Book: When a Man Marries

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This etext was typed by Theresa Armao of Albany, New York.





WHEN A MAN MARRIES

by Mary Roberts Rinehart




Contents

I At Least I Meant Well
II The Way It Began
III I Might Have Known It
IV The Door Was Closed
V From The Tree Of Love
VI A Mighty Poor Joke
VII We Make An Omelet
VIII Correspondents' Department
IX Flannigan's Find
X On The Stairs
XI I Make A Discovery
XII The Roof Garden
XIII He Does Not Deny It
XIV Almost, But Not Quite
XV Suspicion and Discord
XVI I Face Flannigan
XVII A Clash and A Kiss
XVIII It's All My Fault
XIX The Harbison Man
XX Breaking Out In A New Place
XXI A Bar of Soap
XXII It Was A Delirium
XXIII Coming




Needles and pins
Needles and pins,
When a man marries
His trouble begins.




Chapter I. AT LEAST I MEANT WELL

When the dreadful thing occurred that night, every one turned on
me. The injustice of it hurt me most. They said I got up the
dinner, that I asked them to give up other engagements and come,
that I promised all kinds of jollification, if they would come;
and then when they did come and got in the papers and every
one--but ourselves--laughed himself black in the face, they
turned on ME! I, who suffered ten times to their one! I shall
never forget what Dallas Brown said to me, standing with a coal
shovel in one hand and a--well, perhaps it would be better to
tell it all in the order it happened.

It began with Jimmy Wilson and a conspiracy, was helped on by a
foot-square piece of yellow paper and a Japanese butler, and it
enmeshed and mixed up generally ten respectable members of
society and a policeman. Incidentally, it involved a pearl collar
and a box of soap, which sounds incongruous, doesn't it?

It is a great misfortune to be stout, especially for a man. Jim
was rotund and looked shorter than he really was, and as all the
lines of his face, or what should have been lines, were really
dimples, his face was about as flexible and full of expression as
a pillow in a tight cover. The angrier he got the funnier he
looked, and when he was raging, and his neck swelled up over his
collar and got red, he was entrancing. And everybody liked him,
and borrowed money from him, and laughed at his pictures (he has
one in the Hargrave gallery in London now, so people buy them
instead), and smoked his cigarettes, and tried to steal his Jap.
The whole story hinges on the Jap.

The trouble was, I think, that no one took Jim seriously. His
ambition in life was to be taken seriously, but people steadily
refused to. His art was a huge joke--except to himself. If he
asked people to dinner, every one expected a frolic. When he
married Bella Knowles, people chuckled at the wedding, and
considered it the wildest prank of Jimmy's career, although Jim
himself seemed to take it awfully hard.

We had all known them both for years. I went to Farmington with
Bella, and Anne Brown was her matron of honor when she married
Jim. My first winter out, Jimmy had paid me a lot of attention.
He painted my portrait in oils and had a studio tea to exhibit
it. It was a very nice picture, but it did not look like me, so I
stayed away from the exhibition. Jim asked me to. He said he was
not a photographer, and that anyhow the rest of my features
called for the nose he had given me, and that all the Greuze
women have long necks. I have not.

After I had refused Jim twice he met Bella at a camp in the
Adirondacks and when he came back he came at once to see me. He
seemed to think I would be sorry to lose him, and he blundered
over the telling for twenty minutes. Of course, no woman likes to
lose a lover, no matter what she may say about it, but Jim had
been getting on my nerves for some time, and I was much calmer
than he expected me to be.

"If you mean," I said finally in desperation, "that you and Bella
are--are in love, why don't you say so, Jim? I think you will
find that I stand it wonderfully."

He brightened perceptibly.

"I didn't know how you would take it, Kit," he said, "and I hope
we will always be bully friends. You are absolutely sure you
don't care a whoop for me?"

"Absolutely," I replied, and we shook hands on it. Then he began
about Bella; it was very tiresome.

Bella is a nice girl, but I had roomed with her at school, and I
was under no illusions. When Jim raved about Bella and her banjo,
and Bella and her guitar, I had painful moments when I recalled
Bella, learning her two songs on each instrument, and the old
English ballad she had learned to play on the harp. When he said
she was too good for him, I never batted an eye. And I shook
hands solemnly across the tea-table again, and wished him
happiness--which was sincere enough, but hopeless--and said we
had only been playing a game, but that it was time to stop
playing. Jim kissed my hand, and it was really very touching.

