The next morning's paper announced that spring had officially arrived
and been recognized at the Capitol--a certain Senator had taken off
his wig. Washington accepted this as the sure sign that the weather
was warm. It would not be officially autumn till that wig fell back
into place.
There were less formal indications: for instance, the annual
flower-duel between the two terraces on Massachusetts Avenue. The
famous Embassy Terrace forsythias began it, and flaunted little
fringes of yellow glory. The slopes of the Louise Home replied by
setting their magnolia-trees on fire with flowers like lamps, flowers
that hurried out ahead of their own leaves and then broke and covered
the ground with great petals of shattered porcelain. The Embassy
Terrace put out lamps of its own closer to the ground, but more
gorgeous--irises in a row of blue, blue footlights.
The Louise Home, where gentlewomen of better days, ambassadresses of
an earlier régime, kept their state, had the last word, the word that
could not be bettered, for it uttered wistaria, wistful lavender
clusters weeping from the trellises in languorous grace.
Marie Louise, looking from her open window in Rosslyn, felt in the
wind a sense of stroking fingers. The trees were brisk with hope. The
river went its way in a more sparkling flow. The air blew from the
very fountains of youth with a teasing blarney. She thought of Ross
Davidge and smiled tenderly to remember his amiable earnestness. But
she frowned to remember his engagement with Lady Clifton-Wyatt. She
wondered what excuse she could invent to checkmate that woman.
Suddenly inspiration came to her. She remembered that she had
forgotten to pay Davidge for the seat he surrendered her in the
chair-car. She telephoned him at his hotel. He was out. She pursued
him by wire travel till she found him in an office of the Shipping
Board. He talked on the corner of a busy man's desk. She heard the
busy man say with a taunting voice, "A lady for you, Davidge."
She could hear the embarrassment in his voice. She was in for it now,
and she felt silly when she explained why she bothered him. But she
was stubborn, too. When he understood, he laughed with the constraint
of a man bandying enforced gallantries on another man's telephone.
"I'd hate to be as honest as all that."
"It's not honesty," she persisted. "It's selfishness. I can't rest
while the debt is on my mind."
He was perplexed. "I've got to see several men on the Shipping Board.
There's a big fight on between the wooden-ship fellows and the
steel-ship men, and I'm betwixt and between 'em. I won't have time to
run out to see you."
"I shouldn't dream of asking you. I was coming in to town, anyway."
"Oh! Well, then--well--er--when can I meet you?"
"Whenever you say! The Willard at--When shall you be free?"
"Not before four and then only for half an hour."
"Four it is."
"Fine! Thank you ever so much. I'll buy me a lot of steel with all
that money you owe me."
Marie Louise put up the receiver. People have got so used to the
telephone that they can see by it. Marie Louise could visualize
Davidge angry with embarrassment, confronting the important man whose
office he had desecrated with this silly hammockese. She felt that she
had made herself a nuisance and lost a trick. She had taken a deuce
with her highest trump and had not captured the king.
Furthermore, to keep Davidge from meeting Lady Clifton-Wyatt would be
only to-day's battle. There would still be to-morrows and the
day-afters. Lady Clifton-Wyatt had declared herself openly hostile to
Marie Louise, and would get her sooner or later. Flight from
Washington would be the only safety.
But Marie Louise did not want to leave Washington. She loved
Washington and the opportunities it offered a woman to do important
work in the cosmopolitan whirl of its populace. But she could not live
on at Polly Widdicombe's forever.
Marie Louise decided that her hour had struck. She must find a nook of
her own. And she would have to live in it all by herself. Who was
there to live with? She felt horribly deserted in life. She had looked
at numerous houses and apartments from time to time. Apartments were
costlier and fewer than houses. Since she was doomed to live alone,
anyway, she might as well have a house. Her neighbors would more
easily be kept aloof.
