by Gwen Bristow
“Elizabeth, are we having anybody to dinner tomorrow night?”
“No, do you want to bring in somebody?”
“Kessler. I’ve just been talking to him. He’s got an idea for clearing up this story. So don’t have anybody else around. I want to go into it with him after dinner.”
“All right, tell him tomorrow at seven-thirty. Has he got Hollywood ulcers, or can he eat anything?”
“He can eat anything, so far as I know, but remember what I told you—only one hand. Have something that won’t be too awkward.”
“Oh yes, I’m glad you reminded me. Soup to start with, and what about chicken patties? Then he won’t have to use a knife and fork at once.”
“Sounds fine to me.”
“And one thing more—has he got a wife or anything that I should call up and invite with him?”
“No wife—come to think of it, though, I did hear him mention a daughter, but I don’t know how old she is. I’ll find out if she’s grown and let you know. You’d better tell Dick to stay around and take her out of the way after dinner so Kessler and I can talk.”
“Oh dear,” exclaimed Elizabeth, “oh dear. Does the girl speak English?”
“I’ve no idea.” Spratt laughed penitently. “Tell him my heart bleeds for him, but this is the way I make a living for my family and there’s no way out.”
“You’d better start your heart bleeding for me. I’m the one who’ll have to break the news to him. All right, I’ll do my best, dinner, Dick and everything.”
“I know you will. I’ve got to go now, three people waiting for me. Thanks,” said Spratt, and hung up.
Elizabeth screwed up her face as she reached for her desk calendar to make a note of tomorrow’s dinner. She did not mind it, for she was used to entertaining Spratt’s colleagues, but she felt sorry for Dick. He could take the girl to a show, if she understood the language well enough. She ought to, Spratt had said something at lunch about Kesslers having been two or three years in this country. Elizabeth hoped Miss Kessler would at least be pretty. Flipping the leaves of the calendar, she tried to remember what the date was. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday—today was Monday, so here was the page for tomorrow, blank but for a note reminding herself of an appointment with the hairdresser. She was scribbling “Kessler to dinner 7:30,” when the date at the bottom of the page leaped up at her, and struck her and glared at her and made her start backward to put the calendar down quickly, but she could still see the date and she put her arm over her eyes as though by doing that she could shut it out of sight of her mind. October 6, 1942. Her imagination was making such a fierce effort to adjust itself that even with her eyes covered she could still see it, October 6, 1942. For though the figures did not resemble each other, there had been a fraction of a second when by some trick of the light or of her own mind it had looked like October 6, 1918.
And now all her power of will and reason was insufficient to hold her back from the shadow into which she was slipping, into which she still went down once every two or three years in spite of her full life and happy marriage, impelled each time by some trivial incident that had no connection with the pain it brought. October 6, 1942. October 6, 1918. Twenty-four years. She tried to stop it, but nothing she had learned in her lifetime could stop this darkness once it began to close around her.
2
She was remembering that day, and nothing she could do or think of could make her stop remembering. It was just about this time in the afternoon, and the autumn sun coming in by the front door glittered through the hall and fell on the yellow telegram she held in her hand, with its letters blue-black against the shining sheet of paper. “…regrets to inform you … Sergeant Arthur Kittredge … killed …”
There was no reason for this, Elizabeth was telling herself angrily. She had fought and conquered it years ago, she had rebuilt her life in the knowledge that she had conquered it, she was a perfectly rational woman and a very happy one, there was no reason why every now and then some incident of no importance should strike her down and leave her as she was now, quivering under an assault of pain. Lying on the chaise-longue, her arms crossed over her eyes and her hands pressing against her temples, she fought it with all the strength she had. But it did no good and she had known it would not. She might as well have tried to argue with an earthquake as with these rare but terrible re-livings of the days when she had been put to the torture. Every time she thought it would be the last. But a year later, or two or three years later, some occurrence too small to be otherwise noticed would stir up the fire that she had been so sure was finally out. There was no escaping it; that day came back as though it had been that day and not this that she was living in.
It was such a cool, shining day, the trees reddening, and it seemed that nearly every house in Tulsa had a flag rippling from its front porch. After spending the day rolling bandages at the Red Cross headquarters, Elizabeth came home with her knitting-bag on her arm. There was very little she could do to win the war, but if knitting sweaters and rolling miles of bandage was of any value she was glad to do it. Anything that might shorten the war by five minutes would bring Arthur back that much sooner, and for five minutes more of his presence she would give up all the years she had to spend without him. She ran up the steps, singing. It was a silly song, but everybody was singing it about that time, “I’d like to see the Kaiser with a lily in his hand.” Their little house welcomed her brightly as she ran in. She and Arthur had lived here for the year before he went to the army, and she now shared it with a girl friend who was releasing a man for war by working for the telephone company.
