CHAPTER XXVA BLACK MILESTONE
CHAPTER XXV
A BLACK MILESTONE
What happened was, in the first week of October, the sudden death of her father. It was sudden only to his wife and daughter, whom, as always, the Judge had tried to spare, at all costs, the knowledge of anything unpleasant. Dr. Melton thought that perhaps the strong man’s incredulity of anything for him to fear had a good deal to do with his repeated refusals to allow his wife or daughter to be warned of the danger of apoplexy. Without that hypothesis, it seemed incredible, he told Mrs. Sandworth, that so kind a man could be so cruel.
“Everything’s incredible,” murmured Mrs. Sandworth, her handkerchief at her eyes, her loving heart aching for the newly-made widow, her lifelong friend.
Her brother did not answer. He sat, gnawing savagely on his finger nails, his thoughts centered, as always, on his darling Lydia—fatherless.
He had prided himself on his acute insight into human nature in general, and upon his specialized, intensified knowledge of those two women whom he had known so long and studied so minutely; but “I’ve been a conceited blockhead, and vanity’s treacherous as well as damnable,” he cried out to his sister some days later, amazed beyond expression at the way in which their loss affected Lydia and her mother.
Mrs. Emery’s attitude was a revelation to him, a revelation that left him almost as angrily full of grief as she herself. He had thought best on the whole not to disclose to her the substance of the several conversations he had had with his dead friend on the subject of finances. Withtwo prosperous sons, the widow would be well taken care of, he thought, perhaps adding with a little acridity, “just as she always has been, without a thought on her part.” But when Mrs. Emery, divining the truth with an awful intuition, came flying to him after the settlement, he was not proof against the fury of her interrogations. If she wanted to know, he would tell her, he thought grimly to himself.
“There is nothing left,” she began, bursting into his office, “but the house, which has a mortgage, and the insurance—nothing! Nothing!”
It was rather soon for her to be resentful, the doctor thought bitterly, misreading the misery on her face. “No,” he said.
“Had the Judge lost any money—do you know?”
“No; I think not.”
“But where—what—we had at one time five thousand dollars at least in the savings bank. I happened to know of that small account. I supposed of course there was more. There is no trace of even that, the administrator says.”
“That went into the extra expenses of the year Lydia made her début. And her wedding cost a great deal, he told me one day—and her trousseau—and other expenses at that time.”
Used as the doctor was to the universal custom of divided interests among his well-to-do patients, it did not seem too strange to him to be giving information about her own affairs to this gray-haired matron. She was not the first widow to whom he had been forced to break bad news of her husband’s business.
Mrs. Emery stared at him, her dry lips apart, a glaze over her eyes. He thought her expression strange. As she said nothing, he added, with a little sour pleasure in defending his dead friend, even if it should give a prick to a survivor, “The Judge was so scrupulously honest, you know.” The widow sat down and laid her arms across the table, still staring hard at the doctor. It came to him that she was not looking at him at all, but at some devastating innersight, which seared her heart, but from which she could not turn away her eyes. He himself turned away, beginning to be aware of some passion within her beyond his divination. There was a long silence.
Finally, “That was the reason he would not stop working,” said the woman in a voice which made the physician whirl about. He looked sharply into her face, and what he saw there took him in one stride to her side. She kept her stony eyes still on the place where he had been—eyes that saw only, as though for the first time, some long procession of past events.
“I see everything now,” she went on with the same flat intonation. “Hecouldnot stop. That was the reason why he would never rest.”
She got slowly to her feet, smoothing over and over one side of her skirt with a strange automatic gesture. She was looking full into the doctor’s face now. “I have killed him,” she said quietly, and fell as though struck down by a blow from behind.
Her long, long illness was spent in the Melton’s home, with the doctor in attendance and Julia Sandworth, utterly devoted, constantly at hand. The old Emery house, the outward symbol of her married life, was sold, and the big “yard” cut up into building lots long before she was able to sit up. Lydia came frequently, but, acting on the doctor’s express command, never brought Ariadne. The outbreaks of self-reproach and embittered grief that were likely to burst upon the widow, even in the midst of one of her quiet, listless days, were not, he said, for a child to see or hear, especially such a sensitive little thing as Ariadne. Those wild bursts of remorse were delirious, he told Lydia, but to his sister he said he wished they were. “I imagine they are the only times when she comes really to herself,” he added sadly.
"I SEE EVERYTHING NOW," SHE WENT ON. "HE COULD NOT STOP"“I SEE EVERYTHING NOW,” SHE WENT ON. “HE COULD NOT STOP”
The especial agony for the sick woman was that nothing of what had happened seemed to her now in the least necessary. “Why, if I had only known—if I had only dreamed how things were—” she cried incessantly to those about her. “What did I care about anything compared with Nat! I loved my husband! What did I care—if I had only dreamed that—if I had only known what I was doing!”
Dr. Melton labored in heartsick pity to remove her fixed idea, which soon became a monomania, that she alone was to blame for the Judge’s death. It now seemed to him, in his sympathy with her grief, that she had been like a child entrusted with some frail, priceless object and not warned of its fragility. She herself cried out constantly with astonished hatred upon a world that had left her so.
“If anyone had warned me—had given me the least idea that it was so serious—I could have lived in three rooms—we had been poor—what did I care for anything but Nathaniel! I only did all those things because—because there was nothing else to do!”
Lydia tried to break the current with a reminder of the sweet memories of the past. “Father loved you so! He loved to give you what you wanted, Mother dear.”
“What I wanted! I wanted my husband. I want my husband!” the widow screamed like a person on the rack.
The doctor sent Lydia away with a hasty gesture. “You must not see her when she is violent,” he said. “You would never forget it.”
It was something he himself never forgot, used as he was to pitiful scenes in the life of suffering humanity. He was almost like a sick person himself, going about his practice with sunken eyes and gray face. His need for sympathy was so great that he abandoned the tacit silence about the Emerys which had existed between him and Rankin ever since Lydia’s marriage, and, going out to the house in the Black Rock woods, unburdened to the younger man the horror of his heart.
“She’s suffering,” he cried. “She’s literally heartbroken! She is! It’s real! And what has she had to make up for it? Oh, it’s monstrous! One thing she says keeps ringing in my ears. That gray-haired woman, a human being my own age—the silly, tragic, childish thing shekeeps saying—‘I only did all those things—I only wanted all those things—because there was nothing else!’Nothing else!” He turned on his host with a fierce “Good God! She’s right. What else was there ever for—for any woman of her class—”
Rankin pushed his shivering, fidgeting visitor into a chair and, laying a big hand on his shoulder, said with a faint smile: “Maybe I can divert your mind for an instant with a story—another one of my great-aunt’s, only it’s an old one this time; you’ve probably heard it—about the old man who said to his wife on his death-bed, ‘I’ve tried to be a good husband to you, dear. It’s been hard on my teeth sometimes, but I’ve always eaten the crusts and let you have the soft bread.’ You remember what the wife’s answer was?”
“No,” said the doctor frowning.
