Part Four: Bracken

Bracken roused under his hands, and cursed him for the pain.

“That’s better,” said Fitz soothingly. “Want a drink? I’ll go down to the river, the canteens are empty.”

But Bracken’s eyes were bright and blank and could not focus, and he fumbled anxiously for the watch.

“It’s there,” Fitz told him. “I didn’t pinch it.” Then he saw that Bracken didn’t know him any more.

“Dinah,” Bracken said. “It belongs to Dinah—you won’t let anyone steal it, will you—I promised her she’d have it—some day—”

“All right, we’ll get it to Dinah, don’t you worry—”

“My mother has the address,” Bracken insisted, as to a stranger. “Will you take the watch to my mother—ask her to send it—tell Dinah—tell Dinah I didn’t forget—”

“Tell her yourself,” said Fitz. “We’re not done for yet. It’s me, Bracken.

It’s Fitz. Lie still, now, while I get some water. Shan’t be long.” He crawled away with the canteens towards the river bank—going on all fours not because of the bullets, for there were none now, but because it was easier.

When he returned Bracken was thrashing feebly at the land crabs with his hat. Fitz waved his arms and yelled at them and they all vanished into watchful silence.

“Go some place else, you’re wastin’ your time!” he yelled. “We aren’t dead enough! Scat! ”

“Water,” said Bracken, fingering the watch.

“Can’t drink that water. I found you some limes.” Fitz slid an arm behind Bracken’s head and held the cut lime to his lips. “You know, you were right about that fever,” he said, while Bracken sucked. “Remember what you told me when you turned back after Shafter? It’s coming down on me again soon, and there’s something I’ve got to tell you first. You listenin’?” Bracken’s head fell back against him, his eyes were closed. Fitz bent over him. “Bracken, you’ve got to hear. Uncle Cabot is gone. You’re the Boss now.”

“They won’t let her wear it,” Bracken mumbled, feeling for the watch.

“They open her letters, I think—I daren’t say how I feel—not yet—”

“Bracken. Your father is dead.”

“What?” said Bracken, lying very still.

“I hate to tell you, but it’s kind of up to us. Uncle Cabot died last Monday.”

“It’s Fitz,” said Bracken, without moving.

“Yeh, it’s me. The battle’s over. Looks like we won. I’ve been chasin’

you all day, as though it was good news I had.”

“You said—Father—”

“Yes. At Tampa. Wendell told me.”

Bracken lay quiet against him, and Fitz could not see his face—so quiet that the land crabs stole out again to see, on tiptoe, twiddling their eyes.

Then Bracken tried to sit up, and they all disappeared into the leaves, while he swayed against Fitz’s shoulder.

“I’ve got to get down to the coast,” he said.

“Sure, sure, we’ll get down all right. Only, you know that fever you promised me? Well, I got it.”

“That’s tough. Any first-aid men around?”

“Not a soul. We seem to be sort of on the edge of things here.”

“Sun’s going down already,” Bracken discovered with surprise.

“Where’s the day gone, to? Is that the river there?”

“Yep, we’ve got to cross it, just for a starter. Up to our necks right here.”

“Oh, go on, Fitz, it’s never more than waist deep.”

“Banks are steep,” said Fitz. “Come and see.”

Bracken was trying to feel around on the ground under him.

“My notebook—I had it—I had the whole story up till I got hit—I wrote some with my left hand after that—”

“Here’s your notebook.” Fitz put it in his own pocket. “Let’s get on our way now, Wendell will be having a fit. Can you walk if I hold you up?”

He made a sling of his own yellow scarf for Bracken’s right arm, and by lifting and heaving they got Bracken to his feet.

“Gosh, I’m tall,” he said wonderingly. “It looks such a long way to the ground. Gimme your shoulder—”

“You got it!”

“Hell, we’re off!”

And so they were, with a rather drunken stagger, through the trees and down to the river bank, which was decorated just beyond by a dead mule, his insides running out into the water.

“He’s down-stream,” said Fitz. “Come on.”

“Let’s find the ford,” said Bracken.

“Things were pretty thick there when I came through.”

“Probably still are. We can get hold of somebody going down to Siboney and ask him to deliver us to Wendell in case you give out.”

“Oh, shucks, I’m good for hours yet,” said Fitz, who was momentarily dreading the recurrence of the first chill.

For some minutes they floundered along the bank which was slippery with mud, afraid to lose sight of the water, often throwing themselves down with panting groans to rest.

“By the river of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion,” Fitz chanted unexpectedly. “Remember when we used to go to church? Where is Zion? Don’t I hear voices?”

Bracken seemed to recall something about an innumerable company of angels in connection with Zion, and said he wasn’t ready for that just yet, he had things to do.

By the time they reached the ford a train of empty ammunition and ration wagons returning from the front had already removed the rows of wounded men Fitz had seen there on his way up, taking them to the field hospital established near Shafter’s headquarters back of El Poso. Bates’s brigade was now coming up the trail from El Caney to reinforce the exhausted troops who were in perilous possession of San Juan heights.

