Produced by Theresa Armao
WHEN A MAN MARRIES
By Mary Roberts Rinehart
Contents
I At Least I Meant Well
II The Way It Began
III I Might Have Known It
IV The Door Was Closed
V From The Tree Of Love
VI A Mighty Poor Joke
VII We Make An Omelet
VIII Correspondents’ Department
IX Flannigan’s Find
X On The Stairs
XI I Make A Discovery
XII The Roof Garden
XIII He Does Not Deny It
XIV Almost, But Not Quite
XV Suspicion and Discord
XVI I Face Flannigan
XVII A Clash and A Kiss
XVIII It’s All My Fault
XIX The Harbison Man
XX Breaking Out In A New Place
XXI A Bar of Soap
XXII It Was A Delirium
XXIII Coming
Needles and pins
Needles and pins,
When a man marries
His trouble begins.
Chapter I. AT LEAST I MEANT WELL
When the dreadful thing occurred that night, every one turned on me.
The injustice of it hurt me most. They said I got up the dinner, that
I asked them to give up other engagements and come, that I promised all
kinds of jollification, if they would come; and then when they did come
and got in the papers and every one--but ourselves--laughed himself
black in the face, they turned on ME! I, who suffered ten times to their
one! I shall never forget what Dallas Brown said to me, standing with a
coal shovel in one hand and a--well, perhaps it would be better to tell
it all in the order it happened.
It began with Jimmy Wilson and a conspiracy, was helped on by a
foot-square piece of yellow paper and a Japanese butler, and it
enmeshed and mixed up generally ten respectable members of society and
a policeman. Incidentally, it involved a pearl collar and a box of soap,
which sounds incongruous, doesn’t it?
It is a great misfortune to be stout, especially for a man. Jim was
rotund and looked shorter than he really was, and as all the lines of
his face, or what should have been lines, were really dimples, his face
was about as flexible and full of expression as a pillow in a tight
cover. The angrier he got the funnier he looked, and when he was raging,
and his neck swelled up over his collar and got red, he was entrancing.
And everybody liked him, and borrowed money from him, and laughed at his
pictures (he has one in the Hargrave gallery in London now, so people
buy them instead), and smoked his cigarettes, and tried to steal his
Jap. The whole story hinges on the Jap.
The trouble was, I think, that no one took Jim seriously. His ambition
in life was to be taken seriously, but people steadily refused to. His
art was a huge joke--except to himself. If he asked people to dinner,
every one expected a frolic. When he married Bella Knowles, people
chuckled at the wedding, and considered it the wildest prank of Jimmy’s
career, although Jim himself seemed to take it awfully hard.
We had all known them both for years. I went to Farmington with Bella,
and Anne Brown was her matron of honor when she married Jim. My first
winter out, Jimmy had paid me a lot of attention. He painted my portrait
in oils and had a studio tea to exhibit it. It was a very nice picture,
but it did not look like me, so I stayed away from the exhibition. Jim
asked me to. He said he was not a photographer, and that anyhow the rest
of my features called for the nose he had given me, and that all the
Greuze women have long necks. I have not.
After I had refused Jim twice he met Bella at a camp in the Adirondacks
and when he came back he came at once to see me. He seemed to think I
would be sorry to lose him, and he blundered over the telling for twenty
minutes. Of course, no woman likes to lose a lover, no matter what she
may say about it, but Jim had been getting on my nerves for some time,
and I was much calmer than he expected me to be.
“If you mean,” I said finally in desperation, “that you and Bella
are--are in love, why don’t you say so, Jim? I think you will find that
I stand it wonderfully.”
He brightened perceptibly.
“I didn’t know how you would take it, Kit,” he said, “and I hope we will
always be bully friends. You are absolutely sure you don’t care a whoop
for me?”
“Absolutely,” I replied, and we shook hands on it. Then he began about
Bella; it was very tiresome.
Bella is a nice girl, but I had roomed with her at school, and I was
under no illusions. When Jim raved about Bella and her banjo, and Bella
and her guitar, I had painful moments when I recalled Bella, learning
her two songs on each instrument, and the old English ballad she had
learned to play on the harp. When he said she was too good for him, I
never batted an eye. And I shook hands solemnly across the tea-table
again, and wished him happiness--which was sincere enough, but
hopeless--and said we had only been playing a game, but that it was time
to stop playing. Jim kissed my hand, and it was really very touching.
We had been the best of friends ever since. Two days before the wedding
he came around from his tailor’s, and we burned all his letters to me.
He would read one and say: “Here’s a crackerjack, Kit,” and pass it
to me. And after I had read it we would lay it on the firelog, and Jim
would say, “I am not worthy of her, Kit. I wonder if I can make her
happy?” Or--“Did you know that the Duke of Belford proposed to her in
London last winter?”
Of course, one has to take the woman’s word about a thing like that, but
the Duke of Belford had been mad about Maude Richard all that winter.
