JOHN MAKES A POINT OF IT
Mary was warmly touched by the thought of Wallace's coming to see her in
that special sort of way when he was certain of finding her at dinner an
hour or two later. Her feelings about him were rather mixed but he dated
back to the very earliest of her memories, and his kindly affectionate
attitude toward her had never failed, even during those periods when she
had treated him most detestably. Even as a little girl, she had been
aware of his sentimental attachment to her mother and perhaps in an
instinctive way had resented it, though her actual indictment against
Wallace in those days had always been that he made her naughty; incited
her by his perpetual assumption that she was the angelic little creature
she looked, to one desperate misdemeanor after another, for which her
father usually punished her. Mary had, superficially anyhow, her mother's
looks along with her father's temper.
But for two years after Mrs. Wollaston's death, she and Wallace had been
very good friends. She was grateful to him for treating her like a
grown-up, for talking to her, as he often did, about her mother and how
much she had meant to him. (She owed it, indeed, largely to Wallace that
her memories of this sentimental, romantic, passionless lady with whom in
life she had never been completely in sympathy, were as sweet and
satisfactory as they were.) He had taken infinite pains with her, guiding
her reading and her enjoyment of pictures in the paths of good taste. He
took her to concerts sometimes, too, though at this point her docility
ceased. She wouldn't be musical for anybody. He gave her much-needed
advice in dealing with social matters which her sudden prematurity
forced her to cope with. And with all this went a placidity which had no
part at all in her relations with her father.
She got the idea, during this period, that he meant, when she was a
little older, to ask her to marry him, and she sometimes speculated
whether, if he did, she would. There would be something beautifully
appropriate about it;--like the Professor's Love Story. Usually, though,
she terminated the scene with a tender refusal.
She had long known, of course, how unreal all this was. Wallace had faded
into complete invisibility at the time when she fell in love with Captain
Burch and quarreled with her father about him. She couldn't remember
afterward whether he had even been on the scene or not. But the savor of
their friendship, though mild, was a pleasant one and there was none of
her old acquaintances she'd rather have looked forward to to-day at
tea-time in the drawing-room. She knew exactly what he would be like;
just what they would say to each other. The only doubt in her mind was
whether he'd bring her chocolates or daffodils.
She guessed wrong. It was a box of candied strawberries that he gave her
as soon as their double hand-shake set him free. But nothing else came at
once to the surface to falsify her prevision. She remembered how he liked
his tea and was able to get an affectionate warmth into her voice, that
sounded real though strangely enough it wasn't, in agreeing with him how
like old times this was and how good it seemed to be home. Then came the
joy of having Rush back again, and the war, and the Peace
Conference,--only we weren't going to talk about things like that. And
then Alan Seeger, Rupert Brooke, Conningsby Dawson.
But oddly enough, she felt herself going back to still older times, to
the abominable little girl who had yielded to irresistible desires such
as making faces at him and rubbing the nap of his silk hat the wrong
way. She repressed, vigorously, this lawless vein. She was determined for
this one day to be just as nice as he tried, so hard, to think she was.
But with this resolution occupying her mind the talk presently ran rather
thin, her contribution to it for whole minutes drying up entirely. It was
after a rather blank silence that he said he supposed Paula was lying
down, resting for to-night's performance. His inflection struck Mary as a
little too casual and reminded her that it was his first mention of her
stepmother's name. This roused her attention.
"Oh, Paula's off playing with Rush," she said. "I believe they went to
a matinée."
He exclaimed at that, over Paula's stores of energy and her reckless ways
of spending them. He said she gave him the impression of being absolutely
tireless, superimposing a high speed society existence which John
Wollaston and he, in relays, could hardly keep up with, upon the heavy
routine of work in her studio. He illustrated this with a schedule of her
activities during the last three days. "Oh, yes," he threw in, in
parenthesis, "I'm as much in the family as ever. When your father can't
do escort duty, they call on me." He added in conclusion that he was glad
she had already made a start toward getting acquainted with Rush.
Was this relief, Mary wondered--at learning that she was not at this
moment engaged less domestically somewhere with Anthony March? But she
doubted whether this was a good guess. If he did feel any such relief, it
was not, at all events, from a personal jealousy; for the illuminating
conviction had come over her that Wallace could not possibly be one of
Paula's conquests. A man still capable of cherishing as the most
beautiful event of his life, that sentimental platonic friendship he had
enjoyed with her mother, would be immune against Paula's spells.
She wondered if he wasn't a little afraid of Paula. If he did not, in
his heart, actually dislike her. But if this were true, why did he
willingly devote so many of his hours to squiring her about, substituting
for her husband? (She told herself, as one discovering a great truth,
that a substitute was exactly what Heaven had ordained Wallace Hood to
be.) She kept him going about Paula easily enough, as a sort of obbligato
to these meditations and her name was on Wallace's lips when John
Wollaston came into the room.
