Part 19

And Joan didn't want him to go farther away. She was positive about this. But she was also very sure that the arm's-length relationship must be abridged only under certain indispensable conditions--decorously--and soon, if at all: else she must be the one to withdraw, lest a worse thing befall her. It was a problem of two factors: Quard's nature and her own; she had herself to reckon with no less than with him; and herself she distrusted, who was no stronger than her greatest weakness. He attracted her. She often caught herself thinking of him as she had thought of no other man--not Matthias, not the Quard of "The Convict's Return," not even Marbridge except, perhaps, for one shameful instant.

Something in the lawless, ranging, wanton grain of this man called to her with a call of infinite allure: something latent in her thrilled to the call and answered.... That way lurked danger, disguised, but deadly.

They moved on to Greenpoint, thence to Trenton for a week.

Daily Quard's attentions became more constant, intimate and tender. They were much together, and now far more exclusively together than had been possible in New York, where acquaintances commandeered so much of their time. In Trenton they lodged at the same hotel, the other members of the company finding cheaper accommodations at greater distance from the theatre. This increased their close and confidential association. They fell into the habit of breakfasting together. Quard, always first to rise, would telephone to Joan's room, ascertain how soon she would be dressed, and order for both of them accordingly. In return for this privilege he had that of paying for both meals.

A negro waiter spoke of Joan one morning, in her presence, as "the Missus." When he had retired out of earshot, their eyes sought one another's; constraint was swept away in laughter.

"We might's well be married, the way we're together all the time," Quard presently ventured.

"Oh, I don't know about that," Joan retorted pertly.

"I mean, the way other people see us. I shouldn't be surprised if everybody in the hotel thought we was married, girlie."

Joan coloured faintly....

"Well, the room-clerk knows better," she said definitely. "I'd like another cup of coffee, please."

Quard snapped his fingers loudly to attract the attention of the waiter.

He grew aware of an awkward silence: that the thoughts of both were converging to a common point.

"Folks are fools that get married in the profession," he observed consciously. "It's all right if you've got a husband or I've got a wife at home--"

"I don't see it," Joan interrupted smartly. "Anyway, _I_ haven't. Have you?"

The actor stared, confused. "Have I--what?"

"Got a wife at home?" Joan repeated, laughing.

"No--nothing like _that_!" he asserted with intense earnestness. "I mean, it's all right if you've got somebody keeping a flat warm for you, some place not too far off Broadway; but if you marry into the business--good _night_! You got all the trouble of being tied up for life, and that's all."

"Why?"

"Managers don't want husband and wife in the same company. They're always fighting each other's battles when they ain't fighting between themselves. So you're always playing different routes, and the chances are they never cross except it's inconvenient and you get caught and nominated for the Alimony Club."

"Do you belong?"

"Didn't I just tell you nothing like that?" Quard protested with unnecessary heat.

"Well," Joan murmured mischievously, "you seem to know so much about it. I only wondered...."

Their place on the bill was near the end, that week: a trick bicyclist followed them, and moving-pictures wound up the performance. Consequently, by the time they were able to leave the theatre in the afternoon the sun was already below the horizon. They emerged the same evening from the stage-door to view a cloudless sky of pulsing amber, shading into purple at the zenith, melting into rose along the western rim of the world. A wash of old rose flooded the streets, lifting the meanest structures out of their ugliness, lending an added dignity to rows of square-set, old-fashioned residences of red-brick with white marble trimmings.

"Which way are you going?" Quard enquired as they approached the corner of a main thoroughfare. "Back to the hotel?"

"No; I'm sick of that hole," Joan replied with a vivid shudder. "I'm going to take a walk. Want to come?"

"I was just going to ask you."

They turned off toward the Delaware.

It was the twenty-first of November--winter still a month away; yet the breath of winter was in the air. It came up cool and brisk from the river, enriching the colour in Joan's cheeks that were bright and glowing from the scrubbing she always gave them after removing grease-paint with cold cream. The blood coursed tingling through her veins. Her eyes shone with deepened lustre. They walked with spirit, in step, in a pensive silence infrequently disturbed.

