CHAPTER EIGHT
In the next weeks, it seemed to Anne that the world had been recreated while she and Roger loved by the lake. The old world of definite working hours, through which strangers claimed her physical energy and brain, as deeply strangers one day as the next; the old family life of repression, grown unconscious from habit; minute but never ceasing spiritual adjustment, strengthless rebellions against habits set in steel bands before one awakened to their cramping horror, all had dissolved in a community of interest in a larger and much simpler world.
In this world, men and women tried to increase happiness. They worked with ideas; many ideas and many people striving to embody them in form. Often in the mornings, after Anne had watched Roger vanish round the corner of the street far below, she continued to stand on the porch of the little cottage they had found on a rocky crag that rose from the grass-grown cobbles to a view of the bay and Tamalpais. It was like her inner life here, high above the confusions of her mother's muddled thinking, her father's petulance, Belle's brutal experience. Above the confusion of The Niche, the unironed laundry, the unreasoned bursts of Hilda's extravagances, the intrusion of uninteresting gossip. The three white-painted rooms with their sweep of bay and hills, close to the stars at night, walled from the city below by the spicy fragrance of a tangled garden, was another world.
Anne dreaded anything that might disturb its peace. No discordant note must enter the full day, when alone in her new home, she made it beautiful, or prepared for the guests Roger like to ask to dinner; nor the pleasant evenings when she and Roger read or talked before the fire, or went to the many meetings included in Roger's duty as Wainwright's secretary.
But, at the end of two months, when Anne realized that this guarding of her new peace had excluded her family, that neither Belle nor her father had seen the place at all, and her mother only once, she was ashamed and decided to ask all three to dinner the first night Belle could take off and to make a little celebration of the occasion. On the next Thursday evening, when Roger was at a conference with Hilary Wainwright, Anne went especially to arrange the night.
"Well! I was just wishing you'd phone or something!" Hilda hurried half-way down the stairs to meet Anne and walked back with her arm about her daughter's waist. "It was kind of lonesome to-night and I was just thinking of running down to Mrs. Welles for a minute, but this is the night she goes to church and it didn't seem worth while. I am glad." Hilda hugged her effusively; for, although Anne had made it a rule to go home once a week, if only for a few moments late in the afternoon, Hilda greeted each visit with such amazed admiration that Anne had been able to include it among the many responsibilities of her new life.
For Hilda was now very deeply impressed with Roger's importance as the private secretary of a millionaire. Millionaire philanthropists had not existed in Hilda's knowledge of the social structure and Roger's close connection with one filled her with awe. The status of Hilary Wainwright in the financial world had done much, also, to reconcile James. And when, one day, shortly after Anne's marriage, he had chanced to see Roger in earnest talk with the president of the Coast Electric, James Mitchell had accepted Roger, in no generous apology to Anne for his attitude the last night before her marriage, but in a thinly veiled eagerness to know all about the schemes of the great man.
Anne despised herself for yielding to this curiosity, but it was so much pleasanter when things moved smoothly, that she catered just a little to him. She admitted him, without apparent consciousness of his real purpose, to the projects of Hilary Wainwright for increasing the total of human happiness. She threw off carelessly such phrases as: "welding of classes," "the larger democracy," "the obligations of wealth"; phrases which James Mitchell heard with satisfaction, as he might have observed the social minutiæ of a class above him. As working theories he did not visualize them at all, but it gave him a feeling of Roger and Anne—hence vaguely himself—moving in high places.
To-night he was specially interested, for the papers were full of some scheme of Wainwright's for getting sugar more cheaply to the market from his plantations in Hawaii. In the office, James Mitchell had spoken with authority upon the subject that very afternoon, and had enjoyed the respectful attention of the other clerks.
