Chapter 6

Of the sorrow that was gnawing at John Fulton's heart I saw no sign. He was alert, hospitable, humorous often, and toward Lucy his manner was wonderfully considerate and gentle. If I had guessed at anything, it would have been that the wife was in trouble and not the husband. He could not sit still for long at a time, but he did not in the least suggest a man who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His activity and sudden shiftings from place to place and from topic to topic were rather those of a man who superabounds in physical and mental energy.

At this time he did not know whether he and Lucy were going to separate or not. If they should, he was already preparing dust to throw in the world's eyes. He let it be known that at any moment he might have to go to Messina in the interests of his cartridge company (this was a polite fiction) and that he might have to be gone a long time. Business was a hard master. He had always tried to keep it out of his home life, but in times like these a man must be ready to catch at straws.

And Lucy, just her head and fingers showing from the great coon-skin coat, would give him a look that I should not now interpret as I did then. I thought that it made her feel sick at heart even to think of his going to some far-off place without her!

"Speaking of far-off places," I said once, "Gerald Colebridge is taking some men to Burlingham to play polo. He's asked me, and I'm tempted almost beyond my strength. What does everybody think?"

"I'd go like a shot," said Dawson Cooper. "Gerald will take his car and everything will be beautifully done; and California just about now!" Here he bunched his fingers, kissed them and sent the kiss heavenward.

"Wish _I_ was asked!" exclaimed Evelyn.

"Ever been to California?" Fulton asked. "Because if not, go. And still I've thought sometimes that spring in Aiken is almost as lovely."

Poor fellow, it must have been quite obvious that he didn't think so any more. But then Evelyn, Dawson, and I were blind and deaf, at this time.

"When," said Lucy at last, "would you go, if you go?"

"Why, in a day or two," I said. "I'd probably leave day after tomorrow on the three o'clock and join the party in New York."

"Oh, dear," she said, "I'll have to take up golf then. You're the only man in Aiken who likes to ride. And John won't let me ride alone."

"Why not," said he, "ask me to ride with you?"

"Oh, I know you'd do it," she said. "You're a hero, but I'm not quite such a brute."

I wish I could have gone to California.

I rode with Lucy the next afternoon, for the last time as we both thought. As we came home through Lover's Lane, the ponies walking very slowly, she leaned toward me a little, turned the great praying eyes upon me, and said, her mouth smiling falteringly:

"Please don't go away. I hate it. Everything's gone all wrong with the world. And if you're not my friend that I can talk to and tell things to, I haven't one."

"Are you serious, Lucy?"

"Oh, it's no matter!" she said lightly, and began to gather her reins, preparatory to a gallop.

"It's only that it didn't seem possible that you could need one particular friend out of so many. Of course, I stay. Will you tell me now what it is that's gone all wrong?"

"Yes," she said with a quickly drawn breath. "I've had to tell John that I don't love him any more, and don't want to be his wife."

If one of those still and stately pines which lend Lover's Lane the appearance of a cathedral aisle had fallen across my shoulders, I could hardly have been more suddenly stunned.

When I looked at her the corners of her lovely mouth were down like those of a child in trouble.

"Please don't look at me," she said.

We rode on very slowly in silence. Sometimes, without looking, I could not be sure that she was still crying. Then I would hear a little pathetic sniffling--a catching of the breath. Or she would fall to pounding the thigh with her fist.

But she pulled herself together very quickly and borrowed my handkerchief and when we reached the telegraph office her own husband could not have known that she had been crying.

She held my pony while I telegraphed Gerald Colebridge that I could not go to California with him.

Far from looking like one who had recently been crying, she looked a triumphant little creature, as she sat the one pony, and held the other. The color had all come back to her face, and she looked--why, she looked happy!

XIII

"Well, my dear," said my mother, "we shall miss you."

"Oh," I said, "I've given it up. I'm not going."

As she had said that she would miss me, this answer ought to have given my mother unmixed pleasure. It didn't seem to. She smiled upon me with the greatest affection, and at the same time looked troubled.

