Chapter 5

I was facing the nearest wall of the room when the lights went out and I backed Lucy toward it, and then, groping, for I hadn't a match in my clothes, found it and stood guard over her, one hand pressing the wall on each side of her and my back braced. I received one thundering jolt over the kidneys, and one cruel kick on the ankle bone. And then the lights went on again, and we finished our dance.

Lucy said she hated people who weren't cool and collected in time of danger. That if she was ever in a theater when it caught fire she hoped there'd be somebody with her, like _me_, to take care of her! "That was the neatest thing," she said, "the way you got us out of that. We might have been knocked down and trampled to death."

When that dance ended, we went out of doors for a few minutes to get cool. We took a turn the length of the narrow, sanded yard and back. We could hear the buggy boys just beyond the tall privet hedge. Some were cracking jokes; others were heavily snoring, and there were whispered conversations that had to do, no doubt, with mischief, and petty crimes.

"It's been a grand party," I said. "By and by I'm going to give one."

"But not for me, you know, just a spontaneous party. Oh, do please, will you?"

"Of course I will. But it will really be given----"

"I mustn't know."

"You shall never know if you mustn't."

"I think you ought to dance once with Evelyn."

"I have danced with her, but only half a dance. She said she was tired--and then she finished it with Dawson Cooper."

"I wish they'd get to like each other."

"So do I. They're the right age. They've the right amount of money between them, and they like the same sort of things. But it rests with Evelyn. Dawson would fly to a dropped handkerchief as a pigeon flies home; but he's very shy and doesn't think much of himself."

It seemed a good omen when we entered the main hall and found them sitting out a dance together.

Dawson rose, but with some reluctance, it seemed to me.

"Isn't it about my turn, Lucy?" he said. "Will you?"

"Did Evelyn tell you you had to?"

He blushed like a schoolboy, and Evelyn burst out laughing.

"Then I will," said Lucy, "when I see a man trying to do his duty like a man, I help him always, and besides you dance like a breeze."

So they went away together, he apologizing and she teasing.

"How about me?" I said to Evelyn. "Is it my turn?"

"No," she said, "it isn't. I want to talk to you."

I sat down facing her in the chair that Dawson Cooper had occupied. "Just now," she said, "when you and Lucy went outside, I heard someone say to someone else----"

"Hadn't they any names?"

"No. She said to him, 'It's about time John Fulton came back. Lucy's making a fool of herself.'"

Somehow I seemed to turn all cold inside.

"Of course," said Evelyn, "Lucy knows and you know and I know, but the man in the street who sees you ride out together day after day, and the woman who's no particular friend of yours, who sees you dance dance after dance together--_they_ don't know. Aiken is a small place, but like the night, it has a thousand eyes, and as many idle tongues. If I didn't know Lucy so well, and you so well, I'd be a little worried."

"Why," I said, "it's a golf year. Nobody would rather ride, except Lucy and me."

"The reason doesn't matter," said Evelyn. "When two young people are together a whole lot, their feelings don't stand still. They either get to like each other less and less, or more and more. You and Lucy don't like each other less and less. Anybody can see that, so it must be more and more. And there's always danger in that. Isn't there?"

I thought for a moment, and then said: "Not for her, certainly."

"You knew Lucy when she was a little girl, but you didn't see her often when she was growing up, did you? Her best friend never thought that she would ever settle to any one man. She was the most outrageous little flirt you ever saw. No, not outrageous, because each time she thought she was really in love herself. It was one boy after another, all crazy about her, and she about them. Then it was one man after another. What Lucy doesn't know about moonlight and verandas, and the sad sounds of the sea at night, isn't worth knowing. But all the time, from the time she was fifteen, there was John Fulton in the background. He was never first favorite till she actually accepted him and married him, but he was always in the running, in second or third place, and whether he won her down by faithfulness and devotion nobody knows. Nobody quite knows how or why she changed toward him. I don't believe she does. He was just about the last man anybody thought she'd marry. But anyway her young and flighty affections got round to him at last, and fastened to him. They fastened to him like leeches. No man was ever loved as hard as she loved him when she got round to it. She made up for all the sorry dances she'd led him. She was absolutely shameless. She made love to him in public, she----"

"She still does, Evelyn," I said. "I think that's one reason why I like her so much, and him. There's nobody else so frank and natural about their feelings for each other. Why, it's beautiful to see."

"Archie," said Evelyn, "for short periods of time she loved some of the men she didn't marry almost as hard."

After a moment's silence, she said with hesitation,

"It's a lucky thing for her that all the men she thought she cared about were gentlemen. You must have noticed yourself how little yesterday means to her, how less than nothing tomorrow means, until it becomes today."

