One day something dreadful happened. Milly realized that she was to have a child. A strange kind of terror seized her at the conviction.This, she had felt ever since her marriage, was the one impossible thing to happen: she had promised herself when she married her poor young artist it should never be. One could be "Bohemian," "artistic"—light and gay—without money, if there were no children. And now, somehow, the impossible had happened, in this unfamiliar city, far away from friends and female counsellors.
She wandered out into the street in a dull despair, and after a time got on top of an omnibus with a vague idea of going off somewhere, never to return, and sat there in the drizzle until she reached the end of the route, which happened to be the Luxembourg. She recognized the place because she had visited the gallery with her husband and also dined at Foyot's and gone to the Odéon on one of their expansive occasions. She walked about aimlessly for a while, feeling that she must get farther away somehow, then wandered into the garden and sat down near one of the fountains among the nurses. The sun had come out from the watery sky, and it was amusing to watch the funny French children and the chattering nurses in their absurd headdresses. The graceful lines of the old Palais made an elegant frame for the garden, the fountains, and the trees. Milly couldn't brood long, but after a time the awful fact would intrude and pull her up with a start. What should she do? There was no room in their life for a child, especially just now. She could never tell Jack. What useless things women were anyway! She didn't wonder that men treated them badly, as they did sometimes, she had heard.
A familiar small figure came towards her. It was Elsie Reddon, the two-year-old girl she had played with on the steamer.
"Where's Mama, Elsie?" Milly asked. The child pointed off to a corner of the garden near by, and Milly followed her small guide to the bench where Marion Reddon was seated. The other child hadn't yet come, but evidently was not far off. Milly felt strangely glad to see the little woman again, and before long confided in her her own trouble.
"That's good!" Marion Reddon said quickly and with evident sincerity.
"You think so!" Milly cried pettishly. "Well, I don't."
"It simplifies everything so."
"Simplifies?"
"Of course. When you're having children, there are some things you can't do—just a few you can—and so you do what you can and don't worry about the rest."
"It spoils your freedom."
The pale-faced little woman laughed.
"Freedom? That's book-talk. Most people do so much more when they aren't free than when they are. Sam says it's the same with his work. When he's free, he does nothing at all because there's so much time and so many things he'd like to try. But when he's tied down with a lot of work at the school, then he uses every spare moment and gets something done—'just to spite the devil.'"
She smiled drolly.
"You'll see when it comes."
Milly looked unconvinced and said something about "the unfair burden on women," the sort of talk her more advanced women friends were beginning to indulge in. Mrs. Reddon had other views.
"It's the natural thing," she persisted. "If I didn't want children for myself, I'd have 'em anyway for Sam."
"Does he like babies?"
"Not especially. Few men do at first. But it trains him. And it makes a hold in the world for him."
"What do you mean?"
"Children make a home—you have to have one. The man can't run away and forget it."
She smiled with her droll expression of worldly wisdom.
"Sam would be in mischief half the time, if it weren't for us. He'd be running here and there, sitting up all hours, wasting his energies smoking and drinking with everybody he met—and now he can't—very much."
"But—but—how about you?"
"Oh," the little woman continued calmly, "I don't flatter myself that I could hold my husband long alone, without the children." She looked Milly straight in the eyes and smiled. "Few women can, you know."
"I don't see why not."
"They get used to us—in every way—and want change, don't you see that? They know every idea we have, every habit, every look good and bad—clever men, especially."
"So we know them!"
"Of course! But women don't like change, variety—the best of us don't. We aren't venturesome. Men are, you see, and that's the difference.... I don't know that we mightn't become so if we had the chance, but we've been deprived of it for so long that we have lost the courage, the desire for change almost. What we know we cling to, isn't that so?"
She rose to capture the wandering Elsie.
"I must go back now to get Sam'sdéjeuner. Won't you come? He'd love to see you—he often speaks about you and your husband."
Milly accepted readily enough. Although she did not agree with all that Marion Reddon had said, she was soothed by the talk, and she had a curiosity to see the Reddonménagein operation.
"So," she remarked, as they passed through the great gilt gate out to the noisy street, "you think a woman should have children to keep a man true to her."
"Tied to her," Marion Reddon emended, "and truer than he otherwise might be. Then they are something in case the husband quits altogether—if he turns out to be a bad lot. Most of them don't, of course; they are loyal and faithful. But if they do, then a woman has the children, and that's a world for any one."
"It makes it all the worse—if she has to support them without a man's help."
"I wonder! It's the incentive that makes work effective, isn't it?"
They crossed the vivid stream of the boulevard, the child between them, and mounted the hill towards the Panthéon.
"You know the time is coming when the woman will again be the responsible head of the family in form as she is in fact to-day, and then she will tolerate the man about her house just so long as she thinks him a fit father, and take another if she prefers him as the father of her children."
These anarchistic doctrines had a quaint absurdity on the lips of this mild, little New England woman. Milly, not having lived in circles where the fundamental relations of life were discussed with such philosophical frankness, was puzzled. The Reddons must be "queer" people, she thought.
"So I tell Sam when he gets fussy that if he isn't careful, I'llflanquer la porteto him and run the shop myself."
"My!"
"I could, too, and he knows it—which is very salutary for him when he gets uppish and dictatorial, as all men will at times."
"How could you?"
"You see I'm an expert taxidermist. I learned the thing vacations to help an uncle out, who was a collector. I could always make a living at it, and one for the kiddies too. That's the nub of the whole matter, as we used to say in the country."
(Later, Milly remembered this talk in its every bearing, and had reason to appreciate the profound truth of the last statement.)
"But you love your husband," Milly remarked as if to reassure herself.
"Of course I do, or I shouldn't be living with him and bearing his children. But he needs me and the children rather more than I need him—which is the better way."
The Reddons lived on the fourth floor back of an old lantern-jawed building that tilted uphill behind Ste. Geneviève. Milly found the stairs steep and dark and the odor of the old building anything but pleasant. Marion assured her cheerfully that the smell was not unhealthy, and as they kept their windows open most of the time they did not mind it. The three little rooms of theapartement meubléewere dingy, to say the least, but they looked out over the clock tower of Ste. Geneviève into an old college garden.
"I make Sam get the coffee mornings, and I do thedéjeuner; then an old woman comes in to clean us up and cook dinner, if we don't go out. Sam is rather given to the student cafes."
Mrs. Reddon moved dexterously within the confined limits of the closet kitchen and continued to describe her household. "You see we pay only thirty dollars a month for this place, and I cover the housekeeping bills with another thirty or a little more."