"Where is she?" he asked Mary. "I hoped I'd find her resting for
to-night." Evidently he had been up to her room to see. The relief was
plainly legible in his face when he got Mary's answer.
"She and Rush, eh," he said. "I'm glad they've made a start together, but
they ought to be back by now. They drove, didn't they?"
She couldn't inform him as to that and by way of getting him to come to
anchor, offered him his tea.
"Oh, I'll wait for the others," he said. "They can't be much later than
this.--I'm glad she's taken a vacation from those songs," he went on
presently from the fireplace. "She told me last night she'd been working
all day with Novelli over them. Only sent him home about half an hour
before it was time for her to dress for dinner. Do you suppose,"--this to
Wallace--"that they're as wonderful as she thinks they are?"
It was obvious to Mary that Hood's reply was calculated to soothe; his
attitude was indulgent. He talked to Mary about March as just another of
Paula's delightful extravagances. March's indignant refusal, at first, to
tune the Circassian grand, his trick of sitting on the floor under
Paula's piano while she played for him, his forgetting to be paid, though
he had not, in all probability, a cent in his pockets, were exhibited as
whimsicalities, such as Wallace's favorite author, J.M. Barrie, might
have invented. It was just like Paula to take him up as she had done, to
work away for days at his songs, proclaiming the wonder of them all the
while. "We're all hoping, of course," he concluded, "that when she's
finished with them to-night, she'll sing us some of the old familiar
music we really love."
The neat finality of all this, produced, momentarily, the effect of
ranging Mary on the other side, with Paula and her musician. But just at
this point, she lost her character of disinterested spectator, for
Wallace, having put March back in his box and laid him deliberately on
the shelf, abruptly produced, by way of diversion, another piece of goods
altogether.
"I hope Mary's come home to stay," he said to John. "We can't let her go
away again, can we?"
Afterward, she was able to see that it was a natural enough thing for him
to have said. It would never have occurred to him, pleasant, harmless
sentimentalist that he was, that John's second marriage might be a
disturbing factor in his relation with Mary and that the question so
cheerfully asked as an escape from the more serious matter that he had
been talking about, struck straight into a ganglion of nerves.
But at the time, no such excuse for him presented itself. She stared for
a moment, breathless, paled a little and locked her teeth so that they
shouldn't chatter; then, a wave of bright anger relaxed her stiffened
muscles. She did not look at her father but was aware that he was fixedly
not looking at her.
"I don't know whether I am going to stay or not," she said casually
enough. "There isn't any particular reason why I should, unless I can
find something to do. You haven't a job for me, have you?"
"A job?" Wallace gasped.
"In your office," she explained. "Filing and typing, or running the
mimeograph. It seems to be a choice between something like that
and--millinery."
"That's an extravagant idea," her father said, trying for, but not quite
able to manage, a tone that matched hers. "Good lord, Wallace, don't sit
there looking as if you thought she meant it!"
"You do look perfectly--consternated," she said with a pretty good laugh.
"Never mind; I shan't do anything outrageous for a week or two. Oh, here
they come. Will you ring, dad? I want some more hot water."
Rush came into the drawing-room alone, Paula having lingered a moment,
probably before the mirror in the hall. Mere professional instinct for
arranging entrances for herself, Mary surmised this to be. And she may
have been right for Paula was not one of those women who are forever
making minute readjustments before a glass. But when she came in, just
after Wallace Hood had accomplished his welcome of the returned soldier,
it was hard to believe that she was concerned about the effect she
produced upon the group about the tea-table. She didn't, indeed,
altogether join it, gave them a collective nod of greeting with a faint
but special smile for her husband on the end of it and then deliberately
seated herself with a "No, don't bother; this is all right," at the end
of the little sofa that stood in the curve of the grand piano, rather in
the background.
When Mary asked her how she wanted her tea, she said she didn't think
she'd have any; and certainly no cakes. No, not even one of Wallace's
candied strawberries. There was an exchange of glances between her and
Rush over this.
"They have been having tea by themselves, those two," Mary remarked.
"No," said Rush, "not what you could call tea."
Paula smiled vaguely but didn't throw the ball back, did not happen, it
appeared, to care to talk about anything. Presently the chatter among the
rest of them renewed itself.
Only it would have amused an invisible spectator to note how those three
Wollastons, blonde, dolichocephalic, high-strung, magnetically
susceptible, responded, as strips of gold-leaf to the static electricity
about a well rubbed amber rod, to the influence that emanated from that
silent figure on the sofa. Rush, in and out of his chair a dozen times,
to flip the ash from his cigarette, to light one for Mary, to hand the
strawberries round again, was tugging at his moorings like a captive
balloon. When he answered a question it was with the air of interrupting
an inaudible tune he was whistling. John still planted before the
fireplace, taking, automatically, a small part in the talk just as he
went through the minimum of business with his tea, seemed capable of only
one significant action, which he repeated at short, irregular intervals.
