THE WHOLE STORY
The shot told. The harried, desperate look of panic with which she gazed
at him and tried, tugging at his hands, to turn away, revealed to him
that he had leaped upon the truth. Part of it anyhow. He closed his
eyes, for an instant, for another unaddressed prayer that he might not
falter nor let himself be turned aside until he had sounded the full
depth of it.
When he looked at her again she had recovered her poise. "It was silly,"
she said, "to think that I could hide that from you. I am going
away--to-morrow. For quite a long while."
"Are you going away--physically? In the ordinary literal sense, I mean;
or is it that you are just--going away from me?"
Once more it was as if a trap had been sprung upon her. But this time he
ignored the gasp and the sudden cold slackness of the hands he held and
went on speaking with hardly a pause.
"I asked that question, put it that way, thinking perhaps I understood
and that I could make it easier for you to tell me." He broke off, there,
for an instant to get his voice under control. Then he asked, steadily,
"Are you going to marry Graham Stannard?"
She gasped again, but when he looked up at her there was nothing in her
face but an incredulous astonishment.
So there was one alternative shorn away; one that he had not conceived as
more than a very faint possibility. It was not into matrimony that her
long journey was to take her. He pulled himself up with a jerk to
answer--and it must be done smoothly and comfortably--the question she
had just asked him. How in the world had he ever come to think of a thing
like that?
"Why, it was in the air at Hickory Hill those days before you came.
And then Sylvia was explicit about it, as something every one was
hoping for."
"Was that why you went away?" she asked with an intent look into his
face. "Because he had a--prior claim, and it wouldn't be fair to--poach
upon his preserves?"
He gave an ironic monosyllable laugh. "I tried, for the next few days to
bamboozle myself into adopting that explanation but I couldn't. The truth
was, of course, that I ran away simply because I was frightened. Sheer
panic terror of the thing that had taken hold of me. The thought of
meeting you that next morning was--unendurable."
She too uttered a little laugh but it sounded like one of pure happiness.
She buried her face in his hands and touched each palm with her lips. "I
couldn't have borne it if you'd said the other thing," she told him. "But
I might have trusted you not to. Because you're not a sentimentalist.
You're almost the only person I know who is not."
She added a moment later, with a sudden tightening of her grip upon his
hands, "Have you, too, discovered that sentimentality is the crudest
thing in the world? It is. It is perfectly ruthless. It makes more
tragedies than malice. Ludicrous tragedies--which are less endurable than
the other sort. Unless one were enough of an Olympian so that he could
laugh." She relaxed again and made a nestling movement toward him. "I
thought for a while of you that way."
He managed to speak as if the idea amused him. "As an Olympian? No, if
I had a mountain it wouldn't be that one. But I like the valleys
better, anyhow."
"I know," she said contentedly. Then her voice darkened. "I'm just at
the beginning of you--now..." The sentence ended unnaturally, though he
had done nothing to interrupt it.
Deliberately he startled her. "What time does your train go, to-morrow?"
he asked. "Or haven't you selected one? You haven't even told me where it
is you are going."
Through his hands which held her he felt the shock, the momentary agony
of the effort to recover the threatened balance, the resolute relaxation
of the muscles and the steadying breath she drew.
"Oh, there are plenty of trains," she said. "You mustn't bother.--Why,
Wallace Hood has a sister living in Omaha. (Wallace Hood, not James
Wallace. It would be terrible if you confused them.) She's been trying
for months to find a nursery governess. And I've been trying--perhaps you
didn't know; the family have been very unpleasant about it--to find a
job.--Oh, for the most realistic of reasons, among others. Well, it
occurred to me the other day that Wallace's sister and I might be looking
for each other."
There she paused, but only for a moment. Then she added, very explicitly,
"So I'm going to Omaha to-morrow."
Even her lying she had to do honestly. She preferred, he saw, that he
should remember she had lied to having him recall that she had tricked
him by an evasion.
One need not invoke clairvoyance to account for his incandescent
certainty that she had lied. The mere unconscious synthesis of the things
she had said and left unsaid along the earlier stages of their talk,
would have amounted to a demonstration. Her moment of panic over his
discovery that she was saying good-by, her irrespressible shudder at the
question whether she was going away in the ordinary literal sense of the
phrase; finally, her pitiful attempt to avoid, in answer to his last
question, a categorical untruth and then her acceptance of it as, after
all, preferable to the other. But it was by no such pedestrian process
as this that he reached the truth.
