"Lucy," I said, "have you thought out anything since I saw you last?"
"I think in circles," she said; "one minute I"m for doing my duty to him, the next minute I can only think of myself. It _can"t_ be right for me to be his wife when I"ve stopped being--Oh, anything but awfully fond of him."
"You _are_ that?"
"Of course I am."
"It"s just about the saddest thing that ever came to my knowledge," I said; "and you won"t be angry if I say that I think you ought to stick to him and make the best of it?"
"You"re not a woman. No man understands a woman"s feeling of degradation at belonging to a man she doesn"t love. Oh, it"s an impossible situation. And I can"t see any way out. I _couldn"t_ take money from John, if I left him; I haven"t got a penny of my own. And I think it would kill me to go away from Jock and Hurry for long. And the other thing would just kill me."
"That," I said, "Lucy, I don"t believe."
"You don"t know. Not being a woman, you _can"t_ know."
"Men," I said, "and women too survive all sorts of things, mental and physical, that they think _can"t be_ survived. I read up the Spanish Inquisition once for a college essay, and the things they did to people were so bad that I was ashamed to put them in, and yet lots of those people survived and lived usefully to ripe old ages."
"Who did?"
Unheard by us, John had finished in the dining-room and had come to pay us a flying visit.
"People that were tortured by the Spanish Inquisition," I said.
"A lot they know about torture," said he. "They only did things to people that the same people could imagine doing back to them. Nothing is real torture if you can see your way to revenge it--if only in imagination. Torture is what you get through no fault of your own from somebody you"d not torture back for anything in the world. It"s what sons do to mothers, husbands to wives, wives to husbands. Isn"t that so, Lucy?"
"I suppose so," she said very quietly, her head bent close to her work.
"But what," exclaimed John, "has all this to do with the high cost of living?"
He would neither sit down nor stand still. He moved here and there, changing the positions of framed photographs and ash trays, lighting cigarettes, and throwing them into the fire. He had the pinched, hungry look of a man who is not sleeping well, and whose temperature is a little higher than normal.
"Were you in the Spanish War?" he asked me suddenly.
(At the moment I was thinking: "If you go on like this you"ll never win her back, you"ll only make matters worse!") I said: "In a way, but I didn"t see any fighting. I got mixed up in the Porto Rico campaign."
"I was with the Rough Riders," he said; "I"ve just been remembering what fun it all was. I wish you could go to a war whenever you wanted to, the way you can to a ball game."
Then as quickly as he had introduced war, he switched to a new subject.
"I want you to try some old Bourbon a man sent me."
He had crossed the room, quick as thought, and pushed a bell; when the waitress came he told her to bring a tray.
"Isn"t whiskey bad for you when you"re so nervous?" said Lucy quietly, and without looking up.
"I don"t know," said John, with a certain frolicking quality in his voice; "I"m trying to find out."
"What was that you were playing a while ago?" I asked. "The slow, peaceful, sad sort of thing."
"This?" And he whistled a few bars.
I nodded.
"I made it up as I went along," he said; "music"s like a language.
When a man"s heard a lot of the words and the idioms he can make a bluff at talking it; but I can only speak a few words. I"ve only got a child"s vocabulary. I can only say, "I"m hungry," or "I"m sleepy," or "I want a set of carpenter"s tools," or "Brown swiped my tennis bat and I"m going to punch his head," or "The little girl over the fence has bright blue eyes and throws a ball like a boy and climbs trees.""
He had to laugh himself at the idea of being able to express such things in musical terms, but when he had sponged up a long gla.s.s of very darkly mixed Bourbon and Apollinaris, the picture of the little girl over the fence must have been still in his mind, for having left us abruptly for the piano, he preluded and then began to improvise upon that theme. He talked rather than sang, but always in tune and with the clearest enunciation, and any amount of experience.
He began merrily, and in no time had us both laughing; I think the first air which he tortured to fit his unrhymed and unrhythmical words belonged once to Mozart, but I am not sure. It was made out of merriness, sunshine, and dew.
"The little girl over the fence, the fence Has bri-i-i-ight blue-ooo eyes And throws a ball like a boy, a boy, And cli-i-i-i-i-i-imbs trees."
He repeated in the minor, modulated into a more solemn key, and once more talked off the words. He left you with a slight feeling of anxiety. You began to be afraid that the little girl would fall out of the trees and hurt herself. But no, instead he grabbed something by the hair right out of a Beethoven adagio, and began to want that little girl with the blue eyes as a little girl with blue eyes has seldom been wanted before; she became Psyche, Trojan Helen, a lover"s dream; all that is most exquisite and to be desired in the world--and then suddenly he lost all hope of her and borrowed from Palestrina to tell about it, and the last time she climbed trees it was plump on up into Heaven that she climbed, and from h.e.l.l below, or pretty close to it, there arose the words "And climb trees" like a solemn ecclesiastical amen.
It was an astounding performance, almost demoniac in its cleverness and in its power to move the hearer.
Lucy"s eyes were filled with tears.
"I wish he wouldn"t," she said.
There was quite a long silence, but as we did not hear him moving about, he probably sat on at the piano, for presently, in a whisper, you may say, more to himself than to us, he sang that Scotch song, "Turn ye to me," which to my ear at least stands a head and shoulders taller and lovelier than any folk song in all the world, unless it"s that Norman sailor song that Chopin used in one of the Nocturnes.
"The waves are dancing merrily, merrily, Ho-ro, Whairidher, turn ye to me: The sea-birds are wailing, wearily, wearily, Horo Whairidher, turn ye to me.
"Hushed be thy moaning, love bird of the sea, Thy home on the rocks is a shelter to thee; Thy home is the angry wave, mine but the lonely grave, Horo Whairidher, turn ye to me."
Lucy rose abruptly and left the room. I could hear her whispering to him, pleading.
Surely he must have sung that song to her when she was only the little girl with blue eyes over the fence, and it must have had something to do with making her love him. But the qualities of his voice that could once make her heart beat and fire her with love for him could do so no more. He had left, poor fellow, only the power to torture her with remorse and make her cry.
XV
The next day I kept a riding engagement with Lucy, but she didn"t.
"She"s gone for a walk with John," said Evelyn, who had come out of the house to give me Lucy"s messages of regret and apology.
"Lucy gone walking!" I exclaimed. "Have the heavens fallen?"
"Sometimes I think they have," said Evelyn. "But you know more about that than I do."
"Know more about what?"
"Haven"t you noticed?"