Chapter IX: Part 9

To-night, when I told Dinky-Dunk that Peter would in all likelihood be here to-morrow, he listened without batting an eyelash. But he asked if I'd mind handing him a cigarette, and he studied my face long and intently. I don't know what he saw there, or what he concluded, for I did my best to keep it as noncommittal as possible. If there is any move, it must be from him. That sour-inked Irishman called Shaw has said that women are the wooers in this world. A lot he knows about it!... Yet something has happened, in the last half-hour, which both disturbs and puzzles me. When I was unpacking Dinky-Dunk's second trunk, which had stood neglected for almost four long days, I came across the letter which I thought I'd put away in the back of the ranch ledger and had failed to find.... And he had it, all the time!

The redoubtable Struthers, it must be recorded, to-day handed me another paper, and almost as triumphantly as the first one. She'd picked it up on her way home from the druggist's, where she went for aspirin for Dinky-Dunk. On what was labeled its "Woman's Page" was yet another photographic reproduction of the fair Lady Allie in aviation togs and a head-line which read: "Insists On Tea Above The Clouds." But I plainly disappointed the expectant Struthers by promptly handing the paper back to her and by declining to make any comment.

_Thursday the Thirty-first_

Peter walked in on us to-day, a little less spick and span, I'm compelled to admit, than I had expected of one in his position, but as easy and unconcerned as though he had dropped in from across the way for a cigarette and a cup of tea. And I played up to that pose by having Struthers wheel the tea-wagon out into the _patio_, where we gathered about it in a semicircle, as decorously as though we were sitting in a curate's garden to talk over the program for the next meeting of the Ladies' Auxiliary.

There we sat, Dinky-Dunk, my husband who was in love with another woman; Peter, my friend, who was in love with me, and myself, who was too busy bringing up a family to be in love with anybody. There we sat in that beautiful garden, in that balmy and beautiful afternoon sunlight, with the bamboos whispering and a mocking-bird singing from its place on the pepper-tree, stirring our small cups and saying "Lemon, please," or "Just one lump, thank you." It may not be often, but life _does_ occasionally surprise us by being theatrical. For I could not banish from my bones an impression of tremendous reservations, of guarded waiting and watching from every point of that sedate and quiet-mannered little triangle. Yet for only one moment had I seen it come to the front. That was during the moment when Dinky-Dunk and Peter first shook hands. On both faces, for that moment, I caught the look with which two knights measure each other. Peter, as he lounged back in his wicker chair and produced his familiar little briar pipe, began to remind me rather acutely of that pensive old _picador_ in Zuloaga's _The Victim of The Fete_, the placid and plaintive and only vaguely hopeful knight on his bony old Rosinante, not quite ignorant of the fact that he must forage on to other fields and look for better luck in newer ventures, yet not quite forgetful that life, after all, is rather a blithe adventure and that the man who refuses to surrender his courage, no matter what whimsical turns the adventure may take, is still to be reckoned the conqueror. But later on he was jolly enough and direct enough, when he got to showing Dinky-Dunk his books and curios. I suppose, at heart, he was about as interested in those things as an aquarium angel-fish is in a Sunday afternoon visitor. But if it was pretense, and nothing more, there was very actual kindliness in it. And there was nothing left for me but to sit tight, and refill the little lacquered gold cups when necessary, and smile non-committally when Dinky-Dunk explained that my idea of Heaven was a place where husbands were served _en brochette_, and emulate the Priest and the Levite by passing by on the other side when Peter asked me if I'd ever heard that the West was good for mules and men but hard on horses and women. And it suddenly struck me as odd, the timidities and reticences which nature imposes on our souls. It seemed so ridiculous that the three of us couldn't sit there and unbosom our hearts of what was hidden away in them, that we couldn't be open and honest and aboveboard and say just what we felt and thought, that we couldn't quietly talk things out to an end and find where each and all of us stood. But men and women are not made that way. Otherwise, I suppose, life would be too Edenic, and we'd part company with a very old and venerable interest in Paradise!

_Saturday the Second_

Peter had arranged to come for us with a motor-car and carry us all off to the Rose Tournament yesterday morning, "for I do want to be sitting right next to that little tike of yours," he explained, meaning Dinkie, "when he bumps into his first brass band!"

