Farther up the table there was talk of the market—another drop today, the most appreciable since the crash; people were kidding Rutherford about it: “Too bad, old man. You better not get married, after all.”
Michael asked the man on his left, “Has he lost a lot?”
“Nobody knows. He’s heavily involved, but he’s one of the smartest young men in Wall Street. Anyhow, nobody ever tells you the truth.”
It was a champagne dinner from the start, and towards the end it reached a pleasant level of conviviality, but Michael saw that all these people were too weary to be exhilarated by any ordinary stimulant; for weeks they had drunk cocktails before meals like Americans, wines and brandies like Frenchmen, beer like Germans, whisky-and-soda like the English, and as they were no longer in the twenties, this preposterous melange, that was like some gigantic cocktail in a nightmare, served only to make them temporarily less conscious of the mistakes of the night before. Which is to say that it was not really a gay party; what gaiety existed was displayed in the few who drank nothing at all.
But Michael was not tired, and the champagne stimulated him and made his misery less acute. He had been away from New York for more than eight months and most of the dance music was unfamiliar to him, but at the first bars of the “Painted Doll,” to which he and Caroline had moved through so much happiness and despair the previous summer, he crossed to Caroline’s table and asked her to dance.
She was lovely in a dress of thin ethereal blue, and the proximity of her crackly yellow hair, of her cool and tender grey eyes, turned his body clumsy and rigid; he stumbled with their first step on the floor. For a moment it seemed that there was nothing to say; he wanted to tell her about his inheritance, but the idea seemed abrupt, unprepared for.
“Michael, it’s so nice to be dancing with you again.”
He smiled grimly.
“I’m so happy you came,” she continued. “I was afraid maybe you’d be silly and stay away. Now we can be just good friends and natural together. Michael, I want you and Hamilton to like each other.”
The engagement was making her stupid; he had never heard her make such a series of obvious bluffs before.
“I could kill him without a qualm,” he said pleasantly, “but he looks like a good man. He’s fine. What I want to know is, what happens to people like me who aren’t able to forget?”
As he said this he could not prevent his mouth from drooping suddenly, and glancing up, Caroline saw, and her heart quivered violently, as it had the other morning.
“Do you mind so much, Michael?”
“Yes.”
For a second as he said this, in a voice that seemed to have come up from his shoes, they were not dancing; they were simply clinging together. Then she leaned away from him and twisted her mouth into a lovely smile.
“I didn’t know what to do at first, Michael. I told Hamilton about you—that I’d cared for you an awful lot—but it didn’t worry him, and he was right. Because I’m over you now—yes, I am. And you’ll wake up some sunny morning and be over me just like that.”
He shook his head stubbornly.
“Oh, yes. We weren’t for each other. I’m pretty flighty, and I need somebody like Hamilton to decide things. It was that more than the question of—of—”
“Of money.” Again he was on the point of telling her what had happened, but again something told him it was not the time.
“Then how do you account for what happened when we met the other day,” he demanded helplessly—“what happened just now? When we just pour towards each other like we used to—as if we were one person, as if the same blood was flowing through both of us?”
“Oh, don’t!” she begged him. “You mustn’t talk like that; everything’s decided now. I love Hamilton with all my heart. It’s just that I remember certain things in the past and I feel sorry for you—for us—for the way we were.”
Over her shoulder, Michael saw a man come towards them to cut in. In a panic he danced her away, but inevitably the man came on.
“I’ve got to see you alone, if only for a minute,” Michael said quickly. “When can I?”
“I’ll be at Jebby West’s tea tomorrow,” she whispered as a hand fell politely upon Michael’s shoulder.
But he did not talk to her at Jebby West’s tea. Rutherford stood next to her, and each brought the other into all conversations. They left early. The next morning the wedding cards arrived in the first mail.
Then Michael, grown desperate with pacing up and down his room, determined on a bold stroke; he wrote to Hamilton Rutherford, asking him for a rendezvous the following afternoon. In a short telephone communication Rutherford agreed, but for a day later than Michael had asked. And the wedding was only six days away.
They were to meet in the bar of the Hotel Jena. Michael knew what he would say: “See here, Rutherford, do you realize the responsibility you’re taking in going through with this marriage? Do you realize the harvest of trouble and regret you’re sowing in persuading a girl into something contrary to the instincts of her heart?” He would explain that the barrier between Caroline and himself had been an artificial one and was now removed, and demand that the matter be put up to Caroline frankly before it was too late.
Rutherford would be angry, conceivably there would be a scene, but Michael felt that he was fighting for his life now.
He found Rutherford in conversation with an older man, whom Michael had met at several of the wedding parties.
“I saw what happened to most of my friends,” Rutherford was saying, “and I decided it wasn’t going to happen to me. It isn’t so difficult; if you take a girl with common sense, and tell her what’s what, and do your stuff damn well, and play decently square with her, it’s a marriage. If you stand for any nonsense at the beginning, it’s one of these arrangements—within five years the man gets out, or else the girl gobbles him up and you have the usual mess.”
“Right!” agreed his companion enthusiastically. “Hamilton, boy, you’re right.”
Michael’s blood boiled slowly.
“Doesn’t it strike you,” he inquired coldly, “that your attitude went out of fashion about a hundred years ago?”
“No. it didn’t,” said Rutherford pleasantly, but impatiently. “I’m as modern as anybody. I’d get married in an aeroplane next Saturday if it’d please my girl.”
“I don’t mean that way of being modern. You can’t take a sensitive woman—”
“Sensitive? Women aren’t so darn sensitive. It’s fellows like you who are sensitive; it’s fellows like you that they exploit—all your devotion and kindness and all that. They read a couple of books and see a few pictures because they haven’t got anything else to do, and then they say they’re finer in grain than you are, and to prove it they take the bit in their teeth and tear off for a fare-you-well—just about as sensitive as a fire horse.”
“Caroline happens to be sensitive,” said Michael in a clipped voice.
At this point the other man got up to go; when the dispute about the check had been settled and they were alone, Rutherford leaned back to Michael as if a question had been asked him.
“Caroline’s more than sensitive,” he said. “She’s got sense.”
His combative eyes, meeting Michael’s, flickered with a grey light. “This all sounds pretty crude to you, Mr. Curly, but it seems to me that the average man nowadays just asks to be made a monkey of by some woman who doesn’t even get any fun out of reducing him to that level. There are darn few men who possess their wives any more, but I am going to be one of them.”
To Michael it seemed time to bring the talk back to the actual situation: “Do you realize the responsibility you’re taking?”
“I certainly do,” interrupted Rutherford. “I’m not afraid of responsibility. I’ll make the decisions—fairly, I hope, but anyhow they’ll be final.”
“What if you didn’t start right?” said Michael impetuously. “What if your marriage isn’t founded on mutual love?”
“I think I see what you mean,” Rutherford said, still pleasant. “And since you’ve brought it up, let me say that if you and Caroline had married, it wouldn’t have lasted three years. Do you know what your affair was founded on? On sorrow. You got sorry for each other. Sorrow’s a lot of fun for most women and for some
