Part 28 (1/2)

”Why, what in the world possessed them?” she returned indignantly. ”It is a beautiful play.”

She saw him flinch at the word, and the sombre irritation which his outburst had relieved for a minute, settled again on his features. Her praise, she understood, only exasperated him, though she did not realize that it was the lack of discrimination in it which aroused his irritation. At the moment, intelligent appreciation of his work would have been bread and meat to him, but her pitiful attempts at flattery were like bungling touches on raw flesh. Had he written the veriest rags of sentimental rubbish, he knew she would as pa.s.sionately have defended their ”beauty.”

”I'll get dressed quickly and look after some business,” he said, ”and we'll go home to-night.”

Her eyes shone, and she began to eat her eggs with a resolution born of the consoling memory of Dinwiddie. If only they could be at home again with the children, she felt that all this trouble and misunderstanding would vanish. With a strange confusion of ideas, it seemed to her that Oliver's suffering had been in some mysterious way produced by New York, and that it existed merely within the circ.u.mscribed limits of this dreadful city.

”Oh, Oliver, that will be lovely!” she exclaimed, and tried to subdue the note of joy in her voice.

”I shan't be able to get back to lunch, I'm afraid. What will you do about it?”

”Don't bother about me, dearest. I'll dress and take a little walk just to see what Fifth Avenue is like. I can't get lost if I go perfectly straight up the street, can I?”

”Fifth Avenue is only a block away. You can't miss it. Now I'll hurry and be off.”

She knew that he was anxious to be alone, and so firmly was she convinced that this mood of detachment would leave him as soon as he was in the midst of his family again, that she was able to smile tolerantly when he kissed her hastily, and seizing his hat, rushed from the room.

For a time after he had gone she amused herself putting his things in order and packing the little tin trunk he had brought with him; but the red walls and the steam heat in the room sickened her at last, and when she had bathed and dressed and there seemed nothing left for her to do except get out her work-bag and begin darning his socks, she decided that she would put on her hat and go out for a walk. It did not occur to her to feel hurt by the casual manner in which Oliver had s.h.i.+fted the responsibility of her presence--partly owing to a personal inability to take a selfish point of view about anything, and partly because of that racial habit of making allowances for the male in which she had been sedulously trained from her infancy.

At the door the porter directed her to Fifth Avenue, and she ventured cautiously as far as the flowing rivulet at the corner, where she would probably have stood until Oliver's return, if a friendly policeman had not observed her stranded helplessness and a.s.sisted her over. ”How on earth am I to get back again?” she thought, smiling up at him; and this anxiety engrossed her so completely that for a minute she forgot to look at the amazing buildings and the curious crowds that hurried frantically in their shadows. Then a pale finger of sunlight pointed suddenly across the high roofs in front of her, and awed, in spite of her preoccupation, by the strangeness of the scene, she stopped and watched the moving carriages in the middle of the street and the never ending stream of people that pa.s.sed on the wet pavements. Occasionally, while she stood there, some of the pa.s.sers-by would turn and look at her with friendly admiring eyes, as though they found something pleasant in her lovely wistful face and her old-fas.h.i.+oned clothes; and this pleased her so much that she lost her feeling of loneliness. It was a kindly crowd, and because she was young and pretty and worth looking at, a part of the exhilaration of this unknown life pa.s.sed into her, and she felt for a little while as though she belonged to it. The youth in her responded to the pa.s.sing call of the streets, to this call which fluted like the sound of pipes in her blood, and lifted her for a moment out of the narrow track of individual experience. It was charming to feel that all these strangers looked kindly upon her, and she tried to show that she returned their interest by letting a little cordial light s.h.i.+ne in her eyes. For the first time in her life the personal boundaries of sympathy fell away from her, and she realized, in a fleeting sensation, something of the vast underlying solidarity of human existence. A humble baby in a go-cart waited at one of the crossings for the traffic to pa.s.s, and bending over, she hugged him ecstatically, not because he reminded her of Harry, but simply because he was a baby.

”He is so sweet I just had to squeeze him,” she said to his mother, a working woman in a black shawl, who stood behind him.

