I
MONDAY was busy in Sable and Flandon’s office. Conferences, a dinning of telephones, a vast opening of mail. Every one was conscious of important work in transaction. The Laidlaw case was having its first hearing before the District Court and it was understood to be worrying, ticklish business. The Judge was irascible and his point of view of the case important from this first hearing. Both the partners were at the office by half past nine and left together, one of the younger lawyers accompanying them, much as young doctors are present at a skillful operation, to learn and observe.
Freda, watching and hearing much of the office talk, discreet as it was, wished she could have gone along too. She was feeling very fit, buoyed up by the first strength of separation when it is a delight to feel one’s capacity for cheerfulness and bravery in the midst of loneliness. She wanted to plunge very hard into work, to do something important, to get thoroughly absorbed in her work and not to dawdle into dreams. So she told herself strongly. At night, when she was alone, she would live with her memories and her dreams. It was youth’s swagger in the presence of emotion. She was busy until Flandon left the office, making memoranda of things to be done, getting papers for him, keeping him from telephone interruptions. But after ten o’clock the office settled down and became quiet. The clerks were hammering away endlessly at their typewriters, the few clients who came in were quickly taken care of, and Freda found herself harder to control. She was looking up a list of references that Mr. Flandon wanted ready by noon and answering his telephone. It was not absorbing work. Try as she would, her mind slipped away from her and concentrated on amazing facts.
She was a married woman. A week ago she had been a girl visiting at the home of the Brownleys’. Rapid enough the events which had led to her working here—but this other secret whirlwind—how strange it all was. She wondered if lives were like that. Going along placidly enough until they struck the edge of the waterfall of circumstance and then—. All lives must have secret strange places. She had loved, in Mohawk, to reflect on those sometimes. Spoon River had never quite gone out of her mind. She had always, since she had read it, seen people as other than the reflection of their acts and seeming—speculating on the curious contradictions of appearances and motives. Here she sat, working, Gage Flandon’s clerk, Eric Thorstad’s daughter. And those two things mattered not at all—gave no key to her. It mattered only that she was the wife, the secret wife of a man whom she had known six days. Physically, chemically, actually she was altered. That was life. When you found it, you held it to you secretly. You never told. That was why you couldn’t tell about people. Life might be caressing them, making itself known to them, biting them. Over it all the vast illusion of action. It was illusion.
The morning drifted by. At a little after twelve Mr. Sable and Mr. Flandon came in together. It was easy to see that things had not gone well. They were self-contained, sober, but the lines of Gage’s face were ugly and those of his partner disapprovingly set. They went into Mr. Sable’s office and closed the door. Freda, getting on her hat and coat, heard the young lawyer who had accompanied them, speaking to a colleague.
“Didn’t go well. Flandon got Judge Pratt mad. Something got under Flandon’s skin and he didn’t play the old judge very well.”
That was all she heard.
At the moment Gage was hearing the same thing. Sable was walking about the office in some irritation explaining it.
Gage had continued to handle his work badly at the office. Like many a man with a hobby he took his hobby into business hours. But the concession which might be made to a man on account of golf, on account of curling, were not to be made for a man who had a boresome way of bringing in the eternal question of whether women were progressing or “actually retrogressing,” “whether all this woman movement weren’t a mistake,”—and so on. Needing support, comfort, consolation, encouragement and direction, Gage, as he felt about for them, only became somewhat absurd.
Men are not tolerant of those who bore them, except sometimes in the family, where such things are endured for practical reasons. They moved away from Gage, so to speak, while he talked on.
Sable noticed it. He had his own irritation, growing more focused each day. To begin with, they would lose the Laidlaw case and it was all, Sable thought, due to that false start which Gage had made. He had rather decisively taken the matter out of Gage’s hands towards the end but the thing had been lost already—or he preferred to think so. Sable could bear to lose cases but not a case which involved so much money. It frightened off the right sort of clients.
When Gage was a cub lawyer, arguing cases with flaring energy in the local courts, Sable had picked him out as a bright young man. He had kept his eye on him and his progress, with sheer admiration for the practical genius with which he picked up important clients and gained and held their confidence. He edged in on politics after a little—and in Mr. Sable’s own party. Then King and Sable had made a proposition to young Flandon—that he join them, bringing his clients, of course, and coming in, not as an ordinary apprentice lawyer but as the colleague of Mr. Sable. It was an amazing offer to be made to so young a man. Gage accepted it. Two years later King, rather elderly now and ready to retire, went to Congress and the firm name changed from King and Sable to Sable and Flandon. Flandon made good. He made important alliances for Mr. Sable, he played the political end for Mr. King, he made money for himself.
