The Cup of Fury Part 15

Coming from London and the country life of England, she found the town intolerably ugly. It held no a.s.sociations for her. She had been unhappy there, and she said: "Poor me! No wonder I ran away." She justified her earlier self with a kind of mothering sympathy. She longed for some one to mother her present self.

But her sister was not to be found. The old house where they had lived was replaced by a factory that had made suspenders and now was turning out cartridge-belts. She found no one who knew her sister at all. She did not give her own name, for many reasons, and her face was not remembered. A few people recalled the family. The town marshal vaguely placed her father as a frequent boarder at the jail.

One sweet old lady, for whom Marie Louise's mother had done sewing, had a kind of notion that one of the sisters had run away and that the other sister had left town with somebody for somewhere sometime after.

But that was all that the cupboard of her recollection disclosed.

Anatole France has a short story of Pilate in his old age meeting his predecessor as Proconsul in Jerusalem. During their senile gossip the elder asks if Pilate had known a certain beauty named Mary of Magdala.

Pilate shakes his head. The other has heard that she took up with a street-preacher called Jesus from the town of Nazareth. Pilate ponders, shakes his head again, and confesses, "I don't remember him."

It was not strange, then, that Marie Louise's people, who had made almost no impression on the life of the town, should have lapsed from its memory. But it was discouraging. Marie Louise felt as much of an anachronism as old Rip Van Winkle, though she looked no more like him than an exquisite, fashionable young woman could look like a gray-bearded sot who has slept in his clothes for twenty years.

Her private detective, Larrey, homesick for New York, was overjoyed when she went back, but she was disconsolate and utterly detached from life. The prodigal had come home, but the family had moved away.

She took a comfortable little nook in an apartment hotel and settled down to meditate. The shops interested her, and she browsed away among them for furniture and clothes and books.

Marie Louise had not been in her homeless home long when the President visited Congress and asked it to declare a state of war against Germany. She was exultant over the great step, but the wilful few who held Congress back from answering the summons revealed to her why the nation had been so slow in responding to the crisis. Even now, after so much insult and outrage, vast numbers of Americans denied that there was any cause for war.

But the patience of the majority had been worn thin. The opposition was swept away, and America declared herself in the arena--in spirit at least. Impatient souls who had prophesied how the millions would spring to arms overnight wondered at the failure to commit a miracle.

The Germans, who had prepared for forty years, laughed at the new enemy and felt guaranteed by five impossibilities: that America should raise a real army, or equip it, or know how to train it, or be able to get it past the submarine barrier, or feed the few that might sneak through.

America's vast resources were unready, unwieldy, unknown. The first embarra.s.sment was the panic of volunteers.

Marie Louise was only one of the hundred million who sprang madly in all directions and landed nowhere. She wanted to volunteer, too, but for what? What could she do? Where could she get it to do? In the chaos of her impatience she did nothing.

Supping alone at the Biltmore one night, she was seen, hailed, and seized by Polly Widdicombe. Marie Louise's detective knew who Polly was. He groaned to note that she was the first friend his client had found.

Polly, giggling adorably, embraced her and kissed her before everybody in the big Tudor Room. And Polly's husband greeted her with warmth of hand and voice.

Marie Louise almost wept, almost cried aloud with joy. The prodigal was home, had been welcomed with a kiss. Evidently her secret had not crossed the ocean. She could take up life again. Some day the past would confront and denounce her, perhaps; but for the moment she was enfranchised anew of human society.

Polly said that she had read of Sir Joseph's death and his wife's, and what a shock it must have been to poor Marie Louise, but how well she bore up under it, and how perfectly darn beautiful she was, and what a shame that it was almost midnight! She and her hub were going to Washington. Everybody was, of course. Why wasn't Marie Louise there?

And Polly's husband was to be a major--think of it! He was going to be all dolled up in olive drab and things and-- "d.a.m.n the clock, anyway; if we miss that train we can't get on another for days. And what's your address? Write it on the edge of that bill of fare and tear it off, and I'll write you the minute I get settled, for you must come to us and nowhere else and-- Good-by, darling child, and-- All right, Tom, I'm coming!"

And she was gone.

Marie Louise went back to her seclusion much happier and yet much lonelier. She had found a friend who had not heard of her disgrace.

She had lost a friend who still rejoiced to see her.

