The Whirligig of Time Part 54

"I shall receive a telegram calling me back to town to-morrow, in time for me to catch the evening train...."

She was so occupied with the ultimate meaning of his words that their immediate meaning escaped her. She raised her eyes in question.

"You're going away to-morrow? Why?"

"Yes. I prefer not to remain here and watch it going on under my very eyes. It's a silly prejudice, no doubt, but you must pardon it...."

He continued his pacing, keeping his eyes fixed on the floor in front of him. Occasionally he uttered a few sentences in the same cold, lifeless tone.

"It's all over now, at any rate. I had hoped we might be able to tide these things over through these first years, till we got old enough to stop caring about them, but I was wrong. You can't govern things like that.... I always had a theory that any two sensible people could get along together in marriage, even though they didn't care much about each other, if they made up their minds to take a reasonable point of view; but I was wrong there too. Marriage is a bigger thing than I thought. I was wrong all around....

"Just a year--not even that. I should have said it could go longer than that, even at the worst....

"It's all in the blood, I suppose--rotten, decadent blood, in both of you. I don't blame you, especially. Your father's daughter--I might have known. I suppose I oughtn't to blame your father much more--it's the curse of your whole civilization. Only it's hard to confine one's anger to civilizations in such cases....

"The strange part about you is that you gave no sign of it whatever beforehand. I had no suspicion, at all. I don't think any one could have told....

"There's just one thing I should like to suggest. I don't know whether it will be comprehensible to you, but I have a certain respect for my family name and a sort of desire to spare the members of the family as much as possible. So that, although you're perfectly free to act exactly as you wish, I should appreciate it if you--if you could suspend operations as long as you remain under my uncle's roof. Though it's just as you like, of course.

"I shall be in New York. You can let me know your plans there when you are ready. I suppose you'll want to sue, in which case it can't be done in New York state; you'll have to establish a residence somewhere else.

Or if you prefer to have me sue, all right. That would save time, of course.... Let me know what you decide.

"Well, we might as well go to bed, I suppose. It will be the last time...."

Beatrice watched him as he took off his coat and waistcoat and threw them over a chair and then attacked his collar and tie. Then she arose from where she sat and addressed him.

"I don't suppose there's any use in my saying anything. We might get quarreling again, and naturally you wouldn't believe me, anyway. I agree with you that it's impossible for us to live together any longer. But I can't forbear from telling you, James, that you've done me a great wrong. You've said things ... oh, you've said things so wrong to-night that it seems as if G.o.d himself--if there is a G.o.d--would speak from heaven and show you how wrong you are! But there's no use in mere human beings saying anything at a time like this....

"You've been a very wicked man to-night, James. May G.o.d forgive you for it."

She turned away with an air of finality and started to prepare for bed.

She hung up her evening wrap in the closet and walked over to her bureau. She took off what jewelry she wore and put it carefully away, and then she seemed to hesitate. She stood looking at her reflection in the mirror a moment, but found no inspiration there. She walked inconclusively across the room and then back. Finally she stopped near James, with her back toward him.

"It seems an absurd thing to ask," she said, "but would you mind? As you say, it's the last time...."

"Certainly," said James.

CHAPTER XII

A ROD OF IRON

It is all very well to be suddenly called back to town by telegram on important business, but suppose the business is wholly fict.i.tious--what are you going to do with yourself when you get there? Especially if you have your own reasons for not wanting Business to know that you have returned before the appointed time, and consequently are shy about appearing in clubs and places where it would be likely to get wind of your presence? And if, moreover, your apartment has been closed and all the servants sent off on a holiday?

That is a fair example of the mean way sordid detail has of encroaching on the big things of life and destroying what little pleasure we might take in their dramatic value. When he arrived in New York James had the chastened, exalted feeling of one who has just pa.s.sed a great and disagreeable crisis and got through with it, on the whole, very tolerably well. What he wanted most was to return to the routine of his old life and, so far as was possible, drown the nightmare recollection in a flood of work. Instead of which he found idleness and domestic inconvenience staring him in the face. He also saw that he was going to be lonely. He walked through the dark and empty rooms of his apartment and reflected what a difference even the mute presence of a servant would make. He longed whole-heartedly for Stodger--for Stodger since we last saw him has been promoted into manhood by nature and into full-fledged chauffeurhood--with the official appellation of McClintock, if you please--by James. With Stodger, who still retained jurisdiction over his suits and shoes, James was accustomed, when they were alone together, to throw off his role of employer and embark on technical heart-to-heart talks on differential gears and multiple-disc clutches and kindred intimate subjects. But Stodger was tasting the joys of leave of absence on full pay, James knew not where.

