Mary Wollaston Part 31

After another moment of silence she smiled and added, "I suppose a Freudian would carry off an admission like that to his cave and gnaw over it for hours."

He stared at her, shocked, incredulous. "What do you know about Freud?"

he demanded.

"One couldn't live for two years within a hundred yards of Washington Square without knowing at least as much about it as that," she told him,--and was glad of the entrance of the maid with another installment of the breakfast. There was no more talk between them during the meal. But at the end of it she faced him resolutely.

"We must have this out, dad. And isn't now as good a time as any?"

He followed her out into the veranda but the sounds from the dining-room, where the maid had come in to clear away the breakfast, disturbed him so Mary suggested a walk.

"Get your hat and we'll go over to the lake. I know a nice place not far, an open field right at the edge of the bluff with one big tree to make it shady. At this hour of the morning we are sure to have it all to ourselves."

He said as they walked along, "I've no reproaches for you. Not this morning. I've thought over a lot of ground since four o'clock."

He said nothing more to the point until they reached the spot which Mary had selected as their destination--it lived up handsomely to all her promises--and settled themselves under the shade of the big tree.

"I suppose," he added then, "that I ought to forgive Whitney and Hood.

Their intentions were the best and kindest, of course. But I find that harder to do."

He sat back against the trunk of the tree, facing out over the lake; she disposed herself cross-legged on the gra.s.s near by just within reaching distance. She offered him her cigarette case but he declined.

Of late years, since his marriage to Paula, he had smoked very little.

As a subst.i.tute, now, he picked up a forked bit of branch, and began whittling it.

"I'm as much to blame as they are," she said, presently. "More, really.

Because, if I hadn't procrastinated-o-ut of cowardice, mostly,--until yesterday, when she was half-way over the edge, it might never have come to Maxfield Ware at all. After the situation had dramatized itself like that, there was only one thing she could do. Of course, they didn't foresee that five years' contract, any more than I did."

He nodded a.s.sent, though rather absently to this. "I'm not much interested in the abstract ethics of it," he said. "It's disputable, of course, how far any one can be justified in making a major interference in another's life; one that deprives him of the power of choice. That's what you have done to me--the three of you. If the premises are right, and the outcome prosperous, there's something to be said for it. But in this case ..."

"They aren't mistaken, are they, dad? Wallace and Mr. Whitney?--Or Doctor Steinmetz?"

"Why, it's reasonable to suppose that Whitney understands my financial condition better than I do. I mean that. It's not a sneer. But what he and Hood don't allow for is that I've never tried to make money.

They've no idea what my earning power would be if I were to turn to and make that a prime consideration. A year of it would take me out of the woods, I think."

She waited, breathless, for him to deal with the third name. She was pretty well at one with Paula in the relative valuation she put upon her father's opinion and that of the throat and lung specialist.

"Oh, as for Steinmetz," John Wollaston said, after a pause, querulously, "he's a good observer. There's nothing to be said against him as a laboratory man. But he has the vice of all German scientists; he doesn't understand imponderables. Never a flash of intuition about him. He managed to intimidate Darby into agreeing with him. Neither of them takes my recuperative powers into account."

He seemed to feel that this wasn't a very strong line to take and the next moment he conceded as much.

"But suppose they were right," he flashed round at her. "Am I not still ent.i.tled to my choice? I've lived the greater part of my life. I've pulled my weight in the boat. It should be for me to choose whether I spend the life I have left in two years or in twenty. If they want to call that suicide, let them. I've no religion that's real enough to make a valid argument against my right to extinguish myself if I choose."

She wasn't shocked. It was characteristic of their talks together, this free range among ethical abstractions, especially on his part.

"You act on the other theory though," she pointed out to him. "Think of the people you've patched together just so that they can live at most another wretched year or two."

"That's a different thing," he said. "Or rather it comes to the same thing. The question of shortening one's life is one that n.o.body has a right to decide except for himself."

Then he asked abruptly. "What sort of person is Maxfield Ware?"

She attempted no palliations here.

"He kissed me last night," she said, "taking his cigar out of his mouth for the purpose. He's not a sort of person I can endure or manage. Paula hates him as much as I do, but she can manage him. He'd never try to kiss her like that."

"Oh, G.o.d!" cried John. "It's intolerable." He flung away his stick, got to his feet and walked to the edge of the bluff. "Think of her working, traveling,--living almost,--with a man like that! You say she can manage him; that she can prevent him from trying to make love to her. Well, what does that mean, if you're right, but that she--understands him; his talk; his ideas; his point of view. You can't make yourself intelligible to a man like that; she can. It's defilement to meet his mind anywhere--any angle of it. She's given him carte blanche, she says, to manage the publicity for her. Do you realize what that means? He's licensed to try to make the public believe anything that he thinks would heighten their interest in her. That she dresses indecently; that she's a frivolous extravagant fool; that she has lovers. You know how that game is played."

