1
AGAIN Felix tore up his unfinished play. Rose-Ann had shattered his
philosophy of compromise. But still he hesitated to accept her
philosophy of freedom. Throughout the summer he idled and dreamed.
Late in August he took his vacation. Part of it they were to spend in
paying their long-due visits to their respective families; the rest was
to be given to a walking trip. They went first to Springfield.
2
Rose-Ann’s father lived, under the mismanagement of an unmarried sister,
a fussy, well-meaning woman, in the rambling old house which Rose-Ann
had described to Felix—the house in which she had been born. It was
filled with vexatiously new furniture, except as to the old man’s
study—a shabby, comfortable, low-ceilinged, book-lined room at the top
of the house. It was to this room that Rose-Ann had once stolen, in the
dead of night, to get the Dan-Emp volume of the Encyclopedia, to read
about dancing.
The Rev. Mr. Prentiss seemed more subdued in his home surroundings—a
picturesque and mildly eccentric clergyman, but by no means the
disturbing force he had been during his brief visit to them in Chicago
the year before.... And Rose-Ann’s brothers were not at all the terrible
persons he had been led to imagine—interested only in money-making. They
were quite obviously proud of their father; and Felix felt that they
were rather proud of him, too—pleased, at least, to have a “writer” in
the family. They—or their wives—had severally subscribed to the Chicago
Chronicle in order to read Felix’s dramatic criticisms, which they took
very seriously, and sometimes clipped out and saved for their guidance
when the plays of which he wrote reached Springfield. Felix had expected
to find them alien and a little hostile; on the contrary he was rather
embarrassingly deferred to—treated distinctly as a personage.
He enjoyed his brief visit, and could not understand the relief Rose-Ann
showed when they had bade her family good-bye and were on their way to
visit his own parents on the farm further down in the state. It ought to
be easy enough, he felt, to get along with such people as Rose-Ann’s
relatives. It was the thought of seeing his own parents that filled him
with uneasiness.
“But, Felix,” she explained impatiently, “it’s because they _are_ my
relatives. I feel their criticism all the time.”
“I don’t think they criticize you any more,” he said. “You’ve had a
struggle with them—and you’ve won. They’ve accepted the situation now. I
think they’ve even accepted me.”
“You’re not their property, and I am,” she said. “But it isn’t my
brothers that count so much any more—we look prosperous, and that’s
about as far as they can judge us. It’s my father—I feel as though he
were seeing right through me ... and smiling.”
“Smiling at what?”
“At—my pretences. I can’t explain very well, but I feel as though I were
a—a fake, a fraud, when I’m with him.”
“But what about?”
“I don’t know, exactly. But he stirs up some childish confusion in
me.... I think I have all my life been trying to live up to my father’s
expectations—not of me, for I don’t think he expects anything of me—but
of womankind ... if that seems to you to make sense. It’s as if I were
trying to prove to him that women could be—I don’t know what, but
perhaps ... different from my mother. For instance, I want to be a
certain kind of wife to you, Felix—not possessive, not interfering, and
all that. I go along thinking I am that kind of wife—and then I see him
looking at me and smiling, and I have the feeling that it isn’t true ...
that I’m just Woman all over again, the only kind of woman he knows, the
kind he hates. Yes, I feel that I am just that kind—and I wonder if
there is any other kind—and I get desperate and want to prove there is.
I couldn’t have stood it there much longer. I should have done some
crazy thing!... I don’t suppose you can understand—you aren’t a girl!”
3
He couldn’t understand; though it was true that as the train carried
them nearer and nearer to his own parents, he became more and more
uncomfortable.... The situation was different enough; Rose-Ann had felt
that their prosperous air secured them against family criticism; Felix
felt that same appearance as a reproach to his conscience....
“I’ve felt for years,” he said, “that I was an ungrateful child. I hate
to go there to exhibit my prosperity to them. Of course, it isn’t so
tremendous a prosperity—but it’s enough to make me feel ashamed. You
know how hard it is for me to write to my mother; and I hardly ever can
bring myself to write except when I can send her a little money—as if,
yes, as if in penance for my desertion of her!”
“Would you like to have her live with us?”
“No—I wouldn’t. I owe her too much, I couldn’t bear to be always
reminded of the debt. It’s a debt that’s too huge—I never can pay it,
and I try to forget it.”
“The thought that she loves you more than you love her—is that what
makes you feel ungrateful?”
“I suppose so. I do love her—”
“Of course you do, Felix!”
“More than I want to, perhaps! I can’t forget her, and I resent that. I
want to get away from her.... She petted and spoiled me when I was a
child. She wanted to keep me a child always. She kept me in skirts, she
kept me wearing long curls—she made a baby of me. My whole life is in a
sense trying to get away from that.... You’ll see—she’ll wait on me,
‘hand and foot,’ as they say—try to make me her baby again. She’ll
anticipate my wishes, and jump up from the table to get something for
me, and follow me about with her eyes—and I’ll get to feeling helpless,
and then furious—and then I’ll say something cross to her, and be
ashamed of myself.... Oh, well!”
