The Breaking Point Part 56

When n.o.body dropped in she would go upstairs and spend the hour or so before bedtime in the rites of cold cream, ma.s.sage, and in placing the little combs of what Leslie had learned was called a water-wave.

But her judgment was as clear as his, and even more pitiless; the difference between them lay in the fact that while he rebelled, she accepted the situation. She was cleverer than he was; her mind worked more quickly, and she had the adaptability he lacked. If there were times when she wearied him, there were others when he sickened her.

Across from her at the table he ate slowly and enormously. He splashed her dainty bathroom with his loud, gasping cold baths. He flung his soiled clothing anywhere. He drank whisky at night and crawled into the lavender-scented sheets redolent of it, to drop into a heavy sleep and snore until she wanted to scream. But she played the game to the limit of her ability.

Then, seeing that they might go on the rocks, he made a valiant effort, and since she recognized it as an effort, she tried to meet him half way. They played two-handed card games. He read aloud to her, poetry which she loathed, and she to him, short stories he hated. He suggested country walks and she agreed, to limp back after a half mile or so in her high-heeled pumps.

He concealed his boredom from her, but there were nights when he lay awake long after she was asleep and looked ahead into a future of unnumbered blank evenings. He had formerly taken an occasional evening at his club, but on his suggesting it now Nina's eyes would fill with suspicion, and he knew that although she never mentioned Beverly Carlysle, she would neither forget nor entirely trust him again. And in his inner secret soul he knew that she was right.

He had thought that he had buried that brief madness, but there were times when he knew he lied to himself. One fiction, however, he persisted in; he had not been infatuated with Beverly. It was only that she gave him during those few days something he had not found at home, companionship and quiet intelligent talk. She had been restful. Nina was never restful.

He bought a New York paper daily, and read it in the train. "The Valley"

had opened to success in New York, and had settled for a long run. The reviews of her work had been extraordinary, and when now and then she gave an interview he studied the photographs accompanying it. But he never carried the paper home.

He began, however, to play with the thought of going to New York. He would not go to see her at her house, but he would like to see her before a metropolitan audience, to add his mite to her triumph. There were times when he fully determined to go, when he sat at his desk with his hand on the telephone, prepared to lay the foundations of the excursion by some manipulation of business interests. For months, however, he never went further than the preliminary movement.

But by October he began to delude himself with a real excuse for going, and this was the knowledge that by a strange chain of circ.u.mstance this woman who so dominated his secret thoughts was connected with Elizabeth's life through Judson Clark. The discovery, communicated to him by Walter Wheeler, that d.i.c.k was Clark had roused in him a totally different feeling from Nina's. He saw no glamour of great wealth. On the contrary, he saw in Clark the author of a great unhappiness to a woman who had not deserved it. And Nina, judging him with deadly accuracy, surmised even that.

That he was jealous of Judson Clark, and of his part in the past, he denied to himself absolutely. But his resentment took the form of violent protest to the family, against even allowing Elizabeth to have anything to do with d.i.c.k if he turned up.

"He'll buy his freedom, if he isn't dead," he said to Nina, "and he'll come snivelling back here, with that lost memory bunk, and they're just fool enough to fall for it."

"I've fallen for it, and I'm at least as intelligent as you are."

Before her appraising eyes his own fell.

"Suppose I did something I shouldn't and turned up here with such a story, would you believe it?"

"No. When you want to do something you shouldn't you don't appear to need any excuse."

But, on the whole, they managed to live together comfortably enough.

They each had their reservations, but especially after Jim's death they tacitly agreed to stop bickering and to make their mutual concessions.

What Nina never suspected was that he corresponded with Beverly Carlysle. Not that the correspondence amounted to much. He had sent her flowers the night of the New York opening, with the name of his club on his card, and she wrote there in acknowledgment. Then, later, twice he sent her books, one a biography, which was a compromise with his conscience, and later a volume of exotic love verse, which was not. As he replied to her notes of thanks a desultory correspondence had sprung up, letters which the world might have read, and yet which had to him the savor and interest of the clandestine.

