If you should look through the files of old magazines for the first

years of the present century you would find, sandwiched in between the

stories of Richard Harding Davis and Frank Norris and others long

since dead, the work of one Jeffrey Curtain: a novel or two, and

perhaps three or four dozen short stories. You could, if you were

interested, follow them along until, say, 1908, when they suddenly

disappeared.

 

When you had read them all you would have been quite sure that here

were no masterpieces--here were passably amusing stories, a bit out of

date now, but doubtless the sort that would then have whiled away a

dreary half hour in a dental office. The man who did them was of good

intelligence, talented, glib, probably young. In the samples of his

work you found there would have been nothing to stir you to more than

a faint interest in the whims of life--no deep interior laughs, no

sense of futility or hint of tragedy.

 

After reading them you would yawn and put the number back in the

files, and perhaps, if you were in some library reading-room, you

would decide that by way of variety you would look at a newspaper of

the period and see whether the Japs had taken Port Arthur. But if by

any chance the newspaper you had chosen was the right one and had

crackled open at the theatrical page, your eyes would have been

arrested and held, and for at least a minute you would have forgotten

Port Arthur as quickly as you forgot Château Thierry. For you would,

by this fortunate chance, be looking at the portrait of an exquisite

woman.

 

Those were tie days of "Florodora" and of sextets, of pinched-in

waists and blown-out sleeves, of almost bustles and absolute ballet

skirts, but here, without doubt, disguised as she might be by the

unaccustomed stiffness and old fashion of her costume, was a butterfly

of butterflies. Here was the gayety of the period--the soft wine of

eyes, the songs that flurried hearts, the toasts and tie bouquets, the

dances and the dinners. Here was a Venus of the hansom, cab, the

Gibson girl in her glorious prime. Here was...

 

...here was you. Find by looking at the name beneath, one Roxanne

Milbank, who had been chorus girl and understudy in "The Daisy Chain,"

but who, by reason of an excellent performance when the star was

indisposed, had gained a leading part.

 

You would look again--and wonder. Why you had never heard of her. Why

did her name not linger in popular songs and vaudeville jokes and

cigar bands, and the memory of that gay old uncle of yours along with

Lillian Russell and Stella Mayhew and Anna Held? Roxanne

Milbank-whither had she gone? What dark trap-door had opened suddenly

and swallowed her up? Her name was certainly not in last Sunday's

supplement on the list of actresses married to English noblemen. No

doubt she was dead--poor beautiful young lady--and quite forgotten.

 

I am hoping too much. I am having you stumble on Jeffrey Curtains's

stories and Roxanne Milbank's picture. It would be incredible that you

should find a newspaper item six months later, a single item two

inches by four, which informed the public of the marriage, very

quietly, of Miss Roxanne Milbank, who had been on tour with "The Daisy

Chain," to Mr. Jeffrey Curtain, the popular author. "Mrs. Curtain," it

added dispassionately, "will retire from the stage."

 

It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming;

she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible. Like two floating logs

they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together. Yet had

Jeffrey Curtain kept at scrivening for twoscore years he could not

have put a quirk into one of his stories weirder than the quirk that

came into his own life. Had Roxanne Milbank played three dozen parts

and filled five thousand houses she could never have had a role with

more happiness and more despair than were in the fate prepared for

Roxanne Curtain.

 

For a year they lived in hotels, travelled to California, to Alaska,

to Florida, to Mexico, loved and quarrelled gently, and gloried in the

golden triflings of his wit with her beauty--they were young and

gravely passionate; they demanded everything and then yielded

everything again in ecstasies of unselfishness and pride. She loved

the swift tones of his voice and his frantic, if unfounded jealousy.

He loved her dark radiance, the white irises of her eyes, the warm,

lustrous enthusiasm of her smile.

 

"Don't you like her?" he would demand rather excitedly and shyly.

"Isn't she wonderful? Did you ever see--"

 

"Yes," they would answer, grinning. "She's a wonder. You're lucky."

 

The year passed. They tired of hotels. They bought an old house and

twenty acres near the town of Marlowe, half an hour from Chicago;

bought a little car, and moved out riotously with a pioneering

hallucination that would have confounded Balboa.

 

"Your room will be here!" they cried in turn.

 

--And then:

 

"And my room here!"

 

"And the nursery here when we have children."

 

"And we'll build a sleeping porch--oh, next year."

 

They moved out in April. In July Jeffrey's closest friend, Harry

Cromwell same to spend a week--they met him at the end of the long

lawn and hurried him proudly to the house.

 

Harry was married also. His wife had had a baby some six months before

and was still recuperating at her mother's in New York. Roxanne had

gathered from Jeffrey that Harry's wife was not as attractive as

Harry--Jeffrey had met her once and considered her--"shallow." But

Harry had been married nearly two years and was apparently happy, so

Jeffrey guessed that she was probably all right.

