Lost Ecstasy/Chapter 44
BESSIE OSBORNE returned from Bar Harbor unexpectedly early that autumn. She had heard some disquieting rumors, and she came back in haste and what amounted to indignation.
Her own philosophy was a simple one, based on her conviction that one only lived once and must therefore make the best of it. She shed her yesterdays as a snake shed its skin, and ignored the tomorrows unless they offered something pleasant. It was only today that counted, so she wakened happily to a hearty breakfast tray, read her letters, made grimaces into a hand-mirror for five minutes, took a bath with reducing salts in it—to offset the tray—and then dressed ritually, if it be dressing to don one thin underslip and a frock. And thereafter she faced each day with a determination to make the most of it.
But if, as old Lucius cruelly had asserted, Bessie was a retarded adolescent, she was also an incorrigible romanticist. She stalked into Henry's library one night, then, dressed in what Henry considered very "fast" black, and sitting down across from him, demanded to light her cigarette from his cigar.
"What for? There are plenty of matches."
Henry's cigar was a precious thing to him; he tasted its quality by the length of the ash.
"I like the flavor. I'd smoke cigars, if they didn't twist my mouth. Well, I see you are still holding on to Kay."
"Holding on? What else am I to do?"
"Send her back to her husband. Have you happened to look at her lately?"
He moved uncomfortably.
"I've asked her. She says she's all right."
"And what is your plan?"
"Plan? I haven't any plan. I don't know what you're talking about."
"Oh, yes you do, Henry! You always know. You may be a pig-headed sort of brute, but you're not an idiot. Is she to divorce McNair and marry Herbert? I hear he's always hanging around."
"Really, Bessie, you are impossible," he said irritably. "If McNair wants her, why doesn't he say so? She doesn't even hear from him. And as to Herbert—he's not around as much as you say. He's here, of course."
"So I understand," she retorted. "Under foot, coming back to be slapped, like a pup: What do you do with a pup like that? You stop slapping and begin to pet him. I know; I've been there. Send her back, Henry. Let him beat her, if he wants to. It isn't such a bad life, you know. Mother stood it pretty well, and—look at us!"
But she was not so certain after she had talked to Kay.
"What are you going to do with Herbert? Marry him?"
"I am married," said Kay flushing, "Herbert understands all that."
"Well, you are getting talked about all the same," Bessie retorted. "If you must have somebody hanging around, why always Herbert? Why not somebody else? The woods are full of them."
But Kay had no answer for that.
Bessie stayed for a week, while her town house was being opened, and left at the end of that time as unenlightened as she came. Kay, she saw, was still wearing her wedding ring. She had developed a curious habit of turning it around her finger, especially when Herbert was there. And Herbert, Henry notwithstanding, was there a great deal.
Bessie thought he had changed his attitude since the spring. He was more assured, faintly possessive.
"It's cool out here. Where's that cape of yours, Kay? I'll get it."
And if Kay was rather like a wooden image when he put it around her, Bessie knew that it was not the first, nor even the tenth time he had done so.
Nora was very outspoken. She waited one day until Celestine was at her early luncheon, and then slipped into Bessie's room.
"She's just drifting along, the poor lamb," she said. "I can't say a word against Mr. Forrest; he's always polite to me. But you mark my words, Mrs. Osborne, they'll be wishing a divorce on her before she knows it."
"You knew this—you knew Mr. McNair, Nora. Why do you think she never hears from him?"
And Nora, wise in the pride of the poor, was ready with an answer.
"What has he got to offer her, against what she's got here?" she asked shrewdly. "If she goes, that's one thing; but if he has to ask her, that's another. If you'd seen what she brought back with her"
Her face winked, she fumbled in the pocket of her black silk apron. "Just rags," she said, "and poor little things she's tried to make herself. If you'd see the way she put in a sleeve!"
"Is she grieving now?"
"I think she cries in her sleep, poor lamb. Her pillows are wet sometimes in the morning."
Bessie's thoughts went back swiftly, to that other morning long ago, when she had found Kay's pillow damp with tears. "But I don't know who or what it's about. Honestly, I don't remember." She could not say that now.
As it happened, Bessie was still there when Tom's box arrived. The top boards were taken off downstairs. And it was placed in Kay's boudoir for her to unpack. Kay was not there when all this happened, and even Bessie did not know it was there.
She was having her hair waved, and after her usual fashion her door stood open. The first she knew that anything was wrong was a sort of wail from Kay's room across. She listened, and then she saw Nora outside with her finger to her lips. Bessie acted immediately, jerked her hair free and ran across to find Kay sitting on the floor beside a queer-looking box, holding a dirty little pillow to her breast, and staring at nothing at all.
"Kay! Kay dear, what is it?"
Kay looked at her blankly.
"My things," she said slowly. "He's sent me my things. It's all over."
Later on they got her into her bedroom, Nora and Bessie, and into her bed. She was very cold, and Nora filled hotwater bags and put them around her, while Bessie noticed again how thin she was; that the coverings were hardly raised over her body. Still later on Bessie and Nora unpacked the box.
"Well, whatever would you make of that? It's a candle!"
"It must have got in by mistake."
But the tragic poverty-stricken contents of the box appalled Bessie. That, and Kay's reception of them.
She sat thinking after Nora had gone. What a tragedy it was that the only thing age could offer to youth was its own experience, and that the experiences of others were never profitable. Not that her own! She brushed that aside.
The thing was to find out if McNair still cared. If Nora was right, probably he did. This other girl had been an episode. Men often were unfaithful to women they adored; a man's passion and his love could be two entirely different matters; only women never believed that, because with them passion was only a further development of love.
