When two human beings—above all when man and wife—meet at such tense moments, one of Virgil's beneficent clouds should descend upon them, hiding all, and they should be wafted apart to remote places, there to abide until once more a sense of the proportion and the harmony in this mundane system has taken possession of them, and they have become, if not gods and goddesses, at least reasonable human beings. The least the historian can do under the circumstances is to imitate Virgil and draw a merciful veil between the cruel battle-field and all profane eyes. The more so as few of the hot words then uttered, the sharp agony displayed, the giving and the baring of wounds have any real effect upon the result. What is done counts, and that is about all, always.
It might be that afterwards Milly derived some deeper understanding of herself, of her husband, and of the married way of life from the agony she then experienced. It might be that the young artist, headstrong in his first triumphant mastery, the first achievement of his whole being, entertained, for some moments at least, the idea of cutting the knot then and there and taking his freedom which he had surrendered at the altar, choosing what might seem to him then spiritual life instead of prolonged death. The blood was in his head, the scent of delirious deeds which he knew now that he could do. But he was an honest and loyal young American, no matter what he had done: he could not hesitate long. One glance at the sleeping form of his small child, dependent upon him for the best in life, probably settled the matter.
In the calm of the still night itwassettled—and by him.
The little colony of the Hotel du Passage were genuinely concerned over the hurried departure of the Bragdons, who were much liked. All—but one—were at the pier that September morning to wish them farewell and good luck and much happiness. It was understood that family matters had recalled them unexpectedly to the States. Too bad! Bragdon was a promising chap, the great painter pronounced atdéjeuner,—willing to work, intelligent, with his own ideas. Had any one seen Madame Saratoff's portrait? He had kept very quiet about that—perhaps it had not come off. Well, he needed years of hard work, which he wouldn't get in America, worse luck. With a sigh he went to his day's task of completing the thirty-seventh edition of the well-known landscape,—"Beside the Bay at Klerac," with a fresh variation of four colored sails on the horizon instead of three....
And meanwhile the slow train to Paris was carrying a man, who having climbed his hill and looked upon the promised land from afar, must turn his back for the present upon all its glories and await Opportunity.
It is a long and tiresome journey in a second-class compartment from the farther end of Brittany to Paris, even under the best of circumstances. To Jack Bragdon and Milly, with the vivid memory of their personal wreck on that rocky coast, it was monotonously painful. They dared not ask each other,—"What next?" At first Milly thought there could be no next, though she was really glad not to be making this journey alone with her child, as she had expected to do. To the man who sat in the opposite corner with closed eyes and set lips, it seemed to matter little for the present what the next step was to be.
Happily an impersonal fate settled this for them. Bragdon found at the bankers in Paris an answer to his appeal for funds. The curt cable read, without the aid of code,—"Come Home." Probably that would have been the wisest thing to do in any case. But it would have meant a hard struggle with himself to turn his back so quickly upon the promised land of accomplishment. Now it was beyond his power to do otherwise, unless he were willing to force Milly and the child to starve on what he could make. If that had ever been possible, it surely was not any longer.
So with the last of the hoard he bought their tickets, and all three sailed for New York on the next steamer.
There was no one at the dock to greet them.
"Your friends come down to see you off," Milly reflected sadly, while Bragdon was struggling with the inspectors, "but they let you find your way back by yourself!"
It was hot and very noisy,—the New World,—and no one seemed to care about anything. As they made their way up town through the crowded streets, Milly felt it must be impossible for human beings to do more than keep alive in this maelstrom. The aspect of an American city with its savage roar, especially of New York in the full cry of the day's work, was simply terrifying after two years of Europe. There was something so sordidly repellent in the flimsily furnished rooms of the hotel where they went first, that she shed a few tears of pure homesickness. She longed to take the first train west; for the sights and the sounds of Chicago, if no gentler, were at least more familiar.
She did not know what they would do; husband and wife had not discussed plans on the homeward voyage or referred in any way to the future, both shrinking from the quaking bog that lay between them. Now their course must speedily be settled. When Bragdon went out after establishing them in their hotel, Milly felt curiously like a passenger on a ship whose ticket had been taken for her and all arrangements made by another. All she could do, for the present at least, was to wait and see what would happen....
Towards evening Big Brother came in with Jack and welcomed her back nonchalantly. He had the New York air of unconcern over departures and arrivals, living as he had all his life in a place where coming and going was the daily order of life. He declared that Milly had grown prettier than ever and accepted his niece with condescending irony,—"Hello, missy, so you came along, too? Made in France, eh!" and chuckled over the worn joke.
It seemed that no business disaster had caused him to send his cable recalling them. Business, he declared, was "fine, fine, better all the time," in the American manner. It was merely on general principles that he had cabled,—"Come home." Two years was enough for any American to spend out of his own country, even for an artist. Eying his younger brother humorously, he remarked,—"I thought you'd better get a taste of real life, and earn a few dollars. You can go back later on for another vacation.... I saw Clive Reinhard on the Avenue the other day. He wanted to know how you were getting on. Think he has another of his books on the way. You'd better see him, Jack. He's a money-maker!"
The artist meantime sat cross-legged on his chair and stroked his mustache meditatively, saying nothing. Milly glanced at him timidly, but she could not divine what he was thinking of all this. As he was American-trained he was probably realizing the force of Big Brother's wholesome doctrine. He could not live on other people's bounty and prosecute the artist's vague chimeras. Having taken to himself a wife and added thereto a child, he must earn their living and his own, like other men, by offering the world something it cared to pay for.
Nevertheless, there smouldered in his eyes the hint of another thought,—a suggestion of the artist's fierce egotism, the desire to fulfil his purpose no matter at whose cost,—the willingness to commit crime rather than surrender his life purpose. It was the complement of the Russian's "will to eat," only deeper, more impersonal, and more tragic. But nowadays men like Jack Bragdon neither steal nor murder—nor commit lesser crimes—for the sake of Art.
Instead he inquired casually,—"Where is Reinhard staying? The same place?" and when his brother replied,—"He's got an apartment somewhere up town. They'll know at the club—he's been very successful,"—Bragdon merely nodded. And the next morning after breakfast he sallied from the hotel, leaving Milly to dispose of herself and the child as she would. For several days she hardly saw him. He had caught the key of the New World symphony at once, and had set forth on the warpath without losing time to get the Job. He succeeded without much difficulty in securing the illustration of Reinhard's new piece of popular sentimentality and also put himself in touch with the editors of a new magazine. Then to work, not his own work, but the world's work,—what it apparently wanted, at least would pay well for. And the first step was to find some sort of abiding-place where his family could live less expensively than at the hotel. Here Milly came in.
