E-text prepared by Al Haines
I'VE MARRIED MARJORIE
by
MARGARET WIDDEMER
Author of
"Why Not," "The Wishing Ring Man," "You're Only
Young Once," "The Boardwalk," etc.
A. L. Burt Company
Publishers
New York
Published by arrangement with Harcourt, Brace and Howe
Copyright, 1920, by
The Crowell Publishing Company
Copyright, 1920, by
Harcourt, Brace and Howe, Inc.
I'VE MARRIED MARJORIE
CHAPTER I
The sun shone, that morning, and even from a city office window the
Spring wind could be felt, sweet and keen and heady, making you feel
that you wanted to be out in it, laughing, facing toward the exciting,
happy things Spring was sure to be bringing you, if you only went a
little way to meet them--just a little way!
Marjorie Ellison, bending over a filing cabinet in a small and solitary
room, felt the wind, and gave her fluffy dark head an answering,
wistful lift. It was a very exciting, Springy wind, and winds and
weathers affected her too much for her own good. Therefore she gave
the drawer she was working on an impatient little push which nearly
shook the Casses down into the Cats--she had been hunting for a very
important letter named Cattell, which had concealed itself
viciously--and went to the window as if she was being pulled there.
She set both supple little hands on the broad stone sill, and looked
downward into the city street as you would look into a well. The wind
was blowing sticks and dust around in fairy rings, and a motor car or
so ran up and down, and there were the usual number of the usual kind
of people on the sidewalks; middle-aged people principally, for most of
the younger inhabitants of New York are caged in offices at ten in the
morning, unless they are whisking by in the motors. Mostly elderly
ladies in handsome blue dresses, Marjorie noticed. She liked it, and
drew a deep, happy breath of Spring air. Then suddenly over all the
pleasure came a depressing black shadow. And yet what she had seen was
something which made most people smile and feel a little happier; a
couple of plump, gay young returned soldiers going down the street arm
in arm, and laughing uproariously at nothing at all for the sheer
pleasure of being at home. She turned away from the window feeling as
if some one had taken a piece of happiness away from her, and snatched
the nearest paper to read it, and take the taste of what she had seen
out of her mouth. It was a last night's paper with the back page full
of "symposium." She read a couple of the letters, and dropped the
paper and went back desperately to her filing cabinet.
"Cattell--Cattell----" she whispered to herself very fast, riffling
over the leaves desperately. Then she reverted to the symposium and
the soldiers. "Oh, dear, everybody on that page was writing letters to
know why they didn't get married," she said. "I wish somebody would
write letters telling why they _did_, or explain to those poor girls
that say nobody wants to marry a refined girl that they'd better leave
it alone!"
After that she hunted for the Cattell letter till she found it. Then
she took it to her superior, in the next room. Then she returned to
her work and rolled the paper up into a very small ball and dropped it
into the big wastebasket, and pushed it down with a small, neat
oxford-tied foot. Then she went to the window again restlessly, looked
out with caution, as if there might be more soldiers crossing the
street, and they might spring at her. But there were none; only a fat,
elderly gentleman gesticulating for a taxi and looking so exactly like
a _Saturday Evening Post_ cover that he almost cheered her. Marjorie
had a habit of picking up very small, amusing things and being amused
by them. And then into the office bounced the one girl she hadn't seen
that day.
"Oh, Mrs. Ellison, congratulations! I just got down, or I'd have been
here before!" she gasped, kissing Marjorie hard three times. Then she
stood back and surveyed Marjorie tenderly until she wanted to pick the
wad of paper out of the basket and throw it at her. "Coming back to
you!" she said softly. "Oh, you must be thrilled!" She put her head
on one side--she wore her hair in a shock of bobbed curls which
Marjorie loathed anyway, and they flopped when she wished to be
emphatic--and surveyed Marjorie with prolonged, tender interest. "Any
time now!" she breathed.
"Yes," said Marjorie desperately. "The ship will be in some time next
week. Yes, I'm thrilled. It's--it's wonderful. Thank you, Miss
Kaplan, I knew you would be sympathetic."
One hand was clenching and unclenching itself where Miss Kaplan,
fortunately a young person whose own side of emotions occupied her
exclusively, could not see it.