She sought a real-estate agent, Mr. Hailstorks, of the sort known as
affable. But the dwellings he had to show were not even that. Places
she had found not altogether odious before were rented now. Places
that her heart went out to to-day proved to have been rented
yesterday.
Finally she ran across a residence of a sort. She sighed to Mr.
Hailstorks:
"Well, a carpenter made it--so let it pass for a house. I'll take it
if it has a floor. I'm like Gelett Burgess: 'I don't so much care for
a door, but this crawling around without touching the ground is
getting to be quite a bore.'"
"Yes, ma'am," said Mr. Hailstorks, bewilderedly.
He unlocked the door of somebody's tenantless ex-home with its lonely
furniture, and Marie Louise intruded, as one does, on the chairs,
rugs, pictures, and vases that other people have been born with, have
achieved, or have had thrust upon them. She wondered, as one does,
what sort of beings they could have been that had selected such things
to live among, and what excuse they had had for them.
Mr. Hailstorks had a surprise in store for her. He led her to the rear
of the house and raised a shade. Instead of the expectable back yard,
Marie Louise was startled to see a noble landscape leap into view. The
house loomed over a precipitous descent into a great valley. A stream
ran far below, and then the cliffs rose again opposite in a succession
of uplifting terraces that reminded her somehow of Richmond Hill
superbly built up above the silver Thames.
"Whatever is all that?" she cried.
"Rock Creek Park, ma'am," said Mr. Hailstorks, who had a sincere
real-estately affection for parks, since they raised the price of
adjoining property and made renting easier.
"And what's the price of all this grandeur?"
"Only three hundred a month," said Mr. Hailstorks.
"Only!" gasped Marie Louise.
"It will be four hundred in a week or two--yes ma'am," said Mr.
Hailstorks.
So Marie Louise seized it before its price rose any farther.
She took a last look at Rock Creek Park, henceforth her private
game-preserve. As she stared, an idea came to her. She needed one. The
park, it occurred to her, was an excellent wilderness to get lost
in--with Ross Davidge.
* * * * *
She was late to her meeting with Davidge--not unintentionally. He was
waiting on the steps of the hotel, smoking, when she drove up in the
car she had bought for her Motor Corps work.
He said what she hoped he would say:
"I didn't know you drove so well."
She quoted a popular phrase: "'You don't know the half of it, dearie.'
Hop in, and I'll show you."
He thought of Lady Clifton-Wyatt, and Marie Louise knew he thought of
her. But he was not hero or coward enough to tell a woman that he had
an engagement with another woman. She pretended to have forgotten that
he had told her, though she could think of little else. She whisked
round the corner of I Street, or Eye Street, and thence up Sixteenth
Street, fast and far.
She was amazed at her own audacity, and Davidge could not make her
out. She had a scared look that puzzled him. She was really thinking
that she was the most unconscionable kidnapper that ever ran off with
some other body's child. He could hardly dun her for the money, and
she had apparently forgotten it again.
They were well to the north when she said:
"Do you know Rock Creek Park?"
"No, I've never been in it."
"Would you like a glimpse? I think it's the prettiest park in the
world."
She looked at her watch with that twist of the wrist now becoming
almost universal and gasped:
"Oh, dear! I must turn back. But it's just about as short to go
through the park. I mustn't make you late to Lady Clifton-Wyatt's
tea."
He could find absolutely nothing to say to that except, "It's mighty
pretty along here." She turned into Blagdon Road and coasted down the
long, many-turning dark glade. At the end she failed to steer to the
south. The creek itself crossed the road. She drove the car straight
through its lilting waters. There was exhilaration in the splashing
charge across the ford. Then the road wound along the bank, curling
and writhing with it gracefully through thick forests, over bridges
and once more right through the bright flood. The creek scrambling
among its piled-up boulders was too gay to suggest any amorous mood,
and Marie Louise did not quite dare to drive the car down to the
water's edge at any of the little green plateaus where picnics were
being celebrated on the grass.
