Part Three: Gwen

“He does?” Fitz was impressed, and turned to Gwen. “Mind if I—?”

She shook her head, and he went off to the ballroom, leaving Cabot by the door.

“We’re getting a lot of compliments on your singing,” Cabot said, advancing to the table to choose a sandwich. “Fitz said you might be willing to take some other engagements, is that right?”

“I’d be glad to, but I haven’t got an accompanist. Fitz told Mrs. Palmer that he’d play for me at her house, but that can’t go on indefinitely.”

“Why not?”

They looked at each other, Cabot munching his sandwich, Gwen with her glass at her lips. In that instant, while his hard, hooded eyes bored into her, they understood and liked each other.

“You needn’t worry about him, Mr. Murray,” she said. “He won’t come to any harm through me.”

“Do you take me for a fool, my dear?” he said, and went to lean on the mantelpiece, looking down at her. The firelight threw sharp shadows upward on his rugged face. “So you’ve tumbled to it,” he added, smiling.

“How?”

“He mentioned his Aunt Eden once. Then Mrs. Palmer called your wife by her given name, and I knew. It wasn’t really news to me, though. That is

—I knew he didn’t belong in West Twenty-ninth Street. You see, Mr.

Murray, I’m no fool either.”

“Would it be any use to you to know,” he remarked, watching her from the hearthrug, “that when I first went to Virginia, where I found my wife, I felt as though I had stepped into another world where I had no right to be?”

Gwen sat motionless, looking down into her glass. Was it written all over her that she loved Fitz and couldn’t have him? She wouldn’t admit it, though, much as she liked this knowing, outspoken uncle of his. He wasn’t going to hypnotize her into giving herself away.

“Well, I just thought I’d mention it,” Cabot was saying.

Still she made no answer, obstinately.

“Who are you?” he demanded gently. “How did you first meet him?”

“At a third-rate music hall.” She let it sound just as bad as it could.

“Mm-hm. I said How.”

Slowly her eyes came up to him. Then they went to the door. There was no sign of Fitz to rescue her. When she looked back Cabot was still waiting.

“I worked there with my brother as a dancing team. He got into trouble with the Fagan crowd. They called his hand and he shot himself—during a performance. Fitz and Johnny were there that night. It was their own idea to protect me from Fagan—I needed it, too. They walked me right out from under Gyp O’Connor‘s nose and hid me in Johnny’s room. They loaned me money, they fed me, they got me another job where I’d be safe. With the money I get here tonight I can pay back what I owe them. And that’s all. I didn’t know there were people like them. I kept waiting for the catch in it.

There wasn’t one. But you know them better than I do, you’re not surprised.”

“Fagan—O’Connor—?” he said, and his eyes glinted. “For the love of God, those small-time crooks! If you have any more trouble with them, let me know.”

“Are you—with the police?”

“No, I’m Murray of the Star. We know those fellows, every one of them

—that’s our business. Part of it. We helped clean up the Piotti gang last year. That was safe-cracking. Your Fagan is a gambler, and that’s harder.

All the same, we’re always interested in him.”

“He’s a killer. You want to look out.”

“You’ve got friends from now on, Miss Maguire. Remember that.”

“Funny. That’s what Fitz always says.”

“Don’t you believe it?”

Gwen rose and set her glass back on the tray.

“Mr. Murray, if you have any idea that I—that Fitz and I—well, it’s like I told you, he wants nothing of me, nor I of him. When I give him back the money I owe him we’re all square. I could walk out tomorrow and there’s no harm done.”

“I sort of hope you won’t though.” He had not moved from his position against the mantel. “You’re good for Fitz, I think. But don’t be too easy on

him. He wants shaking up.”

She faced him, the light full on her troubled, honest eyes and curving red mouth.

“I hope you aren’t putting ideas into my head, Mr. Murray,” she remarked with dignity, and Cabot grinned, strolling towards her with one hand in his pocket.

“Well, it suddenly occurred to me that you might have some idea of paying your debt back and then going out into the night and closing the door behind you with a dull, Ibsenesque thud. And I just wanted to say, while there is still time—Don’t.” He patted her shoulder briefly on his way to the door. At the threshold he turned and caught her eyes across the room.

“Don’t do it,” he said firmly, and went.

Gwen stared after him a moment Then she poured herself another glass of champagne.

“Hullo, Mr. Tosti,” she murmured, and drank to him gravely.

