ECHOES
In the early days of February Stella had an unexpected visitor. The
landlady called her to the common telephone, and when she took up the
receiver, Linda Abbey's voice came over the wire.
"When can I see you?" she asked. "I'll only be here to-day and
to-morrow."
"Now, if you like," Stella responded. "I'm free until two-thirty."
"I'll be right over," Linda said. "I'm only about ten minutes drive from
where you are."
Stella went back to her room both glad and sorry: glad to hear a
familiar, friendly voice amid this loneliness which sometimes seemed
almost unendurable; sorry because her situation involved some measure of
explanation to Linda. That hurt.
But she was not prepared for the complete understanding of the matter
Linda Abbey tacitly exhibited before they had exchanged a dozen
sentences.
"How did you know?" Stella asked. "Who told you?"
"No one. I drew my own conclusions when I heard you had gone to
Seattle," Linda replied. "I saw it coming. My dear, I'm not blind, and
I was with you a lot last summer. I knew you too well to believe you'd
make a move while you had your baby to think of. When he was gone--well,
I looked for anything to happen."
"Still, nothing much has happened," Stella remarked with a touch of
bitterness, "except the inevitable break between a man and a woman when
there's no longer any common bond between them. It's better so. Jack has
a multiplicity of interests. He can devote himself to them without the
constant irritation of an unresponsive wife. We've each taken our own
road. That's all that has happened."
"So far," Linda murmured. "It's a pity. I liked that big, silent man of
yours. I like you both. It seems a shame things have to turn out this
way just because--oh, well. Charlie and I used to plan things for the
four of us, little family combinations when we settled down on the lake.
Honestly, Stella, do you think it's worth while? I never could see you
as a sentimental little chump, letting a momentary aberration throw your
whole life out of gear."
"How do you know that I have?" Stella asked gravely.
Linda shrugged her shoulders expressively.
"I suppose it looks silly, if not worse, to you," Stella said. "But I
can't help what you think. My reason has dictated every step I've taken
since last fall. If I'd really given myself up to sentimentalism, the
Lord only knows what might have happened."
"Exactly," Linda responded drily. "Now, there's no use beating around
the bush. We get so in that habit as a matter of politeness,--our sort
of people,--that we seldom say in plain English just what we really
mean. Surely, you and I know each other well enough to be frank, even if
it's painful. Very likely you'll say I'm a self-centered little beast,
but I'm going to marry your brother, my dear, and I'm going to marry him
in the face of considerable family opposition. I _am_ selfish. Can you
show me any one who isn't largely swayed by motives of self-interest, if
it comes to that? I want to be happy. I want to be on good terms with my
own people, so that Charlie will have some of the opportunities dad can
so easily put in his way. Charlie isn't rich. He hasn't done anything,
according to the Abbey standard, but make a fair start. Dad's
patronizing as sin, and mother merely tolerates the idea because she
knows that I'll marry Charlie in any case, opposition or no opposition.
I came over expressly to warn you, Stella. Anything like scandal now
would be--well, it would upset so many things."
"You needn't be uneasy," Stella answered coldly. "There isn't any
foundation for scandal. There won't be."
"I don't know," Linda returned, "Walter Monohan came to Seattle a boat
ahead of me. In fact, that's largely why I came."
Stella flushed angrily.
"Well, what of that?" she demanded. "His movements are nothing to me."
"I don't know," Linda rejoined. She had taken off her gloves and was
rolling them nervously in a ball. Now she dropped them and impulsively
grasped Stella's hands.
"Stella, Stella," she cried. "Don't get that hurt, angry look. I don't
like to say these things to you, but I feel that I have to. I'm worried,
and I'm afraid for you and your husband, for Charlie and myself, for all
of us together. Walter Monohan is as dangerous as any man who's
unscrupulous and rich and absolutely self-centered can possibly be. I
know the glamour of the man. I used to feel it myself. It didn't go very
far with me, because his attention wandered away from me before my
feelings were much involved, and I had a chance to really fathom them
and him. He has a queer gift of making women care for him, and he trades
on it deliberately. He doesn't play fair; he doesn't mean to. Oh, I know
so many cruel things, despicable things, he's done. Don't look at me
like that, Stella. I'm not saying this just to wound you. I'm simply
putting you on your guard. You can't play with fire and not get burned.
