Mary Wollaston Part 22

CHAPTER XV

THE END OF IT

About a week later--just at the beginning of June, this was--Paula did go back to Chicago, leaving her husband to go on gaining the benefit, for another ten days or so, of that wine-like mountain air. It was an unwelcome conviction that he really wanted her to go, rather than any crying need for her at Ravinia that decided her to leave him. The need would not be urgent for at least another fortnight since it had been decided between her and LaChaise that she should make her debut in _Tosca_, an opera she had sung uncounted times.

Since their momentous conversation in which John had attempted to revise the fundamentals of their life together, they had not reverted to the main theme of it; had clarified, merely, one or two of its more immediate conclusions. Paula was to carry out in spirit as well as in letter the terms of her Ravinia contract exactly as if it were still to be regarded as the first step of her reopened career. What she should do about the second step in case it offered itself to her was a bridge not to be crossed until they came to it.

John had professed himself content to let it remain at that, but she divined that there was something hollow in his profession. It was possible, of course, that his restlessness represented nothing more than a new stage in his convalescence. It didn't seem possible that after the candors of that talk he could still be keeping something back from her.

Yet that was an impression she very clearly got. Anyhow, her presence was doing him no good, and on that unwelcome a.s.surance, she bade him a forlorn farewell and went home.

It was a true intuition. John heaved a sigh of relief when she was gone. In his present enfeebled state she was too much for him. The electrical vitality of her overpowered him. Even before his illness he had had moments--I think I have recorded one of them--when her ardent strength paralyzed him with a sort of terror and these moments were more frequent now.

There was, too, a real effort involved in presenting ideas to her (intellectual ideas, if they may be so distinguished from emotional ones). He didn't know, now, whether she had fully understood what he had been driving at that day; whether anything had really got through to her beyond a melancholy realization that his love had cooled. He had always been aware of this effort, but in the days of his strength he hadn't minded making it.

Now he was conscious of wishing for some one like Mary,--indeed, for Mary herself. They talked the same language, absolutely. Their minds had the same index of refraction, so that thoughts flashed back and forth between them effortlessly and without distortion. He thought of her so often and wished for her so much during the first two days of his solitude that it seemed almost a case for the psychical research people when he got a telegram from her.

It read: "Aunt Lucile worried you left alone especially traveling. Shall you mind or will Paula if I come down and bring you back, Mary."

There was a situation made clear, at all events. He grinned over it as he despatched his wire to her. "Perfectly unnecessary but come straight along so that we can play together for a week or two before starting home."

Play together is just what they did. Enough of his strength soon came back to make real walks possible and during the second week, with a two-horse team and a side-bar buggy, they managed, without any ill effect upon him, an excursion across the valley and up the opposite mountainside to a log cabin road-house where they had lunch.

Mary, a born horsewoman, did the driving herself, thus relieving them of the impediment to real companionship which a hired driver would have been. In an inconsecutive, light-hearted way difficult to report intelligibly, they managed to tell each other a lot. She let him see, with none of the rhetorical solemnities which a direct statement would have involved, her new awareness of his professional eminence. A dozen innuendoes, as light as dandelion feathers, conveyed it to him; swift brush-strokes of gesture and inflection sketched the picture in; an affectionate burlesque of awe completed it, so that he could laugh at her for it as she had meant he should.

She told him during their drive what the source of her illumination was; described Anthony March's visit on that most desperate day of all, the vividness of his concern over the outcome of the fight and his utter unconcern about the effect of it upon his own fortunes. She had been reading Kipling aloud, out at the farm, to the boys and Aunt Lucile and a memory of it led her to make a comparison--heedless of its absurdity--between the composer and Kirn's lama. "He isn't, anyhow, tied to the 'wheel of things' any more than that old man was."

"I'd like to have come down that day and heard him talk," John said.

"Because it's the real thing, with him. Not words. He wouldn't be a bad person to go to," he added musingly, "if one had got himself into a real _impa.s.se_--or what looked like one. Paula has chucked his opera, you know."