There was almost no traffic in the other direction, and not much chance of getting a ride to Siboney just then.

Fitz and Bracken crossed the ford, for the river seemed to be rising, and sat down on the other side where the trail widened for a space, hoping for a stray ambulance or provision wagon going their way. While they sat there the jungle echoed to the whoop-la! and the shrill whistles of the mule-packers, the pistol-like snap of their black-snake whips, and the rural tinkle of the cowbell round the lead mule’s neck, as a pack-train emerged from the shadows of the trail in the wake of Bates’s men. It splashed recklessly through the ford, and disappeared behind the trees which rimmed the meadow, bound for the front.

They said very little as they sat there waiting beside a trail strewn with everything from tin cups and toothbrushes to the wreckage of the balloon.

Fitz’s head felt twice the size of a football, his clothes were wet to the waist from the ford and had set him shivering again even without the malarial chill which still held off. He had begun to think of Gwen, with a need which gnawed like the hunger he had half forgotten because he was now so

accustomed to it. He longed for Gwen till it ached in his bones—for her little half-smile, her quiet voice, her sweet, warm hands—and he began to try to remember everything they had done together, hoarding it against oblivion, building it into a shelter for his weary spirit there beside the trail.

He remembered the first time he had ever seen her, and how she had trembled under his hand for terror of Fagan and his small-time gang—and the night she had sung at Eden’s party, wearing the new dress, and he had realized that she was beautiful—and the night he asked her to marry him and she said—what had she said?— I don’t belong as your wife—a funny idea—well, she knew different now—by the time they had their wedding supper at Delmonico’s, maybe, she knew different—and he remembered going to Lord and Taylor’s with her to buy a trousseau out of his option money—two new dresses, and three hats—slippers, things to go underneath

—Gwen was half shocked at his extravagance, half like a greedy child, holding the froth of silk and lace in both her hands, looking up at him across her treasures, saying, “Are you sure it’s all right? Can we really afford it?” She had had so little all her life—there was so much he wanted to give her of cherishing and good times. She had come a long, hard way but now she was safe, now she had a home, he had seen to that—because if anything happened to him they would always look after Gwen at Williamsburg—had he asked them to?—but Cousin Sue would know—

Cousin Sue would always take care of Gwen….

Bracken, lying beside Fitz at the ford that night, covered with a white mist and drenched with dew, was his father’s son, and he thought mostly of the man who was dead at Tampa and what that would mean back at the Shop in Park Row—what would they do without the Boss?—Temple, the Managing Editor, was Murray-trained and knew all there was to know about newspapers—but there would never be the feeling about Temple that there was for the Boss—that took a Murray, and the only Murray left was one called Bracken—he wasn’t ready for that job yet—he didn’t know enough, he hadn’t done enough, he wasn’t big enough—he had always known dimly that some day he would be expected to sit at his father’s mahogany desk and run the Star—but that time had always seemed a long way off—his father was still a young man, healthy, except for the malaria, straight as a flagpole, confident, successful, looked up to, at the height of his powers—and now he was gone, and the mahogany desk was waiting for

his son, who felt small and humble and forlorn in the face of his inheritance. Inevitably, the question came: What about Dinah now?

What about the leisurely life he had meant to live in England with weekends at Farthingale, waiting for Dinah to grow up and marry him? He couldn’t very well court Dinah from the New York office in Park Row.

Separations like that might not be fatal once you were engaged, once you knew where you were, but Dinah would soon be at the age where she might fall in love with anybody. She might even be pushed into some sort of suitable marriage without ever falling in love at all—some marriage arranged by Alwyn and Clare, no doubt with the best intentions, to better the family fortunes or to get her a comfortable establishment of her own.

They would rule him out of their plans for Dinah because of Lisl. Alwyn, at least, knew that he was married. And that was another thing. How was he going to get the divorce now, with Lisl hiding on the Continent with her California millionaire, and himself dependent on the New York courts, where conclusive evidence would be exceedingly hard to produce? And then he reproached himself for thinking of his father’s death as an inconvenience in his own affairs, and mourned him bitterly and sincerely, and thought about his mother and Virginia and how he must get back to them as quickly as possible and put things to rights as far as he could. Daisy would take him to Jamaica and he could get a steamer to New York from there. Fitz and Wendell would have to run the war in Cuba now. Unless Fitz was through too, because of the fever. He put out his hand in the dark. Fitz had the shakes again.

The first streaks of dawn were showing over the tree tops when they were roused from a feverish stupor by the crack of the black-snakes and the language and the bell which accompanied the pack-train returning across the ford. Bracken dragged himself up and hailed the packer who rode the lead mule. The man slid down and called up one of his fellows. Together they hoisted Bracken and Fitz aboard a couple of mules and held them on for the jolting, wretched journey to the field hospital, and there lifted them down and half-carried them to the crowded cluster of inadequate dog-tents and canvas flies where the surgeons worked wearily in the morning sunlight.

