Chapter 14

Late in February Harry Colemain joined me at Palm Beach. He had wintered at Aiken, and I had all the Aiken news from him. The place had never been so full--people who usually went abroad, etc., etc.--some delightful new people, about all the old standbys. It was not a sporting winter. Most of the men were feeling too poor for high stakes. Would I believe it, the golf course was crowded all day? The new hotel? It looked as if it was going to be a success. The clubs were having the biggest year in their history. The golf club would be able to reset the green with Bermuda grass. Some of the holes had come through the summer splendidly. Some were better than they ever had been, others were worse, etc., etc.

I asked him about this and about that. At last I said: "How are the Fultons?"

"Well, John comes and goes. He seems to have gotten back his health. The kids are fine . . . of course they are not what they _were_ as a family. That's obvious. But Lucy seems to have come to her senses. She was very gay at first. Then she went round looking--well, she looked frightened. Lots of people noticed it. It was as if the doctor had told her she had lung trouble. She quit riding and dropped out of everything--except very quiet little dinners. Then she got very interested in her yard, and had experts over from Berckman's and did a lot of new planting . . ."

"But why did she look frightened? There wasn't anything the matter, was there?"

"Well, you know the trouble she made for John, wouldn't be his wife and all that? Well, he seems to have won her round to his way of looking at compromise--or she got more or less fond of him again. I don't know."

"I don't quite understand what you're driving at."

"You _don't_? Why, she's to have a baby. And everybody who knew there had been trouble says, 'Thank God for that.'"

My hands began to tremble so that I had to hide them under the table at which we were sitting.

"Bully, isn't it?" said Harry; fortunately he had turned his head to look at two very lovely young women who had strolled into the palm garden.

"Bully," I said.

"See those two, Archie?" he said in a guarded voice.

"Sure I see them."

"One of 'em's the famous Mrs. Paxton, who----"

"I know."

"Met her last autumn at----" He rose suddenly to his feet, and advanced to meet the two women. "Hello, there! Glad to see you."

Mrs. Paxton's cool demure face broke into a delighted smile.

"Why, Harry!" she exclaimed. "Miss Coles, let me introduce Mr. Colemain."

A moment later Harry had dragged me forward (literally) and I was being introduced. Miss Coles had very beautiful brown eyes, very white teeth, and a very deep dimple.

"Why," said Harry, "shouldn't all you good people dine with me?"

"Why not?" exclaimed Mrs. Paxton.

I started to say that I had a pressing engagement, discovered Miss Coles' exceedingly beautiful eyes lifted to mine, and saw upon her face an expression of the most alluring mockery, and so--"Why not?" said I.

We had a long and a merry dinner. I felt defiant of life, a man without responsibilities, who owed nothing and to whom nothing was owed.

After dinner we went strolling in the moonlight. Harry and Mrs. Paxton strolled in one direction, Miss Coles and I in another.

Miss Coles looked very beautiful, and she wore an expression of childlike proprietorship which was very becoming to her.

"Why are you _Miss_ Coles?" I asked.

"I'm not--really." Her voice was little more than a whisper. "It's more fun to be _Miss_ while the divorce is pending. I'm from California--nobody knows me here."

"And you're getting a divorce?"

She nodded slowly. And then with a flash of engaging frankness: "No, I'm not," she said; "_he_ is."

"Oh!"

We strolled on in silence for a moment, and then as if by agreement came to a sudden halt and looked at each other.

Then she laughed softly, her head tilted back, and her round bare throat showing very white in the moonlight.

I threw my cigar into a bed of scarlet flowers.

XXXIV

I had passed through one of those stages of mental and spiritual depression during which a man does not even ask forgiveness of himself for any of his acts. If "Miss" Coles had wished me to marry her I would have done so; but the suggestion was never made by either of us. We parted, a little gloomily, but not unhappily, and before there was even a breath of scandal. It was just after she heard that her husband had secured his decree against her. That hard cold fact, that proof of things which no woman likes to have proved against her, seemed to sober her, you may say, and bring her up with a round turn. From now on she was going to be good, she said. No. I mustn't blame myself for anything. Everything was her fault. Everything always had been. I was ashamed too? She was glad of that. We'd always be good friends. Why, yes! From a friend, yes--if he was really as rich as all that. It would help her to look around, to get her bearings for the new and better life. It had been a frightfully expensive winter. It had been sweet of me to keep her rooms so full of flowers. She loved flowers. . . . Oh, nobody was hurt much, and nobody but us anyway.

