Things by Alice Duer Miller - HTML preview

III

THE strength of Mrs. Royce’s character was shown by the fact that she obeyed—she actually went. She went almost gladly—a state of mind induced by the extraordinary activity of her last days at home. In one brilliant flash of prophecy and power she foresaw and forestalled every contingency that could arise in her absence. She departed in a condition of exhaustion fully justifying the doctor’s story of a needed rest.

Her weariness lasted through the first few days at the sanatorium. She was well content to lie in bed and think of nothing. But by the fifth or sixth day she began to wonder where she had left the key of the cedar closet; and several possibilities of error in the arrangements she had made to reach from garret to cellar began to creep into her consciousness. Her elder boy was subject to throat trouble; her younger was subtly averse to bathing. She had not, perhaps, sufficiently emphasized these two dangers. She had, however, given her promise not to communicate with her household except in case of necessity.

Conscientious in her determination to do what she had set out to do, she took out some of the books she had brought with her, but they seemed an unsatisfactory lot: the novels, trashy; the essays, dull; the history, heavy. Strange, she thought, how people will recommend books which really did not even hold one’s attention.

The word attention, bringing with it the recollection of Despard’s speech, recalled her to her obligations. Heavy or not, she was resolved to make her way through the volume.

She read: “It has been argued that the too rapid introduction of modern political machinery, and the too rapid unification of such different populations as those—” Had she told them not to keep the house too hot in these first spring days? Overheated houses, in her opinion, were a fruitful source of ill health. “—though these may with more justice be ascribed to deep-seated sociological causes stretching back through two thousand years—” This was the season for putting away the furs. If, in her absence, moths should attack her husband’s sable-lined overcoat! Ah, she put down her book; this was serious.

Fifteen minutes later she went out, trying to walk off the haunting presence of that fur coat.

There was something not a little heroic in her struggle with temptations—staying on while every notion she had heretofore considered righteous called to her to go back. Hideous pictures of ruin and discomfort at home floated before her mind. She had to admit she found a certain grim satisfaction in such visions. They would at least prove to Despard how little the modern family is able to dispense with the services of the old-fashioned mother.

She was human enough to be eager to prove him wrong in essentials, for in minor matters he had shown himself terribly accurate. With unlimited leisure on her hands she was surprised to find how little enjoyment she derived from her books. She read herself to sleep with a novel every night, but it was enough for her to open one of the more serious works for her mind to rush back to the old domestic problems. Her eyes alone would read the printed page.

Her life seemed hideously vacant—empty, as she put it, of all affection; but it was also empty of all machinery—perhaps the greater change of the two. She had no small duties, no orders to give, no mistakes to correct.

She was not forbidden to communicate with Despard, and at the end of a week she telegraphed him that she was going home. He came to her at once.

“I am doing what I know to be wrong,” she broke out. “I am neglecting my family.”

“You are doing what your medical adviser orders.”

“Yes,” she answered, “but can you guarantee that nothing will happen in my absence? Will it be any comfort to me, if things go wrong, to say that I was obeying orders?”

He did not directly answer this question, which had been largely rhetorical in intention. Instead, he said:

“Yes, I suppose you are dreadfully bored.”

She checked an impulse toward complete denial. He had stated half the truth. She was bored, but she tried to make him see that there was more than that in her attitude. He, a man and a bachelor, could hardly realize how serious might be the results of a mother’s protracted absence.

He had at times a trick—irritating to Mrs. Royce—of replying to something slightly different from the thought one had expressed. He did so now.

“And if they do miss you,” he said, “won’t that be a help?”

Yes, certainly, it would be a help, and it was perhaps that thought which kept her on day after day—the thought that they were missing her in every detail of life, the belief that the daily service, the common-place sacrifice of an existence like hers could only be realized by its cessation.

One reward she had. Her books began to grow more interesting. “It grows better as you get into it,” she explained to one of the nurses, but in her heart she knew the improvement was not in the book.

At last a night came when she had a dream, more poignant, more vivid than any material message could have been—a dream of disaster at home. She was not a superstitious woman, but the impression already in her mind was immensely deepened. She was needed at home; that was her place. What madness it had been for her to go away, and what a selfish madness, made up partly of desire to rest and partly of a wish to prove Despard wrong! She might have cause to reproach herself for the remainder of her life. She could forgive him all that she herself had suffered, removed from her work, deprived of all occupation and happy home activities, but if anything had gone wrong with those she loved——

That very afternoon she went home.

Once inside her own gates she began to see signs of her three weeks’ absence. Although the grounds were nominally her husband’s charge, the standards since her departure had evidently been lowered. The gutters were but half cleared and the gravel unraked. The appearance of the house confirmed her fears. The window curtains had not been changed. Sixty-two dirty window curtains seemed to her to offer but a dreary welcome.

