The Smart Set/Volume 29/Issue 3/Suttee

by Neith Boyce

 

SUTTEE

By NEITH BOYCE

THE doctor was answering a hurry call. His motor, however, was constantly checked in the stream of carriages on Fifth Avenue, and his impatience betrayed itself in the tenseness of his attitude and of his smooth, sharply cut face. The house to which he was going stood in a side street near the Park, a few doors from the Avenue. He jumped out before the motor had stopped, and the door was opened for him before he reached it. The butler had a pale and terrified face.

“Glad you've come, sir,” he gasped. “We didn't know what to do. Mr. Lindsay's on an awful tear. He won't let nobody near him. Look at that, sir!”

The tiled floor of the hall was wet, and a stream of water was running down through the balustrade of the stairway from the floor above.

“What's that for? Guess you need a plumber, not a doctor,” snapped Graves, as the man took his hat and fur coat.

“Lord, sir, it's Mr. Lindsay. He's been pouring water down the stairs this half-hour. He won't let none of us go up or down.”

“Where's Mrs. Lindsay?”

“I think she's in the library. I haven't seen her since he commenced this. She was talking to him before—”

Graves started up the stairs, and the man called after him quaveringly:

“Look out for yourself, Doctor! Shall I telephone for a policeman? I didn't like to do it on my own—”

“No. Just stay below there,” Graves called back sharply.

He ran up the short flight of stairs and started up the second flight leading to the bedrooms, but was met by a fresh deluge of water which struck him fair on one shoulder and for a moment blinded him.

“Stop that!” he shouted.

“Eh, stop what?” returned a husky voice from above. “Get out of my bath tub, will you?”

Graves cleared his eyes and saw a figure in pink pajamas, with a large pitcher in one hand, standing, feet wide apart, at the head of the stairs.

“Don't you come up here,” growled the master of the house, brandishing the empty pitcher. “It's damned queer if a man can't take a bath without the whole neighborhood coming in.”

“Look here! I'm coming up,” said the doctor. “I'm Graves; don't you know me? And I'm in a hurry. You've wet me through to the skin with your infernal foolishness, and I've got to come up and get dry. Do you want me to have pneumonia?”

“Don't care if you do. You ought to know better than to get into my bath. You can't come up here. Pity if a man can't have his own dressing room to himself, in his own house.”

“Do you dress on the stairs? How in thunder do you expect to take a bath on the landing?”

Graves went up, stair by stair, toward the big pink figure, whose congested face and half-opened gray eyes lowered down at him. The big man stood like a bull, head down, breathing heavily.

“Bath!” he stammered. “I've poured water enough down there for a dozen baths. If that fool of a man hadn't left the stopper out—  Look out!”

And as Graves approached within arm's length he aimed a furious blow with the pitcher.

Graves dodged and threw himself upon the big man, knocking the pitcher from his hand and seizing both his wrists. Lindsay staggered back against the wall, then forced Graves over against the balustrade of the stairs in a frantic effort to free himself. Graves shouted for Parker, the butler, tripped Lindsay and threw himself forward on his chest. Both men went to the floor. Lindsay's head struck against the parquet floor and he lay quiet.

The butler and two women servants came running. The doctor got to his feet and looked down on the insensible man, his face set and hard, breathing fast from the encounter.

“Come, get him into his own room,” he said curtly.

The four carried Lindsay in and laid him on a carved walnut bed, facing a great Bouguereau “Madonna” that smiled in sickly sweetness from the red wall. The doctor touched his head, laid a finger on his wrist, and then, after hastily drying as well as he could his own drenched coat, left the room, saying:

“One of you stay here, and when he comes to himself let me know.”

He ran downstairs to the telephone and called up a private hospital.

“Is Miss Schmidt there? Tell her Dr. Graves ... Miss Schmidt, I want two special nurses here in half an hour. D. T. case. Have you got two good ones?... Miss Parsons? That's good —and another. I'll send my motor. Have 'em ready, please. Good-bye.”

He scribbled on a leaf of his notebook the address of the hospital and gave it to the butler.

“Give that to my chauffeur and tell him to make the best time he can,” he said, and turned brusquely away as Parker began a question.

“Don't bother me now—I'll talk to you later,” he added over his shoulder.

