Book Four
Fifty-seventh Street
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XXI. Advancement
1
WHEN they took the train to town on Monday morning, the question of where they were to live was still undecided. Rose-Ann had put the matter unreservedly in Felix’s hands; she had told him in detail and without prejudice the merits and demerits of the various apartments she had seen. But he felt incompetent to arrive at a decision in such a matter; and after all, he did not want to do anything which would not have Rose-Ann’s real approval. He distrusted this mood of utter surrender to his will, and he sought to make her reassume the burden of judgment.
He suggested again the possibility of having a house in the country; and she discussed that possibility in a practical spirit. They could rent some small house in Woods Point for the summer; it would cost only a hundred dollars or so for the season—or they might find something they liked that was for sale.
It was easier to buy a house, it appeared, than Felix had thought; there was usually a mortgage to be taken over, and one needed only keep up the interest on that; the actual cash need be only a little, five hundred dollars, or at most a thousand. To Felix this seemed a great deal, but Rose-Ann explained casually that she could borrow it from her brothers in Springfield, and if need be give a second mortgage; so that only the interest would have to be paid for the time being. And the interest on both debts would be less than the rent they would pay in town.
Felix had never understood these things very well, and buying a house seemed amazingly simple—one need not work and save for years, one bought the house first, even though one had no money! Of course, there were the mortgages, of which Felix retained a somewhat sinister notion from his childhood fiction-reading; but Rose-Ann seemed to regard them as a commonplace....
If he only knew what she really wanted!
It ended by his suggesting, half-jestingly, that they go and live in a hotel until they could decide what to do; and she agreed, saying that she knew of a good family hotel, in Hyde Park, not expensive—the St. Dunstan. So it was at the St. Dunstan that they engaged, by telephone from Woods Point, a room for the following week. During that week Rose-Ann could settle up her affairs at Community House, Felix could get reacquainted with his job, and they could decide on a place to live.
2
They parted at the station, and Felix went to the office. It was strange to take his place at his desk again. It seemed as though he had been away a thousand years; he had the feeling of a truant who has returned to school and wonders if he will ever catch up with his lessons.... Mr. Devoe had said to come in and see him when he got back. But Harris sent him out on an interview the first thing, and when he had finished writing it, Mr. Devoe was out in the composing room overseeing some change in the editorial page. Felix did not like to bother him. Doubtless he had spoken lightly, and had already forgotten what he had said to Felix.
As Felix sat idly before his typewriter, Hawkins came up. “Glad to see you back,” he said, and shook hands. And then: “Come in my office, will you?”
One of the last things Felix had done before falling ill was to “do” a play for Hawkins, on a night when there were two openings. His way of doing plays was so unlike Hawkins’s serious method of assigning praise and blame that he had been afraid Hawkins would never ask him to do another; but he had been encouraged by Willie’s laughter at his piece of foolery, and Clive’s only half-ironical remark: “When Willie Smith enjoys a piece of writing, you can figure on ten thousand other people liking it, too!” The idea of those ten thousand other people liking his whimsical criticism had offset the supposedly unfavorable judgment of the serious Hawkins.
“Sit down,” Said Hawkins. “I suppose”—with an embarrassed air—“you’ve heard I’m writing a play.” Then, more cheerfully, “Well, I want to get as much time away from the office as possible, so I’ve persuaded Devoe to let me have an assistant. Would you like the job?”
Felix flushed with incredulous pleasure. “All right,” Hawkins went on. “There’s a certain amount of detail to be attended to—making up the Saturday dramatic page, selecting the pictures and arranging the layout, seeing publicity people or letting them see you, once a week—that sort of thing. You can take all that off my hands, besides doing some of the shows for me. There’s two opening tonight, and I’d like to have you do one of them.” He felt in his pocket, and took out two envelopes. A little apologetically, he said, “I’m sending you to the one I don’t want to do myself—but you’ll get a chance at the real shows a little later. All right?”
“I’m—everlastingly grateful to you,” said Felix. “Is this all settled with—with Mr. Devoe?”
“Oh, yes. You made quite a hit with the Old Man, you know—something you wrote in that thing you did for me—something about the fatted laugh and the prodigal joke—I forget, but he went around the shop all morning that day repeating it to everybody. Yes, the Old Man thinks you’re all right. You’d better go in and see him; not now—I want to tell you some more about this job. Have a cigarette?”
It appeared that Felix was to commence his duties at once, taking a desk in Hawkins’ office and the title of assistant dramatic editor. He would be relieved of his regular work as a reporter, but he would be expected to help along a little with the editorial page, especially in the summer, when there would be hardly any theatrical stuff to take care of. And there was to be a small raise in salary; he would get thirty dollars a week—to begin with, as Hawkins put it.
These happy prospects were confirmed by a brief interview with Mr. Devoe, who seemed to beam on Felix with paternal benevolence. “I think we’ve found the right place for you,” he said. And then his eyes narrowed and his lips straightened. “You can prove whether we are right or not,” he said sternly, and held out his hand in a formal gesture.
“Yes, sir—thank you!” said Felix, a little frightened, and went out.
3
Felix went to Canal street that afternoon to remove his things and give up the room. He told the news of his marriage and advancement to Roger and Don with something of the feeling of revisiting the scenes of childhood and finding one’s old friends still playing at marbles, astonishingly not grown up. But Roger and Don did not sense his secret scorn; at least they maintained their customary imperturbable air.
“Rose-Ann Prentiss? Who is she? What does she do?” they asked, and when they learned that she was not an artist, not a writer, not even an interior decorator, they raised their eyebrows and went back to their Flaubert.
Rose-Ann herself, that night, took his news calmly enough. It seemed that there was no surprising her with any such good fortune; it was as if she had expected it all along!
She dressed with particular care for dinner and the theatre that evening, considering and rejecting half a dozen frocks before she decided upon a quite simple tight-bodiced black velvet thing that made her seem very pale and her hair a flaming red. This was the first time that Felix had seen her wardrobe, and he was much impressed. “I’ve never seen you in anything but your working clothes, have I!” he laughed. “I like you, dressed up!”
“Oh, these are all old things,” she said; and Felix wondered why women always said that, when one praised anything they wore. “But,” she said, “I do look rather nice in this evening dress,” and she held up a shimmering fluid thing of blue and silver that did not seem to Felix like a dress at all, but like a moonlit fountain dripping silver spray. “I’d wear this if you’d get some evening clothes yourself.”
“What do I want of evening clothes?” he protested, his pleasure in the sight of that lovely garment gone with the threatening onset of sartorial obligations of his own.
“I should think a dramatic critic might very well have evening clothes,” said Rose-Ann mildly.
“I’m only half a dramatic critic,” objected Felix.
“Well,” said Rose-Ann, “that being the case, I wouldn’t insist on full-dress. I’ll be content if you come half way. I mean, dinner clothes. It’s the silly long-tailed coat that you object to, isn’t it? I don’t like it myself. Dinner clothes would be very becoming to you, though.”
“But I haven’t any money—” he began.
“Felix,” she said, “how many times must we argue that out? If you haven’t any money, I have—not much, but enough to get ourselves started on. And do you want me to let it lie in the bank at Springfield while we do without things we need? You want me to look nice, don’t you? And if I didn’t have a decent dress to go to the theatre with you in, and you could help me get one, you’d want to, wouldn’t you?”
“Do I look so bad as all that?” he asked, looking down at his rather worn blue serge suit.
“You look very nice, Felix,” she said, coming over and kissing him. “But you do need some new clothes, that’s a fact. And really, if you’re going to be a dramatic critic—. As long as we bought our own seats, in the balcony, it was all right to go in our ‘working clothes.’ But I think—”
“Oh, all right!” he said gloomily.
4
Nevertheless, the prospect of evening clothes did not spoil his enjoyment of the play and Rose-Ann. It was a rather silly play, and they bubbled over with amused comments upon it on their way back to the St. Dunstan. “I must remember all these things, and put them into my criticism,” he remarked.
“Why don’t you write it tonight,” she said.
“At the hotel? I haven’t a typewriter, for one thing.”
“But I have mine. Why don’t you say it off to me, and I’ll take it down. Then you’ll have it over with, and we can mail it tonight, and then we can talk as late as we want to, without having to think of getting-up-time in the morning. Now that you’re a dramatic critic, you don’t have to keep such regular working hours.”
Really, it seemed an admirable plan. “But won’t the other people in the hotel object to a typewriter being pounded at this hour of the night?”
“Let them! If they complain, we’ll say we’re sorry, and promise not to do it again! And by the next time, we’ll be in some place of our own where we can pound a typewriter all night if we want to—I hope!”
Felix stored that away in his memory as one of Rose-Ann’s specifications for a place to live—a place where one could run a typewriter all night.... It was going to be hard to find such a place!
Rose-Ann exchanged her black velvet frock for a flame-coloured kimono—which, as he noted, matched her hair when the light shone through its stray curls—and sat down at the typewriter.
“Ready!”
Felix dictated for half an hour, only occasionally thinking of their neighbours on the other side of these thin hotel partitions. Still, it was not yet midnight. “I guess that’s enough,” he said at last.
“A good line to end on,” she agreed, finishing the sentence and typing his name underneath. “There are stamps in my pocketbook, Felix—and here’s your envelope, all addressed. It will make the one o’clock collection, and we can breakfast at leisure.”
“But,” he said, pausing at the door, “suppose it got lost in the mails or something!”
“I made a carbon,” said Rose-Ann, “and you can take that with you when you go to the office, in case of emergencies.”
“You _are_ an efficient little manageress!” he said.
5
Obediently the next day he went to a tailor—recommended by Clive, who seemed heartily to approve of this particular surrender to convention—and was measured for a dinner coat, and a new loose-fitting suit of brown homespun selected by Rose-Ann.
He found he did not mind the idea of wearing evening clothes after all. He only wished that—well, that he was going to pay for them himself!
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XXII. Mainly About Clothes
1
AND still they found no place to live, and their week at the St. Dunstan became as second, and a third.
They went together to look at dozens of apartments. Rose-Ann was observantly critical of their good and bad features, and yet extremely complaisant; he felt that she would have agreed to anything he wanted. But he had not forgotten her fierce discontent at “ordinary” apartments, and he was looking for something that would really please her. He felt that he had not found it yet....
And no one at the St. Dunstan had objected to the noise of their typewriter on occasional evenings. They could have breakfast brought up and set down on a tray at their bedside, a breakfast of cool grapefruit and elaborately disguised eggs and coffee with cream, and linger over their last sip of coffee and a final cigarette before dressing lazily; and Felix could stroll into the office at ten o’clock, like Hawkins—a free man and not a hurried, anxious slave.
Felix had at first felt a little guilty about these late appearances, when everybody else had been at work for hours; but it was apparently expected of him that he would take due advantage of the opportunities for leisure that the position gave. So long as he did his work, it did not matter when he came or went; Hawkins himself did not show up every day—and there was that god-like being, the literary editor, McQuish, he who had taught the Chicago intelligentsia to speak of their “reactions” and of being “intrigued”: he fulminated his Wednesday critiques locked in his office on Tuesday afternoon and except for his Tuesday arrival and departure was never seen around the place at all!
Felix’s new loose-fitting homespun clothes, with their air of having been worn in to town from a country-club, helped Felix to feel the rightful possessor of this leisure, and to assume its proper air. Silk shirts with soft collars, and Windsor ties, bought by Rose-Ann, and approved by Clive, helped still more.
After all, if the management liked his work, if he was no longer on trial, but an accepted person, privileged to do about as he pleased, why should he maintain his old anxieties and disguises? Why try to look like an efficient young business man? Nobody wanted him to! Why not be comfortable, in a soft collar and homespun clothes? Yes, why not?
In this mood, he bought himself a stick, on his own initiative.... He had always wanted to carry a stick, and had never quite dared. His clothes had never been quite up to it. Perhaps they were not quite up to it now. But there was nothing dandified about this stick; it was no silver-plated confection, just a simple stick of light bamboo, covered with a shiny black lacquer—a real stick. It suited him; he liked the smooth firm lacquered surface, he liked the feel of it in his hand, lightly swinging, or hanging from the crook of his arm. And Rose-Ann liked it, too. He felt that it gave him the touch of confidence he had lacked in his new position; with that stick on his arm, he could saunter into the Chronicle office at ten o’clock in the morning without a qualm.
2
Just after his evening clothes were finished, they were invited casually to one of Mr. and Mrs. Howard Morgan’s evenings, and Felix was assured by Rose-Ann that it was an occasion which a dinner coat would appropriately grace; she also remarked that ordinary clothes would be all right. That seemed to make it rather a test of his moral courage, and so he wore his evening clothes....
Howard Morgan was a poet, one of the few in America for whom Felix had any respect. Felix had been introduced to him once, under rather inauspicious circumstances—one evening when, deep in kalsomine, he was painting a back drop for Rose-Ann in the little Community Theatre, which the great man was being shown, in what was apparently a tour of inspection of Community House. Rose-Ann had met him then, too, and, less abashed by her kalsomine-smeared apron and hastily turbaned hair, had talked with him; and he had remembered her, and sent a message by some one in Community House to come up to his next “Friday evening” and bring her husband.
Felix was glad to pay his respects to this distinguished personage, but he was not prepared for the crowd of people who filled the Morgans’ drawing-room; he hated crowds. But, after Mrs. Morgan had introduced him to an elderly and talkative spinster, and then, as he felt, basely deserted him, he was rescued by Rose-Ann; steered through a whirlpool of encounters—he almost failed to recognize Clive Bangs in his evening clothes, with that wild lock of hair neatly slicked into its proper place—and brought into the presence of Howard Morgan himself, who was standing, a tall and impressive figure, with grey hair, a nose like an eagle’s beak, and flashing eyes, in the midst of, as it seemed to Felix, swirling tides of people. Morgan turned from two women, one very old and the other very young, with whom he was conducting two different conversations at once—a flirtatious one with the aged dame and a very earnest and serious one with the young girl.
“The last time I saw you, you were painting scenery,” he said, smilingly extending his hand.
“Yes,” said Felix, flushing.
“And now I read your dramatic criticisms in the Chronicle,” said Howard Morgan. “You seem to have a multitude of talents! No wonder you have captured that lovely prize!—She is lovely, isn’t she?” he added, in a tone of man-to-manly confidence, looking after Rose-Ann, who had floated away in that dress which was like moonlit falling water.
“Yes,” said Felix, feeling very stupid.
“Do you know Mrs. Meagham? Mr. Fay....” And the great man, who had retained Felix’s hand in his, pressed it warmly, smiled with his big delicately-carven mouth and his cavernous, flashing eyes, and turned back to resume with instant interest his conversations with the young woman and the old one, not to speak of a third who came up and was welcomed heartily in the midst of a sentence; leaving Felix to the mercies of Mrs. Meagham.
It appeared that Mrs. Meagham had no wish to detain Felix Fay; it was the great man, Howard Morgan, that she wanted to talk to. And Felix had no wish to prevent her—none whatever; only he was between her and the great man and he didn’t know how to get out of the way.
How does one leave a lady whom one does not want to talk to, and who obviously enough reciprocates that lack of interest? Felix hadn’t the slightest idea.... He ransacked his memory of books—while saying to Mrs. Meagham that no, he had not lived in Chicago long—for something to help him. Surely in all the novels he had read there must be something bearing upon this situation! But the only thing he could remember was the desperate device of H. G. Wells’ Mr. Polly, who upon one embarrassing occasion murmured to the young woman something about a “little dog,” and ran out of the house. But then, Mr. Polly had a bicycle, and he was pretending that he heard a little dog gnawing at the tires. No—that would not do at all. He suddenly felt that H. G. Wells was but a poor guide and mentor in the thorny ways of real life. Perhaps if he had forced himself to read more of Henry James—!
At this stage, when he felt his reason going, Rose-Ann appeared, radiant and cool, to his rescue. He was so grateful that he forgot to note how she did it.... It had been easy enough, apparently; no such heroic task as it appeared. But then, things like that _were_ easy, to anybody except himself!
And he had not told Howard Morgan how much he liked—how devoutly he knew by heart—the magnificent “Ode in the Valley of Decision.” No, he had stood there saying, “Yes,” like a fool, while a great poet paid _him_ compliments! He thought a little the less of Howard Morgan for those compliments; they were so obviously a product of the occasion, a few out of the hundred he had uttered that night—two or three around to everybody, share and share alike! They were none the less banal because he uttered them with such pretended sincerity and real grace. What madness such a scene was! To think of men and women deliberately inflicting upon themselves such painful mockery of social intercourse! But perhaps it was not painful to them. No, they actually appeared to enjoy it. Well—that proved that they were mad! Bedlam! And a great poet condemned to go through this rigmarole, so abominable to any person of decent sensitiveness! But perhaps he enjoyed it, too? In truth, he did seem to be enjoying it vastly. Then he was no poet, but a sham.... A line of the great Ode came into Felix’s mind, one of the magnificent lines: he said it over to himself, testing it—and it did sound rather tinny. Milton and some base amalgam, not true gold.... An actor, the fellow was, strutting and smirking and kissing ladies’ hands.... Still—if it were a thing that had to be done (like wearing evening clothes, for instance) doubtless the more gracefully it was done the better. And Howard Morgan—it must be conceded—did it superlatively well!... Would Rose-Ann never be ready to go home?
Rose-Ann, in their room afterward, remarked upon how well Howard Morgan had “played the host.”
“Yes,” said Felix. “... I felt utterly lost, myself.”
She turned to him fondly. “You were doing very well, darling. I noticed at the time. It’s just your inexperience that made you feel a trifle ill at ease. With a little more experience, you will be quite as charming as Howard Morgan. More so, darling!”
3
Tell one whom you have caused to be waylaid and tortured by cruel savages, that he has passed through the incident very creditably; tell him that with a little more practice he will be able to wear the true martyr’s look of joy! And then kiss him.... Yes, and pretend that you love him, that you are the wife of his bosom. Ah, serpent! Delilah!
That was the way Felix felt as he lay sleeplessly at Rose-Ann’s side that night; but he knew perfectly well why he felt that way. He was just looking for an excuse to get out of taking a little trouble.... Of course things like that went hard, at first; so was walking hard to a child who had just begun fearfully to stand upon its two feet; so was breathing hard at first for the new-born infant—did it not greet the world with a cry of pain? Yes, life was hard; that was why it was so interesting. It would be dull if one never did anything one was afraid to do.... And why, at the age of twenty-two, should he still find it an agony to meet a roomful of people?... No, confound it, that wasn’t true! There were roomfuls of people he could meet, with pleasure; it was _these_ people—they meant nothing to him, he nothing to them.... Or was it just egotism? Was it because he _was_ nothing to them, that he resented their presence? Was it just the feeling of mother’s little boy who goes out to play and finds that instead of being the Young Prince, he is only one of a crowd? He remembered his first day in school—the humiliation of suddenly finding himself nobody in particular!... Yes, he had gone there that evening as if he alone in the world had ever admired Howard Morgan—and found himself merely one of dozens. He had hoped to impress the great man by his admiration; and he had found his admiration not at all needed. That was why he was angry at his hero!... And then, too, perhaps a little jealous. As if he had thought, “I could get the same kind of worship if I would condescend to pay for it in the same way you do!” But could he? Was he, too, in spite of his protestations to Rose-Ann, secretly dreaming of greatness? Was it because this man dared admit himself a poet, a creator, a Somebody, that Felix Fay disliked him?—And what was he doing to realize those dreams? It was all very well to say, “Some day!” But—no, his destiny wasn’t just writing silly-clever things for the Chronicle. But what was it? Rose-Ann believed in him. Did he believe in himself?
And all this was far enough away from the question at issue: which was very simple—in fact, it resolved itself down to one thing—doing what Rose-Ann wanted him to do! Not because she was his wife; not at all because he loved her; but because she understood life better than he did....
He must never let her know what a baby he was about things like these. What a silly fuss he had been making about nothing at all! He must do what was expected of him: yes, confound it, and if she wanted a house like the Morgans’, and crowds of people ... he could see with half-dreaming mind her white shoulders, her eyes, her red-gold hair, gleaming in their midst—why, she should have them!... even if he had to “play the host,” like Howard Morgan, for her.
