Chapter XXII: The Mourners

Margaret came, calm and yet clearly distressed beyond measure. It was pathetic to see her control, to see that she could not even break through it to the relief of abandonment. She was very white during the day of the funeral and the ones succeeding it and her eyes met other eyes somewhat reluctantly. She came on Friday morning and Helen had not been able to persuade her to stay with them. She had gone to a hotel and from there, quite simply to the parlors of the undertakers.

“Don’t wait for me, Helen--and I’d sooner be alone. I’ll be here a long while, probably.”

Perhaps after all Walter and Margaret found relief in each other when the grim parlor door was shut. At least at the funeral Margaret sat very quietly, though the well-bred curious eyes of the little group of people strayed unceasingly toward her. She went through it as she went through the following days. It was soon known, before the will was probated, that she was Walter’s legatee. There was a great deal of business to be done. Walter had decided no doubt that the brief embarrassment of inheriting his fortune was better than the recurrent fear of cramping poverty which had always pursued her and of which she had told him. She saw the lawyers and his business associates and discussed with them the best way of disposing of Walter’s interests, and word of her coldness spread around rather quickly and was considered to justify Mr. Robinson’s deductions.

Gage saw her at the funeral. He had not looked for her--had not felt ready to see her. But in the semicircle of chairs facing the gray satin coffin, he was so placed that his eyes met hers unexpectedly. When they did, hostility glinted in his. “You got him,” they seemed to say--and hers looked back steady, unrepentant, even though her mouth was drawn with pain and sorrow.

It had hit Gage as it had Helen. The lightning had been drawn from him. Walter’s death had roused in him an instinct of resistance which had been dormant. He had no certain idea of what had passed between Walter and Margaret but he knew what Carpenter’s point of view had been--how far he had gone, how willing he had been to yield every concession to a woman--to Margaret--in the belief that it would then be possible to build love on a basis of comradeship. Walter had found failure, just how or why no one knew except perhaps Margaret herself. Gage’s mind stumbled along nervously, trying to analyze his and Walter’s failure. He remembered how they had talked together about women, how Walter had said he would be “willing to trust to their terms.” For some reason he lay dead of their terms. And he himself--he had looked at himself in the glass an hour ago with a kind of horror as if he saw himself for the first time in weeks. There was a softening of his features it seemed to him, a look of dissipation, of untrimmed thought, brooding. The memory of his face haunted him. That was what came of being unwilling to trust to the terms of women. Either way--

He looked across at Margaret again, quiet, firm, persistent through tragedy, through all emotional upheaval, and a grim admiration shot through his hostility. After all she was consistent. With all his admiration for women, even at the height of his passion for Helen, he had never connected her or any woman with ability to follow a line of action with such consistency. He had some sense of what was going on in Margaret’s mind--an apperception of her refusal to let this tragedy break her down.

He became conscious of Helen’s sigh. She sat beside him, her hands folded loosely in her lap. The minister talked on, performing with decent civility and entanglement of phrase, the rites of last courtesy for the dead. Gage wondered what he and Helen would do. He was glad that the mess about Freda Thorstad was cleared up. Not that it made any grave difference except in a certain clearness of atmosphere. If she got a divorce she couldn’t get it on those grounds. He wondered how their painfully sore minds could be explained in a divorce court which was accustomed to dealing with brutal incidents. Perhaps a separation would be better. He wondered how he was going to provide for her decently. It was going to be a long job building up the new practice. Things were breaking badly.

Some emphatic phrase of the minister, starting out of his droning talk, brought Gage’s eyes back to the coffin. Strange how the sense of that silent form within it gave him fresh energy. Life had got Walter. Women had got him, in some obscure way. He felt his shoulders straighten with stubborn impulse. They wouldn’t get him. Deftly and logically his thought became practical. He would cut out all this thinking about women. He would--perhaps he would get the Thornton business. It meant a big retainer. He could have done it a few months ago. Now--he visualized old Thornton’s tight mouth, keen eyes. He’d want value received. Have to get in shape--cut out the booze--concentrate on business--men’s business. The actual phrase took shape in his mind. Men’s business. By God, that was how women got you. They got you thinking about them until you became obsessed, obsessed with them and their business. It was so and it had always been so. These new problems were not what people thought they were. They were not sex stuff. Perhaps they altered the grain of woman--changed her--but the adjustment of sex was as it always had been, between each man and each woman. Let the women go on, be what they wanted, do what they wanted. It made some of them better, some of them worse--put new figures in the dance but it was the same dance. Even if it wasn’t the minuet or the waltz there was still dancing. And there was choosing of partners.