"Well," I said, "it all bolls down to this, that after many vicissitudes, she found her Paradise at last."

"Who can be sure that a girl who had as many love affairs as she had is--all through!"

Just then Dawson Cooper came back and took Evelyn away with him. I was immensely interested in all that she had told me about Lucy. I rather wished that I might, for a while, have been one of the many. And I was annoyed to learn that people were undertaking to make our business theirs.

"I'll tell John about it when he comes back," I said, "and if he thinks best, why I won't see so much of her."

But when he came back it did not seem worth while to tell him.

X

I had forgotten that John Fulton was to return Monday, until Lucy gave it as a reason for not being able to ride on that afternoon.

"Even if the train is on time," she said, "I don't think I ought to go chasing off, do you? He'd like us all to be at home together and maybe later he'd like me to take him for a little drive."

She was rather solemn for Lucy. I did not in the least gather that she would rather ride with me than play around with her husband. I did gather that she was not using her own wishes and preferences as an excuse, but the physical fact of John's home-coming. And I learned in the same moment that I wished his return might be indefinitely postponed, and that Monday afternoon with no Lucy to ride with promised to be a bore.

I saw her doing chores in the village, Jock and Hurry crowded into the seat beside her, just before the arrival of the New York train. From the back of the runabout dangled the reed-like, moth-eaten legs of Cornelius Twombley. For him, too, the return of the master was a joyous occasion; there would be a quarter for him if he had been a good boy, and some inner voice evidently was telling him that he had. There was a red-and-white-striped camellia in his buttonhole, and his narrow body was beautified by a dirty white waistcoat.

The New York train whistled. Lucy flicked the horse with the whip, three handsome hatless heads were jerked backward, Cornelius Twombley's peanut-shaped head was jerked forward, the voices of Jock and Hurry made noises like excited tree frogs, and away they all flew toward the station.

It was easy to picture the beaming faces that John Fulton could see when he got off the train; it was [Transcriber's note: two words obliterated here] hear the happy joyous voices all going at once, that would greet him. If there was trouble in his life he would forget it in those moments.

I turned into the Aiken Club feeling a little lonely. How good, I thought, it would be to be met, even once, as Fulton is being met.

And now I must set down things that I did not know at this time, and only found out afterward. And other things that are only approximately true, things that wouldn't happen in my presence, but which I am very sure must have happened.

When Lucy drove off at such a reckless pace to get to the station before the train, I don't think it even occurred to her that during his absence her feelings for her husband had changed in any way. It was he, I think, who was the first to know that there was a change. He did not realize it at the station or on the way home. How could he with Jock and Hurry piled in his lap, and both talking two-forty, and Lucy at his side, trying to make herself heard and even understood? No man could. It must have been shortly after he got home, at that moment, indeed, when he was alone with her, and his arms went out to her with all the love and yearning accumulated at compound interest during absence. Habit, and the wish to hurt no one, must have carried her arms to tighten a little about him, and to lift her lips to him. Then I think she must have turned her head a little, so that it was only her cheek that he kissed. I imagine that until that time Fulton's love-making had always found the swiftest response, that with those two passion had always been as mutual and spontaneous as passion can be; and that now, perhaps the very first time, his fire met with that which it could not kindle into answering flame.

I do not think that he at once let her go. I think that first his arms that held her so close loosened (already the pressure had all gone out of hers). I think she was sorry they had to loosen, and glad that they had. Then his arms must have dropped to his sides. He did not at once turn away, but kept on looking at her, as she at him--he, hurt, he did not know why, but brimming with love and compassion and tenderness and a little desperate with the effort to understand and to make allowances for whatever might have to be understood. Her great blue eyes looked almost black for once, prayer upon prayer was in their depths, they were steady upon his and unfaltering. It was as if she was giving him every opportunity to look down through them and see what was in her soul.

It could not have been till many days later that a whole sequence of episodes which hurt and could not be understood forced him into speech. I think he must suddenly in a moment of trial, have come out with something like this:

"Why, Lucy, it sometimes seems as if you didn't love me any more."

When she didn't answer, it must have flashed through him like a streak of ice-cold lightning that perhaps she really didn't.

I am glad that it is only in imagination that I can hear his next question and her answer. There must have been a something in his voice from which the most callous-hearted would have wished to run, as from the deathbed of a little child.

"_Don't_ you, Lucy?"

And how terribly it must have hurt her to answer that question! Considering what he had been to her and she to him, for how long a period of time neither had been able to see anything in this world beyond the other, and considering with even more weight than these things their own children for whom the feelings of neither could ever really change, I think that Lucy ought to have lied. I think she ought to have lied with all her might and main, lied as John Fulton would have lied if the situation had been reversed, and that thereafter, until his death or hers, she ought to have acted those lies, with unflagging fervor and patience. Tenderness for him she never lost. She might, upon that foundation, have built a saintly edifice of simulated love and passion.