... He fell asleep and awoke dreaming that he was a little boy, who was captured by savages and tortured, and who endured it all with a smile for the sake of their Queen, a girl with white shoulders and red hair, who had promised to tell him a secret if he was brave. And he said: “I know your secret! You are all the women I have ever known; you are the little girl I was afraid to walk to school with, and you are the girl I played with in the garret and was afraid to go to meet for a farewell kiss, and you are Margaret, the girl in the candy-factory that I was afraid to write to, and you are the girl in Port Royal that I was afraid to ask to marry me.” And she said, “Yes, but I have one more secret.” “I know that, too,” he said. “You are Life!”
A very literary dream! He wasn’t sure, when he woke up at dawn, but that he had made it up like a story. Anyway, he understood it, and he didn’t want to forget it, and he was writing it down hastily on sheets of hotel stationery when Rose-Ann opened her eyes sleepily at eight o’clock.... She opened her eyes sleepily, but sleep vanished when she saw what he was doing, and she sat up eagerly in bed.
“Oh!” she cried, looking as though an expected, long-awaited miracle had happened at last.
“What?” he asked, startled.
“You’re writing again!—writing, I mean, for yourself....”
“Well, what of it?” he said crossly.
“Nothing,” she said. “Only—I knew you would!”
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XXIII. A Bargain in Utopias
1
BUT, even though life was much easier than he had ever dreamed it to be, though one could acquire a lovely wife without deserving her, an easy job without asking for it, and a house in the country, if one wished, without money—still, the fact remained that he was only a young newspaper man getting thirty dollars a week. And thirty dollars a week meant that he could afford to pay only thirty dollars a month for rent: he had read that in a book, and it seemed like good sound economics. And thirty dollars a month would cover only the poorest and most cramped of the apartments that Rose-Ann had viewed so judicially and, he felt, with secret disdain. By no stretch even of an imagination keyed to the marvellous by recent events, could he see himself getting a place to live in that Rose-Ann would really approve.... And meanwhile they were living above their means—above _his_ means, anyway—at the St. Dunstan. It was their fourth week there, and they were no nearer to finding a place to live in than they had been when they came. Something had to happen pretty soon.
He reminded himself that when he came to Chicago he had not expected such hospitality, such friendship, such help as he had actually received; he had never dreamed of getting a job on the Chronicle, nor of being made assistant dramatic critic ... and least of all had he dreamed of having Rose-Ann for a wife! Such things happened, it seemed—happened to one in spite of one’s stupidities and suspicions and fears. Perhaps Rose-Ann’s grand house would drop from the sky in the same way; perhaps!—but to one whose mind was trained sternly in old-fashioned nineteenth century realism, it seemed merely silly ... and a little worse than that. He would give one more day to the deities that presided over his fantastic fortunes, and then he would take the next thirty-dollar-a-month apartment they looked at.... So much for that!
They were going to look at some apartments on the south side, near Jackson Park, and they had planned to meet on the steps of the Field Museum.... He was a little early when he left the elevated at Fifty-fifth street, and he strolled slowly over toward Jackson Park looking thoughtfully at all the apartment buildings he passed.... One, which looked like a place where Rose-Ann might care to live, was quite obviously beyond their means.
He turned into Fifty-seventh street, and went under the Illinois Central viaduct, passing a row of dingy brown one-story shops—at least, there was a photographer’s shop among them, though the others were apparently lived in, the big plate-glass windows in front being covered with curtains. Felix wondered what kind of people lived there. As he reached the corner, just across from the green stretch of Jackson Park, it seemed that he had a chance to find out, for there stood a young woman in the doorway directing the operations of a moving man who was carrying things to a van in the street.
“Don’t you _dare_ drop those,” the young woman was saying. “The frames are valuable anyway!”
It was an armful of large paintings that was being carried out. The young woman, a rather impressive little person, with a sturdy, plump figure, and short curly black hair, held a cigarette in her hand. A painter? Did artists live in these places?
Felix glanced past the girl into the room beyond. “May I look in?” he asked the girl.
“Sure,” she said indifferently.
Felix stepped inside. It was a large room—a huge room, unpartitioned except by a flimsy screen about eight feet high which cut off the rear portion. Evidently the occupant had slept back there, and used the front part for a studio.
“You’re leaving?” he asked the girl.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Looks like it,” she said.
“Is it for rent?”
Of course, Rose-Ann would not want to live in a place like that, but—it interested him.
“Yes, it’s for rent, if anybody wants it,” she said lazily.
“What’s the matter with it?” asked Felix.
She seemed to become a little more aware of him. “Are _you_ thinking of taking it?” she asked.
“Maybe,” said Felix.
“If you do, maybe I could persuade you to take a few things off my hands.”
“What’s wrong with the place?” he countered.
“Nothing’s wrong with it,” she said.
“Then why are you leaving?”
“Because,” she said. “I don’t want to build my own fires. I can’t paint and look after a stove, too. Want to see my stove? It’s a good stove. I’m moving to a steam-heated studio-apartment, and I shan’t want it any more. There it is—”
“Oh, a Franklin stove!” he said.
“Yes, a darn nice little stove. Do you paint?”
“No.”
“Write?”
“Yes.”
“You’d like this place.... And it’s dirt cheap.”
“How much?”
“You wouldn’t believe it. Twelve dollars.”
“Twelve dollars a what?”
“A month!”
“Twelve dollars a month?” Why, his hall bedroom over on Canal street had cost more than that....
“Yes, and look at the space. It’s really a find. If you don’t mind living in a kind of bohemian way. I’m bohemian enough, God knows, but when I get to painting I let my fire go out.”
“I didn’t know,” said Felix, “that there were such places as this in Chicago.”
“There aren’t. There’s just these. Here and around the corner. They were put up for shops at the time of the World’s Fair—just temporary structures—and they’ve never bothered to tear ’em down. There’s been a bunch of artists living here ever since; a place like this for twelve dollars is a godsend to an artist. If this was spring, it wouldn’t be for rent—there’d be a dozen after it. You’re in luck.” She resumed her neglected cigarette to keep it from going out. “Well, what do you say? Want my stove?”
“I’ll—have to see my wife about it,” said Felix. “She’s waiting for me over in the Park.” No, Rose-Ann would not like it, but—
“Your wife? Then, good-_night_! No Christian female would live in these diggings for a week—unless she was an artist’s wife and couldn’t help herself.”
“Why not?” Felix demanded. Though this was just what he himself had been conjecturing about Rose-Ann’s feelings, he found himself resenting this girl’s scornful imputation to her of those same feelings.
“Well, you’ve seen the place,” she said. “Have you noticed any bath-tub? No—the people who live in these places take their baths standing up in that iron sink there in the back. Cold water, fresh from a very cold lake! It’s healthy—Spartan and all that—but no regular wife would stand for it. You’ll see. Bring her over here—I’d like to watch her face when you show her around. I haven’t had a good smile for a long time. Bring her over!”
“I’ll do that,” Felix said grimly. “You wait.”
“Oh, I’ll wait. Here—” to the moving man—“leave that stove alone and take a rest for about five minutes.”
2
Felix had felt in the attitude of this girl artist a challenge to Rose-Ann which he was somehow anxious for her to meet. She might not like this place—but it would not be because she was a bourgeois doll, afraid to bathe standing up in an iron sink. Rose-Ann would see in this place what he saw in it, even if she did want something different....
“I’ve been to one place already,” said Rose-Ann, rising from the steps and coming down to meet him. “It’s—just like all the others.”
“Well,” said Felix, his voice unconsciously defiant, “I’ve found you a place that’s different!”
“Have you really? Where is it?”
“Just over here. Right on the edge of the Park.”
“I’d like that!”
“Would you like to bathe in ice-cold water, standing up in a cast iron sink?”
“Oo! I can feel the water now, oozing out of a sponge at the back of my neck! What makes you think I’m afraid of cold water? You remember my snow-baths at Woods Point? The primitive life has no terrors for me—so far as that’s concerned. So there’s no bathroom?”
“No.”
“M-m. Well, I’ll see.”
“Here it is, then.”
“Oh, this? An unpromising exterior....”
“Here,” said Felix, indicating the girl, who came to the door, “is the lady who’s just leaving. And this,” he said to the girl, “is my wife.”
She stood aside and waved them in with a flourish of her cigarette. “Well, here it is, without one plea. See for yourself!”
“Oh!” cried Rose-Ann. “What a lovely big room!”
“It _is_ big,” said Felix.
“It’s splendid! A real room....” She drew a deep breath. “I could live in a place like this, Felix.”
The girl regarded her with respectful interest, and then turned to Felix. “Did you tell her about the sink?”
“Yes,” said Rose-Ann. “I know about the sink. But I think I’ll inspect the sanitary details right now, before I get any more enthusiastic.”
The two girls went back of the screen, talking excitedly. “Does the screen stay here?” Rose-Ann was asking. “Good! We’ll sleep back here—or make it a kitchen, and sleep out in front, I don’t know which....”
Felix lighted a cigarette, and laughed softly to himself at his own folly. So _this_ was what Rose-Ann had wanted! This was the reality of that supposedly grandiose dream of hers, which had frightened him so much to think of making come true for her! This—twelve dollars a month—an iron sink—a Franklin stove!
So the destinies that presided over his fantastic fortunes had made good again.
How simple life was, after all!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXIV. Studio
1
THE girls came back from inspecting the mysteries behind the screen, Rose-Ann’s enthusiasm undiminished. “Where is the agent?” she demanded. “We must get this place right away, before somebody else does.... You want it, don’t you, Felix?”
“Oh, I wanted it all along,” said Felix. “Only—”
“You didn’t think I would? Oh, Felix! It’s just our kind of place. And twelve dollars a month! And that lovely stove!”
“How much do you want for the stove?” Felix asked the girl.
“Oh, that’s all right,” said the girl. “Your wife and I have settled that between us.”
“She’s given us the stove for a wedding-present!” said Rose-Ann. “I tried to buy it, but she wouldn’t let me.”
“It’s no good to me any more,” said the girl defensively. “And do you mind if I leave behind that old model stand? You can knock it to pieces and make kindling of it. And speaking of kindling, there’s a little left there in that box, and about one shovelful of coal. I’m sorry there isn’t more to start you off with.”
“You’re a dear to be so generous,” said Rose-Ann. “And you _will_ come to see us?” She turned to Felix. “Her name is Dorothy Sheridan. She rather likes us, I think, Felix. And I like her very much!”
Felix and the girl shook hands rather awkwardly. “I take back all I said about your wife,” said Dorothy. “Hey, you!”—to the moving man who was lounging at the door—“that’s all. The stove and the other things stay here. You’ve got the address. I’ll be there to take in the stuff when it comes.” She held out her hand to Rose-Ann. “Good-bye. I’ll drop in some evening when you’ve got more or less settled. Good-bye!”
2
Felix and Rose-Ann went to the landlord and were confirmed in their possession of the studio. They put up the Franklin stove again, and built a fire with the remains of Dorothy’s kindling and coal, and sat there till twilight, on the low model-stand, furnishing the room in imagination.
Felix was feeling a curious emotion which was at once an immense relief and a dim perturbation. He felt now that he had never wanted to live in an ordinary apartment. He could sympathize now with all the indignant things Rose-Ann had been saying about such places. It would have meant a kind of surrender—a giving up to outward form of the special quality of their lives.... But he had been willing to surrender. It was strange now to realize, but it was true—he had felt that very surrender to be a part of marriage, of adjusting himself to the world of actuality. Yes, he had thought that he and Rose-Ann had to live cooped up together in a little domestic cage like other married people.
And instead they were to remain free!
For that was what living in a studio meant. They would not subordinate their individual lives to a domestic arrangement. On the contrary, all their domestic arrangements were pushed into the background. This was first of all a place for them to do their work in.
They planned for their work-tables first of all—two enormous tables that one could fill with papers and books to one’s heart’s content, and that never were to be disturbed, no matter how messy they looked: these, one on either side of the room, up by the front windows. And then, books—all the books they would ever want, ranged on two long shelves along the side-walls. And then two large beds, at the back of the studio, behind the screen—two, so that they could work as late at night as they wished and go to bed without disturbing each other. And a settle in front of the fire, and chairs—ordinary kitchen chairs that they would paint in bright colours—for rest and talk and friends. And a gate-legged table that could be pushed out of the way after dinner, if they dined at home. And a tiny gas-range, and a cupboard for dishes. Coloured dishes they would be—no two alike. “I hate sets of dishes as much as I hate sets of books,” said Rose-Ann.... And a tiny gas-range.
That gas-range was to be their least and last possession, not they its slaves!
No, they would be two artists who lived together because they loved each other, who ate when they were hungry, slept when a chapter was finished, and cooked when they thought it would be fun to eat at home!
“For instance,” said Rose-Ann, “it would be fun to get dinner here tonight, but we can’t. But I’ll tell you—let’s early in the morning go and buy beds and dishes and things, so we can move right in.”
“Why not have dinner here tonight?” said Felix. “We can get it at a delicatessen and eat it with our fingers!”
“The electricity has been turned off—we can’t eat in the dark,” she said wistfully.
“We’ll buy some candles!”
“Of course!” said Rose-Ann.
They bought candles, and bread and butter, which Felix cut and spread with his pocket-knife, and a variety of delicatessen. They made a table-cloth out of a newspaper spread on the model-stand, and sat on the floor and ate with their fingers, laughing. It made this all the more their home, thus to pioneer in it the first night.... They put on the last of Dorothy’s coal, and then sat side by side on the bare comfortless model-stand, and, still unable to go away, talked for hours of what they would buy tomorrow, and where they would put it, while the grate cast flickering and changing lights on the ceiling. Then the fire died down, and the room became cold, and they could hear the wind roaring outside, and still they sat there, huddled together for warmth. Rose-Ann fell asleep at last with her head on Felix’s shoulder and a strand of her red hair against his lips. She slept, and shivered ... and he awoke her with kisses. And only then, and reluctantly, they went back to their hotel.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXV. St. George of the Minute
1
WITHIN less than two weeks the studio was furnished, according to their desire; and not only furnished, but painted and kalsomined, in a light creamy yellow with a bright green-blue trim—a most cheerful and, as they felt, out-door effect! And old Mrs. Perk had been brought from Community House to sew the tall orange silk window-curtains.... “It’s like painting the scenery and setting the stage for a play,” said Rose-Ann. “Only this play is to run for—for as long as we like.”
When it was all finished, “Now let’s ask Clive out to see it!” she said.
“Oh—all right,” said Felix.
“You haven’t liked Clive ever since the wedding, have you?” observed Rose-Ann.
“He behaved so queerly!” said Felix. “But he does seem to have become rather human again.”
“People do behave queerly at weddings,” said Rose-Ann. “Always. If it isn’t one way, it’s another. They cry, or get drunk, or something. There’ve been four weddings in my family—five, with mine—and I can assure you this one was the sanest of the lot. And they always make the same jokes, too. You remember, when Clive offered to marry me himself—I’ve heard that one every time. I know you were bothered; but it’s the regular thing. People can’t help it. And it’s the regular thing, too, for the groom to be frightfully angry at his best man.”
“And it’s the regular thing for the young people to be perfectly crazy about their new house, too, I suppose,” Felix said thoughtfully. “Well—I’m glad if other people have as much fun about it all as we do!”
“Oh, but they don’t!” Rose-Ann said confidently.
2
Clive came, and saw, and approved. And after dinner, when the gate-legged table had been pushed back against the wall, and they were comfortably disposed about the fire, Rose-Ann said:
“Do you remember, Clive, you promised to tell us a story?”
“A story? Yes, so I did. Well, I will tell you a story about St. George and the Village Dragon.”
He lighted a cigarette. “This particular village is situated, as the story-books say, not a thousand miles from Chicago. It has a Dragon there, which—. But let me drop the epic style. The fact is, that in this village there are three classes of people, each of which strictly avoids the others—though they maintain casually friendly relations, and say ‘Good Morning’ when they meet in the post-office. The three classes are, first, the villagers proper, the original inhabitants of the place; second, the summer people; and third, a few artists and writers.
“The village people live in the village, and keep themselves to themselves; the summer people live in boarding houses and in nice new bungalows on the edge of town, and associate with each other; and the artists and writers live out in the more inaccessible regions, perched on the edges of ravines, and turn up their noses at everybody else.
“The fact is that they are afraid of some sort of social infection or contamination from each other’s manners and morals. They all secretly despise each other; the writers and artists despise the summer bourgeoisie, and the villagers sell them groceries and taxi them home from the station and despise them both.
“And yet once in a while some young person of one group happens not to despise some young person from one of the other groups. Then everybody else becomes very much alarmed.... Two years ago, it was a young man in the summer colony and a village girl. Everybody—in the summer colony and the village—was afraid something terrible would happen. The villagers have a story about a girl who was betrayed and deserted by a gilded youth who owned an automobile—and she drowned herself in the Lake. And the summer colony has an even more heart-rending legend about a foolish boy who married a pretty village girl and took her to the city, and she couldn’t speak grammatically, and so on: a dreadful story! Well, the young man in the summer colony and the village girl, two years ago, hadn’t heard these stories, it seems; at any rate, they went to dances together—and the whole community waited, fluttering with horror—until the young man and the girl, finding themselves the objects of universal anxiety, became frightened of each other, and stopped seeing one another at all. They realized in time that they were violating a social taboo.... That’s the introduction to my story.
“Well, the taboo operates even more powerfully to prevent any friendships between the villagers and us ravine-folk. Our young men haven’t got any money or automobiles, and the village girls don’t know how to talk about art. I don’t know why that should make such a difference, but it seems to. Besides, we hardly ever meet them. We don’t go to the local dances; and when we go in swimming, we go up the Lake to some place where we don’t have to wear bathing suits. The only young woman in the village with whom we are likely to exchange a dozen words in as many weeks is the daughter of the man who owns one of the cars that meet people at the station, and who occasionally drives us home herself.
“But, after all,”—he paused, and blew a cloud of smoke up toward the ceiling, “even Woods Point is part of the modern world. Anything can happen there. It’s not impossible that a girl should be born in Woods Point who went to the public library and got hold of Shaw and Galsworthy and H. G. Wells, and dreamed of going to Chicago and getting a job and living her own life—and yet who, being a girl, stayed on in Woods Point.”
“Yes,” said Felix, “I can understand that.”
“I can’t,” said Rose-Ann. “How old was she?”
“Nineteen.”
“Well—go on,” said Rose-Ann. “Perhaps I’m wrong.”
“That girl,” said Clive, “wouldn’t be particularly interested in the summer boarders. But she would be interested in the writers and artists out on the edge of the ravines. She would hear the gossip about their ‘queer doin’s’”—he smiled, and looked at Rose-Ann—“about how they run around in the snow without a stitch of clothes on! for instance....”
“Goodness!” said Rose-Ann, “who could have seen me?”
“Us village folks hears about everything that’s goin’ on!” said Clive. “Well—this girl would hear about these crazy artists, and their crazy talk, and their crazy parties—and she would feel that she understood these people, that she belonged among them. But she would never have talked to a living soul about the things that interested her. She would be inarticulate. And if any of these artists or writers had talked to her for a passing moment, they would never have guessed that she was anything but what she seemed—a village girl.
“She might see a good deal of these people, first and last. She might be the girl who drove them home from the station in her father’s car, who came for them after midnight at the end of one of their crazy parties. And none of them would ever guess—why should he?—that the girl who honked the horn impatiently for them out in the road, would go home and read ‘Man and Superman’ in bed, and then cry herself to sleep.
“Unless, perhaps, one of the ravine-folk happened to be a man of a very curious and inquiring disposition, who never took anything at its face-value—who doubted everything—even the villageness of village girls.... He might ask her one day—and wouldn’t it be absurd? can you imagine anything more ridiculous to ask a village girl, out of a clear sky—‘Did you ever read Bernard Shaw?’ And she might reply very quietly, ‘Yes, every play I could get hold of.’”
“Well!” said Rose-Ann.
