The Mulberry Bush (15 page)

And he went out, not looking back, closing the door very gently. She heard the pounding of his feet as he ran down the stairs.

She had not slept when dawn came, heavy and gray, against the windows.

She had stretched herself on the rack of a hundred reproaches, she had walked from window to window, and then lain down to press her fingers to her burning eyes. She had told herself over and over that she was right, that what she had done was the only thing that in justice and honor she could do. And then she had turned on all the lights and gazed at herself in the mirror, seeing there a bleak and ravaged face—and suddenly she had laughed, bitterly, glaring at the answering grimace in the glass.

“You—” she said aloud, with scorn, “you, Virginia Warfield—talking about honor! Making noble speeches about honor! Oh, it's funny—if it weren't so pitiful—if it weren't so—ghastly!”

Coffee, black and hot, that was what she needed when dawn came. There was the coffee pot, the steak, drying and darkening, ignored—she began to cry a little when she saw it.

“Oh, Mike—what have I done to you—what have I done to us!” Prating about courage—and she had been too cowardly to tell Bruce Gamble that she was another man's wife! Talking about honor, and she had let Bruce Gamble make love to her.

She would telephone Mike as soon as it was day. He would be at one of the hotels. Perhaps he had been lying awake, too, as miserable as she over their quarrel. And she prayed that he would be as ready as she to put an end to all this wretchedness and misunderstanding.

But first she had to put her own house in order, face her problem and see it through. She could not demand honesty of Mike when she was herself dishonest.

She remembered, too, that there were other things that she must do. Obsessed by her own problems, she had been a little selfish and callous about Teresa. She'd have to go there first.

“I've been judging everyone—critical of other people—and look at the kind of person I've turned out to be.”

Oscar Harrison was still wandering about Teresa's rooms like a gray-faced ghost. Flowers had begun to arrive, and he carried each offering in and arranged it personally, making note of the name on the card in a little book.

“I wish she could see them,” he said wistfully. “We had a little house out in Chevy Chase, once. She had zinnias in the backyard—and marigolds.”

People began coming in, and Virginia slipped away. The office had been left in confusion, she would close it later when the mail came in. And she wanted to telephone undisturbed. She had to see Bruce before she saw Mike. She called his office and left a request for him to call. Perhaps he was too angry, undoubtedly Avis had gone straight to him last night. Very likely he was despising her now, but she had to set things straight. Before she saw Mike again, she had to feel clean and worthy.

The morning wore on, and Bruce did not call. She decided to call Mike, ask him to come to the apartment at night. But though she dialed for half an hour, calling one hotel after another, she could not find him. He had not been registered at any of them. She called the newspapers, finally, but no one had seen Michael Paull.

“He's in South America somewhere,” they told her, when she made inquiry at the Press Club. They even gave her the forwarding address Mike had left there, “Gran Hotel Bolivar, Lima, Peru.” As though he had stepped out of her house into a void, Mike had vanished. But he would come back. Bill Foster would know where to find him. She would call Bill later, if Mike did not come back. But—he must come back. He would not go away, knowing that nothing was settled—he had told her that he would give her time to think things over, and if she knew impetuous Mike, he would not give her too much time.

His birthday. November seventh.

“I'll call you that day,” he had said. And he had forgotten that, too!

When she saw him again, she would be the humble one—she would make her own sorry confession. Her face burned a little as she thought of it, but she did not let herself weaken or waver. But what if Mike was as ungenerous, as unyielding, as she had been? She put that thought away abruptly, because it was more than she could bear.

She must go to the hospital. Mary would want to know about Teresa. She looked around the office, as she closed her desk, wondering if a week hence she would be here, sitting among the familiar files and maps.

“But—I'm Mike's wife,” she remembered. Life opened out, swiftly and brightly as an opening flower. She was Mike's wife, and everything was going to be all right again.

