Together Part 41

heritage--the gift of her forefathers--for a miserable t.i.the of its real value,--just because their father was too weak to hold what others had given him; and hadn't kept faith with her like a frank comrade.... What was left she took into her own possession.

So the Poles went abroad, after this. In doubt and distress, in sickness and divorce, what else does an American do? Margaret had one lingering hope for her husband. He had a good voice. At college it was considered remarkable,--a clear, high tenor. He had done little with his gift except make social capital out of it. And he had some apt.i.tude for acting. He had been a four years' star in the college operas. If the judge had not belonged to the settled cla.s.ses, Larry might have adorned a "Broadway show." Instead, through his father's influence, he had attempted finance--and remained an amateur, a "gentleman." But now, Margaret said to herself, over there, away from trivial society,--the bungled business career ended,--Larry might turn to his gift seriously. He was only thirty-two,--not too old, with hard work and steady persistence, which she would supply, to achieve something. For she would have been content to have him in the Broadway show; it mattered not to her now what he should do. And then she beguiled herself with the hope that some of that intellectual life, the interests in books, music, art--in ideas--could come to them in common,--a little of what she had dreamed the husband-and-wife life might be like. Thus with clear insight into her husband's nature, with few illusions, but with tolerance and hope, Margaret betook herself to Munich and settled her family in a little villa on the outskirts, conformable to their income,--_her_ income, which was all they had. But it mattered not what she had to live on; her mother had shown her how to make a little answer....

At first Larry liked this Munich life. It saved his vanity, and offered an easy solution for his catastrophe in cotton. He was the artist, not fitted for business, as his wife saw. He liked to go to concerts and opera, and take lessons,--but he had to learn German and he was lazy about that.

Margaret studied German with him, until the little girl came. Then Larry was left to amuse himself, and did it. First he found some idle American students, and ran about with them, and through them he fell in with a woman of the Stacia Conry type, of which there is always a supply in every agreeable European centre. When Margaret emerged from her retirement and began to look about, she found this Englishwoman very prominent on the horizon. Larry sang with her and drove with her and did the other things that he could not do with his wife. He was the kind of man who finds the nine months of his wife's disability socially irksome, and amuses himself more or less innocently.

Margaret understood. Whether Larry's fondness for Mrs. Demarest was innocent or not, she did not care; she was surprised with herself to find that she had no jealousy whatever. Mrs. Demarest did not exist for her.

This Mrs. Conry had a husband who came to Munich after her and bore her back to London. When Larry proposed that they should spend the next season in London, his wife said calmly:--

"You may if you like. I am going to return to America."

"And my work?"

Margaret waved a hand ironically:--

"You will be better alone.... My father is getting old and feeble; I must see him."...

When the family sailed, Larry was in the party. Mrs. Demarest had written him the proper thing to write after such an intimacy, and Larry felt that he must "get a job."...

In those months of the coming of the little girl and the summer afterwards, the new Margaret had been born. It was a quiet woman, outwardly calm, inwardly thinking its way slowly to conclusions,--thoughts that would have surprised the good Bishop. For when her heart had begun to grow cold in the process of petrifaction, there had awakened a new faculty,--her mind. She began to digest the world. Those little rules of life, the ones handed down with the prayer-book, having failed, she asked questions,--'What is life?

What is a woman's life? What is my life? What is duty? A woman's duty? My duty, married to Larry?'...

And one by one with relentless clarity she stripped bare all those plat.i.tudinous precepts that she had inherited, had accepted, as one accepts the physical facts of the world. When the untrained mind of a woman, driven in on itself by some spiritual bruise, begins to reach out for light, the end may be social Anarchy. Margaret read and understood French and German, and she had ample time to read. She saw modern plays that presented facts, naked and raw, and women's lives from the inside, without regard to the moral convention. She perceived that she had a soul, an inner life of her own, apart from her husband, her children, her father, from all the world.

