HORATIA made another effort to stop Anthony. She found herself disturbed beyond all control by this love of his. It seemed to her that such a thing had no right to exist in the same world with her feeling for Jim. She did not want to hurt Anthony—she did not want to argue about his love. She merely wanted his love not to exist—not to be there to affront her. If ever a woman’s psychology was pure in trying to arrest the affections of a man, Horatia’s was. So it was not enough to refuse Anthony. He must be recreated into the jolly friend that he had been. She would not have him as a lover. All this she tried to tell him and of course in the telling she laid herself open to misconstruction.
For Anthony could not see but that the discussion itself was a sign of his growing importance in her eyes. To him it probably would have been natural enough to have her refuse him and then decline to see him at all. But that did not suit Horatia. She wanted him to be just a friend—to stop loving her. He was comparatively acquiescent. He told her that he thought she might some time come to care for him, and when she protested in real horror, he was gentlemanly enough to yield the point and adjust his conversation to the comfortable tone she wanted. It cheered Horatia immensely. She was too inexperienced to know that men have always yielded to women in form when they won a victory in fact. There was a new vigor in Anthony’s walk as he left her after that.
That talk straightened “everything out,” according to Horatia, and she went to her window and drew a long breath of relief. She was clean again and fit for Jim. How tremendously she loved Jim that day! She wanted to bring him something finer, something cleaner, something purer than anyone in the world had ever brought to any man. She wanted to bring him all that the world could give a man. Her ardor almost frightened him that night. It was so great—so tempestuous.
“How can women play with men they love?” she wondered. “I suppose it’s because they don’t love. You’re warned to keep your distance—to give a little at a time. Why I—I want to give everything in the world all at once—everything. And then I wouldn’t have enough. I want to do foolish, extravagant things to show you my love—only because it is love they wouldn’t be foolish or extravagant.”
“Do you know how I love you?” asked Jim. “I love you as a man loves a woman once in a long, long while, so much that all the primal things, the violent things have been refined out of it. I love you so much that the lightest touch of your hand on my shoulder turns me to fire andso much that if it would harm a hair of your head or bring a shadow of trouble to your soul, I’d never see you again. I love you because you are beautiful of body—that least and first—and I love your fine, clean soul which is like a candlelight before the altar of life, and I love—most of all, your warm, warm heart that warms everything which is near it at all. No—most of all I love you and I’d love you if you were ugly and vicious and cold—because you’d be you. You attached me and you’ll never shake me off now.”
No—for all his protestations that he would give her up if it were best for her, his arms around her did not seem to be willing to even give her up for a moment. They were talking a little more practically now.The Journalwas really commencing to pay and an amazing offer had come to Langley offering him an editorship on an Eastern paper. But he had refused it, with Horatia’s connivance, because they both felt that they did not want to leave so soon the lake and the city which had brought them together and the familiar office.
“A flat it will have to be.”
“But some day there will be the house with the dark oak hall,” he promised. “Some day there will be those sunny guest-rooms. Once, Horatia, I had a little money and I lost it all. It was what my father left me. Well, I never missed it. I didn’t care—much. But now I covet that money. I see things in windows that I want to give you. I want to smother you with presents.”
“You’re a capitalist in spirit for all your protestations!”
“Don’t you dare tell anyone, but I’ve the making of a rare one in me. All that I care about just now is giving things to you—myself and other things.”
“You care about your work.”
“Ah, but that’s so that I may be more worthy to give myself to you.”
“But this flat business!”
They thought perhaps that they could marry in the autumn. Late autumn with the leaves turning to wonderful colors and the lake shimmering with the first cold winds. It would put spirit into that most marvellous of honeymoons. And after that they would come back to the office—and the flat.
“Let’s look at flats and furniture—sort of surreptitiously——” begged Horatia.
He was stern.
“If this is to be a secret,” he said, “how on earth can we go about asking for furniture? Now I will tell you anyway that we are not going to buy much furniture. And I will show you why we are not if you will call on me next Sunday morning.”
“You have furniture of your own.”
“I have a few nice things—not awfully valuable—but you shall see.”
She saw them and they were far more lovely than he had told her. His little apartment was much more luxurious than she had imagined.There were small, beautiful rugs and several pictures which had signatures which startled Horatia, and an inlaid table stood beside a great velvet chair and faced another chair, a rocker, low-seated and high-backed, not at all a man’s chair.
“I suppose I was rocked to sleep in that chair,” said Langley whimsically.
He showed her the dining-room with its smooth-oiled mahogany table and then laid his hand lightly on the panel of the other door.
“In there,” he said softly, “is the bedroom furniture which was my mother’s. Would you like that too?”
The color faded from Horatia’s cheeks and the gravity of her eyes deepened.
“I want it,” she answered.
Her pallor frightened him.
“You’re not afraid of me, are you, darling?”
“A little afraid of life—not you—and the curious thing is that I don’t know what part of life does frighten me. It’s only that sometimes there seem to be so many things I don’t know yet—or understand——”
Langley often thought of her as she was when she said those words, standing in his shadowy living-room, with the light from the window on her face half-turned away from him towards things she did not understand. So young—so instinctively brave and so instinctively honest. And so beautiful.
“I shall tell you of as many as I can and therewill be things we both don’t understand that we must find out together. But we will go—hand in hand—with our heads up—to meet them.”
She turned and caught his hands in her own outstretched ones.
“Oh, let us start, soon—soon,” she begged. “I want to go with you.”
“Yes—soon,” answered Langley. His head was high and his face the face of a young man. “Soon—my darling—wife.”
AND then suddenly came one of those swift unexpected tragedies which knock the heart out of life for those who see and must witness them. This came on Horatia like a thunderbolt. Life was magnificently clean about Horatia—clean and beautiful—and then it was sullied by a contact.