 

"I'm making biscuits," chattered Roxanne gravely. "Can you wife make

biscuits? The cook is showing me how. I think every woman should know

how to make biscuits. It sounds so utterly disarming. A woman who can

make biscuits can surely do no----"

 

"You'll have to come out here and live," said Jeffrey. "Get a place

out in the country like us, for you and Kitty."

 

"You don't know Kitty. She hates the country. She's got to have her

theatres and vaudevilles."

 

"Bring her out," repeated Jeffrey. "We'll have a colony. There's an

awfully nice crowd here already. Bring her out!"

 

They were at the porch steps now and Roxanne made a brisk gesture

toward a dilapidated structure on the right.

 

"The garage," she announced. "It will also be Jeffrey's writing-room

within the month. Meanwhile dinner is at seven. Meanwhile to that I

will mix a cocktail."

 

The two men ascended to the second floor--that is, they ascended

half-way, for at the first landing Jeffrey dropped his guest's

suitcase and in a cross between a query and a cry exclaimed:

 

"For God's sake, Harry, how do you like her?"

 

"We will go up-stairs," answered his guest, "and we will shut the

door."

 

Half an hour later as they were sitting together in the library

Roxanne reissued from the kitchen, bearing before her a pan of

biscuits. Jeffrey and Harry rose.

 

"They're beautiful, dear," said the husband, intensely.

 

"Exquisite," murmured Harry.

 

Roxanne beamed.

 

"Taste one. I couldn't bear to touch them before you'd seen them all

and I can't bear to take them back until I find what they taste like."

 

"Like manna, darling."

 

Simultaneously the two men raised the biscuits to their lips, nibbled

tentatively. Simultaneously they tried to change the subject. But

Roxanne undeceived, set down the pan and seized a biscuit. After a

second her comment rang out with lugubrious finality:

 

"Absolutely bum!"

 

"Really----"

 

"Why, I didn't notice----"

 

Roxanne roared.

 

"Oh, I'm useless," she cried laughing. "Turn me out, Jeffrey--I'm a

parasite; I'm no goal----"

 

Jeffrey put his arm around her.

 

"Darling, I'll eat your biscuits."

 

"They're beautiful, anyway," insisted Roxanne.

 

"They're-they're decorative," suggested Harry.

 

Jeffrey took him up wildly.

 

"That's the word. They're decorative; they're masterpieces. We'll use

them."

 

He rushed to the kitchen and returned with a hammer and a handful of

nails.

 

"We'll use them, by golly, Roxanne! We'll make a frieze out of them."

 

"Don't!" wailed Roxanne. "Our beautiful house."

 

"Never mind. We're going to have the library repapered in October.

Don't you remember?"

 

"Well----"

 

Bang! The first biscuit was impaled to the wall, where it quivered for

a moment like a live thing.

 

Bang!...

 

When Roxanne returned, with a second round of cocktails the biscuits

were in a perpendicular row, twelve of them, like a collection of

primitive spear-heads.

 

"Roxanne," exclaimed Jeffrey, "you're an artist! Cook?--nonsense! You

shall illustrate my books!"

 

During dinner the twilight faltered into dusk, and later it was a

starry dark outside, filled and permeated with the frail gorgeousness

of Roxanne's white dress and her tremulous, low laugh.

 

--Such a little girl she is, thought Harry. Not as old as Kitty.

 

He compared the two. Kitty--nervous without being sensitive,

temperamental without temperament, a woman who seemed to flit and

never light--and Roxanne, who was as young as spring night, and summed

up in her own adolescent laughter.

 

--A good match for Jeffrey, he thought again. Two very young people,

the sort who'll stay very young until they suddenly find themselves

old.

 

Harry thought these things between his constant thoughts about Kitty,

He was depressed about Kitty. It seemed to him that she was well

enough to come back to Chicago and bring his little son. He was

thinking vaguely of Kitty when he said good-night to his friend's wife

and his friend at the foot of the stairs.

 

"You're our first real house guest," called Roxanne after him. "Aren't

you thrilled and proud?"

 

When he was out of sight around the stair corner she turned to

Jeffrey, who was standing beside her resting his hand on the end of

the banister.

 

"Are you tired, my dearest?"

 

Jeffrey rubbed the centre of his forehead with his fingers.

 

"A little. How did you know?"

 

"Oh, how could I help knowing about you?"

 

"It's a headache," he said moodily. "Splitting. I'll take some

aspirin."

 

She reached over and snapped out the light, and with his arm tight

about her waist they walked up the stairs together.

 

 

II

 

Harry's week passed. They drove about the dreaming lanes or idled in

cheerful inanity upon lake or lawn. In the evening Roxanne, sitting

inside, played to them while the ashes whitened on the glowing ends of

their cigars. Then came a telegram from Kitty saying that she wanted

Harry to come East and get her, so Roxanne and Jeffrey were left alone

in that privacy of which they never seemed to tire.

 

"Alone" thrilled them again. They wandered about the house, each

feeling intimately the presence of the other; they sat on the same

side of the table like honeymooners; they were intensely absorbed,

intensely happy.

