Bunny did not eat a mouthful of waffle, and Mary did not do much better. Florry, who was no fool—in a way—decided it had, indeed, been as she suspected. Bunny had gone home and stumbled on Mullen and there had been a row.
The evening wasn’t so bad as the supper because other people came in, and that relieved the strain somewhat and took attention from Bunny and Mary. And Kit Logan dropped in and wanted to stay overnight because her Bert had just gone to Boston and she was lonely and blue.
“Kit,” suggested Bunny, as naturally as he could, “you go home with Mary and keep her company. I’d like to spend the night at the engine house. I haven’t been there in years.”
Mary looked at him queerly, but said nothing. He did not return her look. It was a terrific load off Bunny’s mind. All evening he had been revolving what to do. To face Mary and have a scene was too degrading. Besides, to what end? Mary had broken her word. He must keep his. He had said he would quit. It was just a question of the most dignified kind of exit. There was no possibility of reconsideration or misunderstanding. It was all too ghastly clear. Once he was safely out of the way, Mary must have phoned that scoundrel. How else would he have known the coast was clear? Whenever he thought of it a lump came into Bunny’s throat and his stomach felt unsafe. And it occurred to him that if a man tried he could really cry salt tears. It was all so ugly—the chain on the door, the handkerchief at the passageway leading to the servant’s corridor. Mary must have let that man out the back entrance while he waited at the front. There was no question that the end had come. The only question was how to go about it.
And so he was vastly relieved at the simple solution which presented itself. Tomorrow, when his head was clear, he would write Mary a note. Tonight he was spared the necessity of facing Mary—of discussing the thing while he was still suffering and numb with the smart of it—of entering that house which was no longer home to him. Often in an abstract way he had wondered how he would feel and what he would do, face to face with a situation like this. Would he see red and desire to commit murder? Would he grow heroic and depart with a flourish? Would he become bitter and leave with a laugh? Well, here he was face to face with it, and he was sneaking off silently to the fire house—licked, utterly licked.
They were glad to see him at the engine house, and of course there was a bed for him. The captain was particularly cordial and insisted on having a talk with him. Bunny was in no mood for banging on the old square piano that night, so after he had talked an hour with the captain in his office he wished him a good night and withdrew into the bunk room. It was still early. A few men were already asleep in their beds. The rest were up in the dormitory playing cards or checkers or reading.
Bunny sat down on the edge of his bed in the semidarkness of the bunk room, and never in his life had he drunk so deep of bitterness. The bunk room was the ideal back drop for the play of Bunny’s thoughts. There was no light save that which glimmered through the transom from the captain’s office, and a reflection, on the big brass pole, of the light in the dormitory above. Subdued noises reached him through the opening in the ceiling—the rustle of turning paper, the slap of a palm on a table, an occasional laugh and the undercurrent of humming talk.
Bunny Brinkerhoff tried not to think. He tried to confine himself to wishing. He was wishing for a fire the way a drunkard wishes for a drink. A fire was the only thing that could keep him from realizing all the things—the uncompromising things that were clamoring for entrance into his consciousness. But fires are like any other strokes of luck—they never come when you need them. And certainly never when you sit and wait for them—But even while he was reasoning so, the joker in the bunk room began tapping out its call.
Automatically Bunny began to count. Automatically his mind registered how in the room above him the front legs of chairs came tap-tapping to the floor. You could feel the silence up there. With the first round of four taps he knew. At the next eight he was getting into his boots and pulling up his trousers, and the men, sliding down the pole, were hitting the floor from the room above. And before the final round of eight was tapped in, Bunny had dropped to the apparatus floor just as the man on watch yelled, “Four-eighty-eight. Madison Avenue and Forty-first Street. We roll!”