These things were not to be passed lightly over and Mr. Sable had them all docketed somewhere in his mind. He was fond of Gage too, in his own restrained way. But Sable was fifty-eight. He had seen many a brilliant start end in disaster, many a man with ability fail. He knew most of the signs of failure in men. He knew further exactly what steps Gage should take to achieve eminence. They were broad and fair before him. Instead it was increasingly clear that Gage was not keeping his mind on his work—that he was letting his nerves get the better of his judgment. For some reason or other he was making a fool of himself. When a man made a fool of himself, there were, in Sable’s experience, one of three things back of it—a woman, liquor or speculation. He was watching Gage to see which of these things it might be in his case.
All this talk which Flandon was always getting off about women now—thought the senior partner—that was camouflage. He felt fairly convinced that Gage must be playing the fool with some woman. Irregular and disappointing, with a lovely, fine looking, distinguished wife like Mrs. Flandon. Rotten streak in Flandon probably. Sable chose the woman solution rather definitely. Gage drank when he could get it of course. And he nearly always had a supply on hand. But he used his head about it pretty well. It didn’t seem like liquor trouble. As for speculation—surely he wouldn’t play the fool there. There was plenty of money coming to Gage, and he always could get more.
It must be a woman. Probably Flandon was trying to keep it from his wife and that was what was on his nerves. Some little—Sable characterized Gage’s visionary lady impolitely. He thought on, his mind lighting, for no apparent reason, on Freda. And there it stopped. Queer, Flandon’s bringing that girl into the office. Bright enough but no experience. Unlike him too, considering his usual impatience with inexpert assistance. He wondered—
So while the Brownley girls gossiped in ugly, furtive, rather lustful conversations and Ted Smillie told his little discovery on occasion as being an instance of what those “smooth touch-me-not girls were usually up to”—while Mr. Sable, his mouth tight in repression and his eyes keen, watched and noted Freda. Freda went on her serene way. She was serene and she was happy. At times her happiness seemed to shut her completely off from every one—even in her thoughts from her father. She never tired of exploring her memory for the sound of Gregory’s voice, the touch of his hands, the mystery of love. More and more as the days went by she hugged her secret to herself. She could not have shared a vestige of it. Its exquisite privacy was part of its quality. She had the vaguest notions of what might be waiting her as Gregory’s wife. Certainly she might have a baby—normally that probably would happen to her in the next nine months. Gregory was poor. They’d have to work. And there might be hard things. She thought once or twice that it might be an ugly sort of proposition if she did not have the particular feeling she did for Gregory. But there it was. It wasn’t a matter of the mind—nor of physiology either. She didn’t believe it was physiology which made her deliciously faint and weak as she read Gregory’s strange letters—letters so frequent, so irregular, so curiously timed and written—on the back of a menu, on a scrap of envelope, on a dozen sheets of hotel paper. Each message, beating, alive, forcing its entrance. This was the love that according to Margaret was the undoing of her sex. She knew she would go anywhere Gregory wanted her to go, to be with him. That she knew her life with him would have its independence completely in so far as her own love allowed it, did not make it less clear to her that even if the independence had been less, if she had found him a man of convention she would none the less—but would she?
She was immensely interested in possibly having a baby, and anxious to know about it. She wanted to tell Gregory. She wrote him letters in which she spent the deepest of her thought. She said things in her letters which would have astounded her if she had read them over. But she never did read them after she had written them. It would have seemed almost like cheating to read them as if for criticism.
But to-day she had not had a letter from Gregory and several unpleasant things broke in upon her absorbed happiness. She missed his letter which she usually went home at noon to get. In the afternoon as she sat at her desk working and trying to feel that she could fill up the time until she went home that night to see if there was a letter, Bob and Allison Brownley came in with another young girl. They were as resplendent as usual and Freda judged that they were collecting for some fashionable charity, from their intrusion with pencils and notebooks. She had seen women invade these offices almost every day for some such reason but it was her first encounter with Bob since that night on which she had left her house. To her horror she found herself flushing, and hoping that Barbara would not notice her and that thought enraged her so that she raised her head and looked full at the girls coming towards Mr. Flandon’s office, evidently referred to her.
She expected some embarrassment in Barbara and instead met a glance of insolence and surprise. She looked at Allie but Allie looked away and left it to Barbara.
“Can I take your message?” asked Freda with a little hauteur.
“We prefer to see Mr. Flandon personally,” said Barbara, and went by. It was in Freda’s mind to stop them but Barbara was swift. Freda could hear Mr. Flandon’s voice greeting her and judged it was too late to do anything. She sat down at her desk frowningly and was further surprised when the door opened very shortly and the girls went out. They, especially Barbara, had heads unpleasantly held, angrily tilted. The buzzer sounded for Freda.
She found her employer sitting at his desk looking as angry as his departing guests.
“Sit down a moment, Miss Thorstad, will you?”