But little Dinkie didn't hear his brass band, and we didn't go to the Rose Tournament, although it was almost at our doors and some eighty thousand crowded automobiles foregathered here from the rest of the state to get a glimpse of it. For Peter, who is staying at the Greene here instead of at the Alexandria over in Los Angeles, presented himself before I'd even sat down to breakfast and before lazy old Dinky-Dunk was even out of bed.

Peter, I noticed, had a somewhat hollow look about the eye, but I accepted it as nothing more than the after-effects of his long trip, and blithely commanded him to sit down and partake of my coffee.

Peter, however, wasn't thinking about coffee.

"I'm afraid," he began, "that I'm bringing you rather--rather bad news."

We stood for a moment with our gazes locked. He seemed appraising me, speculating on just what effect this message of his might have on me.

"What is it?" I asked, with that forlorn tug at inner reserves which life teaches us to send over the wire as we grow older.

"I've come," explained Peter, "simply because this thing would have reached you a little later in your morning paper--and I hated the thought of having it spring out at you that way. So you won't mind, will you? You'll understand the motive behind the message?"

"But what is it?" I repeated, a little astonished by this obliquity in a man customarily so direct.

"It's about Lady Newland," he finally said. And the solemnity of his face rather frightened me.

"She's not dead?" I asked in a breath.

Peter shook his head from side to side.

"She's been rather badly hurt," he said, after several moments of silence. "Her plane was winged yesterday afternoon by a navy flier over San Diego Bay. She didn't fall, but it was a forced landing and her machine had taken fire before they could get her out of her seat."

"You mean she was burnt?" I cried, chilled by the horror of it.

And, inapposite as it seemed, my thoughts flashed back to that lithe and buoyant figure, and then to the picture of it charred and scorched and suffering.

"Only her face," was Peter's quiet and very deliberate reply.

"Only her face," I repeated, not quite understanding him.

"The men from the North Bay field had her out a minute or two after she landed. But practically the whole plane was afire. Her heavy flying coat and gauntlets saved her body and hands. But her face was unprotected. She--"

"Do you mean she'll be _disfigured_?" I asked, remembering the loveliness of that face with its red and wilful lips and its ever-changing tourmaline eyes.

"I'm afraid so," was Peter's answer. "But I've been wiring, and you'll be quite safe in telling your husband that she's in no actual danger. The Marine Hospital officials have acknowledged that no flame was inhaled, that it's merely temporary shock, and, of course, the face-burn."

"But what can they do?" I asked, in little more than a whisper.

"They're trying the new ambersine treatment, and later on, I suppose, they can rely on skin-grafting and facial surgery," Peter explained to me.

"Is it that bad?" I asked, sitting down in one of the empty chairs, for the mere effort to vision any such disfigurement had brought a Channel-crossing and Calais-packet feeling to me.

"It's very sad," said Peter, more ill-at-ease than I'd ever seen him before, "But there's positively no danger, remember. It won't be so bad as your morning paper will try to make it out. They've sensationalized it, of course. That's why I wanted to be here first, and give you the facts. They are distressing enough, God knows, without those yellow reporters working them over for wire consumption."

I was glad that Peter didn't offer to stay, didn't even seem to wish to stay. I wanted quietness and time to think the thing over. Dinky-Dunk, I realized, would have to be told, and told at once. It would, of course, be a shock to him. And it would be something more. It would be a sudden crowding to some final issue of all those possibilities which lay like spring-traps beneath the under-brush of our indifference. I had no way of knowing what it was that had attracted him to Lady Alicia. Beauty of face, of course, must have been a factor in it. And that beauty was now gone. But love, according to the Prophets and the Poets, overcometh all things. And in her very helplessness, it was only too plain to me, his Cousin Allie might appeal to him in a more personal and more perilous way. My Diddums himself, of late, had appealed more to me in his weakness and his unhappiness than in his earlier strength and triumph. There was a time, in fact, when I had almost grown to hate his successes. And yet he was my husband. He was _mine_. And it was a human enough instinct to fight for what was one's own. But that wild-bird part of man known as his will could never be caged and chained. If somewhere far off it beheld beauty and nobility it must be free to wing its way where it wished. The only bond that held it was the bond of free-giving and goodness. And if it abjured such things as that, the sooner the flight took place and the colors were shown, the better. If on the home-bough beside him nested neither beauty nor nobility, it was only natural that he should wander a-field for what I had failed to give him. And now, in this final test, I must not altogether fail him. For once in my life, I concluded, I had to be generous.

