Chapter 9

Going back to the hotel, I had my first pang of regret for having waked up on that midnight at Bourg-la-Comtesse. It was the same reflection; the dead were so much wiser in staying dead. I guessed that during the weeks when I was missing Vio had mourned for me with a grief into which a new element had come when my clothes were found on the bank of the Padrille. That was a mistake, that my clothes should be found there. A missing man should be traced to a prison or a hospital, or remain gloriously missing. He should have no interval of safety in which to go in bathing, a hundred miles from the spot on which he had last been seen alive, not even to be drowned. There was a mystery in that which might easily become a flaw in a soldier's record, and which to a woman as proud as Vio would be equivalent to dishonor. That there should be a question of the kind with regard to her own husband...

So I began to do justice to the courage she displayed. Rising to the occasion in a way I could only call magnificent, she sank herself, her opinions, and her plans�I called them plans to avoid a more definite word�to meet the imperative in the situation. What lay in the back of her mind I didn't dare inquire, notwithstanding the signs that betrayed her.

And yet the more splendid her gesture the deeper my humility at having to call it forth. It made me like a man, once strong and active, reduced to living on the doles of the compassionate. I could never be independent again; I could never again have the mental freedom of one as to whom there is nothing unexplained. By a process of bluff I might carry the thing off; but to that I felt an unspeakable aversion. It was not that I was unwilling to second Vio; it was incapacity. Having been guilty of the indiscretion of waking at Bourg-la-Comtesse, I began to regret the long, dull, peaceful routine of Creed & Creed's.

I do not assert that these things were as clear in my mind on that day as they are on this; but they were there confusedly. Every impression I received that afternoon was either confused and painful or strikingly vivid, as to one waking from an anesthetic.

Of those more vivid one in particular stands out in my recollection.

Returning from the hotel with my suit-case and bag�the same with which I had landed from the Auvergne�I heard a man's voice in the drawing-room up-stairs. The deep, soft tones told me it was not Wolf's.

"Mrs. 'Arrowby said as you was to go right up, sir," Boosey informed me, relieving me of my bags. "I 'ear as you was a prisoner in Germany, sir," he continued, while making his way to the coat-closet with my coat. "That's why I didn't know as it 'd be you when you come this afternoon. Might I ask, sir, if they throwed beer in your face, or anything like that?"

With one foot on the stairs I looked after the waddling figure retreating down the hall.

"Who told you that I was a prisoner?"

"Mr. Wolf's man, sir; but"�I am sure there was a veiled taunt in what followed�-"but if you wasn't, sir, or if it's a secret�"

I lost the rest as he became engulfed in the closet, but I had heard enough. Wolf had taken his own way to protect the honor of the family.

It was not easy to enter the drawing-room and face one of Vio's friends; but it was the sort of thing to which I must learn to steel myself. Moreover, it might be one of my own friends come to welcome me back. Vio had informed me that Wolf had taken steps to keep any mention of my "discovery" and return out of the papers; but we were too well known in Boston not to have the word passed privately. To any friend's welcome there would be unspoken reserves; but that I must take for granted and become accustomed to.

But, as it happened, it was not a friend of mine; it was the colonel of the photograph, who had apparently dropped in for a cup of tea�and something more. What that something more might be I could only surmise from Vio's way of saying, "Here's Mr. Harrowby now." They had seemingly discussed me, it had seemingly been necessary for them to discuss me, and taken a definite attitude toward me. That my wife should do this with a man who was a stranger to me, that the circumstances should be such that it was a duty for them to do it, was the extraordinary cup of gall given me to drain. I drained it while Vio went on, with that ease which no one knew better than I to be sustained on nerve:

"Billy, I want you to know Colonel Stroud. He's just got back from France, and has been explaining to me how the Allies are to occupy the Rhineland. Our men are already reaching Mayence and Coblenz, and he has heard, too, that the President arrived this morning at Brest. I suppose it will be in the evening papers."