She had told Grace Walsh that she was to spend the night with Maud and then she changed her mind. Going home from the office late and entering quietly so as not to wake Grace, she heard voices. It was midnight and she wondered. The voices were from Grace’s room, not from the sitting-room, and Horatia stood weakly still in the dark and heard them. One was a man’s and the other was Grace’s and they were saying things, half-laughing things which turned Horatia weak and sick. Somehow she stumbled out of the room—somehow got quietly down the stairs and out of the building. She walked to Maud’s blindly and when Harvey let her in said that she was very dizzy and must go straight to her room. Not to sleep. To listen to what Grace had said and the man had said and to see things of horror. Life was like that, was it? Foul—ugly? Was that love too? They had used theword—that word—her word! No, no, no, she cried to her tortured brain—not love. But Grace. Why should Grace be like that? Had she always been? Grace who was fond of her. She was agonized not by the facts as much as by her vision, her hearing of them. Abstractly her brain tried to argue. Argue modern things she had heard. Suddenly she understood many things that had puzzled her about Grace—understood conversations which they had had together. She tried to get Grace’s view of this, tried desperately. Grace had a right to live—to be herself, to act as she pleased. But her senses, her heart kept denying that—kept suffering its denial.
Harvey told her flatly at breakfast that she must cut out the night work if she didn’t want to ruin her health—and her looks. He took her downtown in his car and left her at the office for Jim to worry over. Her white face and her shocked eyes told Jim that something had happened. But she could not tell him. She worked mechanically, facing the time when she would have to see Grace.
At six o’clock she took advantage of Jim’s absence to slip out and go over to the apartment. Grace was there. She was paring potatoes in the kitchenette. Sometimes they got their own supper.
Horatia did not take her hat off. She stood and watched the knife scrape the skin from the potatoes. Grace looked at her.
“Why, what’s wrong, my dear?”
Horatia’s knees were weak and queer. She felt herself apt to faint if she were not very, very slow and precise in what she said.
“I came back last night and heard—you.”
Grace’s face turned scarlet and then a different color—a color mixed of anger, shame and defiance. She seemed about to speak several times—several ways—and at last she succeeded.
“I really don’t see how it concerns you,” she said, viciously.
“No,” said poor Horatia, “I suppose it doesn’t. Only I can’t stay here.”
Grace’s expression hardened to an ugly sneer.
“So virtuous as all that,” she said. “Do I say a word when you go to Jim Langley’s rooms? Don’t play the high and mighty lady with me.”
Grace had lost her intellectuality like a dropped cloak. She was pure, raging passion, discovered in sin and accused. But Horatia did not stop to analyze. She was stricken with horror. She couldn’t speak and Grace raged on.
“You’re like all the rest. I knew you’d be or I’d have told you. Pretend to be broadminded and yet scurry to get behind a fence of conventions if your own skirts are involved. What business is it of yours if I have a lover? If he isn’t married to me? He would marry me if he could and if I’d let him. He’s married now to one of the silly fools who runs around with your sister. He can’t stand her. He hates her presence—and he loves me and I love him. We get what we can and then you come with your faceof horror to preach to me—to tell me I’m not fit to live with! Fit to live with! I’m fit as the rest of the hypocrites that you live with. Women or men—they’re all alike—covering their traces better. I wonder where your brother-in-law spends some of his nights when he has to go out of town. Do you think those silly little doll-faced prattlers can hold a man? As for you—you go as far as you dare with Langley. How do I know how far you go? I don’t spy on you when you go to his rooms on Sunday! Not fit to live with! God, this prating of righteousness—sex righteousness, the most silly lying farce in the world. There is no such thing as righteousness. But there is love and passion, little white-face.”
Still Horatia did not speak. Before this ugly situation she had become powerless to attack or to defend. She had neither weapons nor skill for such a fight. And Grace tore on, through a tirade of defense and condemnation, revealing her shattered pride and her spirit torn by the sense of guilt, of satisfactions and strangled discontents, trying to believe in its own rectitude. But poor Horatia could not analyze it then. She was only able to see facts and to hear the anger and accusations against herself. She knew instinctively that Grace did not mean them but she had said them and in the saying had irretrievably marred and stained some things in Horatia.
Stray phrases hit her ear cruelly. Grace was now condemning her—now men—now women.
“Modern women! Modern with your tongues!Love should be free. Love should be above conventions. How often you’ve said it! And I with my real beliefs did not dare to tell you how I chose to carry out your phrases because I knew that you were only talking. Doing lip service to modernism! Easy, isn’t it? But before modernism—naked—you’d be horrified and pursing your shocked lips and running for veils.”
Horatia sank down in a chair and covered her face with her hands.
“My God,” cried Grace, “why shouldn’t I do as I please? Why should I say one thing and act another? If I know marriage is rotten why should I hold to its forms? Haven’t we all said marriage was archaic—love should be free?”
There was no answer.
“Come now, isn’t that one of the great Sunday afternoon subjects for discussion?”
Horatia nodded. “But this is different.”
“Why different?”
“Because it is furtive and hidden—don’t you see it’s—ugly?”
“It’s hidden because of just such cowards as you. You for whom I am not fit!”
“It’s not a question of fitness. I don’t condemn you, Grace. Perhaps you are right. Maybe I am cheap and cowardly. But I can’t—live with it.”
Generations of Grants and Ferrises living in holy wedlock speaking through her—rash current phrases, fine modern leniencies dropping from her before the facts of furtive illicit loveand adultery. The education of modern thought and modern living dashed to the ground by the healthy instinct of race, healthy still in spite of its soaking in strong, acidulous, dangerous ideas. Poor Horatia—so feeble in her humiliation and yet stronger than ever before because there was only one thing that she could do. Living with Grace was not a debatable issue. It was an impossibility.
“Heaven knows that I don’t want to live with you,” said Grace hotly. “But I would like to have you see that wherever you turn you can’t do more than keep your own skirts clean. You can’t guarantee the skirts of others.”
She walked up and down furiously and Horatia, not looking at her, knew nevertheless how she looked. Her strong figure, her neat hair bound about her head, her smart tailored gown did not make a proper figure of passion but of restraint. But the passion was breaking through the physical restraints.