Her coat and her brown hat—and where were her keys? She found them at last, in the bottom of her purse, and then the door opened abruptly, and Bruce Gamble stood there.

She said, “Oh, Bruce—” faintly. “I telephoned you—”

“So they told me,” he came in and closed the door. “I don't like talking on telephones, so I came.”

“Bruce—I wanted to explain—” This wasn't going to be easy, but this was what she had demanded of Mike. She set her teeth a little and kept her head up. “I suppose Avis told you—” she went on.

“Yes, she told me. She was—rather upset. I—wish you had told me, Virginia.”

“It was—cheap of me not to have told you. I'm ashamed. Ashamed that I let you—be kind to me under a false impression. I wanted to apologize, that's why I called.”

“No doubt you had your reasons?” Bruce said gently. Why must he be gentle, why couldn't he be angry, too, burn away a little of this sick shame she was feeling with fiery wrath? Why must he put upon her the added reproach of having hurt him intolerably?

“I—had reasons. They seem—a little silly, now that I consider them. We had agreed not to tell anyone for a while, and then Mike went away—”

“And forgot you?” he asked bluntly.

“Oh, no—he didn't forget—he's back now—” she spoke in a rush, nervously. “Everything's going to be all right—if you forgive me, Bruce.”

“I'm trying to believe you,” he said gravely. “But I'm seeing the same tormented look in your eyes that I saw there in Colorado—and since. You didn't lie to me, Virginia. You told me frankly that you loved another man. And then I saw that look of pain and anxiety come, over your face and I knew that something was wrong. And it's still wrong, isn't it?”

“Bruce—I'm apologizing to you. I've hurt you—stupidly, inexcusably—I'm everything that Avis says I am. But—as far as my own affairs are concerned—”

“I accept the reproof—and I forgive you entirely. That isn't what I came here to talk about. You're not happy, and that's what hurts—not that you put on your little masquerade. I fell in love with you of my own accord. I wasn't lured—you can purge your conscience of that idea. Even if you had told me at the beginning that you were Michael Paull's wife—I don't think it would have changed my feelings, though of course I wouldn't have put them into words.”

“But—I let you put them into words. I let you go on believing in me. Please, Bruce—don't go on being kind! Despise me if you must—but I can't stand kindness.”

“I think you need kindness,” he persisted, “right now—have you seen your husband?”

“Bruce—I'm sorry I can't talk about it. Yes, I've seen him.”

“You don't need to talk about it. I know, Virginia.”

“What do you know? Bruce, I am upset. Teresa died last night. Everything is confused right now—please tell me you forgive me—and go away!”

“I've already told you that I forgive you. But you tell me that everything is going to be all right, and I'm sorry, but I don't believe you. I know that Michael Paull took a plane for New York at midnight last night. I know because I was there at the airport to meet Dan Thomas, a lawyer friend of Avis's. I heard Paull identifying himself to the stewardess. And then I went home, and Avis came, very much excited—”

Virginia hardly heard. Mike was gone! Gone to New York—without a word, without giving her a chance to make amends, to explain—she groped with her hand for the back of a chair. She had turned pale as death but she did not know that. She only knew that her body felt cold, and that her heart was a stone, and that she could not endure much more.

She said hoarsely, “Please go, Bruce. This is my problem. I have to meet it—alone.”

“Not alone. I'm standing by, Virginia. Even if you don't want me—even if you still love Michael Paull—and your eyes tell me that you do—I'm standing by. And if you need me—if there's anything at all that a good friend can do—”

“There's nothing—that anyone can do,” wearily.

“There is always something that can be done. If this marriage is a mistake—a failure—”

“It wasn't a mistake. I love Mike! I'll always love him! No matter if he—”

He looked at her soberly for a long minute. Then he said, slowly, “I see.” And after that, still slowly, “Remember that I'm your friend, Virginia. You may need a friend.”

