CHAPTER XXII

There was no doubt that at the start the break meant peace to Cecily. That was what surprised her so much. She had tortured herself in advance with the thought of those nervous stresses which she imagined would follow Dick’s leaving. But they did not materialize. There were a few very bad nights at first. Then came a sleep of exhaustion and after that a night when to her surprise she slept naturally and although, when she woke, the sick feeling of impending trouble and past trouble was still upon her, she was rested. There were hours of choking hysteria when it took more courage than she had ever guessed she had to keep from seeking Dick out, begging him to come back--on any terms--only to relieve the terrible loneliness without him. Days when she felt strangely light and queer and at the end of things as if the emptiness of her soul were swallowing her up; days when the sight of her own strange, strainedly sad eyes and thin face horrified her. The physical pain and exhaustion which went with the mental struggle seemed sometimes unbearable. The children looked strange and seemed remote at times. And yet, little by little, usage, duties, routine began to pull her back to normal. Her emotions wore themselves out battering against her resistance and she commenced to live again.

Half life, she told herself, without sparkle, with no joy, but none the less ordered. She commenced to read a little and the ability to focus her mind on an impersonal situation came back. Reading was almost her only diversion. The few people whom she saw at her own home were her only companions and the only two of those who gave her real companionship were her stepfather and Agatha Ward, whose literary modernism had a kind of solace in it because it grouped her case with so many others. Not that she talked about her trouble to Agatha, but Agatha talked of life and of strange, new, shifting points of view to her. If Agatha had a point of approach to all the currents of life other than that of analysis she never showed it. Under her touch Cecily was able now and then to depersonalize herself, see herself as a “case”--as a situation created by the turmoil of modern things--and it invariably gave her some comfort. The moments of intellectual broadening did not last, but they helped.

Matthew she had not seen. He had written her a note which was brief and careful, asking her if there was anything that he could do for her and she had replied briefly:

“Nothing, thank you, Matthew. There is nothing for any one to do except be sorry for the fact that we are not always brave and wise. Come to see me when you can. Talking to you always helps me. Faithfully yours, Cecily Harrison.”

Matthew read that note again and again and then, not putting it into his pocket, perhaps for fear of the mocking eye of Fliss, he tore it across and dropped it thoughtfully into the wastebasket. He did not go to see her at once.

So with the routine, the care of the house and the increasingly interesting children, a month wore on. At the end of the month a letter from Dick came, enclosing a check for her usual allowance. She sent it back with a note which she tried to make not too curt, reiterating that she must live on her own money and that she had plenty. Then she went into her own room and there, with her check book and a pencil, made various budgets to figure out just how she could manage to cut her expenses to a fourth of their usual amount. That, it appeared, must be done--or if not she would have to take money from Dick or her stepfather. She wouldn’t do that, she was resolved. The decision not to take Dick’s money helped her self-respect enormously. If he was not to live with her she was not going to be supported by him. Dick’s incensed, insulted arguments on that point--that he had a right to support his children and that she had no right to prevent him--made no impression on the fixity of her decision.

“I couldn’t do it, Dick,” she told him, as they were trying to have a “calm” discussion a few days before he went. “Don’t you see that it would be shameful? You’re getting nothing from me--nothing from the children and there’s something in taking money from a man with whom you aren’t living that puts you in a sordid class.”

“But I did get so much--I did get everything----”

“You don’t owe anything for that; please don’t drag money into it, Dick. I couldn’t--I couldn’t ever take it. Love is a gift; children are a gift; you can’t settle for them in----”

“I’m not trying to,” cried Dick, “but don’t you see that for you and for them to get along without things that they have a right to have is ridiculous!”

But she was stubborn. She sent back his first check without an instant’s thought of changing her position, although expenses already were beginning to trouble her. That strength which her mother had known was in her had already begun to bolster up her actions and her resolves.

She took counsel with Ellen.

“Do you think that if I did the upstairs work and took all the care of the children we could get along with just you and a laundress? Now that the family is smaller and since we shall be very quiet we might be able to manage it, don’t you think so?”

“I’d be glad,” said Ellen. “There’s not so much work as there used to be and now that you are taking so much care of the babies those nurses have time heavy on their hands.”

So the nurse and the housemaid problem was solved for Cecily by her getting along without them and the extra activity which was necessary for her helped her to fill many hours which might have been terribly disconsolate. That saved a hundred dollars a month for her.

She scraped her budget closer and closer. Cards from exclusive shops showing children’s clothes or gowns for herself went into the wastebasket. She went to the public library instead of to the booksellers for her books. Yet, in spite of all she tried to do and all she actually did accomplish she could not cut far enough to make her little income cover expenses. She was running behind at the end of the first month. Recalculations made her do a little better for a week after that. Then the baby had a week’s illness of no particular seriousness, but Cecily found herself confronting a presumable bill from the child specialist which would throw her budget into chaos again. She used the thousand dollars her father had given her for Christmas to bring her checking account up to normal and that exhausted her cash reserves.

There was a certain interest and pleasure in working it out, however. Work was almost her only refuge and it was one which she sought with redoubled interest and comfort constantly.

The mind which had been latent for so long began to develop as it was trained upon real problems and as she made herself independent, her own protector and her own refuge.

The moments when she was panic-stricken for want of a refuge--when she needed Dick or her mother to solve things, to smooth life over--became fewer and fewer. It amazed her to find how dependent she had been, to see how many things Dick had taken off her hands. That he still wanted to do them she knew, for there were rather pathetic attempts to pay garage bills; a watchdog was presented to her by her father, but she somehow guessed from the phrasing of the note that came with it that it had been Dick’s thought and that her father wanted her to know it. Such things hurt. It wasn’t that it made her feel more hopeful about herself and Dick. But she usually wanted to feel that Dick was happy and benefited by leaving her, and such things made her wonder. Then in the bitter, contradictory hours when she did not want him to be happy and when the resentment at the wreck of her own happiness scourged her, she was angry that he should attempt even anonymous courtesies.

