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

said, "where I can--hold you. I can't let you go on like this. You can tell me the rest of it there."

She released herself from his hands by taking them in her own and pressing them for a moment tight. Then she let them go.

"I couldn't," she said. "I couldn't be comforted like that while I was telling you about him."

He understood instantly. "That's like you," he commented. "You're always like yourself, thank God." He walked away to the chair he had invited her to and stood behind it, gripping its padded leather back. "He wrote your brother a letter then." He had spoken, he thought, quietly and evenly enough, but the indignation he felt must have betrayed itself in his voice for she answered instantly:

"You mustn't be angry about that. He had to write to Rush, you see. Rush had been in his confidence about it all the while. Rush knew his hopes and his explanations. Rush knew of his coming yesterday, was waiting up at Wallace Hood's apartment for his news. Now, do you see how horrible it was? He couldn't tell Rush what I had said to him. There was nothing he could tell him. He couldn't even face him. He did the only thing I'd left for him to do."

March asked, "What has he done?"

"We don't know, exactly. Just gone away, I suppose. The letter was written about midnight from the University Club. He said he wasn't coming back to Hickory Hill. That he couldn't possibly come back. He'd arrange things, somehow, later. He told Rush not to try to find him nor make any sort of fuss, and to be very kind to me; not to question nor worry me."

She broke off there and looked intently up at him. In her eyes he thought he saw incredulity fighting against a dawning hope. "I wonder," she went breathlessly on, "if you can understand this, too. Can you see that, for him, the unbearable thing about it--was that it was ludicrous? The contrast between what he had believed me to be and--what I am?"

He interrupted sharply, with a frown of irritation, "Don't put it like that!"

"Well, then," she amended, "the contrast between his explanation of the way I had been treating him, and the true one?"

"That is a thing I think I can understand," he said. "It was a sort of--awakening of Don Quixote. To a fine sensitive boy nothing could give a sharper wrench than that.--I'm moving in the dark," he added. Yet he knew he was drawing near the light. The secret he had set out to discover was not very far away.

"You see well enough," she said. "Better than Rush, though I tried to explain it to him. He'd caught a surmise of the truth, too, I think, in New York, when he came back from France and brought me home. But he wouldn't look. Father wouldn't, either, once when I tried to tell him about it. It was too horrible to be thought,--let alone believed.--I don't quite see how I can have gone on believing it myself."

The look he saw in her eyes made him wonder how she could. He managed to hold his own gaze steady. It gave him a sense of somehow supporting her.

"But you," she said,--"you, of all people in the world, don't seem to feel that way about it. You were there--waiting for me--before I even tried to tell you. Oh, you do understand, don't you?"

"I think," he told her--and the smile that came with the words was spontaneous enough, though it did feel rather tremulous--"I think I could almost repeat the sentence you demolished young Stannard with in your own words. But can't you see why it doesn't demolish me? It's because I love you."

"So did he. So do father and Rush."

"Not you. Not quite you. Don't you see? It's just the thing I was trying to tell you a while ago. What they insist on loving is--oh, partly you, of course, but partly a sort of--projection of themselves that they call you, dress you out in, try to compel you to fit. One can fight hard to preserve an outlying bit of one's self like that. But there would be a limit I should think. How your brother, with a letter like that in his hands, could refuse to look at what you were trying to make him see ..."

"He had a theory, that began when we were in New York together as a sort of joke, that I was a case of shell-shock. So whenever there has been anything really uncomfortable to face, he has always had that to fall back upon."

A momentary outburst of anger escaped him. "You've been tortured!" he cried furiously. He reined in at once, however. "You've never, then," he went on quietly, "been able to tell the story to any one. I'm sure you didn't tell it to Graham Stannard. You didn't even try to."

She shook her head. The pitifulness of her, sitting there so spent, so white, blurred his vision again with sudden tears. But after he had disposed of them, he managed a smile and sat down comfortably in his easy chair.

"You couldn't find a better person than me to tell it to," he said.

"You know already," she protested. "At least, you know what it comes to."

"I know the brute fact," he admitted, "but that and the whole truth are seldom quite the same thing."

He saw the way her hands locked and twisted together and remembered with a heart-arresting pang, her half-choked cry, "Don't! Don't hurt them like that!" when his own had agonized in such a grip. But no caress of his could help her now. He held himself still in his chair and waited.

