And then, suddenly, the face of life was indescribably changed: Joan
Thursday seemed but a memory, a slight and somehow wistful shadow in the
shadowed depths of that darkling mirror, yesterday; in her place another
creature altogether reigned, the Joan Quard of today, woman, actress,
wife; with a gold band round her finger; mature, initiate of mysteries,
ripe in wisdom; strong, poised serenely, clear of eye; with added
graciousness in her beauty, conscious of added powers over Man, but
discreet in their employment.
She thought a great deal about herself in those days: not, perhaps, more
than had been common with her in that so-dead yesterday, but much, and
more profoundly; reading a new meaning into the riddle of existence, so
changed had all things become since her marriage.
Before her pensive vision Life unfolded rare, golden-vista'd promises.
With another man, or in another stratum of society, she might have
fulfilled herself wonderfully, even unto her salvation....
To begin with, she was very happy. Fond to distraction of her husband,
she never doubted that he worshipped her; he gave her quick wits no
cause to entertain a doubt. They were together always, inseparable. She
felt that nature must truly have fashioned them solely for one another,
and could not forget her wonder that their passion should be so mutual,
so complete. She loved him to distraction: all his traits, his robust
swagger, his sonorous and flexible tones, the flowery eloquence of his
gesture, his broad, easy-going, tolerant good-humour, the way he wore
his clothes and the very cut and texture of them. And she ruled him like
a despot.
Quard submitted without complaint. She was all his fancy had painted
her, and something more; recognizing dimly that she excelled him
variously (although he was quite incapable of analyzing these
distinctions) he served her humbly, with unconscious deference to her
many excellences. She was by way of making him a better wife than he
deserved. If at times conscious of some little irk from her amiable but
inflexible autocracy, he reminded himself that she was a finer woman
than any he had ever known, well worth humouring: it wasn't on every
corner a fellow'd pick up one like Joan.
He liked to follow her into hotel lobbies and restaurants and watch
people turn to eye her, the men with sudden interest, the women with
instinctive hostility. It even amused him to quell a too-ambitious stare
with a fixed, grim, and truculent regard backed by the menace of his
powerful physique. It gave a man standing, license to swagger, to own a
woman like Joan.
He came to pander oddly to this vanity--would leave Joan to go to their
room alone, while he strolled off to a bar to meet some crony or
acquaintance of the day, tell his best story, and then suddenly excuse
himself:
"Well, s'long. The wife's waiting for me."
The response rarely failed: "Ah, let her wait; have another drink. Did
_I_ ever tell you--"
A lifted, deprecatory palm, a knowing look: "No--guess I'll kick along;
y'see, _she_'s some wife...."
Conscious only of his adoration, Joan was enchanted by their mode of
life, with its constant shifts of scene, its spice of vagabondage. She
believed she could never tire of travelling.
Railroad journeys, with their inevitable concomitants of dirt, noise,
and discomfort, never discouraged her: she really liked them; they were
taking her somewhere--it didn't much matter where. She even derived a
sort of pleasure from such nauseating experiences as rising to catch a
train at four-thirty in the morning, against their "long jumps." And
there was keen delight in napping in a parlour-car chair or with a head
upon her husband's shoulder in a day-coach, to wake all drowsy, breathe
air foul with coal-smoke, and peer through a black window-pane (shadowed
by her hand) to catch a glimpse of some darkly fulgent breadth of
strange water, or the marching defile of great alien hills, or a sweep
of semi-wooded countryside bleached with moonlight--remembering that,
only a few short months ago, the world of her travels had been bounded
by Fort George on the north, Coney Island on the south, knowing neither
east nor west.
She was discovering America: even as she was discovering Life....
Their route from Trenton took them south through Philadelphia,
Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, and Norfolk; whence they
doubled back by steamer to New York, took a Sound boat to Fall River,
played Boston, and drifted through New England in bitter cold weather,
eventually striking westward again, via Albany, Buffalo, and the middle
country.
Quard drew her attention to the fact that it was "a liberal
education...."
Sometimes she thought pityingly of Matthias, and wondered if he knew she
was married and what she was doing; and whether he were angry, or
heart-broken, or eaten up with morbid jealousy; and how he would act
should chance ever throw them together again. She was sorry for him: he
had lost her. If only he had been a little more enterprising.... She
wondered what would have happened if Matthias _had_ been more
enterprising; he could have possessed her at any time during the brief
period of their infatuation. If he had married her then, would she be as
contented as she was now, with Charlie? She doubted it; Quard was so
completely his opposite....
She ceased to worry about the ring. She meant to return it some day,
perhaps. Though she did not wear it and had never so much as mentioned
Matthias to Quard, it remained a possession whose charms tugged at her
heart-strings. At times she amused herself formulating idle little
intrigues, with the object (if ever set in motion) of excusing the
appearance of the jewel upon her hand. But all her schemes seemed to
possess some fatal flaw, and she was desperately afraid of the truth.
Meanwhile, the ring lay perdue at the bottom of a work-basket of woven
sweet-grass which she had purchased shortly after her marriage; twisted
in an old, empty needle-paper and mixed in with a worthless confusion of
trash, such as women accumulate in such receptacles, its hiding place
was well calculated to escape detection by even an informed purloiner.
Quard's tardy engagement ring was set with an inferior diamond flanked
by artificial pearls. Joan despised it secretly. For a long time it was
the sole blemish on the bright shield of her happiness....
And then, the night of their opening day in Cincinnati, Quard escorted
her from the theatre to the hotel, left her at the door, and turned back
to "see a friend" who happened to be playing on the same bill.
This was quite the usual thing, and Joan went contentedly off to her
room and in due course to bed, confident that Quard would return within
an hour.
