Part 11

Marriage had hardly changed an outward detail of their lives. She had refused to give up her job, which he somehow expected she could do. Perhaps she could paint and try to sell her work. It appeared to him so much more fitting. But Moira did not wish to sell her paintings, even if she had thought them worth any money. All that could wait. Wasn’t his work waiting too? Poor boy! How could any one expect him to write with his time all taken up?

“But,” he objected, “I may have to take care of more than you one of these days. Hadn’t I better get used to it?”

“Nonsense,” she replied. “That’s all the more reason why I should be earning now.”

Miles had retained his room downstairs, much as it was, except that she saw it was kept in some sort of order for him. Her own tiny living quarters were not enough comfortably for two, and she had foreseen that he would have many a spell when he wanted to be quite alone. To her mind he was very chivalrous in hiding his low-spirited moments from her. When he left her early after dinner to spend the evening and the night in his room, she knew that it was a signal for one of these. He was working off some disappointment, some mood of defeat. These troubles had generally fled by morning. He would be in her bedroom, before she woke up, noisy and hungry, and full of jokes.

“You’re making me too happy to write,” he told her on one such occasion, as he sat on her bedside and put her hand to his lips. “You remember Rossetti says:

“By thine own tears thy song must tears beget O Singer! Magic mirror thou hast none Except thy manifest heart and save thine own Anguish or ardour, else no amulet.”

He had the old-fashioned way of reading poetry, intoning it without much shading or expression--and he threw himself into it. She thought nobody was just like him when he did that entirely for his own pleasure.

“But he speaks of ardour as well as anguish,” she objected.

“Yes, I suppose poetry itself does not have to be sad. But it comes out of something like sadness. Rossetti was right. It is as foolish to write poetry in the midst of happiness as to try to find words for what you look like now--when I can be looking at you instead. How beautiful you are when you wake.”

It occurred to Moira that she might be a little distressed over all this. She wanted him to be happy, but she also wanted him to write--and become famous or at least deserve it in her eyes. But her good sense brushed his idle words aside. Why encourage harbouring such notions? She had never known any one who spoke his mind aloud so continuously as he did, and she knew that many of the things he said simply passed through it aimlessly. They were without significance except the significance of always tossing up other thoughts, and still others, until the right one came. This thinking aloud had a ruthless quality that would have hurt a more sensitive wife. It did not trouble her.

She decided there was no hurry about his getting to work. She did not want him to do it until he could do his best. Nothing less than that she wished to foster. They were living their lives to the full, now, through each other. In good time they would branch out and live in wider circles. Miles was storing up treasures that would find utterance one of these days. Indeed he was writing--slight, experimental things which she did not like, it was true, but which would help to open up the dried springs of his invention. This period of his life was certainly not less promising than the five years before she had met him, arid years of picking up a mere living by critical trifles.

An event that she did not foresee, however, happened shortly afterward. A week came when Harlindew spent almost no time with her. He disappeared into his room early; at breakfast he seemed to have slept little, and he was distracted and irritable. When the time came to go downtown, she felt that he resented it. He would dawdle and temporize and start off anywhere from a quarter to a half hour late. The secrecy of his movements were a trial to her, and she could not get anything out of him by casual questioning. His answers were indirect, hinting at work. Then her questioning stopped. She realized that she was growing angry; malicious impulses came to her, a desire for petty revenge, and all this warned her that she was vainer than she had believed. She depended upon his attentions, his love-making, his continual amusing flattery. That was the unfairness of marriage, she argued. It taught you to expect certain things you had got on very well without before. But if your single mate withheld them, you could not go elsewhere to supply them.... After six days of this, Moira began to believe herself a philosopher, and something of a cynic as well. She had kept her temper, but she had also been experimenting with the green serpent of disillusionment.

The thing ended with a visit to her bedroom at two in the morning. He was a little excited by liquor, a most unusual thing since their marriage, yet she was sure he had not been away. Most of this excitement came from another cause. He held in his hand a half a dozen sheets of paper and began without preliminaries to read them to her. They were new poems, of course--how stupid she had been not to suspect it! When he had finished reading them she snatched them from him with cries of delight and read them herself.

“I have to see the words--the blessed words!” she declared.

He walked out of the room, leaving the crinkly papers with her, walked on air yet timorously, jumping half out of his boots at every slight noise she made with the sheets. When he came back he found tear-drops clinging to her lashes. She was still reading the poems as though to fix them then and there in her mind. She laid back on the pillows and asked him to read them all over himself aloud, and “very slowly.” It was a long moment after he had ended that she spoke.

“They’re better than anything you’ve done,” she said, with a contentment that filled him with torturing pangs of delight. “As good and better than the best in your book. It’s come back to you, Miles, I always knew it would. Oh, isn’t it wonderful!”

