Man's Country/Chapter 26
BUT when George Judson did come back to the suite in the Pontchartrain, he came alone. He was white and more shaken than when he departed; his eyes appeared sunken.
"She is gone!" he said.
"Already? Hmn! Where to?"
"Europe!"
The doctor was himself rather startled by this complete confirmation of his fears. "And taken the child?"
George Judson nodded sickly. "Her mother, too. The whole family!"
"Then she didn't go with Sir Brian?"
"Sir Brian is gone, though. I tried to find him at the club. Lucky for him I didn't, I guess," and the distracted man dropped his eyes for a minute. "I had one of those crazy spells."
"Lucky for you also, I guess!" observed the doctor pithily.
Judson's slightly shamefaced manner confessed that he thought so, too. He was all over his killing rage and appreciating more poignantly every second the magnitude of the blow which had fallen upon him. He sank dejectedly into a chair, and gazed at the wall with vacant, unseeing eyes. His mind busy with terrible regrets, he had forgotten his hatreds.
"I didn't even get a chance to tell her what a blind fool I'd been—that I was mostly to blame for the whole horrid mess and that—" With a weary shake of his head he left the sentence unfinished.
In the breathing silence there came up to the window a vast, faint shouting from the streets below. The doctor stepped to the casement and looked down into the Circle. Crowds were knotted on the corners, with newsboys weaving in and out among them and selling papers so rapidly that rather than any necessities of salesmanship, it must have been the urge of some profound excitement which kept their voices barking in such hoarse, persistent chorus.
"What's it all about, I wonder!" commented the doctor, thinking to divert George for a minute from his misery.
"Oh!" recalled the half-stupefied man, rousing. "You know what the headlines say? War!" His pronunciation of the word was almost incredulous. "Germany has invaded Belgium on the way to France. Russia is attacking Germany."
"My God!" breathed the doctor slowly, his eyes fixed on his informant, while one by one the wide horizons of his mind lighted up with the possibilities of such a conflagration among the nations. "England will come in. There'll be the devil to pay. All Europe will be torn to pieces like a rag baby by a pack of wolves," he declared.
Abruptly George Judson stood up. "And my wife and child are sailing into that tomorrow!"
The two men exchanged glances, gravely impressed.
"However, she'll read the papers and—she won't go," reasoned George hopefully.
But the doctor shook his head decisively. "I think she will," he asserted. "Anything as big as a trip to Europe was not decided upon hastily. The fact of war is likely to make her more determined. Indeed, I suspect anything like a war between nations will seem so mild compared to the strife that has gone on in her heart that she will fly to it with a kind of rapture. She craves adventure. She will get it. She pines for action—she will see it. She is in search of romance—she will find it, the grisly, horrible romance of sudden death. She will see men adventuring all round her—women outraged, children trampled, famine stalking! She might get so well fed up on adventure that a home with a butler and a chef in it, in far-off Detroit, and a husband that sticks to his desk like glue all day and comes home nights and pesters her with his selfish caresses, might be the most fascinating idea in the world to her."
"You think so, Doctor?" George Judson in this hour was clutching at straws if ever man did. "If only I had seen them go—if only I could have kissed her goodby and assured her that I would love her to the end of my life if I lived to be as old as Methuselah! If only Junior had held my finger again!"
"Better they didn't," opined the doctor, looking always at the practical values. "That was her consideration for you—and for herself, Did she leave you any message?"
"This!" George took from his inside coat pocket an oblong of lavender notepaper. The communication was without salutation and without signature. It was very brief and read:
"I am going, George, on the far, far journey. (You won't miss the farewell. I couldn't stand it.) I am going to search for the Garden of Eden. To search for it without you! That sounds topsy-turvy, doesn't it? But I've taken our small edition of you along, precious, precious Junior!"
That was all.
"That doesn't sound as if she went away with Sir Brian," declared the doctor, weighing the note in his hand.
