Release (Wylie)

by I. A. R. Wylie

For works with similar titles, see Release.

 

Taught by One Who Was Called
Life Itself, He Became Something
More Than Leader Among Doctors.

RELEASE BY I. A. R. WYLIE

THEY were to have been married in a month's time. The brass plate with the double inscription, "Dr. Walter Uloth, Dr. Frances Uloth," was already fastened to the newly varnished door of the new house, and every evening they made a deliberate detour to admire this silent witness to their coming partnership.

Their marriage had seemed inevitable—both were so brilliant, so passionately attached to their profession, both outstanding personalities with all the magnetism of an uncompromising sincerity.

Dr. Uloth went up to the operating ward where he knew Frances Wilmot had been working. She came out as he reached the door. They walked together down the passage. In the hospital their attitude toward each other was rigidly impersonal, but he was too keen a psychologist not to be aware of some emotional trouble in her apart from the day's perplexities. He took her arm and pressed it. Emotion frightened and irritated him.

She drew away quietly. "Paula Finlay is dead," she said, "five minutes ago. I do not think she ought to have died."

Something in her tone galled him. "We couldn't do more than our best. From the point of view of society—we might as well admit it frankly—she is better dead."

"She knew. She told me. She saw in your face, a sort of disgust and reluctance. She said, 'Of course, it's true.' But it broke her. She wouldn't fight."

Her low, beautiful voice had lost its steadiness. They were passing his private office, and they went in. He was in that mood when a struggle is welcome.

"I'm sorry if I betrayed myself," he said. "Probably it was what she felt herself. Rightly, too. We shut up criminals and lunatics. There are people who are not less dangerous. One can't regret them."

"People like Paula Finlay?"

"Yes."

"What do you know about Paula Finlay?"

"Quite enough."

"To pass judgment?"

"If you like to put it that way."

He became aware of a prolonged silence. He looked up. She had taken off her engagement ring and laid it on the top of his papers. The one thought that flashed clear of his intense anger was that the action was childishly theatrical.

"I am a mere mortal," she said. "I don't see how a mere mortal and you, who consider yourself above mortal limitations, can work in partnership."

****

WALTER ULOTH had fought his way alone up a steep and cruel road to success. When some hope or other was shattered, he simply put his heel on his desire and went on. So that he left the hospital that night without a sigh, without conscious suffering, and without protest. The episode was finished.

He resigned from the hospital. The row house was transformed into a nursing home of his own, where patients came to him eagerly. His profession became his master and his religion. Only toward nightfall, when his brain wearied, he flung his work aside and stormed out of the house, walking rapidly westward, to the streets which never sleep.

It was on one such night that Keith McManus saw him and laid hold of him. McManus and he had roomed together in their desperate Edinburgh days. Their friendship had seemed then a thing of necessity rather than choice, for Uloth had despised McManus for his inferior abilities—but at least it endured. They met now as though days and not years had separated them.

"I didn't even know you were in England," Uloth said. "Why haven't you looked me up? Where have you been? You've been ill anyway."

McManus shrugged his stooping shoulders. "Oh, yes, I've been pretty bad. Studying bugs in a South African swamp. I've been in London a week, drifting round. Couldn't make up my mind to look up any one, not even you. That's how I am—fed up, up to the teeth."

"Yes, I can see."

"Got me diagnosed already? Well, it's a damnable state, Uloth." He laughed miserably. Uloth was looking across to the "Pavilion" opposite and mechanically spelling out the illuminated sign. "Gyp Labelle—Gyp Labelle." He heard himself answering a question. "No—no, that's a rumor. I killed a patient and lost a wife on the same day. I'm a free lance—quite free. What do you want to do? We neither of us need count the barbees now. Make a night of it? I've not done such a thing in my life—it's probably what you want."

McManus, too, was staring across the road with his dead eyes. "Good Lord. If I only knew! I'd be so thankful to want something."

His voice cracked. Uloth took him by the arm, much as he had taken Frances Wilmot by the arm months ago.

"We'll try first what the devil can do for you," he cried.