He knew, now, why he had been terrified from the moment she came into the
room. He knew why she had wrung that promise from him--a death-bed
promise she had dared with a smile to call it--that he would not,
whatever happened, destroy _The Dumb Princess_. It would be a likely
enough thing for him to do, she had perceived, when he learned the truth.
She could not--sleep, she had told him, until that surmise was laid.
There were, as she had said, plenty of trains to that unknown destination
of hers, but he thought that that word sleep offered the true clue. She
was a physician's daughter; there must be, somewhere in that house, a
chest or cupboard that would supply what she needed. They'd find her in
her own bed, in that room he had once cast a glance into on his way
up-stairs to Paula.
The conviction grew upon him that she had her plans completely laid; yes,
and her preparations accomplished. That quiet leisureliness of hers would
not have been humanly possible if either her resolution or the means for
executing it had remained in doubt. It was likely that she had whatever
it was--a narcotic, probably; morphine; she wouldn't, conceivably, resort
to any of the corrosives--upon her person at this moment. In that little
silken bag which hung from her wrist.
He clenched the finger-nails into the palms of his hands. This thing was
a nightmare. He had fallen asleep over his table; had only to wake
himself.--It would not do to play with an idea like that. Nor with the
possibility that he had misread her mind. He knew. He was not mistaken.
Let him never glance aside from that.
For one moment he thought wildly of trying to call in help from outside,
of frustrating her design by sheer force. But that could not be done. As
between them, he would be reckoned the madman. Her project might be
deferred by that means, perhaps. It could not be prevented.
It was that terrible self-possession of hers that gave the last turn to
the screw. She could not be dealt with as one frantic, beside herself, to
be wooed and quieted back into a state of sanity. She was at this moment
as sane as he. She was not to be held back, either, by a mere assurance
of his love for her. She had never, it appeared, lacked that assurance.
But her life, warmed even as it was by their love, presented itself to
her somehow as something that it was not possible to go on with.
This was very strange. All of its externals that were visible to him
made up, one would have said, a pattern singularly gracious and
untroubled. Buried in it somewhere there must be some toxic focus that
poisoned everything. He must meet her on her own ground. He must show
her another remedy than the desperate one she was now resolved upon. And
before he could find the remedy he must discover the virus. The only
clue he had was the thing she said about sentimentalists, and the
tragedies they caused. More tragedies than malice was responsible for.
He thought she was probably right about that. It was some such tragedy
anyhow, ludicrous, unendurable, that had driven her to this acquiescence
in defeat.
He said, in as even a tone as he could manage, "I asked about trains
because I wondered whether there was anything to hurry you to-night.
Packing to do or such a matter; or whether we mightn't have a really
leisurely visit. I haven't much idea what time it is except that I don't
think I've eaten anything since around the middle of the day. Have you?
If you'd stay and have supper with me ... But I suppose you're expected
somewhere else."
She smiled ironically at this, then laughed at herself. "It happens
rather funnily that I haven't been so little expected or looked after,
since I came home from New York, as I am to-night. I'm not--in a hurry at
all. I'll stay as long as you like."
"Is that a promise?" he asked. "As long as I liked would be a long
while."
"I'll stay," she said, "as long as I can see I'm making you happy. When I
find myself beginning to be a--torment to you, I shall--vanish."
He was almost overmastered by the temptation to forget everything except
his love for her; to let himself be persuaded that his ghastly surmise
was a product of his own fatigue and sleepless nights. Even supposing
there were a basis for it, could he not keep her safe by just holding her
fast in his arms?
He dashed the thought out of his mind. She would surrender to his
embrace, how eagerly he already knew. For a matter of moments, for a few
swift hours she might forget. She had perhaps come to him meaning to
forget for a while in just that way. But no embrace could be eternal.
He'd have to let her go at last and nothing would be changed save that
she would have a memory of him to take with her into her long sleep.
No, love must wait. That obscure unendurable nightmare tragedy of hers
must be brought out into the light first and shorn of its horrors.
