CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Winter came, a dry winter of cool mornings and nights, and days of clear sunshine. Against this sparkling background, Anne and Roger moved side by side in almost total silence. Anne still went to the loft but not regularly. Roger never asked why she stayed away or what she did with her time. He worked now far into the night, often even after Katya had gone with a comforting, indifferent "good night." Sometimes they left together and Roger walked as far as her car with her, talking of their plans, never of personal things. If she noticed that Anne no longer came regularly to the loft, she never mentioned it, nor did she make any comment when Anne ceased coming at all.
It was in February that Rogie had an attack of croup and Anne stayed away for two weeks. When he was well she did not return. On the first night of his illness she had moved his crib into the wing of the living-room they called a library and this arrangement was maintained. She bought a screen of silk and lacquer and converted the wing into a comfortable bedroom. Roger made no comment. For a few days their eyes held consciousness of the change and then they spoke indifferently of "your room" and "my room."
On the evenings when Roger was home, Anne usually retired first. Behind the impregnable wall of silk and lacquer, Roger heard the soft swish of her garments as she dropped them, then the even breathing of her sleep. For a little while, after their forced nearness in the illness of Rogie, Roger would sometimes close his book, and, with tightening muscles, glare at this thing of silk, or stare before him, trying to find a clew through the present to the past.
When had it all begun?
Farther back than the day that Anne had snatched at Rogie. Much farther back than that. Perhaps, back at the very beginning, when Anne had been afraid to tell her people. But when Roger visioned again the Indian graveyard, the weeks by the lake, the Basque herder playing his flute in the sunny meadow, the clinging of Anne's lips that last night, and moments in their first months, the clew vanished in hurt wonder.
If moments like those were not real, what was? If a certainty as real as the certainty that had come to him in the sweeping wind on the Bluff was false, what was true?
Had their nearness even then held within itself the germ of discord? Had this erosion of difference, that had at last eaten its way down to their physical relationship, always existed between himself and Anne? Did it exist between all men and women, and was that marvelous nearness only a cloak over the stark skeleton of sex? The hunger once appeased, was the purpose satisfied, and did the soul demand this separateness for its own development? Was marriage only the lowering of an ideal beyond the average man and woman to reach?
At farther and farther intervals, the puzzle held him. Then, wonder settled to acceptance. Roger no longer heard the swish of Anne's garments or her breathing behind the screen. He came from the office pleasantly tired and was content with the wide coolness of the big bed and freedom.
But his mouth grew firmer and his eyes lit less often. Like a copy done in fainter wash, his eyes at times had the loneliness of Black Tom's. Katya watched and found it harder and harder not to go to him on the nights they worked alone. Often after they had separated, and Katya sat in the ugly hall bedroom that had been her home for years, she would clench her fists and pound the washstand as if it were a rostrum and she were addressing a crowd:
"It had to come, with that little fool. She couldn't hold him back. He will grow now."
But when, stealing a glance toward Roger, she saw him staring out across the loft with lonely eyes, she would have had him happy at any price. To have his enthusiasm bubble over in gayety as it used to do, to feel him warmly happy, Katya would have freely given the years that remained. Standing at that terrible spot of middle ground, the future clear in the light of the past and perfect knowledge of self, looking back down the lonely years indifferently, through the future lonelier still, nothing mattered but to have Roger happy.
At last, one night in early April, a warm night of many stars, Katya rose from her machine and went to Roger sitting motionless at Black Tom's desk. It was late and the others had all gone long ago. As Katya took a seat on the window sill, Roger looked up, not concerned at all with this action of Katya's but with the confusion of his own thought. He had gone home to dinner that night, stirred by the soft spring warmth, to make an effort at some kind of adjustment with Anne. They had slipped so far now, to almost quarreling over the most trivial things. To-night Anne had objected to the way he sat at the table and asked with plaintive primness if the world would be saved any more quickly if every one slouched over his plate like a plow-hand. And he, in blind rage to smash that primness to bits, had deliberately done things to annoy her, until he felt the disgust in Anne's eyes flick him like whips. The remainder of the meal had been eaten in hasty silence and he had left immediately after.
What a thing to quarrel over!
Katya smoked through her cigarette and then said slowly:
"Why do you go on?"
So perfectly did it fit with Roger's thought, that he answered with no wonder at her understanding.
"I don't know."
There was a short silence before Katya added: "You ought never to have married her."
"I—suppose not. But it seemed——" Roger broke off, disturbed at discussing Anne with another. He shrugged and made a motion as if to go on with his work. But he felt Katya's look on him, and, after a moment, met it. Her concern was too deep for insincerity and he said thoughtfully:
"Love is a queer thing. One thinks it is going to last forever and bear any weight. Perhaps the very weight of the years themselves must break it."
Katya made a strange noise deep in her throat, as if the words were cracking their way through some obstruction.
"Love does bear any weight—love, but nothing else. Only there is so little love and so few find it. What the world calls love is a flash of desire—a Catherine wheel of emotion, Life's urge to continue tricked out in finery, like an old woman dressed in silk. Fools. They understand nothing. They are afraid of truth, everywhere. To excuse the suffering in the world, the human cruelty of man to man, they have invented the patient, anemic Christ. The fact of sex they have hung over with the ornaments of matrimony. And of Love they know nothing, nothing at all."
Katya had turned while she spoke and was looking out now through the open window to the light-strewn city. Seen so, in profile, the thickness of feature was thinned to hardness. It seemed to Roger, for a moment, that Katya had never been born, would never die. She was like her own steppes, stretching away beyond the weariness of human sight, unhurt by the rage of men. She was eternal truth and courage.
"Perhaps. But if you're not one of the rare few? We have been as happy as most people."
"And now you are content to be as miserable as most people. To go on year after year, dragging at each other, quarreling, making up, hating, despising, driven sometimes, by a force beyond you—to—to—mocking Love."
"Don't," Roger whispered. "Don't. You're exaggerating. One adjusts to anything in time."
"Yes. And then there is no strength left for anything else—and spiritually—you die. You will die. You are weaker than she is, because there is no force so unbreakable as the rigidity of self-righteous mediocrity. You will die—in this 'adjustment,' slowly perhaps, as thousands of others have died, sometimes men, sometimes women, whichever has the finer soul. 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.' But a camel goes easier through the eye of a needle than a high purpose breathes with a smaller fastened upon it. Adjust and die."
Katya threw the stub of her cigarette violently out the window and then leaned from it to watch the tiny red spark expiring on the black tarred roof below.
"What—can—I do?"
Katya's brain despised the question and her arms ached for Roger.
"Do? Leave. Demand your own life."
"Leave Anne!"
Katya shrugged. Why did she love this boy looking at her like a frightened baby?
"Do you want to go on like this forever?"
The future opened before Roger, all the years to the end faced by the lacquer screen, the almost silent meals, the never-ceasing need for watchfulness, artificial and unfree.
"No," he said slowly. "No."
"Then don't."
"There's—Rogie."
With a broken laugh, Katya got down from the window sill.
"And, in a few years, there will probably be others. Then your 'duty' will be still clearer."
She clumped away and a moment later Roger heard her heavy step going down the stairs. He stayed for another hour, staring out into the night.