BY mid-week, Rose-Ann had become transformed into a housewife. Meals were being planned, the butcher and the grocer were making regular deliveries, Mrs. Cowan had been pressed into service, and Rose-Ann was quite the mistress of the establishment.
And then suddenly she became discontented. “I can’t keep on playing that this is my house,” she said. “There are so many things I want to do to it! Let’s go in to town and look for a place of our own.”
So on Thursday morning they took the train to town. On the way in, they marked—or rather, Rose-Ann marked—a dozen advertisements of apartments to let, which she proposed to spend the morning looking at.
“I’m not going to find what I want,” she said, “and I’m going to be cross, I know. I’d really rather not have you along. Why don’t you do something else? Go and visit the office. We’ll meet at lunch.”
“All right,” said Felix. Going to the office, as it were to confess his marriage, was an uncomfortable errand. In spite of what Clive had said, it seemed to him far less likely that he would get a raise than that he would be fired. But it did not seem to matter much now, if he did get fired. The Chronicle job no longer seemed the only one in Chicago.
“Where shall we meet, and when?” he asked.
He noted down the time and place. “But don’t you want to come with me? Clive would like to see you.”
“No, but you can bring Clive along to lunch, if he will come.”
“Good-bye, then.” It was their first parting since 144Saturday, ages ago. It was to be for hours. In the station here, amid the crowds, they sought to be casual about it.
“Good-bye.” She smiled, and turned away. He walked a few steps, and then turned. She had stopped, too, and was looking back at him mournfully.
He came back to her and took her in his arms. “How foolish we are!” she whispered, and surrendered herself to a kiss that seemed somehow, to both of them, to make their temporary separation endurable.
At the office, Felix perceived at once, by the manner of his welcome, that he had established himself more firmly in the esteem of everybody by getting married. He shook hands formally with every one, and received their congratulations. At last, it seemed to be over. But Willie Smith reminded him: “You haven’t been in to see the Old Man, have you?”
Felix could not imagine that Mr. Devoe would concern himself with such a matter as a reporter’s marriage. But Willie managed to convey to him Mr. Devoe would feel hurt if not permitted to add his felicitations. “Sure, the Old Man will want to see you!”
Felix shyly went in. Mr. Devoe rose and shook his hand warmly. “Yes, Mr. Bangs told us,” he said. “Quite a surprise, my boy. But it’s the right way to start out in life. Yes.... I understand you’re quite well again? I’m glad it wasn’t anything serious—you look quite well now—” and his eyes twinkled. “When you get back to work, come in and see me—we may have some new plans for you. Next Monday? Very good.”
New plans.... Felix wondered what that phrase might mean. Perhaps the promise of a raise in wages—though it sounded like something more than that. But he could not guess what it might be, and he decided not to tell Rose-Ann about it—she was so egregiously confident for him, and she might build up vain hopes on a phrase that meant nothing. He did not want her to be disappointed.
145
2
Clive, who looked tired, and seemed preoccupied, came willingly enough along to lunch. “So the nest-building instinct is at work already!” observed Clive. And then: “What kind of place does Rose-Ann want? One with elevators, a man in brass buttons to answer the door, and a garbage incinerator?”
At lunch, which started in with a curious lack of amicability, Felix repeated this latter pleasantry to Rose-Ann. It occurred to him that what she wanted might very easily be something beyond his income, even with that possible raise.
Rose-Ann smiled at Clive. “Not exactly that,” she said. “Perhaps more preposterous still! The truth is, I don’t know, exactly. All I do know is that I don’t like any of the things I’ve seen this morning. I did see some that—but no, even those won’t do.”
“What’s the matter with them?” asked Felix.
“I’ll take you along and let you see for yourself. Mostly stuffy little cubicles. You know what the ordinary Chicago flat is like.”
“Why should you want something different?” asked Clive innocently.
“Why not?” said Rose-Ann, challengingly. “Felix and I are different—why should we live like everybody else?”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Clive. “I confess I thought you were going to.”
“Is that why you have been so distant and satirical with me today? Had you lost confidence in me already?”
“Forgive me,” he said.
“You are angry at some other girl,” said Rose-Ann shrewdly.
Clive smiled. “Perhaps you are right.”
“And if you gave me a hundred guesses,” said Rose-Ann, “perhaps I could guess the girl, too.”
“Perhaps you could,” he conceded.
“So it’s Phyllis. I’m sorry. I like her very much.”
146“So do I,” said Clive grimly.
Felix was surprised at Rose-Ann’s rashness in teasing Clive about a situation concerning which he had always shown a disposition to keep his own counsel; and still more surprised at the way Clive took this teasing.
“Well,” Rose-Ann was saying, “she has an air of quiet possessiveness towards you which indicates that not much can be amiss!”