He accepted the invitation with such unusual grace that Anne was ashamed for him; but when, a little later, as she said good-by to her mother in the hall and Hilda whispered: "It will be a great occasion for us, Annie. I never saw him so delighted," Anne forgave him. Her mother had so few pleasures and this mood of her father's was almost as great an event as the dinner itself. "I don't believe he remembers a word he said that night," Hilda went on in the same confidential whisper as she went with Anne down the stairs. "Anyhow he's never said another thing about objecting and now—everything's going to be lovely. I feel it in my bones. But three extra to dinner! I'm afraid it will make a lot of extra work for you."
"Now, mamma, don't be silly. Besides, you haven't the least idea what a fine cook I am."
"I don't doubt it a bit. Any one who can get up a dinner for a millionaire! Goodness, I should be scared to death."
"Oh, Mr. Wainwright's simple. Roger says his god is simplicity." But as Anne herself was not quite sure how Roger sometimes meant this, she hurried over the puzzled stare in her mother's eyes. "Next Wednesday at seven."
Hilda sparkled. She had never eaten later than six and the fashionable, if inconvenient hour, clinched her belief in Roger's efficiency.
"I'll finish my new waist for the occasion and see that papa gets a good shave."
She went as far as the street corner with Anne and gave her an extra hug.
"Going to dinner with my married daughter. Why, I feel like a young girl going to her first dance."
Anne kissed her. "You dear thing, you're going to eat a lot of meals of your daughter's contriving only—don't expect too much this first time. In spite of my boasting, I'm not always absolutely sure, especially about salad dressing and gravy."
"I'll take a chance." Hilda nodded, her eyes so bright, that Anne drew her quickly back and kissed her again.
"Don't forget, seven sharp."
"We'll be there in cap and bells, never fear."
She stood on the pavement until Anne had disappeared, then went smiling back to the flat. Hilda Mitchell was indeed deeply grateful for her daughter's happiness. In spite of her denial of the fear that Anne might have been an old maid, she had never been quite sure of Anne's powers of attraction. Anne was so "highfalutin'," what Belle called a "spiritual aristocrat"; and, like most women who refer to the physical relation with their husbands as "duty," Hilda considered spinsterhood a disgrace.
To Anne's relief, by which she measured to a hairline her previous anxiety, the dinner was a success. If Roger made an effort to meet the Mitchells on their own ground, his tact exceeded Anne's keen sensitiveness to discover. He kept the conversation at anecdotal level, apparently because that mood was his own. James Mitchell laughed as Anne had rarely heard him laugh, and reciprocated with uninteresting, tedious reminiscences of the office. In her delight at "papa's mood," Hilda was sobered to quiet dignity. Belle was a little bored, as she always was when she did not direct the conversation, but content, for she had expected to shoulder the social responsibility at this initial dinner, and she was not in the vein. She watched Roger and Anne and wondered whether they were really as united as they seemed. Belle had had more experience than even Hilda suspected.
Roger felt the evening glide pleasantly away and was glad that Anne had done this. The Mitchells interested him not at all. He thought Hilda a vapid fool, Belle pretentious and James a nonentity. They were a perfect illustration of the bewildered and confused sheep. Anne's birth among them was a miracle. But the miracle had happened and they would always be more or less in the background of life.
A little after ten the Mitchells went. They kissed Anne and Anne returned their kisses while Roger tried not to resent this very natural act. They had kissed Anne and she had kissed them years before he had known of her existence, but now, she was so exclusively his, her delicate fairness so fully the outward expression of their love and understanding, that this intimate physical contact with the Mitchells echoed a discordant note in the perfect harmony.
So he forced himself, in rebuke of his jealousy, to the unnecessary courtesy of seeing them down the long flight of stairs with a flashlight, because the porchlight just missed a weak spot below the second landing. But he came back three steps at a time to Anne.
"Well, little hostess, that was some dinner you got up." He went about switching out all the lights except one, as he always did when people had gone. With this dimming of the light, he closed out intruding personalities, focussed life back to the points of himself and Anne. "How did I behave?"
He had then felt the need to "behave."
