“It’s all there is to know,” she said, bleakly. “It was all wrong, you see, from the beginning. I’d better tell you. We oughtn’t to have married. He-we were so young. That was over a year ago.”
A year ago! So now she felt aged and adult and looked back on herself a year ago as being very young. She couldn’t have been, allowing even for the years of her training, more than twenty-four at the very most.
She went on quickly, “Craig-you see, he was sick; he was home on leave and he was in an auto accident and broke his arm. It was a compound fracture and he was in the hospital five weeks. Five weeks,” she said, “and three days. I was one of his nurses. And the day he came out we were married.”
“On leave?”
“Yes. That-that was one of the troubles later. His father, you see, wanted him to be in the diplomatic service. All his life he’d been destined for that and he’d got, a year or so before, his first appointment. It was a consular appointment, not much, but a beginning. It was in South America, and it was when he was at home on his first leave that we met. Like that.”
I put in a stud and said, “And married.”
“Yes. He-oh, it’s one of those stories. So simple really and so wrong. We oughtn’t to have married then. We didn’t know each other, really. There wasn’t time. We’d tried to tell each other things; things about our lives and the things that had happened to us before, but none of it seemed to matter then. We…” She stroked the little dog’s head, her face bent above him. “We had a little time together; not much, because his leave had been extended but still it was nearly up. So we had to come home. That is, we came here. To see his father.” She stopped again. I fastened in the last stud and said, “I take it Papa was surprised.”
“He hadn’t been told.” Her face was still lowered over the dog but had a kind of fixity and whiteness. “You see that was wrong, too. He had other plans for Craig.” She stopped again, stroking the dog’s head.
“Alexia,” I said.
She glanced at me once, quickly. “Yes. They weren’t really engaged, she and Craig. If they had been, Craig would have told her, before we married, in another way. But it was a kind of understanding; it had been for a long time. I didn’t know that, then. Until we came here and Alexia was here. It was a clear, cold night in January over a year ago and we came into the hall downstairs. It was after dinner and they were having coffee in the library and his father came out of the library with a cup in his hand and then Alexia came. She was so beautiful-she wore a crimson, trailing dinner gown and she went straight to Craig and put up her face to be kissed and he said, ‘Alexia, this is my wife.’ ”
“Dear me,” I said, keeping to myself the strong impression that young Craig might have well deserved the shooting he had got. Certainly Alexia couldn’t be expected to greet Drue now or ever with anything like joy.
“Yes. Oh, I told you it was all wrong. Everything. But in a queer way, Sarah, we couldn’t help it. It was as if we had been caught in something we couldn’t stop. It wasn’t Craig’s fault, any of it, any more than it was mine.” I thought there were tears in her eyes again, but she lowered her face over the dog so I couldn’t see and began to smooth out his long forelock with fingers that trembled.
“So there were fireworks,” I said.
“It meant Craig’s career, really. I didn’t realize that when we were married. Perhaps it’s why Craig hadn’t told his father until after we were married. His father told me our marriage was impossible. He said it was a terrible mistake. He said Craig’s career demanded money; he simply had to have money to get anywhere. I hadn’t any money, of course. But that wasn’t the main thing: he made it clear that he had intended to help Craig himself with money. But he said that now, in view of our marriage, he wouldn’t. He said Craig’s career was washed up because of our marriage and that for that reason alone he would have refused him the money that was necessary, even if he had approved of his wife-me-as a person. He didn’t like me; but that wasn’t all. I-I was a nurse, you see.” She lifted her shining head a little proudly. “My family were good and old, too. But I couldn’t help him, socially. Not directly, you know, with wires at my hand to pull. He explained all that to me.”
I sniffed. You couldn’t look at Drue Cable and not know she had good breeding; it was in every line of her face and every motion of her body as it is in a thoroughbred. I am no snob. I’ve nursed too long to have anything but a kind of respectful recognition of certain qualities like courage and truth and gentleness which, Heaven knows, can exist anywhere. But I’ve nursed long enough to have seen something of heredity; natural laws are natural laws, and you can’t get around them.
“So Pa Brent resorted to the good old-fashioned disinheriting threat. Or what amounted to it. What did Craig say to all this?”
“Craig laughed at first. Then he wouldn’t even talk of it. He told me to forget it; he said it wasn’t important, to pay no attention to what his father said. But I couldn’t help paying attention. Because Mr. Brent told me that the only thing to do was for us to end our marriage as-as abruptly as it began.” She was quoting. I could tell it from the bitterness that then, for the first time, came into her voice.
I got out of my wool dress and reached for my uniform and I remember that I stood there for an instant staring at her. For the way she spoke gave me a hint as to what was going to come next, and I really couldn’t believe it. “You surely don’t mean to say you agreed to that,” I cried, astonished.
She started to braid the dog’s long forelock, her fingers very gentle but still unsteady. “Not just then. I couldn’t. We stayed on a little. Craig’s leave had been given another month’s extension. Then Alexia came back and-and Nicky,” she said, bending over the dog. “Her twin brother.”
There was a rather long pause while she braided and rebraided the soft forelock. “Then,” she went on finally, “Craig had to go to Washington. His father wanted me to stay here; he said we must get to know each other better. That pleased Craig; he hoped it meant his father was coming around. So he asked me to stay, and I did. I went to the train with him and he kissed me and said he’d be back in a week. It was there at the station-where we got off the train…” She bent closely over the dog again. “I never saw Craig again until today.”
“Never-why not?”
“He had to stay longer in Washington, two weeks, three weeks. It-it wasn’t…” She broke off and, after a moment said, “His father didn’t want to know me better. Alexia was here all the time, too. It wasn’t very pleasant.” Her voice hardened a little and she said, “Besides, there was Nicky. Craig didn’t come back, and I couldn’t stay here. I went away.” She stopped, as if that was all the story.
“Do you mean to tell me you let them influence you like that? So you walked out and never returned?”
“That wasn’t all,” she said and seemed to think for a moment, arranging facts in the order which would make them clearest to me. She frowned and said: “You see, Sarah, I couldn’t stay here. So I left. But that wasn’t all, because Craig gave up his job. That was why he stayed so long in Washington. He had decided to get training as a pilot. It was before the war began. I mean before we got into it, naturally…”
I nodded. Naturally. It had been then only a matter of weeks since Pearl Harbor.
“He wanted to get into the air force. He hadn’t talked to me about it before he went, and I understood why. It was because he knew that I would feel that he was giving up his chosen career because of me. I wouldn’t have let him do it, at least, I would have tried to stop him. But, you see, he didn’t know that at that time, and if he got the training he wanted he had to be unmarried. Then, and for that particular course of training, they wouldn’t take a married man. He didn’t know that until he applied for it. I didn’t know it until Mr. Brent wrote to me and told me.”