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

maddening to think about and after the performance went with him and his wife to supper so that it was well after midnight before she returned to the cottage.

It was an ineffable relief to find it dark. Her habit on warm nights was to sleep on the gloucester swing in the screened veranda and she made it her bed to-night, though beyond a short uneasy doze of two, she didn't sleep at all.

At half past eight or so, just after she had sat down to breakfast, she heard her father coming down the stairs. She tried to call to him but could command no voice and so waited, frozen, until he appeared in the doorway.

"I thought I heard you stirring down here and that it perhaps meant breakfast. Paula won't be down, I suppose, for hours. She fell asleep about four o'clock and has been sleeping quietly ever since."

This was exactly like Paula, of course. She was the vortex of the whole tempest, but when she had thoroughly exhausted the emotional possibilities of it she sank into peaceful slumber like a baby after a hard cry.

No wonder she was too much for these two Wollastons who sat now with dry throats and tremulous hands over the mockery of breakfast! Mary, although she knew, asked her father whether he wanted his coffee clear or with cream in it and having thus broken the spell, went on with a gasp:

"I'm glad Paula isn't coming down. It gives you a better chance to tell me just how you feel about my having interfered. I did run away last night. You guessed that, I suppose. But it wasn't to evade it altogether. My--whipping, you know."

It had an odd effect on both of them, this reference to her childhood; her hand moved round the table rim and covered his which rested on the edge of it.

"Did your mother ever punish you?" he asked. "Corporeally? It's my recollection that she did not. I was always the executioner. I doubt now if that was quite fair."

"Perhaps not," she asserted dubiously. "In general it isn't fair of course. It probably wasn't in the case of Rush. But with me,--I don't think I could have borne it to have mother beat me. It would have seemed an insufferable affront. I'd have hated her for it. But there was a sort of satisfaction in having you do it."

After another moment of silence she smiled and added, "I suppose a Freudian would carry off an admission like that to his cave and gnaw over it for hours."

He stared at her, shocked, incredulous. "What do you know about Freud?" he demanded.

"One couldn't live for two years within a hundred yards of Washington Square without knowing at least as much about it as that," she told him,--and was glad of the entrance of the maid with another installment of the breakfast. There was no more talk between them during the meal. But at the end of it she faced him resolutely.

"We must have this out, dad. And isn't now as good a time as any?"

He followed her out into the veranda but the sounds from the dining-room, where the maid had come in to clear away the breakfast, disturbed him so Mary suggested a walk.

"Get your hat and we'll go over to the lake. I know a nice place not far, an open field right at the edge of the bluff with one big tree to make it shady. At this hour of the morning we are sure to have it all to ourselves."

He said as they walked along, "I've no reproaches for you. Not this morning. I've thought over a lot of ground since four o'clock."

He said nothing more to the point until they reached the spot which Mary had selected as their destination--it lived up handsomely to all her promises--and settled themselves under the shade of the big tree.

"I suppose," he added then, "that I ought to forgive Whitney and Hood. Their intentions were the best and kindest, of course. But I find that harder to do."

He sat back against the trunk of the tree, facing out over the lake; she disposed herself cross-legged on the grass near by just within reaching distance. She offered him her cigarette case but he declined. Of late years, since his marriage to Paula, he had smoked very little. As a substitute, now, he picked up a forked bit of branch, and began whittling it.

"I'm as much to blame as they are," she said, presently. "More, really. Because, if I hadn't procrastinated-o-ut of cowardice, mostly,--until yesterday, when she was half-way over the edge, it might never have come to Maxfield Ware at all. After the situation had dramatized itself like that, there was only one thing she could do. Of course, they didn't foresee that five years' contract, any more than I did."

He nodded assent, though rather absently to this. "I'm not much interested in the abstract ethics of it," he said. "It's disputable, of course, how far any one can be justified in making a major interference in another's life; one that deprives him of the power of choice. That's what you have done to me--the three of you. If the premises are right, and the outcome prosperous, there's something to be said for it. But in this case ..."

"They aren't mistaken, are they, dad? Wallace and Mr. Whitney?--Or Doctor Steinmetz?"

"Why, it's reasonable to suppose that Whitney understands my financial condition better than I do. I mean that. It's not a sneer. But what he and Hood don't allow for is that I've never tried to make money. They've no idea what my earning power would be if I were to turn to and make that a prime consideration. A year of it would take me out of the woods, I think."

