by Frank Norris
During the days that Jadwin and Crookes were at grapples Laura found means to occupy her mind with all manner of small activities. She overhauled her wardrobe, planned her summer gowns, paid daily visits to her dressmakers, rode and drove in the park, till every turn of the roads, every tree, every bush was familiar, to the point of wearisome contempt.
Then suddenly she began to indulge in a mania for old books and first editions. She haunted the stationers and second-hand bookstores, studied the authorities, followed the auctions, and bought right and left, with reckless extravagance. But the taste soon palled upon her. With so much money at her command there was none of the spice of the hunt in the affair. She had but to express a desire for a certain treasure, and forthwith it was put into her hand.
She found it so in all other things. Her desires were gratified with an abruptness that killed the zest of them. She felt none of the joy of possession; the little personal relation between her and her belongings vanished away. Her gowns, beautiful beyond all she had ever imagined, were of no more interest to her than a drawerful of outworn gloves. She bought horses till she could no longer tell them apart; her carriages crowded three supplementary stables in the neighbourhood. Her flowers, miracles of laborious cultivation, filled the whole house with their fragrance. Wherever she went deference moved before her like a guard; her beauty, her enormous wealth, her wonderful horses, her exquisite gowns made of her a cynosure, a veritable queen.
And hardly a day passed that Laura Jadwin, in the solitude of her own boudoir, did not fling her arms wide in a gesture of lassitude and infinite weariness, crying out:
“Oh, the ennui and stupidity of all this wretched life!”
She could look forward to nothing. One day was like the next. No one came to see her. For all her great house and for all her money, she had made but few friends. Her “grand manner” had never helped her popularity. She passed her evenings alone in her “upstairs sitting-room,” reading, reading till far into the night, or, the lights extinguished, sat at her open window listening to the monotonous lap and wash of the lake.
At such moments she thought of the men who had come into her life — of the love she had known almost from her girlhood. She remembered her first serious affair. It had been with the impecunious theological student who was her tutor. He had worn glasses and little black side whiskers, and had implored her to marry him and come to China, where he was to be a missionary. Every time that he came he had brought her a new book to read, and he had taken her for long walks up towards the hills where the old powder mill stood. Then it was the young lawyer — the “brightest man in Worcester County” — who took her driving in a hired buggy, sent her a multitude of paper novels (which she never read), with every love passage carefully underscored, and wrote very bad verse to her eyes and hair, whose “velvet blackness was the shadow of a crown.” Or, again, it was the youthful cavalry officer met in a flying visit to her Boston aunt, who loved her on first sight, gave her his photograph in uniform and a bead belt of Apache workmanship. He was forever singing to her — to a guitar accompaniment — an old love song:
“At midnight hour Beneath the tower He murmured soft, ‘Oh nothing fearing With thine own true soldier fly.’”
Then she had come to Chicago, and Landry Court, with his bright enthusiasms and fine exaltations had loved her. She had never taken him very seriously but none the less it had been very sweet to know his whole universe depended upon the nod of her head, and that her influence over him had been so potent, had kept him clean and loyal and honest.
And after this Corthell and Jadwin had come into her life, the artist and the man of affairs. She remembered Corthell’s quiet, patient, earnest devotion of those days before her marriage. He rarely spoke to her of his love, but by some ingenious subtlety he had filled her whole life with it. His little attentions, his undemonstrative solicitudes came precisely when and where they were most appropriate. He had never failed her. Whenever she had needed him, or even, when through caprice or impulse she had turned to him, it always had been to find that long since he had carefully prepared for that very contingency. His thoughtfulness of her had been a thing to wonder at. He remembered for months, years even, her most trivial fancies, her unexpressed dislikes. He knew her tastes, as if by instinct; he prepared little surprises for her, and placed them in her way without ostentation, and quite as matters of course. He never permitted her to be embarrassed; the little annoying situations of the day’s life he had smoothed away long before they had ensnared her. He never was off his guard, never disturbed, never excited.
