The Gay Cockade
slenderness of the figure outlined beneath the white covers.
Anne had married Ridgeley Dunbar because she loved him. And love to Anne
had been all fire and flame and spirit. It did not take her long to
learn that her husband looked upon love and life as matters of flesh and
blood--and bones. By degrees his materialism imposed itself upon Anne.
She admired Ridgeley immensely. She worshiped, in fact, the wonder of
his day's work. He healed the sick, he cured the halt and blind, and he
scoffed at Anne's superstitions--"I can match every one of your Bible
miracles. There's nothing to it, my dear. Death is death and life is
life--so make the most of it."
Anne tried to make the most of it. But she found it difficult. In the
first place her husband was a very busy man. He seemed to be perfectly
happy with his cutting people up, and his medical books, and the
articles which he wrote about the intricate clockwork inside of us which
ticks off the hours from birth to death. Now and then he went out to the
theatre with his wife or to dine with friends. But, as a rule, she went
alone. She had a limousine, a chauffeur, a low swung touring car--and an
electric. Her red hair was still wonderful, and she dressed herself
quite understanding in grays and whites and greens. If she did not wear
habitually her air of gay youth, it was revived in her now and then when
something pleased or excited her. And her eyes would shine as they had
shone in the hospital when Ridgeley Dunbar had first bent over her bed.
They shone on Christopher Carr when he came home from the war. He was a
friend of her husband. Or rather, as a student in the medical school, he
had listened to the lectures of the older man, and had made up his mind
to know him personally, and had thus, by sheer persistence, linked their
lives together.
Anne had never met him. He had been in India When she had married
Ridgeley, and then there had been a few years in Egypt where he had
studied some strange germ, of which she could never remember the name.
He had plenty of money, hence he was not tied to a practice. But when
the war began, he had offered his services, and had made a great record.
"He is one of the big men of the future," Ridgeley Dunbar had said.
But when Christopher came back with an infected arm, which might give
him trouble, it was not the time to talk of futures. He was invited to
spend July at the Dunbars' country home in Connecticut, and Ridgeley
brought him out at the week-end.
The Connecticut estate consisted of a rambling stone house, an
old-fashioned garden, and beyond the garden a grove of white birches.
"What a heavenly place," Christopher said, toward the end of dinner;
"how did you happen to find it?"
"Oh, Anne did it. She motored for weeks, and she bought it because of
the birches."
Anne's eyes were shining. "I'll show them to you after dinner."
She had decided at once that she liked Christopher. He still wore his
uniform, and had the look of a soldier. But it wasn't that--it was the
things he had been saying ever since the soup was served. No one had
talked of the war as he talked of it. There had been other doctors whose
minds had been on arms and legs--amputated; on wounds and shell
shock--And there had been a few who had sentimentalized. But Christopher
had seemed neither to resent the frightfulness nor to care about the
moral or spiritual consequences. He had found in it all a certain beauty
of which he spoke with enthusiasm--"A silver dawn, and a patch of Blue
Devils like smoke against it--;" ... "A blood-red sunset, and a lot of
airmen streaming across--"
He painted pictures, so that Anne saw battles as if a great brush had
splashed them on an invisible canvas. There were just four at the
table--the two men, Anne, and her second cousin, Jeanette Ware, who
lived the year round in the Connecticut house, and was sixty and
slightly deaf, but who wore modern clothes and had a modern mind.
It was not yet dark, and the light of the candles in sconces and on the
table met the amethyst light that came through, the wide-flung lattice.
Anne's summer gown was something very thin in gray, and she wore an
Indian necklace of pierced silver beads. Christopher had sent it to her
as a wedding-present and she had always liked it.
When they rose from the table, Christopher said, "Now for the birches."
Somewhere in the distance the telephone rang, and a maid came in to say
that Dr. Dunbar was wanted. "Don't wait for me," he said, "I'll follow
you."
Jeanette Ware hated the night air, and took her book to the lamp on the
screened porch, and so it happened that Anne and Christopher came alone
to the grove where the white bodies of the birches shone like slender
nymphs through the dusk. A little wind shook their leaves.
"No wonder," said Christopher, looking down at Anne, "that you wanted
this--but tell me precisely why."
She tried to tell him, but found it difficult. "I seem to find something
here that I thought I had lost."
"What things?"
"Well--guardian angels--do you believe in them?" She spoke lightly, as
if it were not in the least serious, but he felt that it was serious.
"I believe in all beautiful things--"
"I used to think when I was a little girl that they were around me when
I was asleep--
'Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--
Bless the bed that I lie on--'"
her laugh was a bit breathless--"but I don't believe in them any more.
Ridgeley doesn't, you know. And it does seem silly--"
"Oh, no, it isn't--"
"Ridgeley feels that it is a bit morbid--and perhaps he is right. He
says that we must eat and drink and--be merry," she flung out her hands
with a little gesture of protest, "but he really isn't merry--"
"I see. He just eats and drinks?" He smiled at her.
"And works. And his work is--wonderful."
