TWO WOMEN AND JOHN
Paula seemed calm enough after that one explosion but she moved along
toward the accomplishment of her purpose, to get herself thoroughly
committed to Max before John's arrival, with the momentum of a liner
leaving its pier. Mary made two or three more attempts at dissuasion but
their manifest futility kept her from getting any real power into them.
She was, to tell the truth, in a panic over the prospect of that
evening;--her father arriving triumphant in Paula's supposed surrender to
find Maxfield Ware with his five years' contract in his pocket. And the
responsibility for the disaster would be attributed to herself; was
indeed so attributable with a kind of theatrical completeness seldom, to
be found in life. It didn't often happen that any one was as entirely to
blame for a calamity to some one else as Mary was for this _volte-face_
of Paula's.
She did not run away altogether. Paula, indeed, didn't know that she had
fled at all, for Maxfield Ware's tardiness about coming back the second
time supplied her with a pretext.
It was nearly eight o'clock before he came and Paula, who was momentarily
expecting John's arrival by then, was in an agony of impatience to sign
his papers and get him out of the house again. Ware may have divined her
wish and loitered out of mischievous curiosity as to the cause of it. Or
he may, merely, have been prolonging an experience which he found
agreeable. Anyhow, he wouldn't be hurried and he wouldn't go. But Paula
finally turned a look of despairing appeal upon Mary who thereupon
announced her intention of going to to-night's performance in the park.
She would drive, of course, and would be glad to take Mr. Ware along.
Or, for that matter, she would set him down first wherever he might want
to go. He smiled upon her with the fatuous smile of one who finds he has
made an unexpected conquest and said he would be delighted to accompany
Miss Wollaston anywhere.
She took him, driving pretty fast, to the Moraine Hotel and was glad the
distance was not greater, for after various heavy-handed and unquenchable
preliminaries he kissed her as nearly on the mouth as possible, clinging
to a half-lit cigar the while, just before she whipped around into the
hotel drive. She avoided a collision with one of the stone posts narrowly
enough to startle him into releasing her,--he hadn't realized the turn
was so close--and stopped at the lighted carriage door with a jerk that
left him no option but to get out at once.
She nodded a curt good night and drove back to the park; went to one of
the dressing-rooms and washed her face. Then she came around in front to
hear Edith Mason sing _Romeo and Juliet_. She didn't get just the effect
she anticipated from this lovely performance because Polacco, who is Miss
Mason's husband, came and sat down beside her--there was nothing spidery
about him, thank goodness--and in a running and vivacious commentary
expressed his lively contempt for this opera of Gounod's. At its best it
was bad _Faust_. Its least intolerable melodies were quotations from
_Faust_,--an assertion which he proved from time to time by singing, and
not very softly either, the original themes to the wrath of all who sat
within a twenty-five foot radius of them.
Mary felt grateful to him for giving her something that was not
maddening to think about and after the performance went with him and his
wife to supper so that it was well after midnight before she returned to
the cottage.
It was an ineffable relief to find it dark. Her habit on warm nights was
to sleep on the gloucester swing in the screened veranda and she made it
her bed to-night, though beyond a short uneasy doze of two, she didn't
sleep at all.
At half past eight or so, just after she had sat down to breakfast,
she heard her father coming down the stairs. She tried to call to him
but could command no voice and so waited, frozen, until he appeared in
the doorway.
"I thought I heard you stirring down here and that it perhaps meant
breakfast. Paula won't be down, I suppose, for hours. She fell asleep
about four o'clock and has been sleeping quietly ever since."
This was exactly like Paula, of course. She was the vortex of the
whole tempest, but when she had thoroughly exhausted the emotional
possibilities of it she sank into peaceful slumber like a baby after
a hard cry.
No wonder she was too much for these two Wollastons who sat now with dry
throats and tremulous hands over the mockery of breakfast! Mary, although
she knew, asked her father whether he wanted his coffee clear or with
cream in it and having thus broken the spell, went on with a gasp:
"I'm glad Paula isn't coming down. It gives you a better chance to tell
me just how you feel about my having interfered. I did run away last
night. You guessed that, I suppose. But it wasn't to evade it altogether.
My--whipping, you know."
It had an odd effect on both of them, this reference to her childhood;
her hand moved round the table rim and covered his which rested on the
edge of it.
"Did your mother ever punish you?" he asked. "Corporeally? It's my
recollection that she did not. I was always the executioner. I doubt now
if that was quite fair."
"Perhaps not," she asserted dubiously. "In general it isn't fair of
course. It probably wasn't in the case of Rush. But with me,--I don't
think I could have borne it to have mother beat me. It would have seemed
an insufferable affront. I'd have hated her for it. But there was a sort
of satisfaction in having you do it."
