Flight, p.24
Flight, page 24
“Yet I find that despite all I do to pluck you and the memory of you out of my heart I love you more devotedly every day that passes. Take pity, Mimi, just let me talk with you—see you, sit beside you and hear your voice. I know now there’s nothing you can do which can kill my love. I cannot understand why you act as you do—surely you do not hate me completely. If you won’t let me see you, won’t you write me just one little note and tell me why you have acted as you have?”
That night Mimi read the letter over and over again. She knew what it had cost him to write it—to make such confessions of his inability to stop loving her despite all she had done to kill that love. For a long time she sat by the window and gazed out into the quiet street below. The roar of the East Side elevated trains came faintly to her like the gentle rumbles of far-off thunder. One by one the little groups of children playing near at hand dispersed with shrill shouts of parting until the morrow. A slightly chilling breeze from the East River swayed the yellowish silk curtains lazily. Ever and again it bustled through the windows in little gusts that swept in and were gone. She heard leaves of paper on the table behind her blowing to the floor but she made no move to pick them up. Life for her was like that, she thought. Little gusts came and swept her out of life just as she was beginning to find her way about in the new spot where she had been placed. They took her and tossed her about, this way and that, dropping her willy-nilly into some new place, some new situation in which she had to begin all over again the process of adjusting herself.
There was no pity for herself in Mimi’s reflections. She had been flung this way and that, buffeted by winds that often threatened to capsize the tiny boat which was her life. But with it all her lot had not been as hard as it might have been. There had been compensation—Jean and Petit Jean, her work, the love of people, human beings she had studied at first to take herself out of herself, and later because she found in them interest and joy in that interest. But all the things hitherto now seemed easy, for through them all she had kept her soul free. Now she was threatened with inundation, the great rising of a wave that rose up—up—up and, bursting into a million silver bubbles, took shape again and formed the face of Jimmie Forrester. That face haunted her with its pleading, its suffering, eloquent of the struggle which he too was making.
From below voices came to her. She recognized one of them as that of Mrs. Mahoney, the wife of the janitor, out for a breath of air before going to bed.
“And I says to him, says I,” Mrs. Mahoney was declaring in tones redolent of shamrocks and St. Patricks and harps, “you can’t get nowhere by dodging the truth. If you got a hard job in front of you, the only thing to do is to jump at it and clean it up … ”
Mrs. Mahoney was probably speaking of housework but her words filtered through the fog of thoughts which enveloped Mimi. “You can’t get nowhere by dodging the truth!” The only thing to do is to jump at it and clean it up! She had been dodging the truth and shrinking from doing the very thing which she had known from the beginning she must do. There could be no happiness either for her or Jimmie if there was deceit or concealment of facts which he should know. She determined to tell him everything. If he was repelled by these facts, as she felt sure he would be, then the telling would end this strain for both of them and they could pass quietly out of each other’s lives.
Fearing that if she waited until morning her mind might be changed, she rose from the window and hurried, head held high and all her indecision and haggard fears fled, to the telephone. Her lips were set in a grim line, pressed so tightly together they made a thin red gash across her chalky-white bloodless face. Perversely, her mind flew back to that other crisis—when she waited outside the door which closed her from the operating-room in which Petit Jean was being put to sleep, perhaps never to waken again. Then, nerves raw and tingling, she had hovered dangerously near the brink of a collapse in the consciousness that flesh of her flesh was about to die. Now she felt the same quivering nerves stabbing her with fiery daggers as she knew that a thing, close and beautiful and precious, closer to her even than flesh, was even at the moment in danger of destruction, yes, was almost sure to wither up and pass into oblivion. She took the telephone in her hand, for some minutes holding down the receiver with the forefinger of her right hand, even then fearing to take the step which she feared but which she knew must be taken …
Jimmie was at home. Incredulously he spoke to her, hardly daring to believe that it really was she. Come over, Jimmie, I want to talk with you—to tell you some things you must know, she whispered hoarsely. As she sat on the side of her bed after hanging up the receiver, she stared vacantly ahead of her, wondering, wondering …
Hardly had she had time to dash a bit of powder on her face and arrange her hair before he rang the bell. She was shocked when she saw him, the first time in several weeks. His face was drawn and there were telltale hollows in his cheeks, and his eyes were far back in his head.
“Mimi, tell me, have you decided? You need not answer now about marrying me—if you don’t want to answer—but won’t you let me try to show you how I love you?” he pleaded. “I’ve suffered agonies, Mimi darling—sometimes I believed I was almost crazy—”
“No—no, Jimmie, you mustn’t say such things to me—I didn’t ask you to come over for that—“ Mimi sought to stop him.