“You can see what might happen.... Those people would want to see more of each other. And you can imagine some of the difficulties. Why, they might as well have belonged to the Montagues and the Capulets! You can imagine the talk—about two people who only wanted a chance for a little literary conversation!”
“Only, Clive?” asked Rose-Ann.
“At first, anyway. But with that atmosphere of intrigue and suspicion, their meetings would assume a romantic colouring—inevitably.... To such a man, that girl with her need for ideas, for talk, for companionship, might be very appealing. And to her, in her isolation and ignorance, he might appear as a very superior, a very wonderful person indeed.... He would lend her books, and talk with her, and urge her to go to Chicago and get some kind of a job. He would talk to her about love—”
“In short,” said Felix, “he would fall in love with her!”
Clive shook his head. “He would know better than that. He would know that what she really needed was Chicago, and friends, and work, and adventure....”
Felix reflected that Clive could have offered her all these things....
“And what happened?” asked Rose-Ann.
“He couldn’t persuade her to take the plunge into life in Chicago without some kind of preparation.... She’s terribly afraid of Chicago.... So she’s worked out a solution of her own. She’s gone off to a normal school, to learn to be a school-teacher; and get a job in Chicago that way.... Worse than that—she’s going to teach somewhere else first, for some damned reason, and later go to Chicago. I tell her, yes, when she’s forty, she’ll be ready to begin life!”
“So that,” Felix said, “was what was troubling you all winter. I thought you were trying to get some girl to marry you; and you were merely trying to get her to go to Chicago and get a job!”
“Am I to be given no credit for the disinterested and unselfish character of my worrying?” Clive asked gaily.
“I don’t imagine the girl gives you much credit for it,” said Felix. “Why don’t you marry her and be done with it?”
“Good heavens!” said Clive. “Must one marry a girl because he has talked to her about Bernard Shaw?”
“Must St. George marry the girl he has rescued from the dragon?” Felix retorted. “I only know it always happens in the story-books that way.”
“A fine realist you are, young man! Fortunately, there are other St. Georges in the world.—Why this sudden passion of matrimonial propaganda? Misery loves company?”
“I wouldn’t worry about Phyllis if I were you,” Rose-Ann said to Felix coolly. “She’s perfectly able to take care of herself. Her plan is all right. She’s very young, and it won’t do her any harm to wait a year or two and learn a trade before she comes here to live. I think she’s a very sensible young woman, myself.”
It was time for Clive to go, for he was living out at Woods Point again. They discussed the studio for a few minutes, and then Felix put on his hat and accompanied Clive to the platform of the Illinois Central station a block away.
“Spring!” said Clive, sniffing the mild March breeze. “Tomorrow will be warm.”
“Clive,” said Felix, “what’s the matter with you, anyway? You’re really in love with Phyllis!”
“Who knows?” said Clive. “Sometimes I think I am, myself!”
“Well, then?”
“But there’s another question you haven’t considered. Is she in love with me?”
“Ask her and find out!”
“Oh, I’ve no doubt she thinks she is, at this moment. Just because I don’t seem to care whether she is or not! She’s a queer girl, Felix. You don’t understand her at all....”
“You exasperate me,” said Felix. “Marry her, and put an end to all this foolishness.”
“But why should you assume that my intentions—if I have any—are honourable, young man! What makes you think I want to get married to anybody? I think I’ll wait and see how your marriage turns out first!”
Felix walked home slowly, but it seemed only an instant before he opened the door of the studio. “Who is it?” called Rose-Ann from behind the screen. “It’s me,” he said, and locked the door, and stood there for a moment.... He felt a kind of vague bewilderment.
He had been so immersed in the story of these other unhappy lives, so poignantly concerned with their tangled doubts and fears, that it was strange to return to this scene of his own untroubled happiness. The sense of those other tormented lives burned at this moment more vividly in his imagination than his own life and Rose-Ann’s....
“Coming to bed?” Rose-Ann called from behind the screen.
“No,” he said vaguely, “I think I’ll write for a while.”
“All right, then I won’t bother you. Good-night!”
“Good-night, Rose-Ann.”
He went over to his desk, and turned on the electric light, and dipped his pen in the ink, and then sat dreaming before a white sheet of paper.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXVI. What Rose-Ann Wanted
1
“WHY don’t you want me to get a job, Felix?”
It was mid-April, and the Park across the way had, all at once, turned that lovely young green of beginning grass and burgeoning trees. It was dusk, and Rose-Ann and Felix were sitting in their cushioned window-seat—a new addition to the household furnishing—arguing a point which had been coming up from time to time since their marriage.
“You have your work,” she went on.
“Yes,” he said, “and I’m doing all Hawkins’s work now, and in the fall I will get a respectable salary, I expect, so why need we—”
“I don’t mean that,” she said. “I mean your writing.” Ever since that morning at the St. Dunstan, Felix had been writing at odd times, at—heaven knew just what, he wasn’t sure himself—something that might perhaps be called a play, but so fantastic a thing as yet that he had not even ventured to show any of the fragments of it to Rose-Ann; she had been very nice about it, too, never asking him to let her see what he had done the night before ... to furnish the justification, as it were, for staying up until all hours. Felix wasn’t at all certain that they constituted such a justification. They were probably mere folly: but, so far, they were all he could attempt.
“You have your writing,” Rose-Ann was saying. “And I haven’t anything.”
“You used to write, Rose-Ann,” he said.
“I know. Not much.”
“You need not have given up your class at Community House,” he suggested.
“It wasn’t enough, any longer. I want something else.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Something to use up my energies. I can’t stay here and play keeping house in a studio. There’s no excuse for it. That’s why we have a studio, Felix! So we can each be free. Why are you so stubborn about it?”
“I’m not being stubborn, Rose-Ann. I’m just being candid. I can’t stop you from going out and getting a job. But I can tell the truth and say I don’t like the idea! And that’s all I can do. If it means so much to you, you’ll have to do it in spite of my not liking it, that’s all.... It isn’t as if there were some particular thing you wanted to do—I wouldn’t say a word against that. But work in general—work for the sake of work—that just means a little more money, which we don’t need, and your coming home tired at night.... After all, Rose-Ann, I want a wife....”
She grew suddenly cold. “Then you should have married somebody else,” she said. “I don’t want to be—a wife!”
And they went out to dinner in an estranged silence.
2
These silences, inexplicable and impenetrable, would spring up between them, and then as inexplicably dissolve—sometimes in tears, sometimes in laughter.
That night when they came home to their studio and started to undress for bed, Rose-Ann changed back suddenly to her accustomed self; and his own mood, a moment ago puzzled and angry, could not withstand the influence of her smile. Then both of them were sorry, and accused themselves inwardly of the fault.... Felix could see why she objected to being merely “a wife,” and wondered that he had been so crass as to say such a thing ... and they sought with passionate tenderness to make each other forget....
“Do I make you happy, Felix?”
“Yes.... And are you happy?”
“Yes,”—a little sadly, in spite of herself.
“Sometimes,” he said, “you seem for a moment to go far away from me, even when you are here in my arms. I can’t bear that.” He held her more closely, as though to reassure himself of the reality of her presence. “Then it all begins to seem like a dream again.... I’ve always been lonely for you, all my life, wanting you always ... and not believing I was ever going to find you ... trying to adjust myself to a world in which you didn’t exist. And sometimes, even now—But you are real, aren’t you?”
“I dreamed of you, too, Felix....”
“Isn’t it strange? And strangest of all, that the story should have a happy ending.”
“This—is just the beginning, Felix....”
A faint sadness in her tone, that he had heard before in the very midst of their happiness, frightened him.
“The beginning, yes,” he said. “The beginning of happiness.”
“And—afterward, Felix?”
“More happiness.... Doesn’t that satisfy you?”
“Yes, but—Oh, of course it’s beautiful and wonderful to me, Felix. But I’m afraid....”
“Of what, darling?”
“We love just being together, now. But will we always? I mean—doesn’t something happen to happiness, after a while? I know it sounds absurd. I don’t mean we’ll fall out of love—not that—but won’t we lose the beauty of this—this intimacy, in time? You know how other people sometimes seem—cooped up and used to each other—just that. It’s ugly, to me ... I suspect we are rather awful, Felix, talking about such things!...”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t enough to feel—we must know why we feel.”
She sighed. “I guess we _are_ like that. We can’t even take happiness without asking why.”
It was true; they encouraged each other in what would have seemed, to some people, an exaggerated curiosity about things of no importance—and, to many lovers, a prying into matters best left alone. Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy? They did not seem to fear it.
“I suppose,” said Felix reflectively, “people must care a great deal for each other.... It would be dreadful, this closeness, if one didn’t want it.”
“But does one keep on wanting it?... Yes, Felix, that’s what I’m afraid of. If this is only for a while—and then we were to be just like other people—sunk in a greasy domesticity—Felix, I couldn’t keep on living.”
He took her hand tenderly. “But we aren’t like those other people, Rose-Ann,” he said. He had a baffling sense of this speech contradicting something he had said or thought before....
“Do you really think our marriage is so different from other people’s, Felix?”
They seemed to have exchanged places in the argument—that argument, so absurd and yet so poignant, which kept arising, neither of them knowing why, nor quite what it was all about....
“Of course our marriage is different,” he was saying. “How many married people really want to know each other? How many of them can really talk to one another about what is going on in their inmost minds—as we do!”
“Yes, we do, don’t we,” said Rose-Ann, comforted to find in this complete candour of theirs an authentic superiority to the common destiny of tragic and ridiculous mutual misunderstanding.
“We shall always be finding out new things about one another,” Felix went on bravely. “That is what our marriage means—a knitting together of our whole lives, a marrying of our memories.”
“And our hopes, too, Felix,” said Rose-Ann. “And a creating of something new and beautiful—books, plays, poems.... But I forgot!” she laughed. “I mustn’t talk about your literary works till you let me. Must talk about something else!...
“Yes, Felix, we _are_ different. We can say things to each other that ordinary lovers couldn’t. I wouldn’t have dared speak of my silly fears to anybody but you.... And—you can tell me things.... What you wrote to me, when I was home in Springfield, you remember, about that girl, Felix—I loved you for it. A sonnet you read me last night reminded me of her and you. I made you read it over twice—I didn’t tell you why. I still remember the way it begins.” Softly she said the lines:
“_We needs must know that in the days to come No child, that from our summer sprang, shall be...._
“It made me love you all the more to know you felt so about your boyish love-affair—that you wanted to be married, that you really wanted your girl-sweetheart to have a baby, hers and yours.... I’m glad it didn’t happen that way, but I think you were a lovely, foolish, beautiful boy-lover to want it....
“Of course,” she added, “artists shouldn’t have families to support.... They are children themselves.—Do you know why I want to get a job, Felix? You mustn’t be angry at me—but if anything should happen, if you should lose your place on the Chronicle, or if you should get to feel that you need all your time for your writing, I would want to be able to make enough money so you could go on with your own work. You don’t mind my wanting that, do you, Felix? We’re not the conventional married couple, the wife sitting at home doing nothing while the man goes out to work every day! I want to be a real helpmeet—an artist’s wife, not an ordinary wife.”
“You’re a darling,” said Felix. “But—” a little uncomfortably—“I guess I can take care of myself; I shan’t need to be supported. Why don’t you go ahead and be an artist yourself?”
“Oh, Felix, I can’t!...”
“Why not? What kind of artist do you want to be?”
“Something I can’t be, Felix. If I tell you, you’ll understand.... But you won’t laugh at me?”
“Of course not, Rose-Ann.”
“But it’s really funny! Especially if you had seen me when I was a girl—shy, awkward, prudish—yes, prudish, Felix. When I was eighteen, I was the worst little old maid you ever saw. I read romantic books all the time, and real people seemed to me coarse and horrible. I hated everybody. I wouldn’t go to boy-and-girl parties, because of the—it still seems an ugly word to me—‘spooning’ that went on in the corners. I wouldn’t dance, I wouldn’t hold hands. I wouldn’t keep company. Oh, I was terrible. For a while I wanted to be a missionary in some savage country—”
“And teach the natives to wear clothes?—is that your secret ambition?” he laughed.
“No—for I got converted ... to paganism. When I was twenty-one years old. It was a book that converted me.”
“I really know very little about you, don’t I? All this seems so strange.... I’ve imagined you as always being what you are now. What book was it converted you?”
“It was ‘Leaves of Grass.’ You remember I told you how I decided to be a librarian, and took a course of training, and was made an assistant in the library at Springfield.... Well, there was a shelf of forbidden books—and one day I opened one of those forbidden books, and read a passage.... I’ll tell you: it was ‘A woman’s body at auction’—do you remember it? Uncouth, wonderful lines—not so much poetry to me as a revelation. I remember I stood there reading some of those lines again and again, and I went back to the desk saying them over and over to myself—just rough, plain phrases naming over one by one the joints and muscles and parts of the body, like an anatomy text-book—but making me feel, as no text-book had ever done, that these wonderful things were _my_ body! Those lines still have a thrill for me—” And she chanted, solemnly, like a litany:
“_Upper arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones, Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails, Ribs, belly, back-bone, hips, hip-sockets.... O I say these are not parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul!_”
She paused, and smoked her cigarette silently, remembering. “I went around the rest of that day,” she said presently, “in a dreaming ecstasy.... I had read in some of my father’s books about the mystics, and I knew that I felt like them when they had seen God.... I looked every now and then with a kind of awe at my wrist or my finger-nail, saying to myself, _These are not parts of the body only, but of the soul!_ And that night I took the book home, and read it in bed, happy and afraid....
“And now comes the part that is funny. There always is something funny, isn’t there, in trying to put a revelation into practice! But don’t laugh at me, Felix. Think what it would mean to a young-lady-librarian, a clergyman’s daughter, to discover that her body was a poem.... I got out of bed and took off my nightgown to look at myself in the glass. But it was a modest glass, fastened sideways to the top of the bureau, and it refused to show me all of myself at once; so I unfastened it, and wrestled it down from the bureau, and stood it upright against the wall. I was rather disappointed, Felix—my body wasn’t as beautiful as a poem ought to be; it was just a slim, awkward, twenty-one-year-old girl’s body, that was all.
“But there _had_ been something beautiful about it for a moment—in the glimpses I had of it in the glass as I pulled it down from the bureau; then it had been—well, yes, beautiful, with the beauty of—flexed muscles and purposeful movement.... And I had a kind of vision.... Yes, really, Felix ... a wonderful and terrible moment, in which I seemed to see myself wrestling with life, in a kind of agony of creation ... and for a moment I seemed to know what my woman’s body was for. And then I sort of waked up, wondering what it was all about. I was thrilled and afraid....
“And then an idea came to me—I’m glad I can tell you this part, Felix—I said to myself: I will be a dancer! Yes, I decided to go to Chicago and learn to be a dancer....
“There was a boy who wanted to marry me—though I don’t know what this has to do with it; anyway, I would get away from him at the same time, by going to Chicago.... I was all on fire with the idea. I wanted to start right away with dancing. I couldn’t go to sleep. And—this is the part that seems to me the most terribly ridiculous of all—I went downstairs and brought back the Dan-Emp volume of father’s encyclopedia to read the article about Dancing....
“And there, in that article, Felix, I learned why I could never be a really-truly dancer—it seems that one must begin in one’s cradle!
“Well—I cried. I could cry now when I think about it. I’m a perfect fool, Felix.... But what’s the use of having a vision of one’s purpose in life, if one can’t do anything about it?... There seemed to be nothing to do except stay in Springfield and—marry that boy. And I couldn’t, I couldn’t do that. I thought of other things besides dancing that I might do, but they didn’t interest me. An artist’s model? Somehow I didn’t like that idea—not in modern terms—not at so much an hour; after all, I _was_ a clergyman’s daughter, and it just didn’t seem respectable! I thought—if I had lived in Ancient Greece, I might have been a friend of Phidias or somebody, and seen myself carved upon the frieze of a temple ... or been one of the marble maidens of Keats’ Grecian Urn. Oh, I dreamed of all the lovely and impossible things in the world. And I decided—at least I wouldn’t stay in Springfield!”
“And so you came to Chicago....”
“Yes, and became a settlement-worker. It seems a pitiful climax to my story, doesn’t it? And yet, if one lives in twentieth-century America instead of in Ancient Greece, what is one to do? It seemed to me a good pagan life, to try to bring about a better world for everybody—a world in which beauty would count for something.... At one time I thought I was a socialist, but I found that I couldn’t bear to attend stuffy meetings, and that I couldn’t understand Marx and didn’t want to. And I wasn’t interested in woman suffrage, either. My life had to be centred around something personal. So—”
“So you taught those children how to play....”
“It was the Greekliest thing I knew to do.... If Aspasia had been born in Springfield, Illinois, _she_ might have taken a class in a Chicago settlement!” Rose-Ann said defiantly—and then, doubtfully, “What do you think of it all?”
“I don’t know,” he said—“it leaves me bewildered—except that I think you’re a wonderful child.”
“It’s you who are wonderful,” she said, “to understand. I _am_ a child, I suppose—and I want to stay one always. I don’t want to grow up. That’s very foolish, isn’t it? Do you know that horrible habit some married people have of addressing each other as ‘Pa’ and ‘Ma’—as soon as they have a baby, I mean? I suppose it’s meant as a joke. And I suppose it’s a joke, too, when a man refers to his wife as ‘the old woman.’ When I was a little girl, I vowed to myself that no man would ever have the right to call me his ‘old woman.’ Or ... but then, we shan’t ever have any children, shall we? You remember what I said—the talk we had in the hospital that day. I meant that, Felix.”
Felix’s mind was fumbling for the lost thread of their discourse. Rose-Ann’s talk had a disconcerting way of suddenly leaping from one idea to another. How did they come to be talking about children? She had brought them in, without rhyme or reason, more than once tonight. And each time he had remembered with a sense of discouragement and vague shame that moment at the hospital when he had not had the courage to tell her that he wanted to be—everything that it seemed he need not be after all. He wanted now to say something—but what could he say? Some other time, perhaps, when he had a chance to think things out more clearly.... It did not need to be settled now.
“Why,” he said confusedly, “we did talk about it, yes. I don’t suppose we can afford to—” He was going to add “right away,” but Rose-Ann interrupted him.
“Oh, dear!” she said, “I’ve forgotten—I promised to let my father know our address, as soon as we found a place to live, so he could come and see us, and I forgot all about it! Felix, will you bring me pencil and paper, please? I’ll write to him now.”
Rose-Ann’s troubled mind—too troubled to be aware of itself—had been seeking an answer to a question ... the question for which she had unconsciously sought the answer in “Leaves of Grass,” in the “Dan-Emp” volume of her father’s encyclopedia, in settlement work, and now in her marriage. There was an answer which she dreaded—and perhaps hoped—to hear. But in his chance phrase she had heard instead the definite ratification of their casual agreement that she was never to bear him a child ... and the question, which neither of them knew had been discussed, of whether the meaning of her vision, of her search, of her unsatisfied yearning, might not perhaps be found in the common, ordinary, the all too obvious rôle of motherhood, was answered No....
Felix brought the pencil and a writing pad, and she sat and wrote, and smiled, and wrote again. She had become once more remote—a figure, it seemed to him as she sat there on the bed in the lamplight with her red-gold hair falling over her white shoulders, like a girl in a painting, as eternally lovely and unapproachable.
She stopped writing. “We’ve utterly forgotten the world ever since we moved into this studio,” she murmured.
“And a good thing, too,” said Felix, feeling in her words some threat against their peace and quiet.
“But we _must_ let our friends know where we are—and that they can come to see us.... We might give a kind of house-warming.”
“A house-warming?” Felix repeated doubtfully.
“Yes—a big party—one of the kind you hate. But I’ll make it up to you by giving some cozy little parties.... There are people you ought to know, Felix.... Yes, I’m going to be a real artist’s wife!” She put her arms about him and kissed him, fiercely and tenderly.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXVII. Parties
1
ROSE-ANN decided to give at least one or two of her “little” parties immediately; perhaps to encourage Felix to meet the larger ordeal. And to the first of these little parties, she planned to invite, with what seemed to Felix a reckless defiance of congruity, Clive, Dorothy Sheridan (who had in the meantime been in to see “what they had done to her old studio” and appeared to be satisfied that they had _not_ turned it into what she called “a Christian home”)—and the Howard Morgans!
