IV
The Pickerbaugh daughters were always popping into Martin’s laboratory. The twins broke test-tubes, and made doll tents out of filter paper. Orchid lettered the special posters for her father’s Weeks, and the laboratory, she said, was the quietest place in which to work. While Martin stood at his bench he was conscious of her, humming at a table in the corner. They talked, tremendously, and he listened with fatuous enthusiasm to opinions which, had Leora produced them, he would have greeted with “That’s a damn silly remark!”
He held a clear, claret-red tube of hemolyzed blood up to the light, thinking half of its color and half of Orchid’s ankles as she bent over the table, absurdly patient with her paintbrushes, curling her legs in a fantastic knot.
Absurdly he asked her, “Look here, honey. Suppose you—suppose a kid like you were to fall in love with a married man. What d’you think she ought to do? Be nice to him? Or chuck him?”
“Oh, she ought to chuck him. No matter how much she suffered. Even if she liked him terribly. Because even if she liked him, she oughtn’t to wrong his wife.”
“But suppose the wife never knew, or maybe didn’t care?” He had stopped his pretense of working; he was standing before her, arms akimbo, dark eyes demanding.
“Well, if she didn’t know—But it isn’t that. I believe marriages really and truly are made in Heaven, don’t you? Some day Prince Charming will come, the perfect lover—” She was so young, her lips were so young, so very sweet! “—and of course I want to keep myself for him. It would spoil everything if I made light of love before my Hero came.”
But her smile was caressing.
He pictured them thrown together in a lonely camp. He saw her parroted moralities forgotten. He went through a change as definite as religious conversion or the coming of insane frenzy in war; the change from shamed reluctance to be unfaithful to his wife, to a determination to take what he could get. He began to resent Leora’s demand that she, who had eternally his deepest love, should also demand his every wandering fancy. And she did demand it. She rarely spoke of Orchid, but she could tell (or nervously he thought she could tell) when he had spent an afternoon with the child. Her mute examination of him made him feel illicit. He who had never been unctuous was profuse and hearty as he urged her, “Been home all day? Well, we’ll just skip out after dinner and take in a movie. Or shall we call up somebody and go see ’em? Whatever you’d like.”
He heard his voice being flowery, and he hated it and knew that Leora was not cajoled. Whenever he drifted into one of his meditations on the superiority of his brand of truth to Pickerbaugh’s, he snarled, “You’re a fine bird to think about truth, you liar!”
He paid, in fact, an enormous price for looking at Orchid’s lips, and no amount of anxiety about the price kept him from looking at them.
In early summer, two months before the outbreak of the Great War in Europe, Leora went to Wheatsylvania for a fortnight with her family. Then she spoke:
“Sandy, I’m not going to ask you any questions when I come back, but I hope you won’t look as foolish as you’ve been looking lately. I don’t think that bachelor’s button, that ragweed, that lady idiot of yours is worth our quarreling. Sandy darling, I do want you to be happy, but unless I up and die on you some day, I’m not going to be hung up like an old cap. I warn you. Now about ice. I’ve left an order for a hundred pounds a week, and if you want to get your own dinners sometimes—”
When she had gone, nothing immediately happened, though a good deal was always about to happen. Orchid had the flapper’s curiosity as to what a man was likely to do, but she was satisfied by exceedingly small thrills.
Martin swore, that morning of June, that she was a fool and a flirt, and he “hadn’t the slightest intention of going near her.” No! He would call on Irving Watters in the evening, or read, or have a walk with the school-clinic dentist.
But at half-past eight he was loitering toward her house.
If the elder Pickerbaughs were there—Martin could hear himself saying, “Thought I’d just drop by, Doctor, and ask you what you thought about—” Hang it! Thought about what? Pickerbaugh never thought about anything.
On the low front steps he could see Orchid. Leaning over her was a boy of twenty, one Charley, a clerk.
“Hello, Father in?” he cried, with a carelessness on which he could but pride himself.
“I’m terribly sorry; he and Mama won’t be back till eleven. Won’t you sit down and cool off a little?”
“Well—” He did sit down, firmly, and tried to make youthful conversation, while Charley produced sentiments suitable, in Charley’s opinion, to the aged Dr. Arrowsmith, and Orchid made little purry interested sounds, an art in which she was very intelligent.
“Been, uh, been seeing many of the baseball games?” said Martin.