 

The town of Marlowe, though a comparatively old settlement, had only

recently acquired a "society." Five or six years before, alarmed at

the smoky swelling of Chicago, two or three young married couples,

"bungalow people," had moved out; their friends had followed. The

Jeffrey Curtains found an already formed "set" prepared to welcome:

them; a country club, ballroom, and golf links yawned for them, and

there were bridge parties, and poker parties, and parties where they

drank beer, and parties where they drank nothing at all.

 

It was at a poker party that they found themselves a week after

Harry's departure. There were two tables, and a good proportion of the

young wives were smoking and shouting their bets, and being very

daringly mannish for those days.

 

Roxanne had left the game early and taken to perambulation; she

wandered into the pantry and found herself some grape juice--beer gave

her a headache--and then passed from table to table, looking over

shoulders at the hands, keeping an eye on Jeffrey and being pleasantly

unexcited and content. Jeffrey, with intense concentration, was

raising a pile of chips of all colors, and Roxanne knew by the

deepened wrinkle between his eyes that he was interested. She liked to

see him interested in small things.

 

She crossed over quietly and sat down on the arm of his chair.

 

She sat there five minutes, listening to the sharp intermittent

comments of the men and the chatter of the women, which rose from the

table like soft smoke--and yet scarcely hearing either. Then quite

innocently she reached out her hand, intending to place it on

Jeffrey's shoulder--as it touched him he started of a sudden, gave a

short grunt, and, sweeping back his arm furiously, caught her a

glancing blow on her elbow.

 

There was a general gasp. Roxanne regained her balance, gave a little

cry, and rose quickly to her feet. It had been the greatest shock of

her life. This, from Jeffrey, the heart of kindness, of

consideration--this instinctively brutal gesture.

 

The gasp became a silence. A dozen eyes were turned on Jeffrey, who

looked up as though seeing Roxanne for the first time. An expression

of bewilderment settled on his face.

 

"Why--Roxanne----" he said haltingly.

 

Into a dozen minds entered a quick suspicion, a rumor of scandal.

Could it be that behind the scenes with this couple, apparently so in

love, lurked some curious antipathy? Why else this streak of fire,

across such a cloudless heaven?

 

"Jeffrey!"--Roxanne's voice was pleading--startled and horrified, she

yet knew that it was a mistake. Not once did it occur to her to blame

him or to resent it. Her word was a trembling supplication--"Tell me,

Jeffrey," it said, "tell Roxanne, your own Roxanne."

 

"Why, Roxanne--" began Jeffrey again. The bewildered look changed to

pain. He was clearly as startled as she. "I didn't intend that," he

went on; "you startled me. You--I felt as if some one were attacking

me. I--how--why, how idiotic!"

 

"Jeffrey!" Again the word was a prayer, incense offered up to a high

God through this new and unfathomable darkness.

 

They were both on their feet, they were saying good-by, faltering,

apologizing, explaining. There was no attempt to pass it off easily.

That way lay sacrilege. Jeffrey had not been feeling well, they said.

He had become nervous. Back of both their minds was the unexplained

horror of that blow--the marvel that there had been for an instant

something between them--his anger and her fear--and now to both a

sorrow, momentary, no doubt, but to be bridged at once, at once, while

there was yet time. Was that swift water lashing under their feet--the

fierce glint of some uncharted chasm?

 

Out in their car under the harvest moon he talked brokenly. It was

just--incomprehensible to him, he said. He had been thinking of the

poker game--absorbed--and the touch on his shoulder had seemed like an

attack. An attack! He clung to that word, flung it up as a shield. He

had hated what touched him. With the impact of his hand it had gone,

that--nervousness. That was all he knew.

 

Both their eyes filled with tears and they whispered love there under

the broad night as the serene streets of Marlowe sped by. Later, when

they went to bed, they were quite calm. Jeffrey was to take a week off

all work--was simply to loll, and sleep, and go on long walks until

this nervousness left him. When they had decided this safety settled

down upon Roxanne. The pillows underhead became soft and friendly; the

bed on which they lay seemed wide, and white, and sturdy beneath the

radiance that streamed in at the window.

 

Five days later, in the first cool of late afternoon, Jeffrey picked

up an oak chair and sent it crashing through his own front window.

Then he lay down on the couch like a child, weeping piteously and

begging to die. A blood clot the size of a marble had broken his

brain.