“What is amiss, dear lady,” said Clive gravely, “is with the universe. Phyllis and I are each all right, in our separate ways, I hope. Phyllis is, I’m sure!—she’s a lovely child, isn’t she?... With an interesting history too. Perhaps I’ll tell it to you, some time.”
“Clive is very unhappy, isn’t he?” said Rose-Ann, when he had left them for a moment to talk to a couple who had greeted him from another table.
“He prefers to be unhappy, I think,” said Felix.
“Why should you be so unsympathetic, Felix? Because you are contented, you think everybody else ought to find it easy to achieve the same state? I hope you’re not going to be smug. I’m really sorry for Clive.”
“I might be sorry, if I knew what to be sorry about. I haven’t the slightest idea what the trouble is.”
“That neurotic girl, of course.”
“Neurotic? Do you mean Phyllis? Why, what nonsense!” he exclaimed.
“Why nonsense?” she asked.
“Because—why—well, it’s just ridiculous!”
“After all, Felix, we neither of us know her well enough to be so positive,” said Rose-Ann pacifyingly.
“Then why do you say that about her?”
“Because I think it, Felix!” she replied with a touch of exasperation. “I really do!”
“I can’t understand you,” he said coldly.
“What are you children quarrelling about now?” asked Clive, returning.
Rose-Ann laughed. “About nothing at all, again. Felix, we are rather absurd. Come, we’ll look at those apartments.—And 147don’t imagine vain things about our home till you see it, Clive!”
3
To Felix, the apartments seemed just apartments. An apartment couldn’t be a house in the country. And as apartments, these were all that could be expected. The only serious objection to them, indeed, was that the rents were rather high.
“Why don’t you like them?” he asked again.
“I don’t know. They’re not quite—our kind of place.”
“I wish I knew what you meant, Rose-Ann,” he said wistfully.
“I’ll try to tell you,” she said, “on the way home.”
And on the train, she began: “You saw those people on the other side of the hall at that last place we looked at?” The door had been opened by a fat man with a bulging neck, and they had glimpsed an interior of plush and golden oak, and the rather plump and vapid-looking woman who awaited him there. “Well, those apartments are made for people like that—I mean people without imagination. They take such an apartment and buy some of the furniture that is made to go in it, and they settle down and are contented there. Why not! It has a kitchen, a dining-room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a room to sit in and entertain callers. And that is the whole of their existence—cooking, eating, sleeping, washing their bodies, and showing off to their friends. But that isn’t the whole of our existence.—Felix, I would rather we would eat at a lunch-wagon and sleep on a park bench, than make those things the centre of our lives!”
It was not so much her argument that impressed him as the genuine and profound scorn in her tone and manner. He was conscious of a defection of sympathy in himself from the point of view that her words expressed. It might have been himself of a few years ago saying these things so intensely; and yet they seemed like nonsense to him now!
But one could not argue about such things in the midst 148of a trainload of people, the nearest of whom were already beginning to be too much interested in one’s affairs, so he only said, “Yes—I think I understand.”
But his mind went back to their life in the country—to the cooking of that first breakfast in the kitchen, to their first dinner after walking through miles of snow, to the bed of their happy love and sleep, the tingling snow-baths at dawn, and the fire in front of which they had sat and talked for so many lazy hours—and it seemed to him, without quite understanding why, that Rose-Ann was really denouncing her own life there with him! A kitchen, a table, a bed, a bath, a fire—hadn’t these things circumscribed their life? “People like that,” she had said, bitterly. Who were these people but their own happy selves of the past week? And why had she turned so fiercely against that happiness?
All these things passed through his mind swiftly and vaguely, an emotion rather than a thought: an emotion of mingled anger and pity—a strange anger and a strange pity that he could not understand. Vaguely he sensed the existence in her of a tragically divided mind, torn between the desire to sink deep into the lap of that simple and traditional domesticity she had been experiencing, and the fear of some profound hurt and shame in making that surrender in vain....
But if he sensed this struggle in her, it was not very clearly, and it was obscured by his effort to think the situation out in logical terms. “Confound it,” he thought, “if we live in town, we must live in an apartment—and all apartments are more or less alike. Of course, some are bigger than others. It is probably the cramped space that she objects to, after that house in the country. Well, if I get my raise—let me see....”
Across the aisle were two women interestedly talking with each other, one of them a young mother, with a rather frightened little tow-headed boy of a year old in her lap. He had been enduring this strange adventure rather stoically, but he felt neglected, and his lips were curving down further and further toward the danger point of tears. He 149was feeling very sorry for himself.... Rose-Ann had watched the small lips begin to twist and the round chin begin to tremble, and she leaned forward and smiled at him—a smile which interested him, which he considered hesitantly, and at last found irresistible and answered wholeheartedly with a beaming one of his own. This was not such a cold and indifferent world after all; somebody did love him!