Miss Kaplan kissed her, quite uninvited, again, said "_Dear_ little
war-bride!" and--just in time, Marjorie always swore, to save herself
from death, fled out.
It is all very well to be a war-bride when there's a war, but the war
was over.
"And I'm married," Marjorie said when the door had swung to behind Miss
Kaplan, "for life!"
She was twenty-one. She was little and slender, with a wistful, very
sweet face like a miniature; big dark-blue eyes, a small mouth that
tipped down a little at the indented corners, and a transparently rose
and white skin. She looked a great deal younger even than she was, and
her being Mrs. Ellison had amused every one, including herself, for the
last year she had used the name. As she sat down at her desk again,
and looked helplessly at the keen, dark young face surmounted by an
officer's cap, that for very shame's sake she had not taken away from
her desk, she looked like a frightened little girl. And she _was_
frightened.
It had been very thrilling, if scary, to be married to Francis Ellison,
when he wasn't around. The letters--the _dear_ letters!--and the
watching for mails, and being frightened when there were battles, and
wearing the new wedding-ring, had made her perfectly certain that when
Francis came back she would be very glad, and live happily ever after.
And now that he was coming she was just plain frightened,
suffocatingly, abjectly scared to death.
"I mustn't be!" she told herself, trying to give herself orders to feel
differently. "I _must_ be very glad!" But it was impossible to do
anything with herself. She continued to feel as if her execution was
next week, instead of her reunion with a husband who wrote that he was
looking forward to----
"If he didn't describe kissing me," shivered poor little Marjorie to
herself, "so accurately!"
She had met Francis just about a month before they were married. He
had come to see her with her cousin, who was in the same company at
Plattsburg. Her cousin was engaged to a dear friend of hers, and it
had made it very nice for all four of them, because Billy and Lucille
weren't war-fiancés by any means. They had been engaged for a couple
of years, in a more or less silent fashion, and the war had given them
a chance to marry. One doesn't think so much about ways and means when
the man is going to war and can send you an allotment.
Francis, dark, quick, decided, with a careless gaiety that was like
that of a boy let out from school, had been a delightful person to pair
off with. And then the other two had been so wrapped up in the
wonderful chance to get married which opened out before them, that
marriage--a beautiful, golden, romantic thing--had been in the air.
One felt out of it if one didn't marry. Everybody else was marrying in
shoals. And Francis had been crazy over little Marjorie from the
moment he saw her--over her old-fashioned, whimsical ways, her small
defiances that covered up a good deal of shyness, over the littleness
and grace that made him want to pick her up and pet her and protect
her, he said . . . Marjorie could remember, even yet, with pleasure,
the lovely things he had said to her in that tense way he had on the
rare occasions when he wasn't laughing. She had fought off marrying
him till the very last minute. And then the very day before the
regiment sailed she had given in, and the other two--married two weeks
by then--had whisked her excitedly through it. And then they'd
recalled him--just two hours after they were married, while Marjorie
was sitting in the suite at the hotel, with Francis kneeling down by
her in his khaki, his arms around her waist, looking up at her
adoringly. She could see his face yet, uplifted and intense, and the
way it had turned to a mask when the knock came that announced the
telegram.
And it seemed now almost indecent that she should have let him kneel
there with his head against her laces, calling her his wife. She had
smiled down at him, then, shyly, and--half-proud, half-timid--had
thought it was very wonderful.
"When I see him it will be all right! When we meet it will all come
back!" she said half-aloud, walking restlessly up and down the office.
"It must. It will have to."
But in her heart she knew that she was wishing desperately that the war
had lasted ages longer, that he had been kept a year after the end of
the war instead of eight months; almost, down deep in her heart where
she couldn't get at it enough to deny it, that he had been
killed. . . . Well, she had a week longer, anyway. You can do a great
deal with yourself in a week if you bully hard. And the ships were
almost always a much longer time getting in than anybody said they
would be, and then they sent you to camps first.
Marjorie had the too many nerves of the native American, but she had
the pluck that generally goes with them. She forced herself to sit
quietly down and work at her task, and wished that she could stop being
angry at herself for telling Lucille that Francis had written he was
coming home. Because Lucille worked where she did, and had promptly
spread the glad tidings from the top of the office to the bottom, and
her morning had been a levee. Even poor little Mrs. Jardine, whose boy
had been killed before he had been over two weeks, had spoken to
Marjorie brightly, and said how glad she was, and silent, stiff Miss
Gardner, who was said never to have had any lovers in her life, had
looked at her with an envy she tried to hide, and said that she
supposed Marjorie was glad.