A more ill-assorted company, Felix felt, had never been invited to sit at the one table—a poet who was also (or at least so Felix considered him) a social lion, a rough-mannered Bohemian girl-artist, a satirical young newspaper writer; and he, a frightened young husband giving his first dinner, was doubtless expected by his infatuated bride to bring music out of this discord! Well, let her find out.... It was a relief, anyway, to be told that he need not wear his evening clothes.
The party went off amazingly well. There was a certain constraint, at first, it was true; but it was not of the sort he had expected. Dorothy Sheridan had turned up with her bobbed hair elaborately and beautifully curled and wearing a gaily embroidered Russian smock. “I never wear smocks when I paint,” she said, “painters never do—but I like to wear them everywhere else. What kind of folks are these Morgans?” And being told by Rose-Ann—rashly, Felix thought—that they were “all right,” she said, “Then I can smoke,” and lighted a cigarette with an air of relief.... And when the Howard Morgans came, the great man was dressed in an old suit of corduroys, concerning which he appeared to be nervous. He looked at Felix’s clothes anxiously, and then at Dorothy Sheridan with her cigarette, and seemed reassured. He must have been reassured, for when the introductions were accomplished, he took out an old sack of tobacco from his coat-pocket and a crumpled package of straw-coloured paper, and rolled himself a cigarette.... Yes, that was all they were afraid of—that the occasion might not be sufficiently informal! And after they had ceased to be afraid of that, they got on vastly well, drank Felix’s cocktails with gusto, ate Rose-Ann’s dinner (it was, though one might not have known it, a delicatessen dinner) with unabashed appetite, and talked like old friends. Later in the evening, Clive turned to Dorothy Sheridan and demanded, “Come, you are not really one of _the_ Sheridans, are you? I can’t believe it!”—And she answered: “Well, I’m the black sheep of the family; I don’t live their life—I paint, and mind my own business—so you ought not to hold that against me!” From her manner, one would have thought that the Sheridans were a band of notorious criminals, but Rose-Ann told him afterward—what it seemed she had suspected all along—that Dorothy belonged to one of the—well, as Clive had said, one of “_the_”—families of Chicago.... Yes, they got along very well indeed, and Felix talked about everything in the world with complete unselfconsciousness....
2
Yes, that party was all right.... But a dinner for Will Blake of Community House, _and_ Paul, their old scenic-genius friend, now a prosperous designer of musical comedy settings in New York and just back in Chicago for a few days—_and_ (yes!) old Mrs. Perk ... that was simply, Felix felt, defying the gods. And yet it turned out to be an even more successful party than the other. Mrs. Perk was as delightful a dinner companion as any one could wish, and really made the party a “go.”... Or perhaps it was the studio: apparently everybody liked a touch of bohemia; apparently anybody in such a place could be completely human, natural, and at ease.... Or perhaps it was Rose-Ann: there was no doubt about it, she was a wonderful hostess....
And Rose-Ann had only just started, it seemed, on her social career. After the “house-warming,” which came next on their program, she intended to ask some of her “bourgeois” friends in to dinner, before they went away for the summer. “You haven’t been miserable at _these_ parties, have you?” she said. “Well, you’ll find the others just as easy. Everybody’s human—even in evening clothes, Felix. We’ll have to go to dinner at these other people’s houses, too, you know—and once you make up your mind to it, you can have as good a time there as you can here!”
All right.... He would try to enjoy himself, he promised obediently. But this house-warming presented difficulties. They were inviting everybody they knew—everybody!—people from Community House, from the Chronicle office, from Canal street, et cetera.... Such a crowd! “I shall have to introduce them to each other, and I won’t remember their names,” he said forlornly. “I never remember people’s names!”
“It’s all right!” said Rose-Ann. “After a cocktail or two, half of them won’t know their own names. Besides, this will be our last big party, ever. I promise!”
Well, it was a satisfaction to know that. But—cocktails, and Community House residents; Felix was not sure (even after seeing Will Blake flushed and merry with their California wine sherbert the other night!) how these two elements would mix. Eddie Silver after his ninth cocktail would scarcely be an edifying spectacle. “Don’t worry,” said Rose-Ann. “People are not so Puritanical as you think. Anyway, our respectable friends will come early and go early—and the others vice-versa.”
“I thought,” said Felix, “when I went to the hospital, that I had finished with boozing....”
“So you have,” said Rose-Ann cheerfully. “This is quite different!”
“And you a clergyman’s daughter!” said Felix.
3
Rose-Ann’s father was somewhat on Felix’s mind, because she had said he might come to see them any day. And if Felix felt some awkwardness in adapting himself to the convivial life, he felt still more embarrassment at the prospect of acting the difficult rôle of the son-in-law of a clergyman.... One had to, it seemed, be so many different things to get along with people! But he was learning. When these parties were over, he would commence to think about how to make himself agreeable to his father-in-law.
And then, late in the afternoon of the day of the house-warming, when Rose-Ann had gone out to buy something she had forgotten, and Felix was busy squeezing lemons, a tall, gentle, stooping man with a slight greying beard walked into the studio, looked about, smiled, and extended his hand.
“I suppose you are my son-in-law,” he said. “I see you’re getting ready for a party, so I’m just in time. Rose-Ann didn’t specially invite me, but I guess she’ll let her old dad come anyway.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXVIII. A Father-in-Law
1
FELIX stood still for a moment with a lemon suspended in mid-squeeze.
“I know just how you feel,” said the old gentleman. “At such a moment as this, a father-in-law would be just the last straw!”
Felix laughed, and shook the extended hand. “Did I give away my dismay as plainly as all that?” he asked.
“I don’t blame you,” said the old gentleman, taking off his hat and overcoat, and sitting down. “Go right on with what you were doing, and we’ll talk. I feel rather well acquainted with you from what I’ve already heard about you. No, Rose-Ann didn’t say much, but I sort of always know what she’s up to. The marriage wasn’t exactly a surprise to me. And I shouldn’t have thought of coming down here to bother you, except that I thought it would be better for me to come than one of the boys. You see, I’ll have to report to them that it’s all right, or they’ll go on thinking that Rose-Ann has married some perfectly disreputable person.” He smiled.
“How do you know,” Felix asked, laughingly, “that I’m _not_ a disreputable person!”
“Well,” said Rose-Ann’s father gravely, taking out a cigar, “perhaps you are. Will you have one of these? No? They’re very good Havana cigars—I can recommend them; oh, I see you smoke cigarettes.... Perhaps you _are_ a disreputable person. But of a certain type that I can very well sympathize with, because I belong to it myself. Impractical. Yes, I can see you’re that. Not interested in making money. All that sort of thing. Yes, I’m afraid my sons would consider you a poor match for Rose-Ann. What they don’t understand is that she was bound to marry that sort if she married anybody. I’ll have to misrepresent you when I get back home. I’ll tell them that you’re an enterprising young newspaper man. You won’t mind that?”
“I should be delighted to have somebody think that of me,” said Felix.
“Well, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t.... I’ll be a little sad when I get home, and tell them that I’m afraid Rose-Ann will never be really happy with you—that you are too practical to appreciate the poetic side of her nature. Then they’ll be convinced that it’s all right.... I suppose it sounds odd to you, my speaking this way of my own sons?”
“Well—yes,” said Felix, “it does rather! But it’s refreshing.”
“I haven’t a scrap of family sentiment,” said Rose-Ann’s father. “I am interested in people only as individuals. And I must say that I have been cursed with four of the most practical and unimaginative sons that a ne’er-do-well father ever had. They will all end up as millionaires, I’m sure. By the way, I hope you’ve no prejudice against preachers?”
“Not your kind, anyway!” Felix laughed.
“I was reading a book the other day,” said the old man, “about women in the Middle Ages. It said that women often went into convents then, not because they felt particularly religious, but because they wanted to escape from the humdrum ways of ordinary life. A woman who went into a convent might become—a scholar, a ruler, a politician, the peer of princes! She could have friendships with distinguished men. She could be, in a sense that her married sister wasn’t, free.... And I thought how well all that applied to myself. If I had lived in a Catholic country, I would probably have gone into a monastery, and written a history of something. I did the next best thing, it seems to me now. I went into a profession where nobody is expected to succeed. I escaped from the bedevilment of business; I started out in business, you know, and left it for the ministry. Now I can be a little odd, and nobody minds very much. I am very fortunate, I think. The pulpit is a wonderful refuge. For instance—do you like to drink?”
“No—not really,” Felix said.
“No, I thought not,” said the old gentleman. “But you have to. You will have to consume your share of that enormous quantity of vile-tasting medicine you are preparing for your guests. Now, I am free from any such social necessity. It’s an enormous relief.”
Felix thought of his Eddie Silver parties in the past, and all the parties he seemed committed to in the future—and it seemed to him that Rose-Ann’s father was indeed very fortunate.
“I assume,” said the old man, “that you don’t particularly relish the idea of this party, anyway?”
“No, to tell the truth, I don’t,” said Felix.
“Of course not. What sane human being would want to spend an evening talking to forty people without saying anything to any of them? And yet ordinary people are supposed to like that sort of thing.”
“Rose-Ann promises that this will be the last one of this kind.”
“Hold her to her promise, young man!” said Rose-Ann’s father. “And be stern about it. Be ruthless. Rose-Ann,” he observed reflectively, “means well. But after all, she’s a woman. And when you know as much about women as I do, you will know that they are the natural ally of the world against the human soul. Now I have always had my _sermon_ as an excuse for getting out of everything I didn’t want to do. I always managed to make the writing of that sermon last me nearly all week. I locked myself in my study, and let the world rush past outside. In my study I could read and dream and think; I could be by myself. Aren’t you going to write a novel or something? A play, I believe it was Rose-Ann spoke of.”
“I’m—thinking about something of the sort,” said Felix. It was true, he reflected, he had not been able to get any writing done lately! One could not write with parties going on all the time....
“Well, you’d better get down to work on it right away. And get a room of your own somewhere to do it in. You’re just married, and your head is full of all sorts of romantic nonsense about Rose-Ann, who is a very fine young woman, but, after all, a woman; and the time to establish your right to be by yourself some of the time is at the very beginning. I see you have two desks up there in front. Do you expect to work there?”
“Yes. That one is Rose-Ann’s—”
“And the other is yours. And when you are in the middle of a sentence, you find that Rose-Ann has come over and put her arms around your neck. Very natural. Very charming. But how in the name of Prince Beelzebub are you going to get any work done under those circumstances?”
Felix smiled. It certainly was odd, to have one’s wife’s father take your side against her. But it was easy to see that he was thinking of his own case. He had doubtless had to lock himself in his study to be free from the encroachments of domesticity. But Rose-Ann was different; Rose-Ann did not come over and kiss him in the middle of a sentence....
“I see you don’t take my warnings seriously,” said the old man. “Well, don’t say I didn’t do my best for you. Here she is now.”
Rose-Ann came in, crying out, “Dad!”—and running up to him flung her arms about him. “You didn’t tell me you were coming!”
Her father set her on his knees.
“No, Rosie, I didn’t—and I see I’ve intruded on a wild party. But if you’ll not tell anybody I’m a preacher they won’t know it. I won’t spoil your party!”
“It’s only our house-warming, and of _course_ I’m glad you came. How do you like my husband?” She looked proudly at Felix.
“We’ve become very well acquainted,” said her father. “I’ve been warning him against you.”
“And you’ve been getting cigar-ashes all over my nice clean floor, too,” said Rose-Ann. “Why will you never, never learn to use an ash-tray?”
“I’m sorry, my dear,” said her father with a twinkle at Felix, “but I thought this was a studio, and that people in studios did just as they pleased.”
“Well,” said Rose-Ann, “if you’re not going to be a preacher tonight, you can help Felix get things ready for the cocktails. I have a million sandwiches to fix, myself. Take off your coat and put on this apron. How do you like our studio?”
“I was very much impressed by those desks up in the front there,” he said disingenuously, smiling at Felix.
“Yes, that’s where Felix is going to write his play, and I’m going to do—I don’t know just what, yet. But isn’t it all—wonderful, father!”
“Wonderful!” said Rose-Ann’s father.
2
Whether it was the effect of that talk or not, all Felix’s recent social sophistication had vanished utterly, and the party passed after the usual fashion of such events to a shy and bewildered person. He made desperate efforts to remember people’s names, and succeeded once or twice; at other times Rose-Ann intervened and performed that painful feat for him; and once when he saw two people beside him who had not yet been introduced, and whose names he knew as well as he knew his own, but which he could not to save his life think of, he slunk away in guilty crimson shame. An old lady—it seemed to him that he was a favourite prey of old ladies—got him into a corner and talked to him for a long time about telepathy, and the life beyond the grave. He could not recall ever having seen her before, and he wondered what she was doing at his house-warming. “Yes,” he said earnestly to her—“yes!” So convincingly, that Rose-Ann, who wanted him to meet Professor Hedding of the University of Chicago, left him alone until at last she caught his piteous glance of appeal and came and bore him away. Howard Morgan was there, at ease as always, his leonine grey head the centre of a phantasmagoria which he seemed to understand, to rule with a glance, a smile, a word. He was enjoying it all.
“No,” Felix said to himself, “I shall never be like that!”
His father-in-law wandered up to him as he stood helplessly aside. He seemed to Felix to be about to ask, “And is this the kind of life you are going to lead?” But instead, he remarked, “Your friend Mr. Bangs is a very interesting young man. We had a good talk. I like the way his mind works.”
It struck Felix as the oddest aspect of his fantastic fortunes that he should have a father-in-law—out of all possible fathers-in-law!—who so heartily approved of him, approved of his very weakness, and of his maddest friends! What he might have expected was: “If I were you, I don’t think I’d see too much of that young man—he has queer ideas.” But queer ideas, his own and Clive’s, were, it seemed, not merely tolerable, but commendable....
A little before midnight, the Rev. Mr. Prentiss took his daughter and son-in-law aside and said, “I’m getting sleepy, so I’m going to my train and try to get a little sleep between now and morning. No, don’t you bother about seeing me off. But you must come and visit us in Springfield. Sometime, I mean—no hurry—just whenever you feel like it.” He shook hands with Felix. “Do,” he said. Rose-Ann kissed him, and he slipped quietly away.
“Father likes you,” she whispered.
“He’s lovely,” said Felix.
“He told me—”
“What?”
“Never mind. I’ll tell you some other time.”
“What?” Felix repeated.
“Oh, I guess the same things he told you. He warned you against me. And he warned me, too.”
“Against _me_?”
“No. Against myself. Come, we must say good-bye to these people.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXIX. Interlude at Midnight
1
CLIVE stayed a few minutes after the others to give them some news. Phyllis, it seemed, was desperately discontented with the process of learning to be a teacher. And he had been talking with Howard Morgan about her—Howard Morgan had spent a summer in Woods Point, and remembered her as “the pretty girl who used to drive a taxi”—and he had become interested in her problem to the extent of offering her a position as his secretary (“if she can type manuscripts, and look up things in books”—he was at work now on a grandiose historical poem). That, Clive had remarked, seemed to solve the problem of coming to Chicago for her—if she accepted it. He wanted to know what they thought about it.
Rose-Ann had said, a little wearily, that that did seem to solve the problem for her.
“So you’re in favour of it?” Clive had asked, insistently.
Rose-Ann had shrugged her shoulders. “It’s not for me to decide!” she said, and so Clive, thanking her in an ironical voice, had gone away.
2
And as soon as he had gone Felix began—or thought he began—to understand what it was all about.... And yet, the fancy was so preposterous!
“I wonder,” he said cautiously, “why Clive made such a fuss about that offer of Howard Morgan’s?”
“Well,” said Rose-Ann. “Leave the door open a moment to let the smoke out....”
“What kind of reputation has Howard Morgan, with—with regard to girls?” he asked point-blank.
“Oh,” said Rose-Ann, “the usual reputation of handsome poets, old and young. Why?”
“Then,” said Felix, “—then that was what Clive was thinking about!”
“I suppose so,” said Rose-Ann. “I think the room’s aired out now. You can close the door.”
“But,” said Felix, “It’s monstrous!”
“What—oh, you’re still talking about Phyllis? But why be angry at _me_ about it?”
“I’m not angry at you, Rose-Ann; I’m disgusted with Clive for thinking of turning her over to that old scoundrel!... You don’t seem to care?”
“Must everybody in the world be sorry for poor Phyllis, and anxious about poor Phyllis, and worrying about poor Phyllis?” Rose-Ann demanded in a tone of exasperation. “I’m tired of her problems, myself. Can’t she decide what she wants to do without so much masculine assistance? After all, all I said was that it wasn’t my affair. Let her decide for herself.... And shut the door, please—it’s getting chilly....”
Felix shut the door.
“Well, this is over, anyway!” said Rose-Ann, walking back behind the screen, and kicking off her pumps.
Felix followed her. “What’s over?”
“This party,” she said, letting down her hair. “A lot of cleaning tomorrow, and then—never again.... Felix, I don’t want you to be a perfect host, after all. You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be.”
“But about Phyllis,” he said. “Surely you aren’t cold-bloodedly considering her becoming the mistress of that old—”
“Poets don’t have mistresses nowadays,” said Rose-Ann, impersonally, “at least, in Chicago. They have flirtations—and ‘affairs.’ An ‘affair’ may mean anything. Howard Morgan has been having ‘affairs’ for the last forty years. I was surprised that he didn’t have some pretty girl sitting on his lap tonight. He does it in such a fatherly way that nobody can object, not even his wife. After all, I repeat, it’s Phyllis’s concern, not mine.”
“You mean that she might be agreeable to such an arrangement?” Felix asked angrily.
“How do I know?” she said. “Put out the candle, will you, Felix?”
“I can’t understand you!” he said. “I thought you liked her?”
“I do,” she said. “At least, I’m willing to let her live her own life as she sees fit.”
“I’m not,” said Felix, blindly.
“No,” said Rose-Ann. “Of course you’re not. You want to save her from ‘that old scoundrel.’ But I don’t see how you can do it, Felix, except by divorcing me, and marrying her yourself. And just because you’re jealous of Howard Morgan—”
“Jealous! Rose-Ann!”
“—Is no reason for quarrelling with me....”
“I’m not quarrelling with you, Rose-Ann. But I think you are trying to quarrel with me. You behave as though you were jealous, yourself.” The idea had seemed absurd, until he stated it; then he looked at her wonderingly. “Perhaps you are!”
“Perhaps I am, Felix. But I wish you wouldn’t stalk up and down while you’re talking to me. Of course I’m jealous, Felix.”
“What in the world of?”
“Of Phyllis.... Oh, I know I’m not being reasonable, Felix. But I’m tired, and I’ve been scolded by my father, and made to feel like—like a wife. I suppose that’s why I’m behaving like one. And—and—damn it all, I’m going to cry.” And she did.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXX. Fathers and Daughters
1
FELIX, astonished and perturbed, came over and petted her. “What’s the matter, darling?” he asked.
“Oh, Felix,” she said, putting her head against his breast, “do you love me?”
“Of course I love you! Don’t you know it?”
“I suppose so. But—all this—I’ve felt separated from you. I’ve felt—I don’t know what—I suppose it was what my father said—that this was just going to be him and my mother all over again....”
“He said that!”
“No, that isn’t what he said. But that’s what it made me feel. Felix, we aren’t going to stop loving one another now, are we?”
“Of course not. But what was it your father did say?”
“Nothing—only he spoke of how many distinguished friends we had, and—I knew he meant it all satirically—and that you had the makings of a successful man in you, if they were properly brought out by an ambitious wife—meaning me. And I felt as though—as though—Felix, I don’t want to behave to you as my mother did to my father....”
“What do you mean?” he asked quietly, still petting her like a child.
“You know, they were married very young, and he gave up business for the ministry after they were married, and we were very poor until my brothers left school and commenced to make money—and I think she never forgave him for that. And I’ve always—”
“Can’t we live our own life and love, Rose-Ann, without letting it get mixed up with our fathers and mothers?” Felix asked sadly.
