Ever After (30 page)

Bracken was off again at once for Havana, his return to London indefinitely postponed. What might prove to be the biggest story of his lifetime was breaking now in Cuba. It seemed apparent to Cabot that as it was the
insurrectos
who stood to gain by American intervention, they were much more likely to hold the key to the tragedy than the Spanish, who could not seriously have desired to provoke a war. This was for Bracken to prove if he could. He had a natural gift for languages, and Spanish was one of the three he had spoken adequately even before he began an intensive brushing up. By mingling with the shadier characters of Havana around the waterfront and encouraging them to tipple he hoped to come at the truth.

Between censorship and native hostility it had been as much as an American correspondent’s life was worth to enter the Havana cable office for some time past. Hilgert of the A.P. after skulking about for weeks in his cherished anonymity had dared to flash the news of the
Maine
from there the night she sank. But after that the office was closed to American newspapermen. The Spanish Government in Havana had been gravely disturbed by the presence of the
Maine
in the harbour to begin with, and they now resented being suspected by the entire nation of laying the mine which was said to have sunk her.

The correspondents who reported on Cuban affairs during the secret sessions of the Board therefore had to use the Key West cable, which meant that they spent their lives on chartered dispatch boats running to and fro across the hundred miles of choppy water in the Florida Straits. Bracken, who was a good sailor, got tired of trying to wedge himself into a bunk with a pad of paper on his knee, and took to writing his copy lying flat on his stomach on the floor, from where it was impossible to fall when the trampy little boat shipped it green over the bow.

Meanwhile Fitz in New York was pursuing his customary unruffled course against the tide of public opinion. No fault could be found with his efficient routine on any assignment given to him by the City Editor, but neither was there any evidence that the news from Cuba gave him the slightest personal concern. Johnny had taken to making fiery speeches, and was threatening to join the army himself and personally kick Spain out of the Western Hemisphere. Fitz heard him patiently, almost without comment, revising lyrics
meanwhile
in his head, or working out a new chorus in the nearly finished
score of the piece which was to make Gwen LaSalle a star with Victor Herbert’s blessing.

Thus March passed and April came, and the Board at Havana decided that the
Maine
had been destroyed by the explosion of a submarine mine, which had caused the partial explosion of two or more of the forward magazines. The findings added that the court had been unable to obtain evidence fixing the responsibility for the destruction of the
Maine
upon any person or persons.

“There, you see?” said Fitz. “It will all blow over.”

But Johnny was so mad he went out and enlisted. That was sobering.

With Bracken rolling about the Florida Straits in his tin can of a dispatch boat, and Cabot spending most of his time mysteriously closeted in Washington, with Johnny missing from all the usual places, and Park Row an hysterical beehive of rumour and patriotism, the world in which Fitz lived was all askew. Gwen, of course, was just the same. She had taught herself to use Johnny’s typewriter and with his help had got odd jobs of copying to do. It was tedious work and paid only a few cents a page, but money was money to Gwen, and for the first time in her life, what with the chorus job and an occasional engagement to sing at the houses of Eden’s friends, she had a little money laid up ahead, so that the regular Saturday night payments for Pa were less of a bogey than she could ever remember. When Johnny left for the army she moved down into his room and set up housekeeping there with the typewriter.

Fitz would drop in sometimes in the old way and she would cook a meal for the two of them on the gas ring. They missed Johnny on those evenings. Fitz hired an old upright piano and when it was fitted in alongside the typewriter his work on the musical comedy went faster, because Gwen-was right at hand to sing the songs in her own way and make her diffident suggestions. Cabot had
good-naturedly
bought a chunk of the show to insure Gwen’s place as Arabella against better-known singers, and she had given in her notice to Weber and Fields.

Miles’s birthday was the twenty-third of April and Eden had set the morning of Monday the eighteenth for their departure to Williamsburg. Cabot was in Washington and would join them there on the way down. Bracken would try to come up from Key West for the day.