The one distinct memory Milly kept of that first year in New York was of hunting apartments and moving. It seemed to her that she must have looked at a cityful of dark, noisy rooms ambitiously called apartments, each more impossible than the others. (As long as they lived in New York she never gave up the desire for light and quiet,—the two most expensive luxuries in that luxurious metropolis.) They settled temporarily in a small furnished "studio-apartment" near Washington Square, where they were constantly in each other's way. Milly called it a tenement. Although they had done very well in two rooms in Brittany, it required much more space than the studio-apartment offered to house two people with divided hearts. So in the spring they moved farther up-town to a larger and more expensive apartment without a studio. Bragdon preferred, anyway, to do his work outside and shared a studio with a friend. Milly regarded this new abode as merely temporary—they had taken it for only one year—and they talked intermittently of moving.
Once or twice Jack suggested going to one of the innumerable suburbs or abandoning the city altogether for some small country place, as other artists had done. It would be cheaper, and they could have a house, their own patch of earth, and some quiet. Milly received this suggestion in silence. Indeed they both shrank from facing each other in suburban solitude. They were both by nature and training cockneys. Milly especially had rather perch among the chimney-pots and see the procession go by from the roof than possess all that Nature had to offer. And they were still young, she felt: much might happen in the city, "if they didn't give up." But she said equivocally,—
"Your work keeps you so much in the city; you have to see people."
What he wanted to reply was that he should abandon all this job-hunting and live lean until he could sell his real work, instead of striving to maintain the semblance of an expensive comfort in the city by selling himself to magazines and publishers. But Milly would not understand the urgency of that—how could she? And what had he to offer her now for the sacrifice he should be demanding? What would she do with the long, silent days in the country, while he worked and destroyed what he did, only to begin again on the morrow at the ceaseless task, with its doubtful result? If there had been real companionship, or if the flame of their passion had still burned, then it might not have proved an intolerable exile for the woman....
They did as others would do under the circumstances—hung on in the great city as best they could, in the hope of a better fortune soon, living expectantly from day to day. Each month the city life seemed to demand more money, and each month Bragdon sank deeper into the mire of journalistic art. Worst of all they got into the habit of regarding their life as a temporary makeshift, which they expected to change when they could, tolerating it for the present as best they could,—like most of the workers of the world. Bragdon, at least, knew what he hoped for, impossible as it might be,—a total escape from the debauching work he was doing. Milly hoped vaguely for a pleasanter apartment and an easier way of living,—more friends and more good times with them.
One of the first familiar faces Milly met in the bewildering new city was Marion Reddon's. She came across the little New Englander standing at the curb of a crowded street, a child by either hand, waiting until the flow of traffic should halt long enough to permit crossing.
"Marion!" Milly cried, her eyes dancing with delight on recognizing her. A smile came to the white, tired face of the other woman,—the smile that gave something of beauty to the plain face. "Are you living here, too—in New York?"
"Yes, since the autumn."
"Has Sam given up his teaching?"
"I made him resign."
They drew to one side where they could hear each other's voices. The sight of Marion Reddon brought back happy days,—at least they seemed to be happy now, by comparison. Marion continued:—
"The teaching was too easy for him—besides he didn't like it. And if a man doesn't like that work, he's no business doing it. He had much better get out into the fight with other men and make his way against them."
"But you loved the college town: you must have hated to leave it."
"It was what I had known all my life, and it was a good sort of place to bring the children up in—pleasant and easy. But New York is the big game for men, of course. I wanted Sam to go up against it."
She smiled, but Milly might divine something of the courage it had taken for Marion to launch her small craft in the seething city. They talked a little longer, then parted, having exchanged addresses.
"Take the subway," Marion called out as she plunged into the street, "get out when it stops, then walk! Don't forget!" and with a last smile she was gone.
Milly went on her way about some errand, thinking that Marion was no longer in the least pretty,—quite homely, in fact, she was so worn and white. She had nice, regular features and a quaintly becoming way of wearing her hair in simple Greek fashion, waving over her brows. If she only dressed better and took more care of herself, she might be attractive still. She had let herself fade. Milly wondered if Sam loved her still, really loved her, as he seemed to in his rough way when they were together that summer at Gossensass. How could he? That was the cruelty in marriage for women. Men took the best they had to offer of their youth and beauty, gave them the burdens of children, and then wanted something else when they had become homely and unattractive. At least Jack did not yet have that excuse with her.
Milly did not think that a man might love even a faded flower like Marion Reddon, if she had kept the sweet savor of her spirit alive.... So the Reddons were in New York, living far out in the impossiblehinterlandof the Bronx. When she told her husband at dinner of meeting Marion Reddon and of their new move, Jack seemed neither greatly surprised nor interested.
"We must try to see them," he remarked vaguely.
Perhaps, she thought, he did not care to recall those happier days in Europe. The truth was that the New York struggle specialized men intensely, removing to the vague background every one not directly in the path. Bragdon's efforts were so supremely concentrated on rolling his own small cart in the push, that he had little spirit to bestow elsewhere, however well he might wish people like the Reddons and others not in his immediate game.
"I thought you liked the Reddons," Milly said, half accusingly.
"I do—what makes you think I don't?" he asked, taking up a pipe preparatory to work.
"You don't seem much interested in their being in New York."
"Oh," he said lightly, "every one comes to New York."
And he turned to his evening task. This habit of working evenings, which Milly rather resented, served to prevent discussion—of all kinds. She played a few bars on the piano, then settled herself comfortably with Clive Reinhard's latest book. That was the way their evenings usually went unless some one came in, which did not happen often, or Jack was called out.
Even New York could be dull, Milly found.
Milly could not remember just when she first heard ofBunker's Magazine,—certainly not before their return from Europe, but soon thereafter, for its name was associated with her first experiences in New York. Shortly after they landed,Bunker'swas added to the highly colored piles on the news-stands among the other periodicals that increased almost daily in number. During that first year of apartment hunting and moving, the name ofBunker'sbecame a household word with them. Some of the men Bragdon knew were interested in the new magazine, and one of the first jobs he did was a cover design for an early number. The magazine with his picture—a Brittany girl knee-deep in the dark water helping to unload a fishing boat—lay on the centre table for weeks. Clive Reinhard's new novel, for which Jack did the pictures, also came out inBunker'sthis year. The novelist had been paid ten thousand dollars for the serial rights, Jack told Milly, which seemed to her a large price. Some forms of art, she concluded, were well paid.
Bunker'swas to be a magazine of a very special kind, of course, altogether different from any other magazine,—literary and popular and artistic all at once. Also it was to have an "uplift"—they were just beginning to use that canting term andBunker'sdid much to popularize it. The magazine was to be intensely American in spirit, optimistic and enthusiastic in tone, and very chummy with its readers. Each month it discussed confidentially with "our readers" the glorious success of the previous issue and the astonishing triumphs in the way of amusement and instruction that were to be expected in the future.... All this Milly gathered from the editor's "talks" and also from the men who worked for it or hoped to work for it, who were among their first friends in New York. Its owner, who had boldly given to it his name, was a rich young man, something of an amateur in life, but intensely ambitious of "making himself felt." And this was his way of doing it, instead of buying a newspaper, which would have been more expensive, or of running for public office, which would have meant nothing at all to anybody. Jack pointed him out to his wife one night at the theatre. He was in a box with a party of men and women,—all very well dressed and quite smart-looking. He had a regular, smooth-shaven face with a square jaw like hundreds of other men in New York at that moment. Milly thought Mrs. Bunker overdressed and "ordinary." She was a very blonde, high-colored woman, of the kind a rich man might marry for her physical charm.