“You were born in West Park,” Grace went on, “and brought up in a quiet orderly way, told nothing ugly, seeing nothing ugly. I wasn’t. I was born in a cheap hotel in a small town. Two years afterward my mother either skipped or died. I suppose she skipped. And my father sent the woman who kept the hotel a little money to keep me. He was a travelling salesman—used to drop in now and then because I and the town were on his route. I lived in that place where people came and went—some of them decentenough—pale, dragged, gossipy women with fat, bloated men or fat, big-breasted, lazy, powdery women, and their men. They were not too attractive nor too delicate in their talk—these respectable ones. And there were others too—not decent and not caring to be. I heard things—saw things. I was well instructed in dirtiness young. And I couldn’t stand it. I broke away and went to work in a woman’s kitchen when I was fourteen. I washed dishes and cooked and made beds for domestic decency. So it was called and rated. I learned how cheap and dishonest a thing decency is. I was with that woman for two years. I helped her when her fourth child was born. And the sordidness—the hideousness of that unwelcomed birth ground some facts about modern decency into me. They rowed over that baby—talked about ‘blame’. The fears—the backbiting—the lack of love or even respect! I used to wonder what those people started on—and then and there I vowed never to marry.
“Well, I saved enough to go to High School. I had been through grammar school. I started High School when I was sixteen years old and I got through in three years. Meantime I was a ‘mother’s helper’. The irony of that phrase! I helped that mother by washing clothes and dishes and slaving way into the night sometimes. It was a hard little town. I wanted to go to college so I moved—with my package—it was a small package—of clothes to the University town—got some work, earned enough to start on and to buy someclothes and then went to the Dean to ask about working my way through. The Dean was the first woman I had ever met who seemed to care what happened to me. It was a queer experience. Funny, wasn’t it, the reputation I made in college. By the time you came on the scene I was quite a celebrity, going home for vacations with girls who were met at the stations by limousines and weaving a hazy fiction about my dead parents and good connections. Then—after college—jobs were easy.
“But I wanted other things by this time. I found myself wanting things I never had. Love—men——” Horatia, watching her now, saw her standing still, looking back at her own life with angry, thwarted eyes.
“I didn’t want marriage. I had no illusions about that. Marriage was quite the ugliest thing I had seen. But I did want a lover. And I found I could love—I can love! I’ve had three lovers in five years, and I believe in marriage less than ever. The men have all wanted me to marry them. But I won’t. People use marriage and then it uses them. It is meaningless. More and more people cheat it and pretend to hang on when they are sick of each other. When my lovers and I are through—we’re through. I tell you that that man who was here last night hates the sight of his wife. She must know it. Yet she rides in his car and takes his money and eats at his table. Isn’t that degradation?”
Horatia did not answer and Grace stoppedtalking too, for a while. They were aware of the awkwardness of the pared potatoes and the interrupted preparations for supper, which seemed to insist on a continued intimacy.
“Will you have supper?” asked Grace, with bitter casualness.
“I’ll help get it,” answered Horatia gently and turned her attention to details, striving, striving all the time to understand and help. They set the informal table and faced each other over it.
“Don’t you want to stay here? I’ll go,” offered Grace brusquely later.
“No—no——” Horatia protested. “I’m the one to go. I really ought to go to stay with Maud’s children for a while anyhow. She and her husband want to go to New York for six weeks and they have been asking me to stay at their house while they are away. I didn’t promise but I will go.”
“Tonight?”
Horatia hesitated.
“No,” she answered bravely, “tomorrow.”
Suddenly Grace burst into tears.
It was the first time that reality had closely touched Horatia and for the first time she realized that in dealing with personal realities, theories have little value unless they have been tested by experience. She had never been one of those who sought after modern ideas for their own sake but she had accepted easily and as a matter of course all the talk which went with her time—talk which was lavish in its use of phrases about the rightsof the individual, freedom of thought, antique conventionality and the new everything. She believed in no church and she laughed at Maud’s rigors as to what was and what wasn’t proper. In college she had often expressed an opinion strongly indignant that women should be required or expected to be more chaste than men and held the double standard in abhorrence. And yet she was horrified to discover that the man in this case did not excite her really. He was condemned but it was a passionless condemnation that she gave him. But with Grace her horror at finding that Grace had made use of this little apartment for a furtive love affair turned her sick and yet miserable lest her fastidiousness might be only cheapness. The saddest point in the little tragedy was that Horatia could not know that she was learning one of the deepest truths which she would ever learn—that through all intensive modernism and intensive conservatism runs a thread of instinct that is stronger than either—a fundamental morality which drives the most hidebound conservatives into most radical actions and the most dangerous radicals into the most conservative actions. The thread may be tangled, and never untangled by some people in either group but, unbroken, it runs through life and always will, through Bolshevism and monarchism. Always irrefutable the fact confronts us that life is bigger than politics or economic conditions or theories about either.
When Grace and Horatia said a restrainedgood night and went to their bedrooms Horatia threw off her clothes and jumped into bed.
“If this affair was a block away it wouldn’t bother me at all,” she said to herself determinedly. “I’ve decided to leave. Now I must go to sleep.”
It was easy to say and impossible to do—easy to whip her actions into conformity but not so easy to control her thought. She was shivering with unpleasant contacts and she found herself standing on the floor in the darkness, longing to dress and run away again. She tried to laugh, to be “sensible,” assuring herself that all she needed was sleep and rest. But there was no such thing as sleep. The darkness was not soft and quiet. It was full of thoughts and pictures which did not soothe but tortured her. She had always let her last thought be of her lover. Now she wanted to forget about all men—even Jim. Grace had said—and so her mind raced on through the darkness and morning came again.
To be sure that there could be no more discussion she telephoned her sister at once and Maud’s flat definite tones coming over the wire, expressing pleasure at the news and plunging at once into a world of detail, reassured her. It was reassurance just to realize that Maud was getting up from her breakfast table and that her mind was anxiously turning on the problem of buying a new wardrobe trunk or making her old one “do.” There was something cheering in the impression that much of life was made up of just such innocent trivialities.
But at the office Jim saw the ravages of the day before increased and she seemed unnatural to him, as if she was trying overhard to be natural. He asked her to come into his office and shut the door on her entrance.
But at the touch of his arms she looked so pathetic that his worry deepened.
“You’re not yourself, darling.”
She shook her head weakly.
“I’m quite all right.”
“No—circles and shadows under your eyes—troubles in them—pale cheeks—what is it about?”
Horatia tried to smile and failed miserably.
“Tell me, dear.”
He was so easy, so unpassionate because of some wise instinct that she turned to him and the story came out. Grace had played her game silently and well, for Jim had not suspected the situation.
