Part 12

The two women had in fact glanced at her curiously and critically, but she did not care. They were certainly a very smart party. She wondered what they would think if they knew that she, too, not so many years ago, had worn the clothes they were wearing and cultivated their dry, sophisticated smiles. It appeared to her now a diluted and uninteresting sophistication....

“Moira,” he was saying, “I’ve got to know all about you. I’m hungry for information. You don’t look any younger. But you don’t look any the worse, either. What wouldn’t they give back home to be with me now!”

“Rob, it’s good to see you!”

“Honest? Well, I’m certainly glad you feel that way. Still, I always knew you’d be just the same. Why did you do it, Moira? Why in the devil did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Oh, all that--rot. It was silly, Moira. You’re one of us, to this day. Always will be, you know. Who cared?”

She laughed a few notes of warm laughter that was still a clear stream free from the sediment of bitterness.

“I never think of that any more. Perhaps it was silly. But I’ve been happier.”

“H’m.” She was conscious that his eyes searched her face, and rather proud that what he found there would make it impossible to pity her. “H’m,” he repeated, “well, maybe you have. I guess you know a lot.”

“How are they, Rob? I’d like to see them all. I really would. Goodness, it’s been ten years! How’s Hal?”

There was no challenge in the tone--it was just a natural question.

“You haven’t heard about Hal? Well, Hal is in China. Been there for six years and I reckon he won’t come home. You know he looked high and low for you--thought he was going out of his mind. There were difficulties, you understand, or perhaps you counted on them. Fear of publicity--truth leaking out--abduction--shouting your name from the house-tops. But he wore himself out. Then one night he came home, and broke down. Well, he told me he guessed it was better the way it turned out--that he admired you and knew you’d never be moved. Thought after what happened you’d never feel right. My God, you high and mighty idealists!”

“Is he happy?”

“I don’t know. Hal and I were always so confounded different, it’s hard for me to get him. He wasn’t cut out to be happy or the opposite. He’s turned out one of those quiet, square-jawed gumps, Moira. I met him in Paris two years ago, and we had a rotten dull time of it. I suppose he’ll mope around the Orient the rest of his life, working for corporations, get richer and richer and marry somebody’s sister equally rich. Now, I’m another breed of coyote. I’m always satisfied when I have a clean shirt on. It’s the thoughtless life I like.”

“I’m sorry Hal isn’t happy,” said Moira ruefully.

“I wouldn’t be sorry about him!” snapped Rob. “Damn it, Moira, I don’t say you weren’t clever as the devil. But if Hal had been me I’d have found you.”

“You’re the same Rob!” she laughed. “You know, of course, you’re the only one of them I could have run into this way and talked to comfortably. And the others--how are they? Your father I”--she dropped her voice--“read about in the papers.”

“Poor Dad. He must have felt he was buncoed sometime or other in his life. He tried to overcrowd the last few years. I think Aunt Mathilda felt he went off about in time.... Those two old women--I mean your mother, Moira, and my aunt. It’s a curious friendship that’s grown up between them. They keep that big house together and think mostly about cows and flowers--and old times.”

She did not reply to that nor look at him directly. She was glad when he burst out in a more immediate vein.

“Well, what do you say to a night of it? I find it’s a dull world, Moira. You may have more money than I have, and it may bore you to do the bright lights ... but that’s my form of entertainment. However, I’m only going to do what you say. It’s your night. But I don’t imagine you want me to take you to church!”

“I haven’t money,” she answered, smiling. “I never have a night of it, Rob. I’d love one.”

“Good! Come on.”

“No. I want you to wait here while I change. These clothes won’t do.”

“Just as you say. But can’t I take you--wherever it is you go to change your clothes?”

“What’s the use?” she queried, tentatively, as much to herself as to him. “No, I’d rather you wouldn’t.”

“Just as you say.”

“Rob, you’re a dear. In fifteen minutes I’ll be back. Meantime you talk to Sophie. Oh, Sophie,” she called, and while she waited for Sophie to come, she added, “Sophie will like you fine. She might even put you on the poor list.”

