Chapter 48

For Cass, the worst, in the late Northern winter, when the malicious cold and the ashen skies had gone on too long, when the white world was speckled with dirt and the snow was spoiled for skiing, was coming home from court to the dusky house that was empty of her welcome. Her absence was not a negative thing, merely a not-being-there; it was a positive and frightening presence, which crept after him and made him turn quickly to see her not-being-there.

He muttered “Jinny?” as he stood in the dark living-room, as though she must hear him and come.

Cleo stoutly accompanied him through the house with her inquiring “Mrawr?” and he talked to her more than to Mrs. Higbee. Once, late at night, when he sat in the living-room alone with Cleo, he heard her reasonlessly begin to purr, and watched her watch an invisible presence in the room. Her eyes clearly followed the unseen figure, to the piano, to the bookshelves, to Jinny’s chair, rested there, then, with slowly turning head, she followed the apparition to the door and, half in terror, Cass thought that in the doorway he could see an outline made of air.

—This is bad. Dangerous. I wonder if something could have happened to her? I don’t believe in this telepathy stuff, but I’ve got to telephone to her.

—Don’t be a fool!

He felt that he ought to rush out of the house, out of this danger, go to a neighbor’s, play bridge, anything. But he could not endure having to explain Jinny’s flight. For weeks after she had gone, he was glad when he was invited to dinner, glad to know that he still existed in somebody’s affection, yet he always refused. Except for public affairs, where he spoke more impersonally than ever, he dined alone, silent, served by a silent Mrs. Higbee, guarded by an attentive Cleo, whose eyes too often moved from him to follow again the invisible being that slowly entered the room and circled it and vanished.

It had taken him a fortnight to believe that Jinny actually had left him, but as it became contemptuously clear, his state grew worse. All evening, trying to escape into the security of Dickens and Thackeray and Hardy, half-listening to the radio, he kept himself from telephoning to Jinny in Darien.

At every moment through the evening, always calculating the hour’s difference in time between Grand Republic and Darien, he was conscious of what she might now be doing. He saw her at bridge with the Eldermans and a neighborhood widower—the widower was imaginary, but Cass pictured him and his sticky little literary goatee, and hated him. Then there were the evenings when the Eldermans were out and Jinny was alone. She was listening to the same network program as himself, and if he disliked it, he still could not turn it off, because she might want to hear it.

He hoped that she was not lonely then, and he wanted to speak to her, cheer her, reassure her. He thought of so many things about which he really MUST telephone her—such as Cleo’s casually having kittens—but he dared not try, lest he reach only Avis Elderman or her stupid husband or a Jinny patiently answering his solicitude with “Lonely? Of course I’m not. In fact we’re having a wonderful party. . . . HE is here.”

No, no! Surely she would not slap him thus.

But then—she might. He laid down for future generations the discovery: “Love does queer things to people.”

His mental dogging of her stopped sharply when his personal Guardian Fiend buzzed in his ear, “And now, my boy, she is having a little love-making with Bradd, your successor and a better man than you.”

He was presently able, in a slowly growing self-discipline, to wipe out entirely that picture of them as lovers. He made an injunction against thinking of it at all. He did not, however, persuade himself that Jinny and Bradd were merely playing checkers, or that some day she would raise that lovely face to him and say with tender rebuke, “It was you only that I loved, all along, and Bradd, whom you so unjustly suspected, is my long-lost brother.”

His hope was that Bradd was already cooling toward her, and that was at once a vicarious humiliation and a preserving promise. After all, Bradd had never seen in her any peculiar divinity, but only an amusing freshness. Might he not tire of her soon?

He was happiest when the radio played such rustic memories as “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Nelly Was a Lady.” He could see himself as a boy of eighteen with a Jinny aged sixteen, on a country hayride in the dusk. They held hands and trusted each other, and suddenly they were both of them eighty, on a country doorstep in the sun, still holding hands, as true to each other as the coursing rhythms of their blood.

He detested the bland, blond yapping of radio announcers, with their new-world litany of cigarettes and liver pills and bean soup— “yum, GOOD!” He resented the fact that he was coming to resemble the college students who cannot study without the narcotic of unceasing radio sound.

But when he turned it off, the house was too solitary in the Northern winter night, too quiet, and he sat listening for Jinny, knowing that she would not come, yet forever listening for her footstep, listening and afraid, not knowing of what he was afraid, not daring to turn his head, afraid and rigid, while Cleo murmured to the invisible passer-by, till he cried aloud and desperately switched on the banal magnificence of a million-dollar band that was right out of the jungle via Tin Pan Alley.