"But—she's left me!" despaired George, unable to see hope anywhere in the sky. "I've lost her! Say!" and he sat up with a sudden fierceness of self-accusation. "What's the matter with me? I work like the devil, and I don't get anything out of it. I win a wife, and I can't keep her. I have a son, and he's taken away from me. I've made a lot of money, but I can't ever get my hands on any of it to spend. I've built a great business, and so help me God, I'm tortured half the time for fear they're going to take it away from me! What's the matter with me anyway?"
"You're a hell-paver!" diagnosed the doctor again.
"But I'm not one of these sapheads that just dream of doing things," resented George. "I do 'em, I'm a performer."
"And a lot of hell-pavers are performers. That's how they fool themselves. Your scheme of life looks to you like a masterpiece. It would to a lot of people. They wouldn't see where the hell-paving comes in."
"You'll have to show me," challenged the man stubbornly.
"And I will show you," rejoined the doctor resolutely. "There are two kinds of hell-pavers, the weak and the strong; the little and the big. The weak intend and stop there. The strong perform all right, but they leave fatal gaps in their biggest performances that rob them of the fruits of their efforts just as you see that you yourself have been robbed. Recall your simile of the unfinished bridge a while ago—you've left more open gaps in your life structure than you've got hands and arms to hold the bridges up with."
George winced, but the doctor never faltered.
"And you've also hell-paved at home. You were hell-paving when you did not tell your wife frankly the facts about your business. You should have had her sympathy when you got only her scorn. You hell-paved when you checked your beautiful wife with another man upon the golf-links as you might have checked a wet umbrella at a stand."
"Doctor!" roared the husband in pain. "I never did that. You know I never did it."
"You did something strangely like it," rebuked the specialist with a relentless driving home of his assertion by an unshaken glance of his level, blue eyes.
"No—no," protested George, sick to death with his distress and sick with any attempt at speculating upon the mistakes that had led to them, although it was himself that had asked it. "I'm wrong, but you're not right. Let's end this moralizing, and help me, Doctor, if you can. I just haven't learned the secret of holding a woman's love. What is that secret, Doctor?"
"If I knew, I could make a million dollars a day selling it in New York City alone," smiled the doctor. "If I knew, I could brighten the homes and lighten the hearts of half the men and women in the world. Each man must find it out for himself. You haven't—yet."
"But, so help me God, I will!" declared George with rising emphasis, and, suddenly indomitable again, he started up and seemed about to take himself away.
"Where are you going?" asked the doctor, apprehensively.
"To New York to bring her back."
"Don't!" said the doctor impressively. "I advise against it. It will lose you your chance. Be patient. Be self-contained. Be resigned. If you have lost her, she is gone from you beyond your power to bring her back. If you have not, there is still hope that your absence, not your presence, may rekindle her love for you. You have always been devoted to her—in your blind, self-engrossed fashion. Leave that to fight for you—that and the boy! Go back to all that's left you—your job—and do it! Try to bear yourself in such a big way that it will challenge her admiration once more, that it will make her turn to you like the magnet to the pole."
George appeared to listen with the humble faith of a child. "But how is she going to know what I do now?" he objected.
"I fancy she will know—that she will find a way, or has arranged a way, to keep herself informed of all your goings on." The doctor came near with lowered voice and a hand sympathetically on George Judson's shoulder. "You have one resource left to try now, my boy, the power of constancy, of a faithful and steadfast love—the power of the knowledge that a home is open and a husband waits for her here. That, without one act of violence, one bitter word of recrimination, he confesses at least his own faults and he—waits!"
"Waits? My God! That is an awful sentence, Doctor, to a man like me. I'm a go-getter. I never wait for plums to fall into my lap. I shake the tree."
"This may be the very discipline your character requires. Patience, Mr. Judson, is as great a virtue as your particular god, perseverance, and a rarer one—a more difficult one. Wait."
