Mary Wollaston Part 4

CHAPTER III

THE PEACE BASIS

There were four in their party but it was only with Alfred Baldwin that Mary Wollaston danced. The other man--Black his name was, and he came from Iowa City or Dubuque or thereabouts--devoted all his attention to Baldwin's wife. He was very rich, very much married--out in Iowa--and whenever he made his annual business trip to New York, he liked to have a real New York time. They had dined together at the Baldwins' apartment with a vague idea of going afterward to see a play of Baldwin's then drawing toward the close of a successful season's run. But dinner had been late and they had lingered too long over it to make this excursion worth while. It had amused both Mary and Christabel to discover Black's secret hope of being taken back-stage and introduced to the beautiful young star who was playing in the piece and taking her out to supper with them. He didn't know that Baldwin hated her with a perfect hatred and never got within speaking distance of her if he could help it.

So, by way of making up to the western visitor for his disappointment they taxied up-town about ten o'clock to the brightest, loudest and most fantastically expensive of New York's dancing restaurants. Once there, he took command of the party; confidently addressed the head waiter by his first name and began "opening wine" with a lavish hand. He was flirting in what he conceived to be quite a desperate and depraved manner with Christabel, and what enhanced his pleasure in this entertainment was that he did it all right under the nose of the husband, who obviously didn't mind a bit. He would talk eloquently when he got home, with carefully selected corroborative details, about the wickedness of New York.

Mary liked the Baldwins. Christabel was on the executive committee of their Fund and one of the best and steadiest and most sensible supporters it had. She was a real person. Baldwin, himself, whom she hadn't known so long nor so well and had regarded from afar as a rather formidable celebrity, proved on better acquaintance, though witty and sophisticated, to be as comfortable as an old glove. Altogether they were the nearest thing to friends that her long sojourn in New York had given her. She had sometimes thought rather wildly of putting them to the test and seeing whether they were real friends or not.

To-night, though, even they irritated her. She wished Christabel would snub that appalling bounder, Black, as he deserved. How could she go on playing up to him like that! As for Baldwin, she wished he would just dance with her and not talk. She supposed that the amount of alcohol they had consumed since seven o'clock had something to do with his verging upon the vein, the Broadway sentimental vein, that he had got started on and couldn't seem to let alone.

It wasn't new to Mary. Indeed it was a phenomenon familiarly a.s.sociated in her mind with Forty-second Street restaurants and late hours and strong drink, particularly gin. The crocodile tear for the good woman who stayed at home; who didn't know; who never, please G.o.d! should know. The tribute to flower-like innocence--the paper flower-like innocence of the stage _ingenue_!

Baldy wasn't as bad as that, couldn't ever conceivably be as bad as that, no matter how much he had had to drink. Perhaps, if she had not been hypersensitive to-night,--in an impossible mood for any sort of party really--she might have failed to detect the familiar strain in his sensible, rather fatherly talk. As it was, she thought she did detect it and it made her want to scream--or swear!

There is one point to be urged in Baldy's defense that Mary never learned to allow for. Gin or no gin, the effect of contrast she presented to her surroundings in a place like this, her look of a seraphic visitor gone astray, would have given any one the impulse, at least, to rush to the rescue. To begin with, it was not possible to credit her with the twenty-five years she truly claimed; nineteen, in a soft colored evening frock like the one she had on to-night, was about what one would have guessed. Then, you never would have believed, short of discovering the fact yourself, how strong she was; her slenderness and the fine articulation of her joints made her look fragile. Her coloring helped the illusion along, the clear unsophisticated blue of her eyes, the pallor of her hair that the petals of a tea-rose could have got lost in,--it was, literally, just about the tint of unbleached linen--and the pearly translucence of her skin. If you got the opportunity to look close enough to see that there wasn't a grain of powder upon it, not even between the shoulder blades, it made you think of flower petals again. What clenched the effect was her healthy capacity for complete relaxation when no effort was required of her. She drooped a little and people thought she looked tired. She never could see herself like that and never made due allowance for the effect she produced, invariably upon strangers and not infrequently upon an old friend.

To-night, she lacked the name to label her mood by, rejecting rather fiercely the one that kept offering itself. You couldn't be homesick when home was the last place in the world you wanted to go back to--the place you were desperately marshaling reasons for staying away from.

It was the non-appearance of her brother, Rush, that had brought a lot of dispersed feelings to a focus. She had heard nothing later from him than the letter she referred to when she last wrote to her father. She had expected a cable and it hadn't come. She had this morning gone over to Hoboken to meet the transport he had said he expected to sail on, but having got down to the pier a little late, after the debarkation had begun, she could not be sure that she hadn't missed him. So she had gone back to her tiny flat in Waverly Place and had spent the rest of the day there, vainly hoping that he would turn up or at least that she should get some word of him. And sitting around like that for hours and hours she had, which was a silly thing to do, let her thoughts run wild over things--a thing--that there was simply no sense in thinking about at all.

