WHO CARES?

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"Great weather," he said, wrenching the conversation into a harmless
generality. "Are you sleeping on the yawl to-night?"

"Yes," replied Martin. "It's wonderful on the water. So still. I can
hear the stars whisper."

"Most of the stars I know get precious noisy at night," said Howard,
characteristically unable to let such a chance go by. Then he grew
suddenly grave and sat down. "Martin, I'm getting frightfully fed up
with messing about in town. I'm going to turn a mental and physical
somersault and get a bit of self-respect."

"Oh? How's that, old man."

"It's this damn war, I think. I've been reading a book in bed by a
man called Philip Gibbs. Martin, I'm going to Plattsburg this August
to see if they can make something of me."

Martin got up. "I'm with you," he said. "If ever we get into this
business I'm going to be among the first bunch to go. So we may as
well know something. Well, how about turning in now? There'll be a
wind to-morrow. Hear the trees?" He filled his pocket with
cigarettes and slung a white sweater over his shoulder.

"All right," said Howard. "I shall read down here a bit. I won't
forget to turn out and lock up." He had forgotten one night and
Judson had reported him.

"Good night, old son."

"Good night, old man."

XII

He was not given much to reading, but when Martin left the cottage
and stood out in the liquid silver of the moon under the vast dome
which dazzled with stars, and he caught the flash of fireflies among
the undergrowth that were like the lanterns of the fairies a line
came into his mind that he liked and repeated several times, rather
whimsically pleased with himself for having found it at exactly the
right moment. It was "the witching hour of night."

He remained on top of the incline for a little while, moved to that
spirit of the realization of God which touches the souls of
sensitive men when they are awed by the wonder and the beauty of the
earth. He stood quite still, disembodied for the moment, uplifted,
stirred, with all the scents and all the whisperings about him,
humble, childlike, able, in that brief flight of ecstasy, to
understand the language of another world.

And then the stillness was suddenly cut by a scream of vacuous
laughter, probably that of an exuberant Irish maid-servant, to whom
silences are made to break, carrying on, most likely, a rough
flirtation with a chauffeur.

It brought Martin back to earth like the stick of a rocket. But he
didn't go down immediately to the water. He sat there and nursed his
knees and began to think. Whether it was Howard's unexpected talk of
Plattsburg and of being made something of or not he didn't know.
What he did know was that he was suddenly filled with a sort of
fright. . . ."Good God," he said to himself, "time's rushing away,
and I'm nearly twenty-six. I'm as old as some men who have done
things and made things and are planted on their feet. What have I
done? What am I fit to do? Nearly twenty-six and I'm still playing
games like a schoolboy! . . . What's my father saying? 'We count it
death to falter not to die' . . . I've been faltering--and before I
know anything about it I shall be thirty--half-time. . . . This
can't go on. This waiting for Joan is faltering. If she's not coming
to me I must go to her. If it's not coming right it must end and I
must get mended and begin again. I can't stand in father's shoes
with all he worked to make in my hands like ripe plums. It isn't
fair, or straight. I must push up a rung and carry things on for
him. Could I look him in the face having slacked? My God, I wish I'd
watched the time rush by! I'm nearly twenty-six . . . Joan--to-
morrow. That's the thing to do." He got up and strode quickly down
to the water. "If she's going to be my wife, that's a good step on.
And she can help me like no one but my father. And then I'll make
something of myself. If not . . . if not,--no faltering, Gray,--then
I'll do it alone for both their sakes."

He chucked his sweater into the dingey, shoved it off the beach and
sprang in and rowed strongly towards the yawl. Somehow he felt
broader of back and harder of muscle for this summing up of things,
this audit of his account. He was nearly twenty-six and nothing was
done. That was the report he had to make to his conscience, that was
what he had to say to the man who smiled down upon him from his
place in the New York house. . . . Good Lord, it was about time that
he pulled himself together.

The yawl was lying alone, aloof from the other small craft anchored
near the pier. Her mast seemed taller and her lines more graceful
silhouetted against the sky, silvered by the moon. It was indeed the
witching hour of night.

He got aboard and tied up the dingey, cast a look round to see that
everything was shipshape, took in a deep breath and went into the
cabin. He was not tired and never felt less like sleep. His brain
was clear as though a fog had risen from it, and energy beat in him
like a running engine. He would light the lamp, get into his pajamas
and think about to-morrow and Joan. He was mighty glad to have come
to a decision.