If you've been nursing any feeling for Walter Monohan, crush it, cut it
out, just as you'd have a surgeon cut out a cancer. Entirely apart from
any question of Jack Fyfe, don't let this man play any part whatever in
your life. You'll be sorry if you do. There's not a man or woman whose
relations with Monohan have been intimate enough to enable them to
really know the man and his motives who doesn't either hate or fear or
despise him, and sometimes all three."
"That's a sweeping indictment," Stella said stiffly. "And you're very
earnest. Yet I can hardly take your word at its face value. If he's so
impossible a person, how does it come that you and your people
countenanced him socially? Besides, it's all rather unnecessary, Linda.
I'm not the least bit likely to do anything that will reflect on your
prospective husband, which is what it simmers down to, isn't it? I've
been pulled and hauled this way and that ever since I've been on the
coast, simply because I was dependent on some one else--first Charlie
and then Jack--for the bare necessities of life. When there's mutual
affection, companionship, all those intimate interests that marriage is
supposed to imply, I daresay a woman gives full measure for all she
receives. If she doesn't, she's simply a sponge, clinging to a man for
what's in it. I couldn't bear that. You've been rather painfully frank;
so will I be. One unhappy marriage is quite enough for me. Looking back,
I can see that even if Walter Monohan hadn't stirred a feeling in me
which I don't deny,--but which I'm not nearly so sure of as I was some
time ago,--I'd have come to just this stage, anyway. I was drifting all
the time. My baby and the conventions, that reluctance most women have
to make a clean sweep of all the ties they've been schooled to think
unbreakable, kept me moving along the old grooves. It would have come
about a little more gradually, that's all. But I have broken away, and
I'm going to live my own life after a fashion, and I'm going to achieve
independence of some sort. I'm never going to be any man's mate again
until I'm sure of myself--and of him. There's my philosophy of life, as
simply as I can put it. I don't think you need to worry about me. Right
now I couldn't muster up the least shred of passion of any sort. I seem
to have felt so much since last summer, that I'm like a sponge that's
been squeezed dry."
"I don't blame you, dear," Linda said wistfully. "A woman's heart is a
queer thing, though. When you compare the two men--Oh, well, I know
Walter so thoroughly, and you don't. You couldn't ever have cared much
for Jack."
"That hasn't any bearing on it now," Stella answered. "I'm still his
wife, and I respect him, and I've got a stubborn sort of pride. There
won't be any divorce proceedings or any scandal. I'm free personally to
work out my own economic destiny. That, right now, is engrossing enough
for me."
Linda sat a minute, thoughtful.
"So you think my word for Walter Monohan's deviltry isn't worth much,"
she said. "Well, I could furnish plenty of details. But I don't think I
shall. Not because you'd be angry, but because I don't think you're
quite as blind as I believed. And I'm not a natural gossip. Aside from
that, he's quite too busy on Roaring Lake for it to mean any good. He
never gets active like that unless he has some personal axe to grind. In
this case, I can grasp his motive easily enough. Jack Fyfe may not have
said a word to you, but he certainly knows Monohan. They've clashed
before, so I've been told. Jack probably saw what was growing on you,
and I don't think he'd hesitate to tell Monohan to walk away around. If
he did,--or if you definitely turned Monohan down; you see I'm rather in
the dark,--he'd go to any length to play even with. Fyfe. When Monohan
wants anything, he looks upon it as his own; and when you wound his
vanity, you've stabbed him in his most vital part. He never rests then
until he's paid the score. Father was always a little afraid of him. I
think that's the chief reason for selling out his Roaring Lake interests
to Monohan. He didn't want to be involved in whatever Monohan
contemplated doing. He has a wholesome respect for your husband's rather
volcanic ability. Monohan has, too. But he has always hated Jack Fyfe.
To my knowledge for three years,--prior to pulling you out of the water
that time,--he never spoke of Jack Fyfe without a sneer. He hates any
one who beats him at anything. That ruction on the Tyee is a sample.