As she opened the door the sun fell in a long rectangle on the floor of the hall. Dropping her knitting-bag on a chair Elizabeth turned by eager habit to look at the table where the colored maid always put the mail. Arthur wrote her often, but the ships from France were not regular; sometimes she would go weeks without a letter and then get a pile of them at once. Wonderful letters he wrote, mirthful even in the blood and dirt of the trenches, telling her very little about the awfulness of the war but describing every amusing incident he had observed and only now and then changing to wistfulness when he told her how much he missed her. Only once, when she wrote to him saying the war could not be only what he told her, he answered: “Please, Elizabeth, don’t ask me to write about what I’ve seen. When I write to you I can forget for awhile that I’ve seen it. Let me keep it like that. I love you so. Haven’t you got any new pictures of yourself?” She sent the pictures, and never suggested again that he write her anything but what he wanted to.
There were no letters on the table today, nothing but the telegram. She picked it up and slit it open, wondering vaguely who could have anything to say to her important enough to be sent by wire, and then she saw that it came from the War Department. The message was mercifully brief. It merely told her that Arthur was dead. She did not know then that he had died of wounds received at Chateau-Thierry. They told her that later, in a letter from the Red Cross.
She did not understand even the little they had told her. She stood still, staring at the sheet of paper in her hand, all her instincts of self-protection rising up to prevent her understanding what it said.
(Wasn’t it enough to have lived through this once, twice, ten times? Elizabeth tried to think of something else, tried so hard that the palms of her hands were damp with the effort. But she lived through it again, helplessly.)
She folded up the telegram and put it into her purse. She picked up a vase of flowers on the table and straightened the cloth under it, looked at the picture on the cover of a magazine lying near by, brushed a speck of dust from a chair, picked up her knitting-bag and went upstairs to the bedroom she had shared with Arthur before he joined the army. The windows were open to the afternoon sun. Arthur had said, “Let’s find a house that has the bedroom on the west side. There’s no sense in inviting the sun to come in and wake us up at four or five o�
�clock all summer long. Any time we have to get up at dawn we can use an alarm clock, so why not let ourselves sleep late when we have a chance?” Elizabeth had never thought about it, but once he called her attention to it she wondered why everybody didn’t make allowance for such an obvious fact. It was odd, she had thought at first, that Arthur should be so much interested in dwellings, for he knew nothing about architecture; he was a research chemist employed by one of the oil companies. But Arthur was interested in everything. He had never been bored in his life, and never understood how anybody could be, with a perpetually fascinating world to be enjoyed and the longest lifetime too short to enjoy all of it.
Even in this ordinary little house he had arranged their room perfectly—the bookshelves within reach of the bed, the light excellently placed for reading, her dressing-table between the windows, the long mirror so she could see herself from hat to shoes when she got dressed. “You have such fine ankles,” he said to her, “imagine your having to dress in a room where you haven’t a chance to see whether or not your stockings are on straight.” He had planned everything for her. She had let him do it, without realizing that since they could not afford everything, he would get what she needed and take what was left. So she had not noticed until later that his shaving-glass did not turn properly and he had to stretch his neck to get at those hairs around the angle of his chin. She was saving part of her army allowance now to buy him a new mirror when he came back, and a better light for his writing table, though she was going to let him pick out the latter for himself. Arthur was not, thank heaven, a sentimental goose. He might have worn a hideous necktie if she had given him one, but if she should give him an inadequate gadget for his work he would not use it any longer than it took to buy a better one. So she was going to give him the money she had saved for the lamp and let him select it, as soon as he came back and got to work again.
A hundred hammers started to beat on her head. She dropped her knitting-bag in the middle of the floor and grabbed at the catch of her purse to get out that thing inside, which she seemed to remember had said what it could not possibly say. But it did say just what she recalled. It told her Arthur was dead.
Then all of a sudden she knew what had happened. The purse dropped out of her hand and fell softly on the half-made army sweater that was tumbling out of her bag. The telegram dropped with it, and a little wind from outside picked it up and began blowing it merrily around the room. Her legs went down like strips of macaroni. She caught at the nearest solid object, which happened to be the bed, and then at the nearest object on that, which happened to be a pillow, and she clamped the corner of the pillow between her teeth and heard herself making fierce choking noises down in her throat, like an animal strangling.
