Chapter 44

Mr. Crossbow of Crossbow, Murphy and Thane, in which firm Cass’s classmate, Dennis Thane, was a partner, was born in Yankton, South Dakota. He thought highly of Middlewestern men and of the Minnesota judiciary; he said Yes, he believed arrangements could be made for Judge Timberlane to join their firm; in fact, they would be honored.

Cass walked a mile up Broadway from Pine Street, out of the district of gold certificates and steamship tickets, dazed that he should have chosen to make his home in this wilderness where grizzlies prowled all night and rattlers lurked all day. He was at once homesick for the stillness of Dead Squaw Lake and proud that he might some day be a millionaire, invited out to Long Island palaces where each guest had three bathrooms.

—Let’s see. Jinny wouldn’t care for the suburbs. Probably get an apartment on Park Avenue. Maybe on the river. Be interesting to watch the boats—I guess.

He was to meet her at the hotel at six-thirty. They were to dine together, and he rejoicingly had two good seats for Berg Nord’s new play.

He pictured himself rushing in to her with the news. That morning he had merely mentioned the voodoo word “diabetes,” and she had sworn that she would be back at the hotel by five, and have a nap.

—We won’t overdo it tonight. We won’t even go backstage and see Berg. I’ll send her to bed by half-past-eleven.

She was not in the suite when he arrived. He sat waiting for her till twenty minutes past seven. When she came in, tired and blank, he controlled himself, but the excitement and surprise had gone out of his news and he said methodically, “Well, looks as if we really can stay in New York. I can get a partnership with a good firm. All we have to decide now is when I resign from the bench. Do you want to come here before this summer, or wait till fall, when it’ll be—”

“No!” She looked secret and unhappy as she interrupted him. “I don’t want you to give up being a judge. I can’t do that to you, too.”

“How do you mean? TOO?”

“Oh, just generally disappointing you.”

“You haven’t. You couldn’t!”

“Oh, Cass, don’t do it! Take me home—tomorrow, if you can. Please give up this whole idea. I know you couldn’t be happy, practising here, and then how could I be happy? I was so stupid and didn’t realize, but when I see how you writhe—and you should; they’re so incredibly packed and vulgar—how you hate these night-clubs, and even the streets, that are so tall and no trees, then I know you mustn’t do it. Let’s go back NOW! I will try to be satisfied, and I’m sure I can be, now I know how fast and noisy this place is.”

“Of course if we lived here quietly, in a nice flat, like most New Yorkers—”

“No, no, no! I want security—and our home—and Cleo. Please!”

“You scarcely have to coax me! Of course that’s what I want, too. But tomorrow?”

“Tonight, if we only could!”

That evening he was able to get, for the two of them, one single upper berth on a minor railroad to Chicago, for the next day. He telephoned to his putative new partners, Mr. Crossbow and Mr. Dennis Thane, at their homes, that he would not be able to join their firm. They both said that he had “let them down,” but Cass, to whom such an accusation would normally have been occasion for alarm, scarcely heard them.

He was too busy to ask Jinny what she had been doing all day.

“I think we can still make our show, all right,” he said happily. (Aspens gentle by the Sorshay River!) “Want us to have some fun, our last evening here. It will be the last for quite a while, I guess.”

“Yes—see Cousin Berg—” she said feebly.

But he went on conscientiously, “Or do you think we ought to give up the show and spend the time with Bradd?”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary. We’ve seen a good deal of him. Can’t we just telephone him?”

He liked that very much. “Sure. I’ll try him now.”

He did not reach Bradd till after the play, to which he was not very attentive, so swelling was he with thought of the coming spring back home, when the top of their blue spruce would be dotted with red buds, like a tiny Christmas tree, the mountain ash starred with white, and the earth-smell sharply clean from Northern rivulets. People here could not understand how proud and separate was his land, nor how completely it drew him back, with no regrets for the heathen wonders of Broadway.

