JOHN ARRIVES
Two or three hours after March and Mary came to the Dearborn Avenue house
that Sunday morning, a little before eight o'clock to be precise, John
Wollaston, deterred by humane considerations from ringing the door-bell,
tried his latch-key first and found it sufficient. Rather surprisingly
since his sister was particular about bolts and chains. But this mild
sensation was engulfed the next moment in clear astonishment when he
encountered in the drawing-room doorway, Anthony March.
The piano tuner was coatless and in his socks. Evidently it was no less
recent an event than the sound of the latchkey which had roused him
from sleep.
"Oh," he said. "It's you, sir." And added as he came a little wider
awake, "I'm very glad you've come."
John detected a reservation of some sort in this afterthought; faintly
ironic perhaps. There was, at any rate, a conspicuous absence of any
implication that his presence was urgently needed just then, or eagerly
waited for.
He replied with an irony a little more marked, "It's an unexpected
pleasure to find you here. They're wanting you rather badly up at Ravinia
these days, I understand."
March nodded, cast a glance in the direction of the stairs and led the
way decisively into the drawing-room. His pantomime made it clear that he
did not wish the rest of the slumbering household aroused. Considerate of
him, of course, and all that, but the decisiveness of the action--as if
he somehow felt himself in charge, despite the arrival of his
host--roused in John a faint hostility.
He followed nevertheless. He saw at once where his unaccountable visitor
had made his bed. A big cane davenport had been dragged into the bay
window, its velvet cushions neatly stacked on the piano bench, and the
composer's coat, rolled with his deftness of experience, had served him
for a pillow. Not a bad bed for such a night as this that John himself
had sweltered through so unsuccessfully. Probably the coolest place in
the house, right by those open south windows. But all, the same ...
"Couldn't Rush do better for you than that?" he said. "There must be a
dozen beds in the house."
"Rush isn't here," March answered. "I believe he went to Lake Geneva
yesterday, for over Sunday."
John Wollaston felt the blood come up into his face as the conviction
sprang into his mind that Lucile wasn't here, either. She'd never have
left the front door unbolted. She'd never have permitted a guest, however
explicit his preferences, to sleep upon the cane davenport in the
drawing-room with his coat for a pillow.
It was as if March had followed his train of thought step by step.
"Miss Wollaston isn't here either," he said. "She was detained by a
broken spring in the car. I believe she expects to arrive this morning."
A faint amusement showed in his face and presently brightened into a
smile. "I'm really very relieved," he added, "that it was you who got
here first."
And then the smile vanished and his voice took a new timbre, not of
challenge, certainly not of defiance, but all the more for that of
authority. "The only other person in the house is Mary."
A sudden weakness of the legs caused John to seat himself, with what
appearance of deliberation he could manage, in the nearest chair. March,
however, remained on his feet.
"I brought her home last night," he went on, "very late--early this
morning rather--with the intention of leaving her here alone. But I
decided to stay. Also it was her preference that I should. I suspect
she's asleep. She promised, at least, to call me if she didn't."
That, apparently, finished for the present what he had to say. He
turned--it really was rather gentle the way he disengaged himself from
the fixity of John's look,--replaced the cushions on the cane davenport;
and then, seating himself, began putting on his shoes.
Precisely that gentleness, though it checked on John's tongue the angry
question, "What the devil were you doing with her until early this
morning?" only added to his anger by depriving it of a target. For a
minute he sat inarticulate, boiling.
It was an outrageous piece of slacking on Rush's part that he should have
deserted his sister before the arrival of one or the other of his
promised reenforcements relieved him of his duty. It was inexcusable of
Lucile to let a trivial matter like a broken spring keep her at Hickory
Hill. There were plenty of trains, weren't there? And the third rail
every hour? It was shockingly disengenuous of Mary, when she talked with
him over the telephone yesterday afternoon, to have suppressed the
essential fact that Rush had already deserted her and that she was at
that moment alone.
And then his anger turned upon himself, as a voice within him asked
whether, on his conscience, he could affirm that this knowledge would
have made a difference in his own actions. Could he be sure he wouldn't
have clutched at the assurance that his sister was already on the way
rather than have exacerbated his quarrel with Paula by doing the one
thing that would annoy her most.