The unconsciousness of the confession chilled Anne's joy a little. It made her feel a traitor to her people and she moved away and stood looking thoughtfully down into the fire. Her mother, so stiff and subdued in the new waist, so happy in her happiness; Belle, bored, but generous always in her love; even her father so genial that she had wondered several times during dinner whether, if the conditions of his life had been different, he would have been quite so dull and gray-souled and selfish. Each in his own way was a little vain and proud of the way she now lived. To her father and mother, at least, she was a very real part of life; through her, they touched experience not their own. But they were no longer a needed part of her life. Across the chasm of the full present and her future with Roger, they stood apart in the past, a tiny group, a little isolated and lonely, even Belle.
Her eyes filled with tears and Roger took her quickly in his arms.
"Why, Princess, what is it?"
"Oh, Roger, it is tragic, really. I felt it all evening, and when they followed you down the stairs and I knew you would come back alone and they would go to that cold, dismal flat—they seemed suddenly so cut off, so separate. They were the Mitchells and—and we were the Bartons—and it hurt."
"But, honey girl, that's such a natural thing. It's always that way. How did you expect to feel toward your lawful husband?" he added, trying to force an answering smile into Anne's eyes. But she only burrowed deeper into his shoulder and he felt her body quivering.
"It's awful the way children grow up and go away. Mamma hasn't anything really but me and Belle. She's gone on all these years—kind of looking forward, feeling in the midst of life—oh, I can't get it into words, but she doesn't seem to have anything. She's always been so cheerful and planning and doing the best she knew how—and now—there doesn't seem to be any reason for her to keep it up."
Roger stroked Anne's hair gently. "I know, dear, but any one who hasn't anything of his very own in life, has to come to that point. And most people haven't."
"But she did have something of her own. We were her own. She's lost it."
"Nobody can be anybody else's own, not lastingly their own. Men and women who haven't anything but their children, haven't really anything at all. They're just vehicles for the next generation, a kind of machine to keep things running. And what's the good of keeping things running, unless you make them better?"
Anne lay close to Roger, her nerves relaxing under the soft touch of his fingers.
"Roger," she whispered after a long silence, "don't you ever want children?"
Roger's stroking of her hair ceased. She looked up into his suddenly grave eyes. Already Anne was seeing life in relation to children, and he had not thought of a child at all. It seemed very necessary to be honest in his answer.
"It's this way. I do, if you do. But there's so much to do in the world, and there are so many people in it already, that it seems to me selfish just to add to the numbers. There's a lot of talk about children being the highest work of the race and all that, but it seems to me it's on the part of people who can't do anything else. Most anybody can have children, and very few can do anything else; but what's the good of perpetuating a race on and on without time or space to grow in? As for the comfort of children, the selfish clutching at companionship or less lonely age—well—if the children are really worth while as human beings, if they're going to add anything to the sum of life, they have to be so far in advance of their parents' generation—that you just can't bridge the gap. And even if they're not, but just trudge along in the old groove—still they're themselves and not you really. They——"
"Don't," Anne cried, "it breaks my heart."
Roger held her closer still and began stroking her hair again. But he felt, for the first time, a difference between himself and Anne. Was this just the difference between all men and all women? Or was it a difference between one viewpoint and another? The natural growth of life, the widening of human outlook, the wrenching of any bonds, these were pain to all the Mitchells in the world. The sentimental, clutching possession of "family" was Love to them. Roger wished he knew exactly what Anne was thinking, drawn close to him, her arm creeping up until it circled his neck in a clinging hold.
"Roger, let's never grow apart. Let's share always. Wait, if one of us has to, but never go on alone. I—I—couldn't bear it, Roger, now."
"Neither could I, Princess." Roger took Anne's face between his hands and tried to smile into her eyes. But, at the cool firmness of her cheeks beneath his fingers, the smile burned to a flame that scorched Anne's eyes; with a little sigh she closed them and raised her lips to his.