And he amused her, he entertained her without seeming to do so. He made her talk; he made her think. He stimulated and aroused her, so that she herself talked and thought with a brilliancy that surprised herself. In fine, he had so contrived that she associated him with everything that was agreeable.
She had sent him away the first time, and he had gone without a murmur; only to come back loyal as ever, silent, watchful, sympathetic, his love for her deeper, stronger than before, and — as always timely — bringing to her a companionship at the moment of all others when she was most alone.
Now she had driven him from her again, and this time, she very well knew, it was to be forever. She had shut the door upon this great love.
Laura stirred abruptly in her place, adjusting her hair with nervous fingers.
And, last of all, it had been Jadwin, her husband. She rose and went to the window, and stood there a long moment, looking off into the night over the park. It was warm and very still. A few carriage lamps glimpsed among the trees like fireflies. Along the walks and upon the benches she could see the glow of white dresses and could catch the sound of laughter. Far off somewhere in the shrubbery, she thought she heard a band playing. To the northeast lay the lake, shimmering under the moon, dotted here and there with the coloured lights of steamers.
She turned back into the room. The great house was still. From all its suites of rooms, its corridors, galleries, and hallways there came no sound. There was no one upon the same floor as herself. She had read all her books. It was too late to go out — and there was no one to go with. To go to bed was ridiculous. She was never more wakeful, never more alive, never more ready to be amused, diverted, entertained.
She thought of the organ, and descending to the art gallery, played Bach, Palestrina, and Stainer for an hour; then suddenly she started from the console, with a sharp, impatient movement of her head.
“Why do I play this stupid music?” she exclaimed. She called a servant and asked:
“Has Mr. Jadwin come in yet?”
“Mr. Gretry just this minute telephoned that Mr. Jadwin would not be home to-night.”
When the servant had gone out Laura, her lips compressed, flung up her head. Her hands shut to hard fists, her eye flashed. Rigid, erect in the middle of the floor, her arms folded, she uttered a smothered exclamation over and over again under her breath.
All at once anger mastered her — anger and a certain defiant recklessness, an abrupt spirit of revolt. She straightened herself suddenly, as one who takes a decision. Then, swiftly, she went out of the art gallery, and, crossing the hallway, entered the library and opened a great writing-desk that stood in a recess under a small stained window.
She pulled the sheets of note paper towards her and wrote a short letter, directing the envelope to Sheldon Corthell, The Fine Arts Building, Michigan Avenue.
“Call a messenger,” she said to the servant who answered her ring, “and have him take — or send him in here when he comes.”
She rested the letter against the inkstand, and leaned back in her chair, looking at it, her fingers plucking swiftly at the lace of her dress. Her head was in a whirl. A confusion of thoughts, impulses, desires, half-formed resolves, half-named regrets, swarmed and spun about her. She felt as though she had all at once taken a leap — a leap which had landed her in a place whence she could see a new and terrible country, an unfamiliar place — terrible, yet b
eautiful — unexplored, and for that reason all the more inviting, a place of shadows.
Laura rose and paced the floor, her hands pressed together over her heart. She was excited, her cheeks flushed, a certain breathless exhilaration came and went within her breast, and in place of the intolerable ennui of the last days, there came over her a sudden, an almost wild animation, and from out her black eyes there shot a kind of furious gaiety.
But she was aroused by a step at the door. The messenger stood there, a figure ridiculously inadequate for the intensity of all that was involved in the issue of the hour — a weazened, stunted boy, in a uniform many sizes too large.
Laura, seated at her desk, held the note towards him resolutely. Now was no time to hesitate, to temporise. If she did not hold to her resolve now, what was there to look forward to? Could one’s life be emptier than hers — emptier, more intolerable, more humiliating?
“Take this note to that address,” she said, putting the envelope and a coin in the boy’s hand. “Wait for an answer.”
