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Show the other hall still breathing, alive lor no purpose but to feel the anguish an-guish ol the separation. She felt nothing else. The morning morn-ing came at length, and other mornings morn-ings followed it, but for a long time Elizabeth was not conscious ol anything any-thing but the immensity of her pain. She went through the usual movements move-ments of existence, because the routine rou-tine was so automatic that she followed fol-lowed it without paying attention to what she was doing. Every day blended into the next without anything any-thing to mark the transitions, so that she would have found it hard to say how long it had been since they told her Arthur was dead, or whether some occurrence had taken place yesterday or a week ago. It seemed to her that she was alone all the time, though this was not true, for a great many friends came to see her. She was grateful, but they could not penetrate her loneliness. The shock had been too great. Sometimes Some-times she wished they would stop THE STOKY THUS FAR: Spralt Her-lone, Her-lone, successful motion picture producer, hurt married Klizabrih, after her first husband, Arthur Ktttredt;e, had been reported re-ported killed in World War I. They had three children, Dick, Cherry and Brian. Elizabeth had been orphaned when a baby and had been raised by her aunt and unelo in Tulsa. Durins one summer sum-mer vacation from school, she had gone sulinnilnc at the country club. White divine she met Arthur Klttrcdge. He was from Chicago, but was at that time employed In Tulsa as a chemist. She went dancing with him the first night 6ho met him. Ho had proven a strong attraction to her. CHAPTER V He agreed and they sat down on the grass again. Like herself he had no immediate family, he told her. His parents had died long ago, and he had worked his way through the University of what he could still call nothing else but Chicawgo. After a few moments' conversation they found that Elizabeth's uncle, who fall of 1910, and by spring it was evident that the United States was about to enter the war. "Suppose I should be called into the army," he said, "and have to leave you here alone." Elizabeth shivered. Now that she had found Arthur, the idea of living without him was more than she could bear to contemplate. "The war won't last much longer," she said. "I'm sure it won't. We don't have to have children right now we've got years and years before us, but you do want them, don't you?" Arthur grinned at her with tender eagerness. "You're mighty right I do." Then the United States was in the war, and there was no keeping Arthur Ar-thur back from it. Arthur loved people. peo-ple. The people of France and Belgium Bel-gium and Great Britain, cloudy masses to Elizabeth because she had never seen them except on one or two schoolgirl tours ol Europe, Eu-rope, were as real to Arthur as the f-i I'm coming in, talking and making her answer, but it did not matter very much. She simply .drifted from day into night and back into day again, without expectation. Whatever happened hap-pened around her, she was not really real-ly aware of anything except that Arthur Ar-thur was dead, she had to get through the time without him, and she hoped she could do so without being too much ol a nuisance to anybody. any-body. Several weeks after the end of the war she received a tactfully worded letter from the Red Cross, telling her that Arthur had died in a German Ger-man field hospital. There were some gentle phrases about how the stretcher-bearers paid no attention to international differences in their errands ol mercy. Before she had read halfway down the page Elizabeth Eliza-beth recognized it as a form letter composed by some expert writer to soften the regret that would be felt by recipients on learning that their loved ones had had to spend their last hours among loreigners. It was very kind ol them, no doubt to have gone to the trouble ol getting up such a pretty letter, but neither this nor any other literature could help her. She tore the sheet of paper into small pieces and let them dribble out ol her hand into the wastebasket. By this time it was as if her single great pain had changed into a thousand thou-sand small ones striking her with swift short anguish, each in a different differ-ent place from the one before. Earlier, Earli-er, there had been no details. Now whatever she saw, every object she touched, stabbed her with its own small blade ol memory. She could not pick up a table-napkin without remembering what lun she and Arthur Ar-thur had had choosing the linens for their home. Every time she opened the china-closet she could hear their secret laughter as they garnished the top shelf with the atrocities some of their relatives had thrust on them as wedding presents. If she looked was also in the oil business, knew several members of the company where Arthur was employed, so they justified their acquaintance by that. They went dancing that' night, and as the next day was Sunday they went swimming again. A week later Elizabeth was refusing to undertake the projected trip to Canada. A month later she was refusing to go back to college. In September they were married. There was no use in anybody's saying say-ing eighteen was too young to be married, she hadn't known him long enough, she would never have another an-other chance to go to college, Arthur couldn't support her in the style to which she was accustomed, or giving giv-ing any of .the other sensible advice older people like to give young girls in love. She and Arthur wanted each other and nobody could keep them apart. Elizabeth found there was still some ol her lather's property left, so with what had been intended for the rest of her expensive schooling school-ing they furnished their home. That it was a very modest little place troubled them not at all. It was a place of peace and ecstasy. Elizabeth Eliza-beth was tremulous with joy at finding find-ing out what it was like to be loved. She had always had plenty ol friends, her masculine acquaintances acquaint-ances had let her know she was desirable, de-sirable, and her aunt and uncle had done their dutilul best to be affectionate, affec-tionate, but nobody had ever loved her. Arthur loved her. She was not very good at expressing express-ing it. But in the evenings while he ' read, or worked on the pamphlets he wrote describing his researches for the benefit of other oil chemists, she would sit with the mending and look up to watch the line of light down his profile, and every now and then Arthur would glance up and smile at her and she would be unutterably happy. Sometimes when they went out together and did something quite nrHinnrv lilras sppinff fl mnvie nr TllaV- She would be unutterably happy. people of Tulsa, though he had never nev-er been to Europe at all. While she had been seeing the war in terms ol newspaper accounts he was seeing it as human beings starving and bleeding before a force ol evil that decent men must stop. Arthur had registered for the