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

at her word and plunged into the study of his score.

She found herself a novel and managed, for five minutes or so, to pretend to read. Then she flung it aside and drifted over to the piano bench and after gazing moodily a while at the keyboard, began in a fragmentary way to play bits of nothing that came into her head. But she stopped herself short in manifest contrition when, happening to look around at him, she saw a knot of baffled concentration in his forehead.

"Of course, you can't read if I do that," she said. "I'm sorry." Then under cover of the same interruption, "How did John look when you saw him this morning? Like a wreck? What time was it, anyway? It must have been frightfully early that he left here because I waked as soon as it was really light and he was gone by then."

"I don't know that he looked particularly a wreck," March said. "Not any worse, I mean, than he looked out at Hickory Hill the day you opened the season here."

"He didn't say anything about me, did he?" she asked.

"No," March said, "I don't think he did."

"I suppose you'd remember it if he'd happened to tell you that he loathed and hated me and never wanted to see me again." Then she rose and went over to the opposite side of his little table and leaning down spread her hands out over his score.

"Oh, I know I said I wouldn't bother, but do stop thinking about this and talk to me for a minute. We're having--we're having a perfectly hideous time. He and I. We've been fighting like cat and dog for four days. I don't exactly know what it's all about, except that it seems we hate each other and can't go on. You've got to tell me what to do. It all started with you anyway. With the time you brought around those Whitman songs.--That was the day Mary came home from New York, too," she added.

"All right," he said, shutting down the cover upon his manuscript, "then Mary and I will try to patch you up. That is, if we haven't already done it."

Her face darkened. "Don't try to talk the way they do," she commanded. "I'm not intelligent enough to take hints. Do you mean that the whole trouble is that I'm jealous of Mary? And that now she's going to marry you I'll have nothing to be jealous of? Well, you're wrong both ways. There's more to it than that. And that isn't going to stop just because she's marrying you. She'll always be there for him. And he'll be there for her. You'll find that out before you've gone far."

He didn't seem disposed to dispute this, nor to be much perturbed about it, either. He annoyed her by saying, "Well, if it's a permanent fact, like snow in February, what's the good of taking it so hard?"

"You can go south in February," she retorted. Then she went on, "I want to know if you don't think I've a right to be jealous of her. I'd saved his life. He admitted that. But when we went south, afterward, he simply didn't want me around. Sent me home pretending I'd be wanted for rehearsals. And then he sent for her. They spent a week together--talking! As far as that goes, they could have done it just as well if I'd been there. They can talk right over my head and I never know what it's all about. Wait till they begin doing that with you! I don't suppose they will though. You're a talker, too. He told her things he'd never told me-about his money troubles. What he said to me was that he didn't want to stand in the way of my career. He left her to tell me the truth about it, later,--after I'd told him I didn't want any career--though I'd just been offered the best chance I ever had. And then, when he came and found that I'd done--for him--what he'd been trying to make me do for myself, he was furious. We fought all night about it. And when I came down the next morning, ready to do anything he wanted me to, he'd wandered off with Mary. To talk me over with her again.--Tell her some more things, I suppose, that I didn't know about."

March had nothing to interpose here, it seemed, in Mary's defense, for her pause gave him ample opportunity to do so. He merely nodded reflectively and loaded and lighted his pipe.

"Well," she demanded presently, "can you see now that there's something more to it than jealousy? Whatever I try to do, he fights. When I wanted to begin singing again last spring, he fought that. And when I wanted to give it all up, after he'd so nearly died, he wouldn't let me. And when I'd refused the best chance I'd ever had, for him, and then changed around and accepted it because of him, he seemed to hate me for doing that. And he simply boiled when I told him I'd gone and got the money, myself, from Wallace Hood."

"Yes," March said, so decisively that he startled her, "I know all about it up to there. That was Thursday afternoon, wasn't it? Go on from then."

The interruption disconcerted her. "There isn't much more--to tell," she went on, but a good deal less impetuously. "Except that we fought and fought and fought. About eight o'clock that night I said I was going to the park to see the performance;--just to get a rest from talking. Mr. Eckstein was there and the Williamsons and James Wallace, so I asked them all to come home with us. And Fournier and LaChaise, too. And we got on your opera and LaChaise played part of it and then I read a lot of it with Fournier. So they didn't go home till after three. John thought I was keeping them there in order not to be left alone with him.--Well, what was the good of talking, anyhow? We did get started again on Friday, though; all day long. And Friday night we--made up, in a way. At least, I thought we did.