Laboriously he got himself together, steadied himself. "You mustn't
think," he said, "that I'm not grateful. We're all grateful, of course,
to you for having done what our combined negligence appears to have made
necessary." Then his voice hardened and the ring of anger crept into it
as he added, "You may be sure that nothing of the sort will occur again."
"No," March said dryly. "It won't occur again." He straightened up
and faced John Wollaston squarely. "I've persuaded Mary to marry
me," he said.
"To marry--_you_!" John echoed blankly. For a moment before his mind
began to work, he merely stared. The first thought that struggled through
was a reluctant recognition of the fact that there was a sort of dignity
in the man which not even the stale look, inevitable about one who has
just slept in his clothes, could overcome. No more than his pallor and
the lines of fatigue deeply marked in his face could impeach his air of
authority. There was something to him not quite accountable under any of
the categories John was in the habit of applying. So much John had
conceded from the first; from that morning in this very room when he had
found him tuning the Circassian grand and had gone away, shutting the
door over yonder, so that Paula shouldn't hear.
But that Mary should seriously contemplate marrying him! Mary! Good God!
Once more March disengaged himself from John's fixed gaze. Not at all
as if he couldn't support it; gently again, by way of giving the older
man time to recover from his astonishment. He went into the bay and
stood looking out the window into the bright hot empty street. From
where he sat John could see his face in profile. He certainly was
damned cool about it.
There recurred to John's mind, a moment during that day's drive he had
taken with Mary, down South, when he had leaped to the wild surmise that
there might be something between those two. She'd been talking about the
piano tuner with what struck him as a surprisingly confident
understanding.
She had instantly, he remembered, divined his thought and as swiftly
set it at rest. March wasn't, she had said, a person who saved himself
up for special people. He was there for anybody, like a public
drinking fountain.
But had she been ingenuous in making that reply to him? Had he really
been in her confidence about the man? Obviously not. The only encounter
between them that he had ever heard about was the one she had upon that
day described to him. And Lucile and Rush were evidently as completely in
the dark about the affair as he himself had been. Their meetings, their
numerous meetings, must have been clandestine. That Mary, his own white
little daughter, should be capable of an affair like that!
Another memory flashed into his mind. The evening of that same day when
she had tried to tell him why she couldn't marry Graham. She wasn't, she
had said, innocent enough for Graham; she wasn't even quite--good.
The horror of the conclusion he seemed to be drifting upon literally, for
a moment, nauseated John Wollaston. The sweat felt cold upon his
forehead. And then, white hot, bracing him like brandy, a wave of anger.
Some preliminary move toward speaking evidently caught March's ear, for
he turned alertly and looked. It was one of the oddest experiences John
Wollaston had ever had. The moment he met March's gaze, the whole
infernal pattern, like an old-fashioned set-piece in fireworks,
extinguished itself as suddenly as it had flared. There was something
indescribable in this man's face that simply made grotesque the notion
that he could be a blackguard. John felt himself clutching at his anger
to keep him up but the momentary belief which had fed it was gone.
March's face darkened, too. "If you have any idea," he said, "that I've
taken any advantage--or attempted to take any..."
"No," John said quickly. "I don't believe anything like that. I confess
there was a moment just now when it looked like that; when I couldn't
make it look like anything else. It is still quite unaccountable to me.
That explanation is discarded--but I'd like the real one."
"I don't believe," March said, reflecting over it for a moment, "that
there is any explanation I could give that would make it much more
accountable. We love each other. That is a fact that, accountable or not,
we both had to recognize a number of weeks ago. I didn't ask her to marry
me until last night. I wouldn't have asked her then if it hadn't become
clear to me that her happiness depended upon it as much as mine did. When
she was able to see that the converse was also true, we--agreed upon it."
"What I asked for," John said, "was an explanation. What you have offered
is altogether inadequate--if it can be called an explanation at all." He
wrenched his eyes away from March's face. "I've liked you," he went on,
"I've liked you despite the fact that I've had some excuse for
entertaining a contradictory feeling. And I concede your extraordinary
talents. But it remains true that you're not--the sort of man I'd expect
my daughter to marry. Nor, unless I could see some better reason than I
see now, permit her to marry."
