Читать книгу Second Hand Wife - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 6

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Half an hour later Betty put her head into the library door; Miss Trumbull was just going. She had several letters in her hand, and a leather briefcase under her arm.

“It seems a shame not to give you some dinner,” Betty said, vaguely. She was annoyed by not knowing exactly what one did, under the circumstances. Immediately she added, “Cart, Pete’s here, and Fred Fargo and Doc Riggs. They’re all going to stay.”

“Grand,” Carter said, reaching for his cane, limping to the door with both women. “Paul’s taking Miss Trumbull to the train. Is that all right by you?” he asked his wife.

“Oh, quite. But I’m afraid you’ll not get into town until nearly seven, Miss Trumbull.”

Sandra raised her gold-brown eyes. She looked steadily at the other woman, spoke out of a dream.

“That doesn’t matter. My mother always waits for me anyway.”

“If Miss Curtis’s too busy I may have to ask you to come down again; we’ll make it the morning and keep you to lunch,” Carter said.

“You were only so fortunate not to have had a more serious accident!” Sandra observed politely.

She went down the steps and got into the car. All the way into San Francisco she sat close to the train window, one elbow on the sill, her cheek in her hand, her eyes fixed absently on the winter evening scenes slipping so rapidly by. Houses and lights; little motorcars racing behind their own bright eyes up and down. Darkness, and the bulk of flying trees and fog-swathed hills. Alexandra did not change her position; she did not move; she was not conscious of thought. She breathed steadily, but a little hard. Her big white teeth lightly caught her lower lip; the flanges of her finely cut nostrils opened and shut. About her the unsensed world whirled in a cloud of star dust.

After awhile she was telling Flossy about it, over the table d’hôte at Roselli’s. For her mother’s benefit she described the beautiful gardens, so perfectly groomed at this unfriendly season, the sunset shining into the library, its big leather chairs, its sleepy fire; the ease, the service, the comfort of the Cavendish house.

“It makes all this—ghastly!” her thoughts added. She did not say it aloud. She played with her thick soup in its heavy plate, buttered her stiff crust of sour bread, rumpled her coarse, damp, gray-white napkin. Two friends, reporters from the Examiner, were dining at Roselli’s; they came over to join Flossy and Sandra. Flossy was pleasantly cordial, but not effusive. Her daughter knew her thoughts: such fellers never had any money, everything had to be Dutch, and newspapermen were notoriously impecunious husbands. Still, she liked to talk with them about recent divorces and theatrical changes, and Sandra looked at them with her strange, gold-brown eyes, and smiled occasionally her slow, mysterious smile.

She was never very talkative. But to-night she was more silent than usual. Magic ran in her veins. The intoxicating sweetness of this afternoon’s experience wrapped her in reverie. The big house, all order and sweetness and color of flowers, the silent library with its books and leather chairs, the coldness of sunset sky and winter branches outside, the softness of summer within, still held her. She still heard the voice of Carter Cavendish, still saw him, brown and lean and smiling, facing her across the table.

Passion consumed her like a fire; she did not know what it was; she had never felt it before. In previous casual affairs with this young man or that, Sandra had always been the loved rather than the loving; she had supposed it would always be that way. If she had thought of love at all it had been only as a deeper liking, a different feeling from her love for her mother, perhaps, but still only love—a controllable and enjoyable new emotion that should some day enlarge and enrich her life.

Impossible that she should recognize it in the feeling that was now absorbing her, soul, mind, and body. Sandra did not so recognize it; she would have been affronted and horrified at the thought.

She knew that she felt oddly awakened; felt as if she were seeing and feeling the things of earth for the first time, or in some entirely new and different fashion. And yet she experienced at the same time a curious lightness and giddiness, a delicious vertigo that seemed to be carrying her away from all anchorage. It was impossible to swallow food; food was suddenly only so much plaster and sawdust. It was impossible to take interest in what Kane O’Neill and Spike Whiffin were saying. But at the same time all this—the little Italian restaurant and the newspaper boys and Flossy—was all delightfully absorbing; Sandra’s long hand, lying on the table, was fascinating, too, and Sandra’s voice, when she occasionally used it, was full of cadences that enchanted her. She raised her eyes and saw herself in a flawed mirror that streaked her clear pure skin and her bright hair with spots of white. It made small difference; she was wonderful to-night.

