CHAPTER XXIX

Cecily was home when Ellen brought the children back from the train.

“Where have you all been?” she asked, pulling Leslie’s cap off and patting the rosy, wind-blown cheeks.

Ellen looked at her squarely.

“Mr. Harrison telephoned that he was leaving town and would like to see the children. So I took them down to the train.”

A flush came over Cecily’s face.

“You took them to the train without my permission?”

“Their father telephoned me that he would like me to,” answered Ellen, continuing to take off Dorothea’s wraps in the utmost calmness.

There was something in Ellen’s assumption which it was impossible to circumvent. There was no answer. He was their father; he had asked to see them; she had no right to prevent it; the thoughts skimmed through Cecily’s mind, disturbed as she was. She said nothing further. Dorothea was full of embarrassing comments on her father that Cecily did not want to hear, but it was impossible to divert her. For several days Dorothea was determined to talk of her father and could not be thrown off the track. It seemed to Cecily that it would be outrageous to forbid her such talk, but she did not like it.

She had come to see the difficulties of continuing in her present relations with Dick. It could hardly go on. Some arrangement would have to be made to clear up the vagueness of the situation. She was disagreeably conscious of the lurking feeling among her relatives that Dick and she would “make it up,” and that, she felt angrily, made her position intolerably cheap. It wasn’t a thing which could be “made up.” In those moments when she did toss over in her restless mind the possibilities of living with Dick again, the thought of the smiles of people over the “reconciliation” was intensely irritating. Della had tried to urge her to take some step to see Dick, but gentle as she was with Della these days, Cecily would not allow her to go on.

Yet she was learning from Della. Learning the strangest things from Della’s pragmatic little soul. Walter was always asking her to come to see them, to join them here and there and it was so good to be wanted that Cecily saw the young Warners often. At first the demonstrations of affection she used to witness bothered her, shamed her delicacies. But she grew used to them and quite tolerant. One couldn’t do away with Dellas. Why shouldn’t she kiss her husband in public if she liked? What difference did it make? They cared for each other and when Della would pout and grow angry and Walter get angry in return, Cecily grew used to seeing them, for no reason at all, give up the quarrel in favor of a caress. No long silences, no quiet bitternesses. No one made his point in these little quarrels, but what did that matter either? They weren’t points worth making.

Cecily had noted through the papers the return of Fliss for those few days. It had been evidently quite a social triumph. The entertaining for her had been very quiet in deference to Fliss’s mourning. Cecily heard that with a quick, ironic memory of the day she had visited Fliss’s mother.

Once she spoke of Fliss to Ellen.

“Your cousin has become very important.”

“She was always a hard worker,” returned Ellen.

Cecily looked at her skeptically.

“Oh, yes, in her way. She’s really a very hard worker. Of course she likes things pretty and gay, but I will say this for her. She was always willing to work for what she got. And she knew what she wanted from the time she was a little thing.”

But Cecily felt no tolerance there--no tolerance towards Fliss. Fliss was to her the waste of the world--the corruption of the times--with whom there must be no truce.

Her money affairs were still in a bad way. There had been expensive house repairing; there had been clothes for the children and Cecily could not bear to put them into cheaper things than they had been accustomed to wear. The fact that money which she would not use had been put to her credit made the situation half-ridiculous. She was conscious of looking a little ridiculous. As the standards for marriage which she had held so sacredly grew a little less rigid because of her friendliness with Della, she used to wonder more and more why she had let things matter so much between herself and Dick. So many things might have been passed over. “But I wouldn’t like to live like Della,” she’d tell herself. “It’s all right for Della to squabble and caress; our marriage was different.” And back again she would come to the old point that Dick had preferred casual amusements to her, that he had not been willing to concede that hers was the highest way. Though she might concede some things she was still sure of one fact: that hers was the highest way. It wasn’t, she would tell herself in these intense mental discussions, that she wanted Dick to stay in every night, that she didn’t want him to dance--to play. She only wanted him to stand with her mentally on a height of marriage to which they had attained at least in those early days; she didn’t want their union to mix on a common basis with these haphazard marriages of passion, of convenience, marriages of deliberate childlessness--which she saw around her. How he was to express his mental agreement with her she didn’t know; how he could have expressed it she could dream; but she knew that he never could feel or express it now. For they had put themselves in the quarreling class. Even if they lived together again they could not get the perfection they had missed. Resentment would be casting shadows between them for a while and, when resentment died at last, with it would die some delicacies, some memories. When the memories of these months of bitterness and separation faded, were they together or apart, some capacities for feeling would have faded, too.

