The Empty Sack Part 32

He already knew what he should begin on. It was to be called, "Eve Tempting the Serpent." He was not yet sure how he should treat the idea, but a lethargic semihuman reptile was to be roused to the concept of evil by a woman's beauty and abandonment. The thing would be daring; but it couldn't be too daring, or it would bring down on him the recrudescent blue-law spirit already so vigorous through the country. He couldn't afford a tussle with that until he was better established.

But he had made some sketches, and had written to Jennie that he should like to talk the matter over on that very afternoon. She had written in reply that, at last, she would be free to come. For the first few days after the funeral she had been either too grief stricken or too busy; but now the claims of life were a.s.serting themselves again and she was trying to respond to them. He must not expect her to be gay; but she would grow more cheerful in time.

So he went back to the studio to lunch and to wait for her coming. Till she had ceased coming he hadn't known how much the daily expectation of seeing her had meant to him. The very occasions on which she had, as he expressed it, played him false had brought an excitement which he would have been emotionally poorer for having missed. He could not go through the experience often; he could, perhaps, not go through it again. But for that test he was apparently not to be called upon. She was coming.

She knew what she was coming for. The very fact that she had written meant surrender.

And that, indeed, was what Jennie had been saying to herself all through the morning. Now that there had been this interval, she knew that her lat.i.tude for saying "Yes" and acting "No" was at an end. If she went at all, she must go all the way. To go once more and draw back once more would not be playing the game. She was clear in her mind that the day would be decisive. As to her decision, she was not so sure.

That is, she was not sure of its wisdom, though sure what she would do.

She would do what she had meant to do more than two months earlier.

There was no reason why she shouldn't, and the same set of reasons why she should. Not only were the money and release imperative, but Hubert meant more to her than ever. His sympathy through her sorrow had touched her by its very novelty. He had written, sent flowers, and kept himself in the background. Bob would have done more and moved her less, for the reason that doing all and giving all were in his nature. The rare thing being the most precious thing, she treasured the perfunctory phrases in Hubert's scrawl of condolence above all the outpourings of Bob's heart.

Nevertheless, she treasured them with misgivings. The consciousness of being married had acquired some strength from watching the effect of her father's death on her mother. She had known, ever since growing up, that her father and mother had been unequally mated. It was not wholly a question of practical failure or success-it was rather that the balance of moral support had been so shifted between them that the mother had nothing to sustain her. "Poor momma," had been Jennie's way of putting it, "has to take the burden of everything. She's got us on her shoulders, and poppa, too." And yet, with Josiah's death, some prop of Lizzie's inner life seemed to have been s.n.a.t.c.hed away. She was not weaker, perhaps, but she was more detached, and stranger. To her children, to her neighbors, she had always been strange, always detached, but now the aloofness had become more significant. With Josiah alone she had lived in that communion of things shared which leads to understanding. Now that he was gone, something had gone with him, leaving Lizzie like an empty house.

Jennie was thrown back on what Bob had repeated so often: "You're the other half of me; I'm the other half of you." Whether it came through some impulse of affinity, or whether it was the chance of conscientiously living together, Jennie wasn't sure; but it began to seem as if in the mere fact of marriage there was a naturally unifying principle. To go against it was, in a measure, to go against the forces of the universe; and though she had only been nominally married to Bob, she was preparing to go against it. Had she been a rebel at heart, it would have been easier; but she was docile, loving, eager to be loved, with nothing more daring in her soul than the wish to live at peace with the world she saw round her.

Bob's letters were disturbing, too. In the way of a happy future, he took everything for granted. He reasoned as if, now that they had gone through a certain form together and signed it with a parson's name, she had no more liberty of will than a woman in a harem. Little as she was rebellious, she rebelled against that, preferring an element of chance in her love to a love in which there was no choice. Bob wrote as if her love was of no importance, as if he could love enough for two-did, in fact, love enough for two-so that the whole need of loving was taken off her hands.

I feel, as if my love was the air and you were a plant to grow in it. It's the sunshine to which your leaves and blossoms will only have to turn.

"That's all very well for him," she said, falling back with a grimace on the language Gussie brought home with her from vaudeville shows, "but I ain't no blooming plant."

Hubert's love, she thought at other times, was like a rare and precious cordial, of which a few drops carefully doled out ran like fire through the veins. Bob's was a rushing torrent which, without saying with your leave or by your leave, carried you away. She preferred the cordial, of which you could take up the gla.s.s and put it down according as you wanted less or more; but, on the other hand, when there was a flood which, without asking your permission, poured all over you, what were you to do? She knew what she meant to do; but it was the difficulty of doing it and facing that terrific tide which made her stand aghast. If Bob would only let her alone....

But, then, Bob couldn't let her alone. He himself would have argued that you might as well ask a man to let a hand or a foot alone while it is aching. At the minute when Jennie was thinking these thoughts as she flitted about the house, he was seated at an open hotel window on the Santa Thereza hill above Rio de Janeiro, looking down on an iridescent city creeping round the foam-fringed edges of a turquoise sea, and saying to himself: "I'm watching over you, Jennie. I'm here, but my love is there and fills all the s.p.a.ce between us. I came away and left you exposed to all sorts of trouble. I shouldn't have done that; I'm sorry now I did. I thought that if we were married the rest would take care of itself; but I see now it couldn't. You're having a harder time than I ever supposed you'd have, and you're having it all alone; but my love is with you, Jennie, and the worst can't happen while it protects you.