“Then why—why did you ask me?” His voice was low-pitched, little more than a whisper, but there was in it a huskiness that showed the strain he was undergoing. Mimi felt sick at heart as she saw the changes that had taken place in him. He was no longer the laughing, debonair, assured individual he had been that day they met in Paris. His eyes burned with a blazing intensity from the deep sockets in which they were sunk, his hands twitched as he alternately closed and opened them, he kept his lips pressed tightly together, and his words came short and crisp from the emotion that lay behind them. Mimi felt her resolution to tell him all slipping away into thin air. She did not want to hurt him further, though she knew that for his own good and hers she must tell him now. She braced herself as though she were about to plunge into an icy bath in January
“I’ll tell you why I sent for you,” she began. “I did run away from you in Paris. And I’ve been running from you here in New York because I knew it was the only way I saw of keeping from hurting you—”
“Hurting me?” he asked, puzzled.
“Yes, hurting you! Don’t you remember that night just after you came back from Paris and I left you so abruptly at dinner?” He nodded. “I told you then there was no use of your seeing me, that there could never be anything between us. That’s why I’ve deliberately done everything I could to make you angry at me, tired of me, so exasperated you would go your way and I mine—”
“But, Mimi, don’t you love me? Look at me! Tell me you don’t love me, and I’ll not say another word!”
He seized her by the arms and turned her around so that they faced each other. She looked directly at him.
“That’s just the trouble, Jimmie, I do love you—love you as I’ve never loved before—love you as I know I’ll never love again. That’s just the reason you and I must have this talk and then end our friendship—” Her eyes filled slowly with tears as she pulled her arms free. He looked dazed, puzzled, distrait, and let her go.
“You love me? Therefore we’ve got to end everything here? Tell me, Mimi, what is back of all this?”
Mimi dashed the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand, her handkerchief gone and she too upset to look for it. Determination replaced the expression of pain.
“Here is what is back of it! I told you that you didn’t know anything about me or my life—” she began.
“But I do. Mrs. Crosby has given me your whole history, she went to Francine for what she herself didn’t know already.”
“But neither Mrs. Crosby nor Francine knows anything about me before I went to Francine’s eight years ago to work. And there’s a lot in my life back of that, I’m going to tell you the whole story and then you’ll see why—”
Jimmie shook off his lethargy, his air of supplication.
“Mimi, you’ll do nothing of the sort,” he said firmly. “I know you—and that’s enough for me. Whatever it is you’re worried about, I know you well enough to know that the things you’re trying to magnify into an insurmountable barrier between us were done through no fault of yours. You’re too fine, too decent—”
“No—no, Jimmie,” she cried, “you must let me finish—”
“There’ll be no finishing. You and I both will be much happier if we just let that drop—dropped for all time. If you told me and we married, you’d feel all the rest of your life that I was holding against you what you want to tell me now. Or that you’d been mighty foolish in worrying about it at all. And your trying to tell me just proves what I said about your being fine and decent—if you’d been less than that, you’d never have let it worry you at all. There’s never been the slightest thing against you—you can bet your life Mrs. Crosby would have found it—and she thinks you are the most marvellous person she’s ever met!”
“But, Jimmie—” Mimi made one last, despairing effort to stop him.
“But nothing, Mimi. There’s just one thing that counts now, nothing else in the world matters. I love you and you love me—oh, darling, I do love you so!” he almost cried softly as he took her in his arms and prevented utterance of any other words from her lips with his own …
They were married on Thanksgiving Day—“those old Puritans who started this custom never knew what wise birds they were!” Jimmie gaily remarked when they came out of the church into the crisp November sunlight. The Crosbys gave a most elaborate wedding breakfast for them in their Park Avenue apartment—even in her happiness Mimi felt she was in a fantastic curio shop. Just a few friends, Mrs. Crosby had said when she asked the privilege of furnishing the bridal breakfast. There sat down some sixty guests and the supply of Veuve Clicquot and Pommery Sec seemed inexhaustible.
“I’ve got a cunning little surprise for you, Mimi,” Mrs. Crosby coyly whispered. “I know you’ll like it, for you told me you did. You and dear Jimmie run into the library and look at it all by your own little selves.” They did look. It was the marble monstrosity of Cupids and bows and arrows Mrs. Crosby had bought in Paris from the romantic-looking sculptor with “the big, dark eyes and long hair and the sweetest velvet jacket.” But Mr. Crosby, gruff and kindly and intensely practical, gave them a cheque—“You youngsters’ll know what you want better’n an old man like me get what you want with it.”
Madame Francine wept throughout the ceremony and her tears were because she loved Mimi and not—well, not very much because she did not know what she would do now that Mimi was going to leave the shop. Mimi had wanted to keep on working but Jimmie had been adamant. “You’ve worked long enough already—now you’re going to play!” he had declared, and there was no changing his mind. Jimmie’s mother was there, white-haired and kindly and self-effacing, but she had kissed Mimi tenderly and said: “My dear, you’re the only woman I’ve ever seen who’s good enough for my Jimmie!” Jimmie became mildly tipsy from the imbibing of many glasses of champagne drunk as toasts, and the breakfast was yet in progress, that is, the liquid portion of it, when Mimi, more lovely than ever in a coral green gown with a hat to match which Madame Francine herself had designed, slipped away with Jimmie at three in the afternoon.