She did as he told her. It was evident that he had something important and difficult to say. She watched him. He looked nervous, tired too, she thought.
“That young lady made some unpleasant remarks about you and I asked her to leave the office,” he said.
“Oh—I’m sorry,” answered Freda. “She’s been abominable, Mr. Flandon. But it’s too bad you should have been involved.”
“Don’t let that bother you,” said Gage grimly; “it’s of no consequence. But I wonder if you ought to let her be quite so broadcast in her remarks. It could be stopped.”
“It doesn’t matter—truly it doesn’t. Let her say what she pleases. If any one wants to know the truth of the matter I always can tell it, you see.”
“Would you think it infernal impudence if I asked you what the truth was?”
She hesitated and then laughed a little.
“You know the funny thing is that I had almost completely forgotten the whole business. It seemed important at the time but it was really trivial. Except for the fact that it opened up other things to me. Of course I’ll tell you, if you want to know.”
She did tell him in outline, stressing the fact of the misunderstanding all around, on the whole, dealing rather gently with Barbara, now that anger had gone out of her.
“I had made rather a fool of myself you see,” she finished.
He looked at her as if waiting for her to go on.
“That’s all.”
“I see. She—well—.” He let that pass. “Now ordinarily it is easy to say that gossip and slander don’t make any difference to a high minded person. I think you are high minded. I do feel however that she has made this incident a basis for a kind of slander that is dangerous. Her accusations against you are, from what I hear, absolutely libelous. It wouldn’t take ten minutes to shut her mouth if I could talk to her. But I want you to fully refute her specific attacks.”
“I know. I imagine she might say almost anything.”
“Well, then, you have never stayed at the Roadside Inn, have you?”
To his amazement the face of the girl in front of him changed. She had been calm and half smiling. Now astonishment, consciousness, and something like panic showed in her eyes, her suddenly taut body.
“Does she say that? How did she know?” There was a little moan of dismay in Freda’s answer.
Gage’s face grew stern. He sat looking at the girl across from him, whose eyes were closed as if in pain.
“To lay her hands on that,” said Freda, under her breath.
“I don’t understand you,” said Gage rather curtly.
She lifted her face.
“It hurts to have any one know that—but for her to know it most of all.”
“Such things are usually public knowledge sooner or later, my dear young lady. Clandestine—”
“Don’t say that,” cried Freda, her voice rising, “don’t use that word.”
And then as if some gate had been opened her words poured out. “Can’t you understand something being too beautiful to be anything except secret? It was something I couldn’t have let even those who love me know about. And to have her ugly devastating hands on it! It soils it. I feel her finger marks all over me. It was mine and she’s stolen it.”
Her head went down on her arms on the desk in front of her. Gage watched her with curiosity, embarrassment and pity. To his mind this love affair was a shady business but she didn’t see it so. That was evident. Her abandonment touched a chord of sympathy in him. He knew how she was being rent by pain.
“My dear girl,” he told her, more gently, “I’m afraid you’ve been very unwise.”
“No—not unwise.” She raised her head and smiled unsteadily. “I’ve been quite wise. It’s just bad luck—that’s all.”
“Could you tell me about it?”
She got up and walked to the window, evidently trying to compose herself. “It’s nothing that matters to any one but me. And I suppose you are thinking things that, even if they don’t matter, had better be set straight. For perhaps you think they matter. There’s nothing that I’ve done that I shouldn’t have done. I was there at that Inn—with—with my husband. It was just that we wanted—he even more than I at first until I learned why—to keep that little bit of life for ourselves. We didn’t want people to know—we didn’t want to share with any one except each other. I know you won’t understand but there’s nothing to condemn except that we had our own way of—caring.”
“But I do understand,” answered Gage, “and I’m glad you told me. I do most entirely understand. Because I’ve felt that way. Is your husband here?”
“He’s gone,” said Freda, “but he’ll come back. You see I married Gregory Macmillan.”
A memory of that slim, gaunt young poet came to Gage. Yes, this was how he would do it. And how perfect they were—how beautiful it all was.
“Mr. Flandon,” said Freda, “let them say what they please about me. Let them talk—they don’t know about Gregory—or do they?”
“No—they don’t.”
“Then don’t tell them, will you? Don’t tell any one. I don’t care what they say now if they don’t lay their hands on the truth. I can’t bear to have the truth in their mouths. Please—what do I care what any one says? I don’t know any one. I never see those people. He will be back and we’ll go away and they’ll forget me.”
She was very beautiful as she pleaded with him, eyes fresh from their tears, her face full of resolution.
“It’s all right, my dear,” said Gage, “no one shall know. You are right. Keep your memories to yourself. What they say doesn’t matter.”
He was standing by her at the window now, looking down at her with a tenderness that was unmistakable. It was unfortunate that at that moment Mr. Sable entered without notice.