And yet the bond remained between them. After she had proved to herself that living with Dick now would be an admission of failure, her mental house of cards always tumbled. During the night she would waken and be looking into blackness, clearly conscious that her marriage was as alluring and commanding as ever, facing simple, elemental lonelinesses and desires. Rightness and wrongness of the issues did not matter much in these moments; in so far as they did it occurred to her that her little unbending scrupulosities about standards cut shabby figures besides unscrupulous, unprejudiced love. Even if he had been faithless--even if there had been another woman whom he loved--even then the bond would have remained. It was cemented in her soul by her memories--in her outer life by her children.

She was almost ready for her half-loaf.

Matthew wrote to her in March. He had not seen her when he was in Carrington and wrote to tell her why--a dangerously frank letter for a Senator.

“I thought it best not to come because I did not want to mix issues. What I wanted to say to you as I thought of going to you was to urge you to return to Dick--to have him return to you. But perhaps what I might say if I came into your presence would not be that. So I write instead, for as I write I can think of you simply. I have thought often of you and Dick. You are both very dear to me. In the curious quadrangle of our lives there have been strange attractions. But accidents of place have almost destroyed the quadrangle and I think it should end in a real understanding between you and Dick. You can’t love anybody but Dick, Cecily, and you can love him much more if you watch him more, if you see that under a certain natural mannishness there is a spirit that probes into things as does yours. I don’t think you will ever regret going back to Dick--I speak of it as going back, but I mean going to him--but I know that you will shrivel and waste your life if you do not.

“You have made heights real to us. Don’t make it hard for Dick because he can’t live on them. Live on the plains where most of the work of the world is done, live with the people who do it--and watch the heights from your window.

“I am sending you my love and I am proud as I do it.”

* * * * *

Cecily read his letter on a windy day in early March. She put it into the pocket of her coat and went out for a walk. As she passed the convent the open gates seemed to beckon to her. She went in and stealing down the corridor to the chapel door, sat as she had sat years ago on the ledge of the window opposite the statue of the Virgin. She remembered how frightened and allured she had been by the talk about marriage. “An institution for the establishment of a home and the bringing up of children.” That, her heart cried out; yes, that, but so much more, so infinitely much more. A shrine for the love of man and woman--a shrine which she had somehow desecrated!

Her thoughts tormented her. Hither and thither they tossed her. She turned towards the door of the convent and asked for Mother Fénelon. Mother Fénelon took her hands from under her black robe and placed them on Cecily’s shoulders.

“Still in trouble, Cecily?”

Cecily nodded.

“Are you living with your husband?”

She shook her head.

“Go to him, my dear----”

“Don’t,” cried Cecily. “Don’t, please.”

It was late afternoon but she did not go home. She walked to the park and sat on a bench and felt like an outcast as the evening shadows fell around her. It grew darker and people went past her going home--carrying bundles, hurrying. Motors slipped by carrying other people home. What was home? She didn’t have one. She and Dick didn’t have one. They were kept apart by shadows, kept apart because they couldn’t get close enough. It grew colder. She looked at her watch. The children would have had their supper. She should go home. But she felt as if she must do something definite first. Still she was not quite sure what it was that she must do.

At last she rose unsteadily and made her way to a corner drugstore. It was deserted at the supper hour. Cecily saw her face as she looked across the counter into the glass, reddened with wind, streaked with tears (she hadn’t been conscious of crying) and her hat was askew. She asked the clerk for change and went into the telephone booth.

“I shan’t be home for supper, Ellen--nor all night. I’m going to Allenby. Can you manage?”

The other call was to get Dick’s exact address.

It was eleven o’clock when she toiled up from the station to the hotel, and it took more courage than she had known she had left to face the clerk and ask for Mr. Allenby’s room.

The clerk looked very dubious.

“I’m Mrs. Allenby,” said Cecily, pushing a card across at him. “I’ll go right up. Evidently,” she lied, “he didn’t get my telegram.”

“Very well, Mrs. Allenby,” said the clerk, still with a trace of dubiousness in his manner.

What had Cecily the immaculate, the fastidious, come to, to be toiling up these noisy stairs at eleven o’clock at night in search of her husband? Baggageless, shrinking from the curious looks of the few lounge loafers.

If she could only have crept in in the darkness. But she must knock and a woman at the other end of the hall was turning to look. Dick was hard to rouse.

“Let me in,” said Cecily, hoarsely. She did not know her own voice.

Nor did he. She could hear him lighting the gas, coming to the door, opening it.

She fairly pushed him aside so that she could get in.

“Cecily! For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”

She looked at him gravely, her eyes flaring in her white face.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what was the matter. I must have been right. Don’t you see I must have been right. All I wanted was right things. But that doesn’t make any difference. I want you home. I came up--I came up--because I’m your wife.” And she tumbled over in a desolate worn-out little heap at his feet.