Rose-Ann rubbed from her face the last vestige of her tears. “That’s why I didn’t want father to come to see us,” she said. “In-laws always mess things up, don’t they?”
“Even when they are the nicest people in the world, like your father.”
“Felix—I’m so glad to be back with you again—I feel as though I had been away from you, somehow. I don’t like it.”
“Don’t go away again, Rose-Ann-dear.”
“I won’t.” She pressed her head closer against his breast. “I’ll never go away again.”
Again the storm had passed, leaving Felix again wondering how it could have arisen. Some of the things they had said to each other were really incredible. How hard and hostile they had been to each other! And—quarrelling over Phyllis! Why, the whole thing was absurd, the product of fevered imaginations.... Why had they both been so willing to indulge those grotesque fantasies about Phyllis and Howard Morgan?... And then, what of Rose-Ann’s freakish accusation against him—for that was what it amounted to!—of being in love with Phyllis? Phyllis, whom he had seen but once in his life, and that on the occasion of his own marriage! Had Rose-Ann really been jealous? It was too extravagantly farcical.
But oughtn’t they discuss these things, and settle them, once and for all? Wasn’t that what their mutual candour was for, to expose and kill these silly doubts and fears and suspicions? Or—did talking about such things only give them new vitality? Were these things too senseless to talk about?
“I love you, Felix.”
“I love you, Rose-Ann.”
There was a true magic, it seemed, in words like those! They brought happiness ... and forgetfulness....
“Darling....”
“Yes....”
“Did we have a quarrel?”
“I don’t know—did we?”
“Yes—but what was it about?”
“I can’t remember!”
“Neither can I!”
They laughed happily at their folly.
2
Yet Felix could not quite understand the turn of affairs which followed the brief and dynamic intrusion of Rose-Ann’s father into their domestic life. Rose-Ann had changed. The most obvious manifestation of that change was the complete abandonment of all her social plans.
She had intended to give a number of parties to her “bourgeois friends” that spring; but they were never given; and when Felix asked why, she only shook her head and said,
“You know you don’t like parties, Felix.”
Felix was quite aware that he did not like parties. But he had definitely assessed that dislike as a species of cowardice, which he must get over. Just because he did not like parties was the very reason why he should try to learn to like them. Other people liked parties; and he wanted to become as other people are. He had surrendered himself to Rose-Ann’s guidance. He trusted her as a mentor. He had worn evening clothes, learned to carve and serve a roast of beef, talked desperately about nothing to people whose names he could not remember, because she wanted him to. He had braced himself to endure the worst that the social life had to offer; he would do whatever she demanded. And now suddenly she had ceased to demand anything! There was a tremendous relief in this relaxation; but it left him puzzled and brooding.
“I understood,” he said to her hesitatingly one day, “that you had undertaken to civilize me. Have you given up the task as hopeless?”
“But I don’t want to civilize you, Felix!” she protested.
“I thought you did want to,” he said.
“I’m sorry you thought that,” she said.
“Then what,” he insisted, “do you want me to be, if not civilized?”
“An artist,” she said.
He laughed. “That is too easy,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she asked, looking at him with incredulous wide-open eyes and parted lips.
“Rose-Ann, I’ve always been an artist. That’s the trouble with me. I don’t say I’ve been a good artist. I’ve nothing to show for my art-ing except a barrelful of youthful poems, an unfinished novel that I burned up before I came to Chicago, and a few fantastic fragments of impossible plays. But I’ve been an artist all the same, and I’ll tell you why I’m sure of it. There are two kinds of people in the world—artists and human beings. I’ve never been a human being; so I must have been an artist. And I don’t want to be any longer!”
She looked at him, frightened at this heresy.
“But Felix!” she said.
“And I thought you were going to help me,” he said.
“To stop being an artist?” she cried, starting up as though a dreadful accusation had been flung at her.
“To be a human being,” he said, laughingly.
She looked at him with eyes of alarm.
“I can’t think you mean it!” she said.
“Perhaps I don’t.... It’s hard to tell what one really does mean,” he said, discouraged. “I don’t mean that I shan’t keep on trying to write plays—if that’s what you are afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid,” she said. “Only, Felix—”
“Yes?”
“You must do what _you_ want to do; not what you think I want you to do!”
“Why do you say that?” he asked; for it sounded cryptic, as if charged with hidden meanings.
“Because,” she said, “I think we’ve been going on a wrong basis. I’ve—done things to you I didn’t intend. I’m sorry.... And from now on I’m going to—let you alone.”
He laughed. “All right!” he said.
3
He thought he knew what she meant. Not in vain had dozens of novels been written in which the young wife subtly corrupts her artist husband into prosperous mediocrity. So that was what Rose-Ann was afraid of! She did not know that the artist chooses his wife in the profound unconscious hope of being led down from the perilous icy heights of lonely poetic ecstasy into the green valleys of everyday human life....
That Rose-Ann wanted him to dwell with her here in these green valleys he did not doubt. She wanted him to be successful. But she did not want to be blamed for his success!
He could understand that.
Well, he would take the responsibility upon himself.
He would become what, in her secret heart, and in spite of all her protestations, she really wanted him to be.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXXI. More or Less Theatrical
1
MEANWHILE, with summer coming on, Felix had wondered what an assistant dramatic editor would find to do. He learned from Hawkins that the management traditionally continued the Saturday dramatic department through the season, though in a restricted space. Later, in anticipation of the opening of the theatrical season, he could print the news of what New York and London held in prospect for the Chicago public. And for the present a column or two once a week could be furbished up somehow—the how of it being left entirely to Felix’s own discretion and ingenuity.
“Interviews—clip-stuff from the London weeklies of last winter—anything to keep going,” said Hawkins, cleaning up his desk and going home on a formal leave of absence for the summer to rewrite his play—which, it appeared, had impressed a New York manager and only needed to be “strengthened” in its second act.
Felix, according to his arrangement with Willie Smith, was to write “something light,” every day if possible, for the editorial page; and that done, nobody cared what he put in the Saturday “Plays and Acting” column. With Hawkins away, he felt that he had a free hand. And the fact that there were no new plays to criticize did not matter much, for the kind of criticism that Felix liked to write subsisted quite as well on familiar plays that everybody had seen as upon brand-new ones—better, perhaps.
Felix was rather humble about the kind of dramatic criticism he wrote; though that humility merely concealed, from himself and others, a fierce egotistic pride. For his attitude toward plays was different from that of any other dramatic critic whose work he had ever seen. It was, in a sense, not a “critical” attitude at all. Perhaps that was why his commentaries had been so well received, by the management and the readers of the Chronicle. It was at least an agreeable novelty. But Felix knew quite well that he did not have either the experience or the knowledge necessary to do the job in the usual way. Truth to tell, he both stood in awe of, and despised, the usual way.... The regular critics were always telling you whether a play was good or bad, and why, and assessing expertly the merits of various bits of acting. Old Jennison, “the dean,” as he was sometimes called, “of the critical fraternity,” could remember the way Somebody had played Hamlet, and how Miss Somebody Else had done the “great scene” in “Camille,” and he told you all about it apropos of the latest play. This, doubtless, was real criticism, but of a kind Felix could not aspire to, for he had never seen Anybody in Anything. On the other hand, Hawkins was gravely an enthusiast for modernity, as represented by Ibsen and Shaw, and took occasion to point out the duty of American drama to bestir itself and deal with the problems of the time. Then, of course, there was a third kind of criticism, for which Felix had little respect—the enthusiastic pounding of drums outside the tent of some favourite actor or actress. And there was a fourth kind, for which Felix had no respect at all, but to which he sometimes feared his own work belonged—the smart-aleck kind of criticism.
He confessedly did not know very much about the art of acting, and could not even say that some part was played “in a masterly manner,” let alone tell the poor devil of an actor how he should have played it. He was, as a matter of fact, not interested in the technique of acting, but only in the effects produced. And, though he was a little ashamed of it, he could not really feel that the stage had any “duties,” either to modern problems or anything else. He still got a childlike thrill out of the fantasies enacted behind the footlights—at least for the first few moments after the curtain went up. And then, as that magic vanished for him, and he became bored by the dull spectacle and unconvincing dialogue on the stage, he became interested in the audience, for whom evidently this magic still persisted. He wondered why, and tried to see the play with their eyes, to find the things in it that held them, if not breathless, at least coughless, for minutes at a time. What emotions were those that were so touched by the cheap tears and tawdry heroisms of “The Witching Hour” and “The Third Degree”? Why was it that they liked to see the heroine in distress, the hero unjustly accused? Felix set himself the task of proving that he knew why they liked these things—and he described the commonplace predicaments and familiar crises of current drama in terms which conveyed to his own mind some real emotional excitement, with only a touch or two of humorous satire as he resumed his own proper character as a philosophic observer. He found that he could translate the most absurd plot into something authentically interesting to himself—as if the worst play in the world were, after all, only a good play badly conceived. And in this mood, seeing bad plays through the eyes of an audience to whom they were interesting, he too became interested. He discovered some at least of the secrets of that wish-world of the theatre, in which what happens is what we want to happen: and, only when conscience pinches too hard, and reminds us that crime must be punished and virtue rewarded, what _ought_ to happen—but not at all, no, never, a place where things happen as they do in everyday life! A strange world of pseudo-realities, elaborately persuading us at the outset that it is the same world of houses and streets as ours, inhabited by people like ourselves, wearing the same clothes and talking the same talk, ruled by the same eternal laws of probability—and then making come true for us for an hour our wildest, silliest, loveliest, most impossible dreams!
2
It was fascinating, this imaginative insight into people’s minds. And—in the absence of a real play—a vaudeville act or moving-picture or burlesque show afforded him the same, or even a more profound and startling, enlightenment.
One evening that summer he went with Rose-Ann to a burlesque theatre on South State street. He noted the people who went in—workingmen, toughs, sailors, young men wearing the latest Arrow collar, and husbands accompanied by their wives. In the street outside, the wind picked up a litter of dust and paper and flung it into people’s faces. Over the roofs of tall buildings a dim moon shone in a cloudy sky. The brightest thing in this street was the arc-lighted promise of the theatre-entrance: “Refined Burlesque!”
In the front row, in an aisle seat, was a white-haired man who seemed to be nearly a hundred years old; he sat there with an air of having occupied that seat once every week since the theatre was built. Midway of the parquet floor sat a placid matron of fifty, beside her fat and complacent husband; their views on all subjects must have coincided exactly with those of Dr. Parkhurst—they were solid blocks in the fabric of our American civilization—and they had come here to find something which their life required, not to be had elsewhere. About them was a grey mass of padded masculine shoulders, with here and there, in twos and threes, girls, making spots of colour on the greyness. Above, the balcony buzzed—and the peanut-gallery filled suddenly like the breaking of a dam. An orchestra of seven filed in. And a hush, not of eagerness but of religious certainty, filled the theatre. In fifteen hundred souls there was the calm that comes of utter confidence in the absolution (or, as Aristotle would say, _katharsis_!) which they were about to receive....
No one had come there for novelty; they had come for the familiar and satisfying benediction of burlesque. The old rite had changed a little with the changing times—it pretended to be a “musical comedy”—but the heart of the ancient mystery was still there. The tunes were those invented by Jubal, father of all such as handle the harp and organ—revised slightly, year by year; the first chord awoke dim ancestral memories. There was a trace of plot on the program, and the name of an author; but no one was deceived. For, to put any doubts at rest, and to make clear that this was simply the ten millionth performance of the seasonal festival invented by Adam (after a hard day’s work pulling eucalyptus stumps to the westward of Eden), it was entitled, in the good old traditional manner, “The Jolly Girls.”
The orchestra played its immemorial tunes, the sons of Adam leaned a little forward with a beatific look on their faces, the curtain rose, and the festival, the sacred orgy, began. The stage was filled with Beauty, in the form of four dozen female legs, while in the right wing waited Laughter, in the shape of a little man with a putty nose. The legs burst upon the scene in a blaze of light and sound—a kaleidoscope of calf and ankle, a whirl of soft pink feminine contours, a paradisiac vision of essential Girl: the whole theatre breathed forth a sigh of happiness, and the sons of Adam leant back in their seats, content. The promise of the dionysiac god to them that toiled and bore harsh burdens, was being fulfilled.
The legs, encased in pink tights, moved forward and back, up and down. Somewhere above them were lungs and larynxes that poured forth a volume of sound, in time to the hypnotic throb of the music. Gradually, in the melée, arms became visible, and, vaguely connecting the arms and legs, pieces of coloured cloth that finally became definite as golden tunics, green sashes, scarlet bodices. Moreover, there were faces—but not real faces of weariness or anger or sadness, to disturb the illusion—these faces were masks, painted to express an impersonal and disinterested pleasure in the exhibition of bodily charms. Pink cheeks, bestrode eyelashed depths that emitted glances at the corners, carmined lips set in an imperishable smile—these served as the perfect and sufficient symbols of a joy that never was on sea or land.—But faces, after all, belong to another world, the world of reality; if one looks at them too long, one sees them, and the dream vanishes; so they were extinguished presently by a row of flying legs and arms—the scene became a chaos of feminine extremities, the music rose to a climax, and stopped, as the chorus left the stage. Entered the man with the putty nose.
He spoke to somebody, in a rapid, monotonous, unintelligible voice; it did not matter, he was only telling what the plot of the piece was. His real function was revealed a minute later, when two tramps—a tall one and a short one—entered, and the tall one hit him over the head with a stick. The victim fell on his putty nose. The house rocked with laughter, and the gallery stormed applause.
What secret wish is gratified when we see man who was created in the image of God falling bump on his nose? Irresistibly, by a profound impulse, we laugh. The cares of the day, the harsh realities of life, fade away when in the golden land of Never-never a tall man enters with his short companion and hits the third man (he of the putty nose) over the head with a slapstick.
In the course of the evening, the small man was hit over the head fifty-seven hundred times; he rose but to fall again, more helplessly than before. He was also kicked—in the nose, in the ear, in front and behind. His nose was pulled into an infinite variety of shapes, being made to resemble every object under heaven from a telephone wire to a turnip. He submitted meekly, and upon him the desire of the whole audience to see mankind made ridiculous was visited times without number.
Genially, casually, the tall man kicked him in the face whenever he happened to notice him. The tall man had taken possession of the stage. Singing, dancing, clowning, guying, arguing, wheedling, mocking, bullying—now as an unshaven tramp, a few minutes later as an unshaven Turk, then as an unshaven pirate—whatever a man could be and do without first submitting to that odious refinement of civilization, the clean shave; in a dozen different costumes, always delightful and irresponsible and seductive, and always accompanied by his short comrade, he pervaded the evening. He spoke, and the audience laughed; he refrained from speaking, and the audience laughed.
His slapstick, that magic wand which had only to touch things to make them funny, was like himself. He had slapstick shoulders, slapstick eyebrows, ears, nose, legs, posteriors; he acted with all of these, eloquently—and at each gesture some ideal of human dignity was knocked on the head and tumbled on its nose. He sang, walked across the room, made love—and these actions, to the immense satisfaction of the audience, were revealed as essentially absurd. The precious gift he brought was a genial vulgarity, a hilarious cheapening of the values of normal life. When he spoke, with irresistible drollery, about women, about work, about marriage, about anything in the world, it became not worth a—his abrupt gesture told what—and the stout matron in the middle of the parquet became hysterical with laughter. For a moment she was not a solid block in the structure of our respectable American civilization—she was a rebellious child, delightedly come into a dream world where all burdens are lifted, all values transvalued. It seemed to do her good.... Then two dimpled soubrettes sang another song.
In and out between these episodes floated the chorus, shaking its immortal legs. The legs and their owners classified themselves into three ranks or hierarchies of fleshly charm: in front, the “little ones,” the “ponies”; in the next row, the “mediums”; and, last and most sumptuous, the “big ones,” the “show girls.” The big ones were the _piece de resistance_; no frills, no sauces, but a satisfying super-abundance. All that the hungry eye desired was bodied forth in these vast and shapely statues of feminine flesh, tipping the scales at not less than two hundred pounds. Two hundred pounds of arm and leg, bust and buttock; here was riches, here was Golconda—two hundred pounds of female meat! A thousand hungry eyes feasted rapturously on the sight.
But this was not the ultimate magic of burlesque.
A storm of applause, and a young woman entered on one toe, kicking the zenith with the other. A young woman? A pinwheel, a skyrocket, a slender feminine firework! Feminine? Not with the obvious allurements of her sex. Her figure was like that of a boy; boyish was the mischievous face that sparkled behind the tangle of her short curls. She was like a sword-blade in this poppyfield of easy dreams. Her soul was adventurous, like her legs; she kicked open the zenith with her boisterous boyish laugh. She defied the code of this tinsel dream-world, in which women burn with the ready fires of miscellaneous invitation; she seemed beyond sex. Nor was she a mere bundle of graceful muscles. She had, shining in contrast to all this impersonal eroticism, a hint of personality, a will of her own, an existence independent of the wishes of the audience. She smiled at them, but scornfully, indifferently, mischievously,—and triumphed over them. That touch of reality gave a momentary sharp savour to the too-cloying illusion. Then she left the stage—on her hands—and the dream-festival went on as before.
The music pounded itself, with endless repetition, through the senses, into the soul. The rhythm of legs became the rhythm of the universe. The people of the audience were absolutely at one with each other and with the genius of the slapstick, who talked to them familiarly now, as his friends. Cries and handclaps of applause mingled with the rhythm. The heart of the theatre beat gigantically, joyously, ecstatically. The play rose to its climax. To the tune of “Yankee Doodle,” the young firework appeared, turning handsprings, an American flag on the seat of her pants. Walking on her ear, she crossed the stage, waving the flag in the faces of the audience. The audience applauded in patriotic frenzy. They would have died for that flag.
The curtain fell, rose a foot from the floor, and disclosed a row of legs—legs—legs—twinkling across behind the footlights. Into those legs was concentrated the infinite sorcery of the theatre.... But it was time to go home. It was time to re-enter the world of reality.—Another leg appeared, the eloquent left leg of the tall slapstick comedian, clothed round with heavy woolen drawers and clasped by a Boston garter. It seemed to say: “After all, my friends, a leg is only a leg!” The spell was broken, and the audience began slowly to file out into the dusty street.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXXII. Duty
1
FELIX, having torn up all his previous attempts, was again at work upon a play. It seemed clear to him now that plays were not written to please the author: they were written to please the public.
There was plenty of time to work, now. They were seeing hardly anybody that summer. Clive came occasionally, and they spent a few week-ends at his place in Woods Point. They did not see Phyllis, for she was still at the normal school, having heroically decided to shorten the term of her training by taking the summer course. Dorothy Sheridan came once or twice to their studio before leaving to spend the summer in some eastern fishing village where things were very “paintable.” Howard Morgan had dropped in one evening to smoke a cigarette with them. They had made the acquaintance of a taciturn etcher in the studio next door, and of an unhappily married boy-painter who lived around the corner and who used sometimes to take refuge from domestic infelicities in a cup of their coffee....
It seemed to Felix that in these idle summer months, with life flowing lazily past in the sunshine, he should be able to accomplish something in play-writing. Certainly there was nothing else to distract or excite him.
He went about his task soberly and conscientiously this time. He undertook to learn how plays were written. He read books on “play-construction.” He even, conquering his instinctive distaste, studied the methods of Pinero and H. A. Jones. Their plays bored him ineffably—they seemed trite, false, vulgar and dull. But the public had liked them, and doubtless they had something to teach him.
“Why don’t you write what you want to, in your own way?” Rose-Ann would ask impatiently.
But he did not want to write “in his own way.” The things he had written to suit himself that spring, the fantastic dramatic fragments which he had torn up in disgust, were too utterly freakish, too whimsical and absurd. He wanted to prove that he could write something else—something that was not so damnably “different.” He wanted to write a regular three-act play, of the sort that audiences liked, and he was going to learn to do it if it took five years.... It had taken Hawkins five years to get to a point where he could impress a manager—Hawkins, lending him a book on play—construction, had confessed as much.... And Hawkins was now on the verge of a brilliant success. He had gone to New York to collaborate with the manager on a few final changes.
