III
Gage went home that night more cheerful than he had been for some time. He had a mischievous sensation of having rescued a brand from Margaret Duffield. At dinner Helen asked him if he had attended to Freda’s case.
“Drummond had other arrangements already.”
“What a shame,” she said, “I wonder where we can place that girl. She is too good to go back and do nothing in Mohawk. And she really wants to earn money badly.”
“I placed her,” said Gage, hugging his mischief to himself.
“You did? Where?”
“I took her into my office.”
Helen looked at him in surprise.
“You know that she can’t typewrite?”
“I know. But I can use her. She has a good head and—a nice influence. I think I’ll like to have her around. Since she has to work she’d be better there than grubbing in politics.”
“As if your office wasn’t full of politics!”
“Well they’re not Duffield-politics.”
“Whatever you mean by that is obscure,” said Helen, “but don’t eat the child’s head off, will you?”
CHAPTER X
THE CLEAN WIND
FREDA felt that night that all her dreams, all her vague anticipations of doing were suddenly translated into activity and reality. In the strangest way in the world, it seemed to her, so naïve was she about the obscure ways of most things, she had a room of her own and a job in St. Pierre. Margaret Duffield had smiled a little at the news of her job but at Freda’s quick challenge as to whether she were really imposing on Mr. Flandon, Margaret insisted that she merely found Gage himself humorous. She did not say why that was so. Together she and Freda went to see the landlady about a room for Freda. There was one, it appeared, in an apartment on the third floor. Freda could have it, if she took it at once, and so it was arranged.
It was a plain little room with one window, long and thin like the shape of the room, furnished sparsely and without grace, but Freda stood in the midst of it with her head high and a look of wondering delight in her eyes, fingering her door key.
Later she went down to Margaret’s apartment to carry up her suitcase. She found Gregory there. He had not come for lunch as Margaret had warned her. Seeing him now more clearly than she had the night before, Freda saw how cadaverous his face was, how little color there was in his cheeks. She thought he looked almost ill.
They did not hear her come in. Gregory was sitting with his eyes on Margaret, telling her something and she was listening in a protesting way. It occurred to Freda that of course they were in love. She had suspected it vaguely from their attitude. Now she was sure.
She coughed and they looked up.
“It’s my damsel in distress,” said Gregory, rising, “did everything clear up? Is the ogress destroyed?”
“If she is, poor Miss Duffield had to do it.”
“She wouldn’t mind. She likes cruelties. She’s the most cruel person—”
“Hush, Gregory, don’t reveal all my soul on the spot.”
“Cruel—and over modest. As if a soul isn’t always better revealed—”
“You can go as far as you like later. Just now you might carry Freda’s suitcase upstairs.”
He took the suitcase and followed them, entering Freda’s little room which he seemed to fill and crowd.
“So this is where you take refuge from the ogress?”
“It’s more than a refuge—it’s a tower of independence.”
He looked at her appreciatively.
“We’ll agree on many things.”
Margaret asked Freda to come down with them and she went, a little reluctantly wondering if she were not crowding their kindness. But Gregory insisted as well as Margaret.
Margaret sat beside a vase of roses on her table and Gregory and Freda faced her, sitting on the couch-bed. The roses were yellow, pink—delicate, aloof, like Margaret herself and she made a lovely picture. Gregory’s eyes rested on her a little wearily as if he had failed to find what he sought for in the picture. He was silent at first—then, deftly, Margaret drew him out little by little about the Irish Republic, and he became different, a man on fire with an idea. Fascinated, stirred, Freda watched him, broke into eager questioning here and there and was answered as eagerly. They were hot in discussion when Walter Carpenter came.
There was a moment of embarrassment as if each of the men studied the other to find out his purpose. Then Margaret spoke lightly.
“Do you want to hear about the Irish question from an expert, Walter?”
“Is Mr. Macmillan an expert?”
“He’s to lecture about it on Friday night.”
“It’s a dangerous subject for a lecture.”
“It’s a dangerous subject to live with,” answered Gregory a little defiantly.
“Are you a Sinn Feiner, Macmillan?”
“I’m an Irish Republican.”
There was a dignity in his tone which made Walter feel his half-bantering tone ill judged. He changed at once.
“We’re very ignorant of the whole question over here,” he said, “all we have to judge from is partisan literature. We never get both sides.”
“There is only one side fit to be heard.”
Freda gave a little gasp of joy at that statement. It brushed away all the conventions of polite discussion in its unequivocal clearness of conviction.
“I was sure of it,” she said.