All that first yearBunker'scame more and more to the fore in their life. The wife of the Responsible Editor, Mrs. Montgomery Billman, called on Milly in company with Mrs. Fredericks, the wife of the Fiction Editor, and the two ladies, while critically examining Milly, talked of "our magazine" and described the Howard Bunkers, who evidently played a large rôle in their lives. Mrs. Billman, Milly decided, and so confided to her husband, was hard and ambitious socially. Mrs. Fredericks she "could not quite make out," and liked her better. Both the ladies seemed to "go in for things" hard and meant to "count." They knew much more about their husbands' affairs than Milly had ever cared to know about Jack's. She decided that was the modern way, and that Jack ought to take her more fully into his confidence. By the time she had returned these visits and realized the importance felt by the editors' wives for their husbands' workBunker'sgained greatly in her eyes.
Then, unexpectedly, the magazine became of first importance to the Bragdons. Jack was asked to become the Art Editor. He had been at luncheon with Bunker himself and the Responsible Editor, who was a gaunt and rather slouchy person from the other shore of the Mississippi. The Responsible Editor, who had a way of looking through his spectacles as if he were carrying heavy public burdens, unfolded to Bragdon the aims and purposes of the magazine, while Bunker contented himself with ordering the lunch and, at the close, making him the offer. Milly, when she learned of the offer, was surprised that her husband did not show more elation. She had a woman's respect for any institution, and Mrs. Billman had made her feel thatBunker'swas a very important institution.
"What will they give?" she asked.
"Six thousand."
It was more than she had ever dreamed an "artist" could make as an assured income.
"Aren't you glad—all that!" she exclaimed.
"That's not much. Billman gets twelve thousand and Fredericks eight. But I shall be able to make something 'on the side.'"
"I think it's wonderful!" Milly said.
But Jack exhibited slight enthusiasm.
"I'll have to see to getting illustrations for their idiotic stories and half tones and colors—all that rubbish, you know."
There was nothing inspiring to him in "educating the people in the best art," as the Responsible Editor had talked about the job.
"And they want me to contribute a series of articles on the new art centres in the United States: Denver in Art, Pittsburgh in Art, Milwaukee in Art—that sort of rot," he scoffed.
Milly saw nothing contemptible in this; all the magazines did the same thing in one subject or another to arouse local enthusiasm for themselves.
"You write so easily," she suggested, by way of encouragement, remembering the newspaper paragraphs he used to contribute to theStar.
"But I want to paint!" Bragdon growled, and dropped the subject.
In the intervals of pot boiling he had been working on several canvases that he hoped to exhibit in the spring. Milly had lost confidence in painting since she had come to New York and had heard about the lives of young painters. Even if Jack could finish his pictures in time for the exhibition, they might not be accepted, and if they were, would probably be hung in some obscure corner of the crowded galleries for several weeks, with a lot of other "good-enough" canvases, only to be returned to the artist—a dead loss, the fate of most pictures, she had learned.
So Milly was for the Art Editorship. She took counsel with Big Brother, who happened to call, and B. B., who regarded Milly as a sensible woman, the right sort for an impracticable artist to have married, said: "Jack would be crazy to let such a chance slip by him. I know Bunker—he's all right." So when he saw Jack next, he went at him boisterously on the subject, but the artist cut him short by remarking quietly,—"I've told them I'd take it—the thing's settled."
When Milly heard this, she felt a little reaction. Would Marion Reddon have done the same with Sam? But she put her doubts aside easily. "It'll be a good start. Jack is still young, and he will have plenty of time to paint—if he has it in him" (a reservation she would not have made two years before), "and it will do him good to know more people."
Milly would like herself to know more people in this great city, which was just beginning to interest her, and she was not at all inclined to immure herself in a suburb or the depths of the country with a husband who, after all, had not fully satisfied her heart. To know people, to have a wide circle of acquaintance, seemed to her, as it did to most people, of the highest importance, not merely for pleasure but for business as well. How otherwise was one to get on in this life, except through knowing people? Even an artist must make himself seen.... So she considered that in urging her husband to become part of the Bunker machine, she was acting wisely for both,—nay, for all three of the family, for should not Virginia's future already be taken into account?
The wife of the Fiction Editor, with whom she had become intimate in her rapid way, confirmed this view of things. Hazel Fredericks fascinated Milly much more than the aggressive Mrs. Billman, perhaps because she went out of her way to be nice to the artist's wife. Milly had not yet convinced the wife of the Responsible Editor that she was important, and she never wasted time over "negative" people. The dark little Hazel Fredericks, with her muddy eyes and rather thick lips, was a more subtle woman than Mrs. Billman and took the pains to cultivate "possibilities." She had Milly at lunch one day and listened attentively to all her dubitations about her husband's career. Then she pronounced:—
"Stanny was like that. He wanted to write stories. They are pretty good stories, too, but you know there's not much sale for the merely good thing. And unsuccessful art of any kind is hardly worth while, is it?... When we were first married, he had an idea of going away somewhere and living on nothing at all until he had made a name. But that is not the way things are done, is it?"
She paused to laugh sympathetically and look at Milly, as if she must understand what foolish creatures men often were and how wives like Milly and herself had to save them from their follies.
"Of course," she continued, "if he had had Reinhard's luck, it would have been another thing. Clive Reinhard's stuff is just rot, of course, but people like it and he gets all kinds of prices."
She took a cigarette and throwing herself comfortably on a divan blew a silvery wreath upwards. Meditatively she summed up the philosophy she held,—
"It's better to stay with the game and make the most you can out of it, don't you think so?"
Milly agreed.
"AndBunker'sis a very good game, if you haven't any money."
Milly admired her new friend's cleverness. She was the kind who knew how to manage life,—her own life especially,—and get what she wanted out of the game. Milly began to have great respect for that sort of women and wished she were more like them. She felt that Hazel Fredericks never did things waywardly: she always had a well-calculated purpose hidden in her mind, just as she had a carefully conceived picture of herself that she desired to leave upon the minds of others. If Mrs. Billman had put her husband where he was inBunker'sby force, as her rival hinted, Mrs. Fredericks had also engineered "Stanny's" career with skilful strategy.
Just at present she was involved in a project for a coöperative apartment building, which some people she knew were to put up in a desirable neighborhood. She quite fired Milly with the desire to buy space in the building.