Stooping, he lit the lamp, turned and gave a gasp of surprise.

There, curled up like a water sprite on the unmade bunk lay Tootles
in bathing clothes, holding a rubber cap in her hand, her head, with
its golden bobbed hair, dented into a cushion.

For a moment she pretended to be asleep, but anxiety to see how
Martin was looking was too much for her. Also her clothes were wet
and not very comfortable. She opened her eyes and sat up.

"My dear Tootles!" said Martin, "what's the idea? You said you were
going home to bed." She would rather that he had been angry than
amused. "It was the night," she said, "and something in the air. I
just had to bathe and swam out here. I didn't think you'd be coming
yet. I suppose you think I'm bug-house."

"No, I don't. If I hadn't taken my bathing suit to the cottage to be
mended I'd have a dip myself. Cigarette?" He held one out.

But she shook her head. How frightfully natural and brotherly this
boy was, she thought. Was her last desperate card to be as useless
as all the rest of the pack? How could it be! They might as well be
on a desert island out there on the water and she the only woman on
it.

"Feel a bit chilly? You'd better put on this sweater."

She took it from him but laid it aside. "No. The air's too warm,"
she said. "Oh, ho, I'm so sleepy," and she stretched herself out
again with her hands under her head.

"I'm not," said Martin. "I'm tremendously awake. Let's talk if
you're not in a hurry to get back."

"I'm very happy here," she answered. "But must we have that lamp? It
glares and makes the cabin hot."

"The moon's better than all the lamps," said Martin, and put it out.
He sat on his bunk and the gleam of his cigarette came and went. It
was like a big firefly in the half dark cabin. "To-morrow," he said
to himself, with a tingle running through his blood, "to-morrow--and
Joan."

Tootles waited for him to speak. She might as well have been miles
away for all that she affected him. He seemed to have forgotten that
she was alive.

He had. And there was a long silence.

"To-morrow,--and Joan. That's it. I'll go over to Easthampton and
take her away from that house and talk to her. This time I'll break
everything down and tell her what she means to me. I've never told
her that."

"He doesn't care," thought Tootles. "I'm no more than an old shoe to
him."

"If I'd told her it might have made a difference. Even if she had
laughed at me she would have had something to catch hold of if she
wanted it. By Jove, I wish I'd had the pluck to tell her."

"He even looks at me and doesn't see me," she went on thinking, her
hopes withering like cut flowers, her eagerness petering out and a
great humiliation creeping over her. "What's the matter with me?
Some people think I'm pretty. Irene does . . . and last night, when
I kissed him there was an answer. . . . Has that girl come between
us again?"

And so they went on, these two, divided by a thousand miles, each
absorbed in individual thought, and there was a long queer silence.

But she was there to fight, and having learned one side of men
during her sordid pilgrimage and having an ally in Nature, she got
up and sat down on the bunk at his side, snuggling close.

"You are cold, Tootles," he said, and put his arm round her.

And hope revived, like a dying fire licked by a sudden breeze, and
she put her bobbed head on his broad shoulder.

But he was away again, miles and miles away, thinking back,
unfolding all the moments of his first companionship with Joan and
looking at them wistfully to try and find some tenderness; thinking
forward, with the picture of Joan's face before him and wondering
what would come into her eyes when he laid his heart bare for her
gaze.

Waiting and waiting, on the steady rise and fall of his chest,--poor
little starved Tootles, poor little devil,--tears began to gather,
tears as hot as blood, and at last they broke and burst in an awful
torrent, and she flung herself face down upon the other bunk, crying
incoherently to God to let her die.

And once more the boy's spirit, wandering high in pure air, fell
like the stick of a rocket, and he sprang up and bent over the
pitiful little form,--not understanding because Joan held his heart
and kept it clean.

"Tootles," he cried out. "Dear old Tootles. What is it? What's
happened?"

But there was only brotherliness in his kind touch, only the same
solicitude that he had shown her all along. Nothing else. Not a
thing. And she knew it, at last, definitely. This boy was too
different, too much the other girl's--curse her for having all the
luck.

For an instant, for one final desperate instant, she was urged to
try again, to fling aside control and restraint and with her
trembling body pressed close and her eager arms clasped about his
neck, pour out her love and make a passionate stammering plea for
something,--just something to put into her memory, her empty
loveless memory,--but suddenly, like the gleam of a lamp in a
tunnel, her pride lit up, the little streak of pride which had taken
her unprofaned through all her sordid life, and she sat up, choked
back her sobs, and dried her face with the skirt of her bathing
dress.