You can see that the burning of the letters, which was meant to be
reminiscently sentimental, a sort of how-silly-we-were-but-it-is
all-over-now occasion, became actually a two hours’ eulogy of Bella. And
just when I was bored to death, the Mercer girls dropped in and heard
Jim begin to read one commencing “dearest Kit.” And the next day after
the rehearsal dinner, they told Bella!
There was very nearly no wedding at all. Bella came to see me in a
frenzy the next morning and threw Jim and his two-hundred odd pounds in
my face, and although I explained it all over and over, she never quite
forgave me. That was what made it so hard later--the situation would
have been bad enough without that complication.
They went abroad on their wedding journey, and stayed several months.
And when Jim came back he was fatter than ever. Everybody noticed it.
Bella had a gymnasium fitted up in a corner of the studio, but he would
not use it. He smoked a pipe and painted all day, and drank beer and
WOULD eat starches or whatever it is that is fattening. But he adored
Bella, and he was madly jealous of her. At dinners he used to glare at
the man who took her in, although it did not make him thin. Bella was
flirting, too, and by the time they had been married a year, people
hitched their chairs together and dropped their voices when they were
mentioned.
Well, on the anniversary of the day Bella left him--oh yes, she left him
finally. She was intense enough about some things, and she said it got
on her nerves to have everybody chuckle when they asked for her husband.
They would say, “Hello, Bella! How’s Bubbles? Still banting?” And Bella
would try to laugh and say, “He swears his tailor says his waist is
smaller, but if it is he must be growing hollow in the back.”
But she got tired of it at last. Well, on the second anniversary of
Bella’s departure, Jimmy was feeling pretty glum, and as I say, I am
very fond of Jim. The divorce had just gone through and Bella had taken
her maiden name again and had had an operation for appendicitis. We
heard afterward that they didn’t find an appendix, and that the one they
showed her in a glass jar WAS NOT HERS! But if Bella ever suspected, she
didn’t say. Whether the appendix was anonymous or not, she got box after
box of flowers that were, and of course every one knew that it was Jim
who sent them.
To go back to the anniversary, I went to Rothberg’s to see the
collection of antique furniture--mother was looking for a sideboard
for father’s birthday in March--and I met Jimmy there, boring into a
worm-hole in a seventeenth-century bedpost with the end of a match, and
looking his nearest to sad. When he saw me he came over.
“I’m blue today, Kit,” he said, after we had shaken hands. “Come and
help me dig bait, and then let’s go fishing. If there’s a worm in every
hole in that bedpost, we could go into the fish business. It’s a good
business.”
“Better than painting?” I asked. But he ignored my gibe and swelled up
alarmingly in order to sigh.
“This is the worst day of the year for me,” he affirmed, staring
straight ahead, “and the longest. Look at that crazy clock over there.
If you want to see your life passing away, if you want to see the steps
by which you are marching to eternity, watch that clock marking the
time. Look at that infernal hand staying quiet for sixty seconds and
then jumping forward to catch up with the procession. Ugh!”
“See here, Jim,” I said, leaning forward, “you’re not well. You can’t go
through the rest of the day like this. I know what you’ll do; you’ll
go home to play Grieg on the pianola, and you won’t eat any dinner.” He
looked guilty.
“Not Grieg,” he protested feebly. “Beethoven.”
“You’re not going to do either,” I said with firmness. “You are going
right home to unpack those new draperies that Harry Bayles sent you from
Shanghai, and you are going to order dinner for eight--that will be two
tables of bridge. And you are not going to touch the pianola.”
He did not seem enthusiastic, but he rose and picked up his hat, and
stood looking down at me where I sat on an old horse-hair covered sofa.
“I wish to thunder I had married you!” he said savagely. “You’re the
finest girl I know, Kit, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, and you are going to throw
yourself away on Jack Manning, or Max, or some other--”
“Nothing of the sort,” I said coldly, “and the fact that you didn’t
marry me does not give you the privilege of abusing my friends. Anyhow,
I don’t like you when you speak like that.”
Jim took me to the door and stopped there to sigh.
“I haven’t been well,” he said heavily. “Don’t eat, don’t sleep.
Wouldn’t you think I’d lose flesh? Kit”--he lowered his voice
solemnly--“I have gained two pounds!”
I said he didn’t look it, which appeared to comfort him somewhat, and,
because we were old friends, I asked him where Bella was. He said he
thought she was in Europe, and that he had heard she was going to marry
Reggie Wolfe. Then he signed again, muttered something about ordering
the funeral baked meats to be prepared and left me.
That was my entire share in the affair. I was the victim, both of
circumstances and of their plot, which was mad on the face of it.
During the entire time they never once let me forget that I got up the
dinner, that I telephoned around for them. They asked me why I couldn’t
cook--when not one of them knew one side of a range from the other. And
for Anne Brown to talk the way she did--saying I had always been crazy
about Jim, and that she believed I had known all along that his aunt was
coming--for Anne to talk like that was sheer idiocy. Yes, there was an
aunt. The Japanese butler started the trouble, and Aunt Selina carried
it along.