_ BOOK III. IN WASHINGTON
CHAPTER VIII
The next morning's paper announced that spring had officially arrived and been recognized at the Capitol--a certain Senator had taken off his wig. Washington accepted this as the sure sign that the weather was warm. It would not be officially autumn till that wig fell back into place.
There were less formal indications: for instance, the annual flower-duel between the two terraces on Massachusetts Avenue. The famous Embassy Terrace forsythias began it, and flaunted little fringes of yellow glory. The slopes of the Louise Home replied by setting their magnolia-trees on fire with flowers like lamps, flowers that hurried out ahead of their own leaves and then broke and covered the ground with great petals of shattered porcelain. The Embassy Terrace put out lamps of its own closer to the ground, but more gorgeous--irises in a row of blue, blue footlights.
The Louise Home, where gentlewomen of better days, ambassadresses of an earlier regime, kept their state, had the last word, the word that could not be bettered, for it uttered wistaria, wistful lavender clusters weeping from the trellises in languorous grace.
Marie Louise, looking from her open window in Rosslyn, felt in the wind a sense of stroking fingers. The trees were brisk with hope. The river went its way in a more sparkling flow. The air blew from the very fountains of youth with a teasing blarney. She thought of Ross Davidge and smiled tenderly to remember his amiable earnestness. But she frowned to remember his engagement with Lady Clifton-Wyatt. She wondered what excuse she could invent to checkmate that woman.
Suddenly inspiration came to her. She remembered that she had forgotten to pay Davidge for the seat he surrendered her in the chair-car. She telephoned him at his hotel. He was out. She pursued him by wire travel till she found him in an office of the Shipping Board. He talked on the corner of a busy man's desk. She heard the busy man say with a taunting voice, "A lady for you, Davidge."
She could hear the embarrassment in his voice. She was in for it now, and she felt silly when she explained why she bothered him. But she was stubborn, too. When he understood, he laughed with the constraint of a man bandying enforced gallantries on another man's telephone.
"I'd hate to be as honest as all that."
"It's not honesty," she persisted. "It's selfishness. I can't rest while the debt is on my mind."
He was perplexed. "I've got to see several men on the Shipping Board. There's a big fight on between the wooden-ship fellows and the steel-ship men, and I'm betwixt and between 'em. I won't have time to run out to see you."
"I shouldn't dream of asking you. I was coming in to town, anyway."
"Oh! Well, then--well--er--when can I meet you?"
"Whenever you say! The Willard at--When shall you be free?"
"Not before four and then only for half an hour."
"Four it is."
"Fine! Thank you ever so much. I'll buy me a lot of steel with all that money you owe me."
Marie Louise put up the receiver. People have got so used to the telephone that they can see by it. Marie Louise could visualize Davidge angry with embarrassment, confronting the important man whose office he had desecrated with this silly hammockese. She felt that she had made herself a nuisance and lost a trick. She had taken a deuce with her highest trump and had not captured the king.
Furthermore, to keep Davidge from meeting Lady Clifton-Wyatt would be only to-day's battle. There would still be to-morrows and the day-afters. Lady Clifton-Wyatt had declared herself openly hostile to Marie Louise, and would get her sooner or later. Flight from Washington would be the only safety.
But Marie Louise did not want to leave Washington. She loved Washington and the opportunities it offered a woman to do important work in the cosmopolitan whirl of its populace. But she could not live on at Polly Widdicombe's forever.
Marie Louise decided that her hour had struck. She must find a nook of her own. And she would have to live in it all by herself. Who was there to live with? She felt horribly deserted in life. She had looked at numerous houses and apartments from time to time. Apartments were costlier and fewer than houses. Since she was doomed to live alone, anyway, she might as well have a house. Her neighbors would more easily be kept aloof.
She sought a real-estate agent, Mr. Hailstorks, of the sort known as affable. But the dwellings he had to show were not even that. Places she had found not altogether odious before were rented now. Places that her heart went out to to-day proved to have been rented yesterday.
Finally she ran across a residence of a sort. She sighed to Mr. Hailstorks:
"Well, a carpenter made it--so let it pass for a house. I'll take it if it has a floor. I'm like Gelett Burgess: 'I don't so much care for a door, but this crawling around without touching the ground is getting to be quite a bore.'"
"Yes, ma'am," said Mr. Hailstorks, bewilderedly.
He unlocked the door of somebody's tenantless ex-home with its lonely furniture, and Marie Louise intruded, as one does, on the chairs, rugs, pictures, and vases that other people have been born with, have achieved, or have had thrust upon them. She wondered, as one does, what sort of beings they could have been that had selected such things to live among, and what excuse they had had for them.
Mr. Hailstorks had a surprise in store for her. He led her to the rear of the house and raised a shade. Instead of the expectable back yard, Marie Louise was startled to see a noble landscape leap into view. The house loomed over a precipitous descent into a great valley. A stream ran far below, and then the cliffs rose again opposite in a succession of uplifting terraces that reminded her somehow of Richmond Hill superbly built up above the silver Thames.
