, since you went away but I believe you could still get into
a suit of my pajamas--plain ones, not ruffly. Anyhow, I've another big
bathrobe like this that you could roll up in. You'll be just in time for
the coffee. You won't know yourself by then."
"I wish I didn't," he said morosely.
There wasn't much good arguing with that mood, she knew, so she
waited a little.
"Is this where you live?" he asked. "You brought me here last night?"
"You brought me," she amended.
He frowned over that but didn't take it in. The next moment though he
sat up suddenly and after a struggle with the giddiness this movement
caused, asked, "Who else is here? Where's the other girl that lives
with you?"
"She's not here now," Mary said. "We are all by ourselves."
He rose unsteadily to his feet. "I've got to get out of here quick. If
anybody came in ..."
"Rush, dearest!" she entreated. "Don't be silly. Lie down again--Well,
then take that easy chair. Nobody will come in." Then over his air of
resolute remorse she cried, on the edge of tears herself, "Oh, _please_
don't be so unhappy. Do let's settle down and be comfy together. I don't
have to go to the office to-day. My job's just about played out. But
nobody ever comes here to see me in the daytime. And it wouldn't matter
if they did."
But this change of attitude was clearly beyond him. "I'll have to ask you
to tell me what happened last night. You were there at that restaurant
with friends of yours I suppose. I must have disgraced you up to the hilt
with them. I should think you'd hate the sight of me."
"You didn't disgrace me at all," she contradicted, and now the tears did
came into her eyes. "They knew I was expecting you and I told Mr. Baldwin
who you were. You came up in the nicest way and asked me to dance and
when we went away together there wasn't a thing--about you--that they
could see. I was on the point of tears myself because my plan had gone
wrong. But that would have seemed natural enough to them."
He frowned at the name Baldwin, as if he were trying to recover a memory.
Now he felt vaguely in his trousers pocket and pulled out the crumpled
visiting card that had her note scribbled on the back of it. "You haven't
told me yet what happened," he said.
"Oh, I was afraid you wouldn't remember." She looked away from him as she
said it and a little unwonted color crept into her cheeks.
"Afraid?" he questioned.
"I wanted you to understand," she said, "and now I'll have to tell you
again. It was because I was trying so hard not to meddle that I did. I
sent that little note to you just to get a chance to tell you not to mind
my seeing you there with those others--not to let it spoil your party. I
couldn't bear to have you come to me to-day, or to-morrow or whenever it
was, feeling--well, ashamed you know, and explanatory. That's what I
tried to tell you last night but couldn't make you understand. So I did,
really, just exactly what I was meaning not to. Of course, I loved you
for coming away and I love having you here like this, all to myself. But
I didn't mean to--to spoil things for you."
He stared at her a moment in blank inapprehension; then a deep blush came
burning into his face. "You didn't understand," he said thickly. "You
didn't know what those girls were."
"Oh, Rush!" she cried. "Of course I did. I knew exactly what they
were--better than you. I even knew who they were. They live not very far
from here."
He paled and his look was frightened. "How did you know that?" he
demanded. "How could you know a thing like that?"
"They've lived here in the Village for years," she said, summarizing
Baldy without quoting him as her authority. "One of them used to be an
illustrator--or something--before she went--over the edge. They're two of
our celebrities. One can't go about, unless he's stone blind, without
picking up things like that."
"You did know what she was, then," he persisted, doggedly pushing
through something it was almost impossible for him to say, "and yet,
knowing, you asked me to leave you alone and go back to her. You wanted
me to do that?"
"I didn't want you to!" she cried. "I hated it, of course. But
men--people--do things like that, and I could see how--natural it was
that you wanted to. And if you wanted to, I didn't think it fair that it
should be spoiled for you just because we happened to recognize each
other. I didn't want you to hate me for having spoiled it. That's all."
She gave him the minute or two he evidently needed for turning this over
in his mind. Then she turned her back on the window she had withdrawn to
and began again.
"I used to be just a big sister to you, of course. Ever so superior, I
guess, and a good bit of a prig. And all this time over there in France
with nothing but my letters and that silly picture of me in the khaki
frame, I suppose you have been thinking of me, well,--as a sort of nice
angel. I'm not either, really. I don't want to be either.
"I want to be somebody you feel would understand anything; somebody you
could tell anything to. So that it would work the other way as well.