Every one stood up. Gage was standing too, with the rest, his vagrant thoughts brought back from their wanderings to the ever shocking realization that he was helping in the laying away of this friend of his and the inevitable feeling that life was a short business for him and every one. He fell back into triteness. You must play the game.

After it was all over he was standing beside Helen.

“I want to go to see Margaret,” said Helen. “I’ll go to her hotel now, Gage.”

“Bring her home if you like,” answered Gage.

The ease of his tone startled Helen. She looked at him in quick surprise, meeting his unexpected smile.

“I merely meant I thought I could be reasonably civil,” he said--and with impulse, “I feel rather cleaned out, Helen. I’ll run down town now and see what I can do before dinner.”

She thought, “He hasn’t had anything to drink for two days,” placing the responsibility for his unwonted pleasantness on a practical basis. It cheered her. She went to Margaret’s hotel and found her in her room, lying on her bed and her head buried in the counterpane. It was the nearest to abandonment that Helen had ever seen in her friend so she ventured to try to comfort.

“It’s the awful blackness of his mind that I can’t bear,” said Margaret, “the feeling he must have had that there was no way out.” She sat up and looked at Helen somewhat wildly. “It frightens me too. For he had such a good mind. He saw things straight. Perhaps there isn’t any way out. Perhaps we are battering our heads against life and each other like helpless fools.”

“Did you love him?” asked Helen. It seemed to her the only vital point just then.

Margaret threw her hands out futilely.

“I don’t know. I was afraid of what might happen if we married. Either way it looked too dangerous. I was afraid of softening too much--of lapsing into too much caring--or of not being able to care at all. He wasn’t afraid--but I was. And--the rotten part is, Helen, that I wasn’t afraid for him but for myself.”

She was hushed for a moment and then broke out again.

“It wasn’t for myself as myself. It was just that if our marriage hadn’t been a miracle of success, it would have proved the case against women again.”

“You mustn’t think any more than you can help,” said Helen. “It wasn’t like Walter to want to cause you pain and I know he wouldn’t want you to suffer now.”

“No, he was willing to do all the suffering,” said Margaret in bitter self-mockery. “He did it too.”

She got hold of herself by one swift motion of her well-controlled mind and stood up, brushing her hair back with the gesture Walter loved. “It’s not your burden, poor girl. You have enough.”

“Not so many,” said Helen. “By the way, Margaret, you haven’t heard about Freda Thorstad, have you?”

“Did she come back?”

“No--she wrote. She had married Gregory Macmillan secretly when he was here. They sent her word that he had typhoid out West and she went to him. Why she didn’t tell people is still a mystery.”

“Married him--Gregory? But she’d only known him four days.”

Helen nodded. “That’s just it. Isn’t it--” she stopped, fearing to wound.

“Magnificent--brave--foolish--” finished Margaret. Her voice broke unaccustomedly. “It’s wonderful. Gregory will be a strange husband but if she shares him with Ireland and--oh, it’s rather perfect. And so all that nonsense about Gage being involved--”

“Was nonsense.”

Margaret did not ask further about Gage. She reverted to Freda and Gregory. The news left her marveling, an envy that was wonder in her remarks. She made no comparisons between Freda and herself and yet it was clear that Freda wrought herself to another phase--a step on towards some solution of thought.

Helen urged her to come to dinner.

“I’d rather not, I think. I’ll have a rest perhaps.”

“Then you’ll go out with us for a ride to-night?”

“Gage wouldn’t like it, would he?”

“He suggested your coming to dinner, my dear.”

They smiled at each other.

“Then I’ll go.” She turned swiftly to Helen. “Oh, work it out if you can, Helen. Not working it out--is horrible.”