Gregory turned and smiled at her. The four of them stood, as they had stood to greet Walter, Margaret by the side of her last guest, looking somehow fitting there, Gregory and Freda together as if in alliance against the others. Then conversation, civilities enveloped them all again. But the alliances remained. Freda made no secret of her admiration for Gregory. The openness of his mind, the way his convictions flashed through the talk seemed to her to demand an answer as fair. Her mind leapt to meet his.
Gregory Macmillan was Irish born, of a stock which was not pure Irish for his mother was an Englishwoman. It had been her people who were responsible for Gregory’s education, his public school and early Oxford life. But in his later years at Oxford his restlessness and discontents had become extreme. Ireland with its tangle of desires, its heating patriotism, heating on the old altars already holy with martyrs, had captured his imagination and ambition. He had gone to Ireland and interested himself entirely in the study of Celtic literature and the Celtic language, living in Connacht and helping edit a Gaelic Weekly. Then had come the war, and conflict for Gregory. The fight for Irish freedom, try as he did to make it his only end, had become smaller beside the great world confusion and, conquering his revulsion at fighting with English forces he had enlisted.
Before the war Gregory’s verse had had much favorable comment. He came out of the war to find himself notable among the younger poets, acclaimed even in the United States. It seemed preposterous to him. The machinations of the Irish Republican party absorbed him. Intrigue, plotting, all the melodrama, all the tragedy of the Sinn Fein policy was known to him, fostered by him. He had been in prison and after his release had fallen ill. They had sent him to convalesce in Wales. It was while he was there that there had come an offer from an American lecture bureau to go on tour in the States telling of Irish literature and reading his own verse. He laughed at the idea but others who heard the offer had not laughed. He was to come to the States, lecture on poetry and incidentally see and talk to various important Americans who might have Irish sympathies. The Republic needed friends.
He came reluctantly and yet, once in New York, he had found so many young literati to welcome him, to give him sympathy and hearing if not counsel that his spirits had risen. And he had met Margaret Duffield and drawn by her mental beauty, her curious cold virginity, he had fallen in love with her and told her he loved her. For a few ardent weeks he wooed her, she explaining away his love, denying it. Then she had come West and he had sought his lecture bureau, making them include a lecture in this city which held her. He had come and found her colder, more aloof than ever, and now sitting in this room of hers he found a quiet, controlled, cultivated, middle-aged man who seemed to be on terms of easy and intimate friendship such as he had not attained.
After a little they divided their conversation. Margaret wanted to talk to Walter about some complication in local politics—something affecting Helen’s election. And Freda wanted to hear Gregory talk.
He told her about Ireland, of the men and women who plotted secretly and constantly to throw off every yoke of sovereignty. He told of the beauty of the Gaelic tongue, translating a phrase or two for her—talked of the Irish poets and his friends and she responded, finding use now for all the thoughts that had filled her mind, the poems she had read and loved. The light in his deep set eyes grew brighter as he looked at the face turned to his, meeting his own enthusiasm so unquestioningly. Once he looked at Margaret curiously. She was deep in her discussion and with a glimmer of a smile in his eyes he turned again to Freda.
At eleven he took her to her room. They went up the stairs to the door of her apartment.
“Shall I see you between now and Friday night?”
“I’m going to work to-morrow.” Freda came back to that thought with a jolt. “I don’t know.”
“To-morrow night? Just remember that I’m alone here—I don’t know any one but you and Miss Duffield and I don’t want the people in charge of my lecture to lay hands on me until it’s necessary. You’ve no idea what they do to visiting lecturers in the provinces?”
“But hasn’t Miss Duffield plans for you?”
“I hoped she might have. But she’s busy, as you see.” His tone had many implications. “So I really am lonely and you made me feel warm and welcome to-night. You aren’t full of foolish ideas about friendships that progress like flights of stairs—step by step, are you?”
“Friendships are—or they aren’t,” said Freda.
“And this one is, I hope?”
They heard a sigh within the apartment as if a weary soul on the other side of the partition were at the end of its patience. Gregory held out his hand and turned to go.
But Freda could not let him go. She was swept by a sense of the cruel loneliness of this strange beautiful soul, in a country he did not know, pursuing a woman he did not win. She felt unbearably pent up.
Catching his hand in both of hers, she held it against her breast, lifted her face to his and suddenly surprisingly kissed him. And, turning, she marched into her room with her cheeks aflame and her head held high. Groping for the unfamiliar switch she turned on her light and began mechanically to undress. It seemed to her that she was walking in one of her own storied imaginings. So many things had happened in the last twenty-four hours which she had often dreamed would happen to her. Adventures, romantic moments, meetings of strange intimate congeniality like this with Gregory Macmillan. She thought of him as Gregory.