Reform is a great thing. I learned from Harry that the very night I left Palm Beach she lost all the money I had "conveyed" to her at gambling, and only the other day she ran off with a man I know very well indeed--and a married man at that. I hope she won't talk too much in the first few weeks of her infatuation.

I reached New York feeling like the cad that I suppose I am. But it was pretty bitter hearing about Lucy, and the baby. At least I had kept faith longer than she had. I wondered if she once more loved her husband. Did I hope so? Yes, of course, in the same way that you express conventional horror when you hear of the latest famine in China.

Well, for better for worse, I was a free man again. Free--if it is free to be tormented by remorse, to feel cheap, futile, a waster--a thing of no account to anyone. If this is freedom it isn't good to be free. No man is happy who comes and goes as he pleases. There must be responsibilities to shoulder, and ties which bind him. If he lives for himself alone and for what, in the first glad bursts of unattachment he imagines to be pleasure, a day will come when the acid of self-contempt begins to corrode him.

I determined to go to France, via London for I needed clothes, and if I had a definite place it was to volunteer as a nurse in the American hospital. So I took out a passport, and engaged my passage.

A few days later, while crossing from Madison Avenue to Fifth, I found myself suddenly face to face with Hilda. She averted her head and tried to pass without being recognized, but I called her name, and she stopped short and turned back.

"It's just to ask how you are getting on, Hilda."

"I've just left Mrs. Fulton," she said; "I'm going home."

"Home?"

"England."

"You don't mean it! But why?"

"Oh," she said, "it's all gotten on my nerves--the war. I want to help. I've saved enough money to take me over, and to keep me if I have to look round a bit."

"I'm going over, too," I said.

"To help?"

"Oh, Hilda, I don't know. I _hope_ so."

"Oh, I hope so, too, Mr. Mannering."

"But, Hilda, I want to talk to you. There may not be another chance. Where are you going _now_?"

"I'm staying with friends till I sail."

"Well, tell them you're going for a motor ride with another friend, and to dine somewhere along the Sound, will you?"

"Oh, I couldn't, not very well."

"Hilda," I said, "there are so many things I want to know, and only you can tell me about Stamford--about last winter--is it true that Mrs. Fulton is going----?"

"Yes, she is."

We were silent for a moment. Then she spoke. "Do you still----?"

"No, I don't _think_ so, Hilda."

"Then I'll come--if you want me to, and think I ought. But if any of your friends----?"

"Do I have to tell you that you are one of the smartest looking people I know, Hilda? They'll think you are the Marchioness of Amber----" I glanced at her red hair, which did have amber lights in it, "and they'll envy. So do come. Will you?"

I borrowed a fine new racing runabout, and at six o'clock called for her at the address she had given me. She had gotten herself up with the most discreet good taste, and looked perfectly charming. She must have read the approval in my glance, for the color flew to her cheeks, and she looked triumphantly pleased.

"Going to be warm enough?"

"Yes, thank you."

"It's mighty nice of you to come."

"Oh, when you held out half an excuse to me, I couldn't help coming."

"What's your idea--for England? To be a nurse--or what?"

"A nurse, sir."

"I'm not _sir_, please. I'm going to be a nurse, too. I told you once that I'd always be your friend. And a friend isn't ever sir. So don't do it again."

"I'll not," she said.

Presently I began to ask her about the Fultons. At first her answers were short and unsatisfactory, but presently she began to warm to the topic.