 

 

III

 

There is a sort of waking nightmare that sets in sometimes when one

has missed a sleep or two, a feeling that comes with extreme fatigue

and a new sun, that the quality of the life around has changed. It is

a fully articulate conviction that somehow the existence one is then

leading is a branch shoot of life and is related to life only as a

moving picture or a mirror--that the people, and streets, and houses

are only projections from a very dim and chaotic past. It was in such

a state that Roxanne found herself during the first months of

Jeffrey's illness. She slept only when she was utterly exhausted; she

awoke under a cloud. The long, sober-voiced consultations, the faint

aura of medicine in the halls, the sudden tiptoeing in a house that

had echoed to many cheerful footsteps, and, most of ail, Jeffrey's

white face amid the pillows of the bed they had shared--these things

subdued her and made her indelibly older. The doctors held out hope,

but that was all. A long rest, they said, and quiet. So responsibility

came to Roxanne. It was she who paid the bills, pored over his

bank-book, corresponded with his publishers. She was in the kitchen

constantly. She learned from the nurse how to prepare his meals and

after the first month took complete charge of the sick-room. She had

had to let the nurse go for reasons of economy. One of the two colored

girls left at the same time. Roxanne was realizing that they had been

living from short story to short story.

 

The most frequent visitor was Harry Cromwell. He had been shocked and

depressed by the news, and though his wife was now living with him in

Chicago he found time to come out several times a month. Roxanne found

his sympathy welcome--there was some quality of suffering in the man,

some inherent pitifulness that made her comfortable when he was near.

Roxanne's nature had suddenly deepened. She felt sometimes that with

Jeffrey she was losing her children also, those children that now most

of all she needed and should have had.

 

It was six months after Jeffrey's collapse and when the nightmare had

faded, leaving not the old world but a new one, grayer and colder,

that she wait to see Harry's wife. Finding herself in Chicago with an

extra hour before train time, she decided out of courtesy to call.

 

As she stepped inside the door she had an immediate impression that

the apartment was very like some place she had seen before--and almost

instantly she remembered a round-the-corner bakery of her childhood, a

bakery full of rows and rows of pink frosted cakes--a stuffy pink,

pink as a food, pink triumphant, vulgar, and odious.

 

And this apartment was like that. It was pink. It smelled pink!

 

Mrs. Cromwell, attired in a wrapper of pink and black, opened the

door. Her hair was yellow, heightened, Roxanne imagined by a dash of

peroxide in the rinsing water every week. Her eyes were a thin waxen

blue--she was pretty and too consciously graceful. Her cordiality was

strident and intimate, hostility melted so quickly to hospitality that

it seemed they were both merely in the face and voice--never touching

nor touched by the deep core of egotism beneath.

 

But to Roxanne these things were secondary; her eyes were caught and

held in uncanny fascination by the wrapper. It was vilely unclean.

From its lowest hem up four inches it was sheerly dirty with the blue

dust of the floor; for the next three inches it was gray--then it

shaded off into its natural color, which, was--pink. It was dirty at

the sleeves, too, and at the collar--and when the woman turned to lead

the way into the parlor, Roxanne was sure that her neck was dirty.

 

A one-sided rattle of conversation began. Mrs. Cromwell became

explicit about her likes and dislikes, her head, her stomach, her

teeth, her apartment--avoiding with a sort of insolent meticulousness

any inclusion of Roxanne with life, as if presuming that Roxanne,

having been dealt a blow, wished life to be carefully skirted.

 

Roxanne smiled. That kimono! That neck!

 

After five minutes a little boy toddled into the parlor--a dirty

little boy clad in dirty pink rompers. His face was smudgy--Roxanne

wanted to take him into her lap and wipe his nose; other parts in the

of his head needed attention, his tiny shoes were kicked out at the

toes. Unspeakable!

 

"What a darling little boy!" exclaimed Roxanne, smiling radiantly.

"Come here to me."

 

Mrs. Cromwell looked coldly at her son.

 

"He will get dirty. Look at that face!" She held her head on one side

and regarded it critically.

 

"Isn't he a _darling?_" repeated Roxanne.

 

"Look at his rompers," frowned Mrs. Cromwell.

 

"He needs a change, don't you, George?"

 

George stared at her curiously. To his mind the word rompers

connotated a garment extraneously smeared, as this one.

 

"I tried to make him look respectable this morning," complained Mrs.

Cromwell as one whose patience had been sorely tried, "and I found he

didn't have any more rompers--so rather than have him go round without

any I put him back in those--and his face--"

 

"How many pairs has he?" Roxanne's voice was pleasantly curious, "How

many feather fans have you?" she might have asked.

 

"Oh,--" Mrs. Cromwell considered, wrinkling her pretty brow. "Five, I

think. Plenty, I know."

 

"You can get them for fifty cents a pair."

 

Mrs. Cromwell's eyes showed surprise--and the faintest superiority.

The price of rompers!

 

"Can you really? I had no idea. He ought to have plenty, but I haven't

had a minute all week to send the laundry out." Then, dismissing the

subject as irrelevant--"I must show you some things--"

 

They rose and Roxanne followed her past an open bathroom door whose

garment-littered floor showed indeed that the laundry hadn't been sent

out for some time, into another room that was, so to speak, the

quintessence of pinkness. This was Mrs. Cromwell's room.

 

Here the Hostess opened a closet door and displayed before' Roxanne's

eyes an amazing collection of lingerie.

 

There were dozens of filmy marvels of lace and silk, all clean,

unruffled, seemingly not yet touched. On hangers beside them were

three new evening dresses.

