Together Part 43

"Don't worry, Larry! No immediate scandal. I haven't any one in view, and living as I do it isn't likely that I shall be tempted by some knightly or idiotic man, who wants to run away with a middle-aged woman and three children. I am anch.o.r.ed safely--at any rate as long as dad lives and your mother, and the children need my good name. Oh!" she broke off suddenly; "don't let us talk any more about it!" ...

Leaning her head on her hands, she looked into the fire, and murmured to herself as if she had forgotten Larry's presence:--

"G.o.d! why are we so blind, so blind,--and our feet caught in the net of life before we know what is in our souls!"

For she realized that when she said she was middle-aged and anch.o.r.ed, it was but the surface truth. At thirty, with three children, she was more the woman, more capable of love, pa.s.sion, understanding, devotion--more capable of giving herself wholly and greatly to a mate--than any girl could be. The well of life still poured its flood into her! Her husband could never know that agony of longing, those arms stretched out to--what? When would this torture of defeated capacity be ended--when had G.o.d set the term for her to suffer!

In the black silence that had fallen between them, Pole betook himself to the club, as his wife had suggested, for the consolation of billiards and talk among sensible folk, "who didn't take life so d.a.m.ned hard." In the intervals of these distractions his mind would revert to what had pa.s.sed between him and his wife that evening. Margaret's last remarks comforted him somewhat. Nothing of a scandalous or public demonstration of her feeling about her marriage was imminent. Nevertheless, his pride was hurt.

In spite of the fact that he had suspected for a long time that his wife was cold,--was not "won,"--he had hitherto travelled along in complacent egotism. "They were a fairly happy couple" or "they geed as well as most,"

as he would have expressed it. He had not suspected that Margaret might feel the need of more than that. To-night he had heard and understood the truth,--and it was a blow. Deep down in his masculine heart he felt that he had been unjustly put in the wrong, somehow. No woman had the right--no wife--to say without cause that having thought better of the marriage bargain she had "taken herself back." There was something preposterous in the idea. It was due to the modern fad of a woman's reading all sorts of stuff, when her mind was inflammable. He recognized that his wife was the more important, the stronger person of the two,--that was the trouble with American women (Larry always made national generalizations when he wished to express a personal truth)--they knew when they were strong,--felt their oats. They needed to be "tamed."

But Larry was aware that he was not fitted for the task of woman-tamer, and moreover it should have been begun long before this.

So having won his game of billiards Larry had a drink, which made him even more philosophical. "Margaret is all right," he said to himself. "She was strung up to-night,--something made her go loose. But she'll come around,--she'll never do the other thing!" Yet in spite of a second whiskey and soda before starting for home, he was not absolutely convinced of this last statement.

What makes a man like Larry Pole content to remain the master of the fort merely in name, when the woman has escaped him in spirit? Why will such men as he live on for years, aye and get children, with women, who do not even pretend to love them?

Meanwhile the wife sat there before the fire, her reading forgotten, thinking, thinking. She had said more than she herself knew to be in her heart. For one lives on monotonously, from day to day, unresolved, and then on occasion there flame forth unsuspected ideas, resolves. For the soul has not been idle.... It was true that their marriage was at an end. And it was not because of her husband's failures, his follies,--not the money mistakes. It was himself,--the petty nature he revealed in every act. For women like Margaret Pole can endure vice and folly and disappointment, but not a petty, trivial, chattering biped that masquerades as Man.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

IN the weeks that followed the accident Margaret Pole saw much of Falkner.

The engineer would come up the hill to the old house late in the afternoon after his work, or ride up on his bicycle in the morning on his way to the dam he was building. Ned--"the Little Man" as Falkner called him--came to expect this daily visit as one of his invalid rights. Several times Falkner stayed to dinner; but he bored Larry, who called him "a Western bounder,"

and grumbled, "He hasn't anything to say for himself." It was true that Falkner developed chronic dumbness in Larry's conversational presence. But Margaret seemed to like the "bounder." She discovered that he carried in his pocket a volume of verse. An engineer who went to his job these days with a poetry book in his coat pocket was not ordinary, as she remarked to her husband....