We had been the best of friends ever since. Two days before the
wedding he came around from his tailor's, and we burned all his
letters to me. He would read one and say: "Here's a crackerjack,
Kit," and pass it to me. And after I had read it we would lay it
on the firelog, and Jim would say, "I am not worthy of her, Kit.
I wonder if I can make her happy?" Or--"Did you know that the
Duke of Belford proposed to her in London last winter?"

Of course, one has to take the woman's word about a thing like
that, but the Duke of Belford had been mad about Maude Richard
all that winter.

You can see that the burning of the letters, which was meant to
be reminiscently sentimental, a sort of how-silly-we-were-but-
it-is-all-over-now occasion, became actually a two hours' eulogy
of Bella. And just when I was bored to death, the Mercer girls
dropped in and heard Jim begin to read one commencing "dearest Kit."
And the next day after the rehearsal dinner, they told Bella!

There was very nearly no wedding at all. Bella came to see me in
a frenzy the next morning and threw Jim and his two-hundred odd
pounds in my face, and although I explained it all over and over,
she never quite forgave me. That was what made it so hard
later--the situation would have been bad enough without that
complication.

They went abroad on their wedding journey, and stayed several
months. And when Jim came back he was fatter than ever. Everybody
noticed it. Bella had a gymnasium fitted up in a corner of the
studio, but he would not use it. He smoked a pipe and painted all
day, and drank beer and WOULD eat starches or whatever it is that
is fattening. But he adored Bella, and he was madly jealous of
her. At dinners he used to glare at the man who took her in,
although it did not make him thin. Bella was flirting, too, and
by the time they had been married a year, people hitched their
chairs together and dropped their voices when they were
mentioned.

Well, on the anniversary of the day Bella left him--oh yes, she
left him finally. She was intense enough about some things, and
she said it got on her nerves to have everybody chuckle when they
asked for her husband. They would say, "Hello, Bella! How's
Bubbles? Still banting?" And Bella would try to laugh and say,
"He swears his tailor says his waist is smaller, but if it is he
must be growing hollow in the back."

But she got tired of it at last. Well, on the second anniversary
of Bella's departure, Jimmy was feeling pretty glum, and as I
say, I am very fond of Jim. The divorce had just gone through and
Bella had taken her maiden name again and had had an operation
for appendicitis. We heard afterward that they didn't find an
appendix, and that the one they showed her in a glass jar WAS NOT
HERS! But if Bella ever suspected, she didn't say. Whether the
appendix was anonymous or not, she got box after box of flowers
that were, and of course every one knew that it was Jim who sent
them.

To go back to the anniversary, I went to Rothberg's to see the
collection of antique furniture--mother was looking for a
sideboard for father's birthday in March--and I met Jimmy there,
boring into a worm-hole in a seventeenth-century bedpost with the
end of a match, and looking his nearest to sad. When he saw me
he came over.

"I'm blue today, Kit," he said, after we had shaken hands. "Come
and help me dig bait, and then let's go fishing. If there's a
worm in every hole in that bedpost, we could go into the fish
business. It's a good business."

"Better than painting?" I asked. But he ignored my gibe and
swelled up alarmingly in order to sigh.

"This is the worst day of the year for me," he affirmed, staring
straight ahead, "and the longest. Look at that crazy clock over
there. If you want to see your life passing away, if you want to
see the steps by which you are marching to eternity, watch that
clock marking the time. Look at that infernal hand staying quiet
for sixty seconds and then jumping forward to catch up with the
procession. Ugh!"

"See here, Jim," I said, leaning forward, "you're not well. You
can't go through the rest of the day like this. I know what
you'll do; you'll go home to play Grieg on the pianola, and you
won't eat any dinner." He looked guilty.

"Not Grieg," he protested feebly. "Beethoven."

"You're not going to do either," I said with firmness. "You are
going right home to unpack those new draperies that Harry Bayles
sent you from Shanghai, and you are going to order dinner for
eight--that will be two tables of bridge. And you are not going
to touch the pianola."

He did not seem enthusiastic, but he rose and picked up his hat,
and stood looking down at me where I sat on an old horse-hair
covered sofa.

"I wish to thunder I had married you!" he said savagely. "You're
the finest girl I know, Kit, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, and you are going
to throw yourself away on Jack Manning, or Max, or some other--"

"Nothing of the sort," I said coldly, "and the fact that you
didn't marry me does not give you the privilege of abusing my
friends. Anyhow, I don't like you when you speak like that."

Jim took me to the door and stopped there to sigh.

"I haven't been well," he said heavily. "Don't eat, don't sleep.
Wouldn't you think I'd lose flesh? Kit"--he lowered his voice
solemnly--"I have gained two pounds!"

