His Second Wife Part 6

Gleams of this feeling came in his eyes. It showed now and then so openly that even Joe took notice. He stopped bringing his partner home, and he drew closer to Ethel now, as together they cherished the memory of the woman who was gone.

And slowly, in this companionship, this loneliness, this quiet, Joe grew very real to her, and appealing in his grief. Everything else seemed so remote--but he was close. "He needs me." It was a bright spot in the dark. At times this darkness had no end, it stretched away to eternity; but at least she did not face it alone. Of Joe's grief she could have no doubt. Each week his blunt strong features displayed more lines of suffering; his high cheek-bones showed hard and grim. He was grateful, affectionate at times, but more often silent, and she saw in his eyes what frightened her. He had so few resources here. In his office was his work, just as it had always been; but at home there was nothing; his wife was gone, and he seemed restless to get out.

"Let's go somewhere," he would mutter.

She went with him for strolls in the evenings. Often they walked on and on till both were ready to drop with fatigue, but she stuck doggedly by his side. One evening they pa.s.sed the open door of a church. It was lighted, and the deep low rumble of an organ floated out. Joe stopped a moment irresolute, and then started to go inside. But a glance through the door revealed to him that the church was nearly empty; and he turned away as he would have turned from any show on Broadway which was so obviously "not a hit."

"Sometimes on Sunday mornings I seem to hear 'em, preachers, droning and shouting all over the land," he told her once. "What's in it? What do they know about G.o.d or where you go when you are dead? Nothing, no more than you or I!"

His voice was harsh and bitter then, but the next instant it was kind.

With his arm about her he was saying:

"Don't, Ethel--please--don't take it like that! I was a brute! I won't again! I'll keep it inside! I'm sorry, dear!"

"Oh, Joe," she whispered, "if we only knew!"

So these two faced eternity.

But only at moments. They looked away. For she saw how good it was for Joe to have the distractions that he craved; and so on their long walks at night she took him to the noisy streets, or into the movies, where his mind appeared to stop and find some rest. Best of all, she discovered, was to go with him in the small car which he used for his business. Driving this car through crowded streets amid a clamour and blare of horns and shouts and peals of laughter, the look on Joe's face made Ethel see how this dulled his grief, how he lost himself and his questionings and became a mere part of the town. What a glamourous seething town! There was something terrific to her in its laugh. If you stopped to think and ask yourself, "What are we all doing here?" how soon it jostled you back into line!

So pa.s.sed another fortnight. Then Joe grew quieter, and with relief she saw he was ready to stay home. She herself felt tired and relaxed; and it was good to sit at home on these December evenings and feel that both had partly emerged from the sea of doubts in which they had been plunged. He had come out of it, she soon learned, with an image of his wife that even Ethel vaguely felt was swiftly becoming so ideal as to have little or no resemblance to the woman who had died. But eagerly she helped him in this building of Amy's memory. She dwelt upon Amy's appealing side, her lovable moods, her beauty and dash, her unerring instinct for pretty things, her unselfishness, her anxious planning for Ethel's good.

And all this fitted in so well with the picture Joe was making of the wife who had been so true to him, who had never had a thought or a wish for anything but his career. How cheerfully she had given up all sorts of pleasures, trips abroad, a house in the country, summer vacations.

Year after year she had spent the hot months almost wholly in town because he could not afford to leave, although she herself had had many chances to go to friends in the mountains or up along the seash.o.r.e.

Instead she had stayed with him in town; and in the evenings always she had been waiting, good-humoured and gay, ready to stay home or go out; with never a word of complaint for the delay of his prosperity, but only encouragement and praise.

At times, as Joe talked on and on, in this mood of hungry wistful love and humility and self-reproach, Ethel would bring herself back with a jerk to the Amy she had known; but again she would feel herself borne along upon the tide of his belief, and she was glad that it was so. So the picture grew. Nor was it only when they talked. For often in long silences, when she thought he was reading his paper, she would glance up from her book and find him staring into the past. And again at the piano, smoking and playing idly, his music made her realize how his mind was groping back through the years, picking and choosing here and there what he needed to build up his ideal.

This music at times made her curious, wondering what kind of a man he had been before Amy took him in hand.

"Where did you learn to play like that, Joe?" He frowned a little.