The boy shut the letter in his book, which he thrust into his breast pocket, buttoning his coat over it. He nodded and turned away.
Still seated, Laura watched him moving towards the door. Well, it was over now. She had chosen. She had taken the leap. What new life was to begin for her to-morrow? What did it all mean? With an inconceivable rapidity her thoughts began racing through, her brain.
She did not move. Her hands, gripped tight together, rested upon the desk before her. Without turning her head, she watched the retreating messenger, from under her lashes. He passed out of the door, the curtain fell behind him.
And only then, when the irrevocableness of the step was all but an accomplished fact, came the reaction.
“Stop!” she cried, springing up. “Stop! Come back here. Wait a moment.”
What had happened? She could neither understand nor explain. Somehow an instant of clear vision had come, and in that instant a power within her that was herself and not herself, and laid hold upon her will. No, no, she could not, she could not, after all. She took the note back.
“I have changed my mind,” she said, abruptly. “You may keep the money. There is no message to be sent.”
As soon as the boy had gone she opened the envelope and read what she had written. But now the words seemed the work of another mind than her own. They were unfamiliar; they were not the words of the Laura Jadwin she knew. Why was it that from the very first hours of her acquaintance with this man, and in every circumstance of their intimacy, she had always acted upon impulse? What was there in him that called into being all that was reckless in her?
And for how long was she to be able to control these impulses? This time she had prevailed once more against that other impetuous self of hers. Would she prevail the next time? And in these struggles, was she growing stronger as she overcame, or weaker? She did not know. She tore the note into fragments, and making a heap of them in the pen tray, burned them carefully.
During the week following upon this, Laura found her trouble more than ever keen. She was burdened with a new distress. The incident of the note to Corthell, recalled at the last moment, had opened her eyes to possibilities of the situation hitherto unguessed. She saw now what she might be capable of doing in a moment of headstrong caprice, she saw depths in her nature she had not plumbed. Whether these hidden pitfalls were peculiarly hers, or whether they were common to all women placed as she now found herself, she did not pause to inquire. She thought only of results, and she was afraid.
But for the matter of that, Laura had long since passed the point of deliberate consideration or reasoned calculation. The reaction had been as powerful as the original purpose, and she was even yet struggling blindly, intuitively.
For what she was now about to do she could give no reason, and the motives for this final and supreme effort to conquer the league of circumstances which hemmed her in were obscure. She did not even ask what they were. She knew only that she was in trouble, and yet it was to the cause of her distress that she addressed herself. Blindly she turned to her husband; and all the woman in her roused itself, girded itself, called up its every resource in one last test, in one ultimate trial of strength between her and the terrible growing power of that blind, soulless force that roared and guttered and sucked, down there in the midst of the city.
She alone, one unaided woman, her only auxiliaries her beauty, her wit, and the frayed, strained bands of a sorely tried love, stood forth like a challenger, against Charybdis, joined battle with the Cloaca, held back with her slim, white hands against the power of the maelstrom that swung the Nations in its grip.
In the solitude of her room she took the resolve. Her troubles were multiplying; she, too, was in the current, the end of which was a pit — a pit black and without bottom. Once already its grip had seized her, once already she had yielded to the insidious drift. Now suddenly aware of a danger, she fought back, and her hands beating the air for help, turned towards the greatest strength she knew.
“I want my husband,” she cried, aloud, to the empty darkness of the night. “I want my husband. I will have him; he is mine, he is mine. There shall nothing take me from him; there shall nothing take him from me.”
Her first opportunity came upon a Sunday soon afterward. Jadwin, wakeful all the Saturday night, slept a little in the forenoon, and after dinner Laura came to him in his smoking-room, as he lay on the leather lounge trying to read. His wife seated herself at a writing-table in a corner of the room, and by and by began turning the slips of a calendar that stood at her elbow. At last she tore off one of the slips and held it up.
“Curtis.”