"Wait!" The great specialist had advised with an impressiveness so great that it had all the authority of a supreme moral imperative. And it was a tribute to the fibre of George Judson that he was able to do this—wait. There was no direct communication, but he knew that Fay had landed in England. And of course she must remain in England, for there was no travel now except backward to America, and she did not travel backward. But England! That was Sir Brian Hook's country.
Then from her mother vague news began to come to his mother. Miraculously she had gained the Continent as if some high influence had opened secret doors for her. She was in Paris. She was in Rome. She was—of all places—Salonica. How did she accomplish it? He could only surmise, and the only surmise that occurred to him was an unpleasant one. But there she was—in the thick of it. Drinking her fill of excitement—feeding the passion of her eternal restlessness; getting, George hoped, her fill of adventure.
And his boy! Where was he?
Safe in England! So Mrs. Gilman's letter had assured Mary Judson, and besides the heartache of loss and loneliness George's proud spirit chafed especially at this. His boy—his son—why should he be in England, a foreign country and war-encompassed? why dependent upon the care of hired strangers? Why, some of these air raids or something—but there he was, and his mother was still away upon her quest of the Garden of Eden, while the covenant George Judson had made with himself forbade him to interfere, forbade him to do anything but wait.
He kept the covenant. He remained in America. He never closed the Indian Village home. Out of it he came and went to his daily work. The servants stayed on. The cream-and-blue room was as it had always been. Mrs. George Judson was merely away. She might return at any time.
Lonely but proud, suffering but self-contained, George Judson gave himself up to longer hours of unremitting toil than he had known since boyhood. He punished himself with work. His dissipation was work. His life became one long debauch of work, work, work! Work that prospered now as no work of his had ever prospered before. But there were also times when hope and faith strove against sickly, withering jealousy and both were blighted by it, times when he left everything for a day and rushed down to New York to counsel with the specialist who had been definitely established as physician to, not his body, but his heart.
"What is she doing round all these places? How does she get there?" These were stock queries of George's always.
"Nursing, maybe," soothed the doctor.
"Nursing? Fay! She doesn't know how to nurse. She's not—steady enough to nurse."
"Scrubbing, maybe. Roustabout work in hospitals."
George Judson smiled, a superior, half-ironic smile. His wife wouldn't nurse, she couldn't scrub, she couldn't do anything but play.
But the wise doctor smiled also, and not ironically, but hopefully. "It might be," he suggested, "that this play-girl is learning to work—is learning to organize her energies about something else than whims—that her will-life is conquering her impulse-life—that over yonder is growing, my man, a woman so big that you'll have to be a bigger man than you have ever been to aspire to her. Remember you thought you had to be rich to win her at first. But she didn't put so much value on your riches. Mere dollars couldn't hold her. It may be that you'll have to become a great deal more of a man to be the kind of mate she can admire as she once admired you and as we want her to admire you again."
"But how—?" George would begin always to protest, and.
"Wait! Be steadfast! Stick!" That was always what the advice of the Doctor simmered down to.
And meanwhile, business—and such business! How easy it was to make money now! He could discharge his salesforce, he could cancel his advertising contracts, he could turn every energy and every resource to production. With a kind of black exultation he saw the dividends grow larger and surer—the ends of the two spans of the bridge growing nearer and nearer together until at last they joined. The operation was complete. The empty chambers of hope on which the foundations of the Judson-Morris Motor Works had been laid were filled now by the solid gold of earned assets. The institution was sound. With a sigh of relief President Judson ceased to be Atlas holding up the world of his creation.
He leaned back to breathe. In business, at any rate, he was no longer a hell-paver—except—unless—
He had drawn no more than one breath of this blessed relief, however, before his mind had fastened on the single ground for business apprehension which remained—the fifteen per cent—the fifteen thousand shares he had been forced to part with, thereby jeopardizing his control. He had money enough now to buy it, but Templeton would not sell. George went into the market to buy a different fifteen thousand shares or any part of them, but Judson-Morris stock was all at once strangely retiring. It had practically disappeared. This meant that somebody was buying it. For what?