He went slowly up the first flight of stairs, passing a housemaid, who had begun to mop up the water, and at the top of the stairs he paused. No sound from the floor above. Before him, along the passage, was the library door, closed. No sound from there. While he hesitated an instant, a door behind him opened, and a trim young woman came out, closing it behind her. She was English, blonde, pretty, and rather coquettish—the governess.

“Oh, Doctor, have you quieted him? What a scene today! The poor children—I couldn't help their hearing something! Is he hurt? And you—I hope you are not!”

She bent toward him, her blue eyes shining.

“No damage done,” said Graves shortly. “Better take the children out now for an hour. It's all right.”

He nodded and walked away from her toward the library door. She stood and watched him. He knocked, and, as there was no response, went in and shut the door again softly.

The room was almost dark; the wood fire had died down, and the windows rather shut out the gray light of late afternoon with their pale saffron curtains. Graves made out the figure of a woman at a desk at the end of the room, lying forward, her arms thrown out and her head down. He spoke hesitatingly:

“Mrs. Lindsay—”

She did not move, and he went nearer. He saw that the loose sleeves of her dress half covered her head. She had not heard him come in.

“Mrs. Lindsay!”

His voice was sharp with distress. She stirred and said dully:

“What is it?”

“It's I—Graves. Are you ill?”

He turned on the electric light on the desk. She lifted her head and sat up, moving as though in pain, showing a delicate face, deadly pale, and dark hair in disorder. Her light blue eyes looked up at him with a stunned and tragic expression.

“I didn't know—you were here. I told them to telephone—”

“I came as soon as I could. It's all right now. He's quiet. I've sent for two nurses. When did this begin?”

“Oh—this afternoon. He was ill this morning, but not—violent. I couldn't—do anything with him.”

“You've seen him today, then?”

“Oh—of course. Just now—an hour or so ago.”

She started to get up from her chair, and uttered a cry of pain.

“My wrist—I think I've sprained it. I was trying to make him stay in bed.”

She put up her right hand, and Graves took it in both his.

“Yes,” he said. “Come upstairs and I'll bandage it.”

He gave her his arm—she could hardly walk. She seemed in a half-stupor, asked no questions about her husband's state, and did not notice the dilapidation of Graves's usually smart appearance. Her light blue eyes stared fixedly at the floor. She breathed quickly and faintly, like some delicate animal in pain or fear. Graves did not try to talk to her. He rang for her maid, and when the bandaging was finished, ordered Mrs. Lindsay to bed. Then he was summoned to his other patient, who had recovered consciousness. The two nurses arriving at this time, he put them in charge of Lindsay, and finally, after more than an hour spent in the house, he got away on his delayed round of visits. He would not take the time to go home and change his dress, and the discomfort of his wet clothes, as he hugged himself up in the fur coat and rug, gave an additional edge to his inward rage.

“It's hell!” he said to himself savagely, again and again. “Just hell!” And his frowning brow and set mouth expressed an emotion that must find an outlet.

During the two years that he had been the Lindsays' family doctor, he had generally carried away from their home this same impression; but with time it had grown steadily stronger, and there was now a personal element in it. For the past year he had been a combatant on that field of battle. So far, he had been beaten in his effort to change what seemed to him—what was rapidly becoming to himself—an intolerable situation. But with each defeat he gathered fresh determination. Each scene like that of today—and there had been many, more or less similar—enraged him anew, inspired him anew to conflict. What he was fighting was a woman's mind. Or, rather, not her mind, he said to himself fiercely, for she would not use it, but a kind of stupid instinct, slavish bondage to tradition, sentimentality.

He had used these harsh words to Mrs. Lindsay herself; he was now almost always angry with her. And yet it had happened to him—but much more during the first year of their acquaintance than the last—to see a sort of moral beauty in her attitude. In his daily contact with so many intimate miseries of mind and body, in his daily sight of so much human weakness, frivolity and folly, she for a long time had seemed to him a much nobler creature than he was likely ordinarily to see. Her idea of duty, her sacrifices, her sufferings, had moved him to sympathy, to admiration.