****

ABRUPTLY, the orchestra caught hold of Uloth. It was playing something that he had heard before, at restaurants where he had gone with Frances Wilmot. The stage, set with a stereotyped drawing room, was empty, as the curtain rose. Two dead-white hands, loaded with emeralds, held the black hangings over the center doorway, then parted them bruskly, letting through the brilliant, shining figure of a woman. She stood there, her fair head with its monstrous crest of many-colored ostrich plumes flaming against the dead background. Her dress, impudently scanty, showed the lines of a body almost too slender and supple as a rapier. But she wore jewels that clothed her. And each one of them had its romance, its scandal. It was part of the show that she should flaunt them.

She was pretty by force of some secret physical magnetism. "Hullo, every one!" she said, tentatively, gaily.

She began to laugh then, as she laughed every night at the same moment, spontaneously, shrilly, helplessly, until suddenly she had them. It was like a whirlwind. Even Uloth felt it at his throat, a choking, senseless laughter. He knew that McManus was leaning forward, flung headlong out of his apathy, almost angry.

She broke into the incessant din of music:

"I'm Gyp Labelle,
Come dance with me;
You'll dance to my tune.
Whatever it be—"

She couldn't sing. And after that one doggerel verse she made a gesture of good-humored contempt and danced. It was a wild gymnastic, the delirious capering of a gutter urchin caught by a jolly tune. A long-haired youth jumped onto the stage from the stage box and swung her about him and over his shoulder, so that her plumes swept the ground and the great rope of pearls made a chain of white light about them both.

"Those pearls," Uloth said to his companion, "Prince Rudolph gave them to her. And then he shot himself. They belonged to the family. He had no right, of course, but she wanted them."

McManus stirred impatiently. He did not answer.

Uloth had a queer conviction that secretly, in their hearts, the audience danced with her.

"I'm Gyp La belle
Come dance with me * * *"

Something had come into the theater that had not been there before. Nothing mattered so much. The main business was to have a good time somehow, not to worry or care.

She had whirled catherine-wheel fashion, head over heels, from end to end of the stage, and stood with her thin arms stretched up straight in a gesture of triumph, her mouth still parted in that curious, empty, expectant smile.

The curtain fell.

"I want to get out," said McManus sharply. "It's this closeness."

The audience had begun to stream out. Two men who loitered in front of Uloth in the aisle exchanged laconic comments.

"A live wire, eh, what?"

The face of the second man who spoke was bloated and full of a weary intelligence.

"Life itself, my dear fellow; life itself."

****

ULOTH took a month's holiday and McManus went with him down to the house on the Scotch moors where he was to have spent his honeymoon. For a week they tramped the hills together, stalked deer and fished in the salmon river. McManus was like, a man who hugs a secret pleasure—whose eyes are continually turned inward on a desire.

On the eighth day he disappeared. He left a note behind him. He had to go back to town. Uloth was not to bother. Uloth followed in three days.

At McManus' lodging house he found a room littered like that of some young fop, with half-opened boxes, new suits, shining unworn shoes and boots.

On the mantelpiece Uloth found a letter, which he read deliberately. The handwriting was a woman's, large and sprawling, and signed with a single, undecipherable initial. It agreed to a meeting at the Carlton before the "turn."

Uloth waited in the Carlton lounge an hour later. Then be saw McManus before he saw the woman, though for every one else she obscured McManus utterly. She walked a few paces ahead, a bizarre, fantastic figure, her head with its crown of diamonds lifted audaciously, the same fixed smile of childish pleasure on her painted face.

McManus walked at her heels. The well-cut evening clothes suited his lean figure. Though he was thirty-five, he looked like a boy on the threshold of his first romance.

Uloth was overwhelmed and transfixed by an insensate anger. This woman had trapped his friend.

She could not have overlooked Uloth. He stood right in front of her and his height and his rugged face must inevitably have drawn her attention to him. Her eyes, blue as a kitten's, met his with a kind of bonhomie as of one who expects and accepts admiration. The uncompromising enmity that replied seemed to check her. She hesitated, then passed on, still smiling, but mechanically McManus brushed against Uloth without recognition.