Stamford? Oh, it had been awful. The house had never been divided in its allegiance, but nobody could have remained callous to Mrs. Fulton's grief. Meals were especially awful. Mr. and Mrs. Fulton tried to make conversation. Sometimes just when it seemed as if she was going to be a little cheerful--phist! her eyes would fill with tears, and she would bolt from the room. At such times Mr. Fulton's face was a study of pity for her and grief for them both. She was good to the children; no question about that. Sometimes she grabbed them into her arms and hugged them too hard. It was as if she was trying by sheer physical effort to give them back what she had taken away from them.

Sometimes one thought one heard little Hurry crying very softly and bitterly, and it would turn out to be Mrs. Fulton, locked in her bedroom. Pressure of business, success, kept Mr. Fulton going. Sometimes the two tried to talk things over. But it was an irritating, mosquitoey house. Always their voices ended by rising to the point where they could be heard all over the ramshackle paper-thin dwelling.

It stood on a lawn that sloped to tidal waters, very ugly and muddy at low tide. A long gangway reached to a float for boats; here the water was deep enough to dive into at half tide. Often at dawn, if the tide was right, and you happened to be awake, you might see Mr. Fulton descend the wet lawn in wrapper and bare feet for the swim that seemed to make up to him for his sleepless nights. You knew that he was in trouble by the way that he took to the water. It's always a little shivery at dawn, but he never hesitated. His wrapper was coming off by the time he reached the float--it was too far off to mind watching him--and into the water he'd go, head first, as quick as he could get in. It was almost as if he was afraid he'd die before he got to it. He was a fine swimmer, but oftenest he just lay about, sometimes with his face under. Then he looked like a drowned man. Sometimes he went in earlier than dawn. She had seen phosphorescence off the float in the black night, and heard the clean, quiet splash of his dive.

Once he stayed in so long that Mrs. Fulton called to him from her window, "_Please_ come in, John, I'm frightened." Oh, yes, she wanted to be free from him, perhaps she still does, but not that way. If anything had happened to him, if he had taken his life, for instance, one imagined that in the first agonies of remorse she would have taken hers too.

It must have been terrible for her--at first--never hearing from _you_, not knowing where you were, or what you were doing, whether you were sick or well. Of course she wanted you to be happy, but with _her_. It would have been a comfort to know that you were suffering as much as she was. And she couldn't know.

She had a calendar in her room. She kept tab on it of the days as they passed, beginning with the first day of the probationary year. She'd draw a line through each day--each day when she went to bed, and hoped that the day was really over. She had her bad, wicked, black, sleepless nights, too. You could always tell by how late she was in the morning. She had a child's happy faculty of being able to make up for lost sleep. Well, when the day seemed over she drew a line through it. One day the chambermaid came below stairs (it was the first we knew of it) and propounded a conundrum. "When is a day not a day?" No one could guess. So she said, "When Mrs. Fulton doesn't draw a line through it." So it seemed that the forty-ninth day of her probation had not been a passage of time. Time had stood still. Why? Well, in the afternoon Mrs. Fulton had gone as crew with a young gentleman who owned a knockabout, and they had got wet to the skin, and had won a leg on some pennant or other after a close, well-sailed race. Mrs. Fulton had come home about dark, drenched, blooming, buoyant, and chattering about the events of the afternoon. She had had her first heart-felt good time of the probationary year. For once, time had not dragged. Time had stood excitingly, exhilaratingly still. She had forgotten to scratch off the day.

Things went better after that. Twice a week, rain or shine, she was crew of the young gentleman's knockabout. Often they went for practice sails. Sometimes they took Jock and Hurry. In hot weather they wore bathing suits. The young gentleman? He was to be a Yale senior, come autumn. He rowed on the Yale crew. My! you should have seen his arms and legs--so strong and so brown, so becoming to his dark blue bathing suit. His hair was so sunburnt that it looked like molasses candy. He could stay in the water all day and fetch from the bottom anything that was thrown in for him. Sometimes he came to meals. He was very quiet and shy. He blushed a good deal. And there was a weight on his mind. He had a condition to make up--political economy. He could hold Jock and Hurry out at arm's length, one in each hand, but the weight on his mind was too much for him. Every time the Fultons mentioned it to him, he groaned. He was truly comical when he groaned. Toward autumn he began to get gloomy. Summer was over, college would open. No more sails; no more Mrs. Fulton. Below stairs one knew that he was in love with Mrs. Fulton. How? Well, when one let him out at the front door, he always drew in a sigh that he held all the way to the front gate. One waited to hear him let it out. It would have blown out a gas jet across a good-sized room. There were other ways of telling. And since the forty-ninth day that was not a day, no one had heard Mrs. Fulton crying.

