Lost Ecstasy/Chapter 24
THE Show had gone on. It had its schedules to meet, its competitions to face. It put up its paper, and other rival organizations came along and tore it down. Now and then there was even a battle.
It was like an army, it cared as best it could for its casualties and then moved on, unloading, parading, playing and reloading.
"Gangway for the elephants! Get in there, Babe! Damn your thick hide, get in."
But for a day or two at least there was no singing as the cowboys rode their horses through the darkness to the siding, swaying easily in their saddles to the rustle of leather on leather, the click of buckles and spurs. Tom had been popular with them. He had been a fine rider, and he had been square. "A square shooter," they said among themselves. And there was a mystery about his injury. The property man had loaded the guns himself with blanks.
The Colonel himself had gone to the hospital to see Tom and get at the truth, but Tom had been curiously non-committal.
"Maybe some Indian had a grudge against me. You never can tell"
"You don't know?"
"No, and couldn't prove it if I did."
The Colonel had done his best, arranged for Tom's hospital bills, and for his salary to go on for three months, and then had gone away, not quite easy in his kindly mind. He thought Tom knew more than he would say.
Then, for a few days, Tom fought a good fight. He suffered intensely, but when Kay was around he kept it to himself. He seemed content to have her beside him, to hold her hand, even—as he improved—to let her read to him. The reading rather bored him, but he submitted amiably enough.
"All right," he would say resignedly. "Let's hear what the poor simp did, after he let his wife up and leave him."
But he would drop off to sleep very soon. He had lived in a hard school, and the fetich of the printed word was not for him. However, if he roused and she was not in sight he was restless until she returned.
"Seems to me you're eating right hearty these days!"
"I have to walk two blocks to eat at all."
But over his injury and its cause he preserved a silence even to her. Sometimes she would look up from her book to see him staring at the ceiling, with a strange concentration that almost frightened her, and with his fists clenched.
It was a queer life for Kay. Her romance had got about, and well-intentioned nurses invented errands to get a look at her. And one day a very curious thing happened. A man down the hall said he knew her, and would be grateful if she would stop in and see him. It was Ronald Osborne. She hardly knew him at first, the dapper little man who used to pose for the benefit of the servants, and even now was smoothing his hair with one thin hand.
"Hello, Kay."
"Hello, Uncle Ronald. I didn't—have you been very I?"
"Not very," he said. "Not very. So you've decided to live your own life after all, Kay! You got away from them, eh?"
"I'm afraid I've hurt them all pretty badly."
"Not you," he said. "They're thick-skinned. Look at your Aunt Bessie!" He laughed a little, horribly. "Your mother's different, but she hadn't your courage. She never did get away."
She went back again a day or two later, forcing herself rather because she had never liked him. But the bed was neatly made and empty, and she learned that Uncle Ronald had himself "got away" the night before, quite comfortably and without pain.
It was indeed a queer life, and not the least queer thing about it was her relationship to Tom, and his to her. This long youth alternately lying back on his pillows and refined by pain into gentleness, or cursing the surgeon half humorously and half in earnest when he dressed his leg, was a stranger to her. Sometimes he caught her staring at him, and a gulf of self-consciousness opened between them. He would try to bridge it.
"Come on over here, girl, What're you thinking about?"
"Nothing. It seems so queer, doesn't it?"
"It seems pretty fine to me; the finest thing that ever happened."
"Getting hurt?"
"Now that's not like you, girl. Loving you and getting you. You're mine. Don't forget that."
She had managed to keep the papers from him, and he knew nothing of Herbert, or of the scandal. But once he startled her by asking about Herbert. His hands, calloused and hard, had begun to peel, and he eyed them ruefully.
"Nice hands for a real he-man!" he said scornfully. "They'll soon be as soft and white as Percy's!" He looked up at her. "What's became of lil' old Percy anyhow? He'd have made a fine girl, he would!"
"I suppose he's all right."
"It wouldn't surprise me to learn that he chewed a finger nail plumb off when he heard the news," he drawled.
It had never occurred to him that his injury was a permanent one. As he improved he began to make plans. He had saved some money, enough to get them back home, and he wasn't afraid after that. He could always take care of her; not the way she'd been used to, but he was strong and he wasn't afraid to work.
"You stick to me, girl, and I'll amount to something yet."
"I'll always stick, Tom."