From that moment Uloth was possessed by a purpose. McManus, his friend, was not to end like those others.

He chose his table so that he faced her. McManus turned in her direction as though hypnotized.

Twice she met Uloth's eyes, still with a faintly puzzled amusement. Then she spoke to McManus, laughingly, and McManus turned, and a moment later he came across. He was radiant.

"What luck your being here, old man! I didn't know you went in for frivolity of this sort. Come over and join us. We're just having a bite before the show. You remember Mlle. Labelle, don't you?"

Uloth left his table at once, his manner composed and suave.

"It's Dr. Uloth, my old captain," McManus said. "We don't need to introduce you, mademoiselle."

"Ce cher docteur ('e don't like me)," she complained pathetically to McManus. "'E sit opposite and glare like a 'ungry tiger. Believe me, I grow quite cold with fear. Tell me why you don't like me, monsieur."

"He was only waiting to be asked," McManus broke in, laughing.

She jerked a jeweled thumb at him, appealing to Uloth. "'E 'as cheek, that young man. 'E send in 'is card to my dressing room, saying 'e got to meet me. As though any one could just walk in!" She leaned across to Uloth, speaking earnestly. "You saw me dance, hein? Monaier le docteur is an artist, perhaps. 'E know I can't dance at all. Nor sing. Nor nozzlngs. Just enjoy myself. You think I don't deserve all I get, hein?"

"I think," said Uloth, smiling, "that there are others in your profession who are less fortunate, mademoiselle."

"Zat's true. I 'ave been lucky. I shall always be lucky. Everybody knows that. Zey say, 'Our Gyp, she will have a good time at 'er funeral.' No, no, Monsieur Uloth, I will not drink. If I drink I might dance 'ere on the table—and ze company is so ver' respectable."

Obviously she knew that the severely elegant men and women on either hand watched her with a covert, chilly hostility. But there was something oddly simple in her acceptance of their attitude. Therein lay her power. She was herself. She didn't care.

She rose to go at last.

"I'm coming with you," McManus said quietly.

She shrugged her shoulders. "Eh bien—what can I do? Zey are all the same. Good-bye, Monsieur le docteur. You scare me stiff. But I like you."

****

PROBABLY she had expected him. Uloth followed the ugly old woman down the passage gorgeous and dim with an expensive orientalism.

The room was huge and square-built. The walls were hidden under eastern embroideries and silk divans were set haphazard on the mosaic floor. In the center a fountain of the modern-primitive school, banked with flowers, played noisily. There was something rather magnificent in the room's absurdity.

She herself sat on the edge of her fountain and fed a gorgeous macaw. But as Uloth entered, she sprang up and ran to him.

"Ah, it's droll—I think about you—just when you ring up. I wonder what you want of me," she remarked.

She went back to her place on the fountain edge, sitting amidst the flowers.

"Do people usually want things of you?" he asked.

"Always—all ze time."

"And you give so much?"

She eyed him seriously. "I give what I 'ave to give."

"And take what you can get?"

"And you, Monsieur—?"

The absoluteness of his detestation made it possible for him to laugh with her. "My fees are reasonable, at any rate. I've helped a good many people for nothing."

"P'raps. Still, you make experiments—and sometimes leetle mistakes. 'Ze operation was a complete success, but ze patient died.' I know. Some of mine die, too."

"That Rudolph, for instance?"

8he lifted the chain of pearls about her neck. "That canard! You think 'e could give me these? 'E couldn't 've given me a chain of pink coral. I could 'ave bought him and his funny little kingdom with my dress money. No, my friend. My agent, 'e set that story going.

"Tell me what you think of my little 'ome."

"You don't care what I think," he retorted. "As a matter of fact, it reminds me of a quaint old custom. When our early ancestors were building a particularly important house, they buried a few of the less important citizens alive under the foundations."

8he offered him her cigarette case. Suddenly she laughed out with an unfeigned enjoyment.

"I see. My victims, hein? You make a leetle joke, monsieur. But why so ver' serious. I am not burying you, am I?"