"Heavens! How can you do it?" Milly gasped.
Their pension was over that amount apiece.
"It's cheaper than anything at home, and lots more fun!"
Presently Sam Reddon came whistling upstairs. He stopped in histrionic surprise at sight of Milly.
"Not really, Milady! How did you find your way?"
"By accident."
"Ma," he sang out to his wife, "you aren't going to try one of your historic stews on Mrs. Bragdon—our one fashionable visitor of the season? Don't you think we had better make an occasion of this and adjourn to Foyot's?"
"No," his wife replied firmly, "you've had too many 'occasions' this month. One of mydéjeunerswon't hurt Mrs. Bragdon or you either."
"Well," he submitted dolefully, "she can't drink that red ink you mistakenly bought for wine, my dear.... I'll just fetch a bottle of something drinkable."
"Hurry then!Déjeuneris quite ready."
"You see," she observed placidly as Reddon departed, "he takes every excuse to escape his work and make a holiday. It wasn't altogetheryou, my dear!"
"It's so human!"
"It's so—Sam."
They had a very jolly luncheon, and afterwards, the old servant having arrived to take charge of the apartment and Elsie, the two women accompanied Reddon down the hill as far as the Sorbonne, where Marion was attending a course of lectures. Milly gathered that the little woman, in spite of her housekeeping, the one child on the spot, and another coming, had many lively interests and saw far more of Paris, which she loved, than Milly and her husband did. Both the Reddons lived carelessly, but lived hard every minute, taking all their chances, good and bad, of the minutes to come. It was a useful philosophy, but not one that Milly wholly admired.
Late that afternoon Milly met her husband in a frame of mind much more serene than it was before she saw the Reddons, and told him her momentous news. He seemed more pleased and less disturbed by it than she had supposed possible. A few days later he got the proof-sheets of Reinhard's novel from the trunk, where they had been lying neglected, and worked diligently on the foolish sketches required by the text to illustrate the hero and heroine in their "tense" moments. He finished the job before they left Paris in March, which was his male way of acknowledging the new obligation that was on its way.
Milly thought there might be something in Marion Reddon's ideas about men, after all.
After much debate Milly resolved to take a leaf from Marion Reddon's philosophy and not let her "condition" make any difference in her husband's plans; they should not give up the trip to Italy because of possible dangers or discomforts to her. So they went to Florence and afterwards to Rome, where the Reddons, having miraculously procured the price of the railroad tickets at the last moment, joined them and gave them lessons in how to see Europe as the Europeans see it. After a short visit to Venice, the two families settled for the summer in a quiet little village of the Austrian Tyrol, where the men tried to work, but for the most part climbed mountains and drank beer instead. Then in September they were back in Paris; the Reddons, who had exhausted all their resources, went home to America for the year's grind in the technical school; and the Bragdons settled in a small house in Neuilly. And there early in October Milly's little girl came safely into the world.
The small brick house with its scrap of garden and gravelled drive proved to be the pleasantest of Milly's European experiences. It was the most regularly domestic thing they did. The artist still went to the school in the mornings, but worked at home in the afternoons. Milly convalesced healthily and was properly absorbed in her baby and her house, so that she did not feel lonely during her husband's absences in Paris. Now that the child had got into the world, after all her fears and forebodings, Milly was surprised at the naturalness of the event. As Marion Reddon had said, it really simplified life. First consideration must always be the Baby. Mdle. Virginia, as she was called after Milly's mother, could do so little in this world at present that its parents' ambitions were necessarily curbed. Milly was an admirably devoted mother. She had always liked babies since she was a very little girl, and she became wholly wrapped up in her own human venture. The summer while the child was coming had drawn her very close to Marion Reddon, with whom she had established a staunch bond of the woman's league, offensive and defensive, against men. Marion, she felt, understood both babies and men. Although she could not approve of all Marion's ideas about the relations of the sexes, she admired the frank, brave, humorous way in which she solved her own life.
Curiously enough, the child seemed to set Milly apart from her husband—and from the world of men in general. Jack was no longer the supreme emotional fact in her life. He was a good husband; she was more conscious of that than ever before. He had been very tender and considerate of her during her pregnancy, keeping up her spirits, guarding her against folly, insisting on luxuries in their travels so that she might be thoroughly comfortable. Thus he went to Gossensass, not for his own profit and pleasure, but because the doctor they consulted in Venice advised this secluded mountain resort. And when the time of the birth came, he had been properly solicitous to see that she was provided with the best attendance and care, and Milly knew vaguely that he had spent lavishly of their hoard for this purpose. Milly was sure he loved her, and what was also very important to her, she was sure that he was "a good man,"—clean-minded and unselfish with a woman. Even if he should come to love her less passionately than at the beginning, he was the loyal sort of American, who would not let that fact furnish him with excuse for errancy. And she loved him, of course—was "quite crazy" about him, as she expressed it to Marion—and still believed in his glorious future as a great painter.
Yet in some indefinable way he had sunk from first to second place in her thoughts and might soon—who knows?—descend to third place in the family triangle. As for all other men, like Sam Reddon and the artists Jack brought to the house, they began to have for her the aspect of coarse and rather silly beings, essentially selfish and sensual. "Oh, he's just a man" became more and more in her mouth the mocking formula to indicate male inferiority. Later it was, "They're all alike, men." Thus the child brought out in Milly the consciousness of womanhood. She was more the mother now than the wife, as was natural, but she had no desire to become again the wife, paramount, to any man....
Meanwhile any one of those who came in upon them in the Neuilly house and saw the father and mother grouped about the baby's bassinet would say,—"An ideal young pair—has he much talent?"
This winter when she grew stronger Milly saw more of people than before. She had two very capable servants and her little household ran smoothly, though its cost made severe inroads on the "hoard." People she knew drifted through Paris and were glad to lunch or dine in the little Neuilly house. Sally Norton, who was now Mrs. Willie Ashforth, having finally secured the elderly bachelor, was one of the first to come. Sally laughed over the small house, over Milly's baby, over Milly as a mother. She seemed determined to consider Milly as an irresponsible joke in everything she did, but she was good-natured and lively as always, and absorbed in her own plans. The Ashforths were building at Highland Forest, a fashionable suburb outside of Chicago. Vivie had had a "desperate affair" with a divorced man, etc., etc. Then the Gilberts turned up unexpectedly one day, gracious and forgiving to Milly, and apparently very much bored with themselves in Paris. Milly gave them a nice little dinner, to which she had the smartest people she knew, which was her way of "getting even" with Nettie for the snubs. Others came more frequently as the spring influx of Americans arrived. Occasionally Jack complained of the time these idle wanderers consumed, especially of the precious afternoons lost when they came for luncheon and stayed until tea. Milly thought it selfish of him to object to "her one pleasure," now that "she was tied up in the house." Perhaps he felt so too, for he said no more, and remained at the school to work when there was likely to be company at the Neuilly house. On the whole he was amiably indulgent with his wife, according to the best American tradition.... So with friends, new and old, the second year of their foreign life drew on towards summer. The baby flourished, and all was well. They began to talk of summer plans.
