Chapter 8

It was after lunch before I was summoned to the telephone, to hear Wolf's voice at the other end. Vio would see me at three. I was to understand that my being alive had been a shock to her, and therefore all this ceremonial!

At a quarter to three I started to walk across the Common to the old Soames house on Beacon Hill. It occurred to me then that if for the living it is a strange sensation when the dead come back, for the dead it is a stranger sensation still. Not till I set out on this errand had I understood how dead I had been. I had been dead and buried; I had been mourned for and forgotten; Vio had finished her grieving and returned to every-day life. For anything I knew, she might be contemplating remarriage. Alice Mountney had said that when people were dead it was better for them to stay dead; and I began to fear it was.

Beacon Hill, as I drew near it, struck me as an illustration of that changing of the old order of which all the inner springs seemed to be within myself. It was no longer the Beacon Hill of my boyhood. It was not even the Beacon Hill of the year when I went away. To those who had stayed on the spot and watched the transformation taking place little difference might be apparent; but to me, with my newly awakened faculties, it was like coming back in autumn to a garden visited in spring. The historic State House had deployed a pair of huge white wings, to make room for which familiar landmarks round about it had for the most part disappeared. All down the slope toward the level land the Georgian and Early Victorian mansions were turning into shops and clubs. The old Soames house, with occasional panes of purple glass in otherwise normal windows, was flanked on one side by a bachelors' chambers and on the other by an antique-shop. One of the few old houses in Boston still in the hands of people connected with the original owners, it had been purchased by Vio's father from the heirs of his mother's family, while Vio's trustees had in their turn bought out Wolf's share in it. Four-square, red, with a fine white Doric portico over which a luxuriant wistaria trained, it suggested, as I approached it now, old furniture, old books, old pictures, old wines, old friendships, and all the easy, well-ordered life out of which we were called by the pistol-shot of Sarajevo.

My nervousness in crossing the street and ringing the door-bell was augmented by that sense, from which I was never free, of being guilty of a stupidity so glaring as almost to amount to crime. No ex-convict returning from the penitentiary could have had a more hangdog conviction of coming back to where he was no longer wanted than I in wiping my cheap boots on Vio's handsome door-mat. If I found any solace in the moments of waiting for an answer to my ring it was in noticing that the doorway needed paint and that nothing in the approach to the house was quite so spick and span as formerly. I call this a solace only because it helped to bring Vio nearer me by making her less supremely mistress than she used to be of everything best in the world. I noticed the same thing when the door was opened by a cheery English man-servant of sixty-odd, who was too gaily captain of his soul to be the perfect butler of the old regime.

"Couldn't see you," was his offhand response, when I had asked for Mrs. Harrowby.

"I think she'll see me."

"No, myte, and I'll tell you why. She's kind o' expectin' of 'er 'usband like. Excuse me."

The politeness was called forth by his shutting the door in my face, compelling me to speak plainly.

"I'm Mrs. Harrowby's husband."

The absurdities in my situation were dramatized in the expressions that ran successively over the man's face. Amazement having followed on incredulity, apology followed on amazement. As I was still too near to Pelly, Bridget, and the Finn to separate myself from the servants hall, my sympathy was with him.

"That's all right, old chap," I found myself saying, with a hand on the astonished henchman's shoulder. "Just tell Mrs. Harrowby I'm here. She'll find me in the library."

It was purely to convince Boosey, that was his name, of my right to enter that I tossed my hat on the hat-rack peg and walked to the coat-closet with my overcoat. With the same air of authority I marched into the long, dim library, where my legs began to tremble under me and my head to swim.

Perhaps because I had not yet had time to think of this room in particular, I experienced my first sensation of difficulty or unreality in getting back the old conceptions. It was not alone my head that swam, but the room. If you imagine yourself sailing through a fog and drawing an approaching ship out of the bank by sheer mental effort of your own, you will understand what I mean. In ordinary conditions you have only to watch the ship making itself more and more distinct; in my case the ship did nothing. It was as if I had to build it plank by plank and sail by sail in order to see it at all.