 

"I have some beautiful things," said Mrs. Cromwell, "but not much of a

chance to wear them. Harry doesn't care about going out." Spite crept

into her voice. "He's perfectly content to let me play nursemaid and

housekeeper all day and loving wife in the evening."

 

Roxanne smiled again.

 

"You've got some beautiful clothes here."

 

"Yes, I have. Let me show you----"

 

"Beautiful," repeated Roxanne, interrupting, "but I'll have to run if

I'm going to catch my train."

 

She felt that her hands were trembling. She wanted to put them on this

woman and shake her--shake her. She wanted her locked up somewhere and

set to scrubbing floors.

 

"Beautiful," she repeated, "and I just came in for a moment."

 

"Well, I'm sorry Harry isn't here."

 

They moved toward the door.

 

"--and, oh," said Roxanne with an effort--yet her voice was still

gentle and her lips were smiling--"I think it's Argile's where you can

get those rompers. Good-by."

 

It was not until she had reached the station and bought her ticket to

Marlowe that Roxanne realized it was the first five minutes in six

months that her mind had been off Jeffrey.

 

 

IV

 

A week later Harry appeared at Marlowe, arrived unexpectedly at five

o'clock, and coming up the walk sank into a porch chair in a state of

exhaustion. Roxanne herself had had a busy day and was worn out. The

doctors were coming at five-thirty, bringing a celebrated nerve

specialist from New York. She was excited and thoroughly depressed,

but Harry's eyes made her sit down beside him.

 

"What's the matter?"

 

"Nothing, Roxanne," he denied. "I came to see how Jeff was doing.

Don't you bother about me."

 

"Harry," insisted Roxanne, "there's something the matter."

 

"Nothing," he repeated. "How's Jeff?"

 

Anxiety darkened her face.

 

"He's a little worse, Harry. Doctor Jewett has come on from New York.

They thought he could tell me something definite. He's going to try

and find whether this paralysis has anything to do with the original

blood clot."

 

Harry rose.

 

"Oh, I'm sorry," he said jerkily. "I didn't know you expected a

consultation. I wouldn't have come. I thought I'd just rock on your

porch for an hour--"

 

"Sit down," she commanded.

 

Harry hesitated.

 

"Sit down, Harry, dear boy." Her kindness flooded out now--enveloped

him. "I know there's something the matter. You're white as a sheet.

I'm going to get you a cool bottle of beer."

 

All at once he collapsed into his chair and covered his face with his

hands.

 

"I can't make her happy," he said slowly. "I've tried and I've tried.

This morning we had some words about breakfast--I'd been getting my

breakfast down town--and--well, just after I went to the office she

left the house, went East to her mother's with George and a suitcase

full of lace underwear."

 

"Harry!"

 

"And I don't know--"

 

There was a crunch on the gravel, a car turning into the drive.

Roxanne uttered a little cry.

 

"It's Doctor Jewett."

 

"Oh, I'll--"

 

"You'll wait, won't you?" she interrupted abstractedly. He saw that

his problem had already died on the troubled surface of her mind.

 

There was an embarrassing minute of vague, elided introductions and

then Harry followed the party inside and watched them disappear up the

stairs. He went into the library and sat down on the big sofa.

 

For an hour he watched the sun creep up the patterned folds of the

chintz curtains. In the deep quiet a trapped wasp buzzing on the

inside of the window pane assumed the proportions of a clamor. From

time to time another buzzing drifted down from up-stairs, resembling

several more larger wasps caught on larger window-panes. He heard low

footfalls, the clink of bottles, the clamor of pouring water.

 

What had he and Roxanne done that life should deal these crashing

blows to them? Up-stairs there was taking place a living inquest on

the soul of his friend; he was sitting here in a quiet room listening

to the plaint of a wasp, just as when he was a boy he had been

compelled by a strict aunt to sit hour-long on a chair and atone for

some misbehavior. But who had put him here? What ferocious aunt had

leaned out of the sky to make him atone for--what?

 

About Kitty he felt a great hopelessness. She was too expensive--that

was the irremediable difficulty. Suddenly he hated her. He wanted to

throw her down and kick at her--to tell her she was a cheat and a

leech--that she was dirty. Moreover, she must give him his boy.

 

He rose and began pacing up and down the room. Simultaneously he heard

some one begin walking along the hallway up-stairs in exact time with

him. He found himself wondering if they would walk in time until the

person reached the end of the hall.

 

Kitty had gone to her mother. God help her, what a mother to go to! He

tried to imagine the meeting: the abused wife collapsing upon the

mother's breast. He could not. That Kitty was capable of any deep

grief was unbelievable. He had gradually grown to think of her as

something unapproachable and callous. She would get a divorce, of

course, and eventually she would marry again. He began to consider

this. Whom would she marry? He laughed bitterly, stopped; a picture

flashed before him--of Kitty's arms around some man whose face he

could not see, of Kitty's lips pressed close to other lips in what was

surely: passion.

