White Birches
by
I
A woman, who under sentence of death could plan immediately for a trip to the circus, might seem at first thought incredibly light-minded.
You had, however, to know Anne Dunbar and the ten years of her married life to understand. Her husband was fifteen years her senior, and he had few illusions. He had fallen in love with Anne because of a certain gay youth in her which had endured throughout the days of a dreadful operation and a slow convalescence. He had been her surgeon, and, propped up in bed, Anne’s gray eyes had shone upon him, the red-gold curls of her cropped hair had given her a look of almost boyish beauty, and this note of boyishness had been emphasized by the straight slenderness of the figure outlined beneath the white covers.
Anne had married Ridgeley Dunbar because she loved him. And love to Anne had been all fire and flame and spirit. It did not take her long to learn that her husband looked upon love and life as matters of flesh and blood–and bones. By degrees his materialism imposed itself upon Anne. She admired Ridgeley immensely. She worshiped, in fact, the wonder of his day’s work. He healed the sick, he cured the halt and blind, and he scoffed at Anne’s superstitions–“I can match every one of your Bible miracles. There’s nothing to it, my dear. Death is death and life is life–so make the most of it.”
Anne tried to make the most of it. But she found it difficult. In the first place her husband was a very busy man. He seemed to be perfectly happy with his cutting people up, and his medical books, and the articles which he wrote about the intricate clockwork inside of us which ticks off the hours from birth to death. Now and then he went out to the theatre with his wife or to dine with friends. But, as a rule, she went alone. She had a limousine, a chauffeur, a low swung touring car–and an electric. Her red hair was still wonderful, and she dressed herself quite understanding in grays and whites and greens. If she did not wear habitually her air of gay youth, it was revived in her now and then when something pleased or excited her. And her eyes would shine as they had shone in the hospital when Ridgeley Dunbar had first bent over her bed.
They shone on Christopher Carr when he came home from the war. He was a friend of her husband. Or rather, as a student in the medical school, he had listened to the lectures of the older man, and had made up his mind to know him personally, and had thus, by sheer persistence, linked their lives together.
Anne had never met him. He had been in India When she had married Ridgeley, and then there had been a few years in Egypt where he had studied some strange germ, of which she could never remember the name. He had plenty of money, hence he was not tied to a practice. But when the war began, he had offered his services, and had made a great record. “He is one of the big men of the future,” Ridgeley Dunbar had said.
But when Christopher came back with an infected arm, which might give him trouble, it was not the time to talk of futures. He was invited to spend July at the Dunbars’ country home in Connecticut, and Ridgeley brought him out at the week-end.
The Connecticut estate consisted of a rambling stone house, an old-fashioned garden, and beyond the garden a grove of white birches.
“What a heavenly place,” Christopher said, toward the end of dinner; “how did you happen to find it?”
“Oh, Anne did it. She motored for weeks, and she bought it because of the birches.”
Anne’s eyes were shining. “I’ll show them to you after dinner.”