“You know them?” How quickly she turned her head that night! “They’re friends of yours—Winnie Milburn, and Charley Jones and—all those other boys? You’re not joking, Tommy, are you?”
“No!” A suspicion flashed across him, and it made him start. “Marianne—you didn’t think I’d lie to you—any more than you’d lie to me?”
“Oh, Tommy!” gasped Marianne. “Of course I don’t—only—only—”
“Only what?” She was sitting very still, looking at him through the dark, and yet he knew that her spirit was dancing like firelight, forever beyond his grasp.
“Only it’s so remarkable,” said Marianne. He knew what she meant, and that old pain surged over him, to which he had never become inured.
“Marianne,” he asked, “is it any more remarkable than—than you and me?”
“No,” whispered Marianne. “Oh, Tommy, I think you’re ever so wonderful. You know that. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think so. I wouldn’t have said I had a headache just so I could come.”
Then he heard his own voice.
“Marianne, you do love me, don’t you, Marianne?”
“Yes.” How often she had told him that! “Yes, of course I do!”
“And that’s the only thing that matters!” How often Tommy had said so! “It’s the only thing, I guess. Don’t you forget some day I’ll call for you right at your own front door.”
Those were the days when everything was changing. There was tar upon the roads. The automobiles were going faster, and the music was playing a restless tune. There was a dance called the “one-step” which was driving the waltz to cover, like some rare animal unfit to cope with a new struggle for existence. A one-step tune was running through everything, chiming into thoughts, and changing the very sound of life. Tommy himself could hear it. He did not know how much he had changed until his Great-aunt Sarah died, leaving him the house at Michael’s Harbor and thirty-five hundred dollars in the bank. It seemed to Tommy that a rope had been cut away, which had held him to a shore. He did not know until much later that it was his boyhood and his youth he was leaving, as one leaves a land forever that grows fairer and still fairer as it approaches the horizon’s rim.
They were sitting in easy attitudes in Winthrop Milburn’s room when Tommy came walking in that last year they were together. It was two weeks after his Aunt Sarah had died. They called to him in lazy pleasant voices. They made remarks about his new overcoat and his new brown hat.
“Is anything the matter?” some one asked. “Look at him—he ought to be at home with Mrs. Schoule.”
A year before Mrs. Schoule had become a joke. One by one they had come to call, just to look at Mrs. Schoule, but they were all good boys. They did not bother to admire Tommy’s more sterling characteristics, but accepted them with weary resignation, as they accepted all that smacked of energetic virtue.
“Don’t worry,” said Tommy. “Please don’t any of you strain yourselves. I’m through with Mrs. Schoule!”
“Through with Mrs. Schoule?”
“Yes,” said Tommy, “through with Mrs. Schoule.”
“Through with Mrs. Schoule?”
“Listen,” said Tommy. “I wish you’d all shut up.”
“We won’t shut up,” said Winnie Milburn; “he’s through with Mrs. Schoule.”
“And what’s more,” said Tommy. “I want to know if you won’t come out for dinner. I wish you would. You’ve all done a lot for me—and I want to do something.”
“Don’t,” said Winnie Milburn, “please don’t make me cry.”
“Well, you know you have,” said Tommy. “If it hadn’t been for you—”
He stopped because every one was begging him in strangled voices please to stop.
“Won’t you shut up?” said Tommy Michael.
“All right,” said Winnie Milburn, “all right, but don’t take Sherwood Jellett along. Don’t be big-hearted and take Sherwood Jellett!”
Maurice, who ran the basement dining room in that hotel which the young gentlemen frequented most, looked at Tommy questioningly, because Tommy had not been there before.
“Champagne,” said Tommy Michael, and looked at Maurice in just the right way, as old Simeon Danforth might have looked. “I’ll leave the brand to you.”
And then, ever so much later, he and Winnie Milburn were in a taxicab. Tommy never knew how they got there, or where the rest had gone. He only remembered that his head was very light and singing with soft laughter.
“Where’s all the rest?” asked Tommy.
