CHAPTER VI

Even the unhappy, disillusioned man or woman who looks back at a wrecked marriage with cynicism or disgust or who does not look back at all because it is too painful, will, none the less, carry about with him until the end of his life a few poignant memories which never lose their power to thrill him anew, though desire to relieve them may be gone or the companion of his memories have become ludicrous. It is the fat dowager still able to blush at her daughter’s teasing inquiry about the time father asked her to marry him, it is the faded, washed-out woman who sobs in the movies as the heroine tells the hero that she is going to have a child and they fade out in an embrace, it is the old gentleman who grows sentimental over a popular song, who bear this out. Troubles, bitternesses, grief--temporary drama, mock drama they may be--but the drama of undying poetry is in love and not in disillusion or hate.

The hesitation of the first steps of marriage, the explanation of love, the abandonment, the amazing tendernesses, the secret rivalry in affection for each other--those are the moments of greatest dramatic intensity. Stories give us, as is natural for them, perhaps, the odd cases--the ill-matched couples--but for the great number of people who follow nature and are led by her there never comes again greater poignancy in life than steeps the wedding night and the hour of the birth of their children. More excitement, more pleasure, more joy at other times perhaps--but it is then that human life sounds its depths. It is the memory of such times which may account, more than the pressure of society or the weight of habit, for the strange fidelities of men to unworthy women and of women to unworthy men.

Cecily stored her memory with very beautiful things during the first days of marriage. There were times when she walked in an exalted dream. She had become immensely conscious of herself. It seemed to her that she could not walk unnoticed on the street--the glory of her happiness must show to other people. Fear, the strange fears in her contemplation of her marriage, the nervous fears during the ceremony had been blown away in a very wind of happiness. She had no care, no thought except Dick and their amazing joy in each other. They had gone to New York and then, after a few days, motored up the Hudson, keeping to the State road only as the fancy took them and wandering off for half days along country by-ways, leading through valleys of farms and steep little towns set on hills. Through the long evenings of slow twilight they drove by the river, and when it was dark there was some hotel or road house transformed by the magic of the journey into a hospitable inn for wayfarers. And night came and they were in strange rooms but always with the new warmth of intimacy contrasting with the strangeness of the setting and making them closer together. So on through a golden month--a month which held moments of sacredness, of steady joy, of sheer laughter.

Dick was making himself real to Cecily and enjoying her as he had never enjoyed anything before. There was not so much glamour for him as for her, partly because he was a man and partly because the world kept its proportions for Dick almost always. As a lover and a suitor he had done exactly what a lover and suitor should do--tortured himself with feelings of unworthiness and with doubts and lain awake with his hopes. As a husband, his feelings changed. He was no longer doubtful, no longer bothered about unworthiness. He was Cecily’s husband and radiantly, boyishly satisfied. Marriage was accomplished in his life and it was all that was delightful. And Cecily was the most beautiful and charming of women. His feeling was partly inspired directly by his wife; also it went with the code of men in marriage. There was room in his mind for other things, too--for business plans, for politics.

Cecily had no code. To her all that had happened had happened to her first and singly, of all women in the world. She could not conceive of grouping her experiences or sharing them with all women. Nor did she have thoughts which did not concern Dick. He had suffused her mind. She was very innocent and her husband, entering her mind and heart, had taken complete possession. She thought through him, and it never occurred to her that she was subordinating herself. She wanted to share everything in the world with him and to identify herself with him. Into her first month of marriage she brought exactly the elements to make it perfect and if she failed to establish exactly the proper basis for a modern marriage she built for herself and her husband a perfect memory and dropped an anchor thereby.

Dick had glimpses of insight. “I wonder if you are really very innocent or very wise,” he said laughingly to her. “Sometimes I guess one and sometimes the other. You avoid disagreeable things so--so exquisitely. Most women are so controversial nowadays.”

“I’ve nothing to be controversial about. Besides I don’t like controversies.”

“Wonderful woman!” admired Dick.

He enjoyed making Cecily presents, took delight in the almost childish pleasure she showed over his thoughtfulness and over new possessions. And he liked to see people admire her, as people invariably did.

They had planned on a month of vacation and then were to join Cecily’s mother and stepfather in New York for a few days before going home. Cecily’s mother awaited that meeting with some anxiety. In the days before the wedding she had kept close to Cecily, a little shyly, as if she wished to compress into those days a closer companionship than they had ever had before. But it was too late, perhaps, to create a feeling that grows naturally with years. They admired each other immensely, but they were not intimate.

