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Into the torrid summer months of that year Ray was to cram mental torment of a variety which, she always averred, but laughingly, endowed her with her first gray hair. Walter, too, always regarded this statement as a joke, when she related, only in part, some of her travail during the period of his absence abroad. But deep down inside her Ray knew how relentlessly she had aged during those lean waiting-months. The gray hairs were dyed out, but the scars were not dyed out. There were little pools of old terror deep in her heart which were never quite to dry.

It all happened so needlessly. The contemplated trip to France, to confer with a small group of petty plenipotentiaries, took form so rapidly that there was scarcely time to collect one’s wits. At the last moment, a circumstance so devastating to Ray that she was scarcely able to bear it, Corinne did, after all, accompany her husband, causing a confusion, a hurry of events, that precipitated the period of time they had put apart for farewells into a series of jumbled telephone calls.

Practically before she realized it, certainly before she had time to pull herself together for the ordeal, Walter and Corinne, two children, and a nurse were aboard the steamship, bound for France.

It was in a soggy world of rain-soaked unseasonable wind, uddery clouds swollen with the threat of more rain, that Ray found herself sitting that morning when her clock told her the
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse
was just swinging from dock.

At nine o’clock Walter had telephoned her for the last time—contrite bothered messages, filled with obviously restrained endearments and necessarily cryptic explanations of his inability to come to her the evening previous. Their last evening. Their planned evening. No possible time. Sudden change in plans. Felix-Arnold Friedlander’s last-minute decision that Corinne and children go too. All muddled. Out of the question to inconspicuously get away from the house. Dear, be patient. Not for long. Keep out of mischief. Get on with the china painting. Read books on banking. Best girl ever. Take care of self. Won’t write. Conspicuous. Don’t you write either. But thoughts always with you. See you again before you can say Jack Robinson. Wish me luck—Sweet!

He was gone. Step-by-step, sitting there in the rain-soaked morning behind the elaborate paraphernalia of her lace curtains, Ray visualized the procedure. Trunks. Bags. Passports. Carriage waiting at the curb to be stacked with luggage. Corinne in veils. Children. Did Corinne know that for ocean voyages young children should be fortified with extra-heavy clothing? There would be the business of choosing steamer-chairs on the sunny side of the boat; and did Corinne realize that Walter must not be permitted to indulge too heavily in the wide variety of exotic foods for which the steamship line was famous?

To Ray, who had never been on an ocean liner, it was all, nevertheless, so clear. The newspapers were forever describing the arrivals and departures of notables. Many of the men with whom she used to go about had been importers. There would be messages and flowers and gifts at the boat. There stood her own little tissue-paper-wrapped package on the mantelpiece. A pair of handpainted lotion-bottles and a new pair of handpainted porcelain cuff links.
But even had it been possible to deliver them, it would not have been feasible. Caution. Caution. One misstep and one trembled to think. For every precaution of Walter’s, she had two in its place. It was better to accept the heartbreaking edict of no correspondence between them—he had shown her how to watch the newspapers for the arrivals and departures of ships. As Walter had assured her in one of those last stolen messages over the telephone, of course it would be possible to have letters from her sent to a secret address, but the unforeseen was so apt to happen. Letters during periods of travel were uncertain quantities. Never tell where or under what circumstances a forwarded letter might overtake. Best to eliminate correspondence altogether, as they invariably did upon his shorter trips. A letter from him to her might tempt her to write. Oh, it was better so. Everything was better so. The days would pass. The weeks would pass. The months …

It was a full week after the departure, with its reaction into all the moods against which she had tried to so strongly fortify herself, that her strange predicament first dawned upon her.

Walter had left her with no thought and no talk of money. At the time of his sailing, what with the slight additions of the china-painting income, there was about thirty-five dollars in the house. It was only when this little bankroll of notes began to dwindle that the situation dawned suddenly upon her. Walter, although there had been plenty of time for it their last evenings together, had left without provision for her. In the hurry of departure, and then the omission of that last evening which they had planned, the matter had slipped his mind. Of course he would write or wire her funds. If only he remembered. He was such a child in so many things. The prospect of her little dilemma developing into an acute situation was simply beyond the thinking. But just the same, she broke briskly into one of her ten-dollar bills for a good supply of china for painting.