"Oh, long ago."

He did not seem to care to go back of his marriage. So Ethel let him continue his building; and though at times she smiled a little at some of his fond recollections, still her own deep adoration of her older sister, the whirl of happy memories of that vivid month in town, and the sense of all that Amy had been planning to do for her, combined now with her desperate loneliness to put Ethel in a mood where she gladly and loyally believed almost anything good of her sister.

Christmas was only one example of many similar incidents. They had a small Christmas tree for Susette, and they hung up her stocking as well, and went out Christmas Eve and bought candy canes and dogs and dolls and picture books. And although this was Ethel's idea, it was made to appear as only the thing which Amy would have done had she lived.

So in these two hungry souls, groping for something bright and deep and strong upon which they could live, swiftly and unawares to them both the picture of Amy was stamped deep, idealized and beautified. In life it had been fascinating, but now it was almost heroic as well. It was as though the small gloved hand, which Ethel had noticed so many times, in death had increased the power of its light, firm, tenacious hold.

Ethel began to feel more free, for Joe was no longer on her mind. More than once, in fact, she was surprised at the way he seemed to be settling down. She felt a deeper change in him, something she did not understand. The worn hara.s.sed expression she had so often seen on his face while his wife had been alive, the look of a man driven and drained of his vitality, was now gone; and in its place was an unconscious look of content. He often stayed very late at the office; and more and more in his evenings at home he went to his desk and became absorbed in doc.u.ments and blue print plans.

"What a refuge a man's business is," she thought with a twinge of envy.

And wistfully she began to look about for some resource for herself.

She felt the youth within her rise, but the city seemed so vast and strange. In her loneliness the big building of which her present home was a part, seemed doubly huge, impersonal, hard; and so did every other building on that block appear. She felt lost, left out amid ceaseless tides of gaiety on every hand. She took long determined walks, and on these walks she donned the smart attractive clothes that she had bought with Amy. She strove to keep her mind on the sights, the faces of people afoot and in cars, the adorable things in shop windows. And she chatted busily to herself in order to keep on admiring. This old habit of hers, of soliloquy, had grown upon her unawares, as a refuge from her loneliness. Sometimes she even talked aloud. St.u.r.dily she told herself:

"You've only begun. You'll get up out of this, Ethel Knight--just wait.

Can't you give a few months to Amy now?"

And scowling at her "morbidness" in feeling dreary and forlorn, she resolutely scanned the papers for news of lectures, plays and concerts.

She went to a few in the afternoons, and dressed for them as carefully as though they were great social affairs. And in the intermissions when a buzz of talk would rise, she would begin with quick animation to converse with herself and be gay, or alert and argumentative. Her lips would move inaudibly. Now and then she would brightly smile and nod across the house at some friend she pretended to have seen. She enrolled for a course of lectures upon "Mental Science." She resumed her reading of magazines and books on all kinds of topics. It made her think of high school days, and hungrily she reached back for that old.

zest and inquisitiveness about everything under the moon and stars.

And through this searching she caught hints of the presence in the city of a life wider and deeper than shops and yet not antagonistic--a life of gaiety, grace and ease, but with it all the brilliancy to which Amy had been blind; the rich ferment of new ideas in women's lives, discussions, work of many kinds, art, music, "movements" all combined into one thrilling pulsing whole. And again she felt within herself that rising tide of youth and eager vitality.

"Oh, what couldn't I do, my dear, if I only had a chance? Why doesn't somebody see it at once--notice me now, right here on the street? You, madam, in that limousine--look out and see me--don't go by! You're losing the chance of a lifetime! You're missing me--me--Ethel Knight!"

As the dame in her car sped smoothly by, Ethel suddenly laughed aloud.

But her laughter had a dangerous note, and she added fiercely, biting her lip:

"Now, don't be silly and burst into tears!"

"Ma'am?" said a voice.

She stopped with a jerk and looked up into the startled eyes of a ma.s.sive young policeman. Her last remark had been spoken directly up into his face, and the youth was blushing visibly.

"Oh!" she gasped. "Excuse me!"

"Certainly, ma'am."

And she hurried on.