He'll spend money, risk lives, all but his own, do anything to satisfy a
grudge. That's one of the things that worries me. Charlie will be into
anything that Fyfe is, for Fyfe's his friend. I admire the spirit of the
thing, but I don't want our little applecart upset in the sort of
struggle Fyfe and Monohan may stage. I don't even know what form it will
ultimately take, except that from certain indications he'll try to make
Fyfe spend money faster than he can make it, perhaps in litigation over
timber, over anything that offers, by making trouble in his camps,
harassing him at every turn. He can, you know. He has immense resources.
Oh, well, I'm satisfied, Stella, that you're a much wiser girl than I
thought when I knew you'd left Jack Fyfe. I'm quite sure now you aren't
the sort of woman Monohan could wind around his little finger. But I'm
sure he'll try. You'll see, and remember what I tell you. There, I think
I'd better run along. You're not angry, are you, Stella?"
"You mean well enough, I suppose," Stella answered. "But as a matter of
fact, you've made me feel rather nasty, Linda. I don't want to talk or
even think of these things. The best thing you and Charlie and Jack Fyfe
could do is to forget such a discontented pendulum as I ever existed."
"Oh, bosh!" Linda exclaimed, as she drew on her gloves. "That's sheer
nonsense. You're going to be my big sister in three months. Things will
work out. If you felt you had to take this step for your own good, no
one can blame you. It needn't make any difference in our friendship."
On the threshold she turned on her heel. "Don't forget what I've said,"
she repeated. "Don't trust Monohan. Not an inch."
Stella flung herself angrily into a chair when the door closed on Linda
Abbey. Her eyes snapped. She resented being warned and cautioned, as if
she were some moral weakling who could not be trusted to make the most
obvious distinctions. Particularly did she resent having Monohan flung
in her teeth, when she was in a way to forget him, to thrust the strange
charm of the man forever out of her thoughts. Why, she asked bitterly,
couldn't other people do as Jack Fyfe had done: cut the Gordian knot at
one stroke and let it rest at that?
So Monohan was in Seattle? Would he try to see her?
Stella had not minced matters with herself when she left Roaring Lake.
Dazed and shaken by suffering, nevertheless she knew that she would not
always suffer, that in time she would get back to that normal state in
which the human ego diligently pursues happiness. In time the legal tie
between herself and Jack Fyfe would cease to exist. If Monohan cared for
her as she thought he cared, a year or two more or less mattered little.
They had all their lives before them. In the long run, the errors and
mistakes of that upheaval would grow dim, be as nothing. Jack Fyfe would
shrug his shoulders and forget, and in due time he would find a fitter
mate, one as loyal as he deserved. And why might not she, who had never
loved him, whose marriage to him had been only a climbing out of the
fire into the frying-pan?
So that with all her determination to make the most of her gift of song,
so that she would never again be buffeted by material urgencies in a
material world, Stella had nevertheless been listening with the ear of
her mind, so to speak, for a word from Monohan to say that he
understood, and that all was well.
Paradoxically, she had not expected to hear that word. Once in Seattle,
away from it all, there slowly grew upon her the conviction that in
Monohan's fine avowal and renunciation he had only followed the cue she
had given. In all else he had played his own hand. She couldn't forget
Billy Dale. If the motive behind that bloody culmination were thwarted
love, it was a thing to shrink from. It seemed to her now, forcing
herself to reason with cold-blooded logic, that Monohan desired her less
than he hated Fyfe's possession of her; that she was merely an added
factor in the breaking out of a struggle for mastery between two
diverse and dominant men. Every sign and token went to show that the pot
of hate had long been simmering. She had only contributed to its boiling
over.
"Oh, well," she sighed, "it's out of my hands altogether now. I'm sorry,
but being sorry doesn't make any difference. I'm the least factor, it
seems, in the whole muddle. A woman isn't much more than an incident in
a man's life, after all."
She dressed to go to the Charteris, for her day's work was about to
begin. As so often happens in life's uneasy flow, periods of calm are
succeeded by events in close sequence. Howard and his wife insisted that
Stella join them at supper after the show. They were decent folk who
accorded frank admiration to her voice and her personality. They had
been kind to her in many little ways, and she was glad to accept.