“You must leave her, of course,” he said with quick masculine intolerance for this business which affronted a woman dear and pure to him.
“Pull my skirts aside—I suppose so,” she said drearily, “that’s what hurts. My own reactions.”
“But you can’t help her by living there—and she had no right to expose you to such a situation. It’s damnable.”
She had never seen him so excited or so very angry. He strode up and down, his mouth set, eyes smouldering. She found that she was feebly arguing for Grace but there was reassurance in the way he swept her arguments aside. Hewasn’t interested in Grace. He didn’t want to discuss Grace. What she did was her own business. Let it go at that. But to involve Horatia in a living arrangement and not explain her own method of life—that was outrageous.
Suddenly he stopped and held up her face in his hands.
“And you have been thinking that all men——”
Her eyes wavered and his filled with tenderest pity.
“No, darling,” he said, quietly, “it’s not true.”
Confidence swept Horatia’s soul like a clean wind. She lifted her eyes to her lover again.
MAUD departed for New York, radiant in new clothes and expectations of others. She set her house in order and gave Horatia a detailed list of instructions as to what to do on every usual occasion and in every emergency. And Horatia found a surprising pleasure in what she was to undertake. The Williams were to be gone two months and she would have full charge of everything. It would be interesting and stimulating to run a house and supervise the care of children. She liked Maud’s children and she liked the housemaid and the cook. It would be very easy and to Maud’s anxious worries she turned a laughing face and a competent spirit. She stood, with Jackie held by one hand and the baby in her arms, waving good-bye to their parents, and when the car was out of sight took her charges to the nursery with a delightful new feeling of personal responsibility.
After the flat, Maud’s house gave her a sense of expansion. To have her breakfast served daintily at a dining-room table was refreshing after months of getting up hurriedly and getting the milk and orange marmalade and rolls together herself. To come back at night to a comfortable house where there were two or three rooms into which she might wander instead ofthe small living-room of the flat was restful and to go up to the nursery was the most fun of all. The children were often in bed or just being put to bed by the housemaid and their smiles and chuckles at the sight of Horatia if she arrived in time to give them the finishing touches and tuck them in was one of the nicest happenings of the day. Their helplessness, their recognitions, their constantly growing intelligence, all fascinated her. Mingled with her natural love for them was wonder too and constant speculation. It was not unlikely that in a few years she might have children too, children for whom the responsibility would be always hers. She began to respect Maud, Maud being absent and non-irritant, for this achievement of two children. Two children brought into the world and preserved in perfect health. It was no slight thing. It was a big thing—a big success.
There was further speculation in her mind when she paid her sister’s bills. Dimly she had known that Harvey and Maud spent a great deal of money but she had not guessed how much. Their home was simple and it was not until she had checked over a great sheaf of bills which came in at the end of Maud’s first week of absence that Horatia found that the simplicity was the expensive result of many hands, many shops, many materials all blended smoothly together into a domestic interior. The total of the bills appalled her. She had laughed at Harvey’s insistence on leaving her a sum in the bank, which shedeclared “would last a year.” At this rate of expenditure she saw that it would possibly last the two months of her sister’s absence. The most unexpected things cost so much—in the kitchen and in the nursery. And a new speculation bordering on worry came to take the place of those first rapturous thoughts about her own children. She and Jim had figured on living on a sum which did not represent a tenth of what her sister was spending. Granted that she could save this and that and cut out this and that expense, could she even then—— She decided that she must ask Jim.
Jim came every evening when she did not go to the office. He was especially tender these days as if he were trying to completely and surely eradicate the scar which Grace had left on Horatia’s mind. They were beautiful, peaceful evenings with the house quiet and full of the spirit of the sleeping children, and sometimes they imagined that it was their house, that they were at home at last.
“Have you any idea how much this costs, Jim,” asked Horatia, “this peace and order and well-keptness?”
“I can only guess at it in horror.”
She told him and he whistled.
“Worse than your guess?”
“Yes.”
“I wish I had some money of my own,” said Horatia, regretfully. “We’ll have to devise ways of makingThe Journalpay better.”
“If I leftThe JournalI could get a fairly big salary on some other paper, perhaps.”
“And have your policy dictated by a lot of rotters! No indeed. We’ll stick toThe Journal. It brought us all our luck. Something will happen. And of course I could live on lots less than Maud can. But I want my house even if it’s only a flat to have dignity too—not to be messy and frumpy. You want that too.”
“I don’t think that I want anything in the world except you and to give you everything I can.”
So they buried the difficulty in words and secretly Langley puzzled over his account books and secretly Horatia made budgets, strange and startling budgets, of household expenses with estimates of the cost of things reduced to minimums which would have shocked Maud or made her laugh. But even then——
The money part did not bother Horatia seriously. It was fun to puzzle and to plan. And for three weeks things ran smoothly. Then the housemaid was sent to the hospital one day for an operation for acute appendicitis, and for a few hours confusion reigned. Horatia, to whom the cook telephoned, left her work to Bob Brotherton and came home in haste. She encouraged the terrified housemaid and got her safely into the ambulance and engaged a nurse for her at the hospital. Then the cook went shakily back to her own work and Horatia started to put the children to bed. She had often done it before, butalways before Ellen had laid things out for her and the nursery had been in order and the children fed. She found tonight a nursery in the wildest confusion, two cross children and no supper ready for them. She consulted Anna, the cook. Anna was but temperately helpful. She told Horatia what they had for supper and how to prepare the baby’s food but she did not suggest helping her. Horatia struggled with a maze of dishes, formulas and prohibitions and finally bore the tray up to the nursery. It was an hour and a half before she came down, but then the room was in order and the children in bed and quiet. Anna, who had kept dinner waiting for half an hour, did not seem especially coöperative. Now that the shock of Ellen’s illness was over and a call from the hospital reported her as resting easily, Anna seemed inclined to worry lest she be imposed upon. She told Horatia that Ellen always dressed the children at half-past seven and that she could not both get breakfast and dress them. Also she wondered if she could care for them during the day when Horatia was at the office. Horatia soothed her fears. Maud had left no instructions as to what to do in case one of the servants had appendicitis but Horatia guessed that the best thing was to engage a temporary housemaid. In the morning she promised Anna that should be done.
