The Breaking Point (37 page)

Dick nodded.

"All right. This poor boob of a valet made a search and didn't find it.
Later he found it. Why did he search? Wasn't it the likely thing that
you'd carried it away with you? Do you suppose for a moment that with
Donaldson and the woman in the room you hid it there, and then went back
and stood behind the roulette table, leaning on it with both hands, and
staring? Not at all. Listen to this:

Q. "You recognize this revolver as the one you found?"

A. "Yes."

Q. "You are familiar with it?"

A. "Yes. It is Mr. Clark's."

Q. "You made the second search because you had not examined the woodbox
earlier?"

A. "No. I had examined the woodbox. I had a theory that—"

Q. "The Jury cannot listen to any theories. This is an inquiry into
facts."

"I'm going to find Melis," the reporter said thoughtfully, as he folded
up the papers. "The fact is, I mailed an advertisement to the New York
papers to-day. I want to get that theory of his. It's the servants in
the house who know what is going on. I've got an idea that he'd stumbled
onto something. He'd searched for the revolver, and it wasn't there.
He went back and it was. All that conflicting evidence, and against it,
what? That you'd run away!"

But he saw that Dick was very tired, and even a little indifferent.
He would be glad to know that his hands were clean, but against the
intimation that Beverly Carlysle had known more than she had disclosed
he presented a dogged front of opposition. After a time Bassett put the
papers away and essayed more general conversation, and there he found
himself met half way and more. He began to get Dick as a man, for the
first time, and as a strong man. He watched his quiet, lined face, and
surmised behind it depths of tenderness and gentleness. No wonder the
little Wheeler girl had worshipped him.

It was settled that Dick was to spend the night there, and such plans
as he had Bassett left until morning. But while he was unfolding the
bed-lounge on which Dick was to sleep, Dick opened a line of discussion
that cost the reporter an hour or two's sleep before he could suppress
his irritation.

"I must have caused you considerable outlay, one way and another," he
said. "I want to defray that, Bassett, as soon as I've figured out some
way to get at my bank account."

Bassett jerked out a pillow and thumped it.

"Forget it." Then he grinned. "You can fix that when you get your
estate, old man. Buy a newspaper and let me run it!"

He bent over the davenport and put the pillow in place. "All you'll have
to do is to establish your identity. The institutions that got it had to
give bond. I hope you're not too long for this bed."

But he looked up at Dick's silence, to see him looking at him with a
faint air of amusement over his pipe.

"They're going to keep the money, Bassett."

Bassett straightened and stared at him.

"Don't be a damned fool," he protested. "It's your money. Don't tell me
you're going to give it to suffering humanity. That sort of drivel makes
me sick. Take it, give it away if you like, but for God's sake don't
shirk your job."

Dick got up and took a turn or two around the room. Then, after an old
habit, he went to the window and stood looking out, but seeing nothing.

"It's not that, Bassett. I'm afraid of the accursed thing. I might talk
a lot of rot about wanting to work with my hands. I wouldn't if I didn't
have to, any more than the next fellow. I might fool myself, too, with
thinking I could work better without any money worries. But I've got to
remember this. It took work to make a man of me before, and it will take
work to keep me going the way I intend to go, if I get my freedom."

Sometime during the night Bassett saw that the light was still burning
by the davenport, and went in. Dick was asleep with a volume of Whitman
open on his chest, and Bassett saw what he had been reading.

"You broken resolutions, you racking angers, you short-lived ennuis; Ah,
think not you shall finally triumph, my real self has yet to come forth.
It shall march forth over-mastering, till all lie beneath me, It shall
stand up, the soldier of unquestioned victory."

Bassett took the book away and stood rereading the paragraph. For the
first time he sensed the struggle going on at that time behind Dick's
quiet face, and he wondered. Unquestioned victory, eh? That was a pretty
large order.

