Complete Works of Frank Norris

by Frank Norris

  “Well, well,” he murmured. “This certainly is the real thing, J. I suppose, now, it all represents a pretty big pot of money.”

  “I’m not quite used to it yet myself,” said Jadwin. “I was in here last Sunday, thinking it all over, the new house, and the money and all. And it struck me as kind of queer the way things have turned out for me.... Sam, do you know, I can remember the time, up there in Ottawa County, Michigan, on my old dad’s farm, when I used to have to get up before day-break to tend the stock, and my sister and I used to run out quick into the stable and stand in the warm cow fodder in the stalls to warm our bare feet.... She up and died when she was about eighteen — galloping consumption. Yes, sir. By George, how I loved that little sister of mine! You remember her, Sam. Remember how you used to come out from Grand Rapids every now and then to go squirrel shooting with me?”

  “Sure, sure. Oh, I haven’t forgot.”

  “Well, I was wishing the other day that I could bring Sadie down here, and — oh, I don’t know — give her a good time. She never had a good time when she was alive. Work, work, work; morning, noon, and night. I’d like to have made it up to her. I believe in making people happy, Sam. That’s the way I take my fun. But it’s too late to do it now for my little sister.”

  “Well,” hazarded Gretry, “you got a good wife in yonder to—”

  Jadwin interrupted him. He half turned away, thrusting his hands suddenly into his pockets. Partly to himself, partly to his friend he murmured:

  “You bet I have, you bet I have. Sam,” he exclaimed, then turned away again. “... Oh, well, never mind,” he murmured.

  Gretry, embarrassed, constrained, put his chin in the air, shutting his eyes in a knowing fashion.

  “I understand,” he answered. “I understand, J.”

  “Say, look at this organ here,” said Jadwin briskly. “Here’s the thing I like to play with.”

  They crossed to the other side of the room.

  “Oh, you’ve got one of those attachment things,” observed the broker.

  “Listen now,” said Jadwin. He took a perforated roll from the case near at hand and adjusted it, Gretry looking on with the solemn interest that all American business men have in mechanical inventions. Jadwin sat down before it, pulled out a stop or two, and placed his feet on the pedals. A vast preliminary roaring breath soughed through the pipes, with a vibratory rush of power. Then there came a canorous snarl of bass, and then, abruptly, with resistless charm, and with full-bodied, satisfying amplitude of volume the opening movement of the overture of “Carmen.”

  “Great, great!” shouted Gretry, his voice raised to make himself heard. “That’s immense.”

  The great-lunged harmony was filling the entire gallery, clear cut, each note clearly, sharply treated with a precision that, if mechanical, was yet effective. Jadwin, his eyes now on the stops, now on the sliding strip of paper, played on. Through the sonorous clamour of the pipes Gretry could hear him speaking, but he caught only a word or two.

  “Toreador ... horse power ... Madame Calve ... electric motor ... fine song ... storage battery.”

  The movement thinned out, and dwindled to a strain of delicate lightness, sustained by the smallest pipes and developing a new motive; this was twice repeated, and then ran down to a series of chords and bars that prepared for and prefigured some great effect close at hand. There was a short pause, then with the sudden releasing of a tremendous rush of sound, back surged the melody, with redoubled volume and power, to the original movement.

  “That’s bully, bully!” shouted Gretry, clapping his hands, and his eye, caught by a movement on the other side of the room, he turned about to see Laura Jadwin standing between the opened curtains at the entrance.

  Seen thus unexpectedly, the broker was again overwhelmed with a sense of the beauty of Jadwin’s wife. Laura was in evening dress of black lace; her arms and neck were bare. Her black hair was piled high upon her head, a single American Beauty rose nodded against her bare shoulder. She was even yet slim and very tall, her face pale with that unusual paleness of hers that was yet a colour. Around her slender neck was a marvellous collar of pearls many strands deep, set off and held in place by diamond clasps.