Then the two women smiled at each other in that freemasonry of motherhood of which no man is aware, and Virginia wondered why people had ever foolishly written of the ”indifference of a crowd.” The chill which had lain over her heart since her meeting with Oliver melted utterly in the glow with which she had embraced the baby at the crossing. With the feeling of his warm little body in her arms, everything had become suddenly right again. New York was no longer a dreadful city, and Oliver's failure appeared as brief as the pa.s.sing pang of a toothache. Her natural optimism had returned like a rosy mist to embellish and obscure the prosaic details of the situation. Like the cheerful winter suns.h.i.+ne, which transfigured the harsh outlines of the houses, her vision adorned the reality in the mere act of beholding it.

Midway of the next block there was a jeweller's window full of gems set in intricate patterns, and stopping before it, she studied the trinkets carefully in the hope of being able to describe them to Lucy. Then a man selling little automatic pigs at the corner attracted her attention, and she bought two for Harry and Jenny, and carried them triumphantly away in boxes under her arm. She knew that she looked countrified and old-fas.h.i.+oned, and that n.o.body she met was wearing either a hat or a dress which in the least resembled the style of hers; but the knowledge of this did not trouble her, because in her heart she preferred the kind of clothes which were worn in Dinwiddie. The women in New York seemed to her artificial and affected in appearance, and they walked, she thought, as if they were trying to make people look at them. The bold way they laced in their figures she regarded as almost indecent, and she noticed that they looked straight into the eyes of men instead of lowering their lashes when they pa.s.sed them. Her provincialism, like everything else which belonged to her and had become endeared by habit and a.s.sociation, seemed to her so truly beautiful and desirable that she would not have parted with it for worlds.

Turning presently, she walked down Fifth Avenue as far as Twenty-third Street, and then, confused by the crossing, she pa.s.sed into Broadway, without knowing that it was Broadway, until she was enlightened by a stranger to whom she appealed. When she began to retrace her steps, she discovered that she was hungry, and she longed to go into one of the places where she saw people eating at little tables; but her terror of what she had heard of the high prices of food in New York restaurants restrained her. General Goode still told of paying six dollars and a half for a dinner he had ordered in a hotel in Fifth Avenue, and her temperamental frugality, reinforced by anxiety as to Oliver's debts, preferred to take no unnecessary risks with the small amount in her pocket book. Oliver, of course, would have laughed at her petty economies, and have ordered recklessly whatever attracted his appet.i.te; but, as she gently reminded herself again, men were different. On the whole, this lordly prodigality pleased her rather than otherwise. She felt that it was in keeping with the bigness and the virility of the masculine ideal; and if there were pinching and sc.r.a.ping to be done, she immeasurably preferred that it should fall to her lot to do it and not to Oliver's.

At the hotel she found that Oliver had not come in, and after a belated luncheon of tea and toast in the dining-room, she went upstairs and sat down to watch for his return between the Nottingham lace curtains at the window. From the terrific height, on which she felt like a sparrow, she could see a row of miniature puppets pa.s.sing back and forth at the corner of Fifth Avenue. For hours she tried in vain to distinguish the figure of Oliver in the swiftly moving throng, and in spite of herself she could not repress a feeling of pleasant excitement. She knew that Oliver would think that she ought to be depressed by his failure, yet she could not prevent the return of a child-like confidence in the profound goodness of life. Everything would be right, everything was eternally bound to be right from the beginning. That inherited casuistry of temperament, which had confused the pleasant with the true for generations, had become in her less a moral conviction than a fixed quality of soul. To dwell even for a minute on ”the dark side of things”

awoke in her the same instinct of mortal sin that she had felt at the discovery that Oliver was accustomed to ”break” the Sabbath by reading profane literature.

When, at last, as the dusk fell in the room, she heard his hasty step in the corridor, a wave of joyful expectancy rose in her heart and trembled for utterance on her lips. Then the door opened; he came from the gloom into the pale gleam of light that shone in from the window, and with her first look into his face her rising joy ebbed quickly away. A new element, something for which neither her training nor her experience had prepared her, entered at that instant into her life. Not the external world, but the sacred inner circle in which they had loved and known each other was suddenly clouded. Everything outside of this was the same, but the fact confronted her there as grimly as a physical sore.

