At the Crossroads Part 8

How long Larry would have kept on it would have been hard to tell, but he suddenly looked full at Mary-Clare and--stopped!

The expression on the face confronting his was puzzling: it looked amused, not angry. Now there is one thing a man of Larry's type cannot bear with equanimity and that is to have his high moments dashed. He saw that he was not impressing Mary-Clare; he saw that he was mistaking her att.i.tude of mind concerning his treatment of her--in short, she did not care!

"What are you laughing at?" he asked.

"I'm not laughing, Larry."

"What are you smiling at?"

"My smile is my own, Larry; when I laugh it's different."

"Trying to be smart, eh? I should think when your husband's been away months and has just got back, you'd meet him with something besides a grin."

There was some justice in this and Mary-Clare said slowly: "I'm sorry, Larry. I really was only thinking."

Now that she was face to face with her big moment, Mary-Clare realized anew how difficult her task was. Often, in the past, thinking of Larry when he was not with her, it had seemed possible to reason with him; to bring truth to him and implore his help. Always she had striven to cling to her image of Larry, but never to the real man. The man she had constructed with Larry off the scene was quite another creature from Larry in the flesh. This knowledge was humiliating now in the blazing light of reality grimly faced and it taxed all of Mary-Clare's courage. She was smiling sadly, smiling at her own inability in the past to deal with facts.

Larry was brought to bay. He was disappointed, angry, and outraged. He was not a man to reflect upon causes; results, and very present ones, were all that concerned him. But he did, now, hark back to the scene soon after the birth and death of the last child. Such states of mind didn't last for ever, and there was no baby coming at the moment. He could not make things out.

"See here," he said rather gropingly, "you are not holding a grouch, are you?"

"No, Larry."

"What then?"

For a moment Mary-Clare shrank. She weakly wanted to put off the big moment; dared not face it.

"It's late, Larry. You are tired." She got that far when she affrightedly remembered the bedroom upstairs and paused. She had arranged it for Larry--there must be an explanation of that.

"Late be hanged!" Larry stretched his legs out and plunged his hands in his pockets. "I'm going to get at the bottom of this to-night. You understand?"

"All right, Larry." Mary-Clare sank back in her chair--she had fallen on her adventurous way; she had no words with which to convey her burning thoughts. Already she had got so far from the man who had filled such a false position in her life that he seemed a stranger. To tell him that she did not love him, had never loved him, was all but impossible. Of course he could not be expected to comprehend. The situation became terrifying.

"You've never been the same since the last baby came." Larry was speaking in an injured, harsh tone. "I've put up with a good deal, Mary-Clare; not many men would be so patient. The trouble with you, my girl, is this, you get your ideas from books. That mightn't matter if you had horse sense and knew when to slam the covers on the rot. But you try to live 'em and then the devil is to pay. Dad spoiled you. He let you run away with yourself. But the time's come----"

The long speech in the face of Mary-Clare's wondering, amazed eyes, brought Larry to a panting pause.

"What you got a husband for, anyway, that's what I am asking you?"

Mary-Clare's hard-won philosophy of life stood her in poor stead now.

She felt an insane desire to give way and laugh. It was a maddening thing to contemplate, but she seemed to see things so cruelly real and Larry seemed shouting to her from a distance that she could never retrace. For a moment he seemed to be physically out of sight--she only heard his words.

"By G.o.d! Mary-Clare, what's up? Have you counted the cost of carrying on as you are doing? What am I up against?"

"Yes, Larry, I've counted the cost to me and Noreen and you. I'm afraid this is what we are all up against."

"Well, what's the sum total?" Larry leaned back more comfortably; he felt that Mary-Clare, once she began to talk, would say a good deal.

She would talk like one of her books. He need not pay much heed and when she got out of breath he'd round her up. His interview with Maclin had not been all business; the gossip, interjected, was taking ugly and definite form now. Maclin had mentioned the man at the inn.

Quite incidentally, of course, but repeatedly.

"You see, Larry, I've got to tell you how it is, in my own way,"

Mary-Clare was speaking. "I know my way makes you angry, but please be patient, for if I tried any other way it would hurt more."

"Fire away!" Larry n.o.bly suppressed a yawn. Had Mary-Clare said simply, "I don't love you any more," Larry would have got up from the blow and been able to handle the matter, but she proceeded after a fas.h.i.+on that utterly confused him and, instead of clearing the situation, managed to create a most unlooked-for result.

"It's like this, Larry: I suppose life is a muddle for everyone and we all do have to learn as we go on--nothing can keep us from that, not even marriage, can it?"

No reply came to this.

"It's like light coming in spots, and then those spots can never be really dark again although all the rest may be. You think of those spots as bright and sure when all else is--is lost. That is the way it has been with me."

"Gee!" Larry shrugged his shoulders.

"Larry, you _must_ try to understand!" Mary-Clare was growing desperate.

"Then, try to talk American."

"I am, Larry. _My_ American. That's the trouble--there is more than _one_ kind, you know. Larry, it was all wrong, my marrying you even for dear Dad's sake. If he had been well and we could have talked it over, he would have understood. I should have understood for him that last night. Even the letters should not have mattered, they must not matter now!"

This, at least, was comprehensible.

"Well, you _did_ marry me, didn't you?" Larry flung out. "You're my wife, aren't you?" Correcting mistakes was not in Larry's plan of life.

"I--why, yes, I am, Larry, but a wife means more than one thing, doesn't it?" This came hopelessly.

"Not to me. What's your idea?" Larry was relieved at having the conversation run along lines that he could handle with some degree of common sense.

"Well, Larry, marriage means a good many things to me. It means being kind and making a good home--a real home, not just a place to come to.

It means standing by each other, even if you can't have everything!"

Just for one moment Larry was inclined to end this s.h.i.+lly-shallying by brute determination. He was that type of man. What did not come within the zone of his own experience, did not exist for him except as obstacles to brush aside.

It was a d.a.m.ned bad time, he thought, for Mary-Clare to act up her book stuff. A man, home after a three months' absence, tired and worn out, could not be expected, at close upon midnight, to enjoy this outrageous nonsense that had been sprung upon him.

He must put an end to it at once. He discarded the cave method. Of course that impulse was purely primitive. It might simplify the whole situation but he discarded it. Mary-Clare's outbursts were like Noreen's "dressing up"--and bore about the same relation in Larry's mind.

"See here," he said suddenly, fixing his eyes on Mary-Clare--when Larry a.s.serted himself he always glared--"just what in thunder do you mean?"

The simplicity of the question demanded a crude reply.

"I'm not going to have any more children." Out of the maze of complicated ideals and gropings this question and answer emerged, devastating everything in their path. They meant one, and only one, thing to Larry Rivers.

There were some things that could illume his dark stretches and level Mary-Clare's vague reachings to a common level. Both Larry and Mary-Clare were conscious now of being face to face with a grave human experience. They stood revealed, man and woman. The big significant things in life are startlingly simple.

The man attacked the grim spectre with conventional and brutal weapons; the woman backed away with a dogged look growing in her eyes.

"Oh! you aren't, eh?" Larry spoke slowly. "You've decided, have you?"

"I know what children mean to you, Larry; I know what you mean by--love--yes: I've decided!"