"Whatever is all that?" she cried.
"Rock Creek Park, ma'am," said Mr. Hailstorks, who had a sincere real-estately affection for parks, since they raised the price of adjoining property and made renting easier.
"And what's the price of all this grandeur?"
"Only three hundred a month," said Mr. Hailstorks.
"Only!" gasped Marie Louise.
"It will be four hundred in a week or two--yes ma'am," said Mr. Hailstorks.
So Marie Louise seized it before its price rose any farther.
She took a last look at Rock Creek Park, henceforth her private game-preserve. As she stared, an idea came to her. She needed one. The park, it occurred to her, was an excellent wilderness to get lost in--with Ross Davidge.
* * * * *
She was late to her meeting with Davidge--not unintentionally. He was waiting on the steps of the hotel, smoking, when she drove up in the car she had bought for her Motor Corps work.
He said what she hoped he would say:
"I didn't know you drove so well."
She quoted a popular phrase: "'You don't know the half of it, dearie.' Hop in, and I'll show you."
He thought of Lady Clifton-Wyatt, and Marie Louise knew he thought of her. But he was not hero or coward enough to tell a woman that he had an engagement with another woman. She pretended to have forgotten that he had told her, though she could think of little else. She whisked round the corner of I Street, or Eye Street, and thence up Sixteenth Street, fast and far.
She was amazed at her own audacity, and Davidge could not make her out. She had a scared look that puzzled him. She was really thinking that she was the most unconscionable kidnapper that ever ran off with some other body's child. He could hardly dun her for the money, and she had apparently forgotten it again.
They were well to the north when she said:
"Do you know Rock Creek Park?"
"No, I've never been in it."
"Would you like a glimpse? I think it's the prettiest park in the world."
She looked at her watch with that twist of the wrist now becoming almost universal and gasped:
"Oh, dear! I must turn back. But it's just about as short to go through the park. I mustn't make you late to Lady Clifton-Wyatt's tea."
He could find absolutely nothing to say to that except, "It's mighty pretty along here." She turned into Blagdon Road and coasted down the long, many-turning dark glade. At the end she failed to steer to the south. The creek itself crossed the road. She drove the car straight through its lilting waters. There was exhilaration in the splashing charge across the ford. Then the road wound along the bank, curling and writhing with it gracefully through thick forests, over bridges and once more right through the bright flood. The creek scrambling among its piled-up boulders was too gay to suggest any amorous mood, and Marie Louise did not quite dare to drive the car down to the water's edge at any of the little green plateaus where picnics were being celebrated on the grass.
"I always lose my way in this park," she said. "I expect I'm lost now."
She began to regret Davidge's approaching absence, with a strange loneliness. He was becoming tenderly necessary to her. She sighed, hardly meaning to speak aloud, "Too bad you're going away so soon."
He was startled to find that his departure meant something to her. He spoke with an affectionate reassurance.
She stopped the car on a lofty plateau where several ladies and gentlemen were exercising their horses at hurdle-jumping. The elan of rush, plunge and recovery could not excite Mamise now.
"I'll tell you what we'll do. The next time I come to Washington you drive me over to my shipyard and I'll show you the new boat and the new yard for the rest of the flock."
"That would be glorious. I should like to know something about ships."
"I can teach you all I know in a little while."
"You know all there is to know, don't you?"
"Lord help us, I should say not! I knew a little about the old methods, but they're all done away with. The fabricated ship is an absolute novelty. The old lines are gone, and the old methods. What few ship-builders we had are trying to forget what they know. Everybody is green. We had to find out for ourselves and pass it along to the foremen, and they hand it out to the laborers.
"The whole art is in a confusion. There is going to be a ghastly lot of mistakes and waste and scandal, but if we win out there'll be such a cloudburst that the Germans will think it's raining ships. Niagara Falls will be nothing to the cascade of iron hulls going overboard. Von Tirpitz with his ruthless policy will be like the old woman who tried to sweep the tide back with a broom."
He grew so fervent in his vision of the new creation that he hardly saw the riders as they stormed the hurdles. Marie Louise took fire from his glow and forgot the petty motive that had impelled her to bring him to this place. Suddenly he realized how shamelessly eloquent he had been, and subsided with a slump.
"What a bore I am to tell all this to a woman!"
She rose at that. "The day has passed when a man can apologize for talking business to a woman. I've been in England for years, you know, and the women over there are doing all the men's work and getting better wages at it than the men ever did. After the war they'll never go back to their tatting and prattle. I'm going to your shipyard and have a look-in, but not the way a pink debutante follows a naval officer over a battle-ship, staring at him and not at the works. I'm going on business, and if I like ship-building, I may take it up."
"Great!" he laughed, and slapped her hand where it lay on the wheel. He apologized again for his roughness.
"I'll forgive anything except an apology," she said.
As she looked proudly down at the hand he had honored with a blow as with an accolade she saw by her watch that it was after six.
"Great Heavens! it's six and more!" she cried. "Lady Clifton-Wyatt will never forgive you--or me. I'll take you to her at once."
