FELIX, astonished and perturbed, came over and petted her. “What’s the matter, darling?” he asked.
“Oh, Felix,” she said, putting her head against his breast, “do you love me?”
“Of course I love you! Don’t you know it?”
“I suppose so. But—all this—I’ve felt separated from you. I’ve felt—I don’t know what—I suppose it was what my father said—that this was just going to be him and my mother all over again....”
“He said that!”
“No, that isn’t what he said. But that’s what it made me feel. Felix, we aren’t going to stop loving one another now, are we?”
“Of course not. But what was it your father did say?”
“Nothing—only he spoke of how many distinguished friends we had, and—I knew he meant it all satirically—and that you had the makings of a successful man in you, if they were properly brought out by an ambitious wife—meaning me. And I felt as though—as though—Felix, I don’t want to behave to you as my mother did to my father....”
“What do you mean?” he asked quietly, still petting her like a child.
“You know, they were married very young, and he gave up business for the ministry after they were married, and we were very poor until my brothers left school and commenced to make money—and I think she never forgave him for that. And I’ve always—”
“Can’t we live our own life and love, Rose-Ann, without 211letting it get mixed up with our fathers and mothers?” Felix asked sadly.
Rose-Ann rubbed from her face the last vestige of her tears. “That’s why I didn’t want father to come to see us,” she said. “In-laws always mess things up, don’t they?”
“Even when they are the nicest people in the world, like your father.”
“Felix—I’m so glad to be back with you again—I feel as though I had been away from you, somehow. I don’t like it.”
“Don’t go away again, Rose-Ann-dear.”
“I won’t.” She pressed her head closer against his breast. “I’ll never go away again.”
Again the storm had passed, leaving Felix again wondering how it could have arisen. Some of the things they had said to each other were really incredible. How hard and hostile they had been to each other! And—quarrelling over Phyllis! Why, the whole thing was absurd, the product of fevered imaginations.... Why had they both been so willing to indulge those grotesque fantasies about Phyllis and Howard Morgan?... And then, what of Rose-Ann’s freakish accusation against him—for that was what it amounted to!—of being in love with Phyllis? Phyllis, whom he had seen but once in his life, and that on the occasion of his own marriage! Had Rose-Ann really been jealous? It was too extravagantly farcical.
But oughtn’t they discuss these things, and settle them, once and for all? Wasn’t that what their mutual candour was for, to expose and kill these silly doubts and fears and suspicions? Or—did talking about such things only give them new vitality? Were these things too senseless to talk about?
“I love you, Felix.”
“I love you, Rose-Ann.”
There was a true magic, it seemed, in words like those! They brought happiness ... and forgetfulness....
“Darling....”
“Yes....”
212“Did we have a quarrel?”
“I don’t know—did we?”
“Yes—but what was it about?”
“I can’t remember!”
“Neither can I!”
They laughed happily at their folly.
2
Yet Felix could not quite understand the turn of affairs which followed the brief and dynamic intrusion of Rose-Ann’s father into their domestic life. Rose-Ann had changed. The most obvious manifestation of that change was the complete abandonment of all her social plans.
She had intended to give a number of parties to her “bourgeois friends” that spring; but they were never given; and when Felix asked why, she only shook her head and said,
“You know you don’t like parties, Felix.”
Felix was quite aware that he did not like parties. But he had definitely assessed that dislike as a species of cowardice, which he must get over. Just because he did not like parties was the very reason why he should try to learn to like them. Other people liked parties; and he wanted to become as other people are. He had surrendered himself to Rose-Ann’s guidance. He trusted her as a mentor. He had worn evening clothes, learned to carve and serve a roast of beef, talked desperately about nothing to people whose names he could not remember, because she wanted him to. He had braced himself to endure the worst that the social life had to offer; he would do whatever she demanded. And now suddenly she had ceased to demand anything! There was a tremendous relief in this relaxation; but it left him puzzled and brooding.
“I understood,” he said to her hesitatingly one day, “that you had undertaken to civilize me. Have you given up the task as hopeless?”
“But I don’t want to civilize you, Felix!” she protested.
“I thought you did want to,” he said.
“I’m sorry you thought that,” she said.
213“Then what,” he insisted, “do you want me to be, if not civilized?”
“An artist,” she said.
He laughed. “That is too easy,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she asked, looking at him with incredulous wide-open eyes and parted lips.
“Rose-Ann, I’ve always been an artist. That’s the trouble with me. I don’t say I’ve been a good artist. I’ve nothing to show for my art-ing except a barrelful of youthful poems, an unfinished novel that I burned up before I came to Chicago, and a few fantastic fragments of impossible plays. But I’ve been an artist all the same, and I’ll tell you why I’m sure of it. There are two kinds of people in the world—artists and human beings. I’ve never been a human being; so I must have been an artist. And I don’t want to be any longer!”
She looked at him, frightened at this heresy.
“But Felix!” she said.
“And I thought you were going to help me,” he said.
“To stop being an artist?” she cried, starting up as though a dreadful accusation had been flung at her.
“To be a human being,” he said, laughingly.
She looked at him with eyes of alarm.
“I can’t think you mean it!” she said.
“Perhaps I don’t.... It’s hard to tell what one really does mean,” he said, discouraged. “I don’t mean that I shan’t keep on trying to write plays—if that’s what you are afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid,” she said. “Only, Felix—”
“Yes?”
“You must do what you want to do; not what you think I want you to do!”
“Why do you say that?” he asked; for it sounded cryptic, as if charged with hidden meanings.
“Because,” she said, “I think we’ve been going on a wrong basis. I’ve—done things to you I didn’t intend. I’m sorry.... And from now on I’m going to—let you alone.”
He laughed. “All right!” he said.
214
3
He thought he knew what she meant. Not in vain had dozens of novels been written in which the young wife subtly corrupts her artist husband into prosperous mediocrity. So that was what Rose-Ann was afraid of! She did not know that the artist chooses his wife in the profound unconscious hope of being led down from the perilous icy heights of lonely poetic ecstasy into the green valleys of everyday human life....
That Rose-Ann wanted him to dwell with her here in these green valleys he did not doubt. She wanted him to be successful. But she did not want to be blamed for his success!
He could understand that.
Well, he would take the responsibility upon himself.
He would become what, in her secret heart, and in spite of all her protestations, she really wanted him to be.