There could be but one reason. George was sick as he thought what this reason was. It would be terrible if they took the plant away from him now—now, just as he had made it into the great, solid structure that it was. It was all he had left—except a hope that turned toward Europe. This hope and that fear seemed all that remained to him, and it was while he shifted his eyes dizzily from one to the other and back again, that the United States rushed suddenly headlong into the world war. Instantly George Judson roused to a new possibility.
The Judson-Morris Motor Works no longer required his presence, It would run now of its own momentum, and he decided to abandon its direction entirely to Chilton. He left an order with his brokers to buy all or any part of fifteen thousand shares of Judson-Morris common when and wherever opportunity should arise, and himself went immediately to enlist. He wanted to fight, a rifle in his hand, against civilization's enemies.
He might die! Well, why not? But they wouldn't give him a gun.
"Just the man we need to go to France and organize our motor transport service," suggested a dollar-a-year friend of George's in affiliation with the War Department, and into motor transport he was sent—by way of Liverpool and London.
London? His boy was there, but in London he learned that Junior was tucked away in a corner of Wales far from the path of air raids. "Safest place in the kingdom," they told him, but when the eager father wanted to set off hot-foot to Wales, he could not go because of military orders.
But there was one satisfaction in passing through London. He saw Mrs. Gilman there, her hands full of war work on some committee or other of American women, and she gave him a more detailed account of Fay's activities. They had been quite worthy ones. She had found herself in the war. Its opportunities called down to earth her restless, romantic spirit. She had learned to be of yse in the world.
But she was still restless, nomadic of disposition. She had established a home for orphaned Belgian children, but had left it for others to manage. She had taken a course and done nursing in the great Red Cross Hospital at Neuilly, near Paris, and then, craving more adventure, had gone to driving ambulance for a British Hospital unit.
George was permitted to see a snapshot of her in uniform, the same trim, graceful figure, but with a rare steadiness in the eyes, a new strength in the pose—or was it the uniform that imparted this? Why not an American uniform? But the Americans had only men driving ambulances.
Nothing was said about Sir Brian; nothing was asked about him. George feared the question—feared a reply that might destroy hope.
He went on to France, a land groaning with war and teeming with the movement of war, yet to his fascinated imagination, it seemed only some small, magic maze in the labyrinths of which he must presently encounter his wife. In this state of mind he indulged day-dreams the absurdity of which made those by which his wife had once been charmed seem like polished diamonds of Aristotelian wisdom.
For instance, he dreamed ridiculously of being sent on some errand to the British sector, of there blundering into front-line danger, where he would fall wounded or gassed or something, lying all night upon the field; but with morning light the stretcher-bearers would take him back, back to where an ambulance waited. Its driver, a graceful girl, especially fetching in her jaunty cap and Sam Browne belt, would be standing by while the stretcher-men lifted their burden into her car.
But that was a dream—an absurd, ridiculous imagining. He never saw the British sector. He never got within one hundred miles of the American front. He was never even ditched in one of his own trucks. He spent most of his time working twenty hours a day. He got rid of the two bars of a captain and finally wore the eagle of a colonel on his collar, but he had the authority of a three-star general in his organization, and he did his part to keep the army fed and clothed, working with unbounded enthusiasm until the armistice. But in a few short November days all the glamour and fascination faded out of war. A military organization became dreary and desultory and inefficient.
He longed to get away from it and had prestige enough now to secure immediate leave. He searched the hospitals of Paris; he appealed to the records of the British Ambulance Units; he turned at length to London. Even Mrs. Gilman had gone, leaving no address.
Discouraged, hope almost gone, he went back to Paris. When he reached the Hotel Continental, lo, there was a letter with the address almost obliterated by postmarks—a letter that had followed him for months through the eccentric channels of army mail, and at last had overtaken him here. But the address was still distinguishable, and it was in her handwriting.