After a little the moods grew less bitter. But one bitterness never grew less. The sight of such frivolities as had wrecked Dick and herself, the mention of them, the sight of the people involved in them--could always bring back a rush of poison through her mind. That had cut her off completely from Della. Her mother’s house had changed. It was no longer the spacious, comfortable, somewhat quiet house of Mrs. Warner’s planning, at least not to Cecily, though a casual observer would have noticed few changes. Della had pervaded the house with herself. At first Cecily made a protest here and there, but her protests were against trifles and it was impossible to explain to her stepfather or to Walter why little things like irregular hours for meals, like the careless and indiscriminate use of linens (Della could not waste her time over a lot of sheets and pillow-cases, she said), were a violation of her mother’s spirit. Cecily felt that the men thought her trivial and she soon came seldom to the house now ruled by Della, except to bring the children to see Mr. Warner. Walter and she were rather definitely estranged. She came in one morning at eleven o’clock to find Walter eating breakfast in a bathrobe, weary, red-eyed and unshaven. He explained crossly and with an aggressive note of defense that they had been up until all hours. Cecily was silent and her glance as she looked at him and the disordered breakfast room was only discouraged, but it must have shamed Walter into bravado.

She was standing there when Della came in. Della was wearing an extravagant negligee and looking untidy, but delightfully pretty. At sight of Cecily she threw up her hands.

“Good Heavens, Cecily, this is no morning for you to drop in and catch us at our worst. We’ll shock her, Walter. Now don’t you scold him, Cecily. He was tired and I let him sleep.”

She settled down on the arm of Walter’s chair and he pushed back from the table, pulling her down into his arms. Disheveled and laughingly protesting, Della let him hold her. Cecily turned away, trying to be light.

“Too domestic a party for me. I only wanted to see if I could find the second volume of a novel father lent me. I’ll hunt for it?”

“Go ahead. Try his room if it isn’t in the library.”

Cecily left them and with the closing of the door, Della settled herself more comfortably.

“I think we really shocked her, dearie.”

“Nonsense,” said Walter, looking down at the bundle of lace and ribbons which should have been so alluring. “Nonsense.” He passed a hand over his chin and kissed her without much interest. “Get up, honey; I’ve got to get dressed.”

* * * * *

It was such little things which isolated Cecily. She did not go to her father’s house again for weeks. She was apologetic for being a drawback and yet she could not enter into so many of the things the others made their habits. The knowledge, too, that Della felt that Cecily had made a mess of things and that all her sympathies were with Dick kept her away. The thought of Della as her critic was intolerable to her pride.

Shut off from her own family, she was equally shut off from Dick’s mother. Mrs. Harrison had been away at the time of the actual break and she was humiliated by it all. Most seriously of all was she hurt by the fact that Dick had gone to his club and not home to her. When he did come to her he absolutely refused to discuss the situation. So Mrs. Harrison went to Cecily and found it equally hard to get information from her.

“You’re the talk of the town--you and Dick--and both of you mute. What is the trouble? Has Dick been misbehaving himself?”

“No,” answered Cecily. “No, indeed, Mrs. Harrison. It is just that we don’t seem very happy and I thought--we hoped it would be better for us if we separated.”

“But without a reason!”

“We don’t agree about marriage. It’s so impossible to explain.”

“Is this stuff I hear about your refusing to go into society true? Or is it true that Dick is enamored of this Mrs. Allenby?”

That struck fire. “It is quite true that Dick and I did not agree about the kind of society we cared to enter. What there is in any feeling for Mrs. Allenby is really for Dick to say, Mrs. Harrison.”

“It’s ridiculous. He’s not in love with that young woman.”

“He prefers her type of woman to what he calls the domestic type,” answered Cecily coldly. There was nothing in this little woman, so annoyed about scandal, to excite any pity or kindly feeling in her at all.

Mrs. Harrison rose, tapping her fingers nervously on her bag.

“It’s an extremely unfortunate situation. I would be prepared to give you every support, Cecily, if I believed that Dick had misbehaved himself at all. But if you have thrown him over, broken up his home for the sake of a--a theory, it is one of the most cruel and unnecessary things I have ever heard of. Men are men. They demand a little amusement. If you refuse to allow him that you must expect----”

“Please, Mrs. Harrison. There’s nothing to be gained by all this, surely.”

The little woman drove off, her angry, alert little head looking straight ahead through the window of her limousine.

“Didn’t Grandmother Harrison bring me anything?” asked Dorothea, running in a little too late to speak to her grandmother.

“Not to-day, dear. She was in a hurry.”

“She nearly always does,” said Dorothea, with some disappointment.

Cecily regarded her daughter with some worry as she climbed up to see if she could catch a glimpse of the departing car from the window. She often wondered how she was going to explain all this to the children. Would they understand or would they, like Della, blame her, or, like Mrs. Harrison and her father, think she was foolish?

“But I didn’t do it,” she protested to herself. “It was Dick who insisted. I couldn’t keep him from going. Unless I was willing to throw everything in life which seems worth while to me into the discard. Everything that is worth while to anybody. The standards of life that must be maintained.” She thought of Della, a mass of provocative lingerie. She did not want this sturdy little figure in blue linen to grow up to be like that. If one had to give up everything to prevent Dorothea’s becoming like that, it was worth it. The extravagance of her conclusions did not strike her as false just then. She topped her sacrifice with some self-glorification, and taking Dorothea out into the garden, played with her until dinner time.

But in the empty evening she found the self-glory fading. She was alone. She had failed.

It was often like that.