"Of course," Quard presently offered without preface, "it's different in vodeveal, if you stick to it."

"What's different?"

"Being married."

Joan's eyes widened momentarily. Then she laughed outright. "Gee! You don't mean to say you've been chewing _that_ rag ever since breakfast?"

"Ah, I just happened to think of it again," said Quard with the air of one whose motives are wantonly misconstrued.

Nevertheless, he wouldn't let the subject languish.

"There's plenty of family acts been playing the circuits Gawd knows how long," he pursued, with a vast display of interest in the sunset glow. "Look't the Cohans, before George planted the American flag in Longacre Square and annexed it to the United States. And they ain't the only ones by a long shot. I could name a plenty that'll stick in the big time until their toes curl. It's all right to trot in double-harness so long's you manage your own company."

"Well?" Joan asked with a sober mouth and mischievous eyes.

"Well--what?"

"If you're getting ready to slip me my two-weeks' notice, why not be a man and say so?"

"What would I do that for?" Quard demanded indignantly.

"Because you're thinking about getting married; and there's only room for one leading lady in any company I play in."

"Quit your kidding," the man advised sulkily; "you know I couldn't get along without you."

"Yes," Joan admitted calmly, "_I_ know it, but I didn't know you did."

Quard shot a suspicious glance askance, but her face was immobile in its flawless loveliness.

He started to say something, choked up and reconsidered with a painful frown. A mature man's perfect freedom is not lightly to be thrown away. And yet ... he doubted darkly the perfection of his freedom....

They held on in silence until they came to Riverside Park.

Over the dark profile of the Pennsylvania hills the sky was jade and amethyst, a pool of light that dwindled swiftly in the thickening shades of violet. Below them, as they paused on a lonely walk, the river stole swiftly, like a great black serpent writhing through the shadows. A frosty wind swept steadily into their faces, making cool and firm the flesh flushed with exercise. There was no one near them. A train of jewelled lights swept over the railroad bridge and vanished into the night with a purring rumble that lent an accent to their isolation. Joan hugged about her voluptuously her wonderful coat, stole a glance warm with gratitude at the face of Quard. He intercepted it, and edged nearer. Aglow and eager, she murmured something vapid about the prettiness of the sky.

He answered only with the arm he passed about her. She suffered him, lashes veiling her eyes, her head at rest in the hollow of his shoulder. The man stared down at her exquisite, suffused face, luminous in the last light of gloaming.

"Joan," he said throatily--"girlie, don't you love me--a little?"

Her mouth grew tremulous.

"I ... don't ... know," she whispered.

"I love you!" he cried suddenly in an exultant voice--"I love you!"

He folded her, unresisting, in both his arms, covering her face with kisses, ardent, violent kisses that bruised and hurt her tender flesh but which she still sought and hungered for, insatiable. She sobbed a little in her happiness, feeling her body yield and yearn to his, transported by that sweet, exquisite, nameless longing....

Then suddenly she was like a steel spring in his embrace, writhing to free herself. Wondering, he tried to hold her closer, but she twisted and fended him off with all the power of her strong young arms. And still wondering, he humoured her. She drew away, but yet not wholly out of his clasp.

"Charlie!" she panted.

"Darling!"

"How do you get married in New Jersey?"

He pulled up, dashed and a little disappointed, and laughed nervously.

"Why, you get a license and then--well, almost anybody'll do to tie the knot."

She nodded tensely: "I guess a regular minister will be good enough for us."

"I guess so," he demurred; and with another laugh: "I wasn't thinking serious' about it, but I guess I might's well be married as the way I am."

"Well," she said quietly, "we've _got_ to. It's the only way...."

