PLAYING DEAD

To fate, “Jimmie” Blagwin had signalled the “supreme gesture.”  He had accomplished the Great Adventure.  He was dead.

And as he sat on his trunk in the tiny hall bedroom, and in the afternoon papers read of his suicide, his eyes were lit with pleasurable pride.  Not at the nice things the obituaries told of his past, but because his act of self-sacrifice, so carefully considered, had been carried to success.  As he read Jimmie smiled with self-congratulation.  He felt glad he was alive; or, to express it differently, felt glad he was dead.  And he hoped Jeanne, his late wife, now his widow, also would be glad.  But not too glad.  In return for relieving Jeanne of his presence he hoped she might at times remember him with kindness.  Of her always would he think gratefully and tenderly.  Nothing could end his love for Jeanne—­not even this suicide.

As children, in winter in New York, in summer on Long Island, Jimmie Blagwin and Jeanne Thayer had grown up together.  They had the same tastes in sports, the same friends, the same worldly advantages.  Neither of them had many ideas.  It was after they married that Jeanne began to borrow ideas and doubt the advantages.

For the first three years after the wedding, in the old farmhouse which Jimmie had made over into a sort of idealized country club, Jeanne lived a happy, healthy, out-of-door existence.  To occupy her there were Jimmie’s hunters and a pack of joyous beagles; for tennis, at week-ends Jimmie filled the house with men, and during the week they both played polo, he with the Meadow Brooks and she with the Meadow Larks, and the golf links of Piping Rock ran almost to their lodge-gate.  Until Proctor Maddox took a cottage at Glen Cove and joined the golf-club, than Jeanne and Jimmie on all Long Island no couple were so content.

At that time Proctor Maddox was the young and brilliant editor of the Wilderness magazine, the wilderness being the world we live in, and the Voice crying in it the voice of Proctor Maddox.  He was a Socialist and Feminist, he flirted with syndicalism, and he had a good word even for the I.W.W.  He was darkly handsome, his eyeglasses were fastened to a black ribbon, and he addressed his hostess as “dear lady.”  He was that sort.  Women described him as “dangerous,” and liked him because he talked of things they did not understand, and because he told each of them it was easy to see it would be useless to flatter her.  The men did not like him.  The oldest and wealthiest members of the club protested that the things Maddox said in his magazine should exclude him from the society of law-abiding, money-making millionaires.  But Freddy Bayliss, the leader of the younger crowd, said that, to him, it did not matter what Maddox said in the Wilderness, so long as he stayed there.  It was Bayliss who christened him “the Voice.”