 

"God!" he cried aloud. "God! God! God!"

 

Then the pictures came thick and fast. The Kitty of this morning

faded; the soiled kimono rolled up and disappeared; the pouts, and

rages, and tears all were washed away. Again she was Kitty Carr--Kitty

Carr with yellow hair and great baby eyes. Ah, she had loved him, she

had loved him.

 

After a while he perceived that something was amiss with him,

something that had nothing to do with Kitty or Jeff, something of a

different genre. Amazingly it burst on him at last; he was hungry.

Simple enough! He would go into the kitchen in a moment and ask the

colored cook for a sandwich. After that he must go back to the city.

 

He paused at the wall, jerked at something round, and, fingering it

absently, put it to his mouth and tasted it as a baby tastes a bright

toy. His teeth closed on it--Ah!

 

She'd left that damn kimono, that dirty pink kimono. She might have

had the decency to take it with her, he thought. It would hang in the

house like the corpse of their sick alliance. He would try to throw it

away, but he would never be able to bring himself to move it. It would

be like Kitty, soft and pliable, withal impervious. You couldn't move

Kitty; you couldn't reach Kitty. There was nothing there to reach. He

understood that perfectly--he had understood it all along.

 

He reached to the wall for another biscuit and with an effort pulled

it out, nail and all. He carefully removed the nail from the centre,

wondering idly if he had eaten the nail with the first biscuit.

Preposterous! He would have remembered--it was a huge nail. He felt

his stomach. He must be very hungry. He considered--remembered--yesterday

he had had no dinner. It was the girl's day out and Kitty had

lain in her room eating chocolate drops. She had said she felt

"smothery" and couldn't bear having him near her. He had given

George a bath and put him to bed, and then lain down on the couch

intending to rest a minute before getting his own dinner. There

he had fallen asleep and awakened about eleven, to find that

there was nothing in the ice-box except a spoonful of potato salad.

This he had eaten, together with some chocolate drops that he found on

Kitty's bureau. This morning he had breakfasted hurriedly down town

before going to the office. But at noon, beginning to worry about

Kitty, he had decided to go home and take her out to lunch. After that

there had been the note on his pillow. The pile of lingerie in the

closet was gone--and she had left instructions for sending her trunk.

 

He had never been so hungry, he thought.

 

At five o'clock, when the visiting nurse tiptoed down-stairs, he was

sitting on the sofa staring at the carpet.

 

"Mr. Cromwell?"

 

"Yes?"

 

"Oh, Mrs. Curtain won't be able to see you at dinner. She's not well

She told me to tell you that the cook will fix you something and that

there's a spare bedroom."

 

"She's sick, you say?"

 

"She's lying down in her room. The consultation is just over."

 

"Did they--did they decide anything?"

 

"Yes," said the nurse softly. "Doctor Jewett says there's no hope. Mr.

Curtain may live indefinitely, but he'll never see again or move again

or think. He'll just breathe."

 

"Just breathe?"

 

"Yes."

 

For the first time the nurse noted that beside the writing-desk where

she remembered that she had seen a line of a dozen curious round

objects she had vaguely imagined to be some exotic form of decoration,

there was now only one. Where the others had been, there was now a

series of little nail-holes.

 

Harry followed her glance dazedly and then rose to his feet.

 

"I don't believe I'll stay. I believe there's a train."

 

She nodded. Harry picked up his hat.

 

"Good-by," she said pleasantly.

 

"Good-by," he answered, as though talking to himself and, evidently

moved by some involuntary necessity, he paused on his way to the door

and she saw him pluck the last object from the wall and drop it into

his pocket.

 

Then he opened the screen door and, descending the porch steps, passed

out of her sight.

 

 

V

 

After a while the coat of clean white paint on the Jeffrey Curtain

house made a definite compromise with the suns of many Julys and

showed its good faith by turning gray. It scaled--huge peelings of

very brittle old paint leaned over backward like aged men practising

grotesque gymnastics and finally dropped to a moldy death in the

overgrown grass beneath. The paint on the front pillars became

streaky; the white ball was knocked off the left-hand door-post; the

green blinds darkened, then lost all pretense of color.

 

It began to be a house that was avoided by the tender-minded--some

church bought a lot diagonally opposite for a graveyard, and this,

combined with "the place where Mrs. Curtain stays with that living

corpse," was enough to throw a ghostly aura over that quarter of the

road. Not that she was left alone. Men and women came to see her, met

her down town, where she went to do her marketing, brought her home in

their cars--and came in for a moment to talk and to rest, in the

glamour that still played in her smile. But men who did not know her

no longer followed her with admiring glances in the street; a

diaphanous veil had come down over her beauty, destroying its

vividness, yet bringing neither wrinkles nor fat.