  With Laura came Mrs. Gretry and Page. The broker’s wife was a vivacious, small, rather pretty blonde woman, a little angular, a little faded. She was garrulous, witty, slangy. She wore turquoises in her ears morning, noon, and night.

  But three years had made a vast difference in Page Dearborn. All at once she was a young woman. Her straight, hard, little figure had developed, her arms were rounded, her eyes were calmer. She had grown taller, broader. Her former exquisite beauty was perhaps not quite so delicate, so fine, so virginal, so charmingly angular and boyish. There was infinitely more of the woman in it; and perhaps because of this she looked more like Laura than at any time of her life before. But even yet her expression was one of gravity, of seriousness. There was always a certain aloofness about Page. She looked out at the world solemnly, and as if separated from its lighter side. Things humorous interested her only as inexplicable vagaries of the human animal.

  “We heard the organ,” said Laura, “so we came in. I wanted Mrs. Gretry to listen to it.”

  The three years that had just passed had been the most important years of Laura Jadwin’s life. Since her marriage she had grown intellectually and morally with amazing rapidity. Indeed, so swift had been the change, that it was not so much a growth as a transformation. She was no longer the same half-formed, impulsive girl who had found a delight in the addresses of her three lovers, and who had sat on the floor in the old home on State Street and allowed Landry Court to hold her hand. She looked back upon the Miss Dearborn of those days as though she were another person. How she had grown since then! How she had changed! How different, how infinitely more serious and sweet her life since then had become!

  A great fact had entered her world, a great new element, that dwarfed all other thoughts, all other considerations. This was her love for her husband. It was as though until the time of her marriage she had walked in darkness, a darkness that she fancied was day; walked perversely, carelessly, and with a frivolity that was almost wicked. Then, suddenly, she had seen a great light. Love had entered her world. In her new heaven a new light was fixed, and all other things were seen only because of this light; all other things were touched by it, tempered by it, warmed and vivified by it.

  It had seemed to date from a certain evening at their country house at Geneva Lake in Wisconsin, where she had spent her honeymoon with her husband. They had been married about ten days. It was a July evening, and they were quite alone on board the little steam yacht the “Thetis.” She remembered it all very plainly. It had been so warm that she had not changed her dress after dinner — she recalled that it was of Honiton lace over old-rose silk, and that Curtis had said it was the prettiest he had ever seen. It was an hour before midnight, and the lake was so still as to appear veritably solid. The moon was reflected upon the surface with never a ripple to blur its image. The sky was grey with starlight, and only a vague bar of black between the star shimmer and the pale shield of the water marked the shore line. Never since that night could she hear the call of whip-poor-wills or the piping of night frogs that the scene did not come back to her. The little “Thetis” had throbbed and panted steadily. At the door of the engine room, the engineer — the grey MacKenny, his back discreetly turned — sat smoking a pipe and taking the air. From time to time he would swing himself into the engine room, and the clink and scrape of his shovel made itself heard as he stoked the fire vigorously.

  Stretched out in a long wicker deck chair, hatless, a drab coat thrown around her shoulders, Laura had sat near her husband, who had placed himself upon a camp stool, where he could reach the wheel with one hand.

  “Well,” he had said at last, “are you glad you married me, Miss Dearborn?” And she had caught him about the neck and drawn his face down to hers, and her head thrown back, thei
r lips all but touching, had whispered over and over again:

  “I love you — love you — love you!”

  That night was final. The marriage ceremony, even that moment in her room, when her husband had taken her in his arms and she had felt the first stirring of love in her heart, all the first week of their married life had been for Laura a whirl, a blur. She had not been able to find herself. Her affection for her husband came and went capriciously. There were moments when she believed herself to be really unhappy. Then, all at once, she seemed to awake. Not the ceremony at St. James’ Church, but that awakening had been her marriage. Now it was irrevocable; she was her husband’s; she belonged to him indissolubly, forever and forever, and the surrender was a glory. Laura in that moment knew that love, the supreme triumph of a woman’s life, was less a victory than a capitulation.