A cheap place in the country was imperative, for by this time their "hoard" had shrunk to a mite in three figures, and unless Big Brother, who had been doing well in Big Business by all accounts, should remember to send over additional funds as he had promised, they must return to America in the autumn. Jack seemed loath to remind Big Brother of their needs as Milly wanted him to do. Yet he must have more time: he was not yet ready to get a living out of his pictures. He had not done enough work, he said. Milly, who had expected that in a year or so he would become an accomplished painter, was disturbed. She found the oils he was doing,—the picture of her beside the baby's bassinet on the terrace, for instance,—disappointing. It was distinctly less understandable and amusing than his pen-and-ink work had been, and she felt a certain relief when he did some comic sketches of the Brittany nurses to send to a magazine. His hand had not lost the old cunning, if it had not gained the new. Was it possible that her husband was not born to be a great painter?... "I don't know about such things," she murmured into the baby's ear. "Jack must decide for himself what's best."
She found it very convenient to have a husband to take upon himself decision and responsibility, the two most annoying things in life.
After much of the usual futile discussion they decided upon Klerac, a little place on the coast of Brittany, which certain artists whom Bragdon knew recommended. One American landscapist of established reputation painted in that region, and around him had gathered a number of his countrymen, in the hope of acquiring if not his skill at least some of his commercial talent for self-exploitation.
So the end of June found them settled comfortably enough in the Hotel du Passage just across the bay from Douarnenez, where the great one had his studio. Milly, who usually had some difficulty in adjusting herself to a new situation and missed the freedoms of her own house, took to Klerac after the first few days of strangeness. The tiny village and the sleepy country were utterly unlike anything she had ever seen or dreamed of before. Green branches of broad chestnut trees overhung the dark water of the little bay, and a sea of the deepest purple lay out beyond the headland and boomed against the sand-dunes. The bay and the brilliant sea were perpetually alive with the fishing craft, which were picturesquely adorned with colored sails. And inland, only a few steps from all this vivid coloring of the sea, green lanes meandered between lofty hedges of thick blackberry vines. Always, even among the remoter fields, there was the muffled murmur of the sea on the sand and the tang of salt in the air. The queer, dark little people of the place still wore about their daily tasks their picturesque costumes, and spoke little French. One met them as in an opera, gathering kelp on the beach, driving their little tip carts through the lanes, or singing beside their thatched cottages.
From her first exploratory walks with her husband Milly returned quite ravished by the quality of the place, its beauty of colored sea and peaceful country, and the little gray houses sheltered by large trees. Here she dreamed, in this fragrant salty air, they would have an enchanting summer withdrawn from the world, and great deeds would be done by her husband. "I could almost paint myself here," she said to him, "it all looks so quaint and lovely." Jack liked the place, and quickly set up his easel under the trees down by the stone pier where the fishing-boats landed and where there was always a noisy, lively scene. Milly idled near by in the sand with the baby. But the work did not go fast. She thought that Jack must be fagged after the long winter indoors, and urged him to rest for a while. They took to walking through the lanes and along the beaches. They found little to say to each other; sometimes she thought that she bored him and he would rather be alone. They were suffering, naturally, from the too great intimacy of the past two years. Neither had a spontaneous thought to offer the other,—no reaction to arouse surprise and discussion. Milly could not comprehend her husband's restless depression, his wish to be at something which he could not formulate to himself clearly enough to do. She decided that he was developing nerves and recommended bathing in the sea. When he took to painting again, she would wander along the beach by herself and watch the boys fishing forécrevissesin the salt pools among the rocks, or lay prone on the sand gazing at the colored sails on the dark sea. In spite of all the peace and the beauty about her she was lonely, and asked herself sometimes if this was what it meant to be an artist's wife. Was this all? Was life to be like this for years and years?...
Their hotel was a rambling low building surrounded by high walls, with a high terrace behind, from which there was a glimpse of the sea and which was well shaded by branching plane trees. Here on calm summer nights the dinner table was spread for thepensionnaires, who gradually arrived. There were a few French, of a nondescript sort, a fat American from Honolulu, who had been rolling about Europe since the Spanish War, in which he had had some part. Then there was a Russian lady with two children and a Finnish maid. She was already there when they arrived and kept by herself, taking her meals at a little table with her oldest child. This Russian, a Madame Saratoff, piqued Milly's curiosity, and she soon became acquainted with her. One day when they happened to be alone on the terrace, the Russian lady turned to her with a swift smile,—
"You are American?" and when Milly admitted it, she added, "One can always tell the American women from the English."
She spoke English easily, with the slightest sort of accent that merely added distinction to whatever she said. Madame Saratoff was still young, and though not a beautiful woman, had an air of privilege and breeding, with something odd in the glitter of her eyes and the wolfish way in which her curving upper lip revealed strong white teeth. She had a good figure, as Milly had already recognized, and she dressed well, with great simplicity. Milly felt interested in her, and the women talked for an hour. Milly reported to her husband:—
"She's really a Baroness. Her husband is in the diplomatic service—off in the east somewhere, and she's here alone with the children and her maid. Don't you think she's interesting looking?"
The artist replied indifferently,—
"Not particularly—she has fine hands."
He seemed to have noticed that about her.
They quickly became better acquainted with Madame Saratoff, who, it seemed, had been in Brittany before and knew the coast thoroughly. She explained that the little hotel became unendurable later with thecanaille des artistes, and so she had rented an oldmanoirin the neighborhood, which was being put to rights for her. The next afternoon the three walked to see themanoirthrough a maze of little lanes. It was a lovely old gray building with crumbling walls and had evidently once been the seat of a considerable family. But only a half dozen rooms were now habitable, and in the cracks of the great walls that surrounded the garden thick roots of creepers twisted and curled upwards. From the other end of the garden, through a break in the old hedge, there was a glimpse of the sea, and in one corner was the ruin of a chapel surmounted by an iron cross. Madame Saratoff showed them all the rooms, into which men were putting some furniture she had bought in the neighborhood—oldarmoiresand brass-bound chests of black oak as well as some modern iron beds and dressing-tables. Milly admired the peaceful graymanoir, and Bragdon observed as they retraced their way alone through the lanes:—
"That woman has a lot of energy in her! It shows in her movements—she has personality, character."