She was up early to dress and feed the children—but in spite of her early rising she found that she had to eat her own breakfast veryhurriedly and then was late at the office because she had to go to three employment agencies. Rather discouraging places, the employment agencies. They showed her long waiting lists of their patrons but promised to do what they could. Horatia had no choice but to be content and so she went to the office and plunging into an exciting day forgot Maud’s household for a while.
But returning that night she was forced into the thick of domestic difficulty again. Anna was distinctly cross. The children were cross. There were many loose ends for Horatia to tie—many duties to perform which seemed especially wearying after her long day at the office.
“Domesticity needs a lot of oiling,” she told Jim.
He made things easy for her in the office but even with a great many things done for her there Horatia found both the office and the domestic burdens heavy. Savagely she spurned a little thought which crawled into her mind at times. “Of course I can manage my house and my work, when I am attacking my own problems. It’s only because this is something I am not used to, something that I have to carry out according to the plans which other people have made for me.” But none the less the thought crawled back again, suggesting that Maud had money and everything to make things easy for her and that even then the care of two children and a household was a heavy task when it was coupledwith even eight hours of office work. She did not take that problem to Jim. It was hard to phrase and there seemed no very obvious way to solve it except by her own efforts. They wanted children and a home and she must work. She was doubly sure that she would want to work, especially when Anna’s complaints and the children’s restlessness were forgotten in the busy routine of the office—and yet there were times when just to get up in the morning and go to the office seemed too hard a strain. Suppose that after her marriage she should feel it too hard?
They could not find a new housemaid. The employment agencies seemed futile and advertisements, even inThe Journal, brought such dilapidated creatures in answer that Horatia could not bear to entrust the children to them. For a few days they tried a trained nurse with whom Anna quarreled bitterly and who finally left because Anna insisted that she should make beds and do the dusting. Anna was continually on the defensive. After a visit to Ellen she felt it rather unfair that she should not have had an attack of appendicitis and have been sent to a pleasant hospital where her meals were brought to her on a tray and she was watched over by nurses. Ellen continued to get better. That was the bright spot. In a few weeks she would be as well as ever and in the meantime, if Anna would only stay, Horatia felt that she could manage. She refused to write Maud that she was havingdifficulties. Maud had counted on this trip and after all there was nothing very wrong.
“Nothing except that you are wearing out under my eyes,” complained Jim.
But a worse complication came and after it had come, Horatia felt that all had been easy before. Jackie, with the astonishing suddenness of children, had been well when she started for her office in the morning and when she came home at night he was sick and feverish and refused to eat his supper. She put him to bed and consulting Maud’s lists found the name of the baby doctor and summoned him. He was a gentle-voiced, pleasant young man who after one look at the boy developed a frightening air of seriousness and told Horatia to send for a nurse. She asked him if she should telegraph Maud but he shook his head.
“It’s not much use. He’s poisoned somehow—eaten something or some things that he shouldn’t have eaten. The chances are that he will come out all right by tomorrow, but if he doesn’t she couldn’t get here anyhow. You can wait until morning. He will probably be all right. But it will mean prompt work now. Try to get a nurse from the children’s hospital.”
A tangled night. Horatia remembered the coming of the nurse and her own quick confidence that the uniform would help somehow in bringing Jackie through. So much skill surely—— She remembered Jim’s coming and her amazement that his arms could not comfort her—that nothing could help her except the assurances that the poor, tossing, wailing little boy would probably be all right. She heard him cry as they did things to his little body which hurt before they relieved it. She had constant pictures of the way he had looked two days before and she could hear his jolly little laugh. She had an agonized sense of the terrible waste of life there must be when children died. And once she turned to Jim with a frightened cry:
“I can’t bear it, Jim! I tell you I can’t bear it. And what if it were my child? Could it be worse? Dare we risk all that?”
She had a memory of Jim’s great strength and of all the things he did—and how the doctor turned to him and asked things and of Jim’s calmness and readiness, and of one moment when he took a wailing Anna by the shoulders and sent her out of the room. Horatia did not wail. But her face was so white and so full of suffering that Jim kept close beside her ready for a collapse if it should come.
A fight for life is always terrible, but with a child, when the odds are so unequal, it is especially terrible. The doctor and nurse, quiet and coöperative, worked steadily together—hours passed—the cries from the tortured little body became fewer and at last the doctor, coming out into the upper hallway where Jim and Horatia sat together, said those words which have brought such floods of happiness to so many watchers, “He’ll get through all right. In a weekhe’ll be as fit as ever. Great bit of luck that we caught it in time. In half an hour more he would have had convulsions and it’s hard to get a baby well under those conditions.”
Horatia was weeping silently.
“You’ve had a big strain, Miss Grant. Better get to bed. The nurse will be here all night and tomorrow I’ll send someone to relieve her. In a day or two he won’t need any watching; but while he is so weak it is just as well to give him expert nursing.”
He was gone.
“Will you go to bed, now?”
“I don’t need to go to bed now,” she answered, smiling through her tears. “I’ve strength enough for a lifetime.”
“You’re to go to bed at once,” said Jim. “If you don’t, you will lose your job onThe Journal. Come, you can lock me out and then go to bed.”
They told Anna about the boy’s safety and Anna characteristically relapsed into a quick account of what she herself had gone through since he had begun to be sick. She admitted that she had given him a piece of mince pie and that he had liked it so well that she had let him have “another sliver.”
“He was pestering me for it.”
Horatia was past reproaches. She turned and went away, around the house with Jim, locking the windows and doors and turning off the lights. Coupled with her relief and happiness was a happiness in doing these domestic things with Jimand a new closeness because they had been through suffering together. At the front door, he took her in his arms.
“I couldn’t have borne it without you, Jim.”
“We can bear anything—together.”
Again that feeling that this might be repeated in their own life together—their own children might go down to the edge of death—suffering might come—but they would have each other. Life could not frighten them.