7

THE entire Murray family and Fitz escorted Sue from New York to Williamsburg and spent Christmas there, as usual. Plans were already being made for Dabney’s son Miles’s coming-of-age in April. Coming-of-age parties were even more regarded in the family than Christmas. They occurred less frequently. There was always a special wine which had been laid down at the time of the christening with the date on it, and there were certain table traditions and ceremonies. Only the worst kind of personal disaster or emergency prevented any member of the family from attending, no matter how far he might have to travel. Although Eden’s son Bracken had been born and reared in New York, he had come of age in Williamsburg, with all the fixings and everybody there to drink his health.

And now it was Miles’s turn.

In order not to miss Miles’s party, Eden and Virginia had set their sailing for England for the first week in May. Cabot’s plans for going abroad with them were provisional, for he had now become deeply interested in the situation in Cuba, where Spanish brutality was receiving a good deal of publicity through the reports of adventurous Special Correspondents from the American Press.

The ubiquitous Richard Harding Davis had been sent there by Hearst, and had witnessed the dawn execution of a young Cuban patriot, his account of which had wrung the hearts of his readers. Scovel of the World, Flint of the Journal, among others, had been risking their lives under fire with the insurgent forces—dodging Spanish spies, burning up with fever, sometimes landing in jail, and somehow getting their dispatches smuggled out. Most of them were wanted by Spanish firing squads. Ralph Paine had gone pirating with a filibustering ship running arms to the insurgents and nearly lost his life in a running fight at sea. Frederick Remington, Stephen Crane, Ernest McCready—only a few years earlier the name of Cabot Murray would have joined the distinguished list. But in that climate it was a job for a young man, as he well knew; a man moreover who had not for thirty years been subject to recurrent bouts of malaria which laid him low, put severe strain on his heart, and then departed abruptly till next time. He now perceived with incredulous surprise that Bracken was not going to demand Cuba as his next assignment instead of returning to the Fleet Street office, which in his absence Nelson was running creditably. It was inconceivable to Cabot that any son of his should so neglect a spectacular opportunity for news gathering.

Bracken for the first time in his life was not completely alive to his father’s wishes. His mind dwelt obstinately on getting back to England, to Farthingale, to Dinah. Her letters, written spontaneously now without Miss French’s supervision, were full of Edward’s hunting talk and news of the weather. But always somewhere in their schoolgirl content he could find a line to comfort him which showed her need of him and her sustaining confidence in his quick return. Since it was impossible yet for him to write as he felt, he tried to bring her closer to his life by telling about the parties Eden gave, the plays they saw, the endless variety and stimulation of a newspaper shop. And at the end of each letter he promised again to come back soon—by the end of January, anyway.

Just before they all left New York for Williamsburg in December Cabot came to a decision and Bracken got his orders—on to Tampa right after Christmas, and thence to Key West and Havana, where he was to report to the American Consul, General Fitzhugh Lee, under whom Sedgwick had served as a cavalryman during the War Between the States. With General Lee’s approval Bracken would make his manners to the Spanish Captain-

General and take all the safe-conducts and introductions Blanco would part with, as Davis had done the year before with his predecessor. Then, with other credentials supplied by the Cuban junta in New York, Bracken was to get out at night between the lines, talk to the insurgents, learn both sides, never take any notes, never go near the cable office, and bring back the story in his head to be written on uncensored American soil.

As an assignment it was a Special Correspondent’s dream, and Bracken knew that a year ago he would have been blissfully happy at the prospect.

He was nearly as aghast as his father would have been to discover that he only wanted to go back to England instead. He found it hard to talk to Cabot about Dinah, when at one time he had longed for the chance. It was still too soon. The best parents on earth could never understand the cobweb romance which nevertheless held him fast with the strength of steel. And so he had said very little after all, and left them wondering, which was not his way. He told himself it would be much simpler once they saw her, when they came to Farthingale in the spring. He had given up without even trying to describe to them his own fatalistic belief that he and Dinah were meant to be, and that obstacles were only put in their way to be overcome, and that the more unlikely it seemed that he would ever be free to take her the surer he became, inside, that she was his.

And now there was this Cuba business. It never occurred to Bracken to question his assignment, or try to beg off from it. It was a nuisance, qualified by many emphatic adjectives, but he would see it through, although it meant that now he would be lucky to arrive in England before the first of March. But he told himself that Dinah must learn to wait for him, and could not begin too soon, and he sat down to write and explain.

This was rather difficult to do, for it must on no account be a love letter and yet on the other hand he must not sound like just another careless adult who found it inconvenient to keep a promise. He wrote the letter more than once and was not satisfied with the final version. But he sent it off along with the best music box New York could produce for her Christmas present—in a gold case, with a tinkling minuet tune and a French miniature on the lid.