 

She acquired a character in the village--a group of little stories

were told of her: how when the country was frozen over one winter so

that no wagons nor automobiles could travel, she taught herself to

skate so that she could make quick time to the grocer and druggist,

and not leave Jeffrey alone for long. It was said that every night

since his paralysis she slept in a small bed beside his bed, holding

his hand.

 

Jeffrey Curtain was spoken of as though he were already dead. As the

years dropped by those who had known him died or moved away--there

were but half a dozen of the old crowd who had drunk cocktails

together, called each other's wives by their first names, and thought

that Jeff was about the wittiest and most talented fellow that Marlowe

had ever known. How, to the casual visitor, he was merely the reason

that Mrs. Curtain excused herself sometimes and hurried upstairs; he

was a groan or a sharp cry borne to the silent parlor on the heavy air

of a Sunday afternoon.

 

He could not move; he was stone blind, dumb and totally unconscious.

All day he lay in his bed, except for a shift to his wheel-chair every

morning while she straightened the room. His paralysis was creeping

slowly toward his heart. At first-for the first year--Roxanne had

received the faintest answering pressure sometimes when she held his

hand--then it had gone, ceased one evening and never come back, and

through two nights Roxanne lay wide-eyed, staring into the dark and

wondering what had gone, what fraction of his soul had taken flight,

what last grain of comprehension those shattered broken nerves still

carried to the brain.

 

After that hope died. Had it not been for her unceasing care the last

spark would have gone long before. Every morning she shaved and bathed

him, shifted him with her own hands from bed to chair and back to bed.

She was in his room constantly, bearing medicine, straightening a

pillow, talking to him almost as one talks to a nearly human dog,

without hope of response or appreciation, but with the dim persuasion

of habit, a prayer when faith has gone.

 

Not a few people, one celebrated nerve specialist among them, gave her

a plain impression that it was futile to exercise so much care, that

if Jeffrey had been conscious he would have wished to die, that if his

spirit were hovering in some wider air it would agree to no such

sacrifice from her, it would fret only for the prison of its body to

give it full release.

 

"But you see," she replied, shaking her head gently, "when I married

Jeffrey it was--until I ceased to love him."

 

"But," was protested, in effect, "you can't love that."

 

"I can love what it once was. What else is there for me to do?"

 

The specialist shrugged his shoulders and went away to say that Mrs.

Curtain was a remarkable woman and just about as sweet as an

angel--but, he added, it was a terrible pity.

 

"There must be some man, or a dozen, just crazy to take care of

her...."

 

Casually--there were. Here and there some one began in hope--and ended

in reverence. There was no love in the woman except, strangely enough,

for life, for the people in the world, from the tramp to whom she gave

food she could ill afford to the butcher who sold her a cheap cut of

steak across the meaty board. The other phase was sealed up somewhere

in that expressionless mummy who lay with his face turned ever toward

the light as mechanically as a compass needle and waited dumbly for

the last wave to wash over his heart.

 

After eleven years he died in the middle of a May night, when the

scent of the syringa hung upon the window-sill and a breeze wafted in

the shrillings of the frogs and cicadas outside. Roxanne awoke at two,

and realized with a start she was alone in the house at last.

 

 

VI

 

After that she sat on her weather-beaten porch through many

afternoons, gazing down across the fields that undulated in a slow

descent to the white and green town. She was wondering what she would

do with her life. She was thirty-six--handsome, strong, and free. The

years had eaten up Jeffrey's insurance; she had reluctantly parted

with the acres to right and left of her, and had even placed a small

mortgage on the house.

 

With her husband's death had come a great physical restlessness. She

missed having to care for him in the morning, she missed her rush to

town, and the brief and therefore accentuated neighborly meetings in

the butcher's and grocer's; she missed the cooking for two, the

preparation of delicate liquid food for him. One day, consumed with

energy, she went out and spaded up the whole garden, a thing that had

not been done for years.

 

And she was alone at night in the room that had seen the glory of her

marriage and then the pain. To meet Jeff again she went back in spirit

to that wonderful year, that intense, passionate absorption and

companionship, rather than looked forward to a problematical meeting

hereafter; she awoke often to lie and wish for that presence beside

her--inanimate yet breathing--still Jeff.

 

One afternoon six months after his death she was sitting on the porch,

in a black dress which took away the faintest suggestion of plumpness

from her figure. It was Indian summer--golden brown all about her; a

hush broken by the sighing of leaves; westward a four o'clock sun

dripping streaks of red and yellow over a flaming sky. Most of the

birds had gone--only a sparrow that had built itself a nest on the

cornice of a pillar kept up an intermittent cheeping varied by

occasional fluttering sallies overhead. Roxanne moved her chair to

where she could watch him and her mind idled drowsily on the bosom of

the afternoon.

 

Harry Cromwell was coming out from Chicago to dinner. Since his

divorce over eight years before he had been a frequent visitor. They

had kept up what amounted to a tradition between them: when he arrived

they would go to look at Jeff; Harry would sit down on the edge of the

bed and in a hearty voice ask:

 

"Well, Jeff, old man, how do you feel to-day?"

