I
Nathan was facing the prospect of a dreary, rainy Sunday in a Wilkes-Barre hotel when that “turning-point” telegram arrived from Thorne. Since that day in Springfield when he had received a wire from Mildred concerning his child’s death, telegrams had not been without a flavor of calamity. Yet Thorne’s message on its face looked harmless enough. It read:
DROP EVERYTHING COME HOME AT ONCE IMPORTANT MISSION FOR YOU. T. E. Thorne.
An important mission for him! Nathan had a queer, telepathic intuition that something had happened, or was about to happen, that was to affect his career and perhaps his whole life vitally. It never left him. In fact, it grew upon him as he entered Vermont the next afternoon and his train drew into Paris about half-past seven o’clock.
Usually Nat wired Milly when he was returning from his trips; his wife was piqued and exasperated when he “walked in on her” with no food ready in the house or when she was in the midst of neighborhood or family activities such as occupied her time while her husband was absent. But he had been so intent on making his trains that this time he had forgotten. When the man finally alighted on the depot platform Sunday evening, the place showed no signs of life; not even a Ford taxi met the train. So Nathan left his suit cases in the baggage room to be brought up next morning and started toward the business section afoot.
He entered the Metropolitan Drug Store pay-station and called Ted Thorne. Ted was out for the evening and Nat promised to call him later. Then he called Milly to inform her that he had returned to town and would be up in a few minutes. Milly did not answer the ‘phone.
“Probably down to her mother’s,” he said. So he stopped for a lunch at the Élite, lit a cigar and headed for Preston Hill at a leisurely pace. This was about half-past eight.
It was one of those blowy nights in early March with the wind drying up the snow puddles and clouds scurrying across the face of a high white moon. Spring would be on New England in a handful of weeks. Already most of the snow had gone and only sickly, dirty patches, the last vestiges of winter drifts, were disclosed on the northern sides of walls and fences where the sunlight failed to touch them.
His house was dark when he finally turned into Vermont Avenue. As Milly had not answered the ‘phone, he thought nothing of it. He went up the front veranda steps and let himself into the hall with his latchkey. The warm odor of his own home was pleasant and inviting, the house welcomed him after his three-weeks’ absence by its mellow darkness. He pressed on the lamp button in the hall and called his wife’s name. But he received no answer. The house was very quiet. The wind blew a loose blind somewhere. On the distant kitchen sink-shelf a brassy alarm clock ticked faintly. Nathan hung hat and coat on the hall hat-tree and pressed out the hall light as he moved into the sitting room on the west side.
He pulled the tiny chain on the reading lamp and looked around for his mail. It contained nothing of interest, most of it being bills. He glanced over the recent copies of the Daily Telegraph. But his thoughts were upon Ted Thorne and why he should have been called so abruptly off the road.
After a time the moon got around to where it cast a splotch of lemon-colored light on the sitting-room floor. The window shades had not been drawn. Nathan glanced up and saw the cold, round disk behind the gaunt, waving tree boughs. He turned his chair—a heavy wing-rocker—so that it faced the window, its back to the room. Then he reached a hand and pulled off the reading light to enjoy the wild, windy beauty of the outside night.
He had turned many bitter things over in his mind and it was after nine o’clock when the man heard a strange sound. It seemed to come from the rear of the house, out on the back porch beyond the kitchen. At first Nat thought it some freak of the wind. Then, as the latter died down and perfect quiet reigned for a moment, the sound came again, sharp and distinct.
Some one had tried several keys in the back-porch door. Finally they had found one which fitted. A gust of wind swept through the house and the door was immediately closed.
Nathan had no desire to startle his wife. He was about to rise and call, to advise her of his presence in the darkened home, when there came a thunderous thud in the kitchen and an oath.
A man was in the kitchen! He had fallen over a chair!
Nathan drew back into the protective depths of the rocker. He was frightened. Most normal people know some degree of terror when it is evident burglars are in the house. He debated what he should do. Then it occurred to him to keep silent a moment, to see what the intruder was after and where he would go.
The burglar apparently righted the chair and groped his way to the sitting room, where Nathan held his breath and waited, completely hidden by the enormous back of the rocker. The intruder came in, still groping. Nathan could hear his deep breathing through the semi-dark.
Apparently the man stood for a time in the center of the room, hesitant. Then, to Nathan’s bewilderment, he sank down on the sofa. Nathan heard the springs creak plainly. Next came the scratch of a match, the silhouette the flare made of adjacent furniture on west wall and ceiling, and the acrid odor of cigar smoke. A queer burglar, this! He sat down on the family sofa and lit a smoke before proceeding to his loot. And Milly might come at any minute.
Milly came. She let herself in the front way. Nathan knew when she had arrived by another draught of spring wind and the sharp click when the front door closed and the lock snapped. But she did not turn on the lights. Her footstep sounded on the hard-wood floor of the hall and he knew without looking around that she was standing in the door.
The sofa springs creaked. Nathan waited for Milly to shriek when she beheld a burglar smoking in the room. He had his mind ready to reach for the chain of the reading lamp and snap it on. After that,—well, Nathan still knew how to use his fists.
But Milly did not shriek. Instead, he heard her say in the most normal, natural intonation of voice, softened with a trace of humor:
“Don’t take you long to make yourself comfortable, does it?”