“Well, old girl?”
“Do you see that date?”
He looked over to her.
“Do you see that date? Do you know of anything that makes that day different — a little — from other days? It’s June thirteenth. Do you remember what June thirteenth is?”
Puzzled, he shook his head.
“No — no.”
Laura took up a pen and wrote a few words in the space above the printed figures reserved for memoranda. Then she handed the slip to her husband, who read aloud what she had written.
“‘Laura Jadwin’s birthday.’ Why, upon my word,” he declared, sitting upright. “So it is, so it is. June thirteenth, of course. And I was beast enough not to realise it. Honey, I can’t remember anything these days, it seems.”
“But you are going to remember this time?” she said. “You are not going to forget it now. That evening is going to mark the beginning of — oh, Curtis, it is going to be a new beginning of everything. You’ll see. I’m going to manage it. I don’t know how, but you are going to love me so that nothing, no business, no money, no wheat will ever keep you from me. I will make you. And that evening, that evening of June thirteenth is mine. The day your business can have you, but from six o’clock on you are mine.” She crossed the room quickly and took both his hands in hers and knelt beside him. “It is mine,” she said, “if you love me. Do you understand, dear? You will come home at six o’clock, and whatever happens — oh, if all La Salle Street should burn to the ground, and all your millions of bushels of wheat with it — whatever happens, you — will — not — leave — me — nor think of anything else but just me, me. That evening is mine, and you will give it to me, just as I have said. I won’t remind you of it again. I won’t speak of it again. I will leave it to you. But — you will give me that evening if you love me. Dear, do you see just what I mean? ... If you love me.... No — no don’t say a word, we won’t talk about it at all. No, no, please. Not another word. I don’t want you to promise, or pledge yourself, or anything like that. You’ve heard what I said — and that’s all there is about it. We’ll talk of something else. By the way, have you seen Mr. Cressler lately?”
“No,” he said, falling into her mood. “No haven’t seen Charlie in over a month. Wonder what’s become of him?”
“I understand he’s been
sick,” she told him. “I met Mrs. Cressler the other day, and she said she was bothered about him.”
“Well, what’s the matter with old Charlie?”
“She doesn’t know, herself. He’s not sick enough to go to bed, but he doesn’t or won’t go down town to his business. She says she can see him growing thinner every day. He keeps telling her he’s all right, but for all that, she says, she’s afraid he’s going to come down with some kind of sickness pretty soon.”
“Say,” said Jadwin, “suppose we drop around to see them this afternoon? Wouldn’t you like to? I haven’t seen him in over a month, as I say. Or telephone them to come up and have dinner. Charlie’s about as old a friend as I have. We used to be together about every hour of the day when we first came to Chicago. Let’s go over to see him this afternoon and cheer him up.”
“No,” said Laura, decisively. “Curtis, you must have one day of rest out of the week. You are going to lie down all the rest of the afternoon, and sleep if you can. I’ll call on them to-morrow.”
“Well, all right,” he assented. “I suppose I ought to sleep if I can. And then Sam is coming up here, by five. He’s going to bring some railroad men with him. We’ve got a lot to do. Yes, I guess, old girl, I’ll try to get forty winks before they get here. And, Laura,” he added, taking her hand as she rose to go, “Laura, this is the last lap. In just another month now — oh, at the outside, six weeks — I’ll have closed the corner, and then, old girl, you and I will go somewheres, anywhere you like, and then we’ll have a good time together all the rest of our lives — all the rest of our lives, honey. Good-by. Now I think I can go to sleep.”
She arranged the cushions under his head and drew the curtains close over the windows, and went out, softly closing the door behind her. And a half hour later, when she stole in to look at him, she found him asleep at last, the tired eyes closed, and the arm, with its broad, strong hand, resting under his head. She stood a long moment in the middle of the room, looking down at him; and then slipped out as noiselessly as she had come, the tears trembling on her eyelashes.