“It’s the epitome of tragedy. She said, ‘Oh, my dear, and I like crusts so!’”
The doctor stared into the fire. “Do you mean—there’s work for them?”
“I mean work for them,” repeated the younger man.
The word echoed in a long silence.
“It’s the most precious possession we have,” said Rankin finally. “We ought to share more evenly.”
The doctor rose to go. “Generally I forget that we’re of different generations,” he said with apparent irrelevance, “but there are times when I feel it keenly.”
“Why now especially?” Rankin wondered. “I’ve stated a doctrine that is yours, too.”
“No; you wouldn’t see, of course. Yes; it’s my doctrine—in theory. I believe it, as people believe in Christianity. I should be equally loath to see anybody doubt it, or practice it. Ah, I’m a fool! Besides, I was born in Kentucky. And I’m sixty-seven years old.”
He shut the door behind him with emphasis.
He was on his way to Bellevue to see Lydia. Knowing her tender heart, he had expected to see her drowned in grief over her father’s death. Her dry-eyed quiet madehim uneasy. That morning, he found her holding Ariadne on her knees and telling her in a self-possessed, low tone, which did not tremble, some stories of “when grandfather was a little boy.”
“I don’t want her to grow up without knowing something of my father,” she explained to the doctor.
Her godfather laid a hand on her arm. “Don’t keep the tears back so, Lydia,” he implored.
She gave him as great a shock of surprise as her mother had done.
“If I could cry,” she said quietly, “it would be because I feel so little sorrow. I do not miss my father at all—or hardly at all.”
The doctor caught at his chair and stared.
“How should I?” she went on drearily. “I almost never saw him. I never spoke to him about anything that really mattered. I never let him know me—or anything I really felt.”
“What are you talking about?” cried the doctor. “You always lived at home.”
“I never lived with my father. He was always away in the morning before I was up. I was away, or busy, in the evening when he was there. On Sundays he never went to church as Mother and I did—I suppose now because he had some other religion of his own. But if he had I never knew what it was—or anything else that was in his mind or heart. It never occurred to me that I could. He tried to love me—I remember so many times now—andthatmakes me cry!—how he tried to love me! He was so glad to see me when I got home from Europe—but he never knew anything that happened to me. I told you once before that when I had pneumonia and nearly died Mother kept it from him because he was on a big case. It was all like that—always. He never knew.”
Dr. Melton broke in, his voice uncertain, his face horrified: “Lydia, I cannot let you go on! you are unfair—you shock me. You are morbid! I knew your father intimately. He loved you beyond expression. He wouldhave done anything for you. But his profession is an exacting one. Put yourself in his place a little. It is all or nothing in the law—as in business.”
“When you bring children into the world, you expect to have them cost you some money, don’t you? You know you mustn’t let them die of starvation. Why oughtn’t you to expect to have them cost you thought, and some sharing of your life with them, and some time—real time, not just scraps that you can’t use for business?”
As the doctor faced her, open-mouthed and silent, she went on, still dry-eyed, but with a quaver in her voice that was like a sob: “But, oh, the worst of my blame is for myself! I was a blind, selfish, self-centered egotist. I could have changed things if I had only tried harder. I am paying for it now. I am paying for it!”
She took her child up in her arms and bent over the dark silky hair. She whispered, “It’s not that I have lost my father. I never had a father—but you!” She put out her hand and pressed the doctor’s hard. “And my poor father had no daughter.”
She set the child on the floor with a gesture almost violent, and cried out loudly, breaking for the first time her cheerless calm, “And now it is too late!”
Ariadne turned her rosy round face to her mother’s, startled, almost frightened. Lydia knelt down and put her arms about the child. She looked solemnly into her godfather’s eyes, and, as though she were taking a great and resolute oath, she said, “But it is not too late for Ariadne.”
CHAPTER XXVIA HINT FROM CHILDHOOD
CHAPTER XXVI
A HINT FROM CHILDHOOD
As the spring advanced and Judge Emery’s widow recovered a little strength, it became apparent that life in Endbury, with its heartbreaking associations, would be intolerable to her. In anxious family councils many futile plans were suggested, but they were all brushed decisively away by the unexpected arrival from Oregon of the younger son of the family.
One day in May, a throbbingly sunshiny day, full of a fierce hot vigor of vitality, Lydia was with her mother in the Melton’s darkened parlor. As so often, the two women had been crying and now sat in a weary lethargy, hand in hand. There came a step on the porch, in the hall, and in the doorway stood a tall stranger. Lydia looked at him blankly, but her mother gave a cry and flung herself into his arms.
“I’ve come to take you home with me, Momma dear,” he said quietly, using the old name for her, which had been banished from the Emery household since Lydia’s early childhood. The sound of it went to her heart.
The newcomer smiled at her over his mother’s head. It was her father’s smile, the quaint, half-wistful, humorous smile, which had seemed so incongruous on the Judge’s powerful face. “I’m your brother Harry, little Lyddie,” he said, “and I’ve come to take care of poor Momma.”
During all that summer it was a bitter regret to Lydia that she had seen her brother so short a time. He had decreed that the sooner his mother was taken away from Endbury, the better for her, and Mrs. Emery had clung to him, assenting passively to all he said, and peering constantly, withtear-blurred eyes, into his face to see again his astonishing resemblance to his father. They had left the day after his arrival.
He had found time, however, to go out to Bellevue for a brief visit, to see Lydia’s home and her little daughter—Paul was away on a business trip—and the half-hour he spent there was one that Lydia never forgot. The tall, sunburned Westerner, with his kind, humorous eyes, his affectionate smile, his quaint, homely phrases, haunted the house for the rest of the summer. The time of his stay had been too breathlessly short for any serious talk. He had looked about at the big, handsome house with a half-mocking awe, inspected the “grounds” with a lively interest in the small horticultural beginnings Lydia had been able to achieve, told her she ought to see his two hundred acres of apple-trees; and for the time that was left before his trolley-car was due he played with his little niece and talked over her head to his sister.
“She’s a dandy, Lyddie! She’s a jim-dandy of a little girl! She ought to come out and learn to ride straddle with her cousins. I got a boy about her age—say, they’d look fine together! He’s a towhead, like all the rest of ’em—like their mother.”
For months afterward Lydia could close her eyes and see again the transfigured expression that had come over his face at the mention of his wife. “Talk about luck!” he said, after a moment’s pause, “there never was such luck as my getting Annie. Say, I wish you could know her, Lyddie. I tell you what—shoulder to shoulder, every minute, she’s stood up to things right there beside me for twelve years—Lord! It don’t seem more than six months when I stop to think about it. We had some hard sledding along at the first, but with the two of us pulling together—. She’s laughed at sickness and drought and bugs and floods. We’re all through that now, we’re doing fine; but, honest, it was worth it, to know Annie through and through as I do. There isn’t a thing about the business she doesn’t know as well as I do, and good reason why, too. We’ve worked itall out together. We’ve stuck close, we have. I’ve helped in the house and with the kids, and she’s come right out into the orchards with me. Share and share alike—that’s our motto.”