“So you have queer feelings about your parents, too!”
The visit did not justify all these forebodings.... The house was the
same as Felix had remembered it, only smaller; the same boxes of
moss-roses grew beside the door, and peacocks as of old screamed in the
yard; there was a little porch, with a wild-cucumber vine trained up to
screen out the light, and on that porch his father and mother sat, the
Sunday morning of their arrival, in rocking-chairs, his mother reading a
paper through spectacles that sat slightly askew, his father smoking a
fat pipe.... They were not so old as he had in several years of absence
begun to picture them; his father’s plump little body looked
surprisingly sturdy, and there was a youthful humour in his mother’s
smile as she sat talking, unaware of her son’s approach....
The first greetings over, Felix’s two aunts appeared from within the
house—really old people these, Felix thought, but still wearing their
air of aggressive self-dependence. They had looked after their little
farm for so many years, without any masculine assistance except from an
occasional hired man, that they resented, somewhat Felix thought, his
father’s presence there, as a slur on their own capacity for taking care
of themselves. They treated him a little scornfully, as if, being a man,
he were a rather helpless person, and more of a nuisance than a help. He
understood this, and smiled genially and tolerantly at their remarks, he
being secure in the knowledge that it took a man to run things and that
the real boss of this establishment was himself.... Just before they
were seated at Sunday dinner, he led Felix to a cupboard, and smilingly
produced a bottle of whiskey. “Have a little something to improve your
appetite?” he asked.
Felix poured himself a drink, and his father did the same, carefully
raising the tumbler so as to let the light shine through the golden
liquid, and smacking his lips after he had poured it down his
throat—while Felix’s two aunts stonily ignored this masculine nonsense,
and his mother looked on with an air of mild disapproval.
At dinner they talked about the crops; his father was happy in being a
farmer again; happy, after years of increasing uselessness in town while
his children were growing up, in being master of a situation, the real
head of a household; happy, and boyishly active, despite his spells of
rheumatism, of which he also discoursed seriously and uncomplainingly.
He had had a bad spell this last winter—in fact they had all been
bothered with it—but they had found a liniment which seemed to do some
good. “Pretty powerful stuff!” he said. “I sometimes wondered which was
the worst, that liniment or the rheumatism—but it appeared to do the
work!”
With the dessert they came to the fortunes of Felix—briefly alluded to
before, but saved to the last for thorough consideration. They wanted to
know all about Felix’s job, or rather all about how important a
personage he had become. Felix’s shame in his good fortune gradually
disappeared as he realized how immensely proud they all were of him—how
they hugged his success to their hearts and enjoyed it. It was as though
his good fortune were their own!
4
Rose-Ann liked them immensely, and that night reproached Felix for never
having told her what lovely people they were. She entered into their
domestic life, busied herself in the kitchen, and displayed qualities as
a cook which he had never, in their studio-life, realized that she
possessed. Their little studio-dinners had been masterpieces in their
way. But to see Rose-Ann coming in flushed and triumphant from the
kitchen with one dish after another of an old-fashioned country dinner
in her hands was a new experience.
Rose-Ann had smoked surreptitiously during her visit to her own home,
merely wishing not to offend her aunt by any ostentatious indulgence of
what that good lady regarded as a reprehensible practice; but here she
did not smoke at all, even in their room at night. She did not want to
do anything that Felix’s folks would not like, and was seriously
concerned to secure their approval.... And she secured it—for who could
resist Rose-Ann in her most buoyant mood?
The visit had not been as disturbing as he had expected; and yet he was
glad to go.
“Felix,” said Rose-Ann, as they took the train back to Chicago, “I think
I understand why we feel this way. It’s because all our lives—and this
is the truth—we’ve scorned the older generation. And we are ashamed,
coming back to face them, because we’ve nothing better—really—to show
for our lives than they have.”
“I wonder?” he said.
“But we _can_ be happy in a way they knew nothing about, Felix. We can.
And we shall!”
5
Then came their real vacation—a week’s walking trip in Wisconsin.
The night-boat carried them from Chicago to Milwaukee; and from thence,
early in the morning, dressed now in their oldest clothes, and with
packs on their backs, they set out happily on foot. They stopped by the
roadside to make themselves a breakfast of eggs and bacon, cooked in the
ten-cent frying pan that dangled from one corner of Felix’s pack;
pausing again at mid-day for a luncheon of blackberries and raspberries
gathered in some bramble-patch. At night they reached, in a drizzling
rain that had accompanied them for the last hour of their journey, a
town with an ugly little hotel, where they could at least dry their
clothes, eat a poor dinner with a good appetite, and sleep, dog-tired
and happy, from ten o’clock till dawn.