Sitting there, the sunlight lighting up her short yellow hair—slightly darker at the roots—Bessie gave herself up to the unusual indulgence of thought. There had been Ronald; dying alone in a hospital. She had never cared for Ronald; he had been one of those who kept his passions and his love far apart. But she was sorry he had died alone.
She had made the best she could out of life, but lately it had grown a trifle stale and unprofitable. What was the use of pretending to youth, when it was gone. Gone forever. There was a little Russian now; he admired her, because he said she must have looked, in her youth, very like a lady he had once loved!
"A lady of the circus; she was very beautiful. But my people"
After rather a long time she rose, looked at her reflection in the mirror, in the pitiless sunlight, sighed and going downstairs, wrote a telegram on Henry's desk; a telegram to Mr. Tulloss at Ursula.
"Please wire how a letter will reach Tom McNair." And she gave her city address. The local telegraph operator had a bad habit of telephoning her messages.
Late that night she went into Kay's room, but Kay had at last fallen asleep. Her reading lamp was going, and her hand still lay on an opened book. Bessie slid the book out carefully and looked at it. It was an oldish little volume of poetry, and there was a fine pencil mark around two lines:
And gray dawn saw his camp fires in the rain."
Bessie left the next morning, and found her telegram waiting in town. Tom had had bad luck, and had gone back to the Ninety Nine Ranch show. He was on his way to England, if he had not already sailed.
There was apparently nothing to be done, and as the days went on Bessie decided that perhaps it had been as well. Kay never mentioned the box again; was even on the surface quite normal. She went out a little, played tennis—although she tired easily—smiled rather too often and too quickly, went about her duties efficiently.
"Can you get some fresh caviare at the club, father? Mr. Trowbridge is coming to dinner."
When Trowbridge came Herbert generally came also, to make a fourth for bridge. The game would drag along:
"Now let's see. Put your king on, Henry! I've got you coming or going. That's the boy! Now, Herbert"
On and on; nine o'clock, ten o'clock, eleven; Herbert playing neatly and safely and generally winning. He took no chances, did Herbert. Mr. Trowbridge paying up reluctantly.
"Got any change, Herbert? I've nothing less than twenty."
And Herbert getting out his wallet, with the bills neatly laid inside, and carefully counting them out. "One, two, three, four, five"
She had stopped watching for the mail carrier long ago. She had stopped hoping. Sometimes she thought she had stopped living. Nothing really mattered. Some day there would be a divorce, probably. Tom had a right to his freedom. Then, if he still wanted her, she would marry Herbert. Herbert had a right to something, too.
On Sundays she and Henry took flowers to the cemetery after church. Henry would get out carefully and stand by her mother's grave, holding his silk hat in his hand; Hawkins would take out the old flowers, and put fresh water in the container; and then she would arrange the new ones. Sometimes, when they reached the car again, Henry would turn around and look back.
She felt at those times that she owed him something, also.
Then, one day, something happened to shock her back into life again. She was in town for some shopping, and suddenly there was the screech of a calliope ahead, and people ran out of stores or stopped on the street to line up against the curbing. Hawkins drew in to one side and stopped the car.
"Circus coming, miss." She was still "miss" to the servants.
But it was not the circus.
She was suddenly very cold. Just so, a year and a half ago, had Tom come back to her like a young knight, haughty and arrogant and wonderful to see. She had called out to him, and he had dug his spurs into his horse until it reared. And the next day
She sat twisting her ring while the procession passed; the cowboy band; the heavy-stepping elephants; the Indians in their war bonnets and buckskin clothes, their faces Oriental and inscrutable; the Cossacks, in their high astrakhan hats, their long tunics, their soft-soled boots.
There was no escape for her. She saw the cowboys coming, their bright neckerchiefs, their chaps and spurs, their coiled ropes. They sat easily, swaying to the motion of their horses, one gloved hand resting easily on hip or thigh, and as they passed they picked out pretty girls among the crowd and smiled at them.
"Are you a real cowboy, mister?"
"Sure am, son."
She searched their faces, lean and tanned under their big hats, but Tom was not among them. How could he be?
When the parade had passed she went about her shopping methodically, but there was a strange leaven working in her. For the first time she looked back and saw the girl she had been when she ran away to Tom. Saw herself carried by a romantic impulse, swayed by the beating of drums, emotional, unstable, immature. Why had she married him? Because she loved him? Or because he was like those boys she had just watched, picturesque, carefree and reckless? This last, perhaps, or so he must surely think, for when the lean days came, when he had been making his hard undramatic fight, she had abandoned him. What did it matter about Clare? What did it matter if he had kept his dogged silence all this time? She was the one who had failed, failed and run away, to live softly and at ease.
Then, if that were so!
She never knew just when she made her decision to go back. She was moving as automatically as had Tom on his search for Little Dog. She went to the railway ticket office, to the bank. She had plenty of money now, plenty for both of them, if he would only take her back. And he could not object to it; it was hers. Her mother had left it to her.
She was half feverish with excitement, her hands cold, her head hot. Impatient too, while her ticket was stamped, her reservations made. She would not even telegraph. She would go to Ursula and get a car there, and then
Suppose he did not want her? Suppose she got there to find that he had definitely put her out of his life? Suppose he opened the door of the house, and looked at her, as he could look, and she had to turn around and go away again?
Well, she could only try. It was her life, as well as his. She had taken her courage in her hands once before. She could do it again. And she would not even go home, for fear of Henry.
She went to Bessie's instead.