She nodded, evidently not in the least surprised and, no more, perturbed by this intelligence. "He won't mind that," she explained. "The only thing he really needs, in the world, is to hear his music, but this, you see, wasn't his any more. He had been trying to make it Paula's. He had been working over it rather hopelessly, because he had promised, but it was like letting him out of school when he found that she had forgotten all about him;--didn't care if she never saw him again."

She caught, without an explanatory word, the meaning of the glance her father turned upon her, and went straight on. "Oh, it seems a lot, I know, to have found out about him in one short talk, but there's nothing--personal in that. He doesn't, I mean--save himself up for special people. He's there for anybody. Like a public drinking fountain, you know. That's why he would be such a wonderful person--to go to, as you said. No one could possibly monopolize him."

She added, after a silence, "It seems a shame, when he wants so little that he can't have that. Can't hear, for example, that opera of his the way he really wrote it."

"We owe him something," her father said thoughtfully. "He got rather rough justice from Paula, anyhow. I suppose a thing like that could, perhaps, be managed--if one put his back into it."

She understood instantly, as before, and quite without exegesis, the twinge of pain that went across his face. "You _will_ have a back to put into things again, one of these days. It wants only courage to wait for it, quite patiently until it comes. You've plenty of that. That's one of he things Mr. March told me about you," she added with the playful purpose of surprising him again. "Only I happened to know that for myself."

"It's more than I can be sure of," he said. "I've been full of bravado with Paula, telling her how soon I was going to be back in harness again; c.o.c.k-sure and domineering as ever, so that she'd better make hay while the sun shone. But it was I, nevertheless, who made her go home so that she could start to work--when the whistle blew. Some one was going to have to support the family, I told her, and it didn't look as if it were going to be me."

This speech, though it ended in jest, had begun, she knew, in earnest. He meant her to understand that, and left her to judge for herself where the dividing line fell. She answered in a tone as light as his, "Paula could do it easily enough." But she was not satisfied with the way he took it.

The mere quality of the silence must have told her something. She turned upon him with sudden intensity and said, "Don't tell me you're worrying--about three great healthy people like us. You have been, though. Whatever put it into your mind to spend half a thought on that?"

"Why, it was a letter from Martin Whitney," he said. "Oh, the best meant thing in the world. Nothing but encouragement in it from beginning to end, only it was so infernally encouraging, it set me off. No, let me talk. You're quite the easiest person in the world to tell things to.

I've been remiss, there's no getting away from that. I've never taken money-making very seriously, it came so easily. I've spent my earnings the way my friends have spent their incomes. Well, if I'd died the other day, there wouldn't have been much left. There would have been my life insurance for Paula, and enough to pay my debts, including my engagements for Rush, but beyond that, oh, a pittance merely. Of course with ten years' health, back at my practise, even with five, I could improve the situation a lot."

She urged as emphatically as she dared--she wanted to avoid the mistake of sounding encouraging--that the situation needed no improvement. The income of fifty thousand dollars would take care of Paula, and beyond that,--well, if there were ever two healthy young animals in the world concerning whom cares and worries were superfluous, they were herself and Rush.

He told her thoughtfully that this was where she was; wrong. "Rush, to begin with, isn't a healthy young animal. That's what I couldn't make Martin Whitney understand. He's one of the war's sacrifices precisely as much as if he had had his leg shot off. He needs support; will go on needing it for two or three years, financial as well as moral. He mustn't be allowed to fail. That's the essence of it. He's--spent, you see; depleted. One speaks of it in figurative terms, but it's a physiological thing--if we could get at it--that's behind the la.s.situde of these boys.

It all comes back to that. That they're restless, irresolute. That they need the stimulus of excitement and can't endure the drag of routine.

They need a generous allowance, my dear,--even for an occasional failure in self-command, those two boys out at Hickory Hill."