Sometimes her thoughts followed the conversation for a few seconds; she was glad of that. It meant that she could presently rush back, in her thoughts, to the library and the soft lights and wide dim spaces of the old Cavendish home, rush back to the memory of a smiling brown-faced man seated on the other side of a wide, bare, leather-topped table, handling papers in strong brown hands, talking mere matters of business in a voice that would ring in Alexandra Trumbull’s head for many an hour to come.

“Shall I ask Miss Curtis to telephone you to-morrow about that?” she had asked at one point.

“No; you look that up and telephone me, will you?” Carter had answered promptly, almost absently, as he studied a report. “She very likely hasn’t got the data ready. She may have it, though,” he had added upon consideration; “you might speak to her about it. I’ll be in, in a day or two, anyway.”

And he had glanced openly, innocently, across the table at the glowing face under the brown hat, the gold-brown eyes, the slow smile that showed Sandra’s big white teeth, the loose soft frill of white silk that left the round column of her throat bare.

“Just one more obscure stenographer in love with her boss!” Sandra thought, walking to work the next day. “Carter Cavendish doesn’t know I’m alive!” But even that consideration did not keep her heart from singing, her feet from touching the dirty wet morning sidewalks of Ellis Street with an almost dancing step, her eyes from finding the world miraculously beautiful and thrilling.

But not only was Carter Cavendish, as it happened, thoroughly aware that Sandra was alive; Betty was thinking of her, too. With a surprise only equal to what would have been Sandra’s own, they had found themselves, after her first visit to the old San Mateo house, bringing her name more than once into their talks together.

On the surface all was well between the young Cavendishes. Their lives ran in an ordered, brilliant, conventional groove; a wide groove that included a beautiful home, servants, cars, country clubs, duck clubs, trips, dinners, tennis, golf, polo, theater—everything indeed that would have seemed to Betty Finchley desirable, when at twenty she had married the twenty-two-year-old Carter Cavendish eleven years ago.

They had enough money, they were both good-looking, they were popular. And Betty, in the fourth year of her marriage, had duly added to this full cup the requisite child; only one. That one was the engaging, black-curled gypsy of a Patsy. Carter adored her. Betty was not only an adoring but a capable mother. Her complete adequacy included teachers, friends, music, dentist, amusements for Patsy. The child had a gift for music; her mother assiduously cultivated it. Some day, Betty prophesied, Patsy would astonish more than San Mateo with her violin.

But when Patsy was about five, Betty had made a change in the fashion of her own life. The world never saw it; that small fraction of Betty’s world that suspected it attached no particular significance to it. Betty, quite simply and finally, ceased to be her husband’s wife.

She had inaugurated some changes in their own suite; enlarging a dressing room, putting on a sleeping porch where the old sewing room used to be, repainting, repapering, reupholstering. During these changes Betty had gone in to sleep with Patsy in the nursery, and Carter had had the big room that had been his and Peter’s in their boyhood.

And after the changes were made, Betty had quite simply taken possession of the wide silk-covered, pillow-laden French bed that formed the central motive for the reconstructed room, and had asked Carter to stay where he was. Marriage, as marriage, was over for Betty.

The impulse that had carried her into wifehood, an emotion strangely mixed with pride in a good social and financial bargain, interest in trousseau and wedding presents, had been forgotten long ago. Whatever passion she had known in Carter’s arms as his bride had not been deep; Betty had always been conscious of the need of becoming lights, becoming laces, becoming phrases, even in the most sacred hours of their love. Before they had been man and wife for a week, she had surprised him by tears over a missing lace stocking, by her insistence upon a trip to a beauty parlor. Carter had been too young to know exactly what he had missed; he had been very proud of the always lovely, always smart and smiling and social little wife.

But not many years had gone by before he had sensed the truth about her: Betty was incapable of true married love. Her only affectionate moments with him were when their group was about to admire the complete subjection of the big man to the saucy little woman. She never abandoned herself when they were alone; she chilled and angered him with a display of reluctance, of boredom, of annoyance; she bargained shrewdly, with herself for pay.

“If I’m terribly, terribly nice to you, can I have it?” she would plead, for a new fur coat or a new car. And, so pleading, she would establish herself and her filmy laces in his arms and press against his cheek the kisses, and whisper into his ear the endearments for which he was always hungry.