He came to say good-by. One never knew just what happened. They were in the front hall. Suddenly the front door must have opened. Fulton must have come in, for suddenly one heard his laugh. It was the strangest laugh in the world, full of joy, full of laughter, and full of scorn.

He saw the young gentleman to the front gate. He clapped the young gentleman on the back, and said (the parlor maid had heard); "Don't worry! It's all right! Don't make a mountain out of a mole-hill!" and then in a different voice, "Bless you, my son!"

Then he had come back to the house still laughing, and one heard him shouting, "Where are you, Lucy? Come here! The game's up now! You must see that for yourself! Don't be a goat!"

Did she see for herself? Oh, yes. She hadn't loved the young gentleman, not really. She had liked him enough to get over you being a life and death matter to her. That was all. She had liked him enough to let him kiss her at parting. That must have been what Mr. Fulton had caught them at.

"But, Hilda," I interrupted, "why didn't he tell me that it was all over, when I saw him in New York--just before Christmas?"

"Well, they couldn't know how you felt, could they? Maybe he wanted you to have your full year. Maybe he thought you'd fall down as she had, and that she'd hear of it and that it would be a lesson to her. How should _I_ know?"

She told me more. The very night of the young gentleman's departure, late, a telegram had come to Mr. Fulton. She, Hilda, had gone down to the front door, signed for the telegram, and carried it to Mr. Fulton's room. He did not answer to her first light knock; nor to a first or second loud knock. She pushed the door open. The room was full of moonlight. Mr. Fulton's bed was empty. It had not been slept in.

Hilda tiptoed to the end of the corridor, laid the telegram on the floor in front of Mrs. Fulton's door, knocked very firmly, and the moment she heard someone stirring within, turned upon her heel and fled.

So much for the average strength of those grand passions upon which so many marriages are wrecked!

"Are they happy now, Hilda--the way they used to be?"

Oh no, not happy, fairly contented. She would never love him the way she used to. Her fantastics [Transcriber's note: fantasies?] had taken the beauty plumb out of their lives. But something remained. A loving husband, an unloving, but naturally kind, good-natured and affectionate wife, trying to do her duty by the two children that were and the one that was to be.

"Oh, Mr. Mannering," said Hilda; "you mustn't blame yourself too much. If it hadn't been you, it would have been someone else. I didn't think so, but now I do. And _he_ might not have been a gentleman."

XXXV

We had dinner on the terrace of the Tamerlane Inn, overlooking the Sound.

"But, Hilda," I was arguing, toward coffee, "we might have gone on caring forever--if we hadn't been separated. Propinquity feeds love; absence starves it."

"Love? Indeed it doesn't. Fancy? Yes."

She looked straight in my eyes.

"Hilda," I said, "you--you don't still--that way--about me?"

"Don't I?" she said slowly. "Why else would I lie awake to hear Mr. Fulton go swimming? Why else would I be wanting to go with the Red Cross to the front where the bullets are?"

"But you told me in Aiken that you--that you despised me."

"It would be a poor love," she said, "that couldn't live down a little contempt that had jealousy for its father and mother."

We continued to look at each other while the waiter brought and served the coffee. Then I said: "Hilda, I know one thing. What you've got to give ought not to go begging."

Her eyes part-way filled, but she gave her shoulders a valiant little shrug. Then, with a sudden strong emotion, and a thrill in her voice: "That's for you to say," she said.

"Do you mean that?"

"You had only to ask," she said; "ever."

I was deeply moved, and a conviction that for me there might still be something true and fine raced into my mind. And was followed by a whole host of gentle and unselfish and pitying thoughts, as to a tree at evening flocks of starlings come to roost.

