CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
On the Monday morning following the wedding, Jerome was at the office earlier than usual. After the lonely Sunday behind him, the day ahead was filled with expectation. First, he would tell Jean about the trip. There were many things he wanted to tell her, things that no one else would quite get. And then they would lay out the program for the piers.
The morning passed quickly, with only a few lulls in which Jerome leaned back in his chair, smoked a cigar, made notes and tried not to listen too closely for sounds across the hall. As soon as she was free she would probably come in.
But by mid-afternoon it was not so easy to keep from listening. For one thing, it was suffocatingly hot, and for another, he was not sure that Jean had been in all day. He had not heard her come or leave for lunch, and usually her hours were punctual. At three o'clock Jerome closed the transom. It made him nervous to sit listening for sounds from Jean's office. As soon as she was free she would come in. It was the kind of thing Jean did.
But Jean did not come.
Neither on Tuesday nor on Wednesday. Thursday morning, Jerome crossed the hall almost to Jean's door, and came back. If Jean were so busy that she had not a moment for him he did not wish to intrude. And if Jean had lost her interest in the conference, or had only pretended one, still less did he wish to force her. Besides there were the piers. Jean had been as eager as he and it had been understood that they would begin as soon as the wedding was over.
On Friday afternoon, Jerome opened the transom. Jean Herrick could come or not, exactly as she liked. He would not mention the conference and if she felt obliged to inquire he would cut her short as gracefully as he could. As for the piers, if it suited his convenience by the time she strolled round, he would do them, and if it did not, she could do them alone.
On Saturday he did not go to the office at all, but stayed home and worked in the garden. He pulled down a summer house that had really been a charming place to sit, and finished pruning and clipping every shrub that had escaped in the long, empty evenings of the past week.
On Sunday he took Pips, and set out for a long tramp right after lunch. But he had lost the habit of tramping alone ever since Alice had been old enough to go with him; so, although he had intended to stay out until evening, at three he turned back. The heat was at its apex, but under pretense that it was really getting cooler, Jerome increased his pace, until Pips suddenly dropped panting under a tree and refused to budge.
"All right, old man, have it your own way."
Jerome stretched beside him. Pips snapped languidly at a few gnats and went to sleep. But Jerome could not sleep. His head felt hot and empty, and although he had accomplished nothing all day, he was exhausted with the effort of getting rid of the hours. He tried to find something interesting to think about, but there seemed to be nothing worth wasting a thought upon. The week ahead stretched as flat and monotonous before him as the week behind. There was nothing, except the problem of Jean's inexplicable behavior.
She had not gone on a vacation because she had told him half a dozen times she did not intend to take one. Summer, everywhere, was dull and he could imagine no work that would call her out of town. No. Jean was following some whim of her own, with no consideration of upsetting him.
That was the trouble with women who had brains, especially after they had passed their first youth; they got so set in their habits, that consideration for others never occurred to them. No doubt, Jean was quite unconscious of causing him any inconvenience.
And there he was wondering about Jean when he had definitely put her out of his thoughts a dozen times that week.
Queer how a thought persisted against one's wish.
A thought ought to be the easiest thing in the world to keep where you wanted it. A person could intrude, or an extraneous body inject itself into your cosmos, but a thought didn't exist apart from yourself, and if you didn't want it there, why did it come?
Interesting business, Thought, like a demon, dwelling inside and ordering you about at its will. Fascinating, if you got to really thinking about Thought. Jerome gripped the idea of Thought, dragged it along with him like a companion over the field of the Will and the Subconscious, until he brought up in a conversation he had had a few days before with the psycho-analyst he had corralled for Tony's tea.
But now, as soon as he thought of him in relation to the tea, Jean rose from nowhere, drove out the psycho-analyst and usurped his place. Jean as she had looked when he came in through the glass door, amused and a little sad; Jean at the gate: dimming in the dusk; as she had looked when they first talked of the piers, eager and alive in every nerve; standing close while Tony played, in the candle lighted room, with the thick, heavy odor of hothouse plants; as merry and teasing as Alice, at supper afterwards, in "the little joint"; at the concert—
Jerome jumped up. "Here, boy. It must be almost six."