Because I've got to have somebody to tell things to,--troubles, and
worries. And I've been hoping, ever since your letter came, that it would
turn out to be you."
"What sort of troubles?" He shot the question in rather tensely.
There was a breathless moment before she answered, but she shook it off
with a laugh and her manner lightened. "There's nothing to be so solemn
about as all that. We don't want to wallow. We'll have some
breakfast--only you go first and tub."
He was too young and healthy and clean-blooded to resist the effect upon
his spirits which the cold water and the fresh white bathrobe and the hot
strong coffee with real cream in it produced. And the gloomy, remorseful
feeling, which he felt it his moral duty to maintain intact, simply
leaked away. She noted the difference in him and half-way through their
breakfast she left her chair and came round to him.
"Would you very much mind being kissed now?" she asked.
His answer, with a laugh, was to pull her down upon his knee and hug
her up tight in his arms. They looked rather absurdly alike in those
two white bathrobes, though this was an appearance neither of them was
capable of observing. She disengaged herself presently from his embrace
and went to find him some cigarettes, refraining from taking one
herself from a feeling that he would probably like it better just then
if she did not.
Back in her own place over her coffee and toast, she had no difficulty in
launching him upon the tale of his own recent experiences. What the
French were like now the war was over; and the Boche he had been living
among in the Coblenz area;--the routine of his army life, the friends he
made over there, and so on. Altogether she built him up immensely in his
own esteem. It was plain he liked having her for a younger sister instead
of for an older one, listening so contentedly to his tales, ministering
to his momentary wants, visibly wondering at and adoring him.
But she broke the spell when she asked him what he meant to do now.
He turned restlessly in his chair. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know
what the deuce there is I can do. Certainly father's idea of my going
back to college and then to medical school afterward, is just plain, rank
nonsense. I'd be a doddering old man before I got through--thirty years
old. I should think that even he would see that. It will have to be
business, I suppose, but if any kind friend comes around and suggests
that I begin at the bottom somewhere--Mr. Whitney, for instance, offering
me a job at ten dollars a week in his bank--I'll kill him. I can't do
that. I won't. At the end of about ten days, I'd run amuck. What I'd
really like," he concluded, "for about a year would be just this." His
gesture indicated the bathrobe, the easy chair and the dainty breakfast
table. "This, all the morning and a ball-game in the afternoon. Lord, it
will be good to see some real baseball again. We'll go to a lot of games
this summer. What are the Sox going to be like this year?"
She discussed the topic expertly with him and with a perfectly genuine
interest, at some length. "Oh, it would be fun," she finished with a
little sigh, "only I shan't be there, you know. At least I don't think I
shall." Then before he could ask her why not, she added in sharper focus,
"I can't go home, Rush."
"Can't!" he exclaimed. "What do you mean by that?"
"Oh, nothing to make a fuss about," she said with a frown of irritation.
"I wish you weren't so jumpy this morning,--or perhaps, it's I that am.
All I meant was that home isn't a comfortable place for me and I won't go
back there if I can help it--only I am afraid I can't. That's the trouble
I wanted to talk to you about."
"I thought you liked the new stepmother," he said. "Hasn't she turned out
well?--What am I supposed to call her, anyhow? I wanted to find out about
that before I was right up against it."
"Call her?" Mary was a little taken back. "Why, anything you like, I
should think. I've always called her Paula.--You weren't thinking of
calling her mother, were you?"
"Well," he protested, "how should I know? After all, she is father's
wife. And she must be fairly old."
"But, Rush, you've _seen_ her!"
"Only that once, at the wedding. She was made up to look young then, of
course. Painted and dyed and so on, I suppose. I felt so embarrassed and
silly over the whole thing--being just a kid--that I hardly looked at
her. And that was a long while ago."
Mary laughed at that, though she knew it would annoy him. "She never
paints nor dyes nor anything, Ruddy. She doesn't have to. She's such a
perfectly raving beauty without it. And she's more beautiful now than she
was then. She really is young, you see. Hardly enough older than we are
to matter, now that we're grown up."
She saw Rush digesting this idea of a beautiful young stepmother whom he
was to be privileged to call--straight off--by her first name, with a
certain satisfaction, so she waited--rather conscious that she was being
patient--for him to come back from the digression of his own accord.
Presently he did.
"What does she do that you don't like?"
