XX
Theexperience of that night was one of those moments on the Olympus of extravagant hope, before which it is merciful to draw the veil. In one hour they seemed to have attained all that life held for the most fortunate—freedom, work, love.
Therefore, had they stepped from the tropical belt to the Arctic circle; had they plunged from the top of a sunlit tower to the depths of a coal shaft, the change which came during the next month could not have been greater. Moira had never anticipated resenting her first baby. Preparations for the trip, expenditures for the trip, had first been slackened up in mid-career, as they waited apprehensively and then had been abandoned with the abruptness that only comes when death enters a house. There lay the paraphernalia of travel, new and useless. They had drifted into a state of divine negligence. Jobs and all practical affairs went along any old way; they were matters soon to be jettisoned like an old coat. Then came this reality as if the four walls of a prison had been dropped about them in a day.
It was not so bad as that of course, when the first rude awakening had passed. Life substitutes one enthusiasm for another. Miles recovered admirablyat once; he spent his eloquence reassuring her that this was the best thing that could have happened to them. He had all the normal delight in the prospect of fatherhood.
But Moira was not so easily reconciled. She would always look upon that baby as something a little too unreasonably expensive. She was not ready for it, and had the plan of going abroad been broached earlier she would never have had it. She would have been more pleased had Miles not tried so hard to make her see it in a better light. She did not doubt his sincerity, nor that he would be one whose joy in children of his own would be unbounded. But she hated to think of his taking one burden after another from her shoulders until he would be carrying them all, while she waited helplessly. She had never thought him, as yet, strong enough without her.
So she did not relinquish her burdens until she had to. She worked on, until the last day she could without embarrassment. After a season of careful figuring she estimated that what they had saved, with Miles’ salary (which had been slightly increased not long before) would enable them to maintain their present comforts until she got back to earning. She hoped that could be managed somehow within two years.
But if the idea of having a child was an adventure, they both had to admit that the conditions it called for were somewhat depressing.For one thing, they had to have more space. The first work she did after leaving Barcroft’s establishment was to move to a flat in the eighties on the west side. In every particular this place lacked the charm of her studio, nor could anything they did to it or put into it make it seem the same. The little kennel-like separations called rooms were diabolically invented for people who had to have children, and so constructed as to make them hate the fact that they had them.
At the earliest hint of the baby’s coming she noticed changes in Miles. He had never been very regular or responsible about office hours. Now it worried him if he was a half minute late in getting started. He talked less, he exaggerated less. He seemed to be unwilling to discuss books, or any of the old subjects that had enthralled him. He spoke much of there being a future “in the firm,” for a chap who “really buckled down and dug up results.” She realized that he was beginning to regard his job as a permanent support.
He came home sometimes with bundles of papers filled with figures and sat in the little study at night, writing what he called “plans” and “copy” and making “market analyses.” It was the same sort of jargon that Barcroft talked incessantly—“sales and distribution,” “consumer demand,” and “dealer helps.” It had sounded all right from Barcroft; but from Miles....She found among his papers rough drafts in his own hand of advertisements extolling the value of hog foods, lice powder, piston rings—and one long story about “How I raised my salary from fifty to two hundred dollars a week in six months.” When she read these she went into her room and cried. They had meant nothing to her so long as he took them lightly; now that he applied his whole mind to them and sat absently dreaming of them, they seemed blasphemous. But she dared not complain; she had no remedy to offer.
In a little while—after the baby was a few months old—he began to bring home news of certain results from all this energy and absorption. His salary took a sudden jump. He was “meeting clients” continually, doing executive work. Soon, he told her, he would have a small office to himself. She simulated pleasure at these announcements, but she felt none. Every triumph of that sort meant a surrender of himself. She even resented the care he had begun to take in his clothes and his hair-cuts, the change in his style of dress.
The ugliness of the little apartment in a building which held perhaps fifty tiresome families, the dreary parade of bourgeois virtues, and fourth or fifth rate finery, the strident female voices in the street and halls, the newness of everything one touched and looked at, the lack of shadows and mystery and ease, the pervasive, obvious travailfor money—all these things were to Moira an education in American life which her youth had escaped. She disliked them, but she regarded them, because they were strange to her, with a detached, half-amused curiosity.
To Miles, however, they were a return to the hated past—from just such a street in Cincinnati he had fled in horror years before. She saw that it really involved him; that daily, as it were, he had to brush its overwhelming effect from his clothes and from his mind. It was she who was putting him through all this.... And it was only an added irony that Miles, junior, turned out such a satisfactory child, normal and vigorous and good-tempered. It did not improve matters any that he deserved this sacrifice, for with every new fascination he exerted, every delightful characteristic he exhibited, the subjection of all their hopes to his demands became more complete....