He was silent a moment, caressing Ariadne’s dark hair gently, and reviewing the past with shining eyes. “Lord! Lord! It’s been a good life!” He turned to his sister with a smile. “Well, Lyddie, I expect you know something about it, too. You certainly are fixed fine, and everybody says you’ve married a splendid fellow.”
Lydia leaned forward eagerly, the impulse to unburden herself overwhelming. “Oh, Paul is the best man—” she began, “so true and kind and—and—pure—but Harry, we don’t—we can’t—his business—” She turned away from her brother’s too keen eyes and stared blindly at the wall, conscious of an ache in her heart like a physical hurt.
Later, as they were talking of old memories, of Lydia’s childhood, Harry asked suddenly: “How’d you happen to give your little girl such a funny name?”
It was a question that had not been put to Lydia before. Her family had taken for granted that it was a feverish fancy of her sick-bed. She gazed at her brother earnestly, and was about to speak when he looked at his watch and stood up, glancing uneasily down toward the trolley track. It was too late—he would be gone so soon—like something she had dreamed. “Oh, I liked the name,” she said vaguely; adding, “Harry! I wish you could stay longer! There’s so much I should like to talk over with you. Oh, how I wish you’d never gone away.”
“You come out and see us,” he urged. “It’d do you good to get away from this old hole-in-the-ground! We live six miles from a neighbor, so you’d have to get along without tea-parties, but I bet Annie and the kids would give you a good time all right.”
He kissed Lydia good-by, tossed Ariadne high in the air, and as he hurried down the driveway he called back over his shoulder: “Take good care of my little niece for me! I tell you it’s the kids that count the most!” It was a sayingthat filled ringingly for Lydia the long, hot days of the quiet summer that ensued. As for Ariadne, she did not for months stop talking of “nice, laughy, Unkie Hawy.” Her fluency of speech was increasing out of all proportion to her age.
Whatever slow changes might be taking place in Lydia, went on silently and obscurely during that summer; but in the fall a new moral horizon burst upon her with the realization that she was again to become a mother. Another life was to be entrusted to her hands, to hers and Paul’s, and with the knowledge came the certainty that she must now begin to take some action to place her outer life more in accord with her new inner self. It would be the worst moral cowardice longer to evade the issue.
Thus bravely did she exhort herself, and, though shrinking with apprehension at the very thought of entering upon a combat, attempted to shame herself into a little courage.
When Paul heard of his wife’s hopes, he was enchanted. He cried out jubilantly: “I bet you it’ll be a boy this time!” and caught her to him in an embrace of affection so ardent that for a moment she glowed like a bride. She clung to him, happy in the warmth of feeling that, responsive, as always, to his touch, sprang up in her; and when in his good-natured, half-laughing, dictatorial way he made her lie down at once and promise to rest and be quiet, the boyish absurdity of his solicitude was sweet to her.
He disappeared in answer to a telephone call, and she closed her eyes, savoring the pleasure of the little scene. How she needed Paul to reconcile her to life! How kind he really was! How good! His was the clean, honorable affection he had promised her on their wedding day. If she were to have any faith in the novels she read (like most American women of the leisure class, her education after her marriage consisted principally in reading the novels people talked about), if there was any truth in what she read in these stories, she felt she was blest far above most women in that there had come to her since her marriage norevelation of a hidden, unclean side to her husband’s nature.
But Lydia had never felt herself closely touched by reading; it all seemed remote from her own life and problems. The sexual questions on which the plots invariably turned, which formed the very core and center of the lives of the various female characters, had, as a matter of fact, according to her honest observation of her acquaintances, a very subordinate place in the average American life about her. The marital unhappiness, estrangement, and fragmentary incompleteness in the circle she knew, over which she had grieved and puzzled, had nothing to do with what novels mean by “unfaithfulness.” The women of Endbury, unlike the heroines of fiction, did not fear that their husbands would fall in love with other women. The men of Endbury spent as little time in sentimentalizing over other men’s wives as they did over their own.
She often wondered why writers did not treat of the other problems that beset her class—for instance, why it was only women in frontier conditions, like Harry’s wife, who could share in their husband’s lives; why nobody tried to change things so that they could do more of their part in the work of the world; why they could not have a share in the activities that gave other men, even little boys like Walter, so much closer knowledge of their husbands’ characters than they, their wives, had. She had a dim notion, caught from stray indications in the magazines, that writers were considering such questions in books other than novels, but she had no idea how to search them out. The woman’s club to which she belonged was occupied with the art of Masaccio, who was, so a visitor from Chicago’s æsthetic circles informed them, the “latest thing” in art interests.
She decided to ask Paul if he had heard of such books. She would ask him so many such questions in the new life that was to begin. They had been married more than three years and, so far as their relations to each other went, they were by no means inharmonious; but of the close-knit, deep-rooted intimacy of soul and mind that had been her dreamof married life, there had not been even a beginning. Well, she told herself bravely, four years were but a short period in a lifetime. They were both so young yet. They could begin now.
Paul came back from the telephone, note-book in hand, jotting down some figures. He smiled at her over the top of the book, and before he sat down to his desk he covered her carefully with a shawl, stroked her hair, and closed her eyes, saying with an absent tenderness: “There! take a nap, dear, while I finish these notes.”
He looked supremely satisfied with himself in the instant before he plunged into his calculations, and Lydia guessed that he was congratulating himself on having remembered her in the midst of absorbing business cares. She lay looking at him as he worked, her mind full of busy thoughts.
Chiefly, as she went over their situation, she felt guilty to think how entirely apart from him all her real life was passed. The doubts, the racking spiritual changes, that had come to her, she had kept all to herself; and yet she could say honestly that her silence had been involuntary, instinctive, she fancied whimsically, like the reticence as to emotions that one keeps in the hurly-burly of a railway station. With tickets to be bought and trunks to be checked and time-tables to be consulted, it is absurd to try to communicate to a busy and preoccupied companion inexplicable qualms of soul-sickness. Any sensible woman—and Lydia, like most American women, had been trained by precept and example to desire above all things to be sensible and not emotionally troublesome to the men of her family—any sensible woman kept her thoughts to herself till the time came when she could talk them over without interfering with the business on hand.
As she lay on the sofa and watched Paul’s face sharpen in his concentration, it occurred to her that the point of the whole matter was that for her and Paul the suitable and leisurely time for mutual discussion had never come. That was all! That was the whole trouble! It was not any inherent lack of common feeling between them. Simply,there was always business on hand with which she must not interfere.
Paul lifted his head, his eyes half closed in a narrowed, speculative gaze upon some knotty point in his calculation. This long, sideways look happened to fall upon Lydia, and she turned cold before the profound unconsciousness of her existence in those eyes apparently fixed so piercingly upon her. She had a quick fancy that the blank wall of abstraction at which that vacant stare was directed really and palpably separated her husband from her.