In spite of sunshine, the rainy-day door mat greeted her, left from the day before, which had been rainy; and the brasses of the door, though not actually tarnished, lacked that elysian brightness on which she herself insisted.

As she mounted the steps two of the boys came running up—hugging and clawing at her with hands on which she caught a glimpse of the lustrous veneer of dirt. They were so glad to see her; and little Lewis had been ill. Her heart stood still—oh, only a cold. Where was he? she asked them, and when they said—oh, horror!—out with the governess in the pony cart, she sent them racing after him.

The darkest forebodings filled her mind as to what she would find within. She rang and, after an interval too long by several minutes, Churchley opened the door. For an instant his appearance drove all other thoughts away.

“Why, Churchley,” she cried, “you have been putting on weight!”

Churchley acknowledged the imputation with a smile that approached dangerously near a dimple.

“Yes, madame,” he said, “I’ve taken a great turn for the better,” and he asked sympathetically after her own health.

She made no answer, but, turning her head away from the staircase, in whose crevices she had already detected faint gray lines of dust, she moved toward the library door, which Churchley quietly opened for her.

She saw with a shock that the arrangement of the furniture—an arrangement sanctified by twenty years of habit—had been altered. Two desks had been drawn near the windows without any respect for symmetry, and at these, back to back, her husband and daughter were sitting.

That Celia should bring her school-books to the library, though unusual, was not unnatural, but the sight of Royce at work on page after page of foolscap was something requiring an explanation.

The room was perfectly quiet except for the scratch of his pen and the ticking of the clock; and Mrs. Royce decided that she would stand there silent until some other interruption occurred. It could not be very long before a servant entered or they themselves would weary of this work.

But the silence continued. Once Royce took out a book and glanced at some reference. Once Celia got up and lighted the lamps for both, but neither of them spoke.

For a long time Mrs. Royce stood there, transfixed by a curious conviction that came to her as she watched—the conviction that this silence carried with it a more perfect companionship than all her long talks with her husband had ever brought. Of course, she had long since realized that, as gradually as one season melts into another, her relationship to her husband had changed—changed inevitably, she had imagined, from the poetry of first love into something that resembled the prose of a business partnership. To her the change was not altogether to be regretted; in her eyes the business of being the head of a man’s house and the mother of his children was still charged with the romantic idea. But for the first time it now occurred to her to ask whether the change had been equally satisfactory to him. Ah, she admitted that a certain charm, a certain stimulation had gone from their affection, but never before had she thought, as she was thinking now, that the quality most conspicuously absent was intimacy. How was such a thing possible when she had lived twenty years of her life with him in perfect amity?

Yet, standing there, she saw that for many years she had not had the least conception of what had been going on in his mind. She had used the word business partnership, and, naturally, when they were together they often discussed the details of the business, only now she remembered that it was always in her department that the problems for discussion arose. Royce seemed to be able to manage his end of it without consultation. Why was this?

She tried desperately to see the thing clearly. Her whole life was built on the belief that she existed solely to be depended upon; and yet she saw that her husband, in all his more personal interests, far from depending on her, never even mentioned them to her. What did that mean? And why had she never observed this contradiction before? Could it be that, after all, she was not dependable, or had some unreckoned factor in his life rendered Royce more self-reliant than he had been in the early days of their marriage?

And at this point, before she realized her intention, she heard her own voice saying: “Celia, my dear, your lamp is flaring.”

Well, there was no question of the welcome with which both pairs of eyes lit up. “Mother, dear!” cried the girl. Both overwhelmed her with solicitude about her health. She did not have to ask after theirs. Never were two rosier, more unlined faces than theirs.

After a moment she asked what it was that her husband was writing, and he answered, almost timidly, that it was a book on trees; he had had the idea in his mind for a number of years but had never had the energy to begin it before.

“Why not?” she asked almost sharply, but before he had time to answer—and it was evident he himself had no idea of the real answer—Celia broke in:

“And what do you think, mother? I’ve won the prize for composition at school. I had the idea the very night you went away, and I’ve worked and worked over it, and they all say that it is much better than anything I ever did before. Aren’t you glad?”

Yes, her mother was glad, but a strain of bitterness mingled with her rejoicing. Was it, indeed, her absence that had released all the vital energy?

One hope lingered unacknowledged in her breast. She turned to her husband.

“And have they made you comfortable since I went?” she asked.

“Oh, perfectly,” he replied. “Everything has gone without a hitch, thanks to your arrangements.”

“Yes,” Celia chimed in, “the servants have been too wonderful; they’ve done everything just as if you were at home, only better.”

Mrs. Royce looked round the room, where to her eye everything was wrong—the corners dusty, the lamps ill-cared for, the sofa pillows rumpled, and the tea-tray, which ought to have been removed, still standing disordered in a corner.

She stretched her hand toward the bell to ring and order it taken away; and then, checking herself, she sank back and folded her hands idly in her lap. Her husband had begun to tell her something about his book.