Gwen and Fitz spent Sunday afternoon going over the completed score from the beginning for the last improvements before sending it in to the impatient manager, who was waiting for it to start
rehearsals
. Almost before they knew it, the day was fading and there was still one more act to go. Fitz said reluctantly that they’d better go and eat at Frieda’s and finish afterwards.

“Unless you’d rather I got us something here,” Gwen offered. “Then you could go right on. Let’s see, there’s coffee and bacon, four fresh eggs, and some cookies and milk. Would that do?”

Fitz nodded, his fingers never leaving the keys, and she sang along with him as she lighted the gas and drew the shades and put on an apron. Pretty soon the smell of coffee was in the air, and then the sizzle of bacon. Fitz’s hands slid off the keyboard and he sat watching her from the piano stool, his shoulders drooping. She set the well-filled plates on the table and turned to say that dinner was ready and met his eyes. But only for a moment. She looked away quickly, untying the apron.

“You’d better come and eat,” she said. “It will go better after you’ve had some food.”

“It’s goin’ all right,” he said, not moving.

“Well, come
on,
Fitz, things will get cold!” She took her place at the table, still not looking at him, and began to pour out the coffee.

He followed slowly, sitting down opposite to her.

“I was thinking about the first night you came here,” he said at last.

“Seems a long time ago, doesn’t it.”

“It’s a year, almost.”

“It will be queer without Johnny, won’t it—as time goes on,” she suggested rather at random, making conversation against a
preoccupation
on his part which she found vaguely alarming.

“Gwen, I’ve got no right to ask you this, but—”

“You’ve got a right to ask me anything you like, Fitz. But maybe you’d better not,” she added gently as he seemed unable to go on. “Eat your eggs while they’re hot, why don’t you?”

“Gwen—are you in love with Johnny?”

Gwen took time to swallow.

“No,” she said evenly.

“You sure about that?”

“Sure I’m sure. Johnny and I are just friends, that’s all. Whatever made you think of that?”

“Oh, I dunno, Johnny does the right thing at the right time. Thought maybe you might be grievin’ for him, now that he’s gone into the army.”

“There’s no war yet, Fitz. He’s perfectly safe in the army. It might even sober him up.”

“Yeah, that’s how I figured it. There’s no war. Not yet, anyway.”

For a while they ate in silence.

“Now, take me, I’m always out of step,” he brooded finally, thinking out loud. “At home I was supposed to go
into my father’s law
business. In our family one of the sons always does what his father did, and I’m the only one. Take my cousin Miles, his father teaches at Charlottesville and
his
father ran a school there in Williamsburg—so now Miles is studying to teach when he gets out of college. And then there’s Bracken, givin’ up going back to England where he’s bought a house and all, just to go into the field as a Special because that’s what Uncle Cabot did back in the War Between the States. And even Johnny, his father was a Yankee captain of artillery at Gettysburg—so now Johnny rushes off and joins the army at the first sign of a fight. Accordin’ to all that, I oughtn’t to just go on sitting around writin’ songs.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Fitz.” She poured him another cup of coffee. “People need songs to sing, even if there is a war. People can’t get along without songs.”

But he was not comforted, and accepted the coffee absently, gazing past her at the piano while he drank. Unintrospective Fitz had become aware, with growing dismay, that he didn’t want to go home to Williamsburg tomorrow. Having achieved that revelation, he went further to discover why. Cabot would be there, fresh from Washington and his confidential sessions with Theodore Roosevelt, who as Assistant Secretary of the Navy was known to have no patience with the administration’s policy of cautious neutrality in Cuba. Bracken would be there, strong in his conviction that now United States intervention had to come, trailing glory from his active and useful career as correspondent while tension rose. And he, Fitz, still had nothing to show for himself but a few songs, as usual. They were good songs. The best he had ever done. But it suddenly seemed to Fitz as though he couldn’t face it, down at Williamsburg.

He rose with his lazy, easy movement, and drifted to the piano, his one sure solace no matter what happened. Moodily he began to play again, random chords at first, merging into Arabella’s third act solo,
Moonlight
on
the
Floor.