XXVI

And then, suddenly, the face of life was indescribably changed: Joan Thursday seemed but a memory, a slight and somehow wistful shadow in the shadowed depths of that darkling mirror, yesterday; in her place another creature altogether reigned, the Joan Quard of today, woman, actress, wife; with a gold band round her finger; mature, initiate of mysteries, ripe in wisdom; strong, poised serenely, clear of eye; with added graciousness in her beauty, conscious of added powers over Man, but discreet in their employment.

She thought a great deal about herself in those days: not, perhaps, more than had been common with her in that so-dead yesterday, but much, and more profoundly; reading a new meaning into the riddle of existence, so changed had all things become since her marriage.

Before her pensive vision Life unfolded rare, golden-vista'd promises.

With another man, or in another stratum of society, she might have fulfilled herself wonderfully, even unto her salvation....

To begin with, she was very happy. Fond to distraction of her husband, she never doubted that he worshipped her; he gave her quick wits no cause to entertain a doubt. They were together always, inseparable. She felt that nature must truly have fashioned them solely for one another, and could not forget her wonder that their passion should be so mutual, so complete. She loved him to distraction: all his traits, his robust swagger, his sonorous and flexible tones, the flowery eloquence of his gesture, his broad, easy-going, tolerant good-humour, the way he wore his clothes and the very cut and texture of them. And she ruled him like a despot.

Quard submitted without complaint. She was all his fancy had painted her, and something more; recognizing dimly that she excelled him variously (although he was quite incapable of analyzing these distinctions) he served her humbly, with unconscious deference to her many excellences. She was by way of making him a better wife than he deserved. If at times conscious of some little irk from her amiable but inflexible autocracy, he reminded himself that she was a finer woman than any he had ever known, well worth humouring: it wasn't on every corner a fellow'd pick up one like Joan.

He liked to follow her into hotel lobbies and restaurants and watch people turn to eye her, the men with sudden interest, the women with instinctive hostility. It even amused him to quell a too-ambitious stare with a fixed, grim, and truculent regard backed by the menace of his powerful physique. It gave a man standing, license to swagger, to own a woman like Joan.

He came to pander oddly to this vanity--would leave Joan to go to their room alone, while he strolled off to a bar to meet some crony or acquaintance of the day, tell his best story, and then suddenly excuse himself:

"Well, s'long. The wife's waiting for me."

The response rarely failed: "Ah, let her wait; have another drink. Did _I_ ever tell you--"

A lifted, deprecatory palm, a knowing look: "No--guess I'll kick along; y'see, _she_'s some wife...."

Conscious only of his adoration, Joan was enchanted by their mode of life, with its constant shifts of scene, its spice of vagabondage. She believed she could never tire of travelling.

Railroad journeys, with their inevitable concomitants of dirt, noise, and discomfort, never discouraged her: she really liked them; they were taking her somewhere--it didn't much matter where. She even derived a sort of pleasure from such nauseating experiences as rising to catch a train at four-thirty in the morning, against their "long jumps." And there was keen delight in napping in a parlour-car chair or with a head upon her husband's shoulder in a day-coach, to wake all drowsy, breathe air foul with coal-smoke, and peer through a black window-pane (shadowed by her hand) to catch a glimpse of some darkly fulgent breadth of strange water, or the marching defile of great alien hills, or a sweep of semi-wooded countryside bleached with moonlight--remembering that, only a few short months ago, the world of her travels had been bounded by Fort George on the north, Coney Island on the south, knowing neither east nor west.

She was discovering America: even as she was discovering Life....

Their route from Trenton took them south through Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, and Norfolk; whence they doubled back by steamer to New York, took a Sound boat to Fall River, played Boston, and drifted through New England in bitter cold weather, eventually striking westward again, via Albany, Buffalo, and the middle country.

Quard drew her attention to the fact that it was "a liberal education...."

Sometimes she thought pityingly of Matthias, and wondered if he knew she was married and what she was doing; and whether he were angry, or heart-broken, or eaten up with morbid jealousy; and how he would act should chance ever throw them together again. She was sorry for him: he had lost her. If only he had been a little more enterprising.... She wondered what would have happened if Matthias _had_ been more enterprising; he could have possessed her at any time during the brief period of their infatuation. If he had married her then, would she be as contented as she was now, with Charlie? She doubted it; Quard was so completely his opposite....