That soul had its own rights,--must be respected. What it might compel her to do in the years to come, was not yet clear. She waited,--growing. If it had not been for her father, she would have been content to stay on in Europe as she was, reading, thinking, loving her children.

On the way back to America, Larry, becoming conscious in the monotony of the voyage of his own insufficiency and failure, hinted that he was ready to accept the mountain home, which Margaret still retained, her mother's old house. "We might try living in the country," he suggested. But Margaret, focussing in one rapid image the picture of her husband always before her in the intimacy of a lonely country life, Larry disintegrating in small ways, shook her head firmly, giving as an excuse, "The children must have schools." She would set him at some petty job in the city, anything to keep him from rotting completely. For he was the father of her children!

The good old Bishop met them at the pier in New York. In spite of his hardened convictions about life, the little rule of thumb by which he lived, he knew something of men and women; and he suspected that process of petrifaction in his daughter's heart. So he took occasion to say in their first intimate talk:--

"I am glad that you and Lawrence have decided to come home to live. It is not well for people to remain long away from their own country, to evade the responsibilities of our social brotherhood. The Church preaches the highest communism, ... and you must help your husband to find some definite service in life, and do it."

Margaret's lips curved dangerously, and the Bishop, as if answering this sign, continued:--

"Lawrence does not show great power, I know, my dear. But he is a good man,--a faithful husband and a kind father. That is much, Margaret. It rests with you to make him more!"

'Does it?' Margaret was asking herself behind her blank countenance. 'One cannot make bricks without straw.... What is that sort of goodness worth in a man? I had rather my husband were what you call a bad man--and a Man.'

But she said nothing.

"Thus our Lord has ordered it in this life," continued the Bishop, feeling that he was making headway; "that one who is weak is bound to one who is stronger,--perchance for the good of both."

Margaret smiled.

"And a good woman has always the comfort of her children,--when she has been blessed with them,--who will grow to fill the desolate places in her heart," concluded the good Bishop, feeling that he had irrefutably presented to his daughter the right ideas. But the daughter was thinking, with the new faculty that was awakening in her:--

'Do children fill the desolate spots in a woman's heart completely? I love mine, even if they are spotted with his weaknesses. I am a good mother,--I know that I am,--yet I could love,--oh, I could love grandly some one else, and love them more because of it! At thirty a woman is not done with loving, even though she has three children.'

But she did not dispute her father's words, merely saying in a weary voice, "I suppose Larry and I will make a life of it, as most people do, somehow!"

Nevertheless, as she spoke these words of endurance, there was welling up within her the spirit of rebellion against her lot,--the ordinary lot of acceptance. She had a consciousness of power in herself to live, to be something other than the prosaic animal that endures.

The Poles took the house at Dudley Farms and began the routine of American suburban life, forty miles from New York. After several months of futile effort, s.p.a.ced by periods of laziness that Margaret put an end to, a gentleman's job was secured for Larry, through the kindness of one of his father's friends. At first Larry was inclined to think that the work would belittle him, spoil his chances of "better things." But Margaret, seeing that as a.s.sistant secretary to the Malachite Company he could do no harm, could neither gamble nor loaf, replied to these doubts in a tone of cold irony:--

"You can resign when you find something better suited to your talents."

Thus at thirty-five Larry was _range_ and a commuter. He dressed well, kept up one of his clubs, talked the condition of the country, and was a kind father to his boys.... 'What more should a woman expect?' Margaret asked herself, thinking of her father's words and enumerating her blessings.

Three healthy children, a home and enough to eat and wear, a husband who (in spite of Conny's gossip) neither drank to excess nor was unfaithful nor beat her,--who had none of the obvious vices of the male! Good G.o.d!

Margaret sighed with a bitter sense of irony.

"I must be a wicked woman," her mother would have said under similar circ.u.mstances,--and there lies the change in woman's att.i.tude.

Looking across the table at Larry in his neat evening clothes,--he was growing a trifle stout these days,--listening to his observations on the railroad service, or his suggestion that she should pay more attention to dress, Margaret felt that some day she must shriek maniacally. But instead her heart grew still and cold, and her blue eyes icy.