Fitz, happily exempt from family tradition and obligation, returned to New York with Cabot and Eden after Christmas and settled down to finish his musical comedy. Victor Herbert had backed up his own enthusiasm with an introduction to a manager he thought would be interested in producing it,

and from him Fitz had received substantial encouragement in the form of an option. No one had ever seen Fitz so busy.

“It must be that girl,” Eden said to Cabot one evening towards the end of January. “I do believe Fitz is going to find himself at last. She believes in him. He needed something like that.”

“She needs a job,” Cabot said. “Fitz will always go out of his way to help somebody else. That’s why he wants to sell this opperetta of his—so she can sing in it.”

“Do you think he—?”

“I think he’s too near-sighted. But maybe he’ll come to, eventually.”

“Marry her?”

“You married me,” he reminded her, and they smiled at each other.

“Still, it’s not quite the same thing,” Eden said then.

“Not quite. I had a great deal more on my soul than this little waif of Fitz’s ever dreamed of.”

“But do you think she’s—”

“Virtuous? Oh, women! She’s not nineteen yet, he says, so she’s not had much time for sin!”

“She’s got red on her mouth, Cabot. I’m only thinking of the family, if he should ever take her home to Williamsburg as his wife.”

“And how much did you think of the family, beloved, when you fell in love with your rough Yankee journalist?”

“I wish I could feel sure she wasn’t just feathering her nest,” Eden said wilfully.

“You are a cat, Eden. All women are cats. That girl can’t see straight for being in love with Fitz. She’d feel the same if he was nothing but a leg-man and couldn’t play a note. I thought you might be more charitable in your old age and in the light of your own experience. Or did you marry me for my money?”

“And why else do you think I married you?” They were safe to joke like that, after thirty years together.

“It’s Bracken I don’t like the look of,” he added after a moment, playing with her rings as they sat hand in hand before the fire. “He wasn’t keen to go to Cuba. He went in the line of duty and he won’t spare himself, but he wasn’t keen. Must we take that girl in England seriously, d’you think?”

Eden brooded at the fire.

“He’s been very silent about her. But he’s different from what he was last spring, he’s more—lighthearted. As though Lisl was wearing off. We should be grateful for that, in any case.”

“He didn’t say so—but I know he would rather have gone back to London than to Cuba,” Cabot ruminated unhappily. “That in itself is a terrible state of affairs, at his age!”

“Perhaps it’s just the delay on the divorce that upset him. He says they can’t get on with that until he is back there living in London. Sally wants to rush right over and swear before the Queen’s Proctor or whoever it is that she saw Lisl and the Hutchinson person living together at Cannes. But Bracken says that isn’t the way it’s done.”

“The mills of the English legal gods grind slowly,” Cabot said. “But he seems to think an English divorce, if he can get one, will have weight with the Earl. Must we have a ladyship for a daughter-in-law next, I wonder?

Why can’t he fall in love with an American? I did!”

“At least she sounds very different from Lisl,” Eden murmured.

“Oh, anything but Lisl!” he agreed, yawning, and somehow comforted, they put out the lights and went to bed.

8

WHEN Bracken reached New York again the second week in February, he was the complete correspondent with nothing on his mind but a story. He had written feverishly all the way up in the train from Tampa and was sleepless and unshaven. He handed over a thick sheaf of manuscript in his neat longhand with the request that Cabot have it typewritten at once, fell into a hot bath with groans of joy, dropped into bed and slept all day till nearly dinner time.

Around seven o’clock Cabot couldn’t bear it any longer and invaded the room, the typed story in his hand.

“Wake up, you young son-of-a-gun, and tell me more!” he shouted, landing heavily on the edge of the bed. “How did you get this stuff about the shooting of bound men? Where have you been? What else did you see?

Wake up, I say, and go on from here!”

Bracken, who was a light sleeper and always woke up all there, opened one eye, grinned, and burrowed deeper into the pillow.

“Got a cup of coffee on you?” he wanted to know.

Cabot stripped back the covers with a ruthless hand and then, lest his favourite Special catch pneumonia, went to close the window and toss a dressing gown at the bed.

“Come out of that,” he said. “Who was the man in the café? Did you ever find out?”

“Mm-hm. He’d been jailed for photographing Morro Castle, and escaped, and was hiding. He was in cahoots with the A.P. man, whose real name nobody knows. Except me. I saw him. It’s Hilgert. But don’t tell. He didn’t see me. Mind if I have another bath?” He drifted away towards the bathroom, Cabot at his heels,

By the time Bracken had shaved and dressed for dinner, at which there were several guests, Cabot’s curiosity had been a little appeased. Yes, said Bracken, the insurgents had shot a Spanish colonel under flag of truce.