  Since then her happiness had been perfect. Literally and truly there was not a cloud, not a mote in her sunshine. She had everything — the love of her husband, great wealth, extraordinary beauty, perfect health, an untroubled mind, friends, position — everything. God had been good to her, beyond all dreams and all deserving. For her had been reserved all the prizes, all the guerdons; for her who had done nothing to merit them.

  Her husband she knew was no less happy. In those first three years after their marriage, life was one unending pageant; and their happiness became for them some marvellous, bewildering thing, dazzling, resplendent, a strange, glittering, jewelled Wonder-worker that suddenly had been put into their hands.

  As one of the first results of this awakening, Laura reproached herself with having done but little for Page. She told herself that she had not been a good sister, that often she had been unjust, quick tempered, and had made the little girl to suffer because of her caprices. She had not sympathised sufficiently with her small troubles — so she made herself believe — and had found too many occasions to ridicule Page’s intenseness and queer little solemnities. True she had given her a good home, good clothes, and a good education, but she should have given more — more than mere duty-gifts. She should have been more of a companion to the little girl, more of a help; in fine, more of a mother. Laura felt all at once the responsibilities of the elder sister in a family bereft of parents. Page was growing fast, and growing astonishingly beautiful; in a little while she would be a young woman, and over the near horizon, very soon now, must inevitably loom the grave question of her marriage.

  But it was only this realisation of certain responsibilities that during the first years of her married life at any time drew away Laura’s consideration of her husband. She began to get acquainted with the real man-within-the-man that she knew now revealed himself only after marriage. Jadwin her husband was so different from, so infinitely better than, Jadwin her lover, that Laura sometimes found herself looking back with a kind of retrospective apprehension on the old days and the time when she was simply Miss Dearborn. How little she had known him after all! And how, in the face of this ignorance, this innocence, this absence of any insight into his real character, had she dared to take the irretrievable step that bound her to him for life? The Curtis Jadwin of those early days was so much another man. He might have been a rascal; she could not have known it. As it was, her husband had promptly come to be, for her, the best, the finest man she had ever known. But it might easily have been different.

  His attitude towards her was thoughtfulness itself. Hardly ever was he absent from her, even for a day, that he did not bring her some little present, some little keep-sake — or even a bunch of flowers — when he returned in the evening. The anniversaries — Christmas, their wedding day, her birthday — he always observed with great eclat. He took a holiday from his business, surprised her with presents under her pillow, or her dinner-plate, and never failed to take her to the theatre in the evening.

  However, it was not only Jadwin’s virtues that endeared him to his wife. He was no impeccable hero in her eyes. He was tremendously human. He had his faults, his certain lovable weaknesses, and it was precisely these traits that Laura found so adorable.

  For one thing, Jadwin could be magnificently inconsistent. Let him set his mind and heart upon a given pursuit, pleasure, or line of conduct not altogether advisable at the moment, and the ingenuity of the excuses by which he justified himself were monuments of elaborate sophistry. Yet, if later he lost interest, he reversed his arguments with supreme disregard for his former words.

  Then, too, he developed a boyish pleasure in certain unessential though cherished objects and occupations, that he indulged extravagantly and to the neglect of things, not to say duties, incontestably of more importance.

  One of these objects was the “Thetis.” In every conceivable particular the little steam yacht was complete down to the last bolt, the last coat of varnish; but at times during their summer vacations, when Jadwin, in all reason, should have been supervising the laying out of certain unfinished portions of the “grounds” — supervision which could be trusted to no subordinate — he would be found aboard the “Thetis,” hatless, in his shirt-sleeves, in solemn debate with the grey MacKenny and — a cleaning rag, or monkey-wrench, or paint brush in his hand — tinkering and pottering about the boat, over and over again. Wealthy as he was, he could have maintained an entire crew on board whose whole duty should have been to screw, and scrub, and scour. But Jadwin would have none of it. “Costs too much,” he would declare, with profound gravity. He had the self-made American’s handiness with implements and paint brushes, and he would, at high noon and under a murderous sun, make the trip from the house to the dock where the “Thetis” was moored, for the trivial pleasure of tightening a bolt — which did not need tightening; or wake up in the night to tell Laura of some wonderful new idea he had conceived as to the equipment or decoration of the yacht. He had blustered about the extravagance of a “crew,” but the sums of money that went to the brightening, refitting, overhauling, repainting, and reballasting of the boat — all absolutely uncalled-for — made even Laura gasp, and would have maintained a dozen sailors an entire year.