Leslie Ward had found the autumn extremely tedious. His old passion for
Nina now and then flamed up in him, but her occasional coquetries no
longer deceived him. They had their source only in her vanity. She
exacted his embraces only as tribute to her own charm, her youth, her
fresh young body.

And Nina out of her setting of gaiety, of a thumping piano, of
chattering, giggling crowds, of dancing and bridge and theater boxes,
was a queen dethroned. She did not read or think. She spent the leisure
of her mourning period in long hours before her mirror fussing with her
hair, in trimming and retrimming hats, or in the fastidious care of her
hands and body.

He was ashamed sometimes of his pitilessly clear analysis of her. She
was not discontented, save at the enforced somberness of their lives.
She had found in marriage what she wanted; a good house, daintily
served; a man to respond to her attractions as a woman, and to provide
for her needs as a wife; dignity and an established place in the world;
liberty and privilege.

But she was restless. She chafed at the quiet evenings they spent at
home, and resented the reading in which he took refuge from her uneasy
fidgeting.

"For Heaven's sake, Nina, sit down and read or sew, or do something.
You've been at that window a dozen times."

"I'm not bothering you. Go on and read."

When nobody dropped in she would go upstairs and spend the hour or so
before bedtime in the rites of cold cream, massage, and in placing the
little combs of what Leslie had learned was called a water-wave.

But her judgment was as clear as his, and even more pitiless; the
difference between them lay in the fact that while he rebelled, she
accepted the situation. She was cleverer than he was; her mind worked
more quickly, and she had the adaptability he lacked. If there were
times when she wearied him, there were others when he sickened her.
Across from her at the table he ate slowly and enormously. He splashed
her dainty bathroom with his loud, gasping cold baths. He flung his
soiled clothing anywhere. He drank whisky at night and crawled into the
lavender-scented sheets redolent of it, to drop into a heavy sleep and
snore until she wanted to scream. But she played the game to the limit
of her ability.

Then, seeing that they might go on the rocks, he made a valiant effort,
and since she recognized it as an effort, she tried to meet him half
way. They played two-handed card games. He read aloud to her, poetry
which she loathed, and she to him, short stories he hated. He suggested
country walks and she agreed, to limp back after a half mile or so in
her high-heeled pumps.

He concealed his boredom from her, but there were nights when he lay
awake long after she was asleep and looked ahead into a future of
unnumbered blank evenings. He had formerly taken an occasional evening
at his club, but on his suggesting it now Nina's eyes would fill
with suspicion, and he knew that although she never mentioned Beverly
Carlysle, she would neither forget nor entirely trust him again. And in
his inner secret soul he knew that she was right.

He had thought that he had buried that brief madness, but there
were times when he knew he lied to himself. One fiction, however, he
persisted in; he had not been infatuated with Beverly. It was only that
she gave him during those few days something he had not found at home,
companionship and quiet intelligent talk. She had been restful. Nina was
never restful.

He bought a New York paper daily, and read it in the train. "The Valley"
had opened to success in New York, and had settled for a long run. The
reviews of her work had been extraordinary, and when now and then she
gave an interview he studied the photographs accompanying it. But he
never carried the paper home.

He began, however, to play with the thought of going to New York. He
would not go to see her at her house, but he would like to see her
before a metropolitan audience, to add his mite to her triumph. There
were times when he fully determined to go, when he sat at his desk
with his hand on the telephone, prepared to lay the foundations of
the excursion by some manipulation of business interests. For months,
however, he never went further than the preliminary movement.

But by October he began to delude himself with a real excuse for going,
and this was the knowledge that by a strange chain of circumstance
this woman who so dominated his secret thoughts was connected with
Elizabeth's life through Judson Clark. The discovery, communicated to
him by Walter Wheeler, that Dick was Clark had roused in him a totally
different feeling from Nina's. He saw no glamour of great wealth. On the
contrary, he saw in Clark the author of a great unhappiness to a woman
who had not deserved it. And Nina, judging him with deadly accuracy,
surmised even that.