"No. It would be a mistake to try. Nor are you going to bury my friend McManus. It will be much better business to let him go."

"Let him go? But I want 'im to go. Yesterday I would not see 'im. I didn't want to see him."

"Sufficient reason. But about two months ago I lent him three thousand pounds. He bought you presents, outrageous for a man in his position."

"Some one 'ave to buy them," she explained good-humoredly. "I don't ask about position. It is not polite."

"Last night he came to my rooms. He has been very Ill. He has become dangerous. He threatened to shoot you——"

"Well, before 'e knew me, 'e want to shoot himself. He is gettin' better decidedly, that young man."

Her infectious laughter caught him. He wanted to laugh, too, and then thrust her laughing, empty face down into the water of her comic fountain till she died. There were people who were better dead. He had said so.

"Give him up," he said, quietly.

"You make me laugh," she retorted. "This Keith, I can't give him up. 'E don't belong to me. I neffer ask for him. Take him away. Keep him away. I don't want better."

Uloth stirred uneasily. He knew now that his hatred was apart from his friend, a bitter, personal hatred.

"It can't be done like that. You can't take drugs away from a drug fiend at one swoop. All I ask is that you should let him down gently—treat him as a friend till he gets his balance."

"No," she said, "1 can't be bothered. I was born in ze gutter—I crawl out of ze gutter by myself—I keep out of ze gutter—always. And I don't cry and wring my hands when people try to kick me back again. I look after myself, Monsieur Ulot' and all these others, they must look after themselves, too. They want fun and life from me—and I give them that. When they want more, they can—'ow you say?—get out."

He bowed. "Thank you. I've wasted your time. You are infamous."

She kissed her fingers to him in good-humored farewell.

****

THAT night McManus tried to force an entrance to the Kensington house, and the old woman, seconded by a Japanese servant, flung him down the steps into the arms of a policeman, who promptly arrested him. Uloth bailed him out.

The morning papers were full of it. It was one more feather in Gyp Labelle's cap. McManus sailed for South Africa with a medical mission—to die, as he said—but three months later Uloth received a photograph of his wife, a fair-haired, wide-eyed, slightly bovine-looking creature.

Uloth kept the picture on the table in his consulting room. He believed that it amused him.

It was in the same ironical mood that he consented to receive her. She had driven up to his door and sent up her card with the penciled inscription, "Me voila." She was splendidly outrageous. She must have put on every jewel that she could carry. Her dress was as natural to her as gay plumage to a bird of paradise.

"'Ow kind of you to see me! You 'ave a little time for me?" she said.

"Ten minutes," he replied. "I was sure that sooner or later you would turn up," he said.

She looked at him with a rather wistful surprise. "'Ow clever of you! You knew? Why, yes, I say to myself. 'One of these days I pay that terrible docteur a visit.' But I 'ave been so busy. We rehearse 'Madamoiselle Pantalonne.' The first night tomorrow. You come? I send you a ticket."

"Thanks. Your form of entertainment doesn't amuse me—except pathologically."

"Pathologically—" she echoed. "'Ow 'orrid that sounds! You don't like me, hein, doctor?"

"That surprises you?"

"That surprise me ver' much," she admitted frankly. She picked up the portrait and examined it with an unconscious impertinence. "You like 'er?" she asked. "Zat kind of woman?"

"I don't know," he said. "I've never met her."

"She Is not your wife?"

"She is Keith McManus' wife."

It was evident that she had almost forgotten. "McManus? Ah oui, I am glad. She is the right sort for 'im."

"The ten minutes are almost up," he said. "I presume you came here to consult me."

He knew that she had come because he had tantalized her.

She laughed, shrugging her shoulders. "You are an 'orrlble old docteur. I wonder, 'ave you ever 'ad a good time in your life—ever laughed like I do—from ze 'art? Well, I got to give you three guineas, so I'll 'ave an illness—sore throat—now—you know about throats, hein?"

"My specialty," he said.

