CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Mary had decided to stay on and work for an M. A. at Columbia. She was busy choosing courses of study and quarreling with professors about prerequisites, so Jean, by pleading extra work herself, managed to keep away from Gramercy Park for the first days of Gregory's going.
In the morning she went to the office and at night she came back. She tried to read and turned page after page with a detached sense of accomplishment in which all understanding of the words was lost. Finally, one night, when she had read from eight till eleven, and found that it was not the same book she had been reading so dutifully for days, Jean threw it across the room, and, standing defiantly in the center of the floor, faced the thoughts that she had refused entrance since the morning she had crept to bed in the gray dawn.
"Well? What are you going to do about it? What can you do about it? Why is this any different from his going away for a week-end?"
With her hands in the side pockets of her skirt, Jean paced up and down. It was the way she straightened tangles in her work, and the familiar rhythm seemed to throw this problem to an impersonal distance, beyond the haze of her own emotions.
"Well? What are you going to do? Are you going around always clouded up in this tragedy? He isn't any more married now than he was in the beginning, and you knew it from the very first. You knew he had duties and obligations. You rather prided yourself on your logical attitude toward them. You weren't being logical. You couldn't deny them because they were right there in front of you. But the first minute you got a chance to close your eyes, you shut them so tight that—that it's taken an operation to open them."
Jean stopped before the window and leaned with both hands on the sill, frowning into the night.
"He would have gone on living his life and so would you, and you would have done your work, too, if you had never met at all. Yes, you would, and so would he." The corners of Jean's lips twitched, for always before, when she had thought of Gregory's home, she had thought of it as something he had acquired by accident, not as something that he had made, an expression of himself. "Wedomean something to each other, something terribly real, but it won't be real, if you begin to mess it up with jealousy. That's what it is—jealousy. You know that nothing in the world could have draggedyouout of town this summer and you're mad and hurt and jealous clear through. There! Put that in your pipe and smoke it whether you like the flavor or not."
Jean began walking again. She went very carefully through the summer, picking up the happy hours from the scattered heap into which Gregory's going had shattered them, and built them anew.
"The trouble was that you never recognized the conditions; all you did was to ignore them, until you came to believe they weren't there." Again and again Jean dragged this fact forward from the background into which it was always slipping. "You never mentioned his wife or Puck and you slopped it all over with 'delicacy and broad-mindedness.' You were afraid, that's what you were, whether you knew it or not."
Jean came to a halt again in the middle of the room.
"Now, Jean Norris, from now on you're going to face things as they are. You arenotgoing to ignore the existence of his wife, or of Puck. You're either going to—or quit."
But the idea of quitting was so ridiculous that Jean laughed out loud.
At the end of the week she wrote a long, cheerful letter to Gregory and went to have dinner with Mary.
Gregory answered by return mail. He said he was working on the plans, which were getting along, but he was so sick of them he didn't know whether they were good or bad. He never mentioned the country nor how he passed his time when he was not working. Only at the very end there was a line clear across the paper of extremely thin and wobbly columns, under which he had printed: "These are the other boarders. Christian Scientists."
Jean kissed the letter and tore it up. "I don't want to take to 'carrying it in my bosom.'"
A week later Jean came home early one night, after a cheerful evening with Mary, to find Martha quietly mending under the lamp.
"Why, mummy Norris!" Jean took Martha's sewing and laid it on the table. Squatting on her heels, she grinned with mock reproof. "Why, Mrs. Norris, may I ask? Did I tell you you could come home?"
Martha's eyes twinkled. "You may be a very important person in the outside world, Jeany, but you're my baby yet, and I think I'll come and go a few years longer without asking permission. Besides, Pat is all right and has a thousand times more sense than you have and is far better able to look out for herself." Martha pointed to the mending on the table.
"It's not inability, mummy, it's a question of belief. It's an economic principle. Why should I mend stockings when I ought to be resting my mammoth brain for further world efforts? And if I could make you understand, think of the extra pennies some poor woman might earn."
"Economics! Fiddlesticks!"
"All right! I'll bring you home a brochure to-morrow on Conserving Mental Waste. Maybe you'll believe it when you see it in print."
"You'll never make me believe it's good economics or anything else, to wear stockings like those." Martha held up a pair run from heel to knee, with a great gap at the toes.
"And you'll never make me believe it isn't a wicked waste of time to mend them like that." Jean seized a pair from the neat pile. "You can't tell which was the original thread and which was the mend."
"I suppose it would be all right if I mended them so they would hurt your feet. After all, Jean, logic is not your strong point, whatever you or your brochures may say."
Jean hugged her. "I'm rather coming to that belief myself, mummy. What time did you get back?"