It was, at least, a sort of idealism, strong if narrow; and he saw little enough of the ideal in his daily life. But gradually the narrowness of Mary Lindsay impressed him more and her idealism less. She was so utterly mistaken! She had so little common sense! She was so romantic, in immolating herself to a brute like Lindsay, who in his drunkenness would strike her! Once Graves, at one of these periodical crises, had found her insensible on the floor. She had explained this away as a fainting fit. And the sprained wrist—that was another accident, no doubt. Graves carried the thought of it and of her look—beaten down, wounded, almost crushed —and of what he meant to say to her, all through his afternoon, which stretched on to nine o'clock. He seldom dined before half past nine or ten. Before going back to his house for that solitary meal, he made another visit to the Lindsays.

This time the house was calm. Lindsay was in a morphine-induced sleep; Mrs. Lindsay was finishing her dinner. She had left word for the doctor that Harold, the second child, was not well, asking him to see the boy first and her afterwards. Graves found the child restless, nervous and unable to sleep. He was a delicate boy of six, with his mother's look. Graves ordered him a glass of hot milk and talked lightly with him for a few moments. Harold, who liked the doctor, settled down and closed his eyes when Graves, stroking his forehead, announced that the belated sandman had at last arrived. The governess turned out the light and left the room with the doctor.

“It's the effect on him of the disturbance this afternoon,” she whispered.

“Indigestion,” said Graves tartly. “Give him a dose of castor oil in the morning.”

Then he went down to the dining room. He disliked that room for its ostentation of plate and old porcelain, that table, set out for a single person with flowers and silver, over which Mary Lindsay was lingering. She was quite herself again. She looked up at him with a faint smile and offered him her left hand. The right was hidden in the laces of her sleeve. She was as carefully dressed as ever, and even had a gold ribbon twisted as a fillet in her dark hair. Graves had come to hate her habitual exquisiteness, her evident love for dress and costly things. These were part of the mercantile atmosphere of the house, part of her price.

“How did you find Harold?” she asked anxiously.

“Oh, a little indigestion, caused by nervous disturbance probably.”

“And—Mr. Lindsay?'”

“Sleeping. Morphine. He'll be quieter tomorrow.”

“What has happened to you?” She looked at his collar and coat sleeve.

“Oh, Lindsay threw a pitcher of water over me this afternoon. Then he tried to knock my brains out with the pitcher. I had to throw him. Didn't you hear the row?”

She got up from the table, even paler than before.

“I—no, I didn't hear,” she stammered.

“Well, next time it will be you, perhaps—or one of the children. And you won't be able to defend yourselves.”

She looked down and said softly:

“Have you had your dinner? Sit down and eat something, won't you, with me?”

“Dinner—in Lindsay's house? No.”

At that she flushed and lifted her head proudly.

“You don't mind abusing Lindsay in his own house, though,” she said.

“No, I don't mind it a bit—if you call it abuse. I didn't mind knocking him down, either.”

She came toward him and stood before the fire, looking at him with great, pathetic eyes. She looked as fragile as a flower.

“You're very harsh,” she said slowly. “There was a time when I felt you were my friend—when you had some sympathy and—and kindness for me. But now you treat me like a criminal—as though—as though—you blamed me.”

“And I do blame you,” said Graves incisively, and looked at her with hard eyes. “I haven't a bit of sympathy for you. You're keeping up an impossible situation—ruinous for the children as well as yourself—merely out of conventionality—conventional sentiment, conventional pride. But you know what I think. I've said it all before. I'm going. Good night.”

“You don't understand. You won't try to,” she said quickly. “And so you are turning away from me. And you are the only person I have ever been able to speak to about it. I have nobody—”

“Then why won't you listen to me? You ought, for your own sake and the children's sakes, to separate from Lindsay, divorce him. What sort of a household, of a home, is this? The man's irresponsible!”

“You know he would never consent. He would never give up the children. He would fight it, and you don't know —you can't imagine—I don't know— what he would do! It would be a terrible blow to his reputation, his pride. And then the scandal, the publicity, the scenes!”

She shuddered.

“I know all that. I don't say it will be pleasant. But you can do it, and you ought to.”