Five hours later she awoke to startled apprehension of the facts, first
that she must have dropped off to sleep without meaning to, next that
Quard had not returned, finally that it was past four o'clock in the
morning.
With a little shiver of sickening premonition she rose, slipped into a
dressing-gown, called a bell-boy, and instructed him to look for her
husband. Some time later the boy reported that the bar was closed and
the gentleman not to be found.
It was broad daylight when Quard staggered in with the assistance of
the same bell-boy and his negro dresser. His eyes were glazed, his face
ghastly, his mind wandered: he was as helpless as a child. With the aid
of the boys, Joan managed to undress the man and put him to bed. At once
he fell asleep, with the cold stump of a half-burned cigar obstinately
clenched between his teeth. It was an hour before the muscles of his jaw
relaxed enough to release it.
Dressing, Joan left the hotel, swallowed some coffee and rolls,
tasteless to her, in a nearby restaurant, and wandered about until eight
o'clock, when she found a drug-store open, and consulted the clerk. He
advised bromo seltzer and aromatic spirits of ammonia. Armed with these,
she returned to her husband, and shortly after noon, daring to delay no
longer, roused him by sprinkling cold water in his face--all other
methods having failed even to interrupt his stertorous breathing. Even
then it was some time before she could induce him to swallow the
medicine, and it required no less than three powerful doses, together
with much black coffee and followed by a cold bath, to restore him to
presentable condition. In the end, however, she succeeded in getting him
to the theatre in time for the matinée.
Through it all she uttered no single word of reproach, but waited on the
man with at least every outward sign of sympathy and devotion.
His remorse (when another nap at the hotel after the matinée had brought
him to more complete realization of what had happened) was touching and,
as long as it lasted, unquestionably sincere. Joan accepted without
comment his lame explanation as to the manner of his temptation and fall
during an all-night session at poker "with the boys," and gave genuine
credulity to his protestations that it would never, never happen again.
But three weeks later in Chicago he repeated the performance, though
under somewhat less distressing circumstances. As before, he left her in
the lobby, "to finish his cigar and chin with Soandso." Within an hour
he was half-led, half-carried to their room, in a hopelessly sodden
condition. The actor with whom he had been drinking accompanied him,
apparently quite sober, but puzzled; and after Quard had been helped to
bed, explained to the girl that her husband's collapse had been
incomprehensibly due to no more than three drinks.
"I never seen nothin' like it!" the man expostulated, with an air of
grievance. "There he was, standin' up against the bar, with his foot on
the rail, laughin' and kiddin', same's the rest of us; and he'd only had
three whiskeys--though I will say they was man-size drinks; and then,
all of a sudden, he turns white as a sheet and starts mumblin' to
himself, and we all thinks he's joshin' until he keels over, limp's a
rag. If the stuff gets to him like that, he's got no business touchin'
it, ever!"
These experiences continued at varying intervals; and presently Joan
began to understand that Quard had not only primarily a weakness to
tempt him, but a constitutional inability to assert his will-power after
he had surrendered to the extent of a single drink. One modest dose of
alcohol seemed to exercise upon him a sort of hypnotic power, driving
him on whether he would or not to the next, the next, and the
next--until the nadir of unconsciousness was reached. It was not that he
invariably succumbed to moderate indulgence, but that once started he
rarely stopped until his identity was completely submerged. Indeed, the
way of alcohol with him seemed never twice to follow the same route; but
its end was invariably the same.
Hoping against hope, fighting with him, pleading, reasoning, threatening
with him, even praying, Joan endured for a long time--much longer than,
in retrospective days, seemed possible even to her; for she was honestly
fond of her husband, far more so than she was ever of any other living
being save herself.
They reached San Francisco the third week in April. For some time Quard
had been drinking rather methodically but stealthily. A threat made by
Joan, while he was sobering up from his last debauch, to the effect that
on repetition of the offence she would leave him without an hour's
notice, had frightened the man to the extent of making him hesitate to
add one drink to another except at intervals long enough to retard the
cumulative effect; but never a day passed on which, in spite of her
watchfulness, he did not contrive to throw several sops to the devil in
possession, if without ever quite losing his wits.
Detected with reeking breath, he would adopt one of three attitudes: he
was a man, subject to the domination of no woman and of no appetite, had
learned his lesson and now knew when to stop; or he was sorry--hadn't
stopped to think--and wouldn't let it go any further; or nothing of the
sort had happened, he had drunk nothing except a glass of soda-fountain
nerve-tonic, or possibly it was his cigar that she smelled. With the
first, Joan had no patience; and since she had a temper, it was the last
resort in Quard's more sober stages, seldom employed save when potations
had made him either indifferent or vicious. In his contrition, whether
real or assumed, she tried hard to believe. But his lies never deceived
her: to these she listened in the silence of contempt and despair.
On the Wednesday afternoon of their week in San Francisco, the girl did
a bit of shopping after the matinée; it was half after five before she
returned to the hotel, and walked into their room to find Quard, with
his coat off, seated in a chair that faced the door. His back was to the
windows, through which the declining sun threw a flood of blinding
golden light, so that Joan's dazzled vision comprehended only the dark
silhouette of his body.
She said "Hello, dearie!" lightly enough in the abstraction of reviewing
some especially pleasing purchases, closed the door, walked over to the
bureau, put down her handbag and a small parcel, and removed her hat.
Then the fact that Quard had not answered penetrated her reverie.
Disposing of her hat, she looked half casually over her shoulder, to
discover that he hadn't moved. Two surmises struck through her wonder:
that he had fallen asleep waiting for her; with poignant apprehension,
that he had been drinking again. But this seemed hardly likely: he had
been entirely rational and unintoxicated during the matinée.