Wounded men in every degree of misery were waiting in uncomplaining, prostrate groups for attention, from the exhausted doctors. Those who had

come back from the operating tables, where blood-soaked, sweat-drenched clothing had been cut away, were some of them almost completely naked.

There were no spare garments, no cots, practically no blankets. Most of the men lay or sat on the bare ground.

Each regiment of Regulars was supposed to have carried with it three months’ hospital supplies, and practically all of this equipment had in each case been left on board the transports. Most of the rest was piled up at Siboney awaiting the trickle of wagons and mule-trains. Many of the ambulances had been left behind at Tampa for lack of shipping space. Each Regular was supposed to have carried on his person a small emergency packet of antiseptic gauze, but most of these had been lost or thrown away along with the blanket-rolls and knapsacks, and the best of them needed replacement.

Fitz was now quite helpless with fever and weakness, and lay where he was dumped by the packers, breathing unevenly, his eyes closed. Bracken retained consciousness by a supreme effort and circulated with difficulty among the driven hospital orderlies, begging for a quinine pill—even just one—which he finally captured and carried back to Fitz. After that they lay side by side in the shifting shade cast by a tent already full. Someone came round with black coffee. It was all the food they saw, though a cook-fire smoked somewhere in the middle distance.

Along about mid-afternoon someone dressed Bracken’s wound, which was fortunately open at both ends, the bullet having passed clean through, missing the lung. Soon after that it began to rain, but they lay still where they were for every inch of shelter was occupied. As the night went on they formed little human islands in standing water, for the hospital ground was as level as a floor with no drainage and the rain came down too fast to soak in. Both were half delirious now and they carried on a fantastic dialogue in which neither one really replied to the other or was quite aware of what he himself was saying, but the sound of each other’s voices was comforting.

The ghastly night passed in this way, and with the drizzling dawn Fitz began to emerge from the second fever attack, and sat up waveringly, a hand to his head, and gazed about him. The sun came out and began to dry things a little. Apart from everything else, they were now faint with hunger, and he made his way somehow to where the fire burned sulkily with damp green wood, and begged a quinine pill and some coffee. There was a kettle

of soup stewing sluggishly, but after one swallow he poured it out on the ground and secured a cup of coffee for Bracken instead. As he was turning away from the fire, he saw approaching it a group of people, among them three women in white nurse’s uniforms. The Red Cross had come up from Siboney.

“Miss Barton is here,” he told Bracken, patiently pouring the coffee into him. “Give them a few hours and this place will be run right! Now that I’m able to wobble around again, I’ll see about gettin’ us down to Siboney. You stay right here, now, so I can find you again.”

Bracken had no intention of moving.

Fitz hovered a while in Miss Barton’s vicinity, his subconscious reporter’s mind taking notes while he admired the efficient way they got a new fireplace built, much larger and higher, and set their ten-gallon agate kettles going with oatmeal gruel and soup. “I never thought to make gruel over a campfire again,” he heard her say to one of her helpers. “How it takes one back! Is this Sharpsburg or San Juan? Was it ever as bad as this in the old days?”

The rain began again, and Fitz was one of those who helped, rather fumblingly, to unload the Red Cross supplies from the wagon and raise a tarpaulin over them. Swaying on his feet, he accepted from Miss Barton’s own hand a cup of the thick white gruel, rich with condensed milk, and gulped it down and asked for another for his cousin who had been wounded.

“Will there be ambulances going down soon?” he asked as she ladled it out for him. “We’re able to travel—within reason, that is. Bracken Murray has just learned of his father’s death, and I want to get him down to the coast where our dispatch boat is.”

“We’re short of ambulances, I’m afraid,” the little grey-haired woman told him kindly. “But they’re trying to move men out as fast as possible in the wagons. Tell Dr. Egan what you need and where to find you.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“What’s the matter with you? Malaria?” She peered up into his drawn, unshaven face.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m sort of between spells right now.”

“Ask the Sister over there for some quinine pills.”

“I sure will. Here’s Colonel Roosevelt, ma’am, comin’ to talk to you,”

he added as Roosevelt strode up to them.

“Miss Barton?” he inquired politely, touching his hat-brim. “I would like to buy some of your supplies for my men at San Juan.”

“Our supplies are not for sale,” she answered, fronting him sturdily, her thin face severe and unsmiling.

The Colonel was nonplussed.

“But you seem to have a lot of things we can’t get from the commissary,” he explained. “How can I get some dressings and corn meal and dried fruit and quinine pills for my men in the trenches?”

“You just ask for them, Colonel,” said Miss Barton gently, and Roosevelt’s big grin flashed as he saw the point.

“We’re not used to such generosity around here, ma’am! If you can spare me a sack I’ll take the stuff with me right now.”

They moved away together, towards the tarpaulin-covered dump of Red Cross supplies.