Women and children were starving by the hundreds because the Spanish did burn whole villages of homes in order to drive the population into the concentration camps where they could be exterminated by hunger and disease. Yes, there had been a riot in Havana while he was there. But it was a strictly Spanish riot against the native advocates of autonomy, and there was no particular anti-American feeling in it, except that all the Havanese blamed the American newspapers—with cause—for fanning the flame of rebellion. During the rioting the American Consul, a not very even-tempered man, had gone right off the handle and started cabling the State Department for battleships. Yet Bracken himself had accompanied General Lee through the streets of Havana unmolested that same evening, and had seen him dining publicly at his usual table in a window at the Hotel Inglaterra. The old gentleman put up a magnificent front, and the Spaniards were impressed. Things cooled off. Ten days later the Maine had arrived from Key West and dropped anchor in Havana harbour. Her presence there was intended to suggest to the Spanish Captain-General that it would be well in the interests of American life and property to keep order in the city.

There was no demonstration against her as she passed sedately in under the guns of Morro Castle, but there was no denying she wasn’t welcome. Looks can’t kill, though, said Bracken, and when Captain Sigsbee of the Maine came ashore to render his compliments to the Captain-General the manners

of the Spanish officers, as well as their Spanish caution, had been impeccable.

The Spanish army in Cuba, Bracken went on, had pretty light blue and white uniforms made out of bed-ticking, with red and yellow cockades.

Their personal habits and condition were a disgrace to any so-called civilized nation, and none of them had ever heard of sanitation in any form.

“Forgive me for sounding like a Hearst man,” Bracken said gravely, sitting in the tub soaping himself while his father leaned against the wash-basin firing questions at him every time he paused for breath, “but it’s got to stop, down there. I’m convinced, even though it means lining up alongside the yellow-kid press and screaming our heads off for intervention. Not because I have any shining belief in the holy democratic destiny of Cuba. But the place is a garbage heap on our doorstep, breeding future ills. We’ve got to go in and clean it up. What we will do with it then remains to be seen.

Somebody said once that only the Anglo-Saxon nations were capable of governing themselves democratically. I must look up who that was.”

Cabot nodded in encouraging silence, waiting for more. Richard was himself again, he thought, and then groped ruefully for the rest of the quotation, which was something about the shrill trumpet sounding, to horse, away, my soul’s in arms and eager for the fray. Whatever hold that girl in England might have over him, Bracken was first and last his father’s son, and had been weaned, the story went, on printer’s ink.

Long after midnight, when the guests had gone, the family was still sitting around the drawing room fire listening to Bracken’s stories. Johnny was there too, drinking whisky and pumping Bracken enviously. Fitz was thinking how nice it would have been if only Johnny could have brought Gwen along with him, to make one more in the comfortable family circle.

“You don’t have to believe more than half you hear down there to be converted,” Bracken was saying. “I heard what were apparently the muffled volleys of execution squads in the Cabañas fortress from where I sat drinking coffee at a table on the Prado. But I saw the bodies of forty unarmed villagers who had been dragged out and shot at the roadside without trial because one of them was supposed to have given shelter to insurgents. The local Spanish military commander had drawn up a formal report of a ‘skirmish’ with an estimate of ‘enemy dead.’ That night a Cuban patriot took me out there, at some risk to both of us, and we went to work

with spades by lantern light. It wasn’t a pretty sight we uncovered, and the men had been killed with their hands tied behind them. The whole island is a slaughter-house and pest-hole. The churches are fortresses with barricades at the doorways and hammocks hung from the altars. Many of the Cuban patriot soldiers are children hardly taller than the Mausers they are almost too weak to carry. The babies are wizened skeletons that never stop mewing. They haven’t got the strength to cry. Non-combatants are herded into filthy stockades with no shelter and no sanitation and left there to rot.”

“Then our worthy New York competitors don’t make up the atrocity stories,” Johnny said, still a little unbelieving. “You saw just as good or better. Is that right?”

“There’s no need to make up atrocity stories. They happen all the time, better than Hearst’s gang can invent ’em,” Bracken said impatiently. “But don’t let’s forget, either, that it was their precious Gomez who devised the idea of burning the food and the cane-fields and the industries in order to force the Cuban patriots to join him in the fight for their own freedom from Spanish misrule. Well, naturally the Spanish caught on. It works both ways.

And so now the island is devastated by both sides. Don’t let’s overlook that most of these so-called American citizens whose wrongs must be avenged, bear Spanish names and have always lived in Cuba. On top of that, let’s remember that the patriot agitation, and the funds, and the ammunition, originate in the good old U.S.A. That’s largely furnished by professional enthusiasts for liberty who never go near Cuba themselves. They take it out in attending meetings in New York and Jacksonville. From there they egg on professional guerrilla fighters like Gomez. Everybody has forgotten that he comes from San Domingo!”

