“That won’t make me mad. I wouldn’t have come over here anyway if it wasn’t for you.”
“Just all selfsacrifice, aren’t you?”
“Let’s not squabble, Annabelle.”
The last days in Paris Ward began to like it. They heard La Bohème at the opera and were both very much excited about it. Afterwards they went to a café and had some cold partridge and wine and Ward told Annabelle about how he’d wanted to be a songwriter and about Marie O’Higgins and how he’d started to compose a song about her and they felt very fond of each other. He kissed her again and again in the cab going home and the elevator going up to their room seemed terribly slow.
They still had a thousand dollars on the letter of credit Dr. Strang had given them as a wedding present, so that Annabelle bought all sorts of clothes and hats and perfumes and Ward went to an English tailor near the Church of the Madeleine and had four suits made. The last day Ward bought her a brooch in the shape of a rooster, made of Limoges enamel and set with garnets, out of his salary from The Paris Herald. Eating lunch after their baggage had gone to the boat train they felt very tender about Paris and each other and the brooch. They sailed from Havre on the Touraine and had a completely calm passage, a gray glassy swell all the way, although the month was February. Ward wasn’t seasick. He walked round and round the firstclass every morning before Annabelle got up. He wore a Scotch tweed cap and a Scotch tweed overcoat to match, with a pair of fieldglasses slung over his shoulder, and tried to puzzle out some plan for the future. Wilmington anyway was far behind like a ship hull down on the horizon.
The steamer with tugboats chugging at its sides nosed its way through the barges and tugs and carferries and red whistling ferryboats of New York harbor against a howling icybright northwest wind.
Annabelle was grouchy and said it looked horrid, but Ward felt himself full of enthusiasm when a Jewish gentleman in a checked cap pointed out the Battery, the Custom House, the Aquarium and Trinity Church.
They drove right from the dock to the ferry and ate in the red-carpeted diningroom at the Pennsylvania Station in Jersey City. Ward had fried oysters. The friendly darkey waiter in a white coat was like home. “Home to God’s country,” Ward said, and decided he’d have to go down to Wilmington and say hello to the folks. Annabelle laughed at him and they sat stiffly in the parlorcar of the Philadelphia train without speaking.
Dr. Strang’s affairs were in very bad shape and, as he was busy all day with his practice, Annabelle took them over completely. Her skill in handling finance surprised both Ward and her father. They lived in Dr. Strang’s big old house on Spruce Street. Ward, through a friend of Dr. Strang’s, got a job on The Public Ledger and was rarely home. When he had any spare time he listened to lectures on economics and business at the Drexel Institute. Evenings Annabelle took to going out with a young architect named Joachim Beale who was very rich and owned an automobile. Beale was a thin young man with a taste for majolica and Bourbon whisky and he called Annabelle “my Cleopatra.”
Ward come in one night and found them both drunk sitting with very few clothes on in Annabelle’s den in the top of the house. Dr. Strang had gone to a medical conference in Kansas City. Ward stood in the doorway with his arms folded and announced that he was through and would sue for divorce and left the house slamming the door behind him and went to the Y.M.C.A. for the night. Next afternoon when he got to the office he found a special delivery letter from Annabelle begging him to be careful what he did as any publicity would be disastrous to her father’s practice, and offering to do anything he suggested. He immediately answered it:
DEAR ANNABELLE:
I now realize that you have intended all along to use me only as a screen for your disgraceful and unwomanly conduct. I now understand why you prefer the company of foreigners, bohemians and such to that of ambitious young Americans.
I have no desire to cause you or your father any pain or publicity, but in the first place you must refrain from degrading the name of Moorehouse while you still legally bear it and also I shall feel that when the divorce is satisfactorily arranged I shall be entitled to some compensation for the loss of time, etc., and the injury to my career that has come through your fault. I am leaving tomorrow for Pittsburgh where I have a position awaiting me and work that I hope will cause me to forget you and the great pain your faithlessness has caused me.
He wondered for a while how to end the letter, and finally wrote
sincerely JWM
and mailed it.
He lay awake all night in the upper berth in the sleeper for Pittsburgh. Here he was twentythree years old and he hadn’t a college degree and he didn’t know any trade and he’d given up the hope of being a songwriter. God damn it, he’d never be valet to any society dame again. The sleeper was stuffy, the pillow kept getting in a knot under his ear, snatches of the sales talk for Bancroft’s or Bryant’s histories, .. “Through peachorchards to the sea…” Mr. Hillyard’s voice addressing the jury from the depths of the realestate office in Wilmington: “Realestate, sir, is the one safe sure steady conservative investment, impervious to loss by flood and fire; the owner of realestate links himself by indissoluble bonds to the growth of his city or nation… improve or not at his leisure and convenience and sit at home in quiet and assurance letting the riches drop in to his lap that are produced by the unavoidable and inalienable growth in wealth of a mighty nation…” “For a young man with proper connections and if I may say so pleasing manners and a sound classical education,” Mr. Oppenheimer had said, “banking should offer a valuable field for the cultivation of the virtues of energy, diplomacy and perhaps industry….” A hand was tugging at his bedclothes.
“Pittsburgh, sah, in fortyfive minutes,” came the colored porter’s voice. Ward pulled on his trousers, noticed with dismay that they were losing their crease, dropped from the berth, stuck his feet in his shoes that were sticky from being hastily polished with inferior polish, and stumbled along the aisle past dishevelled people emerging from their bunks, to the men’s washroom. His eyes were glued together and he wanted a bath. The car was unbearably stuffy and the washroom smelt of underwear and of other men’s shaving soap. Through the window he could see black hills powdered with snow, an occasional coaltipple, rows of gray shacks all alike, a riverbed scarred with minedumps and slagheaps, purple lacing of trees along the hill’s edge cut sharp against a red sun; then against the hill, bright and red as the sun, a blob of flame from a smelter. Ward shaved, cleaned his teeth, washed his face and neck as best he could, parted his hair. His jaw and cheekbones were getting a square look that he admired. “Cleancut young executive,” he said to himself as he fastened his collar and tied his necktie. It was Annabelle had taught him the trick of wearing a necktie the same color as his eyes. As he thought of her name a faint tactile memory of her lips troubled him, of the musky perfume she used. He brushed the thought aside, started to whistle, stopped for fear the other men dressing might think it peculiar and went and stood on the platform. The sun was well up now, the hills were pink and black and the hollows blue where the smoke of breakfastfires collected. Everything was shacks in rows, ironworks, coaltipples. Now and then a hill threw a row of shacks or a group of furnaces up against the sky. Stragglings of darkfaced men in dark clothes stood in the slush at the crossings. Coalgrimed walls shut out the sky. The train passed through tunnels under crisscrossed bridges, through deep cuttings. “Pittsburgh Union Station,” yelled the porter. Ward put a quarter into the colored man’s hand, picked out his bag from a lot of other bags, and walked with a brisk firm step down the platform, breathing deep the cold coalsmoky air of the trainshed.