CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In the months that followed there were whole weeks when Herrick despised Jean for her blindness; when he hated her for the calm, filled order of her days; when he wanted to go and lay his head in her lap and be comforted.
What would Jean do if he told her?
She would answer as she would to any cry of distress. In a scientific, impersonal way she would even be happy at her ability to help. For the time he would be her favorite "case." She would probe into his feeling for The Kitten and into The Kitten's and decide what was to be done. When she had analyzed it all, she would ask him what he wanted to do.
What did he want?
From considering the abstract possibility of his wife's action, Herrick came down to Jean herself. Picture after picture of her flashed before him. Jean in the Sundays before their marriage. Jean as she had looked in the moonlight, beside the driftwood fires. Jean on the Sunday mornings when they used to argue about the novel. Did she ever think of it now? It was months since they had even mentioned it. Had she forgotten this thing that had once seemed the motive of her days? Had her interest ever been real, or had it only filled an empty space? In the mazes of his own nature Herrick groped and could find no answer. After almost three years of marriage Herrick knew less of Jean than he had the first day in the library.
Would she go on forever as they were going now? They had never referred in any way to the night that Jean had come back from Belgrave. It might never have been, for all the outward difference it had made in their lives. Only Jean never again mentioned a case nor did she ever ask him to come on Sunday afternoons to The Hill House where she poured for the neighborhood teas that she and Dr. Mary had instituted for the winter.
On Sundays Herrick went to Flop's. Jean made no comment, except sometimes to inquire about various people, with a forced interest that exasperated Herrick. As for The Bunch, they never asked about Jean. Behind the banner of "personal freedom," Herrick and The Kitten marched unquestioned. As indifferent as the rest, Vicky had gone back to the country. The Kitten had refused to go with him.
The long rains ended and spring came again. The air was clean and soft, and fluffy white clouds sailed over the hills, once more cameo-clear against the blue. Herrick and Jean saw even less of each other than through the winter. They ate together in the mornings and then went their ways. The paper was changing hands and Herrick spoke of the new proprietor and the future policy. Dr. Mary and Jean were drawing up a pamphlet on the evil conditions resulting from bad housing, and now that the actual gathering of statistics was over, and the work had widened to include quarrels with political bosses, with the Board of Health and Building Commissions, Jean was in her glory. The breakfasts were calm meals, unruffled, impersonal and dead.
The darkest spot in this third summer of Jean's married life was Martha. The small face was thinner and whiter and, for the first time in Jean's memory, her mother moved slowly about the house. Jean went as often as she could and frequently found her sitting on the porch behind the screen of roses, her hands idle in her lap. Twice, tiptoeing in unexpectedly, Jean had found her mother lying down, her eyes closed in such utter weariness that Jean's heart had stopped beating for a moment in a terrible fear.
But each time Martha had insisted that it was only the heat and promised faithfully that she would take more rest.
"Mummy, it's really selfish of you not to let me help. I know half a dozen women who would be glad to come over and work for their home and a very small salary, and I could spare it so easily."
"Now, Jeany, don't be silly." At this point Martha always got up briskly and began preparing tea. "In all the years that I've kept house, I've never had a maid."
"Which is no reason at all," Jean insisted. "You know, Martha Norris, that once you see the error of your ways the trouble's over. You used to tell me that yourself when I was a little girl."
"Maybe I did. But the cases aren't the same."
"Why not?" It was the oldest form of dispute they had, Jean quoting her mother's own words and Martha insisting the cases were not the same. "It is the same, exactly. You're not well, or else you're getting lazy. Which is it? It must be one."
"Not at all. You're just talking to hear yourself, Jeany. You always were fond of that silly arguing that pins people down to a yes or no."
"Oh, mummy, you're such a fake. You get so terribly philosophic when you want to slip out of a thing. But now listen to me. I won't scold you any more. But I'm going to watch you precisely as if you were a 'case' and I'll give you till the tenth of July and not one day longer. If you look the way you do now you're going to the country, if I have to take you there by force. Do you hear?"