For a moment she wondered if she were growing like the women she had heard her father so unsparingly condemn—silly, childish, egotistic women who could not bear to have their husbands think of anything but themselves, who were jealous of the very business which earned them and their children a living. She acquitted herself of this charge proudly. She did not want all of Paul’s time; she wanted only some of it. And then, it was not to have him thinking of her, but with her about the common problems of their life; it was to think with him about the problems of his life; it was to have him help her by his sound, well-balanced, well-trained mind, which, so everyone said, worked such miracles in business; to have him help her through the thicket of confusion into which she was plunged by her inability to accept the plainly-marked road over which all of her world was pressing forward. Perhaps it was all right, she thought, the way Endbury people “did.” She asked nothing better than to be convinced that it was; she longed for a satisfying answer. But Paul did not even know she had doubts! How could he, she asked herself, exonerating him from blame. He was away so many hours of the day and days of the year; and when he came home he was so tired!
It was characteristic of her temper that she had learned quickly and without bitterness the lesson every wife must learn, that neither tenderness nor delicate perceptions of shades of feeling can be extorted from a very tired or very preoccupied man. Masculine fatigue brings with it ahealthy bluntness as to what is being expected in the way of emotional responsiveness, and men will not allow their sense of duty to spur their jaded affection to the point of exhaustion. Lydia noted this, felt that she could not with any show of reason resent it, since it showed a state of things as hard for Paul as for her; but she could not blind herself to the fact that the inevitable result was Paul’s complete ignorance of her real life. She felt herself to be so different from the girl he had married as scarcely to be recognizable, and yet there was no way by which he could have caught even a glimpse of the changes that had made her so. The short periods they spent with each other were necessarily more than filled by consultations about matters of household administration and plans for their social life, and about the way to spend the money that Paul earned. Paul was a very good-natured and consciously indulgent husband, but Lydia seldom emerged from an hour’s conversation with him without an uneasy feeling that she was not by any means getting out of the money he furnished her the largest amount possible of what he wanted; and this sensation was scarcely conducive to an expression of what was, after all, on her part nothing but a vague aspiration toward an ideal—an aspiration that came to her clearly only at times of great tranquillity and peace, when her mind was quite at rest.
She was going around and around the treadmill of her familiar perplexities when a trifling incident, so small, so dependent on its framing of situation, accent, expression and gesture as scarcely to be recordable, gave her a sudden glimpse of quite another side to the matter. She was shocked into realizing that just as their way of life hid from Paul what was going on in her mind, so he also, in all probability, was rapidly changing without her knowledge.
Paul finished his figuring, pushed the papers to one side with a sigh of fatigue, and turned his eyes thoughtfully on his wife. “That’s very good news of yours, Lydia dear, about the expected son and heir. But it’s rather a pity it didn’t come last winter, isn’t it?”
“How so?” she asked.
“Why, you had to be out of things on account of being in mourning, anyhow. If this had happened the year your father died, you could have killed two birds with one stone, don’t you see?”
Lydia’s perception of a thousand reasonable explanations and excuses for this speech was so quick that it was upon her almost before she was aware of her resentment. She hurried to shut the door on a blighting new vision of her husband, by telling herself loudly that it was to be expected Paul should feel so; but, rapid as her loyal, wifely movement had been, she had felt a gust of hot revulsion against something in her husband which her affection for him forbade her to name.
She could not put out of her mind, his look, his accent, his air of taking for granted that the speech was a natural one. The knowledge that Marietta would be too bewildered by her dwelling on the incident even to laugh at her, did not avail to free her of the heavy doubts that filled her. Was she mistaken in feeling that it indicated an alarming increase of materialism in Paul? She was really too fanciful, she told herself many times a day, surprised to find herself going over it again. Was it a mere chance remark—a little stone in the garden path—or was it the first visible outcropping of a stratum of unconquerable granite which grimly underlay all the flower beds of his good nature?
The final impression on her mind was of a new motive for coming to a better, closer understanding with Paul about the fundamentals of their life. It had not occurred to her before, in spite of all her struggles “to be good,” as she put it to herself with her childlike naïveté, that Paul might be needing her as much as she needed him! Spurred on by this new reason for breaking through the impalpable wall that separated their inner lives, she resolved that she would no longer let herself be dominated by the inconsequent multiplicity of the trifling incidents that filled their days.
If she could only get close to Paul she was sure that all would be well. She made herself hope, with a brave belittling of the tangle that baffled her, that perhaps just onelong, serious talk with Paul would be all that was needed. If she could just make Paul see what she saw, he could tell her how to set to work to remedy things. Paul was so clever. Paul was always so kind—when he saw!
She began watching for a favorable opportunity for this long, serious talk, and as day after day fled past with only a glimpse of Paul desperately in a hurry in the morning and desperately tired at night, she was aware that her idea of the shape their life was taking had not exaggerated the extent of the broad flood of trivialities that separated them. Although the light laugh of her girlhood was rarer than before her marriage, life had not proved it to be the result of mere animal spirits. She still saw a great deal to laugh at, though sometimes it was tremulous laughter, carrying her to the edge of tears. And she often laughed to herself during these days at the absurd incongruity of what her heart was swelling to utter and the occasions on which she would have to speak.
’Stashie was away, tending her aunt who was ill, away for an indefinite period, for Patsy’s steady wages quite sufficed to keep his cousin at home to care for his grandmother. Lydia sometimes feared the satisfaction she took in Patsy’s exemplary career was tinctured with vainglory for her own share in it, but, if so, she was punished for it now, since it was his very prosperity that took away from her the only steady domestic help she had ever been able to keep. She had now only a cook, a slatternly negress, with a gift for frying chicken and making beaten biscuit, and a total incapacity to conceive of any other activity as possible for her. Lydia had telephoned to the two employment agencies in Endbury and had been informed, by no means for the first time, that the supply of girls willing to work in the suburbs had entirely given out. For the time being there was simply not one to be had, so for the next few days Lydia, as well as Paul, was more than usually occupied; but her fixed intention to “talk things over with him” was not shaken. And yet—day after day went by with the routine unvaried—there was no time in themorning; in the evening Paul was too tired, and on Sundays there was always “Company,” it being practically their only time for daylight entertainment. Often Paul brought a business associate home for dinner; his family or hers came in; there were always callers in the afternoon; and they were usually invited out to supper or had guests themselves. It was the busiest day of the week.
Ever since her father’s death she had been reviving in her mind, shocked to find them so few, her positive, personal recollections of him, and one of them now came back to her with a symbolic meaning. It had been a not uncommon occurrence in her childhood—a school picnic in the Black Rock woods; but this one stood out from all the others because, by what freak of chance she never knew, her father had gone with her instead of her mother. How proud she had been to have him there! How eagerly she had done the honors of the “entertainment”! How anxiously she had hoped that he would be pleased with the recitations, the songs, the May-day dance!