* * * *
He was in terrible pain. It was his face. And his shoulder. And oh! his leg. He was being lifted somewhere and they were leaving his leg behind. He opened his eyes. He had just been laid on a table. He had been in operating rooms before, so he knew where he was. A man all in white, even to a white covering over the lower part of his face, stood at his head and slipped something over Bunny’s face and told him to breathe quietly and deeply. He tried to do so and a sweetish smell went dizzyingly up into the cavities of his head, causing them to swell. Also he had a sensation of suffocation.
He became conscious of another man all in white, and a nurse. They did not seem to be paying any attention to him. The thing on his face was keeping the air from getting into his lungs. So he reached up to take it away. But somebody held his hands. He began to fight. Two of them held him down. Then suddenly the desire to fight left him, and it became a little easier for him to breathe. He closed his eyes. Somebody lifted up his arm and let it drop, and he realized in a sudden flash of what seemed like superhuman vision that they thought he was unconscious and they were going to cut his leg off. But he wasn’t.
But he was.
The next time he opened his eyes he was in another room, a small room, and he was feeling sick. His lips were terribly parched and his face hurt him. Also his leg. He wanted to know what was the matter but he was too tired to bother. And too sick. He wanted Mary…
Again he wanted Mary. And a drink of water. A nurse wet his lips and gave him some ice to chew, after which, with sickening and increasing waves of pain—waves which rolled into his consciousness with the relentlessness of a tide—it all came back to him. He had left Mary—forever. And the fire had been a bad one. His company had been the first to stretch in. And he had been one of the first men in. If his mind had not been so upset about Mary he would not, when they sent him back, have acted like such an amateur. No real fireman would have failed to follow the line of hose. But he had not been himself. He had plunged back through the smoke and suddenly stepped off into space.
It grew clearer and clearer to him. An unguarded stair well or an air shaft. And his leg—no, they had not cut it off. It was still there. In plaster, it seemed. Broken no doubt. Probably a bad break or they would not have given him an anesthetic. And his shoulder hurt when he moved it. And his face was bandaged; maybe bruised or scorched. Lucky to have come off so well. He had paid his last honors to many a man who had stepped off into an air shaft.
A broken leg and bruises. Long-winded, perhaps, but not irreparable. But Mary, ah, that was graver! He wished suddenly, passionately, that when he had stepped off into space he had made a thorough job of it and stepped off into eternity.
And then a wonderful thing happened. A great happiness stole over him until it almost suffocated him. He lay perfectly still and simply let it soak in, although it was hard to be absolutely still. His heart seemed to be making his chest bump up and down—up and down.
Mary’s voice. Mary had come. She was there—in the room! Of course she was. She did not know that he had left her forever. A weak, foolish joy seized him, and he felt a guilty satisfaction as if he had cheated the devil. Mary did not know. And she need not know—yet.
But still, he must not open his eyes, because if he did he would have to smile at her and she would see how foolishly glad he was to have her there, how foolishly mad he was about her, in spite of everything. And that would make it so much more complicated afterwards—when he came to write that letter. But if he just lay there quietly—and drank in her presence. He was shamelessly without pride, although his pride was not really involved. He had threatened to do a certain thing and he meant to do it. But in the meanwhile�
�In the meanwhile, he fell asleep.
He grew conscious, then, of another voice which mingled with Mary’s. He wondered what time it was, and when Florry had come. They were talking very softly and he could not catch more than the mere hum of their voices. But after a while either his ears grew more accustomed to the sound, or they raised their voices, for he began to be able to distinguish what they said. The trouble seemed to be in his own head. When he kept that clear—“It’s terrible!” Florry was wailing. “Simply terrible!”
A fear shot through Bunny. Terrible?
But no. “Oh, no”—Mary’s voice was smooth and velvety and soothing—“it’s not terrible. But it might have been. He’ll be up and around soon, and not a bit the worse for it. One can be a good sport about a husband with a broken leg when one’s been as frightened as—Florry!” There was a catch in her lovely voice. “If you only knew how frightened I was!” Bless her heart!