So I waited until Dinky-Dunk emerged. I waited, deep in thought, while he splashed like a sea-lion in his bath, and called out to Struthers almost gaily for his glass of orange-juice, and shaved, and opened and closed drawers, and finished dressing and came out in his cool-looking suit of cricketer's flannel, so immaculate and freshly-pressed that one would never dream it had been bought in England and packed in mothballs for four long years.

I heard him asking for the kiddies while I was still out in the _patio_ putting the finishing touches to his breakfast-table, and his grunt that was half a sigh when he learned that they'd been sent off before he'd had a glimpse of them. And I could see him inhale a lungful of the balmy morning air as he stood in the open doorway and stared, not without approval, at me and the new-minted day.

"Why the clouded brow, Lady-Bird?" he demanded as he joined me at the little wicker table.

"I've had some rather disturbing news," I told him, wondering just how to begin.

"The kiddies?" he asked, stopping short.

I stared at him closely as I shook my head in answer to that question. He looked leaner and frailer and less robustious than of old. But in my heart of hearts I liked him that way. It left him the helpless and unprotesting victim of that run-over maternal instinct of mine which took wayward joy in mothering what it couldn't master. It had brought him a little closer to me. But that contact, I remembered, was perhaps to be only something of the moment.

"Dinky-Dunk," I told him as quietly as I could, "I want you to go down to San Diego and see Lady Allie."

It was a less surprised look than a barricaded one that came into his eyes.

"Why?" he asked as he slowly seated himself across the table from me.

"Because I think she needs you," I found the courage to tell him.

"Why?" he asked still again.

"There has been an accident," I told him.

"What sort of accident?" he quickly inquired, with one hand arrested as he went to shake out his table-napkin.

"It was an air-ship accident. And Lady Allie's been hurt."

"Badly?" he asked, as our glances met.

"Not badly, in one way," I explained to him. "She's not in any danger, I mean. But her plane caught fire, and she's been burned about the face."

His lips parted slightly, as he sat staring at me. And slowly up into his colorless face crept a blighted look, a look which brought a vague yet vast unhappiness to me as I sat contemplating it.

"Do you mean she's disfigured," he asked, "that it's something she'll always--"

"I'm afraid so," I said, when he did not finish his sentence.

He sat looking down at his empty plate for a long time.

"And you want me to go?" he finally said.

"Yes," I told him.

He was silent for still another ponderable space of time.

"But do you understand--" he began. And for the second time he didn't finish his sentence.

"I understand," I told him, doing my best to sit steady under his inquisitorial eye. Then he looked down at the empty plate again.

"All right," he said at last. He spoke in a quite flat and colorless tone. But it masked a decision which we both must have recognized as being momentous. And I knew, without saying anything further, that he would go.

_Sunday the Third_

Dinky-Dunk left Friday night and got back early this morning before I was up. This naturally surprised me. But what surprised me more was the way he looked. He was white and shaken and drawn about the eyes. He seemed so wretched that I couldn't help feeling sorry for him.

"_She wouldn't see me!_" was all he said as I stopped him on the way to his room.

But he rather startled me, fifteen minutes later, by calling up the Greene and asking for Peter. And before half an hour had dragged past Peter appeared in person. He ignored the children, and apparently avoided me, and went straight out to the pergola, where he and Dinky-Dunk fell to pacing slowly up and down, with the shadows dappling their white-clad shoulders like leopards as they walked up and down, up and down, as serious and solemn as two ministers of state in a national crisis. And something, I scarcely knew what, kept me from going out and joining them.

It was Peter himself who finally came in to me. He surprised me, in the first place, by shaking hands. He did it with that wistful wandering-picador smile of his on his rather Zuloagaish face.