One of the events of the day was to be the recitation of a fairy poem by a boy in one of the upper grades. He was to step out of the bushes in the character of a Brownie. The child had but just thrust his head through the leaves and begun, “I come to tell ye of a world ye mortals wot not of,” when a terrific clap of thunder overhead, followed by lightning, and rain in torrents, broke up the picnic and sent everyone flying for shelter to a near-by barn. Lydia had been very much afraid of thunderstorms, and she could still remember how, through all her confusion and terror, she had admired the fixity of purpose of the little Brownie, piteous in his drenched fairy costume, gasping out, as they ran along: “I come to tell ye—I come to tell ye, mortals—” to his scurrying audience.
When they reached the barn and were huddled in the hay, wet and forlorn, and deafened by the peals of thunder, the determined little boy had stood up on a farm wagon on the barn floor, and the instant the storm abated began again with his insistent tidings of a world they wot not of. Withher father’s death fresh in her mind, Lydia could not without a throb of pain recall his rare outburst of hearty laughter at the child’s perseverance. “I bet on that kid!” he had cried out, applauding vigorously at the end. “Whoishe?”
“Paul Hollister,” she had told him, proud to know the bigger children. “He’s a very especial friend of mine.”
“Well, you can bet he’ll get on,” her father had assured her.
The opening of the Brownie’s speech had come to be one of the humorous catchwords of the Emery household, to express firmness of purpose, and it was now with a mixture of laughter and tears that Lydia recalled the scene—the dusky interior of the barn, the sweet, strong scent of the hay, the absurd little figure grimacing and squeaking on the farm wagon, and her big, little-known, all-powerful father, one strong arm around her, protecting her from all she feared, as nothing in the world could protect her now.
She was grown up now, and must learn how to protect her own children against dangers less obvious than thunderstorms. It was her turn now to insist on making herself heard above uproar and confusion. Her little Brownie playmate shamed her into action. She would not wait for a pause in the clatter of small events about Paul and herself; she would raise her voice and shout to him, if necessary, overcoming the shy reluctance of the spirit to speak aloud of its life.
CHAPTER XXVIILYDIA REACHES HER GOAL AND HAS HER TALK WITH HER HUSBAND
CHAPTER XXVII
LYDIA REACHES HER GOAL AND HAS HER TALK WITH HER HUSBAND
Paul was still asleep when Lydia opened her eyes one morning and said to herself with a little laugh, but quite resolutely: “I come to tell ye of a world ye mortals wot not of.”
As she dressed noiselessly, she fortified herself with the thought that she had, in her nervousness, greatly overestimated the seriousness of her undertaking. There was nothing so formidable in what she meant to do, after all. She only wished to talk reasonably with her husband about how to avoid having their life degenerate into a mere campaign for material advancement. She did not use this phrase in her thoughts about the matter. She thought more deeply, and perhaps more clearly, than during her confused girlhood, but she had no learned or dignified expressions for the new ideas dawning in her. As she coiled her dark hair above her face, rather pale these days, like a white flower instead of the glowing rose it had been, she said to herself, like a child: “Now, I mustn’t get excited. I must remember that all I want is a chance for all of us, Paul and the children and me, to grow up as good as we can, and loving one another the most for the nicest things in us and not because we’re handy stepping-stones to help one another get on. And we can’t do that if we don’t really put our minds to it and make that the thing we’re trying hardest to do. The other things—the parties and making money and dressing better than we can really afford to—they’re only all right if they don’t get to seeming the things to look out for first. We must find out how to keep them second.”
A golden shaft of winter sunshine fell on Paul’s face. He opened his eyes and yawned, smiling good-naturedly at his wife. Lydia summoned her courage and fairly ran to the bed, sitting down by him and taking his strong hand in hers.
“Oh, you india-rubber ball!” he cried in humorous despair at her. “Don’t you know a woman with your expectations oughtn’t to go hurling herself around that way?”
“I know—I’m too eager always,” she apologized. “But, Paul, I’ve been waiting for a nice quiet time to have a long talk with you about something that’s troubling me, and I just decided I wouldn’t wait another minute.”
Paul patted her cheek. He was feeling very much refreshed by his night’s sleep. He smiled at his young wife again. “Why, fire away, Lydia dear. I’m no ogre. You don’t have to wait till I’m in a good temper, do you? What is it? More money?”
“Oh, no,no!” She repudiated the idea so hotly that he laughed, “Well, you can’t scare me with anything else. What’s up?”
Lydia hesitated, distracted, now that her chance had come, with the desire to speak clearly. “Paul dear, it’s very serious, and I want you to take it seriously. It may take a great effort to change things, too. I’m very unhappy about the way we are—”
A wail from Ariadne’s room gave warning that the child had wakened, as she not infrequently did, terrified by a bad dream. Lydia fled in to comfort her, and later, when she came back, leading the droll little figure in its pink sleeping-drawers, Paul was dressing with his usual careful haste. He stopped an instant to laugh at Ariadne’s face of determined woe and tossed her up until an unwilling smile broke through her pouting gloom. Then he turned to Lydia, as to another child, and rubbed his cheek on hers with a boyish gesture. “Now, you other little forlornity, what’s the matter with you?”
Lydia warmed, as always, at the tenderness of his tone,though she noticed with an inward laugh that he continued buttoning his vest as he caressed her and that his eyes wandered to the clock with a wary alertness. “Perhaps you’d better wait and tell me at the table,” he went on briskly. “I’m all ready to go down.” He pulled his coat on with his astonishing quickness, and ran downstairs.
Lydia put Ariadne into her own bed, telling the docile little thing to stay there till Mother came back for her, and followed Paul, huddling together the remnants of her resolution which looked very wan in the morning light. Breakfast was not ready; the table was not even set, and when she went out into the kitchen she was met by a heavy-eyed cook, moving futilely about among dirty pots and pans and murmuring something about a headache. Lydia could not stop then to investigate further, but, hurrying about, managed to get a breakfast ready for Paul before his first interest in the morning paper had evaporated enough to make him impatient of the delay.
He fell to with a hearty appetite as soon as the food was set before him, not noticing for several moments that Lydia’s breakfast was not yet ready. When he did so, he spoke with a solicitous sharpness: “Lydia, you need a guardian! You ought to eat as a matter of duty! I bet half your queer notions come from your just pecking around at any old thing when I’m not here to keep track of you.”
He poured out another cup of coffee for himself as he spoke.
“Yes, dear; I know, I do. I will,” Lydia assured him, with her quick acquiescence to his wishes. “But this morning Mary is sick, or something, and I got yours first.”
Paul spoke briefly, with his mouth full of toast: “If you were more regular in the way you run the house, and insisted on never varying the—”
“But I was afraid you would be late,” said Lydia. It was the daily terror of her life.
“Iamlate now,” he told her, with his good-humored insistence on facts. “I’ve missed the 7:40, and I’ve just time to catch the next one if I hurry. Do you happento know, dear, where I put that catalogue from Elberstrom and Company? The big red book with the picture of a dynamo on the cover. I was looking over it last night, and Heaven knows where I may have dropped it.”