I could do this, even if I did it painfully. The room came into being, mistily, tremblingly, while my head ached with the effort. Taking a few steps here, there, gazing about me at haphazard, the remembered objects appeared one by one�the desks, the arm-chairs, the rows of books, the portraits, the fireplace, in which there was a slumbering fire. Over the mantelpiece hung Zuloaga's portrait of Vio, which always raised discussion wherever it was exhibited.

I had reached this point at the end of the room when a low stifled cry came from the corner by the fire.

"Oh, Billy, is this you?"

Vio had been sitting there watching me. Had I been able instantly to reconstruct the room I should have seen her instantly; but all these minutes she had been observing me, with that queer, half-choked cry as the result.

I cannot tell you now how long we stared at each other, she in the arm-chair, I on the hearth-rug; but once more the new brain-cells acted sluggishly I knew that this slender, picturesque creature, swathed in soft black satin, with a little white about the open throat line, was Vio, and that Vio was my wife. But I knew it as something remembered, not as an existing fact. I knew it as a ghost might know that another ghost had married him, and that they had once lived intimately side by side.

You must not think from this that there was no emotion. There was tremendous emotion, only it was not the emotion of love after long separation. If it was that there were too many elements in it to allow pent-up passion the immediate right of way. Pent-up passion was stemmed by the realization of what my coming back must mean to the woman before me. For her I had been three years in my grave. As Alice Mountney had put it, she had been in mourning for me�and out again. It was the out again that created this thickened atmosphere between her and me. What had been all over, finished and done with she had to begin again.

And I had not come back to her as I had gone away. I had come back�entirely to the outward eye and somewhat in my heart�not as the smart young fellow of Lydia Blair's recollection, but as a working-man. The metamorphosis rendered me in some ways more akin to Boosey the butler than to my former self. I had acquired an art that made it possible for me to go into the servants' sitting-room and be at home in the company I should find there. The people in the front of the house had to some extent become to me as the Olympian gods at Creed & Creed's, exalted beings with whom I had little to do outside the necessities of work and pay. This change in me was more than superficial; and whatever it was Vio saw it. For her the meeting was harder than for me; and for me it was like a backward revolution of the years.

But after she had clung to me and cried a little, the tensity was broken. As I analyze now, I see the impulse that urged us into each other's arms as one of memory. For her, I was the man who had been, as she was the woman who had been, for me. She, however, had the help of pity, while I was humble and overawed.

It was one of those moments when so many things begin again that it is hard to seize on any. The simplest being the easiest, she said, after having detached herself from me and got back some measure of her self-control:

"What about your things? Have you brought them?"

"The little I have is at the hotel."

Both question and answer came out absently while we looked at each other with a new kind of inspection. The first had been of the self within; now it was of the outer self. I should have shrunk from the way in which her eyes traveled over me had not my whole mind gone into the examination I was making.

Yes; she had changed, though I cannot say that it was in the way of looking older. Rather she had grown to resemble Zuloaga's portrait of her, which we had always considered too theatrical. Zuloaga had emphasized all her most startling traits�her slenderness, sinuousity, and fantastic grace�her immense black eyes, of which he alone of all the men who had painted her had caught the fire that had been compared to that of the black opal�the long, narrow face that was like Wolf's, except for being mysterious and baffling�the mouth, haunted by memories that might have survived from another incarnation, since there had been nothing in her present life to correspond to them. You could speak of her as being beautiful only in the sense of being strange, with an appeal less to the eye than to the imagination. More akin to fire than to flesh, she was closer to spirit than to fire. It might have been a perverse, tortured spirit, but it was far from the merely animal. Discriminating people called it her salvation to have married a humdrum chap like me, since, with a man of more temperament, she would have clashed too outrageously. High-handed and intense, she needed some one seemingly to yield to her caprices, correcting them under the guise of giving in.

Like others of tempestuous nature, when she was gentle her gentleness was heavenly. She was gentle in that way now.

"Sit down, Billy, and let me look at you. Why didn't you bring your things?"

"I didn't know that you wanted me to do that, or that�that we were to�to begin again."

"Of course we shall begin again. What made you think we shouldn't?"

"I didn't think so. I simply didn't know."

"Did Alice Mountney, or Wolf, tell you anything?"

There was a curious significance in the tone, but I let it pass.

