Lester was one of those who believed in this formula. He was nearing sixty. He thought he had, say, twenty years more at the utmost to live — perhaps not so long. Well, he had lived comfortably. He felt that he could not complain. If death was coming, let it come. He was ready at any time. No complaint or resistance would issue from him. Life, in most of its aspects, was a silly show anyhow.
He admitted that it was mostly illusion — easily proved to be so. That it might all be one he sometimes suspected. It was very much like a dream in its composition truly — sometimes like a very bad dream. All he had to sustain him in his acceptance of its reality from hour to hour and day to day was apparent contact with this material proposition and that — people, meetings of boards of directors, individuals and organisations planning to do this and that, his wife’s social functions. Letty loved him as a fine, grizzled example of a philosopher. She admired, as Jennie had, his solid, determined, phlegmatic attitude in the face of troubled circumstance. All the winds of fortune or misfortune could not apparently excite or disturb Lester. He refused to be frightened. He refused to budge from his beliefs and feelings, and usually had to be pushed away from them, still believing, if he were gotten away at all. He refused to do anything save as he always said, “Look the facts in the face” and fight. He could be made to fight easily enough if imposed upon, but only in a stubborn, resisting way. His plan was to resist every effort to coerce him to the last ditch. If he had to let go in the end he would when compelled, but his views as to the value of not letting go were quite the same even when he had let go under compulsion.
His views of living were still decidedly material, grounded in creature comforts, and he had always insisted upon having the best of everything. If the furnishings of his home became the least dingy he was for having them torn out and sold and the house done over. If he travelled, money must go ahead of him and smooth the way. He did not want argument, useless talk, or silly palaver as he called it. Every one must discuss interesting topics with him or not talk at all. Letty understood him thoroughly. She would chuck him under the chin mornings, or shake his solid head between her hands, telling him he was a brute, but a nice kind of brute. “Yes, yes,” he would growl. “I know. I’m an animal, I suppose. You’re a seraphic suggestion of attenuated thought.”
“No; you hush,” she would reply, for at times he could cut like a knife without really meaning to be unkind. Then he would pet her a little, for, in spite of her vigorous conception of life, he realised that she was more or less dependent upon him. It was always so plain to her that he could get along without her. For reasons of kindliness he was trying to conceal this, to pretend the necessity of her presence, but it was so obvious that he really could dispense with her easily enough. Now Letty did depend upon Lester. It was something, in so shifty and uncertain a world, to be near so fixed and determined a quantity as this bear-man. It was like being close to a warmly glowing lamp in the dark or a bright burning fire in the cold. Lester was not afraid of anything. He felt that he knew how to live and to die.
It was natural that a temperament of this kind should have its solid, material manifestation at every point. Having his financial affairs well in hand, most of his holding being shares of big companies, where boards of solemn directors merely approved the strenuous efforts of ambitious executives to “make good,” he had leisure for living. He and Letty were fond of visiting the various American and European watering-places. He gambled a little, for he found that there was considerable diversion in risking interesting sums on the spin of a wheel or the fortuitous roll of a ball; and he took more and more to drinking, not in the sense that a drunkard takes to it, but as a high liver, socially, and with all his friends. He was inclined to drink the rich drinks when he did not take straight whiskey — champagne, sparkling Burgundy, the expensive and effervescent white wines. When he drank he could drink a great deal, and he ate in proportion. Nothing must be served but the best — soup, fish, entree, roast, game, dessert — everything that made up a showy dinner — and he had long since determined that only a high-priced chef was worth while. They had found an old cordon bleu, Louis Berdot, who had served in the house of one of the great dry goods princes, and this man he engaged. He cost Lester a hundred dollars a week, but his reply to any question was that he only had one life to live.
The trouble with this attitude was that it adjusted nothing, improved nothing, left everything to drift on toward an indefinite end. If Lester had married Jennie and accepted the comparatively meagre income of ten thousand a year he would have maintained the same attitude to the end. It would have led him to a stolid indifference to the social world of which now necessarily he was a part. He would have drifted on with a few mentally compatible cronies who would have accepted him for what he was — a good fellow — and Jennie in the end would not have been so much better off than she was now.
One of the changes which was interesting was that the Kanes transferred their residence to New York. Mrs. Kane had become very intimate with a group of clever women in the Eastern four hundred, or nine hundred, and had been advised and urged to transfer the scene of her activities to New York. She finally did so, leasing a house in Seventy-eighth Street, near Madison Avenue. She installed a novelty for her, a complete staff of liveried servants, after the English fashion, and had the rooms of her house done in correlative periods. Lester smiled at her vanity and love of show.
“You talk about your democracy,” he grunted one day. “You have as much democracy as I have religion, and that’s none at all.”
“Why, how you talk!” she denied. “I am democratic. We all run in classes. You do. I’m merely accepting the logic of the situation.”
“The logic of your grandmother! Do you call a butler and doorman in red velvet a part of the necessity of the occasion?”
“I certainly do,” she replied. “Maybe not the necessity exactly, but the spirit surely. Why should you quarrel? You’re the first one to insist on perfection — to quarrel if there is any flaw in the order of things.”