The opinion as to the proper answer to a speech like this was one of the sharply marked lines of divergence between Madeleine Lowder and her brother’s wife. “Soak him one when you get a chance, Lydia,” she was wont to urge facetiously, and her advice in the present case would unhesitatingly have been to answer as acrimoniously as possible that if he were more regular in the way he handled such things his wife would have to spend less time ransacking the house looking for them. But in spite of such practical and experienced counsel, Lydia was scarcely conscious of refraining from the entirely justifiable and entirely futile customary recriminations, and she was as unaware as Paul of the vast amount of embittering domestic friction which was spared them by her silence. She had some great natural advantages for the task of creating a better domestic life at which she was now so eagerly setting herself, and one of them was this incapacity to resent petty injustices done to herself. She was handicapped in any effort by her utter lack of intellectual training and by a natural tendency to mental confusion, but her lack of small vanities not only spared her untold suffering, but added much to her singleness of aim.
She now went about searching for the catalogue, finally finding it in the library under the couch. When she came back to the dining-room she saw Paul standing up by the table, wiping his mouth. Evidently he was ready to start. How absurd she had been to think of talking seriously to him in the morning!
“Mary brought your breakfast in,” he said nodding toward an untidy tray. “I hate to seem to be finding fault all the time, but really her breath was enough to set the house on fire! Can’t you keep her down to moderate drinking?”
“I’ll try,” said Lydia.
Paul took the catalogue from her hand and reached for his hat. They were in the hall now. “Good-by, Honey,” he said, kissing her hastily and darting out of the house.
Lydia had but just turned back to the dining-room when he opened the door and came in again, bringing a gust of fresh winter air with him. “Say, dear, you forgot about something you wanted to tell me about. I’ve got eight minutes before the trolley, so now’s your chance. What is it? Something about the plumbing?”
In the dusky hall Lydia faced him for a moment in silence, with so singular an expression on her face that he looked apprehensive of some sort of scene. Then she broke out into breathless, quavering laughter, whose uncertainty did not prevent Paul from great relief at her apparent change of mood. “Never mind,” she said, leaning against the newel-post, “I’ll tell you—I’ll tell you some other time.”
He kissed her again, and she felt that it was with a greater tenderness now that he no longer feared a possibly disagreeable communication from her.
After he had gone, she thought loyally, putting things in the order of importance she had been taught all her life, “Well, itishard for him to have perplexities at home and not to be able to give the freshest and best of himself to business.” It was not until later, as she was dressing Ariadne, that she swung slowly back to her new doubt of that view of the problem.
Ariadne was in one of her most talkative moods, and was describing at great length the dream that had frightened her so. There was a hen with six little chickens, she told her mother, and one of them was as big—as big—
“Yes, dear; and what did the big little chicken do?” Lydia laced up the little shoes, on her knees before the small figure, her mind whirling. “That was just the trouble, she couldn’t make it seem right any more, that Paul’s best and freshest shouldallgo to making money and none to a consideration of why he wished to make it.”
“Yes, Ariadne, and it flew over the house, and then?”
She began buttoning the child’s dress, and lost herself in ecstasy over the wisps of soft curls at the back of the rosy neck. She dropped a sudden kiss on the spot, in the midst of Ariadne’s narrative, and the child squealed in delighted surprise. Lydia was carried away by one of her own childlike impulses of gayety, and burrowed bear-like, growling savagely, in the soft flesh. Ariadne doubled up, shrieking with laughter, the irresistible laughter of childhood. Lydia laughed in response, and the two were off for one of their rollicking frolics. They were like a couple of kittens together. Finally, “Come, dear; we must get our breakfasts,” said Lydia, leading along the little girl, still flushed and smiling from her play.
Her passion for the child grew with Ariadne’s growth, and there were times when she was tempted to agree in the unspoken axiom of those about her, that all she needed was enough children to fill her heart and hands too full for thought; but sometimes at night, when Paul was away and she had the little crib moved close to her bed, very different ideas came to her in the silent hours when she lay listening to the child’s quick, regular breathing. At such times, when her mind grew very clear in the long pause between the hurry of one day and the next, she had rather a sort of horror in bringing any more lives into a world which she could do so little to make ready for them. Ariadne was here, and, oh! She must do something to make it better for her! Her desire that Ariadne should find it easier than she to know how to live well, rose to a fervor that was a prayer emanating from all her being. Perhaps she was not clever or strong enough to know how to make her own life and Paul’s anything but a dreary struggle to get ahead of other people, but somehow—somehow, Ariadne must have a better chance.
Something of all this came to her mind in the reaction from her frolic, as she established the child in her high-chair and sat down to her own cold breakfast; but she soon fell, instead, to pondering the question of Mary in the kitchen. She had not now that terror of a violent scenewhich had embittered the first year of her housekeeping, but she felt a qualm of revulsion from the dirty negress who, as she entered the kitchen, turned to face her with insolent eyes. It seemed a plague-spot in her life that in the center of her home, otherwise so carefully guarded, there should be this presence, come from she shuddered to think what evil haunts of that part of Endbury known as the “Black Hole.” She thought, as so many women have thought, that there must be something wrong in a system that made her husband spend all his strength laboring to make money so much of which was paid, in one form or another, to this black incubus. She thought, as so many other women have thought, that there must be something wrong with a system of life that meant that, with rare exceptions, such help was all that could be coaxed into doing housework; but Lydia, unlike the other women she knew, did not—could not—stop at the realization that something was wrong. Some irresistible impulse moved her to try at least to set it right.
On this occasion, however, as she faced the concrete result of the system, she was too languid, and felt too acutely the need for sparing her strength, to do more than tell her cook briefly that if she did not stop drinking she would be dismissed. Mary made no reply, looking down at her torn apron, her face heavy and sullen. She prepared some sort of luncheon, however, and by night had recovered enough so that with Lydia’s help the dinner was eatable.
Paul was late to dinner, and when he sat down heavily at the table Lydia’s heart failed her at the sight of his face, fairly haggard with fatigue. She kept Ariadne quiet, the child having already learned that when Daddy came home from the city there must be no more noisy play; and she served Paul with a quickness that outstripped words. She longed unspeakably to put on one side forever all her vexing questions and simply to cherish and care for her husband physically. He had so much to burden him already—all he could carry. But she had been so long bringing herself to the point of resolution in the matter, she had sofirmly convinced herself that her duty lay along that dark and obscure path, that she clung to her purpose.
After dinner, when she came downstairs from putting Ariadne to bed, she found him already bent over the writing-table, covering a sheet of paper with figures. “You remember, Paul, I have something to talk over with you,” she began, her mouth twitching in a nervous smile.
He pushed the papers aside, and looked up at her with a weary tenderness. “Oh, yes; I do remember. We might as well have it over now, I suppose. Wait a minute, though.” He went to the couch, piled the pillows at one end, and lay down, his hands clasped under his head. “I might as well rest myself while we talk, mightn’t I?”
“Oh, yes, yes, poor dear!” cried Lydia remorsefully. “I wish I didn’thaveto bother you!”