"Never mind Lady Clifton-Wyatt," he said. "But I've got another engagement for dinner--with a man, at half past six. I wish I hadn't."
They were drifting with the twilight into an elegiac mood, suffering the sweet sorrow of parting.
The gloaming steeped the dense woods, and the romance of sunset and gathering night saddened the business man's soul, but wakened a new and unsuspected woman in Marie Louise.
Her fierce imaginations were suddenly concerned with conquests of ambition, not of love. So fresh a realm was opened to her that she was herself renewed and restored to that boyish-girlish estate of young womanhood before love has educated it to desire and the slaveries of desire. The Aphrodite that lurks in every woman had been put to flight by the Diana that is also there.
Davidge on the other hand had warmed toward Marie Louise suddenly, as he saw how ardent she could be. He had known her till now only in her dejected and terrified, distracted humors. Now he saw her on fire, and love began to blaze within him.
He felt his first impulse to throw an arm about her and draw her to his breast, but though the solitude was complete and the opportunity perfect, he saw that she was in no spirit for dalliance. There is no colder chaperon for a woman than a new ambition to accomplish something worth while.
As they drew up at the New Willard she was saying:
"Telephone the minute you come to town again. Good-by. I'm late to dinner."
She meant that she was late to life, late to a career.
Davidge stared at her in wonderment as she bent to throw the lever into first speed. She roughed it in her impatience, and the growl of the gear drowned the sound of another man's voice calling her name. This man ran toward her, but she did not notice him and got away before he could overtake her.
Davidge was jostled by him as he ran, and noted that he called Miss Webling "Mees Vapelink." The Teutonic intonation did not fall pleasantly on the American ear at that time. Washington was a forbidden city to Germanic men and soon would banish the enemy women, too.
The stranger took refuge on the sidewalk, and his curses were snarly with the Teutonic
r. Davidge studied him and began to remember him. He had seen him with Marie Louise somewhere. Suddenly his mind, ransacking the filing-cabinet of his memory, turned up a picture of Nicky Easton at the side of Marie Louise at the dinner in Sir Joseph's home. He could not remember the name, but a man has a ready label for anybody he hates.
He began to worry now. Who was this spick foreigner who ran hooting after her? It was not like Davidge to be either curious or suspicious. But love was beginning its usual hocus-pocus with character and turning a tired business man into a restless swain.
Davidge resented Easton's claim on Marie Louise, whatever it was, as an invasion of some imagined property right of his own, or at least of some option he had secured somehow. He was alarmed at the Teutonic accent of the interloper. He began to take heed of how little he knew of Marie Louise, after all. He recalled Sir Joseph Webling's German accent. An icy fear chilled him.
His important business parley was conducted with an absent-mindedness that puzzled his host, the eminent iron-master, Jacob Cruit, who had exchanged an income of a million a year and dictatorial powers for a governmental wage of one dollar per annum, no authority, no gratitude, and endless trouble.
Davidge's head was buzzing with thoughts in which Cruit had no part:
"Can she be one of those horrible women who have many lovers? Is she a woman of affairs? What is all this mystery about her? What was she so afraid of the night she would not stop at Mrs. Widdicombe's? Why was she so upset by the appearance of Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Why was she in such a hurry to get me away from Mrs. Prothero's dinner, and to keep me from keeping my engagement with Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Why so much German association?"
He thought of dozens of explanations, most of them wild, but none of them so wild as the truth--that Marie Louise was cowering under the accusation of being a German agent.
He resolved that he would forget Marie Louise, discharge her from the employment of his thoughts. Yet that night as he lay cooking in his hot berth he thought of Marie Louise instead of ships. None of his riot of thoughts was so fantastic as the fact that she was even then thinking of ships and not of him.
That night Marie Louise ransacked the library that the owner of Grinden Hall had left with the other furniture. Some member of the family had been a cadet at Annapolis, and his old text-books littered the shelves. Marie Louise selected and bore away an armload, not of novels, but of books whose very backs had repelled her before. They were the very latest romance to her now.
The authors of
An Elementary Manual for the Deviation of the Compass in Iron Ships,
The Marine Steam-engine, and
An Outline of Ship-building,
Theoretical and Practical, could hardly have dreamed that their works would one night go up-stairs in the embrace of a young woman's arms. The books would have struck a naval architect as quaintly old-fashioned, but to Marie Louise they were as full of news as the latest evening extra. The only one she could understand with ease was Captain Samuels's
From the Forecastle to the Cabin, and she was thrilled by his account of the struggles of his youth, his mutinies, his champion of the Atlantic, the semi-clipper
Dreadnaught, but most of all, by his glowing picture of the decay of American marine glory.
She read till she could sit up no longer. Then she undressed and dressed for sleep, snapped on the reading-lamp, and took up another book, Bowditch's
American Navigation. It was the "Revised Edition of 1883," but it was fresh sensation to her. She lay prone like the reading Magdalen in the picture, her hair pouring down over her shoulders, her bosom pillowed on the volume beneath her eyes. _