After a few bars of it Gwen followed him and stood leaning against the corner of the piano singing softly, compassionately, watching his face. Her desire was all to lay her arms around his shoulders and beg him not to mind anything; to mother him, cosset him, comfort him with all she had of love and devotion. Gwen, too, could remember that first night she had entered this room of Johnny’s, and how she had looked from one to the other of them, wondering which would expect to claim the fee for their protection. And even then, she was hoping dimly that it might be this one.

She had come a long way since that night. The debt, which he had never recognized, was anyway squared between them. She had paid back what they had lent her, and she had been a help with
Arabella, she knew. She was friends with Johnny as she had never supposed it was possible to be friends with a man. But for easygoing, absent-minded Fitz she had learned a passion deep and still and hopeless, so that she no longer cared what might become of her if only he always had what he wanted and did as he pleased and had no problems and no responsibilities and no cares.

She was in his hands now, in a selfless ecstacy of love, and whatever he asked of her she knew she would give freely as long as he wanted it, and no regrets when it ended—as even this association between them was bound to end some day, to leave her with nothing but what she could remember of times like these. She had already grown greedy and jealous of the memories she gathered up and stored away against the lean times without him which were sure to come. And she wanted more to remember. It seemed to her that Cabot Murray had given her the right to it, that night in the library. She wasn’t to leave Fitz, Cabot Murray had said, for his own good. It was for Fitz’s good that she should be there when he wanted her, Cabot Murray had implied, tacitly recognizing her own state of mind, realistically condoning what she felt people like his wife Eden might have condemned—handing her over to Fitz, that night in the library, as though on a silver platter with his compliments—possibly buying her Arabella as a reward. Arabella had worried her a little. She had even thought of confronting Cabot Murray again and making it clear to him that she didn’t have to be bribed to be Fitz’s girl, but that anyway Fitz wasn’t thinking along those lines, and apparently wasn’t ever going to. All Fitz wanted of her was her voice. It would have come hard to confess that to Cabot Murray, she thought, now that they understood each other. And so after nearly a year Gwen still had much to learn about this different breed of men who had entered her destiny.

Fitz, brooding above the keyboard while she sang, was thinking how dull life had been before that night when he and Johnny happened to go to that little dump on West Thirty-fourth Street to get Fay Lea to sing his song—and how because of a sordid small-time gambling suicide, out of violence and poverty and terror Gwen had come to stand here singing his tunes. And he remembered how that first night she had thought they would expect to collect for having saved her from Fagan, which was a thing he had never been able to bring himself to contemplate fully—what could her life have been, for eighteen years, to make such a thing seem to her natural and inevitable? As always when something brought him face to face with Gwen’s dark background of fear and crime and beastliness, his soft heart recoiled in embarrassment, and he fell to thinking how she had insisted on paying back out of her poor little earnings every cent he and Johnny had ever lent her—and how she had stuck to
them, no matter how late it got or how tired she must have been, always patient and kind with Johnny when he was drunk, always ready to sing or make coffee or go to a show—and he thought, Johnny won’t be here to help me look after her now—and he thought, Funny, she didn’t fall in love with Johnny—and he thought—

His hands lay idle on the keys. His eyes as they rose to her face were full of innocent surprise. And then slowly, as though he had been lifted by marionette strings, Fitz came up off the piano stool and put his arms around her where she stood, and his lips took hers. She was soft and willing in his hold, and so much smaller than you’d think, because she always held herself so straight—and her wild, triumphant joy ran through him in the kiss and he was quite sure now that it wasn’t Johnny she loved….

“Gwen,” he marvelled, when he could breathe again. “Oh, Gwen, why didn’t you tell me, I’ve been wastin’ time—!” And he felt her smiling as he kissed her again as though he could never bear to stop—felt her arms slide up around his neck, felt her slim body give
with laughter, and tried to see her face, which she hid against his chest,
laughing
at him, in that solemn moment when he felt so shaken and profound. But it was a nice way to start, wasn’t it, with laughter, and her arms locked tight behind his head. It was all right with him, so long as she was happy, only what had he done that was wrong? And then, with his cheek against hers, he felt tears—“Hey
honey,
what’s the matter, here, I thought you were
laughing
—”