Dr. Egan visited Bracken and said he was fit to be moved, approved their plans to go to Jamaica with Daisy and home from there by steamer, and ordered Fitz out of Cuba too. That afternoon they were loaded into one of the springless wagons and made the agonizing descent along a trail which often ran hub-deep with water. Wendell was waiting at the bottom, anxiously searching the faces of the wounded as they were lifted out, for he had somehow learned that Bracken had been hit. The reunion was enthusiastic.

“Have you heard the news?” he cried, pumping their hands excitedly.

“Cervera came out and we sank him! The war is over!”

“Go on!” said Fitz unbelievingly.

“It’s true! Cervera tried to run for it and we finished him! There is no Spanish Fleet! And without it Santiago may as well surrender!”

“When did all this happen?” they asked, dazed.

“Today! It just came in from Guantanamo—eye-witness account from the shore, cabled from Guantanamo everywhere by now! It’s true, I tell you! We’ve won!”

He was more or less right. The white flags of truce were already passing between Santiago and Shafter’s headquarters on the hill.

9

FITZ lasted as far as Jamaica and there, before they could get on to a steamer for New York, he collapsed entirely and was only just saved alive by an English doctor at Kingston. Meanwhile, Bracken’s wound healed nicely and he was pretty much himself, though still thin and tottery, by the time they sailed at the end of August.

Eden and Virginia and Sue went up to New York in time to meet the steamer, and they took Gwen with them to the dock. Bracken had not known how to prepare them for the change in Fitz, who was barely able to stand and came down the gangplank supported on either side by Bracken and a steward. Sue’s face went white when she saw him, but Gwen, the actress, gave them all a lesson in self-control by her gallant gaiety over getting her man back safe from the wars.

Bracken’s house had been shuttered and dark since Lisl’s departure for Europe, and he had been living with his parents in Madison Avenue. Fitz and Gwen were to stay there too until he was better. While they drove there in one carriage, followed by the others, Gwen answered all his eager questions about the show, which had been much on his mind and which now looked as though it would run for ever. And she told him, sitting with his hand held tight in both hers, about singing into a horn-thing which made a gramophone disc of the song and played it back to you. And if he approved, she could get paid quite well to sing other songs into the horn for the new machine. They offered her fifty cents a round and she could make twenty-five rounds in a day, singing into seven grouped horns at once. All the songs Fitz could write the gramophone people would buy, said Gwen, and it would all mount up. And so even after the show stopped they could still be sure of something coming in each week.

To Gwen, singing into the horns, making the little black discs at fifty cents a round, was one more barricade against the old Saturday night nightmare of getting together enough money for the next seven days. Fitz was ill—she could see how ill—and he wouldn’t be able to work for a long time, as a reporter. They had money in the bank, yes, but it wouldn’t last for ever, money never lasted. You had to go on earning, to keep ahead. It was like a treadmill in an animal act; the little dog had to keep on running just to stay in the same place. Now that Fitz wouldn’t be able to work for a while,

it was very lucky that she had found the gramophone people so that she could earn for both of them—and Pa—after the show closed. It never occurred to Gwen to look to his family for help if their money ran out. Fitz was ill and she would support him. She was young and strong and could sing.

“So you see, I haven’t been wasting our time with you away,” she added as the carriage rolled up Madison Avenue. “You can just sit with your feet up and the money rolls in!”

“’Bout all I’m good for now, I reckon,” he said.

“You’ll get well, Fitz. All you need is a little time.”

“Sure, that’s all I need.”

But when they put him to bed in Cabot’s house he was thinking of his old room at Williamsburg, with the sun coming in the window above the garden and Mammy’s wrinkled black hands to tend him, and he sighed. He was homesick. He told himself firmly that he’d rather have Gwen, and he couldn’t ask her to leave the show and the money she was earning and go down to Williamsburg with a sick husband and nothing to do but put up with him.

Gwen had to leave for the theatre after an early dinner, and when she came in after the show Fitz was asleep. No one knew that she locked herself into the bathroom that night and turned on the taps so she couldn’t be heard, and cried, and cried, and cried.

In the morning Cabot’s doctor came and went over Fitz and said he must stay in bed and rest. Fitz said the hell with that, he was going to see the show, but they persuaded him to leave it for a week or two. Plenty of time to see the show. Fitz subsided, almost too willingly, for he was very tired—

tired above everything else, of being ill and unable to do what he liked.

Everybody could be as cheerful as they liked, but he knew what they were thinking. He knew how he looked. Worse, he knew how he felt. It would be weeks—months—before he was on his feet again. He kept thinking of Williamsburg, and his mother and Phoebe chattering around the house like birds, and his father coming home from the office—his tall, handsome, vital father, who was everything a Sprague should be, and who was doubly to be cherished now that Bracken’s father was gone. Tears of weakness and despair stood in Fitz’s eyes. He wanted to go home. But not without Gwen.