Martha smiled. "Yes, dear, I hear."
It was an afternoon at the end of June and Martha and Jean were in the clean, darkened kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil. Bees buzzed in the garden outside and the old pine was sweetly fragrant in the warmth. There was something very positive and real about this peace and clean orderliness, so that Jean wondered whether, after all, this silent strength was an accident of her mother's nature, or whether the quiet little figure, trotting on its mechanical round of duty, had not achieved it, at perhaps a price no one guessed.
Jean watched her as she beat up a pan of the tea biscuits that no remonstrance of Jean's had been able to stop.
"I'd have to make something for supper and I might just as well make these."
And as always she had her way. Jean listened to the bees and watched the deft hands at their work. It was so precisely as it had always been and yet somehow it was different. Jean's mind wandered lazily about the problem. What was different? Why did it no longer annoy her? It had once.
She remembered the day of graduation when all her fine enthusiasm to fill her life with work and beauty had died at the sight of Martha dishing up the roast. And the day when she had heard of the library work and Martha had gone on making apple pies. And now she was making tea biscuits and pretending that nothing was the matter with her, when Jean could see that it was a strain to lift the heavy mixing bowl and that tiny drops of perspiration appeared at the corners of Martha's mouth. She was ill and no doubt she knew it.
Jean got up and took the mixing bowl away from her.
"Mummy, you're all in. You can scarcely stand. You've got to tell me what's the matter."
"Now, Jeany——" But Martha's eyes fell before her daughter's. "I don't feel quite so strong as usual, but it's the heat. It's the warmest June we've had for years."
"It's nothing of the kind. It's not a bit hotter than it always is. And if you feel like this now, what will you be in July? I don't believe I'll give you till the tenth. I have a good mind to cart you off to a doctor this very minute."
"Now, Jean daughter, I appreciate your interest and all the rest of it, but remember I am not a case. I won't be packed off to a doctor."
"I wish you were, I'd straighten you out in two minutes. You're really a very simple proposition. I'd close this place, send you to a nice quiet country house where you would have nothing to do but eat lovely food cooked by some one else, and get fat."
"I should hate to get fat and there's no place nicer or quieter than this."
"But, mummy, you need a change."
"Well," Martha took the bowl away from Jean and went on with her mixing, "I haven't said that I wouldn't take that, have I? You always were the most impatient child. I suppose you want me to put on my hat this minute and leap on a train."
"I certainly would, but I can't imagine you 'leaping' at anything unless it was particularly disagreeable. For the second time, listen to your daughter, who has had much experience managing many families and can surely manage one small mother. Next week Mary and I are going to locate a new summer camp for mothers. We're going to take the train and get off wherever it looks good to us and tramp and ride around till we find the exact spot. It's going to be glorious. I've been looking forward to it for months. I'd just bundle you along, too, but you wouldn't enjoy it, and besides it's going to be awfully strenuous. What you need is rest. But I won't budge a step unless you're fixed first, do you hear? If you don't go to a doctor and get some kind of tonic and promise to do exactly as he says, I'll stay right here and work without a day's vacation. There, now will you do as I say?"
"What's Franklin going to do, while you and Doctor traipse about?"
"I don't know. He said something about taking a vacation himself once, but he hasn't said anything very lately."
"Jean, I don't want to annoy you or interfere in any way with your life. You're a married woman and must manage your affairs. But, I've never seen any happiness come of a husband and wife having separate interests and not knowing what the other's going to do. Not that I've seen much happiness come of any married life. But if you do the best you can, you can't do any more and you can't have it on your conscience that the fault was yours."
Jean laughed. After all, if there was any change it must be in herself, for certainly Martha was the same as ever.
"Mummy, times have changed. No modern husband and wife clamp on each other's backs in the good old-fashioned way. Marriage isn't a pond in which you both drown, hanging madly to each other."