I AM A MERE MORTAL," SHE SAID. "I DON'T KNOW HOW A MERE MORTAL AND YOU CAN WORK IN PARTNERSHIP"

"Bien. I 'ave a little sore throat. 'E come and go. I smoke too much. But I 'ave to smoke. Its no good what you say."

He made her sit down in the white iron chair behind the screen and switched on the light.

****

TEN minutes later they sat opposite each other by his table. She was coughing and laughing and wiping her eyes.

"C'est ridicule," she gasped. "Ridicule!"

He waited. The power was his now. He could take his time. In that deliberation the woman in the hospital, Keith McManus and Frances Wilmot and a host of men who had gone under the chariot wheels had their devious, sinister parts. He became in his own eyes the figure of the law, pronouncing sentence.

"You do it on purpose," she said. "You made me cough."

He arranged the papers on his table with precise hands. "Medical science," he said, "is not an exact science. We doctors are never absolutely certain of anything until it is done. But speaking with that reservation, I have to tell you that you have three—at the outside four—months to live——"

SHE STOOD THERE, HER FAIR HEAD WITH ITS MONSTROUS CREST OF MANY-COLORED OSTRICH PLUMES FLAMING AGAINST THE DEAD BACKGROUND.

He waited again. She had begun to laugh, but the laugh had broken in half. She had read his face. After a long interval she asked a question—one word—almost inaudibly—and he nodded.

"If you had come earlier one might have operated," he said. "But even so—it would have been doubtful."

So many men and women had received their final sentence here in this room, and each had met it in his own way. Some had stormed and raved and pleaded. Some had risen to an impregnable dignity finer than their lives. One or two had laughed.

And this woman—?

He looked up at last. He thought—with a thrill not of pity—of a bird hit in full flight and mortally hurt, panting its life out in the heather, its gay plumage limp and disheveled. He could hear her breath, short and broken like the smothered sobbing of a child. And yet he was aware, too, that she was thinking—that she was calling up secret reserves of strength.

"Trois mois—la vie—c'est la mort—well—but I don't feel so ill—perhaps for a little month, hein? Then they can't say I don't do my bit."

He had no clue to her thought.

"I suffer much, monsieur."

"I'm afraid so. Though any one who attends you will do his best."

"Death so ugly—so sad——"

"Not always," he said significantly.

After all, it was true. 8he had been a beast of prey all her life. Only sentimentalists like Frances Wilmot could have held out a hand of pity and regret.

She got up at last. He had given her time. She fumbled with her gold jeweled bag. She laid three guineas on his table. "That is ver' little for so much," she said. "I think—when I can't go any more—I come to your 'ospltal. You take me in, hein? I 'ave a fancy——"

"I can't prevent your coming if you want to. You would be more in your element in your own home. Besides, there are regulations. You—your friends—won't like them."

She looked at him quickly, with a startled eagerness. "Mes pauvre amis—I 'ave so many—they won't understand. They say, 'That's one of Gyp's little jokes.' They won't believe it. They won't dare."

She gave him her hand, and he touched it perfunctorily.

"It's as you like, of course. You have only to let me know."

"You are ver' kind."

He showed her to the door and rang the bell for the servant. The next morning he received a note from her and a ticket for the first night of 'Mademoiselle Pantalonne.'

****

HE went. He was driven by a curiosity to which were added anger and disgust. He told himself, with a solitary, inhuman pride, that he alone of all that densely crowded theater could taste the full flower of her performance. He was like God, seeing behind the scenes. He foresaw the moment, perhaps before the footlights, she would break down. It will be in all the papers. 8he would make use of her own death as she had used Keith McManus' miserable infatuation.

And yet he was sick in heart and brain. He had begun to realize that no man can trample on his strongest instincts with impunity. Frances Wllmot's face dickered before his hot eyes like the light of a will o' the wisp.

Gyp Labelle stood between the curtains at the back of the stage in the familiar attitude, smiling with that foolish friendliness.

He found himself clapping with the rest. He grew angry and afraid. He had worked too hard lately. The whole business had got an unnatural hold over him. He got up to go and then realized that he was trying to escape.