Milly had never heard him say as much as that about any other woman, and she wondered how such large generalizations could be made from the fact that a woman was fitting up an old house. She was vaguely jealous, as any woman might be, that her husband should choose just those qualities for commendation.
She went often thereafter to themanoirwhile her husband was painting, and marvelled at the ease and sureness with which the Russian installed herself, her only helpers being the stupid peasants, who seemed to understand no language but their own jargon.
"I'm used to driving cattle," the Russian explained to Milly with a little laugh. "You see my father had estates in southern Russia, and I lived there a good deal before I was married."
"They must be quite important," Milly reported to Jack. "They seem to know people all over Europe."
"Oh, that's Russian," he explained.
"And Baron Saratoff is away on a most important mission."
"Absent husbands ought to be!"
"I don't believe she cares for him much."
"How can you tell that so soon?"
"Oh!" Milly replied vaguely, as if that were a point few women could keep from other women.
As a matter of fact the Russian lady had given Milly some new and startling lights upon marriage.
"I am," she told Milly in her precise speech, "what you call the 'show wife.' I go to parties, to court—all rigged up,—you say rigged, no?—dressed then very grand with my jewels. And I have children, see!" She pointed to the healthy little Saratoffs playing in the garden. "My husband goes away on his business—makes long journeys. He amuses himself. When he comes back, I have a child,—voilà." She laughed and showed her white teeth. "But I have my vacations sometimes, too, like this."
Milly thought that the Russian type of marriage must be much inferior to the American, at least the Chicago variety, where if there was any going away from home, it was usually the wife who went, and she confided this opinion to Jack, who said with a laugh:—
"Oh, you can never understand these foreigners. She's probably like every one else.... But I'd like to paint her and get that smile of hers."
"Why don't you ask her?"
"Perhaps I will one of these days."
The hotel gradually filled up. The great painter had come and with him his satellites, chiefly young American women, who "painted all over the place," as Bragdon put it. The longtable d'hôteunder the plane trees was a cheerful if somewhat noisy occasion these summer nights, with the black, star-strewn canopy above. They all drank the bottled cider and talked pictures and joked and sang when so moved. Even if the spirit was somewhat cheaply effervescent, like the cider, there was plenty of talk, clashing of eager ideas, and Milly liked it even more than Bragdon. He seemed older than the other artists, perhaps because he was married and less given to idle chatter. The great man singled him out for companionship after the first week, and gave patronizing praise to his work.
"You are still young," he said, with a sigh for his own sixty years. "Wait another ten years and you may find something to say."
Jack, repeating these words to his wife, added,—"And where do you suppose we'd be if I should wait another ten years? On the street."
Tell an American to wait ten years in order to have something to say!
"He's jealous," Milly pronounced. "You're going to do something stunning this summer, I just know it."
"How do you know it?" he asked teasingly.
"Because we can't wait ten years!"
"Um," the artist sighed, "I should think not."
Just how it came about Milly never remembered, but in the weeks that followed it was arranged that Jack should do the Russian lady's portrait. Milly flattered herself at the time that she had produced this result. Madame Saratoff came rarely to the hotel after she was installed in her oldmanoir, but she often drove to the beach for her bath and took Milly home with her for luncheon. And Jack would join them late in the long afternoon for tea. On one of these occasions the affair was settled.
Bragdon decided to do the figure out of doors in a corner of the ruined garden wall with a clustering festoon of purple creeper above and a narrow slit of sea in the distant background. Against the gray and green and purple of the wall he placed Madame Saratoff, who was tall, with a supple, bony figure. It was for him a daring and difficult composition. The first afternoon, while the figure was being lined in with charcoal, Milly was much excited. She tried to keep quite still, but Madame Saratoff persisted in making little jokes and impertinent comments upon the artist. She did not seem to feel the importance of the event. Milly thought to herself, "How wonderful if he should do a really stunning picture and have it in the Salon next season!" and she said to herself, "Portrait of the Baroness Saratoff by John Archer Bragdon." That would be a start towards fame!
But the start was scarcely perceptible those first days. Milly could make nothing of the blurred canvas and was depressed. Jack seemed more intent on watching the lithe figure, with the mottled flesh tones, the steel-blue eyes, the mocking mouth than in putting brush to canvas. When Milly complained of his dawdling, the Baroness remarked with a curl of her lips,—
"How do you expect an artist to work with his wife hanging over his brushes and counting every stroke?"
Milly pretended to be hurt and ran off to the other end of the garden. She asked her husband on their way back if she were really in the way, and though he laughed at her question and considered the Russian woman's remark as merely one of her rather feline jokes, Milly did not come the next day. She said the baby was sick, and needed her attention. It was several days before she returned to themanoir, and then because Jack made a point of it. She was astonished at the progress which he had made. The picture had suddenly leaped into life.
"See!" the Russian remarked, indicating the canvas with a slow sweep of her long, thin fingers. "The painter has done all that without his wife's help."
Milly resented the joke. But it was true that in these few days the picture had grown surprisingly: the pose of the tall figure, the background was all firmly worked in, and he had begun to define the features,—the perilous part. Already something of the subtle mockery of the Russian woman's expression was there. Milly turned away. For the first time she felt outside her husband's world and in the way. Presently, in spite of the Baroness's protests, she took little Paul Saratoff to the beach. When her husband came in at the hotel just in time for dinner and expressed surprise that she had not returned to themanoirfor him, she said coldly,—
"Oh, I didn't care to—I didn't want to interrupt."
"Anna expected you back to tea."
"I guess not."
Bragdon gave her a swift glance, but said nothing. This was a new aspect of his wife, and it evidently puzzled him. He was too much absorbed by his picture, however, to give much heed to anything.
Latterly another American had joined the circle around the dinner table on the terrace,—a long, lanky young man who had been in the navy during the late war and was now engaged in the production of literature. That is, he contributed profusely to those American magazines with flaming covers stories of love and adventure in strange seas,—the highly seasoned bonbon entertainment for the young. He was southern by birth with a pronounced manner towards women. And Milly found him attractive. Roberts and the fat Hawaiian wit had many encounters that kept the table stirred. To-night they were discussing the needs of the artist nature,—and "temperament." That was a term not much in vogue in the Chicago of Milly's time, but it seemed to occupy endlessly the talkers about the table at the Hotel du Passage. Milly never understood exactly what was meant by "having a temperament," or the "needs of the artistic temperament" except vaguely that it was a license to do flighty things that all reasonable Chicago folk would deplore.