That he was jealous of Judson Clark, and of his part in the past,
he denied to himself absolutely. But his resentment took the form of
violent protest to the family, against even allowing Elizabeth to have
anything to do with Dick if he turned up.

"He'll buy his freedom, if he isn't dead," he said to Nina, "and he'll
come snivelling back here, with that lost memory bunk, and they're just
fool enough to fall for it."

"I've fallen for it, and I'm at least as intelligent as you are."

Before her appraising eyes his own fell.

"Suppose I did something I shouldn't and turned up here with such a
story, would you believe it?"

"No. When you want to do something you shouldn't you don't appear to
need any excuse."

But, on the whole, they managed to live together comfortably enough.
They each had their reservations, but especially after Jim's death they
tacitly agreed to stop bickering and to make their mutual concessions.
What Nina never suspected was that he corresponded with Beverly
Carlysle. Not that the correspondence amounted to much. He had sent her
flowers the night of the New York opening, with the name of his club on
his card, and she wrote there in acknowledgment. Then, later, twice
he sent her books, one a biography, which was a compromise with his
conscience, and later a volume of exotic love verse, which was not. As
he replied to her notes of thanks a desultory correspondence had sprung
up, letters which the world might have read, and yet which had to him
the savor and interest of the clandestine.

He did not know that that, and not infatuation, was behind his desire to
see Beverly again; never reasoned that he was demonstrating to himself
that his adventurous love life was not necessarily ended; never
acknowledged that the instinct of the hunter was as alive in him as
in the days before his marriage. Partly, then, a desire for adventure,
partly a hope that romance was not over but might still be waiting
around the next corner, was behind his desire to see her again.

Probably Nina knew that, as she knew so many things; why he had taken to
reading poetry, for instance. Certain it is that when he began, early in
October, to throw out small tentative remarks about the necessity of a
business trip before long to New York, she narrowed her eyes. She
was determined to go with him, if he went at all, and he was equally
determined that she should not.

It became, in a way, a sort of watchful waiting on both sides. Then
there came a time when some slight excuse offered, and Leslie took up
the shuttle for forty-eight hours, and wove his bit in the pattern. It
happened to be on the same evening as Dick's return to the old house.

He was a little too confident, a trifle too easy to Nina.

"Has the handle of my suitcase been repaired yet?" he asked. He was
lighting a cigarette at the time.

"Yes. Why?"

"I'll have to run over to New York to-morrow. I wanted Joe to go alone,
but he thinks he needs me." Joe was his partner. "Oh. So Joe's going?"

"That's what I said."

She was silent. Joe's going was clever of him. It gave authenticity to
his business, and it kept her at home.

"How long shall you be gone?"

"Only a day or two." He could not entirely keep the relief out of his
voice. It had been easy, incredibly easy. He might have done it a month
ago. And he had told the truth; Joe was going.

"I'll pack to-night, and take my suitcase in with me in the morning."

"If you'll get your things out I'll pack them." She was still thinking,
but her tone was indifferent. "You won't want your dress clothes, of
course."

"I'd better have a dinner suit."

She looked at him then, with a half contemptuous smile. "Yes," she said
slowly. "I suppose you will. You'll be going to the theater."

He glanced away.

"Possibly. But we'll be rushing to get through. There's a lot to do.
Amazing how business piles up when you find you're going anywhere. There
won't be much time to play."

She sat before the mirror in her small dressing-room that night,
ostensibly preparing for bed but actually taking stock of her situation.
She had done all she could, had been faithful and loyal, had made
his home attractive, had catered to his tastes and tried to like his
friends, had met his needs and responded to them. And now, this. She was
bewildered and frightened. How did women hold their husbands?

She found him in bed and unmistakably asleep when she went into the
bedroom. Man-like, having got his way, he was not troubled by doubts or
introspection. It was done.