His Second Wife Part 21

"Mrs. Lanier," said her teacher, "I'm under your orders--digging for gold."

He took Joe to his club on the following night, and later several times for lunch.

"Joe likes it," he reported. "And he has already met some chaps who knew of him and his earlier work, not only in Paris but over here, he was one of the most brilliant designers in the city, I find--and a good many men were disappointed when he threw over his true profession and went after ready cash. How would you like me to put up his name?"

"For club membership?"

"Precisely."

"I'd like it, sir.

"And I obey."

"This is getting rather intimate," Ethel told herself that night.

"Never mind, my love, you've been perfectly honest. He knows very well what you're after. And if he likes you and wants to help, so much the better."

Some days in the studio she stuck severely to her voice and showed him she meant business. She was practising quite hard, and her progress was by no means slow. But on other days half the hour at least was spent in learning from her new friend about "a Paris in New York." Dwight was already finding one, although he had been here less than a year. In this teeming city of endless change he had found a deep joy of creation, of newness, youth and boldness that made even Paris seem far behind.

"It's all so amazingly big," he said, "with such revealing chances opening up on every side!" How simple it was for him, she thought, with a little pang of envy. A young musician with plenty of talent, easy manners, single, free. As he spoke of his club friends and some of their homes that were open to him, the glimpses exasperated her. Here were the people she wanted to know, a little world of artists, architects and writers, and goodness only knew what else. She was still rather vague about them. To her surprise she discovered that many were after money, too. "Decidedly," her teacher said. "Excessively," he added.

"But at least," she rejoined, defending them, "when they get the money they know how to spend it on something better than food and clothes!

They really live--I'm sure they do--and have ideas and really grow!" She caught her breath. What an idiot, to have said so much! "I'm so glad,"

she added lamely, "that you got my husband into your club. It's bound to do so much for him." She threw a sharp little glance at Dwight, and scowled, for she thought she detected a smile.

"He's doing something for the club," Dwight was saying cheerfully.

"Some of those chaps are a bit too refined and remote for this raw crude city of ours. And Joe is getting back enough of his old vim and pa.s.sion, his wild radical ideas of what may still be done with the town, so that he jars on such sensitive souls--makes 'em frown and bite their moustaches like the husbands in French plays. On the other hand some are decidedly for him. I hear them discuss him now and then."

"Oh, how nice!" sighed Ethel.

At times she grew so impatient to get Joe into this other world. But she had to be very careful. Repeatedly she warned herself that Dwight, for all his Paris past and his present friendliness, was very fast becoming a New Yorker like the rest: making his way and climbing his climb, and wanting no climbers who had to be carried. "Ethel Lanier, the first thing you know you'll be dropped like a hot potato," she thought. "There's nothing unselfish about this man. Don't make him feel he has you on his hands." And she would grow studiously abstract and detached in her talk about the town. But it kept cropping up in spite of her, this warm eagerness to "really live."

"It's funny," she said to Dwight one day. "I had thought of music and all that I wanted as being so different from Joe's work. But now in this city that you seem to know, I find that what I've wanted most is just what he ought to want in his work! The two go together!"

"Exactly!"

"The city Joe once lived in." She frowned. "There are so many cities in New York. But I don't want to try to get into his, until I can do it through Joe himself. People will have to want me because I'm the wife of Joe Lanier."

"I think they'll want you more than that." His tone was most rea.s.suring.

"But I like the way you are going about it. It's so delightfully novel, you see--conspiring to make your husband find his friends all by himself--so that when he has found them he'll come to you with a beaming smile and say, 'Woman, I bring you wealth and fame and friends in abundance. Take them, love, and bless me--for I have done all this for you.'"

Ethel smiled. "I don't like you to joke about it," she said.

"Very well," he agreed, "let's get back to the serious work of his resurrection. You asked me to recruit other brisk diggers, and I've hunted about quite a bit. There's that chap Crothers and his wife, but so far they're the best I can do--and the Crothers pair seem rather blind. They can't see the old Joe for the new."

"You mean they think he's hopeless," Ethel scornfully put in.

"Oh, we'll make them open their eyes in time. I drop in on them every now and then. I had Crothers to the club last week, and let him hear some of the gossip about the emerging Joe Lanier."

Often he talked of the early group of students over in Paris, of their ideas, ambitions, and their youthful views of life, which for all their gaiety had been so fervid and intense. But to Ethel, because she herself was still young, their dreams seemed very wonderful. Some she had hungrily read about long ago with the history "prof" at home. But the world which the little suffragist had revealed to her pupils had been more heroic and severe. This was warmer, dazzling, this had beauty, this was art! And yet not weak nor tame nor old--this was gloriously new in the way it jabbed deep into life and talked of really changing it all. This was youth! And her own youth responded and she made it all her own. She was reading now voraciously, with a sparkle and gleam of hope in her eyes. She was coming so very close to her goal, or rather the gate of her promised land.

At times she grew impatient at her teacher's calm, and the good-natured easy smile with which he looked upon all this. "Oh, why not get excited!" she thought. She felt the old dreams a bit cold in him, as they had been in her husband. And in dismay she would ask herself:

"Are they all too old? Is just the fact that I'm ten years younger than Joe and his friends going to mean that I'm too late--to bring back what was in him!"

CHAPTER XIX

But all this was as nothing compared to the intensity, the ups and down, in her relations with Joe himself. He often looked tired and hara.s.sed. "What's the matter with me?" he seemed to ask. And she felt his two sides combatting each other. On the one hand were the influences of Nourse and Dwight and the men at the club, to which he went nearly every day. He took part in discussions there, long rambling talks and arguments. And his old ideals were rising hungrily within him. But meanwhile the business man in Joe kept savagely putting the dreamer down, and for days he would plunge into his work and the fever of the money game. Joe had been so successful of late; and she knew that in his office that odious press agent was for ever at him.