"Well, it's two weeks, maybe. Two weeks is ages."
Marjorie dived headfirst into the filing cabinet again, and was saying
to herself very fast, "Timmins, Tolman, Turnbull--oh, dear,
_Turnbull_----" when, very softly, the swinging-door that shut her off
from the rest of the office was pushed open again, and some one crossed
sharply to her side. She flung up her head in terror. Suppose it
should be Francis--
Well, it was.
She had no more than time for one gasp before he very naturally had her
in his arms, as one who has a right, and was holding her so tight she
could scarcely breathe. She tried to kiss him back, but it was
half-hearted. She hoped, her mind working with a cold, quick
precision, that he could not tell that she did not love him. And
apparently he could not. He let her go after a minute, and flung
himself down by her in just the attitude that the knock on the door,
fifteen months ago, had interrupted. And Marjorie tried not to stiffen
herself, and not to wonder if anybody was coming in, and not to feel
that a perfect stranger was doing something he had no right to.
It was to be supposed that she succeeded more or less, because when he
finally let her go, he looked at her as fondly as he had when he
entered, and began to talk, without much preface, very much as if he
had only been gone a half hour.
"They'll let you off, won't they, for the rest of the day? But of
course they will! I almost ran over an old gentleman outside here, and
it comes to me now that he said something like 'take your wife home for
to-day, my boy!' I was in such a hurry to get at you, Marge, that I
didn't listen. My wife! Good Lord, to think I have her again!"
She got her breath a little, and stopped shivering, and looked at him.
He had not changed much; one does not in fifteen months. It was the
same eager, dark young face, almost too sharply cut for a young man's,
with very bright dark eyes. The principal difference was in his
expression. Before he went he had had a great deal of expression, a
face that showed almost too much of what he thought. That was gone.
His face was younger-looking, because the flashing of changes over it
was gone. He looked wondering, very tired, and dulled somehow. And he
spoke without the turns of speech that she and her friends amused each
other with, the little quaintnesses of conscious fancy. "As if he'd
been talking to children," she thought.
Then she remembered that it was not that. He had been giving orders,
and taking them, and being on firing-lines; all the things that he had
written her about, and that had seemed so like story-books when she got
the letters. His being so changed made it real for the first
time. . . . And then an unworthy feeling--as if she simply could not
face the romantic and tender eyes of all the office--everybody having
the same feelings about her that Miss Kaplan had, even if they were
well-bred enough to phrase them politely.
"Shall we go?" she asked abruptly, while this feeling was strong in her.
"Not for a minute. I want to see the place where my wife has spent her
last year . . ."
He stood with his arm still around her--would he never stop touching
her?--and surveyed the office with the same sort of affectionate
amusement he might have given to a workbasket of hers, or a piece of
embroidery. Marjorie slipped from under his arm and put her hat on.
"I'm ready now," she said.
They walked out of the little office, and through the long aisle down
the center of the floor of the office-building, Marjorie, still
miserably conscious of the eyes, and the emotions behind the eyes, and
quite as conscious that they were emotions that she ought to be ashamed
of minding.
"Now where shall we go for luncheon?" demanded Francis joyously, as
they got outside. He caught her hand in his surreptitiously and said
"You darling!" under his breath. For a minute the old magic of his
swift courtship came back to her, and she forgot the miserable
oppression of facing fifty years of wedded life with a stranger; and
she smiled up at him. Then, as he caught her hand in his, quite
undisguisedly this time, and held it under his arm, the repulsion came
back.
"Anywhere you like," she answered his question.
"We'll go to the biggest, wildest, wooliest place in the city, where
the band plays the most music," he announced. "Going to celebrate.
Come on, honey. And then I have a fine surprise for you, as soon as we
go back to the flat. Lucille won't be back till five, will she? And
thank goodness for that!"
Lucille and Marjorie, pending the return of their husbands, shared a
tiny flat far uptown on the west side. Marjorie had described it at
length in her letters, until Francis had said that he could find his
way around it if he walked in at midnight. But his intimacy with it
made her feel that there was no place on earth she could call her own.
