I think you will credit me with not trying to come back just because you are rich and strong, and Kurt poor and honest. It’s just—Oh, you know what it is! I venture to turn to you because I do know that once, anyway, you loved me a great deal. And if we could manage to stick together, it will be so much better for Brent and Emily—oh, I know, probably it’s shameless of me to speak of that so late, but it is true.
I find there is a boat leaving Hamburg September 19, Cherbourg the next day, the Deutschland and if you care to join me on it, or meet me in Paris, I should be—Oh Sam, if you still do love me, you mustn’t be proud, you mustn’t take this chance to punish me, but come, because otherwise—Oh, I don’t know what I will do! I’ve been so proud! Now I feel the world is jeering at me! I don’t dare leave my flat, don’t dare answer the phone and hear their pitying laughter, I have my maid answer it for me, and usually it is still Kurt, but I’ll never see him again, never, he talks of killing himself but he won’t—his Mamma wouldn’t let him!
As soon as you get this, won’t you please telephone me here, from Naples.
If you feel like coming, I hope this will not inconvenience your hostess, Mrs. Cortright, whom I remember so agreeably in Venice, kindly give her my regards. But I hope that my appeal may be somewhat more important to you than even your social duty to that doubtless most charming lady who is I am sure much less irritating than I.
Her whole handwriting changed then; he felt that the rest of the letter had been written hours later:
Oh, Sam, I do need you so, did I ever tell you that I adore you?
He blundered down to the drawing-room, snorting, “Got to run into Naples. May be late for tea. Don’t wait.”
“What is it?”
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
He fled from her.
All the way down, on the tram, he asked himself whether he wanted to have Fran again, and whether he was really going to join her, and to both he answered with perfect blankness. But when he asked whether he wanted to leave Edith, he denied it, sharply, with fury, reflecting wretchedly how good she had been, how honest, how understanding, and perceiving there was rising in him a passion for her greater than the mystic vexation with which Fran had fascinated him.
And he was going to desert Edith, going to be weak enough to betray her?
“Oh, probably,” he sighed, when for an hour, at the American Express Company, he had been waiting for the telephone call to Berlin.
He seemed to wait forever.
He was as conscious of the scene in the express office as though he had sat there for years. A picture of a big New York Central locomotive. Racks of pamphlets about spicy places—Burma and Bangkok and São Paulo—he would never see them now, because Fran would find them crude and unfashionable. A tourist lady writing letters and between sentences boasting to her mother of the wonderful corals she had found on the Piazza dei Martiri—
Then startlingly, “Your Berlin call!”
He heard Fran’s voice, quicksilver voice, eagerness of the wildly playing child in its lifting mutations:
“Oh, Sam, it really is you? You really are coming, dearest? You do forgive poor Fran?”
“Sure. Be on the boat. On the boat. Yes, the nineteenth, yes, sure, we’ll talk over everything, goodbye, honey, you better get the tickets as you’re there in Germany. Get the steamer tickets, goodbye, honey, I’ll wire you a confirmation.”
He walked back most of the way, looking old and slow and sweaty, laboring over the coming scene with Edith. She would be very polite but surprised, contemptuous of him for returning to the servitude of Fran’s witchery.
He slunk in a few minutes after six.
She was reading by the great window in the drawing-room. She glanced up, then, wondering, “What is it? What’s happened?”
“Well—”
He stood by the window, making much of clipping and lighting a cigar, and he did not look at her as he grumbled, “Fran’s lover, this Count Obersdorf, has turned her down. His mother thought she was kind of déclassé—divorce and all that. Poor kid, that must’ve been hard on her. She’s given up the idea of divorce, and she’s sailing for home. She’ll be kind of—Oh, people’ll talk a lot, I guess. I’m afraid I’ll have to go with her. Fact, I’ll have to catch the midnight for Rome, tonight. … I wish there were some way of telling you all that you’ve—”
“Sam!”
She had sprung up. He was astonished by the fury in her quiet eyes.
“I won’t let you go back to that woman! And I won’t see you killed—yes, killed!—by her sweet, gay, well-mannered, utter damned selfishness! Her only thought about anybody is what they give her! The world offers you sun and wind, and Fran offers you death, fear and death! Oh, I’d seen how you’ve aged five years in five minutes, after one of her complaining letters! And you won’t be helping her—you’ll just make her feel all the more that she can do any selfish, cruel thing she wants to and come out of it unscathed! Think of Peking and Cairo! No! Think of the farm you could have in Michigan, among the pines! Think of how natural and contented you’d be—yes, we’d be—back there—”
“I know, Edith; I know every bit of it. I just can’t help it. She’s my child. I’ve got to take care of her.”
“Yes. Well.” The passion did not fade from her eyes, but snapped out, as though one should turn off a light, and she said dully, “Sorry. I was impertinent. At least let me help you pack.”
Throughout the
