V
At the moment when the Nice Boy, as brown as the proverbial berry, was playing a round of golf with Joan within sound of the sea, Howard Oldershaw, his cousin, drove up to the little house in East Sixty-fifth Street to see Martin.
He, too, had caught the sun, and his round fat face was rounder and fatter than ever. He, too, had the epitome of health, good nature, and misdirected energy. He performed a brief but very perfect double shuffle on the top step while waiting for the door to open, and then barged past the constitutionally unsurprised man servant, sang out a loud woo-hoo and blew into the library like an equinoctial gale.
Pipe in mouth, and wearing a thin silk dressing gown, Martin was standing under the portrait of his father. He slipped something quickly into his pocket and turned about. It was a photograph of Joan.
“Well, you Jack-o’-Lantern,” he said. “It’s better late than never, I suppose.”
Howard sent his straw hat spinning across the room. It landed expertly in a chair. “My dear chap, your note’s been lying in my apartment for a week, snowed under my bills. I drove back this morning, washed the bricks out of my eyes and came right around. What are you grumbling about?”
“I’m not grumbling. When you didn’t show up in answer to my note I telephoned, and they told me you were away. Where’ve you been?”
“Putting in a week at the Field Club at Greenwich,” replied Howard, filling a large cigarette case from the nearest box, as was his most friendly habit. “Two sweaters, tennis morning, noon and night, no sugar, no beer, no butter, no bread, gallons of hot water—and look at me! Martin, it’s a tragedy. If I go on like this, it’s me for Barnum’s Circus as the world’s prize pig. What’s the trouble?”
There was not the usual number of laughter lines round Martin’s eyes, but one or two came back at the sight and sound of his exuberant friend. “No trouble,” he said, lying bravely. “I got here the day you left and tried to find you. That’s all. I wanted you to come down to Shinnecock and play golf. Everybody else seems to be at Plattsburg, and I was at a loose end.”
“Golf’s no good to me. It wouldn’t reduce me any more than playing the piano with somebody dying in the next room. Been here all the week?”
“Yes,” said Martin.
“What? In this fug hole, with the sun shining? Out with it, Martin. Get it off your chest, old son.”
Just for an instant Martin was hugely tempted to make a clean breast of everything to this good-hearted, tempestuous person, under whose tight skin there was an uncommon amount of shrewdness. But it meant dragging Joan into open discussion, and that was all against his creed. He had inherited from his father and his father’s father an absolute incapability of saying anything to anybody about his wife. And so he slammed the door of his soul and presented an enigmatical front.
“There’s nothing on my chest,” he said. “Business downtown has kept me here,—legal stuff and that sort of thing. But I’m free now. Got any suggestions?”
Howard accepted this. If a pal was determined not to confide and get invaluable advice, what was the use of going for him with a can opener? But one good look at the face whose every expression he knew so well convinced him that something was very much the matter. “Why, good Lord,” he said to himself, “the old thing looks as if he’d been working night and day for an examination and had been plucked. I wonder which of the two girls is at the back of all this,—the wife or the other?” Rumors had reached his way about both.
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
“I don’t care,” said Martin. “Any damn thing so long as it’s something with somebody. What’s it matter?”
He didn’t quite manage to hide the little quiver in his voice, and it came to Howard Oldershaw for the first time how young they both were to be floundering on the main road, himself with several entanglements and money worries, his friend married and with another complication. They were both making a pretty fine hash of things, it seemed, and just for a moment, with something of boyishness that still remained behind his sophistication, he wished that they were both back at Yale, unhampered and unencumbered, their days filled with nothing but honest sport and good lectures and the whole joy of life.
“It’s like this with me, Martin,” he said, with a rather rueful grin. “I’m out of favor at home just now and broke to the wide. There are one or two reasons why I should lie low for a while, too. How about going out to your place in the country? I’ll hit the wily ball with you and exercise your horses, lead the simple life and, please God, lose some flesh, and guarantee to keep you merry and bright in my well-known, resilient way. What do you say, old son?”
Martin heartily appreciated Howard’s sound method of swinging everything round to himself and trying to make out that it was all on his side to go out to the house in which Joan ought to be. He was not a horseman or a golfer, and the simple life had few attractions for him. Well, that was friendship.
“Thanks, old man,” he said. “That’s you to the life, but I vote we get a change from golf and riding. Come down to Devon with me, and let’s do some sailing. You remember Gilmore? I had a letter from him this morning, asking if I’d like to take his cottage and yawl. Does that sound good?”
“Great,” cried Howard. “Sailing—that’s the game, and by gum, swimming’s the best of all ways of dropping adipose deposit. Wire Gilmore and fix it. I’ll drive you out to-morrow. By the way, I found a letter from my cousin Harry among the others. He’s in that part of the world. He’s frightfully gone on your wife, it appears.”
Martin looked up quickly. “Where is she?” he asked.
“Why, they’re both staying at the Hosacks’ place at Easthampton. Didn’t you know that?” He was incredulous.
“No,” said Martin.
Howard metaphorically clapped his hand over his mouth. Questions were on the tip of his tongue. If Martin were not in the mood to take him into his confidence, however, there must be a good reason for it, but,—not to know where his wife was! What on earth was at the bottom of all this? “All right,” he said. “I’ve one or two things I must do, and I’ll be round in the morning, or is that too soon?”
“The sooner the better,” said Martin. “I’ll send the cook and Judson down by the early train. They’ll have things in shape by the time we show up. I’m fed up with New York and can smell the water already. Will you dine with me to-night and see a show?”
“I can’t,” said Howard, and laughed.
“I see. To-morrow, then.”
“Right. Great work. So long, old son. Get busy and do what you have to do to-day, then we can leave this frying pan to-morrow with nothing on our minds.”
“I haven’t anything to do,” said Martin.
Howard picked up his hat and caught it with his head in the manner of a vaudeville artist. But he didn’t go. He stood waiting, keyed to a great sympathy. There was something in Martin’s voice and at the back of his eyes which made him see him plainly and suddenly as a man standing all alone and wounded. But he waited in vain. There was a curious silence,—a rather painful and embarrassing silence, during which these two lads, who had been pretending to be men, dodged each other’s eyes.
And then Howard, with an uncharacteristic awkwardness, and looking very young, made a quick step forward, and with a sort of gentle roughness grasped Martin by the arm. “But you’ve got something to say,” he said. “Good God, man, have we been pals for nothing? I hide nothing from you. I can help.”
But Martin shook his head. He tried to speak and failed. There was something hard in his throat. But he put his hand very warmly on his friend’s shoulder for a moment and turned away abruptly. “Joan, Joan,” he cried in his heart, “what are you doing, what are we both doing? Why are we killing the days that can never come back?”
He heard Howard go out. He heard the front door close and the honk of the horn. And for a long time he stood beneath the portrait of the man who had gone so far away and who alone could have helped him.
The telephone bell rang.
Martin was spoken to by the girl that lived in the rabbit warren in West Forty-sixth Street in the rooms below those of Tootles. “Can you come round at once?” she asked. “It’s about Tootles—urgent.”
And Martin answered, “Yes, now, at once.”
After all, then, there might be something to do.