"It's really the only way you can live in New York, if you haven't money," Mrs. Fredericks said convincingly, displaying the plan of their tiny apartment. "Of course we can't have children—there's no room for them—but Stanny is so delicate I shouldn't feel it was right to have them, anyway."
She spoke as if it were a sacrifice she had deliberately made for her husband....
Milly talked enthusiastically to Jack that night of the new coöperative building and urged him to look into it. "I do so want a home of my own," she said with a touch of pathos. "Mrs. Fredericks still thinks there's space to be had on one of the floors."
Bragdon looked into it, and reported that a good deal of space was to be had. He was dubious of the wisdom of the scheme, even if by a complicated arrangement of loans they could manage to buy a nominal share. But Milly was persistent and proved to him with a sudden command of figures that it would really reduce the cost of rent. She found out more details, and she gained the support of Big Brother, who generously offered to finance the undertaking for them. "It will make you feel settled," he said, "to own your own home." Jack could not see that in the end he should own much of anything unless by some surprising stroke of luck a good many thousands of dollars fell into his lap. But he felt that Milly should have a permanent place of her own, such as the slice of the new ten-story building offered, and it would be better for the child than to be wandering from rented apartment to apartment. So the plans were drawn, the agreements practically made, when he had a final misgiving.
The agreements lay on the table before him to be signed, and he had just read them over carefully. They seemed to him like a chain that, once signed, bound him to the city, toBunker'sfor an indefinite future. His editorial chair had been specially galling that day, perhaps, or the impulse to paint stronger than usual. He threw down the papers and exclaimed,—
"Let's quit, Milly, before it's too late!"
"What do you mean?"
And he made his plea, for the last time seriously, to take their lives in their hands and like brave people walk out of the city-maze to freedom, to a simple, rational life without pretence.
"I want to cut out all this!" he cried with passion, waving his hand carelessly over the huddle of city roofs, "get into some quiet spot and paint, paint, paint! until I make 'em see that I have something to say. It's the only way to do things!"
With passionate vividness he saw the years of his youth and desire slipping away in the round of trivial "jobs" in the city; he saw the slow decay of resolves under the ever increasing demands to "make good" by earning money. And he shrank from it as from the pit.
"I don't see why you say that," Milly replied. "Most painters live in the city part of the year. There's —— and ——"
She argued the matter with him long into the night, obstinately refusing to see the fatality of the choice they were making.
"We can get rid of the apartment any time, if we don't want it," she said, and quoted Hazel Fredericks.
They came nearer to seeing into each other's souls that night than ever before or ever again. They saw that their inmost interests were antagonistic and must always remain so for all the active, creative years of their lives, and the best they could do, for the sake of their dead ideals, much more for the sake of the living child, was decently to compromise between their respective egotisms and thus "live and let live."
"If I had married a plain business man," Milly let fall in the heat of the argument, revealing in that phrase the knowledge she had arrived at of her mistake, "it would have been different."
Bragdon was not sure of that, but he was sure that in so far as he could he must supply for her the things that "plain business man" could have given her. Or they must part—they even looked into that gulf, from which both shrank back. At the end Milly said:—
"If you don't think it's best, don't do it. You must do what you think is best for your career."
Such was her present ideal of wifely submission to husband in all matters that concerned his "career," but she let him plainly perceive that in saying this she was merely putting the responsibility of their lives wholly upon his shoulders, as he was the breadwinner.
With an impatient gesture, Bragdon drew the agreements towards him and signed them.
"There!" he said, with a somewhat bitter laugh, "nothing in life is worth so much talk."
Afterwards Milly reminded him that he had made this choice himself of his own free will: he could not reproach her for their having bought a slice in the East River Terrace Building.
One of the notable incidents of this period was the visit they made to the Bunker's place on Long Island. It was in the autumn after Bragdon had been on the magazine staff for some months. Milly went out in the train with Hazel Fredericks, who took this occasion to air her views of the Bunkers and the Billmans more fully than she had before. She described the magazine proprietor and his wife in a succinct sentence,—
"They're second-class New York: everything the others have but the right crowd—you'll see."
Howard Bunker, she admitted, was likable,—a jolly, unpretentious, shrewd business man, with a hearty American appetite for the bustle of existence. As for the handsome Mrs. Bunker,—"She was from Waterbury, Connecticut, you know," she said, assuming that Milly, who had heard of the Connecticut town solely as a place where a popular cheap watch was manufactured, would understand the depth of social inferiority Mrs. Howard Bunker's origin implied. "She's too lazy to be really ambitious. They have a box at the Opera, but that means nothing these days. She's kind, if you don't put her to any trouble, and they have awfully good food.... It's a bore coming out to their place, but you have to, once in so often, you understand. You sit around and eat and look over the stables and the garden and all that sort of thing."
She further explained that probably Grace Billman was motoring out with their host. "She always manages that: she regards him as her property, you know." It would be a "shop party," she expected. "That's all the social imagination these people have: they get us together by groups—we're the magazine group. Possibly she'll have Clive Reinhard. He's different, though, because he's made a name for himself, so that all sorts of people run after him."
Mrs. Bunker met the young women at the station, driving her own ponies. Milly recognized the type at a glance, as much from her Chicago experience as from Mrs. Fredericks' description. Mrs. Bunker was a largish, violent blonde, with a plethora of everything about her,—hair and blood and flesh. She was cordial in her greeting to the editors' wives. She apparently regarded the magazine as one of her husband's fads,—an incident of his wealth,—like a shooting-box or a racing stable or a philanthropy. It gave prestige.
"I've got Clive Reinhard," she announced, as they started from the station, a note of triumph in her languid voice. "My, but he's popular. I've tried to get him for a month. This time I had him on the telephone, and I said 'I won't let you go—simply won't ring off until you promise. I'll tell Howard to turn down your next book.'"
She laughed at her own wit. Hazel Fredericks glanced at Milly with a look of intelligence. Milly was much amused by the good lady and listened appreciatively to her petty conversation....
It was all just as Mrs. Fredericks had predicted. Their host arrived shortly in his car with Mrs. Montgomery Billman, who cast a scornful glance at the "shop party," nodded condescendingly at Milly, kissed Hazel on the tip of her nose, and retired to her room. The men came along later, in time for dinner, all except the popular novelist, who was motored over from another house party the next morning. Dinner was long and dull. The Responsible Editress absorbed the host for the most part. What little general talk there was turned on the magazine, especially on the noise it was making with a series of "exposure" articles on the "Crimes of Big Business." Milly could not understand how Mr. Bunker, who seemed to have prospered under the rule of Big Business, could permit such articles in his magazine. But Reinhard explained to her the next day that Radicalism was the "new note." "You have to be progressive and reform and all that to break into notice," he said.