“You’re tight,” said Winnie Milburn. “They’re all in cabs behind. Where’re we going now?”
“I don’t care,” said Tommy. “Anywhere at all—just as long as it’s somewhere bright.”
“You’re tight,” said Winnie Milburn.
“I don’t care,” said Tommy; “so are you.”
“Oh, well,” said Winnie, “does it matter?”
There was a silence and then they both began to laugh, but Tommy’s mind was very clear.
“Winnie,” said Tommy, “I want to ask you something.”
“Then don’t talk—ask it,” Winnie said.
Tommy placed his hands very carefully, one on each knee.
“Winnie,” said Tommy, “suppose I wanted to marry your sister—would you mind?”
“Who?” said Winnie. “You?”
Winnie Milburn’s eyes were on him. He could feel them in the half light.
“Yes,” said Tommy. “Me.”
“I get you,” said Winnie. “No. Hell, no. Why should I mind?”
Tommy leaned back in that swaying cab. He seemed to have traveled a long distance. It seemed as though he had always been jolting along a road.
“I guess—” said Tommy, and his voice grew stronger, “I guess I’ve shown you, then.”
“You’re tight,” said Winnie. “Don’t be so vague, because it hurts my head. Showed me what, I want to know?”
“I don’t know,” and perhaps Tommy Michael didn’t. “But you and everybody—I’ve showed you just the same.”
XXI
Yes, Tommy Michael had shown them, or he thought he had, even if he did not know what. Things were going too fast to be sure of anything by then, but he must have shown them something of what he was. A year in business might have taught him differently, but he went to Plattsburg that same May. He dropped everything and went, remembering that his great-aunt’s thirty-five hundred dollars was waiting in the bank. He had arrived somewhere entirely by himself. He would never have become an officer at Plattsburg, if he had not. You could not get away from that, even though officers and gentlemen were being manufactured in wholesale lots that spring. He had shown them at Michael’s Harbor. He could hear their voices behind his back as he walked down the street.
“Lookit—he’s an officer! Look at Tommy Michael. Lookit! He’s going to the war!”
Yet, as he stood on Mr. Jellett’s doorstep, he had a sense of being nowhere, not of Michael’s Harbor and not of Warning Hill. As Tommy Michael waited, he remembered that his mouth had grown very dry, and that he had pressed his nails into his palms so tightly that an hour later he could see the marks. He could stand straight with a lean hard straightness. He could walk with the swift grace of coordinated muscles. He could look anybody in the eye—and yet it all seemed as nothing now that he had reached his journey’s end. Instead, an odd thought kept crossing his mind in aimless circles, and the thought was like a panic, for though he had fought against it for as long almost as he could remember, there it was, as strong as ever, the stronger for being ground into the earth.
“I’m just as good as they are,” his mind kept saying; “I’m just as good as they are. Of course—of course I am.”
Even so, he gave a start when Hubbard came back to the door. He hated himself because he knew that Hubbard noticed.
“Miss Marianne will see you, sir,” said Hubbard; “this way, if you please.”
Tommy was in that hall again
, and it was curious that nothing at all seemed changed. Though other places had grown smaller, that hall was as large as ever—the same enormous place of golden oak, with a great stairway mounting upward to a gallery, and a fireplace with a suit of armor upon either side, and a row of pictures near the light. And Tommy was just like a very small boy when he walked through that front door, exactly as though time had meant nothing. He stood for a moment looking at those pictures, not because he wished to see them, but only to catch his breath.
“Turners, sir,” said Hubbard.
“Yes,” said Tommy; “yes, I know.”
“Beg pardon, sir,” said Hubbard. There was a difference in the way he spoke that made Tommy turn and watch him. There was just the slightest difference in Hubbard, though he was still impassive and perfectly polite. “I didn’t hardly realize until I saw your card. Your father once admired those pictures, sir. I thought you might be interested to know.”
“Oh,” said Tommy. “Thank you.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Hubbard; “may I take your hat?”
“Thanks,” said Tommy.
