CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
For a week the tension between Roger and Anne lasted, pulling a little weaker each day under the pressure of proximity, little Rogie, and the habit of agreement. Anne did not mention Merle again and tried not to think of the staring, embryonic eyes of what might have been Merle's child. She knew such thought was morbid and unhealthy. As Merle had said, one million women a year, in the United States alone, recognized this as their right of escape. To Belle it was perhaps a very ordinary occurrence. Anne herself would have hesitated to call it "wicked." She called it "horrible" instead. But she was glad when Merle stopped coming and never asked about her.
Autumn passed and the holiday season came with early rain. Hilda spoke tentatively of another Christmas dinner, although Belle was in Europe now with a rich patient. But Anne evaded these suggestions and did not even mention them to Roger.
On Christmas Eve Anne bought a tiny tree and decorated it, but Rogie was fretful and squirmed away from it, crying; so that Anne put out the candles and did not light them again.
On Christmas morning she and Roger exchanged their presents and immediately after the late breakfast Roger began work on a complicated case that was to come up right after the New Year.
Just before noon it began to rain again, a thin, icy drizzle that soaked all the cheer and hope from life. Anne tried to read or sew, but the thin, cold, inexhaustible rain washed away all interest. She could not even make up her mind to go to Hilda, although it was Christmas day and she had not been for a week. No decision could crystallize in that icy drip, never condensing to a real downpour, never ceasing, trickling into one's courage until it washed away desire.
They had planned to go to a theater in the evening, but a little after five the woman whom Anne had hired to stay with Rogie phoned that she could not come, and the tickets were cancelled. Roger had worked all afternoon in order to have the evening free, and now that the evening was to be his he decided to take a nap. He slept until Anne waked him for dinner at half past six.
After dinner he helped Anne with the dishes and they smoked an extra cigarette in honor of the day. But he was so plainly anxious to get back to the work he had not quite finished that at last Anne's taut nerves could no longer stand his generosity and she urged him to finish.
"Otherwise you'll want to sit up all night, and you've been up late for days."
"I would like to get it through to-night," he conceded. "But what will you do? I'm afraid I've been pretty absorbed all day."
"That's all right. I may go 'round to mom's for a little. I haven't even phoned and I sent the presents by post."
"Has it stopped raining?"
"I don't know. It doesn't matter." Anne went to the door and the sweet dampness of the garden flooded the warm room. "Yes, it's stopped; thickened to a heavy mist. I won't be long."
"Then I'll try and finish by the time you get back."
Almost before the door closed Roger was at the typewriter. As Anne went down the stairs she heard it click, click, as fast as Katya's.
She found Hilda and James alone, Hilda crocheting and James reading in the silence that always lay over their evenings. For a few moments her entrance shattered it, and they came together in interest of her news, the health of Rogie, the presents Anne had sent. Then James went back to his paper and Hilda rummaged in her disordered work-basket for Belle's last letter.
Would she and Roger some day meet like this for a moment on the coming of Rogie, a grown man?
Anne scarcely heard the letter Hilda had found, not in the work-basket at all, but in the pocket of her kitchen apron. It was only the postscript that drew Anne's attention in time to comment intelligently:
"We're leaving Marseilles to-morrow," Belle wrote, "and may go on to the Far East."
"Now, if that isn't just like Belle's luck," Hilda smiled and folded the letter. "Traipsing 'round like a millionaire with nothing to do. The lady has her own maid, and Belle only has to see that she takes her drops and things and doesn't get too tired. I'll bet Belle has a high old time."
Hilda looked like an excited child, prematurely gray-headed, as she nodded her assurance of Belle's ability to have a good time in any circumstance.
"I don't doubt that, but, personally, I can't imagine anything worse than trotting about with an invalid, looking after her pills and sandwiching all the lovely things in Europe into the spaces between her patient's rests."
Hilda laughed. "If I know Belle, by this time she's got that maid trained."
"She's tried, anyhow," Anne agreed, and they smiled together in appreciation of Belle's "efficiency."
Just as Anne was leaving Charlotte Welles came in, and Anne stayed on a few moments. Charlotte Welles was a slight woman with great dark eyes under cloudy brown hair, a pale skin, and pale, sweet lips. She had a soft voice, but her manner annoyed Anne. Her gentleness was so insistent, and although she never mentioned her belief in Christian Science, Anne was sure she never forgot it for a moment. She seemed always to measure one's remarks up against eternity, to discount any opposition as the meanderings of a clouded mind; to be quite sure that, in time, one would see Truth. To-night she was particularly annoying, although as Anne walked home she could not repeat a single annoying thing Mrs. Welles had said.