Falkner's was one of those commonplace figures to be seen by the thousands in an American city. He dressed neither well nor ill, as if long ago the question of appearances had ceased to interest him, and he bought what was necessary for decency in the nearest shop. His manners, though brusque, indicated that he had always been within that vague line which marks off the modern "gentleman." His face, largely covered by beard and mustache, was pale and thoughtful, and his eyes were tired, usually dull. He was merely one of the undistinguished units in the industrial army. Obviously he had not "arrived," had not pushed into the circle of power. Some lack of energy, or natal unfitness for the present environment? Or was he inhibited by a twist of fate, needing an incentive, a spur?

At any rate the day when Margaret met him, the day when he had brought her boy home in his arms, the book of life seemed closed and fastened for him forever. The fellow-units in the industrial scheme in which he had become fixed, might say of him,--"Yes, a good fellow, steady, intelligent, but lacks push,--he'll never get there." Such are the trite summaries of man among men. Of all the inner territory of the man's soul, which had resolved him in its history to what he was, had left him this negative unit of life, his fellows were ignorant, as man must be of man. They saw the Result, and in the rough arithmetic of life results are all that count with most people.

But the woman--Margaret,--possessing her own hidden territory of soul existence, had divined more, even in that first tragic moment, when he had borne her maimed child into the house and laid his burden tenderly on the lounge. As he came and went, telephoning, doing the little that could be done, she saw more than the commonplace figure, clothed in ready-made garments; more than the dull, bearded face, the strong, thin hands, the rumpled hair. Something out of that vast beyond which this stranger had in common with her had spoken through the husk, even then....

And it had not ended there, as it would have ended, had Falkner been the mere "bounder" Larry saw. It was Falkner to whom the mother first told the doctors' decision about the boy. Certain days impress their atmosphere indelibly; they have being to them like persons, and through years the odor, the light, the sense of their few hours may be recalled as vividly as when they were lived. This May day the birds were twittering beside the veranda where Margaret was reading to the Little Man, when Falkner came up the drive. The long windows of the house were opened to admit the soft air, for it was already summer. Margaret was dressed in a black gown that relieved the pallor of her neck and face like the dark background of an old portrait. As the boy called, "There's big Bob!" she looked up from her book and smiled. Yet in spite of the placid scene, the welcoming smile, Falkner knew that something had happened,--something of moment. The three talked and the birds chattered; the haze of the gentle brooding day deepened. Far away above the feathery treetops, which did their best to hide the little houses, there was the blue line of sea, gleaming in the sun. It seemed to Falkner after the long day's work the very spot of Peace, and yet in the woman's controlled manner there was the something not peace. When Falkner rose to go, Margaret accompanied him to the steps.

"It's like the South to-day, all this sun and windless air. You have never been in the South? Some days I ache for it."

In the full light she seemed a slight, worn figure with a blanched face.

"Bring me my puppy, please, Bob!" the child called from his couch. "He's in the garden."

Falkner searched among the flower-beds beneath the veranda and finally captured the fat puppy and carried him up to the boy, who hugged him as a girl would a doll, crooning to him. Margaret was still staring into s.p.a.ce.

"What has happened?" Falkner asked.

She looked at him out of her deep eyes, as if he might read there what had happened. They descended the steps and walked away from the house.

"He hears so quickly," she explained; "I don't want him to know yet."

So they kept on down the drive.

"Dr. Rogers was here this morning.... He brought two other doctors with him.... There is no longer any doubt--it is paralysis of the lower limbs.

He will never walk, they think."

They kept on down the drive, Falkner looking before him. He knew that the woman was not crying, would never betray her pain that watery way; but he could not bear to see the misery of those eyes.