He lay there, waiting for Gwen, who was playing a matinée, and Sue looked in at the door.

“Sleepy?” she whispered.

“Nope. Just bone-lazy.”

Sue came in, and sat down by the bed.

“Fitz, tell me honestly, is there anything you want? I promised Eden I’d ask you if there was anything that money could buy to help you to get well faster. She said Cabot would want a fortune spent if it would make any difference.”

“What on earth could I want besides what I’ve got?” he objected with a glance around the luxurious room. “There’s something I could do without, even. That nurse. I’m able to come down to meals, and take my own baths, and the footman shaves me, so what good does she do?”

“Well, with Gwen away so much, we thought—” Sue stopped. There had never before in the history of the family been a wife who left her husband to the care of a trained nurse. Retreating hastily from tactlessess, Sue put her foot into another pitfall. “If only we had you down home at Williamsburg, Mammy could look after you,” she said.

“Yeh, I—I’ve been kind of homesick lately.”

They looked at each other levelly, both remembering Gwen, who had to be in the theatre every night and two matinées a week.

“Perhaps, by the time you’re strong enough to make another journey—”

Sue began, and he interrupted her.

“I won’t ask Gwen to give up the show,” he said firmly. “It’s everything to her, Cousin Sue—maybe you don’t quite understand, but she grew up in show business, they all want what she’s got, a leading part in a success. I’m kind of proud she got it through me, and I meant her to have it. Besides, the money is important to her, she’s never had enough.” And he told, in strictest confidence, about Pa, who had fallen on his head and so it wasn’t hereditary.

While they were still talking, over an extra cup of tea, Gwen returned from the matinée, bringing with her a vibrant, fragment something that enlivened the stale air of the city-bound room like a window thrown open to spring. Sue slipped away and left them together, Gwen sitting on the edge of the bed with Fitz’s hand in hers, making him laugh.

An hour later, when Sue was dressing for dinner, there was a tap on her door and Gwen came in. Sue thought as Gwen crossed the room towards her in the lamplight that the girl got more beautiful every day. Gwen’s first words took her by surprise.

“Cousin Sue, do you think Fitz would be better off in Williamsburg for a while?”

“Well—yes, I do,” Sue said courageously.

“Then we must try and make him go,” Gwen said, looking worried. “We could tell him it was just for a visit—”

“And leave you here?” Sue looked incredulous, and Gwen answered, uncomprehending—

“They think the show will run till spring.”

“Does the show mean so much to you?” Sue watched her with troubled, affectionate eyes. “I know it must be everything you’ve ever dreamed of—

to make such a big success while you’re so young. But I thought—” Her words died away, on the guilty knowledge that in a minute she would be interfering, and Fitz would hate that.

“You mean you think I ought to give up the show and go with him?”

Gwen put the question gravely, without resentment.

“Well—yes—”

“But, Cousin Sue, you surely don’t think I put the show before Fitz!”

Gwen cried. “It’s what I dreamed of, sure, it’s what my Mom dreamed of, for me, and I never thought it would happen, and I owe it all to Fitz. But don’t get any idea that I’m so stuck on hearing myself sing every night that I wouldn’t give in my notice and go south with him—if it wasn’t for the money! Of course I’ve got some saved up, but we don’t know how long it will have to last. I wouldn’t want Fitz to be a charge on his folks, not while I can earn for him.”

Sue frankly stared. The women of the family nursed their husbands and bore them children, but this girl’s Spartan code was different. This girl considered herself a breadwinner. Sue perceived an entirely strange set of values, and realized that she had judged Gwen by the wrong measuring stick. Gwen had her own ideas of a wife’s duty—ideas which took no account of the easy, hospitable, family life at Williamsburg. Sue tried in some embarrassment to explain.

“But, Gwen, honey, it’s Fitz’s home. They’d be only too glad if you’d both come and stay there as long as you like!”

“Two more mouths for them to feed?” Gwen shook her head. “I couldn’t do that, it wouldn’t be right, except for a visit. I’m healthy and I’ve got a job. It’s my business to keep Fitz till he can work again. My Mom kept Pa for years, after—And that’s another thing. It’s not just Fitz and me, I’ve got Pa to think of.”

And Sue heard again about Pa, who was queer because of a fall and not because it ran in the family. She said untruthfully that she saw what Gwen meant, and then tried again.

“Fitz’s royalties go on as long as the show does, don’t they, whether you leave or not?” she suggested, and Gwen’s chin came out.

“That’s his money,” she said. “I don’t want Fitz paying for my lame ducks. Pa is my job. I’ve got to find his keep myself, as long as he lives.”

“That’s a very—advanced viewpoint,” Sue remarked cautiously. “In my day when a man married he took on his wife’s responsibilities.”