"I always lose my way in this park," she said. "I expect I'm lost
now."
She began to regret Davidge's approaching absence, with a strange
loneliness. He was becoming tenderly necessary to her. She sighed,
hardly meaning to speak aloud, "Too bad you're going away so soon."
He was startled to find that his departure meant something to her. He
spoke with an affectionate reassurance.
She stopped the car on a lofty plateau where several ladies and
gentlemen were exercising their horses at hurdle-jumping. The élan of
rush, plunge and recovery could not excite Mamise now.
"I'll tell you what we'll do. The next time I come to Washington you
drive me over to my shipyard and I'll show you the new boat and the
new yard for the rest of the flock."
"That would be glorious. I should like to know something about
ships."
"I can teach you all I know in a little while."
"You know all there is to know, don't you?"
"Lord help us, I should say not! I knew a little about the old
methods, but they're all done away with. The fabricated ship is an
absolute novelty. The old lines are gone, and the old methods. What
few ship-builders we had are trying to forget what they know.
Everybody is green. We had to find out for ourselves and pass it along
to the foremen, and they hand it out to the laborers.
"The whole art is in a confusion. There is going to be a ghastly lot
of mistakes and waste and scandal, but if we win out there'll be such
a cloudburst that the Germans will think it's raining ships. Niagara
Falls will be nothing to the cascade of iron hulls going overboard.
Von Tirpitz with his ruthless policy will be like the old woman who
tried to sweep the tide back with a broom."
He grew so fervent in his vision of the new creation that he hardly
saw the riders as they stormed the hurdles. Marie Louise took fire
from his glow and forgot the petty motive that had impelled her to
bring him to this place. Suddenly he realized how shamelessly eloquent
he had been, and subsided with a slump.
"What a bore I am to tell all this to a woman!"
She rose at that. "The day has passed when a man can apologize for
talking business to a woman. I've been in England for years, you know,
and the women over there are doing all the men's work and getting
better wages at it than the men ever did. After the war they'll never
go back to their tatting and prattle. I'm going to your shipyard and
have a look-in, but not the way a pink debutante follows a naval
officer over a battle-ship, staring at him and not at the works. I'm
going on business, and if I like ship-building, I may take it up."
"Great!" he laughed, and slapped her hand where it lay on the wheel.
He apologized again for his roughness.
"I'll forgive anything except an apology," she said.
As she looked proudly down at the hand he had honored with a blow as
with an accolade she saw by her watch that it was after six.
"Great Heavens! it's six and more!" she cried. "Lady Clifton-Wyatt
will never forgive you--or me. I'll take you to her at once."
"Never mind Lady Clifton-Wyatt," he said. "But I've got another
engagement for dinner--with a man, at half past six. I wish I
hadn't."
They were drifting with the twilight into an elegiac mood, suffering
the sweet sorrow of parting.
The gloaming steeped the dense woods, and the romance of sunset and
gathering night saddened the business man's soul, but wakened a new
and unsuspected woman in Marie Louise.
Her fierce imaginations were suddenly concerned with conquests of
ambition, not of love. So fresh a realm was opened to her that she was
herself renewed and restored to that boyish-girlish estate of young
womanhood before love has educated it to desire and the slaveries of
desire. The Aphrodite that lurks in every woman had been put to flight
by the Diana that is also there.
Davidge on the other hand had warmed toward Marie Louise suddenly, as
he saw how ardent she could be. He had known her till now only in her
dejected and terrified, distracted humors. Now he saw her on fire, and
love began to blaze within him.
He felt his first impulse to throw an arm about her and draw her to
his breast, but though the solitude was complete and the opportunity
perfect, he saw that she was in no spirit for dalliance. There is no
colder chaperon for a woman than a new ambition to accomplish
something worth while.
As they drew up at the New Willard she was saying:
"Telephone the minute you come to town again. Good-by. I'm late to
dinner."
She meant that she was late to life, late to a career.