“Don’t I know?” retorted Florry. “It makes me feel faint just to think about it! Why, I thought he was k—”
“I know,” Mary interrupted quickly. “That’s why I’m so thankful it’s only this. Although it will be hard on him to be laid up.”
“Well, it’s hard on you too. And maybe this will be a lesson to him. In a way it serves him right.”
“Don’t, Florry! I won’t let anybody say that anything serves Bunny right. My Bunny is God’s own lamb. And if he has any faults at all they’re more precious to me than anybody else’s virtues and I’m glad he has them. It makes things more even.”
A lovely little warmth suffused itself dreamily around the region of Bunny’s heart.
“Of course Bunny is sweet. But I think you ought to put your foot down on this fire business. It’s so unnecessary. And he has no right to risk his neck every time some dirty old tenement catches fire. He ought to think more of you.”
“Florry,” said Mary, “if Bunny thought any more of me I couldn’t support the weight of it. Even if I try I can’t keep thinking of him all the time. Not all the time. There are lots of times when I don’t want to think of anybody but myself.”
“That’s very selfish of you, Mary. When people get married they ought—”
“Oh, if you only knew how I hate that word! Just as soon as I think I ought to do something there isn’t a nerve in my body that doesn’t rise up and shriek against it. Here’s my only philosophy of life. If there’s something he wants to do and I don’t want him to do it, and his wanting to means more to him than my don’t wanting him to means to me, then I ought to give in and be a good sport about it. But if it means more to me than to him, he ought to be a good sport and give it up. Going to fires is just part of Bunny, the same as liking a lot of men around is part of me, I guess. And for four years Bunny grinned and bore it, because he knew it was part of me—even if it wasn’t exactly admirable. But when it began to hurt him more than it pleased me—well, I had to cut it out. At least I tried.” She sighed. “I kind of wish I hadn’t promised, though. I sometimes feel that if I don’t break out in little places I’ll break out all over and do something terrible from sheer accumulation of devil.”
“Mary, how can you even think of those things! With a husband like Bunny!”
“Oh, well, it’s just something inside of me that starts to ferment, husband or no husband. I think I’ll explain it to Bunny when he’s all better. He’s awfully understanding. And maybe he won’t mind my playing golf with some of the boys again. I like playing with men so much better than with women—don’t you?”
“No. Decidedly not. And you ought to be glad to have women for your friends.”
“I am. But not exclusively. I just naturally like men better. They’re better friends. Oh, I don’t mean good friends like you and Kit. But in general don’t you think we women are awfully unscrupulous?”
“I don’t like to hear you talk that way,” replied Florry. “I think we women ought to stick together.”
“I suppose we ought,” agreed Mary, “but it’s a terrible bore. It’s so much easier sticking together with men. I was brought up with two brothers, you know, and I never did meet a woman who was one-two-three to my Bunny.”
This in the teeth of the old proverb about listeners. “By the way,” inquired Florry, “was Mack Mullen up to see you yesterday?”
Bunny could almost feel Mary’s eyes boring through his lids. And her voice and his heart dropped as she answered: “Yes. He’d been writing and phoning me for two weeks, begging for a chance to say goodbye, because he’s going away for good; has gone away, in fact, by now. But you know I gave Bunny my word I wouldn’t, so I didn’t. Although it made me feel awful to think I was refusing to say goodbye to him when I’m the only friend he has in the world.”
“He doesn’t deserve any. He’s a trouble maker and—”
“I know. But I guess even trouble makers need friends once in a while. Anyway, when Bunny went to the fire yesterday, and I realized it was my last chance to do that little thing for Mack and it might make all the difference in the world to him—well, I couldn’t resist doing it. So I phoned him and he came right up.”
“You phoned him—after promising Bunny?”