So he managed for the moment a lighter note. He would not let her help in
the preparation of the meager little meal which was all that his
immediate resources ran to. He hadn't quite realized how exiguous it was
going to be when he spoke of it as supper. It was nothing but a slice of
Swiss cheese, a fresh carton of biscuits and a flagon of so-called
Chianti illicitly procured from the Italian grocery downstairs.
He cleared his work table and anchored her in the easy chair at the
same time by putting into her lap the bulky manuscript of _The Dumb
Princess_, and it was this they talked about while he laid the cloth--a
clean towel--and set out his scanty array of dishes. He feared when they
drew up to the table that she was not going to be able to eat at all,
and he was convinced that she was even more in need of food than he. But
the wine, thin and acidulous as it was, helped, and he saw to it that
for a while she had no chance to talk. He told her the story of _The
Dumb Princess_ in detail and dwelt a little upon the half formulated
symbolism of it.
When at last he paused, she said, "I think I know why the princess was
dumb. Because when she tried to speak no one wanted to hear what she had
to say. They insisted on keeping her an image merely, so that they could
go on attributing to her just the thoughts they wished her to think and
just the desires they wanted her to feel. That's the spell that has made
many a woman dumb upon all the essentials."
He gripped his hands together between his knees, leaned a little forward,
drew a steadying breath and said, "There's something I wish you'd do for
me just while we're sitting quietly like this. It has been so momentary,
this life of ours together,--the times I mean when we've been bodily
together. The whole of it could be reckoned quite easily in minutes.
There has been more packed into them, of course, than into many a lover's
months and years, but one effect it has had on me has been to make you,
when you aren't here physically with me, like this, where by merely
reaching out I can touch you, a little--visionary to me. I confuse you
with the Dumb Princess over there whom you made me create. I get
misgivings that you're just a sort of wraith. Well, if you're going away
and we aren't to be within--touching distance of each other again for a
long while--perhaps months, I want more of you, that my memory can hold
on by. The real every-day person that you are instead, as you say, of the
image I've had to make of you. So I wish you'd tell me as nearly as you
can remember everything that you've done--everything that has happened to
you--to-day."
That last word was like the touch of a spur. She shuddered as she cried,
"Not to-day!"
He did not press for a reason and the next moment she went on in her
natural manner again. "That's a strange thing for you to wish. At least
the strangeness of it strikes me after some of the things that have been
happening lately. Yet I don't believe it happens often that a lover asks
as specifically as that to be--disillusioned. And that is what you would
be. Because the complete story of a day,--any day,--with no
suppressions, nothing tucked decently away out of sight, would be a
pretty searching test."
"That's why I asked for it," he said, "I'd like to be disillusioned; just
as completely as possible."
"That's because you're so sure you wouldn't be." The raggedness of her
voice betrayed a strong emotion. With a leap of the pulse he told himself
that it was as if she were crying out against some unforeseen hope. "You
think it would merely be that lovely little image of yours--the Dumb
Princess, coming to life."
"I'd rather have the reality," he told her, "whatever it is. I think I
can make you see that that must be true. The person I love is you who are
sitting there across the table from me. I don't believe that any one in
the world was ever more completely and utterly adored than you are being
adored at this moment. I love the things I know you by. The things I've
come to recognize as yours. I know some of your qualities that way; your
sensitiveness, your uprightness, your fastidious honesty that makes you
hate evasions and substitutes,--everything you mean when you say
sentimentality. And I know your resolution that carries you along even
when you are afraid,--when your sensitiveness makes you afraid. I admire
all those qualities, but it isn't their intrinsic worth that makes me
love them. I love them because they're the things I know you by. I can't
be mistaken about them because I've felt them. Just as I've felt your
hands and your mouth and your hair. Well, then, whatever your days have
been, one day after another, they have in the end produced you sitting
there as you sit now. Whatever your--ingredients are they're your
ingredients. The total works out to you. Whereas my illusions work out to
nothing better than my little image of the Dumb Princess."
"Would it surprise you," she asked, "to know that I could be cruel? I
mean exactly what the word means. Like a little boy who tears the legs
off a beetle. Can you imagine me hurting some one frightfully, whom I
needn't have hurt at all? Some one who was trying in his own way to be
kind to me?"
He smiled. "I can imagine your being cruel to a sentimentalist," he said.
