Man's Country/Chapter 28
IT was a wild ride that George Judson took, homebound from the motor works, and at the end of it he found his wife waiting for him; but not at the door; not in library or hall, but standing in the center of her own cream-and-blue room, wearing a simple housedress of pink and white stripes in some soft material—an old dress it was, that he had loved her in in the old days. She was wearing her hair in a way that he had liked it, the fine, dark locks waved about the brow and temples, and the lustrous coils doubled low upon the neck. She was the same Fay and yet a different one.
Her beauty was more striking, more ravishing than ever. The rich color contrasts of her symmetrical face were all heightened. But besides this there was upon the features a new kind of glow as from fires deep in the soul fed by some rare, spiritual experience, and even in her pose there was a new dignity as hinting some marked exaltation of character, some fresh access of purposefulness in life.
She did not advance, but smiled, and it was the old smile with a new glory added. She spoke, and it was the old tone, but with a richer, mellower trill than he had ever heard before. She was there; and she was more exquisite than ever and—he loved her more devotedly, more passionately, than he had ever loved her.
"You have come home," he cried with a choke in his voice, with eagerness consuming him, but still holding off, for his soul had learned its discipline.
"To you," she said simply, and opened her arms.
The long wait was over!
With a sigh of ecstasy that was pain, he folded her to his breast for the longest, the tenderest, the slowest embrace that he had ever given, each moment of which was rapture beyond rapture.
George Junior gazed at his father and mother strangely for an interval, and then, as if awed by some emotion beyond his power to comprehend, he backed out of the room and sought the absorbing concerns of childhood elsewhere.
As for the reunited lovers, nothing and nobody existed but themselves, and in the minds of each a thousand thoughts, reflections, queries, explanations, impulses, and resolutions were forming and demanding expression. Each knew instinctively that this embrace marked the end of wanderings, of discontents, of misunderstandings and separations; that at last two lives were fused, and each wanted to give the other bonds to that effect—bonds of gratitude, bonds of affection, bonds of eternal assurance. Both were highly emotional, close to laughter and to tears.
"You—you saved the works for me!" blurted George with shining eyes.
"You—you kept the home open for me," she countered, and kissed him with impulsive tenderness. Then a mood of self-reproach overtook her. "Oh, I was hard, hard, when I went away," she said. "It took a long time to break me, but at last I am broken, George, broken by a world and its woe, and made whole again by the gospel of work and service."
"It was all my fault, though," insisted the husband with a manner that demanded generously the right to monopolize all self-reproaches for himself. "I am just a plain hell-paver!"
"A hell-paver?" Fay looked at him wonderingly.
"Yes," said George, and expounded to her Doctor Mellus's definition of the word with some of his own connotations added. "That's all I've been, just a plain hell-paver," he concluded remorsefully.
But a soft, appealing hand was laid upon his arm, and Fay's face, full of a look of deep contrition was brought near to his. "I've been a hell-paver, too," she said humbly. "I meant well, but I didn't do well. I was just a silly, wilful, spoiled child of luxury. Environment had nearly ruined me. But I am cured, I think; at least I am improved. I have learned to work, George. Feel my hands!"
He took them reverently in his. The palms were hard, the fingers roughened; he lifted them to his lips and kissed them. She went on:
"In the midst of all that woe and distress over there I found the impulse to work; I discovered the thrilling, absorbing pleasure that there is in work. But I was so ignorant I didn't know how to work at first. With all my supposed accomplishments I was unfit for anything useful in a world where suddenly nothing but useful things were needed. But I think I may tell you that I have learned. King Albert was good enough to say that I had been rather useful, and he gave me a bit of ribbon to remember his words by. There is also a trinket in my trunk that the French pinned on my breast. And I hear one is coming from the British. I am not so ashamed of that as of some things."
George leaned back and resurveyed his wife with a kind of awe. No wonder he had discerned in her something that was new and more superior even than those old superiorities which had so impressed and fascinated him in times past. But she was feeling a little exalted and inspired.
"You were right, George, to work," she told him. "The world is falling to pieces. It needs
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work. Empires are rotting from the hinges of history. Civilizations are crumbling. Men and women go workless and go hungry. Behind us, over there, is a world to be reconstructed—nations, families, individuals to be rebuilt. And it isn't just in Europe and Asia where reconstruction is going on. It's here." She was speaking with quivering enthusiasm now, the beautiful eyes ablaze with a kind of earnestness her husband had never seen in them before.