"Tell me now," she demanded.
Francis laughed again, and shook his head.
"It will do you good to guess. Come now, which--Sherry's or the Plaza
or the Ritz?"
"Sherry's--they're going to close it soon, poor old place!"
"Then we'll celebrate its obsequies," said Francis, grinning cheerfully.
Before he went he had smiled, somehow, as if he had been to a very
excellent college and a super-fine prep school of many traditions--as,
indeed, he had--but now it was exactly the grin, Marjorie realized,
still with a feeling of unworthiness, of the soldier, sailor, and
marine grinning so artlessly from the War Camp Community posters. In
his year of foreign service, Francis had shaken off the affectations of
his years, making him, at twenty-five, a much older and more valuable
man than Marjorie had parted with. But she didn't like it, or what she
glimpsed of it. Whether he was gay in this simple, new way, or grave
in the frighteningly old one, he was not the Francis she had built up
for herself from a month's meetings and a few memories.
He smiled at her flashingly again as they settled themselves at the
little table in just the right spot and place they had chosen.
"Wondering whether I'll eat with my knife?" he demanded, quite at
random as it happened, but altogether too close to Marjorie's feelings
to be comfortable.
She colored up to her hair.
"No--no! I _know_ you wouldn't do that!" she asseverated so earnestly
that he went off into another gale of affectionate laughter.
And then he addressed himself to the joyous task of planning a luncheon
that they would never of them either forget, he said. He took the
waiter into their confidence to a certain degree, and from then on a
circle of silent and admiring service inclosed them.
"But you needn't think we're going to linger over it, Marjorie," he
informed her. "I want to get up to where you live, and be alone with
you."
"Of course," said Marjorie mechanically, saying a little prayer to the
effect that she needed a great deal of help to get through this
situation, and she hoped it would come in sight soon. She could not
eat very much. It was all very good, and the band played ravishingly
to the ears of Francis, who sent buoyantly across and demanded such
tunes as he was fondest of. There was one which they played to which
he sang, under his breath, a profane song which ran in part:
"And we'll all come home
And get drunk on ginger pop--
For the slackers voted the country dry
While we went over the top."
And then, when the meal was two-thirds over, Marjorie wished she hadn't
offered up any prayers for help to get through the situation. Because
softly up to their table strolled a tall, thin young man with a cane,
gray silk gloves, and a dreamy if slightly nervous look, and said
discontentedly, "Marjorie Ellison! How wonderful to find you here!
You will let me sit down at your table, won't you, and meet your
soldier-friend?"
If Marjorie had never written to Francis about Bradley Logan it would
have been all right, quite a rescue, in fact. But in those too fatally
discursive letters; the letters which had come finally to feel like a
sympathetic diary with no destination, she had rather enlarged on him.
He had been admiring her at disconnected intervals ever since she first
met him. He had not been able to get in the army because of some
mysterious neurasthenic ailment about which he preserved a hurt
silence, as to details, but mentioned a good deal in a general way. It
kept him from making engagements, it made him unable to go long
distances; Marjorie had described all the scattered hints about it in
her letters to Francis, who had promptly written back that undoubtedly
the little friend had fits; and referred to him thereafter, quite
without malice, as, "your fit-friend." She had an insane terror, as
she introduced him, lest she should explain him to Francis in an
audible aside by that name. However, it was unnecessary. Francis
placed him immediately, it was to be seen, and was cold almost to
rudeness. Logan did not notice it much. He sat down with them,
declined the food Marjorie offered, ordered himself three slivers of
dry toast and a cup of lemonless and creamless tea, and sipped them and
nibbled them as if even they were a concession to manners.