He sat down, suddenly downcast and sheepish in the midst of his elation.

“But if this is going to happen to me often, what am I going to do?” he said. “I’ve lived those things. It’s been hell and heaven, Moira. I took two afternoons off from the office. I had to. It was all but impossible to go.”

She sat up in bed and gazed at him in profound reflection. She felt she knew what he meant. It was not childish, not perverse. How could such things be mixed up in the same day, this fine fervour of creation, and that mechanical, wretched work? What she most desired him to be he was now, and that he must continue to be at the cost of everything else. She suddenly saw life rosy and fresh ahead of them, untrammelled by anything base, full of brave expression.

“Never mind, never mind!” she cried excitedly. “Listen, you can hold on two months longer somehow. In two months my lease will be up. We’ve got eighteen hundred dollars between us now, and by that time we ought to have two thousand. We’ll just quit cold, Miles, drop everything. Somewhere in Europe we can live for nothing, live forever on that. Who knows what can happen before it is gone? We might never have to come back--never until we wanted to. You can go on writing and writing these gorgeous things!”

“My God,” he murmured, “it would be marvellous. It could be done.... O Magician!”

XX

The experience of that night was one of those moments on the Olympus of extravagant hope, before which it is merciful to draw the veil. In one hour they seemed to have attained all that life held for the most fortunate--freedom, work, love.

Therefore, had they stepped from the tropical belt to the Arctic circle; had they plunged from the top of a sunlit tower to the depths of a coal shaft, the change which came during the next month could not have been greater. Moira had never anticipated resenting her first baby. Preparations for the trip, expenditures for the trip, had first been slackened up in mid-career, as they waited apprehensively and then had been abandoned with the abruptness that only comes when death enters a house. There lay the paraphernalia of travel, new and useless. They had drifted into a state of divine negligence. Jobs and all practical affairs went along any old way; they were matters soon to be jettisoned like an old coat. Then came this reality as if the four walls of a prison had been dropped about them in a day.

It was not so bad as that of course, when the first rude awakening had passed. Life substitutes one enthusiasm for another. Miles recovered admirably at once; he spent his eloquence reassuring her that this was the best thing that could have happened to them. He had all the normal delight in the prospect of fatherhood.

But Moira was not so easily reconciled. She would always look upon that baby as something a little too unreasonably expensive. She was not ready for it, and had the plan of going abroad been broached earlier she would never have had it. She would have been more pleased had Miles not tried so hard to make her see it in a better light. She did not doubt his sincerity, nor that he would be one whose joy in children of his own would be unbounded. But she hated to think of his taking one burden after another from her shoulders until he would be carrying them all, while she waited helplessly. She had never thought him, as yet, strong enough without her.

So she did not relinquish her burdens until she had to. She worked on, until the last day she could without embarrassment. After a season of careful figuring she estimated that what they had saved, with Miles’ salary (which had been slightly increased not long before) would enable them to maintain their present comforts until she got back to earning. She hoped that could be managed somehow within two years.

But if the idea of having a child was an adventure, they both had to admit that the conditions it called for were somewhat depressing. For one thing, they had to have more space. The first work she did after leaving Barcroft’s establishment was to move to a flat in the eighties on the west side. In every particular this place lacked the charm of her studio, nor could anything they did to it or put into it make it seem the same. The little kennel-like separations called rooms were diabolically invented for people who had to have children, and so constructed as to make them hate the fact that they had them.

At the earliest hint of the baby’s coming she noticed changes in Miles. He had never been very regular or responsible about office hours. Now it worried him if he was a half minute late in getting started. He talked less, he exaggerated less. He seemed to be unwilling to discuss books, or any of the old subjects that had enthralled him. He spoke much of there being a future “in the firm,” for a chap who “really buckled down and dug up results.” She realized that he was beginning to regard his job as a permanent support.

He came home sometimes with bundles of papers filled with figures and sat in the little study at night, writing what he called “plans” and “copy” and making “market analyses.” It was the same sort of jargon that Barcroft talked incessantly--“sales and distribution,” “consumer demand,” and “dealer helps.” It had sounded all right from Barcroft; but from Miles.... She found among his papers rough drafts in his own hand of advertisements extolling the value of hog foods, lice powder, piston rings--and one long story about “How I raised my salary from fifty to two hundred dollars a week in six months.” When she read these she went into her room and cried. They had meant nothing to her so long as he took them lightly; now that he applied his whole mind to them and sat absently dreaming of them, they seemed blasphemous. But she dared not complain; she had no remedy to offer.