“I wish so, too,” he said whimsically. “Sure it’s nothing you can’t settle yourself?” He closed his eyes and yawned.
“I don’twantto settle it myself!” cried Lydia with a rush, seeing an opening ready-made. “That’s the point. I want you to be in it! I want you to help me! Paul, I’m sure there’s something the matter with the way we live—I don’t like it! I don’t see that it helps us a bit—or anyone else—you’re just killing yourself to make money that goes to get us things we don’t need nearly as much as we need more of each other! We’re not getting a bit nearer to each other—actually further away, for we’re both getting different from what we were without the other’s knowing how! And we’re not getting nicer—and what’s the use of living if we don’t do that? We’re just getting more and more set on scrambling along ahead of other people. And we’re not even having a good time out of it! And here is Ariadne—and another one coming—and we’ve nothing to give them but just this—this—this—”
She had poured out her accumulated, pent-up convictions with passion, feeling an immense relief that she had at last expressed herself—that at last she had made a breach inthe wall that separated her from Paul. At the end, as she hesitated for a phrase to sum up her indictment of their life, her eyes fell on Paul’s face. Its expression turned her cold. She stopped short. He did not open his eyes, and the ensuing silence was filled with his regular, heavy breathing. He had fallen asleep.
Lydia folded her hands in her lap and sat looking at him intently. In the tumult of her emotions there was neither bitterness nor resentment. But a cloud had passed between her and the sun. She sat there a long time, her face very pale and grave. After a time she laid her hand on her husband’s shoulder. She felt an intolerable need to feel him at least physically near.
The telephone bell rang distinctly in the hall. Paul bounded to his feet, wide awake.
“I bet that’s the Washburn superintendent!” he cried. “He said they might call me up here if they came to a decision.” He had apparently forgotten Lydia’s presence, or else the fact that she knew nothing of his affairs. He disappeared into the hall, his long, springy, active step resounding quickly as he hurried to the instrument. Lydia heard his voice, decisive, masterful, quiet, evidently dictating terms of some bargain that had been hanging in the balance. When he came back, his head was up, like a conqueror’s. “I’ve got their contract!” he told her, and then, snatching her up, he whirled her about, shouting out a “yip! yip! yip!” of triumph.
In spite of herself Lydia’s chin began to tremble. She felt a stinging in her eyes. Paul saw these signs of emotion and was conscience-stricken. “Oh, I’m a black-hearted monster!” he cried, in burlesque contrition. “I must have dropped off just as you began your spiel. But, Lydia, ifyou’dtaken that West Virginia trip, you’d go to sleep if the Angel Gabriel were blowing his horn! I was gone three days, you know, and, honest, I didn’t have three hours’ consecutive sleep! Don’t be too mad at me. Start over again. I’ll listen to every word, honest to gracious I will. I feel as waked up as a fighting cock, anyhow, bythis Washburn business! To think I’ve pulled that off at last!”
“I’m not mad atyou, Paul,” said Lydia, trying to speak steadily, and holding with desperate resolution to her purpose of communicating with her husband. “I’m mad at the conditions that made you so sleepy you couldn’t keep awake! All I had to say is that I don’t like our way of life—I don’t see that it’s making us any better, and I want Ariadne—I want our children to have a better one. I want you to help me make it so.”
Paul stared at her, stupefied by this attack on axioms. “Good gracious, my dear! What are you talking about? ‘Our way of life!’ What do you mean? There’s nothing peculiar about the way we live. Our life is just like everybody else’s.”
Lydia burned with impatience at the appearance of this argument, beyond which she had never been able to induce her mother or Marietta to advance a step. She cried out passionately: “What if it is! If it’s not the right kind of life, what difference does it make if everybody’s lifeislike it!”
The idea which her excitement instantly suggested to Paul was reassuring. Before Ariadne came, he remembered, Lydia had had queer spells of nervous tension. He patted her on the shoulder and spoke in the tone used to soothe a nervous horse. “There, Lydia! There, dear! Don’t get so wrought up! Remember you’re not yourself. You do too much thinking. Come, now, just curl up here and put your head on my—”
Lydia feared greatly the relaxing influence of his caressing touch. If once he put forth his personal magnetism, it would be so hard to go on. She drew away gently. “Cananybody do too much thinking, Paul? The trouble must be that I’m not thinking right. And, oh, I want to, so!Pleasehelp me! Everybody says you have such a wonderful head for organization and for science—if I were a dynamo that wasn’t working, you could set me right!”
Paul laughed, and made another attempt to divert her. “I couldn’t if the dynamo looked as pretty and kissable as you do!” He was paying very little attention to what she said. He was only uncomfortable and uneasy to see her so white and trembling. He wished he had proposed taking her out for the evening. She had been having too dull a time. He ought to see that she got more amusement. They said that comic opera now running in town was very funny.
“Paul, listen to me!” she was crying desperately as these thoughts went through his head. “Listen to me, and look honestly at the way we’ve been living since we were married, and youmustsee that something’s all wrong. I never see you—never, never, do you realize that? except when you’re in a raging hurry in the morning or tired to death at night, and when I’m just as tired as you are, so all we can do is to go to bed so we can get up in the morning and begin it all over again. Or else we tire ourselves out one degree more by entertaining people we don’t really like—or rather people about whose real selves we don’t know enough to know whether we like them or not—we have them because they’re influential, or because everybody else entertains them, or because they can help us to get on—or can be smoothed over so they won’t hinder our getting on. And there’s no prospect of doing anything different from this all the days of our life—”
“But, look-y here, Lydia, that’s the way thingsarein this world! The men have to go away the first thing in the morning—and all the rest of what you say!Ican’t help it! What do you come to me about it for? You might as well break out crying because I can’t give you eyes in the back of your head. That’s the way things are!”
Lydia made a violent gesture of unbelief. “That’s what everybody’s been telling me all my life—but now I’m a grown woman, with eyes to see, and something inside me that won’t let me say I see what I don’t—and I don’t see that! I don’tbelieveit has to be so. I can’t believe it!”
Paul laughed a little impatiently, irritated and uneasy, as he always was, at any attempt to examine too closely the foundations of existing ideas. “Why, Lydia, what’s the matter with you? You sound as though you’d been reading some fool socialist literature or something.”
“You know I don’t read anything, Paul. I never hear about anything but novels. I never have time for anything else, and very likely I couldn’t understand it if I read it, not having any education. That’s one thing I want you to help me with. All I want is a chance for us to live together a little more, to have a few more thoughts in common, and, oh! to be trying to be making something better out of ourselves for our children’s sake. I can’t see that we’re learning to be anything but—you, to be an efficient machine for making money, I to think of how to entertain as though we had more money than we really have. I don’t seem really to know you or live with you any more than if we were two guests stopping at the same hotel. If socialists are trying to fix things better, why shouldn’t we have time—both of us—to read their books; and you could help me know what they mean?”
Paul laughed again, a scornful, hateful laugh, which brought the color up to Lydia’s pale face like a blow. “I gather, then, Lydia, that what you’re asking me to do is to neglect my business in order to read socialist literature with you?”