“Thank you, sir,” said Hubbard. Now what was Hubbard thinking? Tommy never knew, though he sometimes had a suspicion that Hubbard knew everything that was to happen, when Tommy walked down the hall.
“This way, sir,” said Hubbard, “if you please.”
Tommy had never seen the room before. It was the music room, which looked over the garden and out towards the harbor. There was a great black grand piano and sofas and chairs in slip covers of flowered chintz. He could hear the piano as Hubbard opened the door, and he knew the tune, already old even then, whose words went roughly as follows:
“I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy:
Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder
To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?”
Then some one began to laugh and Hubbard said “Mr. Michael,” and the music stopped, and Tommy stood by the door.
The room was smoky. Tommy remembered, and the smoke seemed to go with the song. He could remember just the way that room looked ever so long afterwards, the sun coming through the window, the small red and yellow flowers upon the chintz, a table with glasses, a siphon and a bowl of ice. Marianne was sitting by the piano in a dress of filmy blue. Marianne was laughing, her eyes were dancing and bright Seated beside Marianne at the piano, very tall and thin, was Winnie Milburn. It never occurred to Tommy that Winnie might be there, and for some reason Winnie also seemed surprised. Winnie was also in a uniform with a lieutenant’s bar on his shoulders, and he looked at Tommy very queerly.
“Hi, Tom,” he said.
Marianne waved a hand at him as he stood by the door, and made a little motion with her head.
“You’re late,” said Marianne. “I was just saying I’ve been expecting you all afternoon.”
There was something puzzling about it. Tommy knew that Marianne had not expected him at all. Her hands moved nervously over the piano keys, high and low in little tinkling sounds, and again he had the same feeling that had possessed him in the hall when Hubbard had spoken—that every one could tell him something if they wished. He had never dreamed of telling Winnie Milburn about Marianne, but Winnie must have put two and two together. Winnie must have remembered the question that Tommy had asked him once, for his eyebrows went up and his forehead wrinkled.
“And ten minutes ago,” said Winnie Milburn, “you told me nobody was coming in.”
“Silly!” Marianne’s fingers danced up and down the scale. “I’d given up expecting him, because he was so late.”
“And I never knew you knew him,” Winnie Milburn said and smiled; “there’s always some one else. Look here—why the deuce didn’t you tell me you were coming to call on Marianne?”
Their glances met for a moment and Tommy stammered.
“I—I never thought you were,” he said, and then he squared his shoulders. “It’s the only time I’ve ever called.”
Again Winthrop Milburn raised his eyebrows, but he never asked how it was that Marianne knew that he was coming, and instead he looked at Marianne and laughed.
“So there’s another of ’em, is there?” he inquired; “you might have told me about Tom. We’re in the same outfit, as a matter of fact—and it doesn’t pay to keep everybody separate. You’re getting us all mixed up. There’s two many dozens of us. Well,—good-by, Marianne; see you later, Tom, if you’re taking the night train.”
Then Marianne was seeing Winnie Milburn to the front door. He heard her speaking to him in the hall, because he could not very well but hear her.
“Winnie,” she was saying, “you’ll come again to-night, won’t you, Winnie. He’ll be gone.”
But Tommy hardly noticed at the time. Marianne had never been so beautiful. She had never been so sweet. And there he was. He had walked through the front door, just as he had said he would, ever so long ago.
When Marianne came back, Tommy remembered that the room was very still. There was a faint, sweet smell of cigarette smoke, and the sound of a motor lawn mower outside. And Marianne had never been so beautiful. She was standing very still, now that they were alone, and her face was almost pale and her eyes were dark and staring, and her lips half parted. She almost looked afraid but it made her still more beautiful. And now that they were alone, Tommy also felt a little frightened.
“Tommy,” she said, “I never thought you’d do it.”
For a moment they stood looking at each other, nothing more, but both their hearts were beating faster.
“I told you often enough.” Tommy’s voice was hoarse.
“Well, you needn’t have been so sudden, Tommy.” All at once Marianne remembered the facts and became indignant. “You might have let me know. It’s awfully hard—I don’t know how I’ll explain. Papa’s at home. He may come in here any minute.”