"I've got to say good-by," I found him saying to me.

"Peter!" I called out in startled protest, trying to draw back so I could see him better. But he kept my hand.

"I'm going east to-night," he quite casually announced. "But above all things I want you and your Dinky-Dunk to hang on here as long as you can. _He_ needs it. I'm stepping out. No, I don't mean that, exactly, for I'd never stepped in. But it's a fine thing, in this world, for men and women to be real friends. And I know, until we shuffle off, that we're going to be that!"

"Peter!" I cried again, trying not to choke up with the sudden sense of deprivation that was battering my heart to pieces. And the light in faithful old Peter's eyes didn't make it any easier.

But he dropped my hand, of a sudden, and went stumbling rather awkwardly over the Spanish tiling as he passed out to the waiting car. I watched him as he climbed into it, stiffly yet with a show of careless bravado, for all the world like the lean-jowled knight of the vanished fete mounting his bony old Rosinante.

It was nearly half an hour later that Dinky-Dunk came into the cool-shadowed living-room where I was making a pretense of being busy at cutting down some of Dinkie's rompers for Pee-Wee, who most assuredly must soon bid farewell to skirts.

"Will you sit down, please?" he said with an abstracted sort of formality. For he'd caught me on the wing, half-way back from the open window, where I'd been glancing out to make sure Struthers was on guard with the children.

My face was a question, I suppose, even when I didn't speak.

"There's something I want you to be very quiet and courageous about," was my husband's none too tranquillizing beginning. And I could feel my pulse quicken.

"What is it?" I asked, wondering just what women should do to make themselves quiet and courageous.

"It's about Allie," answered my husband, speaking so slowly and deliberately that it sounded unnatural. "She shot herself last night. She--she killed herself, with an army revolver she'd borrowed from a young officer down there."

I couldn't quite understand, at first. The words seemed like half-drowned things my mind had to work over and resuscitate and coax, back into life.

"This is terrible!" I said at last, feebly, foolishly, as the meaning of it all filtered through my none too active brain.

"It's terrible for me," acknowledged Dinky-Dunk, with a self-pity which I wasn't slow to resent.

"But why aren't you there?" I demanded. "Why aren't you there to keep a little decency about the thing? Why aren't you looking after what's left of her?"

Dinky-Dunk's eye evaded mine, but only for a moment.

"Colonel Ainsley-Brook is coming back from Washington to take possession of the remains," he explained with a sort of dry-lipped patience, "and take them home."

"But why should an outsider like--"

Dinky-Dunk stopped me with a gesture.

"He and Allie were married, a little over three weeks ago," my husband quietly informed me. And for the second time I had to work life into what seemed limp and sodden words.

"Did you know about that?" I asked.

"Yes, Allie wrote to me about it, at the time," he replied with a sort of coerced candor. "She said it seemed about the only thing left to do."

"Why should she say that?"

Dinky-Dunk stared at me with something strangely like a pleading look in his haggard eye.

"Wouldn't it be better to keep away from all that, at a time like this?" he finally asked.

"No," I told him, "this is the time we _can't_ keep away from it. She wrote you that because she was in love with you. Isn't that the truth?"

Dinky-Dunk raised his hand, as though he were attempting a movement of protest, and then dropped it again. His eyes, I noticed, were luminous with a sort of inward-burning misery. But I had no intention of being merciful. I had no chance of being merciful. It was like an operation without ether, but it had to be gone through with. It had to be cut out, in some way, that whole cancerous growth of hate and distrust.

"Isn't that the truth?" I repeated.

"Oh, Tabby, don't turn the knife in the wound!" cried Dinky-Dunk, with his face more than ever pinched with misery.

"Then it _is_ a wound!" I proclaimed in dolorous enough triumph. "But there's still another question, Dinky-Dunk, you must answer," I went on, speaking as slowly and precisely as I could, as though deliberation in speech might in some way make clearer a matter recognized as only too dark in spirit. "And it must be answered honestly, without any quibble as to the meaning of words. Were you in love with Lady Allie?"

His gesture of repugnance, of seeming self-hate, was both a prompt and a puzzling one.