She could not tell him. She would listen to his plans with a sort of terror for the time when he would have to know, and her hands would grow cold in his, and sometimes the nurse, overhearing, would look at her and shake her head. . . .
One evening she went back to that lonely hotel room of hers, to open the door and find Bessie settled in a chair by the window, and the room full of cigarette smoke. But Bessie, who was wise with the wisdom of the serpent, avoided any emotion by receiving her very casually.
"Hello, Kay. Had your dinner yet?"
"I was going to order something up here."
"Then order for two," said Bessie. "I'm over on some business about poor Ronald. I didn't even know he was sick. Well, how's your husband coming on?"
Bessie's matter-of-fact manner did her good. She missed nothing, did Bessie, from the handkerchiefs pasted to dry on the mirror to the strain on the girl's face. The hotel bedroom was "awful." But she brought Kay the news from home that she had been hungering for. Henry had locked up her clothes; she had tried to bring her some, but she could not. But her mother was less unhappy than Kay probably imagined. She was not as well as she might be. She had gone over to the cemetery and taken cold. Kay ought to write to her.
It was only when she learned that Tom's injury was a permanent one that she became grave.
"Then—what will you do?"
"I don't know. They haven't told him yet."
"What your father ought to do is to give him an allowance. I'll see what I can do, Kay."
"It wouldn't be any good. Tom wouldn't touch it, or allow me to."
Later on, after her own worldly fashion, Bessie tried to be helpful.
"You see, Kay, you have a lot to learn. This thing about love, now—you think everything's over, I daresay. You've got him and he's got you! But it isn't, you know. The greatest love stories come after marriage. If I hadn't married poor Ronald" She checked herself.
And again, over the meal served in that dingy room:
"You can divide any woman's life into three parts: up to twenty, anticipation; from twenty to forty, fulfillment—if she's lucky. Usually it is compromise and resignation. Some, of course!" She smiled. "Compromise or be compromised!" she ended, lightly.
It was only before she left that she mentioned Tom again. Out of deference to the object of her journey she wore very smart black, and she surveyed herself carefully in the mirror and then added an extra touch of rouge.
"Not that it fools anybody, except myself! Kay, don't try to make your cowboy over. Give him a long rope. If I know the type he'll need it. But he'll come back and be glad to, if you're clever with him. They all do, you know."
But Bessie felt, when she got on the train, that she had been trying to teach a child higher mathematics. That was one of the tragedies of experience; it could never help any one else.
Kay wrote a long letter to her mother before she went to bed that night. It was a tragic letter between the lines; her divided allegiance, her love for them all, her regret at having had to hurt them. She never received any reply, for Katherine never got the letter, but she was having her own troubles those days. She hardly noticed the lack of response.
One trouble was a small one, comparatively. She came back from her luncheon to find that Tom had had a letter, and that he had not wanted her to see it. The nurse was carrying it out, torn into minute pink scraps, when she went in. He did not mention it to her, but he was very gentle, very conciliatory, all the rest of the day.
The other was a big one.
The day came when Tom had to learn the truth, that his ankle would always be stiff. Kay never forgot the look in his eyes.
"Stiff?" he said. "Then what did you save me for? I'm through!"
"Lots of men go through life with one leg," said the surgeon. "You've got two. If one's not as good as the other"
Tom laughed. It was not pleasant to hear, and his face was ghastly.
"So that's it!" he said. "Me kidding myself along, and all the rest of you kidding too, and I'm a cripple for life! It's a good joke, isn't it? Why don't you all laugh? Go on out, girl, and order me a pair of crutches. Good ones. They'll have to last a long time."
Then he groaned and rolled over on his face.
He did not move for two hours. Once or twice Kay ventured to touch him, but he drew away as if she had burned him. At the end of that time, however, he reached out gropingly, and she took his hand and held it.
"I've just about wrecked you, girl," he said, his voice smothered in the pillow.
"Do you think it makes any difference to me, Tom? I've known all along."
When twilight came, as if he had not wanted her to see his face before, he turned over in the bed and drawing her down to him, held her close.
"I've given you a pretty raw deal," he said, "but if you'll only stick, girl, I'll pull out of this somehow."
"Just keep on loving me, Tom. I can bear anything else."
"We'll beat the game yet."
"Of course we will."
"Just you and me, against the lot of them, eh?"
"Just you and me, dear."
He slept little that night, and the next day his temperature was up. Kay came in to find him sitting up in the bed and staring morosely before him. He let her kiss him without response, and as soon as the nurse had gone out he turned to her somberly.