After another moment of silence she smiled and added, "I suppose a
Freudian would carry off an admission like that to his cave and gnaw over
it for hours."
He stared at her, shocked, incredulous. "What do you know about Freud?"
he demanded.
"One couldn't live for two years within a hundred yards of Washington
Square without knowing at least as much about it as that," she told
him,--and was glad of the entrance of the maid with another installment
of
the breakfast. There was no more talk between them during the meal. But
at the end of it she faced him resolutely.
"We must have this out, dad. And isn't now as good a time as any?"
He followed her out into the veranda but the sounds from the dining-room,
where the maid had come in to clear away the breakfast, disturbed him so
Mary suggested a walk.
"Get your hat and we'll go over to the lake. I know a nice place not far,
an open field right at the edge of the bluff with one big tree to make it
shady. At this hour of the morning we are sure to have it all to
ourselves."
He said as they walked along, "I've no reproaches for you. Not this
morning. I've thought over a lot of ground since four o'clock."
He said nothing more to the point until they reached the spot which Mary
had selected as their destination--it lived up handsomely to all her
promises--and settled themselves under the shade of the big tree.
"I suppose," he added then, "that I ought to forgive Whitney and Hood.
Their intentions were the best and kindest, of course. But I find that
harder to do."
He sat back against the trunk of the tree, facing out over the lake;
she disposed herself cross-legged on the grass near by just within
reaching distance. She offered him her cigarette case but he declined.
Of late years, since his marriage to Paula, he had smoked very little.
As a substitute, now, he picked up a forked bit of branch, and began
whittling it.
"I'm as much to blame as they are," she said, presently. "More, really.
Because, if I hadn't procrastinated-o-ut of cowardice, mostly,--until
yesterday, when she was half-way over the edge, it might never have come
to Maxfield Ware at all. After the situation had dramatized itself like
that, there was only one thing she could do. Of course, they didn't
foresee that five years' contract, any more than I did."
He nodded assent, though rather absently to this. "I'm not much
interested in the abstract ethics of it," he said. "It's disputable, of
course, how far any one can be justified in making a major interference
in another's life; one that deprives him of the power of choice. That's
what you have done to me--the three of you. If the premises are right,
and the outcome prosperous, there's something to be said for it. But in
this case ..."
"They aren't mistaken, are they, dad? Wallace and Mr. Whitney?--Or Doctor
Steinmetz?"
"Why, it's reasonable to suppose that Whitney understands my financial
condition better than I do. I mean that. It's not a sneer. But what he
and Hood don't allow for is that I've never tried to make money.
They've no idea what my earning power would be if I were to turn to and
make that a prime consideration. A year of it would take me out of the
woods, I think."
She waited, breathless, for him to deal with the third name. She was
pretty well at one with Paula in the relative valuation she put upon her
father's opinion and that of the throat and lung specialist.
"Oh, as for Steinmetz," John Wollaston said, after a pause, querulously,
"he's a good observer. There's nothing to be said against him as a
laboratory man. But he has the vice of all German scientists; he doesn't
understand imponderables. Never a flash of intuition about him. He
managed to intimidate Darby into agreeing with him. Neither of them takes
my recuperative powers into account."
He seemed to feel that this wasn't a very strong line to take and the
next moment he conceded as much.
"But suppose they were right," he flashed round at her. "Am I not still
entitled to my choice? I've lived the greater part of my life. I've
pulled my weight in the boat. It should be for me to choose whether I
spend the life I have left in two years or in twenty. If they want to
call that suicide, let them. I've no religion that's real enough to make
a valid argument against my right to extinguish myself if I choose."
She wasn't shocked. It was characteristic of their talks together, this
free range among ethical abstractions, especially on his part.
"You act on the other theory though," she pointed out to him. "Think of
the people you've patched together just so that they can live at most
another wretched year or two."
"That's a different thing," he said. "Or rather it comes to the same
thing. The question of shortening one's life is one that nobody has a
right to decide except for himself."
Then he asked abruptly. "What sort of person is Maxfield Ware?"
She attempted no palliations here.
"He kissed me last night," she said, "taking his cigar out of his mouth
for the purpose. He's not a sort of person I can endure or manage. Paula
hates him as much as I do, but she can manage him. He'd never try to
kiss her like that."
"Oh, God!" cried John. "It's intolerable." He flung away his stick, got
to his feet and walked to the edge of the bluff. "Think of her working,
traveling,--living almost,--with a man like that! You say she can manage
him; that she can prevent him from trying to make love to her. Well, what
does that mean, if you're right, but that she--understands him; his talk;
his ideas; his point of view. You can't make yourself intelligible to a
man like that; she can. It's defilement to meet his mind anywhere--any
angle of it. She's given him carte blanche, she says, to manage the
publicity for her. Do you realize what that means? He's licensed to try
to make the public believe anything that he thinks would heighten their
interest in her. That she dresses indecently; that she's a frivolous
extravagant fool; that she has lovers. You know how that game is played."