Yet when he remembered that Jinny and he had listened to the radio with their arms about each other, relaxed and content with love, then the strident gaiety was as intolerable as the menacing silence.

He took to reading detective stories instead of the history which, as the incorrigible Puritan, he felt he OUGHT to read. But that was not a soothing dissipation, for after them, in bed, he heard from up in the attic, from down in the basement, from all round the house, Limehouse cut-throats and international agents, and rajahs looking for the idol’s eye which he had stolen in 1867. He really could hear them, too.

He thought of her loneliness, as well as his. He thought of all the loneliness in the world:

Of widows who for a quarter-century had depended upon husbands and noisy children, but were alone now in cottages where the clock ticked too loudly. Of more prosperous widows surrounded by alien chatter on the porches of gilt summer hotels. Of young men new to a city, too poor for theaters, desperate in furnished rooms. Of other young men, soldiers in strange camps. Of young women with a richness of potential love but with no prettiness about them, alone in the evening, waiting for a telephone call that would never come. Of the lookout on a steamer long in the fog. Of traveling men plodding in shaky cars from country store to store, over the prairie that fled always back from them. Of Pullman porters late at night, the passengers sleeping. Of rich old men, so rich that they were afraid of all their bobbing relatives, invalid and waiting for dawn. Of an old doctor, retired now, sitting in his worn chair, knowing only too well what was wrong with him. Of kings and watchmen and babies left alone to darkness.

If his travels into pity did not make him the less lonely, they did turn his thoughts from himself, and he could endure it again to look about the room that was too quick with suggestions of Jinny’s soft being: the lamp whose purchase had been such a triumph; the chessmen that still bore the traces of her fingers. He could endure it then, just endure it, as a patient endures the heart-jab that did not quite kill him—this time—and he could even endure the sound of a distant train whistle, loneliest and loveliest of sounds.

But whenever the radio was not blatting, he was listening for her, hearing her in a sound beyond sound, waiting for her, listening for her, stooped and afraid, listening and afraid, like a man in the condemned cell on the last, slow, irremediable night.

To the public eye—and in Grand Republic that eye can be quite public—he was doing what is known as “bearing up.” In court, he had never been so quick and sure; and he had never so often taken briefs home for study. Perhaps, he thought grimly, her absence is very good for my work.

But he knew that if to others his base seemed solid enough, he was out of shape, a figure loose and without pattern.

He carried on an undeclared feud with Mrs. Higbee about eating. He was in a mood to receive sympathy as the lean, suffering, and vitaminless lover, but, with nothing more than a rebuking, “There’s some nice lamb chops tonight, Judge, and you didn’t eat your lovely chicken last night” as her sole maternal comment, he got no satisfaction.

When she brought him an evening highball, Mrs. Higbee still used the brass coasters upon which Jinny had insisted, to save the mahogany, but when Cass went out to the kitchen, in a dull kitchen-shuffle, to get himself a drink which he did not particularly want, he no longer troubled to bring in a coaster with it, and he rested the glass messily on a magazine, which would have brought retribution from Jinny.

He lost, too, the habit of bringing home flowers, and sometimes, dining alone, he disapprovingly noted his own table-manners, his leaning despondently low over his soup-plate or sitting with his elbows on the table and dipping his toast in the coffee or chasing crumbs about the table.

As intently as a lonely woman fussing over pantry-shelves, he grew absorbed in watching the whirling islands of bubbles on his newly stirred cup of coffee: how handsome some of them were, with one vast bubble-mountain in the center, how the lesser islands were drawn across the current by the mass of the major island, and mystically merged with it. There was the most cosmic of tragedies when the great island crashed and dissolved against the high porcelain bluffs.

“I think possibly you’re giving too much attention to the geography of bubbles,” he noted.

To the world, he was as proper as ever, yet he saw himself becoming a little queer. He was—for a while—slovenly about “making this shirt do another day—just a little dirt on the collar,” and once this fanatical devotee to cleanliness did not shave the duskiness of his jaw a second time before going out to a public dinner, and once he forgot to brush his teeth before going to bed.

His next degeneracy was a look into mystic asceticism. He cut his cigarettes down to fifteen a day, and felt that God was counting them and that, as a reward for this abstemiousness, He would give back Jinny’s love.

When the ice turned shoddy and went out of Dead Squaw Lake, Cass found that he could be most satisfyingly alone in a canoe on those chilly waters, and one twilight a man walking on the shore incredulously heard the thin complaining of a flute out on the lake, saw a canoe with a figure silhouetted on the leaden ripples.

“That fellow must be a left-over Indian, or else he’s crazy,” thought the man.

