Scribner's Magazine/The Party of the Third Part

by Philip Curtiss

The Party of the Third Part

BY PHILIP CURTISS
Author of "The Fakir," "The Gum-Shoe," etc.

Illustrations by Clarence Rowe

HIS wife's letter, stark, grim, and white in a high relief against the dull gloss of his study table struck Calvin Moore's eye the instant that he entered the cottage.

"Dear Calvin:

"By the time that you get this, I shall be on my way to New York. I have gone for good, Calvin, and I do not think that it will be necessary to tell you why.

"I have tried so hard to be contented here, but apparently nothing has been able to convince you of the fact that a woman of my age must simply die by inches in the kind of life that you have imposed on me. I admit it frankly. I am starving for color, for gaiety, for people of my own kind. I feel as if I had so few years left of youth that I simply must seize them before they are gone.

"I shall be at Margot's for the present, but please do not make any attempt to follow me. I have fought this out with myself for months and my mind is absolutely made up. There is nothing that you can do and I expect nothing. My own little income will be quite sufficient. I shall probably go to Italy this winter and remain there until—things are settled.

"Forgive me, dear, for I know how cruelly this will hurt you. In fact, it is only the knowledge of how deeply you really do love me that has kept me from doing this long before, but, if your love really is big enough, it can best show itself by allowing me to go on as I have determined.

"Good-by, Calvin.

Leila.

Before his eye had taken in the dim blur of the opening sentence, Calvin Moore felt himself swept by a sudden and sickening faintness. By the time he had finished the letter he found himself in his big study chair, without the slightest recollection of having moved from the window where he had first torn it open. It was not that he was unprepared for this. The instant that he had caught sight of the prim, square envelope, formal and ominous, he had known what it contained. He had, indeed, probably sensed it the moment that he had entered the house and found it so strangely silent; but months, years of preparation never lessen the actual blow of a thing of this kind. The physical shock would have been just the same if his wife had told him, an hour before, what she intended to do. The physical shock was just the same, in spite of a huge, grotesque fact—that Calvin Moore's wife had done exactly what, in his heart of hearts, he had been for years subconsciously hoping that she would do.

Calvin Moore, however, was a man whose intellect came into play never more than a second behind his nerves or emotions. Reading it over a second time, he realized perfectly well how often, in his secret imagination, he had visualized just such a letter as this. Strangely, the only thing about it now that appeared unreal was the mere handwriting. Leila's round, firm, society hand always gave him that same shock of unfamiliarity. It looked so much more mature than she did. His wife's mind and soul Calvin Moore knew inside and out. He had probed their depths before they had lived together a week—an hour would be a more exact statement. It was only occasional startling little physical facts about her that ever surprised him after all these years, as one is startled at moments by unexpectedly mature acts or gestures in a child—uncanny hints of a purely biological evolution in which Nature alone plays any part. A new hat or veil put on for church on a Sunday morning had sometimes amazed him more than any word that his wife had ever said in her life.

A suddenly renewed realization of that same chill silence which had held the house when he had first entered brought Calvin Moore to his feet in what was again a faintly physical alarm. Could it be possible that the servants also had left? Had the whole household taken this absurd moment to pick up its skirts and play "Doll's House"?

His senses unnaturally alert to impressions as he walked through the sitting-room and the halls, it amazed Moore to find how few reminders he found of Leila. None at all, in fact. The house had been his long before he had ever known her and, inwardly or outwardly, she had brought few changes into it. Chairs, sofas, the row of old china stacked over the dining-room mantel, all had for him associations far older, more potent, than any connected with the woman who had lived there eleven years as his wife. She had been gone an hour and already the gap was closing. A curious decade-long incident.

The kitchen reassured him for the moment, at least. It was ridiculous in the perfection of its homely melodrama—not a pot or a pan out of place, the brass and zinc scrubbed like the deck of a yacht, even the kettle peacefully singing over the fire—actually singing. That was almost overdoing it on the part of the kettle. The cat crawled out from under the oven, spread its claws, arched its back, and yawned luxuriously. It looked up at him, practically saying, "Well, old fellow, and what's on your mind?"

Neither one of the maids was in sight, but the gray-haired waitress came anxiously into his study as Moore settled down in his chair.

"Were you looking for me, Mr. Moore? Was there something you wanted?"

Calvin Moore looked up at her vaguely, his mind grasping the scene as a whole better than anything she was saying. Again there came over him a cool sense, uncannily clear, of gradually slipping back into a previous existence—of an incredible dream from which he was slowly awakening. Annie, too, like the chairs and the tables, had been a part of the household long before Leila had been even a name. In those days, indeed, she had been the household complete—and at frequent intervals since. Cooks had come and cooks had gone, intolerable to, or intolerant of, Leila; but Annie, deft, faithful, and dour, had always remained. Like her master, for eleven long years she had seen her peace of mind torn daily to shreds by the chaos and shallow impetuosities of her young mistress; but, again like her master, never by word or sign had she given one indication of it. Facing each other in this first empty moment after the storm, both Moore and Annie could have absolute reassurance that neither by word nor deed had either one of them forced or hastened that final event.

