“So you cannot be induced to stay any longer?” Bliss asked, as she came into his studio to say good-by.
“I’m not as needed here as at the Fincherie—and then, Dan Birge is home and I want to see him,” she admitted honestly. “So don’t dare dig up another date for me until after the New Year. I must stay at home that long for I’m to be Mrs. Santa Claus, you see; even he has been ousted by the new women!”
“I won’t see you for a long time,” he objected drolly. “And you look to-day like the little girl of six years ago when you explained how you wintered with the circus and then sang hymns until I thought I had discovered the Yogi trick of having one’s soul slip out of the body and wander at will—that I was listening at Saint Peter’s keyhole—”
“So I please you,” she answered seriously.
“Of course. I knew you would,” his hand touched the little idol which had always remained on his desk.[409] “It was just that I dreaded the inevitable transition period; so many women never rise above it to find the gray angel part of themselves—”
“Ernestine did,” Thurley murmured.
“Ah, she is a gray angel of gray angels! Fancy her making Caleb stop his fulsome tales and write real things!”
“But she hasn’t played a concert! Must she sacrifice her talent, too?”
“No, it is like anything worth while. It takes much personal endeavor to get it started. When Caleb has begun to wear alpaca house-coats and put bird-houses in all his trees and talk of the uplift and vegetable diets, Ernestine can safely scamper back to her piano and play as she never has before.... They, too, are proving my vision,” he added.
“So is Collin with his wife Polly, and Mark, so would Sam Sparling had he been able to stay among us. It is a simple thing to prove when you really understand the compensations.”
“And Mark has proved the falseness of Lissa’s love and—”
“You are talking like an old-fashioned valentine. Dear, dear, this will never do.” She fastened her dull red cape with its banding of fur.
“Don’t go, I’ve so many things to tell you. I used to be afraid to whisper my ideas to any one; therefore, they were useless. And now, I simply won’t allow myself to keep an idea over night. I must tell it to you—and have you prove it out.... Thurley, do you remember the day at Blessed Memory when we walked to the sea and—”
She looked at her watch. “I must go, Bliss, I’ve promised to say good-by to Caleb and Ernestine and to[410] see how much Collin has done on his statue—Polly says it is wonderful.”
He escorted her to the door, but before he opened it he said in serious tone, “Are you going to flirt with Dan again?”
“Always! I adore him as I adore no one else! He is an inspiration and a Punch and Judy show all in one,” adding as she slipped away, “Perhaps we were talking at cross purposes. I mean Dan junior!”
The night she returned to the Fincherie she gave a concert for Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves in the newly added community room, some of the village hearing of the event and straying in to listen.
Not until the end of the programme did she see Dan Birge and Lorraine. Impulsively, Thurley sang, “Coming Through the Rye,” looking at them in whole-souled friendship.
As the hall was clearing, Thurley flew down to find them.
“Oh, Dan,” she held on to his hands, “it is yourself for certain, I’m so terribly glad!” She read in his dark eyes the shadow which will rest on most of those who have fought and returned, a dangerous expression liable to turn into haunted, ugly memories, desperate longings and unwise impulses.
Lorraine wondered if Thurley read the same problem which she had discerned even while he was kissing her his welcome.
“It is mighty good to be back,” was all he said. “A man doesn’t know what he is going to miss until it is too late. But you’ve done a wonderful thing. Lorraine tells me it is to be permanent.” Yet the dangerous expression of his eyes seemed to ridicule his own praise.
[411]
“Don’t you think Lorraine looks well?” Thurley asked to cover the pause.
“Yes, Lorraine is always the same, thank fortune! The Boy is the only one who has changed.”
Lorraine flushed, thinking all in an instant of how dangerously near she had come to being forever changed, emancipated, as Hortense Quinby would have called it, leaving her fireside untended to pursue phantoms of restless imagination. She smiled in understanding at Thurley as Dan began to say what a splendid overseer Ali Baba made and how good it was to see the old town and surely if Miss Clergy could understand, she would be well pleased with Thurley’s disposal of her fortune. As he talked, he rested his weight first on one foot and then the other, his eyebrows twitching and his hands working together and when Thurley asked as to his own condition, he was brusque almost to rudeness in refusing to consider it of importance.
“If I had only got bumped good and proper,” he declared, “I wouldn’t mind, but I hate this sort of air cushion, cruel invaliding of a man.... Of course you can’t understand because you haven’t been into things. It’s the same as a race horse sold to a cabstand and made to trot slowly to the station with a burden of nervous spinsters!”
Thurley understood the meaning of his expression and the readjustment he must face. She mercifully let Dan go on his way, while Ali Baba swept down on her to report all that had and had not happened during her absence.