To-night the Hawaiian was maintaining his favorite thesis,—that the first duty of the artist was to himself, to preserve and make effective his "temperament." Modern life, especially in America, he held, madebourgeoisof us all. The inevitable ruin of the artist was to attempt to live according to thebourgeoisideal of morality. (That was another term which puzzled Milly always,—bourgeois. These young artists used it with infinite contempt, and yet she concluded shrewdly that the people she had known best and respected all her life would have to come under this anathema. To be healthy and normal, to pay one's bills and be true to husband or wife, was to be justbourgeois. According to that standard Jack wasbourgeois, she supposed, and she was glad of it, and yet a little afraid at the same time, because it seemed to mark him out for artistic ineptitude.) But the fat man was talking heatedly, and Milly was listening.
"In our society artists have no chance to experiment in life, to perfect their natures untrammelled by public opinion, as the artists of old did." (And he cited a lot of names, beginning, of course, with Benvenuto and including Goethe, but Milly was not interested in these historical cases. It was the immediate application of the principle she was waiting for.)
"In those days," some one said, "artists were content to live in their own class like actors and had no social ambitions."
"And much better for them, too!" the Honolulu man put in.
"How about Leonardo and Petrarch?" the great artist queried from his end of the table, and then for a few moments the conversation got off into the question of the social position of artists in the renaissance and their relation to their patrons, which bored Milly, but the Hawaiian brought it back to his point.
"So that's why we have no real creators to-day in any of the arts," he asserted. "They're merely a lot of little citizens who daub canvass to support a wife and a respectable house or pay the butcher's bill with fluffy stories about silly women and impossible heroes." (This, Milly thought, was a raw stab at young Roberts. She wondered how men could say such things to one another and still remain friends.) "They have bank-accounts and go to dinner-parties."
To which the story-teller retorted when he got his chance:—
"What you fellows always mean by 'living' is messing around with some woman who isn't your own wife. A good many of our modern citizens manage to live their own lives that way, and what does it do for them?"
Milly approved.
"That's just the trouble: society damns them and finishes them if they don't behave like properbourgeois. Take the case of——" and he cited an instance of a young artist who was having much newspaper notoriety over his passional experiments. "Women kill art, anyway," he concluded with a growl.
Thereat Roberts' southern blood was touched, and he launched into a glowing sentimental eulogy of Woman as the Inspirer of Men towards the Noblest Things, and incidentally of the peace and the purity of marriage. Milly liked what he said, although it seemed to her rather florid in phrasing, and she felt an instinctive hostility towards the fat gentleman from Honolulu, whom she suspected of disgusting immorality. (Later in New York she was astonished to learn that Roberts had had a very scandalous divorce from a wife, while the Hawaiian lived a laborious and apparently upright life, supporting a mother, as a newspaper correspondent. She learned then that men's expressed views had very little to do with their conduct, and that an ideal was often merely the sentimental reaction from experience.)
Just as Milly, thinking she heard Virginia cry in the room above, slipped away from the table some one said,—
"A man who has anything to do in the world will never let a woman stand in his way. If he does, he is soft, and that's the end of him."
Milly felt moved to put a word in here in behalf of her sex, but the child's cry came more loudly and as she left she heard her husband ask mildly,—
"And how about the children?"
"Oh, the kids—that's woman's business," the fat man replied carelessly. "Pass the cigarettes, will you," and the talk went off somewhere else....
Children were not all "woman's business," Milly felt indignantly. She had surprised her pretty little maid Yvonne in a lonely lane one moonlight night, in company with a tall man, who did not look like a Breton. She had reported the fact to her husband, with her suspicions as to the tall man, observing,—"Men are so horrid!" to which Jack had merely laughed easily. She had scolded him for his frivolity, also scolded Yvonne, who cried, yet somehow seemed to smile through her tears.
To-night when her husband came up for bed, she asked seriously,—
"You don't believe all that stuff Steve Belchers was saying, do you?"
"What stuff?"
"About artists and women."
Bragdon yawned and laughed. Milly came close to him and put her arm about his neck.
"You don't feel that your temperament is ruined by marriage, do you?"
"Never knew I had one before," he replied jokingly.
"Because you know if you ever want your freedom, you can have it."
"Thanks."
"If you need that sort of experience, I shan't stand in your way," she concluded in a heroic burst....
Nevertheless she was glad that her husband had shown no symptoms hitherto of this dangerous "temperament" and was content to be asbourgeoisas the best. All the time there was growing in her a sense of sex distinction, and a dislike, or rather disapproval, of men as a whole. God, she was convinced, as the Southerner had said, had meant the perfect type to be Woman, rather than Man.
One day the noisy chatter at the mid-day meal was interrupted by the terrific splutter and throbbing of a motor-car. Those were still the days when touring cars with strangely clad occupants were less familiar, even on French roads, than they have since become, and the machines announced themselves from afar by their ponderous groans. Very few cars, indeed, got down to this secluded Brittany village which was reached by only one road of the third class that penetrated the little peninsula from Morlaix, a number of miles away to the north.
So every one left the table and crowded to the terrace wall to observe the arrivals. As a dusty, becapped and begoggled figure got down from the seat beside the driver, Milly exclaimed excitedly, "Why, it's Roy Gilbert!" and ran towards the courtyard. The car finally disgorged Nettie Gilbert and her uninteresting fourteen-year-old daughter. They came in for luncheon, and their story was soon told. Paris was hot, and in despair of dispelling Roy's thickening ennui at his European exile, which threatened to terminate their trip, Mrs. Gilbert had induced her husband to charter the car for a tour of Normandy and Brittany. Having done all the north-coast watering-places and remembering that the Bragdons were staying at this little place "with a funny name," they had decided to make them a call. Roy Gilbert ate copiously and denounced hotels, food, and the people, while Milly and Nettie Gilbert talked Chicago and Baby.
"We want to see a 'Pardon,'" Mrs. Gilbert announced at last, "and we've come to take you and your husband with us."