In Moore, however, the first narcotic sense of familiar peace was suddenly broken by a colder wave of actual fact. He looked up again at the housemaid standing anxiously in the doorway.

"Annie," he announced, with a gruff reserve, "Mrs. Moore has gone to New York for a few days."

The gray-haired servant never changed expression. "Yes, sir," she replied, "Mrs. Moore told me that Mrs. Willets was ill and had asked her to come."

Both spoke, or tried to speak, in a studied perfection of casualness, but in the voice of each lay a faint overtone of unmistakable wavering. How like Leila, thought Moore, blandly to believe that she could deceive even the servants, most of all shrewd, sensitive old Annie. It was Annie herself who suddenly recalled him.

"What would you like, Mr. Moore, for your dinner?"

Again came a sharp wave of reminiscence, startlingly vivid, but this time almost humorous. It had been eleven years since Annie had stood in the doorway asking him that familiar question, but now he and she took up the dialogue as if it had been continued only from the day before.

"A rare steak and French fried potatoes?" he suggested, and both of them grinned outright. Eleven years before that had been a standing and almost a daily joke between them. In the old days, three times out of four Moore had answered "rare steak and French fried potatoes," not because he liked them more than most things, but because, in his helpless bachelor preoccupation, he could seldom think of anything else. Now, however, he felt himself suddenly famished for Annie's thick, tender steak, garnished with lettuce and thin, crisp potatoes; but at the same time he felt oddly guilty, disloyal, in ordering them. It was too much like playing a quick march after the funeral. Leila had always refused pointblank to serve them. "Steak and French frieds," she had always insisted, were "so restauranty." She herself liked things with cream sauces.

But Annie still hesitated in the doorway. "Mr. Moore," she suggested cautiously, "there is still one bottle of old Bass ale in the cellar——"

Annie, too, as her master knew, was haunted by that same faint dread of unseemliness. In her good heart she was merely the atavistic old Irishwoman, pandering to the whims of her men-folks, even when those whims were vices; lighting their smudgy pipes and pressing on them their drop of "the craythur"; but at the same time, with a vague, refined apprehension, she feared that she was also making it painfully obvious that she had been saving that one lone bottle of Bass for some dreamed-of day when Leila was not, when her mistress had ceased from troubling.

Old-womanlike, Annie knew but one way to end the embarrassing moment. In growing confusion she decorously fled, but even her master did not realize that she would still be obliged to put on her bonnet and trudge, herself, a long half-mile to the village to get his steak, as many a time, eleven years before, she had willingly done it. Even the silence which again settled down in the house failed to tell him that.

The sane presence, however, of Annie and her subtle, unspoken support had been a healthy note in the atmosphere; and Calvin Moore sat back in his arm-chair to face his problem deliberately.

Leila Moore had been twenty-two when she had married, one of those pretty, kittenish girls who can seem so amazingly everything that they are not. She had worn an old-fashioned gown, with tiny puffed sleeves around her bare arms, the first time that Calvin had seen her. He had been thirty-eight at that time; then, as now, a tall, gaunt man, prematurely gray, with the atmosphere of a country squire and the calm, distinguished face of a scholar.

Fundamentally he had married her for the reason that most men marry—because the momentary desire to marry and the financial ability to do so had, for the first time in his life, come at the same moment. Why Leila had married him had been even more obvious. Few men have "aristocrat" stamped in their every line as plainly—almost as absurdly—as had Calvin Moore. His wife had first met him in a group of people whose opinion she deeply respected and who knew him to be what he actually was, a very great man in a certain limited field. Even his hermit-like manner of living had offered her a distinct and romantic fascination, for, like most Americans, Leila Moore had a passion for all the apparatus of country life—except the country.

In a year Leila Moore had been thoroughly disillusioned. Unconsciously, her whole dream of married life had been one of coming frequently to New York, looking very English and very "tweedy"—a hint of pewter and fox-hunts in her background—of sailing into affairs like the Waldorf musical mornings and hearing people whisper: "That's Mrs. Calvin Moore!" Her dreams had even gone so far as to include the answer: "What! Not that child!"

It had been a bitter and terribly final thought when she had at last slowly realized that to be the wife of a famous, successful writer of erudite studies of the human mind was not at all the same thing as to be the wife of a famous tenor. It appalled her and at first it angered her to find out how many people there were in the world who had never even heard of Calvin and were not particularly impressed when they did hear. Gradually, but in her case inevitably, this gave her, herself, a contempt for his work. He labored over it with such minute pains and really it brought him so little. Because years of married life had made her familiar with all of her husband's grotesque incongruities—the awkward way in which he tied his cravats and the stitched initials on his underwear—she came to believe that she had at least punctured the myth of his tremendous intellect. She found that it gave her an air of amused, sophisticated superiority to boast openly that she never read a line of his books; and secretly she began to brand as charlatans those who said that they did.