Mrs. Warner’s manner, with its unaccustomed trace of nervousness as she stood with her husband before the gates of the train yards, was not reflected in him. He was the first to catch a glimpse of Dick and Cecily and chuckled.

“There they are”--he waved boisterously--“and they don’t see us; they aren’t even looking at us. Like to know what we came for to break in on that--if we could break in!”

They came along the platform, absorbed in something they were discussing, and with one glance at Cecily Mrs. Warner’s face lost its anxiety. Cecily walked regardless of the world. Dick must have been very good to her and very gentle to make her look like that. Then the young people saw the elder ones and hurried to them.

There was something fairly humorous in Cecily’s new sophistication. She felt much older, much more learned, thoroughly admitted to the class of married women. Even her mother smiled. And her stepfather teased her.

“She swaggers when she gives her name,” she said. “Did you hear her tell the clerk that the order was for Mrs. Richard Harrison? He grew pale at the august name. You mustn’t be such a snob, Cecily. Almost anybody can get married.”

“Not to Dick,” said Cecely, unperturbed.

“No--not without some penalty as things stand now,” admitted Mr. Warner.

Such swaggers--Dick sported his complacencies too--amused the Warners and delighted them. Dick had a proprietary way of deciding when Cecily was tired and the note in his voice as he said “my wife” reflected the superiority of Cecily’s “Mrs. Harrison.” The older people showed their pleasure in all this by spending a great deal of money and being willing to postpone their Atlantic City trip still further. But Cecily demurred. She wanted to get back to Carrington now to take the final step that might prove to be the happiest--to begin her home.

When by night they reached Carrington she felt she was right. No one met them, for they had told no one of their coming and Dick put his wife into a taxi and gave the magic address of their home. It was ready for them, they knew, and Mrs. Warner had already installed a servant to keep it open and comfortable.

Dick threw open the door and drew his wife inside. To him it was a glorious adventure, but Cecily’s face reflected more than adventure. She was very grave. Instinctively she felt that her part of things was beginning. Until now it had been Dick’s game--Dick was responsible for what they did and she had been happily content to leave things in his hand--but now her share in the responsibility of marriage began.

“You look so solemn,” said Dick. “It’s a house, not a church, you know.”

“It feels like a church. I never felt so subdued--and holy--in any church before.”

“Why, Cecily, dear!” Dick did not let her maintain that tone. She was tired and he was afraid she was a little overstrained. He made her laugh, led her on a triumphal tour of the house, gave a graphic description of himself caring for a furnace. She met his gayety with gayety, but underneath the gayety persisted that feeling of responsibility and--holiness. It was like a church, her mind kept persisting.

With the next morning came a bustle that drove those thoughts away. Cecily assumed command of her household and Dick went to his office. The telephone began to ring persistently. The maid appealed to Cecily for decisions about food and the housekeeping machinery. Cecily went about using all her new dignity to its best advantage, and repeating to herself under her breath, “This is mine--my home,” with unfading wonder that it was so. She would pause to look about her in admiration, justified admiration, for the sunlight pouring into the big simple living-room, gleaming on the brasses before the fireplace, bringing out the dull colors of the upholstery, made it a very charming room. The living-room and her bedroom were the rooms she liked best, for they both caught the sunlight more than any other rooms in the house, and her bedroom was peaceful as well as beautiful, most of its color concentrated in the Chinese rug which covered the floor and set off the ivory colored furniture and walls. It was all spacious and exquisitely clean and orderly. Housekeeping instincts crowded to the front of Cecily’s consciousness.

She lunched alone that day, for she and Dick had decided, Dick guiding, that it was better for him not to attempt to come home for lunch and lose two hours in the middle of the day. Cecily had agreed with him, but lunching alone, as she tried it, seemed to her a waste of time. And the hours hanging a little heavy on her hands after that first lonely luncheon, she took out the little coupé which had been her stepfather’s wedding gift to her and manufactured a shopping list.