It was the season of that famous Brittany festival, so Baedeker said, and they had seen some evidences of it in the little villages through which they had passed. Did Milly know of a good one? The Gilberts were as æsthetically lazy as they were weak in French, and of course quite helpless in Brittany, whose peasants seemed to them dirty baboons with a monkey language. Milly quickly recalled that some of the artists had been talking of the famousPardonat Poldau, a little fisher-settlement at the extreme tip of the western coast, where the costumes were said to be peculiarly rich and quaint. She had wanted to visit it with Jack, but he had become so much absorbed in his new picture that they had given up the idea. And there was Baby—she did not like to leave her.
"Yvonne will do all right," her husband urged. "Better take the chance—I'll look after Virgie."
So after much encouragement, though with misgivings, Milly consented to accompany the Gilberts in their car for a couple of days and show them the glories of the Brittany countryside.
"I owe Nettie so much," she explained privately to her husband, by way of apology. "I can't very well refuse—and they are so helpless, poor dears!"
"You'll have a bully time," he replied encouragingly. "Don't worry about anything. I'll watch Yvonne like a cat."
"And telegraph me instantly if anything goes wrong."
"Of course.... Don't hurry back if they should want you to go farther. It'll be good for you."
"Oh, not more than two days—I couldn't."
She did not give a thought to the Russian woman, or to anything but the baby. (Afterwards she became convinced that the whole plan had been arranged with skilful prescience by the wicked Baroness in order that she might have the artist to herself these few days....)
The departure in the freshness of the August morning was a great event. Every one in the hotel, including thepatronin his cook's white costume, thepatronne, the grinning ape of a waiter, all the artists, and half the village gathered to watch the motor get under way. The lumbering ark of a car was laden with bags and trunks and bundles, for the Americans meant to be comfortable. Then Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert, their natural amplitude swollen by their dust-coats, goggles, and veils, mounted with stately complacency to their respective seats, and Milly tucked herself into a corner. Then the ratlike French chauffeur attempted to crank the engine, and perspiring, red in the face, spluttering with oaths, made many desperate efforts to arouse his monster. There were sympathetic murmurs from the audience. "Now he's got her—ah—oh—no! Hang to it Pierrot, etc." Finally Pierre exploded in a tragictiradeto his employer, who sat stolidly through all the rumpus, merely asking at the end, "What's he saying, Milly?"
"He can do nothing with the curséd beast," Milly abridged.
"That's evident," Gilbert remarked with cynical satisfaction.
"He thinks it's the water; he warned you not to come down here."
It seemed as if Milly's little trip was not to come off, after all, when Bragdon, who had picked up some knowledge of the new machines in his earlier singlestate, tipped up the hood and dove for the carburetor. After a time he signalled to the Hawaiian to work the crank, and then with a whir, a rumble, at last a clear bellow, the monster responded, trembled, turned its snout up the narrow road, and disappeared. Milly threw a kiss to her husband, who waved his hat in answer. He had saved the day, and she was proud of him.
They had a wonderful time, in spite of Pierre and his balky car, bowling along the winding, leafy roads not far from the sea, through little gray stone villages whose inhabitants turned outen masse, including children and animals, to witness their stately progress of ten miles an hour. They got stuck once in a ford and had to be fished out with three yoke of cream-colored bulls and a long ship's rope. That was about noon, and they decided to lunch at the next inn, though it did not look inviting. However, Milly's French coaxed a tolerable meal from the fat housewife whom they discovered cleaning fish in the kitchen, and even the stodgy Roy mellowed under the influence of fresh fish and a drinkable bottle of wine which he and Milly discovered somewhere.
That evening, without further mishap, they rumbled into the hamlet of Poldau. For the last hour they had seen signs of the comingfête. All the natives, arrayed in their best clothes, were drifting westward to the rocky cape, where, perched on a lonely cliff, was the tiny chapel, "Our Lady of the Guard," which was the scene of thePardonon the morrow. Before they entered Poldau night had fallen, and the long yellow beams from the powerfulPhareglanced out across the sullen waters and the level land. It was beneath this lofty lighthouse they slept, in a clean, bare little inn. Milly, lying in her cushiony bed, could hear the waves grumbling around the rocks, and watch the sweep of that golden beam of light,—speaking to the distant passers-by upon the Atlantic, warning them of the dangers of this treacherous coast....
It was the first time she had been separated from her family, and she lay awake long hours, restless and sleepless, wondering whether Yvonne would remember to pull up the extra blanket over Virginia before the early morning dampness. And she thought about her husband, fleetingly, contrasting him with Roy Gilbert, who seemed to have grown heavier in mind as well as in person these last years. Roy was surely what the artists calledbourgeois, but she liked him—he was so kind and good to Nettie. She felt at home, getting back to the familiarbourgeoisatmosphere of the Gilberts, where life was made easy and comfortable, and you knew every idea any one would advance before the words were half spoken....
Milly was wakened before dawn by the sound of a drunken quarrel beneath her window. Some Breton evidently had begun to celebrate thePardontoo soon; a shrill woman's voice broke the silence with unintelligible reproaches. There was the sound of blows, of crashing glass, a scuffle, sobs,—then silence, broken now and again by fresh sobs. Ah, those men,—men!... The lamp in thePharewent out: it was dawn. Milly fell into a broken sleep.
ThePardonitself, they all agreed, was wonderfully impressive and picturesque, as Baedeker had promised. The little chapel on the cliffs was stuffed with kneeling women in their stiff, starched coifs and heavy velvet-trimmed skirts. The men, slinking up sheepishly, as always to religious ceremonies, fell on their knees on the rocky ground all about the chapel when the priests advanced with the sacred emblems, and prayed vigorously with tight-closed eyes. The strangers, under the guidance of the chauffeur, who maintained a supercilious disdain for these "stupid Brittany pigs," took their position at the apex of the cliff, where they could see everything to advantage. The Gilbert girl kodaked the kneeling throng, which distressed Milly; she thought the people might resent it, but they paid no attention to the Americans.
Her own eyes were filled with unaccountable tears. The symbols of the Catholic religion always affected her in this way; while Nettie Gilbert stared rather disapprovingly at the superstitious ceremony. In spite of its quaint mediævalism, it seemed to Milly quite human,—the gathering together of suffering, sinning human beings around the gray chapel on the storm-beaten coast—"Our Lady of the Guard"—their prayers, the absolution granted by the robed priests, and the going forth to another year of trials and temptations, efforts and sins.... Just below the chapel, withdrawn only a few feet from the religious ceremony, was a cluster of tents, sheltering hurdy-gurdys, merry-go-rounds, cook-shops, and cider—plenty of cider. A few indifferent males, bedecked in their short coats brightly trimmed with yellow braid, were already feasting, even while the host was being elevated above the kneeling throng. But most of the people, with reverently bent heads and murmuring lips, received the sacrament, kneeling around the gray chapel. It was solemn and moving, Milly thought, and she wished that Jack might have had the experience....