Mary did know. She ran over a list of the great names and opposite every
one of them there sprang into her mind the particular bit of vulgar
réclame that had been in its day some press agent's masterpiece. She was
able further to see that Paula would regard the moves of this game with a
large-minded tolerance which would be incomprehensible to John. After
all, that was the way to take it. If you were a real luminary, not just a
blank white surface, all the mud that Mr. Maxfield Ware could splash
wouldn't matter. You burnt it off. None of those great names was soiled.
She tried to say something like this to her father, but didn't feel sure
that she quite had his attention. He did quiet down again however and
resumed his seat at the foot of the tree. Presently he said:
"She's doing it for me. Because my incompetence has forced it upon her.
She'd have taken the other thing; had really chosen it." Then without a
pause, but with a new intensity he shot in a question. "That's true,
isn't it? She meant what she said over the telephone?" As Mary hesitated
over her answer he added rather grimly, "You can be quite candid about
it. I don't know which answer I want."
"She meant every word she said over the telephone," Mary assured him.
"You couldn't doubt that if you had seen her as I did afterward."
She didn't pretend though that this was the complete answer. The
reflective tone in which she spoke made it clear that there was more to
it than that.
"Go on," John said, "tell me the rest of it. I think, perhaps, you
understand her better than I do."
Mary took her time about going on and she began a little doubtfully. "I
always begin by being unjust to Paula," she said. "That's my instinct, I
suppose, reproaching her for not doing what she would do if she were
like me. But afterward when I think her out, I believe I understand her
pretty well."
"Paula exaggerates," she went on after another reflective pause. "She
must see things large in order to move among them in a large way. Her
gestures, those of her mind I mean, are--sweeping. If she weren't so
good-natured, our--hair-splitting ways would annoy her. Then it's
necessary for her to feel that she's--conquering something."
That last word was barely audible and the quality of the silence which
followed it drew John Wollaston's gaze which had been straying over the
lake, around to the speaker. She had been occupying her hands while she
talked, collecting tiny twigs and acorn cups that happened to be within
reach but now she was tensely still and paler than her wont, he thought.
"You needn't be afraid to say what's in your mind," he assured her.
"It wasn't that," she told him. "I realized that I had been quoting
somebody else. Anthony March said once of Paula that if she had not been
an artist she might have been a _dompteuse_."
John settled himself more comfortably against his tree trunk. A contact
like this with his daughter's mind must have been inexpressibly
comforting to him after a night like the one he had just spent. Its
rectitude; its sensitiveness; the mere feel and texture of it, put his
jangling nerves in tune.
"Is Ware the wild beast she has an inclination to tame in this
instance?" he asked.
"He's nothing but a symbol of it," Mary said. Then she managed to get the
thing a little clearer. "What she'd have done if she'd been like us and
what we'd have had her do--Mr. Whitney and Wallace and I,--would have
been to make a sort of compromise between her position as your wife and a
career as Paula Carresford. We'd have had her sign a contract to sing a
few times this winter with the Metropolitan or the Chicago company, go on
a concert tour perhaps for a few weeks, even give singing lessons or sing
in a church choir. That would probably have been Mr. Whitney's idea.
Rather more than enough to pay her way and at the same time leave as much
of her to you as possible.
"But that's the last thing in the world it would be possible for Paula to
do. She must see a great career on one side,--see herself as Geraldine
Farrar's successor,--and on the other side she must see a perfect
unflawed life with you. So that whichever she chooses she will have a
sense of making the greatest possible sacrifice. She couldn't have said
to you what she did over the telephone if Mr. Ware hadn't convinced her
that a great career was open to her and she couldn't have signed his
contract if it had not involved sacrificing you."
She propped herself back against her hands with a sigh of fatigue.
"There's some of the hair-splitting Paula talks about," she observed.
"It may be fine spun," her father said thoughtfully, "but it seems to me
to hold together. Isn't there any more of it?"
"Well, it was balanced like that, you see," Mary went on; "set for the
climax, like the springs in a French play, when I came along at just the
moment and with just the word, to topple it over. Being Paula, she
couldn't help doing exactly what she did. So, however it comes out, I
shall be the one person she won't be able to forgive."
She knew from the startled look he turned upon her that this last shot
had come uncannily close. She fancied she must almost literally have
echoed Paula's words. If she needed any further confirmation she would
have found it in the rather panicky way in which he set about trying to
convince her that she was mistaken, if not in the fact at least in the
permanence of it.