Then, as if everything had become as hard as possible to test her, and finding her brave under the test, was becoming kinder, the household burdens lightened. Jackie was well—so amazingly well that it was hard to believe that he ever had been sick—Ellen was better and came back to her work and the house slid into order and ease again. And more and more accustomed did Horatia become to the ways of a household and more and more normal did it seem to imagine herself in a household. She absorbed the touch of dogmatism natural to the competent woman who must dogmatize about her household. That was one of the unfortunate results of her adaptability and one bound to have grave consequences. All the things around her were real and true. They were made graver and deeper by the reflection of the things she had learned in the last six months but their truth was not altered. Children were beautiful, homes were beautiful, and love was the most beautiful and basic fact of all. The episodeof Grace had become a dulled tragedy and she rarely thought of her previous life in their flat lest she resurrect what had been such an ugly climax to it.
“PLEASE, Jim,” begged Rose Hubbell, “you will come with me today?”
She was proposing a walk in the country and Jim was demurring. It was Sunday in May and a beautiful day of golden greens which he had longed to share with Horatia. But Horatia had gone to a family dinner party at Aunt Caroline’s and refused to include him, because it was such a very family party “with antique aunts and uncles who’d watch us and speculate with the most indecent curiosity.” He was bored but disinclined to see Rose Hubbell. If he could not be with Horatia, he could get pleasure out of the thought of her anyway. But Mrs. Hubbell insisted.
“Please, Jim, don’t leave me alone today. It’s a bad anniversary for me. Let’s go for a long country walk and get all this sunshine. Will you?”
He remembered with a shock that it must be a bad anniversary for her. Just three years ago on just such a day, Jack Hubbell had shot the bottom out of his world. And hers too—and Jim’s own, for a while. The bitter reminiscence awakened a keen pity in him for her. Yes, he would go. He promised, and half an hour later was on his way to meet her at the station. Theywere to ride to the country and then start walking along the lake shore.
She was dressed simply and suitably in a short skirt and jacket and he saw at a glance that she had been weeping. Jim’s gallantry was always greater than his cynicism, and though he had had ample proof that Rose had not let her husband’s suicide blight her life, still this evidence of feeling on her part touched him and made him sorry for her and very kind. They rode along silently—she thoughtful and unwontedly sweet. He saw again in her the mood that had seemed such sweet spirituality and that had seemed to him to be her dominating mood when he had first known her. She was frail and her profile, turned to the light, was very wistful and drooped a little as it contemplated her past sorrows.
“Dear Jim,” she said softly, “I was a wretch to make you share my depression today. But when this time comes around all the gayety with which I can surround myself at other times falls flat. I have all I can do to keep from——” her voice trailed into silence and she stretched her hands forward on her lap, clasping them tightly. Jim said nothing. He had had previous dealings with hysterical women and had learned not to add either the fuel of comfort or of contradiction to their self-musings. And she said nothing more.
They dismounted at their little station. It was only a station house with a country road leading away into light woods, and the road was one which they knew led to a high bluff overlookingmiles on miles of lake. Jim had often thought that he would like to bring Horatia here, but the place was too overclouded by certain memories.
“Do you remember the last time we were here?” she asked.
“Look here, Rose, I don’t think this is a wise place to come today. Let’s go back to town and go to supper some place. Or to a concert. This will only work you all up.”
She refused by a gesture and then, seeming to realize a misstep, quickly changed her mood or at least her manner. She was gay. She saw all sorts of interesting things along the path. Her feet almost danced along and when they came into full sight of the lake, she stepped and flung out her arms with a gesture of joyous abandon, which even in its slight theatricalness was lovely to see. Langley adapted himself to her mood. They sat on a rock and flung stones into the water, and, being entirely human, Langley found himself appreciative of the way the wind could rumple her soft yellow hair without making it ugly or disorderly. An hour passed. It had been late afternoon when they reached the lake and the water was no longer dancing in the sunlight but grey and moving as if turned to severer purposes. Rose lay stretched on a rock, a slim delicate figure, exaggerated against its bareness.
“Are you in love with Horatia Grant?” she asked suddenly.
The question came unpleasantly to Jim. Hehesitated, unwilling to drag Horatia’s name into a tête-à-tête with Rose and then answered, briefly—almost brusquely,
“Yes.”
“Is she going to marry you?”
Mrs. Hubbell did not seem to be aware of his hesitation. She put the second question as directly as the first.
“Yes—we are going to be married. Come, Rose, it is late.”
“She is lovely looking,” contributed Mrs. Hubbell, contemplatively.
“I don’t want to discuss her, Rose. It’s—impossible.”
She continued to lie there very quietly, non-resistant.
“Of course you don’t want to discuss her. But you see it matters so much to me that I couldn’t help asking.”
How could one tread upon such meekness?
“Oh, nonsense, Rose. There’s no reason on earth why you should feel that way. We decided long ago that there was no possible—emotion—between us. We continue to be good friends just as we always have been.”
“I wish we could, Jim.”
“Why can’t we?”
“Because Horatia probably wouldn’t want it.”
“Of course Horatia would. Of course she would.” But he repeated it as if not quite sure of himself.
And still Rose lay there, immobile, her delicatearms outstretched, a perfect picture of resignation.
“The last link is snapping which binds me to the things which I loved. A wasted life—and yet not altogether my fault, was it? Just because we were friends—you and I—before that horrible thing happened. And then—you go—and I am alone—with nothing at all except a future that is as empty as—that hand.” She lifted her lovely open hand to the wind.
“Don’t be morbid, Rose.”
“Oh, I’m not—not a bit,” she assured him. “Of course I’ve always known you’d marry some time. I perhaps might have wished—indelicacies.”
Langley was pacing up and down with embarrassment and his face showed mingled pity and anger, but she did not seem to see him.
“But you don’t love me. There was a day when you thought you did. Do you remember that day when you had tea with me—a winter afternoon and the snow was coming down outside and it was so warm in the little yellow living-room—do you remember my little yellow living-room?—and you leaned down over me at the tea-table and kissed me—because you said you couldn’t help it—just once?”
“Oh, damn it all, Rose—what’s the sense in this? That nonsense was long ago. It was so damned foolish.”
“It was nonsense,” she answered quietly, “nonsense, I suppose, to you. Just a whim to you—just as Jack’s suicide was an impulse to him—andso for whims and impulses, I’ve wasted all my life.”