“Ah, Betty, honey, you do love me?”

“Course I love you, silly!”

But at the first hint of love for love’s sake only, he came to recognize a quick, suspicious look in her bright eyes. Betty had never loved anyone wholly, never would. She loved her pretty, dainty, clever self, she loved the body that was at the height of its beauty, loved it in dinner velvets, in silver slippers and fillets, loved it in bathing suits, in sports clothes and frail underwear; she loved her town suits, trim and tailored and smart, with the silvery fox fur slung across her shoulders.

To secure these good things, had they been jeopardized, she would have done anything. But comfortably married to Carter and admired by his friends, a favorite with his mother and grandmother, the mother of his beloved child, Betty was quite safe. Most of the women she knew had also taken her attitude, good-naturedly but firmly, in the fifth or sixth year of marriage, and, except for unusual circumstances they were true to their decision. Physically, they were all alike, starved into one mold of beauty, flat-breasted, carefully curled of hair, carefully rouged, painted, and clipped. Such energy as their sports, gymnasium work, and card games left them was for other men than their husbands. The bloom had left the legitimate relationship years before; they discussed their affairs, marital and otherwise, quite frankly, debating between bridge hands whether a divorce or another child would best accomplish the desired end of travel, more clothes, more allowance.

Betty was indeed better than most. She was always sweet to Carter; there was in her whole position a disarming kindness.

“You wouldn’t want me if I didn’t love you, Cart,” was Betty’s argument. She had long ago persuaded him that there was even something admirable in her stand; she told him and told everyone that she liked Carter. She said enthusiastically that he played square, and she adored that in a man. But at the slightest hint of tenderness she gently disengaged herself with a “Please, Cart, let’s not be silly!”

Carter, as a younger man, had been angered, puzzled, hurt by turns. But now, for more than two years, he had accepted Betty’s terms. He decided that love in its full power did not last long, and when it was gone there were other things. One made the most of those: business, duck-shooting, polo, theaters.

“In Europe,” Betty had of late begun to hint, “you would quite naturally—find someone else.”

“Find someone else!”

“Certainly, Cart. It would be taken for granted. They marry sensibly there and have families. And then both husband and wife do—well, as they like, and nobody makes the ridiculous blue-nosed fuss that we do here.”

“I don’t consider decency—fidelity—just blue-nosed fussing, somehow.”

“Well, you certainly don’t think that a man and a woman who marry at twenty are bound to spend the next thirty years pretending they feel something they don’t feel, do you?”

“I don’t know,” he would sometimes say bewilderedly; “I suppose I thought that if a woman loved a man she liked to—oh, have him round her room, talking and laughing. It always seemed to me part of it.”

“We had that, and we adored each other, and I had Patsy,” Betty might summarize it sensibly. “And now we still like each other and the baby and our home—why sentimentalize about it? Let’s be sensible and say honestly, ‘that’s that.’ I hope I’m going to meet men I get crazy about, and I hope you’ll get crushes on other women—what’s the harm?”

At first it had hurt him terribly; when it stopped hurting, matters were worse than before. There was a deadness, an apathy about it now that was less endurable than pain. All the glamor of books and movies, all the love stories of the poets, simply—were not there. Love did not mean much to women, and when a woman ceased wanting a man, somehow he ceased caring, too.

He was the less concerned because this arrangement, or something similar, was the common fate of his group. All the “girls” were alike; no man had tenderness, devotion, delusion for his daily fare.

And Betty was clever and pretty, always beautifully dressed and animated and popular, always ready for bridge or a lunch at the club, or a dinner dance. His home was comfortable and hospitable, his gun had come from England, from the most expensive gunmaker in the world, his car was always a source of pride, and his daughter was a darling. Carter told himself that he could find no fault with his life.

Betty had for some time been saying that Patsy should be taken to Germany to go on with her violin work and learn German and French. All the mothers in Betty’s circle had somewhat similar ambitions, and most of them planned to spend these years while the child was “getting her French” pleasantly established in Paris. But, reinforced by his magnificent mother and still more magnificent grandmother, Carter had managed so far to discourage that idea. He wanted his little girl at home, riding her pony and having her fun with the other kids, not isolated among a lot of prim schoolkeeping old maids in some foreign country. Betty had fretted and hinted and pleaded in vain.

