“Marion’s not well and she can’t stand shocks. That kind of people make her really physically sick.”
“I didn’t tell them to come here. They wormed your name out of somebody. They deliberately——”
“Well, it’s too bad. It doesn’t help matters. Excuse me a minute.”
Left alone, Charlie sat tense in his chair. In the next room he could hear the children eating, talking in monosyllables, already oblivious to the scene between their elders. He heard a murmur of conversation from a farther room and then the ticking bell of a telephone receiver picked up, and in a panic he moved to the other side of the room and out of earshot.
In a minute Lincoln came back. “Look here, Charlie. I think we’d better call off dinner for tonight. Marion’s in bad shape.”
“Is she angry with me?”
“Sort of,” he said, almost roughly. “She’s not strong and——”
“You mean she’s changed her mind about Honoria?”
“She’s pretty bitter right now. I don’t know. You phone me at the bank tomorrow.”
“I wish you’d explain to her I never dreamed these people would come here. I’m just as sore as you are.”
“I couldn’t explain anything to her now.”
Charlie got up. He took his coat and hat and started down the corridor. Then he opened the door of the dining room and said in a strange voice, “Good night, children.”
Honoria rose and ran around the table to hug him.
“Good night, sweetheart,” he said vaguely, and then trying to make his voice more tender, trying to conciliate something, “Good night, dear children.”
V
Charlie went directly to the Ritz bar with the furious idea of finding Lorraine and Duncan, but they were not there, and he realized that in any case there was nothing he could do. He had not touched his drink at the Peters’, and now he ordered a whisky-and-soda. Paul came over to say hello.
“It’s a great change,” he said sadly. “We do about half the business we did. So many fellows I hear about back in the States lost everything, maybe not in the first crash, but then in the second. Your friend George Hardt lost every cent, I hear. Are you back in the States?”
“No, I’m in business in Prague.”
“I heard that you lost a lot in the crash.”
“I did,” and he added grimly, “but I lost everything I wanted in the boom.”
“Selling short.”
“Something like that.”
Again the memory of those days swept over him like a nightmare—the people they had met travelling; then people who couldn’t add a row of figures or speak a coherent sentence. The little man Helen had consented to dance with at the ship’s party, who had insulted her ten feet from the table; the women and girls carried screaming with drink or drugs out of public places——
——The men who locked their wives out in the snow, because the snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow. If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money.
He went to the phone and called the Peters’ apartment; Lincoln answered.
“I called up because this thing is on my mind. Has Marion said anything definite?”
“Marion’s sick,” Lincoln answered shortly. “I know this thing isn’t altogether your fault, but I can’t have her go to pieces about it. I’m afraid we’ll have to let it slide for six months; I can’t take the chance of working her up to this state again.”
“I see.”
“I’m sorry, Charlie.”
He went back to his table. His whisky glass was empty, but he shook his head when Alix looked at it questioningly. There wasn’t much he could do now except send Honoria some things; he would send her a lot of things tomorrow. He thought rather angrily that this was just money—he had given so many people money…
“No, no more,” he said to another waiter. “What do I owe you?”
He would come back some day; they couldn’t make him pay forever. But he wanted his child, and nothing was much good now, beside that fact. He wasn’t young any more, with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself. He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn’t have wanted him to be so alone.
Published in Saturday Evening Post magazine (21 February 1931).
