The Light Heart (39 page)

Phoebe sat holding the letter and staring at the desk in front of her where the galley proofs of the new book lay—the most timely thing possible to print, in its prophetic dissection of the German state of mind. Somewhere in the house little Jeff was crying, and she heard him without curiosity or impatience. Rachel was there to look after him, and always knew what to do.
We
do
wish
you
were
here,
we
could
use
you
…. The most terrible story the world had ever seen was being enacted in
France and England, and Phoebe Sprague was three thousand miles away.

Dinah and Bracken did not return for Christmas. By then the war had settled into a dismal stalemate in the trenches, a nightmare of mud and cold and snipers. Charles was reported missing in the fighting round Ypres early in November, where the cavalry had gone into the trenches with rifles and fought like infantry. Oliver had got a body wound at Wytschaete from which he was recovering in London. Rosalind’s letters to Phoebe were few and brief, and sounded as though they had been dictated to her, or had been written under surveillance. Then they stopped coming.

The
Lion’s
Den,
which Bracken called Phoebe’s private war with Germany, was published during the autumn in a
whirlwind
of publicity and made the expected sensation. She was trying hard by Christmas to begin a new book, and made nothing but false starts, because of a deep-rooted longing to write about London in wartime and she was not there to see it. She promised herself that when Bracken did come back she would go up to New York and make him tell her a lot of things he hadn’t, for one reason or another, written for the
Star.

Meanwhile little Jeff’s first efforts to walk and talk, which so enthralled his grandparents, were more than likely to bring tears to Phoebe’s eyes—Jeff didn’t belong, and she was so sorry for him that it ached, and she strove constantly against a crooning, poor-baby love for him which was the most she could seem to feel. She was convinced that the family’s poor-Miles habit had done irreparable harm, and her determination that there must never be a poor-Jeff atmosphere made her almost brusque with his baby griefs lest he should learn the self-pity which had cursed his father.

In April Dinah and Bracken were back in New York. Dinah had badly overdone it at the hospital and was ordered to take a long rest. Bracken too was suffering from nervous fatigue and from the restrictions, amounting to embargo, which Kitchener
and General French had placed on war correspondents at the front. Everyone was now becoming thoroughly alarmed about Rosalind, who had not sent one word out of Germany for months.

Phoebe thought it over carefully and then packed up little Jeff and Rachel and took them along when she went to New York. She was not going to have it said in Williamsburg that she had deserted her child and gone off on a wild-goose chase. Dinah met them at the station with the motor, looking rather thin and white, and gazed with delight at Jeff in his mammys, arms.

“Oh, Phoebe, he’s beautiful!” she said enviously. “I’m Dinah, Jeff—say Dinah—
please
do—
Dinah
,”
she insisted, pointing to herself.

“Diney,” said Jeff, and hid his face in Rachel’s neck as though aware that he had muffed the word, but Dinah was enchanted.

They could talk about Oliver in the car driving home, for Rachel and Jeff did not count. He was quite all right again, Dinah insisted, and was going to have a Staff job at the War Office now, so he would be safe and dry in London and they didn’t have to worry. It was Charles they worried about—still missing, though the Red Cross at Geneva was trying to trace him—not reported prisoner—not known to be dead. It was the kind of thing that drove wives nearly mad. But Charles hadn’t got a wife, and Rosalind wouldn’t know. Phoebe confessed that she had begun to fight a lurking dread that Rosalind might not be alive. The
Schloss
was well back of the German Eastern Front—but Conrad would be away with his regiment, and who knew what might happen to Rosalind, left alone with Aunt Christa and the other terrible women of his family? Where was the maid Gibson and her promise to keep in touch? What became of the letters Phoebe still faithfully mailed to Rosalind? The old melodramatic sense of Rosalind’s doom was heavy on her heart.

When Bracken came home to dinner he was taken straight upstairs to the room which Dinah had several years ago
prepared as a nursery, and there was introduced to Jeff, who was just being put to bed.

“This is Bracken,” Dinah told the baby, pointing. “Say Bracken, Jeff—
do
say it, darling—”

“Backers,” said Jeff, and chortled at Dinah, who chortled back.