In a little while--after the baby was a few months old--he began to bring home news of certain results from all this energy and absorption. His salary took a sudden jump. He was “meeting clients” continually, doing executive work. Soon, he told her, he would have a small office to himself. She simulated pleasure at these announcements, but she felt none. Every triumph of that sort meant a surrender of himself. She even resented the care he had begun to take in his clothes and his hair-cuts, the change in his style of dress.

The ugliness of the little apartment in a building which held perhaps fifty tiresome families, the dreary parade of bourgeois virtues, and fourth or fifth rate finery, the strident female voices in the street and halls, the newness of everything one touched and looked at, the lack of shadows and mystery and ease, the pervasive, obvious travail for money--all these things were to Moira an education in American life which her youth had escaped. She disliked them, but she regarded them, because they were strange to her, with a detached, half-amused curiosity.

To Miles, however, they were a return to the hated past--from just such a street in Cincinnati he had fled in horror years before. She saw that it really involved him; that daily, as it were, he had to brush its overwhelming effect from his clothes and from his mind. It was she who was putting him through all this.... And it was only an added irony that Miles, junior, turned out such a satisfactory child, normal and vigorous and good-tempered. It did not improve matters any that he deserved this sacrifice, for with every new fascination he exerted, every delightful characteristic he exhibited, the subjection of all their hopes to his demands became more complete....

* * * * *

Three years passed this way, and though the affairs of the Harlindew family went on quite as ever in outward appearance, much had happened underneath to both.

In the first place she had learned that a child was not a temporary encumbrance, one that she could throw off in a year or two for outside work. If certain of its wants diminished with its growth, others increased, and the habit of being an attendant mother became fixed. She had had to abandon her plan of returning to offices. Cheap servant girls and the risk run in trusting them worried her too much as it was. She became as helpless a house-person as the scores of other young mothers in her teeming block.

With the relinquishment of this notion came the gradual realization that they might never be able to take up again that shoulder to shoulder independence which had seemed so fine while it lasted. Miles from now on was the provider--she and her child the dependents. She discovered that he had seen this more clearly than she from the beginning.

He ceased to take an interest in himself at all. His mind settled into a hopeless groove of dogged, disinterested work. To see him pick up a book and lay it aside was a gesture that came to hold a veritable sense of tragedy for her. To watch the effect of a fine play upon him was pathetic. While its beauty filled him with happiness, he dared not allow himself to be lifted too far into that rarified atmosphere. He ventured no opinions about any of the hundreds of stimulating personalities who were coming up on the horizon of culture everywhere. Poetry he spoke of with whimsical condescension, even with contempt. It seemed to him an impudent excrescence, a meaningless dream that had no right to existence in a life of reality.

All this came more swiftly than she knew, occupied as she was with the absorbing bit of life under her care. In three years she thought she scarcely knew Miles. The poems he had shown her that night before the baby’s coming were often in her hands, though she dared not mention them to him. They were as fine as they had been then. Could this plodding man--who loved her still with a desperate, clinging love, a love, as it seemed, that was the breath of his life--be the same man who had written them? And was it possible that he must stop that divine occupation for no other reason than that three people had to live? The future seems short when life is meaningless and tiresome, and we become seized with a fierce impatience. Moira fought against a feeling that they were old and life was declining to its end....

An ominous fact was apparent. In spite of Harlindew’s devotion to work at the office he was achieving very little. He had reached a certain point and come to a standstill. His salary, large according to the ideas with which he had begun, was a dwindling insufficiency when it came to paying their bills. He was beginning to be afraid that he might never go farther. She remembered now a saying that Barcroft had repeated to her: “Push may start behind, but it’s got brains beat all hollow in the end.” He was referring to the kind of brains Miles had, theoretic and literary. Miles himself tried to explain his predicament in words of much the same import. There was a “point of saturation,” he said, in salaries and advancement, unless you “got outside and went after the business.” Apparently that was what he could not do.

At the same time, an incredible number of new expenses, roundly chargeable to the item named “baby” had absorbed all their early savings except a few hundred dollars, which she jealously kept--not so much in fear of an emergency, as with the hope that it might be the magic key to open the door to some way out of their life. But she went into this treasure to buy Miles decent business suits. They were both behind in similar comforts and vanities.

Harlindew seemed to resent any invasion of his evenings, to prefer to sit with her and his thoughts. Yet in reality he was full of an enormous restlessness to which he dared not surrender. The office needed all his energy; he could not spend it. So he thought.... Moira would take the bored man out whenever her maid would stay, trying to revive the spirit of their old comradeship. It came to life only in rare flashes.