So we were launched in talk that couldn't hurt any one; and if my feelings were wounded it was only by drawing conclusions. They were the easier to draw from the fact, as I guessed, that Vio directed the talk in such a way that I could read between the lines.

What I gleaned from the give and take of banalities that dealt on the surface with the current gossip of the armistice was that Vio and her colonel had been intimate before he went to France, and now that he was back with medals and only a right arm, the friendship had taken the turn to which such friendships are liable. That he was one of the Strouds of the famous Stroud Valley in northern New York put him into the class with which people like ourselves made social alliances. When Vio, in the early days of her supposed widowhood, had met him at Palm Beach there was nothing to prevent their being sympathetic to each other. How far that sympathy had gone I could only conjecture; but it was easy to see it had gone pretty far.

As to what did not come so directly to the surface, vague recollections began to form themselves in my mind. I seemed to remember the Stroud Valley Strouds as a family with a record. Of the type which in America most nearly resembles the English or Irish country gentleman, they made the marrying of heiresses and the spending of the money thus acquired almost a profession. Horsy, convivial, and good-looking, they carried themselves with the cheery liveliness that acknowledges no account to be given to any one; and when they got into the divorce court, as they did somewhat often, women as well as men, they came out of it with aplomb. I seemed to recall a scandal that a few years before had diverted all the clubs....

But I couldn't be sure that this was the man, or of anything beyond the fact that the central figure of that romance had been a Stroud Valley Stroud. That this particular instance of the race had had a history was stamped all over him; but it was the kind of history which to a man of the world imparts fascination. It was easy to see that he had "done things" in many lines of life. A little the beau m�le of the French lady novelist, and a little the Irish sporting squire, he was possibly too conscious of his looks and his power of killing ladies. A bronzed floridness, due partly to the open air and partly to good living, was thrown into striking relief by the silver hair and mustache not incompatible with relative youth. He couldn't have been much over forty.

His reception to me was as perfect as if regulated by a protocol and rehearsed to the last shade. There was nothing in it I could complain of�and yet there was everything. A gentleman ignoring a disgraceful situation of which every one is conscious would have carried himself with just this air of bland and courteous contempt.

Perhaps it was to react against this and to assert myself a little that I ventured once to cross swords with him. We had exhausted the movements of troops on the Rhine, the possible reception of the President in Pans, and he had given the Peace Conference six months in which to prepare the treaty for signature.

"Then we shall see," he laughed, in his rich, velvety bass.

He brought out the statement so emphatically that I was moved to ask:

"What shall we see?"

"What Mrs. Harrowby and I have been talking about, the end of all this rot as to the war having created a new world."

"That's putting the cart before the horse, isn't it?" I asked, maliciously. "The war didn't create the new world; the new world created the war."

Vio's exquisite eyebrows went up a shade.

"Does that mean anything?"

"Only that the volcano creates the explosion; not the explosion the volcano. Given all the repressions and suppressions and injustices, the eruption had to come."

"The eruption had to come," the colonel declared, hotly, "because the Germans planned it."

"Oh, that was only a detail."

"You might call the whole war only a detail�"

"I do."

"I don't get you," he said, stiffly, leaning forward to place an empty cup on the table in front of Vio.

In her I read something surprised that didn't, however, disapprove of me. Thus encouraged, I went on. If I hadn't thought these things out in the monotonous, unoccupied hours at Creed & Creed's, my stunned brain would not have been master of them now.

"I only meant that the war was but one of the forces, one of the innumerable forces, which the new world in the making�it isn't made yet by any means�has put into operation. If a house collapses it shatters all the windows; but you can't say that the shattering of the windows made the house collapse."

I could see by his stare he was literally minded.

"But what�what house is collapsing?"