  This same inconsistency prevailed also in other directions. In the matter of business Jadwin’s economy was unimpeachable. He would cavil on a half-dollar’s overcharge; he would put himself to downright inconvenience to save the useless expenditure of a dime — and boast of it. But no extravagance was ever too great, no time ever too valuable, when bass were to be caught.

  For Jadwin was a fisherman unregenerate. Laura, though an early riser when in the city, was apt to sleep late in the country, and never omitted a two-hours’ nap in the heat of the afternoon. Her husband improved these occasions when he was deprived of her society, to indulge in his pastime. Never a morning so forbidding that his lines were not in the water by five o’clock; never a sun so scorching that he was not coaxing a “strike” in the stumps and reeds in the shade under the shores.

  It was the one pleasure he could not share with his wife. Laura was unable to bear the monotony of the slow-moving boat, the hours spent without results, the enforced idleness, the cramped positions. Only occasionally could Jadwin prevail upon her to accompany him. And then what preparations! Queen Elizabeth approaching her barge was attended with no less solicitude. MacKenny (who sometimes acted as guide and oarsman) and her husband exhausted their ingenuity to make her comfortable. They held anxious debates: “Do you think she’ll like that?” “Wouldn’t this make it easier for her?” “Is that the way she liked it last time?” Jadwin himself arranged the cushions, spread the carpet over the bottom of the boat, handed her in, found her old gloves for her, baited her hook, disentangled her line, saw to it that the mineral water in the ice-box was sufficiently cold, and performed an endless series of little attentions looking to her comfort and enjoyment. It was all to no purpose, and at length Laura declared:

  “Curtis, dear, it is no use. You just sacrifice every bit of your pleasure to make me comfortable — to make me enjoy it; and I just don’t. I’m sorry, I want to share every pleasu
re with you, but I don’t like to fish, and never will. You go alone. I’m just a hindrance to you.” And though he blustered at first, Laura had her way.

  Once in the period of these three years Laura and her husband had gone abroad. But her experience in England — they did not get to the Continent — had been a disappointment to her. The museums, art galleries, and cathedrals were not of the least interest to Jadwin, and though he followed her from one to another with uncomplaining stoicism, she felt his distress, and had contrived to return home three months ahead of time.

  It was during this trip that they had bought so many of the pictures and appointments for the North Avenue house, and Laura’s disappointment over her curtailed European travels was mitigated by the anticipation of her pleasure in settling in the new home. This had not been possible immediately after their marriage. For nearly two years the great place had been given over to contractors, architects, decorators, and gardeners, and Laura and her husband had lived, while in Chicago, at a hotel, giving up the one-time rectory on Cass Street to Page and to Aunt Wess’.

  But when at last Laura entered upon possession of the North Avenue house, she was not — after the first enthusiasm and excitement over its magnificence had died down — altogether pleased with it, though she told herself the contrary. Outwardly it was all that she could desire. It fronted Lincoln Park, and from all the windows upon that side the most delightful outlooks were obtainable — green woods, open lawns, the parade ground, the Lincoln monument, dells, bushes, smooth drives, flower beds, and fountains. From the great bay window of Laura’s own sitting-room she could see far out over Lake Michigan, and watch the procession of great lake steamers, from Milwaukee, far-distant Duluth, and the Sault Sainte Marie — the famous “Soo” — defiling majestically past, making for the mouth of the river, laden to the water’s edge with whole harvests of wheat. At night, when the windows were open in the warm weather, she could hear the mournful wash and lapping of the water on the embankments.