This was further than, in cool blood, he'd have gone. But the finding of
a stranger here in his own place (any man would have been a stranger when
it came as close as this to Mary) professing to understand her needs, to
see with the clear eye of certainty where her happiness lay, angered and
outraged him. The more for an irresistible conviction that the profession
was true. But that word permit went too far. He wasn't enough of an
old-fashioned parent to believe, at all whole-heartedly, that Mary was
his to dispose of.
Again, he looked up at the man's face, braced for the retort his
challenge had laid him open to, and once more the expression he saw
there--a thing as momentary as a shimmer of summer lightning,--told him
more than anything within the resources of rhetoric could have effected.
It was something a little less than a smile that flashed across March's
face, a look half pitiful, half ironic. It told John Wollaston that his
permission was not needed. Events had got beyond him. He was superseded.
He dropped back limp in his chair. March seated himself, too, and leaned
forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped.
"I know how it must look to you, sir," he said gravely. "Even the social
aspect of the thing in the narrowest sense of the word is serious. And
there are other difficulties harder to get over than that. I don't think
I minimize any of them. And I don't believe that Mary does. But the main
thing is a fact that can't be escaped. If we face that first ..."
He broke off there for a moment and John saw him grip his hands together.
It was with a visible effort that he went on.
"One of the things Mary said last night was that sentimentality was the
crudest thing in the world. It caused more tragedies, she said, than
malice. She had learned the cruelty of it by experience. It's not an
experience she can safely go through again."
It was in an automatic effort to defend himself against the conviction he
felt closing down upon him that John lashed out here with a reply.
"The fact you're asking me to face is, I suppose, that you two have
discovered you're in love with each other to a degree that makes all
other considerations negligible."
"That's not quite it," March replied patiently. "A part of it is, that it
would have been just as impossible for Mary to marry Graham Stannard if
she had never seen me. And if she could forget me completely it would
still be impossible for her to marry any one else like him."
John didn't follow that very closely. His mind was still upon the last
sentence of March's former speech. "It's not an experience she can safely
go through again." What did he mean by that? How much did he mean by
that? Would John, if he could, plumb the full depth of that meaning?
There was no use fighting any longer.
"The simplest way of stating the fact, I suppose," he said, "is that you
two mean to marry and that you're satisfied that your reasons for making
the decision are valid. Well, if Mary corroborates you, as I have no
doubt she will, I'll face that fact as realistically as possible. I'll
agree not to, as you put it, sentimentalize."
Then he got up and held out his hand. "I mean that for a better welcome
that it sounds," he concluded. And if there was no real feeling of
kindliness for his prospective son-in-law behind the words, there was
what came to the same thing, a realization that this feeling was bound to
come in time. No candid-minded person could keep alive, for very long, a
grievance against Anthony March.
The physician in him spoke automatically while their hands were gripped.
"Good lord, man! You're about at the end of your rope. Exhausted--that's
what I mean. How long is it since you've fed?"
March was vague about this; wouldn't be drawn into the line John had been
diverted into. He answered another question or two of the same tenor with
half his mind and finally said--with the first touch of impatience he had
betrayed, "I'm all right! That can wait. There's one more thing I want
to say before you talk to Mary."
He seemed grateful for John's permission to sit down again, dropped into
his chair in a way that suggested he might have fallen into it in another
minute, and took the time he visibly needed for getting his wits into
working order again.
"I think I can see how the prospect must look to you," he began. "The
difficulties and objections that you see are, I guess, the same ones that
appeared to me. The fact that I'm not in her world, at all. That I've
never even tried to succeed nor get on, nor even to earn a decent living.
And that, however hard I work to change all that, it will only be by
perfectly extraordinary luck if I can contrive to make a life for her
that will be--externally anywhere near as good a life as the one she's
always taken for granted.
"It won't be as much worse, though, as you are likely to think. With the
help she'll give me I shall be able to earn a decent living. Unless that
opera of mine fails--laughably, and I don't believe it will, up at
Ravinia, it will help quite a lot. Make it possible for me to get some
pupils in composition. And I know I can write some songs that will be
publishable and singable--for persons who aren't musicians like Paula. I
did write two or three for the boys in Bordeaux that went pretty well.
That sort of thing didn't seem worth while to me then and I never went
on with it.