"Don't mind me," she said. "It's the night or something. It got on
my nerves, I suppose, like--like the throb of an organ. I dunno. I'm
all right now, anyway." And she stood in front of him bravely, with
her chin up, but her heart breaking, and her attempt to make a laugh
must surely have been entered in the book of human courage.

But before Martin could say anything, she slipped into the cockpit,
balanced herself on the ledge of the cabin house, said "Good night,
old dear," and waved her hand, dived into the silver water and swam
strongly towards the beach.

XIII

It began to dawn upon Hosack that Joan had slipped away with Harry
Oldershaw from the fact that Palgrave first became restless and
irritable, then had a short sharp spat with Barclay about the length
of the line on the Western front that was held by the British and
finally got up and went into the house and almost immediately
prowled out alone for a sulky walk along the beach.

Chortling as he watched him, although annoyed that he, himself, was
not going to have an opportunity of saying soft things to Joan for
some hours, Hosack made himself comfortable, lit another cigar and
pondered sleepily about what he called "the infatuation of Gilbert
the precious."

"I can sympathize with the feller's being gone on the girl," he said
to himself, undisturbed by Regina's frequent bursts of loud laughter
at young Barclay's quiet but persistent banter, "but dammit, why
make a conspicuous ass of himself? Why make the whole blessed house
party, including his hostess, pay for his being turned down in favor
of young Harry? Bad form, I call it. Any one would imagine that he
was engaged to be married to Joan and therefore had some right to a
monopoly by the way he goes on, snarling at everybody and showing
the whites of his eyes like a jealous collie. Everybody's talking,
of course, and making jokes about him, especially as it's perfectly
obvious that the harder he hunts her the more she dodges him. . . .
Curious chap, Gilbert. He goes through life like the ewe lamb of an
over-indulgent mother and when he takes a fancy to a thing he can't
conceive why everybody doesn't rush to give it him, whatever the
cost or sacrifice. . . . If young Harry hadn't been here to keep her
amused and on the move I wonder if Joan would have been a bit kinder
to our friend G. P.? She's been in a weird mood, as perverse as
April. I don't mind her treating me as if I was a doddering old
gentleman so long as she keeps Gilbert off. . . . A charming,
pretty, heart-turning thing. I'd give something to know the real
reason why that husband of hers lets her run loose this way. And
where's her mother, and why don't those old people step in?--such a
child as she is. Well, it's a pretty striking commentary on the way
our young people are brought up, there's no doubt about it. If she
was my daughter, now--but I suppose she'd tell me to go and hang
myself if I tried to butt in. Divorce and a general mess-up-the
usual end, I take it."

He shook his head, and his ash dropped all over his clothes and he
began to nod. He would have given a great deal to put his feet on a
chair and a handkerchief over his face and sink into a blissful nap.
The young people had gone off somewhere, and there were only his
wife, the Major, and the bride on the veranda. And, after all, why
shouldn't he? Cornucopia could always be relied upon to play up--her
conversational well was inexhaustible, and as for Mrs. Thatcher--
nothing natural ever stopped the incessant wagging of her tongue.

But it was not to be. He heard a new voice, the squeak of a cane
chair suddenly pushed back, looked up to see the Major in an
attitude of false delight and out came Mrs. Cooper Jekyll followed,-
-as he inwardly exclaimed,--"by the gentle Alice Palgrave, by all
that's complicating! Well, I'm jiggered."

"Well," cried Cornucopia, extending her ample hand. "This IS a
surprise."

"Yes, I intended it to be," said Mrs. Jekyll, more than ever
Southampton in her plague veil and single eyeglass, "just to break
the aloofness of your beach life."

"And dear Alice, too,--neater than ever. How very nice to see you,
my dear, and how's your poor mother?"

Her little hand disappearing between Mrs. Hosack's two podgy members
like the contents of a club sandwich, Alice allowed herself to be
kissed on both cheeks, murmured an appropriate response, greeted the
Thatchers, waved to Hosack who came forward as quickly as he could
with pins and needles in one leg and threw a searching glance about
for Gilbert.