From Nourse she learned that her husband was even still considering the scheme for a row of buildings named after the presidents. And Ethel had a sinking of heart.

"If he does that, I'm lost," she decided. But she would shake off such fears, as she felt again the old Joe emerge, the Joe of dreams and startling plans. And she grew excited as she thought:

"Oh, if he'll only let himself go! I don't want him just nice and tame and refined! I don't want only friends like that! I want--I want--"

What she wanted was still exceedingly vague, and Ethel could not put it in words. It had something to do with the teachings of the little history "prof" at home. She wanted the artist in him to rise, the creative soul of him! Cautiously she probed his thoughts--now tender and maternal toward him in his tired moods, now alive and interested as she got him talking. Bits came out. Joe was so plainly tortured by the struggle going on inside. She felt at once pity and admiration, and was deeper in love with him than she had ever been before. She felt the excitement of a fight with hope of victory close ahead. She took care in her dress and manner to give him little surprises at night, and by her cheery comradeship and her warm beauty of body and soul, Ethel drew him on and on. At such times she would often lose all memory of her scheming and would give up to her love, which had become a pa.s.sion now.

But always she came back to her plan. Not openly, for she had to be careful; she worked at him in little ways. She stirred his youth and his cast-off dreams by her own youth and zest for it all. She got him to tell her of Nourse and Dwight, the old friends she herself had put on his trail, and of new friends he had met in his club--"the club I elected you to," she exulted. But the next instant she would add, "Oh, Ethel, you're so ignorant! If you only knew about his work!" And knitting her brows she would listen hard while he talked of steel construction. As with her encouragement he talked on rapidly, absorbed, Ethel would clutch at this and that. She learned of books and magazines on architecture here and abroad. Stealthily she noted them down, and those she could not purchase she hunted up in libraries. Nourse was a great help to her here. He came to see her now and then; and though he still had his discouraging moods, at other times he was friendly and kind. Enjoying this conspiracy with the charming young Mrs. Lanier, he expressed his gallantry by bringing her books of appalling size. But some had beautiful ill.u.s.trations that set her to imagining. Eagerly she groped her way deep into the history of the building of cathedrals and palaces in times gone by. And the long majestic story of man's building on the earth thrilled her to the very soul. Joe must make his place in it all!

When on coming home at night he dumped a pile of work on the table, she would un.o.btrusively slip some book beside it. She grew to know which ones tempted him most. He had been surprised and amused at first at her interest in architecture--and secretly a little disturbed, suspecting what lay behind it. But as autumn drew on he read more and more of the books she kept putting in his way. While he read she would sit with a novel or sew. She would glance up with some remark, and they would talk and then read on. Subtly she made the atmosphere. She often brought Paris into their talks. She spoke longingly of the shops and plays, and all she wanted to see over there. And she almost succeeded in making him promise to take her over the following spring.

Joe was happy at such times, when she could make him leave business alone. And although he had many relapses, when night after night he would sit by the table planning more horrible "junk for the Bronx," with an inner smile she saw how often her husband scowled at such labour now.

She heard of changes in the office.

"We 're still building junk," Nourse confided one day, "but it isn't quite as bad as before. Joe wants the money just as hard, but he's plainly jarred by some of the jobs. He even fought his press agent last week!"

One night Joe suggested awkwardly:

"Suppose we try Bill Nourse again. Let me bring him home to dinner, I mean. He isn't especially cheery, G.o.d knows--but he seems so d.a.m.nably lonely this fall."

"Very well, dear--if you want to," she sighed. She had told Nourse to hint he was lonely.

When Nourse came to dinner that Sat.u.r.day night, Joe was surprised and delighted at the way his partner seemed to get on now with his wife.

The visit indeed was such a success that it was not long before Joe proposed bringing home "an old pal of mine--fellow named Dwight." To this, too, Ethel a.s.sented, and when Dwight arrived one night she greeted him very graciously.

"I feel as though I knew you," she said. "I've heard Joe talk of you so much."

To Joe's delight they got on like old friends. And when Dwight spied the piano there and learned of her interest in music, he insisted on trying her voice, and was loud in his praise of its promise. Before he left, it was arranged that she should come to his studio and take lessons twice a week. Openly his pupil now, she could speak of him to Joe, and he came to dine with them often.

How smoothly things were working out. If there were any cloud upon the horizon it was the occasional presence of Amy's old friend, f.a.n.n.y Carr.

f.a.n.n.y had been abroad through the summer, but in October she had returned. She had come to see Ethel several times, in the same determinedly friendly way; and Nourse reported that she was going frequently to see Joe at his office about her eternal money affairs.

And the fact that Joe never spoke of it only made the matter worse. For Joe still had his money side, and f.a.n.n.y knew how to flatter him so. He still had his loyalty to his first wife, and f.a.n.n.y so cleverly played to that. "And he likes her, too--clothes, voice, perfumery and all!" Ethel would declare to herself in anger and vexation. Oh, these women who used s.e.x every minute! how could men be so easily fooled?

"You can't change a man in a minute," she thought. "Remember Amy had him five years." Amy had planted so deep in him the feeling that money is everything; she had got the fever into his blood. And f.a.n.n.y was there to keep it alive by her flattery of his money success. And for Ethel, even still, it was decidedly unsafe to criticize Joe in some of his moods. As autumn changed to winter, these moods grew much more frequent. What was worrying him? She couldn't find out. She sent for Nourse and asked him, "What's going on in the office?"

"The press agent is pushing him hard," was Nourse's gloomy answer, "for that row of patriotic atrocities up on Riverside Drive." Ethel squirmed.

"But he won't!" she cried. "He couldn't!"