Mary did know. She ran over a list of the great names and opposite every one of them there sprang into her mind the particular bit of vulgar reclame that had been in its day some press agent's masterpiece. She was able further to see that Paula would regard the moves of this game with a large-minded tolerance which would be incomprehensible to John. After all, that was the way to take it. If you were a real luminary, not just a blank white surface, all the mud that Mr. Maxfield Ware could splash wouldn't matter. You burnt it off. None of those great names was soiled.

She tried to say something like this to her father, but didn't feel sure that she quite had his attention. He did quiet down again however and resumed his seat at the foot of the tree. Presently he said:

"She's doing it for me. Because my incompetence has forced it upon her.

She'd have taken the other thing; had really chosen it." Then without a pause, but with a new intensity he shot in a question. "That's true, isn't it? She meant what she said over the telephone?" As Mary hesitated over her answer he added rather grimly, "You can be quite candid about it. I don't know which answer I want."

"She meant every word she said over the telephone," Mary a.s.sured him.

"You couldn't doubt that if you had seen her as I did afterward."

She didn't pretend though that this was the complete answer. The reflective tone in which she spoke made it clear that there was more to it than that.

"Go on," John said, "tell me the rest of it. I think, perhaps, you understand her better than I do."

Mary took her time about going on and she began a little doubtfully. "I always begin by being unjust to Paula," she said. "That's my instinct, I suppose, reproaching her for not doing what she would do if she were like me. But afterward when I think her out, I believe I understand her pretty well."

"Paula exaggerates," she went on after another reflective pause. "She must see things large in order to move among them in a large way. Her gestures, those of her mind I mean, are--sweeping. If she weren't so good-natured, our--hair-splitting ways would annoy her. Then it's necessary for her to feel that she's--conquering something."

That last word was barely audible and the quality of the silence which followed it drew John Wollaston's gaze which had been straying over the lake, around to the speaker. She had been occupying her hands while she talked, collecting tiny twigs and acorn cups that happened to be within reach but now she was tensely still and paler than her wont, he thought.

"You needn't be afraid to say what's in your mind," he a.s.sured her.

"It wasn't that," she told him. "I realized that I had been quoting somebody else. Anthony March said once of Paula that if she had not been an artist she might have been a _dompteuse_."

John settled himself more comfortably against his tree trunk. A contact like this with his daughter's mind must have been inexpressibly comforting to him after a night like the one he had just spent. Its rect.i.tude; its sensitiveness; the mere feel and texture of it, put his jangling nerves in tune.

"Is Ware the wild beast she has an inclination to tame in this instance?" he asked.

"He's nothing but a symbol of it," Mary said. Then she managed to get the thing a little clearer. "What she'd have done if she'd been like us and what we'd have had her do--Mr. Whitney and Wallace and I,--would have been to make a sort of compromise between her position as your wife and a career as Paula Carresford. We'd have had her sign a contract to sing a few times this winter with the Metropolitan or the Chicago company, go on a concert tour perhaps for a few weeks, even give singing lessons or sing in a church choir. That would probably have been Mr. Whitney's idea.

Rather more than enough to pay her way and at the same time leave as much of her to you as possible.

"But that's the last thing in the world it would be possible for Paula to do. She must see a great career on one side,--see herself as Geraldine Farrar's successor,--and on the other side she must see a perfect unflawed life with you. So that whichever she chooses she will have a sense of making the greatest possible sacrifice. She couldn't have said to you what she did over the telephone if Mr. Ware hadn't convinced her that a great career was open to her and she couldn't have signed his contract if it had not involved sacrificing you."

She propped herself back against her hands with a sigh of fatigue.

"There's some of the hair-splitting Paula talks about," she observed.

"It may be fine spun," her father said thoughtfully, "but it seems to me to hold together. Isn't there any more of it?"

"Well, it was balanced like that, you see," Mary went on; "set for the climax, like the springs in a French play, when I came along at just the moment and with just the word, to topple it over. Being Paula, she couldn't help doing exactly what she did. So, however it comes out, I shall be the one person she won't be able to forgive."

She knew from the startled look he turned upon her that this last shot had come uncannily close. She fancied she must almost literally have echoed Paula's words. If she needed any further confirmation she would have found it in the rather panicky way in which he set about trying to convince her that she was mistaken, if not in the fact at least in the permanence of it.

She insisted no further, made indeed no further attempt at all to carry the theme along and though she listened and made appropriate replies when they were called for, she let her wordless thought drift away to a dream that it was Anthony March who shared this shade and sunshine with her and that veiled blue horizon yonder. It was easier to do since her father had drifted into a reverie of his own. They need not have lingered for they had sufficiently talked away all possible grounds of misunderstanding, even if they had not reconciled their disagreement.