Bracken offered to shake hands gravely, and Jeff reciprocated, a little limp with surprise and drowsiness—he had never been invited to shake hands before. Phoebe stood looking down at them—Dinah kneeling by the crib, an arm along the pillow—Bracken leaning over the opposite rail—and all three of them and Rachel laughing like ninnies. Phoebe was conscious of the steady, triumphant growth of an Idea.

A
FTER
dinner that night, when they had settled cosily over coffee and liqueurs in the library, she sprang it on them.

“Bracken, I want to go to Germany and find out about Rosalind.”

Dinah drew in her breath and looked at Bracken, who said quietly after a moment, “You have to have a passport these days.”

“You can fix that for me, can’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“B-but, Phoebe, what about the
baby?
” cried Dinah.

“Will you keep him?” Phoebe asked casually. “I needn’t be gone much more than a month.”

Dinah’s eyes grew very large in her thin face, staring at Phoebe.

“Could I?” she whispered, as though afraid somebody might say No, it was all a mistake. Then suddenly her voice rang out like a peal of bells. “Oh, darling,
could I?
”

“He won’t be any trouble so long as he’s got Rachel,” Phoebe nodded. “And I’ll feel more in touch if he’s here in
New York with you.” She turned confidently to Bracken. “How long should it take to get the passport?”

“Maybe ten days.” He took the pipe from his mouth and knocked it out against an ashtray on the table beside him, like a good actor holding his pause. “There may be some difficulty about the German visa,” he said.

“But I’m an American!” Phoebe bristled.

“You certainly are,” Bracken agreed. “And you wrote a book called
The
Lion’s
Den
, remember?”

“They won’t know about that.”

“Why won’t they? Their Ambassador here can read.”

“But it’s not
important
enough!”

“How many thousand copies have been sold?”

“Quite a lot,” she admitted with chagrin.

“Well, you must have a pretty fair idea how Conrad and his kind will react to that book.”

“They’d be frothing.”

“Well, there you are.”

“Bracken, you don’t suppose it would have anything to do with Rosalind not writing?”

“It might. She might be forbidden to have anything more to do with you.”

“I’ve got to go anyway,” said Phoebe obstinately. “It might just as well not be anything to do with the book. She might be ill, or—especially if Conrad is away she might be tyrannized over in a dozen ways. Maybe she isn’t getting my letters, or can’t get her answers out of the
Schloss
. Maybe they’ve sent Gibson away. You’ve sot to help, Bracken, you know our Ambassador in Berlin, don’t you?”

“I do. But he’s not God.” Bracken pondered, rubbing the bowl of his pipe with his thumb in a way he had. They both watched him, hanging on his next words. “I could get you as far as Switzerland,” he ruminated. “You could go to Zurich.”

“What good would that do?”

“I’ll have Johnny meet you there. You can give him all the
facts and all the questions—you daren’t write ’em—and then wait there while he investigates.”

“How?” asked Phoebe with some scepticism.

Bracken said after a pause. “He has been visiting prisoner-of-war camps with a secretary from our Embassy. He will arrange—through the Embassy—to visit the nearest camp to Heidersdorf. Being there, he will pay an innocent American call at the
Schloss
as an old friend of yours. We can leave the rest to him. Nobody can think of more inconvenient questions to ask than Johnny can if he smells a rat. Of course if he sees her without any trouble we’ll know at once how things are. Anyway, it’s the best I can think of at the moment.”

Phoebe said she supposed it would have to do, but it wouldn’t be like seeing Rosalind herself.

“The Lusitania sails about the first of the month,” said Bracken. “I’ll try and get you on her. There’s some risk now, of course. The Germans have given out that they’ll sink British ships anywhere near the war zone.”

“That’s what Charles used to call their bogey-bogey-bogey technique,” said Phoebe lightly, and they began to talk of Charles, and of Tommy Chetwynd who had been killed at Neuve Chapelle in March, and of the Zeppelin raids on England’s East Coast, and—with growing animation—of Cousin Sally, who was Phoebe’s aunt, and who by some magic artifice looked very much today as she had looked when Bracken last saw her at Cannes in the year of the Jubilee.

