"Oh, when you held out half an excuse to me, I couldn't help coming."
"What's your idea—for England? To be a nurse—or what?"
"A nurse, sir."
"I'm not sir, please. I'm going to be a nurse, too. I told you once that I'd always be your friend. And a friend isn't ever sir. So don't do it again."
"I'll not," she said.
Presently I began to ask her about the Fultons. At first her answers were short and unsatisfactory, but presently she began to warm to the topic.
Stamford? Oh, it had been awful. The house had never been divided in its allegiance, but nobody could have remained callous to Mrs. Fulton's grief. Meals were especially awful. Mr. and Mrs. Fulton tried to make conversation. Sometimes just when it seemed as if she was going to be a little cheerful—phist! her eyes would fill with tears, and she would bolt from the room. At such times Mr. Fulton's face was a study of pity for her and grief for them both. She was good to the children; no question about that. Sometimes she grabbed them into her arms and hugged them too hard. It was as if she was trying by sheer physical effort to give them back what she had taken away from them.
Sometimes one thought one heard little Hurry crying very softly and bitterly, and it would turn out to be Mrs. Fulton, locked in her bedroom. Pressure of business, success, kept Mr. Fulton going. Sometimes the two tried to talk things over. But it was an irritating, mosquitoey house. Always their voices ended by rising to the point where they could be heard all over the ramshackle paper-thin dwelling.
It stood on a lawn that sloped to tidal waters, very ugly and muddy at low tide. A long gangway reached to a float for boats; here the water was deep enough to dive into at half tide. Often at dawn, if the tide was right, and you happened to be awake, you might see Mr. Fulton descend the wet lawn in wrapper and bare feet for the swim that seemed to make up to him for his sleepless nights. You knew that he was in trouble by the way that he took to the water. It's always a little shivery at dawn, but he never hesitated. His wrapper was coming off by the time he reached the float—it was too far off to mind watching him—and into the water he'd go, head first, as quick as he could get in. It was almost as if he was afraid he'd die before he got to it. He was a fine swimmer, but oftenest he just lay about, sometimes with his face under. Then he looked like a drowned man. Sometimes he went in earlier than dawn. She had seen phosphorescence off the float in the black night, and heard the clean, quiet splash of his dive.
Once he stayed in so long that Mrs. Fulton called to him from her window, "Please come in, John, I'm frightened." Oh, yes, she wanted to be free from him, perhaps she still does, but not that way. If anything had happened to him, if he had taken his life, for instance, one imagined that in the first agonies of remorse she would have taken hers too.