“Oh, dear.” There it was — all the responsibilities and worries always closed in on Nona! But this one, after all, was relatively bearable.
“What can I do, Stan? I can’t imagine why you come to ME!”
He smiled a little, in his queer derisive way. “Doesn’t everybody? The fact is — I didn’t want to bother Jim.”
She was silent. She understood; but she resented his knowing that she understood.
“Jim has got to be bothered. He’s got to look after his father.”
“Yes; but I— Oh, look here, Nona; won’t you see?”
“See what?”
“Why — that if Jim is worried about his father now — Jim’s a queer chap; he’s tried his hand at fifty things, and never stuck to one; and if he gets a shock now, on top of everything else — ”
Nona felt her lips grow hard: all her pride and tenderness for her brother stiffened into ice about her heart.
“I don’t know what you mean. Jim’s grown up — he’s got to face things.”
“Yes; I know. I’ve been told the same thing about myself. But there are things one doesn’t ever have a chance to face in this slippery sliding modern world, because they don’t come out into the open. They just lurk and peep and mouth. My case exactly. What on earth is there about Aggie that a fellow can FACE?”
Nona stopped short with a jerk. “We don’t happen to be talking about you and Aggie,” she said.
“Oh, well; I was merely using myself as an example. But there are plenty of others to choose from.”
Her voice broke into anger. “I don’t imagine you’re comparing your married life to Jim’s?”
“Lord, no. God forbid!” He burst into a dry laugh. “When I think of Aggie’s life and Lita’s —!”
“Never mind about Lita’s life. What do you know about it, anyhow? Oh, Stan, why are we quarrelling again?” She felt the tears in her throat. “What you wanted was only to tell me about poor Arthur. And I’d guessed that myself — I know something ought to be done. But WHAT? How on earth can I tell? I’m always being asked by everybody what ought to be done . . . and sometimes I feel too young to be always the one to judge, to decide. . .”
Heuston stood watching her in silence. Suddenly he took her hand and drew it through his arm. She did not resist, and thus linked they walked on slowly and without further speech through the cold deserted streets. As they approached more populous regions she freed her arm from his, and signalled to a taxi.
“May I come?”
“No. I’m going to meet Lita at the Cubist Cabaret. I promised to be there by four.”
“Oh, all right.” He looked at her irresolutely as the taxi drew up. “I wish to God I could always be on hand to help you when you’re bothered!”
She shook her head.
“Never?”
“Not while Aggie — ”
“That means never.”
“Then never.” She held out her hand, but he had turned and was already striding off in the opposite direction. She threw the address to the chauffeur and got in.
“Yes; I suppose it IS never,” she said to herself. After all, instead of helping her with the Wyant problem, Stan had only brought her another: his own — and hers. As long as Aggie Heuston, a sort of lay nun, absorbed in High Church practices and the exercise of a bleak but efficient philanthropy, continued to set her face against divorce, Nona would not admit that Heuston had any right to force it upon her. “It’s her way of loving him,” the girl said to herself for the hundredth time. “She wants to keep him for herself too — though she doesn’t know it; but she does above all want to save him. And she thinks that’s the way to do it. I rather admire her for thinking that there IS a way to save people. . .” She pushed that problem once more into the back of her mind, and turned her thoughts toward the other and far more pressing one: that of poor Arthur Wyant’s growing infirmity. Stanley was probably right in not wanting to speak to Jim about it at that particular moment — though how did Stanley know about Jim’s troubles, and what did he know? — and she herself, after all, was perhaps the only person to deal with Arthur Wyant. Another interval of anxious consideration made her decide that the best way would be to seek her father’s advice. After an hour’s dancing she would feel better, more alive and competent, and there would still be time to dash down to Manford’s office, the only place — as she knew by experience — where Manford was ever likely to have time for her.
V
The door of his private office clicked on a withdrawing client, and Dexter Manford, giving his vigorous shoulders a shake, rose from his desk and stood irresolute.
“I must get out to Cedarledge for some golf on Saturday,” he thought. He lived among people who regarded golf as a universal panacea, and in a world which believed in panaceas.
As he stood there, his glance lit on the looking-glass above the mantel and he mustered his image impatiently. Queer thing, for a man of his age to gape at himself in a looking-glass like a dago dancing-master! He saw a swarthy straight-nosed face, dark crinkling hair with a dash of gray on the temples, dark eyes under brows that were beginning to beetle across a deep vertical cleft. Complexion turning from ruddy to sallow; eyes heavy — would he put his tongue out next? The matter with him was. . .
He dropped back into his desk-chair and unhooked the telephone receiver.
“Mrs. James Wyant? Yes . . . Oh — OUT? You’re sure? And you don’t know when she’ll be back? Who? Yes; Mr. Manford. I had a message for Mrs. Wyant. No matter.”
He hung up and leaned back, stretching his legs under the table and staring moodily at the heap of letters and legal papers in the morocco-lined baskets set out before him.
“I look ten years older than my age,” he thought. Yet that last new type-writer, Miss Vollard, or whatever her name was, really behaved as if . . . was always looking at him when she thought he wasn’t looking . . . “Oh, what rot!” he exclaimed.
His day had been as all his days were now: a starting in with a great sense of pressure, importance and authority — and a drop at the close into staleness and futility.
The evening before, he had stopped to see his doctor and been told that he was over-working, and needed a nerve-tonic and a change of scene. “Cruise to the West Indies, or something of the sort. Couldn’t you get away for three or four weeks? No? Well, more golf then, anyhow.”
Getting away from things; the perpetual evasion, moral, mental, physical, which he heard preached, and saw practised, everywhere about him, except where money-making was concerned! He, Dexter Manford, who had been brought up on a Minnesota farm, paid his own way through the State College at Delos, and his subsequent course in the Harvard Law School; and who, ever since, had been working at the top of his pitch with no more sense of strain, no more desire for evasion (shirking, he called it) than a healthy able-bodied man of fifty had a right to feel! If his task had been mere money~getting he might have known — and acknowledged — weariness. But he gloried in his profession, in its labours and difficulties as well as its rewards, it satisfied him intellectually and gave him that calm sense of mastery — mastery over himself and others — known only to those who are doing what they were born to do.
Of course, at every stage of his career — and never more than now, on its slippery pinnacle — he had suffered the thousand irritations inseparable from a hard-working life: the trifles which waste one’s time, the fools