A week later Harry appeared at Marlowe, arrived unexpectedly at five
o’clock, and coming up the walk sank into a porch chair in a state of
exhaustion. Roxanne herself had had a busy day and was worn out. The
doctors were coming at five-thirty, bringing a celebrated nerve
specialist from New York. She was excited and thoroughly depressed,
but Harry’s eyes made her sit down beside him.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, Roxanne,” he denied. “I came to see how Jeff was doing.
Don’t you bother about me.”
“Harry,” insisted Roxanne, “there’s something the matter.”
“Nothing,” he repeated. “How’s Jeff?”
Anxiety darkened her face.
“He’s a little worse, Harry. Doctor Jewett has come on from New York.
They thought he could tell me something definite. He’s going to try
and find whether this paralysis has anything to do with the original
blood clot.”
Harry rose.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said jerkily. “I didn’t know you expected a
consultation. I wouldn’t have come. I thought I’d just rock on your
porch for an hour--”
“Sit down,” she commanded.
Harry hesitated.
“Sit down, Harry, dear boy.” Her kindness flooded out now--enveloped
him. “I know there’s something the matter. You’re white as a sheet.
I’m going to get you a cool bottle of beer.”
All at once he collapsed into his chair and covered his face with his
hands.
“I can’t make her happy,” he said slowly. “I’ve tried and I’ve tried.
This morning we had some words about breakfast--I’d been getting my
breakfast down town--and--well, just after I went to the office she
left the house, went East to her mother’s with George and a suitcase
full of lace underwear.”
“Harry!”
“And I don’t know--”
There was a crunch on the gravel, a car turning into the drive.
Roxanne uttered a little cry.
“It’s Doctor Jewett.”
“Oh, I’ll--”
“You’ll wait, won’t you?” she interrupted abstractedly. He saw that
his problem had already died on the troubled surface of her mind.
There was an embarrassing minute of vague, elided introductions and
then Harry followed the party inside and watched them disappear up the
stairs. He went into the library and sat down on the big sofa.
For an hour he watched the sun creep up the patterned folds of the
chintz curtains. In the deep quiet a trapped wasp buzzing on the
inside of the window pane assumed the proportions of a clamor. From
time to time another buzzing drifted down from up-stairs, resembling
several more larger wasps caught on larger window-panes. He heard low
footfalls, the clink of bottles, the clamor of pouring water.
What had he and Roxanne done that life should deal these crashing
blows to them? Up-stairs there was taking place a living inquest on
the soul of his friend; he was sitting here in a quiet room listening
to the plaint of a wasp, just as when he was a boy he had been
compelled by a strict aunt to sit hour-long on a chair and atone for
some misbehavior. But who had put him here? What ferocious aunt had
leaned out of the sky to make him atone for--what?
About Kitty he felt a great hopelessness. She was too expensive--that
was the irremediable difficulty. Suddenly he hated her. He wanted to
throw her down and kick at her--to tell her she was a cheat and a
leech--that she was dirty. Moreover, she must give him his boy.
He rose and began pacing up and down the room. Simultaneously he heard
some one begin walking along the hallway up-stairs in exact time with
him. He found himself wondering if they would walk in time until the
person reached the end of the hall.
Kitty had gone to her mother. God help her, what a mother to go to! He
tried to imagine the meeting: the abused wife collapsing upon the
mother’s breast. He could not. That Kitty was capable of any deep
grief was unbelievable. He had gradually grown to think of her as
something unapproachable and callous. She would get a divorce, of
course, and eventually she would marry again. He began to consider
this. Whom would she marry? He laughed bitterly, stopped; a picture
flashed before him--of Kitty’s arms around some man whose face he
could not see, of Kitty’s lips pressed close to other lips in what was
surely passion.
“God!” he cried aloud. “God! God! God!”
Then the pictures came thick and fast. The Kitty of this morning
faded; the soiled kimono rolled up and disappeared; the pouts, and
rages, and tears all were washed away. Again she was Kitty Carr--Kitty
Carr with yellow hair and great baby eyes. Ah, she had loved him, she
had loved him.
After a while he perceived that something was amiss with him,
something that had nothing to do with Kitty or Jeff, something of a
different genre. Amazingly it burst on him at last; he was hungry.
Simple enough! He would go into the kitchen in a moment and ask the
colored cook for a sandwich. After that he must go back to the city.
He paused at the wall, jerked at something round, and, fingering it
absently, put it to his mouth and tasted it as a baby tastes a bright
toy. His teeth closed on it--Ah!
She’d left that damn kimono, that dirty pink kimono. She might have
had the decency to take it with her, he thought. It would hang in the
house like the corpse of their sick alliance. He would try to throw it
away, but he would never be able to bring himself to move it. It would
be like Kitty, soft and pliable, withal impervious. You couldn’t move
Kitty; you couldn’t reach Kitty. There was nothing there to reach. He
understood that perfectly--he had understood it all along.
He reached to the wall for another biscuit and with an effort pulled
it out, nail and all. He carefully removed the nail from the centre,
wondering idly if he had eaten the nail with the first biscuit.
Preposterous! He would have remembered--it was a huge nail. He felt
his stomach. He must be very hungry. He considered--remembered--yesterday
he had had no dinner. It was the girl’s day out and Kitty had
lain in her room eating chocolate drops. She had said she felt
“smothery” and couldn’t bear having him near her. He had given
George a bath and put him to bed, and then lain down on the couch
intending to rest a minute before getting his own dinner. There
he had fallen asleep and awakened about eleven, to find that
there was nothing in the ice-box except a spoonful of potato salad.