"Not deliberately, of course. Only after you had been hounded, like a
little white cat, into a corner. By some one who wanted you for an image,
merely, that he himself could attribute all the appropriate thoughts and
desires to. I can imagine you turning, at last, and rending him;--limb
from limb, if you like."
She gazed at him, wide-eyed, for a long moment; then she drooped forward
over the table and cradled her head in her arms. With his hands he tried
to comfort her but he felt that they were clumsy and ineffectual.
"I've hurt you horribly," he said, when he could command his voice.
"Probing in like that."
This must be the unendurable tragedy she had referred to a while ago.
She was speaking, voicelessly and he bent down to listen.
"... if you knew the comfort! I suppose I ought to be frightened--at your
guessing like that, but it seems natural, to-night, that you should.--You
know who it was, don't you?"
"Yes," he told her confidently. "It happened just to-day, didn't it?"
"It was yesterday he asked me to marry him," she said. "That wasn't
hounding. He had a right to, I mean. I thought I would marry him, once. I
told him I would if I could. I meant, I would if I could make him
understand what I really was. He thought I meant something altogether
different, something that his image of me might have meant quite nicely.
Yesterday when he asked me again, I flew into a fury and told him what I
am really like. I needn't have done it. I could have told him that the
reason I wouldn't marry him was because I was in love with you. That
would have been true--in a way. I mean, it wasn't the reason in the
beginning; nor even after I was in love with you--so long as you didn't
know. But I never thought of telling him that. I just wanted to--smash
that image of his. And I did. I knew it was cruel when I did it, but not
how terrible until this morning when Rush got a letter from him."
She had to stop there to master a sob. He went around the table and took
her in his arms. "Come over to the big chair," he said, "where I
can--hold you. I can't let you go on like this. You can tell me the rest
of it there."
She released herself from his hands by taking them in her own and
pressing them for a moment tight. Then she let them go.
"I couldn't," she said. "I couldn't be comforted like that while I was
telling you about him."
He understood instantly. "That's like you," he commented. "You're always
like yourself, thank God." He walked away to the chair he had invited her
to and stood behind it, gripping its padded leather back. "He wrote your
brother a letter then." He had spoken, he thought, quietly and evenly
enough, but the indignation he felt must have betrayed itself in his
voice for she answered instantly:
"You mustn't be angry about that. He had to write to Rush, you see. Rush
had been in his confidence about it all the while. Rush knew his hopes
and his explanations. Rush knew of his coming yesterday, was waiting up
at Wallace Hood's apartment for his news. Now, do you see how horrible it
was? He couldn't tell Rush what I had said to him. There was nothing he
could tell him. He couldn't even face him. He did the only thing I'd left
for him to do."
March asked, "What has he done?"
"We don't know, exactly. Just gone away, I suppose. The letter was
written about midnight from the University Club. He said he wasn't coming
back to Hickory Hill. That he couldn't possibly come back. He'd arrange
things, somehow, later. He told Rush not to try to find him nor make any
sort of fuss, and to be very kind to me; not to question nor worry me."
She broke off there and looked intently up at him. In her eyes he thought
he saw incredulity fighting against a dawning hope. "I wonder," she went
breathlessly on, "if you can understand this, too. Can you see that, for
him, the unbearable thing about it--was that it was ludicrous? The
contrast between what he had believed me to be and--what I am?"
He interrupted sharply, with a frown of irritation, "Don't put it
like that!"
"Well, then," she amended, "the contrast between his explanation of the
way I had been treating him, and the true one?"
"That is a thing I think I can understand," he said. "It was a sort
of--awakening of Don Quixote. To a fine sensitive boy nothing could give
a sharper wrench than that.--I'm moving in the dark," he added. Yet he
knew he was drawing near the light. The secret he had set out to discover
was not very far away.
"You see well enough," she said. "Better than Rush, though I tried to
explain it to him. He'd caught a surmise of the truth, too, I think, in
New York, when he came back from France and brought me home. But he
wouldn't look. Father wouldn't, either, once when I tried to tell him
about it. It was too horrible to be thought,--let alone believed.--I
don't quite see how I can have gone on believing it myself."
The look he saw in her eyes made him wonder how she could. He managed to
hold his own gaze steady. It gave him a sense of somehow supporting her.