I said he didn't look it, which appeared to comfort him somewhat,
and, because we were old friends, I asked him where Bella was. He
said he thought she was in Europe, and that he had heard she was
going to marry Reggie Wolfe. Then he signed again, muttered
something about ordering the funeral baked meats to be prepared
and left me.

That was my entire share in the affair. I was the victim, both of
circumstances and of their plot, which was mad on the face of it.

During the entire time they never once let me forget that I got
up the dinner, that I telephoned around for them. They asked me
why I couldn't cook--when not one of them knew one side of a
range from the other. And for Anne Brown to talk the way she
did--saying I had always been crazy about Jim, and that she
believed I had known all along that his aunt was coming--for Anne
to talk like that was sheer idiocy. Yes, there was an aunt. The
Japanese butler started the trouble, and Aunt Selina carried it
along.



Chapter II. THE WAY IT BEGAN

It makes me angry every time I think how I tried to make that
dinner a success. I canceled a theater engagement, and I took the
Mercer girls in the electric brougham father had given me for
Christmas. Their chauffeur had been gone for hours with their
machine, and they had telephoned all the police stations without
success. They were afraid that there had been an awful smash;
they could easily have replaced Bartlett, as Lollie said, but it
takes so long to get new parts for those foreign cars.

Jim had a house well up-town, and it stood just enough apart from
the other houses to be entirely maddening later. It was a
three-story affair, with a basement kitchen and servants' dining
room. Then, of course, there were cellars, as we found out
afterward. On the first floor there was a large square hall, a
formal reception room, behind it a big living room that was also
a library, then a den, and back of all a Georgian dining room,
with windows high above the ground. On the top floor Jim had a
studio, like every other one I ever saw--perhaps a little
mussier. Jim was really a grind at his painting, and there were
cigarette ashes and palette knives and buffalo rugs and shields
everywhere. It is strange, but when I think of that terrible
house, I always see the halls, enormous, covered with heavy rugs,
and stairs that would have taken six housemaids to keep in proper
condition. I dream about those stairs, stretching above me in a
Jacob's ladder of shining wood and Persian carpets, going up, up,
clear to the roof.

The Dallas Browns walked; they lived in the next block. And they
brought with them a man named Harbison, that no one knew. Anne
said he would be great sport, because he was terribly serious,
and had the most exaggerated ideas of society, and loathed
extravagance, and built bridges or something. She had put away
her cigarettes since he had been with them--he and Dallas had
been college friends--and the only chance she had to smoke was
when she was getting her hair done. And she had singed off quite
a lot--a burnt offering, she called it.

"My dear," she said over the telephone, when I invited her, "I
want you to know him. He'll be crazy about you. That type of man,
big and deadly earnest, always falls in love with your type of
girl, the appealing sort, you know. And he has been too busy, up
to now, to know what love is. But mind, don't hurt him; he's a
dear boy. I'm half in love with him myself, and Dallas trots
around at his heels like a poodle."

But all Anne's geese are swans, so I thought little of the
Harbison man except to hope that he played respectable bridge,
and wouldn't mark the cards with a steel spring under his finger
nail, as one of her "finds" had done.

We all arrived about the same time, and Anne and I went upstairs
together to take off our wraps in what had been Bella's dressing
room. It was Anne who noticed the violets.

"Look at that!" she nudged me, when the maid was examining her
wrap before she laid it down. "What did I tell you, Kit? He's
still quite mad about her."

Jim had painted Bella's portrait while they were going up the
Nile on their wedding trip. It looked quite like her, if you
stood well off in the middle of the room and if the light came
from the right. And just beneath it, in a silver vase, was a
bunch of violets. It was really touching, and violets were
fabulous. It made me want to cry, and to shake Bella soundly, and
to go down and pat Jim on his generous shoulder, and tell him
what a good fellow I thought him, and that Bella wasn't worth the
dust under his feet. I don't know much about psychology, but it
would be interesting to know just what effect those violets and
my sympathy for Jim had in influencing my decision a half hour
later. It is not surprising, under the circumstances, that for
some time after the odor of violets made me ill.

We all met downstairs in the living room, quite informally, and
Dallas was banging away at the pianola, tramping the pedals with
the delicacy and feeling of a football center rush kicking a
goal. Mr. Harbison was standing near the fire, a little away from
the others, and he was all that Anne had said and more in
appearance. He was tall--not too tall, and very straight. And
after one got past the oddity of his face being bronze-colored
above his white collar, and of his brown hair being sun-bleached
on top until it was almost yellow, one realized that he was very
handsome. He had what one might call a resolute nose and chin,
and a pleasant, rather humorous, mouth. And he had blue eyes that
were, at that moment, wandering with interest over the lot of us.
Somebody shouted his name to me above the Tristan and Isolde
music, and I held out my hand.

