Part 10

She walked slowly up High Street. Passers-by turned to stare, but otherwise she was unrecognized. There was a new Five-and-Ten-Cent Store, and Finley Brothers had added an ell. High Street was paved. She made a foray down into the little side street where she had spent those queerly remote first seventeen years of her life. How dim her aunt seemed! The little unpainted frame house was gone. There was a lumber-yard on the site. Everything seemed to have shrunk. The street was narrower and dirtier than she recalled it.

She made one stop, at the house of Maggie Simms, a high-school chum. It was a frame house, too, and she remembered that the front door opened directly into the parlor and the side entrance was popularly used in lieu. But a strange sister-in-law opened the side door. Maggie was married and living in Cincinnati. Oh, fine--a master mechanic, and there were twins. She started back toward Finley’s, thinking of Gerald, and half-way she changed her mind.

Maggie Simms married and living in Cincinnati. Twins! Heigh-ho--what a world! The visit was hardly a success. At half after five, she was on her way back to the court-house steps. Stupid to have made it six!

And then, of course, and quite as you would have it, Gerald Fishback came along. She recognized his blondness long before he saw her. He was bigger and more tanned, and, as of old, carried his hat in his hand. She noticed that there were no creases down the front of his trousers, but the tweed was good and he gave off that intangible aroma of well-being.

She was surprised at the old thrill racing over her. Seeing him was like an exquisite stab of quick steel through the very pit of her being. She reached out, touching him, before he saw her.

“Gerald,” she said, soft and teasingly.

It was actually as if he had been waiting for that touch, because, before he could possibly have perceived her, her name was on his lips.

“Hester!” he said, the blueness of his eyes flashing between blinks. “Not Hester?”

“Yes; Hester,” she said, smiling up at him.

He grasped both her hands, stammering for words that wanted to come quicker than he could articulate.

“Hester!” he kept repeating. “Hester!”

“To think you knew me, Gerald!”

“Know you! I’d know you blind-folded. And how--I--you’re beautiful, Hester! I think you’ve grown five years younger.”

“You’ve got on, Gerald. You look it.”

“Yes; I’m general manager now at Finley’s.”

“I’m so glad. Married?”

“Not while there’s a Hester Bevins on earth.”

She started at her own name.

“How do you know I’m not?”

“I--I know--” he said, reddening up.

“Isn’t there some place we can talk, Gerald? I’ve thirty minutes before my friends call for me.”

“Thirty minutes?”

“Your rooms? Haven’t you rooms or a room where we could go and sit down?”

“Why--why, no, Hester,” he said, still red. “I’d rather you didn’t go there. But here. Let’s stop in at the St. James Hotel. There’s a parlor.”

To her surprise, she felt herself color up and was pleasantly conscious of her finger-tips.

“You darling!” She smiled up at him.

They were seated presently in the unaired plush-and-cherry, Nottingham-and-Axminster parlor of a small-town hotel.

“Hester!” he kept repeating. “Hester!”

“I’m a bad durl,” she said, challenging his eyes for what he knew.

“You’re a little saint walked down and leaving an empty pedestal in my dreams.”

She placed his forefinger over his mouth.

“Sh-h,” she said. “I’m not a saint, Gerald; you know that.”

“Yes,” he said, with a great deal of boyishness in his defiance; “I do know it, Hester, but it is those who have been through the fire who come out--new. It was your early environment.”

“My aunt died on the town, Gerald, I heard. I could have saved her all that if I had only known. She was cheap, aunt was. Poor soul! She never looked ahead.”

“It was your early environment, Hester. I’ve explained that often enough to them here. I’d bank on you, Hester--swear by you.”

She patted him.

“I’m a pretty bad egg, Gerald. According to the standards of a town like this, I’m rotten, and they’re about right. For five years, Gerald, I’ve--”

“The real _you_ is ahead of, and not behind you, Hester.”

“How wonderful,” she said, “for you to feel that way, but--”

“Hester,” he said, more and more the big boy, his knees touching the floor now, and his big blond head nearing hers, “I don’t care about anything that’s past; I only know that, for me, you are the--”

“Gerald,” she said, “for God’s sake!”

“I’m a two-hundred-a-month man now, Hester; I want to build you the prettiest, the whitest little house in this town. Out in the Brierwood section. I’ll make them kowtow to you, Hester; I--”

“Why,” she said slowly, and looking at him with a certain sadness, “you couldn’t keep me in stockings, Gerald. The gora on this hat cost more than one month of your salary.”