They sat down on a stone bench which had been hewn out of solid gray
rock. "I wish Ridgeley had time to play," Anne said; "it would be nice
for both of us--"
The amethyst light had gone, and the dusk descended. Anne's gray dress
was merged into the gray of the rock. She seemed just voice, and phantom
outline, and faint rose fragrance. Christopher recognized the scent. He
had sent her a precious vial in a sandalwood box. Nothing had seemed too
good for the wife of his old friend Dunbar.
"Life for you and Ridgeley," he told her, "should be something more than
work or play--it should be infinite adventure."
"Yes. But Ridgeley hasn't time for adventure."
"Oh, he thinks he hasn't--"
As Christopher talked after that, Anne was not sure that he was in
earnest. He complained that romance had fallen into disrepute. "With all
the modern stories--you know the formula--an ounce of sordidness, a
flavor of sensationalism, a dash of sex--" One had to look back for the
real thing--Aucassin and Nicolette, and all the rest. "That's why I
haven't married."
"Well, I have often wondered."
"If I loved a woman, I should want to make her life all glow and
color--and mine--with her--"
Anne's eyes were shining. What a big pleasant boy he was. He seemed so
young. He had a way of running his fingers up through his hair. She was
aware of the gesture in the dark. Yes, she liked him. And she felt
suddenly gay and light-hearted, as she had felt in the days when she
first met Ridgeley.
They talked until the stars shone in the tips of the birch trees.
Ridgeley did not come, and when they went back to the house, they found
that he had been called to New York on an urgent case. He would not
return until the following Friday.
Anne and Christopher were thus left together for a week to get
acquainted. With only old Jeanette Ware to play propriety.
II
It did not take Christopher long to decide that Ridgeley was no longer
in love with his wife. "Of course he would call it love. But he could
live just as well without her. He has made a machine of himself."
He spoke to Dunbar one night about Anne. "Do you think she is perfectly
well?"
"Why not?"
"There's a touch of breathlessness when we walk. Are you sure about her
heart?"
"She has never been strong--" and that had seemed to be the end of it.
But it was not the end of it for Christopher. He watched Anne closely,
and once when they climbed a hill together and she gave out, he carried
her to the top. He managed to get his ear against her heart, and what he
heard drained the blood from his face.
As for Anne, she thought how strong he was--and how fair his hair was
with the sun upon it, for he had tucked his cap in his pocket.
That night Christopher again spoke to Ridgeley. "Anne's in a bad way."
He told of the walk to the top of the hill.
Ridgeley listened this time, and the next day he took Anne down into his
office, and did things to her. "But I don't see why you are doing all
this," she complained, as he stuck queer instruments in his ears, and
made her draw long breaths while he listened.
"Christopher says you get tired when you walk."
"Well, I do. But there's nothing really the matter, is there?"
There was a great deal the matter, but there was no hint of it in his
manner. If she had not been his wife, he would probably have told her
the truth--that she had a few months, perhaps a few years ahead of her.
He was apt to be frank with his patients. But he was not frank with
Anne. He had intended to tell Christopher at once. But Christopher was
away for a week.
In the week that he was separated from her, Christopher learned that he
loved Anne; that he had been in love with her from the moment that she
had stood among the birches--like one of them in her white
slenderness--and had talked to him of guardian angels;--"_Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John_!"
He did not believe in saints, nor in the angels whose wings seemed to
enfold Anne, but he believed in beauty--and Anne's seemed lighted from
within, like an alabaster lamp.
Yet she was very human--and the girl in her and the boy in him had met
in the weeks that he had spent with her. They had found a lot of things
to do--they had fished in shallow brown streams, they had ridden
through miles of lovely country. They had gone forth in search of
adventure, and they had found it; in cherries on a tree by the road, and
he had climbed the tree and had dropped them down to her, and she had
hung them over her ears--He had milked a cow in a pasture as they
passed, and they had drunk it with their sandwiches, and had tied up a
bill in Anne's fine handkerchief and had knotted it to the halter of the
gentle, golden-eared Guernsey.
But they had found more than adventure--they had found romance--shining
upon them everywhere. "If I were a gipsy to follow the road, and she
could follow it with me," Christopher meditated as he sat in the train
on his way back to Anne.
But there was Anne's husband, and Christopher's friend--and more than
all there were all the specters of modern life--all the hideous wheels
which must turn if Anne were ever to be his--treachery to Ridgeley--the
divorce court--and then, himself and Anne, living the aftermath, of it
all, facing, perhaps, disillusion--
"Oh, not _that_," Christopher told himself, "she'd never grow
less--never anything less than she is--if she could once--care--"
For he did not know whether Anne cared or not. He might guess as he
pleased--but there had not been a word between them.
Once more the thought flashed, "If I were a gipsy to follow the road--"
As his train sped through the countryside, he became aware of flaming
bill-boards--a circus was showing in the towns--the fences fairly blazed
with golden chariots, wild beasts, cheap gods and goddesses, clowns in
frilled collars and peaked hats. He remembered a glorious day that he
had spent as a boy!
"I'll take Anne," was his sudden decision.