“Well, then what are we all crying about?” Fitz wanted to know. “What’s all this fudge about the-same-fine-old-American-war-against-European-tyranny?”

“The Spanish are tyrants, particularly nasty ones,” Bracken told him seriously. “The insurrectos, no doubt, are mostly brigands. But the Spanish are behaving like medieval barbarians, and they’ve got to learn that we’ve outgrown their way of thinking, over here. If they can’t administrate their colonies decently, with a minimum amount of bloodshed, as the British do, they must get out–at least out of the Western Hemisphere. And that, my

dears, is how much I give for the sacred cause of Cuba Libre! Taken by and large, it’s about as bogus as Hearst and Pulitzer put together!”

“But still we do back the Cubans against the Spanish,” Cabot said keenly.

“I do, from now on,” Bracken nodded. “For one thing, I just don’t like the Spaniards. They seem to stand for all the things we have got rid of on this side of the world. Besides, a Spanish officer calmly told me across a dinner table at the Hotel Inglaterra in Havana that if we should declare war on Spain because of Cuba they would invade us.”

“Oh, they would, would they!” said Johnny.

“They are convinced their navy can lick ours, and they have more than twice as many men in Cuba right now as we have in our whole regular army scattered all over the United States. They have a solemn, carefully considered plan to land at Charleston, cut us in two, and take New York in no time at all!”

“Well, of all the gall!” cried Johnny angrily.

“Well, they have got a fleet, damn it all,” said Bracken. “And they’ve got colossal nerve and impudence. Of course they couldn’t take New York, but they might try. Even as it is, they are playing hell with our West Indian trade and prestige. There is going to be no place in the twentieth century,”

he wound up firmly, “for the pompous militaristic nonsense Spain believes in. All this parade of fleets and armies and big guns and two-for-a-nickel officers in fancy uniforms rattling sabres is out of date. Spain has got to learn that it’s a civilized world we live in nowadays. If we have to beat her up to prove it, that, by a species of Irish logic, is what we’ve got to do!”

“Listen,” said Cabot suddenly, lifting one hand. Faintly through the quiet house came the persistent shrilling of the telephone on his desk in the library. He rose and streaked out of the room, Bracken just behind him.

It was the briefest kind of message that came down the wire before he was yelling, “What? Say that again!” and reaching for a pad and pencil.

“Go on— go on, what happened?—yes—how?— I said How? —” And meanwhile the pencil in his fingers wrote excitedly for Bracken, hanging over his shoulder: The Maine has blown up in Havana Harbour….

9

THE Maine sank within a few minutes of the explosion, with the loss of two hundred and fifty-three lives. It seemed only logical to assume that she had not blown herself up, but a cautious administration in Washington refused to be stampeded into a declaration of war until it received evidence that the Spanish authorities were guilty of her death. The White House sent out word that there were no grounds (as yet) for suspecting any kind of Spanish plot. Captain Sigsbee, who survived, had included in his first cable a level-headed sentence which read: Public opinion should be suspended until further report.

But the column of flame which shot up from the Maine that night sparked a slow fuse which ran all the way to Washington and New York and westward, to touch off the sentimentalists and the idealists and the jingoes, along with the honest patriots—the politicians in opposition to the administration policy and the people who wanted to sell more newspapers

—the professional intriguers and fire-eaters—all America, according to its lights, was swept away by a wave of belligerency. The New York Journal offered a reward of $50,000 to any man who, presumably for a much smaller sum, had been involved in the supposed conspiracy at Havana and would come forward, confess, and implicate his colleagues. The circulation of the Journal promptly passed the million mark, and a flood of “war extras” poured from rival publications with great black type running all the way across the front page like a banner.

While Washington tried to stress the idea of an accident on board the Maine, the Navy was naturally reluctant to countenance a theory which convicted itself of carelessness, to say the least. A Naval Board of Inquiry was immediately appointed and sent to Havana to interview the survivors and hand down an official opinion, while the country seethed with righteous anger.

Bracken was off again at once for Havana, his return to London indefinitely postponed. What might prove to be the biggest story of his lifetime was breaking now in Cuba. It seemed apparent to Cabot that as it was the insurrectos who stood to gain by American intervention, they were much more likely to hold the key to the tragedy than the Spanish, who could not seriously have desired to provoke a war. This was for Bracken to prove if he could. He had a natural gift for languages, and Spanish was one

of the three he had spoken adequately even before he began an intensive brushing up. By mingling with the shadier characters of Havana around the waterfront and encouraging them to tipple he hoped to come at the truth.