It was slow going, this way; but Felix was not discouraged. It seemed good to struggle at an uncongenial task. Eventually he would conquer its difficulties. He might continue to “get by” with freakish criticism; but he was going to be a writer of plays that ordinary people could recognize as plays. It was not his business to please himself; Bernard Shaw might do that—but he, Felix, was not Bernard Shaw; it was his business to adapt himself to the realities of current play-writing.... He told all this to Rose-Ann, who listened in hostile silence.
Rose-Ann had changed, become less poignantly restless. She seemed to have discovered a new way of occupying herself—or rediscovered an old way, long since abandoned. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “I used to read books all the time. I found them so much more satisfying than actual life. And then I stopped reading, and tried to live. I’ve hardly read anything since I came to Chicago.... So there’s lots of things I want to read.”
She read, day after day, from the time Felix rose from their breakfast of grapefruit and coffee and cigarettes, till afternoon, lying curled up among the pillows of the window seat; she went out for luncheon somewhere alone, and sat in the Park all afternoon or wandered through the Museum whose crumbling stucco porticos of nobly antique pattern looked themselves like relics of some departed race; taking with her a book, which she seldom opened, but which served for companionship—and a notebook, in which she wrote sentences and paragraphs which Felix found she would rather he did not read. “They seem just to belong to me,” she said, shyly.
She had retired into some inner chamber of her self, to think and dream; and the books, the walks, the wanderings among fragments of dead antiquity, the solitude, were all a part of this dream life.... The books which she read, a chapter or two at a time, putting one aside to take up another, were such as took the mind into strange worlds, like “Thais” and “The Napoleon of Notting Hill”; or those which told the adventures of a soul in contact with a new world which it finds strange and perilous, like “The Damnation of Theron Ware” and “The Red and the Black.” Or books of anthropology and of poetry, those two ideal guides of the stay-at-home traveller in quest of strangeness. So much Felix curiously noted, and reflected that he had been at home in those strange worlds all his life and was now trying a greater adventure—the discovery of the familiar and commonplace world in which he actually lived....
When Felix left the office, having hastily written “something light” for the editorial page, or furbished up a few paragraphs for the dramatic column, he would come home to the studio and work fiercely and painfully for two or three hours.
“But, Felix, you work too _hard_!” Rose-Ann had said to him. “That isn’t the way to work!” Whatever the way to work might be, he had not yet found it; but at least he could try.... And late in the afternoon, throwing down his pen with a sense of duty done, he would go to the Park, and find Rose-Ann waiting for him on a bench, with book and notebook in her lap. They would find some cool place to dine, and then walk for hours along the shore of the lake, talking.
Yes, Rose-Ann had changed, become less fiery and impatient, more calm. And coming at this hour out of that inner chamber of self in which she spent her days, she brought to him quaint and lovely thoughts, delicate and ironic fancies, things that charmed and allured his imagination. Sometimes she talked of the books she had been reading, and enriched their stories as she told them with a beauty that came from her own mind.
She told him one day the story of a “girl-goldsmith,” a figure that seemed to have captured her imagination, in a book called “Klaus Hinrich Bass,” by a German clergyman named Frenssen—a startling story to be written by a clergyman, Felix thought; but, reflecting upon Rose-Ann’s father, he remembered that he knew very little about clergymen after all. It was the story of a girl who believed in the truth and goodness of her instincts; Rose-Ann told it with such zest and poetic feeling that he read it one afternoon, when she was away in the Park, for himself; and he found that she had re-created it in her own imagination, giving to Frenssen’s idyl of sweet and fearless love some motives and meanings which it did not seem to him to possess as he read it in the pages of the book; it was as if Rose-Ann knew some things about that girl-goldsmith which Frenssen himself had not guessed.... And sometimes, when Rose-Ann told some story she had read, and Felix asked her whose it was, she pretended to have forgotten—and he wondered if it were not her own. But he feared to demand the truth, lest the shy beginnings of creative effort be frightened by his questioning.
It was strange sometimes to feel that she was entering the world of dreams just as he was leaving it.
One hot July evening, when he wanted to work on his play, she insisted on his coming outdoors with her. “You don’t want to work,” she said. “You know it!”
“Isn’t that a good reason for working, perhaps?” he said. He had that day had a note from Hawkins in New York, and Hawkins’s patient plodding and prospective success were making him feel ashamed of his own laziness.
She showed a touch of her old impatience. “Has it come to this!” she said. “Felix, do you really think the way to be an artist is to do all the things you don’t want to do? I wonder if you take our marriage in the same spirit! Am I a duty, too?”
“Ridiculous child!” he said, and went out with her.
“We’re going to take a ride on the lagoon,” she said, and led him to the landing place, where a little launch presently chugged up and discharged its dozen passengers. Felix and Rose-Ann clambered in, and sat in the bow. The other waiting people followed them, and the boat started slowly out into the mysterious islanded waters, stabbing with its searchlight into the warm thick darkness and revealing with that unearthly light, here and there, some place of trees bending to dip their boughs into the water—the edge of one of the islands around and past which they steered slowly, turning and winding about until they seemed to be exploring a vast islanded wilderness. The breeze stirred faintly the hair of their bared heads. The others of the party appeared to be lovers happily entranced with love and with the mysterious beauty of this realm which it seemed could hardly exist in the confines of a mere park. No one spoke, except in whispers.
“Life ought to be like this,” whispered Rose-Ann, taking his hand. “Not arranged and planned!”
A little later, she whispered fiercely: “Felix, are you thinking of that damned play? Then stop it!”
It was true. Felix had been thinking of his play. He became annoyed with her. She wanted him to write plays, to be a personage—and now, when he tried....
As if in reply to his thought, she bent and said in his ear, “Felix, if you write a conventional play like Hawkins’s, and make a success of it, I shall leave you!”
He was inwardly dismayed.
“I wonder—” said Rose-Ann aloud, and then stopped, as if startled at hearing her voice.
“Yes?” said Felix.
“Nothing,” she whispered. “I’ll tell you afterward.”
And afterward, in a café where they had stopped for a cool drink before going home to bed, she told him that she did not want him to be successful—that she meant it quite seriously.
“It would spoil everything,” she said.
“Never fear, I shan’t be so successful as that,” he said glumly.
“But that’s just what I’m afraid of—that you will!” she said. “I looked at your scenario the other day when you were at the office; and it’s—well, I’ve seen that play a hundred times; it’s what they call sure-fire stuff.”
She said this reproachfully, but Felix was elated. That was exactly what he had been trying to make it. “Do you really think so!” he asked.
“I do,” she said. “And I know that if you keep on long enough, you’ll succeed. But I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because, Felix, that play isn’t true—not as we see truth. It makes people behave as people think they ought to—not as we know they feel. You deal in conventional emotions entirely. The only interesting person in the play is the wicked woman—and you know she isn’t wicked at all, Felix, you only pretend to think so to please your audience.”
“You mean the woman who tries to take the other woman’s husband away from her? Oh, I know—it’s stupid stuff, but—”
“Well, then, why do you do it? If you want to write about a girl who’s in love with another woman’s husband, why don’t you do it honestly? You and I don’t believe in those silly old notions. Why pretend that you think she is wicked? Just to make money? I’d rather we starved than have you write plays like that.”
It was at once an immense relief to be told that he need not try any longer to write that stupid play, and a profound humiliation to be scolded by his wife. He did not know whether to be angry or ashamed. His eyes filled with tears, and he reached across the table and laid his hand in hers in silence.
“What was it you were going to tell me there in the Park,” he said after a while.
“I was thinking about ‘duty,’” she said. “Your attitude toward life reminds me of a little story I read the other day—I think it was in Anatole France ... a curious little story.... If you want to hear it?”
“Yes, tell me.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXXIII. A Parable
1
FELIX searched afterward through several volumes of Anatole France for that story, but he never could find it, and he suspected that she had made it up herself ... or perhaps it was a story her father had told her—it sounded rather like it....
2
“It seems,” she smilingly began, “that there was a young Roman nobleman, in the early Christian days, who was rich and handsome and beloved; and he had a slave who was a Christian. And Julian—I think that was the young nobleman’s name—used to discuss Christianity with this slave. It seemed to him a barbarian superstition, but he had heard of some intelligent people becoming converted to its doctrines, so he wanted to know more about it. The slave explained. And Julian laughed, saying that these doctrines were even more absurd than he had supposed.
“But Julian, who was a perfect young Roman gentleman, always doing what was expected of him and what everybody else did, became more and more bored with the life he was living. He continued to talk with his slave about Christianity, and finally became converted. And he said, ‘I see now that this life of mine is a tissue of vanities in which there is no real joy. I will renounce my wealth and my title, give up my old habits, and then receive baptism and begin a life of true Christian happiness.’
“‘Good,’ said the slave. ‘I will go and tell my brethren.’
“Now Julian kept a stable and had been fond of racing. He had a favourite mare which he used to hitch up to a small but elegant chariot, and drive very fast through the streets of Rome, wearing a chaplet of flowers. But all this looked very silly to him now and so he went first of all to his stable, and said to his head-groom: ‘I have wasted enough time with these soulless brutes. Sell them!’
“The head-groom was thunderstruck. ‘But,’ he stammered, ‘there are the big races next week!’
“‘What of it?’ said Julian.
“‘Well,’ said the head-groom, ‘all your friends are betting on your mare, and they’ll think—’
“‘I don’t care what they think,’ said Julian.
“‘I’ve put all the money I’ve got in the world on her myself,’ said the head-groom, sadly. ‘I’ve been very proud of that filly!’
“Julian was touched. This loyalty deserved an explanation from him. But how could he explain? This good-hearted simple man would never understand. He would simply think his master had gone crazy, and would hold that against Christianity. It did not seem fair that Christianity should get a black eye through such a well-meaning but hasty action as this that he had contemplated. He realized that he must go about the matter of becoming a Christian in a more practical way.
“‘After all,’ he said, ‘there is nothing very wicked about horse-racing. I will keep my horses’—and he countermanded his order to the head-groom—‘and go and give up Leila instead.’ Leila was a Persian girl, and the most beautiful of his three mistresses. Once he had given her up, it would be easier to dispense with the others.
“He went to see Leila, and told her about becoming a Christian. ‘Is it the thing to do?’ she asked. ‘Then I will become one, too!’ Dear, sweet, simple soul! He tried to explain, but she understood nothing, until he said that it meant that he would have to part with her. Then she burst into tears, and cast herself at his feet, and cried out, ‘Is it true, then, that you no longer love me?’
“He told her that he loved her more than ever, but in a different way: now he loved her soul. ‘You have a soul, Leila,’ he said, ‘an immortal soul—and it is high time you began to think about saving it, too!’
“‘Stay with me,’ she begged, ‘and explain all these things to me. I think if you are kind to me I can understand you, and learn to save my soul, whatever that means. But do not look at me coldly, for that frightens me.’
“‘After all,’ he thought, ‘she has as much a right to save her soul as I have to save mine. Perhaps I had better break it to her gently. In the course of a few weeks—’ And so he kissed her and stayed to explain.
“It was harder than he had realized to become a Christian. His other mistress was angry at him when he proposed to leave her, and said that it was because he preferred that Persian hussy with her silly doll-face! It pained him to have his motives so misconstrued, but why, after all, should he discriminate against this girl? She, too, had a soul. As for the third one, he put off mentioning the subject to her; he was discouraged with the results of his previous efforts, and besides, he felt that women did not understand these things very well.
“‘At least,’ he said, ‘I will receive baptism; and these other things will go easier after that.’
“But on the day set for the ceremony, his mother reminded him that it was the day of the festival of Diana, her favourite goddess. It had been his filial custom to escort his mother to the temple, and sprinkle with her a few grains of incense in the fire which burned before the statue of the goddess. He had never believed in the gods and goddesses—no cultivated Roman did—but it had seemed to him a harmless and pretty custom.... Now he endeavoured to explain to his mother why he could not accompany her. Of course the dear old lady could not understand. It seemed to her that her child had fallen under the influence of godless men, and she wept bitterly. ‘To have this happen to me in my old age!’ she wailed.
“He could not bear to see his mother cry like that. And it seemed to him that there must be some mistake: how could this new religion of kindness and gentleness and love command him to break his mother’s heart?
“He comforted her, and said he would go with her after all, and sent word that the baptism was to be postponed for a while.
“Julian pondered this situation in the silent hours of the night, when Leila was asleep. And it seemed to him that perhaps he, too, was a martyr—a different kind of martyr than any his Christian slave had told him about, but a martyr none the less. Upon him lay the burden of seeming to be a mere pagan profligate, sunk in idleness and debauchery, while in truth he was carrying out the precepts of kindness and gentleness and love which he had learned from his slave. He was a Christian after all—too much of a Christian to hurt anybody’s feelings. And nobody would ever understand! That was the saddest part of all, and he shed a few tears, waking Leila, who was frightened by these tears, and had to be comforted....
“He continued to live, in outward seeming, the ordinary life of a young Roman profligate, while inwardly his heart was dedicated to the austere practices of virtue. He wished that he could go to the desert, and wear sackcloth, and go hungry, like his more fortunate brethren. But, no—duty compelled him to bear the burden of meaningless riches and idleness and pleasure. Eventually, he was appointed governor of a Roman province, where he distinguished himself in a quiet way by the economy and orderliness of his rulership, and by a moderation of the severities currently practised against new sects. Nevertheless, strange to say, the Christians of that province hated him, and spread scandalous stories about him. He bore all this meekly, but in his breast was a profound sadness. None of those martyrs whom from his cushioned seat at the gladiatorial games he saw go, pale but erect and proud—rather spectacularly proud, he thought, to meet the lions (for after all, in spite of his moderation, he had to sacrifice a Christian virgin or two now and then to satisfy the mob)—none of them, year by year, would ever know that he too was, in his quiet unassuming way, also a martyr.”
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XXXIV. Journeys
1
AGAIN Felix tore up his unfinished play. Rose-Ann had shattered his philosophy of compromise. But still he hesitated to accept her philosophy of freedom. Throughout the summer he idled and dreamed.
Late in August he took his vacation. Part of it they were to spend in paying their long-due visits to their respective families; the rest was to be given to a walking trip. They went first to Springfield.
2
Rose-Ann’s father lived, under the mismanagement of an unmarried sister, a fussy, well-meaning woman, in the rambling old house which Rose-Ann had described to Felix—the house in which she had been born. It was filled with vexatiously new furniture, except as to the old man’s study—a shabby, comfortable, low-ceilinged, book-lined room at the top of the house. It was to this room that Rose-Ann had once stolen, in the dead of night, to get the Dan-Emp volume of the Encyclopedia, to read about dancing.
The Rev. Mr. Prentiss seemed more subdued in his home surroundings—a picturesque and mildly eccentric clergyman, but by no means the disturbing force he had been during his brief visit to them in Chicago the year before.... And Rose-Ann’s brothers were not at all the terrible persons he had been led to imagine—interested only in money-making. They were quite obviously proud of their father; and Felix felt that they were rather proud of him, too—pleased, at least, to have a “writer” in the family. They—or their wives—had severally subscribed to the Chicago Chronicle in order to read Felix’s dramatic criticisms, which they took very seriously, and sometimes clipped out and saved for their guidance when the plays of which he wrote reached Springfield. Felix had expected to find them alien and a little hostile; on the contrary he was rather embarrassingly deferred to—treated distinctly as a personage.
He enjoyed his brief visit, and could not understand the relief Rose-Ann showed when they had bade her family good-bye and were on their way to visit his own parents on the farm further down in the state. It ought to be easy enough, he felt, to get along with such people as Rose-Ann’s relatives. It was the thought of seeing his own parents that filled him with uneasiness.
“But, Felix,” she explained impatiently, “it’s because they _are_ my relatives. I feel their criticism all the time.”
“I don’t think they criticize you any more,” he said. “You’ve had a struggle with them—and you’ve won. They’ve accepted the situation now. I think they’ve even accepted me.”
“You’re not their property, and I am,” she said. “But it isn’t my brothers that count so much any more—we look prosperous, and that’s about as far as they can judge us. It’s my father—I feel as though he were seeing right through me ... and smiling.”
“Smiling at what?”
“At—my pretences. I can’t explain very well, but I feel as though I were a—a fake, a fraud, when I’m with him.”
“But what about?”
“I don’t know, exactly. But he stirs up some childish confusion in me.... I think I have all my life been trying to live up to my father’s expectations—not of me, for I don’t think he expects anything of me—but of womankind ... if that seems to you to make sense. It’s as if I were trying to prove to him that women could be—I don’t know what, but perhaps ... different from my mother. For instance, I want to be a certain kind of wife to you, Felix—not possessive, not interfering, and all that. I go along thinking I am that kind of wife—and then I see him looking at me and smiling, and I have the feeling that it isn’t true ... that I’m just Woman all over again, the only kind of woman he knows, the kind he hates. Yes, I feel that I am just that kind—and I wonder if there is any other kind—and I get desperate and want to prove there is. I couldn’t have stood it there much longer. I should have done some crazy thing!... I don’t suppose you can understand—you aren’t a girl!”
3
He couldn’t understand; though it was true that as the train carried them nearer and nearer to his own parents, he became more and more uncomfortable.... The situation was different enough; Rose-Ann had felt that their prosperous air secured them against family criticism; Felix felt that same appearance as a reproach to his conscience....
“I’ve felt for years,” he said, “that I was an ungrateful child. I hate to go there to exhibit my prosperity to them. Of course, it isn’t so tremendous a prosperity—but it’s enough to make me feel ashamed. You know how hard it is for me to write to my mother; and I hardly ever can bring myself to write except when I can send her a little money—as if, yes, as if in penance for my desertion of her!”
“Would you like to have her live with us?”
“No—I wouldn’t. I owe her too much, I couldn’t bear to be always reminded of the debt. It’s a debt that’s too huge—I never can pay it, and I try to forget it.”
“The thought that she loves you more than you love her—is that what makes you feel ungrateful?”
“I suppose so. I do love her—”
“Of course you do, Felix!”
“More than I want to, perhaps! I can’t forget her, and I resent that. I want to get away from her.... She petted and spoiled me when I was a child. She wanted to keep me a child always. She kept me in skirts, she kept me wearing long curls—she made a baby of me. My whole life is in a sense trying to get away from that.... You’ll see—she’ll wait on me, ‘hand and foot,’ as they say—try to make me her baby again. She’ll anticipate my wishes, and jump up from the table to get something for me, and follow me about with her eyes—and I’ll get to feeling helpless, and then furious—and then I’ll say something cross to her, and be ashamed of myself.... Oh, well!”
“So you have queer feelings about your parents, too!”
The visit did not justify all these forebodings.... The house was the same as Felix had remembered it, only smaller; the same boxes of moss-roses grew beside the door, and peacocks as of old screamed in the yard; there was a little porch, with a wild-cucumber vine trained up to screen out the light, and on that porch his father and mother sat, the Sunday morning of their arrival, in rocking-chairs, his mother reading a paper through spectacles that sat slightly askew, his father smoking a fat pipe.... They were not so old as he had in several years of absence begun to picture them; his father’s plump little body looked surprisingly sturdy, and there was a youthful humour in his mother’s smile as she sat talking, unaware of her son’s approach....
The first greetings over, Felix’s two aunts appeared from within the house—really old people these, Felix thought, but still wearing their air of aggressive self-dependence. They had looked after their little farm for so many years, without any masculine assistance except from an occasional hired man, that they resented, somewhat Felix thought, his father’s presence there, as a slur on their own capacity for taking care of themselves. They treated him a little scornfully, as if, being a man, he were a rather helpless person, and more of a nuisance than a help. He understood this, and smiled genially and tolerantly at their remarks, he being secure in the knowledge that it took a man to run things and that the real boss of this establishment was himself.... Just before they were seated at Sunday dinner, he led Felix to a cupboard, and smilingly produced a bottle of whiskey. “Have a little something to improve your appetite?” he asked.