“And to Sosthène,” said Bracken solemnly, beginning to refill his pipe, “she is still the only woman in the world.”

Dinah said Sosthène was a lamb.

“An expensive lamb,” Bracken remarked. “They all went up to London and Cousin Sally sold a diamond bracelet on which they can apparently all live for ever. She gave Sosthène a wad of money and he went to Archie’s tailor. You never saw such a wardrobe!”

“Well, she also took Fabrice to
Lucile
,” said Dinah, with a
slanting look at him. “I didn’t hear any complaints about that!”

“I protest,” said Bracken, at work on his pipe. “Phoebe, I protest. There are several one-syllable Anglo-Saxon words for Fabrice, and the time is coming when I no longer refrain from using them. I admit Fabrice made eyes at me. Archie wasn’t there, and she knows it’s no use with Sosthène. I think in the circumstances I behaved very well, when what I really wanted to do was clout her one, hard.”

“She’s a flirt, eh,” said Phoebe drily.

“That’s euphemism,” said Bracken, and struck a match, and Dinah giggled at him.

“He got a sort of
hunted
look,” she said reminiscently. “Fabrice had got hold of that Southern phrase, kissing kin, and insisted Bracken was within the degree of cousinship to be kissed regularly on the slightest provocation, in order that Fabrice might demonstrate that she was a good little American!”

“How Johnny will love to hear about this,” Phoebe said. “He always wanted to know more about Aunt Sally. Where are they now?”

“At Farthingale most of the time. Virginia being in London, that’s an ideal arrangement.”

“At least she’s lucky they aren’t penniless,” Phoebe suggested.

“Well, yes, there are small mercies,” Bracken conceded, puffing, “
Very
small,” he qualified at once.

T
O
D
INAH
the loan of little Jeff Day even for a month—and Bracken said it would be at least two before Phoebe came back—was rapture as uncomplicated as that of a child with a new doll. She had come safely past a dozen psychological pitfalls to a sane acceptance of the fact that she could never have a child for Bracken, and she never looked back now to a time soon after her marriage when she had started a list of names, both
boys’ and girls’ to be on the safe side, and added to it when a new one struck her fancy—or to the time when at last it looked as though she might begin to catch up with the other wives in the family, and the bright nursery room on the upper floor had been made ready—or to the dreadful time when she lost the baby and almost died, and they told her she could not have another, and she felt only a blissful relief that nothing like that could ever happen to her again—or to the time, months later, when it began to dawn on her that she was letting Bracken down, by not giving him a son to carry on the newspaper as he had done for his father. That knowledge grew and worked in her until she went resolutely and ignorantly to the doctor and asked for an operation so that she could try again, and he had to explain that there wasn’t an operation for a case like hers; whereupon the recent months of secret humiliation and self-abasement told on her and she broke down and cried, and the doctor in his wisdom told her what Bracken had said when the crisis came: “I can do without a child,” Bracken said with white lips, “but without Dinah life’s no good to me.” Dinah looked up at the doctor, quivering, and gasped, “You
chose?
” and the doctor shook his head and said, “
He
chose.”

Ever since then Dinah had held her head very high. Bracken chose. And he chose
her
. The doctor had given her back her self-respect, and thereafter she never faltered again, and ceased to feel secretly apologetic to Bracken, or slavishly anxious to please him, or abjectly afraid of not doing everything she could to make up to him for the one thing she couldn’t. She became just Dinah again, gay and self-possessed and adorable. Bracken told himself that at last she had got over losing the baby, and he too became himself again, and stopped being a little too
cheerful
, to show her he didn’t mind a bit, or watching every word he spoke for fear of reminding her, or dreading the sight of all the other babies in the family which might upset her.

The empty nursery stayed where it was, because they didn’t
need the room for anything else, and it was used periodically by Gwen’s babies when she and Fitz brought them along to New York, and even by Virginia’s the autumn she paid a visit there. Virginia remarked to Eden that Dinah was just like the women of their own family, who always loved their husbands better than their children, and made few bones about it, and Eden recalled with rueful laughter that her mother always used to say that Aunt Louise Sprague would have cut off Sedgwick’s head to save Uncle Lafe’s life any day.