"Only that you'd�you'd given me up."

"What else could I do?"

We were sitting half turned toward each other on one of the library sofas, and I seized both her hands.

"But now that I'm back, Vio, are you�are you�glad?"

Though she allowed her hands to remain in mine there was a flash of the black-opal fire.

"It's not so simple as being glad, Billy. The word isn't relevant."

"Relevant to what?"

"I mean that you can't sum up such a situation as this by being either glad or sorry. We've other things to consider."

"But surely that comes first.

"Neither first nor second. The only question we've got to ask for the minute is what we're to do."

"But I thought that was settled�that you wanted me to come back."

"It's settled in the way that getting up in the morning is settled; but that doesn't tell you the duties of the day."

"I suppose one can only meet the duties of the day by going on and seeing what they are."

"Exactly; and isn't that our first consideration�the going on? It doesn't matter whether we're glad or sorry, since we mean to go on, or try to go on�anyhow."

Releasing her hands I dropped back into my own corner of the sofa, scanning the refined features more at my ease, for the reason that her face was slightly averted and her eyes turned to the floor.

"I don't want you to go on, Vio, if�"

"I've thought everything over," she declared in her imperious way, "and made up my mind that it was the only thing for me to do."

"Then you had thought that�that perhaps you�you couldn't."

She nodded slowly, without looking up.

"You'd made other�plans."

"It wasn't that so much; it was�it was thinking of you."

"Thinking of me�from what point of view?"

"From the point of view of�of what you've done." She glanced at me now, quickly, furtively, as if trying to spare me the pain of scrutiny. "Oh, Billy, I'm so sorry for�for my share in it."

"And what do you take your share to be?"

"The share of responsibility. When I urged you to go�"

"As it happened, I should have gone anyhow. When this country had entered the war I should have been under the same obligation as any other man."

"That would have been different. When our men were taken there was discrimination. Each was selected for what he was best fitted to do. A great deal of pains was given to that, and I can't tell you how I suffered when I saw that if I'd only left you alone you could have contributed the thing you knew most about. That's why I feel so strongly that, now you've come back�even in this sort of disguise�"

"I'm not in disguise, Vio. The way you see me�"

The motion of her long, slender hand was partly of appeal and partly of dismissal.

"I don't want to hear about that, Billy. If we're to begin again there are things we mustn't talk about. Since you've done this extraordinary thing, and I may be said to have driven you into it, I want to stand by you. Isn't that enough?"

There was so much in this little speech that I couldn't do it justice at once. All I found myself able to say was:

"Tell me, Vio: Is the extraordinary thing my staying away�or my coming back?"

Again there was that pleading, commanding gesture.

"Oh, Billy, don't. I'm willing to try to pick up the past; but it must be the past, not what's happened in the mean time." She rose with that supple grace which suggested the Zuloaga pose. "Go back to the hotel and get your things. I�I can't bear to see you looking as you are. When you're more like yourself�"

I tried to smile, but I know the effort was no more than a twisted quivering.

"You'll have to see me looking as I am for a few days yet, Vio. My kit doesn't offer me much variety."

"Oh, well�!"

She accepted this as part of the inevitable strangeness in which she had become enveloped, making silent, desperate concessions. Because of this mood I was tempted to ask for five minutes' grace in order to look over the old house.

"You'll find things rather run down," she said, indifferently. "I've no good servants any more. They said that when the war was over it would be easier to get them; but it's a month now since the armistice was signed, and it's just as bad as ever."

"From that point of view, it will probably be worse," I remarked, when about to pass from the library into the hall. "The world isn't going back to what it was before the war. You can't stop an avalanche once it has begun to slide."

She watched me from where she stood before the fire, reproducing almost exactly the attitude of the fascinating woman overhead.

"Does that mean that you've come back a revolutionist, Billy? as well as everything else?"

"N-no; I haven't come back anything in particular. I'm just like you and all the rest of the world, a snowflake in the avalanche. I suppose I shall go tumbling with the mass."