And thus onward, in the general direction of “the dells.” Most of the
time they did not know just where they were going next, nor care; they
took the most promising road.
The “dells” at last—steep ravines, miniature canyons, up which they went
in the guide’s leaky little gasoline launch, landing to explore the
quaint caverns in the rocks, dim-lighted by the daylight that sifted
through the openings above.... And so back, by new roads, glad they had
no map to take the surprise out of their journey.
Felix had never realized how much robust strength and endurance Rose-Ann
had until they tramped those Wisconsin roads. They were not above taking
a lift in some farmer’s wagon or passing automobile, if it promised to
get them to a town with a hotel before nightfall; but, having come in
sight of the town, if the night promised to be clear, they hunted up
some promising spot and encamped there: for what was the use of carrying
two heavy woollen blankets, if they were not going to sleep out under
the stars by a camp-fire?
Felix’s old corduroys, splashed with kalsomine in all colours, caused
him to be taken for an “artist.” At first this displeased him—but he
soon discovered that all the world envies the artist, loves him, and
wishes to take care of him. Old farmers, burly truck-drivers,
delivery-boys, tourists, wanted to give them a lift, and offered them
their best counsel as to where to go next. Hotel-keepers, grocers at
whose shops they replenished their food supplies, and farmers’ wives at
houses where they stopped till a shower passed over, talked to them with
friendly eagerness. Felix perceived that a pair of foot-loose vagabonds
with enough money in their pockets to pay for their bread and eggs and
bacon, are fortunate beings, the world’s darlings, beamed on and
approved by those who sleep under roofs and hold steady jobs and stay
day after day in the same place—approved because they are living life as
all men and women know it should be lived: if everybody cannot live that
way themselves, they are glad to see somebody else who can!
As they tramped, Felix’s mind went back to the songs of vagabondia which
he used to cherish, and then had rejected as romantic and foolish; and
at night, beside their dying camp-fire, when Rose-Ann demanded poetry
before she went to sleep, he would say for her the little fragments that
he remembered:
“_Down the world with Marna,
That’s the life for me!
Wandering with the wandering rain
Its unboundaried domain...._
“Mm—I forget. Anyway—
“_.... the joys of the road are chiefly these—
A crimson touch on the hard-wood trees....
A vagrant’s morning, wide and blue,
In early fall, when the wind walks, too....
A shadowy highway, cool and brown,
Alluring up and enticing down....
A scrap of gossip at the ferry,
And a comrade neither glum nor merry,
Asking nothing, revealing naught,
But minting his words from a fund of thought....
A keeper of silence eloquent...._
“Mm....
“_With only another mile to wend,
And two brown arms at the journey’s end...._
“I forget the rest of it.”
“You are forgetting everything that’s important!” Rose-Ann complained.
“I’ll bet you know by heart Professor Humptydink’s law of dramatic
crisis.”
“No—I’ve stopped that foolishness, thanks to you. If I ever write
anything, it will be just what I want to write—and the devil take the
Great American Public!”
“No, Felix—that’s wrong, too. It’s what one really wants to say that
other people really like—I’m sure of it. Can’t you trust yourself?”
“I don’t know,” he said, looking up at the pale moon through a tangle of
leafy branches. “Somehow I have the notion that anything I want to do
will be foolish.... I used to trust in myself. I used to believe this
sort of thing:—it’s by Bliss Carman, the man that wrote the vagabond
poems.—
“‘_Keep thou, by some large instinct,
Unwasted, fair and whole,
The innocence of nature,
The ardor of the soul—_
“_And through the realms of being
Thou art at liberty
To pass, enjoy, and linger,
Inviolate, and free!_’”
“And don’t you believe that now, Felix?”
“That I can do as I please, if—”
“If it’s what you really please to do! Yes, Felix. You can have any
happiness you ever want, if you really want it—not cynically, nor
because other people seem to have it, but because it _belongs_ to you. I
believe that. I don’t intend ever to keep from doing anything I want to
do. And I shan’t be ashamed of myself, either. Do you remember the
girl-goldsmith I told you about, in the story?”
“I remember her very well,” said Felix. “I know one of her speeches
almost by heart. ‘The only sins are telling lies, and not keeping one’s
body clean, and being careless about one’s work—ugly things. Beautiful
things—the things people sometimes call sins—aren’t sins at all. Being
in love isn’t ever a sin.’”
“Yes,” said Rose-Ann dreamily. “I want us to be like that—not afraid of
life, or of any of the beautiful things life brings us.”
Well ... yes ... it sounded simple enough. To live life beautifully, and
not be afraid! He had believed in that once. But now—or had he really
ceased to believe it possible? At this moment, in the moonlight, it did
not seem so absurd....
“Good night, Felix.”
“Good night, Rose-Ann.”
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