"Let's do our part to make that re-building a fact, husband mine," she pleaded, and drew affectionately close once more. "The world is down. It has to be helped up. And your first step toward that is that mutual ownership program you had in mind once. You haven't abandoned that, have your I want you to get it going, and I want to stand right beside you and help you operate it as the chief part of your job."
But George Judson had suddenly a very peculiar expression on his face, and his eyes were lowered to a crumpled slip of paper in his hand. "I—I haven't got any job," he recalled confusedly. "They just elected a new board of directors over my head."
"Over your head?" inquired his wife in surprise. "But didn't Simon—?"
"Yes, Simon did. But," and George stared sheepishly at that wrinkled slip of paper in his hand, "but—Junior came in, and—and I forgot everything and rushed to you."
"You old dear!" she cried enthusiastically and threw her arms about him. "That shows I was right to come home. You do love me more than your old factory, don't you?"
"Don't I? I always did," insisted George.
"But what can you do then—about the factory plane" Fay inquired, perplexed and feeling that a very real calamity had happened.
"More hell-paving!" ejaculated George with a rueful smile. "By now I'm ousted, and although we still hold the majority stock, we couldn't vote it till the next annual meeting. Tell you," he said. "You were always wanting me to take a vacation. I'll take a vacation for a year, and we'll get acquainted all over again."
"Won't that be thrilling!" cried Fay, "but—" eagerly—"We won't idle, George, on our vacation. We'll go to Europe and work for Mr. Hoover's commission, or we'll settle right down here in Detroit and do something that ought to be done and never has been done before—or—Just a minute, dear! There's the telephone."
She stepped to the extension instrument with an expression of annoyance clouding her features, for this was no time for talk with any outsider, but as she held the receiver to her ear, her face gradually underwent a radiant change.
"What?" she insisted eagerly. "Say that again, Mr. Williams. I want to get it perfectly straight."
George crowded close to her. "What is it?" he demanded. "What does John Williams want?"
Fay hushed him with her eyes. Then she turned abruptly toward him and laughed the happy laugh of a girl, while the telephone instrument sagged unnoticed in her hands.
"George," she exulted. "You've been reelected president. Weems wanted you. The Diamond people wanted you. All the old officers are reelected—only Weems is chairman of the Board. They want you to carry on."
George stared.
"Then I've got my job back again?" he said rather unnecessarily.
"And I've got my husband back," laughed Fay.
"Fay, dear?" he asked as they sat down together, awed and subdued by the violence of their own happiness, "just what was it made you go away?"
His wife flushed and hung her head, toying with a tassel on the corner of the davenport.
"What made me go away," she announced very deliberately, "was just supreme discontent with—with myself, with my husband, with . . . the whole darned world."
"And what brought you back?" he asked shyly.
"You!" she answered mischievously, and leaned close with her breath against his cheek. "You and the gradual dawn of good sense. I saw all kinds of men over there—men with titles and men without, men with great rank and men with decorations for valor upon their breasts. They seemed to vie for the privilege of paying me attention. But they were not all nice men. I met nobles who were not noble.
"I was always comparing you with them, and George—now don't get vain—generally to your advantage. You had your faults but they were superficial faults—theirs went deep—to their very hearts. Blue blood, I found, is sometimes mostly black."
George nodded, deeply satisfied of course; but there was another ghost that required to be laid before his mind could be entirely at rest.
"By the way, Fay?" he asked, as casually as possible, "did you ever see or hear anything of Sir Brian over there? He completely fell out of things round here after the beginning of the war.
"Why,—why didn't you know?" his wife inquired, with shocked eyes and a quick little gasp of pain. "He was here for years on a secret mission for his government. When hostilities broke out he insisted on active duty in the air service. Poor gallant fellow! On his very first combat flight he went roaring down to a hero's death in a chariot of flames." A tear quivered on one of her long lashes and, unashamed, she let it fall. "He was a very great help to me—eventually—Sir Brian Hook! He showed me how very much I loved my husband."
There was some mystery in this allusion but George did not try to comprehend it—did not wish to try. He merely bowed his head in silent emotion over a brave man's death.
Fay was silent also, her mind skirting wide horizons but finally coming back with a sense of supreme contentment—supreme attainment too. Fondly she crept close into George's arms.
"And the sweetest thought to me, George," she said, "is that at last I have found the Garden of Eden, and not away off yonder in a Persian valley, but here in our own quiet home."