He did not know that that, and not infatuation, was behind his desire to see Beverly again; never reasoned that he was demonstrating to himself that his adventurous love life was not necessarily ended; never acknowledged that the instinct of the hunter was as alive in him as in the days before his marriage. Partly, then, a desire for adventure, partly a hope that romance was not over but might still be waiting around the next corner, was behind his desire to see her again.

Probably Nina knew that, as she knew so many things; why he had taken to reading poetry, for instance. Certain it is that when he began, early in October, to throw out small tentative remarks about the necessity of a business trip before long to New York, she narrowed her eyes. She was determined to go with him, if he went at all, and he was equally determined that she should not.

It became, in a way, a sort of watchful waiting on both sides. Then there came a time when some slight excuse offered, and Leslie took up the shuttle for forty-eight hours, and wove his bit in the pattern. It happened to be on the same evening as d.i.c.k's return to the old house.

He was a little too confident, a trifle too easy to Nina.

"Has the handle of my suitcase been repaired yet?" he asked. He was lighting a cigarette at the time.

"Yes. Why?"

"I'll have to run over to New York to-morrow. I wanted Joe to go alone, but he thinks he needs me." Joe was his partner. "Oh. So Joe's going?"

"That's what I said."

She was silent. Joe's going was clever of him. It gave authenticity to his business, and it kept her at home.

"How long shall you be gone?"

"Only a day or two." He could not entirely keep the relief out of his voice. It had been easy, incredibly easy. He might have done it a month ago. And he had told the truth; Joe was going.

"I'll pack to-night, and take my suitcase in with me in the morning."

"If you'll get your things out I'll pack them." She was still thinking, but her tone was indifferent. "You won't want your dress clothes, of course."

"I'd better have a dinner suit."

She looked at him then, with a half contemptuous smile. "Yes," she said slowly. "I suppose you will. You'll be going to the theater."

He glanced away.

"Possibly. But we'll be rushing to get through. There's a lot to do.

Amazing how business piles up when you find you're going anywhere. There won't be much time to play."

She sat before the mirror in her small dressing-room that night, ostensibly preparing for bed but actually taking stock of her situation.

She had done all she could, had been faithful and loyal, had made his home attractive, had catered to his tastes and tried to like his friends, had met his needs and responded to them. And now, this. She was bewildered and frightened. How did women hold their husbands?

She found him in bed and unmistakably asleep when she went into the bedroom. Man-like, having got his way, he was not troubled by doubts or introspection. It was done.

He was lying on his back, with his mouth open. She felt a sudden and violent repugnance to getting into the bed beside him. Sometime in the night he would turn over and throwing his arm about her, hold her close in his sleep; and it would be purely automatic, the mechanical result of habit.

She lay on the edge of the bed and thought things over.

He had his good qualities. He was kind and affectionate to her family.

He had been wonderful when Jim died, and he loved Elizabeth dearly. He was generous and open-handed. He was handsome, too, in a big, heavy way.

She began to find excuses for him. Men were always a child-like prey to some women. They were vain, and especially they were s.e.x-vain; good looking men were a target for every sort of advance. She transferred her loathing of him to the woman she suspected of luring him away from her, and lay for hours hating her.

She saw Leslie off in the morning with a perfunctory good-bye while cold anger and suspicion seethed in her. And later she put on her hat and went home to lay the situation before her mother. Mrs. Wheeler was out, however, and she found only Elizabeth sewing by her window.

Nina threw her hat on the bed and sat down dispiritedly.

"I suppose there's no news?" she asked.

Nina watched her. She was out of patience with Elizabeth, exasperated with the world.

"Are you going to go on like this all your life?" she demanded. "Sitting by a window, waiting? For a man who ran away from you?"

"That's not true, and you know it."

"They're all alike," Nina declared recklessly. "They go along well enough, and they are all for virtue and for the home and fireside stuff, until some woman comes their way. I ought to know."

Elizabeth looked up quickly.