"Oh, you know how I've felt about it. How I've talked about traveling
light and not letting my life get cluttered up. But that isn't really the
thing that's changed. I've never been willing to pay, in liberty and
leisure, for things I didn't want. The only difference is that there's
something now that I do want. And I shan't shirk paying for it. I want
you to understand that."
He stressed the word you in a way that puzzled John a little, but what
he went on to say after a moment's hesitation made his meaning clear.
"That's preliminary. You'll find that Mary's misgivings--she's not
without them and they won't be easy to overcome--aren't the same as ours.
Those aren't the things that she's afraid of. She's afraid of taking my
liberty away from me. She won't be able to believe, easily, that my old
vagabond ways have lost their importance for me; that they're a phase I
can afford to outgrow. She's likely to think I've sacrificed something
essential in going regularly to work, giving lessons, writing popular
songs. Of course, it will rest mostly with me to satisfy her that that
isn't true, but any help you can give her along that line, I'll be
grateful for. Last night she seemed convinced--far enough to give me her
promise but..."
Words faded away there into an uneasy silence. John, looking intently
into the man's face, saw him wrestling, he thought, with same idea, some
fear, some sort of nightmare horror which with all the power of his will
he was struggling not to give access to. He pressed his clenched hands
against his eyes.
"What is it?" John asked sharply. "What's the matter?"
"It's nothing," March said between his teeth. "She promised, as I said.
She told me I needn't be afraid." Then he came to his feet with a gesture
of surrender. "Will you let me see her?" he asked John. "Now. Just for a
minute before I go."
John, by that time, was on his feet, too, staring. "What do you mean,
man? Afraid of what? What is it you're afraid of?"
March didn't answer the question in words, but for a moment he met her
father's gaze eye to eye and what John saw was enough.
"Good God!" he whispered. "Why--why didn't you ..." Then turning swiftly
toward the door. "Come along."
"I'm really not afraid," March panted as he followed him up the stairs,
"because of her promise. It was just a twinge."
Her door at the foot of the stairs which led to the music room stood wide
open, but both men came to an involuntary breathless pause outside it.
Then John went in, looked for a brief moment at the figure that slept so
gently in the narrow little bed, gave a reassuring nod to March who had
hung back in the doorway, a nod that invited him in; then turned away and
covered his face with his hands just for one steadying instant until the
shock of that abominable fear should pass away.
When he looked again March stood at the bedside gazing down into the
girl's face. It was as if his presence there were palpable to her. She
opened her eyes sleepily, smiled a fleeting contented smile and held up
her arms to her lover. He smiled, too, and bent down and kissed her. Then
as the arms that had clasped his neck slipped down he straightened,
nodded to John and went back to the door. John followed and for a moment,
outside the room, they talked in whispers.
"I'm going home now," March said. "To my father's house--not the other
place. There's a telephone there if she wants me. But I'll call anyhow
before I go to Ravina this afternoon."
It was he, this time, who held out his hand.
"You can trust her with me in the meantime, I think," John said as he
took it, but the irony of that was softened by a smile. March smiled,
too, and with no more words went away.
Her eyes turned upon John when he came back into the room, wide open but
still full of sleep. When he stood once more beside her bed a pat of her
hand invited him to sit down upon the edge of it.
"He really was here, wasn't he?" she asked. "I wasn't dreaming?"
"No, he was here," John said.
Her eyelids drooped again. "I'm having the loveliest dreams," she told
him. "I suppose I ought to be waking up. What time is it?"
"It's still very early. Only about half past eight. Go back to sleep."
"Have you had breakfast? Pete's wife, out in the garage, will come in and
get it for you."
"When I feel like breakfast, I'll see to it that I get some," he
said, rising.
Once more she roused herself a little. "Stay here, then, for a while,"
she said. "Pull that chair up close."
When he had planted the easy chair in the place she indicated and seated
himself in it she gave him one of her hands to hold. But in another
minute she was fast asleep.
And that, you know, was the hottest, most intolerable sting of all. He
was sore, of course, all over. He had been badly battered during the last
four days. Some of those moments with March down-stairs had been like
blows from a bludgeon. But his daughter's sleepy attempt to concern
herself about his breakfast and the perfunctory caress of that slack
unconscious hand had the effect of the climax of it all.