“Funny feeling,” was the way in which she described those first days of her realization of her state of funds. Gave you a funny feeling to have a little thing like this happen to you. Of course, Walter would remember and find some way to wire her money, but that
could not possibly be within the next ten days; and what would Mr. Kinley, the agent, think on Thursday, when he came as usual for the rent and the cup of coffee and slice of cake which she always offered him on his monthly rounds. Not that he would mind, for the first time in all these years, being postponed for a few days, but just the same—gave one a funny feeling.

Thirty days later, with the sensation that a steel band was tightening her heart, Ray asked Mr. Kinley for a second postponement, which was still taken with a certain good-humor, but of a sort that seemed to chill that warm day to its core. Neither did he rest for his cup of coffee and slice of raisin-bun, which she baked to what Walter called perfection.

Then and there the summer began in earnest its nightmare. Horribly, as everything consistently seemed to have to be those days, Saperlee, to whom somehow she felt she might have turned in this extremity, had closed her flat, and with much of its trappings departed for Saratoga Springs, where she maintained a “summer flat” adjoining one of the popular hotels. Most of the girls, for that matter, were scattered for the heated months. Hattie, rigidly subject to the whims of her friend from Buffalo, remained on, but it had long since been apparent to Ray that much of Hattie’s bravado front was pretense. Ray suspected that secretly she indulged in an abominable, yet somehow pathetic, practice of sharing her excess in funds with a pale, pimply youth who came with frequency to the flat. But the fact remained that with the words jamming on the end of her tongue Ray could not quite bring herself to ask a loan from Hattie.

As luck would have it too, the little group of her china-customers, dissipated by summer, were not within reach. Even her teacher, an enormous Spanish woman who had finally been asked to vacate her apartment because of her insistence to share it with six cats, had migrated to Thousand Islands, where she accepted summer pupils. It was as if suddenly Ray found herself in the midst of an appalling plateau of a summer, so alone that the days seemed motionless and devoid of population, frightening too, as she found herself actually confronted with the incredible exigency of need.

If anyone had told Ray Schmidt, the tony Ray Schmidt of
Cincinnati, that on a certain day in July, along about the turn of the century, she would be seated in her overstuffed, ornament-jammed flat, confronted with the actual problem of where the next meal was coming from, she would have repudiated the prophecy as fantastic. Yet there she sat in the midst of a summer’s day that was as hot to the face as a going stove, experiencing hunger pangs for a luncheon that she had not the wherewithal to provide.

Curious that in these days of passionate waiting and hoping, she “had not the heart,” as she put it to herself, to cast about for ways and means. She, the Ray Schmidt to whom many a businessman had declared that he “took off his hat” when it came to up and getting, simply sat there in the midst of her torrid misery and imagined that each step in the hallway was the step of a messenger, or that presently that horrid old silent crow of a telephone must ring and convey news to her. Must. Must. Must. There burned in her no sense of shame about thus sitting around. There should have, she reasoned to herself; but where Walter was concerned, none of one’s ordinary yardsticks for measuring behavior applied. Not one. She was a different person; she was her obsessed self. Between them there existed neither right nor wrong. Only the oneness. That sense of intimacy with him that transcended one’s intimacy with one’s self. The way in which he could read the thoughts off her brain almost before they were formed into her own consciousness.… No shame between them. No pride.…

Sometimes it smote her with a full blast of grim satire, how usual, compared to the vast sweep of hers for him, must be his feelings toward her. There was so much, according to the very nature of things, that he could never understand, any more than you could pour a quart of affection into a pint.

Doubtless, even now, as she sat there in the midst of an arid desolation that scorched her spirit, he was innocent. How could he suffer, who did not first feel? He loved her according to the pint of measurement, while she, Heaven help her, as she was fond of saying to herself, was cursed with an absorption that was as blinding as it was blind.