He was suddenly kinder. Perhaps the appeal of that inert figure made him sorry for her just as anger on her part would have aroused every inch of him to masculine resentment. He sat down beside her.
“You mustn’t talk like that, Rose. You’re young, lovely. Of course you had a rotten deal, but you’ve everything in the world ahead of you yet and if you’re brave you’ll have it all coming to you.”
“With a woman when love is gone or has become hopeless, everything is gone.”
Subtle playing on the chords of man’s vanity! Rose Hubbell had not developed her technique for nothing. Langley’s softening and his discomfort showed in every line of his restless figure. And Rose sat up, to advantage, a little more tense.
“Jim, I want you to be happy above everything. And Horatia is wonderful and beautiful. Only don’t let her absorb you. She is so strong—so much stronger than most women or men that she tends to absorb people. I feel myself shrinking into nothing beside her. I am only warning you as an old friend and a wise woman. A woman’s greatest attraction to a man is a man’s strength and she likes to be dominated—not to dominate.”
Strange that Jim, who had avowed to Horatia that Mrs. Hubbell was possibly dangerous and who had himself so few illusions, should havebeen listening to her so seriously and so intently. She did not press the point but began to talk of Horatia—of her beauty, her grace, her mind, and Langley drank it all in. And the lake grew a darker grey as he bathed in the thoughts of the woman he loved and the woman who watched him saw that he was so far away from her that she grew heedless about her own expressions and let them grow a little more hard and bitter and angry. At last she jumped to her feet.
“Getting dark, Jimmy. We must go.”
Jim rose. He had been having a delightful time for that last half hour and was ready to go—go back to Horatia.
“I’m glad you like her so much, Rose,” he said gratefully and awkwardly.
“I admire her more than I can tell you,” said Rose, “and if she would let me love her I would be happy indeed.”
Langley did not answer that. He gave her his hand to help her over the rocks and they went down the deserted country road. In the last stretch before they came in sight of the station he felt her hand suddenly hot in his and as he turned she put her hands on his shoulders.
“Let me kiss you once, Jimmy boy,” she asked, “just for good luck.”
The name woke a host of memories in him which he would not have willingly called forth. He bent his head a little to her swift caress and then they went on, his mind back, uncontrollably back, in the past. He walked in reverie, and shehelped him a little in it. What they talked of now was those early days of her married life when Jim and Jack Hubbell had spent long evenings with her, the three of them in ardent conversation—or so it had seemed then to them. Skillfully Mrs. Hubbell recreated those past days, playing now on chords of sentiment, now on humorous notes, and Jim slid back into the past with her. On the train and on the way to her home she held up the conversation constantly, always maintaining the effect that she wanted of reviving a happy memory about to be relegated to the past forever. It was at her own door, when, after vainly urging him to come in, she gave him her hand in farewell and said:
“I wonder if I dare ask you something.”
It may have been because he was so pleased at the happy turn she had given her melancholy, but in any case his smile was friendly and promising.
“I should almost think so.”
“Don’t just drop me cold, Jim. Let me see you sometimes. I don’t think you have ever guessed how I need you. There’s a black mood comes over me sometimes and you are the only person who can dispel it. I don’t want to meddle—to interfere—to be anything—but don’t hurt me by just dropping me cold. Come to see me now and then—once in a long while—only when Horatia doesn’t want you—promise.”
“Why—of course I will—of course, Rose—don’t be so silly. You know that without a promise.”
“No—promise—it will make me feel so much happier just to have the words to comfort me when I feel awfully outside and alone.”
He hesitated, being a man and naturally reluctant to bind himself too tightly, and then, being a gentleman, he laughed and promised. She asked nothing more and took no advantage of his feeling but bent to open her door and then, waving to him from the dark threshold, was gone.
At his rooms, Jim found a note under his door. It was a little note written on a page out of a familiar notebook. “Where do you run to when I can not find you? I have disposed of the stupidest party in the world because I can not bear my Sunday without the sight of you. I have brazenly rung your door-bell and there came no answer. If you get back, call me at Maud’s to say good night and if it is early enough, come to see me and say it properly.”
He looked at his watch. It was eleven o’clock—too late for a call. He sat down at his telephone and almost lovingly called the number of Maud’s house.
“What were you doing?” asked Horatia. “All this heavenly afternoon?”
Langley did not make any attempt to evade the question.
“Oh, I went out in the country with Rose Hubbell. She was a bit down and needed to be cheered up, she thought.”
“Oh.”
A kind of blankness checked the warmth in Horatia’s voice.
“Well, you must have had a nice time,” she said. “It must have been lovely in the country. But I thought Rose didn’t care for that sort of thing.”
“Oh, once in a while she seems to. I’m sorry you had a dull dinner. And so awfully sorry that I missed you when you called. If I had dreamed that there was a chance that you might come in I wouldn’t have stirred from the place.”
“Oh, I’m glad you did,” answered Horatia, resolutely trying to hide her hurt that he had been happy without her when she had longed so for him.
“Please talk to me a while, dear. You don’t have to go to bed just yet.”
“What did you do in the country?”
“Why, just walked and talked and longed for you.”
“You’re flattering me.”
“Please don’t say that, darling.”
“I’m glad you missed me and I’m sorry I missed you. I’m so silly, Jim. I want you to have a good time and yet I want it to be had with me. Isn’t that silly and disgustingly feminine?”
“It’s most beautiful.”
“Good night, Jim, dear.”
The telephone clicked on the hook. Horatia turned to go up the stairs—but the smile on her lips did not match the look in her eyes, that was not quite one of satisfaction.
STILL Horatia stayed with her sister. It was not what she had planned to do after Maud’s return, but there seemed no easy way of immediate escape and she shrank from the thought of taking another flat. Harvey and Maud were cordially insistent in urging her to stay with them. They told her that they needed her—that the children had become so used to her that they would be miserable without her. And Jim seemed inclined to think it better for her there during the heat of the summer. In the autumn, after they were married, they would have a place of their own. Until then—Maud’s house offered all the comforts which would make the summer easy.