On the night that Sandra had come down to San Mateo, when Betty returned from her late dinner party in her furry wrap and wilted orchids, she came into Carter’s room. He was reading by his fire, the lame foot propped up on a chair.

“Fine, fine,” he said to her perfunctory inquiries, closing his book and looking up at her. “Rigg’s coming over to loosen the bandages after a party somewhere, and that’s why I’m up.”

He could see that Betty was tired, and annoyed about something. She was not listening; presently she burst forth into resentful speech.

“Cart,” she began, “I know we decided not to discuss this again, but I wish you’d listen to reason. The girls have just been telling me that Rose is taking Barbara and Catherine in January, and Louise says she’s going too, and taking Harriet.”

“Going?”

“To Europe, Cart, of course!”

“Oh, is that so?” Cart asked idly. But his mouth hardened a little.

“Louise doesn’t have to ask anyone, the lucky devil,” Betty went on, discontentedly. “She’s divorced, she can do as she likes! She’s already taken the Hamilton apartment on the Ile St. Louis—it sounds too marvelous! As for Rose, she says Will lets her do just whatever she thinks best.”

There was a pause. Then Carter said slowly,

“I know. But it seems like losing the kid, and you too.”

“But it would only be for a year, Cart. And Patsy really needs someone who can go on with her violin work. Pellegrini is all very well, but he can’t give her the groundwork she needs. And if it were for her good——”

“It doesn’t seem to me it would be for her good. She might be terribly unhappy over there.” His tone was determined; they had often been over this ground before.

“She wouldn’t be! She’d adore it.”

Betty dropped into a chair, frowning down at the fingers with which she traced lines on its square red-leather arm. Her small, finely featured face was jaded, her eyes mutinous.

Carter stretched out his hand to take her free hand, dangling over the chair arm; she jerked it petulantly away.

“No use for me, huh?” he asked, smiling a little.

“It isn’t that; I’m tired,” Betty answered shortly.

“Cart,” she asked suddenly, “who’s Miss Trumbull?”

For a minute his heavy dark brows went up in surprise. Then he laughed.

“One of the girls from the office.”

“I never saw her there,” Betty commented.

“She’s been with us about a year or so, I guess.”

“She’s a beautiful creature,” Betty commented thoughtfully. And in an absent tone she added, “Whoever marries that girl will have all the loving he wants! Cart,” she continued, idly, “why didn’t you marry some girl like that, a girl who would just live for one thing, to love and be loved?”

He was too genuinely surprised to show the amusement and the slight sense of shock her words stirred in him.

“Why on earth do you say that of Miss Trumbull?”

“Doesn’t she strike you as that sort?” Betty asked innocently.

“What sort?”

“Oh, the loving sort,” Betty answered ineloquently.

“Does she you?”

“Oh, heavens!” his wife exclaimed, almost impatiently. “Anyone can see it. She was just born to spoil some man, wait for him, feed him his supper, adore him. I mean,” Betty added, “there are women—not many of them—but there are women who love men the way—well, the way men like to be loved!”

“You know the way men like to be loved then?” Carter asked with an edge to his voice.

“ ‘Mah baby don’t want anything but me!’ ” Betty quoted, from a song of the moment.

Carter was regarding her steadily, an odd look in his narrowed eyes, a grim line touching his mouth.

“The idea being that while you and Patsy are in France I have an affair with Miss Trumbull?” he asked, slowly.

Betty giggled.

“I wouldn’t mind your taking her to lunch,” she offered.

“Well, I won’t!” Carter said shortly.

“Well,” Betty admitted, “I don’t suppose you will!”

There was a silence. Then Carter said, disgustedly:

“My God, I don’t know where you women think you get off, sometimes! I suppose you’d be tickled to death to have me fall for some other woman!”

“Well,” Betty persisted, unabashed, “you can’t say I’m jealous. She knows, of course, that you’re married. But perhaps you could take her to lunch somewhere—I don’t know. Only—she is certainly a gorgeous-looking person!”

She gathered her draperies together, passed his chair, and paused to put a butterfly kiss on the top of his dark hair as she went out. Carter caught at her hand and drew her down for a closer embrace. But with the light little laugh he knew so well she disengaged herself and was gone.