Three years passed this way, and though the affairs of the Harlindew family went on quite as ever in outward appearance, much had happened underneath to both.
In the first place she had learned that a child was not a temporary encumbrance, one that she could throw off in a year or two for outside work. If certain of its wants diminished with its growth, others increased, and the habit of being an attendant mother became fixed. She had had toabandon her plan of returning to offices. Cheap servant girls and the risk run in trusting them worried her too much as it was. She became as helpless a house-person as the scores of other young mothers in her teeming block.
With the relinquishment of this notion came the gradual realization that they might never be able to take up again that shoulder to shoulder independence which had seemed so fine while it lasted. Miles from now on was the provider—she and her child the dependents. She discovered that he had seen this more clearly than she from the beginning.
He ceased to take an interest in himself at all. His mind settled into a hopeless groove of dogged, disinterested work. To see him pick up a book and lay it aside was a gesture that came to hold a veritable sense of tragedy for her. To watch the effect of a fine play upon him was pathetic. While its beauty filled him with happiness, he dared not allow himself to be lifted too far into that rarified atmosphere. He ventured no opinions about any of the hundreds of stimulating personalities who were coming up on the horizon of culture everywhere. Poetry he spoke of with whimsical condescension, even with contempt. It seemed to him an impudent excrescence, a meaningless dream that had no right to existence in a life of reality.
All this came more swiftly than she knew, occupiedas she was with the absorbing bit of life under her care. In three years she thought she scarcely knew Miles. The poems he had shown her that night before the baby’s coming were often in her hands, though she dared not mention them to him. They were as fine as they had been then. Could this plodding man—who loved her still with a desperate, clinging love, a love, as it seemed, that was the breath of his life—be the same man who had written them? And was it possible that he must stop that divine occupation for no other reason than that three people had to live? The future seems short when life is meaningless and tiresome, and we become seized with a fierce impatience. Moira fought against a feeling that they were old and life was declining to its end....
An ominous fact was apparent. In spite of Harlindew’s devotion to work at the office he was achieving very little. He had reached a certain point and come to a standstill. His salary, large according to the ideas with which he had begun, was a dwindling insufficiency when it came to paying their bills. He was beginning to be afraid that he might never go farther. She remembered now a saying that Barcroft had repeated to her: “Push may start behind, but it’s got brains beat all hollow in the end.” He was referring to the kind of brains Miles had, theoretic and literary. Miles himself tried to explain his predicament inwords of much the same import. There was a “point of saturation,” he said, in salaries and advancement, unless you “got outside and went after the business.” Apparently that was what he could not do.
At the same time, an incredible number of new expenses, roundly chargeable to the item named “baby” had absorbed all their early savings except a few hundred dollars, which she jealously kept—not so much in fear of an emergency, as with the hope that it might be the magic key to open the door to some way out of their life. But she went into this treasure to buy Miles decent business suits. They were both behind in similar comforts and vanities.
Harlindew seemed to resent any invasion of his evenings, to prefer to sit with her and his thoughts. Yet in reality he was full of an enormous restlessness to which he dared not surrender. The office needed all his energy; he could not spend it. So he thought.... Moira would take the bored man out whenever her maid would stay, trying to revive the spirit of their old comradeship. It came to life only in rare flashes.
Her twenty-eighth year passed. She found herself with more freedom on her hands now, and she obtained work from Elsie Jennings which brought in a few dollars a week. She was not sure which feeling was uppermost in Miles, his pleasure at seeing the money or his disgustat finding her painting silly gift cards. Her painting, the fact that she had always kept it up to some extent, was his consolation, a vicarious substitute for his own emptiness.... But the money made them more comfortable.
Then she discovered that she was going to have another baby. He took the announcement casually, even with a joke.
“By Jove, my dear,” he said, “I’m succeeding in something, anyway.”
He sat down and chuckled to himself. Three things had struck him as very funny. One was that he had never in his life pictured himself as a prolific father—like his own father; another was that he would be thirty-seven that week—and the third that he had come home to tell Moira his salary had been cut.
She dropped quickly, beseechingly beside him, disliking the sound of his laugh.
“What’s the matter, darling, is it too much?”
He put his arms across her shoulders in an accustomed gesture.
“No, no, dear. How absurd. I’m as glad as I can be.”
He laughed again, attempting naturalness, and ruffled his hair with a sudden motion of his hand. But she felt the husband slipping from her grasp, turning defiantly before her eyes into the vagrant poet....