Man's Country/Chapter 23
FROM the hour of George's decision the Judsons joined the Hicksons and the Traceys in spending every spare moment of daylight in the slaughter of imaginary big horns on an improvised range on the shore of Lake St. Clair, and one week later the three couples entrained for the journey westward. On the fourth day after, Sir Brian Hook, as host of the camp and the hunt, was receiving them in a tiny fold of the mountains so deep and narrow that the sun could be seen only at noonday and there seemed a perpetual chill in the air. There were tents; there were horses and horse wranglers; there was Charlie Waterbucket, the Cree guide and hunter, and there was Wah Sing, an expert cook, while above and beyond them was the Big Horn range, only a few thousand feet higher than their camp in a perpendicular direction but astonishingly distant and astonishingly inaccessible for all its proximity.
The second day Sir Brian not only saw a sheep but killed him. There was clamor of the ladies thereafter to be taken under Sir Brian's especial wing. They drew straws for the honor, and Fay won. Sir Brian, who could ride anywhere, climb anywhere, shoot anywhere, and who appeared to think that just for a woman to put on hiking breeches and a flannel shirt made her as wiry as a monkey and as strong as an orangoutang, set out to justify the ladies' faith in him. He delivered Fay, after much laborious exertion, at an isolated spot on the vertebra of the continent where she actually saw a mountain sheep—that is, she saw something like a huge, dirty, white object that stared for an instant, wall-eyed, and then soared like a bird from one detached pinnacle to another, after which it kicked up its heels and dropped suddenly out of sight.
"Oh, what a jump!" Fay exclaimed.
"But, why didn't you shoot?" complained Sir Brian.
"Shoot? What was there to shoot at?" she argued innocently.
And in truth, what was there to shoot at—the sheep having vanished so quickly? Nothing at all now, but Sir Brian's gray and slightly perturbed eyes, and the woman straightway shot at them with her violet ones. Sir Brian, clean and picturesque in his weather-worn hunting rig, and she in her khaki breeches and leathern jacket, with the little cloth hat rolled bewitchingly to one side—there they stood, very close together, breathing quickly from the exertion of the climb and the excitement of the moment which had just passed.
Could the man be as cool as he looked? As unmoved by her presence? by the fact of their aloneness—with her husband a mile in one direction helping Eleanor to re-do her spiral puttees (if Sir Brian could have known just what George was doing at that moment!) and with Charlie Hickson and Ralph and Rose clambering somewhere over that fall of rock two miles away where the Englishman had pointed them out to her through his glasses? Would she not have been less than woman if, under such circumstances, Fay had not dropped her eyes in sudden embarrassment and asked herself that question, her bosom heaving with something besides the exertion and the altitude? With wild, rugged nature all round them, and with lofty mountains challenging to boldness, would it not be surprising if she did not find out very soon the answer to her curious craving to know? . . .
They did not get a shot at the sheep.
Presently Sir Brian was helping her down the rock as unostentatiously courteous and apparently as composed and reserved as ever, but—she had found out!
Fay was girlishly happy, enjoying the novel experience of a hunt in these magnificent wilds amazingly, but on the night of this very day when she had found out about Sir Brian her husband began to show signs of a flagging enthusiasm. At supper-time while others recounted their adventures, he took no part in the camp-fire merriment. There came a faraway look in his eye, and he fell back into the shadow, as far as possible from the flickering firelight and yet within its circle. Fay knew from his manner that he was wretchedly unhappy and was almost sorry for him—but was still relentless. This hunt was one thing she had exacted of him, and she insisted on her pound of flesh; so instead of sympathizing she eyed him watchfully and with suspicion, impelled to rail at him the minute they were alone. But she suppressed this impulse.
"I won't be an utter tyrant," she said to herself with noble magnanimity. "He can think about his business if he wants to."
But the next night when the scattered hunters came by twos and threes and weary into camp, George Judson was not among them. Fay, coming in again under escort of Sir Brian, found pinned conspicuously upon the flap of the Judson tent a note.
"Forgive me, darling, for running away," the note said, "but I couldn't stick it out any longer.