Between censorship and native hostility it had been as much as an American correspondent’s life was worth to enter the Havana cable office for some time past. Hilgert of the A.P. after skulking about for weeks in his cherished anonymity had dared to flash the news of the Maine from there the night she sank. But after that the office was closed to American newspapermen. The Spanish Government in Havana had been gravely disturbed by the presence of the Maine in the harbour to begin with, and they now resented being suspected by the entire nation of laying the mine which was said to have sunk her.

The correspondents who reported on Cuban affairs during the secret sessions of the Board therefore had to use the Key West cable, which meant that they spent their lives on chartered dispatch boats running to and fro across the hundred miles of choppy water in the Florida Straits. Bracken, who was a good sailor, got tired of trying to wedge himself into a bunk with a pad of paper on his knee, and took to writing his copy lying flat on his stomach on the floor, from where it was impossible to fall when the trampy little boat shipped it green over the bow.

Meanwhile Fitz in New York was pursuing his customary unruffled course against the tide of public opinion. No fault could be found with his efficient routine on any assignment given to him by the City Editor, but neither was there any evidence that the news from Cuba gave him the slightest personal concern. Johnny had taken to making fiery speeches, and was threatening to join the army himself and personally kick Spain out of the Western Hemisphere. Fitz heard him patiently, almost without comment, revising lyrics meanwhile in his head, or working out a new chorus in the nearly finished score of the piece which was to make Gwen LaSalle a star with Victor Herbert’s blessing.

Thus March passed and April came, and the Board at Havana decided that the Maine had been destroyed by the explosion of a submarine mine, which had caused the partial explosion of two or more of the forward magazines. The findings added that the court had been unable to obtain

evidence fixing the responsibility for the destruction of the Maine upon any person or persons.

“There, you see?” said Fitz. “It will all blow over.”

But Johnny was so mad he went out and enlisted. That was sobering.

With Bracken rolling about the Florida Straits in his tin can of a dispatch boat, and Cabot spending most of his time mysteriously closeted in Washington, with Johnny missing from all the usual places, and Park Row an hysterical beehive of rumour and patriotism, the world in which Fitz lived was all askew. Gwen, of course, was just the same. She had taught herself to use Johnny’s typewriter and with his help had got odd jobs of copying to do. It was tedious work and paid only a few cents a page, but money was money to Gwen, and for the first time in her life, what with the chorus job and an occasional engagement to sing at the houses of Eden’s friends, she had a little money laid up ahead, so that the regular Saturday night payments for Pa were less of a bogey than she could ever remember.

When Johnny left for the army she moved down into his room and set up housekeeping there with the typewriter.

Fitz would drop in sometimes in the old way and she would cook a meal for the two of them on the gas ring. They missed Johnny on those evenings.

Fitz hired an old upright piano and when it was fitted in alongside the typewriter his work on the musical comedy went faster, because Gwen-was right at hand to sing the songs in her own way and make her diffident suggestions. Cabot had good-naturedly bought a chunk of the show to insure Gwen’s place as Arabella against better-known singers, and she had given in her notice to Weber and Fields.

Miles’s birthday was the twenty-third of April and Eden had set the morning of Monday the eighteenth for their departure to Williamsburg.

Cabot was in Washington and would join them there on the way down.

Bracken would try to come up from Key West for the day.

Gwen and Fitz spent Sunday afternoon going over the completed score from the beginning for the last improvements before sending it in to the impatient manager, who was waiting for it to start rehearsals. Almost before they knew it, the day was fading and there was still one more act to go. Fitz said reluctantly that they’d better go and eat at Frieda’s and finish afterwards.

“Unless you’d rather I got us something here,” Gwen offered. “Then you could go right on. Let’s see, there’s coffee and bacon, four fresh eggs, and some cookies and milk. Would that do?”

Fitz nodded, his fingers never leaving the keys, and she sang along with him as she lighted the gas and drew the shades and put on an apron. Pretty soon the smell of coffee was in the air, and then the sizzle of bacon. Fitz’s hands slid off the keyboard and he sat watching her from the piano stool, his shoulders drooping. She set the well-filled plates on the table and turned to say that dinner was ready and met his eyes. But only for a moment. She looked away quickly, untying the apron.

“You’d better come and eat,” she said. “It will go better after you’ve had some food.”

“It’s goin’ all right,” he said, not moving.

“Well, come on, Fitz, things will get cold!” She took her place at the table, still not looking at him, and began to pour out the coffee.

He followed slowly, sitting down opposite to her.