"What is there in woman that makes trifles so important?" she asked Isabelle in a rare effusion of truth-speaking. "Why do some voices--correct and well-bred ones--exasperate you, and others, no better, fill you with content, comfort? Why do little acts--the way a man holds a book or strokes his mustache--annoy you? Why are you dead and bored when you walk with one person, and are gay when you walk by yourself?"

To all of which Isabelle sagely replied: "You think too much, Margaret dear. As John says when I ask him profound questions, 'Get up against something real!'"

For Isabelle could be admirably wise where another was concerned.

"Yes," Margaret admitted, "I suppose I am at fault. It is my job to make life worth living for all of us,--the Bishop, mother-in-law, children, Larry,--all but myself. That's a woman's privilege."

So she did her "job." But within her the la.s.situde of dead things was ever growing, sapping her physical buoyancy, sapping her will. She called to her soul, and the weary spirit seemed to have withdrawn.

"A case of low vitality," in the medical jargon of the day. And hers was a vital stock, too.

'In time,' she said, 'I shall be dead, and then I shall be a good woman,--wholly good! The Bishop will be content.' And she smiled in denial of her own words. For even then, at the lowest ebb, her soul spoke: there was wonder and joy and beauty somewhere in this gray procession of phenomena, and it must come to her sometime. And when it came, her heart said, she would grasp it!

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

These days Larry Pole began to think well of himself once more. He had made his mistakes,--what man hasn't?--but he had wiped out the score, and he was fulfilling the office of under-secretary to the great Malachite Company admirably. He was conscious that the men in the office felt that his personality, his bearing, and a.s.sociations gave distinction to the place.

And he still secretly looked for some turn in the game which would put him where he desired to be. In New York the game is always on, the tables always set: from the newsboy to the magnate the gambler's hope is open to every man.

Only one thing disturbed his self-complacency,--Margaret treated him indifferently, coldly. He even suspected that though by some accident she had borne him three children he had never won her love, that she had never been really his. Since their return from Europe and establishing themselves in the country, she had withdrawn more and more from him--where? Into herself. She had her own room and dressing-room, beyond the children's quarters, in the rear of the rambling house, and her life seemed to go on in those rooms more and more. It was almost, Larry observed discontentedly, as if there were not a husband in the situation. Well, he reflected philosophically, women were like that,--American women; they thought they owned themselves even after they had married. If a wife took that att.i.tude, she must not complain if the husband went his way, too. Larry in these injured moods felt vague possibilities of wickedness within him,--justified errancies....

One day he was to see deep into that privacy, to learn all--all he was capable of understanding--about his wife. Margaret had been to the city,--a rare event,--had lunched with Isabella, and gone to see a new actress in a clever little German play. She and Isabelle had talked it over,--very animatedly. Then she had brought back with her some new books and foreign reviews. After dinner she was lying on the great lounge before the fire, curled up in a soft dress of pale lilac, seriously absorbing an article on a Russian playwright. Hers was a little face,--pale, thin, with sunken eyes. The brow was too high, and latterly Margaret paid no attention to arranging her hair becomingly. It was not a face that could be called pretty; it would not be attractive to most men, her husband thought as he watched her. But it had drawn some men strongly, fired them; and Larry still longed for its smiles,--desired her.

He had felt talkative that evening, had chattered all through dinner, and she had listened tolerantly, as she might to her younger boy when he had a great deal to say about nothing. But now she had taken refuge in this review, and Larry had dropped from sight. When he had finished his cigarette, he sat down on the edge of the lounge, taking her idle hand in his. She let him caress it, still reading on. After a time, as he continued to press the hand, his wife said without raising her eyes:--

"What do you want?"

"'What do you want?'" Larry mimicked! "Lord! you American women are as hard as stone."

"Are the others different?" Margaret asked, raising her eyes.