"About five. I didn't suppose you came home to dinner, but——"
"Mummy, is there some sherbet in the ice-box?"
"I——"
"Is there some mousse in the ice-box?"
"There is."
"And is it pineapple? Answer me!"
"I rather think I did make pineapple."
"What's the matter with my logic, now?"
Martha laughed and picked up the mending. "It's not the same thing at all, but you'll only talk me down anyhow. So go and get the sherbet. I believe I'll have some, too."
While they ate it Martha talked of Pat and the children and for some reason Jean felt that life was safe and sure again. There could be nothing very terrible in a world where little children said the delightful things that Pat's babies did, where women like Mary kept their belief and enthusiasm undimmed, and the Marthas thoughtfully made pineapple mousse as a surprise.
Four weeks to the day, Gregory wired that he would be back and to keep Sunday for a walk. The world was a nice place, a very nice place, indeed.
Sunday was a day of blue haze and golden sun.
"It was made expressly for us; I ordered it," Gregory declared, as he and Jean swung along, under arching maples that were just beginning to turn crimson, with here and there a brilliant scarlet leaf among the green. The fences were buried under honeysuckle and wild blackberries. The summer was passing in one last passionate abandonment of giving. The bare brown earth, freed from the burden of crops, like a woman released from family cares, went back to its youth. The air was pungent with the sting of sun-warmed loam. The old world frolicked in a second love.
Gregory felt that he was physically leaving the dismal month through which he had just passed, behind him. He strode along and knew in every nerve that Jean was there beside him, just as strong and unwearying as he, stepping step for step with him. He had thought of her so, very often in the last four weeks, even when he was wading out into the breakers with Puck perched on his shoulders, beating his chest with her small, hard heels and shrieking with delight.
Gregory seized Jean's hand and they shot down the green-roofed lane. Terrified birds winged with shrill calls into the blue and an old cow, chewing her cud in a quiet corner, lumbered away to safety. At the end of the lane, Gregory stopped unexpectedly and Jean spun round him like a top at the end of a string.
"Gregory! Whatever's struck you?" In the circle of his arms Jean got back her breath.
"The earth and you, a most intoxicating combination."
Between each word Gregory kissed her. Jean rested against his clasped hands. "Well, don't make me drunk too. One's enough."
"Do I make you drunk, Jeany?" Gregory whispered and leaned to the white hollow of her throat. But Jean suddenly dodged under his arms and stood off, laughing at him.
"All right. But I'll make you answer me later."
The color ran under Jean's skin and then Gregory laughed.
"But I am so awfully glad to see you, Jean. I've got to take it out in something."
"So am I." They were now in step again. "I missed you terribly." Jean paused and added, looking off over a brown field to the right. "You're lots better at drawing than at writing, Gregory. You didn't tell me a thing. How's Puck and all the wobbly row of Christian Scientists?"
"You ought to have seen her. She did her best, but Lady Jane hasn't the right kind of eyes and they wouldn't close." He bubbled over in amusement. "You can't speak to Divine Mind with your eyes open, it seems, and so Puck has to stay out."
Jean visioned Margaret going "into the silence," for evidently she belonged, and wondered which of the wobbly columns she was.
"Is everybody in it?"
"Everybody. It was a regular epidemic. If I had stayed up there another week, First Principle would have got me sure."
Suddenly Gregory realized that they were talking about Puck and Margaret and his life in that other world. He wondered how it had begun, but before he could think back, Jean was asking:
"I suppose that means an end of economics and uplift generally? I imagine Divine Mind isn't a thing one shares with garbage or child labor."
"Hardly. 'Full realization' is a terribly absorbing state."
It was strange to be talking like this to Jean. But it was a relief. He had always felt that Jean understood, but it was nice not to have to think ahead always, to loosen the curb once in a while.
"Better than Montessori or garbage anyhow."
"Heaps."
They spoke no more of Puck or Margaret but both felt that something, somewhere, had changed. What had seemed perfect before was a little more perfect now.
Gregory told her of the plans, the final week of work, and how he had mailed them at the last possible moment.
"And if I win, I'm going to see that along with the valuables buried under the corner stone, goes a picture of the one who made it all possible."
"Who might that be?"
Gregory did not answer.
"Me?"
He nodded. His hand claimed hers.
"I shall have to have one taken then, and I've never had one since I was old enough to rebel."
"Oh, no, you won't. I'm going to draw it myself."
"What will I look like? Please don't make me in two sections, like Mary."
"You're like this." Gregory sketched a tower. It was the square Roman tower, but the top was blurred. Jean pointed to the blur.
"What isthat?"
"Thatis a ray of sunshine."
"Silly," Jean whispered, and kissed him.