"That's the hideous, the simply hideous part of it all," he cried out in a sort of listless desperation.

"Why hideous?" I demanded, quite clear-headed, and quite determined that now or never the overscored slate of suspicion should be wiped clean. I still forlornly and foolishly felt, I suppose, that he might yet usher before me some miraculously simple explanation that would wipe his scutcheon clean, that would put everything back to the older and happier order. But as I heard his deep-wrung cry of "Oh, what's the good of all this?" I knew that life wasn't so romantic as we're always trying to make it.

"I've got to know," I said, as steel-cold as a surgeon.

"But can't you see that it's--that it's worse than revolting to me?" he contended, with the look of a man harried beyond endurance.

"Why should it be?" I exacted.

He sank down in the low chair with the ranch-brand on its leather back. It was an oddly child-like movement of collapse. But I daren't let myself feel sorry for him.

"Because it's all so rottenly ignoble," he said, without looking at me.

"For whom?" I asked, trying to speak calmly.

"For me--for you," he cried out, with his head in his hands. "For you to have been faced with, I mean. It's awful, to think that you've had to stand it!" He reached out for me, but I was too far away for him to touch. "Oh, Tabby, I've been such an awful rotter. And this thing that's happened has just brought it home to me."

"Then you cared, that much?" I demanded, feeling the bottom of my heart fall out, for all the world like the floor of a dump-cart.

"No, no; that's the unforgivable part of it," he cried in quick protest. "It's not only that I did you a great wrong, Tabby, but I did _her_ a worse one. I coolly exploited something that I should have at least respected. I manipulated and used a woman I should have been more generous with. There wasn't even bigness in it, from my side of the game. I traded on that dead woman's weakness. And my hands would be cleaner if I could come to you with the claim that I'd really cared for her, that I'd been swept off my feet, that passion had blinded me to the things I should have remembered." He let his hands fall between his knees. Knowing him as the man of reticence that he was, it seemed an indescribably tragic gesture. And it struck me as odd, the next moment, that he should be actually sobbing. "Oh, my dear, my dear, the one thing I was blind to was your bigness, was your goodness. The one thing I forgot was how true blue you could be."

I sat there staring at his still heaving shoulders, turning over what he had said, turning it over and over, like a park-squirrel with a nut. I found a great deal to think about, but little to say.

"I don't blame you for despising me," Dinky-Dunk said, out of the silence, once more in control of himself.

"I was thinking of _her_," I explained. And then I found the courage to look into my husband's face. "No, Dinky-Dunk, I don't despise you," I told him, remembering that he was still a weak and shaken man. "But I pity you. I do indeed pity you. For it's selfishness, it seems to me, which costs us so much, in the end."

He seemed to agree with me, by a slow movement of the head.

"That's the only glimmer of hope I have," he surprised me by saying.

"But why hope from _that_?" I asked.

"Because you're so utterly without selfishness," that deluded man cried out to me. "You were always that way, but I didn't have the brains to see it. I never quite saw it until you sent me down to--to _her_." He came to a stop, and sat staring at the terra-cotta Spanish floor-tiles. "_I_ knew it was useless, tragically useless. You didn't. But you were brave enough to let my weakness do its worst, if it had to. And that makes me feel that I'm not fit to touch you, that I'm not even fit to walk on the same ground with you!"

I tried my best to remain judicial.

"But this, Dinky-Dunk, isn't being quite fair to either of us," I protested, turning away to push in a hair-pin so that he wouldn't see the tremble that I could feel in my lower lip. For an unreasonable and illogical and absurdly big wave of compassion for my poor old Dinky-Dunk was welling up through my tired body, threatening to leave me and all my make-believe dignity as wobbly as a street-procession Queen of Sheba on her circus-float. I was hearing, I knew, the words that I'd waited for, this many a month. I was at last facing the scene I'd again and again dramatized on the narrow stage of my woman's imagination. But instead of bringing me release, it brought me heart-ache; instead of spelling victory, it came involved with the thin humiliations of compromise. For things could never be the same again. The blot was there on the scutcheon, and could never be argued away. The man I loved had let the grit get into the bearings of his soul, had let that grit grind away life's delicate surfaces without even knowing the wine of abandoned speed. He had been nothing better than the passive agent, the fretful and neutral factor, the cheated one without even the glory of conquest or the tang of triumph. But he had been saved for me. He was there within arm's reach of me, battered, but with the wine-glow of utter contrition on his face.

