Ever After (42 page)

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.

F
ITZ
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.”