At eleven a taxi deposited them at the door of Wain's. The Seattle of
yesterday needs no introduction to Wain's, and its counterpart can be
found in any cosmopolitan, seaport city. It is a place of subtle
distinction, tucked away on one of the lower hill streets, where
after-theater parties and nighthawks with an eye for pretty women, an
ear for sensuous music, and a taste for good food, go when they have
money to spend.
Ensconced behind a potted palm, with a waiter taking Howard's order,
Stella let her gaze travel over the diners. She brought up with a
repressed start at a table but four removes from her own, her eyes
resting upon the unmistakable profile of Walter Monohan. He was dining
vis-à-vis with a young woman chiefly remarkable for a profusion of
yellow hair and a blazing diamond in the lobe of each ear,--a plump,
blond, vivacious person of a type that Stella, even with her limited
experience, found herself instantly classifying.
A bottle of wine rested in an iced dish between them. Monohan was toying
with the stem of a half-emptied glass, smiling at his companion. The
girl leaned toward him, speaking rapidly, pouting. Monohan nodded,
drained his glass, signaled a waiter. When she got into an elaborate
opera cloak and Monohan into his Inverness, they went out, the plump,
jeweled hand resting familiarly on Monohan's arm. Stella breathed a sigh
of relief as they passed, looking straight ahead. She watched through
the upper half of the café window and saw a machine draw against the
curb, saw the be-scarfed yellow head enter and Monohan's silk hat
follow. Then she relaxed, but she had little appetite for her food. A
hot wave of shamed disgust kept coming over her. She felt sick,
physically revolted. Very likely Monohan had put her in _that_ class, in
his secret thought. She was glad when the evening ended, and the Howards
left her at her own doorstep.
On the carpet where it had been thrust by the postman under the door, a
white square caught her eye, and she picked it up before she switched on
the light. And she got a queer little shock when the light fell on the
envelope, for it was addressed in Jack Fyfe's angular handwriting.
She tore it open. It was little enough in the way of a letter, a couple
of lines scrawled across a sheet of note-paper.
"_Dear Girl:_
"I was in Seattle a few days ago and heard you sing. Here's hoping
good luck rides with you.
"JACK."
Stella sat down by the window. Outside, the ever-present Puget Sound
rain drove against wall and roof and sidewalk, gathered in wet,
glistening pools in the street. Through that same window she had watched
Jack Fyfe walk out of her life three months ago without a backward look,
sturdily, silently, uncomplaining. He hadn't whined, he wasn't whining
now,--only flinging a cheerful word out of the blank spaces of his own
life into the blank spaces of hers. Stella felt something warm and wet
steal down her cheeks.
She crumpled the letter with a sudden, spasmodic clenching of her hand.
A lump rose chokingly in her throat. She stabbed at the light switch and
threw herself on the bed, sobbing her heart's cry in the dusky quiet.
And she could not have told why, except that she had been overcome by a
miserably forlorn feeling; all the mental props she relied upon were
knocked out from under her. Somehow those few scrawled words had flung
swiftly before her, like a picture on a screen, a vision of her baby
toddling uncertainly across the porch of the white bungalow. And she
could not bear to think of that!
* * * * *
When the elm before her window broke into leaf, and the sodden winter
skies were transformed into a warm spring vista of blue, Stella was
singing a special engagement in a local vaudeville house that boasted a
"big time" bill. She had stepped up. The silvery richness of her voice
had carried her name already beyond local boundaries, as the singing
master under whom she studied prophesied it would. In proof thereof she
received during April a feminine committee of two from Vancouver bearing
an offer of three hundred dollars for her appearance in a series of
three concerts under the auspices of the Woman's Musical Club, to be
given in the ballroom of Vancouver's new million-dollar hostelry, the
Granada. The date was mid-July. She took the offer under advisement,
promising a decision in ten days.
The money tempted her; that was her greatest need now,--not for her
daily bread, but for an accumulated fund that would enable her to reach
New York and ultimately Europe, if that seemed the most direct route to
her goal. She had no doubts about reaching it now. Confidence came to
abide with her. She throve on work; and with increasing salary, her fund
grew. Coming from any other source, she would have accepted this further
augmentation of it without hesitation, since for a comparative beginner,
it was a liberal offer.