 

Roxanne, standing beside, would look intently at Jeff, dreaming that

some shadowy recognition of this former friend had passed across that

broken mind--but the head, pale, carven, would only move slowly in its

sole gesture toward the light as if something behind the blind eyes

were groping for another light long since gone out.

 

These visits stretched over eight years--at Easter, Christmas,

Thanksgiving, and on many a Sunday Harry had arrived, paid his call on

Jeff, and then talked for a long while with Roxanne on the porch. He

was devoted to her. He made no pretense of hiding, no attempt to

deepen, this relation. She was his best friend as the mass of flesh on

the bed there had been his best friend. She was peace, she was rest;

she was the past. Of his own tragedy she alone knew.

 

He had been at the funeral, but since then the company for which he

worked had shifted him to the East and only a business trip had

brought him to the vicinity of Chicago. Roxanne had written him to

come when he could--after a night in the city he had caught a train

out.

 

They shook hands and he helped her move two rockers together.

 

"How's George?"

 

"He's fine, Roxanne. Seems to like school."

 

"Of course it was the only thing to do, to send him."

 

"Of course--"

 

"You miss him horribly, Harry?"

 

"Yes--I do miss him. He's a funny boy--"

 

He talked a lot about George. Roxanne was interested. Harry must bring

him out on his next vacation. She had only seen him once in her

life--a child in dirty rompers.

 

She left him with the newspaper while she prepared dinner--she had

four chops to-night and some late vegetables from her own garden. She

put it all on and then called him, and sitting down together they

continued their talk about George.

 

"If I had a child--" she would say.

 

Afterward, Harry having given her what slender advice he could about

investments, they walked through the garden, pausing here and there to

recognize what had once been a cement bench or where the tennis court

had lain....

 

"Do you remember--"

 

Then they were off on a flood of reminiscences: the day they had taken

all the snap-shots and Jeff had been photographed astride the calf;

and the sketch Harry had made of Jeff and Roxanne, lying sprawled in

the grass, their heads almost touching. There was to have been a

covered lattice connecting the barn-studio with the house, so that

Jeff could get there on wet days--the lattice had been started, but

nothing remained except a broken triangular piece that still adhered

to the house and resembled a battered chicken coop.

 

"And those mint juleps!"

 

"And Jeff's note-book! Do you remember how we'd laugh, Harry, when

we'd get it out of his pocket and read aloud a page of material. And

how frantic he used to get?"

 

"Wild! He was such a kid about his writing."

 

They were both silent a moment, and then Harry said:

 

"We were to have a place out here, too. Do you remember? We were to

buy the adjoining twenty acres. And the parties we were going to

have!"

 

Again there was a pause, broken this time by a low question from

Roxanne.

 

"Do you ever hear of her, Harry?"

 

"Why--yes," he admitted placidly. "She's in Seattle. She's married

again to a man named Horton, a sort of lumber king. He's a great deal

older than she is, I believe."

 

"And she's behaving?"

 

"Yes--that is, I've heard so. She has everything, you see. Nothing

much to do except dress up for this fellow at dinner-time."

 

"I see."

 

Without effort he changed the subject.

 

"Are you going to keep the house?"

 

"I think so," she said, nodding. "I've lived here so long, Harry, it'd

seem terrible to move. I thought of trained nursing, but of course

that'd mean leaving. I've about decided to be a boarding-house lady."

 

"Live in one?"

 

"No. Keep one. Is there such an anomaly as a boarding-house lady?

Anyway I'd have a negress and keep about eight people in the summer

and two or three, if I can get them, in the winter. Of course I'll

have to have the house repainted and gone over inside."

 

Harry considered.

 

"Roxanne, why--naturally you know best what you can do, but it does

seem a shock, Roxanne. You came here as a bride."

 

"Perhaps," she said, "that's why I don't mind remaining here as a

boarding-house lady."

 

"I remember a certain batch of biscuits."

 

"Oh, those biscuits," she cried. "Still, from all I heard about the

way you devoured them, they couldn't have been so bad. I was _so_

low that day, yet somehow I laughed when the nurse told me about those

biscuits."

 

"I noticed that the twelve nail-holes are still in the library wall

where Jeff drove them."

 

"Yes."

 

It was getting very dark now, a crispness settled in the air; a little

gust of wind sent down a last spray of leaves. Roxanne shivered

slightly.

 

"We'd better go in."

 

He looked at his watch.

 

"It's late. I've got to be leaving. I go East tomorrow."

 

"Must you?"

 

They lingered for a moment just below the stoop, watching a moon that

seemed full of snow float out of the distance where the lake lay.

Summer was gone and now Indian summer. The grass was cold and there

was no mist and no dew. After he left she would go in and light the

gas and close the shatters, and he would go down the path and on to

the village. To these two life had come quickly and gone, leaving not

bitterness, but pity; not disillusion, but only pain. There was

already enough moonlight when they shook hands for each to see the

gathered kindness in the other's eyes.

***