Unknowingly, they had drawn again near to the heart of their discussion. Unknowingly Lydia stood before the answer from her husband, the final statement that she wished to hear.
“But to hustle and keep busy—that’s good only so long as you keep at it. The minute you stop—”
Paul’s answer was an epoch in her thought.
“Don’t stop!” he cried, surprised at her overlooking so obvious a solution.
At this bullet-like retort, Lydia shivered as though she had been struck. She turned away with a blind impulse for flight. Her gesture brought her husband flying to her. He took her forcibly in his arms. “What the devil—what is the matternow?” he asked, praying for patience. She hung unresponsive in his grasp. “What’s the matter?” he repeated.
“You’ve just told me a horrible thing,” she whispered; “that life is so dreadful that the only way we can get through it at all is by never looking at—”
Paul actually shook her in his exasperation. “Gee whiz, Lydia! you’re enough to drive a man to drink! I never told you any such melodramatic nonsense. I told you straight horse sense, which is that if you took more interest in your work, in the work that every woman of your class and position has to do, you’d have less time to think foolishness—and your husband would have an easier life.”
Her trembling lips opened to speak again, but he closed them with a firm hand. “And now, as your natural guardian, I’m not going to let you say another word about it. You dear little silly! However did you get us so wound up! Blessed if I have any idea what it’s all been about!”
He was determined to end the discussion. He was relieved beyond expression that he had been able to get through it without saying anything unkind to his wife. He never meant to do that. He now went on, shaking a finger at her:
“You listen to me, Lydia-Emery-that-was! Do you know what we are going to do? We’re going out into thathowling desolation that Mary has probably left in the kitchen, and we’re going to see if we can find a couple of clean glasses, and we’re going to have a glass of beer apiece and a ham sandwich and a piece of the pie that’s left over from dinner. You don’t know what’s the matter with you, but I do! You’re starved! You’re as hungry as you can be, aren’t you now?”
Lydia had sunk into a chair during this speech and was now regarding him fixedly, her hands clasped between her knees. At his final appeal to her, she closed her eyes. “Yes,” she said with a long breath; “yes, I am.”
CHAPTER XXVIII“THE AMERICAN MAN”
CHAPTER XXVIII
“THE AMERICAN MAN”
A ripple from the surging wave of culture which, for some years, had been sweeping over the women’s clubs of the Middle West, began to agitate the extremely stationary waters of Endbury social life. The Women’s Literary Club felt that, as the long-established intellectual authority of the town, it should somehow join in the new movement. The organization of this club dated back to a period now comparatively remote. Mrs. Emery, who had been a charter member, had never been more genuinely puzzled by Dr. Melton’s eccentricities than when he had received with a yell of laughter her announcement that she had just helped to form a “literary club,” which would be the “most exclusive social organization” in Endbury. It had lived up to this expectation. To belong to it meant much, and both Paul and Flora Burgess had been gratified when, on her mother’s resignation, Lydia had been elected to the vacant place.
This close corporation, composed of ladies in the very inner circle, felt keenly the stimulating consciousness of its importance in the higher life of the town, and had too much civic pride to allow Endbury to lag behind the other towns in Ohio. Columbus women, owing to the large German population of the city, were getting a reputation for being musical; Cincinnati had always been artistic; Toledo had literary aspirations; Cleveland went in for civic improvement. The leading spirits of the Woman’s Literary Club of Endbury cast about for some other sphere of interest to annex as their very own property.
They were hesitating whether to undertake a campaign ofmunicipal house-cleaning, or to devote themselves to the study of the sonnet form in English verse, when an unusual opportunity for distinction opened before them. The daughter of the club’s president was married to a professor in the State University of Michigan, and on one of her visits home she suggested that her mother’s club invite to address it the Alliance Française lecturer of that year. He had to come out to Ann Arbor, anyhow—Ann Arbor was not very far from Endbury—not far, that is, as compared with the journey the lecturer would have made from Columbia and Harvard to “Michigan State.” One of the club husbands was a railroad man and, maybe, could give them transportation. Frenchmen were always anxious to make all the money they could—she was sure that M. Buisine could be induced to come for a not extravagant honorarium. Why should not Endbury go in for cosmopolitanism? That certainly would be something new in Ohio.
And so it was arranged for an afternoon for the first week in December, a very grand “house-darkened-and-candle-lighted performance,” as Madeleine Lowder labeled this last degree of Endbury ceremonious elaboration. It was held at the house of Paul’s aunt, so that, naturally, Lydia could by no means absent herself. Madeleine came for her, and together they took Ariadne to Marietta’s house and left her there for safe-keeping. Lydia was intensely conscious, under her sister’s forbearing silence, that Marietta had never been asked to join the Woman’s Literary Club. Even the jaunty Madeleine was aware of a tension in the brief conversation over the child’s head, and remarked as she and Lydia walked away from the house: “Well, really now,wasthat the most tactful thing in the world?”
“What else could I do?” asked Lydia, at her wit’s end. “I don’t dare leave Ariadne with those awful things from the employment agencies, and ’Stashie’s not coming back till next week.”
“Oh,she’scoming again, is she?” commented her companion. “Well, that’ll mean lots of fun watching Paul squirm. But don’t mind him, Lydia.” Madeleine was one of the women who prided herself on her loyal sense of solidarity among her sex. “If he says a word, you poke him one in the eye. Keep her till after your confinement, anyhow. A woman ought to be allowed to run her house without any man butting in. We let them alone; they ought to let us.”
There never was a person in the world, Lydia thought, in whom marriage had made less difference than in Paul’s sister. She was exactly the same as in her girlhood. Lydia wondered at her with an ever-growing amazement. The enormous significance of the marriage service, the mysteries of the dual existence, her new responsibilities,—they all seemed non-existent. Paul said approvingly that Madeleine knew how to get along with less fuss than any woman he ever saw. Her breezy high spirits were much admired in Endbury, and her good humor and prodigious satisfaction with life were considered very cheerfully infectious.