"She does nothing that isn't perfectly nice, and good-tempered,
and--respectable," Mary assured him, and added on a warmer note, "Oh, and
she's really amiable and lovely. I was being a cat. But I am truly fond
of her--when I have her to myself. It's when she's with father ..."
She broke off there, seeing that she could not make that clear to him
(how could she since she would not state it in plain terms to herself?)
and hurried on, "It's really father whom I don't get on with, any more.
He worries about me and feels sorry for me and wants me to come home. But
I'm nothing to him when I do come--but an embarrassment.--No, it _isn't_
rot. He knows it himself and feels horrid about it and raises my
allowance when I go away, though it was foolishly big already; and then,
as soon as I'm back here he begins worrying again, and urging me to come
home. He didn't insist as long as I was doing war work, but now that
that's played out, I suppose he will.
"Oh, I know well enough what I ought to do. I ought to answer some
advertisement for a typist--I can do that, but not stenography--and take
a regular job. The sort you said you'd shoot Mr. Whitney for offering
you. And then I ought to take a hall bedroom somewhere in the
cross-town twenties and live on what I earned. That's the only thing I
can see, and, Rush, I simply haven't the courage to do it. It seems as
if I couldn't do it."
His lively horror at the bare suggestion of such a thing drew her into a
half-hearted defense of the project. Numbers of the girls she knew down
here who had been doing war work were going enthusiastically into things
like that--or at least were announcing an invincible determination to do
so. Only they were cleverer than she at that sort of thing and could hope
for better jobs. They were in luck. They liked it--looked forward to a
life of it as one full of engaging possibilities. But to Mary it was
nothing, she hardly pretended, but a forlorn last shift. If one couldn't
draw nor write nor act nor develop some clever musical stunt, what else
was there for a girl to do?
"Well, of course," said Rush, in a very mature philosophical way and
lighting a cigarette pretty deliberately between the words,--"of course,
what most girls do, is--marry somebody." Then he stole a look around at
his sister to see how she had taken it.
There was a queer look that almost frightened him in her blue eyes. Her
lips, which were trembling, seemed to be trying to smile.
"That's father's idea," she said raggedly. "He's as anxious now that I
should marry somebody--anybody, as he was that I shouldn't five years
ago--before he found Paula. You see I am so terribly--left on his hands."
There was, no doubt, something comical about the look of utter
consternation she saw on her brother's face, but she should not have
tried to laugh at him for a sob caught the laugh in the middle and swept
away the last of her self-control. She flung herself down upon the divan
and buried her face in one of the pillows. He had seen men cry like that
but, oddly enough, never a woman. What he did though was perhaps as much
to the point as anything he could have done. He sat down beside her and
gathered her up tight in his arms and held her there without a word until
the tempest had blown itself out. When the sobs had died away to nothing
more than a tremulous catch in each indrawn breath, he let her go back
among the pillows and turn so that she could look up at him. By that time
the sweat had beaded out upon his forehead, and his hands, which had
dropped down upon her shoulders, were trembling.
"Well," she asked unsteadily. "What do you think of me now?"
He wanted to bend down and kiss her but wisely he forbore. "It's easy to
see what's the matter," he said. "This war business you have been doing
has been too much for you. You're simply all in." Then happily he added,
"I'd call you a case of shell-shock."
She rewarded that with a washed-out smile. "What's the treatment going to
be?" she asked.
"Why," he said, "as soon as I'm done tucking you up properly in this
eiderdown quilt, I'm going out to your icebox and try to find the makings
of an egg-nog. Incidentally, I shall scramble up all the rest of the eggs
I find and eat them myself. And then I'll find something dull to read to
you until you go to sleep. When it's dark enough so that my evening
clothes won't attract too much attention, I'll go back and get into
uniform; then I'll buy two tickets for Chicago on the fast train
to-morrow, and two tickets for a show to-night; and then I'll come back
and take you out to dinner. Any criticisms on that program?"
"Not just for this minute," she said contentedly. "I don't know whether
I'm going to Chicago with you, tomorrow, or not."
"That's all right," he said. "I know all about that." He added, "I
hope the other girl won't mind--the one who lives here with you. What
was her name?"
"Ethel Holland? Oh, she went over to France with the Y.M.C.A. just
about a year ago. I've tried to find somebody to take her place, but
there didn't seem to be any one I liked well enough. So I've been
living alone."
She saw his face stiffen at that but his only comment was that that
simplified matters.