“Good God!” he said.

“You’re a dear, sweet boy just the same; but you remember what I told you about my crêpe-de-Chine soul.”

“Just the same, I love you best in those crispy white shirt-waists you used to wear and the little blue suits and sailor-hats. You remember that day at Finley’s picnic, Hester, that day, dear, that you--you--”

“You dear boy!”

“But it--your mistake--it--it’s all over. You work now, don’t you, Hester?”

Somehow, looking into the blueness of his eyes and their entreaty for her affirmative, she did what you or I might have done. She half lied, regretting it while the words still smoked on her lips.

“Why, yes, Gerald, I’ve held a fine position in Lichtig Brothers, New York importers. Those places sometimes pay as high as seventy-five a week. But I don’t make any bones, Gerald; I’ve not been an angel.”

“The--the Jew, Hester?”--his lips quivering with a nausea for the question.

“I haven’t seen him in four years,” she answered truthfully.

He laid his cheek on her hand.

“I knew you’d come through. It was your environment. I’ll marry you to-morrow--to-day, Hester; I love you.”

“You darling boy!” she said, her lips back tight against her teeth. “You darling, darling boy!”

“Please, Hester--we’ll forget what has been.”

“Let me go,” she said, rising and pinning on her hat; “let me go--or--or I’ll cry, and--and I don’t want to cry.”

“Hester,” he called, rushing after her and wanting to fold her back into his arms, “let me prove my trust--my love--”

“Don’t! Let me go! Let me go!”

At slightly after six, the ultra cavalcade drew up at the court-house steps. She was greeted with the pleasantries and the gibes.

“Have a good time, sweetness?” asked Wheeler, arranging her rugs.

“Yes,” she said, lying back and letting her lids droop; “but tired--very, very tired.”

At the hotel, she stopped a moment to write a telegram before going up for the vapor-bath, nap, and massage that were to precede dinner.

“Meyerbloom & Company, Furriers. Fifth Avenue, New York,” it was addressed.

This is not a war-story except as it has to do with profiteering, parlor-patriots, and the return of Gerald Fishback.

While Hester was living this tale, and the chinchilla coat was enveloping her like an ineffably tender caress, three hundred thousand of her country’s youths were at strangle-hold across three thousand miles of sea, and on a notorious night when Hester walked, fully dressed in a green gown of iridescent fish-scales, into the electric fountain of a seaside cabaret, and Wheeler had to carry her to her car wrapped in a sable rug, Gerald Fishback was lying with his face in Flanders mud, and his eyesockets blackly deep and full of shrapnel, and a lung-eating gas-cloud rolling at him across the vast bombarded dawn.

* * * * *

Hester read of him one morning, sitting up in bed against a mound of lace-over-pink pillows, a masseur at the pink soles of her feet. It was as if his name catapulted at her from a column she never troubled to read. She remained quite still, looking at the name for a full five minutes after it had pierced her full consciousness. Then, suddenly, she swung out of bed, tilting over the masseur.

“Tessie,” she said, evenly enough, “that will do. I have to hurry to Long Island to a base hospital. Go to that little telephone in the hall--will you?--and call my car.”

But the visit was not so easy of execution. It required two days of red tape and official dispensation before she finally reached the seaside hospital that, by unpleasant coincidence, only a year before had been the resort hotel of more than one dancing-orgy.

She thought she would faint when she saw him, jerking herself back with a straining of all her faculties. The blood seemed to drain away from her body, leaving her ready to sink, and only the watchful and threatening eye of a man nurse sustained her. He was sitting up in bed, and she would never have recognized in him anything of Gerald except for the shining Scandinavian quality of his hair. His eyes were not bandaged, but their sockets were dry and bare like the beds of old lakes long since drained. She had only seen the like in eyeless marble busts. There were unsuspected cheek-bones, pitched now very high in his face, and his neck, rising above the army nightshirt, seemed cruelly long, possibly from thinness.

“Are you Hester?” whispered the man nurse.

She nodded, her tonsils squeezed together in an absolute knot.

“He called for you all through his delirium,” he said, and went out. She stood at the bedside, trying to keep down the screams from her speech when it should come. But he was too quick for her.

“Hester,” he said, feeling out.

And in their embrace, her agony melted to tears that choked and seared, beat and scalded her, and all the time it was he who held her with rigid arm, whispered to her, soothed down the sobs which tore through her like the rip of silk, seeming to split her being.