A sense of something outlived came to me as I roamed through the house which Vio allowed me to visit by myself. After two years spent in a squint-eyed room of which the only decoration was three painted fungi this mellow beauty stirred me to a vague irritation. It was not a real dwelling for real people in the real world as the real world had become. It was too rich and soft and long established in its place. Three or four generations of Soameses and Torrances had stored its rooms with tapestries, portraits, old porcelains, and mahoganies; and for America that is much.

Over the landing where the stairway turned hung the famous Copley of Jasper Soames. For a good two minutes he and I faced each other in unspeakable communion. There was nothing between us but this stairway acquaintance, formed during the three years Vio and I had lived together; and yet somehow his being had stamped itself into mine.

On the floors above there was the same well-chosen abundance of everything, sufficiently toned down by use and time to merit the word shabby. That was the note that struck me first, and surprised me. Vio had never been what is commonly known as a good housekeeper; but she had commanded and been obeyed. What the house betrayed now was a diminution of the power of command. Doubtless money didn't go as far as it used to; and there was a new spirit in the world as to taking orders. I thought again of the garden revisited in autumn. The old house might be said to have fulfilled its long mission, and to be ready to pass away with the age of which it was a type.

To go into my own room and find it empty and swept of every trace of my habitation would have been a stranger experience than it was if every experience that day had not been strange. I looked into the wardrobes; I pulled open the drawers. There was not a garment, not a scrap of paper to indicate that I had ever been alive. Not till I saw this did I realize the completeness with which Vio had buried me.

And not till I saw this did I realize that Vio herself was up against the first big struggle of her life. She had never hitherto faced what might be called a moral situation. Her history had been that of any other well-off girl in a city like Boston, where money and position entitled her to whatever was best in the small realm. American civilization, like that of the Italy of the Middle Ages, being civic and not national, the boundaries of Boston, with its suburbs and seaside resorts, had formed the limits of Vio's horizon. True, she had spent a good deal of time in Europe�but always as a Bostonian. She had made periodical visits to Newport, Bar Harbor, Palm Beach, and White Sulphur Springs�but always as a Bostonian. Once she had traveled as far on the American continent as California�but still as a Bostonian.

Boston sufficed for Vio, seeing that it was big enough to give her variety, and swell enough to permit her to shine with little competition. Competition irked her, for the reason that she despised taking trouble. With the exception of a toilet exact to the last detail of refinement, her life was always at loose ends. She rarely answered letters; she rarely returned calls; she never kept accounts; if she began a book she didn't finish it. Adoring little Bobby during the months of his brief life, she found the necessities of motherhood unbearable. That she was as a rule picturesquely unhappy was due to the fact of having nothing on which to whet her spiritual mettle. Like a motor working while the motor-car stands still, she churned herself into action that got nowhere as a result.

But now for the first time in her life she was face to face with a great, big personal problem. How big and great the problem was I didn't at the time understand. All I could see was that she was meeting her baptism of fire, and that I was the means of the ministration.

Pushing open the door between her room and mine I received again the impression of almost awesome privilege I had got on our return from our honeymoon. I had never been at my ease in this room; it was Vio's sanctuary, her fastness. It was a Soames and Torrance sanctuary and fastness, and to it I had only been admitted, not given its freedom as a right. Possibly the feeling that always came to me on crossing its threshold, that I stepped out of my own domain, betokened the missing strand in the tie that had bound Vio and me together.

It had been a trial to me that she should be so much better off than I. Not only did it leave the less for me to do for her, but it created in her a spirit of detachment against which I chafed in vain. Out of the common fund of our marriage she made large reserves of herself, as she might have made reserves�which she did not�of her income. Our beings were allied, but they were not fused. For fusion she had too much that she prized to give away. In such quantity as I could give she made return to me; but having so much more than I to give, her reserves became conspicuous. Of what she withheld this room was the symbol. It was never my room. My comings and goings there had been made with a kind of reverence, as if the place were a shrine.

The only abiding note of my personality had been my photograph at the head of Vio's bed. There was a photograph there now, but I saw that the frame was different. Mine had been in a silver frame; this was in red-brown leather. If it was still mine...

But it was not mine. It was that of a colonel in an American uniform, wearing British and French decorations. Big, portly, handsome, bluff, with an empty left sleeve, he revealed himself as a hero. He was a hero, while I ... It occurred to me that death was not the only means of giving Vio her freedom, and that I ought to tell her so.