"Baedeker says," Roy Gilbert pronounced in her ear, in the midst of the ceremony, "that there must be Spanish blood among these people because their costumes show Spanish designs.... They all look like Irish or monkeys to me."
Milly smiled responsively to him.
"The costumes are lovely, aren't they?"
The crowd of women worshippers had burst forth from the chapel: there was a swarm of white and black figures over the rocky headland. The faces beneath the broad white caps did not seem to Milly monkeylike. They were weather-beaten and bronzed like their coast, but eager and smiling, and some of the younger ones quite bonny and sweet. And the young men sidled up to the young women here as elsewhere in the world. Milly was full of the spirit of forgiveness that the ceremony had taught: men and women must mutually forgive and strive to do better. She said this to Nettie Gilbert, who seemed only moderately impressed with the semi-pagan scene.
They went down the hill to the booths, which were already thronged with a noisy crowd of eating and drinking peasants, and straightway became too evil-smelling for the Americans.
"If the ladies like this barbaric show," the chauffeur confided to Gilbert, "there is an even larger one to be seen a day's run farther north on the coast at the celebrated shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupré."
So they went on that afternoon to "the other show," as Gilbert expressed it. Milly's doubts were quickly overborne: they must have her longer now that she was with them; she could return any time if necessary by rail; they would telegraph that evening, etc. And they set forth hopefully again in search of the picturesque. The largerpardonproved disappointing, less religious and characteristic, more like a country fair. The next afternoon they meant to return to Klerac, in time for dinner, but the car balked and finally gave out altogether. All Pierre's ingenuity, as well as his heartfelt curses, availed nothing, and they had to abandon it. They drove to the nearest railroad station, which proved to be many kilometres distant, and waited there half a day for a train.
Milly left the Gilberts at Morlaix. They were bound for Paris, and judging from Roy Gilbert's remarks they would shortly be on their way back to America and "some decent living." Four months of Europe and strange beds was all he could endure at a stretch. Milly laughed at his complaints. The way the rich spent their money had always seemed to her a little stupid. If she and Jack had the Gilberts' money! She mused of all the exciting freedom they could get out of it, while the little one-horse trap she had hired at the station rattled her over the hard road towards Klerac.
She had enjoyed her trip greatly, yet after the five days' absence she was eager to get back and see her child. She even looked forward to the noisy Hotel du Passage, with its cluttered table of talkative artists and her own two small rooms. As she had said to Nettie Gilbert, "I'm something of a cat and like my own garret best," even if it were a traveller's garret. And though she had liked being with the Gilberts, going over old Chicago times with Nettie, and had enjoyed the car and the luxurious, easy way of travelling, she suspected that long contact with these good people would be boresome. They were so persistently occupied with how they should sleep and eat, with all their multitudinous contrivances for comfort, with fear of the dust or of getting tired, that they had little energy for other things. She decided that the Gilbert sort made a fetich of comfort and missed most of the landscape of life in their excessive attention to the roadbed. Perhaps that was what clever folk meant by beingbourgeois. If so, she hoped that she should never bebourgeoisto the extent the Gilberts were.
Thus Milly, in a properly contented frame of mind, urged the peasant lad to whip up his lazy pony and get her more quickly home to her family.
There was a midsummer silence about the hotel in the early afternoon when Milly arrived. Yvonne, so thepatronneinformed her, had taken the baby to the dunes, and thither Milly, without stopping to change her dusty dress, set out to find her. She descried her little Brittany maid on the sands safely above tide-water, and by her side a small white bundle that made Milly's heart beat faster.
Virginia received her returned mother with disappointing indifference, more concerned for the moment in the depth of the excavation into the sand which her nurse was making for her benefit. Milly covered her with kisses, nevertheless, while Yvonne explained that all had gone well, "très, très bien, Madame."Bébé, it seemed, had slept and eaten as a celestialbébéshould. They were looking for Madame yesterday, but Monsieur had not been disturbed even before thedépêchearrived.... And Monsieur was at his work as usual at the other madame'smanoir.
After a time Milly, wearied of bestowing unreciprocated caresses upon her daughter, left her to the mystery of the hole in the sand and sauntered up the beach. Dotted here and there in the sunlight at favorable points along the dunes were the broad umbrellas of the artists, who were doubtless all busily engaged in trying to transfer a bit of the dazzling sunlight and dancing purple sea to their little squares of canvases. To Milly this ceaseless effort to comment on nature had something of the ridiculous,—perhaps supererogatory would be a better word. It was so much pleasanter to look at the landscape, and easier! Offshore the dun-colored sails of the fishing fleet dipped and fluttered where the sturdy men of Douarnenez were engaged in their task of getting the herring from the sea. That seemed to Milly more real and important in a world of fact. Such a view betrayed thebourgeoisin her, she suspected, but according to the Hawaiian all women werebourgeoisat heart.
After a time her feet turned into one of the lanes, and she followed unconsciously the well-known path until the gray wall of the ruinedmanoircame in sight. She paused for a moment—she had not meant to go there—then impulsively went forward, crossed the empty courtyard, and finding the garden door ajar pushed it open. The drowsy midsummer silence seemed to possess both house and garden. The place was deserted. In the corner stood the painter's large canvas on the easel, with the brushes and palette on the bench by its side, as if just abandoned, and one of Madame Saratoff's large hats of coarse straw.
Milly went over and examined the picture. It was almost finished, in that last stage where the artist can play with his creation, fondly touching and perfecting infinitesimal details, knowing that the thing has really been "pulled off." And it was triumphantly done! Even to Milly's untutored eyes, the triumph of it was indubitable. There the Russian stood on her thin, lithe haunches, her head tipped a little back disdainfully as in life, the open mouth about to emit some cold brutality, the long curving lip daringly drawn up over the teeth,—the look of "one who eats what she wants," as she herself had said one day. Milly shuddered before the insolence of the painted face. She felt that this was one of the few creatures on the earth whom she feared and hated. Instinctively she made a gesture as if she would deface the portrait. The face seemed to answer her with a sneer,—"Well, and if you did, what good would that do? Would he loveyouany more for that?" it said, and she paused.