At first she was not thinking of anything. The world was simply full of a wild pain that had clamped on her and crushed out of her everything but consciousness of the pain itself. Then after awhile she began to recall everything she had read or heard about what those explosions did to men in battle. She wondered if it had hurt him very much. It did not seem possible that anything could have hurt him. He was never sick. He never complained of anything. Arthur was strong as an athlete. She could remember his arms around her and herself saying, “Arthur, you’re hurting me!” and when he said, “I’m sorry, dearest,” and relaxed his grip she was sorry she had spoken. None of this was possible to understand. That any man so alive could be blown out like a match, could be annihilated, could be not coming back to her—it didn’t make sense, it wasn’t true. But all the time she knew it was true, Arthur was simply not there and nothing was left but herself, muffling screams in the covers of the bed where they had slept together.
It was quite dark when her friend, Frances, knocked on the door. When Frances came in from work and the maid said she had not seen Elizabeth, Frances came up to her room. Elizabeth did not hear the knock, so Frances opened the door, saying, “Elizabeth, are you here?” and then, “Why, what’s the trouble?” She switched on the light and ran to the bed.
Elizabeth managed to say, “Please leave me alone.” Looking around in astonishment, Frances caught sight of the telegram where it had blown into a corner. She picked it up. “Oh my dear,” she gasped. “Oh my dear.” After a minute in which she could not say anything else, she asked, “Do you want me to call your aunt?”
“No!” cried Elizabeth. “Please go out. Please just let me alone.”
Frances hesitated, but being a sensible girl she only said, “You’re going to catch flu in this cold room,” and brought a blanket from the closet to throw over Elizabeth’s tense body, and went out.
Elizabeth did not call up anybody that night, not even her Aunt Grace, an omission which Aunt Grace never forgave her. For weeks afterward Aunt Grace could not think of this without exclaiming, “But I was just like a mother to the poor girl! She needed me. And just when she needed me most, she didn’t call me.” Aunt Grace loved to hover over people in distress. She could well believe that her dear niece had been grieved when she was told of her husband’s death, but she was always sure this grief would have been lessened if she herself had only been around to offer sympathy and a nice cup of tea.
She told all her friends how inconsiderately she had been treated. And after all she had done, too! Why, now it was all right to say that a previous telegram had come for Elizabeth saying Arthur was missing, and she had read it and torn it up, and hadn’t told a soul except a few of her most intimate friends, no use distressing the poor dear girl when everything might turn out to have been all right. She had found it by the merest chance, or perhaps it would be more reverent to say Providence had guided her to it, one day when she dropped in and Elizabeth was still at the Red Cross. While she was there a messenger had delivered the telegram, and since it might be bad news she just opened it herself, wanting to break it gently, but when she found it said Arthur was missing she went home and didn’t tell Elizabeth at all—now what could be kinder than that? If she had only been there to receive this second message! She would have told the dear child gradually, preparing her for the shock, and then she would have stayed with her all night, comforting her. But in spite of such affection, Elizabeth hadn’t even let her know. It was hard. Not that she meant to complain, but it was hard.
Elizabeth had no use for her aunt’s ministrations. She did not think of wanting anybody. Later, she was able to appreciate her friend’s kindness in leaving her alone. But that night she was not capable of appreciating anything but the fact that she was alone and would remain so. For the first few hours the pain stayed with her, blotting out everything except an occasional confused recollection of some minute of her life with Arthur and then closing around her again like a red-hot shell. Then, slowly, she began remembering everything about him, not merely his strength and humor and gentleness, but the tiniest details of his appearance, little unimportant words he had spoken to her, the way his eyes would catch hers across a crowded room and make her feel warm with his love. She remembered his splendid mind, the energy with which he went to work—why should the world want to destroy a man who had no purpose but to contribute to its happiness?—and more than that, his goodness, his large tolerance—“Oh Elizabeth, why get so bothered about it? Who are we to think anybody different from ourselves is wrong?”—and for herself, more even than all of these, their exquisite sense of unity. “Elizabeth, I couldn’t say this to anybody but you, but you’ll understand… .”
She had had so much with him. And yet she had had so little of it. Two years ago she had not known Arthur existed, and now she had lost him.
Her thoughts went back to the beginning. If she had only known him longer! She might have, if she had stayed in Tulsa, for Arthur had lived there several years before she met him. But her aunt and uncle had deprived her of those years by sending her away to school, though of course they had not known they were depriving her of anything and she had not known it either. She liked going to school much better than stayin
g at home with them, for even in her early childhood she had comprehended that though they had a strong sense of duty they really did not know what to do with her. After fifteen years of childless marriage they had hardly been prepared to welcome an orphaned baby left on their hands. Luckily her father’s life insurance prevented her being a financial burden. So they provided her with a competent nurse until she was old enough to go to boarding-school, and in the summers there were always camps and other supervised vacations. It had all seemed a matter of course to her until the summer after her first year at college. She was spending a few weeks with her uncle and aunt before the date of an educational trip to Canada with a group of college girls, and one day she went to swim at the country club and met Arthur.