It was jolly music, too. And she was still the gutter-urchin, flinging herself about in the sheer joy of life, with death capering at her heels! He watched her, waiting for some sign, the first faltering gesture. Or was it possible that she was too empty-hearted to feel even her own tragedy, too shallow to suffer, too stupid to foresee. And yet he knew that in that heated, dusty atmosphere pain itself had set in—and he became aware that there was sweat on his own face. She was facing what every man and woman in that audience must face sooner or later. How? She, at any rate, danced as though there was nothing in the world but life. At the end the band broke into the old doggerel gallop.

"I'm Gyp Labelle-"

She catherine-wheeled round the stage, sweeping it with her plumes, just as she had done that first night. And in two months' time she would be dead.

As the curtain fell she stood there in the footlights. He could see the pulse of pain in her throat. Her arms were raised joyously.

And the next day he had a little note from her, written in a great, sprawling hand. She thought she had better reserve rooms in his hotel in about a month's time for about a month. After that, no doubt, she would require less accommodation. A silly, little, fatuous note—in execrable taste.

Uloth took a month's leave and spent it in the deserted house among the moors, tramping the hills in a haunted solitude. The live things that ran across his path—the quaint, furry hares and scurrying pheasant, the silhouette of a stag against the gray skyline—had become the brothers and sisters of an infamous woman. His gun, leveled at a rabbit sitting in cheery alertness amid the heather, sank under the pressure of inexplicable pity. He had taught himself to stand aloof from life. And now he was being dragged down into it. Its values, which he had learned to judge coldly and dispassionately, were shifting like sand.

In these days the papers, in their frivolous columns, were full of Gyp Labelle. It seemed that Gyp had quarreled with her manager—she had torn up her contracts and flung the scraps in his face. There were gay doings nightly in the Kensington house.

A last fling perhaps—the reckless gesture of a worthless panic-stricken soul—without dignity.

****

HE returned to town. He found that she had arrived at the nursing home with the hideous old woman and the macaw and a phonograph. 8he had signed the register as Marie Dubois.

"It's my name," she explained. "But one couldn't 'ave a good time with a name like that, voyons!"

8he was much nearer the end than he had supposed possible. The last month had to be paid for. She lay very still under the gorgeous quilt she had brought with her.

"Every one here promise not to tell," he said. "I'm just Marie Dubois. Even ze undertaker—'e must not know."

He forced back the question which came instinctively to his lips. He had a conviction that he was fighting her for his sanity, for the very ground on which he had built his life, and that he dared not yield by so much as a kindly word. He did what lay in his power for her, with a heart shut and barred.

She brought a little of her world and her whole outlook with her. On the last few days that she was able to sit up, she dressed herself in a gay mandarin's coat. By the open fire the old woman embroidered an elaborate nightgown.

"It's for my—what you call it—my shroud. You see, with ze blue ribbons—blue—blue—zat's my color. As soon as I could speak, I ask for ze blue ribbons in my pinafore."

"I should have thought that now your mind might be better occupied," he retorted with a brutal commonplaceness.

"Oh, but I 'ave 'ad my talk with monsieur le curé. 'E and I are ze best of friends. 'E understand about ze blue ribbons. But you—you are too clever, hein, monsieur le docteur?"

"It seems so," he said scornfully.

Once, at evening, Uloth came upon her with all her jewels spread about her—emeralds and pearls and diamonds—twinkling amid the creases of her coverlet. She put her finger to her lips.

"8h! This is ver' solemn. I make my testament."

She picked up each jewel in turn and looked at it, caressing it. And yet there was no bitterness and no regret in her farewell of them. The old woman, crouched in the chair beside her, wrote toilfully on a slip of paper.

"She make a list of all. They will be sold for the leetle children of Paris—the gamins—as I was—for a good time—from Marie Dubois."

She beckoned him, and he came nearer sullenly. In her hand was a great pearl.

"Pour vous, monsieur.

He shrank back. "No—I don't wear such things."

"For your wife, then."

"I am not married."