The two women had reached Madame Hollister’s house while Madeleine was expounding her theory of matrimony, and now took their places in the throng of extremely well-dressed women sitting on camp chairs, the rows of which filled the two parlors. The lecturer with the president of the club, occupied a dais at the other end of the room. He was a tall, ugly man, with prominent blue eyes, gray hair upstanding in close-cropped military stiffness, and a two-pronged grizzled beard. He was looking over his audience with a leisurely smiling scrutiny that roused in Lydia a secret resentment.
“He’s very distinguished looking, isn’t he?” whispered Madeleine. “So different! Andcool! I’d like to see Pete Lowder sit up there to be stared at by all this gang of women.”
“Oh, he’s probably used to it,” said her neighbor on theother side. “They say he’s spoken before any number of women’s clubs. He does two a day sometimes. He’s seen lots of American society women before now.”
Madeleine stared at him curiously. “I wonder what he thinks of us! I wonder! I’d give anything to know!” she said. She repeated this sentiment in varying forms several times.
Lydia wondered why Madeleine should care so acutely about the opinion of a stranger and a foreigner, and finally, in her naïve, straightforward way, she put this question to her. Madeleine was not one of the many who evaded Lydia’s questions, or answered them only with a laugh at their oddity. She was very straightforward herself and generally had a very clear idea of what underlay any action or feeling on her part. But this time her usual rough-and-ready methods of analysis seemed at fault.
“Oh, because,” she said indefinitely. “Don’t you always want to know what men are thinking of you?”
“Men that know something about me, maybe,” Lydia amended.
Madeleine laughed. “They’rethe ones that don’t think at all, one way or the other,” she reminded her sister-in-law.
The president of the club rose. Her introduction of the speaker was greeted with cordial, muted applause from gloved hands. There was a scraping of chairs, a stir of draperies, and little gusts of delicate perfumes floated out, as the hundred or more women settled themselves at the right angle, all their keen, handsome, nervous faces lifted to the speaker in a pleasant expectancy. Not only were they agreeably aware that they were forming part of one of the most recherché events of Endbury’s social life, but they were remembering piquant rumors of M. Buisine’s sensational attacks on American materialism. The afternoon promised something more interesting than their usual programme of home-made essays and papers.
Their expectation was not disappointed. In fluent English, apparently smooth with long practice on the sametheme, he wove felicitous and forceful elaborations on the proverb relating to people who are absent and the estimation in which they are held by those present. He had seen in America, he said, everything but the American man. He had seen hundreds and thousands of women as well-dressed as Parisiennes (and, as a rule, much more expensively), as self-possessed as English great ladies, as cultivated as Russian princesses, as universally and variously handsome as visions in a painter’s dream—(“He’s not afraid of laying it on thick, is he?” whispered Madeleine with an appreciative laugh)—but, except for a few professors in college, he had seen no men. He had inquired for them everywhere and was told that he did not see them because he was a man of letters. If he had been the inventor of a new variety of railroad brake he would have seen millions. He was told that the men, unlike their wives, had no intellectual interests, had no clubs with any serious purposes, had no artistic aims, had no home life, no knowledge of their children, no interest in education—that, in short, they left the whole business of worthy living to their wives, and devoted themselves exclusively to the wild-beast joys of tearing and rending their business competitors.
He gave many picturesque instances of his contention, he sketched several lively and amusing portraits of the one or two business men he had succeeded in running down; their tongue-tied stupefaction before the ordinary topics of civilization, their scorn of all æsthetic considerations; their incapacity to conceive of an intellectual life as worthy a grown man; the Stone-age simplicity with which they referred everything to savage cunning; their oblivion to any other standard than “success,” by which they meant possessing something that they had taken away by force from somebody else.
It was indeed a very entertaining lecture, a most stimulating, interesting experience to the crowd of well-dressed women; although perhaps some of them found it a little long after the dining-room across the hall began to be filledwith waiters preparing the refreshments and an appetizing smell of freshly-made coffee filled the air. Still, it was a lecture they had paid for, and it was gratifying to have it so full and conscientiously elaborated.
The ideas promulgated were not startlingly new to them, since they had read magazine articles on “Why American Women Marry Foreigners” and similar analyses of the society in which they lived; but to have it said to one’s face, by a living man, a tall, ugly, distinguished foreigner, with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole,—that brought it home to one! They nodded their beautifully-hatted heads at the truth of his well-chosen, significant anecdotes, they laughed at his sallies, they applauded heartily at the end when the lecturer sat down, the little smile, that Lydia found so teasing, still on his bearded lips.
“Well, he hit things off pretty close, for a foreigner, didn’t he?” commented Madeleine cheerfully, gathering her white furs up to the whiter skin of her long, fair throat and preparing for a rush on the refreshment room. “He must have kept his eyes open pretty wide since he landed.”
Lydia did not answer, nor did she join in the stampede to the dining-room. She sat still, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her eyes very bright and dark in her pale face. She was left quite alone in the deserted room. Across the hall was the loud, incessant uproar of feminine conversation released from the imprisonment of an hour’s silence. From the scraps of talk that were intelligible, it might have been one of her own receptions. Lydia heard not a mention of the opinions to which they had been listening. Apparently, they were regarded as an entertaining episode in a social afternoon. She listened intently. She looked across at the crowd of her acquaintances as though she were seeing them for the first time. In their midst was the tall foreigner, smiling, talking, bowing, drinking tea. He was being introduced in succession to all of his admiring auditors.
Lydia rose to go and made her way to the dressing-roomon the second floor for her wraps. As she returned toward the head of the stairs she saw a man’s figure ascending, and stood aside to let him pass. He bowed with an unconscious assurance unlike that of any man Lydia had ever seen, and looked at her pale face and burning eyes with some curiosity. A faint aroma of delicate food and fading flowers and woman’s sachet-powder hung about him. It was the lecturer, fresh from his throng of admirers. Lydia’s heart leaped to a sudden valiant impulse, astonishing to her usual shyness, and she spoke out boldly, hastily: “Why did you tell us all that about our men? Didn’t you think any of us would realize that they are good—our men are—good and pure and kind! Didn’t you think we’d know that anything that’s the matter with them must be the matter with us, too? They had mothers as well as fathers! It’s not fair to blame everything on the men! It’s not fair, and it can’t be true! We’re all in together, men and women. One can’t be anything the other isn’t!”