"When you came into my room this morning your mind was definitely made up. Has anything happened?"

"Only that I've changed my mind. Aiken is too nice to leave."

"I sometimes think," said my mother, "that the life you lead is narrowing. At your age, how I should have jumped at the chance to see California in spring! But I shan't ask you why you don't jump. I know very well you'd not tell me."

"Must I have a reason? They say women don't have reasons for doing things. Why should men?"

"A woman," said my mother, "does nothing without a reason. But often she has to be ashamed of her reasons, and so she pretends she hasn't any. Men are stronger. They don't have to give their reasons, and so they don't pretend."

"Maybe," I said, "I'm fond of my family and don't want to be away from them."

My mother blushed a little, and laughed.

"I shall pretend to myself," she said, "that that is why you have given up your trip. But I'm afraid it isn't your father and me that you've suddenly grown so fond of."

"Now look here, mamma," I said, "we thrashed that all out the other day."

"Thrashed all what out?--Oh, I remember--your attentions to Lucy Fulton, or hers to you, which was it?"

"It wasn't our attentions to each other, as I remember. It was the attention which Aiken is or was paying to us."

"So it was," said my mother.

She gave me, then, a second cup of tea, and talked cheerfully of other things. Some people came in, and I managed presently to escape from them.

It hadn't been easy to tell my mother that I had given up the California trip. I knew that her triple intuition would connect the change of plan with Lucy Fulton, and I was not in the mood to meet such an accusation with the banter and levity which it no longer deserved.

Like it or not, I was staying on in Aiken because Lucy had asked me to. That we had been gossiped about had angered me; but it could do so no longer. That we were good friends, and enjoyed riding and being together, was no longer the whole truth. There was in addition this: that Lucy no longer loved her husband, and that she had made me her confidant.

From the first to the last of my dressing for dinner that night, everything went wrong. I stepped into a cold tub, under the impression that I had told my man to run a hot one. He had laid out for me an undershirt that had lost all its buttons, and a pair of socks that I hated. I broke the buckle of the belt that I always wear with my dinner trousers; I dropped my watch face downward on the brick hearth, and I spilled a cocktail all over my dress shirt, _after_ I had got my collar on and tied my tie!

Usually such a succession of misadventures would have given rise to one rage after another. But I was too busy thinking about Lucy. I could no longer deny that she attracted me immensely. Perhaps she had from the beginning. I can't be sure. But I should never have confessed this to myself, or so I think, if I had not learned that she had suddenly fallen out of love with her husband. In that ideal state of matrimony, in which I had first gotten to know her, she had seemed a holy thing upon a plane far above this covetous world. But now the angel had fallen out of that which had been her heaven, and come down to earth. That I had had anything to do with this, I should even now have denied to God or man with complete conviction. I had no interest in the causes of her descent, only in the fact of it. And all that time of bungling dressing for dinner I kept thinking, not that I should help her look for a new heaven, but that I must try, as her true friend, to get her back into her old one. At that time John Fulton had no better friend than I. It seemed to me really terrible that things should have gone wrong with these two.

My father came in while I was still dressing.

"Hear you've given up California," he said bluntly; "do you think that's wise? . . . Where do you keep your bell?"

I showed him.

"How many times do you ring if you want a cocktail?"

"Twice. If you'll ring four times I'll have one with you. I spilt mine."

So my father pushed the bell four times and complimented me on my love of system and order, and then he returned to his first question.

"Do you think it wise?"

"Well, father," I said, "we've always been pretty good friends. Will you tell me why you think it isn't wise?"

"Yes, I will," he said; "I think it's foolish for a man to run after women in his own class for any other purpose than matrimony."

"So do I!" said I.