"The whole truth of this story isn't any--prettier than the brute fact. There weren't any extenuating circumstances."

Then she sat erect and faced him. He was amazed to see a flush of color come creeping into her cheeks. Her eyes brightened, the brows drew down a little, her voice steadied itself and the words came swiftly.

"I think I must make sure you understand that it isn't the sort of story that you usually find enveloping that particular brute fact. I wasn't deceived nor betrayed by anybody. There isn't anybody you can take as a villain. Just a nice, rather inarticulate boy, whom I met at a dance the evening before he went overseas."

She broke off there to ask him shortly, "When was it that you went over?"

"Not until September," he said, "when it looked like a very long chance if we ever got to the front at all. Of course, you know, we didn't. But this was a lot earlier, wasn't it?"

"The seventeenth of April," she said. "We'll never forget those weeks, any of us, who were in New York doing what we called war work, but it's hard not to feel that we weren't different persons somehow. I don't mean that to sound like making excuses. We were more our real selves perhaps than we will ever be again. Anyhow, we worked harder all day long, and never felt tired, and in the evening most of the people I knew went out a lot, to dinners and dances.

"We could always make ourselves believe, of course, that we were doing that to cheer up the men who were going to France--and were very likely never coming back. Like the English women one read about. The only thing that used to trouble me in those days was a perfectly scorching self-contempt that used to come when I realized that I was enjoying it all; enjoying the emotional thrill of it. I knew I was getting off cheap.

"I suppose I needn't have told you all that. You'd have understood it anyhow. But that was how I felt when I went to that dance. As if it would be a relief to do something--costly.

"It was a uniform dance as far as the men were concerned. We made ourselves, of course, as--attractive as we knew how. Somebody introduced this boy to me with just the look that said, 'Do be kind to him,' and that's what I set out, very resolutely and virtuously, to be. He couldn't talk much beyond monosyllables and he couldn't dance,--even with me. I mean, I've danced so much ..."

"I've seen you dance, my dear," he reminded her, and saw how, with a deep-drawn breath, the memory of that night at Hickory Hill came back to her.

"Don't," she gasped. "Let me go on." But it was the better part of a minute before she could.

"We sat out two or three dances together and then, when I might decently enough have passed him on to some one else with that same sort of explanatory look--I didn't. Partly because of the feeling I have told you about and partly because I was attracted to him. He was big and young and good-looking, and his voice--oh, one can't explain those things. It wasn't pure altruism. That's what you must see. And then he got up suddenly and said, 'Good-by.' It was early, you know, and I asked him why he was going. He said he wanted to get out of there. Rather savagely.

"I got up too and said I felt the same way about it. So he asked if he might 'see me home.' The dance was in the East Sixties. There had been a shower but it was clear then and warm. There weren't any taxis about and, anyhow, he didn't seem to think of looking for one, and we went over and took a Lexington Avenue car. When we turned at Twenty-third Street I said we'd get out and walk. He'd said hardly anything, but we had sat rather close in the car and he had been holding a fold of my cloak between his fingers.

"We went on down Lexington to Gramercy Park. There was shrubbery in flower inside the iron fence and some of the trees had been leafing out that day and the air was very still and sweet. We both stopped for a minute without saying anything and I slipped my hand farther through his arm and took his.

"He gave a sort of sob and said, 'You wouldn't do that if you knew about me.' I said, 'You'd better tell me and see.'

"We walked on again, around the park and across Twentieth Street and down Fifth Avenue. When we got to my door he hadn't told me.

"My flat was just the second story of an old made-over house. There was no one about, I mean, to stare or wonder, and I asked him to come in. When we were inside I looked at my watch and asked him what time he had to report. He said not until seven o'clock in the morning. He was going over detached. There was nothing but a hotel to go back to.

"If I'd asked him that question out on the sidewalk, and got that answer, I don't know whether I'd have asked him in or not.

"He just stood looking at me for a minute after telling me he hadn't anywhere to report that night. Then he turned away and sat down on the edge of my couch and bent his face down on his hands and began to talk. He told me what was the matter with him. Of course, the same thing must have tormented thousands of them,--the terror of being afraid. He felt pretty sure he was a coward.

"Mostly,