But Vancouver was Fyfe's home town; it had been hers. Many people knew
her; the local papers would feature her. She did not know how Fyfe would
take it; she did not even know if there had been any open talk of their
separation. Money, she felt, was a small thing beside opening old sores.
For herself, she was tolerably indifferent to Vancouver's social
estimate of her or her acts. Nevertheless, so long as she bore Fyfe's
name, she did not feel free to make herself a public figure there
without his sanction. So she wrote to him in some detail concerning the
offer and asked point-blank if it mattered to him.
His answer came with uncanny promptness, as if every mail connection had
been made on the minute.
"If it is to your advantage to sing here," he wrote, "by all means
accept. Why should it matter to me? I would even be glad to come and
hear you sing if I could do so without stirring up vain longings and
useless regrets. As for the other considerations you mention, they
are of no weight at all. I never wanted to keep you in a glass case.
Even if all were well between us, I wouldn't have any feeling about
your singing in public other than pride in your ability to command
public favor with your voice. It's a wonderful voice, too big and
fine a thing to remain obscure.
"JACK."
He added, evidently as an afterthought, a somewhat lengthy postscript:
"I wish you would do something next month, not as a favor to me
particularly, but to ease things along for Charlie and Linda. They
are genuinely in love with each other. I can see you turning up your
little nose at that. I know you've held a rather biased opinion of
your brother and his works since that unfortunate winter. But it
doesn't do to be too self-righteous. Charlie, then, was very little
different from any rather headlong, self-centered, red-blooded
youngster. I'm afraid I'm expressing myself badly. What I mean is
that while he was drifting then into a piggy muddle, he had the
sense to take a brace before his lapses became vices. Partly
because--I've flattered myself--I talked to him like a Dutch uncle,
and partly because he's cast too much in the same clean-cut mold
that you are, to let his natural passions run clean away with him.
He'll always be more or less a profound egotist. But he'll be a good
deal more of a man than you, perhaps, think.
"I never used to think much of these matters. I suppose my own
failure at a thing in which I was cocksure of success had made me a
bit dubious about anybody I care for starting so serious an
undertaking as marriage under any sort of handicap. I do like
Charlie Benton and Linda Abbey. They are marrying in the face of her
people's earnest attempt to break it up. The Abbeys are hopelessly
conservative. Anything in the nature of our troubles aired in public
would make it pretty tough sledding for Linda. As it stands, they
are consenting very ungracefully, but as a matter of family pride,
intend to give Linda a big wedding.
"Now, no one outside of you and me and--well you and me--knows that
there is a rift in our lute. I haven't been quizzed--naturally. It
got about that you'd taken up voice culture with an eye to opera as
a counteracting influence to the grief of losing your baby. I
fostered that rumor--simply to keep gossip down until things shaped
themselves positively. Once these two are married, they have
started--Abbey _père_ and _mère_ will then be unable to frown on
Linda's contemplated alliance with a family that's produced a
divorce case.
"I do not suppose you will take any legal steps until after those
concerts. Until then, please keep up the fiction that the house of
Fyfe still stands on a solid foundation--a myth that you've taken no
measures to dispel since you left. When it does come, it will be a
sort of explosion, and I'd rather have it that way--one amazed yelp
from our friends and the newspapers, and it's over.
"Meantime, you will receive an invitation to the wedding. I hope
you'll accept. You needn't have any compunctions about playing the
game. You will not encounter me, as I have my hands full here, and
I'm notorious in Vancouver for backing out of functions, anyway. It
is not imperative that you should do this. It's merely a safeguard
against a bomb from the Abbey fortress.
"Linda is troubled by a belief that upon small pretext they would be
very nasty, and she naturally doesn't want any friction with her
folks. They have certain vague but highly material ambitions for her
matrimonially, which she, a very sensible girl, doesn't subscribe
to. She's a very shrewd and practical young person, for all her
whole-hearted passion for your brother. I rather think she pretty
clearly guesses the breach in our rampart--not the original mistake
in our over-hasty plunge--but the wedge that divided us for good. If
she does, and I'm quite sure she does, she is certainly good stuff,
because she is most loyally your champion. I say that because
Charlie had a tendency this spring to carp at your desertion of
Roaring Lake. Things aren't going any too good with us, one way and
another, and of course he, not knowing the real reason of your
absence, couldn't understand why you stay away. I had to squelch
him, and Linda abetted me successfully. However, that's beside the
point. I hope I haven't irritated you. I'm such a dumb sort of brute
generally. I don't know what imp of prolixity got into my pen. I've
got it all off my chest now, or pretty near.