"She affects me as the sight of a limousine or a fur-lined overcoat affects the man with a dinner pail trudging in the street, I suppose. She's a kind of spiritual 'capitalist' with an unfair advantage over the rest of the world. Because she started with an illogical mind she's been able to accumulate this 'peace,' and never earned it through a real trouble in her life. I can't imagine what she and moms have in common, but she seems to be always dropping in. Perhaps she hopes to convert mamma to Science." But at the picture of Hilda converted to Science and moving thereafter in calm assurance through the perversities of James Mitchell, Anne laughed aloud. "Dear old moms, she'd never keep her mind on one thing long enough to demonstrate it into existence, even if she could decide what it was she wanted most."
But the calm face of Charlotte Welles continued beside Anne until she reached her own door. After all, the "capitalist" did enjoy his viciously accumulated millions, and Charlotte Welles' peace was real to herself.
The typewriter was covered now, and Roger was reading before the fire. As Anne came in he laid his book aside and looked up.
"Well, what's the news?"
"Nothing special. Belle's going on from France to the Far East. She seems to be having a wonderful time."
"Trust Belle."
"Oh, I don't know. Belle works hard for her money. You wouldn't like to trot a nervous millionaire around the world, would you?"
"Not on your life." Roger was about to add that neither would he like, if he were a nervous millionaire, being trotted about the world by Belle. But he never, if he could avoid it, referred in any way to the Mitchells. He always asked after them when Anne had been there, but he never went himself. He felt at times that Anne understood his feeling, and he wished he could have been more honest with her about it. But at the first hint of criticism Anne flared to their defense; and often, when the Mitchells themselves had been far from his intention, Anne had interpreted his scorn of intellectual narrowness as direct criticism of her people.
The subject of Belle dropped, but Roger did not take his book again. He felt Anne beside him, aloof in some interest acquired at the Mitchell flat, something she would guard from him if he tried to share it. Roger felt a little sentimental and lonely, too, as he searched about among the topics of common interest for a meeting ground with Anne. But this meeting ground had grown narrower and narrower and what remained had dangerous spots, slippery places from which they were sure to slide from generalities to personal recrimination—if Anne let it get that far. Usually, just as they were about to plunge into an anger that Roger often felt would clear the atmosphere, Anne would retreat behind the patient calm that closed him from her as effectually as a barred door.
The silence grew until Roger felt that he must break it at any price, when unexpectedly Anne sighed. She had been wandering through the lovely places of Europe.
"Tired?"
"No, not very. But this rain is getting on my nerves I think. I can't get out much with Rogie, and I feel all cooped up."
"Couldn't we make some arrangement? Couldn't you get Mrs. Horton to come round for so many hours a day? That would leave you free. It's not right to drop all your interests, even for His Highness."
His voice was so concerned, his eyes so gentle that Anne forced back the statement that His Highness was now the only real interest she had.
"I suppose we could. But I really don't know what I would do. I thought the other day of taking some extension lectures again, afternoon ones. I got the prospectus for French literature and history—but I don't know. It seems finicky and dilettantish somehow."
French literature, when Roger was always talking about the drama and tragedy of life about them! History, when the people round her were engaged in making it!
For a moment Roger thought of suggesting that Anne come for a few hours a day and help out in the loft. They were deluged in work. Merle was getting more and more careless. Some days she never appeared at all. She had been away a week now, no one knew where, unless it was Tom, and he had offered no explanation. Katya had done Merle's work in addition to her own, but even Katya was not so good a stenographer as Anne. While he turned the suggestion about, making sure it hid no pitfall of antagonism, Anne went on:
"I guess that the real reason is I'm too lazy."
"You're certainly not that. You keep Rogie like a prince and this house is a regular jewel-box."
And yet, less than two years ago, he had planned to do high things with Anne. One planned, and something, faint as breath, impalpable as a mist, crept in, and one did not do those things. The burned log fell apart. The rain beat again on the roof as if striving to reach within. In the rising wind the acacia lashed at them. Anne came from her thoughts with a little shrug.
"Perhaps I will. I don't know. In the meantime, let's go to bed. The jewel-box has to be thoroughly overhauled this week and I want to get up early to-morrow."
In the darkness they listened for a while to the rain. Then gradually Roger ceased to hear it. His breath came in long, steady sighs, even and assured. Anne rose quietly on her elbow until she could see his face faintly in the blackness. He looked very young in his sleep and remarkably like Rogie.