She spoke with a swift, grave directness, looking squarely into the man’s eyes, for she was as tall as he. They were quite alone in the upper hall. From below came the clatter of the talking, eating women. The Frenchman did not speak for a moment. For the first time the faint smile on his lips died away. He paid to Lydia the tribute of a look as grave as her own. Finally, “Madame, you should be French,” he told her.
The remark was so unexpected an answer to her attack that Lydia’s eyes wavered. “I mean,” he went on in explanation, “that you are acting as my wife would act if she heard the men of her nation abused in their absence. I mean also that I have delivered practically this same lecture over thirty times in America before audiences of women, and you are the first to—Madame, I should like to know your husband!” he exclaimed with another bow.
“My husband is like all other American men,” cried Lydia sharply, touched to the quick by this reference. “It is because he is that I—” She broke off with her gestureof passionate unresignation to her lack of fluency. Already the heat of the impulse that had carried her into speech was dying away. She began to hesitate for words.
“Oh, I can’t say what I mean—you must know it, anyhow! You blame the fathers for leaving all the bringing-up of the children to their wives, and yet you point out that the sons keep growing up all the time to be—to be—to be all you blame their fathers for being! If we women were half so—fine—as you tell us, why haven’t we changed things?”
The foreigner made a vivid, surprised, affirmatory gesture. “Exactly! exactly! exactly, Madame!” he cried. “It is the question I have asked myself a thousand times: Why is it—why is it that women so strong-willed, so unyielding in the seeking what they desire, why is it that apparently they have no influence on the general fabric of the society in—”
“Perhaps it is,” said Lydia unsparingly, her latent anger coming to the surface again and furnishing her fluency, “perhaps it is because people who see our faults don’t help us to correct them, but flatter us by telling us we haven’t any, and all the time think ill of us behind our backs.”
The lecturer began to answer with aplomb and an attempt at graceful cynicism: “Ah, Madame, put yourself in my place! I am addressing audiences of women. Would it be tactful to—” but under Lydia’s honest eyes he faltered, stopped, flushed darkly under his heavy beard, up over his high, narrow forehead to the roots of his gray hair. He swallowed hard. “Madame,” he said, “you have rebuked me—deservedly. I—I demand your pardon.”
“Oh, you needn’t mind me,” said Lydia humbly; “my opinion doesn’t amount to anything. I oughtn’t to talk, either. I don’tdoanything different from the rest—the women downstairs, I mean. I can only see there’s something wrong—” She found the other’s gaze into her troubled eyes so friendly that she was moved to cry out tohim, all her hostility gone: “Whatisthe trouble, anyhow?”
The lecturer flushed again, this time touched by her appeal. “I proudly put at your service any reflections I have made—as though you were my daughter. I have a daughter about your age, who is also married—who faces your problems. Madame, you look fatigued—will you not sit down?” He led her to a sofa on one side of the hall and took a seat beside her. “Is not the trouble,” he began, “that the women have too much leisure and the men too little—the women too little work, the men too much?”
“Oh, yes, yes, yes!” Lydia’s meditations had long ago carried her past that point; she was impatient at his taking time to state it. “But how can we change it?”
“You cannot change it in a day. It has taken many years to grow. It has seemed to me that one way to change it is by using your leisure differently. Even those women who use their leisure for the best self-improvement have not used it well. Many of my countrymen say that the culture of American women is like a child’s idea of ornamentation—the hanging on the outside of all odd bits of broken finery. I have not found it always so. I have met many learned women here, many women more cultivated than my own wife. But listen, Madame, to the words of an old man. Culture is dust and ashes if the spiritual foundations of life are not well laid; and, believe me, it takes two, a man and a woman, to lay those foundations. It can not be done alone.”
“But how, how—” began Lydia impatiently.
“In the only way that anything can be accomplished in this world, by working! Your women have not worked patiently, resolutely, against the desertion of their men. Worse—they have encouraged it! Have you never heard an American, woman say: ‘Oh, I can’t bear a man around the house! They are so in the way!’ Or, ‘I let my husband’s business alone. I want him to let—’”
He imitated an accent so familiar to Lydia that she winced. “Oh, don’t!” she said. “I see all that.”
“You must find few to see with you.”
“But how to change it?” She leaned toward him as though he could impart some magic formula to her.
“With the men, work to have them share your problems—work to share theirs. Do not be discouraged by repeated failure. Defeat should not exist for the spirit. And, oh, the true way—you pointed it out in your first words. You have the training of the children. Their ideals are yours to make. A generation is a short—”
His face answered more and more the eager intentness of her own. He raised his hand with a gesture that underlined his next words: “But remember always, always, what Amiel says, that a child will divine what we really worship, and that no teaching will avail with him if weteachin contradiction to what weare.”
They were interrupted by a loud hail from the stairs. Madeleine Lowder’s handsome head showed through the balustrade, and back of her were other amused faces.
“I started to look you up, Lydia,” she said, advancing upon them hilariously, “I thought maybe you weren’t feeling well, and then I saw you monopolizing the lion so that everybody was wondering where in the world he was, and you were so wrapped up that you never even noticed me, so I motioned the others to see what a demure little cat of a sister I have.”
She stood before them at the end of this facetious explanation, laughing, frank, sure of herself, and as beautiful as a great rosy flower.
“Yoursister,” said the lecturer incredulously to Lydia.
“My husband’s sister,” Lydia corrected him, and presented the newcomer in one phrase.
“Isn’t she a sly, designing creature, Mr. Buisine?” cried Madeleine, in her usual state of hearty enjoyment of her situation. “You haven’t met many as up-and-coming, have you now?”
“I do not know the meaning of your adjective, Mademoiselle; but it is true that I have met few like your brother’s wife.”
“I’m not Mademoiselle!” Madeleine was greatly amused at the idea.
The lecturer looked at her with a return to his enigmatic smile of the earlier afternoon. “I never saw a person who looked more unmarried than yourself, Mademoiselle,” he persisted.