She insisted no further, made indeed no further attempt at all to carry
the theme along and though she listened and made appropriate replies when
they were called for, she let her wordless thought drift away to a dream
that it was Anthony March who shared this shade and sunshine with her and
that veiled blue horizon yonder. It was easier to do since her father had
drifted into a reverie of his own. They need not have lingered for they
had sufficiently talked away all possible grounds of misunderstanding,
even if they had not reconciled their disagreement.
It occurred to her to suggest that they go back, but she dismissed the
impulse with no more than a glancing thought. It was his burden, not
hers, that remained to be shouldered at the cottage and it might be left
to him to choose his own time for taking it up. Paula seldom came down
much before noon anyhow.
As for John Wollaston, he was very tired. Paula's volcanic moments always
exhausted him. He never could derationalize his emotions, cut himself
free; and while he felt just as intensely as she did, he had to carry the
whole superstructure of himself along on those tempestuous voyages. In
the mood Paula had left him in this morning, there was nothing in the
world that could have satisfied and restored him as did his daughter's
companionship. The peace of this wordless prolongation of their talk
together was something he lacked, for a long while, the will to break.
It was not far short of noon when they came back into the veranda
together. He had walked the last hundred yards, after a look at his
watch, pretty fast and after a glance into both the down-stairs rooms, he
called up-stairs to his wife in a voice that had an edge of sudden
anxiety in it. Then getting no response, he went up, two at a time.
Mary dropped down, limp with a sudden premonition, upon the gloucester
swing in the veranda. The maid of all work, who had heard his call, came
from the kitchen just as he was returning down the stairs. Mrs. Wollaston
had gone away, she said. Pete had reported with the big car at eleven
o'clock and Paula, who apparently had been waiting for him, had driven
off at once having left word that she would not be back for lunch.
"All right," John said curtly. "You may go."
He was so white when he rejoined Mary in the veranda that she sprang up
with an involuntary cry and would have had him lie down, where she had
been sitting. But the fine steely ring in his voice stopped her short.
"Have you any idea," he asked, "where she has gone or what she has gone
to do? She came down," he went on without waiting for her answer,--"and
looked for me. Waited for me. And thanks to that--walk we took, I wasn't
here. Well, can you guess what she's done?"
"It's only a guess," Mary said, "but she may have gone to see
Martin Whitney."
"Martin Whitney?" he echoed blankly. "What for? What does she want of
him?"
"She spoke of him," Mary said, "in connection with the money, the twenty
thousand dollars..."
He broke in upon her again with a mere blank frantic echo of her words
and once more Mary steadied herself to explain.
"Her agreement with Mr. Ware required her to put up twenty thousand
dollars in some banker's hands as a guarantee that she would not break
the contract. She mentioned Martin Whitney as the natural person to
hold it. So I guessed that she might have gone to consult him about
it;--or even to ask him to lend it to her. As she said, it wouldn't
have to be spent."
"That's the essence of the contract then. It's nothing without that.
Until she gets the money and puts it up. Yet you told me nothing of it
until this moment. If you had done so--instead of inviting me to go for a
walk--and giving her a chance to get away..."
He couldn't be allowed to go on. "Do you mean that you think I did
that--for the purpose?" she asked steadily.
He flushed and turned away. "No, of course I don't. I'm half mad
over this."
He walked abruptly into the house and a moment later she heard him at the
telephone. She stayed where she was, unable to think; stunned rather than
hurt over the way he had sprung upon her.
He seemed a little quieter when he came out a few minutes later.
"Whitney left half an hour ago for Lake Geneva," he said. "So she's
missed him if that's where she went. There's nothing to do but wait."
He was very nervous however. Whenever the telephone rang, as it did of
course pretty often, he answered it himself, and each time his
disappointment that it was not Paula asking for him, broke down more or
less the calm he tried to impose upon himself. He essayed what amends
good manners enabled him to make to Mary for his outrageous attack upon
her. It went no deeper than that. The discovery that Paula was gone and
simultaneously that he need not have lost her obliterated--or rather
reversed--the morning's mood completely.
It was after lunch that he said, dryly, "I upset your life for you, half
a dozen years ago. Unfairly. Inexcusably. I've always been ashamed of it.
But it lends a sort of poetic justice to this."
She made no immediate reply, but not long afterward she asked if she
might not go away without waiting for Paula's return. "It would be too
difficult, don't you think?--for the three of us, in a small house
like this."
He agreed with manifest relief. He asked if it was not too late to drive
that afternoon to Hickory Hill, but she said she'd prefer to go by train
anyhow. That was possible she thought.
He did not ask, in so many words, if this was where she meant to go.
There was no other place for her that he could think of.