Her twenty-eighth year passed. She found herself with more freedom on her hands now, and she obtained work from Elsie Jennings which brought in a few dollars a week. She was not sure which feeling was uppermost in Miles, his pleasure at seeing the money or his disgust at finding her painting silly gift cards. Her painting, the fact that she had always kept it up to some extent, was his consolation, a vicarious substitute for his own emptiness.... But the money made them more comfortable.

Then she discovered that she was going to have another baby. He took the announcement casually, even with a joke.

“By Jove, my dear,” he said, “I’m succeeding in something, anyway.”

He sat down and chuckled to himself. Three things had struck him as very funny. One was that he had never in his life pictured himself as a prolific father--like his own father; another was that he would be thirty-seven that week--and the third that he had come home to tell Moira his salary had been cut.

She dropped quickly, beseechingly beside him, disliking the sound of his laugh.

“What’s the matter, darling, is it too much?”

He put his arms across her shoulders in an accustomed gesture.

“No, no, dear. How absurd. I’m as glad as I can be.”

He laughed again, attempting naturalness, and ruffled his hair with a sudden motion of his hand. But she felt the husband slipping from her grasp, turning defiantly before her eyes into the vagrant poet....

XXI

They moved again, the landlord uptown having raised the rent at the expiration of their lease. The new place was in two large, bare rooms four stories up, lighted by gas, and without any kitchen except a small gas stove in a corner and some shelves concealed by a wall-board screen. There was a dilapidated bathroom, and a roof above where she could take the children in good weather. The place was in the Italian quarter and was cheap. The move seemed a logical one to Moira, for it brought them down in the social scale. If they were to be poor, it was better to live with the poor than with the pretentious. And the Italian section was in the Village, of which they had both become incurably fond, and where for many reasons they felt most comfortable.

The house was managed by an Italian woman named Respetti, who had once done odd jobs of sewing for Moira and for whom she felt a strong liking. Mrs. Respetti had appeared to be quite overjoyed to see her again, delighted to hear of her marriage and her children, and had offered to help her look after them when she could. Her willingness in this regard was the deciding factor in Moira’s choice of the house.

She had not been installed there more than a few weeks when Miles finally lost his job outright, an event she had anticipated almost any day since before the birth of her little girl. He made efforts to obtain work of the same kind, but unsuccessfully. He got books for review. He did whatever came along. One day he brought her a check signed by his father. He began shortly afterwards to be somewhat worse than idle, and sought forgetfulness of his troubles in a way to increase them....

Moira had lived to see three men in him: the skylarking poet, the dogged misfit in business, and finally the self-drugged and nearly self-convinced failure. And still the vision of the first one haunted her and she hoped to bring it back to life.

Left to herself, she made friendships in the Village and built up her own income to fairly respectable proportions. She was, at least, preserved from downright anxiety about the children. In her youth at Thornhill, had she witnessed the privations and makeshifts which now made up her life she would have thought them a chapter out of some incredible tale of human misfortune.

One night when she had waited late for Miles and he had not come, she went to Sophie’s Kitchen.

This was a dimly lighted little restaurant, with two rows of board tables down each wall, and an exotically foreign air, where the food was well-flavoured and not so expensive as in most of the show places of the section. She was very fond of Sophie, the proprietress, a whole-souled woman, discriminating in her intimates, with a soft, pleasing voice, and remarkably long, narrow hazel eyes.

As Moira seated herself at one of the tables she was conscious of a fashionable party across the room. Such people were not unusual in Sophie’s and she paid little attention to them. She saw the handsome proprietress in the open pantry at the back of the room and waved to her with a cry of greeting. Sophie replied by calling her name. Immediately afterward, Moira looked up to see a man coming toward her from the group she had spotted upon entering. He reached her table and thrust out his hand.

“Well, Rob Blaydon!” she cried.

“Moira.”

She had recognized him at once, but she looked him over more carefully as he sat down opposite her. He was stouter. She found herself experiencing a sensation she had never known before, that of meeting a youthful companion grown mature in her absence, one she was fond of. It wasn’t such an extraordinary sensation. It might have been only a few days ago when she was seeing Rob constantly. Nothing happened to people at all. Perhaps his face had changed a little, but whatever change there was she would have expected. Yes, she felt he was an even more wicked and human Rob than before.

“I’ll tell you what, Moira,” he went on at once. “I don’t care what you’ve got on hand to-night, you’ve got to spend the evening with me. If you will wait just a minute I’ll get away from these people on some pretext. I’ve simply got to talk to you, Moira. What do you say?”

“Go ahead, Rob, if you want to. I’d love it,” she replied with unaffected pleasure.

He came back in a few moments.

“Evidently they are used to your whims,” she said. “They don’t seem to mind.”

“Forget ’em,” he replied, with a clipped ruthlessness she remembered well.