What really was the matter with Logan Marjorie was doomed never to
know. Francis told her afterwards, with a certain marital brevity,
that it was a combination of dry toast and thinking too much about
French poets. His literary affiliations, which he earned his living
by, had stopped short at the naughty nineties, when everybody was very
unhealthy and soulful and hinted darkly at tragedies; the period of the
Yellow Book and Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Symons and Dowson, and the
last end of Wilde. He undoubtedly had the charming and fluent manners
of his time, anachronism though he was. And he talked a great deal,
and very brilliantly, if a bit excitedly. He plunged now, in his
charming, high, slightly too mannered voice, into a discussion with
Marjorie on the absolute rottenness of the modern magazine, considered
from the viewpoint of style. He overwhelmed them with instances of how
all magazines were owned by persons who neither had cultivation nor
desired any. Francis answered him very little, so Marjorie, wifely
before her time, found herself trying nervously to keep up with Logan,
and hurling more thoughts at him about Baudelaire than she had known
she possessed. As a matter of fact she'd never read any of him, but
Logan thought she had to his dying day, which says a good deal for her
brains. Presently Francis summoned the waiter in rather a martial
voice, demanded a taxi of him efficiently, and Marjorie found herself
swept away from Logan and taxi-ing extravagantly uptown before she knew
what she was at.
Francis wasn't cross, it appeared. The first thing he did when he got
her in the cab was to sweep her close to him--the second to burst into
a peal of delighted laughter, and quote
"I had a cow, a gentle cow, who browsed beside my door,
Did not think much of Maeterlinck, and would not, furthermore!"
"Heavens!" he ended, "that fool and his magazine editors! Nobody but
you could have been so patient with the poor devil, Marge."
He leaned her and himself back in the cab, and stared contemplatively
out at New York going by. "And to think--and--to--think--that while
half of decent humanity has been doing what it's been doing to keep the
world from going to hell, that fool--that _fool_--has been sitting at
home nibbling toast and worrying about what is style! . . . I'll tell
him! Style is what I'll have when I get these clothes off, and some
regular ones. You'll have to help me pick 'em out, Marge. You'll find
I've no end of uses for a wife, darling."
"I hope you'll make me useful," she answered in a small voice.
Fortunately she saw the ridiculousness of what she had said herself
before the constrained note of her voice reached her husband, and
began, a little nervously, to laugh at herself. So that passed off all
right.
"Will life be just one succession of hoping things pass off all right?"
she wondered. And she did wish Francis wasn't so scornful about all
the things Logan said. For Logan, in spite of his mysterious
disability, was very brilliant; he wrote essays for real magazines that
you had to pay thirty-five cents for, and when Marjorie said she knew
him people were always very respectful and impressed. Marjorie had
been brought up to respect such things very much, herself, in a pretty
Westchester suburb, where celebrities were things which passed through
in clouds of glory, lecturing for quite as much as the club felt it
could afford. A celebrity who let you talk to him, nay, seemed
delighted when you let him talk to you, couldn't be as negligible as
Francis seemed to think him. . . . Francis didn't seem as if he had
ever read _anything_. . . . It was a harmless question to ask, at
least.
"What did you read, over there?" she asked him.
"We read anything we could get hold of that would take our minds," was
the answer, rather grimly. Then, more lightly, "When I wasn't reading
detective stories I was studying books on forestry. Did you know you
had married a forester bold, Marge?"
"Of course I remembered you said that was what you did," she answered,
relieved that the talk was veering away, for one moment, from
themselves.
"Poor little girl, you haven't had a chance to know very much about
me," he said tenderly. "Well, I know a lot more about it than I did
when I went away. Oh, the trees in France, dear! It's worse to think
of the trees than of the people, I think sometimes. I suppose that's
because they always meant a lot to me--very much as a jeweler would
feel badly about all the spoons the Crown Prince took home with
him. . . . Anyway, they wanted me to stay over there and do
reforestation. Big chances. But I didn't feel as if I could stay away
from little old New York--naturally Marge had nothing to do with
it--another hour. Would you have liked to go to Italy and watch me
re-forest, Marjorie?"
Marjorie's "Oh, _no_!" was very fervent. She also found herself
thinking stealthily that even any one as efficient as Francis could not
reforest the city of New York, and that therefore any position he had
would very likely let her off. Maybe he might go very soon.
With this thought in her mind she led the way up the three flights of
stairs to the tiny apartment she and Lucille Strong shared. If Francis
had not spoken as they reached the door she might have carried it
through. But just as she fitted her key in the door he did speak,
behind her, an arm about her.
"In another minute you and I will be alone together; in our own
home--my wife----"
He took the key gently from her hand; he unlocked the door, and drew
her in, with his arms around her. He pushed the door to behind them,
and bent down to kiss her again, very tenderly and reverently. And in
that instant Marjorie's self-control broke.