“Oh, we American women know the secret of not looking married,” said Madeleine proudly.
“You do indeed,” said the Frenchman with the manner of gallantry. “All of you look unmarried.”
Lydia rose to go. The lecturer looked at her, his eyes softening, and made a silent gesture of farewell.
He turned back to Madeleine. “But Iam,” she assured him, pleased and flattered with the centering of their persiflage on herself. She made a gesture toward Lydia, disappearing down the stairs. “I’m as much married assheis!”
M. Buisine continued smiling. “That is quite, quite incredible,” he told her.
CHAPTER XXIX“... in tragic life, God wot,No villain need be. Passions spin the plot.”
CHAPTER XXIX
“Say, Lydia,” said Madeleine with her bluff good humor, coming into the house a few days after the French lecture, “say, I’m awfully sorry I told Paul! I never supposed he’d go and get mad. It was just my fool notion of being funny.”
Lydia was dusting the balustrade, her back to her visitor. She tingled all through at this speech, and for an instant went on with her work, trying to decide if she should betray the fact that she knew nothing of the incident to which Madeleine’s remark seemed to refer, or if she should, as she had done so many times already, conceal under a silence her ignorance of what her husband told other people. She never learned of matters pertaining to Paul’s profession except from chance remarks of his business associates. He had not even told her, until questioned, about his great inspiration for rearranging the territory covered in that region by his company; a plan that must have engrossed his thoughts and fired his enthusiasm during months of apparently common life with his wife. And Paul had been genuinely surprised, and a little put out at her desire to know of it.
She decided that she dared not in this instance keep silent. She was too entirely in the dark as to what Madeleine had done. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Madeleine,” she said, turning around, dust-cloth in hand, trying to speak casually.
Her sister-in-law stared. “Didn’t Paul come home and give it to you? He looked as though he were going to.”
Lydia’s heart sank in a vague premonition of evil. “Paul hasn’t said anything to me. Why in the world should he? Is it about ’Stashie? She’s been back several days now, but I thought he hadn’t noticed her much.”
“Well, hehasn’tsaid anything, that’s a fact!” exclaimed Madeleine, with the frank implication in her voice that she had not before believed Lydia’s statement. “My, no! It’s not about ’Stashie. It’s about the French lecturer.”
Lydia’s astonishment at this unexpected answer quite took away her breath. “About the—” she began.
“Why, look-y here, it was this way,” explained Madeleine rapidly. “I told you I was only joking. I thought it would be fun to tease Paul about the mash you made on old What’s-his-name—about your sitting off on a sofa with him, and being so wrapped up you didn’t even notice when the whole gang of us came to look at you—and maybe I stretched it some about how you looked leaning forward and gazing into his eyes—” She broke off with a laugh, cheerfully unable to continue a serious attitude toward life. “Oh, never you mind! It does a married man good to make him jealous once in a while. Keeps ’em from getting too stodgy and husbandy.”
“Jealous!” cried Lydia. “Paul jealous! Of me! Never!” Her certainty on the point was instant and fixed.
“Well, you’d ha’ thought he was, if you’d seen him. I was jollying him along—we were in the trolley, going to Endbury. I had to take that early car so’s to keep a date with Briggs, and, oh, Lydia! that brown suit he’s making for me is adream, simply a dream! He’s put a little braid, just the least little bit, along—”
“What did Paul say?”
“Paul? Oh, yes—How’d I get switched off onto Briggs? Why, Paul didn’t sayanything; that was what made me see he wasn’t taking it right. He just sat still and listened and listened till it made me feel foolish. I thought he’d jolly me back, you know. He’s usually a great hand for that. And then when I looked at him I saw he looked as black as a thundercloud—that nasty lookhe has when he’s real mad. When we were children and he’d look that way, I’d grab up any old thing and hit him quick, so’s to get it in before he hit me. Well, I was awfully sorry, and I said, ‘Why, hold on a minute, Paul, let me tell you—’ but he said he guessed I’d told him about enough, and before I could open my mouth he dropped off the car. We’d got in as far as Hayes Avenue. I wanted to explain, you know, that the Frenchman was old enough to be ourgrandfather!”
“When did this happen?”
“Oh, I don’t know; three or four days ago—why, Thursday, it must have been, for after I got through with Briggs I went on to that—”
“And this is Monday,” said Lydia; “four days.”
At the sight of her sister-in-law’s troubled eyes, Madeleine was again overcome with facile remorse. She clapped her on the shoulder hearteningly. “I’m awfully sorry, Lyd, but don’t you go being afraid of Paul. You’re too gentle with him, anyhow. A married woman can’t afford to be. You have to keep the men in their places, and you can’t do that if you don’t knock ’em the side of the head once in so often. It’s good for ’em. Honest! And about this, don’t you worry your head a minute. Like as not Paul’s forgot everything about it. He’d forget anything, you know he would, if an interesting job came up in business. And if he ever does say anything, you just laugh and tell him about old Thingamajig’s white hair and pop eyes, and he’ll laugh at the joke on himself.”
Lydia drew back with a gesture of extreme repugnance. “Don’t talk so—as though Paul could be so—so vulgar.”
Madeleine laughed. “I guess you won’t find a man inthisworld that isn’t ‘vulgar’ that way.”
“Why, I’ve beenmarriedto Paul for years—he wouldn’t think I—no matter what you told him, he couldn’t conceive of my—”
Mrs. Lowder, as usual, found her brother’s wife very diverting. “Of your doing a little hand-holding on theside? Oh, go on! Flirting’s no crime! And you did—honest to goodness, you did, turn that old fellow’s head. You ought to have seen the way he looked after you.”
Lydia cut her off with a sharp “Oh,don’t!” She was now sitting, still absently grasping the dust-cloth.
Madeleine stood for a moment looking at her in a meditative silence rather unusual for her. “Lydia, you don’t look a bit well,” she said kindly. “Are you still bothered with that nausea?” She sat down by her sister-in-law and put her arms around her with an impulse of affectionate pity that almost undid Lydia, always so helplessly responsive to tenderness. “What’s the matter, Lyd?” Madeleine went on. “Something’s not going just right. Are you scared about this second confinement? Is Paul being horrid about something? You just take my advice, and if you want anything out of him, you fight for it. Nobody gets anything in this world if they don’t put up a fight for it.”