“Ah, that's just it! That's what you can never understand. I think— I ought not. The obligation I took upon myself does not end because the pleasantness of life is ended. I—”

She broke off and was silent, in her eyes the far-away, mystical look which he hated. There was no use in going on. All this had been said between them before, had been argued many times. It had been said again now, perhaps simply because they wished to say something to one another. The things that Graves had had in his mind during the afternoon, that he had meant to say, were now to remain unuttered. They were too bitter. He had meant to reproach her with clinging to Lindsay's fortune for herself and the children; for caring for the superficial worldly aspect of unity which was so pitiful a sham. But now he only looked at her sadly and distantly, looked at the lines in her face and throat which should not have been there, and went away without another word.

II

Early in May Mrs. Lindsay took the children to the country house on Long Island. Lindsay continued his bachelor life in town, and after a month or so went to Cuba on business. Graves made a weekly visit of superintendence at the Long Island place. Neither of the children was strong, and Mary Lindsay consulted him minutely about every detail of their care and education. She was an almost morbidly careful and conscientious mother. She had accepted perforce the entire responsibility for the children's welfare, but it weighed heavily upon her. In the desire not to be absolutely alone in it, she attached perhaps an undue importance to Graves's advice and authority. Her mental combination of docility and obstinacy seemed to him a curious one, when he could contemplate it coldly. She was not a managing woman; her wish, apparently, was to be led, to be taken care of; yet in some ways she was as unyielding as rock. He could imagine how her persistence in certain ideas, rather austere and puritanic as was her tendency, and her quiet, persistent expression of them—for Mary had the elements of a nagger—must have irritated Lindsay all these years of their disunion. Graves knew that she had made a consistent, unrelaxing effort to prevent her husband from living as he chose. She had felt it her duty to keep him from living irregularly and drinking excessively, and all times and occasions were to her proper for this effort. She knew from experience that if she argued with or irritated Lindsay when he had been drinking she might expect physical violence, but that did not deter her. She had the courage—Graves recognized it with fear—of her convictions.

Now he rejoiced somberly in this respite of a few weeks for her. In his brief visits to her in the country he saw her gaining strength and color and equilibrium, emerging a little from under the weight of her bondage. She lived quite simply and for her children alone. For the moment she seemed almost happy; and her natural grace, calm and sweet and domestic in character, but tinged sometimes with a charming gaiety, began to appear to him more clearly than he had ever seen it.

It was midsummer before Graves himself could see his way clear to a month's vacation; and he was preparing for his much longed for plunge into Northern forests, when one morning a telephone message, repeated to the hospital where he was working, asked him to go at once to Mrs. Lindsay at the house in town.

He hurried through his work with a sinking heart. Mrs. Lindsay's maid admitted him and took him upstairs through the dark house, shrouded in linen and cooler than the scorching day outside. He found her in the little study adjoining her bedroom, looking over a mass of papers in her desk. She wore a light traveling dress and hat. She turned and put out a hand to him and said quickly:

“Thank you. I had to see you. I'm sailing for Havana today. Mr. Lindsay is down with yellow fever in a hospital there. I had a cable last night. I want to ask you to look after the children for me—I mean, to go out twice a week, if you can, instead of once. Miss Watson will telephone you if anything is wrong in the meantime. They're well just now. Will you do this for me?”

Graves sat down in a chair near her and looked at her face, pale and strained now, and at her feverishly bright eyes. He, too, was pale. Overwork and the summer heat of the city had thinned and scored his face He did not answer her at once, and she repeated her question nervously.

“Will you do what you can to help me? Can I feel that the children will be a little in your care while I'm away?”

At last he said deliberately:

“I'm pretty tired. I had arranged to go away on Monday up to the woods for a month.”

“Oh!” she said faintly.

“I suppose I need a rest, perhaps. But why don't you ask me to give it up, and to stay and look after the children? Self-sacrifice is your law of life, isn't it?”

The irony of his tone startled and hurt her. She looked at him with wide eyes.

“Of course I shall not ask anything of the sort,” she said.

“No, because you know that I would do anything on earth for you without your asking, if I knew what you wanted.”

At the change in his voice a little color came into her face, and she said hesitatingly:

“You know I would not want you to make any sacrifice for me—much less give up this vacation that you need. I am sorry, that's all—but I hope they'll not be ill.”

“And you say you are sailing today?”

“Yes, at two. I have my passage and my luggage has gone down.”

“Are you taking Josephine?”

“Oh, no—there's a risk, you know. Of course I am going alone.”

“Oh, of course. And what are you doing here, might I ask?”