“I was thinking about the first night you came here,” he said at last.

“Seems a long time ago, doesn’t it.”

“It’s a year, almost.”

“It will be queer without Johnny, won’t it—as time goes on,” she suggested rather at random, making conversation against a preoccupation on his part which she found vaguely alarming.

“Gwen, I’ve got no right to ask you this, but—”

“You’ve got a right to ask me anything you like, Fitz. But maybe you’d better not,” she added gently as he seemed unable to go on. “Eat your eggs while they’re hot, why don’t you?”

“Gwen—are you in love with Johnny?”

Gwen took time to swallow.

“No,” she said evenly.

“You sure about that?”

“Sure I’m sure. Johnny and I are just friends, that’s all. Whatever made you think of that?”

“Oh, I dunno, Johnny does the right thing at the right time. Thought maybe you might be grievin’ for him, now that he’s gone into the army.”

“There’s no war yet, Fitz. He’s perfectly safe in the army. It might even sober him up.”

“Yeah, that’s how I figured it. There’s no war. Not yet, anyway.”

For a while they ate in silence.

“Now, take me, I’m always out of step,” he brooded finally, thinking out loud. “At home I was supposed to go into my father’s law business. In our family one of the sons always does what his father did, and I’m the only one. Take my cousin Miles, his father teaches at Charlottesville and his father ran a school there in Williamsburg—so now Miles is studying to teach when he gets out of college. And then there’s Bracken, givin’ up going back to England where he’s bought a house and all, just to go into the field as a Special because that’s what Uncle Cabot did back in the War Between the States. And even Johnny, his father was a Yankee captain of artillery at Gettysburg—so now Johnny rushes off and joins the army at the first sign of a fight. Accordin’ to all that, I oughtn’t to just go on sitting around writin’ songs.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Fitz.” She poured him another cup of coffee.

“People need songs to sing, even if there is a war. People can’t get along without songs.”

But he was not comforted, and accepted the coffee absently, gazing past her at the piano while he drank. Unintrospective Fitz had become aware, with growing dismay, that he didn’t want to go home to Williamsburg tomorrow. Having achieved that revelation, he went further to discover why. Cabot would be there, fresh from Washington and his confidential sessions with Theodore Roosevelt, who as Assistant Secretary of the Navy was known to have no patience with the administration’s policy of cautious neutrality in Cuba. Bracken would be there, strong in his conviction that now United States intervention had to come, trailing glory from his active and useful career as correspondent while tension rose. And he, Fitz, still had nothing to show for himself but a few songs, as usual. They were good songs. The best he had ever done. But it suddenly seemed to Fitz as though he couldn’t face it, down at Williamsburg.

He rose with his lazy, easy movement, and drifted to the piano, his one sure solace no matter what happened. Moodily he began to play again, random chords at first, merging into Arabella’s third act solo, Moonlight on the Floor.

After a few bars of it Gwen followed him and stood leaning against the corner of the piano singing softly, compassionately, watching his face. Her

desire was all to lay her arms around his shoulders and beg him not to mind anything; to mother him, cosset him, comfort him with all she had of love and devotion. Gwen, too, could remember that first night she had entered this room of Johnny’s, and how she had looked from one to the other of them, wondering which would expect to claim the fee for their protection.

And even then, she was hoping dimly that it might be this one.

She had come a long way since that night. The debt, which he had never recognized, was anyway squared between them. She had paid back what they had lent her, and she had been a help with Arabella, she knew. She was friends with Johnny as she had never supposed it was possible to be friends with a man. But for easygoing, absent-minded Fitz she had learned a passion deep and still and hopeless, so that she no longer cared what might become of her if only he always had what he wanted and did as he pleased and had no problems and no responsibilities and no cares.

She was in his hands now, in a selfless ecstacy of love, and whatever he asked of her she knew she would give freely as long as he wanted it, and no regrets when it ended—as even this association between them was bound to end some day, to leave her with nothing but what she could remember of times like these. She had already grown greedy and jealous of the memories she gathered up and stored away against the lean times without him which were sure to come. And she wanted more to remember. It seemed to her that Cabot Murray had given her the right to it, that night in the library. She wasn’t to leave Fitz, Cabot Murray had said, for his own good. It was for Fitz’s good that she should be there when he wanted her, Cabot Murray had implied, tacitly recognizing her own state of mind, realistically condoning what she felt people like his wife Eden might have condemned—handing her over to Fitz, that night in the library, as though on a silver platter with his compliments—possibly buying her Arabella as a reward. Arabella had worried her a little. She had even thought of confronting Cabot Murray again and making it clear to him that she didn’t have to be bribed to be Fitz’s girl, but that anyway Fitz wasn’t thinking along those lines, and apparently wasn’t ever going to. All Fitz wanted of her was her voice. It would have come hard to confess that to Cabot Murray, she thought, now that they understood each other. And so after nearly a year Gwen still had much to learn about this different breed of men who had entered her destiny.