Dangers will threaten you, but you'll go to meet them with my love closing you in, and something will ward them off."

"I wish he'd stop thinking about me like that."

Jennie's reference, while she stood at the mirror putting the last touches to her costume, was to this same thought as expressed in the letters she received from South America. Its appeal to her imagination was such as to create an atmosphere wrapping her about as a halo wraps a saint. She couldn't get away from it. In going to meet Hubert, as she would do in a few minutes, it would go with her, an embarra.s.sing witness of the sin against itself.

For the minute, the action of her mind was twofold. She was making this protest as to Bob and was also giving minute attention to her dress. Not only was it her first appearance in public since her father's funeral but it was a moment at which the victim must be neatly decked for the altar. Having no money to spend on "mourning," she had put deft touches of black on a last year's white summer suit, to which a black hat thrown together by Gussie, with the black shoes and stockings already in her possession, added their mute witness that she was grieving for a relative. Having, moreover, the native _chic_ which counts for most in the art of dressing, she was one more instance of the girl of the humbler walks in life who, by some secret of her own, confounds the product of the Rue de la Paix.

She was to leave for the studio as soon as her mother got up from her early-afternoon rest. The early-afternoon rest had become a necessity for Lizzie ever since the day when Josiah had been laid away.

"You'll call me if Teddy rings," she had stipulated, before lying down, and Jennie had promised faithfully.

As to Teddy's message, nominally sent from Paterson, Lizzie had betrayed a skepticism which the three girls found disconcerting. She said nothing, but it was precisely the saying nothing that puzzled them. When they themselves grew expansive over the things they would buy with the money Teddy was going to make, the mother's faint smile was alarming. It was alarming chiefly because it combined with other things to produce that effect of strangeness they had all noticed in her since their father died. Though they couldn't define it for themselves, it was as if she had renounced any further effort to make life fulfill itself. She was like a man on a sinking ship, who, after casting about as to how he may save himself, knows there is no choice left but to go down, and so becomes resigned. Having thrown up her hands, Lizzie was waiting for the waters to close over her. Jennie was thus uneasy about her mother, as she was uneasy about Bob, uneasy about Hubert, and, most of all, uneasy about herself.

By the time she was ready she heard Lizzie stirring in her bedroom. It was the signal agreed upon. She was free to go, which meant that she was free to turn her back on all her more or less sheltered past and strike out toward a terrifying future. She felt as she had always supposed she would feel on leaving her home on her wedding day; and she would do as she had decided she would do in that event. She would go without making a fuss, without anything to record that the going was different from other goings, or that the return would be different from other returns.

She would make her departure casual, without consciousness, without admitted intentions. She merely called to her mother, therefore, through the closed door, that she was on her way, and her mother had called out in response, "Very well." This leave-taking making things easier-all Jennie had to do was to gulp back a sob.

CHAPTER XVIII

But as Jennie opened the door to let herself out, two men were standing on the cement sidewalk in front of the gra.s.splots, examining the house.

They were big, heavily built men, who, although in plain clothes, suggested the guardianship of law. It came to Jennie instantly that their examination of the house was peculiar; and of that peculiarity she divined with equal promptness the significance. The men declared afterward that in her manner of standing on the step and waiting till they spoke to her there was the same kind of "give-away" as when her brother had eyed them across Broad Street.

The older and heavier of the two advanced up the walk between the gra.s.splots.

"This is the Follett house, ain't it, miss?"

Jennie replied that it was.

"And you're Miss Follett?"

She a.s.sented again.

"Is your brother in?"

"N-no; he's not in town."

The big man turned toward his taller and slighter colleague, whatever he had to say being communicated by a look. Having expressed this thought, he veered round again toward Jennie, speaking politely.

"Maybe we could have a word with you, private-like."

"Won't you step in?"

Presently they were all three seated in the living room, the big man continuing as spokesman.

"Ah, now, about your brother, Miss Follett; you're sure he isn't anywheres around?"

The inference from the tone was that somehow Jennie was secreting him.

"He isn't to my knowledge. He called up last evening to say that he wouldn't be home to-day, and perhaps not to-morrow."

The two men being seated within range of each other's eyes, some new understanding was flashed silently.

"Did he, then? And where would he have called up from?"

"From Paterson."

"From Paterson, was it? And what made you think it was from Paterson?"

"He said so."

"And that was all you had to go by?"

"That was all."

"Well, well, now! He said so, did he? And he didn't come home last night?"

Jennie shook her head.

For a third time Flynn's eyes telegraphed something to Jackman's, and Jackman's responded. What they said to each other Jennie didn't try to surmise, for the reason that she was listening to a call. It was the call that Teddy had heard on the night when his father had brought home the news that he was "fired"-the call to a.s.sume responsibilities. Her father had gone; her mother was collapsing; Teddy had broken beneath the strain. "And now it's up to me." Mentally, she spoke the words almost before she was conscious of the thought. "And that settles it." These words, too, she spoke mentally, but in them the reference was different.

The vision of love and twenty-five thousand dollars, of bliss for herself and relief for the family, which had waxed and waned so often, now faded out forever behind a ma.s.s of storm-clouds. But of all this she gave no sign as she waited for the burly man to speak again.