But it was not in her nature to lie. I think she probably said: "I don't know. I'm afraid not." And then I think her sad face must have begun to pucker like that of a little child going to cry, and I think it is very likely, so strong is habit, that she then hurried into her husband's arms and had her cry upon his breast.

XI

I imagine that thereafter for a time John Fulton's attitude toward Lucy was now dignified and manly, and now almost childlike in its despair. Having made her love him once, he must have felt at first that he could make her love him again. I imagine him making love to her with all the chivalry and poetry that was in him, and then breaking off short to rail against fate, against the whole treacherous race of women, perhaps, and to ask what he had done to deserve so much suffering? "Why didn't you do this to me when I was proposing? Why did you wait till I was stone broke and worried half sick, with everything going from bad to worse? Is it anything I've done, anything I've failed to do? Why, Lucy, we were such a model of happiness that people looked up to us. How can anybody suddenly stop caring the way you have? If it had been gradual! But you were in love with me the night I went away, weren't you? _Weren't_ you?"

Here he catches her shoulders and forces that one admission from her, and makes the great praying woebegone eyes meet his. Then, almost, he pushes her away from him.

"And I go away for a few days," he cries, "and come back and everything is changed. I who had a sweetheart, haven't even a wife. Why have you changed so? There must be a reason? What is it? Are you sick? Have you eaten something that has made you forget? Have you been bewitched? That's no fool question. Have you? Have you?"

"Have I what?"

"Have you been bewitched? Tell me, dear, who has done this thing to you?"

Again he has her by the shoulders.

"Lucy, is there someone? Never mind the other things, just tell me that? You've gotten to like someone else? Is that it?"

And Lucy must have answered that there was no one else. And there is no question but that to the best of her belief and knowledge she was telling the truth.

But the mere thought that there might be someone else had moved Fulton as he had never been moved before. He once told me that even as a little boy he had never in all his life known one pang of jealousy. He will never be able to make that boast again. And like some damned insidious tropical malaria, the passion has taken root in his system, so that only death can wholly cure him.

Like some vile reptile it had found within him some cave from which it might emerge to brandish its hideous envenomed horned head, and into which betimes it might withdraw.

I can imagine no one so stupid as to question any serious statement of fact that Lucy might make. Her eyes were wells of truth; her voice fearless and sure, like that of some kingly boy.

So when she said there was _no one_, Fulton, who knew her far better than anyone else, believed her without any question. And a great weight must have been lifted from his heart. With the truth that he had wrung from her, I think he must have rested almost content for a few hours.

But contentment is far off from a man who hears the great edifice of love and happiness which he has reared, crashing about his ears.

He could not make up his mind to any definite course of action. Now, calm and judicial, I hear him discussing matters with coolness, and self-forgetfulness.

"If there is any chance for me, ever," he would say, "it would be silly of us to take any action which would be final. And, besides, I don't see how I could reconcile my conscience to giving you a divorce. Or you yours to getting one. It would be hard enough for you to lie about the most trifling thing. You couldn't, you simply couldn't face the court and tell them that I had been cruel and unfaithful. You couldn't accuse me of anything so gross, and so unlike me, as the other woman who would have to be hired for the occasion. There's another side to it. I think the children are better off with you than with me. You're the best mother that ever was, the most sensible and the most careful. But I don't think I could give them up. If you and the babies were all three to drop out of my life, I'd have nothing left but the duty of finding money to support you. There's a certain pleasure in doing your duty, of course, but in this case hardly enough. Honestly, dear, with never a sight or touch of you, I simply couldn't keep things going long."

Then perhaps Lucy asked some such question as this: "Don't people often, when they've stopped caring about each other, go on living together just the same, as far as other people know? And really just be good friends and live their own lives?"

"This is very different. We haven't stopped caring about each other. You've stopped caring about me. I care about you, just as I did in the beginning, and always shall. We _couldn't_ lead separate lives under the same roof. God knows I feel old enough, but I'm still a young man, and like it or not, you are still my wife. It is something to own the shell that once contained the pearl."

Another time he goes hurrying through the house, prayer-book in hand, a thumb marking the marriage ceremony. He has been brooding and brooding and snatching at straws.

"Read this, Lucy. Just look it over. It's what you and I stood up and promised before a lot of people. I'm glad I looked it up. You'll see right away that it's a contract which nobody could have the face to break. I want you to read it over to yourself."