She waited, breathless, for him to deal with the third name. She was pretty well at one with Paula in the relative valuation she put upon her father's opinion and that of the throat and lung specialist.

"Oh, as for Steinmetz," John Wollaston said, after a pause, querulously, "he's a good observer. There's nothing to be said against him as a laboratory man. But he has the vice of all German scientists; he doesn't understand imponderables. Never a flash of intuition about him. He managed to intimidate Darby into agreeing with him. Neither of them takes my recuperative powers into account."

He seemed to feel that this wasn't a very strong line to take and the next moment he conceded as much.

"But suppose they were right," he flashed round at her. "Am I not still entitled to my choice? I've lived the greater part of my life. I've pulled my weight in the boat. It should be for me to choose whether I spend the life I have left in two years or in twenty. If they want to call that suicide, let them. I've no religion that's real enough to make a valid argument against my right to extinguish myself if I choose."

She wasn't shocked. It was characteristic of their talks together, this free range among ethical abstractions, especially on his part.

"You act on the other theory though," she pointed out to him. "Think of the people you've patched together just so that they can live at most another wretched year or two."

"That's a different thing," he said. "Or rather it comes to the same thing. The question of shortening one's life is one that nobody has a right to decide except for himself."

Then he asked abruptly. "What sort of person is Maxfield Ware?"

She attempted no palliations here.

"He kissed me last night," she said, "taking his cigar out of his mouth for the purpose. He's not a sort of person I can endure or manage. Paula hates him as much as I do, but she can manage him. He'd never try to kiss her like that."

"Oh, God!" cried John. "It's intolerable." He flung away his stick, got to his feet and walked to the edge of the bluff. "Think of her working, traveling,--living almost,--with a man like that! You say she can manage him; that she can prevent him from trying to make love to her. Well, what does that mean, if you're right, but that she--understands him; his talk; his ideas; his point of view. You can't make yourself intelligible to a man like that; she can. It's defilement to meet his mind anywhere--any angle of it. She's given him carte blanche, she says, to manage the publicity for her. Do you realize what that means? He's licensed to try to make the public believe anything that he thinks would heighten their interest in her. That she dresses indecently; that she's a frivolous extravagant fool; that she has lovers. You know how that game is played."

Mary did know. She ran over a list of the great names and opposite every one of them there sprang into her mind the particular bit of vulgar reclame that had been in its day some press agent's masterpiece. She was able further to see that Paula would regard the moves of this game with a large-minded tolerance which would be incomprehensible to John. After all, that was the way to take it. If you were a real luminary, not just a blank white surface, all the mud that Mr. Maxfield Ware could splash wouldn't matter. You burnt it off. None of those great names was soiled.

She tried to say something like this to her father, but didn't feel sure that she quite had his attention. He did quiet down again however and resumed his seat at the foot of the tree. Presently he said:

"She's doing it for me. Because my incompetence has forced it upon her. She'd have taken the other thing; had really chosen it." Then without a pause, but with a new intensity he shot in a question. "That's true, isn't it? She meant what she said over the telephone?" As Mary hesitated over her answer he added rather grimly, "You can be quite candid about it. I don't know which answer I want."

"She meant every word she said over the telephone," Mary assured him. "You couldn't doubt that if you had seen her as I did afterward."

She didn't pretend though that this was the complete answer. The reflective tone in which she spoke made it clear that there was more to it than that.

"Go on," John said, "tell me the rest of it. I think, perhaps, you understand her better than I do."

Mary took her time about going on and she began a little doubtfully. "I always begin by being unjust to Paula," she said. "That's my instinct, I suppose, reproaching her for not doing what she would do if she were like me. But afterward when I think her out, I believe I understand her pretty well."

"Paula exaggerates," she went on after another reflective pause. "She must see things large in order to move among them in a large way. Her gestures, those of her mind I mean, are--sweeping. If she weren't so good-natured, our--hair-splitting ways would annoy her. Then it's necessary for her to feel that she's--conquering something."

That last word was barely audible and the quality of the silence which followed it drew John Wollaston's gaze which had been straying over the lake, around to the speaker. She had been occupying her hands while she talked, collecting tiny twigs and acorn cups that happened to be within reach but now she was tensely still and paler