He went out then, and she hardly saw him go. Mike was gone! And this was the ending, no doubt—this was the end—and it was all her fault. She had held him—Mike, the restless rover, free as the wind, that no woman could hold—she had held him, he had come back to her, love on his lips and flowers in his hands, and she had sent him away, with bitter words and reproaches—she had let him go!

She turned, on an impulse, and called New York and Bill Foster.

“Mr. Foster, I am trying to locate Michael Paull.”

“So am I,” said Bill Foster bluntly.

“He isn't there? He hasn't come in?”

“He hasn't come in. He walked out of here yesterday and I haven't seen him since. He was supposed to get some copy in here yesterday and that hasn't come in, either. Who's this calling?”

“This is Mike's wife, Mr. Foster—Virginia Paull.”

“I see. Well, if you see Mike or hear from him, you tell him for me that he's out of a job as far as our outfit is concerned, if that copy isn't in here by noon tomorrow. And tell him for me that he's no prima donna. He's a big-headed fool. Goodbye.”

She hung up, feeling lost and sick. Mike—throwing away his career, rushing off in anger—had she done that, too? Had she wrecked Mike's life and his work? But yesterday he had been in New York, yesterday he had been with Harriet Hillery; it was yesterday he had failed to file his copy—but he had done that, ignored his obligations, because he was flying south, boyishly impetuous, naively contemptuous of responsibility because he was coming back—coming home to his wife?

“I've got to stop thinking,” she told herself heavily, “I've got to stop thinking before I go mad.”

There were things she must do—she was so grateful for the things she must do, the duty tasks, her obligations to Teresa—somehow they filled up the dragging day.

She went to the hospital and saw Mary, and while Mary was dutifully regretful for Teresa's death and a little self-reproachful that she had ever thought unkindly of their martinet employer, she was clinging to her own quiet happiness, and the soft glow of it was over her face and in her voice.

“I know I'll be well enough to come back by tomorrow, Miss Warfield—that is, if there's any business to come back to. I want to come back and help all I can.”

“We don't know what's going to happen. Of course, she may have left a will.”

Teresa had not left a will. With Oscar Harrison helping, Virginia searched every file and deposit box, every drawer in the office, every nook in the apartment. They did this after the funeral services were over and every last sad task done, and they found nothing.

They sat then, and looked at each other. “There will have to be an administrator,” Virginia said. “And, of course, you'll inherit everything, Mr. Harrison.”

He looked troubled. “It doesn't seem right. If I could feel that she wanted it that way—”

“I'm sure that—now—she would want it that way.”

“I wish she'd made a will,” he worried, “I'd feel better about it. But at least the business will go on. That is, if you'll stay with me?”

“I'll stay,” Virginia said. “I'll stay unless—”

Unless—the word hung in the air for days. Echoed there through a silence that went on and on. No word from Mike. Bill Foster telephoned twice, angry and exasperated. He had not found Mike.

At the end of the week, Mary came back, and Oscar Harrison went off to Cuba. He still acted a little dazed, as though all that had happened had been a little too much.

He lived on quietly in Teresa's apartment, moving like a shadow in the rich rooms that had been, so lately, gay and noisy with parties. Virginia hoped that the Cuban trip would help him to get back to normal again.

“The trouble is,” Mary said wisely, “that it wasn't Teresa who died for him—not Teresa Harrison who made a lot of money and was hard as nails. Not the woman who had treated him like the dirt under her feet. To him, the woman who died was the girl he had married. A kind of dream-woman he'd been carrying around with him. And when your dream dies, you die a little, too.”

The words checked themselves off in Virginia's brain for hours afterward.

“When your dream dies—”

“I killed Mike's dream,” she told herself bitterly, “and I killed him a little, too.”

No word, no sign—it was as if Mike had never been. She was thankful for work, for the increased responsibility that Teresa's death had put upon her. To be tired in body and brain at night meant sometimes not to lie sleepless, thinking—thinking—.