Not much doubt about it, Walter was deep in affairs that
consumed him. Walter, with her memory perhaps lying snugly in his brain, sometimes no doubt even hankering for her, needing her, was innocent of his lapse of thus leaving her high and dry without funds. The capacity was not in him to reach out with his sensitiveness to her plight.

Never generous with her, he was, nonetheless, within his reach, considerate enough of her welfare. What was happening to her would have been terrible to him. Not so terrible though—that she knew—as it was to her, sitting there in the thin wrapper that she had thrust off her back to be free of its contact in the heat, her hands empty in her lap, her knees wide, eyes lusterless, and, most fantastic of all, larder and purse bare of wherewithal.

The need of action smote her dully, as through blanketed perceptions. The thing to do, of course, while she was gathering her senses for action, was to raise money by pawning what she had that was realizable. By that time, no doubt, consciousness of his oversight would strike Walter like a bolt. There would be cables. There must be cables. Even without the need for precaution which had been ground into her, it would never have occurred to her to write. His word was law. Once or twice she found herself passing the sealed and shuttered house on Lexington Avenue, but even that in some way suggested to her the forbidden, now that he was out of the country and away from knowledge of her movements. He would not like her skulking that way. It struck her that there might even be indiscretion in pawning the few negotiable gifts he had made her. That, she came to realize, was nonsense. At a broker’s on Sixth Avenue she raised eighty dollars on a gold watch and fleur-de-lis brooch set in garnets, the souvenir spoons, and an opal ring, her birthstone. It seemed to her, with two months out of Walter’s three passed by now, that she could manage on that until his return.

How appalled he would be when he knew! In a way, all this horror was, one of these days, going to be worth what she had gone through. His gray eyes would pour pain for the pain he had caused her. He would hold her in the long, silent way she loved, and his compassion would stamp itself against her own heartbeat. Meanwhile, one must live!

In August, despite a schedule of life that for her was frugal, the situation again threatened to become acute. Freda was once more with child. Hugo had lost his position with the gas company, and there was talk of moving back to Cincinnati, where his old situation as meter reader there might be regained. It cost Ray a pang of fear, reading that letter one morning as she lay too supine to rise to the heat of the day, to enclose a ten-dollar bill in an envelope. What if Walter should not return on schedule! The twelve dollars that remained in her purse was ample for the intervening week that lapsed until the estimated date of his landing, but then came the rent again, with the back months due, the eighty dollars depleted, and again there rose the specter of that flabby horror of an object, her flattened purse.

For the first time, lying there day after day, half prostrated from the gummy heat, the grinding noise of streetcars, the humidity of her overstuffed interior, the idea came to Ray, businesswoman, to venture back into that maelstrom from which years before she had so precipitately withdrawn.

Hattie, who, by the way, had bought ten souvenir cups and saucers of her, each with the name of a different friend painted in gold and baked in the china, had finally gone off on a Canadian holiday with her friend from Buffalo. With this last exodus, the flat building with its embalmed-smelling corridors, was as a tomb. The asphalt streets, when she ventured out into them, swam in the heat, and gave like rubber under her feet, adding to the vertiginous effect of August.

It was out into this world, what with Walter already weeks overdue, and Kinley so little the man he had been that when she once more asked for extension he had at last uttered the threat, that there ventured, in immaculate white duck suiting and short-backed sailor with a glass-eyed bird, the timorous figure of Miss Ray Schmidt.

Perhaps it was the timorousness that mitigated so mercilessly against her. Ledbetter and Scape, she learned at once, had gone out of existence; and a firm, in the same building, with which she had done business in the Cincinnati days, had changed entire personnel and gave her scant audience.

It seemed to her that she was like a typhoid patient trying to get back her strength. To think, that of this strange world out here she had once been a vigorous and interested part! She must get back her legs, learn to walk in these regions again. Back in this clanging, interested universe of comings and goings, lurked a Ray Schmidt who was as mysterious to her as if she were observing her own yesteryear’s image embalmed in a mirror.