"The house all round us, the house of this particular form of civilization. It's sliding down. It's been sliding down for years. You might say that it began to slide down as soon as it was put up, because it was wrongly constructed. A building full of flaws begins to settle before they get the roof on, and though it may stand for years the ultimate crash is only a question of time. War came as soon as our building began to split; the building didn't begin to split because the war came. It was splitting anyhow."

"That seems to me�" he sought for a sufficiently condemnatory word�"that seems to me sheer socialism."

"Oh, I don't think it is. The Socialists wouldn't say so. It isn't anything in particular. It's just�just fact."

"Only?" Vio smiled, with her delicate, penetrating sarcasm.

"Only," I echoed. "But as we belong to a world that doesn't like fact it isn't of much importance."

Bewilderment brought a pained expression to the handsome, rather stupid, countenance.

"What the�what on earth do you mean by that?"

"Only that we've a genius for dodging issues and shutting our eyes to what's straight before us."

"Do you mean the ruin straight before us?"

"Not necessarily, Vio. The collapse of this particular form of civilization wouldn't mean ruin, because we'd get a better form. I suppose it's coming into existence now."

"I don't know about that," the colonel objected. "As far as I see, things are pretty much the same as they've always been, and they're getting more so."

"I suppose none of us sees more than we have our eyes open to. Things of the greatest importance to us happen, and we don't know that they're going on."

"I hope that that kind of song and dance isn't going on�the breakdown of our civilization. It wasn't for that we gave 'em hell at Ch�teau-Thierry."

"Oh, none of us knows what anything is for, except in the vaguest way. All we can do is to plod ahead and follow the thread of flame."

"Follow the thread of what?"

I was sufficiently master of myself to indulge in a mild laugh.

"That's just an expression that's been in my mind during the time when I've been�been floundering about. Name I invented for�for a principle."

In this, however, he was not interested.

"Yes, but your collapsing house�"

"It may not come down altogether. I'm neither a prophet nor a prophet's son. All I can see is what I suppose everybody sees, that our civilization has been rotten. It couldn't hold together. It hadn't the cohesive strength. Perhaps I was wrong in saying that it was falling down; it's more as if we were pulling it down, to build up something better. It's our blind instinct toward perfection�"

But refusing to listen to any more, he got up to go. A brave man in the presence of enemies of flesh and blood, intellectual foes frightened him. At the first sound of their shells he rushed for his mental dugout which he burrowed in the ground of denial. "I don't believe that" and "All tommyrot" seemed to him shelters from any kind of danger.

But the main point to me was that I had in a measure not only held my own but got on to superior ground. I had been able to talk; in doing so I had got him at a slight disadvantage. The bit of self-respect inspired by this achievement enabled me to play the host and accompany him to the door with the kind of informal formality to which I had been so long unaccustomed.

And in performing this small duty I made a discovery. As he preceded me down-stairs I remembered seeing the back of his head once before. It was the kind of head not easily forgotten. Moreover, I had seen it in circumstances that had caused me to note it in particular. Where and when and how were details that did not at once return to me; but I knew that the association was sinister.

As I returned from my mission in showing him to the door I heard Vio speaking.

"Come in here, Billy. There's something I want to say."

She was still behind the tea-table, pensive rather than subdued, resolute rather than unhappy.

"I liked your talking like that," she began at once, without looking up at me. "It's�it's the way we shall have to play the game."

A box of cigarettes stood on the tea-table. I took one and struck a match, the usual stage-trick for gaining a little time.

"What game do you mean?" I asked, when I had carefully blown out the match and deposited it in an ash-tray.

"What game can I mean but�but that of your coming back?"

"Oh, is that a game?"

"Only in the sense of giving us something to play. We can't just�just live it."

"Why can't we?"

With a quick movement she was on her feet, flinging out her hands.

"For all the reasons that I should think you'd see." She came and stood on the hearth-rug, confronting me. "Billy, I wonder if you have the faintest idea of what I'm doing for your sake?"