“Oh, looking over some old letters and things—leaving some things for Josephine to burn.” She pointed to a basket full of torn papers and smiled. “Old rubbish.”

“Yes—in case you don't come back, you mean. You know your risk, then.”

“Oh, yes,” she said quickly.

Graves rose and walked to the open window, and stood looking out on the asphalt of the sultry street and the dull, thunderous sky.

“You think you are going down there into that nest of the plague?” he asked carelessly.

“I'm going. I must go. He's alone there.”

“Is he? Well, if he is, he'll have to stay alone. You're not going.”

“Of course Iam. Do you think I shall leave him to live or die as he can, perhaps without proper care?”

“What could you do? Do you fancy yourself nursing a yellow fever patient? I suppose you do. But I don't.”

“Well, I know that I can't stay here and know that he may be—dying—”

“If he's going to die it will be all over before you get there. But you will have the satisfaction of feeling that you've done the spectacular thing. A little thing like quarantine won't matter to you—or your chance of taking the fever and dying and leaving your children to get on without you. You will have lived up to your own idea of yourself, and that's the main thing.”

He had spoken in a low, even tone, standing with his back to her; and now, suddenly wheeling round upon her, he cried:

“And I'm to stand by and watch the finish of this thing that I've seen going on for two years! I'm to aid and abet you in your colossal folly! I'm to look on at the last scene, help you onto the funeral pyre and applaud your beautiful end! I've often thought you a stupid woman, Mary Lindsay, but I didn't think you were quite so silly as all this.”

With her head bowed she moved about some papers on the desk. Her fingers trembled, and her voice, as she said:

“I supposed you would say this sort of thing.”

“Yes, and you like it. Do you suppose I haven't seen that you like to see me angry? That you like me to say rough things to you? That you like to torment me?”

She pushed back her chair and looked angrily and proudly at him.

“That isn't true! I don't know why you say that sort of thing to me—”

“Yes, you do know. If you would only think about things, if you would only look facts in the face—  But you want to keep the mask on, even to yourself—or rather, it's to yourself, above all, that you wear it. I tell you that you shan't sail today, that you will not go to Cuba. Your duty is most plainly here. It isn't duty that you're following, but something much less respectable. Look here!”

He came back and sat down again facing her, and his eyes held hers with all the intensity of his will.

“I've thought a good deal about you these two years. I've studied you. And I believe I understand you fairly well. I've seen a lot in you to admire. You've any amount of spirit and pluck, and you have will and constancy. It isn't moral virtues you lack. If you lack anything, Mary, it's intelligence—good, hard, practical horse sense. Well, that's commoner in the world than the qualities you have—there's a lot more intelligence than character in the world—but, all the same, it's a good thing. It's an especially good thing to combine the two, if possible.”

He had talked on rapidly, his tone becoming more calm and even slightly pedagogical. Mary listened, looking at him. Now she turned her hand slightly and glanced at a tiny watch set in a bracelet on her wrist. He saw that glance and went on, his voice hardening.

“It is not your fault, of course, if you lack a broad intelligence. But you're bound to use what you have, and this you consistently refuse to do. You've set up for yourself a single ideal, that of constancy, faithfulness—and you've narrowed down that ideal to a single case. You demand of yourself to be faithful to the consequences of your mistake.”

Here she would have interrupted, but he hurried on.

“I don't know why you married Lindsay. I can imagine the attraction of a man of his temperament in its pleasant aspect—and I know, too, that it's your sort of woman that men like him want to marry. I suppose that's enough. He wanted you, and you let him take you. Don't shrink and quiver. I'm going to talk to you this once frankly. Marriage is a practical affair, after all. You've made a religion of it—an Oriental, mystical idea of sacrifice. I don't know how soon you found out that your marriage was a mistake, but you've never admitted it. You've never been willing to see the consequences of that mistake. Your children are consequences. Your daughter has her father's temperament. Your boy has been weakly from his birth. You've given them a bad father. You owe them all the more of yourself. You owe yourself to them and not to Lindsay. You can do nothing, really, to change him. He'll go his own way, as he always has done; you're not much of a brake on that wheel. All you can do is to keep up appearances.

“Appearances!” he cried, and got up abruptly, and walked across the room and back. “It's really appearances you care for! It's your appearance to yourself you care for! You've said to yourself: 'No matter how he may fail, I will be perfect!' You're like the white ermine, that dies if it sees a spot on its whiteness!”

