Perch of the Devil

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

XXI

GREGORY and Mark established their wives comfortably in a drawing-room of the limited for Chicago, asked the usual masculine questions about tickets and trunk checks, expressed their masculine surprise that nothing had been forgotten, told them to be careful not to lean over the railing of the observation car, nor to make themselves ill with the numerous boxes of candy sent to the train, admonished them not to spend too much money in New York, to send their trunks to the steamer the day before they sailed, and give themselves at least two hours to get to the docks; above all not to mislay their letters of credit; then kissed them dutifully, and, as the train moved out, stood on the platform with solemn faces and hearts of indescribable buoyancy.

“My Lord!” exclaimed Ida, as she blew her last kiss. “If Greg was going along I’d have to take care of him every step of the way. I wouldn’t trust him with the tickets the length of the train. Men do make me tired. They keep up the farce that we’re children just to keep up that other grand farce that they run the Universe. Any old plank to cling to.”

Ora kept her sentiments to herself.

If Mark, who was fond of his wife, and more or less dependent upon her, wondered vaguely that he should rejoice in the prospect of six months of bachelorhood, Gregory was almost puzzled. Ida was now no more to him personally than a responsibility he had voluntarily assumed and was determined to treat with complete justice; but at least she made him more comfortable than he had ever been before, and he had trained her to let him alone. Since her rapid improvement her speech had ceased to irritate him; she was never untidy, never anything but a pleasant picture to look at. He had also noted on the night of the party that she was indisputably the handsomest woman in the room and received the homage of men with dignity and poise. He had felt proud of her, and comfortably certain that he could trust her. Altogether a model wife.

Nevertheless as he walked out Park Street after he left Mark at his office (Ida not only had sent his personal possessions to the Blake house but found time to unpack and put them away) his brain, which had been curiously depressed during the past week, felt as if full of effervescing wine.

“Jove!” he thought, “why do men marry? What has any woman living to give a man half as good as his freedom.”

His freedom was to be reasonably complete. He had told Ida to expect no letters from him and not to write herself unless she were in trouble. With all the fervour of his masculine soul he hated to write letters. Long since he had bought a typewriter, on which he rattled off necessary business communications so briefly that they would have cost him little more on the wire. He knew that he should hear constantly of his wife’s welfare from Mark, and had no desire to be inflicted with descriptions of scenery and shops.

He felt a spasm of envy, however, as he thought of the letters Mark would receive from Ora. Her letters, no doubt, would be worth reading, not only because she had a mind, and already had seen too much of Europe to comment on its obvious phases, but because they would be redolent of her subtle exquisite personality. He had once come upon a package of old letters among his mother’s possessions and read them. They had been written by his great-great-grandmother to her husband while he was a soldier in the War of the Revolution. It was merely the simple life of the family, the farm, and the woods, that she described, but Gregory never recalled those letters without feeling again the subtle psychological emanation of the writer’s sweet and feminine but determinate personality; it hovered like a wraith over the written words, imprisoned, imperishable, until the paper should fall to dust. So, he imagined, something of Ora’s essence would take wing on the rustling sheets of her letters.

But the spasm of envy passed. Ora would write no such letters to Mark Blake. Her correspondence with her husband would be perfunctory, practical, brief. To some man she might write pages that would keep him up at night, reading and rereading, interpreting illusive phrases, searching for hidden and personal meanings, while two individualities met and melted.... But this yearning passed also. To receive such letters a man must answer them and that would be hell.