Sometimes she was jealous of his work when he telephoned that he was too tired to go out after the theater. Lacking drink, night life was less than nothing to him—something quite spoiled and well lost. For Julia, who never drank, it was a stimulus in itself—the music and the parade of dresses and the handsome couple they made dancing together. At first they saw Phil Hoffman once in a while; Julia considered that he took the matter rather badly; then they didn’t see him any more.
A few unpleasant incidents occurred. An old schoolmate, Esther Cary, came to her to ask if she knew of Dick Ragland’s reputation. Instead of growing angry, Julia invited her to meet Dick and was delighted with the ease with which Esther’s convictions were changed. There were other, small, annoying episodes, but Dick’s misdemeanors had, fortunately, been confined to Paris and assumed here a far-away unreality. They loved each other deeply now—the memory of that morning slowly being effaced from Julia’s imagination—but she wanted to be sure.
“After six months, if everything goes along like this, we’ll announce our engagement. After another six months we’ll be married.”
“Such a long time,” he mourned.
“But there were five years before that,” Julia answered. “I trust you with my heart and with my mind, but something else says wait. Remember, I’m also deciding for my children.”
Those five years—oh, so lost and gone.
In August, Julia went to California for two months to see her family. She wanted to know how Dick would get along alone. They wrote every day; his letters were by turns cheerful, depressed, weary and hopeful. His work was going better. As things came back to him, his uncle had begun really to believe in him, but all the time he missed his Julia so. It was when an occasional note of despair began to appear that she cut her visit short by a week and came East to New York.
“Oh, thank God you’re here!” he cried as they linked arms and walked out of the Grand Central station. “It’s been so hard. Half a dozen times lately I’ve wanted to go on a bust and I had to think of you, and you were so far away.”
“Darling—darling, you’re so tired and pale. You’re working too hard.”
“No, only that life is so bleak alone. When I go to bed my mind churns on and on. Can’t we get married sooner?”
“I don’t know; we’ll see. You’ve got your Julia near you now, and nothing matters.”
After a week, Dick’s depression lifted. When he was sad, Julia made him her baby, holding his handsome head against her breast, but she liked it best when he was confident and could cheer her up, making her laugh and feel taken care of and secure. She had rented an apartment with another girl and she took courses in biology and domestic science in Columbia. When deep fall came, they went to football games and the new shows together, and walked through the first snow in Central Park, and several times a week spent long evenings together in front of her fire. But time was going by and they were both impatient. Just before Christmas, an unfamiliar visitor—Phil Hoffman—presented himself at her door. It was the first time in many months. New York, with its quality of many independent ladders set side by side, is unkind to even the meetings of close friends; so, in the case of strained relations, meetings are easy to avoid.
And they were strange to each other. Since his expressed skepticism of Dick, he was automatically her enemy; on another count, she saw that he had improved, some of the hard angles were worn off; he was now an assistant district attorney, moving around with increasing confidence through his profession.
“So you’re going to marry Dick?” he said. “When?”
“Soon now. When mother comes East.”
He shook his head emphatically. “Julia, don’t marry Dick. This isn’t jealousy—I know when I am licked—but it seems awful for a lovely girl like you to take a blind dive into a lake full of rocks. What makes you think that people change their courses? Sometimes they dry up or even flow into a parallel channel, but I’ve never known anybody to change.”
“Dick’s changed.”
“Maybe so. But isn’t that an enormous ‘maybe’? If he was unattractive and you liked him, I’d say go ahead with it. Maybe I’m all wrong, but it’s so darn obvious that what fascinates you is that handsome pan of his and those attractive manners.”
“You don’t know him,” Julia answered loyally. “He’s different with me. You don’t know how gentle he is, and responsive. Aren’t you being rather small and mean?”
“Hm.” Phil thought for a moment. “I want to see you again in a few days. Or perhaps I’ll speak to Dick.”
“You let Dick alone,” she cried. “He has enough to worry him without your nagging him. If you were his friend you’d try to help him instead of coming to me behind his back.”
“I’m your friend first.”
“Dick and I are one person now.”
But three days later Dick came to see her at an hour when he would usually have been at the office.
“I’m here under compulsion,” he said lightly, “under threat of exposure by Phil Hoffman.”
Her heart dropping like a plummet. “Has he given up?” she thought. “Is he drinking again?”
“It’s about a girl. You introduced me to her last summer and told me to be very nice to her—Esther Cary.”
Now her heart was beating slowly.
“After you went to California I was lonesome and I ran into her. She’d liked me that day, and for a while we saw quite a bit of each other. Then you came back and I broke it off. It was a little difficult; I hadn’t realized that she was so interested.”
“I see.” Her voice was starved and aghast.
“Try and understand. Those terribly lonely evenings. I think if it hadn’t been for Esther, I’d have fallen off the wagon. I never loved her—I never loved anybody but you—but I had to see somebody who liked me.”
He put his arm around her, but she felt cold all over and he drew away.
“Then any woman would have done,” Julia said slowly. “It didn’t matter who.”
“No!” he cried.
“I stayed away so long to let you stand on your own feet and get back your self-respect by yourself.”
“I only love you, Julia.”
“But any woman can help you. So you don’t really need me, do you?”
His face wore that vulnerable look that Julia had seen several times before; she sat on the arm of his chair and ran her hand over his cheek.
“Then what do you bring me?” she demanded. “I thought that there’d be the accumulated strength of having beaten your weakness. What do you bring me now?”
“Everything I have.”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Just your good looks—and the head waiter at dinner last night had that.”
They talked for two days and decided nothing. Sometimes she would pull him close and reach up to his lips that she loved so well, but her arms seemed to close around straw.
“I’ll go away and give you a chance to think it over,” he said despairingly. “I can’t see any way of living without you, but I suppose you can’t marry a man you don’t trust or believe in. My uncle wanted me to go to London on some business—”
The night he left, it was sad on the dim pier. All that kept her from breaking was that it was not an image of strength that was leaving her; she would be just as strong without him. Yet as the murky lights fell on the fine structure of his brow and chin, as she saw the faces turn toward him, the eyes that followed him, an awful emptiness seized her and she wanted to say: “Never mind, dear; we’ll try it together.”
But try what? It was human to risk the toss between failure and success, but to risk the desperate gamble between adequacy and disaster—
“Oh, Dick, be good and be strong and come back to me. Change, change, Dick—change!”
“Good-by, Julia—good-by.”
She last saw him on the deck, his profile cut sharp as a cameo against a match as he lit a cigarette.
IV
It was Phil Hoffman who was to be with her at the beginning and the end. It was he who broke the news as gently as it could be broken. He reached her apartment at half-past eight and carefully threw away the morning paper outside. Dick Ragland had disappeared at sea.
After her first wild burst of grief, he became purposely a little cruel.
“He knew himself. His will had given out; he didn’t want life any more. And, Julia, just to show you how little you can possibly blame yourself, I’ll tell you this: He’d hardly gone to his office for four months—since you went to California. He wasn’t fired because of his uncle; the business he went to London on was of no importance at all. After his first enthusiasm was gone he’d given up.”
She looked at him sharply. “He didn’t drink, did he? He wasn’t drinking?”
For a fraction of a second Phil hesitated. “No, he didn’t drink; he kept his promise—he held on to that.”
“That was it,” she said. “He kept his promise and he killed himself doing it.”
Phil waited uncomfortably.
“He did what he said he would and broke his heart doing it,” she went on chokingly. “Oh, isn’t life cruel sometimes—so cruel, never to