And a man’s coarser bass returned from that dark:
“You bet it don’t! Leave it to your uncle!”
“I hope to Gawd nobody spotted you gettin’ in. That ol’ Miss Pease next door puts her eyes on the doorstep when she sleeps, same as she puts out her cat.”
“Naw, I waited until a cloud went over the moon before I left the shadow o’ the fence. But I did knock my shin over a chair in the kitchen. I’ll break that dam’ thing if you leave it in my way again—fell over it last Sunday night, very same way!”
Nathan was too stunned to move. He seemed all at once to have no body, so completely had all physical sensation fled. He might have been a disembodied spirit sitting in that chair—which he was, so far as the man and his wife were concerned. And they thought him six hundred miles away! He waited. He knew Milly was pulling off her gloves and unpinning her hat.
“You didn’t light any lights, did you?” It was Milly’s voice that asked it.
“What th’ hell sort o’ boob do you take me for, Mil? Besides, whatter we need lights for—you an’ me?”
The sofa springs suddenly creaked with Milly’s added weight.
“Gawd, kiss me, honeybunch! Gimme a good old humdinger. There ain’t nobody can raise my hair with kissin’ like you can, Si, or anything else, for that matter. Seems just as if a gorilla had me—and I was perfectly willin’ the gorilla should!”
They kissed.
Later-day motion-picture censors would have shortened that kiss considerably, say about forty seconds.
“Honestly, Si,” cried the girl, “when you kiss me like that, I just wanner die—or wish I could!”
“Some little kisser I am, huh? Nat don’t kiss you like that, now, does he, what?”
“Oh, Gawd! If he could do it that way—or ever had—maybe you’d never had the chance, Si. A girl likes to be mauled once in a while—you know—treated rough! But he’s too much of a high-brow to maul anybody. I suppose it ain’t poetical!”
Milly laughed. Plumb swore. As for Nathan,—he sank deeper into his chair. His mind was in that state which a wrecked body sometimes knows between a mangling accident and the moment when blasted nerves begin to respond and bring excruciating agony.
“Mil, honestly, this can’t go much longer! You ain’t his wife, Mil. You never was his wife. He had no business to marry you in the first place. You belong to me. And the right thing all around would be to either come out flat-footed and have a show-down, or else run off and just love as much as we please—forever. I may be a roughneck, Mil, but I hate this bein’ a sneak!”
“I know, Si, but think o’ the dough I’m layin’ by! I got almost seven hundred saved right now. Did I tell you about the New York dress? Nat gimme two hundred and fifty to buy some togs for that high-brow dinner. Do you know what I did? I got a thing that cost seventeen ninety-eight and made him think I’d blowed the whole wad. Made two hundred and thirty at a crack, right there! Gee, he’s easy! He believes anything I tell him. Just because I’m a woman, he takes everything I say for gospel truth.”
“I don’t care nothin’ about his money—unless you wanner blow it on yourself. I got money. And I can get a job anywheres. And honestly, Mil, I’m dam’ tired and sick every time a blind blows thinkin’ it’s him come back by surprise to catch us and raise hell.”
“Aw, he wouldn’t raise hell. He ain’t got the starch.” Milly laughed and apparently pulled Si’s hair. “He’s a high-brow and a poet. Poets don’t fight!”
“Don’t they, though?” commented Plumb. “I had one scrap with Nat. I ain’t hankerin’ to mix up in another. He could even gun me for what we’re doin’ now, Mil, and I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.”
“He wouldn’t gun you—not if I was around,” snapped Milly. “I’d just like to see him. He’s the least o’ my worries. I can handle him!”
“But it ain’t alone that, Mil. I want you myself! You’re my class. Honestly, when I’m at work some days, I got a regularly gnawin’ inside to feel your arms ’round me and hear your old ribs crackin’ when I squeeze you in an honest-to-Gawd hug! I wancher always, Mil. I thought a heap o’ you before you ever took up with him——”
“I thought he was class—and rich,” lamented the girl. “He sure did bunco me fierce.”
“Well, yer kid’s gone and he don’t love you no more or he wouldn’t go off months at a stretch and leave you—exposed to me!” Si laughed. “Mil, you and me just got to fix this up. It’d probably jolt His Nibs terrible to have a divorce. Besides, he’d probably start messin’ things up. Still it oughta be done. Where’s he now? When’s he comin’ home?”
“He oughta be doin’ Pennsylvania this week. It’s his time for it. He’ll be back about a week from Thursday night.”
“Mil, what th’ hell do we care for him or anybody? Let’s cut out this sneakin’-in-the-back-door business. Let’s blow!”
There was silence for a long time after that.
“Where’d we go, Si?”
“I gotta swell chance to go down to Jersey and get a job in a shipyards. They’re payin’ big money for riveters. A feller was tellin’ to the shop yesterday that if we get fightin’ the Germans, them that works on ships won’t have to go across. Let’s blow, Mil! Let’s get outta here for good and all!”
“There’s Ma and Pa and the kids——”
“Yer Ma and Pa wanner see you happy, don’t they? And they know Nat ain’t doin’ it. Then what’s the answer? Besides, I can get along with your Pa a lot better’n Nat. Yer Pa and me speak the same language!”
Another lunge of the couch springs.
“Treat me rough, kid!” cried the girl softly. “Treat me rough enough and—I might!”
Nathan reached up and pulled on the light.