His wife’s rare resentment rose. She spoke with dignity: “I begged you to be serious, Paul, and to try to understand what I mean, although I’m so fumbling, and say it so badly. As for its being impossible to change things, I’ve heard you say a great many times that there are no conditions that can’t be changed if people would really try—”
“Good heavens! I said that ofbusinessconditions!” shouted Paul, outraged at being so misquoted.
“Well, if it’s true of them—No; I feel that things are the way they are because we don’t really care enough to have them some other way. If you really cared as muchabout sharing a part of your life with me—really sharing—as you do about getting the Washburn contract—”
Her indignant and angry tone, so entirely unusual, moved Paul, more than her words, to shocked protest. He looked deeply wounded, and his accent was that of a man righteously aggrieved. “Lydia, I lay most of this absurd outbreak to your nervous condition, and so I can’t blame you for it. But I can’t help pointing out to you that it is entirely uncalled for. There are few women who have a husband as absolutely devoted as yours. You grumble about my not sharing my life with you—why, Igiveit to you entire!” His astonished bitterness grew as he voiced it. “What am I working so hard for if not to provide for you and our child—our children! Good Heavens! What morecanI do for you than to keep my nose on the grindstone every minute. There are limits to even a husband’s time and endurance and capacity for work.”
Lydia heard a frightened roaring in her ears at this unexpected turn to the conversation. Paul had never spoken so to her before. This was a very different tone from his irritation over defective housekeeping. She was as horrified as he over the picture that he held up with such apparently justified indignation, the picture of her as a querulous and ungrateful wife. Why, Paul was looking at her as though he hated her! For the first time in her married life, she conceived the possibility that she and Paul might quarrel, really seriously quarrel, about fundamental things. The idea terrified her beyond words. Her mind, undisciplined and never very clear, became quite confused, and only her long preparation and expectation of this talk enabled her to keep on at all, although now she could but falter ahead blindly. “Why, Paul dear—don’t look at me so! I never dreamed ofblamingyou for it! It’s just because I want things better for you that I’m so anxious to—”
“You haven’t noticed me complaining any, have you?” put in Paul grimly, still looking at her coldly.
“—It’s because I can’t bear to see you work so hard to get me things I’d ever so much rather go without than have you grow so you can’t see anything but business—it seems all twisted! I’d rather you’d pay an assistant to go off on these out-of-town trips, and we’d get along on less money—live in a smaller house, and not entertain.”
“Oh, Lydia, you talk like a child! How can I talk business with you when you have such crazy, impractical ideas? It’s not just the money an assistant would cost! Either he’d not be so good as I, and then I’d lose my reputation for efficiency and my chance for promotion, or else hewouldbe as good and he’d get the job permanently and divide the field with me. A man has to look a long way ahead in business!”
“But, Paul, what if hediddivide the field with you? What if you don’t get ahead of everybody else, if you’d have time and strength to think of other things more—you said the other day that you weren’t sleeping well any more, and you’re losing your taste for books and music and outdoors—why, I’d rather live in four rooms right over your office, so that you wouldn’t have that hour lost going and coming—”
Paul broke in with a curt scorn: “Oh, Lydia! What nonsense! Why don’t you propose living in a tent, to save rent?”
“Why I would—I would in a minute if I thought it would make things any better!” Lydia cried with a desperate simplicity.
At this crowning absurdity, Paul began to laugh, his ill-humor actually swept away by his amusement at Lydia’s preposterous fancies. It was too foolish to try to reason seriously with her. He put his hand on her shining dark hair, ruffling it up like a teasing boy. “I guess you’d better leave the economic status of society alone, Lydia. You might break something if you go charging around it so fierce.”
A call came from the darkness of the hall: “Mis’ Hollister!”
“It’s Mary,” said Paul; “probably you forgot to give her any instructions about breakfast, in your anxiety about the future of the world. If you can calm down enough for such prosaic details, do tell her for the Lord’s sake not to put so much salt in the oatmeal as there was this morning.”
Lydia found the negress with her wraps on, glooming darkly, “Mis’ Hollister, I’m gwine to leave,” she announced briefly.
Lydia felt for a chair. Mary had promised faithfully to stay through the winter, until after her confinement. “What’s the matter, Mary?”
“I cyant stay in no house wheah de lady says I drinks.”
“You will stay until—until I am able to be about, won’t you?”
“My things is gone aready,” said Mary, moving heavily toward the door, “and I’m gwine now.” As she disappeared, she remarked casually, “I didn’t have no time to wash the supper dishes. Good-by.”
“What’s the matter with Mary?” called Paul.
Lydia went back to him, trying to smile. “She’s gone—left,” she announced.
Paul opened his eyes with a look of keen annoyance. “You can’t break in a new cooknow!” he said. “She can’t go now!”
“She’s gone,” repeated Lydia wearily. “I don’t know how anybody could make her stay.”
Paul got up from the couch with his lips closed tightly together, and, sitting down in a straight chair, took Lydia on his knee as though she were a child. “Now, see here, my wife, you mustn’t get your feelings hurt if I do some plain talking for a minute. You’ve been telling me what you think about things, and now it’s my turn. And whatIthink is that if my dear young wife would spend more time looking after her own business she’d have fewer complaints to make about my doing the same. The thing for you to do is to accept conditions as they are and do your best in them—and, really, Lydia, make your best a little better.”
Lydia was on the point of nervous tears from sheer fatigue, but she clung to her point with a tenacity which in so yielding a nature was profoundly eloquent. “But, Paul, if everybody had always settled down and accepted conditions, and never tried to make them better—”
“There’s a difference between conditions that have to be accepted and those that can be changed,” said Paul sententiously.
Lydia tore herself away from him and stood up, trembling with excitement. She felt that they had stumbled upon the very root of the matter. “But who’s to decide which our conditions are?”
Paul caught at her, laughing. “I am, of course, you firebrand! Didn’t you promise to honor and obey?” He went on with more seriousness, a tender, impatient, condescending seriousness: “Now, Lydia, just stop and think! Do you, can you, consider this a good time for you to try to settle the affairs of the universe—still all upset about your father’s death, and goodness knows what crazy ideas it started in your head—and with an addition to the family expected!Andthe cook just left!”
“But that’s the way things always are!” she protested. “That’s life. There’s never a time when something important hasn’t just happened or isn’t just going to happen, you have to go right ahead, or you never—why, Paul, I’ve waited for two years for a really good chance for this talk with you—”
“Thank the Lord!” he ejaculated. “I hope it’ll be another two before you treat me to another evening like this. Oh, pshaw, Lydia! You’re morbid, moping around the house too much—and your condition and all. Wait till you’ve got another baby to play with—I don’t remember you had any doubts of anything the first six months of Ariadne’s life. You ought to have a baby a year to keep you out of mischief! Just you wait till you can entertain and live like folks again. In the meantime you hustle around and keep busy and you won’t be so bothered with thinking and worrying.”