After dinner there was a little music, some bridge, more talk; then the women yawningly went to bed, while the men stayed up for another cigar and further shop talk. The next day was also much as Hazel Fredericks had said it would be. It was hot, and after the very late and copious breakfast everybody was languid. Milly was much interested in being shown over the place by her hostess. She admired the gardens, the hothouses, the planting, the stables, and all the other appurtenances of a modern country estate. Later she had a brief tête-à-tête with Bunker, who had been prejudiced against her by Mrs. Billman and was bored by her too evident flattery. She had also a talk with Clive Reinhard, with whom she discussed his last story and his "ideas about women." For the rest it was a torpid and sensual Sunday with much to eat and drink,—very much like the Sunday of some thousands of rich Americans all over the land. Most of the guests returned to the city on an evening train, bored and unconsciously glad to get back into their respective ruts.
All but Milly! She had enjoyed herself quite genuinely, and with her quick social perceptions had gathered a great deal from the visit, much of which she imparted to her drowsing husband on the train. She mapped out for his duller masculine apprehension the social hierarchy ofBunker's. Mrs. Bunker patronized Mrs. Billman, invited her to her best dinners and to her opera box, because she was striking in looks and had made a place for herself in "interesting circles" in the great city and was more or less talked about. "Hazel is jealous of her," Milly averred. Nevertheless the junior editor's wife accepted Mrs. Billman's patronage and invitations to Mrs. Bunker's opera box when it was given on off nights or matinées to the chief editor's wife, and in turn she was inclined to patronize Mrs. Bragdon by sending her tickets to improving lectures and concerts.
Hazel Fredericks, in her quiet and self-effacing manner, had aspirations, Milly suspected. She could not compete either with Mrs. Howard Bunker or Mrs. Montgomery Billman, of course, but she aspired to the Serious and the Distinguished, instead of the Rich or the merely Artistic. She went in for "movements" of all sorts and was a member of various leagues, and associations, and committees. Occasionally her name got into public print. Just at present she was in the "woman movement," about which she talked to Milly a good deal. That promised to be the most important of all her "movements."
Indeed, as Milly saw, all these women "went in" for something. They tried to conduct their lives and their husbands' lives on lines of definite accomplishment, and she was decidedly "old-fashioned" in living hers from day to day for what it offered of amusement or ennui. She was rather proud of the fact that she had never deliberately "gone in" for anything in her life except Love.
Nevertheless, she found the flutter of women's ambitions exciting and liked to observe the indirect working of their wills even in the man's game....
"Mrs. Billman is too obvious, don't you think Jack?" she said to her husband. But Jack had gone sound asleep.
Before the winter they were established in their own home, in a corner of the new East River Terrace Building, and thereafter their life settled down on the lines it was to follow in New York. Their acquaintance gradually widened fromBunker'sand the editorial set to other circles, contiguous and remote, and the daily routine brought husband and wife less often into contact, and they were thrown less and less on each other's resources. As the artist no longer tried to work at home, the large room designed for studio became the living-room of their apartment. Bragdon went off immediately after his breakfast to the magazine office, like a business man, and as Milly usually had her coffee in bed they rarely met before dinner. Sometimes he came back from the office early to play with Virgie before her supper time, but Milly usually appeared about seven, just in time to dress for dinner.
If she ever stopped to think of it, this seemed the suitable, normal relation of husband and wife. He had his business, and she had hers. Sundays when he did not go to the office, he dawdled through the morning at his club, talking with men or writing letters, and they often had people to luncheon, which consumed the afternoons. On pleasant days he might take the child to the Park or even into the distant country. He was very devoted to his little girl and on the whole a considerate and kindly husband. Milly thought she had forgiven him for breaking her heart. As a matter of fact there is less forgiveness than forgetting in this world. Milly felt that on the whole "they got on quite well" and prided herself on her wise restraint and patience with her husband "at that time."
The household ran smoothly. At first there were only two maids,—the second one serving as nurse for Virginia and Milly's personal helper as well,—a triumph of economic management, as Milly pointed out. For Hazel Fredericks had two merely for household purposes and the Billman's house boasted of four and a boy in buttons. They had to have the laundry done outside and engage extra service when they entertained. By the end of the first year Milly convinced herself it would be cheaper to have three regular servants, and still they depended more or less on outside help....
They saved nothing, of course. Few Americans of their class ever save. They were young, and the future seemed large. Living in New York was horribly expensive, as every one was saying, and it was worse the more they got to know people and had their own little place to keep in the world. It seemed to Milly hard that such perfectly nice people as they were should be so cramped for the means to enjoy the opportunities that came to them. The first year they spent only five thousand dollars and paid something towards the huge loan on their apartment. The second year it was seven thousand and they paid nothing, and the third year they started at a rate of ten thousand dollars. The figures were really small when one considered what the other people they knew were spending. Bragdon began to suspect that here was the trouble—they didn't know any poor people! Milly said they "barely lived," as it was. Of course there were good people who got along on three or four thousand dollars a year and even indulged occasionally in a child or two—professors and young painters and that sort. Milly could not see how it was done,—probably in ghastly apartments out in thehinterland, like the Reddons. The newspapers advertised astonishing bargains in houses, but they were always in fantastically named suburban places, "within commuting distance." One had to live where one's friends could get to you, or go without people, Milly observed.
Husband and wife discussed all this, as every one did. The cost of living, the best way of meeting the problem, whether by city or suburb or country, was the most frequent topic of conversation in all circles, altogether crowding out the weather and scandal. At first Jack was severe about the leaping scale of expenditure and inclined to hold his wife accountable for it as "extravagance." He would even talk of giving up their pretty home and going to some impossible suburb,—"and all that nonsense," as Milly put it to her closest friend, Hazel Fredericks. But Milly always proved to him that they could not do better and "get anything out of life." So in the position of one who is sliding down hill in a sandy soil, he saw that it was useless to stick his feet in and hold on—he must instead learn to plunge and leap and thus make progress. And he did what every one was doing,—tried to make more money. It was easy, seemingly, in this tumultuous New York to make money "on the side." There were many chances of what he cynically called "artistic graft,"—editing, articles, and illustration. One had merely to put out a hand and strip the fat branches of the laden tree. It was killing to creative work, but it was much easier than sordid discussion of budget with one's wife. For the American husband is ashamed to confess poverty to the wife of his bosom.
Milly, perceiving this power of money-getting on her husband's part, did not take very seriously his complaints of their expenditure. Even when they were in debt, as they usually were, she was sure it would come out right in the end. It always had. Jack had found a way to make the extra sums needed to wipe out the accumulation of bills. Bragdon might feel misgivings, but he was too busy these days in the gymnastic performance of keeping his feet from the sliding sand to indulge in long reflection. Perhaps, in a mood of depression, induced by grippe or the coming on of languid spring days, he would say, "Milly, let's quit this game—it's no good—you don't get anywhere!"
Milly, recognizing the symptoms, would bring him a cocktail, prepared by her own skilful hand and murmur sweetly,—
"What would you like to do?"
This was her rôle of wife, submissive to the "head of the house."