She'd just been through the crisis of her life. She'd been down chin-deep
in the black waters of tragedy (he didn't yet know, he told himself, what
the elements of the crisis were nor the poisonous springs of the tragedy)
and all her father meant to her was a domestic responsibility, some one
that breakfast must be provided for!
He managed to control his release of her hand and his rising from his
chair so that these actions should not be so brusk as to waken her again
and, leaving the room, went down to his own.
That was the way with children. They remained a part of you but you were
never a part of them. Mary having awakened for her lover, smiled at him,
been reassured by his kiss, had been content to drop off to sleep again.
Her father didn't matter. Not even his derelictions mattered.
He had been derelict. He didn't pretend to evade that. He could have
forgiven her reproaches; welcomed them. But thanks to March, she had
nothing to reproach him for The presence of a man she had known a matter
of weeks obliterated past years like the writing on a child's slate. He
tried to erect an active resentment against the composer. Didn't all his
troubles go back to the day the man had come, to tune the drawing-room
piano? First Paula and then Mary.
None of this was very real and he knew it. There was an underlying
stratum of his consciousness that this didn't get down to at all,
which, when it managed to get a word in, labeled it mere petulance, a
childish attempt to find solace for his hurts in building up a
grievance, a whole fortress of grievances to take shelter in against
the bombardment of facts.
Was this the quality of his bitter four days' quarrel with Paula? Was the
last accusation she had hurled at him last night before she shut herself
in her room, a fact? "Of course, I'm jealous of Mary," she had
acknowledged furiously when he charged her with it. "You don't care
anything about me except for your pleasure. Down there in Tryon, when you
didn't want that, you got rid of me and sent for Mary instead. If that
weren't true, you wouldn't have been so anxious all these years that I
shouldn't have a child."
No, that wasn't a fact, though it could be twisted into looking like one.
If he had refrained from urging motherhood upon her, if he'd given her
the benefit of his special knowledge, didn't her interest in her career
as a singer establish the presumption that it was her wish rather than
his that they were following. Had she ever said she'd like to have a
baby? Or even hinted?
He pulled himself up. There was no good going over that again.
He bathed and shaved and dressed himself in fresh clothes, operations
which had been perforce omitted at the cottage this morning in favor of
his departure without arousing Paula. (He'd slept, or rather lain awake,
upon the hammock in the veranda.) When he came down-stairs he found
Pete's wife already in the kitchen, gave her directions about his
breakfast and then from force of habit, thought of his morning paper. The
delivery of it had been discontinued, of course, for the months the house
was closed, so he walked down to Division Street to get one.
He had got his mind into a fairly quiescent state by then which made the
trick it played when he first caught sight of the great stacks of
_Tribunes_ and _Heralds_ on the corner news-stand all the more
terrifying. It had the force of an hallucination; as if in the head-lines
he actually saw the word suicide in thick black letters. And his
daughter's name underneath.
He had managed, somehow, to evade that word; to refrain from putting into
any words at all the peril Mary had so narrowly escaped, although the
fact had hung, undisguised, between him and March during the moment they
stared at each other before they went up-stairs together. It avenged that
evasion by leaping upon him now. He bought his paper and hurried home
with it under his arm, feeling as if it might still contain the news of
that tragedy.
Reacting from this irrational panic he tried to discount the whole thing.
March hadn't lied, of course, but, being a lover, he had exaggerated. As
John sat over his breakfast he got to feeling quite comfortable about
this. His mind went back to the breakfast he had had with Mary at Ravinia
--breakfast after much such an abominable night as this last had
been--the breakfast they had left for that talk under the trees beside
the lake. And then his own words came back and stabbed him.
He had been arguing with her his right to extinguish himself if he chose.
He had said he had no religion real enough to make a valid denial of that
right. It was a question no one else could presume to decide. How much
more had he said to that sensitive nerve-drawn child of his? He
remembered how white she had gone for a moment, a little later. And he
had pretended not to see! Just as he had been pretending, a few minutes
back, to doubt the reality of the peril March had saved her from. What a
liar he was!
Sentimentality, March had quoted Mary as saying, was the cruelest thing
in the world. John stood convicted now of that cruelty toward his
daughter. Was he guilty of it, also, toward his wife? Did their quarrel
boil down to that?