His voice broke, and for a moment he stood silent, staring out of the window.

“TI used to think it beautiful,” he went on in a low voice. “And it is—just as a spectacle; it has a morbid kind of beauty. But it isn't a spectacle to me any longer. It's a torture. I see you wearing out your life. You're only thirty-two and you look forty. And the brute strikes you—my God! Don't deny it—I know it! He terrifies the household—the children; and you let it go on. You're burning yourself alive with his dead body—like a Hindoo widow; and all you see is the beautiful blue flame of the funeral pyre!”

He went to the window and leaned against the frame, drying his forehead. Not a breath of air entered from the gasping street. The thunderclouds had sunk lower over the city.

“I know,” Graves said after a moment, and his voice trembled, “that you were going down there with the idea, perhaps the hope, that you might never come back. Life is too hard for you. But it is going to be easier, some way. You will find something else, someone, to help you to live. You won't throw your life away—you dare not. It isn't your own to give. It belongs to—those others.”

She had sunk back in her chair, her eyes closed, and now tears began to flow from under the closed lids.

“Why do you make it harder—drag me back?” she gasped. “Oh, for Heaven's sake, don't make it harder for me!”

“Let you finish quickly, end it all, you mean. End it—that's your idea! Oh, I know! Pure self-indulgence! You see it yourself. And you thought I wouldn't see it and wouldn't make you admit it! You thought I would say a few sympathetic words and let you go. No, you didn't.”

She wept, and at last stammered:

“You don't feel for me. You don't understand. If he dies there—alone—I shall have deserted him at last, after all these years, after all—the first time, perhaps, that he has really needed me. I cannot—”

Graves was silent until she sobbed convulsively.

“Don't! Or, yes, cry. So much the better,” he murmured. And then, hesitating a moment longer, he came and sat down by her and touched her hand gently.

“I think—probably—he will die,” he said. “In his physical condition he has not much power of resistance. You may have word at any moment. I—I understand. Listen; you will feel more—it will be less hard for you—if I go. What time does the boat sail?”

She started and uncovered her reddened eyes and stared at him.

“You go—you!”

She drew a long breath and her eyes glowed strangely. She looked at him and laughed.

“You think I would let you go! Risk your life! You think I could take that from you!”

“There is less risk for me; I can take care of myself. I've been in yellow fever countries before this. And you can take that from me—or anything else I have to give. All I care about is that you should be less unhappy.”

“And I should be less unhappy if I sent you down there? Perhaps you are not so very clever after all. Did you think for one moment I should let you take my place? What a fool you must be! Or what must you think of me? But something must be done.” She twisted her hands in anguish. ane let me go! Or tell me what to do!”

“I will cable for you. Give me all the addresses you can—his firm, the hospital, any people you know of there. I know a surgeon at one of the hospitals. I'll cable to them all. All shall be done that can be done. Give me the addresses now, quick! I'll come back here. I'll give this address for any replies. You'll hear something this afternoon. Josephine will get you some lunch. I'll telephone to the dock about your luggage. I'll get back as soon as I can, and I'll stay with you till you hear.”

He hurried her, giving her no time for protest. And when she had given him the addresses he caught up his hat and said:

“You know, if you change your mind about my going, I am ready.”

“Don't say that again!” she cried sharply. “I've had enough to bear—and I shall have more. I feel like a murderess!”

“Don't be hysterical,” said Graves. “There's no need. You may hear soon that he's all right. People don't invariably die of yellow fever, and you may depend on it, he'll have care. He'll always be looked out for, where-ever he is. I shall be back in an hour.”

He looked at her slender figure leaning on the chair, at her white face and strained eyes overflowing with tears.

“Try and lie down and rest a little,” he said gently, and turned abruptly that she might not see the triumph in his face. He went downstairs through the darkened house, whose heavy magnificence had so often irritated him—the taste of the master who would never come back. The chairs and sofas ranged along the dim walls in their stiff linen coverings, the shrouded chandeliers and pictures, seemed a funereal setting for some mournful ceremony. But there was no mourning in Graves's heart. His eyes shone, his face almost gleamed, with the keen sense of his victory. His jaw was firmly set, and he looked hard. He was not