Lydia began to say that there were some things which lost their value if obtained by fighting, but suddenly she stopped her faltering words, drew a long breath, and laid her head on the other’s shoulder. More than wifely loyalty kept her silent. All her lifelong experience of Madeleine crystallized into a certainty of her limitations, and with this certainty came the realization that Madeleine stood for all the circle of people about her. Lydia had learned one lesson of life. She knew, she now knew intensely, that there was no cry by which she could reach the spiritual ear of the warm human beings so close to her in the body. She knew there was no language in which she could make intelligible her travail of soul. In the moment the two women sat thus, she renounced, once for all, any hope of outside aid in her perplexities. They lay between herself and Paul. She could hope to find expression and relief for them only through that unique privilege of marriage, utter intimacy.
She kissed her husband’s sister gently, comforted somewhat by the mere fact of her presence. “You’re good tobother about me, Maddely,” she said, using a pet name of their common childhood. “I guess I’m not feeling very well these days. But that’s to be expected.”
“Well, I tell you what, I wouldn’t be so patient about it asyouare!” cried the other wife. “It’s simply horrid to have all this a second time, and Ariadne so little yet. It’smeanof Paul.”
She continued voicing an indignant sympathy with her usual energy. Lydia looked at her with a vague smile. At the first words of the childless woman, she had been filled with the mother-hunger which gave savor to her life during those days. As Madeleine went on, she sat unheeding, lost in a fond impatience to feel the tiny body on her knees, the downy head against her cheek. Her arms ached with emptiness. For an instant, so vivid was her sense of it, the child seemed to be there, in her arms. She felt the eager tug of the soft lips at her breast. She looked down—“Well, anyhow, you poor, dear thing! I hope you will bottle-feed this one! It would be just a littletoomuch if they made you nurse it!”
Lydia did not even attempt a protest. Her submissive, entire acceptance of spiritual isolation seemed an answer to many of the conflicting impulses which had hitherto distracted her. She wished that she could reassure Madeleine by telling her that she would never again make another “odd” speech to her. She renounced all common life except the childlike, harmless, animal-like one of mutual material wants, and this renunciation brought her already a peace which, though barren, was infinitely calming after her former struggling uncertainties. “How did those waists come out that you sent to the cleaner’s, Madeleine?” she asked, in a bright, natural tone of interest. “I hope the blue onedidn’tfade.”
Madeleine reported to her husband that Lydia had seemed in one of her queer notional moods at first, but cheered up afterward and talked more “like folks,” and seemed more like herself than she had since her father died. They had a real good visit together she said, and she began to thinkshe could get some good satisfaction out of having Lydia for a neighbor, after all.
But after Lydia was alone, there sprang upon her the terror of living on such terms with Paul. No, no! Never that! It would be dying by inches! Beaten back to this last inner stronghold of the dismantled castle of her ideals of life, she prepared to defend it with the energy of desperation.
She did not believe Madeleine’s story, or, at least, not her interpretation of Paul’s attitude, but she felt a dreary chill at his silence toward her. It seemed to her that their marriage ought to have brought her husband an irresistible impulse to have in all their relations with each other a perfect openness. She resolved that she would begin to help him to that impulse that very day; now, at once.
When Paul came in, he seemed abstracted, and went directly upstairs to pack a satchel, stating with his usual absence of explanatory comment that he was called to Evanston on business. He ate his dinner rather silently, glancing furtively at the paper. Only at the breakfast-table—such was their convention—did he allow himself to become absorbed in the news.
Ariadne prattled to her mother of her adventures in the kitchen, where Patsy O’Hern, ’Stashie’s cousin Patsy, was visiting her, and he made Ariadne a “horse out of a potato and toothpicks for legs, and a little wagon out of a matchbox, and a paper doll to sit and drive, and Patsy was perfectly loverly, anyhow, and he was making such a lot of money every day, and, oh, he made the wheels out of potato, too, as round as could be he cut it, and he gave every cent of it to his grandmother and she loved him as much as she did ’Stashie, and wasn’t it good to have ’Stashie back, and—”
Paul frowned silently over his pie.
“Come, dear; it’s seven o’clock and bedtime,” said Lydia, leading the little girl away.
When she came back she noticed by the clock that she had been gone almost half an hour. She was surprised tosee Paul still in the dining-room, as though he had not stirred since she left him. He was sitting in an attitude of moody idleness, singular with him, his elbows on the table, his chin in his hands. He looked desperately, tragically tired.
No inward monitor gave any warning to Lydia of what the next few moments were to be in her life. She crossed the room quickly to her husband, feeling a great longing to be close to him.
As she did so, a rattling clatter of tin was heard from the kitchen, followed by a shout of roaring laughter. Something in Paul’s tense face snapped. He started up, overturning his chair. “Oh,damnthat idiot!” he cried.
The door opened behind them. ’Stashie stood there, her red hair hidden in a mass of soft dough that was beginning to ooze down over her perspiring, laughing face. “I just wanted to show you what a comycal thing happened, Mis’ Hollister,” she began, in her familiar way. “’Twould make a pig laugh, now! I’d begun my bread dough, and put it on a shelf, an’—”
“Oh, get out of here!” Paul yelled at her furiously. “And less noise out of you in the kitchen!”
He slammed the door shut on her retreat, and turned to Lydia with a face she did not recognize. The room grew black before her eyes.
“I suppose you still prefer that dirty Irish slut to my wishes,” he said.
His words, his accent, the quality of his voice, were the zigzag of lightning to his wife. The storm burst over her head like thunder.
She was amazed to feel a great wave of anger surge up in her, responsive to his own. She cried, in outraged resentment at his injustice: “You know very well—” and stopped, horrified at the passion which rose clamoring to her lips.
“I know very well that my home is the last place where my wishes are consulted,” said Paul, catching her up.
“I will dismiss ’Stashie to-morrow,” returned Lydia with a bitter, proud brevity.