Calvin Moore, for his part, could hardly say that he had been disillusioned by his married life, because in strict terms he had never been illusioned. It was inconceivable that a man of his quick perceptions could ever have supposed that Leila would be an intellectual companion. What he had expected to get from his marriage had been a merry, roguish companionship—a blithe, deft presence. That had been, of course, the very last thing that he had ever found. Minnows like Leila Moore are charming when flashing around in a school of their kind, but one minnow alone is apt to present rather a wilted figure.

But there was no use now in raking up the dismal issues of those eleven endless years. Leila, in her letter, had left them decently vague; and Calvin Moore, sitting there in his study, found no inclination to review them. To-morrow, o-night perhaps, he would have to begin the formal, perfunctory attempts to get in touch with his wife. In the passion of leaving he knew that she had been quite genuine when she had begged that he make no attempt to follow her. Leila's grand gesture about a winter in Italy he did not take too seriously. In Italy, without a party of six or eight of her kind, she would be as miserable as she had been in his cottage in the Berkshires. Paradise for Leila meant endless liberty to shop up and down Fifth Avenue, lunch at a confectioner's, take in a matinée, then dine at some noisy place with her blonde, scented friend, Margot Willets, and the latter's free-spending, broker-type husband. For three hundred and sixty-five days in the year Leila could do that with perfect abandon.

A month from now, or six months, Calvin knew that his wife might be even more resolute in her freedom. He was perfectly prepared for that, but in the meantime the merest decency required that he make at least some efforts to offer a reconciliation. Marriage did not end with any such charming informality. As yet, however, his wife could not even have reached New York. Even the most stringent conscience could not forbid him coldly to lean back now and frankly enjoy the first real hour of exquisite calm that he had known since he could remember.

But exquisite calm does not come at any such call and beckon. Calvin Moore lighted a fire on the hearth, already feeling a forlornness which he had not expected. For a minute or two the blaze flashed and roared through the kindlings, then suddenly died out entirely, refusing to spread  to the heavier logs. He felt too indifferent, too numb, to start it again; but twilight was coming on and the dying down of the flare had left the room dark and cheerless. Moore snapped on his student's lamp, then snapped it off again. For years the noise and confusion of the  house had been a torment to his studious, contemplative habits, but now, once again, he became acutely conscious of the silence. He began to wonder how far Leila had got by this time, whether she had enough money, how long Margot Willets had been abetting and inciting her.  He wondered how Leila had got to the station. Had she sent for O'Ryan's livery car, and what had she taken with her? 

That question in itself offered one outlet for his restlessness, and a moment later he was pacing nervously through the neat white bedrooms of the second story, Here his heart began to misgive him, for here, indeed, were signs of Leila—not signs of her presence, but a vacant, echoing sense of her absence. Leila had always been one of those women who dress in three or four rooms at a time and hang their spare clothes in all of the others. To Calvin, who was as neat as an old soldier, this had been an incessant cause of annoyance; but now the sparse, blank bureau tops and the staring, wide-open closets began to fill him with a ghostly apprehension. He peered into one closet after another, pulled out drawers of the bureaus, and quietly whistled in his amazement. Leila certainly had done her work well. It filled him with an odd, unrestrained admiration. Not even a hairpin or crumpled slipper remained, She must have spent furtive weeks in doing it, and he had never suspected a thing, It gave him an uncanny sense of elaborate plot and also a cold stab of finality.

A door opened and shut down-stairs and Calvin Moore's heart stopped beating. Then he heard a shuffling of plates in the kitchen and realized that it was only Annie. From the sheer horror of those empty rooms he went down to join her.

The kitchen was as cosy and warm as the rooms above had been bleak and vacant. It was brilliantly lighted. An open grill of red broiling coals glowed cheerily at one end of the range and familiar odors of flour and hot butter rose up about him. Calvin Moore found his nerves suddenly stilled and his first resolution suddenly strengthened. Again there began to creep over him a warm sensation of bachelor snugness.

Already Annie was bustling around in cap and apron, the thick, red steak lying in an open paper on the porcelain table, As Moore entered the room she crossed to the range and moved a big iron kettle of fat to the open coals. A spatter of grease slapped over the side and burst into sizzling flames that shot half-way to the ceiling. With an exclamation of fright Moore started back, but Annie nonchalantly beat out the flames with a kitchen rag and they both began laughing. Calvin lighted a cigarette, put his foot on the oven fender, and watched Annie drop the bits of potato one by one into the boiling fat. The smoke of the cigarette, mingling with the tart smoke from the kettle, acquired a delicious, outlandish flavor, one long forgotten, one redolent of camp-fires in the open.

