by Fannie Hurst
Walter was frightened. She could feel him tremble. Walter needed to be bolstered.
“What this amounts to, Ray, is out-and-out international banking. If I go over there, I’m mixing myself up with the history of two small kingdoms. Pretty small ones, but nations on their own. Now, rather than tackle a thing like this if I don’t feel up to it in experience, now is the time for me to come out like a man and say, ‘Look here, Uncle Felix, this is all very fine, but I’m not ready!’ ”
(Yes. Yes. Yes. Stay with me, Walter. Don’t outgrow me. Stay with me.) He was frightened of his life. She would have given everything to be able to reach out her hand and say to him: “Stay back with me, Walter. You will fail. In this snug, sure little nest of our enormous compatibility, be content.”
But Walter would not fail. He would succeed in the way the slow, the plodding, the bitterly tenacious, and the unbrilliant can succeed. Properly guided, always properly guided with the well-established pattern of procedure of the house of Friedlander-Kunz within eye-and-mind grasp, he would succeed.
“You will succeed, Walter.” (One did not add: “Properly guided, you will plod to achievement. But it will be your grim desire, rather than your talent, that will succeed.”) “You will succeed, Walter.”
He caught her wrists.
“Does it seem that way to you, Ray? Sometimes it seems to me you know me better than myself.”
“I know you will succeed.”
“To hear you say that is worth everything.”
“You need not worry about your lack of experience. You are the one to make use of the experience of others.…”
“What do you mean by that?” he asked, a quick cloud chasing the satisfaction across his face.
“Why, darling, that you will climb higher on the underpinnings that others have already erected.” (Neither did she add: “Because you are emulator, not creator.”)
“I know how long my arm is. I will not try to stretch beyond its reach.”
Exactly! Said better than she could have, even had she dared.
“Never make a move, on your way up, Walter, anyway until you get the knack of walking in a high place, without consulting someone who is wiser than you are. You’ll get that knack, Walter. This is a high place compared to the old days, and see how gradually you have been climbing up the mountain almost without knowing it. Watch the other men who have succeeded before you, in your kind of work. Watch. Take their advice up to the point where you believe in it, and from there on use your brain as if you had two of them. One for and one against. May the best of your two brains win.”
“I think you will have to be my other brain, Ray.”
“You’ll succeed, Walter.”
He had never been so tender with her. Stamina revived in him, until he became cocksure, pretentious, and more than ever the small boy.
“I love you, Ray. Don’t know what I’d do without you. You give me nerve. You give me confidence. I’ll show them. I’ve never really let off steam. Ever observe that about me, Ray? I’m the sort who goes slowly until the right moment, and then bingo!”
(Who goes slowly until the right moment! What about the Guaranty Trust case? It was like holding back horses to keep him from plunging into what would have been that terrible mistake. Oh, Walter!) Of course, though, one said nothing of the sort.
“You saw the way I handled the Guaranty case. Another temperament would have snapped up the first offer and made the mistake of his young life. Did I? Not me!”
(How she had prevailed and even forced upon him the policy of watchful waiting! Had caused him, in fact, to reverse, by wire, an important decision of impulse.)
“I’m going to be a force in the banking world, Ray. Governments will have to reckon with me. Why, if you look at it in a certain way, an entire little principality depends on the way my mind works in the next few weeks. That’s the way my wife’s uncle put it. ‘Handle this thing your own way, my boy.’ I’ve a level head, Ray, if I do say so myself, and I know how to keep it square on my shoulders.” (Her phrase, this last.)
“Corinne, now, doesn’t quite understand. She’s all impulse, ambitious for the children, ambitious for me, for the home, and naturally she only sees the immediate result. That’s what I love in you, Ray. Your level head. Sometimes, after I’ve talked with you and got my bearings, I see myself as I am. Now, take today; came here scared out of my wits, admit it, but feel now as if I could go over there across the Atlantic and make terms with high government moguls as if I were one of them myself. Kiss me, Ray. I love you.”
“Oh, my dear. Oh, my dear, dear!” she said. “How terrible never to be able to find words to tell you how much I love you.”
“Darling, what can there be sinful in loving you as much as I do, so long as no one else is really hurt by it?”
How they salved and salved themselves on this philosophy which she had concocted for them out of his and her darts of spiritual neuralgia.
“That is my credo. To live so as to hurt no one else. Otherwise all is fair.” (Her phrase.) “I could stay here,” he said, in the drugged way he had of talking when his creature-satisfaction was soon to demand completion in her arms, “and let life and international banking and success flow past me like so much water.”
She knew that he could not; but thinking of the brownstone house on Lexington Avenue, with its two nurses in uniform, and the three carriages and phaeton, and the implacable stone front to the banking house, and the way his name stood already in tiny type in the extreme northeast corner of the letterhead stationery of Friedlander-Kunz, the miracle of having him there all to herself smote her simultaneously with both fear and ecstasy.
He would be going away, sailing away. The days would be each an empty dice-box out of which every cube of meaning had fallen. Days and days—her lips would not frame the words to ask how many of them; and, as was often the case between them, which invariably they fondly noted, he replied to her unspoken question.