"A man," he persisted, "doesn't always know that he is running after a woman. Nature will fool him. Look at young lovers! Why, they actually believe in the beautiful fabric of spiritual poetry that they weave about each other. And nature lets 'em. But men who have seen life, and have lived, as I shouldn't be at all surprised if you had, for instance, are able to see the ugly mundane facts through the rosy mist. My boy, you and Lucy Fulton are being talked about. You don't have to tell me it's none of my business, I know that. But I can't help wanting you to steer clear of rows, and I don't want to see any woman get mud thrown on her because of you. For a man of course, unfortunately, consequences never amount to much. It's for the woman that I should plead if I had any eloquence or persuasiveness. I'd say to you, don't run away for your own sake, that's not worth while; but run away for hers. Now you will forgive me, my dear fellow, won't you, for butting in like this. . . ."

The cocktails came, and when the man who brought them had gone, I said:

"It's for her sake that I'm staying, father; will you listen a little? You're the only man in the world that I can talk to without fear of being repeated. As far as going to California is concerned I _was_ going--until a late hour this afternoon. I felt more concern at leaving my mother than anyone else. You believe that?"

He nodded to what was left of his cocktail.

"Lucy and I may have been talked about, but there was absolutely no reason why we should have been. We rode together this afternoon and out of a clear sky she told me that she had fallen out of love with her husband--for no _reason_ at all, that's the worst of it--and she doesn't know what to do, and has no friend she feels like talking to about it, except me. That's why I'm staying. She _asked_ me not to go. And of course I said I wouldn't."

My father finished his cocktail, and blew his nose.

"Oh," I said, "I'm not infatuated with the situation either."

"Women certainly do beat the Dutch!" said my father. "I suppose she wants advice, and backing when she doesn't follow it."

"If I can keep her in the path of her duty, father, be sure I will."

"And if you can't?"

"It's a real tragedy," I said. "They were the happiest and most loving couple in the world, except you and mother, and only a short time ago."

"What time is it?" asked my father.

"I've broken my watch."

"Well, it doesn't matter if we are a little late for dinner."

He cleared his throat, and turned a fine turkey-cock red, and looked very old-fashioned and handsome.

"I never thought to tell you this," he said; "it's like throwing mud on a saint. Once your mother came to me and said she didn't love me any more and that she loved another man and wanted to go away with him."

"I feel as if you'd kicked my feet out from under me."

"It doesn't seem to have come quite to that with Lucy, but it may, and in some ways the cases are parallel. I took counsel with your grandfather. He advised me to whip her. When I refused to do that, he gave less drastic advice, which I followed. I told your mother and the man that if after a year during which they should neither see each other nor communicate they still wanted each other, I would give your mother a divorce. I don't know when they stopped caring about each other. I think it took your mother less than three months to get over him. And if he lasted three weeks, why I'm the dog that--he was."

I detected a ring of passionate hatred in my father's voice.

"So she came back to me," he said presently, "in a little less than a year. Your little sister was your mother's offering of conciliation. And we have lived happily. But things have never been with us quite as they were. I have never known if your mother really got to loving me again, or if she has raised a great monument of simulation and devotion upon a pedestal of shame and remorse. Even now, if I drink a little more than is good for me, she never criticizes. She feels that she has forfeited that prerogative."

"What became of the man?"

"He died of heart failure," said my father, "in a disreputable place. They tried to hush it up, but the facts came out. When I heard of it, I plumped right down in a chair and laughed till I was almost sick. I knew what he was," he said with sudden savageness, "all along. But there is no making a woman believe what she doesn't want to believe. He was fascinating to women, and a cur. He kept his compact with me, not because of his given word, but because he was physically afraid of me."

"Thank you for telling me all this, father," I said; "I like you better and better. But in one way the cases aren't parallel. In Lucy's case there is no other man."

"Not yet," said my father; "but when a woman no longer loves her husband, look out for her. She has become a huntress--she is a lovely sloop-of-war that has cleared her decks for action. . . . Are you ready?"

I slipped my arm through my father's and we went downstairs together.

"I'm sorry you're mixed up in this," he said; "but you couldn't go when she made a point of your staying. I'm obliged to you for telling me."