Rose-Ann looked up, rather furtively, at Felix, who was engaged in computing his rent-paying capacity. The women got out at the next stop, and she leaned back in her seat.
“Some time,” Felix was saying, “we might be able to have a house in the country like Clive’s....”
“We don’t want a house in the country,” said Rose-Ann energetically. “What would we do with a house in the country? No, we want a place in town, convenient to our work, yours and mine.”
“Your work?—you mean your dramatic class?” asked Felix, reflecting that Rose-Ann was rather changeable. Only a few days ago she had hated to come to town....
“No—I mean a real job. I don’t know what, yet. But I’m going to get one. I’m tired of playing with children.”
Felix looked at her vaguely, still doing sums in his head. And for a moment he seemed to her very stupid. And perhaps he was. Yet it is an exacting demand to make upon a young husband that he be able to read his wife’s mind, and know the wishes which she will not even admit the existence of to herself!
They reached Woods Point, and took a waiting taxi.
“If I only knew what you really want!” he said, as they started up their path.
“What I really want?”
“Yes. All places to live in are more or less alike.”
“Oh! No, they’re not, Felix. There are enough odd corners left in a city like Chicago to provide for the few odd people like us who don’t want the same things everybody else does. Don’t fear, we shall find something, sooner or later!”
“But when and how?” Felix demanded impatiently. “We 150must live somewhere while we are looking for this Utopia!”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” said Rose-Ann.... An idea, a whimsical and perverse idea, had just come into her mind—an idea that hurt her at first by its flagrant rebellious malice, and then suddenly took possession of her, and seemed eminently sane and reasonable. “I’ve been thinking of it all day,” she said—and as she spoke it seemed to her a mature and long-considered plan. She took his arm persuasively. “Felix, we have a whole lifetime ahead of us—and it is more important for us to live the kind of life we want to, than just to be together for a week or two. If we take the kind of place we don’t want, we shall settle down there and be like everybody else, and it will take years to break free.... Suppose we weren’t married yet—we would decide on how and where we wanted to live, first; and we would take whatever little time was necessary to work out our practical arrangements before we did commence living together....”
Why, yes, perhaps—though this, Felix reflected wistfully, was not the spirit in which they had acted on that Saturday ... ages ago it seemed, when they had left the hospital to be married. But what in the world was she getting at?
“Felix, dear, would you think it so terrible for us to live apart a little while, you at your place and I at mine, until we get a place we really want—?”
He understood her argument now, and to his mind it seemed one reasonable enough. He had, in the past, sometimes argued in favour of lovers keeping their own separate establishments. And a mere temporary separation, for any good reason, and however in defiance of custom, was something which he could expect himself to view calmly. But his reason was not for the moment in control of the situation. The blood mounted to his head in a dizzying rush of anger, his cheeks burned, and, with an effort to control himself, he said coldly: “No, I would not consider that idea for a moment.” And then, losing control of himself, 151he added: “If you want to leave me, Rose-Ann, you can do it right now. But there won’t be any coming back. Do you understand?”
He was astonished at himself for that speech, and still more astonished at its results. Rose-Ann dropped his arm, looked at him, and then, under his indignant glance, suddenly melted to tears.
“But, Felix!” she cried, and came and clung to his arm desperately. “I didn’t mean that! Oh, Felix!” and as they reached their door, she flung herself unrestrainedly on his breast.
“Felix! forgive me! I will do whatever you want. I will live anywhere you say. I will be good, truly I will!”
He petted her, and kissed her cheek, and drew her inside, infinitely astonished. He had impulsively accused her of some horrid disloyalty, some crime against him which he could not even name, and of which he did not for a moment believe her guilty, whatever it might be: and she had confessed it in tears, and promised to be “good”! They had had a battle over something which neither of them understood, some issue which neither could believe really existed—but a battle nevertheless—conducted with mysterious threats on both sides, and now ended in tears and forgiveness as mysterious! A battle over what? He did not know. He only knew that somehow he was the victor.
But how take advantage of a victory which one does not understand?
“Yes,” said Rose-Ann fervently, kissing him amid her tears with what seemed a new access of passion. “How foolish to think of being apart—even for a while!”
“Not foolish, exactly,” said Felix, beginning to be a little ashamed of himself. “I’m sorry I was so unreasonably angry at you.... I know that love ought not to be too—too possessive. I don’t want you to feel that I own you!...”
“But you do own me,” Rose-Ann whispered, pressing his hand against her bosom, “I am yours, all of me. Do 152you know it? Do you realize how much I am yours, Felix? I—it isn’t enough, what I give you. I want to suffer for you, for us. Do you understand that, Felix?”
No, Felix did not really understand that cry from the depths below Rose-Ann’s conscious thoughts of life and love; but then, neither did Rose-Ann.