II
There was an argument that night. Sable had forced it. He had said that Gage had to “cut it out in his own office.”
Gage had asked him what he meant by cutting it out and his partner said that he definitely meant getting that girl out of the office at once.
“And my advice to you is to keep away from her after she is out.”
The upshot was that Gage had refused. He had simply said that there was no reason why he should turn out a useful employee simply because any one disliked her or thought evilly of her. Miss Thorstad was extremely useful to him and there was nothing further to say. At which Sable had snorted in disdain.
But, seeing Gage’s stubbornness he had possibly guessed at what might be the depth of it and grown milder.
“It’s a difficult business for me, Gage,” he said, “but I’ve got to go through with it. She must leave the office. We can’t afford scandal.”
“Suppose I won’t discharge her?”
“I’m not supposing any such nonsense. You aren’t going to act that way unless you’re crazy.”
Sable looked at him.
“It means a smash probably. Don’t let’s talk foolishness. You know you’ve got too much tied up in this business to let it go. You couldn’t afford to say you smashed up your business for a woman. That’s not the way things are done. I can’t insist on your giving up the girl but I can ask you to remove the scandal from an office in which not alone your name is involved.”
“Such rotten minds,” thought Gage, almost without anger. He was feeling curiously clear and light and deft. He had felt that way ever since he had found how Freda felt. Something had been strengthened in his own philosophy by her simple refusal to share her secret with every one. She put other things higher than the opinion of gossip. So must he.
They let the thing ride for a few days. Gage thought of nothing else and found himself dreaming a great deal when he should have been working, according to Sable. He also found that Helen was becoming almost anti-pathetic to him. She was to make the seconding speech for one of the candidates at Chicago and was busy with its preparation. There were conferences constantly, and she had allowed a picture of herself with her children to be syndicated. Gage found it before him everywhere and it enraged him. He felt it on his raw mind as an advertisement of the result of their love, as a dragging into publicity of the last bond between them.
“I feel like the husband of a moving picture actress,” he told her, viciously, one day.
She said what she had never meant to say. She was tired and full of worrying and important matters. Gage and his brooding seemed childish and morbid. And she had her own secret grievance.
“From what I hear of your escapades at the Roadside Inn you act like the husband of one,” she retorted.
She had not meant to say that. But when the gossip about Freda had reached her there had come an ugly coupling in her mind of that gossip and Gage’s interest in the girl. During that very week-end Gage had been absent from the city—on political business—he had said vaguely. Yet she had tried to control her suspicions, convince herself that there was no cause for investigation or accusation. This flare of hers was unexpected and unguarded—dangerous too.
A shudder of misery shot through both of them at their own coarseness. But they were launched. And it was clear to Gage that in some way or other not only Sable but Helen had thought him involved with Freda. It did not make him particularly angry. He rather courted the injustice of the suspicion because it justified him in his own position. This was where this business of Helen’s had landed them then. Alienated, loveless, suspicious—this was the natural outcome of the whole thing. Minds running on sex all the time—that was what happened to these women—yet without delicacy, without reserve. So she thought he was like that, did she? She was thinking that sort of viciousness while he’d been trying to protect her even from himself. What was the use of it all?
“I don’t know what you hear of my escapades as you call them,” he answered. “Possibly you might inform me?”
She was sick with shame at her own impulse but perhaps it had been at the bottom of her mind corroding it more than she knew.
“I didn’t mean to say that, Gage.”
“You must have meant something.”
He was insistent, brutal. He would have the truth out of her. He wanted the inside of her mind, to torture himself with it if he could. He wanted it over with.
“Not to-night, Gage. I’m tired. Let’s talk over some of these things when we are both fresh. I—I apologize.”
She moved towards the door of the living-room on her way upstairs. But Gage caught her hand. He stood looking down at her and as she met his eyes she saw that his face was almost strange. His eyes looked queer. They were brutal, excited, strange glints. His mouth seemed to hang loose and heavy.
“Not to-night, Gage,” she repeated. In her voice was a droop of weariness that was unmistakable.
“Why not to-night? Because you want to save yourself fresh for your public to-morrow? You don’t want to be bothered with a husband and his annoyances?”
“Not to-night because you aren’t in the right mood.”
He still held her hand.
“But suppose I want to go into it to-night. There’ll be no better time. Day after to-morrow my wife goes to the National Convention to dazzle the American public. Suppose she sets her house in order first. Every good politician does that, Helen.”
“There’s a devil in you, Gage, isn’t there?”
“A hundred, and every one bred by you. Tell me, what you were referring to as my escapades? Tell me.”
He shook her a little. She felt a hairpin loosened and the indignity suddenly made her furious.
“Let me go.”
“I will not let you go. I want you to tell me.”
“I’ll tell you,” she said bitterly, her words coming as if anger pushed them out. “Heaven knows I’ve tried to conceal it even from myself. But your viciousness shows you’ve got a rotten conscience. When you took that Thorstad girl into your office I wondered why—and then after I told you she’d been seen at that place with a man, your silly defence of her might have told me what was the situation. You talk of her—all the time—all the time. You were away that week-end. Where were you if you weren’t with her?”
He let her go then. She had said it. It was said, as he had wanted it said. He felt triumphant. And he would give her no satisfaction. He would hurt her—and hurt her.
She went on in a tumbled burst of words.
“I don’t blame the girl, though she’s a little fool. But I won’t stand having her let in for that sort of thing.”
“Why not?” asked Gage, lighting a cigarette. “Isn’t it a perfectly proper thing for a modern woman to choose her lovers where she will?”
Helen felt herself grow dizzy, not at his question but at the admission it made. She drew herself up and Gage wondered at her beauty with a hot surge of desire even while he wanted to torture her more. It was such a relief to have found a weapon.
“Come,” he went on, “we won’t discuss that young lady. There’s not a thing in the world against her. If you have been bending your ear to the ground and heard a lot of rotten gossip I’m not responsible. If the people who talk about her had half her quality—”
“I warn you, Gage, you’re going to pieces,” interrupted Helen. “I can’t stop you if you’re determined to ruin yourself. But you’ve acted like a pettish child for months about the fact that I wanted to do some work you didn’t approve of, apparently you’ve run off and got mixed up with this girl, you’ve been drinking far too much—you had whisky before breakfast this morning—it’s beginning to tell on you.”
“I miss you, Helen,” said Gage with a kind of sinister sarcasm.
She shivered.
“I’m going upstairs.”
“Yes, we are.”
“Aren’t you going to divorce me—or would that hurt your career?”
“You’re not yourself, Gage,” said Helen. She had regained a loose hold on herself. “I’d sooner not talk to you any more to-night.”
He flattened the end of his lighted cigarette and pulled the chain of the table light.
“Then we’ll talk upstairs.”
“Not to-night.”
“Yes, we will, Helen. I’m lonely for you.” He came to where she stood. “Come along, my dear.”
There was not a tone in his voice that Helen could recognize. A kind of ugly caress—she shuddered.
He put his arm around her shoulders.
“Gage—you mustn’t touch me like this.”
He laughed at her.
“It’s quite the new way, as I understand it, my dear, isn’t it? Nature—openness—no false modesties, no false sentiments. After all we are married—or to be more modern, we’re openly living together. The pictures in the paper prove it. There’s no use being silly. You’ve had your way a lot lately—now how about mine?”
He pulled her close to him and pushing back her head sought her lips roughly, as if he were dying of thirst and cared little what healthy or unhealthy drink he had found.