Fitz, brooding above the keyboard while she sang, was thinking how dull life had been before that night when he and Johnny happened to go to that little dump on West Thirty-fourth Street to get Fay Lea to sing his song

—and how because of a sordid small-time gambling suicide, out of violence and poverty and terror Gwen had come to stand here singing his tunes. And he remembered how that first night she had thought they would expect to collect for having saved her from Fagan, which was a thing he had never been able to bring himself to contemplate fully—what could her life have been, for eighteen years, to make such a thing seem to her natural and inevitable? As always when something brought him face to face with Gwen’s dark background of fear and crime and beastliness, his soft heart recoiled in embarrassment, and he fell to thinking how she had insisted on paying back out of her poor little earnings every cent he and Johnny had ever lent her—and how she had stuck to them, no matter how late it got or how tired she must have been, always patient and kind with Johnny when he was drunk, always ready to sing or make coffee or go to a show—and he thought, Johnny won’t be here to help me look after her now—and he thought, Funny, she didn’t fall in love with Johnny—and he thought—

His hands lay idle on the keys. His eyes as they rose to her face were full of innocent surprise. And then slowly, as though he had been lifted by marionette strings, Fitz came up off the piano stool and put his arms around her where she stood, and his lips took hers. She was soft and willing in his hold, and so much smaller than you’d think, because she always held herself so straight—and her wild, triumphant joy ran through him in the kiss and he was quite sure now that it wasn’t Johnny she loved….

“Gwen,” he marvelled, when he could breathe again. “Oh, Gwen, why didn’t you tell me, I’ve been wastin’ time—!” And he felt her smiling as he kissed her again as though he could never bear to stop—felt her arms slide up around his neck, felt her slim body give with laughter, and tried to see her face, which she hid against his chest, laughing at him, in that solemn moment when he felt so shaken and profound. But it was a nice way to start, wasn’t it, with laughter, and her arms locked tight behind his head. It was all right with him, so long as she was happy, only what had he done that was wrong? And then, with his cheek against hers, he felt tears—“Hey honey, what’s the matter, here, I thought you were laughing—”

“I am,” She showed him, but her eyes were wet. “Oh, Fitz, I am, but how could I tell you, it wasn’t my place to let you know until you—w-wanted it—”

Fitz turned this over in his mind, while he cradled her closer jealously.

“How long has it been goin’ on, then?” he asked. “How long have I lost, bein’ so thickheaded?”

“You haven’t lost anything,” she whispered. “I’ll make it up to you, somehow. You’ll have all there is, Fitz, I promise.”

“Honest? From now on?”

Her eyes were shining and steady. From this minute on, with never a backward glance. She nodded, wondering if anybody had ever had so unpredictable a lover as hers.

“Blast Miles, anyway,” he said thoughtfully, trying to plan ahead. “I tell you what, I’ll just miss that train tomorrow morning and we’ll go down to City Hall and get married, so I can take you with me to Miles’s party.”

Gwen stood perfectly still, her lovely mouth ajar.

“M-married?”

“Too soon for you?” he asked ruefully. “Well, it was just an idea. I kind of hate to let you out of my sight now. Of course Aunt Eden will fix you up with a grand church wedding with all the trimmings if we give her time, but I thought it would be kind of fun if you could come to Miles’s party on Saturday.”

“But, Fitz, I never meant I—I didn’t expect you to—it wouldn’t do for you to marry me,” she got out desperately, for she was quite sure that a grand church wedding was not quite what Cabot Murray had in mind.

Fitz held her off to look at her. His brows were very straight, his chin stuck out.

“What’s that you said?” he demanded quietly.

“Don’t you see, Fitz, you feel like this now, but I’m from the wrong side of the tracks and you’re nice people—they wouldn’t—your family would never—well, don’t look at me like that, I’m not going back on anything I said, I can’t help loving you, but I don’t belong as your wife, Fitz, I—I’m not—not—”

“Are you tryin’ to tell me that you’ll go to bed with me tonight, but you won’t go to Williamsburg tomorrow as my wife?”

Gwen put her hand up in front of her face. It was the same gesture she had used that first night before she had said, “You don’t have to be polite with me.” It was as though she had been struck, and was waiting for her head to clear.

“I didn’t mean to make you angry,” she said faintly. “If you—just take time to think, you’ll see how right I am.”