Felix poured himself a drink, and his father did the same, carefully raising the tumbler so as to let the light shine through the golden liquid, and smacking his lips after he had poured it down his throat—while Felix’s two aunts stonily ignored this masculine nonsense, and his mother looked on with an air of mild disapproval.
At dinner they talked about the crops; his father was happy in being a farmer again; happy, after years of increasing uselessness in town while his children were growing up, in being master of a situation, the real head of a household; happy, and boyishly active, despite his spells of rheumatism, of which he also discoursed seriously and uncomplainingly. He had had a bad spell this last winter—in fact they had all been bothered with it—but they had found a liniment which seemed to do some good. “Pretty powerful stuff!” he said. “I sometimes wondered which was the worst, that liniment or the rheumatism—but it appeared to do the work!”
With the dessert they came to the fortunes of Felix—briefly alluded to before, but saved to the last for thorough consideration. They wanted to know all about Felix’s job, or rather all about how important a personage he had become. Felix’s shame in his good fortune gradually disappeared as he realized how immensely proud they all were of him—how they hugged his success to their hearts and enjoyed it. It was as though his good fortune were their own!
4
Rose-Ann liked them immensely, and that night reproached Felix for never having told her what lovely people they were. She entered into their domestic life, busied herself in the kitchen, and displayed qualities as a cook which he had never, in their studio-life, realized that she possessed. Their little studio-dinners had been masterpieces in their way. But to see Rose-Ann coming in flushed and triumphant from the kitchen with one dish after another of an old-fashioned country dinner in her hands was a new experience.
Rose-Ann had smoked surreptitiously during her visit to her own home, merely wishing not to offend her aunt by any ostentatious indulgence of what that good lady regarded as a reprehensible practice; but here she did not smoke at all, even in their room at night. She did not want to do anything that Felix’s folks would not like, and was seriously concerned to secure their approval.... And she secured it—for who could resist Rose-Ann in her most buoyant mood?
The visit had not been as disturbing as he had expected; and yet he was glad to go.
“Felix,” said Rose-Ann, as they took the train back to Chicago, “I think I understand why we feel this way. It’s because all our lives—and this is the truth—we’ve scorned the older generation. And we are ashamed, coming back to face them, because we’ve nothing better—really—to show for our lives than they have.”
“I wonder?” he said.
“But we _can_ be happy in a way they knew nothing about, Felix. We can. And we shall!”
5
Then came their real vacation—a week’s walking trip in Wisconsin.
The night-boat carried them from Chicago to Milwaukee; and from thence, early in the morning, dressed now in their oldest clothes, and with packs on their backs, they set out happily on foot. They stopped by the roadside to make themselves a breakfast of eggs and bacon, cooked in the ten-cent frying pan that dangled from one corner of Felix’s pack; pausing again at mid-day for a luncheon of blackberries and raspberries gathered in some bramble-patch. At night they reached, in a drizzling rain that had accompanied them for the last hour of their journey, a town with an ugly little hotel, where they could at least dry their clothes, eat a poor dinner with a good appetite, and sleep, dog-tired and happy, from ten o’clock till dawn.
And thus onward, in the general direction of “the dells.” Most of the time they did not know just where they were going next, nor care; they took the most promising road.
The “dells” at last—steep ravines, miniature canyons, up which they went in the guide’s leaky little gasoline launch, landing to explore the quaint caverns in the rocks, dim-lighted by the daylight that sifted through the openings above.... And so back, by new roads, glad they had no map to take the surprise out of their journey.
Felix had never realized how much robust strength and endurance Rose-Ann had until they tramped those Wisconsin roads. They were not above taking a lift in some farmer’s wagon or passing automobile, if it promised to get them to a town with a hotel before nightfall; but, having come in sight of the town, if the night promised to be clear, they hunted up some promising spot and encamped there: for what was the use of carrying two heavy woollen blankets, if they were not going to sleep out under the stars by a camp-fire?
Felix’s old corduroys, splashed with kalsomine in all colours, caused him to be taken for an “artist.” At first this displeased him—but he soon discovered that all the world envies the artist, loves him, and wishes to take care of him. Old farmers, burly truck-drivers, delivery-boys, tourists, wanted to give them a lift, and offered them their best counsel as to where to go next. Hotel-keepers, grocers at whose shops they replenished their food supplies, and farmers’ wives at houses where they stopped till a shower passed over, talked to them with friendly eagerness. Felix perceived that a pair of foot-loose vagabonds with enough money in their pockets to pay for their bread and eggs and bacon, are fortunate beings, the world’s darlings, beamed on and approved by those who sleep under roofs and hold steady jobs and stay day after day in the same place—approved because they are living life as all men and women know it should be lived: if everybody cannot live that way themselves, they are glad to see somebody else who can!
As they tramped, Felix’s mind went back to the songs of vagabondia which he used to cherish, and then had rejected as romantic and foolish; and at night, beside their dying camp-fire, when Rose-Ann demanded poetry before she went to sleep, he would say for her the little fragments that he remembered:
“_Down the world with Marna, That’s the life for me! Wandering with the wandering rain Its unboundaried domain...._
“Mm—I forget. Anyway—
“_.... the joys of the road are chiefly these— A crimson touch on the hard-wood trees.... A vagrant’s morning, wide and blue, In early fall, when the wind walks, too.... A shadowy highway, cool and brown, Alluring up and enticing down.... A scrap of gossip at the ferry, And a comrade neither glum nor merry, Asking nothing, revealing naught, But minting his words from a fund of thought.... A keeper of silence eloquent...._
“Mm....
“_With only another mile to wend, And two brown arms at the journey’s end...._
“I forget the rest of it.”
“You are forgetting everything that’s important!” Rose-Ann complained. “I’ll bet you know by heart Professor Humptydink’s law of dramatic crisis.”
“No—I’ve stopped that foolishness, thanks to you. If I ever write anything, it will be just what I want to write—and the devil take the Great American Public!”
“No, Felix—that’s wrong, too. It’s what one really wants to say that other people really like—I’m sure of it. Can’t you trust yourself?”
“I don’t know,” he said, looking up at the pale moon through a tangle of leafy branches. “Somehow I have the notion that anything I want to do will be foolish.... I used to trust in myself. I used to believe this sort of thing:—it’s by Bliss Carman, the man that wrote the vagabond poems.—
“‘_Keep thou, by some large instinct, Unwasted, fair and whole, The innocence of nature, The ardor of the soul—_
“_And through the realms of being Thou art at liberty To pass, enjoy, and linger, Inviolate, and free!_’”
“And don’t you believe that now, Felix?”
“That I can do as I please, if—”
“If it’s what you really please to do! Yes, Felix. You can have any happiness you ever want, if you really want it—not cynically, nor because other people seem to have it, but because it _belongs_ to you. I believe that. I don’t intend ever to keep from doing anything I want to do. And I shan’t be ashamed of myself, either. Do you remember the girl-goldsmith I told you about, in the story?”
“I remember her very well,” said Felix. “I know one of her speeches almost by heart. ‘The only sins are telling lies, and not keeping one’s body clean, and being careless about one’s work—ugly things. Beautiful things—the things people sometimes call sins—aren’t sins at all. Being in love isn’t ever a sin.’”
“Yes,” said Rose-Ann dreamily. “I want us to be like that—not afraid of life, or of any of the beautiful things life brings us.”
Well ... yes ... it sounded simple enough. To live life beautifully, and not be afraid! He had believed in that once. But now—or had he really ceased to believe it possible? At this moment, in the moonlight, it did not seem so absurd....
“Good night, Felix.”
“Good night, Rose-Ann.”
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XXXV. Civilization
1
THEY came back refreshed to civilization—to the studio, to a whirl of exciting parties, to books and ideas, to the problems of ambition, to the Chronicle office and a theatrical season just opening with hectic announcements of “Alias Jimmy Valentine,” “The Case of Becky,” “The Pink Lady” and “The Chocolate Soldier.”...
Hawkins was still in New York, assisting in the selection of a cast for his play—which to Felix’s complete astonishment (for Hawkins had not confided anything to him as to its theme or character) was announced as “Tootsie-Wootsie.” A farce!—with, as it further appeared, honeymoon couples and wrong bedrooms.... What? Hawkins, the serious Hawkins, who had so often called upon American drama to do its duty and deal with “the problems of the time”—he the author of a play called “Tootsie-Wootsie”?
The news of Hawkins’s play brought up in Felix’s mind a practical question which so far he had refused to consider. It had been exciting enough to be the acting dramatic critic of the Chronicle; he had not wanted to look ahead any further. But when one day at lunch he ran into Jennison (“the dean of the critical fraternity”), Jennison asked him, “Are you going to do the plays for the Chronicle?” “Yes, while Hawkins is away,” Felix told him. “Does Hawkins know it?” “Yes—he asked me to.” “Well,” said Jennison, smiling, “then he’s a damn fool!” That was old Jennison’s way of paying him an extravagant compliment. It was in its way an accolade. It was an initiation, by the grand past master, into the “critical fraternity.” And now Felix felt obliged to consider the question of Hawkins and Hawkins’s play in its bearing upon his own career.
If Hawkins’s play failed—and most plays did fail—Hawkins would return and resume his post on the Chronicle. In that event, Felix would be relegated to doing the odd jobs that Hawkins did not want to do. He might even be put back to regular reporting. After all, the present arrangement merely provided for a dramatic critic in Hawkins’s absence; it was not likely they would want two men continuously on the job. They had given Felix another raise that fall; and when Hawkins came back, he would have to earn his salary doing regular reporter’s work again, doubtless—if he _could_ earn it that way. It was rather a dismal prospect.... Felix hoped fervently that the serious-minded Hawkins would somehow, improbably, turn out a success as a farceur.
But if it was a success, and Hawkins resigned his position, how could Felix know he would get it? After all, he was only twenty-three years old. And though by a fluke he was actually _being_ for a while the dramatic critic of a great Chicago newspaper, the idea that he should retain this position and be confirmed in its title was incredible. He wished that he were not so fatally young....
Well—he could only wait and see what happened.
It was at this period that he began wearing a moustache—a short, well-defined moustache, aloof from the upper lip, trim and straight. Nothing boyish, certainly about that moustache!
2
Felix and Rose-Ann had come back to Chicago eager to see Clive Bangs again. They had been away just long enough to discover, in apparently all human beings except themselves, a fundamental lack of interest in all the ideas which most occupied their minds. Talk, with people in general, was limited to an exchange of views, if not on the weather, at least on things equally obvious. They felt the need for talk, and so did Clive; and all at once, after what now seemed to them these months of merely casual friendship, they became inseparable. The three of them lunched together daily at a corner table in a little Hungarian restaurant where they found what they considered the best food in Chicago—a fond trio, laughing, talking excitedly, arguing with the mingled gravity and extravagance of youth, sometimes rehearsing passionately in private the opinions which they would state tomorrow somewhat more soberly in print, and again discussing each other’s characters with ironic humour—perpetually criticizing and taking delight in each other’s criticism of life.
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XXXVI. “We Needs Must Know That in the Days to Come”
1
THEY had come back to civilization. But—unwittingly, at first—into this life of talk, of ideas, of theory, of vague ambition and of self-congratulatory superiority to the mere plain facts of life, they brought somewhat more than a memory of their vagabond adventuring. In their brief and joyous return to nature they had surrendered themselves to its purposes more deeply than they had been aware. But presently Rose-Ann announced that she would have to visit the doctor of whom Dorothy Sheridan had once told her. Rose-Ann did not say that she was with child—that phrase was never used between them in their few discussions of the incident. For that phrase would have implied that she intended to bear a child. It was discussed rather as an accident, an annoying but not serious interruption to their plans. Rose-Ann took the matter, not lightly, but in a soberly practical spirit. And so convincing was her tone that it did not occur to Felix to question the sincerity of her apparent attitude.
Secretly he was troubled. In spite of Rose-Ann’s confidence, he distressed himself with what appeared to be needless forebodings. It seemed to be true that real life was, in this matter as in others, different from fiction. In a story, this would have been a desperate situation; but in actual fact it appeared to have no such gravity. He hoped that was indeed the truth; and, afterward, it appeared that she had been right.... He wondered why he had been so absurd about it!
She would never know how absurd.... He would never tell her how, one night, walking alone along a dark stretch of lake shore, his courage had failed him utterly; how all the terrible things of which he had ever heard had rushed into his mind, filling and flooding it with a kind of nameless remorse, until he had ceased to be a man, and had become a mere terrified child—and how in the influence of that guilty terror he had sunk on his knees in the wet sand, praying to a God he did not believe in, whispering like a child to a kind Father: “God, don’t let anything happen to her!” He had not thought of her then as a free woman acting wisely in her own right—no, but only as a helpless and lovely girl, his beloved, given him to cherish and protect, whom he had let go down to the very gates of death—in vain! Not in the terrible triumph of creation, but meaninglessly.... And he prayed: “Give me back Rose-Ann!”...
No, he would never tell her what a fool he had been.
2
And he would never tell her—for he had safely forgotten now—the moment when, knowing that their lives could go on now as before, they had walked again in the Park under great trees that lifted their shivering glooms to the sky. Through the bushes had come the gleam of motor-cars that glided swiftly down the avenue. “You were a dear to worry,” she had said. “But you needn’t any more. Everything’s quite all right now.”
He had looked at her, cut through with a strange unreal pain, his whole mind quivering. Forces that he did not understand were hurling themselves on his heart, crushing and stunning it. He breathed with difficulty. He looked away from her. He could not speak.
But one forgets things like that. It would not be pleasant to remember them. Nor is it hard to forget unpleasant things in the midst of civilization, with its friendships, parties, talk, books and theories.
So, looking at life realistically, Felix felt that he and Rose-Ann were very fortunate, after all.
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XXXVII. Symbols
1
ROSE-ANN had become restless again. Once more she threatened to go out and get a job. Books no longer contented her; and if she had secretly cherished, as Felix had thought, some dreams of writing, they had vanished, like her notebook, which was no more to be seen. They gave wild parties, extended the number of their friends, and went to dinner-parties, where Rose-Ann shone as always, and even Felix began to be able to take care of himself. She went to the theatre with Felix and took down his criticisms on her typewriter from dictation, as she had a year ago. But these activities did not quite content her volatile spirit.
Her restlessness expressed itself, delightfully enough, in a resumption of the endless midnight talks which had marked the first period of their married intimacy. Their daylight hours together now seemed never to suffice them for talking. Those hours were too filled up with work, and play, and friends. During the day a thousand ideas, observations, comments, stories, had been stored away by each for the other’s benefit. A glance at dinner had meant: “Did you see that? Yes—we’ll talk about it tonight.” In these gatherings, however friendly and outspoken, something was always left unsaid, reserved especially for each other. The heart of every occasion was in its midnight aftermath, in the long wakeful hours in bed, remembering, criticizing, laughing, talking, talking.... Marriage had come to mean above all else the peculiar magic of that intimacy. Sometimes her voice would come mysteriously out of the dark at his side, and again the moonlight would creep in over the roofs and tease the scene with its glamour. Their beds, in summer two little oases of coolness in the sultry night, became in winter warm-coverleted citadels against the cold—two little friendly islands, with two voices floating pleasantly back and forth. “Light me another cigarette,” Rose-Ann would say sleepily. Tired, but kept awake by all they had to tell each other, the mere thoughts and incidents of the day made precious by this re-living of them together, they lay and talked out their hearts.
2
“Felix strikes me as rather paintable. Could you spare him a few afternoons for a sitting now and then? I mean, some time this winter? I’m getting interested in doing portraits again.”
“I’d love to have you!”
Dorothy Sheridan had come back from her fishing village, and a little trip abroad to boot, and she and the Fays were dining in a little restaurant to which she had taken them—not very far from their studio, a little Italian place frequented by artists, where the food was good and the prices low. The men one saw there wore soft collars, like Felix’s own, sometimes turned up to flare about the chin, sometimes open at the neck; one of the girls at the tables wore a Russian smock, like Dorothy Sheridan, and all of them seemed, like her, comfortably uncorseted. They all seemed to know each other, and each new person who came greeted the whole roomful. It was a friendly place.
Felix was rather amused at having his afternoons asked for and given away without his being consulted. But he was flattered by the invitation. He had never been painted, and he considered it a distinction.
“It will be a bore,” Dorothy warned him. “You’ll get awfully tired of it before I’m through. But I’ll do you in half a dozen sittings, I promise you, or give it up. Give him a cup of coffee, before he comes. I don’t talk to my subjects, and they are likely to fall asleep!”
They had been to Dorothy Sheridan’s studio that afternoon, and looked at her paintings and sketches. The paintings were, with one or two exceptions, in a vivid, splashing style that Felix liked. “I’ve changed my style since going to Paris,” she said. “These things are what they call over there Post-Impressionist. I’ll do you in my best Cezanne-Matisse manner, Felix, with some variations all my own. You won’t know yourself!”
Rose-Ann had been most impressed by some of Dorothy’s old sketches, particularly a series of lovely nudes done in pencil with a hard, vibrant line. Dorothy picked one of them out and gave it to Rose-Ann. “Here’s one that looks like you,” she said, appraising Rose-Ann’s figure with a judicious eye. “You can use it for a book-plate if you like.”
It was like Rose-Ann, Felix thought, when she pinned it on the wall that night—it had the same firm and delicate contours, the same sweet livingness of a body that is made for movement, for action, for intense and poignant use. The figure in the drawing was poised in the hesitant instant before flight, with head turned to look backward, and the whole body ready at the next moment either to relapse again into reassured repose or to put all its force into some wild dash for freedom. And somehow that too reminded him of Rose-Ann—of Rose-Ann’s soul.
Rose-Ann was looking at the picture with eyes in which some purpose fulminated darkly.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“That I shall never wear corsets again! It’s really absurd, isn’t it? To imprison one’s body in such a thing as that.... I’m going to burn mine up—now!” And presently, in her chemise and stockings, she solemnly knelt before the Franklin stove and laid the offending article upon the live coals.
“The last of my conventions!” she said, as if to herself.
And then, as it commenced to smoulder, and an acrid odour of burnt rubber emerged, she wrinkled her nostrils and put her thumb and finger to them. “It thmells bad!” she said. And reflectively: “I suppose conventions always do, at the end.... Well, it’s gone now, and my body is free.—Gone forever, leaving nothing but a ... faint unpleasant odour, shall I say?—behind.... Felix—would you mind if I cut off my hair?”
“Cut off—!”
“Short, you know. Like Dorothy Sheridan’s. I’ve always wanted to. And I never quite had the nerve. Living here, it seems only natural. You wouldn’t mind?”
She loosened her hair and it fell about her shoulders, like a flame. “I think it would curl if it were cut. It did when I was a little girl.”
“We’ve no scissors,” said Felix, practically—deferring in his own mind the question of whether he would like her hair cut short or not. He did not know. It would look well—there was no doubt at all of that. He had always wondered at the foolish vanity of women, in putting up with the inconvenience of long hair. He had felt that long hair was in some way a badge of woman’s dependence on man, a symbol of her failure to achieve freedom for herself. And yet ... when it came to Rose-Ann’s hair—
Rose-Ann read his face as a wife can. “No, I suppose not,” she said, and sighed. “No scissors! Well, there’s always something to prevent one from being rash. In the morning I shan’t want to—because I’m going out to look for a job....”
Felix smiled. “Wolf! wolf!” he mocked gently. He had heard that threat of a job too often to be alarmed about it now.
“You’ll see,” said Rose-Ann gaily.
3
Felix was accustomed, by masculine prerogative, to get up first on cold mornings and shake down the fire and make the coffee. But this morning, having dreamed that he had arisen and performed these duties (a very realistic dream—he had heard the noise of the poker among the coals and smelled the fragrance of hot coffee!) he awoke to see Rose-Ann coming toward him with a cup and saucer, on a lacquered tray.
“Your morning draught, my lord!”
“Rose-Ann!” he said angrily. She should have let him make that coffee....