Gregory went down the stairs quickly, pausing at Margaret’s door to say good night. The other man was leaving too and they walked together as far as Gregory’s hotel. They were a little constrained and kept their conversation on the most general of subjects. Gregory was absent minded in his comments but as he entered the hotel lobby he was smiling a little, the immensely cheered smile of the person who has found what he thought was lost.
Freda reported for work at the office of Sable and Flandon at half past eight the next morning. She had not been sure at what time a lawyer’s office began operations and thought it best to be early so she had to wait a full hour before Mr. Flandon came in. The offices were a large, well-furnished suite of rooms. There were three young lawyers in the office, associated with Mr. Sable and Mr. Flandon, and three stenographers, in addition to a young woman, with an air of attainment, who had a desk in Mr. Sable’s office and was known as Mr. Sable’s personal secretary. Freda got some idea of the organization, watching the girls come in and take up their work. She became a little dubious as to where she could fit into this extremely well-oiled machinery and wondering more and more as to the quixotic whim which had made Mr. Flandon employ her, was almost ready to get up and go out when Gage came in.
He saw her in a minute and showed no surprise. Instead he seemed to be anxious to cover up any ambiguity in the position by making it very clear what her duties were to be. He introduced her to the rest of the office force as my “personal secretary” at which the Miss Brewster who held a like position in Mr. Sable’s employ lifted her eyebrows a little. She was given a desk in a little ante-room outside of Gage’s own office and Gage, with a stenographer who had done most of his work, went over her duties. She was to relieve the stenographer of all the sorting of his correspondence, take all his telephone messages, familiarize herself with all of his affairs and interests in so far as she could do so by consulting current files and be ready to relieve him of any routine business she could, correcting and signing his letters as soon as possible.
At five o’clock she hurried back to her little room to find a letter in her mail box. It was from her father and at the sight of it she was saddened by the sense of separation between them. Every word in it, counsel, affection, humor breathed his love and thought for her. She was still poring over it when Gregory came to take her to dinner, and forgot to be embarrassed about the night before.
Gregory had never intended to be embarrassed evidently. He considered that they were on a footing of delightful intimacy. His voice had more exuberance in it to-night than she had previously heard. As they went past Margaret’s door they looked up at her transom. It was dark.
“I hoped she was coming with us,” said Freda.
“She doesn’t want to come with me,” answered Gregory, “and that has hurt me for a long time, it seems to me, although perhaps it is only weeks. But it may be just as well. For I could never make her happy.”
“Would it be so hard?”
“I could never make any woman happy,” said Gregory with extraordinary violence. “Happiness is a state of sloth. But I could live through ecstasy and through pain with some one who was not afraid. For this serene stagnancy which seems to be the end-all of most people, I’m no good. I couldn’t do it, that’s all.”
His head was in the air and he looked, thought Freda, as if he would be extremely likely to forget about any woman or anything else and go sailing off in some fantasy of his own, at any time. She remembered him as he had been, despondent, when she had first met him, last night full of blazing enthusiasms, to-night blithely independent. It delighted her. She had never before met a person who adjusted to no routine.
“Let’s walk in peace and watch the clouds and I’ll tell you what an old Irish poet said of them.”
He could see her chin lift as she listened.
“To have in your mind such a wealth of beauty—what it must mean—to feel that things do not starve within you for lack of utterance—” Her voice was blurred into appreciations.
“Why let them starve?” asked Gregory.
“Perhaps because practical meat-and-drink body needs always claim the nourishment the things of your mind need—and you let the mind go hungry.”
“That’s it—that’s what people do—but you won’t. I hear it in your voice—see it in your face. The things in you are too vital to be starved. You can cripple them but you can’t kill them.”
“I do not know.”
“You must set yourself free.”
Freda smiled ruefully.
“That’s what women are always talking about and what they mean is a washing machine.”
“That’s no freedom—that’s just being given the run of the prison. Don’t you see that what I mean is to keep yourself free from all the petty desires—the little peeping conventions—free for the great desires and pains that will rush through you some day? You have to be strong to do that. You can put up wind breaks for emotion so easily. And you don’t want them.”
“It means being very fearless.”
“I have never yet met anything worth fearing except cowardice.”
He stopped. They were in the middle of some sidewalk, neither of them noticed where.
“Why did you kiss me last night?”
“I wanted to. I’ve not been sorry,” answered Freda. “By all the rules I’ve learned I ought to be abashed, but you don’t live by rules, so why waste them on you?”
Her smile was faintly tremulous. His strange, unfamiliar eyes looked into hers and rested there.
“And we won’t have to spend time talking about love,” he said, half to himself, “we shan’t wear it threadbare with trying to test its fabric. It comes like the wind—like God.”
Again they breasted the wind and her hand was fast in his. It was a clean, cool clasp. Freda felt oddly that she had saved her soul, that she had met an ultimate.