“You’re rather slow to take a hint. How long has she been with us? As for your saying that you can’t get anyone else, and can’t keep house decently as other decent people do, there isn’t a word of truth in it! You can do whatever you care enough about to try to do. You didn’t make an incompetent mess of taking care of the baby as you did out of that disgusting dinner party!”
It was the first time he had ever spoken outright to her of that experience. Lydia was transfixed to hear the poison of the memory as fresh in his voice as though it had happened yesterday.
“I’m simply not worth putting yourself out for,” went on Paul, turning away and picking up his overcoat. “I’m only a common, ignorant, materialistic beast of an American husband!” He added in an insulting tone: “I suppose you’d like two husbands; one to earn your living for you, and one to talk to about your soul and to exchange near-culture with!”
He had not looked at Lydia as he poured out this sudden flood of acrimony, but at her quick, fierce reply, he faced her.
“I’d likeonehusband,” she cried white with indignation.
“And I’d like a wife!” Paul flashed back at her hotly. “A wife that’d be a help and not a hindrance to everything I want to do—a wife that’d be loyal to me behind my back, and not listen to sneaking foreigners telling her that she’s a misunderstood martyr—martyr!” His sense of injury exalted him. “Yes; all you American wives are martyrs, all right, I must say. While your husbands are working like dogs to make you money, you’re sitting around with nothing to do but drink tea and listen to a foreigner who tells you—in summer time, while you’re enjoying the cool breeze out here on a—maybe you think a dynamo-room’s a funny place to be, with the thermometer standing at—what am Idoingwhen I’m away from you? Enjoyingmyself, no doubt. Maybe you think it’s enjoyment to travel all night on a—maybe you think it’s nice to make yourself conspicuous with another man that’s been abusing your—”
Lydia could hear no more for a loud roaring in her ears. She knew then the blackest moment of her life—a sickening scorn for the man before her. Madeleine had been right, then. They were of the same blood. His sister knew him better than—she, his wife, his wedded wife, was not to be spared the pollution of having her husband—
“I didn’t take any stock in Madeleine’s nasty insinuations about your flirting with him, of course, but it showed me what you’ve been thinking about me all this time I’ve been working like a—”
Lydia drew the first conscious breath since the beginning of this nightmare. The earth was still under her feet, struck down to it though she was. The roaring in her ears stopped. She heard Paul say:
“Maybe you think I’m made of iron! I tell you I’m right on my nerves every minute! Dr. Melton threatens me with a breakdown every time I see him!” There was a sort of angry pride in this statement. “I can’t sleep! I’m doing ten men’s work! And what do I get from you? Any rest? Any quiet? Why, these first years, when you might have made things easier for me by taking all other cares off my mind and leaving me free for business—they’ve actually been harder because of you!”
He thrust his arms into his overcoat and caught up his satchel. “I haven’t wanted anything so hard to give! Good Lord! All I asked for was a well-kept house where I could invite my friends without being ashamed of it, and to live like other decent people!” He moved to the door, and put one hand, one strong, thin hand, on the knob. With the unearthly clearness of one in a terrible accident, Lydia noticed every detail of his appearance. He was flushed, a purple, congested color, singularly unlike his usual indoor pallor; hurried pulses throbbed visibly, almost audibly, at his temples; one eyelid twitched rapidly and steadily,like a clock ticking. With a gesture as automatic as drawing breath, he jerked out his watch and looked at it, apparently to make sure of catching his trolley, although his valedictory was poured out with such a passionate unpremeditation that the action must have been involuntary and unconscious. “But I don’t even ask that now—since it doesn’t suit you to bother to give it! All I ask now ought to be easy enough for any woman to do—not tobotherme! Leave me alone! Keep your everlasting stewing and fussing and hysterical putting-on to yourself! I don’t bother you with my affairs—I haven’t, and I never will—why, for God’s sake, can’t you— Some men marry women who help them, and pull with them loyally, instead of pulling the other way all the time! Such a woman would have made me a thousand times more successful than I—”
Lydia broke in with a loud voice of anguished questioning: “Do they make them better men?” she asked piercingly.
Her husband looked at her over his shoulder. “Oh, you and your goody-goody cant!” he said, and going out without further speech, closed the door behind him.
The clock struck the half-hour. Their conversation had lasted less than five minutes.
CHAPTER XXXTRIBUTE TO THE MINOTAUR
CHAPTER XXX
TRIBUTE TO THE MINOTAUR
The scene of Paul’s departure was no worse than many an outbreak in the ordinary married life of ordinary, quick-tempered, over-tired married people, for whom an open quarrel brings relief like the clearing of the air after an electric storm, but to Lydia it was no such surface manifestation of nerves. The impulse that had made them both break out into the cruel words came from some long-gathering bitterness, the very existence of which was like the end of all things to her. A single flash of lightning had showed her to the edge of what a terrifying precipice they had strayed, and then had left her in darkness.
That was how it seemed to her; she was in the most impenetrable blackness, though the little girl played on beside her with a child’s cheerful blindness to its elder’s emotion, and Anastasia detected nothing but that her mistress had a better color than before and stepped about quite briskly.
It was the restless activity of a tortured animal which drove Lydia from one household task to another, hurrying her into a trembling physical exhaustion, which, however, brought with it no instant’s cessation of the tumult in her heart. The night after Paul’s departure was like a black eternity to her turning wildly on her bed, or rising to walk as wildly about the silent house. “But I can’t stand this!—to hate and be hated! I can not bear it! I must do something—but what? but what?” Once she feared she had screamed out these ever-recurring words, so audibly like a cry of agony did they ring in her ears; but, forcingherself to an instant’s immobility, she heard Ariadne’s light, regular breathing continue undisturbed.
She sat down on her bed and told herself that she would go out of her mind if she could not think something different from this chaos of angry misery. She fell on her knees, she sent her soul out in a supreme appeal for help and, still kneeling, she felt the intolerable tension within her loosen. She began to cry softly. The unnatural strength which had sustained her gave way; she sank together in a heap, her head leaning against the bed, her arms thrown out across it. Here Anastasia found her the next morning, apparently asleep, although upon being called she seemed to come to herself from a deeper unconsciousness.