In one of the shops she met Fliss Horton. Fliss was standing in an attitude of reflection before the blouse counter, pretending to the clerk that she was unable to decide which blouse to choose and actually wondering desperately if her father’s account was too large and too long unpaid to justify the purchase of a twenty dollar blouse, reduced from forty. She was idly speculating on the practical use of the blouse and the possible occasions for wearing it when Cecily stopped beside her.

“I thought,” said Fliss, “that brides didn’t need to buy clothes for years and years, especially brides who have just come from New York.”

“They wouldn’t have to if their trousseaux were a little more practical. I have any number of afternoon clothes and pictorial blouses and traveling things with long sleeves. What I need above all and haven’t is a short-sleeved smock to work in mornings.”

“There again I thought all brides wore trailing negligees until noon.”

They laughed together and felt very well acquainted.

“Not brides who keep house. I shall find plenty of ways to assist my maid and I need a good bare arm to do it.”

Fliss, buying the twenty dollar “bargain” of chiffon, was looking enviously at Cecily, who was inspecting cotton smocks at three dollars and ninety-eight cents. Fliss didn’t buy working clothes. She worked in the morning with her mother, hating it, but she and her mother wore “old things” that had to be worn out.

“Are you all settled?”

“Mother and I did that before we went away and so there was nothing to do but enter the house when we came back. You must come to see me.”

“I want to.”

They lingered, talking casually, and Fliss gained several advantages, being seen by half a dozen people with Cecily and finally being asked to ride home in the new coupé. She spoke to every one she knew from the window of the car and Cecily marveled openly at the number of people she knew and at the number of hats that were lifted from handsome masculine heads as Fliss smiled and nodded at them.

“You know every one,” she commented.

Fliss laughed with much pleasure. “I’ve met a lot of people during this last year,” she admitted. “If you and your husband don’t scorn the Assembly and Club dances you’ll see all these people there.”

“Indeed we won’t scorn them. I think I had cards to the Assembly once or twice last winter, but mother thought I was a bit young.”

“Now that you are married you aren’t too young for anything, are you?”

Cecily caught a hint of mockery in the tone and looked surprised. “Well, I shall be twenty in a few months and that’s pretty old. You see I was nearly nineteen when I finished the convent.”

“I’m twenty now.”

“You look about seventeen.”

“Because I’m small. I was in High School five years, because they cruelly flunked me one year. But High School was fun.”

“Yes,” said Cecily vaguely. She was watching some one in the passing crowd and suddenly with a smile she blew her horn and pulled up beside the pavement. “There’s my husband,” she added.

Dick came smilingly to the side of the car.

“It’s exciting meeting your wife on the street,” he said gayly. “I’ve been wondering how soon I could cut and run for home, despite my self-respect as a business man.”

“Oh, come now,” begged Cecily.

She, too, found it exciting to meet her husband on the street. A delicious sense of intimacy underran all this casualness. It made her flush and the flush was becoming. Fliss looked at her, leaning forward towards her husband, with that abandon of interest and affection. It was a new way with men for Fliss. Fliss made them fight for favors and interest--mock battles, no doubt, but well staged.

Dick yielded.

“I will go home now. The house has probably gone to rack and ruin in my absence,” he said, getting in beside Fliss, who had moved to the back seat. They kept up a gay banter, throwing an occasional remark at Cecily, who was driving. The slight embarrassment Fliss sometimes showed when talking to Cecily had vanished now. Fliss was sure of her ground instinctively with men. Hers were methods as old as woman and as deft--flattering, piquing, stimulating.

They dropped her at the door of the apartment house, still smiles and coquetry.

“Funny little thing, isn’t she?” said Dick, climbing over to Cecily’s side. “Where did you pick her up, sweetheart? She doesn’t seem like your kind.”

“I’m always half sorry for her and quite interested.”

“Oh, she’s just a little climbing gutter-pup. Smart--and pretty. She’ll land a man with a million some day if she plays it right.”

“She’s not as bad as that, Dick, and she can’t help it if she’s poor and wants things.”

“All right, Mrs. Charity. Be as good to her as you like. Only don’t blame me if she doesn’t measure up. She’s been going around to dances for years with men twice her age. She’s decent enough, but sophisticated--sophisticated as you never will be.”

“You sound very condemning.”

“No, I didn’t mean to. But I’ve lost my taste for chickens. I prefer--swans.” And he slipped an arm around her, regardless of her driving.

The house was very lovely in the late afternoon light. The door was open, welcoming them into the softly darkened hall.