“In a family like yours, maybe, where you all know each other,” Gwen conceded. “But Fitz has no call to love Pa, he never knew him the way he was. It’s been so long I never knew where to find the money for Pa that now I’ve got it coming in like this. I’m kind of afraid to stop. I’m laying it up for him, I don’t spend it on myself,” she added, with an anxious look, and Sue put her arms round her.

“I know you don’t, honey, but I think Fitz would far rather pay your father’s expenses, if it came to that, than do without your company while he gets well.”

“Well, I don’t know, Cousin Sue, it doesn’t seem fair that way. If I could be real sure—”

“Ask him.”

“You know how he is.” Gwen’s little half-smile came. “He’d think he had to say Yes or hurt my feelings!”

“But if he’s convinced you’d hate to give up the show on his account—”

“Oh, but he knows nothing on earth really matters to me but being with him. He knows it’s only—”

“Are you sure he knows?”

For a moment Gwen gazed at her in naïve astonishment.

“Well, if he doesn’t,” she said then, and started for the door, “he’s going to now.”

Fitz was lying as she had left him, relaxed and listless, a book open on the coverlet which he was not reading. The lamplight from the bedside table threw sharp shadows on his thin face, with its broad cheek-bones and narrow chin. He turned his head towards her as she came in, and the look in his eyes, patient, tethered, expectant, somehow humble, cramped her heart.

She went straight over to the bed and put her arms around his shoulders and her cheek against his.

“Fitz, listen. If I didn’t have to sing every night we could go to Williamsburg and you’d get well faster. Would your parents let us stay there

—for a while, anyway? I’ve got money in the bank, we could pay a little something each week.”

“Let us—? What on earth are you talkin’ about? It’s home! Like this is home for Bracken, only I expect you’d like this better. Maybe you should have married Bracken instead of me, have you ever thought of that?”

“Oh, Fitz, don’t, I’m so tired of pretending!” And while it was the last thing she had ever meant to do, Gwen began to cry, her face hidden in his neck.

Instantly his arms tightened round her in concern.

“Tired of what?” he demanded. “Talk sense, honey, what are you gettin’

at, anyway?”

So it all came out, between sobs which had got beyond her control at last

—how tired she was of singing every night when she could have been with him—how tired she was of show business and the people in it, so if it weren’t for keeping Pa she’d never go near a theatre again except maybe to buy tickets to watch somebody else work—how tired she was anyway of standing on her own feet and holding up her head and not asking quarter from anybody—and how ever since she had first seen Williamsburg heaven had looked just like that to her, a place to live like other people, in a house with a garden, where your children could grow up right, with grandparents and Christmas and birthdays—

Then her tears stopped suddenly with a wrench, for she was horrified at having broken down before him when he was so ill, and she dreaded that she might have made him worse. But instead she had given him what he needed—a sense of responsibility—a job to do—incentive to get well.

Because if Gwen left the show and wasn’t earning, it would be up to him.

He would have to write some more songs, he would have to start that new musical comedy he had thought of during the long, idle days on the dispatch boat, and they would have to look into this gramophone business.

He could write some new songs in Williamsburg, while he was getting well, with Gwen to sing them as he worked. The mere idea of working out a new song with Gwen was a tonic—

“Oh, Fitz, I’m sorry, I don’t know what got into me, please don’t take any notice—”

“You need a holiday,” he said, and his arms held her close where she was when she tried to sit up. “I reckon what you really need is a honeymoon. Shall we go down home and start our honeymoon all over again?”

“You mean—you wouldn’t mind if I quit the show?”

“Give ’em your notice tonight. They can find somebody else.”

“Are you sure it’s all right?” she asked wistfully, as she had when he bought her the trousseau at Lord and Taylor’s. “Can we really afford it?”

“Gwen, honey—will you do something for me from now on? When there’s something you want—like going down to Williamsburg to live—

will you for the love of God let me in on it? I’m your husband, honey—I’m here to make you happy if I can, but I haven’t learned to read your mind yet. I have to have a little help now and then.”

“Well, so long as your folks won’t think we’re sponging—”

“My folks aren’t so hard up as you seem to think. We raise everything we eat, almost, right on the place, in the garden.”

“And you won’t think I’m a piker about Pa? I’ve got quite a lot saved up for him—”

“There’ll be more when you need it.”

Gwen drew a long breath, where she lay against him.

“Fitz.”

“Mm-hm?”

“For the first time in my life I feel—I—”

“How do you feel, honey?”

“I feel free. And that’s funny, because now I’m married, and before I wasn’t.”

“You aren’t half as married as you’re goin’ to be,” he promised her serenely.

10

BECAUSE Cabot had died suddenly at Tampa, when it had never occurred to anybody that such a thing could happen, the readjustment always necessary at such times was even a little grimmer than usual. His clothes, his papers, his small personal belongings were all where he had left them, awaiting his return to New York with the pathetic confidence and helplessness of inanimate things.