draft, though he had been deferred because he was married; but he wanted to go. Terrified, Ter-rified, Elizabeth pled with him. "Arthur havp mprrv nn me! Sun- ing tennis, she would say, "I never knew any two people could have as much fun together as we do," and he would grin at her and answer, "It's great finding out, isn't it?" That was all they really needed to say to each other about it. But Arthur Ar-thur had more talent for words than she had, and now and then he would make it articulate. One night when she was nearly asleep he turned over and said, "Elizabeth, if you're still awake, I was just thinking about us, and how I get such a thrill every time I see you, and I remembered an old myth I read in the university library one day." "Tell me," said Elizabeth. She moved closer to him and he slipped his arm around her as he went on. "I don't know who thought it up, the Persians or Greeks or somebody. They said that in the beginning everybody ev-erybody in the world was happy. Then they sinned, and to punish them the gods decreed that every soul should be split in half. Since then each of us is born incomplete, and has to wander over the earth looking for the other half of himself, and nobody can be happy unless he finds it. But if you're very lucky you find it, and unite with the one who's really the other half of you, and then you're right with the universe uni-verse because you're complete." She drew a long joyful breath. "Arthur, how beautiful! And how right I think I felt like that the first time I saw you." "So did I. You came down olT the diving board and I pulled you out of the water, and you were there, It was right. Funny to think back now there was so much I wanted to do, so much I wanted to learn, about oils and plants and people and stars I still want to do everything like that as much as ever, but it's so different now. You've no idea how different it Is." "Yes I have. 'Everything is different dif-ferent now that we're together. I do iove you so!" she said. Arthur kissed her shoulder in the dark. They both wanted to have children. chil-dren. Elizabeth loved babies. Ever since she was a little girl playing with her dolls she had looked forward for-ward to the time when she could have a real baby of her own. They talked about it eagerly. But Arthur, who had a deep sense of protection, thought they should wait a year or two. Elizabeth was so young. Besides, Be-sides, they had been married in the pose I wanted to go out to France or Flanders don't you understand?" under-stand?" He doubled up his fists. "Yes, I understand." "Have you thought about it? I mean thought about it?" "A lot of times. While you were asleep. I'd look at you in the dark. You looked so trusting." "Arthur, you're not going. It's different dif-ferent with some men. I suppose I mean it's different with some women. wom-en. They've got somebody besides their husbands. Please understand. My father was a bank and my mother moth-er was a bell. The bank sent the checks and the bell rang to tell me what to do. I'm not trying to say I was unhappy I wasn't, because I didn't know any better. But then, all of a sudden, you." "You don't want to go, do you, Arthur?" "No, I don't. But my darling, we've got to win this war or lose it. If we lose it, God help us. Don't you see it? We're fighting so other people will have the same chance at life that we've had not only the foreigners, for-eigners, but Americans, the Americans Ameri-cans who aren't born yet. We've been thinking, here in our favored corner of the world, that we were safe. Now we've found that we're not. Not even this country is safe unless we're willing to fight the brutes of the world so we can keep it so." Her mind yielded, for he was in- contestably right. But she could not help protesting still. "What about those children I was going to have?" "If we win this war," said Arthur, "you'll have your children. If we don't," he added grimly, "you won't want them." So, after not quite a year of marriage, mar-riage, Arthur joined the army. From the day they were married until the day he left, he and Elizabeth had not been separated for as long as twenty-four hours. The first night she slept alone the bed seemed twice its usual size and the room seemed enormous. Crumpled up on that same bed, Elizabeth was telling herself the room would always be empty. She had nothing. No husband, no children, chil-dren, no desire for anything else without them. She was alive, and that was strange, she thought dully as the hours of that dreadful night dragged by, strange that when two persons had interlaced their lives into such a unit as theirs, half of that unit could be torn away and leave out oi a iront window she could almost al-most see Arthur coming down the street from his office and raising his head to see if he could catch sight ol her anywhere and wave at her before he came into the house. Arthur Ar-thur was everywhere, so Vividly that there were even moments when she forgot he would not be there any more. She would wake up in the night and begin to turn over softly so as not to disturb him; sometimes if the library door was closed she would find herself tiptoeing past it, lest the sound ol her approach interrupt in-terrupt the work he had brought home to do. When this happened she would bring herself up with a start that reminded her, "But he isn't there, he'll never be there again." The pain would slash into her, deep and quick, until she thought, "This is worse than it was at first. And there'll never be anything any-thing else. Arthur is dead." She did not make any display ol her griel. This was partly because she had an inborn dread ol public weeping, but mainly because it did not occur to her to do so. What she and Arthur had shared had been too profound for them ever to talk about it except to each other. Now it would have seemed sacrilegious and obscene to try to tell anybody else what he had meant to her. Arthur Ar-thur had been her husband; no matter mat-ter how much his friends had I valued him, he did not stand in that I relationship to anyone but herself, and only she could feel the severing of that tie. So she bore what she had to bear alone and in silence. And then one morning, in the spring after the Armistice, she discovered dis-covered that she did not have much money left to live on. It gave her a start, not because she had thought she was rich but because in the past few months she I had not thought about it at alL She I had been spending very little, me-I me-I chanically writing checks for such I necessities as food and rent since i it was part of the inescapable rou- tine. When a phone call from Un-j Un-j cie Clarence who had again con-I con-I stituted himself her guardian, as he j saw she was in no state to attend i to her affairs .herself advised her that she should meet him at the bank the next morning, she obeyed his summons, mildly wondering what it was about. Uncle Clarence and the bank vice president told her j it was to make arrangements for i her pension as a soldier's widow, j -TO BE CONTINUED) |