Even the background and all the details were admirably conceived and rendered,—the crumbling, lichened wall, in cold gray, with the gnarled root of the creeper and the wreath of purple blossoms, in sharp contrast to the pallor of the face and the bold assurance of the figure. The light fell across the canvas, leading down to a slab of vivid purple water in the far distance. There was nothing pretty or affected or conventional about the painting: it was life caught and rendered with the true boldness of actuality. Milly, gazing in fascination at the creation of line and color and light, realized that here was the work of a new man, totally unknown to her. Its maker was no youthful pupil, stumbling at his set task. No dabbler, this one, no trivial illustrator or petty drawing-room amuser, but a man who had found within himself something long sought for. She shuddered and turned away. So that was what it was to be an Artist! She understood, and she hated it,—Art and all the tribe of artists big and little. In this strange woman, whom chance had put in his way, he had seen what she had not noticed, and he had projected what he saw. He was able to divine the soul of things beneath their superficial appearance, and he was able, exultantly, to project in material form that hidden meaning for others to see and understand, if they would. And that was what an artist, a real artist, was for.
Naturally Milly did not analyze closely her own troubled mind. Here was plain evidence of her husband's being in which she no longer had the smallest share. She had been slightly jealous, more than she would admit, that other time at the beginning of the portrait because of Jack's absorption in his subject and his work. Her egotism had been wounded. But that was trifling compared with the present feeling. In this completed creation she no more existed than the fly which rested for a moment upon the painted canvas. His creation had nothing whatsoever to do with her. And something deeper than egotism, far deeper than jealousy, rose from the depths of her nature in antagonism—a sex-antagonism to the whole affair. Her husband had a new mistress—not necessarily the Russian woman, for that idea had not yet come to her—but his Art. And he might follow this mistress whither she beckoned,—to poverty, defeat, or victory,—unmindful of her and her child, forgetting them like idle memories in the pursuit of his blind purpose. It was a force inimical to her and antagonistic to all orderly living, as the Hawaiian had said,—a demonic force which rises in the midst of society to give the lie to all the pretences men make to themselves and call "civilization."
Milly hated it, instinctively. Jack must paint no more such pictures for love or for money, if their life were not to end in disaster. Did he know what he had done with this Russian woman?... Where were they, anyway?
She looked up at the silentmanoir. The green blinds were drawn to shut out the western sun. Milly knew the long, high room with its timbered ceiling which Madame Saratoff had restored and furnished in English style, and where, for the most part, she lived. The two were there together now—she was sure of it. A new and fiercer emotion swept Milly towards the house: she would discover them in their shame, in their cruel selfishness. But she stopped on the stairs, suffocated by her passion. She felt their presence just above her with a physical sense of pain, but she lacked the strength to go forward. A terrible sense of weakness in face of her defeat made her tremble. Her heart was broken, she said; what mattered it now what they did. She had no doubts: all was revealed as if she saw them in each other's arms. No man could have discovered the secret of a woman's inmost being, if she had not voluntarily yielded to him the key....
After a time she left the place, slipped out through the garden-gate into the green field behind themanoirand wandered unseeingly along the hedge, and at length flung herself down on the ground, sobbing. She was alone, so utterly alone. The one in whose hands she had put her whole life had betrayed her and deserted her. It was worse than death. They were there in that dim, silent room, in the utmost intimacy, and she lay here outside, robbed and abandoned.... She rose to get farther away from the place, when she heard steps approaching on the other side of the hedge. Kneeling close to the ground, she could see through the thick roots of the hedge and watch the two as they came up the lane. It was her husband and the Russian woman. They were not closeted in the house. She had been wrong. They had been for a stroll after his work, and were coming back now for their tea, silently and companionably, side by side. For the merest moment Milly had a sense of relief: it might not be true what her heart had said, after all. But almost at once she knew that it made no difference just what their relations were or had been.
She could read their faces as they came slowly towards her,—the Russian woman's slanting glance from covered eyes of hateful content as she looked at the artist. The "one who eats what she wants!"... They walked very slowly, as if full of thoughts and weary with the day. Bragdon's head was high, his glance fell far off across the fields, his mind intent on something within, his brow slightly contracted as in stern resolve. He was pale, and he seemed to his wife older, much older than she remembered. He was a man, not the careless boy she had married so many, many years ago, and her heart tightened anew with intolerable pain.... His glance fell to the expectant face of his companion, and both smiled with profound intimacy as at a meeting where words are needless.... Milly's hand grasped the prickly vines of the hedge, and she held herself still until they had passed. No, it made no difference to her now what they thought or did. She knew.
She fled. She heard her name faintly through the din of rushing blood in her ears, but she stumbled across the field out into the lane, towards the sea. There followed the most atrocious hour Milly was ever to know in her life, while she wandered aimlessly to and fro on the lonely beach. Her marriage was over—that thought returned like a mournful chant in the storm of blind feeling. Latterly she had come to take her husband as a matter of course, as a part of the married life of a woman. Though she had said to Nettie Gilbert, "I'm as much in love with Jack as when I married him," and believed it, she hadn't been. But now that another had dared to take her husband from her, if only for a few days or hours, she was outraged. She persistently focussed her whole anguish upon this foreign creature with her vampire mouth, though she might know in the depth of her heart that her quarrel was not with the Russian or any woman, but with fate.... She kept repeating to herself,—"He doesn't love me any longer. He loves her—her!... He will be hers now—for a time. They are all like that,—artists. It'sbourgeoisto love one woman always." So Womanhood from the beginning of time seemed outraged in her person.
Had she not joyfully "given up everything for him," as all women did for the men they loved? (Even her worldly prospects when she married the penniless artist began to seem to her brighter than they really had been.) Had she not, at any rate, givenherselfto him, first, and always, and only? And borne him a child in pain and danger? What more could woman do? He was her debtor for eternity, as every man was to the woman who gave herself to him. And four years had barely passed before another one plucked him easily from her side!... Women were cheated always in the game of life because of their hearts, fated unfairly in the primal scheme of things. Marion Reddon knew—she probably had hadherexperiences. But at least she had the child.
On that note her heart became centred, and she hurried back to the hotel and began aimlessly to gather her clothes together and throw them into the trunks. She must take her child and leave at once. She did not want to see him again.... But where should she go—how? Jack always arranged everything for her: she couldn't even make out a time-table or buy a railroad ticket. Marriage had made her dependent—she would have to learn.
At this moment Bragdon entered the room. His face still wore the stern expression she had noted, which gave him the look of age.
"What are you doing?" he demanded abruptly.
"Don't you see—packing!"
"What for?... I've cabled home for more money—I'm going to stay here and paint."
She thought swiftly to herself that the Other had persuaded him to do what he had refused to do for her. She made no reply, but continued to put things blindly into the trunk.