"What is it?"
"It's—it's a mutual arrangement. If you have the same interests and ambitions, you work them out together and if you haven't, why, each one works out his own."
Even as Jean spoke, she wondered when she had come to formulate this theory so decidedly. She remembered the night in the studio when she had promised to marry Herrick and life had seemed to her like a river in which they would both swim on together side by side. But the current had come between and now they were the width of the stream apart.
"You could always word things better than I, Jean, but sometimes it seems to me that that's all there is to them. They don't mean much when you get right down to the bottom of them. How can two people, 'whom God has joined together,' work out their lives apart? It's like the nonsense you and Pat used to talk, just as if you could do with life anything you happened to feel like. We weren't put in this world to follow every whim and there's no bigger whim-killer than the state of holy matrimony."
Martha stopped, cut the biscuits and laid each one carefully in the pan. When she had put them in the gas oven she began clearing up the table. Jean had gone back to her chair and sat looking absently into the garden.
"I don't believe, mummy," she said at last, "that anything that makes you feel smothered is right, no matter what holy state it belongs in. If that isn't 'wrapping your talent in a napkin,' then what is? Franklin doesn't care whether a hundred people live in a room or not. He doesn't think it matters whether people live like intelligent humans or like animals. He doesn't think that any one can change any one else or make the world a bit better."
A look of pain crossed Martha's face. "It's an awful way to believe, Jeany. I hate to think——"
"Then must I give up my beliefs and take things as they are?"
Martha wiped the last grain of flour from the table, washed out the cloth and hung it on the rack to dry.
"Some women should never marry."
Jean looked quickly at her mother and then away. After a moment she said gayly:
"All of which has nothing to do with the question in hand, Mummy Norris, and that is that you go to the doctor and get a tonic or I'll come and take you myself."
Martha agreed that she would go, and the subject of "holy matrimony" and "separate interests" was dropped.
But as Jean crossed back to the city she decided that she would ask Herrick what his vacation plans were and, if possible, arrange her own to meet them.
Herrick was leaving the studio as Jean entered. He stared in such surprise that Jean felt uncomfortable.
"I knocked off early this afternoon and went over to mummy's," she explained. "She hasn't been well and I've been worried. I thought maybe we might go to dinner somewhere, or we could have it here."
Herrick's first surprise gave way to amusement. After all, there was something amusing in Jean's self-centered density. For months they had come and gone without inquiring about each other's engagements and now, because the notion seized her, Jean assumed the possibility of acting as if they were in the habit of knowing each other's whereabouts every moment of the day. The amusement deepened as Jean stood without taking off her things, apparently waiting for him to decide.
Herrick had promised to take The Kitten to a Syrian restaurant that had just opened, and every moment that he delayed increased the possibility of The Kitten herself appearing. She often came for him if he were a little late, although Herrick had begged her not to. She liked the excitement of the risk she ran in meeting Jean, but she always claimed that she came because she loved the studio.
Herrick stood undecided. A meal with Jean would be a restful thing. There would be no emotional demands, no insistence. And The Kitten was getting very insistent. At first, the renewal of her little, cuddling pleas to be assured of his love had thrilled him and made him feel alive. Her fits of childish rage had amused him, just as in the old days. Besides, he could always bring her to time by leaving her for a while. The sense of power was pleasant. But the monotony of its exertion was beginning to weary him.
To-night she would be very insistent. From the first warm days of spring she had been begging him to go for a week to the Portuguese ranch and Herrick did not want to go. She had been through almost all her bag of tricks. She had been the petted, teasing child, the angry woman, the commanding mistress. There was one left. To-night she would be the alluring, giving-all, asking-nothing lover. For that reason she had chosen a new setting. In the isolation of the Syrian restaurant they would be alone. She would wear the dress he liked best, a thin, black clinging thing, and a hat that threw kind shadows on the small face. Against the background of sawdust floor, of strange, dark men who came to eat, she would stand out, fragile and completely his.