Eden and Virginia had spent the time since his death at Williamsburg, and now with Bracken in New York they set about the heartbreaking business of putting away and tidying up all those possessions which Cabot would never want again. Eden would have been the first to admit that she was a wife before she was a mother and the loss of the man who had been to the end of his life her devoted lover was a stunning blow. She rallied very slowly, and was thin and white and piteous in her soft black gowns. She showed no inclination to cling round Bracken’s neck, and if she leaned on anyone it was Sue, for they had always been very close. She spent hours alone in her room, emerging at meal-times calm and unravaged by grief, a little withdrawn and absent-minded, but willing to smile and join in the usual family conversation and quiet diversions. Sparkle and zest were gone from her, and a new passiveness and patience had set in. Nothing mattered to her very much.

During the first day he spent at the Shop, Bracken discovered that his father, at least, had foreseen the thing which had happened and prepared for it in scrupulous detail. His Will and private papers were in order. There were substantial bequests to each of his children, and the rest went to Eden during her lifetime, after which it would pass in full to Bracken. But there were small, mute evidences everywhere that he had not known he was leaving his office for the last time, and Bracken sat alone at the big desk with his head in his hands, striving for strength to face them, while the portrait of Lincoln above the mantelpiece looked down with the same compassionate eyes which had rested on Cabot day after day as he sat in the same chair.

The strings of proofs and stacks of marked exchanges and the overflowing wastepaper-basket were naturally tidied away. But the shears and the paste-pot, the pearl push-bells in a row—unmarked because he knew so well whom each would summon—the coloured inks and pencils, a pile of new books in bright jackets awaiting review, pipes in a rack, an over-size ash-tray, a full stamp-box—they might all have been still warm from his hand. When Bracken raised his head he looked down through a floor-length window at Park Row and the City Hall. On the wall beside the window was Cabot’s framed diploma from Princeton. Should his own come down now to hang beside it….

He returned to Madison Avenue at twilight, white-faced and unnerved, and was pouring himself a stiff whisky at the sideboard in the dining room when his mother looked in at the door and smiled at him faintly. Eden had been so happy and so blessed that she was far from looking anything like her fifty-five years, and even now above the sheer black dress her face looked pinched and girlish rather than widowed, and her reddish hair still gleamed in the dusky room.

“Oh, God, you always did look so beautiful in black,” said Bracken ruefully, and gulped half his drink, and came to put an arm around her waist, moving her towards the drawing room. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. There doesn’t seem to be anything one can say safely at a time like this. Shall we go on talking about the weather?”

“No,” she said gravely. “I want to talk about your father, Bracken.” She sat down on a sofa, and he followed, the glass still in his hand.

“Yes, I suppose we must,” he agreed. “So far, I’ve been dreading it.

There’s something wrong about that. He wouldn’t have put up with that at all. Tell me.”

“It was entirely unexpected,” she said steadily. “We all thought he had taken a turn for the better, and everything was quite cheerful the last night.

He died without waking. I was sitting by the bed, reading—suddenly the room was empty. That was all.”

Bracken drew a long sigh. He had been imagining things, and he felt a great relief.

“We talked a lot about you when he was ill,” Eden’s low voice went on beside him. “And he left you a message. That was before we thought the worst was over. There were two messages, in fact.”

“All right,” said Bracken, gripping the tumbler. “Let’s have them.”

“First, there was something he wanted you to write. He tried to do it himself, but he wasn’t strong enough. I have his notes for you. He wanted you to make people see that this war with Spain has made us one nation again, healing the old wounds left from fighting each other. He felt it very deeply—that the army in Cuba is made up of men from nearly every state in the Union, North and South, shoulder to shoulder, all brothers in arms, no matter which side their fathers fought on in the ’60’s, with officers from both sides too, all under one flag again.”

“Yes, I can do that!” Bracken nodded. “Look at Fighting Joe Wheeler, the wildest Rebel of them all, and at Guasimas when the Spanish finally lit out for the rear he clean forgot which war it was and yelled, ‘Come on, boys, we’ve got the damn’ Yankees on the run!’”

“Your father would have liked that!” she smiled.

“Well, the first one is easy enough. What next?”

“He said you were to go back to England for Dinah, however long it took.”

Everything in Bracken relaxed at once. He had had no idea how he had been braced for the opposite until then. He wanted to cry. He set down the glass arid rose and walked about the room, his hands in his pockets, fighting the tightness in his throat. Eden went on talking softly, giving him leeway.

“He said that Temple could run things here for a while and that anyway you would have to go over and put the Fleet Street office under a permanent deputy. He said, ‘If I should peg out before he can marry Dinah and bring her back here, I don’t want my empty chair to be a millstone round his neck.’ And he said, ‘Tell him not to rush her—it’s asking a good deal of her to leave England with him as she’ll have to.’ And he said, ‘Tell him what you went through with me.’”

Bracken turned to look at her.

“Was it bad?” he said. “I never thought. Was it?”

“I’d do it all over again,” she said, and her chin came up.

He went and knelt beside the sofa, his arms around her.