“You never heard me quarrel.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that literally. But you demand perfection — the exact spirit of the occasion, and you know it.”
“Maybe I do, but what has that to do with your democracy?”
“I am democratic. I insist on it. I’m as democratic in spirit as any woman. Only I see things as they are, and conform as much as possible for comfort’s sake, and so do you. Don’t you throw rocks at my glass house, Mister Master. Yours is so transparent I can see every move you make inside.”
“I’m democratic and you’re not,” he teased; but he approved thoroughly of everything she did. She was, he sometimes fancied, a better executive in her world than he was in his.
Drifting in this fashion, wining, dining, drinking the waters of this curative spring and that, travelling in luxurious ease and taking no physical exercise, finally altered his body from a vigorous, quick-moving, well-balanced organism into one where plethora of substance was clogging every essential function. His liver, kidneys, spleen, pancreas — every organ, in fact — had been overtaxed for some time to keep up the process of digestion and elimination. In the past seven years he had become uncomfortably heavy. His kidneys were weak, and so were the arteries of his brain. By dieting, proper exercise, the right mental attitude, he might have lived to be eighty or ninety. As a matter of fact, he was allowing himself to drift into a physical state in which even a slight malady might prove dangerous. The result was inevitable, and it came.
It so happened that he and Letty had gone to the North Cape on a cruise with a party of friends. Lester, in order to attend to some important business, decided to return to Chicago late in November; he arranged to have his wife meet him in New York just before the Christmas holidays. He wrote Watson to expect him, and engaged rooms at the Auditorium, for he had sold the Chicago residence some two years before and was now living permanently in New York.
One late November day, after having attended to a number of details and cleared up his affairs very materially, Lester was seized with what the doctor who was called to attend him described as a cold in the intestines — a disturbance usually symptomatic of some other weakness, either of the blood or of some organ. He suffered great pain, and the usual remedies in that case were applied. There were bandages of red flannel with a mustard dressing, and specifics were also administered. He experienced some relief, but he was troubled with a sense of impending disaster. He had Watson cable his wife — there was nothing serious about it, but he was ill. A trained nurse was in attendance and his valet stood guard at the door to prevent annoyance of any kind. It was plain that Letty could not reach Chicago under three weeks. He had the feeling that he would not see her again.
Curiously enough, not only because he was in Chicago, but because he had never been spiritually separated from Jennie, he was thinking about her constantly at this time. He had intended to go out and see her just as soon as he was through with his business engagements and before he left the city. He had asked Watson how she was getting along, and had been informed that everything was well with her. She was living quietly and looking in good health, so Watson said. Lester wished he could see her.
This thought grew as the days passed and he grew no better. He was suffering from time to time with severe attacks of griping pains that seemed to tie his viscera into knots and left him very weak. Several times the physician administered cocaine with a needle in order to relieve him of useless pain.
After one of the severe attacks he called Watson to his side, told him to send the nurse away, and then said: “Watson, I’d like to have you do me a favour. Ask Mrs. Stover if she won’t come here to see me. You’d better go and get her. Just send the nurse and Kozo (the valet) away for the afternoon, or while she’s here. If she comes at any other time I’d like to have her admitted.”
Watson understood. He liked this expression of sentiment. He was sorry for Jennie. He was sorry for Lester. He wondered what the world would think if it could know of this bit of romance in connection with so prominent a man. Lester was decent. He had made Watson prosperous. The latter was only too glad to serve him in any way.
He called a carriage and rode out to Jennie’s residence. He found her watering some plants; her face expressed her surprise at his unusual presence.
“I come on a rather troublesome errand, Mrs. Stover,” he said, using her assumed name. “Your — that is, Mr. Kane is quite sick at the Auditorium. His wife is in Europe, and he wanted to know if I wouldn’t come out here and ask you to come and see him. He wanted me to bring you, if possible. Could you come with me now?”
“Why yes,” said Jennie, her face a study. The children were in school. An old Swedish housekeeper was in the kitchen. She could go as well as not. But there was coming back to her in detail a dream she had had several nights before. It had seemed to her that she was out on a dark, mystic body of water over which was hanging something like a fog, or a pall of smoke. She heard the water ripple, or stir faintly, and then out of the surrounding darkness a boat appeared. It was a little boat, oarless, or not visibly propelled, and in it were her mother, and Vesta, and some one whom she could not make out. Her mother’s face was pale and sad, very much as she had often seen it in life. She looked at Jennie solemnly, sympathetically, and then suddenly Jennie realised that the third occupant of the boat was Lester. He looked at her gloomily — an expression she had never seen on his face before — and then her mother remarked, “Well, we must go now.” The boat began to move, a great sense of loss came over her, and she cried, “Oh, don’t leave me, mamma!”
But her mother only looked at her out of deep, sad, still eyes, and the boat was gone.
She woke with a start, half fancying that Lester was beside her. She stretched out her hand to touch his arm; then she drew herself up in the dark and rubbed her eyes, realising that she was alone. A great sense of depression remained with her, and for two days it haunted her. Then, when it seemed as if it were nothing, Mr. Watson appeared with his ominous message.
