The long way

by Mary Imlay Taylor

XIII

All this while Charter had been away. He had left Washington almost immediately and was taking his leave out of the sphere of its influence; he even dreaded the possibility of a summons to report at the War Department. Not that he was afraid to meet the problem and grapple with it, but he was determined to conquer it, and Rachel's very presence, under the altered conditions, had been too distracting a pain. If he was ever to see his way through it, he must see it without her. She had removed herself from his life and he had lived so long near the thought of her that her absence seemed to take the magic part of life away, to leave him a bare skeleton of meaningless days.

At first it was indeed impossible to believe in their final separation; there seemed to exist some indestructible tie between them, spiritual and therefore immortal, born of their community of soul, their absolute sympathy, their old happy comradeship. He could not quite believe that Rachel did not belong to him, that, instead, she belonged to Belhaven, and it was the necessity of recognizing that which forced him to the overt act of flight. He must feel that he was mistaken, that no infrangible bond existed between their spirits, that he was free as Rachel had shown that she felt herself to be free. He could not have explained this feeling, his folly as he called it, to himself, but he tried to urge on the process of dissolution, to slip out of the shackles, and the fact that he knew intuitively that Rachel was unhappy had not made the process of forgetting easier. To stand outside of her life, put out of it by her own act, and to witness her misery was like pouring gall into his wound; even his magnificent courage blenched before it.

For a nature like his absence does very little; life regained its normal aspect, but individually he felt lopsided. Rachel's disappearance from her place in his plans and his hopes left them toppling over, only half complete, and he was continually groping about for a solution of his problem, a way to regain the old, equable poise. He even wanted to go back to the Philippines, a desire which made his brother officers smile sardonically. They thought that John had always been a fool, and now he had apparently become besottedly fond of living in a hole with the sole object of relieving the troubles of a few common soldiers and helping the Filipinos.

The common soldiers and the Filipinos were fervent in their desire to have John back but he did not get there. In fact he found himself suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, appreciated. The War Department was not disposed to let him hide his light under a bushel. For some unheard of reason they began to realize his value. He did not get his orders to the Philippine Islands, but he got a medal from Congress for his distinguished courage at Caloocan, a matter that seemed to have been just remembered. If he had been willing, young Captain Charter would have been quite a hero; as it was, he had to spend most of his time, while visiting his aunt at Newport, dodging social lion-tamers, and he began to dread the sight of a motor filled with ladies in fashionable attire making its way to the front door. If he had the habit of command he had not the attendant love of publicity, and he hated to move continually before the public eye, garbed, as it were, in the pomp and panoply of war. He went on obscure fishing trips with old seafaring characters; he went tramping in the woods and fields; but he could not escape the incense of popular admiration as a hero, nor the disturbing ripple of Pamela's letters. For Pamela kept him informed; from her he heard that Eva had broken down in the heat of August and the Astrys had consequently taken a flying trip to Europe. About Rachel his fair correspondent was more discreet, but she let drop a hint now and then, and he knew when, at the approach of fall, the Belhavens went away together for a brief visit in Boston, Aunt Drusilla Leven having returned from her exile to her little house in Cambridge, where she was likely, so Pamela wrote, to have to live on salt cod and kippered herring until the first of January, when her dividends would have at last arrived. "You know," Pamela added, "that college towns are fearfully expensive and even top round is out of sight up there!"

The knowledge that the Belhavens were probably still absent was a more material comfort to Charter when, in December, he got the dreaded order to report in Washington for staff duty at the White House. At the same time Paul Van Citters wrote to invite him to spend Christmas with them, and casually mentioned that the Belhavens had been away since Thanksgiving, though the Astrys were home again. Pamela had carefully instructed her husband in this portion of his letter and it had the desired effect. John was lonely, he dreaded Christmas, and he had no objections to going to the Van Citterses, as long as he had to be in Washington by the first of the year. Paul talked of going south for a shooting trip; John did not care a pin about it, but he did not want to shoot himself and sometimes he felt dangerously like it. For there are strenuous moments when even the most rational human being lets go of the normal facts of life and feels those destructive forces at work within himself, tearing away his resolutions, letting slip the material bonds that make existence possible, turning back the wheels of life, loosening the noose that holds the body and the will together. John was tired of the struggle; he had put Rachel out of his life, but, as yet, he had not replaced her. To escape the bonds of such a passion it is a vital necessity, they say, to supplant it, and John's great simplicity of soul had not yet reached this easy solution. To him it would not have been easy, chiefly because there were so few like Rachel, so few had her sweetness and her subtle charm.

The day that he arrived in Washington he was received only by Mr. Van Citters' mother, as it happened that Paul had been called to Baltimore to see a sick friend and Pamela was out at a formal luncheon at the White House. These engagements were sufficiently pressing to excuse their temporary failure to welcome their cousin, and, after lunching with his elderly hostess, Charter found time to go out for a stroll before Pamela was likely to return. He had intended to avoid the neighborhood of the Belhaven house, but they were absent, so he found it easy to excuse himself for turning his steps in that direction. The road outside of the city was more inviting, the tempter argued insidiously, and he was less likely to meet chance acquaintances; besides, it was unnecessary to go within a bow-shot of the dangerous neighborhood.

It was a crisp December day; there was snow behind the hedgerows and here and there he saw a snowbird or a woodpecker. The growing familiarity of the scene afforded him a curious kind of comfort. He was only vaguely aware of those mysterious forces that were continually turning him in one direction, and he thought that he had conquered himself, that he could risk even the sights and sounds that recalled most vividly that supreme moment when his universe had toppled over like a house of cards. Moreover, the city had grown beyond his recollection during his absence in the Philippines, and a new block of houses had so entirely altered the appearance of the neighborhood, and he had been so occupied with his own thoughts, that he was surprised to find himself at a turn of the road where he must pass the lower driveway between the entrance to Astry's estate and the old Belhaven place. But, after a moment's hesitation, he went on and, glancing down at the low rambling house, saw the smoke ascending from the chimneys and a large, gray motor standing in the stable-yard. Then he suddenly remembered that Paul's statement that they had been away since Thanksgiving did not contain a guarantee that they would remain away until spring. Sharply aware of the shock that he had received, John called himself a fool to have risked meeting Rachel so soon again. Yet the thought of it gave him a pleasure nearly as poignant as pain. She arose before his mind's eye with the clearness of a perfect revelation; he seemed to see at once the graceful erectness of her slight figure, the delicate face, the charming eyes, the mouth that had both tenderness and strength.

John averted his eyes from the house, for that made Belhaven certain; it clothed the situation in flesh and drove it to his heart. But the long grove of cedars, their pungent odor, the sweep of the frozen field, the bare poles of the wood through which he caught here and there the glorious leap and flash of the sun on the snowy slopes beyond, these things reminded him of Rachel. They made the thought of her so vivid, so persuasive, that it seemed natural to see her in the flesh as he turned the last lap of the Astry meadows. She was alone; she had been to the house and was going home by a short cut through the woods. She wore no hat and the wind had ruffled her brown hair until it curled in little vagrant tendrils about her temples. A long, gray coat covered her to her feet and she had thrust her hands into the pockets, boy fashion, and was walking fast. A swift change passed over her face as she caught sight of him, a change that deepened the soft color in her cheeks and darkened her eyes.

John met her gravely, almost bluntly. "I didn't know until a moment ago that you were here!"