Whatever it had been, the hour or two of oblivion that lay back of her was like a wall between her soul and the worst phase of her suffering. In answer to her cry for help, perhaps an appeal to the best in her own nature, there had come a cessation of what was to her the only unbearable pain—the bitter, blaming anger which had flared up in her, answering her husband’s anger like the reflection of a torch in a mirror. In that silent hour before dawn, she had seen Paul suddenly as a victim to forces outside himself quite as much as she was; poor, tired Paul, with his haggard face, flushed with a wrath that was not his own, but an involuntary expression of suffering, the scream of a man caught in the cogs of a great machine. She hung before her mental vision now, constantly, the picture of Paul as she had seen him when she came downstairs; Paul leaning his chin on his hands, his jaded face white and drawn under his thinning, graying hair.
The alleviation which came through this conception of her husband was tempered by the final disappearance of her old feeling that Paul was stronger, clearer-headed, than she, and that if she could but once make him stop and understand the forces in their life which she feared, he could conquer them as easily as he conquered obstacles in the way of their material success. She now felt that he was not even as strong as she, since he could not get even her faintglimpse of their common enemy, this Minotaur of futile materialism which had devoured the young years of their marriage and was now threatening to destroy the possibility of a great, strongly-rooted affection which had lain so clearly before them. She felt staggered by the responsibility of having to be strong enough for two; and as another day wore on this new preoccupation became almost as absorbing an obsession as her anger of the night before.
But this was steadying in the very velocity with which her mind swept around the circle of possible courses of action. Her thoughts hummed with a steady, dizzy speed around and around the central idea that something must be done and that she was now the only one to do it. ’Stashie thought to herself that she had never seen Mrs. Hollister look so well, her eyes were so bright, her cheeks so pink.
Lydia had set herself the task of getting down and sorting the curtains in the house, preparatory to sending them to the cleaner. Above the piles of dingy drapery, her face shone, as ’Stashie had noted, with a strange, feverish brightness. Her knees shook under her, but she walked about quickly. Ariadne ran in and out of the house, chirping away to her mother of various wonderful discoveries in the world of outdoors. Lydia heard her as from a distance, although she gave relevant answers to the child’s talk.
“It has come down,” she was saying to herself, “to a life-and-death struggle. It isn’t a question now of how much of the best in Paul, in me, in our life, we can save. It’s whether we can saveany! How dirty lace curtains get! It must be the soft coal—yes, it is a life and death struggle—I must see to Ariadne’s underwear. It is too warm for these sunny days.—Oh! Oh! Paul and I have quarreled! And what about! About such sickeningly trivial things—how badly ’Stashie dusts! There are rolls of dust under the piano—but I thought people only quarreled—quarreled terribly—over great things: unfaithfulness, cruelty, differences in religion! Oh, if I only now had a religion, a religion which would—Yes, Ariadne; but only to the edge of the driveway and back. How muddy the driveway is!Paul said it should have more gravel—Paul!Howcanhe come back to me after such—Madeleine says married people always quarrel—how can they look into each other’s eyes again! We must escape that sort of life! We must! Wemust!”
The thought of what she had hoped from her marriage and of what she had, filled her with the most passionate self-reproach. It must be at least half her fault, since she and Paul made up but one whole. As she helped ’Stashie sort the dingy curtains, she was saying over and over to herself that she was responsible, responsible as much as for Ariadne’s health. This conception so possessed her now that she felt herself able to accomplish anything, even the miracle needed.
To have achieved this state of passionate resolution gave her for a moment the sense of having started upon the straight road to escape from her nightmare; and for the first time since the door had slammed behind Paul she drew a long breath and was able to give more than a blind gaze to the world about her.
She noticed that, though it was after twelve o’clock, Ariadne had not been told to come to luncheon. When the little girl came running at her mother’s call, her vivid face flushed with happy play, Lydia knew a throb of that exquisite, unreasoning parent’s joy, lying too near the very springs of life for any sickness of the spirit to affect it. Like everything else, however, the touch of the child’s tight-clinging arms about her neck brought her back to her preoccupation. Ariadne must not be allowed to grow up to such a regret as she felt, that she had never known her father. There were moments, she saw them clearly, when Paul realized with difficulty the fact of his daughter’s existence, and he never realized it as a fact involving any need for a new attitude on his part.
“When is Daddy coming back to usvistime?” asked Ariadne over her egg.
Anastasia paused furtively at the door. She had had a divination of trouble in the last talk between her master andmistress. The door had slammed. Mr. Hollister had not called for the tie she was pressing for him in the kitchen—’Stashie told herself fiercely that “killing wud be too good for her, makin’ trouble like the divil’s own!” She listened anxious for Lydia’s answer.
“Daddy’s coming back to us as soon as his business is done,” said Paul’s wife. At the turn of her phrase she turned cold, and added with a quick vehemence: “No, no! before that! Long before that!” She went on, to cover her agitation and get the maid out of the room, “’Stashie, get the baby a glass of milk.”
“The front door bell’s ringin’,” said ’Stashie, departing in that direction, with the assurance of her own ability to choose the proper task for herself, so exasperating to her master.
She came back bringing Miss Burgess in her wake, Miss Burgess apologizing for “coming rightin, that way,” exclaiming effusively at the pretty picture made by mother and child,—“She must be such company for you, Miss Lydia”—Miss Burgess, deferential, sure of her own position and her hostess’, and determinedly pleased with the general state of things. Lydia repressed a sigh of impatience, but, noting the tired lines in the little woman’s face, told Anastasia to make another cup of tea for Miss Burgess and cook her an egg.
“Oh, delighted, I’m sure! Quite an honor to have the same lunch with little Miss Hollister.”
Ariadne did not smile at this remark, though from the speaker’s accent it was meant as a pleasantry.
Miss Burgess cast about in her mind for another bit of suitable badinage, but finding none, she began at once on the object of her visit.
“Now, my dear, I want you to listen to all I have to say before you make one objection. It’s an idea of my very own. You’ll let me get through without interruption?”