“This New York business is in a muddle,” Mary said, a week after Teresa's death. “I meant to say something about it to you, and then I—had that silly brain-storm. If they're having the fair another year, we ought to work on it—should we wait and talk it over with Mr. Harrison?”

“I don't think he'd want us to delay on it. The fair tours were profitable this year. Let me see all the correspondence, Mary.”

“If you ask him, he'll just defer to you. He always does,” Mary said. “Sometimes I can understand why Teresa got exasperated with him. But you can't help liking him, he's so courteous and kind of—sweet. I guess she trampled all the spirit out of him before she discarded him.”

“He'll get his spirit back. He's beginning already. I think I'll go to New York, Mary. I can talk to people and get everything lined up by the time Mr. Harrison comes back from Cuba.”

She had not told Mary about Mike. Since Teresa's funeral she had not spoken of him to anyone. Now and then she caught Oscar Harrison's eyes upon her, curiously, but he asked no questions. But taking the plane to New York brought it all back poignantly. Perhaps Mike had flown in this same ship, perhaps his hands had rested on the arms of this identical seat—flying away, in anger, from her.

For two days, while she was desperately busy with the affairs of Harrison Tours, she debated whether or not to call Bill Foster. But in the end she decided to telephone. It was callous, it was heartless not to make an effort to find out something about Mike. When he was found, if he was still furious, if he had put her out of his life, then she would know—but she would have done what she could.

But Bill Foster had no information. He was, so he told her, definitely worried.

“It isn't like Mike. He was screwy as they come, but nothing ever made Mike sore. He was the most irresponsible guy I've ever known—I always had to ride him to get work out of him unless he got excited about it, but he never blew up like this before.”

“He blew up—at me, I think,” Virginia was meek. “I rode him—too much. I was unfair. And now I'd like to tell him so—but how can I, when he hides away like this?”

“If I hear anything at all, I'll let you know, Mrs. Paull,” Bill promised. “He ought to come back and go to work. He can write—confound his lazy hide! He's got the most brilliant future of any of the younger men, but he's got to steady down and realize that life isn't all poker games and tough scrapes and tearing off to exciting places. Somebody has to make Mike work. Maybe you can do it.”

“I'd try—if he gave me a chance. But I couldn't bully Mike. I don't think it could be done,” she sighed. “It would be like taming the wind. He has to be free.”

“They've tamed the wind and put it to work. And nobody is free,” Bill Foster said. “Sorry I can't help you, Mrs. Paull.”

She went back to her hotel, sunk in discouragement. She had ruined Mike's life, she reproached herself, she had destroyed the promise of his future. She had been too practical, too trained to responsibility to realize that the effervescent quality in Mike, the boldness, the recklessness, the charm that disregarded any claiming, made him what he was, made his writing sparkle like a polished blade and cut through pretense and pomposity and the stuffy fronts of importance like a blade.

Even if love had died forever, she owed Mike his future—but how pay the debt, how set him free when she had only silence—silence and memory?

It was late in the afternoon when someone knocked on the door of her room. She opened it and saw a girl standing there, a girl with dark, quick eyes under a rakish red hat.

“May I come in, Mrs. Paull?” said this girl. “I'm Harriet Hillery.”

“Please come in,” Virginia opened the door wide, feeling queer and stiff.

“Bill Foster told me you were here,” Harriet Hillery perched on the edge of the bed, declining the chair Virginia offered. “So I came to talk to you—about Mike.”

“Yes?” Virginia held her voice to a casual flatness. “You've seen Mike, then? Lately?”

“You sent him to me. I saw him then. Last week some time.”

“I sent him?”

“Didn't you? He said you did. He said you sent him back to—explain—to clear things up with me. He did it—awkwardly—and I know how hard it was for him, knowing Mike. He abased himself magnificently—I didn't know Mike could do such a gallant job, but he did it. You must have worked some miraculous changes in him.”