“What’s that?”

“Sophie has a sliding scale of prices. But that’s a secret.”

Moira’s one black evening gown was rather old, but she felt extraordinarily happy as she stepped out of the restaurant a little later on his arm. The sweet, leathery smell of the taxicab’s interior held almost a new shiver for her. How long it had been since she had smelled that with a good conscience and seen the lights of the little squares and the upper Avenue slip by like a single glittering chain, to the slinky whirr of wheels. She looked forward to the evening for itself--its adventure in colours--and for Rob. She begged him not to ask her questions, not until they had had a few dances and found a quiet corner after the fun.

“I see,” he said. “You’re starved for a fling--even if you won’t let on.”

“I am--with you.”

“No kidding? But I guess you always did like me pretty well. You used to be my only champion. And I needed one often. Well, I’m an unrepentant sinner.”

After dining they took in a part of the Follies and then went to dance. It was the same, she found, here as it had been at home. Whenever they stopped, at the Tom-Tom and La Fleur de Nuit, he was known and served like the old-timers. She begged him to go on drinking while she skipped, and he did so without apology, explaining that it was his forte. She wondered at his power of absorbing continuously without the trembling of an eyelash. It pleased her to meet admiring eyes, and be asked to dance by his friends.

He steered her afterward to a place furnished like a very intimate club, where they sat in deep armchairs under dim lights and had scrambled eggs and bacon on little French stands. There she took a long Scotch highball and told him something of herself.

“Moira,” he said. “It’s a weird sensation to listen to such a tale from you. You belong in this sort of thing.” He indicated the too elegant room.

She rose to go.

“It’s better fun to feel you belong in the whole crazy world. I wonder if you do?”

She laughed and then added with a sudden burst of bravado: “Rob, I’d like to take you home and let you see my kids. I’d like to to-night. Could you come?”

“Yep. I get a train out of here at nine in the morning and there’s more than six hours to make it.”

She felt it was an odd experience for him climbing up the dark, gas-lit stairs. She led him back to the cribs with candelabra in her hand, and he looked longest at the blond-haired little Joanna, seeing in her broad, upturned, warm face some misty resemblance to his earliest vision of her mother.

“They’re great kids, Moira. But I won’t bluff--I like ’em all best when they’re asleep.”

They came out into the shadowy, haphazard studio, and she knew he felt uneasy and shocked at her surroundings.

“Well,” he said coolly, “of course you’re going to let me help you. I’ve got plenty--more than is good for me--and nobody has more right to it than you. If you say so, I’ll ditch that train to-morrow and have you out of here by noon with the children, into a comfortable place.”

“No, sir,” she laughed.

“But, my God!” he protested, and then added severely. “Moira, I told you early in the evening you looked none the worse for everything.... But you do--you look peaked. You’re fagged.”

“Who wouldn’t be, after a night of it with you! No, no, you dear boy. But we’ll have a night of it again.”

“Thanks for that.”

“And only with you, Rob,” she continued, with emphasis. He caught the hint that he was to keep the secret of her whereabouts.

“Just as you say. I shan’t talk. But I’m going to get you out of this, somehow, sometime. I can’t tell you where to reach me, to-night, except that Thornhill does, in a roundabout way. I’m going to locate in the East in a few days and you’ll hear from me. I’m going now. There’s no use talking, Moira, this pulls me down”--he made a gesture with his hand about the room and then added apologetically--“Don’t be offended. It’s just because it happens to be you.”

As he stood awkwardly, with hat and stick under one arm, he took out a long box of cigarettes and threw it on the table.

“At least let me give you those,” he said with a sheepish grin.

“Rob, please don’t worry about me,” she pleaded. She stepped toward the table to take a cigarette from the box he had thrown down, but his outstretched arm stopped her.

