CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Now that he had worded aloud the idea of leaving Anne, the thought was always with him.
Spiritual freedom. He wished for no other. The man in the street might talk as if sex were a devouring hunger, a ravening wolf ready to spring upon one unexpectedly at any moment. But sex without companionship nauseated him to visualize. There might be moments—these he would deal with when they arose. Now, the wind of spiritual freedom carried no taint of lesser, fiercer need.
How did Anne feel? Perhaps she, too, would welcome freedom. He had visioned restrictions binding him alone. Perhaps Anne, too, was bound.
The need to know consumed Roger's thought and his impatience with smaller issues. As one forgives trivial failings in the face of a great crisis, Roger grew strangely gentle and forbearing. He rarely left home in the evenings now, and Anne often felt his eyes on her questioningly, as she sat sewing under the lamp. For she rarely read; she so often forgot to turn the pages.
It was one evening, about three weeks after he had talked with Katya, that Roger looked up to see Anne almost immersed under a billow of white material. Usually Anne's work was something small and compact, and more than once he had traced fanciful analogies between the short, swift movements of Anne's needle, mending a jagged hole in a sock, and the mental methods of the world of Mitchells. It was with such little stabs that they attempted to draw together the holes of life, patch it for what?—a few more wearings at best. But to-night, as if in keeping with the wonder of Anne's attitude to freedom, she was engaged on larger work.
He laid his book aside and asked with real interest:
"What's that?"
Anne started. They scarcely ever broke in on each other's occupations any more.
"A sheet."
"A sheet? Do you make sheets? I thought you bought them all ready."
"You do, if you want to throw away every one that gets a hole in it. But you can cut them in two—they usually wear in the center—and sew them up again and they're as good as new except for the seam."
Roger was disappointed. No doubt it was an excellent method, but it annoyed him. It was so vehemently sensible and frugal.
"It seems to me that's mending—in extremis. If we need new sheets I wish you'd buy them."
"We don't need new sheets. These are for mamma. Hers are almost all gone."
Roger felt as if he were being quietly suffocated in an ocean of mended sheets. He sat looking at Anne until his eyes disturbed her beyond her power to pretend indifference. She glanced up, but before she could ask him why he was so interested in her sewing, Roger spoke.
"Anne," he said slowly, "why aren't things the same as they used to be between us?"
At last it had come, the thing that had been moving toward her for weeks. It had taken possession of her. The matter was no longer in her control.
"I don't know."
"Neither do I, when I try to put it into words."
Anne threaded her needle in the silence that followed and bent again over the hem. Bent so, with the light gilding to the cool fairness of her, Roger's clear-cut decision of the last few weeks clouded. Surely nothing so physically exquisite as Anne could be empty of beauty within.
"If—neither—of us knows," he went on, "it—can't be terribly serious—can it?"
"Then why are we talking about it?" Anne asked stiffly.
"But what is it? We—we both feel it and yet you say you don't know either. But you feel it, as well as I. Something we used to have is gone."
"Yes. I feel it. We haven't really anything at all," she added, as if facing a fact Roger had avoided.
"I tried to keep it," he said bitterly. "I tried desperately for a long time."
"Did you?"
"Yes, I did. But one can't do those things alone." This was not what he had meant to say, but Anne was looking at him with such cool composure, so safe from all touch of blame in her small assurance of having done all in her power.
"No, of course not. One can't do all the understanding—alone."
Roger felt his anger rising, and stood up, as if by so standing he could reach the calm escaping him.
"I don't suppose you think I tried at all."
"I didn't say you didn't try. You asked me if I felt it and I said I did."
"Well, have you any suggestion to make?" He might have been asking an accused witness to submit proof of his innocence.
"No. I haven't any. Have you?"
"We can't go on like this. We claim to be reasonable human beings and we might as well recognize the truth. We—" but the words were so final; like bullets to say—"we can separate"—that Roger temporized. "We must find what it's all about and try to straighten it out or——" Roger shrugged and turned away. "I have tried to find out what it's all about."
"So have I." Anne went calmly on to the end of the seam, although afterwards she had to rip out every stitch, for not one of them had caught through. At the end of the hem, she looked up, fastened her needle in the material, and said:
"Then there is no real alternative."
At the decision of Anne's tone, Roger started.
"What do you mean?"
"What you didn't quite like to say—we can separate."
"Do you mean that?"
"If you do."
"What do you want?"
"Whatever you do," Anne said after a thoughtful pause. "In a situation like this, the wish of one must be the wish of both."
The cold patience of her explanation was maddening.
"That's unfair—to put it up to me like that."
"I'm not. You put it up to me in the first place. You say we can't go on like this and the only thing to do is separate."
"You said separate."
"Don't quibble." The first impatience pricked Anne's calm. "This isn't a witness stand. You said we had to find the trouble or—you didn't quite have the courage to say separate, but you meant it."
"If you know so well what I mean," Roger said a little sadly, "why haven't you applied that knowledge more frequently? It's only when—oh, what's the use?"
Anne waited but he did not go on. "None, unless you'll speak plainly. I don't know what you're referring to."
"No, I don't suppose you do. You can only interpret my unspoken thoughts against me. Never the other way round."
"Are we quarreling?" she asked with frigid politeness, as she might have asked a detail of social behavior by which to regulate her action.
"No," Roger shouted in a need to break through that icy calm, "we're not quarreling because there's nothing to quarrel about. There's nothing at all."
"That's where we began," Anne rose and carefully folded the sheet which she felt now was the shroud of all dead hopes. "There's really nothing more to be said, is there?"
She was actually waiting for him to confirm this fact, put a neat, rhetorical period to this immense finality. He did not answer.
"I don't want to discuss this again. There's really no need." She put her thimble and cotton back in the work-basket and closed the lid. "We've reached the decision. Haven't we?"
After all, why try to change Anne? She would force the decision upon him. She was right. It was quibbling to evade it.
"Yes. I guess we have."
They stood for a moment looking at each other quietly. Then, to stifle the scream Anne felt rising beyond her control, she yawned.
"Good night. There's no need to keep on talking about it, is there?"
"None at all. Good night."
She turned out the light over the sewing table and went behind the screen. Her garments dropped with the soft swish. Roger heard her open the windows and get into bed.
He stood leaning his elbows on the mantelshelf, his face in his hands, for what seemed to Anne an entire lifetime.
In reality it was not half an hour. This was the situation he had been reluctant to face, had wasted weeks of thought upon. Anne seized the first suggestion, yawned in his face and went to bed. It was almost funny.