“I know what is on your mind, dearest. It won’t be long. I’ll be back by the end of August.”
This was only May! Even his short trips had been almost unbearable; and now this! She felt her lips twisting and hid them against his coat.
“If only it were possible to take you with me.”
He was thinking that there would be Corinne, too, to please. And, strangely, it smote him that leaving his small tender young fowl of a wife would be a deep pang all its own. Two women from whom it would not be easy to be away. There was a prank of circumstance for you! Caring for two such different women in two such different ways. As if life were not already sufficiently complex. Corinne would cry and hang about his neck with those tender arms of hers that felt almost as if the soft flesh were stuffed with a loose mash of farina instead of bone and sinew. They were as relaxed-feeling, those arms, as the paws of a very young puppy. They gave you somehow the feeling of wanting to pinch them. Yes, Corinne would cry. Her Uncle Felix had at first suggested that she accompany him, and then had seemed to reconsider it on the basis of the brevity of the trip. Another time. It would have been pleasant having Corinne along. Corinne would be all right to have along, but Ray, now, would be a godsend! What joy she would take in making everything easier.…
“The time will fly, sweetheart, and next trip you shall come along.”
She sat with her hands loose and dead-looking in her lap.
“Yes, of course.”
“I want you to do some reading up for me while I’m away. Spend lots of time at the library, the way you did for me on the history of banking in Georgia, that time we were negotiating for the state loan. That will fill your time.”
“Yes, of course.”
“You won’t get into mischief, my sweet?”
The question was rhetorical, and absurd, and he knew it and she knew it; and they laughed and came together in their constantly recurring embrace. Mischief! Mischief, when it was difficult for her even so much as to put foot into a world that flowed on the outside of their p
rivate happiness. Mischief! The mischief of counting the days. Dear, dear heart. Dear, dear darling. She was embarrassed at the rush of these terms of endearment to her lips, and half the time she restrained them. It was just enough to lie there and cry inwardly at what was about to befall her, and soak in the sweet moments that were at hand.
He continued to be so tender to her that night, that a sudden fear smote her that persons might intuitively act like that before a catastrophe or a death that was imminent. Walter’s death, or hers! That was nonsense. His talk was of a future, which, if she was not to share publicly, she was at least to help create.
All night she lay in his arms, and the tide of their ecstasies rose to its peak and receded, leaving them bathed in something stranger and sweeter than peace. When dawn broke, it was he who lay in her arms, the small boy—asleep.
25
That was the year, coming on the heels of President Roosevelt’s great journey through the States, which saw the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War, the opening of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis, rainy-day skirts, the Baltimore fire, Fletcherism, lingerie shirtwaists, cigarette coupons, the ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty, and Phoebe Snow.
Into the torrid summer months of that year Ray was to cram mental torment of a variety which, she always averred, but laughingly, endowed her with her first gray hair. Walter, too, always regarded this statement as a joke, when she related, only in part, some of her travail during the period of his absence abroad. But deep down inside her Ray knew how relentlessly she had aged during those lean waiting-months. The gray hairs were dyed out, but the scars were not dyed out. There were little pools of old terror deep in her heart which were never quite to dry.
It all happened so needlessly. The contemplated trip to France, to confer with a small group of petty plenipotentiaries, took form so rapidly that there was scarcely time to collect one’s wits. At the last moment, a circumstance so devastating to Ray that she was scarcely able to bear it, Corinne did, after all, accompany her husband, causing a confusion, a hurry of events, that precipitated the period of time they had put apart for farewells into a series of jumbled telephone calls.
Practically before she realized it, certainly before she had time to pull herself together for the ordeal, Walter and Corinne, two children, and a nurse were aboard the steamship, bound for France.
It was in a soggy world of rain-soaked unseasonable wind, uddery clouds swollen with the threat of more rain, that Ray found herself sitting that morning when her clock told her the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was just swinging from dock.
At nine o’clock Walter had telephoned her for the last time—contrite bothered messages, filled with obviously restrained endearments and necessarily cryptic explanations of his inability to come to her the evening previous. Their last evening. Their planned evening. No possible time. Sudden change in plans. Felix-Arnold Friedlander’s last-minute decision that Corinne and children go too. All muddled. Out of the question to inconspicuously get away from the house. Dear, be patient. Not for long. Keep out of mischief. Get on with the china painting. Read books on banking. Best girl ever. Take care of self. Won’t write. Conspicuous. Don’t you write either. But thoughts always with you. See you again before you can say Jack Robinson. Wish me luck—Sweet!
He was gone. Step-by-step, sitting there in the rain-soaked morning behind the elaborate paraphernalia of her lace curtains, Ray visualized the procedure. Trunks. Bags. Passports. Carriage waiting at the curb to be stacked with luggage. Corinne in veils. Children. Did Corinne know that for ocean voyages young children should be fortified with extra-heavy clothing? There would be the business of choosing steamer-chairs on the sunny side of the boat; and did Corinne realize that Walter must not be permitted to indulge too heavily in the wide variety of exotic foods for which the steamship line was famous?