It was an odd fact, which she had noted long before today, that anything connected with home, a letter from her father or her aunt, news of the doings of any of her Chicago friends (the birth of Olive Corbett's second baby, for example), any vivid projection of a bit of the pattern of the life into which she had once been woven, roused that nightmare memory. Or gave, rather, to a memory which normally did not trouble her much, the quality of a nightmare; a moment of paralyzed incredulity that it could have happened to her; a pang of clear horror that it really and truly had happened to her very self; to this Mary Wollaston who still lived in the very place where it had happened.

This afternoon, while she had sat awaiting from moment to moment the appearance of her brother, or at least the sound of his voice over the telephone, the pang had been prolonged into an agony. She had let herself drift into a fantastic speculation of a sort that was perfectly new. What if the boy who had shared that crazy adventure with her, himself an officer bound overseas, had fallen in with Rush, made friends with him, told him the story!

This was pure melodrama, she knew. There was, in any external sense, nothing to be feared. The thing had happened almost a year ago. It had had no consequences--except this inexplicable one that her brother's approach brought back the buried memory of it. Why should it cling like that? Like an acid that wouldn't wash off! She was not, as far as her mind went, ashamed of it. Never had been. But, waiving all the extenuating circ.u.mstances--which had really surrounded the act--admitting that it was a sin (this thing that she had done once and had, later, learned the impossibility of ever doing again), was it any worse than what her brother had probably done a score of times?

What was this brother of hers going to be like? It wasn't possible, of course, that she would find him the boy he had been five years ago, before he went to France--though from some of his letters one might have thought he hadn't changed a bit. Wasn't it likely that he'd turn out to be some one she could cling to a little; confide her perplexities to--some of them? Was there a chance that ripened, disillusioned, made gentle and wise by the alchemy of the furnace he had come through, he might prove to be the one person in the world to whom she could confide everything? That would make an end to her nightmare, she felt sure.

The question whether he was or was not going to turn out like that was one presently to be answered. Until she knew the answer she didn't want to think at all, least of all about those things which Baldy's talk to-night kept rousing echoes of.

"Oh, they all look good when they're far away," she said, picking that bit of comic supplement slang deliberately to annoy him. "I don't believe our grandfathers and grandmothers were always such models of decorum as they tried, when they had grown old, to make us think. And the simple primitive joys ... I believe an old-fashioned husking bee, if they had plenty of hard cider to go with it, was just as bad as this--coa.r.s.er if not so vulgar. After all, most of these people will go virtuously home to bed pretty soon and you'd find them back at work to-morrow morning not any the worse, really, for this. It may be a rather poor sort of home they go to, but how do you know that the vine-covered cottage you have been talking about was any better?"

"Not to mention," he added, in humorous concurrence, "that there was probably typhoid in the well the old oaken bucket hung in. It seems odd to be convicted of sentimentality by an innocent babe like you. But if you had been looking at the party down at the end table behind you that I've had under my eye for ten minutes, perhaps you'd feel more as I do.

No! don't turn around; they have been looking at us."

"Moralizing over us, perhaps," she suggested. "Thinking how wicked we probably were."

"No," he said, "I happen to know the girls. They live down in our part of town, just over in the Village, that is. They have been here six or eight years. One of them was quite a promising young ill.u.s.trator once. And they're both well-bred--came obviously from good homes. And they've both gone, well--clean over the edge."

Somehow his innocent euphemism annoyed her. "You mean they are prost.i.tutes?" she asked.

He frowned in protest at her employment of the word but a.s.sented unequivocally. He was used--as who is not--to hearing young women discuss outspokenly such topics but he couldn't forgive it from one who looked like Mary Wollaston.

"I have a hunch," he said, "that the two boys who are with them are officers out of uniform. I noticed that they looked the other way pretty carefully when that major who is sitting at the next table to ours came in."

"Let's dance again," she said. "I love this Hawaiian Moonlight thing."

He saw her take the opportunity that rising from the table gave her for a good square look at the party he had been talking about and some change in her manner made him say with quick concern, "What is it?"

But she ignored the question and stepped out upon the floor with him.

They had danced half-way round the room when she said quietly, "One of the boys at that table is my brother Rush."

Baldwin said, "He has seen you, I think." He felt her give a sort of gasp before she replied but the words came steadily enough.

"Oh, yes, we saw each other at the same time."

He said nothing more, just went on dancing around the room with her in silence, taking care, without appearing to do so, to cut the corner where Rush was sitting, rather broadly. After two or three rounds of the floor, she flagged a little and without asking any questions, he led her back to their table. Luckily, Christabel and her Iowan had disappeared.

As soon as she was seated she asked him for a pencil and something she could write on--a card of his, the back of an old letter, anything. She wrote, "Won't you please come and ask me to dance?" and she slid it over to him. He read it and understood, picked up a busboy with his eye and despatched him with the folded sc.r.a.p for delivery to Captain Wollaston at the end table.