But her faithful watchman was completely discouraged. When he turned in his report he threatened to turn in his resignation unless he were relieved of the futile task of recording Marie Louise's blameless and eventless life.

And then the agent's night was turned to day--at least his high noon was turned to higher. For a few days later Marie Louise was abruptly addressed by Nicky Easton.

She had been working in the big Red Cross shop on Fifth Avenue, rolling bandages and making dressings with a crowd of other white-fingered women. A cable had come that there was a sudden need for at least ten thousand bandages. These were not yet for American soldiers in France, though their turn would come, and their wholesale need. But as Marie Louise wrought she could imagine the shattered flesh, the crying nerves of some poor patriot whose gaping wound this linen pack would smother. And her own nerves cried out in vicarious crucifixion. At noon she left the factory for a little air and a bite of lunch.

Nicky Easton appeared out of her list of the buried. She gasped at sight of him.

"I thought you were dead."

He laughed: "If I am it, thees is my _Doppelganger_." And he began to hum with a grisly smile Schubert's setting to Heine's poem of the man who met his own ghost and double, aping his love-sorrow outside the home of his dead sweetheart:

"_Der Mond zeigt mir meine eig'ne Gestalt.

Du Doppelganger, du bleicher Geselle!

Was affst du nach mein Liebesleid, Das mich gequalt auf dieser Stelle So manche Nacht in alter Zeit._"

Marie Louise was terrified by the harrowing emotions the song always roused in her, but more by the dreadful sensation of walking that crowded Avenue with a man humming German at her side.

"Hush! Hush, in Heaven's name!" she pleaded.

He laughed Teutonically, and asked her to lunch with him.

"I have another engagement, and I am late," she said.

"Where are you living?"

She felt inspired to give him a false address. He insisted on walking with her to the Waldorf, where she said her engagement was.

"You don't ask me where I have been?"

"I was just going to. The last I heard you were in the London Tower or somewhere. However did you get out?"

"The same way like you ditt. I thought you should choin me therein, but you also told all you knew and some more yet, yes?"

She saw then that he had turned state's evidence. Perhaps he had betrayed Sir Joseph. Somehow she found it possible to loathe him extra. She lacked the strength to deny his odious insinuation about herself. He went on:

"Now I am in America. I could not dare go to Germany now. But here I try to gain back my place in _Deutschland_. These English think they use me for a stool-pitcheon. But they will find out, and when _Deutschland ist uber alles--ach, Gott_! You shall help me. We do some work togedder. I come soon by your house. _Auf_--Goot-py."

He left her at the hotel door and lifted his hat. She went into the labyrinth and lost herself. When her heart had ceased fluttering and she grew calm from very fatigue of alarm she resolved to steal out of New York.

She spent an afternoon and an evening of indecision. Night brought counsel. Polly Widdicombe had offered her a haven, and in the country.

It would be an ideal hiding-place. She set to work at midnight packing her trunk.

CHAPTER II

Marie Louise tried all the next morning to telephone from New York to Washington, but it seemed that everybody on earth was making the same effort. It was a wire Babel.

Washington was suddenly America in the same way that London had long been England; and Paris France. The entire population was apparently trying to get into Washington in order to get out again. People wrote, telegraphed, radiographed, telephoned, and traveled thither by all the rail- and motor-roads. Washington was the narrow neck of the funnel leading to the war, and the sleepy old home of debate and administration was suddenly dumfounded to find itself treated to all the horrors of a boom-town--it was like San Francisco in '49.

Marie Louise, who had not yet recovered her American dialect, kept pleading with Long Distance:

"Oh, I say, cahn't you put me through to Washington? It's no end important, really! Rosslyn, seven three one two. I want to speak to Mrs. Widdicombe. I am Miss Webling. Thank you."

The obliging central asked her telephone number and promised to call her in a moment. Eternity is but a moment--to some centrals. Marie Louise, being finite and ephemeral, never heard from that central again. Later she took up the receiver and got another central, who had never heard her tale of woe and had to have it all over again. This central also asked her name and number and promised to report, then vanished into the interstellar limbo where busy centrals go.

Again and again Marie Louise waited and called, and told and retold her prayer till it turned to gibberish and she began to doubt her own name and to mix the telephone number hopelessly. Then she went into her hand-bag and pawed about in the little pocket edition of confusion till she found the note that Polly had sent her at once from Washington with the address, Grinden Hall, Rosslyn, and the telephone number and the message.