That archaic phrase, which Milly used with a malicious pompousness when she wished to "put something hard up" to her lord, was of course an ironical misnomer in this modern household. In the first place there was no house, which demanded the service and the protection of a strong male,—merely a partitioned-off corner in a ten-story brick box, where no man was necessary even to shake the furnace or lock the front door. It was "house" only symbolically, and within its limited space the minimum of necessary service was performed by hirelings (engaged by the mistress and under her orders). Almost all the necessities for existence were manufactured outside and paid for at the end of each month (supposably) by the mistress with little colored slips of paper called cheques. In the modern world the function of the honorable head of the house had thus been reduced to providing the banking deposit necessary for the little strips of colored paper. He had been gradually relieved of all other duties, stripped of his honors, and become Bank Account. The woman was the real head of the house because she controlled the expenditures.
"I draw all the cheques," Hazel Fredericks explained to Milly, "even for Stanny's club bills—at is so much easier."
That was the perfect thing, Milly thought, forgetting that she had once tried this plan with disastrous results and had returned to the allowance system with relief. Most men, she felt, were tyrannical and arbitrary by nature, especially in money matters, or as she sometimes called her husband,—"Turks." She often discussed the relation of the sexes in marriage with Hazel Fredericks, who had "modern" views and leant her books on the woman movement and suffrage. Although she instinctively disliked "strong-minded women," she felt there was great injustice in the present situation between men and women. "It is a man's-world," became one of her favorite axioms. She could not deny that her husband was kind,—she often boasted of his generosity to her friends,—and she knew that he spent very little on his own pleasures: whatever there was the family had it. But it always humiliated her to go to him for money, when she was behind, and in his sterner moods try to coax it from him. This was the way women had always been forced to do with their masters, and it was, of course, all wrong: it classed the wife with "horrid" women, who made men pay them for their complaisance.
Ideas on all these subjects were in the air: all the women Milly knew talked of the "dawn of the woman era," the coming emancipation of the sex from its world-old degradation. Milly vaguely believed it would mean that every woman should have her own check-book and not be accountable to any man for what she chose to spend. She amplified this point of view to Reinhard, who liked "the little Bragdons" and often came to their new home. Milly especially amused him in his rôle of student of the coming sex. He liked to see her experiment with ideas and mischievously encouraged her "revolt" as he called it. They had tea together, took walks in the Park, and sometimes went to concerts. He was very kind to them both, and Milly regarded him as their most influential friend. She felt that the novelist would make a very good husband, understanding as he did so thoroughly the woman's point of view.
"I'm not a 'new woman,' of course," Milly always concluded her discourse.
"Of course you're not!" the novelist heartily concurred. "That's why you are so interesting,—you represent an almost extinct species,—just woman."
"I know I'm old-fashioned—Hazel always says so. I believe in men doing the voting and all that. Women should not try to be like men—their strength is their difference!"
"You want just to be Queen?" Reinhard suggested.
"Oh," Milly sighed, "I want what every woman wants—just to be loved."
She implied that with the perfect love, all these minor difficulties would adjust themselves easily. But the woman without love must fight for her "rights," whatever they were.
"Oh, of course," the novelist murmured sympathetically. In all his varied experience with the sex he had found few women who would admit that they were properly loved.
Milly's daily programme at this time will be illuminating, because it was much like the lives of many thousands of young married women, in our transition period. As there was no complicated house and only one child to be looked after, the mere housekeeping duties were not burdensome, especially as Milly never thought of going to market or store for anything, merely telephoned for what the cook said they must have, or left it to the servant altogether. She woke late, read the newspaper and her mail over her coffee, played with Virgie and told her charming stories; then, by ten o'clock, dressed, and her housekeeping arranged for, she was ready to set forth. Usually she had some sort of shopping that took her down town until luncheon, and more often than not lunched out with a friend.
Occasionally on a fine day when she had nothing better to do, she took Virginia into the Park for an hour after luncheon. Usually, however, the child's promenade was left to Louise. Her afternoons were varied and crowded. Sometimes she went to lectures or to see pictures, because this was part of that "culture" essential for the modern woman. Old friends from Chicago had to be called upon or taken to tea and entertained, and there was the ever enlarging circle of new friends, chiefly women, who made constant demands on her time. She finished her day, breathlessly, just in time to dress for dinner. They went out more and more, because people liked them, and when they stayed at home, they had people in "quite informally" and talked until late hours. On the rare occasions when they were alone Milly curled up on the divan before the fire and dozed until she went to bed,—"dead tired."
There was scarcely a single productive moment in these busy days. Yet Milly would have resented the accusation that she was an idle woman in any sense. She had the feeling of being pressed, of striving to overtake her engagements, which gave a pleasant touch of excitement to city existence. That she shouldDOanything more than keep their small home running smoothly and pleasantly—an attractive spot for friends to come to—and keep herself personally as smart and youthful and desirable as her circumstances permitted, she would never admit. A woman's hold on the world, she was convinced, lay in her looks and her charms, not in her character. And what man who had anything of a man in him would expect more of his wife?... Her husband, at any rate, gave no sign of expecting more fromhiswife. All their friends considered them a contented and delightful young couple....
It should be added that Milly was a member of the "Consumers' League," though she paid no attention to their rules, and had been put on a "Woman's Immigration Bureau" at the instance of Hazel Fredericks, who was active in that movement just then. She also had a number of poor families to look after, to whom she was supposed to act as friend and guide. She fulfilled this obligation by raising money for them from the men she knew. "What most people need most is money," Milly philosophized.... All told, her public activities occupied Milly a little more than an hour a week.
As a whole, Milly looked back over her life in New York with satisfaction. They had a pleasant if somewhat cramped home and a great many warm friends who were very kind to them. They were both well, as a rule, though usually tired, as every one was, and the child, though delicate, was reasonably well. Jack was liked atBunker's, and his periods of depression and restlessness became less frequent. They were settling down properly into their place in the scheme of things. But sometimes Milly found life monotonous and a trifle gray, even in New York.
"Love is the only thing in a woman's life that can compensate!" she confided to Clive Reinhard.
And the novelist, trained confessor of women's souls, let her think that he understood.
Milly supposed their life would go on indefinitely like this. She lived much in the slight fluctuations of the present, with its immediate gratifications and tribulations. It seemed to her foolish to take long views, as Jack did sometimes, and wonder what the years might bring forth. Life had always been full enough of interesting change.
The most disturbing fact at present was the difficulty they had in deciding where to go for the summers. The question came up every spring, the first warm days of March, when Bragdon developed fag and headaches. Then it was he would suggest "chucking the whole thing," but that obviously, with their present way of living, they could not do. So it resolved itself into a discussion of boarding-places. It had to be some place near enough the city to permit of Bragdon's going to his office at least three or four times a week. One summer they boarded at an inferior hotel on Long Island. That had been unsatisfactory because of the food and the people. Another summer they took a furnished cottage, in Connecticut. That had been hot, and Milly found housekeeping throughout the year burdensome—and it may be added expensive. As the third summer approached, Bragdon talked of staying in the city until midsummer. Milly and the child could go to the Maine coast with the Fredericks, and he would join them for a few weeks in August. Milly accepted this compromise as a happy solution and looked forward to a really cool and restful summer.