"At least I've got you planted up here, and Sir Brian and the others will see that you don't miss anything. Make my apologies to him and any excuses that occur to you, I just had to light out, that's all.
"Why, how white you look, Fay!" noticed Eleanor, who was standing by her, and Fay immediately contradicted by looking red.
"And who wouldn't?" demanded Fay hoarsely, and stared at Eleanor, white and dumbfounded.
"What is it?" gasped Eleanor.
"That husband of mine!" ejaculated Fay, disgust and anger mingling. "He has bolted—run away—sneaked back to that dirty old factory of his. Abandoned me to—to—" She checked herself. "Abandoned me, Eleanor!" and her eyes grew large and teary with indignation. "Invited me to shift for myself like any common—common—" Feeling the imminence of tears, she dashed through the opening in the tent and flung herself upon one of the cots. Eleanor followed her sympathetically. She had no fortune of her own, and although her husband's circumstances were easy, he still pursued the dollar. Being of a thrifty nature, she aided and abetted him. She had the utmost respect for such husbandly activities and no great patience with wives who affected not to have.
"I wouldn't be too hard on George just now, if I were you," she ventured to suggest. "He's had it pretty fierce this year."
"He has it fierce every year," Fay retorted, searching for a dry spot on her handkerchief. "No sooner does he get one iron out of the fire than he sticks two more in."
"But George has lost a lot of money, you know." Eleanor reminded solemnly.
"Lost money?" Fay curled a tear-swollen lip. "Oh, no!" and she shook her head with a satirical smile. "My husband doesn't lose money. He makes it! Year after year he makes it, and saves out a pittance for himself, and chucks all the rest back into the business, and borrows every cent he can lay his hands on besides."
"Fay Judson!" remonstrated Eleanor, who had listened to this speech with amazement and a sense of shock. "Is it possible you do not know that your husband's company lost money this year? Big money! Away into the millions?"
Fay stiffened proudly and stared. "Oh, no!" she exclaimed in an icy voice with a proud toss of her head. "Oh, no! You are quite mistaken. Quite!"
It was Eleanor's turn to stare. Such blind ignorance combined with such colossal self-satisfaction was truly sublime. "Well!" she retorted in withering tones. "If your husband finds it as hard to tell you anything as I do, I'm not surprised you don't know anything about his business."
With this she walked abruptly from the tent.
Fay hardened and blazed over what she deemed the gratuitous affront in this remark, but nothing at all adequate rose to her tongue to hurl after that indignant squeak of Eleanor's climbing boots. Yet what she flamed with most hotly was resentment toward her husband. And at first this was not for putting her in a position where a woman like Eleanor could talk to her as she had just done. It was for his selfishness in stealing away. Didn't he perceive that she was enjoying Sir Brian and his hunt immensely? Didn't he know that it was her ambition to kill a mountain sheep and that her host had pledged his honor as a sportsman that she should have her chance? And was the man too crass not to understand that she couldn't clamber over these wild and lonely crags with another unless a husband were at least in the same county, thereby lending his official countenance to the inevitable intimacies of such association? Why, he had practically abandoned her to Sir Brian!
But at length the pendulum began to swing the other way, and she found herself staring wide-eyed and thoughtful at the brown, sloping roof of the tent which came so near to her as she lay.
"Lost money? . . ." she was questioning the empty air, white, bewildered and crestfallen, but not quite sympathetic. "Lost money?"
Doubts and wonderings upon this point so distressed her that she had presently to call Eleanor and ask her humbly to explain.
Eleanor did this, now with sympathy for the wife and indignation for a bombastic, vainglorious husband who would leave a wife to learn facts like this from an alien tongue.
The supper call brought this conference to a close, but throughout the meal Fay was silent and contemplative, with the men inclined to joke her a little on her enforced widowhood. The joking came to an end after the meal was over and they were all gathered round the fire, when she spoke out boldly to Sir Brian before them all.
"It was big of George, awfully big of him, to slip out this way," she said with a little break in her voice, "so I couldn't insist on going with him; but the fact is, I think I must. We are so dippy about each other, you know, and George has an awful lot of important things on just now. So I feel I ought to be right with him."