"Well, and then yesterday morning Rush telephoned out from town and said he thought John ought to come in to see Mary. She wasn't very well. I told him to go if he liked. I was feeling perfectly awful, yesterday, myself--and I was billed for _Thais_ last night. There isn't another soprano up here who wouldn't have cancelled it, feeling the way I did. But I told John that if he thought Mary needed him more than I did, he'd better go.--I wish he had gone. After he'd telephoned to say he wasn't coming--he'd talked to Mary herself, that time--he kept getting colder and gloomier and more--unendurable from hour to hour. And after the performance, we had the most horrible fight of all. He told me I had kept him away from Mary on purpose,--because I was jealous of her. He said he could never forgive himself for the way he'd treated her--in order to curry favor with me. And he said that the first thing in the morning he was going to her. That's all.--Oh, well, I said a few things to him, too. Do you wonder?"

By way of a flourish, she flashed to her feet again at this conclusion (she'd been up and down half a dozen times in the course of her appeal to him as jury), and walked away to a window. But after the silence had spun itself out to the better part of a minute, she whipped round upon him.

"Have you been listening to a word I've said?" she demanded.

"Yes," he said, but with the contradictory air of fetching himself back from a long way off. "Truly! I've listened to every word. And I don't wonder a bit."

"Don't wonder at what?"

"That you said a few things to him, too. You've got a valid grievance, it seems to me. You couldn't be blamed for quarreling with him over it as bitterly as possible."

She barely heeded the words. They never did mean much to Paula. But his look and his tone reached her, and stung.

"Look here!" she said with sudden intensity. "Before we go any farther, I want to know this. Did Mary really need John, yesterday?"

She saw him turn pale and she had to wait two or three long breaths for her answer. But it came evenly enough at last.

"I happened to turn up instead. And she's perfectly all right, to-day."

Her eyes filled with tears. She turned forlornly away from him and dropped down upon a settee. "You hate me, too, now, I suppose. As well as he."

He sat down beside her and laid a hand upon her shoulder. "My dear," he said--and his own voice had a break of tenderness in it,--"I couldn't hate any one to-day if I wanted to. And I never could want to hate you. If there's anything I can do to help with John Wollaston.... But you see, if you want to keep your grievance you don't need any help. Nobody can take it away from you. It's only if you want to get rid of it--because it's making you beastly unhappy, no matter how valid it is--that you need any help from me or any one else. If that's what you want, I'll take a shot at writing you a prescription."

"Go crawling back to him on my knees, I suppose," she said in a tone not quite so genuinely resentful as she felt it ought to be. "And ask him to forgive me. What's the good of that when he doesn't love me?--Oh, of course I know he does--in a way."

His hand dropped absently from her shoulder. After a thoughtful moment he sprang up and took a turn of the room. "Do you know," he said, halting before her, "'in a way' is the only way there is. The only way any two people ever do love each other. That's what makes half the trouble, I believe. Trying to define it as if it were a standard thing. Like sterling silver; so many and so many hundredths per cent. pure. Love's whatever the personal emotion is that draws two people together. It may be anything. It may make them kind to each other, or it may make them nag each other into the mad-house, or it may make them shoot each other dead. It's probably never exactly the same thing between any two pairs of people..."

"Don't talk nonsense," she said petulantly.

"I'm not a bit sure it's nonsense," he persisted. "I only just thought of it, but I believe I've got on to something. Well, if I'm right, then the problem is to adjust that emotion to your life, or your life to that emotion, in such a way that the thing will work. There aren't any rules. There can't be any. It's a matter of--well, that's the word--adjustment."

She could not see that this was helping her much. It was not at all the line she'd projected for him. Yet she was finding it hard not to feel less tragic. She had even caught herself, just now, upon the brink of being amused. "Wait till you've tried to adjust something, as you say, with John, and have had him tell you what you think until you believe you do. When he's really being perfectly unreasonable all the while."

"Of course," March observed with the air of one making a material concession, "he is a good