"I've more than the faintest idea, Vio. Some day, when we're able to talk more easily than we are as yet, I shall tell you how grateful I am. Just now I'm�I'm rather dazed. I have to get my bearings�"

She, too, had taken a cigarette, lighting it nervously, carelessly, puffing rapidly at the thing and moving about the room.

"And there's another thing," she began, taking no notice of what I was trying to say; "I don't mind your talking as you did just now, so long as it's�as it's through your hat; but if it isn't�"

"I can't say that it is."

"That's just what I was afraid of. In the places where you've been�I don't want to know anything about them," she interjected, with a passionate gesture of the hand that held the cigarette, "but in such places men do pick up revolutionary ideas, just as they do in prisons!"

"I don't know that it's a question of getting revolutionary ideas, Vio, so much as it's one of living in a revolutionary world."

"And that's what I want to warn you against. It won't go down, Billy, not from you."

"Why not from me, in particular?"

"Oh, why do you make me explain things? Isn't it perfectly clear? If you're coming back among your old friends you'll have to be, after what's happened, more�how shall I put it?�more conservative, more like everybody else�than any one. You can't afford to have wild ideas, because people will only say that you re trying to drag us along the way you went yourself."

I renounced this discussion to ask the question that was chiefly on my mind.

"Vio, who's that man that just went out?"

She threw me a look from the other side of the room.

"You heard. He's�where can you catch on? He's Emmy Fairborough's brother."

"Wasn't there�wasn't there a divorce?"

"Emmy's? Yes; Lord Fairborough and she are divorced, but what difference does that make?"

"I wasn't thinking of Lady Fairborough. I forgot she had been a Stroud. I meant�I meant him."

"Oh, he? Yes, I think he was."

"Divorced?"

"Yes, divorced. What of it?"

"To whom had he been married?"

"How should I know? It was to�to some low creature, an actress or something, the sort of thing men do when they're young and�and�"

"And wild?"

"Wild, if you like. Why are you asking?"

But I was not sure of being ready to tell her, so many things had to be formulated first. To gain more time I lighted another cigarette, and she spoke while I was doing it. Holding her own cigarette delicately, as if examining its spark, she said, with a staccato intonation that emphasized each word:

"Billy, you remember what I said earlier this afternoon? I can go back to our past and try to pick it up. I can't go back to anything that comes after that past and�and before to-day. Do you understand? It's more than three years since they told me your section was blown to pieces at Bourg-la-Comtesse. Most of your comrades were found�-and buried. You were missing; but missing with very little hope. As the weeks went by that little hope dwindled till there was none. Then came the news that�that all that time you had been�alive."

"And I suppose that Wolf told you..."

"He told me a story, or as much of it as I could listen to. But that's not what I meant to speak about now. I want to say that�that I bury all that, deep, deep; only that I can't do it unless you consent to bury�"

"Everything there's been on your side. Is that it, Vio?"

"I shall ask no questions."

"Not even if I'm ready to answer them?"

"Not even if you're ready to answer them; but I shall expect you not to ask questions of me."

"So that between us there will be a gulf of silence."

She inclined her head without speaking.

"But why, Vio? Why?"

She swept up to me, throwing away her cigarette, and laying both her hands on my shoulders.

"Because, old boy, I'm your wife, and I'm trying to help you. I'm trying to help you because�because�"

Her nearness, the scent of her person, the black-opal mystery and fire were like hypnotic enchantment.

"Because you used to�to care for me a little, Vio? Is it possible that�that I can think that?"

She nodded.

"That's part of it, of course. I don't forget it. But what I remember more is what I've told you already, that, whatever you did, I sent you to do it. Now, if there's expiation to be made, I come in for that as well as you."

"So that we make it together?"

"So that we make it together."

Having already been bold I grew bolder. Lifting my hands to my shoulders I laid them on hers.

"And will you�will you let me kiss you on that, Vio?"

"Once," she consented; "but�but don't�don't touch me."