Instantly I had the feeling one sometimes has, of having done
just that same thing, with the same surroundings, in the same
place, years before, I was looking up at him, and he was staring
down at me and holding my hand. And then the music stopped and he
was saying:

"Where was it?"

"Where was what?" I asked. The feeling was stronger than ever
with his voice.

"I beg your pardon," he said, and let my hand drop. "Just for a
second I had an idea that we had met before somewhere, a long
time ago. I suppose--no, it couldn't have happened, or I should
remember." He was smiling, half at himself.

"No," I smiled back at him. "It didn't happen, I'm afraid--unless
we dreamed it."

"We?"

"I felt that way, too, for a moment."

"The Brushwood Boy!" he said with conviction. "Perhaps we will
find a common dream life, where we knew each other. You remember
the Brushwood Boy loved the girl for years before they really
met." But this was a little too rapid, even for me.

"Nothing so sentimental, I'm afraid," I retorted. "I have had
exactly the same sensation sometimes when I have sneezed."

Betty Mercer captured him then and took him off to see Jim's
newest picture. Anne pounced on me at once.

"Isn't he delicious?" she demanded. "Did you ever see such
shoulders? And such a nose? And he thinks we are parasites,
cumberers of the earth, Heaven knows what. He says every woman
ought to know how to earn her living, in case of necessity! I
said I could make enough at bridge, and he thought I was joking!
He's a dear!" Anne was enthusiastic.

I looked after him. Oddly enough the feeling that we had met
before stuck to me. Which was ridiculous, of course, for we
learned afterward that the nearest we ever came to meeting was
that our mothers had been school friends! Just then I saw Jim
beckoning to me crazily from the den. He looked quite yellow, and
he had been running his fingers through his hair.

"For Heaven's sake, come in, Kit!" he said. "I need a cool head.
Didn't I tell you this is my calamity day?"

"Cook gone?" I asked with interest. I was starving.

He closed the door and took up a tragic attitude in front of the
fire. "Did you ever hear of Aunt Selina?" he demanded.

"I knew there WAS one," I ventured, mindful of certain gossip as
to whence Jimmy derived the Wilson income.

Jim himself was too worried to be cautious. He waved a brazen
hand at the snug room, at the Japanese prints on the walls, at
the rugs, at the teakwood cabinets and the screen inlaid with
pearl and ivory.

"All this," he said comprehensively, "every bite I eat, clothes I
wear, drinks I drink--you needn't look like that; I don't drink
so darned much--everything comes from Aunt Selina--buttons," he
finished with a groan.

"Selina Buttons," I said reflectively. "I don't remember ever
having known any one named Buttons, although I had a cat once--"

"Damn the cat!" he said rudely. "Her name isn't Buttons. Her name
is Caruthers, my Aunt Selina Caruthers, and the money comes from
buttons."

"Oh!" feebly.

"It's an old business," he went on, with something of proprietary
pride. "My grandfather founded it in 1775. Made buttons for the
Continental Army."

"Oh, yes," I said. "They melted the buttons to make bullets,
didn't they? Or they melted bullets to make buttons? Which was
it?"

But again he interrupted.

"It's like this," he went on hurriedly. "Aunt Selina believes in
me. She likes pictures, and she wanted me to paint, if I could.
I'd have given up long ago--oh, I know what you think of my
work--but for Aunt Selina. She has encouraged me, and she's done
more than that; she's paid the bills."

"Dear Aunt Selina," I breathed.

"When I got married," Jim persisted, "Aunt Selina doubled my
allowance. I always expected to sell something, and begin to make
money, and in the meantime what she advanced I considered as a
loan." He was eyeing me defiantly, but I was growing serious. It
was evident from the preamble that something was coming.

"To understand, Kit," he went on dubiously, "you would have to
know her. She won't stand for divorce. She thinks it is a crime."

"What!" I sat up. I have always regarded divorce as essentially
disagreeable, like castor oil, but necessary.

"Oh, you know well enough what I'm driving at," he burst out
savagely. "She doesn't know Bella has gone. She thinks I am
living in a little domestic heaven, and--she is coming tonight to
hear me flap my wings."

"Tonight!"

I don't think Jimmy had known that Dallas Brown had come in and
was listening. I am sure I had not. Hearing his chuckle at the
doorway brought us up with a jerk.