“Yes,” admitted Mary; “I thought it all over and then I just followed my impulse and called him. It couldn’t possibly do Bunny a bit of harm and it might do Mack a lot of good. Maybe the fact that he found me among his enemies will make it easier for him to believe, someday, that the world isn’t all against him. And I reckoned that the good I could do him was so much bigger than any harm that I could do Bunny, that I let him come. Only I wouldn’t want Bunny to find out.”
“Mary,” announced Florry, “you deserve to be spanked. Haven’t you any sense of honor?”
“No,” replied Mary, “I don’t suppose I have. They’re a sort of impediment, and you don’t really need one if you stop and reason things out.”
“Mary, I don’t understand you. How could you dare to let that firebrand in your house? Why, he might have—he might have—why, there’s no telling what he mightn’t have done to you—alone in that house.”
“But he didn’t,” said Mary Mary. “And so you see it was all right. I’ve made him happier and myself happier and nobody any unhappier. I consider it a fair deal. Men never do anything awful to me—well, at least not very awful.”
There was a commotion then on the other side of the room. And he heard something being pushed through the doorway. Bunny Brinkerhoff was a brave man, but a little wave of fear swept over him. He opened his eyes.
Nobody noticed him. They were all regarding the object which was being wheeled in. It was a stretcher.
“You’re sure,” Florry was asking anxiously, “that it’s quite all right to move him?”
And Bunny, surmising that she did not think it quite all right, decided on the spot that it was. Only he wondered where and why—shutting his eyes again, because you seemed to acquire so much more information that way.
“Miss Merley,” a strange voice was saying, “will be right here with his card. She had to get it signed before you can take him home.”
Home? Home? Now was the time for Bunny Brinkerhoff to assert himself. He could not let them take him home. Of course he wanted to go. Being ill in a hospital would be a long, dreary affair. And home would be—well, it would be home. And Mary did not know he knew about Mullen—need never know that he knew. He was convinced there had been nothing between that man and her. And she had shown her true value so clearly while that miserable pill, Florry, had been saying what she wouldn’t stand for. What she wouldn’t stand for, forsooth! There was nobody in the world like Mary. Her faults were so much more palatable than Florry’s virtues.
But, on the other hand, there was his honor. He had made an ultimatum, and Mary had ignored it. He paid the rent of that house. Surely he had the right to decide who might not come into it. And he had exercised that right only on
ce—once in four years. And she had not respected his wish nor her promise. Her sacred promise. The woman was not to be trusted. That was what hurt. She really had no sense of honor. She ought to be made to realize the seriousness of broken promises. If love could not control her, nor fear, nor honor—what would? What would he be going back to? What did the future hold for him, married to a woman whom he could not trust? And how could he trust her when she had such a weakness and would never make a serious, sustained effort to conquer it? How could he come into his home at night, now that he knew a man had once made such an exit through the servants’ door? How could he ever believe a word she said, knowing she held her given word so lightly?
There was another commotion at the door and the thing was being wheeled to his bedside. Now was the time. If he did not open his mouth now—Bunny opened his eyes. Mary was smiling down at him. All of Bunny Brinkerhoff came up into his eyes and answered her smile. Two men in white lifted him to a stretcher. When they raised him it hurt his shoulder terribly. He had to bite his lip to keep from crying out. That was what made it impossible for him to open his mouth.
And so, of course, it was too late. And Mary was sitting at his head in the ambulance, and Mary’s fingers were twined in his and Mary was taking him home. He closed his eyes in utter happiness. Home, with Mary. What did anything else matter? Honor—and pride—were they not, after all, a sort of vanity? Would they ever bring him the joy, the happiness, the meaningfulness of one hour with Mary? Mary who could make him laugh. Mary who could make him smile. Mary who could make him feel like this. Mary whose dishonesties seemed suddenly more honorable than other women’s honesties. Mary who, whatever her faults, was his Mary, his to love and protect, his to pet and adore and come home to, his to help to learn the hard word “no.”
The Viola Brothers Shore Mystery Page 16