She ceased to worry about the ring. She meant to return it some day, perhaps. Though she did not wear it and had never so much as mentioned Matthias to Quard, it remained a possession whose charms tugged at her heart-strings. At times she amused herself formulating idle little intrigues, with the object (if ever set in motion) of excusing the appearance of the jewel upon her hand. But all her schemes seemed to possess some fatal flaw, and she was desperately afraid of the truth. Meanwhile, the ring lay perdue at the bottom of a work-basket of woven sweet-grass which she had purchased shortly after her marriage; twisted in an old, empty needle-paper and mixed in with a worthless confusion of trash, such as women accumulate in such receptacles, its hiding place was well calculated to escape detection by even an informed purloiner.

Quard's tardy engagement ring was set with an inferior diamond flanked by artificial pearls. Joan despised it secretly. For a long time it was the sole blemish on the bright shield of her happiness....

And then, the night of their opening day in Cincinnati, Quard escorted her from the theatre to the hotel, left her at the door, and turned back to "see a friend" who happened to be playing on the same bill.

This was quite the usual thing, and Joan went contentedly off to her room and in due course to bed, confident that Quard would return within an hour.

Five hours later she awoke to startled apprehension of the facts, first that she must have dropped off to sleep without meaning to, next that Quard had not returned, finally that it was past four o'clock in the morning.

With a little shiver of sickening premonition she rose, slipped into a dressing-gown, called a bell-boy, and instructed him to look for her husband. Some time later the boy reported that the bar was closed and the gentleman not to be found.

It was broad daylight when Quard staggered in with the assistance of the same bell-boy and his negro dresser. His eyes were glazed, his face ghastly, his mind wandered: he was as helpless as a child. With the aid of the boys, Joan managed to undress the man and put him to bed. At once he fell asleep, with the cold stump of a half-burned cigar obstinately clenched between his teeth. It was an hour before the muscles of his jaw relaxed enough to release it.

Dressing, Joan left the hotel, swallowed some coffee and rolls, tasteless to her, in a nearby restaurant, and wandered about until eight o'clock, when she found a drug-store open, and consulted the clerk. He advised bromo seltzer and aromatic spirits of ammonia. Armed with these, she returned to her husband, and shortly after noon, daring to delay no longer, roused him by sprinkling cold water in his face--all other methods having failed even to interrupt his stertorous breathing. Even then it was some time before she could induce him to swallow the medicine, and it required no less than three powerful doses, together with much black coffee and followed by a cold bath, to restore him to presentable condition. In the end, however, she succeeded in getting him to the theatre in time for the matinée.

Through it all she uttered no single word of reproach, but waited on the man with at least every outward sign of sympathy and devotion.

His remorse (when another nap at the hotel after the matinée had brought him to more complete realization of what had happened) was touching and, as long as it lasted, unquestionably sincere. Joan accepted without comment his lame explanation as to the manner of his temptation and fall during an all-night session at poker "with the boys," and gave genuine credulity to his protestations that it would never, never happen again.

But three weeks later in Chicago he repeated the performance, though under somewhat less distressing circumstances. As before, he left her in the lobby, "to finish his cigar and chin with Soandso." Within an hour he was half-led, half-carried to their room, in a hopelessly sodden condition. The actor with whom he had been drinking accompanied him, apparently quite sober, but puzzled; and after Quard had been helped to bed, explained to the girl that her husband's collapse had been incomprehensibly due to no more than three drinks.

"I never seen nothin' like it!" the man expostulated, with an air of grievance. "There he was, standin' up against the bar, with his foot on the rail, laughin' and kiddin', same's the rest of us; and he'd only had three whiskeys--though I will say they was man-size drinks; and then, all of a sudden, he turns white as a sheet and starts mumblin' to himself, and we all thinks he's joshin' until he keels over, limp's a rag. If the stuff gets to him like that, he's got no business touchin' it, ever!"