"J.H.F."
Stella sat thoughtfully gazing at the letter for a long time.
"I wonder?" she said aloud, and the sound of her own voice galvanized
her into action. She put on a coat and went out into the mellow spring
sunshine, and walked till the aimless straying of her feet carried her
to a little park that overlooked the far reach of the Sound and gave
westward on the snowy Olympics, thrusting hoary and aloof to a perfect
sky, like their brother peaks that ringed Roaring Lake. And all the time
her mind kept turning on a question whose asking was rooted neither in
fact nor necessity, an inquiry born of a sentiment she had never
expected to feel.
Should she go back to Jack Fyfe?
She shook her head impatiently when she faced that squarely. Why tread
the same bitter road again? But she put that self-interested phase of it
aside and asked herself candidly if she _could_ go back and take up the
old threads where they had been broken off and make life run smoothly
along the old, quiet channels? She was as sure as she was sure of the
breath she drew that Fyfe wanted her, that he longed for and would
welcome her. But she was equally sure that the old illusions would never
serve. She couldn't even make him happy, much less herself.
Monohan--well, Monohan was a dead issue. He had come to the Charteris to
see her, all smiles and eagerness. She had been able to look at him and
through him--and cut him dead--and do it without a single flutter of her
heart.
That brief and illuminating episode in Wain's had merely confirmed an
impression that had slowly grown upon her, and her outburst of feeling
that night had only been the overflowing of shamed anger at herself for
letting his magnetic personality make so deep an impression on her that
she could admit to him that she cared. She felt that she had belittled
herself by that. But he was no longer a problem. She wondered now how he
ever could have been. She recalled that once Jack Fyfe had soberly told
her she would never sense life's real values while she nursed so many
illusions. Monohan had been one of them.
"But it wouldn't work," she whispered to herself. "I couldn't do it.
He'd know I only did it because I was sorry, because I thought I should,
because the old ties, and they seem so many and so strong in spite of
everything, were harder to break than the new road is to follow alone.
He'd resent anything like pity for his loneliness. And if Monohan has
made any real trouble, it began over me, or at least it focussed on me.
And he might resent that. He's ten times a better man than I am a woman.
He thinks about the other fellow's side of things. I'm just what he said
about Charlie, self-centered, a profound egotist. If I really and truly
loved Jack Fyfe, I'd be a jealous little fury if he so much as looked at
another woman. But I don't, and I don't see why I don't. I want to be
loved; I want to love. I've always wanted that so much that I'll never
dare trust my instincts about it again. I wonder why people like me
exist to go blundering about in the world, playing havoc with themselves
and everybody else?"
Before she reached home, that self-sacrificing mood had vanished in the
face of sundry twinges of pride. Jack Fyfe hadn't asked her to come
back; he never would ask her to come back. Of that she was quite sure.
She knew the stony determination of him too well. Neither hope or
heaven nor fear of hell would turn him aside when he had made a
decision. If he ever had moments of irresolution, he had successfully
concealed any such weakness from those who knew him best. No one ever
felt called upon to pity Jack Fyfe, and in those rocked-ribbed
qualities, Stella had an illuminating flash, perhaps lay the secret of
his failure ever to stir in her that yearning tenderness which she knew
herself to be capable of lavishing, which her nature impelled her to
lavish on some one.
"Ah, well," she sighed, when she came back to her rooms and put Fyfe's
letter away in a drawer. "I'll do the decent thing if they ask me. I
wonder what Jack would say if he knew what I've been debating with
myself this afternoon? I wonder if we were actually divorced and I'd
made myself a reputation as a singer, and we happened to meet quite
casually sometime, somewhere, just how we'd really feel about each
other?"
She was still musing on that, in a detached, impersonal fashion, when
she caught a car down to the theater for the matinée.