“Now--now. Why, Hester! Now--now--now. Sh-h--it will be over in a minute. You mustn’t feel badly. Come now; is this the way to greet a fellow that’s so darn glad to see you that nothing matters? Sure I can see you, Hester. Plain as day in your little crispy waist. Now, now; you’ll get used to it in a minute. Now--now--”

“I can’t stand it, Gerald; I can’t! Can’t! Kill me, Gerald, but don’t ask me to stand it!”

He stroked down the side of her, lingering at her cheek.

“Sh-h. Take your time, dear,” he said, with the first furry note in his voice. “I know it’s hard, but take your time. You’ll get used to me. It’s the shock, that’s all. Sh-h.”

She covered his neck with kisses and scalding tears, her compassion for him racing through her in chills.

“I could tear out my eyes, Gerald, and give them to you. I could tear out my heart and give it to you. I’m bursting of pain. Gerald! Gerald!”

There was no sense of proportion left her. She could think only of what her own physical suffering might do in penance. She would willingly have opened the arteries of her heart and bled for him on the moment. Her compassion wanted to scream. She, who had never sacrificed anything, wanted suddenly to bleed at his feet, and prayed to do so on the agonized crest of the moment.

“There’s a girl! Why, I’m going to get well, Hester, and do what thousands of others of the blinded are doing. Build up a new, a useful, and a busy life.”

“It’s not fair! It’s not fair!”

“I’m ready now, except for this old left lung. It’s burned a bit, you see. Gas.”

“God! God!”

“It’s pretty bad, I admit. But there’s another way of looking at it. There’s a glory in being chosen to bear your country’s wounds.”

“Your beautiful eyes! Your blue, beautiful eyes! O God, what does it all mean? Living! Dying! All the rotters, all the rat-eyed ones I know, scot-free and Gerald chosen. God, God, where are you?”

“He was never so close to me as now, Hester. And with you here, dear, he is closer than ever.”

“I’ll never leave you, Gerald,” she said, crying down into his sleeve again. “Don’t be afraid of the dark, dear! I’ll never leave you.”

“Nonsense,” he said, smoothing her hair that the hat had fallen away from.

“Never! Never! I wish I were a mat for you to walk on. I want to crawl on my hands and knees for you. I’ll never leave you, Gerald--never!”

“My beautiful Hester!” he said unsteadily, and then again, “Nonsense.”

But, almost on the moment, the man nurse returned, and she was obliged to leave him, but not without throbbing promises of the morrow’s return, and then there took place, down-stairs in an ante-room, a long, a closeted, and very private interview with a surgeon and more red tape and filing of applications. She was so weak from crying that a nurse was called finally to help her through the corridors to her car.

Gerald’s left lung was burnt out, and he had three, possibly four, weeks to live.

All the way home, in her tan limousine with the little yellow curtains, she sat quite upright, away from the upholstery, crying down her uncovered face, but a sudden, an exultant determination hardening in her mind.

That night, a strange conversation took place in the Riverside Drive apartment. She sat on Wheeler’s left knee, toying with his platinum chain, a strained, a rather terrible pallor out in her face, but the sobs well under her voice, and its modulation about normal. She had been talking for over two hours, silencing his every interruption until he had fallen quite still.

“And--and that’s all, Wheeler,” she ended up. “I’ve told you everything. We were never more than just--friends--Gerald and me. You must take my word for it, because I swear it before God.”

“I take your word, Hester,” he said huskily.

“And there he lies, Wheeler, without--without any eyes in his head. Just as if they’d been burnt out by irons. And he--he smiles when he talks. That’s the awful part. Smiles like--well, I guess like the angel he--he almost is. You see, he says it’s a glory to carry the wounds of his country. Just think, just think--that boy to feel that, the way he lies there!”

“Poor boy! Poor, poor boy!”

“Gerald’s like that. So--so full of faith. And, Wheeler, he thinks he’s going to get well and lead a useful life like they teach the blind to do. He reminds me of one of those Greek statues down at the Athens Café. You know--broken. That’s it; he’s a broken statue.”

“Poor fellow! Poor fellow! Do something for him. Buy the finest fruit in the town for him. Send a case of wine. Two.”

“I--I think I must be torn to pieces inside, Wheeler, the way I’ve cried.”

“Poor little girl!”

“Wheeler?”