“Here,” he said, offering his opened case, “take one of these.... Moira, you’re the woman who makes all my conceptions about the sex go blooey. Damn it, I wish I were Harold. I wish I had some prior rights in the matter.”

“You’ve more rights this minute than Hal,” she said firmly.

After he had gone she sat puffing smoke into the dim upper reaches of the room, and watching the petals of candlelight waver and dip. What fun it had been! Life held strange meetings. Perhaps it held many more for her. She was a little unhappy, dissatisfied ... the place did look dismal, unclean, comfortless.

In the morning she found Miles pacing the studio waiting for her to rise. He was nervous and evasive, but in better shape than she had expected to see him. Obviously, he had done his recovering elsewhere, and bathed while she slept. She kissed him, her quarrel with him lost in pleasant afterthoughts of the night before, but he seemed troubled and strange. At breakfast, he suddenly asked:

“What the devil is this?”

“What?”

He tossed a Pall Mall cigarette box across the table and she opened it. The silver paper was folded carefully over the top. Between it and the bottom layer of cigarettes lay five one hundred dollar bills.

“It’s a long story,” she said, recovering from her surprise. Then she told him about Rob. He stood up to go after she had finished.

“Well,” he said, with some embarrassment, “I do hope you feel it’s a perfectly natural thing for a fellow to open a box of cigarettes lying around on a table. I mean to say--”

“Nonsense. I should have done it myself.”

Miles left her, to go to his accumulated work, bitterly, she knew, and more completely convinced of his uselessness. She sat down to try to think out what was to be done. The owner of the five hundred had taken his train long ago. She did not know where to reach him, and if she did, it would be downright mean to send the money back. She remembered how he had prevented her from opening the box before he had left her. The money was not there by accident. Rob was her schoolboy friend. Perhaps she was only giving herself an excuse, but what good would her self-righteousness do to temper the hurt she knew he would feel? She would accept his gift simply and with thanks. Besides, she had a plan. On the children’s account, on Miles’, on her own, she had long been wanting to put it into execution. This money would enable her to do so, beautifully and without a hitch.

XXII

In the open country near a southern village of Connecticut, not over a brisk morning’s walk to the Sound, sat a smallish farmhouse which was probably a century old. It was an innocent and ordinary enough looking house from the road. It topped a swell of land that was somewhat higher than its immediate surroundings and bare of large trees except for a single magnificent elm halfway between the house and the road. The lawn was allowed to grow wild, but nearer the house and covering the approach to its graceful old doorway were several shrubs in more or less cultivated condition placed on a few feet of clipped sod. In the spring the lawn and the fields which rolled out downward from the house were thickly starred with buttercups whose tiny yellow bowls glistened like lacquered buttons in the sun. Later the same meadows turned to a waving lake of red clover.

Potter Osprey, when upbraided by his friends for not making more of his handful of acres, declared he was no gardener. He could neither adorn nature nor gain his feed from her by his own hands, for she was a wild beast whose moods and colours and contours he had struggled with all his life, and there was no quarter between them. To all offers to prettify her in his immediate neighbourhood he was politely deaf. He wanted her rugged and plain as his plastic, solid canvases liked to interpret her, and that way he could love her as one loves a worthy foe.

On the house itself he had lavished more care. Eight years of his own proprietorship had made it, without any great loss of its ancient character, a place of personal charm inside. In the rear the hill fell sharply from the foundation, and here he had built up a broad concrete terrace, looking northward to an unbroken view of horizon and low hills. Above the terrace for ten or twelve feet in height and almost as wide, rose a vertical sheet of heavy, transparent glass in narrow panels, and this gave light to a large room, which had been made by knocking out walls and upper flooring so that half of it was two stories high. The house practically consisted of this room, a cellar under it, and some small bedrooms above. Outhouse and kitchen stepped away to the west.

From Osprey’s north terrace could be seen a smaller house on the eastern slope, nestling in a very old, gnarled and worn-out orchard. Some of its trees reminded one of those anatomical designs in physiological books; they were half bare-branched skeleton and half green, waving body.