"Hilda," I said, "if there is no power of loving in me, but only of fancying, still you have said that fancy feeds on propinquity. I have no right to say that I love you; no right to promise that I ever will. It's not your sweet pretty face that's moving me now. It's your power of loving--your power of loving me--your constancy--your trust--your courage in saying that these things shall not go begging--if I say they shall not. What I thought another had, what I thought I had, only you have. I dare not make promises. I dare not boast. But caring the way you care, if you think you can make anything out of me--say so."

She thought for a while, her eyes lowered, her lips parted in a peaceful sort of smile. Then she said; "It'll be good to have heard all that."

"It'll be better to have tried," I said.

"Not if you don't want me _at all_."

"But I do."

"Well," she said, looking up now, and a valiant ring in her sweet English voice: "If I wanted to say no, I couldn't. If I thought I ought to say no, I wouldn't. But I don't think I ought to. I think when the Lord God put what's in my heart in it, he meant for there to be _something_ for me at the end of torment. So I say yes. For I've knelt on cold floors and hot floors to pray God that some day I could give myself to the man I love."

"And that shall be when you are married to him. . . . Don't look so frightened . . . it's got to be like that. Give a man a chance to make good. Do you think I'm such a fool as to throw away the love you've got for me? . . . We'll try this nursing game together, but not at the front, where the bullets are. I want us to live and to have our chance, you yours and I mine--taken together. Don't you see that I am speaking with every ounce of sincerity there is in me? I _couldn't_ take such love as yours and not make good. That's in my heart. I couldn't, I couldn't. Isn't it in my face, too--isn't it?"

She did not answer at first, only looked in my face, her eyes flooding.

Then she said: "I don't see your face any more--only a kind of glory."

We ran slowly back to the city, slowly, and very peacefully. Now and again we talked a little, and argued a little.

"But," she said, "it will ruin your life if you marry a servant. So please, please don't! What would I do when I knew I'd hurt you?"

"There's no life to ruin, Hilda. What's been is just dust and ashes. You and I--we'll live for each other, and we'll try to help where help's needed. It will be fine for me to have helped, after all these foolish years--when I did only harm, and only half-hearted harm at that."

"It would be so different if only--if only----"

"If only I loved you?" I freed one hand from the steering wheel and put my arm around her. "But you feel tenderness?"

"I feel tenderness."

I pressed her close to my side.

"Was I ever unkind to you?"

"Never."

"Tenderness and kindness--that's something to go on."

She turned her head and kissed the hand that pressed against her shoulder. It was the slightest, gentlest, softest kiss, and a lump rose in my throat.

"If the angels could see me now," she said, "and know what was in my heart, they'd die of envy."

"And what's in your heart, Hilda?"

"You," she said.

The house where she was staying had an inner and an outer door. In the obscurity between these two we stood for a little while at parting, and kissed each other.

And as soon thereafter as could be, we were quietly married.

When I began to put down this story about the Fultons, I was still head over heels in love with Lucy, and I did not know how it was all going to end. And I don't know now. I began to write before Hilda became a definite figure in my life, to write in order to pass the time. And so I wrote until I realized that I had failed Lucy, and began to hope that she had failed me. Even then I expected to live the same old fleeting life of a butterfly bachelor to the end. Then I began to think that out of the thing I was writing, there was beginning to rise a kind of lesson, a preachment. It seemed to me that I was going through an experience that others would do well to know about.

Can a man live down the shame of scorching another man's happiness, after finding that the cause which drove him to do so, has lost its power to impel? I am not ashamed of having loved Lucy; I am ashamed of not having loved her enough. Thank God no greater harm was done to Fulton than was done. He has his Lucy, what there is left of her, his children, and a greater financial success than ever he hoped for. And he has had his triumph over me. He must have told her, in some of his bad moments, just what kind of a man I was--a waster, a male flirt, a man who had the impulse to raise the devil, but lacked the courage, and the character. And she knows now, after her short period of over-powering love for me and belief in me, that he was right. That is his triumph. I think he is too good a gentleman to rub it in.