The cook and the chore boy, it was explained, had gone to a dance at the West Hill schoolhouse. There probably was such a dance, and no doubt the cook had been glad enough to attend it, but really, Moore knew, it had been Annie who in her mothering kindness had sent her away, in order that he might not be distressed by the inevitable atmosphere of whispers and questionings out in the the kitchen. The realization of her kindly tact made him suddenly teary.

As Annie began to skim the potatoes out of the fat, she looked at him, hesitating. "Mr. Moore, are you going to dress? There'll be just about time before I put the steak on."

Moore started. The idea had never occurred to him, would not have occurred on this night of all nights. In his bachelor days he had always dressed scrupulously for his solitary dinners, but after the first few months of his married life the custom had rather languished. Both punctilious before they had married, Leila and he had together sunk into slackness.

Reading again his inquiet memories, Annie hastened to justify her suggestion. "I only asked because you used to say that it rested you—that it made you feel better——"

This was not at all Annie's real motive. but in itself it was true enough. "Why not?" thought Calvin. No matter how life might shape itself on the morrow, to-night he might as well take it as it offered.

He dared not linger too long in those empty rooms on the second floor, but even in the few minutes before he came down Annie had worked facile magic. In the dining-room his old glass candlesticks had replaced the silver ones which Leila had brought as a part of her wedding outfit. Just what else Annie had done to the room he could not distinguish, but the whole scene of the waiting table, with its place for one, was a startling resurrection, Annie, in fact, had done her work almost too well. Agreeable as it was, it gave Moore an uncanny feeling of walking among the dead.

From the study he saw a dull gleam and found that Annie had relit the fire, but otherwise left the room dark and shadowy, just as he had always loved it in the old days, in the quiet moments before dinner. He strolled in and stood luxuriously before the tall, flickering andirons, his feet, through the thin soles of his pumps, treading the familiar softness of the bearskin hearth-rug. Automatically his hand passed along the dark mantel until it rested on a tiny Chinese pipe, which in his most luxurious moods took the place of a pre-dinner cigarette. In semidarkness, his hands guided only by slowly reawakening habit, he filled the thimblelike ivory bowl and searched the pockets of his dinner-jacket for a match, Out in the dining-room he heard a familiar plop! as Annie dropped the ice into the water-pitcher. Infallibly, within thirty seconds she would appear at the door to call him. Smiling, he waited to give her the importance of doing it.

Then suddenly Calvin Moore felt every nerve in his body grow taut. The match in his hand was stopped short in its progress. His eyes were staring at the windows. Outside, in the darkness, he saw a long pencil of fight, now rising, now falling, then suddenly growing diffused and illuminating the fence and the shrubbery. Calvin's ear caught the slap and rattle of O'Ryan's livery-car coming over the hill, then stopping, with a thump of the tonneau door, by his own gateway.

Instantly he was outside the house, but quick as he was, Leila, very demure in her blue travelling suit, was inside the gate before he could reach her. With stiff composure she tipped the O'Ryan boy who carried her bags to the door, but the instant that he had gone she turned and flung herself into Calvin's arms. A moment later they were standing together in the merciful shadows of the firelight, Poor Leila made no attempt to explain, merely lay in her husband's arms racked with inarticulate sobbings,

Then suddenly Moore felt her body stiffen. She sprang away and both of them moved about, self-consciously, looking at the doorway.

Annie was standing there, once more prim, stiff, and dour. Leila tried to greet her with forced, hysterical gaiety.

"Good evening, Annie. You see I've come back before I expected."

Annie did not reply, and Leila lifted her head, sniffed playfully.

"Oh, Annie, that smells so good! What is it? I'm famished for dinner."

From beyond his wife's shoulder Calvin looked toward the door with a smile, then suddenly stopped in amazement, for Annie's face had grown hard as stone and bitter as acid.

"I had a steak," she muttered in a monotone, "but I left it on too long. It was burned to a crisp. The best I can do now will be eggs and bacon."

Almost in hostile defiance she met her master's astonished gaze, and her tone was so sharp that even Leila felt forced to be ingratiating.

"That doesn't matter, Annie, at all," she exclaimed.

She turned to her husband. "Really, dear, I'm so exhausted I couldn't eat very much." She paused and then added wistfully: "You don't suppose, just to celebrate, you could find a drop——"

Calvin smiled—tried to smile—and looked tentatively toward the doorway, "I think," he said gently, "that Annie has saved one last bottle of genuine Bass. If you like——"

But already Annie had brusquely turned down the hall, and as her voice came over her shoulder there was something in it almost like a sob.

"I broke that bottle," said Annie.