"Where has Aunt Selina been for the last two or three years?" he
asked easily.

Jim turned, and his face brightened.

"Europe. Look here, Dal, you're a smart chap. She'll only be here
about four hours. Can't you think of some way to get me out of
this? I want to let her down easy, too. I'm mighty fond of Aunt
Selina. Can't we--can't I say Bella has a headache?"

"Rotten!" laconically.

"Gone out of town?" Jim was desperate.

"And you with a houseful of dinner guests! Try again, Jim."

"I have it," Jim said suddenly. "Dallas, ask Anne if she won't
play hostess for tonight. Be Mrs. Wilson pro tem. Anne would love
it. Aunt Selina never saw Bella. Then, afterward, next year, when
I'm hung in the Academy and can stand on my feet"--("Not if
you're hung," Dallas interjected.)--"I'll break the truth to her."

But Dallas was not enthusiastic.

"Anne wouldn't do at all," he declared. "She'd be talking about
the kids before she knew it, and patting me on the head." He said
it complacently; Anne flirts, but they are really devoted.

"One of the Mercer girls?" I suggested, but Jimmy raised a
horrified hand.

"You don't know Aunt Selina," he protested. "I couldn't offer
Leila in the gown she's got on, unless she wore a shawl, and
Betty is too fair."

Anne came in just then, and the whole story had to be told again
to her. She was ecstatic. She said it was good enough for a play,
and that of course she would be Mrs. Jimmy for that length of
time.

"You know," she finished, "if it were not for Dal, I would be
Mrs. Jimmy for ANY length of time. I have been devoted to you for
years, Billiken."

But Dallas refused peremptorily.

"I'm not jealous," he explained, straightening and throwing out
his chest, "but--well, you don't look the part, Anne. You're--you
are growing matronly, not but what you suit ME all right. And
then I'd forget and call you 'mammy,' which would require
explanation. I think it's up to you, Kit."

"I shall do nothing of the sort!" I snapped. "It's ridiculous!"

"I dare you!" said Dallas.

I refused. I stood like a rock while the storm surged around me
and beat over me. I must say for Jim that he was merely pathetic.
He said that my happiness was first; that he would not give me an
uncomfortable minute for anything on earth; and that Bella had
been perfectly right to leave him, because he was a sinking ship,
and deserved to be turned out penniless into the world. After
which mixed figure, he poured himself something to drink, and his
hands were shaking.

Dal and Anne stood on each side of him and patted him on the
shoulders and glared across at me. I felt that if I was a rock,
Jim's ship had struck on me and was sinking, as he said, because
of me. I began to crumble.

"What--what time does she leave?" I asked, wavering.

"Ten: nine; KIT, are you going to do it?"

"No!" I gave a last clutch at my resolution. "People who do that
kind of thing always get into trouble. She might miss her train.
She's almost certain to miss her train."

"You're temporizing," Dallas said sternly. "We won't let her miss
her train; you can be sure of that."

"Jim," Anne broke in suddenly, "hasn't she a picture of Bella?
There's not the faintest resemblance between Bella and Kit."

Jim became downcast again. "I sent her a miniature of Bella a
couple of years ago," he said despondently. "Did it myself."

But Dal said he remembered the miniature, and it looked more like
me than Bella, anyhow. So we were just where we started. And down
inside of me I had a premonition that I was going to do just what
they wanted me to do, and get into all sorts of trouble, and not
be thanked for it after all. Which was entirely correct. And then
Leila Mercer came and banged at the door and said that dinner had
been announced ages ago and that everybody was famishing. With
the hurry and stress, and poor Jim's distracted face, I weakened.

"I feel like a cross between an idiot and a criminal," I said
shortly, "and I don't know particularly why every one thinks I
should be the victim for the sacrifice. But if you will promise
to get her off early to her train, and if you will stand by me
and not leave me alone with her, I--I might try it."

"Of course, we'll stand by you!" they said in chorus. "We won't
let you stick!" And Dal said, "You're the right sort of girl,
Kit. And after it's all over, you'll realize that it's the
biggest kind of lark. Think how you are saving the old lady's
feeling! When you are an elderly person yourself, Kit, you will
appreciate what you are doing tonight."

Yes, they said they would stand by me, and that I was a heroine
and the only person there clever enough to act the part, and that
they wouldn't let me stick! I am not bitter now, but that is what
they promised. Oh, I am not defending myself; I suppose I
deserved everything that happened. But they told me that she
would be there only between trains, and that she was deaf, and
that I had an opportunity to save a fellow-being from ruin. So in
the end I capitulated.

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