To the larger house Moira Harlindew came one morning in answer to an advertisement in a New York paper, describing a “small, furnished house in the country with conveniences.”

She was admitted by the painter himself, a man of medium height, who showed his fifty years more in his figure, his careless gait, and the way he wore his old clothes, than in the face, which was of no definite age, so Moira thought. What lines had been worn upon it made the man seem more youthful. The eyes were candid and reposeful, but extremely responsive to passing moods. This she detected in his look of anxiety as he first opened the door for her, and in the evident relief that followed his swift inspection. The mouth, under a gray wisp of moustache that tended to turn upwards at the ends, slanted a bit so that more than half of the smile was on one side. There was a suggestion of the satirical in it. Yet Moira found the face, on the whole, a pleasant one to look at, especially when he had recovered his composure and was welcoming her.

“Come in,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“I’ve come to see the house for rent.”

“Good. You’re early. I hardly expected any answers to-day before noon. It’s quite a little way to come from the city, you know. By the way, I’m at my breakfast. Suppose you come along and sit down while I finish. Do you mind?”

He led her into the studio and she sank into a large chair, a little tired after the long, warm walk from the station. She felt instantly and completely happy. The big room, with its cool, even light, its smell of wood and paint, and its thousand and one objects familiar and dear to her trade, drove everything else from her mind, even the anxiety she had felt lest the place be taken--for it was Monday morning and all day Sunday had elapsed since she had seen the advertisement. He noticed her fatigue and glanced at her dusty shoes.

“You’ve walked up,” he exclaimed, surprised. “Well, perhaps you will join me.” He sat down before a low table which gleamed with silver and yellow china. “Coffee? My morning tipple is tea, but Nana always has some coffee because she loves it herself.”

“If you really have it,” said Moira, “I’d like some coffee.”

A large, impassive negress soon served her.

“It isn’t much of a house you’re going to see,” he went on. “I call it the orchard bungalow and it is nearly as decrepit as the orchard itself. But it will shed the rain.”

“And it’s not taken?” asked Moira warmly.

“Well, no--not exactly. But I’m afraid it’s too--well, unpretentious for you.”

“It couldn’t be that,” she laughed. As he finished his toast her gaze went on embracing the room with frank pleasure, and she was aware he took sly glances at her.

“Do you paint?” he asked suddenly.

Moira had been afraid of the question. Though her host had only given his last name she had read it on pictures in the studio, and knew now that he was an American painter of reputation whose work she had worried over at various exhibitions. She felt extremely humble, but her fear arose from the suspicion that a successful painter might object to having irresponsible and immature dabblers running about in his near neighbourhood. She could not hide in the immediate safety of a lie. Eventually that would be found out, though it tempted her.

“I’m just a student,” she replied, and went on quickly, “but the real reason I want a country place is because I’ve two young children. Do you mind that? I’m sure they will not bother you.”

“Not at all,” he said cordially. “On the contrary.... However,” he added, rising, “I think we had better look at this humble dwelling before you grow too enthusiastic, my dear young lady.”

As Moira had entered the place, her mind’s eye had pictured the four-year-old Miles playing among those buttercups, and learning things he might never get to know if he grew much older in the city. Now every step confirmed her in the desire to live here at any cost. The nostalgia for Thornhill which she had felt in many a solitary hour during these last ten years, together with a flood of early memories, swept over her. The orchard, upon which a few apple blossoms lingered, was enchantingly old and weird. Standing in the high grass beneath it one could see a pattern of winding stone fences crisscrossing the fields, and up a near-by hill danced three pale birches like a trio of white-legged girls with green veils trailing about them. Even a bit of decayed brown board by the path made her sentimental. She wanted to run after a butterfly or to lie full length in the grass of the meadow, letting the sun drink her up....

The house was small, but a moment’s speculation and mental rearrangement convinced her that it was adequate. She and the genial owner found themselves making plans together for the comfort of the Harlindew family.