Jean saw the hesitation, the uncertainty in his eyes.
"Never mind, if you have another engagement. I'll go down to the delicatessen and get something. I don't suppose there's anything in the house to eat."
Jean smiled. She couldn't help thinking of Martha and what a heinous crime it would be to have a house and nothing to eat in it.
"We aren't very good housekeepers, are we?"
"No, there's nothing; but the shops aren't closed yet. It would be rather nice to eat here."
After all there was a touch of excitement in being invited to picnic unexpectedly with one's own wife.
"I was only going to eat with Crane. He's been taking the cure again and isn't quite sure of himself. He hates to eat alone. I'll 'phone him and bring some stuff up with me."
Herrick ran whistling down the stairs.
The Kitten was angry and Herrick was very tender. But it couldn't be helped. Crane was his boss and if he would have delirium tremens at inconvenient moments, there was nothing that Herrick could do about it. Herrick was patient. He called her soft love names and promised a week at the Portuguese ranch. The Kitten relented. She was reasonable. She understood. She said low, sweet things that came lightly across the wire and touched Herrick in a caress.
Herrick and Jean got supper together. The strangeness of doing this once familiar thing made them a little shy. They sought for things to say that would not show the realization of this strangeness. The sensation was new and exquisite to Herrick. It was pregnant with possibility. He mashed potatoes vigorously and sensed a possible new relationship waiting beyond the interlude of supper. What it might be he did not know. He did not want to know. He was tired of moods that he understood, reactions that he could bring about at a touch. To-night he had no wish to rouse Jean to the depths of physical passion that had been his aim in the old days when they had gotten supper together. It was not in her, and to-night he did not care. He was weary of storms, smothered at moments beyond endurance by the clinging of The Kitten's arms. He would leave everything to Jean. He would do nothing, lead nowhere, make no effort. He would follow, drugged to a sensuous peace by his own inaction.
When the things were cooked, Herrick laid the cloth at the end of the big table in the studio. He brought up a chair for Jean and with a flourish handed her to it. He was like a boy starting on a new trip, happy and excited. And, as always, Herrick looked the part. His whole body seemed keyed to a greater physical firmness. His eyes had the light that had been in them so often when they used to eat their sandwiches in the rock coves by the sea.
Jean saw and wondered and felt unsure. Was it her own blind, sweeping judgments that had stripped Herrick of all that of which she had once been so sure? To-night he looked and felt as he had on the night he had told her of his lonely boyhood and she had held out her hands to him. Hadn't she changed at all since the days when she and Pat had settled the questions of which they knew nothing? Did she still sit off on her cloud and play her golden flute while people struggled along in the dust below? Did she?
Jean talked of Crane, the pity of his wasted days, while the shuttle of analysis wove back and forth in memory, behind her words. Had she condemned as lack of purpose and sincerity what, after all, might well be a concomitant of that very sweetness and boyishness that had called to her? It was that which had called, Jean was very sure. And the claiming hands that were always trying to hold her, to touch her when she was near, the hunger of Herrick's kiss? It was the groping of a child that didn't want to be alone.
They ate slowly and sat on after the last drop of coffee was drained from the percolator. Herrick had asked Jean about the pamphlet and was helping her with details of publishing and distribution. With a paper and pencil he was making calculations, while Jean leaned across the table, her elbows on the cloth, her chin in her palms. She and Dr. Mary had gone over this ground but she saw instantly that Herrick knew much more about it than they did. It amused Jean, this new humility that met her at every turn to-night.
"I guess there are some things, just a few, that men can do best." And she chuckled in the old, childish way that had always delighted Herrick. It was such a ridiculous, delightful, childish chuckle for a woman of Jean's size. It had always given Herrick in the early days one of those double sensations, two contrasting emotions, that pricked his sense as a pungent spice pricks a jaded palate. It made Jean half woman and half imp.
