Back in his rooms, Alan found letters awaiting him. He read them, and tore all up except one. It was from Clem. She wrote:
Dear Alan: Nance says you are going very far away. I am sorry. It has been raining here very much. In the hollows all the bridges are under water. I have invented a new game. It is called “steamboat.” I play it on old Dubbs. We go down into the valley, and I make him go through the water around the bridges. He puffs just like a steamboat, and when he gets out, he smokes all over. He is too fat. I hope you will come back very soon.
CLEM.
That evening Clem was thrown into a transport by receiving her first telegram. It read:
You must not play steamboat again; it is dangerous.
ALAN.
She tucked it in her bosom and rushed over to the Firs to show it to Gerry.
Gerry and Alix were spending the summer at the Firs, where Mrs. Lansing, Gerry’s widowed mother, was still nominally the hostess. They had been married two years, but people still spoke of Alix as Gerry’s bride, and, in so doing, stamped her with her own seal. To strangers they carried the air of a couple about to be married at the rational close of a long engagement. No children or thought of children had come to turn the channel of life for Alix. On Gerry, marriage sat as an added habit. It was beginning to look as though he and Alix drifted together not because they were carried by the same currents, but because they were tied.
Where duller minds would have dubbed Gerry the Ox, Alan had named him the Rock, and Alan was right. Gerry had a dignity beyond mere bulk. He had all the powers of resistance, none of articulation. Where a pin-prick would start an ox, it took an upheaval to move Gerry. An upheaval was on the way, but Gerry did not know it. It was yet afar off.