She had nothing to say to that, though his pause gave her opportunity. A sudden surmise as to the drift of that last sentence, silenced her. And it was a surmise that leaped, in the next instant, to full conviction. He was pleading Graham's cause with her! Why? Was it something that had been as near his heart as that, all along? Or had some one--Rush--or even Graham himself--engaged his advocacy?

She said at last, rather breathlessly (it was necessary to say something or he would perceive that his stratagem had betrayed itself): "Well, at the gloomy worst, Rush is taken care of. And as for me, I'm not a war sacrifice, anyhow. That's not a possible conception--even for a worried convalescent. Did you ever _see_ anything as gorgeous as that tree, even in an Urban stage setting?"

"No," he said, "the war wasn't what you were sacrificed to."

She held her breath until she saw he wasn't going on with that. But he seemed willing to follow her lead to lighter matters, and for the rest of their excursion they carried out the pretense that there was nothing like a cloud in their sky.

That evening, though, after she had bidden him good night, she changed her mind and came back into his room. There had been something wistful about his kiss that, determined her.

"Which of them wrote to you about me?" she asked.

"Both," he told her. "Of course I should have known you'd guess. Forgive me for having tried to--manage you. I'll show you both their letters if you like. It's a breach of confidence, of course, but I don't know that I could do better."

"I'll read Rush's," she said. "Not the other."

She carried it over to the lamp, and for a while after she had taken in its easily grasped intent she went on turning its pages back and forth while she sought for an end of the tangled skein of her thoughts to hold on by.

Finally, "Do you want me to marry him, dad?" she asked. Then, before he could answer she hurried on. "I mean, would it relieve you from some nightmare worry about me if I did?--This has to be plain talk, doesn't it, if it is to get us anywhere?"

"That's a fair question of yours," he said. But he wasn't ready at once with an answer. "It _would_ be such a relief, provided you really wanted to marry him. That goes to the bottom of it, I think. My responsibility is to make it possible for you to--follow your heart. To marry or not as you wish. To marry a poor man if you wish. But if Graham is your choice and all that holds you back from him is some remediable misunderstanding--or failure to understand ..."

"I don't know whether it's remediable or not," she said; and added, "I told him I would marry him if I could. Did he tell you that?"

It was a mistake to have quoted that expression to her father. He took it just as Graham had. Of course! What else could he think? She sat with clenched hands and a dry throat, listening while he tried to enlighten what he took to be her innocent misunderstanding.

They had never spoken, she realized, about matters of s.e.x. For anything he really knew to the contrary she might have been as ignorant as a child. He was actually talking as one talks to a child;--kindly, tolerantly, tenderly, but with an unconscious touch of patronage, like one trying to explain away--misgivings about Santa Claus! There were elements, inevitably, in a man's love for a woman, that a young girl could not understand. Nothing but experience could bring that understanding home to her. This was what in one way after another, he was trying to convey.

But the intuition which, in good times or bad, always betrayed their emotions to each other, showed him that he was, somehow missing the mark.

Her silence through his tentative little pauses disconcerted him heavily.

He ran down at last like an unwound clock.

It was only after a long intolerably oppressive silence that she found her voice. "The misunderstanding isn't what you think," she said. "Nor what Graham thinks. It's his misunderstanding, not mine. He thinks that I am--a sort of innocent angel that he's not good enough for. And the fact is that I'm not--not innocent enough for him. Not an angel at all. Not even quite--good."

But she got no further. The plea for comprehension, for an ear that would not turn away from her plain story, never was made. In a smother of words he halted her. Affectionately, with a gentleness that achieved absolute finality. She was overwrought. She carried paradox too far. In her innocence she used a form of speech that she didn't know the meaning of, and should be careful to avoid. Her troubles, with patience, would work themselves out in the end. Meanwhile let her as far as possible stop thinking about them.

But she had got, during the intaken breath before he began to speak, a sensation,--as sharp and momentary as the landscape revealed in a lightning flash,--of a sudden terror on his part; as of one finding himself on the edge of an abyss of understanding. For that one glaring instant before he had had time to turn his face away he had known what she meant. But he never would look again. Never would know.

CHAPTER XVI