When he was both idle and strained, as he often was now after court hours, Cass was plagued by tunes that chased round and round in his mind, or by “Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy” repeating itself, without his volition. Worst mental parasite of all, ceaselessly whirling like an electric fan at slow speed, was “Silent upon a peak in Darien.” That one he had started as a wry pun, but before long it had become a recurrent horror, and it meant for him only Jinny, in Darien, lying in the silence that was death.

When he heard of Vincent Osprey’s suicide, he felt that threat menacing himself and, like everybody else now and then, Cass wondered, “Am I losing my mind?” But, like everybody else, he did not believe anything of the sort.

The suicide made him look at his brooding, his own indulgent antics, and abruptly quit all that adult childishness. This sensibleness had its own evils. No longer could the curiously vicious forms of mental solitaire divert his mind from the loss of Jinny. But he had had enough of the exhibitionism of the hair-shirt of morbid love, and when he noticed that he was sloppily leaning over his plate at his dinner, he sighed and straightened himself.

He made himself put away the agonizing memorabilia of Jinny still left in the living-room: the photographs of her, the silver bowl for roses which she had especially loved, the painting of the Sorshay River bluffs—not too good—which she had made on an Indian Summer afternoon. He took to sitting in his tight little paneled study, in which there was room only for himself and Cleo and a portable radio—little room for memories.

But there he could not see her so clearly in his mind, and this was tragic to him, and he wondered of what future it might be an omen.

Though he was frozen with waiting for her, Cass was also busy with war boards and Republican committees. Sometimes he estimated, “I seem to have come out of my fever of wild-eyed love. But I’m not too proud of that. I’d rather go really crazy than forget her and become free—free for what?”

He was not altogether amused when he discovered that there were times when it was pleasant to go to bed just when he wanted to, as noisily as he wanted to or as quietly; to order only what HE liked to eat, and to wear the old brown hat.

Early May, this year, was not so much spring as a pallid and invalid winter, and the shutting down of furnaces, the laying away of overcoats, were more conspicuous than any riot of flowers.

Jinny had been gone from him for three months now.

They had written to each other mechanically, once a week. His letters were the most fatiguing documents that he had ever struggled over, and the most exact. He must be neither harsh nor yet a beggar of love; he must leave her free—while trying to trap her with anxious cunning. He wrote fully about Cleo, a little about his court room and the Drovers.

Her small notes were equally competent—and false and lost and pathetic.

She thought that she would establish residence in Vermont for her divorce, but she did not feel well enough yet for that effort, and Avis was insisting that she remain in Darien till she was quite sure that she wanted to marry Bradd. (“WHAT?” exulted Cass.) She wrote “DEAR Avis,” and Cass could hear the fury in it.

As an inveterate between-the-lines reader, he blissfully concluded that she was seeing Bradd only under chaperonage, and he hoped that she was having a dull time, but just when he was sure of it, she wrote about a “gorgeous party that some people that live near here pulled, they are great friends of Berg Nord as well as Bradd: smart women and amusing men and lyric composers and playwrites.”

—Darling, you never could spell!

“They were just the kind of exciting people that I TOLD you we would meet in and around New York, if we were only patient.”

—The hell you did, my dear! You said you hated the place.

“Bradd met all these people through Cousin Berg, whom I introduced to him.”

—That is the WORST impertinence! It’s MY Cousin Berg!

“He is getting to know them so well, they think he is just as witty as they are, and we had a terrific time, charades and cooking at an outdoor grill.

“I’m afraid I did eat too many pastries and drink too much and stay up late, and as a matter of fact, I’m writing this in bed, where I’ll have to stay for a day or two, not so well, but still it was worth it.”

He was worried to distraction. He wanted to telegraph to her, to telephone, but what could he say? Nothing more than the advice by which conscientious parents drive their infuriated children to lives of vice: “Do take care of yourself.” That he must not say.

So he merely wrote to her—air mail: “I assume that after your fine party but a little risky, you will, without being told, see that you must take care of yourself.”

Her next note frightened him even more. She wrote, in a script that was not too steady:

Cass dearest:

Cant write much at this time, am still in bed tho getting much better, HONESTLY, don’t worry my dear am REALLY being sensible this time. I have a good doctor here Dr. Liskett, he seems to me much smarter than Roy. He has started me in on injections of insulin which, you know, I never had before.

I hate getting jabbed, like a poor trout with a hook but the Dr says he is sure before long I can leave them off and don’t you worry, my dear.

Your bad Jinny

Then he did telephone to Darien.

He was told by a glacial butler that Mrs. Timberlane was now able to leave her bed, that she was taking a short walk, should he give her a message, and what was the nyme, please?

“No message,” said Cass.

The word Insulin was a signal of disaster.