The evil struck at the very heart of her love, since it was not life, but Oliver that had changed.

CHAPTER VI

THE SHADOW

Oliver had changed; for months this thought had lain like a stone on her heart. She went about her life just as usual, yet never for an instant during that long winter and spring did she lose consciousness of its dreadful presence. It was the first thing to face her in the morning, the last thing from which she turned when, worn out with perplexity, she fell asleep at night. During the day the children took her thoughts away from it for hours, but never once, not even while she heard Harry's lessons or tied the pink or the blue bows in Lucy's and Jenny's curls, did she ever really forget it. Since the failure of Oliver's play, which had seemed to her such a little thing in itself, something had gone out of their marriage, and this something was the perfect understanding which had existed between them. There were times when her sympathy appeared to her almost to infuriate him. Even her efforts towards economy--for since their return from New York she had put Marthy into the kitchen and had taken entire charge of the children--irritated rather than pleased him. And the more she irritated him, the more she sought zealously, by innumerable small attentions, to please and to pacify him. Instead of leaving him in the solitude which he sought, and which might have restored him to his normal balance of mind, she became possessed, whenever he shut himself in his study or went alone for a walk, with a frenzied dread lest he should permit himself to ”brood”

over the financial difficulties in which the wreck of his ambition had placed them. She, who feared loneliness as if it were the smallpox, devised a thousand innocent deceptions by which she might break in upon him when he sat in his study and discover whether he was actually reading the papers or merely pretending to do so. In her natural simplicity, it never occurred to her to penetrate beneath the surface disturbances of his mood. These engrossed her so completely that the cause of them was almost forgotten. Dimly she realized that this strange, almost physical soreness, which made him shrink from her presence as a man with weak eyes shrinks from the light, was the outward sign of a secret violence in his soul, yet she ministered helplessly to each pa.s.sing explosion of temper as if it were the cause instead of the result of his suffering. Introspection, which had lain under a moral ban in a society that a.s.sumed the existence of an unholy alliance between the secret and the evil, could not help her because she had never indulged in it. Partly because of the ingenuous candour of the Pendleton nature, and partly owing to the mildness of a climate which made it more comfortable for Dinwiddians to live for six months of the year on their front porches and with their windows open, she shared the ingrained Southern distrust of any state of mind which could not cheerfully support the observation of the neighbours. She knew that he had turned from his work with disgust, and if he wasn't working and wasn't reading, what on earth could he be doing alone unless he had, as she imagined in desperation, begun wilfully to ”nurse his despondency?” Even the rector couldn't help her here--for his knowledge of character was strictly limited to the types of the soldier and the churchman, and his son-in-law did not belong, he admitted, in either of these familiar cla.s.sifications. At the bottom of his soul the good man had always entertained for Oliver something of the kindly contempt with which his generation regarded a healthy male, who, it suspected, would decline either to preach a sermon or to kill a man in the cause of morality. But on one line of treatment father and daughter were pa.s.sionately agreed--whatever happened, it was not good that Oliver should be left by himself for a minute. When he was in the bank, of course, where Cyrus had found him a place as a clerk on an insignificant salary, it might be safely a.s.sumed that he was cheered by the unfailing company of his fellow-workers; but when he came home, the responsibility of his distraction and his cure rested upon Virginia and the children. And since her opinion of her own power to entertain was modest, she fell back with a sublime confidence on the unrivalled brilliancy and the infinite variety of the children's prattle. During the spring, as he grew more and more indifferent and depressed, she arranged that the children should be with him every instant while he was in the house. She brought Jenny's high chair to the table in order that the adorable infant might breakfast with her father; she kept Harry up an hour later at night so that he might add the gaiety of his innocent mirth to their otherwise long and silent evenings. Though she would have given anything to drop into bed as soon as the babies were undressed, she forced herself to sit up without yawning until Oliver turned out the lights, bolted the door, and remarked irritably that she ought to have been asleep hours ago.

”You aren't used to sitting up so late, Virginia; it makes you dark under the eyes,” he said one June night as he came in from the porch where he had been to look up at the stars.

”But I can't go to bed until you do, darling. I get so worried about you,” she answered.

”Why in heaven's name, should you worry about me? I am all right,” he responded crossly.