Finally she does, just to please him, in the sad knowledge that no good will come of it.

"You'd forgotten, hadn't you? But just see what you promised. Didn't you mean to keep these promises when you made them?"

"Oh, of course I did. Why ask that?"

"But now you want to back out."

Then the old argument that a promise which one is powerless to keep isn't a bona fide promise and cannot be so regarded. Fulton sees that for himself presently.

"No, of course," he says. "If you don't love me, you can't make yourself by an effort of will. And if you don't honor me . . ."

"You _know_ I do."

"How about the other thing, the promise to obey? That is surely in your power to keep."

She admits that she can keep that promise; but she leaves herself a loophole. She does not say that she _will_ keep it.

And so the words of the prayer book shed no light on the situation, and I shouldn't wonder if Fulton raged against the book, and flung it into a far corner, and was immediately sorry.

For a man situated as Fulton was, some definite plan of action is necessary; and to my mind the one that would be best would be one in which the least possible consideration for the woman should be shown. When Lucy began to play clench-dummy with her own life, with her husband's love, and with the institution of marriage, Fulton, I think, would have made no mistake if he had stripped her to the skin and taken a great whip to her.

Her whole life had been one of self-indulgence. She had indulged herself with Fulton's love till she was glutted with it; that she was the mother of two children may, perhaps, be traced to self-indulgence, and surely it must be laid down to self-indulgence that she was not the mother of more than two. Her self-indulgence kept Fulton poor and in debt, and it had come to this: that her impulse to self-indulgence would now stop at nothing unless circumstances should prove too strong for it.

It is not the gentle, faithful, self-sacrificing man who keeps his wife's love; it never was. It was always the man who had in him a good deal of the brute.

But, except in a moment of insanity, a man does not go against his nature. Fulton has too good a brain not to think that if Lucy were locked up for a week or so, and fed on bread and water, good might come of it. But his was not the hand to turn the key in the lock. He could no more have done it than he could have struck her. This sudden failure of her love for him was only another evidence of that wastefulness and extravagance which had so often hurt him financially. Surely it must have occurred to him more than once to publish notices in the newspapers to the effect that he would only be responsible for his own debts. He must, I think, have threatened the thing from time to time, knowing in his heart that he could never bring himself to put it into execution.

I wonder how Fulton felt when hard upon the knowledge that she no longer loved him, he received the bill for the dance which she had given against his wishes, and in full knowledge of his present financial predicament?

She had treated him so badly that it is a wonder of wonders that he kept on loving her.

For one thing they deserve great credit. Even Evelyn Gray, a guest in the house, did not know that there was any trouble between them. All she thought was that owing to financial and other worries, which time would right, Fulton seemed a little graver and less enthusiastic than usual.

Nor was I any wiser. I had not, of course, so many chances of seeing the two together, but I saw as much of Lucy as ever, for we rode together nearly every day.

XII

If nothing more definite had come of all this, I should now see but little significance in those long afternoons of riding with Lucy. She could leave the substance of her trouble behind, as easily as she could have left a pair of gloves, and she took into the saddle with her only a shadow of the tragedy that was glowering upon her house.

I see now, that, at this time, we must have begun to talk more seriously and upon more intimate topics; that we laughed less and that there were longer silences between us. We began to take an interest in the trees and flowers among which we rode, to learn their names, and to linger longer over those which did not at once strike the eye.

And I see now that Lucy talked more than usually about her husband. It was as if by doing constant justice to his character she hoped to make up to him for her failure of affection. In his domestic relations he was a real hero by all accounts. Didn't I _think_ they lived nicely? She thought so, too, but it wasn't her fault. She was so extravagant, and such a bad manager, it was a wonder they could live at all. She admitted so much with shame. But if I could understand how it is with some men about drink, then it must be easy for me to understand how it is with some women about money. Oh, she'd spent John into some dreadful holes; but he had always managed to creep out of them. How he hated an unpaid bill! It wasn't his fault that there were so many of them. For her part (wasn't it awful!) they filled her neither with shame nor compunction. And he'd been so fine about people. His instinct was to be a scholar and a hermit. But she loved people, she simply couldn't be happy without them, and (wasn't it fun?) she had had her way, and now John liked people almost as much as she did. And he had a knack of putting life and laughter into the simplest parties.

Sometimes when we had finished riding, we had tea in the garden. It would be turning cool, and she would slip a heavy coon-skin coat over her riding things; and there was a long voluminous polo-coat of John's that I used to borrow. Evelyn nearly always joined us, John not so often. Sometimes Dawson Cooper came. He was getting over his shyness. Sometimes he was quite brazen and facetious. It looked almost as if he was being encouraged by someone.