This loneliness lasted several weeks. Then Joe grew dimly aware of it, and came to her a.s.sistance with awkward efforts to comfort her. He was at home more often at night. His gruff voice took on a kindlier tone, and in an offhand manner intended to seem casual he would ask where she had been that day or what book she was reading. And they would discuss it for a while. He took her to the theatre and to a concert now and then. They went for rides at night in his car, and he talked to her about his work. She could feel his anxious friendliness. "What a dear he is to me," she thought.

As time went on this companionship grew so natural to them both that more than once Ethel felt in herself a content which made her a little uneasy. As in his blunt kindly way Joe drew closer to her now, she had an awkward consciousness of being in her sister's place. No, not that exactly. Still, she did not care to think of it. She kept out of Amy's room. It had subtly changed and become Joe's room--to her mind at least--though by little things he said and did she knew that Joe was keeping that idealized image of his wife still warm and living in his mind.

But was he--altogether? At times she would frown to herself a bit. Joe loyal? Yes, of course he was, she would indignantly declare. In a novel Ethel had once read, the hero who had lost his wife had taken his grief in this same silent way; and the author had laid it down as a law that all quiet widowers are the kind who never, never marry again. This thought had taken root in her mind; and she applied it now to Joe.

Soon at his suggestion she began to use some of Amy's things. One night when they were going out, he helped her slip into her sister's soft luxurious sable cloak. And as she turned, she detected a queerly uncertain look in Joe's eyes. But in an instant it was gone, and she soon dismissed her uneasiness. For through the weeks that followed he became engrossed in his business and barely noticed her at all.

CHAPTER VI

About this time a letter from home brought her a sharp disappointment.

Ethel was not a good correspondent, but during the homesick winter months she had written several times to three of the girls she had known in school. Two had gone west, but the other one was still in Ohio and was planning to come to New York, to take a course of training as nurse in one of the hospitals. In fact it had been all arranged. And Ethel had not realized how much she had counted on this friend, until now a letter came announcing her engagement to a young doctor in Detroit. She was going there to live, and her letter was full of her happiness.

Ethel was very blue that night.

But only a few days after this she received another missive that had quite a different effect. It was a long bulky epistle, a "round robin"

from the members of the little high school club to which she had belonged at home. The girls had scattered far and wide. One was teaching music in an Oklahoma town; another had gone to Cleveland and was a stenographer in a broker's office there; a third was in Chicago, the wife of a young lawyer; and a fourth had married an engineer who was working a mine in Montana. It made an absorbing narrative, and she read it several times. At first it took her out of herself, far, far out all over the land. How good it was to get news of them all, how nice and gossipy and gay. It was almost as though they were here in the room; she seemed to be talking with each one; and as they chatted on and on, the feeling grew in Ethel that each was starting like herself and that some were having no easy time in unfamiliar places. She could read between the lines.

But the part that struck her most was the contribution of their former history "prof," a little lame woman with snappy black eyes, who had been the leading spirit in their long discussions. She was an ardent suffragist, and she it was who had brought so many modern books and plays and "movements" into their talk. Chained to her job in the small town, she had followed voraciously all the news of the seething changing world outside, of the yeast at work in the cities. And to the letters of some of the girls who seemed bent upon nothing but social success, the little teacher now replied by an appeal to all of them:

"Girls, some of these letters worry me. I don't want to preach--you will lead your own lives. But I cannot help reminding you of the things we talked about--the splendid things, exciting things that are stirring in this land today. Oh, what a chance for women--what openings with narrow doors--what fights to make the doorways wide for the girls who will come after you! Keep yourselves strong and awake and alive--keep growing--remember that life is a school and for you it has only just begun. Don't sit at your desks--in your homes, I mean--blinking with a man at your side. Keep yourselves free--don't marry for money--don't let yourselves get under the thumb of any husband, rich or poor, or of social position or money or clothes or any such silly trumpery. Get the real things! Oh, I'm preaching, I know, as I did in spite of myself at home. But girls--dear friends and comrades--be strong--and don't give up the ship!"

Ethel read it many times. She could hear the voice of the little "prof," now earnest, scornful, pleading, now obstinate and angry, again light-hearted, mocking. She recalled how their leader had warned them against the bribery of men. Most of the girls had smiled at her then, for they had felt themselves so strong and clear in their aims and desires.