He thrilled at the sight of that beloved, bold, and angular but distinguished hand. Not in four years had his eye seen anything that so gladdened him, and with heart beating wildly under his breast of whipcord khaki, he sought the privacy of his room. Once there he tore it open almost violently, yet with a genuine reverence in the touch of his impatient fingers.
"George, George," the letter began, "I am so glad you are in the war—so proud to hear that General Harbord has personally commended you."
Harbord—where had she heard that? It was only six months ago? The letter was five months old. She must have been very close to him to have heard of that within a month in war areas, It gave him an uncanny, superstitious feeling, but it made his heart leap as at the discovery that she had been watching him nearer than he thought—and why was she watching if she did not still love him?
"But it isn't that which impels me to write to you. As time drifts on and there is more time for understanding of the tragedy that overtook our love, there are some things that it seems I must tell you. Do you mind if I hurt you a little while I tell them? Things that you ought to know, George, because sometime, somewhere, again, you will be trying to make a woman happy, and I don't want you to make the old mistake."
Sometime—somewhere—a woman! The inference inevitable from the form of this allusion was chilling. He shuddered as if a polar blast had struck him but—he read on:
"Some things I thought were vices in you, George, have come to look like virtues since I've seen so much of other men. But I think for one item, that as a lover, George, you put too much trust in material things. You wanted to give your wife a mountain of concrete and steel when she would rather have had arose. You ordered wagon-loads of flowers sent to me in those five years, George, but I never appreciated all of them as much as if you had stopped your car by the roadside and gathered a handful of daisies and brought them to me. But you never did that. If you had thought of gathering them, you would not have had time to bring them. You would have sent them back by Blakeley!"
"God!" George Judson cried out sharply, under his breath, and bit his lip.
"A woman isn't just an acquisition, you know," the letter went on. "It isn't all when you've captured her. You can't just drag her home through the jungle to your lair and expect her to stay there like a dove with clipped wings and be content. The wooing has just begun then. I told you once it was the duty of a husband to make his business romantic—that was silly, no doubt—but it is the duty of a husband to remain always a wooer and a lover.
"In those days, George, you didn't want a wife; you wanted a pet sheep that would come when you called her and stay away when you didn't. You wanted a plaything, and I couldn't be merely that—though that was all I knew how to be. Being a husband is not an executive posttion; it's only one side of a partnership, and not merely a partnership in business, but in life.
"But enough of ragging! I had these things to say that would hurt you, but might do you good. I have now something to add that will comfort you and certainly do you good also. You are a great builder, George—a creator. Oh, I get so sick of destruction and destroyers! I never saw so plainly as now how important are the constructive forces in the world's history. The greatest men are not the destroyers; they are the constructors. You are a constructor.
"Oh, George! I had such a thrill one day. They gave me a new ambulance to drive, and it was one of yours. I nearly screamed for joy. When no one could see, I bent and kissed the name upon the radiator. Until that moment I had not known how great and really worthy was the thing you were doing. I thought that it would be a kind of sad comfort for you to know that I had caught your vision at last, as it is now for me to recognize it.
"Speaking for myself—for my selfish own concerns—I have not entered into Eden yet, but I think I know where it is. I think it is very near me now—I think I can smell its fragrance—I think I can reach out and touch the secret spring that will open its gates to me. But I have not reached out my hand yet. And before I did, it seemed comradely to write these lines to a fellow-fighter in this war against one of civilization's enemies.
So the letter ended. Cryptic—maddening—inflaming. It was dated Warsaw. Warsaw! She had got out of British service—that was why he could not find her—she was with Hoover perhaps. She had not told him. She did not want him to find her. But—it was not yet too late! and he would find her. He would!
But his leave of absence was expiring. He was still a cog in the military machine and must go back to Tours and take up his duty, the dull, drudging duty of putting up the shutters on a war. But at last his part in it would be done, and when it was, and not until then—he would ask for his discharge—on French soil.