Mary Wollaston by Henry Kitchell Webster (best story books to read txt) 📕

agreed with him; how it was as easy to run as a typewriter.

A few minutes more of that, she thought, and she'd begin telling Ford jokes, so she wrenched around to a new subject and asked him how much he'd seen of France; what he thought of the French; how long he'd been home; and what it seemed like to be in civilian clothes again;--topics upon which he enlarged as well as he could. She had driven meanwhile, north to Diversey Boulevard and had then turned west, around the ring. They were out in the middle of Garfield Park when she said after a hard, tight silence, "Isn't this perfectly ghastly?"

"It's awful," he agreed. "I don't know what's the matter with us--or whose fault it is. But I certainly didn't mean to get started like this."

"I expect that's it," she told him. "Haven't you been trying to treat me just exactly right? Make me feel perfectly comfortable? Haven't you been--being tactful, with all your might, ever since we started? Because I have."

"Well, then, for heaven's sake," he said, "let's quit! Quit trying so infernally hard, I mean. It's too nice a morning to spoil. You know, if the sun manages to come out, as it's trying to, it will be a very handsome April day."

"I don't think talking about the weather is much of an improvement," she commented. "Tony, let's give it up, for to-day I mean. We'll try again sometime from a fresh start. This is perfectly hopeless."

He tried to pretend that she didn't mean it but she made it clear even with a touch of asperity that she did. "Oh, all right," he growled and reached for the handle to the door.

"Don't be silly," she commanded. "I'm not going to leave you out here in the wilds of Garfield Park. Where do you want to go? Is it too early for your lunch?"

"Mrs. Wollaston told me to come at one," he said. "You aren't supposed to be ahead of time for a thing like that, are you? Anyhow, I've got to go back to my room first."

She caught up the name. "Sarah told me about your going there. First to tune the piano and then the evening when she sang your songs. Sarah's quite eloquent about it."

"Yes, poor Sarah, I know. Ben was quoting her this morning. However, that won't make the least difference with what I'm going to do."

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"Why, I suppose," he said, "that I'm going to do what people speak of as settling down. What they mean by that is taking an interest in consequences--more of an interest in what things lead to than in what they are. Well, that's what I'm at now."

"That's a change, all right, for you," she said.

He agreed with her. "I knew when it happened," he added. "It happened when I heard Paula Carresford sing one of my songs. Do you remember the story that used to be in the school reader about the tiger that tasted blood and ate up the princess? You know, Jennie, it's practically true that up to that night I'd never heard any of my music at all--except mutilated fragments of it as I played it myself. And I'll tell you it was a staggering experience. The queerest experience I ever had in my life, too. I'll tell you about that sometime. But I changed right there, just the way the tiger did. I don't happen to want a fur overcoat nor an automobile nor an apartment on the Drive. I honestly don't want them. They aren't a part of my dreams--never were. But I do want to hear my own music. I want to hear it done for all it's worth. I want to hear orchestras play it and singers as good as Paula Carresford sing it. And in order to do that I've got to look ahead a little. I've got to stop doing always exactly as I damned please. I've got to do things because somebody besides myself wants them done."

"Have you got something like that to do to-day--with an eye to the consequences?" she asked.

He looked sharply around at her. She was very intent on her driving just then. "That's a remarkably good guess in a way," he said. "I dread going to that house to lunch. A month ago I'd have refused--or pretended I hadn't got the invitation until too late. And I'd have pretended to myself that it was because I didn't care to play the social game; didn't want to take on obligations of a kind I couldn't meet. But now I've told Mrs. Wollaston I'd come, I know the real reason why I don't want to.

"I said just now I didn't want a fur overcoat nor an automobile, and that's eighty percent true. And yet, there's a crawly little snob inside me that's in a panic right now because I haven't got proper clothes to wear and because I'm going to have to sit down in front of a lot of funny shaped forks that I don't know the special uses of.

"Oh, there's more to it than that of course. It's rather a cross-grained situation. Wollaston doesn't like me. He thinks I'm responsible for his wife's having kicked over the traces and signed up to sing at Ravinia this summer. In a way, I suppose I am. She's planning to use that opera of mine, you remember,--_The Outcry_ we called it--for a novelty, provided they like the way I've padded up her part. The big role in it is really for the baritone, of course. That's what I've been slaving over for the last two weeks. If she makes a hit with it, she'll take it to the Metropolitan next winter. Of course, there's no reason in God's world why she shouldn't do that if she can get away with it. She hasn't any children to look after; she told me she didn't even keep house for her husband. All the same he regards me as a sort of potential homewrecker."