XIV

It grew very warm during the evening and windy. By bedtime there was a hot, lifeless gale blowing from the southeast. Now and then the moon shone out brightly through the smother of tearing clouds, and was visible for a moment in all her glory, only to be submerged the next moment and blotted out. About two o'clock single raindrops began to splash so loudly on the veranda roof just outside my window that the noise waked me; after that I only slept fitfully, and my ears were never free from the loud roaring of the tropic rain that began presently to fall upon Aiken. I dreamed that somebody had stolen the Great Lakes and while being hotly pursued had dropped them. All day it rained like that, and all the following night, and only let up a little the afternoon of the second day. I got into an oilskin then and walked out to the Fultons'.

Theirs was a nervous household. Jock and Hurry confined indoors for nearly two days had had too little exercise and too many good things to eat. They were quite cross and irrepressible. John had the fidgets. He couldn't even stay in the same room for more than a minute, and he wouldn't even try sitting down for a change. Lucy had had to give up at least a dozen things that required dry weather and sunshine. She seemed to take the rain as something directed particularly against herself by malicious persons. Evelyn, also cross and nervous, was on the point of retiring to her own room to write letters. Just then Dawson Cooper telephoned to know if she cared to take a little walk in the rain and she accepted with alacrity.

"It's gotten so that he only has to whistle," said Lucy petulantly, when Evelyn had gone. "I think she's made up her mind to be landed."

Fulton came and went. Every now and then he dropped on the piano-stool for a few moments and made the instrument roar and thunder; once he played something peaceful and sad and even, in which one voice with tears in it ran away from another.

The piano was in the next room, and whenever it began to sound, Lucy dropped her work into her lap and listened. At such time she had an alert, startled look. She resembled a fawn when it hears a stick snap in the forest.

We heard him leave the piano, cross the hall and go into the dining-room.

"He's hardly touched his piano in years," said Lucy. "But now he's at it in fits and starts from morning till night. Night before last when the rain began he got up and went down in his bare feet and played for hours. I had to fetch him and make him come back to bed."

Then she seemed to feel that an explanation was necessary. She bent rosily over the work, and said: "We don't want the servants to know."

Again the piano began to ripple and thunder. Again we heard John go into the dining-room.

I must have lifted an eyebrow, for Lucy said:

"Yes. I'm afraid so, but it doesn't seem to go to his head. Oh," she said, "it wrings my heart, but I haven't the right to say anything."

"Lucy," I said, "have you thought out anything since I saw you last?"

"I think in circles," she said; "one minute I'm for doing my duty to him, the next minute I can only think of myself. It _can't_ be right for me to be his wife when I've stopped being--Oh, anything but awfully fond of him."

"You _are_ that?"

"Of course I am."

"It's just about the saddest thing that ever came to my knowledge," I said; "and you won't be angry if I say that I think you ought to stick to him and make the best of it?"

"You're not a woman. No man understands a woman's feeling of degradation at belonging to a man she doesn't love. Oh, it's an impossible situation. And I can't see any way out. I _couldn't_ take money from John, if I left him; I haven't got a penny of my own. And I think it would kill me to go away from Jock and Hurry for long. And the other thing would just kill me."

"That," I said, "Lucy, I don't believe."

"You don't know. Not being a woman, you _can't_ know."

"Men," I said, "and women too survive all sorts of things, mental and physical, that they think _can't be_ survived. I read up the Spanish Inquisition once for a college essay, and the things they did to people were so bad that I was ashamed to put them in, and yet lots of those people survived and lived usefully to ripe old ages."

"Who did?"

Unheard by us, John had finished in the dining-room and had come to pay us a flying visit.

"People that were tortured by the Spanish Inquisition," I said.

"A lot they know about torture," said he. "They only did things to people that the same people could imagine doing back to them. Nothing is real torture if you can see your way to revenge it--if only in imagination. Torture is what you get through no fault of your own from somebody you'd not torture back for anything in the world. It's what sons do to mothers, husbands to wives, wives to husbands. Isn't that so, Lucy?"

"I suppose so," she said very quietly, her head bent close to her work.