While she was making her arrangements, there was a threatened upheaval in their life. This time it was the magazine. There had been growing friction inBunker'sfor some time. The magazine, having to maintain its reputation, had become more and more radical, while the proprietor, under the influence of prosperity and increasing years, had become more conservative.
"You see," Hazel Fredericks explained, "the Bunkers find reform isn't fashionable the farther up they get, and the magazine is committed to reform and so is Billman. There must be a break some day."
She further hinted that if it had not been for Grace's strong hand, the break would have already come.
"She's not ready for Montie to get out, yet," she said.
Milly was much interested in the intrigue, but she could learn little from her husband, who always expressed a weary disgust with the topic. One evening in early June, just before her departure, he told her thatBunker'shad changed hands: a "syndicate" had bought it, and he professed not to know whose money was in the syndicate. Hazel hinted that Grace Billman knew....
Bragdon seemed more than usually fagged this spring, after his annual attack of the grippe. He had not recovered quickly, and his face was white and flabby, as the faces of city men commonly were in the spring. Milly noticed the languor in his manner when he came to the train to see her off for the summer.
"Do be careful of yourself, Jack," she counselled with genuine concern. He did not reply, merely kissed the little girl, and smiled wearily.
"Try to get away early—in July," were her last words.
Jack nodded and turned back to the steaming city. Milly, reflecting with a sigh that her husband was usually like this in the spring, sank back into her chair and openedLife. For several weeks after that parting she heard nothing from Jack, although she wrote with what for her was great promptness. Then she received a brief letter that contained the astonishing news of his having left the magazine. "There have been changes in the new management," he wrote, "and it seemed best to get out." But neither Billman nor Fredericks had felt obliged to leave the magazine, she learned from Hazel.
She could not understand. She telegraphed for further details and urged him to join her at once and take his vacation. He replied vaguely that some work was detaining him in the city, and that he might come later. "The city isn't bad," he said. And with that Milly had to content herself.... The summer place filled rapidly, and she was occupied with immediate interests. She said to Hazel,—"It's so foolish of Jack to stay there in that hot city when he might be comfortably resting here with us!" Hazel made no reply, and Milly vaguely wondered if she knew more about the situation on the magazine than she would tell.
It was in August, in a sweltering heat which made itself felt even beside the Maine sea, that a telegram came from Clive Reinhard, very brief but none the less disturbing. "Your husband here ill—better come." The telegram was dated from Caromneck,—Reinhard's place on the Sound....
By the time Milly had made the long journey her husband was dead. Reinhard met her at the station in his car. She always remembered afterwards that gravelly patch before the station, with its rows of motor-cars waiting for the men about to arrive from the city on the afternoon trains, and Reinhard's dark little face, which did not smile at her approach.
"He was sick when he came out," he explained brusquely; "don't believe he ever got over that last attack of grippe.... It was pneumonia: the doctor said his heart was too weak."
It was the commonplace story of the man working at high pressure, often under stimulants, who has had the grippe to weaken him, so that when the strain comes there is no resistance, no reserve. He snaps like a sapped reed.... The tears rolled down Milly's face, and Reinhard looked away. He said nothing, and for the first time Milly thought him hard and unsympathetic. When the car drew up before his door, he helped her down and silently led the way to the darkened room on the floor above, then left her alone with her dead husband.
When a woman looks on the face of her dead comrade, it should not be altogether sad. Something of the joy and the tenderness of their intimacy should rise then to temper the sharpness of her grief. It was not so with Milly. It was wholly horrible to plunge thus, as it were, from the blinding light of the full summer day into the gloom of death. Her husband's face seemed shrunken and pallid, but curiously youthful. Into it had crept again something of that boyish confidence—the joyous swagger of youth—which he had when they sat in the Chicago beer-garden. It startled Milly, who had not recalled those days for a long time. Underneath his mustache the upper lip was twisted as if in pain, and the sunken eyes were mercifully closed. He had gone back to his youth, the happy time of strength and hope when he had expected to be a painter....
Milly fell on her knees by his side and sobbed without restraint. Yet her grief was less for him than for herself,—rather, perhaps, for them both. Somehow they had missed the beautiful dream they had dreamed together eight years before in the beer-garden. She realized bitterly that their married life, which should have been so wonderful, had come to the petty reality of these latter days. So she sobbed and sobbed, her head buried on the pillow beside his still head—grieved for him, for herself, for life. And the dead man lay there on the white bed, in the dim light, with his closed eyes, that mirage of recovered youth haunting his pale cheeks.
When she left him after a time, Reinhard met her in the hall. She was not conscious of the swift, furtive glance he gave her, as if he would discover in her that last intimacy with her husband. When he spoke, he was very gentle with her. He was about to motor into the city to make some arrangements and would not return until the morning, leaving to her the silent house with her dead. She was conscious of all his kindness and delicate forethought, and mumbled her thanks. He had already notified Bragdon's older brother, who was coming from the Adirondacks and would attend to all the necessary things for her. As he turned to leave, Milly stopped him with a half question,—
"I didn't know Jack was visiting you."
The novelist hastened to reply:—
"You see he had promised to do another book for me, and came out to talk it over. That was last Saturday."
"Oh!"
"He was not well then," he added, and then he went.
He never told her—she never knew—that he had run across Bragdon quite by accident one day of awful heat, and stopped to exchange a few words with an old friend he had not seen for some time. Bragdon had the limp appearance of a man thoroughly done by the heat, and also to the novelist's keen eye the mentally listless attitude of the man who has been done by life before his time,—the look of one who knows he is not "making good" in the fight. That was what had tortured the lip beneath the mustache.
So on the spur of the moment he had suggested to the artist the new book, though he knew that his publisher would demur. For his fame had raised him altogether out of Bragdon's class. But it was the only tangible way of putting out that helping hand the artist so obviously needed just then. Bragdon had hesitated, as if he knew the motive prompting the offer, then accepted, and the two had motored out of the city together that evening. Even then the artist had a high fever....
That night Milly lived over like a vivid nightmare her married life down to the least detail,—the time of golden hopes and aspirations, Paris and Europe, her disillusionment, the futile scurry of their life in New York, which she realized was a compromise without much result.... It ended in a choke rather than a sob. There was so little left!
In the morning Reinhard reappeared with her brother-in-law. She remembered little of what was done afterwards, in the usual, ordered way, until after the brief service and the journey to the grave she was left alone in their old home. She had wished to be alone. So Hazel Fredericks took Virginia to the Reddons and left Milly for this night and day to collect herself from her blow and decide with her brother-in-law's help just what she should do.