Chapter XXI
The Forrester house sat on the north side of Washington Square. Its high-ceiled walls and hand-carved woodwork, its air of mellowed age were all redolent of days when coaches-and-fours rolling easily through the Square sent flocks of broad-winged pigeons fluttering to safety on the huge, clumsy arch which took its name from the Square. Mimi loved the old-fashioned house it spoke to her in tender tones of the days of splendour it had seen. Jimmie had wanted to dispose of most of the furnishings and furniture but she had restrained him. A new piece or two added to the comfort of the house, new draperies and wall-paper restored the freshness, and they settled down to a comfortable, happy existence together.
Mimi luxuriated in the unaccustomed idleness, in the realization that she had to do nothing she did not want to do. For the first time she realized how long and how hard she had been working. She saw now how steady had been the grind of the past eight years at Francine’s—she had loved it, but now that she saw it in perspective, it made her shudder to see how much of a machine she had become. It had needed the revivifying touch of love to make of her a human being again instead of a coldly inanimate object but little more human than one of the sewing-machines she so often had manipulated. So for months she did little but live the life of the affluent idle, sewing a bit or reading a bit more. She did nothing that could be called work other than supervising the work of her two maids or deciding with the cook what items of food should make up the evening dinner.
In the mornings, négligé-clad, she poured Jimmie’s coffee and commented with more or less interest on the things he read to her, between mouthfuls, from the morning paper. She rather wished he wouldn’t read to her, for it spoiled in a measure her own reading of the paper after he had gone. He liked to tell her what had happened, usually prefaced by the exclamation, “Oh, look here! Here’s a pretty how-to-do! Listen!” And dutifully she would hear him read how Harry Thaw was about to gain his freedom at last or how Babe Ruth had hit another home run, or learned that another woman had shot a man who had betrayed her. Such items together with the market pages ended Jimmie’s interest in the sheet, for he shunned all news from Washington or Europe as he would have dodged the plague—“I leave such heavy stuff to the spectacled birds who like it!”
Jimmie dutifully kissed and sent to the office, Mimi did what household duties she wanted to do, went shopping or to a matinée, and then waited for Jimmie’s homecoming and dinner. In the evening they went to the theatre or to a supper club or cabaret or, occasionally, they dined at the Crosbys’ or with other friends or in turn entertained at dinner. Her placid existence was so restful, so different from the stormy life which had been hers that Mimi wished it could be forever the same simple one. When Jimmie had swept aside her attempts to tell him why she could not marry him, Mimi had resolutely set her will towards securing some of that happiness which had eluded her. Grimly she resolved that she would be happy, she would forget all that had gone before and by devoting her every energy towards making Jimmie content, she would achieve contentment for herself too. There were two or three times during the first year they were married that she fancied she saw a quizzical, indecisive look in Jimmie’s eyes, but some jovial remark had always followed, proving he had not been thinking, as she had suspected and feared, of the things she had wanted to tell him which he had stopped. He loved her with a devotion that made her the centre of all his thoughts, and he was never happier than when she showed her pleasure in some little way in which he had sought to please her. “Not only are you the most beautiful but you’re the most appreciative and most wonderful wife a man ever had,” he would tell her, and his voice would always indicate beyond any doubt the sincerity that lay beneath his not very subtle compliments …
They had been married a little more than a year. Mimi glanced idly through the mail beside her plate at breakfast as Jimmie performed his usual rite of picking juicy morsels from the World.
“‘New Prohibition Shake-up Threatened’—humph! the boot-leggers must have started that—they’ll shoot prices way up to the sky for liquor now—reminds me, Mimi, how’s my stock? The gin must be getting kinda low—I’ll telephone McCarthy to-day … Say, here’s a rich bit—about a Jew selling robes to the Ku Klux Klan. By the way, Mimi, have you seen my Shriner’s pin laying around anywhere? I must’ve left it in my grey suit when I sent it to the cleaners last week. Telephone them and see if I did, won’t you? … Here’s one from Georgia. Man asks native how much corn he expects to raise this year and the native answers: ‘Oh, ’bout a hundred gallons.’ Say, that’s rich, don’t you think so? … They’re talking about passing a law out in Iowa to keep schools from using text-books that mention fermentation—say it’s against the prohibition laws … And here’s a story where a crowd of women down in Louisiana tarred and feathered another woman and run her out of town. Kinda rough on the gal but she must’ve been pretty rotten. And over in Texas they lynched another nigger. They’re really cleaning things up. This Klan’s stirring up things all over-little rough, maybe—but these kikes and Catholics and niggers got to be kept under control … ”