She went to dress, and reappeared, looking as troubled as were her thoughts. She was very pleasing in her appearance yet, a sweet, kindly woman, well dressed and shapely. She had never been separated mentally from Lester, just as he had never grown entirely away from her. She was always with him in thought, just as in the years when they were together. Her fondest memories were of the days when he first courted her in Cleveland — the days when he had carried her off, much as the cave-man seized his mate — by force. Now she longed to do what she could for him. For this call was as much a testimony as a shock. He loved her — he loved her, after all. The carriage rolled briskly through the long streets into the smoky downtown district. It arrived at the Auditorium, and Jennie was escorted to Lester’s room. Watson had been considerate. He had talked little, leaving her to her thoughts. In this great hotel she felt diffident after so long a period of complete retirement. As she entered the room she looked at Lester with large, grey, sympathetic eyes. He was lying propped up on two pillows, his solid head with its growth of once dark brown hair slightly greyed. He looked at her curiously out of his wise old eyes, a light of sympathy and affection shining in them — weary as they were. Jennie was greatly distressed. His pale face, slightly drawn from suffering, cut her like a knife. She took his hand, which was outside the coverlet, and pressed it. She leaned over and kissed his lips.
“I’m so sorry, Lester,” she murmured. “I’m so sorry. You’re not very sick though, are you? You must get well, Lester — and soon!” She patted his hand gently.
“Yes, Jennie, but I’m pretty bad,” he said. “I don’t feel right about this business. I don’t seem able to shake it off. But tell me, how have you been?”
“Oh, just the same, dear,” she replied. “I’m all right. You mustn’t talk like that, though. You’re going to be all right very soon now.”
He smiled grimly. “Do you think so?” He shook his head, for he thought differently. “Sit down, dear,” he went on, “I’m not worrying about that. I want to talk to you again. I want you near me.” He sighed and shut his eyes for a minute.
She drew up a chair close beside the bed, her face toward his, and took his hand. It seemed such a beautiful thing that he should send for her. Her eyes showed the mingled sympathy, affection, and gratitude of her heart. At the same time fear gripped her; how ill he looked!
“I can’t tell what may happen,” he went on. “Letty is in Europe. I’ve wanted to see you again for some time. I was coming out this trip. We are living in New York, you know. You’re a little stouter, Jennie.”
“Yes, I’m getting old, Lester,” she smiled.
“Oh, that doesn’t make any difference,” he replied, looking at her fixedly. “Age doesn’t count. We are all in that boat. It’s how we feel about life.”
He stopped and stared at the ceiling. A slight twinge of pain reminded him of the vigorous seizures he had been through. He couldn’t stand many more paroxysms like the last one.
“I couldn’t go, Jennie, without seeing you again,” he observed, when the slight twinge ceased and he was free to think again; “I’ve always wanted to say to you, Jennie,” he went on, “that I haven’t been satisfied with the way we parted. It wasn’t the right thing, after all. I haven’t been any happier. I’m sorry. I wish now, for my own peace of mind, that I hadn’t done it.”
“Don’t say that, Lester,” she demurred, going over in her mind all that had been between them. This was such a testimony to their real union — their real spiritual compatibility. “It’s all right. It doesn’t make any difference. You’ve been very good to me. I wouldn’t have been satisfied to have you lose your fortune. It couldn’t be that way. I’ve been a lot better satisfied as it is. It’s been hard, but, dear, everything is hard at times.” She paused.
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t right. The thing wasn’t worked out right from the start; but that wasn’t your fault. I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you that. I’m glad I’m here to do it.”
“Don’t talk that way, Lester — please don’t,” she pleaded. “It’s all right. You needn’t be sorry. There’s nothing to be sorry for. You have always been so good to me. Why, when I think —” she stopped, for it was hard for her to speak. She was choking with affection and sympathy. She pressed his hands. She was recalling the house he took for her family in Cleveland, his generous treatment of Gerhardt, all the long ago tokens of love and kindness.
“Well, I’ve told you now, and I feel better. You’re a good woman, Jennie, and you’re kind to come to me this way. I loved you. I love you now. I want to tell you that. It seems strange, but you’re the only woman I ever did love truly. We should never have parted.”
Jennie caught her breath. It was the one thing she had waited for all these years — this testimony. It was the one thing that could make everything right — this confession of spiritual if not material union. Now she could live happily. Now die so. “Oh, Lester,” she exclaimed with a sob, and pressed his hand. He returned the pressure. There was a little silence. Then he spoke again.
“How are the two orphans?” he asked.
“Oh, they’re lovely,” she answered, entering upon a detailed description of her diminutive personalities. He listened comfortably, for her voice was soothing to him. Her whole personality was grateful to him. When it came time for her to go he seemed desirous of keeping her.
“Going, Jennie?”
“I can stay just as well as not, Lester,” she volunteered. “I’ll take a room. I can send a note out to Mrs. Swenson. It will be all right.”
“You needn’t do that,” he said, but she could see that he wanted her, that he did not want to be alone.
From that time on until the hour of his death she was not out of the hotel.
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