To Ray, who had never been on an ocean liner, it was all, nevertheless, so clear. The newspapers were forever describing the arrivals and departures of notables. Many of the men with whom she used to go about had been importers. There would be messages and flowers and gifts at the boat. There stood her own little tissue-paper-wrapped package on the mantelpiece. A pair of handpainted lotion-bottles and a new pair of handpainted porcelain cuff links. But even had it been possible to deliver them, it would not have been feasible. Caution. Caution. One misstep and one trembled to think. For every precaution of Walter’s, she had two in its place. It was better to accept the heartbreaking edict of no correspondence between them—he had shown her how to watch the newspapers for the arrivals and departures of ships. As Walter had assured her in one of those last stolen messages over the telephone, of course it would be possible to have letters from her sent to a secret address, but the unforeseen was so apt to happen. Letters during periods of travel were uncertain quantities. Never tell where or under what circumstances a forwarded letter might overtake. Best to eliminate correspondence altogether, as they invariably did upon his shorter trips. A letter from him to her might tempt her to write. Oh, it was better so. Everything was better so. The days would pass. The weeks would pass. The months …
It was a full week after the departure, with its reaction into all the moods against which she had tried to so strongly fortify herself, that her strange predicament first dawned upon her.
Walter had left her with no thought and no talk of money. At the time of his sailing, what with the slight additions of the china-painting income, there was about thirty-five dollars in the house. It was only when this little bankroll of notes began to dwindle that the situation dawned suddenly upon her. Walter, although there had been plenty of time for it their last evenings together, had left without provision for her. In the hurry of departure, and then the omission of that last evening which they had planned, the matter had slipped his mind. Of course he would write or wire her funds. If only he remembered. He was such a child in so many things. The prospect of her little dilemma developing into an acute situation was simply beyond the thinking. But just the same, she broke briskly into one of her ten-dollar bills for a good supply of china for painting.
“Funny feeling,” was the way in which she described those first days of her realization of her state of funds. Gave you a funny feeling to have a little thing like this happen to you. Of course, Walter would remember and find some way to wire her money, but that could not possibly be within the next ten days; and what would Mr. Kinley, the agent, think on Thursday, when he came as usual for the rent and the cup of coffee and slice of cake which she always offered him on his monthly rounds. Not that he would mind, for the first time in all these years, being postponed for a few days, but just the same—gave one a funny feeling.
Thirty days later, with the sensation that a steel band was tightening her heart, Ray asked Mr. Kinley for a second postponement, which was still taken with a certain good-humor, but of a sort that seemed to chill that warm day to its core. Neither did he rest for his cup of coffee and slice of raisin-bun, which she baked to what Walter called perfection.
Then and there the summer began in earnest its nightmare. Horribly, as everything consistently seemed to have to be those days, Saperlee, to whom somehow she felt she might have turned in this extremity, had closed her flat, and with much of its trappings departed for Saratoga Springs, where she maintained a “summer flat” adjoining one of the popular hotels. Most of the girls, for that matter, were scattered for the heated months. Hattie, rigidly subject to the whims of her friend from Buffalo, remained on, but it had long since been apparent to Ray that much of Hattie’s bravado front was pretense. Ray suspected that secretly she indulged in an abominable, yet somehow pathetic, practice of sharing her excess in funds with a pale, pimply youth who came with frequency to the flat. But the fact remained that with the words jamming on the end of her tongue Ray could not quite bring herself to ask a loan from Hattie.
As luck would have it too, the little group of her china-customers, dissipated by summer, were not within reach. Even her teacher
, an enormous Spanish woman who had finally been asked to vacate her apartment because of her insistence to share it with six cats, had migrated to Thousand Islands, where she accepted summer pupils. It was as if suddenly Ray found herself in the midst of an appalling plateau of a summer, so alone that the days seemed motionless and devoid of population, frightening too, as she found herself actually confronted with the incredible exigency of need.
If anyone had told Ray Schmidt, the tony Ray Schmidt of Cincinnati, that on a certain day in July, along about the turn of the century, she would be seated in her overstuffed, ornament-jammed flat, confronted with the actual problem of where the next meal was coming from, she would have repudiated the prophecy as fantastic. Yet there she sat in the midst of a summer’s day that was as hot to the face as a going stove, experiencing hunger pangs for a luncheon that she had not the wherewithal to provide.
Curious that in these days of passionate waiting and hoping, she “had not the heart,” as she put it to herself, to cast about for ways and means. She, the Ray Schmidt to whom many a businessman had declared that he “took off his hat” when it came to up and getting, simply sat there in the midst of her torrid misery and imagined that each step in the hallway was the step of a messenger, or that presently that horrid old silent crow of a telephone must ring and convey news to her. Must. Must. Must. There burned in her no sense of shame about thus sitting around. There should have, she reasoned to herself; but where Walter was concerned, none of one’s ordinary yardsticks for measuring behavior applied. Not one. She was a different person; she was her obsessed self. Between them there existed neither right nor wrong. Only the oneness. That sense of intimacy with him that transcended one’s intimacy with one’s self. The way in which he could read the thoughts off her brain almost before they were formed into her own consciousness.… No shame between them. No pride.…