The large "studio" room of the apartment had an unfamiliar air of disorderliness about it. Bragdon's easel was there and his uncleaned palette. Also a number of canvases were scattered about. These last weeks, after he had left the magazine—voluntarily as Milly now learned—he had got together all his painter's things and worked in the empty apartment. When Milly began to pick up the odds and ends, she was surprised at the number of canvases. A few of them she recognized as pictures he had attempted in his brief vacations. Almost everything was unfinished—merely an impression seized here and there and vigorously dashed down in color, as if the artist were afraid of losing its definite outline in the rush and interruption of his life. Nothing was really finished she saw, as she turned the canvases back to the wall, one by one. Tears started to her eyes again. The tragedy of life was like the tragedy of death—the incomplete! The nearest thing to a finished picture was the group done in Brittany of herself, Yvonne, and the baby on the gleaming sands, which he had tried to get ready for the New York exhibition on their return. That had the superficial finish of mechanical work from which the creator's inspiration has already departed. With a sigh she turned it to the wall with the others, and somehow she recalled what Reinhard has said once about her husband.
"He had more of the artist in him than any of us when he was in college—what has become of it?"
The remark stabbed her now. What had he done with his gift—what had they made of it?...
She came to the last things,—the canvas he had been working on the day his friend had found him. The touch of fever was in it,—a grotesque head,—but it was as vivid as fresh paint. Yes, he had been one who could see things! She had a sense of pride in the belief.
Another of Reinhard's sayings came back to her,—
"It's all accident from the very beginning in the womb what comes to any of us, and most of all whether we catch on in the game of life, whether we fit!"
The novelist himself, she knew, had not "caught on" at first. He had confessed to her that he had almost starved in New York, writing stories that nobody would read and few publishers could be induced to print—then. They were the uttermost best he had in him, and some had been successful since, but they didn't fit then. Suddenly he arrived by accident. A slight thing he had done caught the fancy of an actress, who had a play made out of it, in which she was a great success. A sort of reflected glory came to the author of the story, and the actress with unusual generosity paid him a good sum of money. From that first touch of golden success he had become a different man. His new and popular period set in when he wrote stories about rich and childish boys and girls and their silly love affairs. Hazel Fredericks and her set affected to despise them, but they were immensely popular.
If he had sold himself, as his critics said, he had made a sharp bargain with the devil. He had become prosperous, well-known, envied, invited. Milly had always admired his intelligence in grasping his chance when it came.
She remembered now another story about the popular novelist. He had never married, and the flippant explanation of the fact was that he was under contract with his publishers not to marry until he was fifty in order not to impair his popularity among his bonbon-eating clientèle, who wrote him intimate, scented letters. But she knew the truth. She had the story from the sister of the girl, whom she had met in Paris. The girl was poor and trying to paint; they met in the garret-days when Reinhard "was writing to please himself," as they say. The two were obviously deeply in love, and only their common poverty, it was supposed, prevented the marriage. It was still desperate love when the fortunate accident befell Reinhard that led him out of obscurity to fame. It was then that the affair had been broken off. The sister found the poor girl in tears with a horrible resolve to throw herself away. (Later she married a rich man, and was very happy with him, the sister averred.) Milly had always felt that Reinhard must have been "hard" with this poor girl,—he would not let his feeling for her stand in the way of his career. Now she understood better why he would have none of her sex except as buyers of his wares. She admired him and disliked him for it all at once. That was what Jack should have done with her. But he was too tender-hearted, too much the mere man.... Oh, well, these artists with their needs and their temperaments!
Slowly Milly went over all the sketches, one by one. It was like a fragmentary diary of the life she had lived beside and not looked at closely while it was in being. She was surprised there were so many recent ones—all unfinished. She could not recall when he had done them or where. It proved that Bragdon had never really given up the idea of painting. The desire had stung him all the time, and every now and then he must have yielded to it, stealing away from the piffling duties of the magazine office—spat on popular art, so to speak—and shut himself away somewhere to forget and to do. Milly remembered certain unexplained absences, which had mystified her at the time and aroused suspicions that he "was having another affair." On his returns he had been morose and dispirited. Evidently the mistress he had wooed in this intermittent and casual fashion had not been kind. But the desire had never left him,—the urge to paint, to create. And during these last desperate days when, fevered, he was stumbling towards his end, he had seized the brush and gone back to his real work....
At last she had reached the bottom of the pile—the Brittany sketches. These she looked over as one might views of a past episode in life. The memories of those foreign days rushed over her with a sad sort of joy. There, they had been completely happy—at least she thought so now—until that hateful woman had taken her husband from her. She had almost forgotten the Russian baroness. Now with a start of fresh interest she thought of the portrait and wondered where it was,—the masterful picture of the one who had ruined her happiness. She looked through the clutter again, thinking that it was probably with the Russian wherever she was. But the portrait was there with the rest, wrapped carefully in a piece of old silk.
With eager hands Milly undid the cover of the picture and dragged it forward to the light. It was as if an old passion had burst from the closet of the past. There she was, long, lean, cruel,—posed on her haunches with upturned smiling face,—"The woman who would eat." She lived there on the canvas, eternally young and strong. Milly could admire the mastery of the painting even in the swell of her hatred for the woman who had taken her lover-husband from her. He was young when he had done that,—barely twenty-seven. A man who could paint like that at twenty-seven ought to have gone far. Even Milly in the gloom of her prejudiced soul felt something like awe for the power in him, which seemingly justified the wrong he had done her. Even Milly perceived the tragic laws stronger than herself, larger than her little world of domestic moralities. And thus, gazing on her husband's masterpiece, she realized that her hatred for the woman who she believed had done her the greatest wrong one woman can do another was not real. It was not the Baroness Saratoff who had cheated her: it was life itself! She no longer felt eager to know whether they had been lovers,—as the saying is, had "deceived" her. For this ghostly examination of her husband's work convinced her that Jack did not belong to her, never had,—the stronger, better part of him. She had lived for eight years, more or less happily, with a stranger. She understood now that domestic intimacy, the petty exchanges of daily life, even the habit of physical passion, cannot make two souls one....
She turned at last from the picture with weariness, a heavy heart. It had all been wrong, their marriage, and still more wrong their going on with it "in the brave way." Well,hewas done with the mistake at last, and he could not be sorry. She was almost glad for him.
Her brother-in-law had asked her to look through her husband's papers for an insurance policy he thought Jack had taken on his advice. In the old desk Bragdon had used there was a mass of letters and bills, a great many unpaid bills, some of which she had given him months and months before and had supposed were paid. There were two letters in an odd foreign hand that she knew instantly must be the Russian woman's. The first was dated from themanoirat Klerac on the evening of their sudden departure. Milly hesitated a moment as if she must respect the secrets of the dead, then with a last trace of jealousy tore it open and read the lines:—