"My word!" ejaculated Sir Brian. "Deuce take it! Must you go though?" and looked at her concernedly as if not quite certain she had given the real reason for her departure.
"I fear I must, Sir Brian!" she persisted however, and the next day went down the canyon. It was indeed with a genuine sense of hurrying to a duty of wifely comradeship and with reproaches for her own blind selfishness that she started—but alas for her intent—three days upon the train were far, far too long for emotions as fluid as hers to be held constant by a reasoned purpose. She had time to brood. So instead of arriving in Detroit to sympathize and comfort him, she reached home late of an afternoon in a mood of simmering wrath, and meaning to arraign George Judson the instant she got an eye upon his recreant form. Favorable to this purpose was the fact that, unsummoned, George himself came home a bit early from his desk to soothe jaded nerves by a play with Junior.
"But why—why on earth did you come homer" he demanded when, in consequence of information imparted by the butler, he came bounding into his wife's room.
"Come home?" she iterated scornfully. "What else was there for me to do?" And she stared contemptuously at a husband who could not see that there was nothing else. "Don't you see why I couldn't stay—after you left?" Haughtily the wife with the sense of outrage so strong upon her swept the length of the room and back.
"I certainly do not," he snapped, and in the anger of his expression was also an appeal for her to let some little light of reason in upon her strange actions if she could possibly manage to do so. "Will you be good enough to enlighten me.
"Will I?" she inquired with a fine irony. "Will I? I certainly will, George Judson, for I have received a good deal of enlightenment myself. For one thing, I learned from Eleanor Hickson all about your wretched failure with the Nemos. I learned the truth about that—not from my husband, but from the lips of a stranger. George Judson," she accused vehemently, and seemed as if on the point of seizing and shaking him, "why didn't you tell me the condition of your business?"
George gave back a little before the force with which she pressed her attack. Besides, this was a shot that went home. "But I—I did it to be kind," he faltered. "I wanted to spare you."
"But will you be kind enough to observe what a fool it made of me?" she inquired with biting sarcasm.
"Fool!" The husband's features framed utter protest. "Oh, now, Fay, dear!" he pleaded. "I can't stand for that."
"But you made me stand for it!" she resented hotly.
"How—I'd like to know?" George inquired stubbornly, but rather bewildered, and perceiving now clearly that he was going to get the worst of whatever was to come.
"Think of me in total, ridiculous ignorance all this spring and summer of how things were going with you," she began, and her wrath was almost melted into tears by sympathy for her own wrongs. "Think of me dragging you to teas, to golf matches, to I don't know what, holding my head high and serene, parading my husband everywhere as a paragon of business genius, bragging about him idiotically! Think of me running about with Sir Brian, taking him off on the yachting trip, and leaving you at home fighting for your life almost—and me finding fault with you because you didn't come to meet us even. Why you—you—don't you see what a cruel position it was to put me in? People must either have thought me a fool who couldn't understand, or a wife so indiscreet she could not be trusted with her husband's business secrets, or too heartless to care simply because she was rich on her own account. Probably they think me all three."
"Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!" George groaned distressfully. "Is that the way you figure it out?"
"You must be blind," his wife accused. "Wasn't I going around boasting about your cleverness in cutting the prices on your Nemo model at the very time when everybody I was talking to knew you had been forced to cut it to save your own neck? Wasn't I?"
"Oh, maybe . . . yes, yes . . . I guess you were, all right," her husband admitted wretchedly.
"Of course, I was, and that's the cruelest thing a man can do to a trusting wife, George Judson—allow her to make herself ridiculous in his behalf." A certain tenderness was permitted to enter into this reproach, and that softness bowled George Judson over completely.
"All right! Have it your own way. I was wrong all the time—all the time," he confessed, throwing up his hands and shaking his head with an expression of deep contrition.
But in such humility there was yet one other rod a truly conscientious wife could lay across his back, and she did not spare it.