He sought at first to beguile the hours with reading. He selected a number of works he had always meant to read but never quite got around to: a novel or two of d.i.c.kens, one of Thackeray, one of Meredith, "The Origin of Species," Carlyle's "French Revolution," "The Principles of Political Economy" and "Tristram Shandy." Steadily his eyes sickened of print; by the time he came to Mill his brain refused to absorb and visions of the very things he wished most to be free from hovered obstinately over the pages. "Tristram Shandy" was even more unbearable; he conceived an insane dislike for those interminable, ineffectual old people and their terrestrial-minded creator. At last he flung the book into the fireplace and strode despairingly out into the streets.

Oh, Beatrice--would she never send him word, put things definitely in motion, in no matter what direction? Oh, this confounded brain of his; would it never stop trying to re-picture old scenes, revive dead feelings, animate unborn regrets? What had he done but what he should have done, what he could not help doing, what it had been written that he should do since the first moment when thoughts above those of a beast were put into man's brain? Oh, the curse of a brain that would not live up to its own laws, but continually kept flas.h.i.+ng those visions of outworn things across his eyes--not his two innocent physical eyes, which saw nothing but what was put before them, but that redoubtable, inescapable, ungovernable inward sight which, as he remembered some poet had said, was "the bliss of solitude." The bliss of solitude--how like a driveling a.s.s of a poet!...

The next day he gave up and went back to his office as usual, saying that he had returned from his vacation a few days ahead of time in order to transact some business that had come up unexpectedly. Just what the business was he did not explain; he was now the head of McClellan's New York branch and did not have to explain things.

So the hours between nine and five ceased to be an intolerable burden, and the hours from five till bedtime could be whiled away at the club in discussing the baseball returns. He could always find some one who was willing to talk about professional baseball. He remembered how he had once similarly talked golf with Harry....

That left only the night hours to be accounted for, and sleep accounted for most of them, of course. Sometimes. At other times sleep refused to come and nothing stood between him and the inmost thoughts of his brain, or worse, the thoughts that he did not think, never would think, as long as a brain and a will remained to him.... Such times he would always end by turning on the light and reading. They gave him a feeling like that of which he had spoken to Beatrice about being caught in a trap, deepened and intensified; a feeling to be avoided at any price.

At last he heard, not indeed from Beatrice, but from Aunt Selina.

"Beatrice arrives New York noon Thursday; for Heaven's sake do something," she telegraphed. James knew what that meant, and thanked Aunt Selina from the bottom of his heart. No scandal--nothing that would reflect on the family name! So Beatrice had determined not to accede to his last request; she was bent on rus.h.i.+ng madly into her Tommy's arms, perhaps at the very station itself? Oh, no, nothing of _that_ sort, if you please; he would be at the station himself to see to it.

It was extraordinary how much getting back to work had benefited him. He was no longer subject to the dreadful fits of depression that had made his idleness a torment. Only keep going, only have something to occupy hands and mind during every waking hour, and all would yet be well.

Beatrice and all that she implied had only to be kept out of his mind to be rendered innocuous; all that was needed to keep her out was a little will power, and he had plenty of that. As for the sleeping hours--well, he had come to have rather a dread of the night time. No doubt some simple medical remedy, however, would put that all right--sulphonal, or something of the sort. He would consult a doctor. No unprescribed drugs for him--no careless overdose, or anything of that sort, no indeed! The time had yet to come when James Wimbourne could not keep pace with the strong ones of the earth and walk with head erect under all the burdens that a malicious fate might heap upon him.

In such a vein as this ran his thoughts as he walked from his apartment to the station that Thursday morning. It was a cool day in early September; a fresh easterly breeze blew in from the Sound bringing with it the first hint of autumn and seeming to infuse fresh blood into his veins. As he walked down Madison Avenue even the familiar sounds of the city, the clanging of the trolley cars, the tooting of motor horns, the rumbling of drays, even the clatter of steam drills or rivet machines seemed like outward manifestations of the life he felt surging anew within him. Was it not indeed something very like a new life that was to begin for him to-day, this very morning? Not the kind of new life of which the poets babbled, no youthful dream, but something far solider and n.o.bler, a mature reconstruction, a courageous gathering together, or rather regathering--that made it all the finer--of the fragments of an outworn existence. That was what human life was, a succession of repatchings and rebuildings. He who rebuilt with the greatest promptness and courage and ingenuity was the best liver.