"You can't quite blame him for that, can you?" Jennie suggested. "If you began reading a story about a beautiful young opera singer who left her husband to go back on the stage again and sing an opera by a musical genius she'd discovered, wouldn't you expect them to fall in love with each other?"

"That shows what nonsense stories are," he said. "That couldn't happen to us in a thousand years. She's beautiful, and kindly, and affectionate. She's got temperament enough to blow the cork out of any bottle you tried to hold it down in. But I couldn't fall in love with her if I tried. It doesn't happen on that basis. Besides which, it's my belief that she's altogether in love with her husband. All the same, she's taken me up. She means to push me for all she's worth and let her husband like it or lump it as he pleases. She's got some plans, I don't know just what, for showing me off to one or two of the 'right' people to-day. You can imagine what it will be like, can't you?"

"I should think it would be rather good fun--that sort of game," she commented.

"That's where the forks come in," he said. "And not having a proper coat. That sort of social skill is the suit of armor those people wear. I've got to go back to my room and sew up the rip Ben told me about and trim my cuffs and try to tie my necktie so that the worn-out spots won't show-and make them do."

It was but a few minutes later--they had been silent ones--that she stopped her car in front of the little grocery store where the rickety outside stair led up to his door.

"I'll come in with you and sew up the rip in your coat," she said.

She wouldn't have made that offer, indeed would hardly have driven him up to his own door, if she had not been a young woman with steady nerves and a level head, and an abundant confidence in both. Because that dingy little wooden building with its outside stair to his attic, was the nucleus of memories that had by no means lost their poignancy. It was not, after all, so many years ago that she had mounted that stair for the first time, and it couldn't be considered strange that her heart quickened a little as she climbed it now.

The room startled her by being so utterly unchanged. Not only the major articles in it; the stove, the iron bed, the deal table he wrote at, the carpenter's bench, the half invented musical typewriter that he had once attempted to convert an old square piano into, the hollow-backed easy chair,--but the quite minor and casual trifles as well. On top of the set of home-made shelves that served for his music and his books was a sort of still-life composed of a meerschaum pipe with a broken stem and an empty goblet of pressed glass, standing upon a yellow paper-covered copy of Anatole France's _Thais_, that had been just like that the last time she was here. She had stuck a bunch of sweet peas she was wearing into that goblet. It made an uncannily short bridge to the past, a trivial reminder like that.

Evidently he felt it, too. Perhaps he had followed her glance toward that dusty shelf corner. Because, a moment after he had shut the door behind them, opened a window and taken a look at the fire, he came hesitantly and a little awkwardly up to her and took her by the shoulders as if to draw her into an embrace. He was very gentle about it.

Also he was ludicrously tentative. If she'd wanted to let herself go she could have laughed rather hysterically about that. She disengaged herself from his hands, decisively, indeed, yet without any air of pique.

"Oh, no, my dear," she said. "Take off your coat and let me get to work. Where's your sewing kit?"

He produced it instantly (the room was not in real disorder; it only looked like that to one who did not understand its system), gave her his coat, wandered restlessly about for a few minutes and presently came to rest at the deal table where he had spent the greater part of the last fortnight, turning over, discontentedly, the sheets of score paper he had left there.

Over her sewing she let her mind run free, forgetting this present Sunday with its problems, mixing a pleasant amalgam of the past. She wasn't heartbroken, you know, hardly regretful. She had life about as she wanted it. She never had been in love with March in the accepted meaning of the phrase--she had never even thought she was--and it is altogether probable that if she had found him eager to resume the old relation, she would have felt a certain reluctance about taking it up again. Life changed with the years and some of its old urgencies quieted down--for the time anyhow. Still the night when she had worn those sweet peas remained a fragrant memory. She was recalled to the present by the violent gesture he made over the score on his work table.

"This damned thing is rotten," he said with angry conviction. "I knew it,--I knew it while I wrote it. It may be what they want, but it's rotten. Straight into the stove is where it ought to go."

"Is that what you're writing for Mrs. Wollaston?" she asked.

He nodded. "I was trying to make up