"And besides—you've done something else, George," she accused with mournful emphasis. "You've shattered an idol and a tradition—short-lived, but oh, so brilliant while it lasted. I thought you were a superman. I thought anything you touched would succeed, just because it was you that touched it. I thought you were a miracle-worker. You're not. You're just an ordinary, blindly optimistic blunderer whom so far luck has favored. I'm disappointed in you, George; that's the sum and substance of it all; I'm disappointed in you."
Her passion was exhausted, but she was resolute still. She didn't mean all she was about to say, but it was well to make him think she did. His mother had said he needed to be broken. Very well, the time had come for that, and she would do it thoroughly while about it. In the tone of one who lays a wreath of immortelles upon the grave of love, she began:
"Things can never be the same between us, George." Her voice was carefully restrained so as to get into just the right regret for some sublime ecstasy that was now forever past. "You've destroyed something—something that will never come again. If you had plotted deliberately against the beautiful perfection of our union, you could not have succeeded more completely than you have. That aura of wonder, that halo of romantic admiration with which I have invested you, is gone, George—gone, broken, dissipated, van—"
There is such a thing as the last straw.
"Sa-a-ay!" George demanded with indignant, self-accusing emphasis, and the manner of the man completely bewildered. "What's the matter with us two people, anyway?" Then while his eye was still upon her there came to him a gleam of inspiration.
"Could it," he blurted explosively, "could it be that cursed Englishman, I wonder?"
"Sir Brian!—"
Startled and outraged, Fay Judson screamed the name hoarsely, as in protest at some terrible profanation, while her husband stared dumbly, for before his eyes a lightning transformation took place.
That soft Persian kitten of a woman, with her little, kittenish rages and quick remorses, whom he had known, went away, and there appeared a vision utterly different—a something out of the jungles of biology—not his darling Fay, but a race-woman, primal, elemental, aboriginal—a very tiger-cat of a woman who appeared to feel herself attacked on ground she would fight tooth and nail to hold, as the primordial women fought.
A transformation indeed, this, for gentle Fay—that same sensitive and refined Fay who had been so painfully shocked, not very long ago, by her husband's vehement outburst against social interruptions. ("Perfectly common," she had called his angry tirade then;—his "practical" nature, under the friction of displeasure, had shown itself through the surface veneer and disappointed sweet Fay so terribly!). A transformation indeed, when a kitten bares its claws!
"George Judson," she warned, with that low, hitherto inconceivable, fierce note in her tones, "George Judson, if you ever dare to make an insinuation like that again I'll tear your eyes out."
But her husband met the crisis unyieldingly. "It wasn't an insinuation, Fay," he answered steadily; "it was only a hazard, but before God, I believe there's something in it!"
The violet eyes blazed. From soft Fay Judson's throat came that inarticulate snarl of the tigress that is in every woman, and her fingers like curving talons tore toward her husband's face.
But his hands were quicker. Before the fingers could touch him he had seized her wrists. Strong wrists they were, with all their wielding of tennis rackets and swinging of golf sticks and pulling of oars, but George held the hands as if they had been Junior's. He was so much stronger that he could be absolutely gentle as he lowered them to his breast and held them there as in a velvet vise, very close to him, very helpless, while he looked steadily into her eyes.
"Let me go!" she panted desperately. "Let me go!"
He still held her. If he had smiled at the ease with which he did it, if his lip had curled with the slightest scorn at the futility of her struggles, if he had gloated over the magnificence of his physical superiority, or if his eye had flashed one hint of anger, he would have lost her there and then. But he did none of these things. His expression was of shame and unspeakable regret. His air was that of one who served—served by controlling her for herself. His moral mastery was greater even than his physical mastery.
As she felt the futility of her efforts, she relaxed them inevitably, and instantly he relaxed the power of his grip. She relaxed more, and he relaxed more, second by second, until she stood entirely unresisting with her hands in his. And all the while this gradation in physical submission had been taking place, his expression had been growing kinder, more considerate, and more sorrowful.
A nervous tremor, preliminary to a great revulsion, passed over her. He felt it—interpreted it. His hands opened, and she was free—to strike him—to tear him—to fly, but she wanted to do neither. With a welling sob she flung her arms high and closed them around her husband's neck in a convulsive clasp of affection and impetuous desire to remain beached and comforted upon that breast forever.