To do that I was making my way down-stairs with the words framing themselves on my lips.

"Vio," I meant to say, "if you don't want me back, if anything has happened to make it best for me to go away again forever, you've only to say the word and I'll do it."

But while I was still descending she swept into the hall. Her movements were always rapid, with a careless, commanding ease. She was once more the Zuloaga woman all on fire within.

"How long do you think it will be, Billy, before your tailor can make you look as you ought to?"

I paused where I was, some three steps above her. "It may hardly be worth while to consider that, Vio�"

"Oh, but it is," she interrupted. "If we're going to put this thing through we must do it with some dash. That's essential."

"Why�why the dash?"

"Because there's no other way of doing it. Don't you see? If you just come in by the back door�" She left this sentiment to continue in her own way. "Alice Mountney is going to give a big dinner and invite all your old friends."

My heart sank.

"Is that necessary?"

"Of course it's necessary. It isn't a matter of preference. As far as that goes it will be as hard for me as for you. If I took my own way I should never�" Once more she left me to divine her thought while she added, firmly: "It has simply got to be done. We must make people think�"

"What?" I challenged, when she paused, not apparently from lack of words but from fear of using them. A suspicion impelled me to say in addition, "How much did Wolf repeat to you of the story I told him?"

Her answer was made with the storm in the eyes that was always my warning of danger.

"As much as I'd let him. I didn't want to hear any more. I never shall. That part of it is closed. I've told you already that I accept the responsibility, and I do. You mayn't think it, but I have a conscience of a kind; and I know that if it hadn't been for me you wouldn't have done this thing; and so� But there we are again. There we shall always be if we allow ourselves to discuss it. You're my husband, Billy; I'm your wife. We can't get away from that, whatever has happened�"

"We could get away from it, if you preferred."

"What I prefer," she declared, with her old-time hauteur, "is what I'm asking you to do. If I didn't prefer it I shouldn't ask for it. Go back to the hotel and get your things. Go to the tailor and get more. Your room is waiting for you. It will be the next room to mine, just as before with only the door�"

"The closed door, Vio?"

"Between us," she finished, ignoring my question. "If other things arrange themselves we can�we can reopen it�in time."

So we left it, since it was useless to go on. That she should consider my mental lapse so terrible a disgrace was a surprise to me; but as I so considered it myself I could not blame another for taking the same point of view. After all, a man should show a man's nerve. Thousands, millions of men, had shown it to the limit and beyond. I hadn't; that was all that could be said about it. How could Vio, how could any one else, regard me as other than abnormal?

As she was making so brave an attempt to put all this behind her, it became my duty to help her. This I could do most easily by deflecting the conversation to the large family connection, as to which I was without news. She gave me this news as we stood at the foot of the stairway, or while I got ready to go out again.

It was a relief to learn that none of my brothers or sisters was in Boston. George, who was older than myself, was on General Pershing's staff, and had just been heard of from Luxembourg. Dan, my junior, had the rank of lieutenant-commander and was somewhere in European waters. Tom Cantley, who had married my sister Minna, was working on the War Trade Board in Washington, and he and Minna had a house there. Their eldest boy, Harrowby, had been killed at Ch�teau-Thierry, but as far as any one ever saw Minna hadn't shed a tear. Ernestine, my unmarried sister, being one of the founders of the Flag Raising League, had patriotic duties which took her all over the United States. Her last letter had been from Oklahoma or Spokane, Vio was not sure which, but it was "one of those places out there." At any rate, they were all a credit to a name the traditions of which I alone hadn't had the spirit to live up to. Vio didn't say this, of course; but it was the inference.

It was the inference, too, with regard to a host of cousins of the first, second, and third degrees, by blood and by marriage, who would have made a small army in themselves. Some were Vio's kin, and some were mine; some by the chances of Boston intermarriage were related to us both. Not one of them but had been modestly heroic, the women not less than the men. Some had given their lives, some their limbs or eyesight; all, their time and money. Even Wolf and Vio had subscribed to funds till reduced to what they considered indigence. It was a distinguished clan; and I its one pitiable member.