Virginia's throat began to ache intolerably. So he had come, humbly—because she had told him to come.

“I did not know—about you,” she said. “Not till—days after.”

“I was—quite sure of that.” Harriet Hillery was magnanimous. “I—had no hard feelings.” She kept her head high, but her voice broke a little. (She did love him, Virginia was thinking; she loved him and lost him, too.) “You see,” Harriet went on, “I've known Mike since we were both raw cubs down in Philadelphia. I—never did quite believe in my luck—knowing Mike. So it wasn't a terrible blow when he—drifted. I hadn't let myself go—too much. I hadn't built any air-castles or started any hope chest. As a matter of fact, I hadn't even let myself hope. So—I recovered. And then—he came back.”

“So—you know where he is?”

“Yes, I know where he is. Don't you? I suppose not—Bill didn't know till I told him, tonight.”

“No, I don't know. I haven't heard anything. I didn't know he had come to you.”

“So—you sent him away, forever? The back of your hand and the slam of the door—” The other girl's dark eyes held a bitter judgment. “You had him—and you could send him away!”

“No,” Virginia said, “I didn't send him away. But I did tell him that we couldn't go on—till he had made things right with you. We couldn't begin a life together—without honor.”

“Honor,” Harriet repeated the word slowly. “It's a word we don't hear often any more, except in speeches. It has a naive sound when you've been up against the tough side of the world as I have, but I think”—her eyes misted a little—“that I like it. Mike—with honor. He did need that—that one thing. And now—he has it.”

“And now”—Virginia had her own bitterness—“he's gone.”

Harriet Hillery stood up. There was a kind of edged shining about her, a vividness that Virginia knew, wisely and pityingly, was fined with pain—and with valor.

“I did hate you,” she said. “I did weep in secret—and rage. I won't lie to you. I had a few days of—stark hell!”

“I'm sorry—”

“Don't be sorry. I wouldn't be sorry for you if Mike had—loved me best. I'd be blowing trumpets. And now—somehow, I don't hate you anymore. You've done something for Mike that I couldn't do. I couldn't have sent him back—to you. If Mike loved me—I wouldn't have cared how many women's lives he had wrecked. I'd have gloated over the broken hearts he'd left behind him. I'm that kind of a person. So—you'll be better for him. Now—” she turned and her eyes burned with fine fury, “finish up the job and make a man of him. Mike could be quite a man—if he'd grow up, and I think he's growing up.”

“How,” Virginia said desolately, “can I finish the job when he doesn't want me? When I don't even know where he is?”

“He does want you. He loves you. . . . Oh, it wasn't fun for me to see that—I'm not being noble, I'd be ready to snatch what I wanted—if I thought I could get it. But—nobody can get Mike now—he's yours. And if you want to know where he is, he's down in southwest Florida—in a little fishing town on the coast. I know because Piggy Branton went down with him. Piggy went to get some stuff on winter training and the baseball line-ups for next year—and Mike went to write a book, so he said. I think he had some very young idea about coming back famous and making you sorry. He'd do that kind of thing. And he went because he was hurt and ashamed and angry and stubborn—being Mike. Today Piggy came back—and he says Mike is sick down there—some germ he picked up in Peru.”

Virginia sprang up, shaking. “I'll go! I'll go—tonight.” No, she couldn't go tonight. She'd have to have more, money—do some things at the office—but tomorrow—

Harriet Hillery looked at her levelly.

“You do have a heart in you,” she said. “I wasn't sure—but now I know. I'll write the address for you. I got it from Piggy. But let me tell you—if you hadn't been ready to go, I should have gone myself. You see”—she smiled thinly—“Mike isn't a person you—seem to get over. Well, good luck.”

They shook hands and stood looking at each other, tears springing into their eyes,

“I'm sorry—you've been wonderful,” Virginia said.

“You're fairly good yourself,” Harriet blinked briskly, “and don't worry about me—I'll get along.”