"But you," she said,--"you, of all people in the world, don't seem to
feel that way about it. You were there--waiting for me--before I even
tried to tell you. Oh, you do understand, don't you?"
"I think," he told her--and the smile that came with the words was
spontaneous enough, though it did feel rather tremulous--"I think I
could almost repeat the sentence you demolished young Stannard with in
your own words. But can't you see why it doesn't demolish me? It's
because I love you."
"So did he. So do father and Rush."
"Not you. Not quite you. Don't you see? It's just the thing I was trying
to tell you a while ago. What they insist on loving is--oh, partly you,
of course, but partly a sort of--projection of themselves that they call
you, dress you out in, try to compel you to fit. One can fight hard to
preserve an outlying bit of one's self like that. But there would be a
limit I should think. How your brother, with a letter like that in his
hands, could refuse to look at what you were trying to make him see ..."
"He had a theory, that began when we were in New York together as a sort
of joke, that I was a case of shell-shock. So whenever there has been
anything really uncomfortable to face, he has always had that to fall
back upon."
A momentary outburst of anger escaped him. "You've been tortured!" he
cried furiously. He reined in at once, however. "You've never, then," he
went on quietly, "been able to tell the story to any one. I'm sure you
didn't tell it to Graham Stannard. You didn't even try to."
She shook her head. The pitifulness of her, sitting there so spent, so
white, blurred his vision again with sudden tears. But after he had
disposed of them, he managed a smile and sat down comfortably in his
easy chair.
"You couldn't find a better person than me to tell it to," he said.
"You know already," she protested. "At least, you know what it comes to."
"I know the brute fact," he admitted, "but that and the whole truth are
seldom quite the same thing."
He saw the way her hands locked and twisted together and remembered with
a heart-arresting pang, her half-choked cry, "Don't! Don't hurt them like
that!" when his own had agonized in such a grip. But no caress of his
could help her now. He held himself still in his chair and waited.
"The whole truth of this story isn't any--prettier than the brute fact.
There weren't any extenuating circumstances."
Then she sat erect and faced him. He was amazed to see a flush of color
come creeping into her cheeks. Her eyes brightened, the brows drew down a
little, her voice steadied itself and the words came swiftly.
"I think I must make sure you understand that it isn't the sort of story
that you usually find enveloping that particular brute fact. I wasn't
deceived nor betrayed by anybody. There isn't anybody you can take as a
villain. Just a nice, rather inarticulate boy, whom I met at a dance the
evening before he went overseas."
She broke off there to ask him shortly, "When was it that you went over?"
"Not until September," he said, "when it looked like a very long chance
if we ever got to the front at all. Of course, you know, we didn't. But
this was a lot earlier, wasn't it?"
"The seventeenth of April," she said. "We'll never forget those weeks,
any of us, who were in New York doing what we called war work, but it's
hard not to feel that we weren't different persons somehow. I don't mean
that to sound like making excuses. We were more our real selves perhaps
than we will ever be again. Anyhow, we worked harder all day long, and
never felt tired, and in the evening most of the people I knew went out a
lot, to dinners and dances.
"We could always make ourselves believe, of course, that we were doing
that to cheer up the men who were going to France--and were very likely
never coming back. Like the English women one read about. The only thing
that used to trouble me in those days was a perfectly scorching
self-contempt that used to come when I realized that I was enjoying it
all; enjoying the emotional thrill of it. I knew I was getting off cheap.
"I suppose I needn't have told you all that. You'd have understood it
anyhow. But that was how I felt when I went to that dance. As if it would
be a relief to do something--costly.
"It was a uniform dance as far as the men were concerned. We made
ourselves, of course, as--attractive as we knew how. Somebody introduced
this boy to me with just the look that said, 'Do be kind to him,' and
that's what I set out, very resolutely and virtuously, to be. He couldn't
talk much beyond monosyllables and he couldn't dance,--even with me. I
mean, I've danced so much ..."
"I've seen you dance, my dear," he reminded her, and saw how, with a
deep-drawn breath, the memory of that night at Hickory Hill came
back to her.
"Don't," she gasped. "Let me go on." But it was the better part of a
minute before she could.