"I've been doing some thinking," he said. "The best thing you can do is to go back to your folks."
"Do you want me to go?"
"I can't support you. What's the use of fooling ourselves? They'll take you back. And you can tell them you are purer than the lily, that"
"Tom!"
"Well, it's God's truth," he said sullenly. "You go back where you can be comfortable; where you'll have enough to eat, anyhow." He avoided her eyes. "I'll have trouble enough keeping myself."
"Look at me. I'll go, if you say you have stopped caring and don't want me."
"It isn't a question of caring. You married a man, not a cripple, and I'm giving you your chance to get out from under. You'd better take it before I yell my fool head off."
The mixed emotions of the next few days almost exhausted her. He rose to heights of the tenderest love, only the next moment to thrust her from him and sink into depths of sullen despair. Once, determined to move the stiffened ankle, he got out of bed and tried to walk on it, and the nurse found him flat on the floor, in a faint. Again he insisted on proof that the company was paying his hospital bills, and not her family.
"Remember this," he told her darkly. "If you stick to me, you get no help from them. I'm no kept man, and I don't want their dirty money."
There was a terrible scene when they brought in his crutches. He sat in his wheeled chair—he was up by that time—and taking them in his hands turned them over with a mocking smile.
"Pretty, aren't they?" he said. "All shiny and nice and—Where's the tin cup, Kay? There ought to be a tin cup to go with them."
Suddenly he flung them across the room.
He was never reconciled to them. Now and then she coaxed him to walk with her in the hospital corridor. He would swing along, his big shoulders hunched, the bad foot hanging awkwardly, but if he saw any one but the nurses he would turn abruptly and start back. And what was worse for her, she felt that he was harboring a suspicion that, in maiming his fine body, he had somehow lost his claim on her. He was less arrogant in his demands on her love, more inclined to those long and bitter periods when he lay and stared at the ceiling with his hands clenched, darkly plotting some secret revenge of his own.
But along with this he was, she discovered, cherishing a hope too. When they showed him his X-ray plates he scoffed at them, and at the surgeons after they had gone.
"Just because a fellow wears a white coat doesn't mean he knows everything," he told her. "I'm waiting till old Dunham gives the word. That old boy knows bones. He was settin' legs out in the mountains with a gun-barrel for a splint before these lady-killers were foaled."
And then one day, when they were almost ready to go and she was packing his clothing, the gay shirts and neckerchiefs, the boots inlaid with colored leathers, the heavy chaps, the broad-brimmed hat, the nurse brought in some old newspapers for packing. And he learned about Herbert! He was in his wheeled chair at the time, and she looked up at the rustle of paper and his intent deadly silence. She went to look over his shoulder, but he held it up beyond her reach.
"I'm finishing this," he said coldly.
It was all there; the brilliant preparations for the wedding, the gifts, her flight, Tom himself on horseback, and it ended with a highly drawn account of the shooting. She was tertified, but he was quiet enough at first.
"Why didn't you tell me about him?"
"It wouldn't have changed things, would it?"
"It would and it wouldn't," he said slowly. "I'm no kidnapper, that's all. If I'd known all that"
"Are you trying to say you wouldn't have married me?" There was a catch in her throat.
"I'm trying to say I'd have gone to him like a man, and not acted like a yellow dog."
Later on, however, his jealousy of Herbert began to manifest itself in the form of scorn.
"And so you were going to marry Percy! With all the he-men there are in the world, you had to pick on him! A fellow that, if he ever saw a hair on his chest, he'd shave it off! And you let him hang around you and make love to you! God Almighty, girl, when I think of him kissing you it makes me sick."
She said little or nothing. She never saw that behind his outrageous talk lay the tragedy of his own crippled condition, his poverty and his bitter jealousy. She was frightened and not entirely just. She told herself that he had unsuspected violences, even cruelties; that he was primitive, savage, ruthless, and that he meant to break her, as he would break a horse. But she would not be broken. She was not old Lucius's granddaughter for nothing. After an hour or so she suddenly stopped her packing and put on her hat.
"I am going to the hotel, Tom," she said. "If you want me to come back you can send for me."
But he did not send for her. He came to her instead. She opened her door that night, to find him, crutches and all, standing outside.
"Well, here I am!" he said, much as she had said it the day she had gone to him. "Do I come in, or am I on my way?"
The next moment she was in his arms.