Davidge stared at her in wonderment as she bent to throw the lever
into first speed. She roughed it in her impatience, and the growl of
the gear drowned the sound of another man's voice calling her name.
This man ran toward her, but she did not notice him and got away
before he could overtake her.
Davidge was jostled by him as he ran, and noted that he called Miss
Webling "Mees Vapelink." The Teutonic intonation did not fall
pleasantly on the American ear at that time. Washington was a
forbidden city to Germanic men and soon would banish the enemy women,
too.
The stranger took refuge on the sidewalk, and his curses were snarly
with the Teutonic _r_. Davidge studied him and began to remember him.
He had seen him with Marie Louise somewhere. Suddenly his mind,
ransacking the filing-cabinet of his memory, turned up a picture of
Nicky Easton at the side of Marie Louise at the dinner in Sir Joseph's
home. He could not remember the name, but a man has a ready label for
anybody he hates.
He began to worry now. Who was this spick foreigner who ran hooting
after her? It was not like Davidge to be either curious or suspicious.
But love was beginning its usual hocus-pocus with character and
turning a tired business man into a restless swain.
Davidge resented Easton's claim on Marie Louise, whatever it was, as
an invasion of some imagined property right of his own, or at least of
some option he had secured somehow. He was alarmed at the Teutonic
accent of the interloper. He began to take heed of how little he knew
of Marie Louise, after all. He recalled Sir Joseph Webling's German
accent. An icy fear chilled him.
His important business parley was conducted with an absent-mindedness
that puzzled his host, the eminent iron-master, Jacob Cruit, who had
exchanged an income of a million a year and dictatorial powers for a
governmental wage of one dollar per annum, no authority, no gratitude,
and endless trouble.
Davidge's head was buzzing with thoughts in which Cruit had no part:
"Can she be one of those horrible women who have many lovers? Is she a
woman of affairs? What is all this mystery about her? What was she so
afraid of the night she would not stop at Mrs. Widdicombe's? Why was
she so upset by the appearance of Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Why was she in
such a hurry to get me away from Mrs. Prothero's dinner, and to keep
me from keeping my engagement with Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Why so much
German association?"
He thought of dozens of explanations, most of them wild, but none of
them so wild as the truth--that Marie Louise was cowering under the
accusation of being a German agent.
He resolved that he would forget Marie Louise, discharge her from the
employment of his thoughts. Yet that night as he lay cooking in his
hot berth he thought of Marie Louise instead of ships. None of his
riot of thoughts was so fantastic as the fact that she was even then
thinking of ships and not of him.
That night Marie Louise ransacked the library that the owner of
Grinden Hall had left with the other furniture. Some member of the
family had been a cadet at Annapolis, and his old text-books littered
the shelves. Marie Louise selected and bore away an armload, not of
novels, but of books whose very backs had repelled her before. They
were the very latest romance to her now.
The authors of _An Elementary Manual for the Deviation of the
Compass in Iron Ships_, _The Marine Steam-engine_, and _An Outline
of Ship-building_, _Theoretical and Practical_, could hardly have
dreamed that their works would one night go up-stairs in the embrace
of a young woman's arms. The books would have struck a naval architect
as quaintly old-fashioned, but to Marie Louise they were as full of
news as the latest evening extra. The only one she could understand
with ease was Captain Samuels's _From the Forecastle to the
Cabin_, and she was thrilled by his account of the struggles of his
youth, his mutinies, his champion of the Atlantic, the semi-clipper
_Dreadnaught_, but most of all, by his glowing picture of the decay of
American marine glory.
She read till she could sit up no longer. Then she undressed and
dressed for sleep, snapped on the reading-lamp, and took up another
book, Bowditch's _American Navigation_. It was the "Revised Edition of
1883," but it was fresh sensation to her. She lay prone like the
reading Magdalen in the picture, her hair pouring down over her
shoulders, her bosom pillowed on the volume beneath her eyes.