The pencil quivered a little, but Herrick did not look up. Instinct warned him to go on with the serious business of calculation.
"There," he announced, "if you'll be content with just ordinary paper you ought to be able to get a thousand for——"
The door opened suddenly and The Kitten came in. She stood quite still, while Herrick sat motionless, the pencil poised over the paper, his lips parted on the word. Every drop of color left his face and then rushed back in a deep red that swelled the veins of his neck and congested his eyes. He rose heavily and the pencil rolled away under the table.
The Kitten closed the door and came toward the table. A few feet away she stopped. Jean noticed mechanically the scarlet of her mouth in the dead whiteness of her face. It was like a wound, and when she spoke her voice was high and cutting, like the crackling of tin that had torn the wound.
"So this is why you lied?" She looked at Herrick and Jean's eyes followed. His flushed face was heavy and ugly, and he looked unspeakably foolish, staring back with his lips parted. Jean thought of her father, standing in the bar of sunlight, and of her mother shrinking from him. In a strange, unreal calm, she thought how odd it was that she should have the same picture of her father and her husband.
She rose, with a detached feeling of not belonging here and at the same time of being called on to do something, perform some unpleasant social duty, that should have fallen to the lot of the hostess, who wasn't herself at all.
"We've just finished dinner," she said quietly, "and there's not a thing left. But I can make you some coffee."
The Kitten turned from Herrick and looked at her directly. The heavy lids lowered and her eyes went slowly from the crown of Jean's head to her feet, in a look that drew Jean's body after it into the mire.
Jean stepped back quickly. There was no pretense or misunderstanding now.
The Kitten grinned. "Didn't you know it, really? I was always sure you guessed. It's been such a long time before you—even."
Clearest of all the thoughts whirling in Jean's brain was the knowledge that she felt no anger, nor was she stunned. With no warning this thing had come upon her and there was no slightest doubt in her. Instead, there was a kind of relief, grotesque but real, and as if she had discovered at last the source of some annoyance that had long puzzled her. Her brain seemed to be running in layers, streams of thought all perfectly distinct. One layer was concerned with herself and Herrick, from the first night they had eaten with The Bunch and The Kitten had stared so rudely across the table. Her first vivid picture of The Kitten had been across a table and now she was seeing her again across a table. And another stream bore Herrick apart from The Bunch, alone with her in the days before their marriage, and the things she had believed and the things that had really been true. There was a stream for Herrick and herself running through the last eighteen months, with all sorts of landmarks coming to the surface. And there was the stream of her own present calm, with the feeling that it was impossible that she should feel this way, that it must be a false strength which would fail in a moment and leave her at the mercy of this woman with the white face and the scarlet mouth and the malicious eyes under their lowered lids.
"No," Jean said, "I didn't know." The calm was broken for a moment by a spark of cold anger at the insincerity of the question, or its implication.
The Kitten shrugged and turned to Herrick. She was trembling with anger now and it made her look like a fierce, small animal at bay.
Jean's calm was swept aside in a wave of physical nausea. She could not stand there and see them quarrel. She moved to Herrick.
"Will you go? Please go. Quick! Now!"
"If you wish." Grotesque in his consideration, pitiful in his relief, Herrick went. They heard his step echo and die in the silence below.
Jean and The Kitten stood looking at each other. Before Jean's calm, The Kitten's anger crumbled. Jean went slowly back to her place at the table and sat down again. Her brain seemed the only living thing about her. She had a problem to solve, but the problem concerned the woman before her more than it concerned herself. There was something she was going to do, but she couldn't do it until she had talked to The Kitten, and she didn't know just how to begin. She sat with her chin in her palms, as she had sat while Herrick made calculations about the cost of the pamphlet.
"Didn't you really know?" It was The Kitten who broke the silence at last. "He always said you didn't, but I never believed it."