Every one caught it and gathered instinctively that Mrs. Jekyll had
been making mischief. She had certainly succeeded in her desire to
break the aloofness. The presence of Alice at that moment, with
Gilbert behaving like a madman, was calculated to set every
imagination jumping.

"Um, this won't make G. P. any better tempered," thought Hosack, not
without a certain sense of glee.

Mrs. Jekyll disclosed her nose and mouth, which, it seemed, were
both there and in perfect condition. "I was in town yesterday
interviewing butlers,--that Swiss I told you about refused to be
glared at by Edmond and left us on the verge of a dinner party,
summing us all up in a burst of pure German,--and there was Alice
having a lonely lunch at the Ritz, just back from her mother's
convalescent chair. I persuaded her to come to me for a few days and
what more natural than that she should want to see what this
wonderful air has done for Gilbert--who has evidently become one of
the permanent decorative objects of your beautiful house."

"Cat," thought Mrs. Thatcher.

"And also for the pleasure of seeing so many old friends," said
Alice. "What a gorgeous stretch of sea!" She bent forward and
whispered congratulations to the Major's bride. Her quiet courage in
the face of what she knew perfectly well was a universal knowledge
of the true state of Gilbert's infatuation was good to watch. With
his one brief cold letter in her pocket and Mrs. Jekyll's
innuendoes,--"all in the friendliest spirit,"--raking her heart, her
self-control deserved all the admiration that it won from the
members of the house party. To think that Joan, her friend and
schoolfellow in whose loyalty she had had implicit faith should be
the one to take Gilbert away from her.

With shrewd eyes, long accustomed to look below the surface of the
thin veneer of civilization that lay upon his not very numerous set,
Hosack observed and listened for the next half an hour, expecting at
any moment to see Joan burst upon the group or Gilbert make his
appearance, sour, immaculate and with raised eyebrows. He studied
Mrs. Jekyll, with her brilliantly made-up face, her apparent lack of
guile, and her ever-watchful eye. He paid tribute to his copious
wife for her determined babble of generalities, well-knowing that
she was bursting with suppressed excitement under the knowledge that
Alice had come to try and patch up a lost cause. He chuckled at the
feline manners of the little lady whom they had all known so long as
Mrs. Edgar Lee Reeves, her purring voice, her frequent over-emphasis
of exuberant adjectives, her accidental choice of the sort of verb
that had the effect of smashed crockery, her receptiveness to the
underlying drama of the situation and the cunning with which she
managed to hide her anxiety to be "on" in the scene which must
inevitably come. He examined his old friend, Thatcher, under whose
perfect drawing-room manners, felicitous quips and ready laughter
there was an almost feminine curiosity as to scandal and the
inadvertent display of the family wash. And, having a certain amount
of humor, he even turned an introspective eye inwards and owned up
to more than a little excitement as to what was going to happen when
Gilbert realized that Mrs. Jekyll had brought his wife over to
rescue him. Conceive Gilbert being rescued! "All of us as near the
primeval as most of us are to lunacy," he told himself. "Education,
wealth, leisure and all the shibboleths of caste and culture,--how
easily they crack and gape before a touch of nature. Brooks Brothers
and Lucile do their derndest to disguise us, but we're still Adam
and Eve in a Turkish bath. . . . Somehow I feel,--I can't quite say
why,--that this comedy of youth in which the elements of tragedy
have been dragged in by Gilbert, is coming to a head, and unless
things run off at a sudden tangent I don't see how the curtain can
fall on a happy ending for Joan and the husband who never shows
himself and the gentle Alice. Spring has its storms and youth its
penalties. I'm beginning to believe that safety is only to be found
in the dull harbor of middle-age, curse it, and only then with a
good stout anchor."

It was at the exact moment that Joan and Harry went together up the
incline towards Martin's cottage at Devon, eyed by Tootles through
the screen door, that Gilbert came back to the veranda and drew up
short at the sight of his wife.

XIV

It was when Gilbert, after a most affectionate greeting and ten
minutes of easy small talk, led her away from the disappointed
group, that Alice made her first mistake.

"You don't look at all well, Gilbert," she said anxiously.

The very fact that he knew himself to be not at all well made him
hate to be told so. An irritable line ran across his forehead. "Oh,
yes, I'm well," he said, "never better. Come along to the summer
house and let's put a dune between us and those vultures."