“Suppose he does?” Tommy’s lips closed tight.
“But I’ll have to explain, won’t I?” Marianne’s voice went to a higher pitch. “He doesn’t even know I know you. It—oh, Tommy, it was much nicer down on the beach.”
Tommy drew a deep breath.
“Well,” said Tommy, “I’m not going to sneak around to see you any more.”
“Oh, Tommy!” cried Marianne. “Don’t be so awfully silly, Tommy, please!”
Sometimes, years later, Tommy could seem to see himself standing there, and the callowness would make his spirit writhe. What a fool she must have thought him in that new uniform, which did not fit too well when he came to beard the Jelletts in their den. Poor Marianne! Was there any wonder she looked ill at ease? The things he said were like the pages of a cheap romance.
Then, “Marianne,” he was saying, “listen, Marianne; I don’t care what any one thinks but you. Do you know what I thought when they made me an officer? The first thing I thought was—‘I can walk in the front door now.’ Well, here I am.”
She stood looking at him, and he could almost think that Marianne wanted to cry, just for a moment. She put her hand up to her throat, a little fluttering hand, so delicate that he wondered how he had ever dared to touch it He always remembered that she put her hand to her throat, and her eyes were dark like the sea on a windy night.
“Oh, Tommy!” whispered Marianne, “I do love you—I do love you so!”
And surely she must have loved him then. He always remembered that. He wanted to take her in his arms but he did not, because there was something eke he had to say.
“And I love you too,” said Tommy, “and I guess it’s time that every one knew it now.”
He saw her give a start as though a noise had startled her.
“Oh—how do you mean?” gasped Marianne.
Perhaps he should have guessed then what was sure to happen, but her sudden start—her bewilderment—meant nothing.
“I mean I’m going over to France.” Even when he said it, it had a tinny sound. “We’ve got a twenty-f
our-hour leave to say good-by. Any time after that we go. We’re at Camp Merritt now.”
“You mean you’re going right away?” asked Marianne.
Tommy nodded, because for a moment he could not speak.
“I think it’s dreadful—dreadful!” whispered Marianne.
“No,” said Tommy, “it isn’t dreadful, when everybody’s going, but Marianne”—his voice choked, “will you marry me if I come back?”
That was how he said it, standing in the Jellett’s music room, and it may have been a childish gesture, though he said it like a gentleman, just as he had read in books.
And there was Marianne. Now that it was over, it seemed as though he had plunged into some sea of emotion, which blinded his eyes and stopped his ears; and now that he could hear, there was Marianne upon a distant beach.
“I—I didn’t mean to frighten you,” said Tommy. “What’s the matter, Marianne?”
Marianne was face to face with a definite fact at last, and of course it made her angry. It made her want to cry.
“Marry you? Marry you?” said Marianne in the queerest way. “But what’s the use of talking about it if you’re going? Tommy—don’t be such a fool!”
Her voice had ended in an indignant clatter, and even Tommy could see that something was not right, and then he heard her speak again, and hardly knew her voice.
“I never thought you’d dream of such a thing!” cried Marianne. “And I don’t see, either, why you have to do this, just before you go!”
“I guess I know what you think,” said Tommy Michael, but he did not know, for none of it was right. She did not seem to realize that he had taken his heart and thrown it at her feet. “I guess you think I’m selfish, but I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“Mind?” There was something piteous in the way she repeated the word after him. “Oh, why shouldn’t I mind, when you go and spoil it all?”
“Spoil it?” Even then Tommy did not understand it. “Why am I spoiling anything?”
“Don’t! Oh, don’t!” cried Marianne, just as though he had hurt her. “Tommy, won’t you stop—? I—I just couldn’t, no matter how much I wanted to, Tommy. Tommy, please be sensible. You know you don’t really mean it! You can’t mean it. It isn’t fair of you, Tommy. You say this to me, but you know you wouldn’t dream of saying it to anybody else. You—”
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