This he had eaten, together with some chocolate drops that he found on
Kitty’s bureau. This morning he had breakfasted hurriedly down town
before going to the office. But at noon, beginning to worry about
Kitty, he had decided to go home and take her out to lunch. After that
there had been the note on his pillow. The pile of lingerie in the
closet was gone--and she had left instructions for sending her trunk.
He had never been so hungry, he thought.
At five o’clock, when the visiting nurse tiptoed down-stairs, he was
sitting on the sofa staring at the carpet.
“Mr. Cromwell?”
“Yes?”
“Oh, Mrs. Curtain won’t be able to see you at dinner. She’s not well.
She told me to tell you that the cook will fix you something and that
there’s a spare bedroom.”
“She’s sick, you say?”
“She’s lying down in her room. The consultation is just over.”
“Did they--did they decide anything?”
“Yes,” said the nurse softly. “Doctor Jewett says there’s no hope. Mr.
Curtain may live indefinitely, but he’ll never see again or move again
or think. He’ll just breathe.”
“Just breathe?”
“Yes.”
For the first time the nurse noted that beside the writing-desk where
she remembered that she had seen a line of a dozen curious round
objects she had vaguely imagined to be some exotic form of decoration,
there was now only one. Where the others had been, there was now a
series of little nail-holes.
Harry followed her glance dazedly and then rose to his feet.
“I don’t believe I’ll stay. I believe there’s a train.”
She nodded. Harry picked up his hat.
“Good-by,” she said pleasantly.
“Good-by,” he answered, as though talking to himself and, evidently
moved by some involuntary necessity, he paused on his way to the door
and she saw him pluck the last object from the wall and drop it into
his pocket.
Then he opened the screen door and, descending the porch steps, passed
out of her sight.
V
After a while the coat of clean white paint on the Jeffrey Curtain
house made a definite compromise with the suns of many Julys and
showed its good faith by turning gray. It scaled--huge peelings of
very brittle old paint leaned over backward like aged men practising
grotesque gymnastics and finally dropped to a moldy death in the
overgrown grass beneath. The paint on the front pillars became
streaky; the white ball was knocked off the left-hand door-post; the
green blinds darkened, then lost all pretense of color.
It began to be a house that was avoided by the tender-minded--some
church bought a lot diagonally opposite for a graveyard, and this,
combined with “the place where Mrs. Curtain stays with that living
corpse,” was enough to throw a ghostly aura over that quarter of the
road. Not that she was left alone. Men and women came to see her, met
her down town, where she went to do her marketing, brought her home in
their cars--and came in for a moment to talk and to rest, in the
glamour that still played in her smile. But men who did not know her
no longer followed her with admiring glances in the street; a
diaphanous veil had come down over her beauty, destroying its
vividness, yet bringing neither wrinkles nor fat.
She acquired a character in the village--a group of little stories
were told of her: how when the country was frozen over one winter so
that no wagons nor automobiles could travel, she taught herself to
skate so that she could make quick time to the grocer and druggist,
and not leave Jeffrey alone for long. It was said that every night
since his paralysis she slept in a small bed beside his bed, holding
his hand.
Jeffrey Curtain was spoken of as though he were already dead. As the
years dropped by those who had known him died or moved away--there
were but half a dozen of the old crowd who had drunk cocktails
together, called each other’s wives by their first names, and thought
that Jeff was about the wittiest and most talented fellow that Marlowe
had ever known. Now, to the casual visitor, he was merely the reason
that Mrs. Curtain excused herself sometimes and hurried upstairs; he
was a groan or a sharp cry borne to the silent parlor on the heavy air
of a Sunday afternoon.
He could not move; he was stone blind, dumb and totally unconscious.
All day he lay in his bed, except for a shift to his wheel-chair every
morning while she straightened the room. His paralysis was creeping
slowly toward his heart. At first--for the first year--Roxanne had
received the faintest answering pressure sometimes when she held his
hand--then it had gone, ceased one evening and never come back, and
through two nights Roxanne lay wide-eyed, staring into the dark and
wondering what had gone, what fraction of his soul had taken flight,
what last grain of comprehension those shattered broken nerves still
carried to the brain.
After that hope died. Had it not been for her unceasing care the last
spark would have gone long before. Every morning she shaved and bathed
him, shifted him with her own hands from bed to chair and back to bed.
She was in his room constantly, bearing medicine, straightening a
pillow, talking to him almost as one talks to a nearly human dog,
without hope of response or appreciation, but with the dim persuasion
of habit, a prayer when faith has gone.
Not a few people, one celebrated nerve specialist among them, gave her
a plain impression that it was futile to exercise so much care, that
if Jeffrey had been conscious he would have wished to die, that if his
spirit were hovering in some wider air it would agree to no such
sacrifice from her, it would fret only for the prison of its body to
give it full release.
“But you see,” she replied, shaking her head gently, “when I married
Jeffrey it was--until I ceased to love him.”
“But,” was protested, in effect, “you can’t love that.”
“I can love what it once was. What else is there for me to do?”
The specialist shrugged his shoulders and went away to say that Mrs.
Curtain was a remarkable woman and just about as sweet as an
angel--but, he added, it was a terrible pity.
“There must be some man, or a dozen, just crazy to take care of
her....”
Casually--there were. Here and there some one began in hope--and ended
in reverence. There was no love in the woman except, strangely enough,
for life, for the people in the world, from the tramp to whom she gave
food she could ill afford to the butcher who sold her a cheap cut of
steak across the meaty board. The other phase was sealed up somewhere
in that expressionless mummy who lay with his face turned ever toward
the light as mechanically as a compass needle and waited dumbly for
the last wave to wash over his heart.
After eleven years he died in the middle of a May night, when the
scent of the syringa hung upon the window-sill and a breeze wafted in
the shrillings of the frogs and cicadas outside. Roxanne awoke at two,
and realized with a start she was alone in the house at last.