“I don’t see what you are going to do with your maid,” said he, “unless she sleeps on the couch out here in the sitting room.”

“I shan’t have a maid,” Moira replied, and he looked at her with another of his glances of wondering curiosity.

“But,” he began, and then stopped, thinking better of what he had intended to say. “Well, there’s my Nana. She often has time lying heavy on her hands and she doesn’t object to an occasional extra fee. No doubt she can help you.”

“Oh, that will be splendid,” she cried. The suggestion did solve a minor problem in her mind, but she had no patience just now with minor problems. “I love the old furniture you have in here.”

“Most of it was here when I came, in the house up above. I made one room out of three when I built the studio, and these are the handful of pieces I could not use. If you haven’t enough, there are a few more odds and ends stored away.”

“You’re going to let me take it, then?” asked Moira breathlessly.

He seemed surprised at the question, as though the matter had been settled between them, and then laughed.

“I’ll tell you the truth now, Mrs. Harlindew. There have been several other applicants but I put them off somehow--I didn’t like any of them.... But!” he exclaimed suddenly--“but my dear girl! Well, well!”

She was crying after all, as she had feared she would in the orchard, ten minutes before. Tears that she could not keep back rolled down her smiling cheeks....

XXIII

Moira’s hope had been that their move to the country would bring Miles to his senses. With nothing to do but rest and lose himself in the beauty and peace of outdoors, with not even the responsibility, for some months at least, to earn any money, she confidently believed he would drop the habits which had regained their hold upon him of late, get possession of his impulse to work, and begin to write the things of which she dreamed he was capable. And in the beginning each day after they arrived confirmed her hope. He seemed to cast heavy burdens from his shoulders and his mind, to love spending hours with the children, romping and making the place merry with their laughter and his. From time to time he wandered off alone with his pockets stuffed with paper, boyishly promising great results, or stayed up with the lamp at night. When they had been there no more than ten days it seemed already a long time ago that their lives had changed and taken a turn for the better. She was for that ten days serenely happy.

Then the country began to pall on Miles. He grew restless and evasive; at breakfast he would hint at various reasons for going to New York. When their second week end came around he managed a convincing excuse and disappeared with a small handbag full of over-night clothing.

Moira’s heart sank at this unexpected turn of affairs, and she spent the days in his absence giving way to more real despair than she had ever known with him. This time she had done her best, done what a little while ago she would have thought impossible, and she had failed....

He seemed to come back passionately eager to see her, and so long as he did that she could only surrender to him and see in him still her lover and her first lover, her lover for all time. But these waves of passion died away; her presence and the children’s began to irk him in a day or two, sometimes in a few hours, and it soon appeared to her that he regarded a week as an interminable visit.

She set herself to observing him, to studying his chance remarks, and for the first time a genuine doubt of his fidelity oppressed her. There was nothing tangible, except his trips to the city, to justify this suspicion, and these would have been inadequate despite his evasions. She could quite naturally think of him as being restless, as wanting to go away, without dreaming that he would belie her faith in him. The suspicion of infidelity came before the evidence, but once the suspicion was lodged in her mind, the evidence, all unconsciously furnished by Miles, piled up by little and little.

She saw that this warmth of love-making with which he returned to her did not last an hour. Bitter thoughts assailed her. Evidently he was not always successful with his hypothetical sweetheart or sweethearts and was driven back to his wife. She could not keep fantastic exaggerations out of her head, though in her sober moments she told herself that the truth, if probably serious, was far less florid than she imagined.

Nevertheless, there grew upon her an increasing repugnance toward his advances. She made no issue of it. She did not want conflict. He was very appealing, very hard on her sympathies, very skilful in inventions. She could not quickly forget that he had suffered and struggled while he still loved her. But her inescapable conclusion, reached in hours of cold reflection, was that they were parting; that sooner or later an end would come. She determined not to invite it so long as her pride was not sacrificed; to wait for it sensibly and coolly.