"Did you think that I would have gone on just the same?"
"I didn't know. You never loved him. What difference would it make?" The Kitten waited a moment and added more kindly, as if she were making something very clear to a child. "Vicky has loved other women; he's always having an affair of some kind, and I don't say anything. You see, I don't love him."
Jean did not move. She sat rigid as if the least movement would precipitate her into the abyss The Kitten was opening before her.
"You thought I knew—and—would go on just the same?"
The thing rose, a barricade to further thought. Jean tried to get by it, push it aside, go on to the end, but somehow she could not get any further. She was living in a world, among people who believed things like that. Men and women lived that way. People she knew lived that way. Not "cases," but friends, people she had eaten with, to whose houses she had gone, people whom she had been anxious to meet once, friends of her husband, of the man she had married.
Jean closed her eyes. It made her sick, physically sick to look at the little figure across the table, the hungry, contemptuous eyes, the fine lines etched by unsatisfied desire in the smooth skin. They did not belong in the same world, they did not speak the same language, and there they sat in Jean's home, at Jean's table, and talked of Jean's husband.
"You needn't look at me like that." The Kitten leaned across the table, so near that Jean saw clearly the smooth texture of her skin and the flecks of black in her eyes. "I don't see that you have such a lot to be proud of. I loved Franklin, I have always loved him, long before you came into his life at all. I loved him and I gave. You don't love him; you never did, and yet you married him. You took. You sold yourself for what? So you wouldn't have to teach school, to get away from that bromide mother, the whole monotonous round! A great motive, wasn't it? Oh, he's told me all about it?"
She spoke in quick, panting breaths, as if the words were coming faster than she could utter them. Jean felt as if little pellets of mud were being flung in her face. She moved now, pushing her chair away.
The Kitten laughed. "Oh, don't mind me, you can go clear over to the end of the room if you like. You have always acted like that, you know. It amused us terribly at first. You were so funny! You tried so hard to be nice to me and The Tiger and the rest of us, but you couldn't quite make it, could you? We were so awfully muddy and you were so clean. Clean! Good God, you're not clean, you're empty. Why, I wouldn't be you, you cold, dead thing, not for all the pain it would save me. You——"
Jean rose. The mud no longer came in pellets; it flowed, a black, sticky stream.
"I think you have said enough. After all, there really is nothing to be said."
She came slowly about the table and stood before The Kitten. She could almost hear the beating of The Kitten's heart, under the stubby hands pressed so tightly over it.
"Well," demanded The Kitten, "what are you going to do?"
"Do?" echoed Jean blankly. "Why, I'm going away."
"You're going away! You're going to give him up, without any more fight than this! You're going to swallow every single thing I've said, without asking him? I say, how do you know it's the truth? How do you know it's not all a lie, except my loving him?"
"I don't know," but as she spoke Jean felt something drop from her eyes. With no warning this thing had come upon her and there was no doubt in her. Like the sucking blackness at the bottom of the well, it had always been there.
The Kitten smiled. "He must have had a hell of a time with you. Poor Boy Blue."
Mechanically Jean put on her things, the things she had thrown down when she came in and found Herrick just leaving. It was queer to put them on again, the things that had not changed at all, while she had been on such a long journey and come back. The Kitten was watching, fascinated into silence by the ordinary movements of Jean pinning on her hat, gathering up her gloves and handbag. When she was quite ready, Jean turned to The Kitten. She felt no anger or disgust now. Instead, she was sorry for the little thing, so eager, so avid, so unsure.
"You can tell him," she said slowly, "that I shall be at the Hill House. I don't want him to come. Please tell him that. But if there's anything to be discussed, he can write. I don't see what it can be, but I suppose he will want to."
"Oh, yes, he'll write."
Then, for no reason at all, the two women smiled faintly, as if they were speaking of a child. And, always afterward, Jean remembered The Kitten as she looked smiling above the greasy dishes.