She knelt and offered him the cup, with the air of a page-boy. Then it was that he saw that her hair was shorn. Short bronze locks fell clustering about her face in tiny curls, making it boyish, and yet, it seemed, more girlish than ever. She turned sideways as he stared, and tilted her head. For the first time its proud contour stood fully and beautifully revealed. “Isn’t that better than an old top-knot?” she said.
“But how—” he began.
“Borrowed scissors from neighbour,” she replied. “What are neighbours for, if not to depend on in an emergency?”
“Why is this an emergency?” he demanded, still withholding his approval. “Couldn’t you wait and go to the barber?” Some of the edges, he noted, were rather jagged.
“No, Felix. Don’t you remember Browning’s poem about the Statue and the Bust? One puts off things. ‘So days grew months, years.’ Moral: do it now.—But do you like me this way, Felix?”
“Of course I like you.” And then, since he did, he added: “Tremendously!”
“You—you approve?”
“Yes, but what of that? Can’t you do what you like whether I approve or not? Aren’t you a free woman?” he teased her.
“That’s what I said to myself. And so I did it. But—I’m glad you like it, Felix, because—because I’m not sure whether I do or not!”
He laughed. “It will grow again.”
“No—I shan’t let it grow again. I’m going to like it, I know—eventually; perhaps very soon. It’s just at first.... But I suppose that’s the way with freedom!... Drink your coffee, Felix, before it gets cold. I’ll bring mine over there, too. Do you love me—very much? Look out—you’ll spill the coffee!”
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XXXVIII. The Portrait of Felix Fay
1
ROSE-ANN’S bobbed hair was generally applauded. There were more studio parties. Felix frivoled, theorized, and wrote jocund dramatic criticisms, with the thought of Hawkins always at the back of his mind.
Hawkins’s play had been cast, re-cast, rewritten, and finally tried out “on the dog,” that is to say, an audience at Atlantic City. And something was still wrong. So the cast had been dismissed, the scenery stored, and Hawkins was desperately rewriting his play for the seventeenth time—this time in collaboration with an expert farce-builder. And Felix remained for a while longer the acting dramatic critic of the Chronicle. He figured that if enough misfortunes happened to Hawkins’s farce, his own tenure in office might last long enough to entitle him to it in the end. With the most amiable feelings toward Hawkins, he nevertheless fervently wished “Tootsie-Wootsie” the worst of bad luck.
Meanwhile, early in January, he began having his portrait painted by Dorothy Sheridan.
2
Having one’s portrait painted was decidedly an experience. When he came for his first sitting, he found Dorothy Sheridan in a big kitchen apron, with her sleeves rolled up, looking more as if she were going to cook a meal than paint a picture. She had called “Come!” to his knock, and when he entered she went on scraping the paint from a palette with no more than a casual nod to him. He put his hat under his arm, and shifting his stick to the crook of his elbow, took out a cigarette and lighted it; then turned and looked curiously and hesitantly about the room.
“There! Keep that! Just that way!” Dorothy Sheridan called. “That’s very good. Very characteristic. No, just as you were. That’s right—relax a little.”
She gave him these orders from half way across the large studio room, where she stood in a brusque commanding attitude. Felix obeyed.
“One minute!” And she ran up the steps to the mezzanine behind and above Felix, and presently he heard from overhead the swish of falling cloth. He half turned, and saw that she had flung over the edge of the mezzanine railing a long piece of rose-coloured silk, which reached the floor behind him.
“That’s for a background,” she said, and Felix resumed his pose.
She came back, pushed out an easel not far from him and a little to one side, and then took up a position at a distance from both him and the easel, armed with a brown crayon. She looked at him intently, with wide eyes, bending a little, with head forward and face uplifted. “Mm,” she said, reflectively, and walked swiftly up to the easel and commenced to draw upon the blank canvas with swift, vigorous strokes of her crayon. After a little, she walked back to her former place, resumed her wide-eyed stare, and then returned once more to the canvas.
After half an hour of this, looking at her subject and drawing on the canvas in turn, she threw down her crayon. “Can you remember that pose?” she asked.
Of course Felix could remember it. It was a pose into which he fell naturally. “Yes,” he said. “May I look?”
“If you want to,” she said indifferently, taking off her apron.
Felix strolled over and looked at the crayon sketch on the canvas. It was a bold caricature of himself, poised hesitantly with stick and cigarette, blithe, debonair, and above all a figure of indecision. Was that himself?
“That’s all for today,” said the painter. “Same time, same day, next week. Don’t forget.”
He went away, startled and puzzled.
Next week, as he came in, eager for one more look at that disconcerting caricature, he found the artist painting it out with a thin grey wash.
“Why do you do that?” he asked.
“Oh, that was only to get the pose,” she said. “This time I want to get the likeness.”
The portrait seemed to Felix completed at the end of an hour, when she declared the sitting over and took off her apron. It was utterly different from the crayon caricature which had preceded it on the canvas. Out of the misty grey background emerged a face and two hands, delicately painted, and catching the quizzical expression of mouth and eyes and the rather limp gesture of the hands, but in a manner which did not carry more than a few feet from the canvas. Moreover, this painting was utterly unlike the other things of hers that he had seen. He wondered, but the painter had hung up her apron and was looking at a portfolio of drawings, indifferent to his existence, so he withdrew.
The next time provided still a new surprise. The painter had just washed out the face and hands on the canvas with turpentine, and was scraping off the paint when he came in. Was this a confession of failure? or some new way of painting? or simply the way all painters went to work?
He was pretty certain, however, that the method pursued in this present sitting was extraordinary; for this time the painter measured his head with a pair of calipers, up and down and in every direction, and noted down the figures on a piece of paper and regarded them thoughtfully. Then she came up to him and felt of his skull with her hands; it was not in the least like a caress—it was exactly as if she were a surgeon, and he were a patient, about to be operated upon.
“Bones!” she said, as if that explained everything, and went to work on her canvas with a brush dipped in blue paint.... The result, which Felix viewed with a very queer sensation at the end of the sitting, was a skeleton-like figure done in blue, with arms and legs like pieces of steel machinery, and a face with dark blue eye sockets and a pale blue jaw.... “Lines of force,” explained the painter, and he went away not knowing whether to laugh or not.
This skeleton was obliterated at the beginning of the fourth sitting, as the other stages of the picture had been, and Felix wondered, what next? Colour, it seemed, this time! Great splashes and daubs of colour, put on anyhow, spread out with a palette-knife, or the painter’s thumb—a riot, an orgy of rose and green and purple-brown, with only a suggestion of Felix amid the chromatic swirls....
Felix described each of these stages to Rose-Ann with zest, and went with infinite curiosity to every new sitting....
The fifth time there was a blank new canvas awaiting him, and when he asked what had become of the other, she replied: “Burned it up. All covered with paint. Always use a fresh canvas if you can afford it.”
She emerged from her preoccupation with her palette long enough to become aware of his surprise, and to explain further:
“All that was just getting acquainted with my subject. Now we’re ready to begin.”
And taking up her position, a little closer this time to him and the easel, she bent upon him that wide-eyed, impersonal stare.... Felix was rather in awe of her by this time. She had ceased to seem to him the careless, slangy bohemian girl that he had first known. She was an expert and delicate technician. Those four portraits in succession had stunned his imagination. She seemed to him almost superhuman—with a little of the flavour of black magic in her. That wide-eyed impersonal stare was part of the effect. At first she seemed merely a pretty girl lifting her face to yours and looking at you, steadily; and if one was not used to returning the wide-eyed stare of a pretty girl, one became a little embarrassed—there is something so intimate about this meeting and touching through the eyes; one seems to be let in, unreservedly, to some mysterious depth. But, as the stare continued, piercing you, probing you, seeing you with calm indifference, you became uneasy and almost afraid—you wanted to look away, and that seemed cowardly and evasive, so you kept on staring back as long as you could ... until those dark blue eyes of hers seemed profound gulfs over which you hung, dizzy, tottering, about to drown.... And then, saying “Mm,” she went over to her canvas again and put on a little dab of paint. She had probably been considering carefully whether or not she had made your nose too long!
3
Felix raved in this fashion to Rose-Ann, who heard him with interest and in silence till he had finished.
“And what does the portrait look like now?” she asked.
“Well—very much like any other portrait, I must say. A little bolder, and lots of colour, but nothing startling. Or perhaps I’ve become so used to startling things by now that this seems a little tame.”
The last sitting was a prolonged one, in which the painter looked at him for what seemed hours at a time, and in which he could not rid himself of the perturbing conviction that she was seeing into his soul.... He was very tired when she finished at last—the sitting had as a matter of fact taken two hours, with only a few momentary rests—and Felix was in a mood of weariness and self-distrust when he went over to look at the completed portrait. Perhaps that accounted for what he saw:
Painted with an exquisite and mordant irony—with stick and cigarette, uncertainly halting, as if in front of life, the head tilted with a quirk of inquiry, the face curious and evasive, with something that was almost boldness in the eyes, something that was almost courage in the chin—Felix Fay, observant, indecisive, inadequate, against a rose-coloured background.
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XXXIX. A Date on the Calendar
1
THE memory of that portrait left Felix bewildered and irritated. It seemed that no one else saw in it quite what he had seen. Rose-Ann praised it—but with some reserve which made him feel that she did not really like it. Clive was delighted with the certainty with which the painter had captured his characteristic gesture.... Only he himself, apparently, saw it as a criticism, profound and harsh....
The painter herself least of all saw it as a criticism. “Is that what you really think of me?” he had asked her.
“I don’t think when I paint pictures,” she had said. “I’m too busy working out the problems of form and colour. Don’t you like it?”
“I like it as a picture. I don’t like it as a—a prophecy,” he said.
“A prophecy? Oh, there you come with your literary interpretations. Can’t you forget that stuff, and learn to look at a picture as a picture?”
She had ceased to be the Sybil, and become again the careless bohemian girl-artist, talking the talk of her tribe.... Pictures were just pictures—yes, he had heard that before.
Morose and fretful, he walked up and down in the studio in the evening, rejecting Rose-Ann’s plans for other entertainment; or sat at his desk, exasperatedly trying to force himself to begin work on some half-formed idea for a play. He was angry at himself for being the indecisive, inadequate figure of that painting. He saw now what being an artist meant—the calm energy, the technical erudition, the vast patience that was needed. He wished to be that kind of person. And the more he wished it, the more weak and petulant he seemed to himself. And what must he seem to Rose-Ann? She must despise him in her heart....
For a week he fidgeted and fumed about the studio, ashamed of his childish behaviour and yet unable to control it. He wondered why Rose-Ann did not tell him what she really thought of him.... It was as if he were trying, by a more and more outrageous parade of his weakness, to force her to break silence and speak out.
Late one afternoon, when he had crumpled up the sheet of paper on which he had been trying to write, and thrown it on the floor with a silly gesture of failure, she put down her sewing and came up to him.
She put her hand on his shoulder.
“What is the matter, Felix, dear?” she asked.
He drew himself away. “I wish you would let me alone,” he said.
“Very well,” Rose-Ann said gently, and went and put on her hat and cloak and left the studio.
2
For a moment he sat there, looking at the door through which she had gone with a sudden sense of utter desolation.
They had had quarrels before, but this was different. He had driven her away.... It would serve him right if she never came back....
Why had he been making such a fool of himself? Why had he been behaving like a silly child?
And all at once he felt that he knew the answer.... He was worrying about that damned job of his.
Rose-Ann had taken it for granted that he was secure in his position. He had pretended to weigh his chances, pro and con.... And all the while he had been deeply convinced that he was about to lose his momentary distinction. Hawkins’s play was being tried out again, this week. It would fail, he would give up his foolishness, return to Chicago, and Felix would be back precisely where he had started. That, of course, though he had not told Rose-Ann, was why he had felt she was right in not wanting to have children right away.
It was this impending crisis in his career that secretly worried him. For nearly a year he had been a dramatic critic—and he was about to lose his job. It was a degradation intolerable to contemplate, but impossible to prevent. How could he prevent it? In romantic novels, the hero wins his spurs. But there were, so to speak, only one pair of critical spurs at the disposal of the Chronicle, and they belonged to Hawkins! In a magazine story, Felix would go over to another paper and get a better job. But Felix disbelieved in his ability to hold with any distinction any ordinary reporter’s job. By some fluke he had made good as a dramatic critic. He saw people on the elevated turning the paper inside out to read first of all his column about the new play. He knew he had made good. But—dramatic editorships do not grow on blackberry bushes; dramatic critics die in their shoes at an advanced age. Hawkins’s folly had given him such a chance as would never happen again in a hundred years.
A chance? A brief hour of glory. An hour for Rose-Ann to be proud of him, to believe that he had risen by force of character to these heights, that he would continue to rise.... She would find out that it had been mere luck. She would find out that he could not even keep a job as a dramatic critic, let alone become a playwright. She would discover him for what he was—a weak, helpless, scared child.
That was why he had been behaving like a fool before her—to show her beforehand that he didn’t amount to anything.
Suddenly he commenced to laugh. The mood of the last week had vanished—it merely seemed funny now. Another attack of moon-calfishness, that was all! That painter-girl had awed him with her astounding technique, made him feel incompetent and helpless—thrown him back into a state of adolescent self-distrust. Yes, it was her fault, the pretentious hussy! And what, after all her fussing, did that picture of hers amount to? An ordinary portrait, that was all, with a touch of easy caricature in it.... Damn her!
And what if Hawkins did come back and take away his laurels? There were other jobs in the world. If not in Chicago, then—
Yes, in New York....
It didn’t make any difference what happened. He had been silly to worry about things. He would never worry again about anything. Rose-Ann was right. One must live fearlessly....
He wished Rose-Ann would come back....
3
The door opened, and she was there. He sprang up.
She shut the door behind her and put her back against it, and her hands, as if to support herself.
Felix stood staring at her in surprise. She was pale, and she had a heroic air, somehow. She tried to speak—twice—and made no sound, only a movement of the throat and lips.
“What’s the matter?” he asked anxiously, going up to her.
She put out her hands, as if to hold him away, and let them rest on his shoulders. She looked at him earnestly.
“Felix,” she said. “Felix.... I know what is troubling you.”
“Yes?” he said, confusedly.
“It’s that girl. You’re in love with her, Felix. Well—I keep my promise. You—you can—”
“What girl?” he asked, amazed.
“Dorothy!” she cried. “You’re in love with her. I knew it all along.”
“What!”
“Yes. I can’t bear to see you unhappy. I’d rather—”
He laughed and took her in his arms. “Little fool!” he said. “Little silly child! Dear little idiot!”
She burst out crying, and put her head on his shoulder.
“I’m not in love with anybody, you goose, except you,” he said. “What made you think I was? I suppose I have been acting crazy. I know I have. But it’s a different kind of craziness. I was worrying about—my job.”
“Your job?” She looked up from his shoulder. “Have you heard already? I just left Clive at the corner.”
“Clive? Heard what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He was coming down to tell you the news. You don’t know it? Well—a telegram came this afternoon. From Hawkins. He’s resigned. And you’ve been appointed in his place.”
“Really!”
“Yes, of course. I knew that was what would happen. But Felix—are you sure?” She meant about Dorothy.
“You’re crazier than I am, Rose-Ann—that’s all.”
“Well—” and she dried her tears. “I guess I am a fool.... But Felix—I left Clive at the corner drug-store. I was very mysterious, and said he mustn’t come here to the studio, but that he was to wait there for me.”
“What for?”
“I—told him I wanted him to help me celebrate an—occasion. But—”
“What kind of occasion?” Felix asked sternly. “Did you tell him any of this nonsensical—”
“No, Felix, I didn’t tell him anything. But—but we can still celebrate an occasion, Felix.”
“You mean my job?”
“No—I mean the—the anniversary of our marriage....”
“You poor abused darling! What an idiot I am!” And he took her in his arms again.
“I’ll wash my face, and be sensible now,” she said. “You go and get Clive, and—and we’ll celebrate!”
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XL. Celebration
1
THERE was something puzzling to Felix about that celebration....
Surely no marriage anniversary had ever before been marked in quite this fashion—by a wife’s offer to give up her husband’s love to another woman!
Already Rose-Ann appeared to have forgotten that incident, as she sat, flushed and happy, at the table with Felix and Clive in the gay restaurant they had chosen. Or no, not forgotten it; for it might perhaps be that very memory, even more than the occasion itself, which made her so radiant—that secret, giving to a commonplace occasion a special quality of romantic uniqueness!
So Felix, watching her, thought he read her mind. And he was perturbed. She had enjoyed that fictitious renunciation. She had needed the taste, as it were, of bitterness, to savour their happiness. She loved him; and she had played with the idea of losing his love.... To have faced that danger—yes, to have faced it, even more than to have come off safely—intoxicated her. There was a new light in her eyes, a dancing light of joyous and reckless courage, a new pride in the toss of her head with its cluster of red-gold curls....
He felt that to her it was not enough to be happy; her happiness must be snatched from the jaws of peril. She was grateful to him, not for being in love with her after all—but for having given her occasion for a moment to think otherwise!
A strange creature to have for a wife, he meditated, watching her. She was more lovely tonight than she had ever been, he thought.... And by what bond did he hold this strange and lovely creature by his side? Not by the tie of any promise. She had made him no promises.... There was no security in their relationship; she did not want security! She wanted adventure; and so long as their marriage was an adventure—!
That was what they were celebrating—not the mere passage of one year of a lifelong marriage, but the beginning of another year of rash adventure.... And in what curious and fantastic ways would their love be tested in that year to come? He wondered....
2
“Have you heard about McQuish?” Clive was saying to Rose-Ann.
“No? What?” she asked.
“I told you,” said Felix, “that he had had a row with the Old Man over a book review he wrote.”
“Oh, yes, so you did. And that he’s talking of leaving to write a novel.”
“Chicago moves in a mysterious way its wonders to perform,” said Clive. “Do you remember, Felix, when you came on the paper a year or so ago?—McQuish was the Marvellous Boy, then. The Old Man was proud of him. He could write whatever he liked.... And now the Old Man reads every word he writes with a suspicious eye. They had this row last week; and it’s the beginning of the end.... I know: I had my day a little earlier than McQuish; now it’s all I can do to get along. That’s what happens to young intellectuals in Chicago. They are fed up on praise and petting for a year or two; and then they get thrown out on their necks. And a darn good thing, too! Otherwise we would stay here and write fiddling things for the daily papers all our lives. But now McQuish will quit and write a novel; and if I have any sense, I will do the same.”
“And my turn will come next, you mean?” Felix asked.
“Not for a while.... I’ve been trying to figure the thing out. Felix came here, you know, scared to death of Chicago; he can’t believe yet in his good luck! He didn’t really believe he was going to get Hawkins’s job. Everybody else knew he was slated for it.... When you go back to the office tomorrow, Felix, the Old Man will give you a cigar and tell you what a fine fellow you are. And it will take him all of a year to discover that you aren’t a fine fellow.... We are a deceptive lot, we young intellectuals; the powers that be think they can use us in their business; and it’s some time before they wake up to discover that we are playing a game of our own.... I give you a year at least to flourish in, Felix! And make the most of it—for about this time next year you will be pulling up stakes and departing elsewhere. What do you think, Rose-Ann?”
“I don’t care,” said Rose-Ann. “So long as things keep happening!”
3
They had said good-night to Clive and came back to the studio. Rose-Ann turned to Felix suddenly, just inside the closed door.
“You remember what I told you here—a little while ago,” she began.
“Yes,” he said, doubtfully.
She looked at him earnestly. “I meant it, you know,” she said.
“Oh—that!”
“Yes.... I’m terribly glad it wasn’t true, what I thought—about you and Dorothy. But if it had been—!”
“Don’t let’s talk about it,” he said uncomfortably.
“But Felix!” she protested.
“Well?”
“I know I was crying, and behaving like a silly idiot and everything—but you must believe that I meant what I said. Do you, Felix?”
Her face was grave now, her eyes solemn. Something in his heart leaped to rejoice in the courage that lay behind her utterance. He wanted to believe it, and at the same time he feared to believe it.
She read the doubt in his eyes.
“You don’t believe me?” she said. “If the time ever comes to prove it, Felix—”
He smiled. “We’ll cross our bridges when we come to them,” he said.
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