"Take me back, _Babushka_," I could hear his shaken voice imploring. "I don't deserve it--but I can't go on without you. I can't! I've had enough of hell. And I need you more than anything else in this world!"

That, I had intended telling him, wasn't playing quite fair. But when he reached out his hands toward me, exactly as I've seen his own Dinky do at nightfall when a darkening room left his little spirit hungry for companionship, something melted like an overlooked chocolate _mousse_ in my crazy old maternal heart, and before I was altogether aware of it I'd let my hands slip over his shoulders as he knelt with his bowed head in my lap. The sight of his colorless and unhappy face with that indescribable homeless-dog look in his eyes was too much for me. I gave up. I hugged his head to my breast-bone as though it were my only life-buoy in an empty and endless Atlantic and only stopped when I had to rub the end of my nose, which I couldn't keep a collection of several big tears from tickling.

"I'm a fool, Dinky-Dunk, a most awful fool," I tried to tell him, when he gave me a chance to breathe again. "And I've got a temper like a bob-cat!"

"No, no, Beloved," he protested, "it's not foolishness--it's nobility!"

I couldn't answer him, for his arms had closed about me again. "And I love you, Tabbie, I love you with every inch of my body!"

Women are weak. And there is no such thing, so far as I know, as an altogether and utterly perfect man. So we must winnow strength out of our weakness, make the best of a bad bargain, and over-scroll the walls of our life-cell with the illusions which may come to mean as much as the stone and iron that imprison us. All we can do, we who are older and wiser, is wistfully to overlook the wobble where the meshed perfection of youth has been bruised and abused and loosened, tighten up the bearings, and keep as blithely as we can to the worn old road. For life, after all, is a turn-pike of concession deep-bedded with compromise. And our To-morrows are only our To-days over again.... So Dinky-Dunk, who keeps saying in unexpected and intriguing ways that he can't live without me, is trying to make love to me as he did in the old days before he got salt-and-peppery above the ears. And I'm blockhead enough to believe him. I'm like an old shoe, I suppose, comfortable but not showy. Yet it's the children we really have to think of. Our crazy old patch-work of the Past may be our own, but the Future belongs to them. There's a heap of good, though, in my humble-eyed old Dinky-Dunk, too much good ever to lose him, whatever may have happened in the days that are over.

_Sunday the Twenty-fourth_

Dinky-Dunk, whom I actually heard singing as he took his bath this morning, is exercising his paternal prerogative of training little Dinkie to go to bed without a light. He has peremptorily taken the matter out of my hands, and is, of course, prodigiously solemn about it all.

"I'll show that young Turk who's boss around this house!" he magisterially proclaims almost every night when the youthful wails of protest start to come from the Blue Room in the East Wing.

And off he goes, with his Holbein's Astronomer mouth set firm and the fiercest of frowns on his face.

It had a tendency to terrify me, at first. But now I know what a colossal old fraud and humbug this same soft-hearted and granite-crusted specimen of humanity can be. For last night, after the usual demonstration, I slipped out to the Blue Room and found big Dunkie kneeling down beside little Dinkie's bed, with Dinkie's small hand softly enclosed in his dad's big paw, and Dinkie's yellow head nestled close against his dad's salt-and-peppery pate.

It made me gulp a little, for some reason or other. So I tiptoed away, without letting my lord and master know I'd discovered the secret of that stern mastery of his. And later on Dinky-Dunk himself tiptoed into Peter's study, farther down the same wing, so that he could, with a shadow of truth, explain that he'd been looking over some of the Spanish manuscripts there, when I happened to ask him, on his return, just what had kept him away so long!

THE END

Transcribers Note:

page 49: changed typo calmy into calmly

page 89: changed Kaikabad to Kaikobad

page 153: changed typo is into it

page 348: changed typo awkardly into awkwardly