Work slackened a little. The office force took their vacations in due order but Horatia kept postponing hers, hating to leave Jim for even two weeks. And yet there was the faintest little cloud between her and Jim. Since the Sunday which he had spent with Mrs. Hubbell she had not felt quite so free with him as she had before—not quite so intimate. She did not want to discuss Rose Hubbell with him but she wanted to talk things out with him which concerned Rose. She felt the first peace of her engagement marred and was resolute in her determination to mar itno further. He had never referred to that Sunday and she was shocked to find that her mind reverted to it fairly often. She found that she wanted to know every incident of every hour and that she was jealous of every minute that he had spent with Rose—that she wanted to share every mood and every hour with him. It made her slightly inquisitive as to what he did with his time. Jim never resented—never seemed to notice her questionings, but Horatia noticed herself sometimes—with a fierce sense of shame—prying into his movements.
“It is disgusting,” she told herself, “but of course it isn’t as though I was just plain jealous. It’s really because I don’t think Rose Hubbell is good for him. Even Kathleen Boyce insisted on telling me that.”
She herself saw nothing much of Rose. Once they met by accident downtown and Horatia had to lunch with her and twice she declined invitations which included her and Jim. But Rose had little opportunity to get near Horatia when Horatia was intrenched behind the life at Maud’s. When Horatia had free time, Maud had a way of absorbing it and Maud sometimes had a good deal to offer in the way of entertainment. She had somehow managed the acquaintanceship of Marjorie Clapp, who seemed pleasantly interested in Maud’s entire household now that Horatia was living there. The Clapps week-ended at the cottage to which Horatia had gone once with Anthony, and Horatia spent a happy Saturday andSunday there with Mrs. Clapp. Anthony was not in evidence. His sister told Horatia that he had decided to go in with his father and that his father had sent him West for six weeks to get acquainted with the branches of the business.
It was as if a background were being given Horatia against which she must paint her life with Jim. The more she saw of these orderly people, the more impossible it seemed not to conform in part to their standards. One’s mind, of course, would remain more free than Maud’s and run deeper in its current than did Marjorie Clapp’s. But there were surely unescapable necessities in any plan of life which she might arrange. Three meals a day and a servant and a certain amount of intercourse with pleasant people. She knew that there were people who did without the servant and took the three meals “out of the house,” but she could never vision herself living as those people lived—without dignity and eternally in disorder. “More of Aunt Caroline is coming out in me every day,” she complained to Jim. “As I plan for the fall my mind almost begins to run to West Park and a house with a stone dog.”
Maud had a deft way of talking trousseau too. Whether she was trying to show Horatia certain impossibilities in life with Langley or whether her sister’s availability for marriage brought out all the woman in her, Horatia could not decide. But Maud had a way of showing her trousseau linen and discussing ways of furnishing, andthough Horatia laughed her to scorn and said she would buy a dozen pequot sheets, half a dozen pillow cases and two table cloths and let it go at that, none the less the shimmer of damask and the alluring silks of window draperies insinuated themselves into her consciousness and made her yearn just a little sometimes for a little more ability to expand her own plans.
Not when she was with Jim. Then everything faded except the vast depths of life with him. She told Mrs. Clapp something about Jim—subtly enough as far as words go, if her eyes and the cadences of her voice had not been absolutely revealing. They talked about love.
“There’s love—and love—and love,” said Marjorie, “and each of us loves his or her own kind of love. I’ve known people who found greatest delight in giving up things for the people they care about. I’ve known others whose joy was in possession of the person loved—and there are people who love by sharing and having children and people who think that they are enough to one another in themselves and that children would be an interference and a hindrance. Some people want one thing and some another and some people want enduring things and some want the fun of transitory things. I’ve never been one of the people who like roses just because they are perishable. I’m all for things that last, myself. But I’m willing to admit the other kind of people.
“Peter and I,” went on Marjorie, “just lookedat each other and saw babies—as the old women say—in each other’s eyes. I don’t mean that we married to have babies, you know. Not as crude as that. But that was the end of our love. We wanted to see each other in little new bodies and we wanted to make a home for the babies and to give them everything good and lovely. Because we loved each other. If we hadn’t happened to meet each other we might have gone on forever without finding the right thing. I think there is a right thing, you know, a thing for everyone. Some people are born to be perpetually esthetic and some to keep the great tide of emotion flowing strong through the world—and some are meant to see babies and some to be good mental companions. The point is to find out what you are suited for and to carry out your own job with the right person. I was lucky.”
“Yes. And I’m going to be.”
“It would be an outrage if you weren’t,” said the older woman admiringly.
She asked Jim out for the Sunday afternoon while Horatia was there, and he came, but curiously, the visit seemed to bring out a vein of cynicism in him that Horatia thought was permanently overlaid. He was brilliant in his talk and gayer than Horatia had ever seen him in anyone’s company, but in spite of his gayety she felt in him criticism of everything he saw about him. He rallied Marjorie on having spread the “flesh-pots of Egypt” before him, but he said it with a kind of laughing scorn that angered Horatiathough it made no apparent impression on Marjorie. And Horatia found herself a little hurt and chilled that he did not seem to appreciate the things which had been charming her so much.
“Poor Jim,” said Marjorie astutely, to her husband, after their guests had left and they sat together on the dusky terrace, “so terribly in love with that girl and so awfully afraid that he won’t be able to give her what she wants.”
“Are you playing a game for Anthony?” asked her husband.
“No—I’m not playing for Anthony. I’m playing for that girl. I’m not sure where she belongs. And it’s tremendously important to get in the right niche these days. Maybe it is Jim—but it would be tragic if it weren’t. And Anthony cares such a lot. He has never cared before and this is all in the right way. It’s so hard to see——”
Meanwhile Horatia was probing Jim.
“They live—beautifully—and it all makes a wonderful harmony.”
“So did nuns in cloisters.”
“But they aren’t cloistered.”
“In a way. They are removed from all earthly trials and they go on the assumption that a thousand perfect individuals will be able to leaven the world. They won’t. Nor ten thousand. The only thing that will leaven the world is the effort of millions of imperfect people.”
“That’s true,” said Horatia, gravely.
He turned to her swiftly.
“Of course it’s true, but it’s not my criticismof them. My criticism of them is bred in jealousy. Because they have all the things actual and spiritual that lend to beauty. I want them for you and because I can’t give them to you, I swagger around on my little dust heap and belittle their mountain.”