Dan and Lorraine walked home that mild November night, Lorraine clinging to his arm until he slouched his shoulder as if the attitude annoyed him.
“Does it make you tired?” she asked wistfully.
[412]
“No, it seems too damned civilized,” he flung back to her dismay.
“Why—Dan!”
He halted to light a cigar before he tried to explain, then walked with long strides and a slight scuffling of the feet. Lorraine had to half run in order to keep abreast.
“Dan, tell me, is there something you are keeping back? I’m brave, I’m really braver than you think, I can understand things, truly, I can, tell me—” She was trying not to cry.
“Nothing more than any man has to face when he’s been in the thick of things and returns to a two-by-four existence. Can you go into the store to listen to women haggle over prices and men fuss about neckties, when all of you tingles with what you’ve seen and helped to do? It is just that you’ve grown beyond your home town. Yet the heart-part of you wants to come back to it and stay loyal and content ... maybe that’s not clear—it’s such a queer thing. We beggars moon about homesickness and sit about campfires and almost crucify ourselves with longing to be home and our letters promise you it will be, ‘Home, Hoboken or hell’ by this time or that.... You’d think we’d rush home and remain one glad grin! But we don’t. Part of us does—the heart-part of us that demands admiring relatives—the very dearest wife and child in the world,” he reached out to touch her arm as he almost strode by her, “but there is another part of us—whether wounded or not, that part is there—the primitive part that has to be roused in order to go over the top,—it can’t demobilize by an officer’s command, it has to die down—slowly—just wear away, a fretting, gnawing longing to go shoot up the town, wallow in mud as you hike, hike, hike after some one—catch[413] the some one—maim him ... maybe kill him,” he was talking more to himself, “to have the boom-boom of guns waken you and put you to sleep, see slaughter about you and chaos and every universal law turned inside out and yourself in the center of it ... and that part will have to be conquered by every true soldier. And who is going to help him? He’ll love home folks the same and all the civilized comforts and fun-making—but sometimes that other part of him will battle against being chained back into silence. It’s the same as the call of the East or the mountaineer’s nostalgia when he has to live in flat country, a state of mind, Lorraine; don’t be frightened, I shouldn’t have bothered you with it—”
They had reached their gate and Dan flung it open with a clatter.
“Let’s sit out on the steps for awhile, will you?” he urged. “Four walls stifle me. If I was sure of my nerve, I’d run the car until morning through dark roads—fast as the wind—” He gave a jangling laugh as he settled himself on the steps.
“Poor Dan,” Lorraine sobbed, trying to gather all of him in her arms.
“Poor little Lorraine, you can’t understand. A fine mess I’ve been for you anyhow, first trying not to love you, not understanding nor appreciating you; then when Boy came and I knew your worth and my love for you and what a splendid pal Thurley was, but just a pal, and then the war, and now—”
“But I do understand,” she told him swiftly, “I do, indeed.... Dan, you don’t know all that has happened—about me. They’ll tell you fast enough, so let me prepare you. When you were gone, instead of grieving and waiting, I, too, found a primitive part of me ... it was the women all about me that roused it, the women[414] going overseas, making speeches, parading in uniforms—and I deliberately neglected our boy! Yes, I did! Ask father, for he disapproved but I would not listen. It was all something I don’t quite understand now, but a mighty powerful something while it lasted, and it was Thurley who taught me the lesson,” Lorraine continued in her sweet, even voice, neither sparing herself nor softening the details. Finally, she ended,
“Even now, loving you a thousand times harder and adoring Boy, content always to be the homemaker, happy in it, there is, sometimes, a faint longing to go forth and do, what shall I name it? And so, I do understand your primitive part, Dan, and I shall be patient with it.... Perhaps it was worth the making the mistake to be able to understand you.”
He gathered her in his arms. “Lorraine,” he whispered, “we both understand—”
So they sat like two jolly, sentimental ghosts, until dawn filtered through dark clouds, talking as they had never talked before, of intangible, personal doubts and resolves, of many happy things to come and of the mistakes which lay behind.
“You know the feeling, Dan! You have been big and keen enough to analyze it,” Lorraine summarized. “Now help other men to become used to ‘life as usual.’ Thurley calls stay-at-homes and quiet workers ‘gray angels’ because we are considered ineffectual, simply keeping things going. You can be a gray angel, Dan. It’s the most peaceful feeling in the world! Help the boys at Thurley’s Fincherie to be average men, neither heroes nor martyrs, talk to them as only a man who is one of them can talk,—there lies your duty and your salvation.”
“I will,” Dan promised, “if you will talk to me!”