Mary meanwhile had cradled her chin in her palms and closed her eyes.

She had experienced so clear a premonition before she turned round to look at the party at the end table that one of those officers out of uniform would turn out to be Rush that the verification of it had the quality of something that happens in a dream. She felt a sharp incredulity that it could really be they, staring at each other across that restaurant. More than that, the brother she saw was not--in that first glance--the man she had been trying all day to make up her mind he would be. Not the new Rush with two palms to his _Croix de Guerre_ and his American D.S.C.; and the scars in his soul from the experiences those decorations must represent; but the Rush she had said good-by to in the autumn of 1914 when he set out to be a freshman at Harvard, the kid brother she had counciled and occasionally admonished, in the vicarious exercise of her father's authority. And in his panic-stricken gaze at her, she had recognized his instinctive acceptance of that position. Exactly so would he have looked five interminable years ago if she had caught him in mischief.

Then, like the undertow of a big wave, the reaction caught her. It was intolerable that he should look at her like that. He who had earned his manhood and its privileges in the long death grapple with the grimmest of realities. Certainly she was not the one to cast the first stone at him.

She must contrive somehow, at once, to make that clear to him. The urgency of the thing lay in her belief that the whole of their future relationship depended upon the removing of his misapprehension now--to-night.

She could not go to that table where he sat without seeming more than ever the school mistress in pursuit of a truant, but perhaps he would come to her if she put her request right. They had danced together quite a lot in the old days. She danced so well that not even her status of elder sister had prevented his enjoying the exercise of their combined accomplishment.

A horrible misgiving had attacked her when she had scribbled the note and closed her eyes, that the c.o.c.ktails and the champagne she herself had consumed since seven o'clock might have clouded her judgment--if, indeed, they were not responsible for the whole nightmare. Would she be equal to following out the line she had set for herself?

But no trace of that misgiving was apparent to her when Rush, after a wait of only two or three minutes, appeared at her table. She greeted him with a smile and a h.e.l.lo, nodded a fleeting farewell to Baldwin and slipped comfortably into her brother's arms out on the floor. They danced away without a word. There was the same quite beautiful accord between them that there had been in the old days, and the sense of this steadied her. They had gone all the way around the floor before she spoke.

"It is like old times, isn't it?" she said. "And it does seem good. You don't mind, do you,--for ten minutes?"

"Ten minutes?" he echoed dully.

She knew then, as she had indeed been aware from the first, that he was drunk and that only by the most painful effort, could he command his scattered wits at all. It made her want to cry that he should be trying so hard. She must not cry. That would be the final outrage. She must be very simple and clear. She must--_must_ contrive to make him understand.

"Will you listen to me, dear, and do exactly what I ask you to? I want you to go back to your people and forget that you have seen me at all."

"I am going to take you home--out of this," he said laboriously.

"I'm going home soon, but not with you. I want you to go back to--to the girl you brought here. No, dear, listen. This is the only reason I sent for you. To tell you that I wasn't going to try to scold you. I don't mind a bit. I want to tell you that, so that when you come back to me to-morrow or next day or whenever your party is quite over, you won't feel that you have anything to try to explain or apologize for. Now take me back to my place and then go on to yours."

"I won't take you back to him," he said doggedly. "What do you think I am? I'm drunk, but not enough for that. I am going to take you home."

She tried to laugh but in spite of herself it was more like a sob.

"Rush, dear, don't be silly. I am perfectly all right--or would be if I hadn't drunk quite so much champagne. They'll take me home. His wife's here with him and they're old friends of mine. They know a lot of our friends in Chicago. Please, Rush...."

"Do you think I'd go back to that--" he managed to pull up on the edge of an ugly word--"back to those people, and leave you here? Is it your wrap on that chair? We'll stop and get it and then we'll go."

She could have wept with vexation over the way her scheme had gone awry but there was clearly nothing else to do. She retrieved her cloak, simply said good night to Christabel and the man named Black, leaving Baldy to explain things as he chose.

Five minutes later she gave a taxi driver the address of her flat and dropped back against the cushions beside her brother. Neither of them spoke a word during that fifteen-minute drive. Mary wept quietly most of the way--it didn't matter there in the dark. The thought of this splendid glorious brother of hers painfully endeavoring to drag himself back into a state of sobriety from his first wild caper after long wearing of the harness of discipline--an escapade she supposed that he must have been looking forward to for days--dragging himself back to protect her--oh, it was too hopeless! Should she ever be able to explain to him why she had sent for him, and that her intentions had been the opposite of those of the moralizing meddler he would take her for? If only she could make it up to him somehow. She would have liked to reach over and pull him down into her arms, mother him and tell him not to mind--there was something so intolerably pathetic about his effort to sit soberly straight--but she resisted this impulse savagely. The alcohol in her own veins was responsible for this. She could not quite trust herself not to go maudlin. So she froze herself tight and huddled away from him into her own corner.