“Now, now,” he said; “taking it so to heart won’t do no good. It’s rotten, I know, but worrying won’t help. Got me right upset, too. Come; get it off your mind. Let’s take a ride. Doll up; you look a bit peaked. Come now, and to-morrow we’ll buy out the town for him.”

“Wheeler?” she said. “Wheeler?”

“What?”

“Don’t look, Wheeler; I’ve got something else to ask you--something queer.”

“Now, now,” he said, his voice hardening but trying to maintain a chiding note; “you know what you promised after the chinchilla--no more this year until--”

“No, no; for God’s sake, not that! It’s still about Gerald.”

“Well?”

“Wheeler, he’s only got four weeks to live. Five at the outside.”

“Now, now, girl; we’ve been all over that.”

“He loves me, Wheeler, Gerald does.”

“Yes?”--dryly.

“It would be like doing something decent--the only decent thing I’ve done in all my life, Wheeler, almost like doing something for the war, the way these women in the pretty white caps have done, and you know we--we haven’t turned a finger for it except to--to gain--if I was to--to marry Gerald for those few weeks, Wheeler. I know it’s a--rotten sacrifice, but I guess that’s the only kind I’m capable of making.”

He sat squat, with his knees spread.

“You crazy?” he said.

“It would mean, Wheeler, his dying happy. He doesn’t know it’s all up with him. He’d be made happy for the poor little rest of his life. He loves me. You see, Wheeler, I was his first--his only sweetheart. I’m on a pedestal, he says, in his dreams. I never told you--but that boy was willing to marry me, Wheeler, knowing--some--of the things I am. He’s always carried round a dream of me, you see--no; you wouldn’t see, but I’ve been--well, I guess sort of a medallion that won’t tarnish in his heart-- Wheeler, for the boy’s few weeks he has left? Wheeler?”

“Well, I’ll be hanged!”

“I’m not turning holy, Wheeler. I am what I am. But that boy lying out there--I can’t bear it! It wouldn’t make any difference with us--afterward. You know where you stand with me and for always, but it would mean the dying happy of a boy who fought for us. Let me marry that boy, Wheeler. Let his light go out in happiness. Wheeler? Please, Wheeler?” He would not meet her eyes. “Wheeler?”

“Go to it, Hester,” he said, coughing about in his throat and rising to walk away. “Bring him here and give him the fat of the land. You can count on me to keep out of the way. Go to it,” he repeated.

And so they were married. Hester holding his hand beside the hospital cot, the man nurse and doctor standing by, and the chaplain incanting the immemorial words. A bar of sunshine lay across the bed, and Gerald pronounced each “I will” in a lifted voice that carried to the four corners of the little room. She was allowed to stay that night past hospital-hours, and they talked with the dusk flowing over them.

“Hester, Hester,” he said, “I should have had the strength to hold out against your making this terrible sacrifice.”

“It’s the happiest hour of my life,” she said, kissing him.

“I feel well enough to get up now, sweetheart.”

“Gerald, don’t force. You’ve weeks ahead before you are ready for that.”

“But to-morrow, dear, home! In whose car are you calling for me to-morrow to take me _home_?”

“In a friend’s, dearest.”

“Won’t I be crowding up our little apartment? Describe it again to me, dearest--our _home_.”

“It’s so little, Gerald. Three rooms and the littlest babiest kitchen. When you’re once up, I’ll teach its every corner to you.”

Tears seeped through the line where his lids had been, and it was almost more than she could bear.

“I’ll make it up to you though, Hester. I know I should have been strong enough to hold out against your marrying me, but I’ll make it up. I’ve a great scheme; a sort of braille system of accountancy--”

“Please, Gerald--not now!”

“If only, Hester, I felt easier about the finances. Will your savings stand the strain? Your staying at home from your work this way--and then me--”

“Gerald dear, I’ve told you so often--I’ve saved more than we need.”

“My girl!”

“My dear, my dear!” she said.

* * * * *

They moved him with hardly a jar in an army ambulance, and with the yellow limousine riding alongside to be of possible aid, and she had the bed stripped of its laces and cool with linen for him, and he sighed out when they placed him on it and would not let go her hand.

“What a feeling of space for so little a room!”

“It’s the open windows, love.”

He lay back tiredly.

“What sweet linen!”

“I shopped it for you.”

“You, too--you’re in linen, Hester?”

“A percale shirt-waist. I shopped it for you, too.”

“Give me your hand,” he said, and pressed a string of close kisses into its palm.

