Nevertheless, Isabel deplored her frivolity. Muriel did not care. She just went on being frivolous. At the moment she was making airy little jokes about the sunny side of being a famine victim.
Jane soon ceased to listen. From her seat near the window she could look out over the roofs of the smaller office buildings toward the east, past the slender silhouette of the Montgomery Ward Tower, across the desert wastes of Grant Park, to the Illinois Central switchyards, where the miniature engines, dwarfed by distance, pulled their toy trains and belched their black smoke and puffed their white steam up into the serene face of the May sky. Beyond them stretched the sparkling blue plane that was the lake.
A lovely day, reflected Jane, idly. A lovely day, with a bright spring sun and a stiff east breeze to sweep the city clean. Her hands still busy mechanically folding her gauze sponges, she gazed up, blinking a little, at the golden orb that shone dazzlingly down on the city roofs above the gilded Diana that topped the Tower. What had that sun seen, she was thinking, since it had last sunk behind the murk of the stockyards, since she herself, staring from that same window, had watched its dying rays paint the Montgomery Ward Diana with rosy fire? The words of the Stevenson nursery rhyme she had so often repeated to the children, when they were little, came into her mind.
“The sun is not abed when I
At night upon my pillow lie,
But round the earth his way he takes
And morning after morning makes.”
One morning here on the Chicago lake front. A few hours earlier a very different one on the battlefields of France. The battlefields that would so soon swallow up Isabel’s Jack and Muriel’s Albert. But the battlefields that still, in May, 1918, almost four years after Jimmy’s death, achieved for Jane their major significance as Jimmy’s last resting-place.
Curious that Jimmy’s death had never made her realize the war. It had remained for her the supremely irrelevant accident that had killed him. An act of God, like a casual stroke of lightning. Or perhaps an act of man, like the blow of a death-dealing taxi, turning too quickly on a policeman’s whistle, to crush an absentminded pedestrian under its indifferent wheels.
Jimmy had not died for Germany, in spite of his Prussian helmet. He had not died for her, in spite of his love. He had died—for fun, perhaps, as he had lived. Died true to his creed embraced in night school, in a supreme desire “to be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy.” Jimmy had died for Pater, as much as for anything! Strange end for a hedonist.
You grew accustomed to pain, thought Jane. You really did. Even to pain like hers over Jimmy, that was so sharp, so constant, so distinctly localized that she almost felt that it had an organic focus in her heart. You grew wise and philosophical about it. You generalized. You struggled for resignation.
In her struggles for resignation, Jane knew that she was sometimes guilty of the great injustice to Jimmy of wondering if it weren’t all better so. Better so, she tried to think she meant, because of Agnes and little Agnes, who were living on the proceeds of Agnes’s third play so much more comfortably with Jimmy’s memory than they could ever have lived in his restless, unhappy presence. Jane tried to think she meant that, but really she knew she was thinking only of herself and of the intolerable problems a future, with or without a living Jimmy, had propounded.
For death had given her Jimmy. He had died loving her. He had died with that love unsullied and unspoiled. Would he have lived to love her always? Few men were capable of that. Would she have lived to see him grow indifferent, remote, concerned, perhaps, oh, vitally concerned! with some other woman? Now he was hers forever. The future held no fears. Time, changing relationships, distance, estrangement—all these were powerless. She could dismiss that fearful question as to whether she had ever really, in her secret heart, wanted Jimmy to go back to Agnes. She could dismiss her vague forebodings on the world of women that waited for him if he didn’t. She could dismiss the thought of Stephen. You could love the dead without disloyalty to the living.
Nevertheless, it was an act of treachery to Jimmy’s memory to allow herself to think, even for a moment, that he was better dead. Jimmy—dead. The thought was still incredible. She had never lost the illusion of his laughing, living presence. He was the constant companion of her reveries. He would be laughing now, if he could read her thoughts. Laughing at her involuntary sense of guilt. “Invincible innocent!” would be his ironical comment. You could not shock Jimmy. And he always mocked you when you shocked yourself Jimmy would be the first to advance the consoling theory that he had made everything much easier for everyone by passing, so opportunely, out of the picture. He would have prided himself on the felicitous gesture. He would have admired his romantic role.
Yet Jimmy had not wanted to die. He had said as much, very definitely, in that last letter he had written her. Not that he hoped much from the future. But he had no fear of it. Jimmy accepted life on its face value. He lived for the moment.
Sudden death. At thirty-five. Before you knew the answer to any of life’s riddles. Perhaps you never knew that, though. Perhaps there