“Oh, been getting in all I can,” said Charley. “How’s things going at City Hall? Been nailing a lot of cases of smallpox and winkulus pinkulus and all those fancy diseases?”
“Oh, keep busy,” grunted old Dr. Arrowsmith.
He could think of nothing else. He listened while Charley and Orchid giggled cryptically about things which barred him out and made him feel a hundred years old: references to Mamie and Earl, and a violent “Yeh, that’s all right, but any time you see me dancing with her you just tell me about it, will yuh!” At the corner, Verbena Pickerbaugh was yelping, and observing, “Now you quit!” to persons unknown.
“Hell! It isn’t worth it! I’m going home,” Martin sighed, but at the moment Charley screamed, “Well, ta, ta, be good; gotta toddle along.”
He was left to Orchid and peace and a silence rather embarrassing.
“It’s so nice to be with somebody that has brains and doesn’t always try to flirt, like Charley,” said Orchid.
He considered, “Splendid! She’s going to be just a nice good girl. And I’ve come to my senses. We’ll just have a little chat and I’ll go home.”
She seemed to have moved nearer. She whispered at him, “I was so lonely, especially with that horrid slangy boy, till I heard your step on the walk. I knew it the second I heard it.”
He patted her hand. As his pats were becoming more ardent than might have been expected from the assistant and friend of her father, she withdrew her hand, clasped her knees, and began to chatter.
Always it had been so in the evenings when he had drifted to the porch and found her alone. She was ten times more incalculable than the most complex woman. He managed to feel guilty toward Leora without any of the reputed joys of being guilty.
While she talked he tried to discover whether she had any brains whatever. Apparently she did not have enough to attend a small Midwestern denominational college. Verbena was going to college this autumn, but Orchid, she explained, thought she “ought to stay home and help Mama take care of the chickabiddies.”
“Meaning,” Martin reflected, “that she can’t even pass the Mugford entrance exams!” But his opinion of her intelligence was suddenly enlarged as she whimpered, “Poor little me, prob’ly I’ll always stay here in Nautilus, while you—oh, with your knowledge and your frightfully strong willpower, I know you’re going to conquer the world!”
“Nonsense, I’ll never conquer any world, but I do hope to pull off a few good health measures. Honestly, Orchid honey, do you think I have much willpower?”
The full moon was spacious now behind the maples. The seedy Pickerbaugh domain was enchanted; the tangled grass was a garden of roses, the ragged grape-arbor a shrine to Diana, the old hammock turned to fringed cloth of silver, the bad-tempered and sputtering lawn-sprinkler a fountain, and over all the world was the proper witchery of moonstruck love. The little city, by day as noisy and busy as a pack of children, was stilled and forgotten. Rarely had Martin been inspired to perceive the magic of a perfect hour, so absorbed was he ever in irascible pondering, but now he was caught, and lifted in rapture.
He held Orchid’s quiet hand—and was lonely for Leora.
The belligerent Martin who had carried off Leora had not thought about romance, because in his clumsy way he had been romantic. The Martin who, like a returned warrior scented and enfeebled, yearned toward a girl in the moonlight, now desirously lifted his face to romance and was altogether unromantic.
He felt the duty of making love. He drew her close, but when she sighed, “Oh, please don’t,” there was in him no ruthlessness and no conviction with which to go on. He considered the moonlight again, but also he considered being at the office early in the morning, and he wondered if he could without detection slip out his watch and see what time it was. He managed it. He stooped to kiss her good night, and somehow didn’t quite kiss her, and found himself walking home.
As he went, he was ruthless and convinced enough regarding himself. He had never, he raged, however stumbling he might have been, expected to find himself a little pilferer of love, a peeping, creeping area-sneak, and not even successful in his sneaking, less successful than the soda-clerks who swanked nightly with the virgins under the maples. He told himself that Orchid was a young woman of no great wisdom, a sigher and drawer-out of her M’s and O’s, but once he was in his lonely flat he longed for her, thought of miraculous and completely idiotic ways of luring her here tonight, and went to bed yearning, “Oh, Orchid—”
Perhaps he had paid too much attention to moonlight and soft summer, for quite suddenly, one day when Orchid came swarming all over the laboratory and perched on the bench with a whisk of stockings, he stalked to her, masterfully seized her wrists, and kissed her as she deserved to be kissed.