"But one day per'aps." She looked at him with a wistful doubt. "Or per'aps it make you sad. It is not for that I give it you. When you see it, you laugh—just as you laugh when I dance, because I dance so ver' bad."

She laughed now, and then gray agony had her by the throat. She hid her face and he took the pearl from her, muttering.

That night he let her suffer. He fled from her. He had begun definitely to doubt his own sanity. As he tried to leave the house the old woman followed and caught hold of him.

"She suffer too much, monster. It is not right. I will not 'ave it."

"I do my best," he flung at her savagely. "And who are you to interfere?"

"I am her mother."

He swung round to stare down into the lined and withered face. "Her mother? Why, good God—she treats you like a servant."

"Before others, monsieur le docteur. She is different—of different stuff. And if I want to be with 'er, it must be as 'er servant. That is our affair. But you are not kind. You let 'er suffer too much. I will not 'ave it!"

She menaced him, and he was aware of an incredible fear.

"I will come at once," he stammered.

Later, when she slept her drugged sleep, he came back to look at her, and the old woman knelt beside her, bowed over her still hand, a rugged, motionless effigy of grief.

****

SHE was almost voiceless now. That she suffered hideously Uloth knew, but not from her. Before them all she bore herself gayly—yes gallantly. It was that gallantry of hers that nursed him, that would not let him rest or forget.

And she was pitifully alone. The woman in the hospital had not been more forsaken. But every day the press man did his work, filling the gossip columns with hints of wild, erratic doings.

An illustrated paper produced her full-length portrait. She sat amid the flowers of her absurd fountain and her hand was raised in a gesture of laughing farewell. Over the top was written, "Gyp Off to Pastures New," and underneath a message, which was reprinted in all the daily papers:

"I want this way to thank the friends who have been so kind to me. We have had good times together. I am going for a long holiday, but one day, think, I dance for you again. I love you all. Au revoir."

He gave her the paper without comment. He had to hold it up for her to see—very close.

And then suddenly his anger burst from him.

"Why do you allow this silly pretense?"

He could feel the old woman turn toward him like a wild beast preparing to spring. He had to bend down to catch the choking, suffering voice."

"We 'ave—such good times. And zey come 'ere—all those kind people—who 'ave laughed ao much—and bring flowers—and pretend it is not true—and they won't believe—they won't dare—" She tried to speak more clearly, clinging to his hand for the first time in the sheer agony of her effort. "Vous voyes—for them—I am—ze good times. Zey come to me for good times—when zey are too sad—when life too 'ard for them—and zey cannot believe any more—zat ze good times come again—zey think of me. 'Voyons Gyp—she' ave a good time always—she dance at her own funeral.' And if zey see me 'ere—like this—zey go away—and thing, 'Grand dieu, have you come to that, too?'—and zey cry——"

Her hand let go its hold suddenly. They sent for him that night. There was a bright light burning by her bedside. She wore a pretty lace cap trimmed with pale-blue ribbons. She smiled at Uloth, but she was only half conscious.

Toward midnight she whispered something that he could not understand. But the old woman lifted herself heavily from her knees and went over to the phonograph. The nurse, who endeavored to stop her, was thrust aside. Uloth himself made a gesture.

"Let her be," he said.

The needle scratched under the shaking hand.

"I'm Gyp La Belle—
Come dance with me—"

He knew that she was smiling

And suddenly the crushing burden of his heart lifted. Strange and difficult tears came, and with them a strange peace. She had won. He loved her—as beneath the fret of passion McManus and all of them had loved her—for what she was, for what she had to give. He loved her more simply still, as in rare moments of their lives men love each other, saying, "This is my brother, this is my sister." From its height of arrogance his spirit flung itself down in thankful humility before a mysterious, incalculable Good.

He could hear the jolly bang-bang of the drum and the whoo of a trumpet. He could see her Catherine-wheeling round the stage, and the man with the bloated face and tragic, intelligent eyes.

"Life itself, my dear fellow. Life itself."

And she was dead.

Frances Wilmot married Uloth a year later. With her he became something more than a great doctor. He had, at any rate, ceased to be all in all in his own eyes.

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