He took a short cut back across the fields and entered the kitchen just as the clock struck five. On a table, covered by a white cloth, mysterious humps disclosed Malone's provision for his supper. It made him think of a country undertaker's, with grewsome appurtenances of death concealed under the cloth. Jerome lifted the edge and discovered cold meat and Malone's tragic efforts at a cake.
Now that he saw his unappetizing meal, he realized that he was hungry. But he certainly couldn't eat there in the kitchen, although it was arranged exactly as he had instructed Malone. In the living-room it might be better, but by the time he had partly cleared the litter of books and papers from the table the dimensions of the effort annoyed him and he threw them back in a worse jumble than before. There was a card table somewhere; that would be just the thing to set on the porch under the honeysuckle. Jerome went all over the house looking for the card table until he remembered that it was in the cellar. The cellar was unlit and he had another hunt for a lamp. He found it at last on the top shelf of the pantry, with just enough oil to make a feeble splutter and a very decided and unpleasant odor. The cellar steps led down from the kitchen, and if the kitchen was cheerless, the cellar was a vault. Clammy damp enveloped him, and the mystery and loneliness of unused places stored with unused things. It was like a deserted house from which the inhabitants had fled at a plague. Jerome located the table under the slats of what had been Alice's baby bed and a broken pedestal. He got it out with difficulty, covered himself with dust and found that the hinge had been broken and it wouldn't stand.
Jerome threw the table down and went back into the kitchen. He jerked the shroud from the humps and ate an unappetizing sandwich of cold beef cut too thick and bread too thin. The cake he had just mashed into Pips' food when he remembered some jam of Alice's. He found a single glass and spread it thick on the remaining crumbs. The cake was possible this way, but now it was all gone in the mash for Pips. While he watched Pips gobbling it up, the clock struck six. And there were four hours yet until the earliest possible bed-time.
Jerome lit a cigar and went out into the garden, but the seclusion and privacy were gone. Through what had been a luxuriant privet hedge he could see the lights of the next house half a block away. At the other end of the garden it was worse. Here he had cut back a wall of hollyhocks, to give more sun to the pansies below and then left the hose running full force until it had washed out the pansy plants, and now a mournful row of bare stems guarded the empty plot.
After all, a garden was an unsatisfactory thing. It was only in the making that the thing had any power of absorption. Once it was made you never knew how much of it you would see. Last year bugs had eaten the roses, and the year before scale had destroyed the apple trees. If the shrubs got along well, then something happened to the flowers, and if the flowers acted on schedule, then the trees didn't.
Spring hit you before you had made up your mind what bulbs you wanted in; or hung back so late that you had no time to plant anything before summer scorched what little you did have. And if spring and summer acted rationally, just about the time you began to get some comfort out of the shaded spots and the smell of things, along came autumn and stripped it bare. There was always a senseless rush and change, nothing permanent accomplished, just stupid repetition over and over, rubbing in the analogy to the impermanent accomplishment of one's own effort. After forty, a man ought to live in a climate the same all the year round, where the futility of accomplishment wasn't always being preached by this eternal leafing and blossoming and dying, round and round in a purposeless circle.
Jerome stopped under a great lilac, primed to nakedness, and glared at its hideous tidiness.
"What do you think you get out of it, anyhow? A few weeks ago you were as bare as you will be again in another few weeks. And you've been doing it to my knowledge for the last fifteen years. You've never really been young or old. You just go on and on. And the little you do do, you can't help, although every spring you look as if you had chosen to be a lilac and had it all your own way. You can't help being a lilac. It was settled for you ages ago in a little brown seed. You can't even prolong your blooming a week beyond the law. You're...."
Suddenly the lilac reminded him of Jean. It was so strong, untrimmed, and indifferent to his tirade. Jerome shrugged and went back into the house. The silence was oppressive. Malone had not returned. There was no reason that she should be in, but it annoyed him that she was out.
At nine o'clock he went to bed.