“Yes, oh, yes,” murmured Lydia, lifting Ariadne down from her high-chair and untying the napkin from about her thin little neck.
The introduction of a new element in her surroundings had for a moment broken the thread of her exalted resolutions. She wondered with a sore heart, as though it had been a common lovers’ quarrel, how she and Paul could ever get over the first sight of each other again. She was wondering how, with the most passionate resolve in the world, she could do anything at all under the leaden garment of physical fatigue which would weigh her down in the months to come.
Miss Burgess began in her best style, which she so evidently considered very good indeed, that she could not doubt Lydia’s attention. It was all about a home for working-women she explained; a new charity which had come from the East, had caught on like anything among the Smart Set of Columbus, and was about to be introduced into Endbury. The most exclusive young people in Columbus—the East End Set (Miss Burgess had a genius for achieving oral capitalization) gave a parlor play for the first benefit there, in one of the Old Broad Street Homes, and they were willing to repeat it in Endbury to introduce it there. A Perfectly splendid crowd was sure to come, tickets could be Any Price, and the hostess who lent her house to it could have the glory of a most unique affair. Mrs. Lowder would be overwhelmed with delight to have the pick of the Society of the Capital at her house, but Miss Burgess had thought it such an opportunity for Miss Lydia to come out of mourning with, since it was for charity. She motioned Lydia, about to speak, sternly to silence: “You said you wouldn’t interrupt! And you haven’t let me sayhalfyet! That’s your side of it—the side your dear mother would think of if she were only here; but there’s another side that you can’t, yououghtn’tto resist!” She finished her tea with a hasty swallow and, going around the table, sat down by Lydia, laying her hand impressively on the young matron’s slim arm. “You’re the sweetest thing in the world, of course, but, like other people of your fortunate class, you can’t realize how perfectly awfully lucky you are, nor how unluckypoorpeople are! Ofcourse it stands to reason that you can’t even imagine the life of a working-woman—you, a woman of entire leisure, with every want supplied before you speak of it by a husband who adores you! Why, Miss Lydia, to give you some idea let me tell you just one little thing. Lots and lots of the working-women of Endbury live with their families in two or three rooms right on that horrid Main Street near their work because they can’t affordcarfares!”
Lydia looked at her without speaking. She remembered her futile, desperate, foolish proposition to Paul to get more time together by living near his work. With a roar, the flood of her bewilderment, diverted for a time, broke over her again. She braced herself against it. Through her companion’s dimly-heard exhortations that, from her high heaven of self-indulgence, she stoop to lend a hand to her less favored sisters, she repeated to herself, clinging to the phrase as though it were a magic formula: “If I can only wish hard enough to make things better, nothing can prevent me.”
The telephone bell rang, and Miss Burgess interrupted herself to say: “It’s for me, I know. I told them at the office to call me up here.” She got herself out of the room in her busy way, her voice soon coming in a faint murmur from the far end of the hall.
Lydia walked to the window to call Ariadne in to put on a wrap, the thought and action automatic. She had buttoned the garment about the child’s slender body before she responded again to the little living presence. Then she took her in a close embrace. With the child’s breath on her face, with her curls exhaling the fresh outdoor air, there came to pass for poor Lydia one of the strange, happy mysteries of the contradictory tangle that is human nature. She had felt it often with Paul after one of their long separations—how mere physical presence can sometimes bring a consolation to the distressed spirit.
As she held her child to her heart, things seemed for a moment quite plain and possible. Why, Paul was Ariadne’sfather! As soon as he was with her again, all would be well. It must be. Nothing could separate her from the father of her baby! They were one flesh now. There was still all their lifetime to grow to be one in spirit. She had only to try harder. They had simply started on a false track. They were so young. So many years lay before them. There was plenty of time to turn back and start all over again—there was plenty of time to—
“Oh, my dear! my dear!” Miss Burgess faltered weakly into the room and sank upon a chair.
Lydia sprang up, Ariadne still in her arms, and faced her for a long silent instant, searching her face with passion. Then she set the little girl down gently. “Run out and play, dear,” she said, and until the door had shut on the child she did not stir. Her hand at her throat, “Well?” she asked.
Miss Burgess began to cry into her handkerchief.
“It’s Paul!” said Lydia with certainty. She sat down.
The weeping woman nodded.
“He has left me,” Lydia continued in the same dry tone of affirmation. “I know. We had a quarrel, and he has left me.”
Miss Burgess looked up, quite wild with surprise, her sobs cut short, her face twisted. “Oh, no—no—no!” she cried, running across the room and putting her arms about the other. “No; it’s not that! He—he—the man who telephoned said they were testing the dynamo, and your husband insisted on—”
Lydia came to life like a swimmer emerging into the air after a long dive. “Oh, he’s hurt! He’s hurt!” she cried, bounding to her feet. “I must go to him. I must go to him!”
She tore herself away from the reporter and darted toward the door. The older woman ran after her, stumbling, sobbing, putting hands of imploring pity on her.
Although no word was spoken, Lydia suddenly screamed out as though she had been stabbed. “NO! Not that!” she cried.
“Yes, yes, my poor darling!” said the other.
Lydia turned slowly around. “Then it is too late. We never can do better,” she said.
Miss Burgess tried helplessly to unburden her kind heart of its aching sympathy. “You spoke of a little disagreement, but, oh, my dear, don’t let that be the last thought. Think of the years of perfect love and knowledge you had together.”
“We never knew each other,” said Lydia. Her voice did not tremble.
“Oh, don’t! don’t!” pleaded Miss Burgess, alarmed. “You mustn’t let it unhinge you so! Such a perfect marriage!”
“We were never married,” said Lydia. She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.
“Oh, help! Someone!” called the poor reporter. “Somebody come quick.”
Lydia opened her eyes. She spoke still in a low, steady voice, but in it now was a shocking quality from which the other shrank back terrified. “I could have loved him!” she said.
“Quick—’Stashie—hurry—keep the baby out of the room! Your mistress has fainted!”
BOOK IV
“BUT IT IS NOT TOO LATE FOR ARIADNE”