"My father the Bishop has written me ... spiritual consolation for Ned's illness. Should I feel thankful for the chastening to my rebellious spirit administered to me through my poor boy? Should I thank G.o.d for the lash of the whip on my stubborn back?"

Falkner smiled.

"My father the Bishop is a good man, a kind man in his way, yet he never considered my mother--he lived his own life with his own G.o.d.... It would surprise him if he knew what I thought about G.o.d,--_his_ G.o.d, at least."...

Falkner looked at her at last, and they stopped. Afterwards he knew that he already loved Margaret Pole. He, too, had divined that the woman, stricken through her child, was essentially alone in the world, and in her hungry eyes lay the story of the same dreary road over which he had pa.s.sed. And these two, defeated ones in the riotous world of circ.u.mstance, silently, instinctively held out hands across the void and looked at each other with closed lips.

Among the trees the golden haze deepened, and the birds sang. Down below in the village sounded the deep throbs of an engine: the evening train had come from the city. It was the only disturbing note in the peace, the silence. The old house had caught the full western sun, and its dull red bricks glowed. On the veranda the small boy was still caressing the puppy.

"Mother!" a thin voice sounded. Margaret started.

"Good-by," Falkner said. "I shall come to-morrow."

At the gate he met Pole, lightly swinging a neat green bag, his gloves in his hand. Larry stopped to talk, but Falkner, with a short, "Pleasant afternoon," kept on. Somehow the sight of Pole made the thing he had just learned all the worse.

Thus it happened that in the s.p.a.ce of a few weeks Margaret knew Falkner more intimately than Isabelle had ever known him or ever could know him.

Two beings meeting in this illusive, glimmering world of ours may come to a ready knowledge of each other, as two travellers on a dark road, who have made the greater part of the stormy journey alone. It would be difficult to record the growth of that inner intimacy,--so much happening in wordless moments or so much being bodied forth in little words that would be as meaningless as newspaper print. But these weeks of the child's invalidism, there was growing within them another life that no one shared or would have understood. When Larry observed, "That bounder is always here," Margaret did not seem to hear. Already the food that the "bounder" had given her parched self was too precious to lose. She had begun to live again the stifled memories, the life laid away,--to talk of her girlhood, of her Virginia hills, her people.

And Falkner had told her something of those earlier years in the Rockies, when he had lived in the world of open s.p.a.ces and felt the thrill of life, but never a word of what had pa.s.sed since he had left the canons and the peaks. Sometimes these days there was a gleam in his dark eyes, a smile on the bearded lips that indicated the reopening of the closed book once more.

His fellow-units in the industrial world might not see it; but Margaret felt it. Here was a human being pressed into the service of the machine and held there, at pay, powerless to extract himself, sacrificed. And she saw what there was beneath the mistake; she felt the pioneer blood, like her own, close to the earth in its broad s.p.a.ces, living under the sky in a new land. She saw the man that should be, that once was, that must be again!

And in this world of their other selves, which had been denied them, these two touched hands. They needed little explanation.

Rarely Margaret spoke of her present life, and then with irony, as if an inner and unsentimental honesty compelled utterance: "You see," she remarked once when her husband called her, "we dress for dinner because when we started in New York we belonged to the dining-out cla.s.s. If we didn't keep up the habit, we should lose our self-respect.... My neck is thin and I don't look well in evening dress. But that makes no matter....

We have prayers on Sunday morning; religion is part of the substantial life."...

Conny had said once, hearing Margaret rail like this: "She ought to make a better bluff, or get out,--not guy old Larry like that; it isn't decent, embarra.s.ses one so. You can't guy him, too."...

But Falkner understood how the acid of her daily life eating into her had touched, at these times, a sensitive nerve and compelled such self-revelations.

It was Falkner who first spoke to the Poles about Dr. Renault. In some way he had heard of the surgeon and learned of the wonderful things he had done.

"Anyhow it is worth while seeing him. It is best to try everything."

"Yes," Margaret a.s.sented quickly; "I shall not give up--never!"