CHAPTER I
So we began what Vio called the expiation, and what to me was no more than the attempt to persuade our friends that they didn't know what they knew. This, according to Vio's calculations, could be best achieved by never for an instant showing the white feather of an uncomfortable conscience. Our assurance was to be something like the Stroud aplomb on emerging from the courts of bankruptcy or divorce. To be unaware of anything odd in one's conduct helped others to be unaware of it, too. A high spirit, a high head, a high hand carried one through difficult situations regardless of the strife of tongues.
I didn't think it necessary to remind Vio that the strife of tongues could go on even if we didn't hear it. Nothing else was possible when Wolf's fatuity blew the trumpet and beat the drum if the clamor showed signs of dying down. It wasn't that he told the truth, but that he told lies so easy of detection. Alice Mountney did tell the truth as far as she knew it; but where she didn't know it she supplied the deficiency by invention. That those so near us should be in conflict naturally called for comment, especially when Vio refused to let me speak.
For the first few weeks I was too busily occupied to think of what any one was saying, seeing that the details I had to arrange were so unusual. Of the steps taken to become a living citizen again, and get back my property from my heirs, I give no account further than to say that they absorbed my attention. My standing in the community I was thus unable to compute till we were into the new year.
By this time I had taken part in a number of family events on which I shall touch briefly. At Christmas we had gone to Washington to spend the festival with Minna and Tom Cantley. There we had met Ernestine, in one of the intervals of her flag-raising, and on the way back to Boston my brother Dan's ship had unexpectedly arrived in New York. A series of domestic gatherings had therefore taken place, at all of which Vio had worked heroically. As she had generally hitherto ignored my family's existence this graciousness was not without its effect. Where she did so much for my rehabilitation, those close to me in blood could hardly do less than follow her example.
They followed it almost to the letter. That is to say, none of them asked me any questions, presumably wishing to spare both themselves and me embarrassment. Once or twice, when I attempted to speak of my experiences, the readiest plunged in with some topic that would lead us away from dangerous ground. If I yielded to this it was because speaking of myself at all was the deliberate exposure of nerves still raw and quivering. I could do it, but I couldn't do it willingly.
Between Minna and myself there had never been much sympathy, largely because I was of the dreamy temperament and she of the sharp and practical. That I should make beauty a career in life, and take advantage of the fact that our father had left me a modest sufficiency to give my services to a museum of fine arts, shocked her to the heart. A man should do a man's work, she said, not that of an old Miss Nancy. When I pointed out that many of the manufacturers in New England, whose work had to do with textiles, came to me for advice, she replied that she didn't believe it. Her attitude now was that I had done no worse than she had always foretold and any one might have expected.
Ernestine, to do her justice, was as tolerant of me as she was of any one who wasn't a flag. The Flag having become her idol and she its high-priestess, she could talk of nothing else. The nation had apparently gone to war in order that the cult of the Flag should be the more firmly established; and all other matters passed outside the circle of her consideration. She knew I had been dead and had somehow become alive again; but as the detail didn't call for the raising of a flag she couldn't give her mind to it. As she could give her mind in no greater measure to Minna's canteen-work or Vio's clothes, I profited by the generous nature of her exclusions.
For Dan, when I met him, I hardly existed, but that might have been so in any case, as we had never been really intimate. Recently he had been working with English naval officers and had taken on their manners and form of speech.
"Hello, old dear. Top-hole to see you looking so fit. I say, where can I find a barber? Got a mane on me like a lion."