He led her down a flight of stone steps and over a stretch of
undulating dry sand to the place where Hosack invariably read the
morning paper and to which his servants led their village beaux when
the moon was up, there to give far too faithful imitations of the
hyena. And there he sat her down and stood in front of her,
enigmatically, wondering how much she knew. "If it comes to that,"
he said, "you look far from well yourself, Alice."

And she turned her pretty, prim face up to him with a sudden
trembling of the lips. "What do you expect," she asked, quite
simply, "when I've only had one short letter from you all the time
I've been away."

"I never write letters," he said. "You know that. How's your
mother?"

"But I wrote every day, and if you read them you'd know."

He shifted one shoulder. These gentle creatures could be horribly
disconcerting and direct. As a matter of fact he had failed to open
more than two of the collection. They were too full of the vibration
of a love that had never stirred him. "Yes, I'm glad she's better.
I'm afraid you've been rather bored. Illness is always boring."

"I can only have one mother," said Alice.

Palgrave felt the need of a cigarette. Alice, admirable as she was,
had a fatal habit, he thought, of uttering bromides.

And she instantly regretted the remark. She knew that way of his of
snapping his cigarette case. Was that heavily be-flowered church a
dream and that great house in New York only part of a mirage? He
seemed to be the husband of some other girl, barely able to tolerate
this interruption. She had come determined to get the truth, however
terrible it might be. But it was very difficult, and he was
obviously not going to help her, and now that she saw him again,
curiously worn and nervous and petulant, she dreaded to ask for
facts under which her love was to be laid in waste.

"No wonder you like this place," she said, beating about the bush.

"I don't. I loathe it. The everlasting drumming of the sea puts me
on edge. It's as bad as living within sound of the elevated railway.
And at night the frogs on the land side of the house add to the
racket and make a row like a factory in full blast. I'd rather be
condemned to a hospital for incurables than live on a dune." He said
all this with the sort of hysteria that she had never noticed in him
before. He was indeed far from well. Hardly, in fact, recognizable.
The suave, imperturbable Gilbert, with the quiet air of patronage
and the cool irony of the polished man of the world,--what had
become of him? Was it possible that Joan had resisted him? She
couldn't believe such a thing.

"Then why have you stayed so long?" she asked, with this new point
of view stirring hope.

"There was nowhere else to go to," he answered, refusing to meet her
eyes.

This was too absurd to let pass. "But nothing has happened to the
house at Newport, and the yacht's been lying in the East River since
the first of June and you said in your only letter that the two
Japanese servants have been at the cottage near Devon for weeks!"

"I'm sick of Newport with all its tuft-hunting women, and the yacht
doesn't call me. As for the cottage, I'm going there to-morrow,
possibly to-night."

Alice got up quickly and stood in front of him. There was a spot of
color on both her cheeks, and her hands were clasped together.
"Gilbert, let's both go there. Let's get away from all these people
for a time. I won't ask you any questions or try and pry into what's
happened to you. I'll be very quiet and help you to find yourself
again."

She had made another mistake. His sensitiveness gave him as many
quills as a porcupine. "Find myself," he said, quoting her
unfortunate words with sarcasm. "What on earth do you mean by that,
my good child?"

She forced back her rising tears. Had she utterly lost her rights as
a wife? He was speaking to her in the tone that a man uses to an
interfering sister. "What's to become of me?" she asked.

"Newport, of course. Why not? Fill the house up. I give you a free
hand."

"And will you join me there, Gilbert?"

"No. I'm not in the mood."

He turned on his heel and went to the other side of the summer
house, and flicked his half-smoked cigarette into the scrub below. A
frog took a leap. When he spoke again it was with his back to her.
"Don't you think you'd better rejoin Mrs. Jekyll? She may be
impatient to get off."

But Alice took her courage in both hands. If this was to be the end
she must know it. Uncertainty was not to be endured any longer. All
her sleepless nights and fluctuations of hope and despair had marked
her, perhaps for life. Hers was not the easily blown away
infatuation of a debutante, the mere summer love of a young girl. It
was the steady and devoted love of a wife, ready to make sacrifices,
to forgive inconstancies, to make allowances for temporary
aberrations and, when necessary, to nurse back to sanity, without
one word or look of reproach, the husband who had slipped into
delinquency. Not only her future and his were at stake, but there
were the children for whom she prayed. They must be considered.

And so, holding back her emotion, she followed him across the
pompous summer house in which, with a shudder, she recognized a
horrible resemblance to a mausoleum, and laid her little hand upon
his arm.

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