"But what," exclaimed John, "has all this to do with the high cost of living?"

He would neither sit down nor stand still. He moved here and there, changing the positions of framed photographs and ash trays, lighting cigarettes, and throwing them into the fire. He had the pinched, hungry look of a man who is not sleeping well, and whose temperature is a little higher than normal.

"Were you in the Spanish War?" he asked me suddenly.

(At the moment I was thinking: "If you go on like this you'll never win her back, you'll only make matters worse!") I said: "In a way, but I didn't see any fighting. I got mixed up in the Porto Rico campaign."

"I was with the Rough Riders," he said; "I've just been remembering what fun it all was. I wish you could go to a war whenever you wanted to, the way you can to a ball game."

Then as quickly as he had introduced war, he switched to a new subject.

"I want you to try some old Bourbon a man sent me."

He had crossed the room, quick as thought, and pushed a bell; when the waitress came he told her to bring a tray.

"Isn't whiskey bad for you when you're so nervous?" said Lucy quietly, and without looking up.

"I don't know," said John, with a certain frolicking quality in his voice; "I'm trying to find out."

"What was that you were playing a while ago?" I asked. "The slow, peaceful, sad sort of thing."

"This?" And he whistled a few bars.

I nodded.

"I made it up as I went along," he said; "music's like a language. When a man's heard a lot of the words and the idioms he can make a bluff at talking it; but I can only speak a few words. I've only got a child's vocabulary. I can only say, 'I'm hungry,' or 'I'm sleepy,' or 'I want a set of carpenter's tools,' or 'Brown swiped my tennis bat and I'm going to punch his head,' or 'The little girl over the fence has bright blue eyes and throws a ball like a boy and climbs trees.'"

He had to laugh himself at the idea of being able to express such things in musical terms, but when he had sponged up a long glass of very darkly mixed Bourbon and Apollinaris, the picture of the little girl over the fence must have been still in his mind, for having left us abruptly for the piano, he preluded and then began to improvise upon that theme. He talked rather than sang, but always in tune and with the clearest enunciation, and any amount of experience.

He began merrily, and in no time had us both laughing; I think the first air which he tortured to fit his unrhymed and unrhythmical words belonged once to Mozart, but I am not sure. It was made out of merriness, sunshine, and dew.

"The little girl over the fence, the fence Has bri-i-i-ight blue-ooo eyes And throws a ball like a boy, a boy, And cli-i-i-i-i-i-imbs trees."

He repeated in the minor, modulated into a more solemn key, and once more talked off the words. He left you with a slight feeling of anxiety. You began to be afraid that the little girl would fall out of the trees and hurt herself. But no, instead he grabbed something by the hair right out of a Beethoven adagio, and began to want that little girl with the blue eyes as a little girl with blue eyes has seldom been wanted before; she became Psyche, Trojan Helen, a lover's dream; all that is most exquisite and to be desired in the world--and then suddenly he lost all hope of her and borrowed from Palestrina to tell about it, and the last time she climbed trees it was plump on up into Heaven that she climbed, and from hell below, or pretty close to it, there arose the words "And climb trees" like a solemn ecclesiastical amen.

It was an astounding performance, almost demoniac in its cleverness and in its power to move the hearer.

Lucy's eyes were filled with tears.

"I wish he wouldn't," she said.

There was quite a long silence, but as we did not hear him moving about, he probably sat on at the piano, for presently, in a whisper, you may say, more to himself than to us, he sang that Scotch song, "Turn ye to me," which to my ear at least stands a head and shoulders taller and lovelier than any folk song in all the world, unless it's that Norman sailor song that Chopin used in one of the Nocturnes.

"The waves are dancing merrily, merrily, Ho-ro, Whairidher, turn ye to me: The sea-birds are wailing, wearily, wearily, Horo Whairidher, turn ye to me.

"Hushed be thy moaning, love bird of the sea, Thy home on the rocks is a shelter to thee; Thy home is the angry wave, mine but the lonely grave, Horo Whairidher, turn ye to me."