He had Bradd on the telephone at midnight, and said apologetically, “Well, despite all we could do to entertain her, Jinny has decided she wants to go home. Looks as if I wouldn’t hook up with any law firm here, for a while at least.”

“Won’t I see you before you go?” Bradd sounded regretful but not inconsolable.

“Afraid not, till the next visit, but we hope you’ll be coming out home soon.”

“You bet, Cass; soon as I can.”

“Jinny will be wanting to say good-bye now. . . . Here you are, Jin.”

She was cordial enough, but so impersonal that Cass was pleased: “Good-bye, Bradd, my dear. It’s been fun having you show us around. You’re the real rubber-neck-wagon guide! Sorry we won’t see you, but I feel a little sick and bothered now—you know—New York is so big—or so I hear! Some day I’ll write you, if I don’t get too busy with the spring gardening. Good-bye!”

The one flaw was that next morning, when they were packing, they found that the crystal Isis had disappeared. They searched the two rooms, they looked under the twin beds, they summoned the chambermaid, the housekeeper, but they did not find it.

Jinny never saw again the little shining talisman which she had loved so youthfully, so long. She sat crying, her face against her thin arm.

All afternoon and evening, in the club car, he learned the strangest things about Wisconsin cheese and haddock-liver oil and the percentages of grades in the Rocky Mountains, from the indigenous magazines. Jinny was in a mood so sacred that he dared not speak to her. She sat covered with silence as with a veil, hands collapsed but eyes roving sightlessly. It was evident that she was trying to decide something that had to be swallowed with a gulp or spit out angrily.

They had to sleep in the one upper berth; they who had not shared a bed all night for many months. Cass was as embarrassed and guilty and yet excited about it as if they had never yet shared a bed at all. She would undress up there by herself; he would shuck off all that modesty permitted in the smoking compartment, and climb up and finish his undressing after she was tucked in.

The wartime world, accustomed now to every fantasy of travel, saw and was uninterested in the spectacle of the stately Judge Timberlane, in undershirt, trousers, and glove-like Pullman slippers, coming down the aisle carrying coat and shirt and shoes and dangling tie, and climbing to the upper berth, the last public view of him merely a pair of trousered legs waving high in air.

He was not a comic figure to himself, but even the dignity of the reserved unhappiness that had come over him as he had watched her all evening was denied him as he wriggled out of his trousers, into his pajamas, sitting on half the constricted space of the berth, while crowded over on her side under the blanket, her face in the shadow of her pillow, she bleakly observed him. Her right fingers lay touching her cheek; her bare arm was misted with the sleeve of her thin nightgown. She would have been an invitation to passion but that there was neither desire in her look nor any fun of intimacy, but only wariness and a doubt that hinted of fear.

He remembered their honeymoon night, remembered the rowdy adventure of her popping across the aisle and into his berth.

As he crawled under the covers beside her, and hesitatingly, just to say good night, slipped his arm about her scarce-covered shoulders, she flinched away from him. She moved over the inch or two that was her only room for escape. He drew his arm back, muttered “G’ night” as indifferently as he could, and pretended to sleep.

Astounding and sudden, he found that there were tears in his eyes, and that he was mourning, “She is drifting away from me. I can’t hold her. She and Bradd were loyal to me, but there will be another Bradd, a less scrupulous one, and I cannot hold her. She is drifting away.”

The last stage of their journey was on the “Borup,” the familiar old club car from St. Paul and Minneapolis to Grand Republic and Duluth. Cass had known it since college days, and for twenty years had known Mac, the old attendant. On it, very welcome, were Diantha Marl and Eve Champeris, brittle and lively and superior in black suits and small pert hats, and Cass was proud of them, citizenesses of no mean city, proofs of home. But Jinny scarcely saw them. There was nothing of her there except her slight body.

But she was still distantly civil as they arrived in Grand Republic toward six, in a dusk that even the friendly sight of the tall Pv elevators could not make anything but cold and dark.