He immediately ceased to be masterful. He was frightened. He stared at her wanly. She stared back, shocked, eyes wide, lips uncertain.
“Oh!” she profoundly said.
Then, in a tone of immense interest and some satisfaction:
“Martin—oh—my dear—do you think you ought to have done that?”
He kissed her again. She yielded and for a moment there was nothing in the universe, neither he nor she, neither laboratory nor fathers nor wives nor traditions, but only the intensity of their being together.
Suddenly she babbled, “I know there’s lots of conventional people that would say we’d done wrong, and perhaps I’d have thought so, one time, but—Oh, I’m terribly glad I’m liberal! Of course I wouldn’t hurt dear Leora or do anything really wrong for the world, but isn’t it wonderful that with so many bourgeois folks all around, we can rise above them and realize the call that strength makes to strength and—But I’ve simply got to be at the Y.W.C.A. meeting. There’s a woman lawyer from New York that’s going to tell us about the Modern Woman’s Career.”
When she had gone Martin viewed himself as a successful lover. “I’ve won her,” he gloated … Probably never has gloating been so shakily and badly done.
That evening, when he was playing poker in his flat with Irving Watters, the school-clinic dentist, and a young doctor from the city clinic, the telephone bell summoned him to an excited but saccharine:
“This is Orchid. Are you glad I called up?”
“Oh, yes, yes, mighty glad you called up.” He tried to make it at once amorously joyful, and impersonal enough to beguile the three coatless, beer-swizzling, grinning doctors.
“Are you doing anything this evening, Marty?”
“Just, uh, couple fellows here for a little game cards.”
“Oh!” It was acute. “Oh, then you—I was such a baby to call you up, but Daddy is away and Verbena and everybody, and it was such a lovely evening, and I just thought—do you think I’m an awful little silly?”
“No—no—sure not.”
“I’m so glad you don’t. I’d hate it if I thought you thought I was just a silly to call you up. You don’t, do you?”
“No—no—course not. Look, I’ve got to—”
“I know. I mustn’t keep you. But I just wanted you to tell me whether you thought I was a silly to—”
“No! Honest! Really!”
Three fidgety minutes later, deplorably aware of masculine snickers from behind him, he escaped. The poker-players said all the things considered suitable in Nautilus: “Oh, you little Don Jewen!” and “Can you beat it—his wife only gone for a week!” and “Who is she, Doctor? Go on, you tightwad, bring her up here!” and “Say, I know who it is; it’s that little milliner on Prairie Avenue.”
Next noon she telephoned from a drug store that she had lain awake all night, and on profound contemplation decided that they “musn’t ever do that sort of thing again”—and would he meet her at the corner of Crimmins Street and Missouri Avenue at eight, so that they might talk it all over?
In the afternoon she telephoned and changed the tryst to half-past eight.
At five she called up just to remind him—
In the laboratory that day Martin transplanted cultures no more. He was too confusedly human to be a satisfactory experimenter, too coldly thinking to be a satisfactory sinful male, and all the while he longed for the sure solace of Leora.
“I can go as far as I like with her tonight.
“But she’s a brainless man-chaser.
“All the better. I’m tired of being a punk philosopher.
“I wonder if these other lucky lovers that you read about in all this fiction and poetry feel as glum as I do?
“I will not be middle-aged and cautious and monogamic and moral! It’s against my religion. I demand the right to be free—
“Hell! These free souls that have to slave at being free are just as bad as their Methodist dads. I have enough sound natural immorality in me so I can afford to be moral. I want to keep my brain clear for work. I don’t want it blurred by dutifully running around trying to kiss everybody I can.
“Orchid is too easy. I hate to give up the right of being a happy sinner, but my way was so straight, with just Leora and my work, and I’m not going to mess it. God help any man that likes his work and his wife! He’s beaten from the beginning.”
He met Orchid at eight-thirty, and the whole matter was unkind. He was equally distasteful of the gallant Martin of two days ago and the prosy cautious Martin of tonight. He went home desolately ascetic, and longed for Orchid all the night.
A week later Leora returned from Wheatsylvania.
He met her at the station.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I feel a hundred and seven years old. I’m a respectable, moral young man, and Lord how I’d hate it, if it wasn’t for my precipitation test and you and—why do you always lose your trunk check? I suppose I am a bad example for others, giving up so easily. No, no, darling, can’t you see, that’s the transportation check the conductor gave you!”