Viewed in this broad and health-bringing light the last months of his life appeared less of a failure than he had been wont to think. He became able to look back on this year of destiny-fighting as, if not actually successful, better than successful, since it led on to better things and gave him a chance to show his mettle, his power of reconstruction. He had made a mistake, no doubt; but he was willing to recognize it as such and do his best to rectify it. Beatrice and he were not cut out for team-mates in the business of destiny-fighting; it had become evident that they could both get on better alone. Well, at last they had come to the point of parting; to the point, he hoped, of being able to part like fellow-soldiers whose company is disbanded, in friends.h.i.+p and good humor, without recrimination or any of that detestable G.o.d-forgive-you business....

He wished the newsboys would not shout so loud; their shrill uncanny shrieks interrupted his line of thought, in spite of himself. It didn't matter if they were calling extras; he never bought extras. Or was it only a regular edition? They might be announcing the trump of doom for all one could understand.

It was too bad that Beatrice had not arrived at anything like his own state of sanity and calmness. This business of eloping--oh, it was so ludicrous, so amateuris.h.!.+ That was not the way to live. He hoped he might be able to make her see this. It would be easier, of course, if Tommy were not at the station; one could not tell what arrangements a woman in her condition might make. But he did not fear Tommy; there would be no scene. A few firm words from him and they would see things in their proper light. He pictured himself and Beatrice repairing sanely and amicably to a lawyer's office together;--"Please tell us the quickest and easiest way to be divorced...."

As he approached Forty-second Street the traffic grew heavier and noisier. He could not think properly now; watching for a chance to traverse the frequent cross streets took most of his attention. And those newsboys--! Why on earth should those newspaper fellows send out papers marked "Late Afternoon Edition" at half-past eleven in the morning? Oh, it was an extra, was it? A fire on the East Side, no doubt, two people injured--he knew the sort of thing. If those newspaper fellows would have the sense only to get out an extra when something _really_ important had happened somebody might occasionally buy them.

Seeing that he had plenty of time he walked slowly round to the Forty-second Street entrance instead of going in the side way. He observed the great piles of building and rebuilding that were going on in the neighborhood, and compared the reconstruction of the quarter to his own case. He wondered why they delayed in making the Park Avenue connecting bridge--such an integral part of the scheme. If _he_ had s.h.i.+lly-shallied like that, a nice mess he would have made of his life!

He gazed up at the great new front of the station and b.u.mped into a stentorian newsboy. Everywhere those confounded newsboys--!

He was actually in the station before he had any suspicion. There was about the usual number of people in the great waiting-room, but there seemed to be more hurrying than usual. He saw one or two people dart across the s.p.a.ce, and observed that they did not disappear into the train gates.... Had he or had he not caught the word "wreck" on one of those flaunting headlines in the street? He turned off suddenly to a news stand and bought a paper.

There it all was, in black and white--or rather red and white. Red letters, five inches high.

Train 64, the Maine Special, had run through an open switch and turned turtle somewhere near Stamford. Fifteen reported killed, others injured.

No names given.

The Maine Special. Beatrice's train.

He knew that he must devote all his efforts at this juncture to keep himself from thinking. Until he knew, that was. He did not even allow himself to name the thoughts he was afraid of giving birth to. Anxiety, hope, fear, premonition, horror, satisfaction, pity--he must put them all away from him. There was no telling what future horrors he might be led into if he gave way ever so little to any one of them. The one thing to do now was to _find out_.

This was not so easy. He went first to the bulletin board where the arrivals of trains were announced, and found a small and anxious-eyed crowd gazing at the few uninforming statements marked in white chalk.

There was nothing to be learned from them. He spoke to an official, who was equally reticent, and spoke vaguely of a relief train.

"Do you mean to say there's no way of finding out the names of those killed before the relief train comes in?" he asked.

"We can't tell you what we don't know!" replied the man, already too inured to such questions to show feeling of any sort. He then directed James to the office of the railroad press agent, on the eighth floor.

James started to ask another question, but was interrupted by a young woman who hurried up to the official. She held a little girl of seven or eight by the hand, and the eyes of both were streaming with tears. The sight struck James as odd in that cold, impersonal, schedule-run place, and he swerved as he walked off to look at them. He turned again abruptly and went his way, stifling an involuntary rise of a feeling which might have been very like envy, if he had allowed himself to think about it....

And no one else had even noticed the two.