He turned his head enough to enable him to see into a mirror which gave
him a reflection of his wife's face; then turned away again, like one
waiting for some sort of reassurance and not getting it. Mary, muscularly
relaxed, indeed, drooping over the tea-table, had visible about her,
nevertheless, a sort of supernormal alertness. Every time her father
looked into the mirror she glanced at him, and she rippled, like still
water, at all of her brother's sudden movements.
As for Wallace Hood, one look at him sitting there, as unresponsive to
the spell as the cup from which he was sipping its third replenishment of
tea, would have explained his domestication in that household;--the
necessity, in fact, for domesticating among them some one who was always
buoyantly upon the surface, whose talk, in comfortably rounded sentences,
flowed along with a mild approximation to wit, whose sentiments were
never barbed with passion;--who was, to sum him up in one embracing
word, appropriate.
Mary, in addition to feeling repentant over her outbreak just before
Paula came in, experienced a sort of gratitude to him for being able to
sit squarely facing the sofa, untroubled by the absent thoughtful face
and the figure a little languorously disposed that confronted him. His
bright generalities were addressed to her as much as to the rest of them;
his smile asked the same response from her and nothing more.
Nothing short of an explosion that shattered all their surfaces at once
could have got a single vibration out of him. By that same token, when
the explosion did occur, he was the most helpless person there, the only
one of them who could really be called panic-stricken.
John had, at last, crossed the room and seated himself beside his wife.
He spoke to her in a low voice but her full-throated reply was audible
everywhere in the room.
"No, I'm not tired and I really don't want any tea. I've gone slack on
purpose because that's how I want to be till nine o'clock. I've just
eaten an enormous oyster stew with Rush. That's what we waited for."
John frowned. "My dear, you'll have ruined your appetite for dinner."
"I hope so," she said, "because I'm not to have any."
At that, from the other two men, there began an expostulatory--"No
dinner!" "You don't mean ...!" but it was silenced by John's
crisp--"You're planning not to come down to dinner, then?"
"Oh, I'll come down," said Paula, "and I'll sit. But I don't mean to eat
anything. Unless you think that will be too much like a--what is
it?--skeleton at the feast."
"I think it would seem somewhat-exaggerated," he said.
"Well," Paula retorted, drawing the rest of the room into it again just
as Wallace was making a gallant effort to start a subsidiary conversation
to serve as a screen, "that's because you haven't heard those songs. If
there's a singer in the world who'd dare--cut loose with them right after
eating the sort of dinner Lucile will have to-night for Mary and Rush,
I'd like to see him try it."
"I didn't mean to imply that they were not difficult. I dare say they are
all but impossible. But it does seem to me that you are taking the
occasion of singing them--a little too--emotionally."
The tone he was trying for was meant to have nothing in it--for other
ears than hers, at least, beyond mere good-humored remonstrance. But her
reply tore all pretense aside. She let him have it straight.
"You're the one who's being emotional about it," she said.
The blood leaped into his face at that but he did not reply.
"Look here, John," she went on--and her big voice swept away the polite
convention that the others were not listening, "I've told you that this
won't work and you must see now that that's true. There's still time to
call up March and tell him that it's to-morrow instead of to-day. Because
of Rush and Mary. Won't you let me do that?"
It is just possible that if he had been alone with her, he might have
acknowledged the issue, might have admitted that this new composer whose
works she had been so absorbed in, frightened him, figured in his mind as
the present manifestation of a force that was trying to take her away
from him. And having let her see that, he could safely enough have said,
"Have your own way about it. You know what will work and what won't. Only
make it as easy for me as you can." But in the presence of his
children--it was they, rather than Wallace, that he minded--he was at
once evasive and domineering.
"I thought we'd already disposed of that suggestion," he said. "If the
situation is as it has been made to appear to me there is not the
smallest reason why March should be put off; why Mary and Rush and the
friends we have asked in to meet them, shouldn't be permitted to hear his
songs; or why I shouldn't myself. I think we'll consider that settled."
Paula rose all in one piece. "Very well," she said--to the audience, "it
is settled. Also it's settled that I shall not come down to dinner. As
for what people will think, I'll leave that to you. You can make any
explanation you like. But I shall sing those songs to March--and for
him--for all they're worth. I don't care who else is there or whether
they like it or not.--A lot of patronizing amateurs! Bring them up to the
music room about nine o'clock, if you like. I'll be there."
She left behind her, in that Victorian drawing-room, a silence
that tingled.