These experiences continued at varying intervals; and presently Joan began to understand that Quard had not only primarily a weakness to tempt him, but a constitutional inability to assert his will-power after he had surrendered to the extent of a single drink. One modest dose of alcohol seemed to exercise upon him a sort of hypnotic power, driving him on whether he would or not to the next, the next, and the next--until the nadir of unconsciousness was reached. It was not that he invariably succumbed to moderate indulgence, but that once started he rarely stopped until his identity was completely submerged. Indeed, the way of alcohol with him seemed never twice to follow the same route; but its end was invariably the same.

Hoping against hope, fighting with him, pleading, reasoning, threatening with him, even praying, Joan endured for a long time--much longer than, in retrospective days, seemed possible even to her; for she was honestly fond of her husband, far more so than she was ever of any other living being save herself.

They reached San Francisco the third week in April. For some time Quard had been drinking rather methodically but stealthily. A threat made by Joan, while he was sobering up from his last debauch, to the effect that on repetition of the offence she would leave him without an hour's notice, had frightened the man to the extent of making him hesitate to add one drink to another except at intervals long enough to retard the cumulative effect; but never a day passed on which, in spite of her watchfulness, he did not contrive to throw several sops to the devil in possession, if without ever quite losing his wits.

Detected with reeking breath, he would adopt one of three attitudes: he was a man, subject to the domination of no woman and of no appetite, had learned his lesson and now knew when to stop; or he was sorry--hadn't stopped to think--and wouldn't let it go any further; or nothing of the sort had happened, he had drunk nothing except a glass of soda-fountain nerve-tonic, or possibly it was his cigar that she smelled. With the first, Joan had no patience; and since she had a temper, it was the last resort in Quard's more sober stages, seldom employed save when potations had made him either indifferent or vicious. In his contrition, whether real or assumed, she tried hard to believe. But his lies never deceived her: to these she listened in the silence of contempt and despair.

On the Wednesday afternoon of their week in San Francisco, the girl did a bit of shopping after the matinée; it was half after five before she returned to the hotel, and walked into their room to find Quard, with his coat off, seated in a chair that faced the door. His back was to the windows, through which the declining sun threw a flood of blinding golden light, so that Joan's dazzled vision comprehended only the dark silhouette of his body.

She said "Hello, dearie!" lightly enough in the abstraction of reviewing some especially pleasing purchases, closed the door, walked over to the bureau, put down her handbag and a small parcel, and removed her hat. Then the fact that Quard had not answered penetrated her reverie. Disposing of her hat, she looked half casually over her shoulder, to discover that he hadn't moved. Two surmises struck through her wonder: that he had fallen asleep waiting for her; with poignant apprehension, that he had been drinking again. But this seemed hardly likely: he had been entirely rational and unintoxicated during the matinée.

She said sharply: "What's the matter?"

Quard made no answer.

With a troubled sigh she moved to his chair and bent over him. His eyes, wide and blazing, met hers with a look of inflexible hostility and rage; his mouth was set like a trap, his lips, like his face, were almost colourless. The air was pungent with his breath, but intuitively she divined that it was not drunkenness alone which had aroused this temper, the more dismaying since it was for the time being under control.

From the look in his eyes she started back as from a blow.

"Charlie! What's the matter?"

Quard opened his lips, gulped spasmodically, closed them without speaking. The muscles on the left side of his face twitched nervously.

Abruptly he shot up out of his chair, strode to the door, locked it and pocketed the key. His face as he turned was terrible to see.

She shrank away, but his eyes held hers in the fascination of fright.

"Why--Charlie!--what--"

He interrupted with an imperative gesture, took a step toward her, and shook his hand in her face. Between his thumb and forefinger glittered something exquisitely coruscant in the sunlight.

"What's that?" he demanded in a quivering voice.