The simplicity of the outrageous subterfuge amazed even her. She held hot-house grapes at two dollars a pound to his lips, and he ate them through a smile.

“Naughty, extravagant girl!” he said.

“I saw them on a fruit-stand for thirty cents, and couldn’t resist.”

“Never mind; I’ll make it up to you.”

Later, he asked for braille books, turning his sightless face toward her as he studied, trying to concentrate through the pain in his lung.

“If only you wouldn’t insist upon the books awhile yet, dear. The doctor says it’s too soon.”

“I feel so strong, Hester, with you near, and, besides, I must start the pot boiling.”

She kissed down into the high nap of his hair, softly.

Evenings, she read to him newspaper accounts of his fellow soldiers, and the day of the peace, for which he had paid so terribly, she rolled his bed, alone, with a great tugging and straining, to the open window, where the wind from the river could blow in against him and steamboat whistles shoot up like rockets.

She was so inexpressibly glad for the peace-day. Somehow, it seemed easier and less blackly futile to give him up.

Of Wheeler, for three running weeks she had not a glimpse, and then, one day, he sent up a hamper, not a box but an actual trunk of roses, and she, in turn, sent them up the back way to Kitty’s flat, not wanting even their fragrance released.

With Kitty, there were little hurried confabs each day outside the apartment door in the hallway before the elevator-shaft. A veil of awe seemed to wrap the Drew woman.

“I can’t get it out of my head, Hester. It’s like a fairy-story, and, in another way, it’s a scream--Wheeler standing for this.”

“Sh-h, Kitty. His ears are so sensitive.”

“Quit shushing me every time I open my mouth. Poor kid! Let me have a look at him. He wouldn’t know.”

“No! No!”

“God, if it wasn’t so sad, it would be a scream--Wheeler footing the bills!”

“Oh--you! Oh--oh--you!”

“All right, all right; don’t take the measles over it. I’m going. Here’s some chicken broth I brought down. Ed sent it up to me from Sherry’s.”

But Hester poured it into the sink for some nameless reason, and brewed some fresh from a fowl she tipped the hall-boy a dollar to go out and purchase.

She slept on a cot at the foot of his bed, so sensitive to his waking that almost before he came up to consciousness, she was at his side. All day she wore the little white shirt-waists, a starchy one fresh each morning, and at night scratchy little unlacy nightgowns with long sleeves and high yokes. He liked to run his hand along the crispness of the fabric.

“I love you in cool stuff, Hester. You’re so cool yourself, I always think of you in the little white waist and blue skirt. You remember, dear--Finley’s annual?”

“I--I’m going to dress like that for you always, Gerald.”

“I won’t let you be going back to work for long, sweetheart. I’ve some plans up my sleeve, I have.”

“Yes! Yes!”

But when the end did come, it was with as much of a shock as if she had not been for days expecting it. The doctor had just left, puncturing his arm and squirting into his poor tired system a panacea for the pain. But he would not react to it, fighting down the drowsiness.

“Hester,” he said suddenly, and a little weakly, “lean down, sweetheart, and kiss me--long--long--”

She did, and it was with the pressure of her lips to his that he died.

* * * * *

It was about a week after the funeral that Wheeler came back. She was on the _chaise longue_ that had been dragged out into the parlor, in the webbiest of white negligées, a little large-eyed, a little subdued, but sweetening the smile she turned toward him by a trick she had of lifting the brows.

“Hel-lo Wheeler!” she said, raising her cheek to be kissed.

He trailed his lips, but did not seek her mouth, sitting down rather awkwardly and in the spread-knee’d fashion he had.

“Well, girl--you all right?”

“You helped,” she said.

“It gave me a jolt, too. I made over twenty-five thousand to the Red Cross on the strength of it.”

“Thank you, Wheeler.”

“Lord!” he said, rising and rubbing his hands together. “Give us a couple of fingers to drink, honey; I’m cotton-mouthed.”

She reached languidly for a blue-enameled bell, lying back, with her arms dangling and her smile out. Then, as if realizing that the occasion must be lifted, turned her face to him.

“Old bummer!” she said, using one of her terms of endearment for him and two-thirds closing her eyes. Then did he stoop and kiss her roundly on the lips.

* * * * *

For the remainder of this tale, I could wish for a pen supernally dipped, or for a metaphysician’s plating to my vernacular, or for the linguistic patois of that land off somewhere to the west of Life. Or maybe, just a neurologist’s chart of Hester’s nerve-history would help.