"We sat out two or three dances together and then, when I might decently
enough have passed him on to some one else with that same sort of
explanatory look--I didn't. Partly because of the feeling I have told you
about and partly because I was attracted to him. He was big and young and
good-looking, and his voice--oh, one can't explain those things. It
wasn't pure altruism. That's what you must see. And then he got up
suddenly and said, 'Good-by.' It was early, you know, and I asked him why
he was going. He said he wanted to get out of there. Rather savagely.
"I got up too and said I felt the same way about it. So he asked if he
might 'see me home.' The dance was in the East Sixties. There had been a
shower but it was clear then and warm. There weren't any taxis about
and, anyhow, he didn't seem to think of looking for one, and we went
over and took a Lexington Avenue car. When we turned at Twenty-third
Street I said we'd get out and walk. He'd said hardly anything, but we
had sat rather close in the car and he had been holding a fold of my
cloak between his fingers.
"We went on down Lexington to Gramercy Park. There was shrubbery in
flower inside the iron fence and some of the trees had been leafing out
that day and the air was very still and sweet. We both stopped for a
minute without saying anything and I slipped my hand farther through his
arm and took his.
"He gave a sort of sob and said, 'You wouldn't do that if you knew about
me.' I said, 'You'd better tell me and see.'
"We walked on again, around the park and across Twentieth Street and down
Fifth Avenue. When we got to my door he hadn't told me.
"My flat was just the second story of an old made-over house. There was
no one about, I mean, to stare or wonder, and I asked him to come in.
When we were inside I looked at my watch and asked him what time he had
to report. He said not until seven o'clock in the morning. He was going
over detached. There was nothing but a hotel to go back to.
"If I'd asked him that question out on the sidewalk, and got that answer,
I don't know whether I'd have asked him in or not.
"He just stood looking at me for a minute after telling me he hadn't
anywhere to report that night. Then he turned away and sat down on the
edge of my couch and bent his face down on his hands and began to talk.
He told me what was the matter with him. Of course, the same thing must
have tormented thousands of them,--the terror of being afraid. He felt
pretty sure he was a coward.
"Mostly, I think, that fear was pretty sensibly dealt with in this war.
It got talked out openly. But he must have been a terribly lonely
person. He came from Iowa, but somehow he got sent to one of the southern
cantonments, and had his officer's training, such as it was, down there.
Then he was sent along to fill in somewhere else. I don't remember all
the details. He'd come to New York alone. The men he had gone to the
dance with he had only met that afternoon.
"I tried to help him. I told him how some of the officers in the French
and English armies, who had the highest decorations for courage, had
suffered most horribly, in advance, from fear. I could tell him two or
three that I knew about personally; men who had told their own stories to
me. Well, that helped a little, roused him out of his daze, gave him a
little gleam of hope perhaps. But it wasn't much; words can't be,
sometimes.
"He wanted more than that. He wanted me. He didn't want to go back alone
to that hotel. So I kept him. Early in the morning, about six o'clock, I
cooked his breakfast and ate it with him and kissed him good-by."
She made a sudden savage gesture of impatience. "I didn't mean to make it
sound like that. That sounds noble and self-sacrificial and sickening. I
suppose because that's the half of the truth that is easiest to tell. I
_did_ want to make an end of perpetually getting off cheap. I did have a
sort of feeling of establishing my good faith with myself. I wanted to
comfort him and make him happy. But it's also true that I'd been
attracted to him from the very first minute, and that it thrilled me when
I first touched his hand, there by the park railing, and afterward when
he took me in his arms."
Since his last interruption he had sat motionless, even breathing small
in the extremity of his effort not to hinder. But now he rose and without
speaking, came to her and bending down, kissed her forehead, her eyes,
her mouth. Then he seated himself on the table close beside her and took
possession, thoughtfully, of one of her hands.
"Did you ever hear anything more of him?" he asked.
She shook her head. "I don't think he remarked my name at all when we
were introduced," she said, "nor asked what it was afterward. I think it
must all have seemed afterward a little unreal to him. The girls he'd
known at home don't smoke cigarettes nor drink champagne--nor wear their
dresses as low as we do. He couldn't once have thought of people like
father and Rush and Aunt Lucile as belonging to me. I remembered his name
and used to look to see if it was there when I read the casualty lists,
but I never did see it again.--No, that's the whole story; just what I
have told you."