“It was worth it, wasn’t it?” he entreated her. “It won’t be asking too much of her?”

“Your father was worth it,” she said. “Tell Dinah that from me.”

“Come and tell her yourself,” he said urgently. “Come with me to England, Mother, and see the house and get a breath of air, after all this. Do you good, hm?”

“Well, do you think it would appeal to Virginia? Of course we can’t go out much now, wherever we are.”

“Leave Virginia to me. I think I can talk her into it. Anyway, I can’t start for a few weeks—months, maybe. There’s a lot to do here first, he knew that as well as anybody.”

“Well, perhaps—after Christmas?” she said doubtfully, and while it seemed like a century to him he saw that she was interested, and it was the first interest she had shown in anything since his father died. But—“We wouldn’t have to miss Christmas with Sue, would we?” she asked anxiously.

“No, of course we wouldn’t,” he reassured her, thinking of the letter he must write to Dinah. “We could go over early in the year. Think how lovely England is in the spring! There’s nothing to keep you here, is there?”

“N-no, if you can persuade Virginia. I’m worried about her, Bracken, I begin to wonder if she’s ever going to marry.”

“Are you so anxious to get her off your hands?”

“Heavens, no, but I had quite made up my mind before I was seventeen

—”

“Virginia isn’t twenty yet!”

“I suppose it’s her attitude, more than anything else,” she said thoughtfully. “She makes fun of everything. She’s too bright and flippant and—well, heartless. Do you think it’s just a phase?”

“She’s a spoilt brat,” he said affectionately, knowing quite well what was the matter with Virginia. “She’ll grow out of it. A few months in England might improve her manners. Now, look here, if I promise to wait for Christmas in Williamsburg, will you promise to spend Easter in England with me?”

“I promise,” she said, and there was something live and quickened in her face that had not been there since his return. “I had almost forgotten about Farthingale. What will you do with it now that you—well, now that you and Dinah will have to think about coming back here to live?”

“I shall hang on to it for a while, at least, because of the divorce. I must show intention of residing in England for that, you see. After all, we’d be

spending quite a lot of time in England. Father always did.” He suppressed the solution which nearly slipped out—Virginia and Archie could have Farthingale as a wedding present. But first, Virginia had to catch Archie.

“Does Dinah know about Lisl?” Eden asked delicately.

“No. Neither does she know that I’m in love with her. I’m going to tell her as soon as I get back. Lisl first, of course.”

“Will it take long—the divorce?”

“I don’t know. I’ve written Partridge, but I won’t really know anything till I get back there. Anyway, you’ve taken the most tremendous load off my mind. I was afraid—”

She smiled at him reproachfully.

“After all these years,” she said, “don’t you know him better than that?”

And so once more he sat down to write to Dinah—

This will come too late for your birthday [he wrote]. It isn’t that I forgot, but I have only just returned to New York and am trying to straighten things out here and see where I am. When I wrote you from Jamaica I could tell you nothing but the facts. Since then I have learned that my father wished me to return to England and go on with the job there in Fleet Street, for a while at least. So I shall be coming back, Dinah, perhaps not as soon as I’d like to, but still very early next year.

And now you are seventeen and I suppose completely grown up. By the time I come to England it will be nearly two years since we first met, that morning on our hill, so in spite of all this time when it’s been impossible to talk to each other we are really quite old friends. Now that I am back here it won’t be so long between letters, if only you will write to me and tell me what you’re doing. I keep wondering if you have changed much, and I keep hoping you haven’t. I know my letters are dull as ditchwater, but I shall try to make up for that by their frequency and by the brilliance of my conversation when I see you again. There was a letter from you waiting for me here when I landed, and I am more grateful for it than I can say. But within a week I shall be convinced I’ll never get another, because I always am….

He paused arid took Dinah’s letter out of its envelope and read it again, wondering how much he dared to say in reply to her artless anxiety for his

welfare, so freely expressed as soon as she learned that he would be under fire in Cuba. Miss French could not have been looking over her shoulder when she wrote: … and if anything happens to you there it will happen to me too, and if you die I am sure to just die of loneliness myself and follow you to heaven, like the poor little heathen girl in the legend who followed the Crusader king across the world with only his name as a password….

Did she know what she was saying, and did she mean it the way it sounded? Did she really think of him like that, as a bulwark against her loneliness? Because that might mean she was beginning to think of him permanently—as a fixture in her life—as a man she might cleave to, forsaking all others—

I like what you say about the Crusader king, [he resumed cautiously]. But that won’t be necessary now, I am pleased to say. The wound has healed and I am quite fit again. It does remind me, though, that it would have been very awkward if you had had to ask St. Peter for Mr. Murray, and it seems to me that now you are certainly old enough to call me by my Christian name, which, in case you have forgotten, is still Bracken.

I look forward to our rides again, Dinah, more than you have any idea. In the meantime, I have sent off a parcel, which you must regard as a late birthday present and not as an early Christmas present….

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